Richard Dawkins ‘Convinced’ AI Is Conscious
Mirnotoriety shares a report from The Telegraph: Richard Dawkins has said chatbots should be considered conscious (source paywalled; alternative source) after spending two days interacting with the Claude AI engine. The evolutionary biologist said he had the “overwhelming feeling” of talking to a human during conversations with Claude, and said it was hard not to treat the program as “a genuine … ⌘ Read more

Former Nintendo Executive Says Amazon Once Requested ‘Illegal’ Price Discounts
Amazon once tried to pressure Nintendo to break the law, says former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé. At a recent NYU lecture, he describes a conversation with an Amazon executive, Kotaku reports:

“Amazon was looking to get bigger into the video game space,” said Fils-Aimé. “Amazon’s mentality back then … ⌘ Read more

ChatGPT Became So Obsessed With Goblins That OpenAI Had to Intervene
The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI “recently gave its popular ChatGPT strict instructions. Stop talking about goblins.”

Recent models of the artificial-intelligence chatbot have been bringing up the creatures in conversations with users seemingly out of the blue, as well as gremlins, trolls and ogres. The goblin-speak caught the atte … ⌘ Read more

Privacy Advocate Accuses US Government of Investing in AI-Powered Mass Surveillance
The Conversation published this warning from privacy/tech law/electronic surveillance attorney Anne Toomey McKenna (also an affiliated faculty member at Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences). The U.S. government “is able to purchase Americans’ sensitive data because the information it buy … ⌘ Read more

53 Nations Gather To Plan a Fossil Fuel Phaseout
Ancient Slashdot reader hwstar shares a report from The Conversation: For the first time ever, more than 50 nations will gather next week in Colombia to hash out how to wind down and end their dependence on coal, oil and gas. The history-making conference was planned before the Iran war. But this year’s energy crisis has greatly raised the stakes. […] Around 80% of the trap … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yup, I’ve also seen the floating point conversion happening with (1 << 63) - 1 yesterday night. But instead of pausing to think about it for a second, somehow all I had in mind was “give me a better representation, ain’t gonna have time for this shit”, so I turned it to hex. Beyond my comprehension what I was thinking there. O_o That’s embarrassing, unbelievable. Well, I blame late o’clock where my brain had already quit on me and went to bed.

Very interesting data point you raise there. The fun part didn’t cross my mind yet or at least I couldn’t pinpoint it. In hindsight it’s totally obvious, though. Past experience also tells me the exact same. Dealing with a problem and researching something myself is a so much more better teacher. The longer I faced up with a topic, the higher the chance to really manifest in long- or at least mid-term memory. If I just get told something, the odds are that it’s completely erased from memory in a matter of days if not hours.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org AI result ahead, feel free to ignore.

I “asked” the AI at work the same question out of morbid curiousity. It “said” that SQLite converts that integer to floating point internally on overflows and then, when converting back, the x86 instruction cvttsd2si will turn it into 0x8000000000000000, even if the actual floating point value is outside of that range. So, yes, it allegedly actually saturates, as a side effect of the type conversion.

I couldn’t find anything about that automatic conversion in SQLite’s manual, yet, but an experiment looks like it might be true:

sqlite> select typeof(1 << 63);
╭─────────────────╮
│ typeof(1 << 63) │
╞═════════════════╡
│ integer         │
╰─────────────────╯

sqlite> select typeof((1 << 63) - 1);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ typeof((1 << 63) ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ real                 │
╰──────────────────────╯

As for cvttsd2si, this source confirms the handling of 0x8000000000000000 on range errors: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/cvttsd2si

The following C program also confirms it (run through gdb to see cvttsd2si in action):

<a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdint.h>
<a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdio.h>

int
main()
{
    int64_t i;
    double d;

    /* -3000 instead of -1, because `double` can’t represent a
     * difference of -1 at this scale. */
    d = -9223372036854775808.0 - 3000;

    i = d;
    printf("%lf, 0x%lx, %ld\n", d, i, i);

    return 0;
}

(Remark about AI usage: Fine, I got an answer and maybe it’s even correct. But doing this completely ruined it for me. It would have been much more satisfying to figure this out myself. I actually suspected some floating point stuff going on here, but instead of verifying this myself I reached for the unethical tool and denied myself a little bit of fun at the weekend. Won’t do that again.)

FFmpeg Introduces Vulkan-Accelerated 360 Degree Video Conversion
Beyond the capabilities of just the Vulkan Video API, the FFmpeg multimedia library has made interesting Vulkan-accelerated adaptations using compute shaders. With Vulkan compute they’ve implemented Apple ProRes video acceleration, FFV1 decode, and other features. The newest Vulkan feature now in place for FFmpeg is 360 degree video conversion… ⌘ Read more

SysV Init 3.16 Released With Cleanups, Improved systemd Unit To SysV Script Conversion
For any holdouts still running SysV Init instead of systemd or other alternatives like OpenRC, SysV Init 3.16 is out as the first release in a half-year and bringing a few refinements… ⌘ Read more

Anthropic’s Claude AI Can Respond With Charts, Diagrams, and Other Visualschat
Anthropic updated Claude so it can automatically generate charts, diagrams, and other interactive visualizations directly inside conversations, rather than only in a side panel. The new visualizations are rolling out now to all users. The Verge reports: As an example, Anthropic says a conversation about the periodic t … ⌘ Read more

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me most of our conversations used to be about twtxt, I am not going to lie. Lately? Not so much. It turns out (a) we don’t need a longer hash, (b) we don’t care so much about changing addressing, and © I am just Bender, what else can I say? :-D :-P

@arne@uplegger.eu I’m finding that hubs like https://twtxt.net, as a yarn “pod” that indexes a lot of users, works great as a place to find interesting conversations and people to follow.

Six of my last eight posts were about twtxt itself. As much as it’s understandable between all the excitement and confusion with finding out and using a new technology, I really don’t want this feed to become something like this:

Image

OpenAI’s First ChatGPT Gadget Could Be a Smart Speaker With a Camera
OpenAI is reportedly developing its first consumer hardware product: a $200-$300 smart speaker with a built-in camera capable of recognizing “items on a nearby table or conversations people are having in the vicinity.” It’s also said to feature Face ID-style authentication for purchases. The Verge reports: In addition to the smart spea … ⌘ Read more

LLM-Generated Passwords Look Strong but Crack in Hours, Researchers Find
AI security firm Irregular has found that passwords generated by major large language models – Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini – appear complex but follow predictable patterns that make them crackable in hours, even on decades-old hardware. When researchers prompted Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 fifty times in separate conversations, only … ⌘ Read more

White House Eyes Data Center Agreements Amid Energy Price Spikes
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Trump administration wants some of the world’s largest technology companies to publicly commit to a new compact governing the rapid expansion of AI data centers, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.

A draft of the compact obtained by POLITICO lay … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Starts Running Ads in ChatGPT
OpenAI has started testing ads inside ChatGPT for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers in the United States, the company said. The Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education tiers remain ad-free. Ads are matched to users based on conversation topics, past chats, and prior ad interactions, and appear clearly labeled as “sponsored” and visually separated from ChatGPT’s organic respo … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Pledges To Keep Claude Ad-free, Calls AI Conversations a ‘Space To Think’
Anthropic said today that its AI assistant Claude will not carry advertising of any kind – no sponsored links next to conversations, no advertiser influence on the model’s responses, and no unsolicited third-party product placements – calling Claude a “space to think” that should remain free of commercial interrupt … ⌘ Read more

Wall Street’s Top Bankers Are Giving Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong the Cold Shoulder
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon interrupted a conversation between Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair at Davos last week to tell Armstrong “You are full of s—,” his index finger pointed squarely at Armstrong’s face. Dimon told Armstrong to stop lying on TV, according to WSJ.

A … ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.342 Published With Cooperative Matrix Conversion Extension
Following last week’s Vulkan spec updates that brought descriptor heaps and other notable new extensions and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone, Vulkan 1.4.342 was published this morning as the latest routine spec update plus one new extension… ⌘ Read more

Massive AI Chat App Leaked Millions of Users Private Conversations
An anonymous reader shares a report: Chat & Ask AI, one of the most popular AI apps on the Google Play and Apple App stores that claims more than 50 million users, left hundreds of millions of those users’ private messages with the app’s chatbot exposed, according to an independent security researcher and emails viewed by 404 Media. The expose … ⌘ Read more

Google Settles $68 Million Lawsuit Claiming It Recorded Private Conversations
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Google has agreed to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly listened to people’s private conversations through their phones. […] the lawsuit claimed Google Assistant would sometimes turn on by mistake – the phone thinking someone had said its activati … ⌘ Read more

Developer Rescues Stadia Bluetooth Tool That Google Killed
This week, Google finally shut down the official Stadia Bluetooth conversion tool… but there’s no need to panic! Developer Christopher Klay preserved a copy on his personal GitHub and is hosting a fully working version of the tool on a dedicated website to make it even easier to find. The Verge’s Sean Hollister reports: I haven’t tried Klay’s mirror, as bo … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic’s Index Shows Job Evolution Over Replacement
Anthropic’s fourth installment of its Economic Index, drawing on an anonymized sample of two million Claude conversations from November 2025, finds that AI is changing how people work rather than whether they work at all. The study tracked usage across the company’s consumer-facing Claude.ai platform and its API, categorizing interactions as either automation (where AI co … ⌘ Read more

@pluralistic@pluralistic summing up my thoughts on where the current #DigitalSovereignty conversation is leading us towards:

I’m sorry. I know that when we talk about “digital sovereignty,” we’re obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.

I don’t have any advice for how to do that. I’m sorry!

I’m trying to implement configurable key bindings in tt. Boy, is parsing the key names into tcell.EventKeys a horrible thing. This type consists of three information:

1. maybe a predefined compound key sequence, like Ctrl+A
   
2. maybe some modifiers, such as Shift, Ctrl, etc.
   
3. maybe a rune if neither modifiers are present nor a predefined compound key exists
   

It’s hardcoded usage results in code like this:

func (t *TreeView[T]) InputHandler() func(event *tcell.EventKey, setFocus func(p tview.Primitive)) {
    return t.WrapInputHandler(func(event *tcell.EventKey, setFocus func(p tview.Primitive)) {
        switch event.Key() {
        case tcell.KeyUp:
            t.moveUp()
        case tcell.KeyDown:
            t.moveDown()
        case tcell.KeyHome:
            t.moveTop()
        case tcell.KeyEnd:
            t.moveBottom()
        case tcell.KeyCtrlE:
            t.moveScrollOffsetDown()
        case tcell.KeyCtrlY:
            t.moveScrollOffsetUp()
        case tcell.KeyTab, tcell.KeyBacktab:
            if t.finished != nil {
                t.finished(event.Key())
            }
        case tcell.KeyRune:
            if event.Modifiers() == tcell.ModNone {
                switch event.Rune() {
                case 'k':
                    t.moveUp()
                case 'j':
                    t.moveDown()
                case 'g':
                    t.moveTop()
                case 'G':
                    t.moveBottom()
                }
            }
        }
    })
}

This data structure is just awful to handle and especially initialize in my opinion. Some compound tcell.Keys are mapped to human-readable names in tcell.KeyNames. However, these names always use - to join modifiers, e.g. resulting in Ctrl-A, whereas tcell.EventKey.Name() produces +-delimited strings, e.g. Ctrl+A. Gnaarf, why this asymmetry!? O_o

I just checked k9s and they’re extending tcell.KeyNames with their own tcell.Key definitions like crazy: https://github.com/derailed/k9s/blob/master/internal/ui/key.go Then, they convert an original tcell.EventKey to tcell.Key: https://github.com/derailed/k9s/blob/b53f3091ca2d9ab963913b0d5e59376aea3f3e51/internal/ui/app.go#L287 This must be used when actually handling keyboard input: https://github.com/derailed/k9s/blob/e55083ba271eed6fc4014674890f70c5ed6c70e0/internal/ui/tree.go#L101

This seems to be much nicer to use. However, I fear this will break eventually. And it’s more fragile in general, because it’s rather easy to forget the conversion or one can get confused whether a certain key at hand is now an original tcell.Key coming from the library or an “extended” one.

I will see if I can find some other programs that provide configurable tcell key bindings.

Lawsuit Over OpenAI For-Profit Conversion Can Head To Trial, US Judge Says
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk persuaded a judge on Wednesday to allow a jury trial on his allegations that ChatGPT maker OpenAI violated its founding mission in its high-profile restructuring to a for-profit entity. Musk was a cofounder of OpenAI in 2015 but lef … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Turns Copilot Chats Into a Checkout Lane
Microsoft is embedding full e-commerce checkout directly into Copilot chats, letting users buy products without ever visiting a retailer’s website. “If checkout happens inside AI conversations, retailers risk losing direct customer relationships – while platforms like Microsoft gain leverage,” reports Axios. From the report: Microsoft unveiled new agentic AI tools for retailers … ⌘ Read more

Slashdot Asks: Your Favorite 2025 Movies, TV Shows and Books?
Another year wraps up, and with it comes the annual ritual of taking stock. What were the movies, TV shows and books from this year that stood out to you? Not necessarily the ones that dominated conversation or topped charts, but the ones you found yourself recommending to friends, or returning to for a second watch or read.

Share your picks and, if you’r … ⌘ Read more

@zvava@twtxt.net By hashing definition, if you edit your message, it simply becomes a new message. It’s just not the same message anymore. At least from a technical point of view. As a human, personally I disagree, but that’s what I’m stuck with. There’s no reliable way to detect and “correct” for that.

Storing the hash in your database doesn’t prevent you from switching to another hashing implementation later on. As of now, message creation timestamps earlier than some magical point in time use twt hash v1, messages on or after that magical timestamp use twt hash v2. So, a message either has a v1 or a v2 hash, but not both. At least one of them is never meaningful.

Once you “upgrade” your database schema, you can check for stored messages from the future which should have been hashed using v2, but were actually v1-hashed and simply fix them.

If there will ever be another addressing scheme, you could reuse the existing hash column if it supersedes the v1/v2 hashes. Otherwise, a new column might be useful, or perhaps no column at all (looking at location-based addressing or how it was called). The old v1/v2 hashes are still needed for all past conversation trees.

In my opinion, always recalculating the hashes is a big waste of time and energy. But if it serves you well, then go for it.

Rob Pike Angered by ‘AI Slop’ Spam Sent By Agent Experiment
“Dear Dr. Pike,On this Christmas Day, I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades….” read the email. “With sincere appreciation,Claude Opus 4.5AI Village.

“IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an AI system. All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default … ⌘ Read more

2015 Radio Interview Frames AI As ‘High-Level Algebra’
Longtime Slashdot reader MrFreak shares a public radio interview from 2015 discussing artificial intelligence as inference over abstract inputs, along with scaling limits, automation, and governance models, where for-profit engines are constrained by nonprofit oversight: Recorded months before OpenAI was founded, the conversation treats intelligence as math plus in … ⌘ Read more

Browser Extensions With 8 Million Users Collect Extended AI Conversations
An anonymous reader shares a report: Browser extensions with more than 8 million installs are harvesting complete and extended conversations from users’ AI conversations and selling them for marketing purposes, according to data collected from the Google and Microsoft pages hosting them.

Security firm Koi discovered the eight ex … ⌘ Read more

Adobe Integrates With ChatGPT
Adobe is integrating Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat directly into ChatGPT so users can edit photos, design graphics, and tweak PDFs through the chatbot. The Verge reports: The Adobe apps are free to use, and can be activated by typing the name of the app alongside an uploaded file and conversational instruction, such as “Adobe Photoshop, help me blur the background of this image.” ChatGPT users won’t have to specify th … ⌘ Read more

Why Meetings Can Harm Employee Well-Being
Phys.org republishes this article from The Conversation:

On average, managers spend 23 hours a week in meetings. Much of what happens in them is considered to be of low value, or even entirely counterproductive. The paradox is that bad meetings generate even more meetings… in an attempt to repair the damage caused by previous ones…

A 2015 handbook laid the groundwork for the nascent fiel … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net my translator says conversations. An Jabber Droid app comes to mind.

Meta Acquires AI Wearable Company Limitless
Meta is acquiring AI wearable startup Limitless, maker of a pendant that records conversations and generates summaries. “We’re excited that Limitless will be joining Meta to help accelerate our work to build AI-enabled wearables,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. CNBC reports: Limitless CEO Dan Siroker revealed the deal on Friday via a corporate blog post but did not disclose … ⌘ Read more

AI Chatbots Can Sway Voters Better Than Political Ads
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: New research reveals that AI chatbots can shift voters’ opinions in a single conversation – and they’re surprisingly good at it. A multi-university team of researchers has found that chatting with a politically biased AI model was more effective than political advertisements at nudging both Democrats … ⌘ Read more

‘We Built a Database of 290,000 English Medieval Soldiers’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation, written by authors Adrian R. Bell, Anne Curry, and Jason Sadler: When you picture medieval warfare, you might think of epic battles and famous monarchs. But what about the everyday soldiers who actually filled the ranks? Until recently, their stories were scattered across handwritten manuscripts i … ⌘ Read more

How OpenAI Reacted When Some ChatGPT Users Lost Touch with Reality
Some AI experts were reportedly shocked ChatGPT wasn’t fully tested for sycophancy by last spring. “OpenAI did not see the scale at which disturbing conversations were happening,” writes the New York Times — sharing what they learned after interviewing more than 40 current and former OpenAI employees, including safety engineers, executives, and re … ⌘ Read more

Can AI Transform Space Propulsion?
An anonymous reader shared this report from The Conversation:

To make interplanetary travel faster, safer, and more efficient, scientists need breakthroughs in propulsion technology. Artificial intelligence is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs. We’re a team of engineers and graduate students who are studying how AI in general, and a subset of AI call … ⌘ Read more

Roos coach sheds light on ‘really difficult’ AFLW grand final omission
North Melbourne coach Darren Crocker says telling Mia King she isn’t going to play in the AFLW grand final is “one of the harder conversations” he’s had to have. ⌘ Read more

Man accused of murdering Toyah Cordingley told police he saw ‘killers’ and ‘ran’
The jury has been played a a covert recording of a conversation Rajwinder Singh had with an undercover officer in a police station cell in 2023. ⌘ Read more

More Than Half of New Articles On the Internet Are Being Written By AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation: The line between human and machine authorship is blurring, particularly as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell whether something was written by a person or AI. Now, in what may seem like a tipping point, the digital marketing firm Graphite recently published a study sho … ⌘ Read more

Analyzing 47,000 ChatGPT Conversations Shows Echo Chambers, Sensitive Data - and Unpredictable Medical Advice
For nearly three years OpenAI has touted ChatGPT as a “revolutionary” (and work-transforming) productivity tool, reports the Washington Post.

But after analyzing 47,000 ChatGPT conversations, the Post found that users “are overwhelmingly turning to the chatbot for … ⌘ Read more

Launch a Chat UI Agent with Docker and the Vercel AI SDK
Running a Chat UI Agent doesn’t have to involve a complicated setup. By combining Docker with the Vercel AI SDK, it’s possible to build and launch a conversational interface in a clean, reproducible way. Docker ensures that the environment is consistent across machines, while the Vercel AI SDK provides the tools for handling streaming responses… ⌘ 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

FTR, I see one (two) issues with PyQt6, sadly:

1. The PyQt6 docs appear to be mostly auto-generated from the C++ docs. And they contain many errors or broken examples (due to the auto-conversion). I found this relatively unpleasent to work with.
   
2. (Until Python finally gets rid of the Global Interpreter Lock properly, it’s not really suited for GUI programs anyway – in my opinion. You can’t offload anything to a second thread, because the whole program is still single-threaded. This would have made my fractal rendering program impossible, for example.)

OpenAI Fights Order To Turn Over Millions of ChatGPT Conversations
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI asked a federal judge in New York on Wednesday to reverse an order that required it to turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT chat logs amid a copyright infringement lawsuit by the New York Times and other news outlets, saying it would expose users’ private conversations. The artificial … ⌘ Read more

GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
Comments ⌘ Read more