Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.
The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.
Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI…
Trump has been briefed in recent days on new 🔥options for #military #strikes in #Iran
as he considers following through on his threat to attack the country for cracking down on protesters, according to multiple U.S. officials famil…
Even in spite of the changes in US administration, the digital curtain continues it's slow descent between RU and the west. In addition to many recent reports of censorship and blocks, thisis expected to complete in 2026:
"In August 2022, Citi announced that, as part of its ongoing efforts to reduce its operations and exposure in Russia, it was winding down its consumer banking and local commercial banking operations."
In The Information newsletter, on Block layoffs. Quote:
The best way to destroy public support for AI is for companies to use it primarily to slash jobs. Dorsey says that’s coming: “Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.” …Block’s stock, which had been in a slump in recent months, soared 24% in after-hours trading. Investors seem to like the profit implications of a company cutting nearly half the st…
California lawmakers made major changes to the state’s car-buying rules this year,
including a controversial rewrite of the state law that allows buyers to get their money back if they are sold a defective vehicle
and a new right to return a used vehicle within three days.
RE: https://mstdn.social/@inecas/116125098722422939
PSA: All the thi.ng subdomains should be working again. I upgraded Caddy yesterday and together with the recent DNS handling changes on Hetzner, Let's Encrypt challenges stopped working. All fixed again n…
The 2025 Web Almanac mistook me.
I did *not* say LLMs provide better image descriptions. I cited SeeingAI and Be My Eyes as tools for undescribed IRL uses.
I said LLM-generated captions could be better than craptions. I mentioned abstracts / reading-level changes, which could be summaries?
But “better” image descriptions is right out.
Robert Treat will speak on 'Vacuuming Large Tables: How Recent Postgres Changes Further Enable Mission Critical Workloads' as part of our PostgreSQL@SCaLE track at SCaLE 23x. Full details: https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/23x
Good Morning #Canada
Are you still looking for that perfect Christmas gift? Years ago I found myself shopping for my wife's Christmas present on December 23rd. Never again. For those of you still shopping it's inevitable that you're going to be standing in front of the Gift Card rack and mentally convincing yourself that the recipient will love a full gas tank or a Timmies coffee and donut. Canadians will buy close to $12 billion in Gift Cards in 2025, with a lot of that in the next 5 days. Recent changes to legislation have made it illegal to charge processing or activation fees on cards purchased with cash and there is no expiry date. That last point is important because companies are betting that a certain percentage of cards are never redeemed and it's estimated that approximately 40% of all cards are never used. I personally like getting a gift card as it allows me to choose something I want, and I always thank the gifter once I've used it.
#CanadaIsAwesome #GiftCards
YES, I love giving and receiving Gift Cards
NO, I'm not happy when I have to buy or get a Gift Card
Give me your suggestions for "assassinated revolutionaries" missing from this #Wikipedia category.
#crowdsourcing
Adaptive transitions in FitzHugh-Nagumo networks with Hebb-Oja coupling rules
Astero Provata, George C. Boulougouris, Johanne Hizanidis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18198 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.18198 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.18198
arXiv:2602.18198v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Adaptive coupling in networks of interacting neurons has gained recent attention due to the many applications both in biological and in artificial neural networks, where adaptive coupling or synaptic plasticity is considered as a key factor in learning processes. In the present study, we apply adaptive connectivity rules in networks of interacting FitzHugh-Nagumo oscillators. Adaptive coupling, here, is realized via Hebbian learning adjusted by the Oja rule to prevent the network link weights from growing without bounds. Numerical investigations demonstrate that during the adaptation process the FitzHugh-Nagumo network undergoes adaptive transitions realizing traveling waves, synchronized states and chimera states transiting through various multiplicities. These transitions become more evident when the time scales governing the coupling dynamics are much slower than the ones governing the nodal dynamics (nodal potentials). Namely, when the coupling time scales are slow, the network has the time to realize and demonstrate different synchronization regimes before reaching the final steady state. The transitions can be observed not only in the spacetime plots but also in the abrupt changes of the average coupling weights as the network evolves in time. Regarding the asymptotic coupling distributions, we show that the limiting average coupling strength follows an inverse power law with respect to the Oja parameter (also called "forgetting" parameter) which balances the learning growth. We also report abrupt transitions in the asymptotic coupling strengths when the parameter related to adaptive coupling crosses from fast to slow time scales. These findings are in line with previous studies on spiking neural networks.
toXiv_bot_toot
Trump has been briefed in recent days on new options for
military strikes in Iran
as he considers following through on his threat to attack the country for cracking down on protesters,
according to multiple U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
Trump has not made a final decision,
but the officials said he was seriously considering authorizing a strike
in response to the Iranian regime’s efforts to suppress demonstrations
set off by widespread eco…
@cdarwin@c.im
