Will Apple Kill Google’s Surprise Android to iPhone AirDrop Interoperability?
Earlier today, Google made a surprise announcement that the Quick Share file transfer feature on Pixel 10 smartphones was able to work with AirDrop, enabling first-party file sharing between Android devices and Apple devices.

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Typically, Apple and Google wor … ⌘ Read more

More NVIDIA Nova Enablement For Linux 6.19 With Other Rust Graphics Driver Code
Alice Ryhl of Google sent out the main set of Rust language code changes for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver subsystem ahead of Linux 6.19. Notable is continued DRM core infrastructure work for Rust plus the open-source NVIDIA “Nova” driver continues taking shape albeit isn’t yet ready for end-user usage… ⌘ Read more

To everyone previously asking, what my (and other developers) endless complaining about Google, to both every EU body, with a form on their website and every relevant team at Google accomplished…
WE FUCKING WON!!!
“While security is crucial, we’ve also heard from developers and power users who have a higher risk tolerance and want the ability to download unverified apps.”
-source

I was also able to work with my new webhost, to bring back “🐕.fr.to” - everyones favorite vanity redirect domain, for my site, Googles changes to SSL warnings in Chrome, killed at the beginning of this year.

The lesson: I NEED TO COMPLAIN MORE

Google Launches Gemini 3, Its ‘Most Intelligent’ AI Model Yet
Google released Gemini 3 on Tuesday, launching its latest AI model with a breakthrough score of 1501 Elo on the LMArena Leaderboard alongside state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks including 91.9% on GPQA Diamond for PhD-level reasoning and 37.5% on Humanity’s Last Exam without tool usage. The model is available starting today in the Gemi … ⌘ Read more

Google Boss Says Trillion-Dollar AI Investment boom Has ‘Elements of Irrationality’
Every company would be affected if the AI bubble were to burst, the head of Google’s parent firm Alphabet has told the BBC. From the report: Speaking exclusively to BBC News, Sundar Pichai said while the growth of artificial intelligence investment had been an “extraordinary moment”, there was some “irrationali … ⌘ Read more

Mathematicians say Google’s AI tools are supercharging their research
AlphaEvolve, an AI system created by Google DeepMind, is helping mathematicians do research at a scale that was previously impossible - even if it does occasionally “cheat” to find a solution ⌘ Read more

The State Of The AMD RADV Vulkan Driver In Late 2025
In addition to talking about the Valve-backed open-source driver work for old AMD Radeon GPUs, Timur Kristóf also presented at the XDC2025 conference on the state of the RADV Vulkan driver. Timur was joined by Daniel Schürmann to talk about the great Linux gaming experience now possible on the RADV driver with the work done by Valve, AMD, Red Hat, Google, and the open-source community. RADV ray-tracing is much better today than in the past, the ACO compil … ⌘ Read more

Google Is Collecting Troves of Data From Downgraded Nest Thermostats
Even after disabling remote control and officially ending support for early Nest Learning Thermostats, Google is still receiving detailed sensor and activity data from these devices, including temperature changes, motion, and ambient light. The Verge reports: After digging into the backend, security researcher Cody Kociemba found that the … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 Brings Build Fixes For Google Cloud & Azure, Base Repository Changes
FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 is available today for testing as this leading BSD operating system works toward the stable release in early December… ⌘ Read more

Tech Giants’ Cloud Power Probed As EU Weighs Inclusion In DMA
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure, and Alphabet’s Google Cloud risk being dragged into the scope of the European Union’s crackdown on Big Tech as antitrust watchdogs prepare to study the platforms’ market power. The European Commission wants to decide if any of the trio should face a raft of new restri … ⌘ Read more

The Internet Archive Now Captures AI-Generated Content (Including Google’s AI Overviews)
CNN profiled the non-profit Internet Archive today — and included this tidbit about how they archive parts of the internet that are now “tucked in conversations with AI chatbots.”

The rise of artificial intelligence and AI chatbots means the Internet Archive is changing how it records the history of t … ⌘ Read more

Google Begins Aggresively Using the Law To Stop Text Message Scams
“Google is going to court to help put an end to, or at least limit, the prevalence of phishing scams over text message,” reports BGR:

Google said it’s bringing suit against Lighthouse, an impressively large operation that allegedly provides tools customers can buy to set up their own specialized phishing scams. All told, Google estimates that … ⌘ Read more

Google To Allow ‘Experienced Users’ To Install Unverified Android Apps
Google says it will build a new “advanced flow” to allow experienced users to install Android apps from unverified developers, easing up on restrictions it proposed in late August. The company said earlier that Android would block such installations starting next year. The new flow will include clear warnings about security risks but wil … ⌘ Read more

Google will allow users to sideload Android apps without verification
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Google will allow users to sideload Android apps without verification
Article URL: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-developer-verification-early.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908938

Points: 501

# Comments: 192 ⌘ Read more

Ask Slashdot: Are There Any Good Android Tablets Out There?
Longtime Slashdot reader hadleyburg writes: For a user with an Android phone and who’s happy to stick within the Google ecosystem, an Android tablet might seem like the more obvious choice over an iPad. Of course, iPads are a lot more popular, and asking about Android tablets is likely to invite advice about sticking with what everyone else has.

The Slashdot … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Is Offering Rewards Points for Using Edge Instead of Google Chrome
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft employs various schemes to stop Edge users from switching to Chrome, and the latest includes financial rewards for sticking with the browser. As spotted by Windows Latest, select users who search on Bing within Microsoft Edge for a link to download Google Chrome are now shown an … ⌘ Read more

Google Relaunches Cameyo To Entice Businesses From Windows To ChromeOS
After acquiring software virtualization company Cameyo last year, Google has relaunched a version of the service that makes it easier for Windows-based organizations to migrate over to ChromeOS. From a report: Now called “Cameyo by Google,” the Virtual App Delivery (VAD) solution allows users to run legacy Windows apps in the Chrome br … ⌘ Read more

Google Is Introducing Its Own Version of Apple’s Private AI Cloud Compute
Google has unveiled Private AI Compute, a cloud platform designed to deliver advanced AI capabilities while preserving user privacy. As The Verge notes, the feature is “virtually identical to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute.” From the report: Many Google products run AI features like translation, audio summaries, and chatbot assist … ⌘ Read more

Google Posts Device Trees For Booting Pixel 10 Hardware With The Mainline Linux Kernel
A Chromium engineer at Google posted the initial Device Tree (DT) files for being able to boot their latest-generation Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Google Announces Even More AI In Photos App, Powered By Nano Banana
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Big G is finally making good on its promise to add its market-leading Nano Banana image-editing model to the app. The model powers a couple of features, and it’s not just for Google’s Android platform. Nano Banana edits are also coming to the iOS version of the app. […] The Photo … ⌘ Read more

FFmpeg To Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs
FFmpeg, the open source multimedia framework that powers video processing in Google Chrome, Firefox, YouTube and other major platforms, has called on Google to either fund the project or stop burdening its volunteer maintainers with security vulnerabilities found by the company’s AI tools. The maintainers patched a bug that Google’s AI agent discovered in code for decoding a 1995 vi … ⌘ Read more

FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs
Article URL: https://thenewstack.io/ffmpeg-to-google-fund-us-or-stop-sending-bugs/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45891016

Points: 508

# Comments: 384 ⌘ Read more

I used Gemini (the Google AI) twice at work today, asking about Google Workspace configuration and Google Cloud CLI usage (because we use those a lot). You’d think that it’d be well-suited for those topics. It answered very confidently, yet completely wrong. Just wrong. Made-up CLI arguments, whatever. It took me a while to notice, though, because it’s so convincing and, well, you implicitly and subconsciously trust the results of the Google AI when asking about Google topics, don’t you?

Will it get better over time? Maybe. But what I really want is this:

• Good, well-structured, easy-to-read, proper documentation. Google isn’t doing too bad in this regard, actually, it’s just that they have so much stuff that it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. Hence …
  
• … I want a good search function. Just give me a good fuzzy search for your docs. That’s it.
  

I just don’t have the time or energy to constantly second-guess this stuff. Give me something reliable. Something that is designed to do the right thing, not toy around with probabilities. “AI for everything” is just the wrong approach.

PDF Will Support JPEG XL Format As ‘Preferred Solution’
The PDF Association is adding JPEG XL (JXL) support to the PDF specification, giving the advanced image format a new path to relevance despite Google’s decision to declare it obsolete and remove it from Chromium. The Register reports: Peter Wyatt, CTO of the PDF Association, said: “We need to adopt a new image [format] that can support HDR [High Dynamic Range] c … ⌘ Read more

Google Cloud N4D Delivers Great VM Performance & Value Powered By AMD EPYC Turin
Google Cloud today is rolling out their N4D compute instances that are optimized for cost/price-performance and geared for general purpose workloads. The N4D instances are powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin” processors and offer very nice performance and value over their prior-generation general purpose VMs. ⌘ Read more

Subsea Cable Investment Set To Double As Tech Giants Accelerate AI Buildout
Investment in subsea cable projects is expected to reach around $13 billion between 2025 and 2027, almost twice the amount invested between 2022 and 2024, according to telecommunications data provider TeleGeography. Tech giants Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft now represent about 50% of the overall market, up from a neglig … ⌘ Read more

POLYVAL Work Bringing More Performance Gains To Linux Crypto Subsystem
Whenever seeing Linux kernel mailing list patches from Google engineer Eric Biggers it tends to be about performance optimizations to the Linux kernel’s cryptography subsystem. That was once again the case on Sunday with the newest patch series providing some nice gains… ⌘ Read more

Did ChatGPT Conversations Leak… Into Google Search Console Results?
“For months, extremely personal and sensitive ChatGPT conversations have been leaking into an unexpected destination,” reports Ars Technica: the search-traffic tool for webmasters , Google Search Console.

Though it normally shows the short phrases or keywords typed into Google which led someone to their site, “starting this September, odd q … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 5 Released With Build Fixes For Google & Azure Clouds
FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 had been expected this weekend but instead a fifth beta release of FreeBSD 15.0 was deemed warranted… ⌘ Read more

Oddest ChatGPT leaks yet: Cringey chat logs found in Google Analytics tool
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Gemini Starts Rolling Out On Android Auto
Gemini is (finally) rolling out on Android Auto, replacing Google Assistant while keeping “Hey Google,” adding Gemini Live (“let’s talk live”), message auto-translation, and new privacy toggles. “One feature lost between Assistant and Gemini, though, is the ability to use nicknames for contacts,” notes 9to5Google. From the report: Over the past 24 hours, Google has quietly started the rollou … ⌘ Read more

Video Games’ Hottest New Platform is an Old One
Web-based video games are experiencing an unexpected revival as the broader $189 billion industry stagnates. Sales for browser-based titles like GeoGuessr and chess were expected to triple from 2021 to 2028, reaching $3.09 billion, according to Google and Kantar. Playgama hosted more than 15,000 new web games in the first half of 2025, exceeding the combined total from 2021 throug … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net hehehe, yeah, it isn’t mine neither. Most obscure TLDs are in small registrars. I like to stick to one register (even though when Google Domains ceased to exist I was forced to have two, as Cloudflare doesn’t support the .ONE TLD).

Magika 1.0 Goes Stable As Google Rebuilds Its File Detection Tool In Rust
BrianFagioli writes: Google has released Magika 1.0, a stable version of its AI-based file type detection tool, and rebuilt the entire engine in Rust for speed and memory safety. The system now recognizes more than 200 file types, up from about 100, and is better at distinguishing look-alike formats such as JSON vs JSONL, TS … ⌘ Read more

Google Plans Secret AI Military Outpost on Tiny Island Overrun By Crabs
An anonymous reader shares a report: On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Google is planning to build a large AI data center on Christmas Island, a 52-square-mile Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, following a cloud computing deal with Australia’s military. The previously undisclosed project will reportedly position advanced A … ⌘ Read more

Gemini AI To Transform Google Maps Into a More Conversational Experience
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Google Maps is heading in a new direction with artificial intelligence sitting in the passenger’s seat. Fueled by Google’s Gemini AI technology, the world’s most popular navigation app will become a more conversational companion as part of a redesign announced Wednesda … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft and Google overstate job creation at Chile data centers
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YouTube Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations
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Epic vs. Google settlement: Opening up Android
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Google Cloud suspended customer’s account 3 times, for 3 different reasons
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I Built My Own Google Drive
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Intent to Deprecate and Remove: Deprecate and remove XSLT
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Intent to Deprecate and Remove XSLT
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Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%
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How I Reported a Pre-Account Hijack Affecting Any Gmail User (Even Google Employees)- My Bug… ⌘ Read more

Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret ‘wink’ to sidestep legal orders
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Twake Drive – The open-source alternative to Google Drive
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The XMPP Standards Foundation: XMPP related Workshop at the Linux Day Torino 2025
Nicolas Vial will host the Quale sistema alternativo per il vostro cellulare? talk with a workshop that will demonstrate how to install and use XMPP for free from F-DROID, but will also give away free QR codes for Monocles Chat from [Google Play](https://play. … ⌘ Read more