Latest News
Last updated 09 Feb, 08:59 PM
BBC News
King's 'profound concern' as police consider Andrew claims over Epstein - Making his first intervention in the Epstein scandal, the King said he is ready to support the police in their inquiries.
Maxwell refuses to answer questions about Epstein in congressional hearing - Ghislaine Maxwell, the jailed associate of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, invoked her Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination.
BBC assesses weaponry used to massacre Iran's protesters - BBC News Persian Forensic has been able to confirm the security forces' deployment of a wide array of lethal and non-lethal weaponry.
More than 90 flood warnings in place across UK as forecasters warn 'no sign' of dry spell - More than 90 flood warnings are in place covering south-west and south-east England, London and south Wales.
So close to a 'world first' - fourth for Brookes on frustrating day for Team GB - Mia Brookes finishes fourth in the snowboard big air final - ending a frustrating day for Team GB that had promised so much more.
The Register
AI chatbots are no better at medical advice than a search engine - And people make bad information worse by failing to provide chatbots with the right details Healthcare researchers have found that AI chatbots could put patients at risk by giving shoddy medical advice.…
Discord to start assuming all users are underage unless they prove otherwise - Although you might be able to wiggle out if its AI age-inference model decides you’re an adult Don't want Discord to start treating your account like it belongs to an underage kid? Then you'd better be willing to fork over some PII – just months after the company's age verification partner had such data stolen. …
'Roaring cougars' lunched on OpenAI in Super Bowl ad battle, but ai.com wins the day - Advertising search and web meters recorded site crashing traffic for ai.com Anthropic's sensitive cubs and roaring cougars commercial trampled OpenAI's offerings in searches and site hit metrics during the Super Bowl, according to ad tracking firm EDO. However, the unknown player ai.com, which pitched the fantastical idea that “AGI is coming,” won the day.…
Yes, backsies: Crypto exchange Bithumb claws back $40B in accidental payments to users - New users promised $68, but briefly saw multi-million-dollar balances Korean crypto exchange Bithumb says it recovered nearly all of the more than $40 billion worth of funds it mistakenly handed out to customers as part of a promotional campaign.…
More than 135,000 OpenClaw instances exposed to internet in latest vibe-coded disaster - By default, the bot listens on all network interfaces, and many users never change it It's a day with a name ending in Y, so you know what that means: Another OpenClaw cybersecurity disaster.…
New Scientist - Home
Gravitational wave signal proves Einstein was right about relativity - Ripples in space-time from a pair of merging black holes have been recorded in unprecedented detail, enabling physicists to test predictions of general relativity
'Hidden' group of gut bacteria may be essential to good health - Scientists have pinpointed a group of bacteria that consistently appear in high numbers in healthy people, suggesting that these could one day be targeted through diet or probiotics
We’re finally abandoning BMI for better ways to assess body fat - People classed as “overweight” according to BMI can be perfectly healthy. But there are better measures of fat, and physicians are finally using them
Specific cognitive training has 'astonishing' effect on dementia risk - A type of cognitive training that tests people's quick recall seems to reduce the risk of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease
Jeff Goldblum should make a film about this legendary mathematician - Paul Erdős was one of the most prolific mathematicians to ever live, known for showing up at the door of others in the field and declaring they should host and feed him while they do maths together. His radical life should be immortalised by Hollywood in a comedy biopic, says columnist Jacob Aron
Hacker News
MIT Living Wage Calculator - Comments
Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month - Comments
Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock - Comments
Why is the sky blue? - Comments
Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk - Comments
Slashdot
Sixteen AI Agents Built a C Compiler From Scratch - Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini set 16 instances of Claude Opus 4.6 loose on a shared codebase over two weeks to build a C compiler from scratch, and the AI agents produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM and RISC-V architectures. The project ran through nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and cost about $20,000 in API fees. Each instance operated inside its own Docker container, independently claiming tasks via lock files and pushing completed code to a shared Git repository. No orchestration agent directed traffic. The compiler achieved a 99% pass rate on the GCC torture test suite and can compile major open source projects including PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, FFmpeg and Doom. But it lacks a 16-bit x86 backend and calls out to GCC for that step, its assembler and linker remain buggy, and it produces less efficient code than GCC running with all optimizations disabled. Carlini also invested significant effort building test harnesses and feedback systems to keep the agents productive, and the model hit a practical ceiling at around 100,000 lines as bug fixes and new features frequently broke existing functionality. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Romance Publishing Has an AI Problem and Most Readers Don't Know It Yet - The romance genre -- long the publishing industry's earliest adopter of technological shifts, from e-books to self-publishing to serial releases -- has become the front line for AI-generated fiction, and the results as you can imagine are messy. Coral Hart, a Cape Town-based novelist previously published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon, produced more than 200 AI-assisted romance novels last year and self-published them on Amazon, where they collectively sold around 50,000 copies. She found Anthropic's Claude delivered the most elegant prose but was terrible at sexy banter; other programs like Grok and NovelAI wrote graphic scenes that felt rushed and mechanical. Chatbots struggled broadly to build the slow-burn sexual tension romance readers crave, she said. A BookBub survey of more than 1,200 authors found roughly a third were using generative AI for plotting, outlining, or writing, and the majority did not disclose this to readers. Romance accounts for more than 20% of all adult fiction print sales, according to Circana BookScan, and the genre's reliance on familiar tropes and narrative formulas makes it especially susceptible to AI disruption. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Autodesk Takes Google To Court Over AI Movie Software Named 'Flow' - Autodesk has sued Google in San Francisco federal court, alleging the search giant infringed its "Flow" trademark by launching competing AI-powered software for movie, TV and video game production in May 2025. Autodesk says it has used the Flow name since September 2022 and that Google assured it would not commercialize a product under the same name -- then filed a trademark application in Tonga, where filings are not publicly accessible, before seeking U.S. protection. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Lines Up 100-Year Sterling Bond Sale - Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year. From a report: The so-called century bond will form part of a debut sterling issuance this week by Google's parent company, according to people familiar with the matter. Alphabet was also selling $15bn of dollar bonds on Monday and lining up a Swiss franc bond sale, the people said. Century bonds -- long-term borrowing at its most extreme -- are highly unusual, although a flurry were sold during the period of very low interest rates that followed the financial crisis, including by governments such as Austria and Argentina. The University of Oxford, EDF and the Wellcome Trust -- the most recent in 2018 -- are the only issuers to have previously tapped the sterling century market. Such sales are even rarer in the tech sector, with most of the industry's biggest groups issuing up to 40 years, although IBM sold a 100-year bond back in 1996. Big Tech companies and their suppliers are expected to invest almost $700bn in AI infrastructure this year and are increasingly turning to the debt markets to finance the giant data centre build-out. Michael Burry, writing on Substack: Alphabet looking to issue a 100-year bond. Last time this happened in tech was Motorola in 1997, which was the last year Motorola was considered a big deal. At the start of 1997, Motorola was a top 25 market cap and top 25 revenue corporation in America. Never again. The Motorola corporate brand in 1997 was ranked #1 in the US, ahead of Microsoft. In 1998, Nokia overtook Motorola in cell phones, and after the iPhone it fell out of the consumer eye. Today Motorola is the 232nd largest market cap with only $11 billion in sales. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Discord Will Require a Face Scan or ID for Full Access Next Month - Discord said today it's rolling out age verification on its platform globally starting next month, when it will automatically set all users' accounts to a "teen-appropriate" experience unless they demonstrate that they're adults. From a report: Users who aren't verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won't be able to speak in Discord's livestream-like "stage" channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive. They will also get warning prompts for friend requests from potentially unfamiliar users, and DMs from unfamiliar users will be automatically filtered into a separate inbox. [...] A government ID might still be required for age verification in its global rollout. According to Discord, to remove the new "teen-by-default" changes and limitations, "users can choose to use facial age estimation or submit a form of identification to [Discord's] vendor partners, with more options coming in the future." The first option uses AI to analyze a user's video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user's device. If the age group estimate (teen or adult) from the selfie is incorrect, users can appeal it or verify with a photo of an identity document instead. That document will be verified by a third party vendor, but Discord says the images of those documents "are deleted quickly -- in most cases, immediately after age confirmation." Read more of this story at Slashdot.