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"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/software-is-over-bold-ai-developer-takes-aim-at-adobe-with-open-source-clones/

For a while, those hoping to avoid the difficulty and expense of dealing with Adobe's Creative Suite have been able to use several free and/or open-source alternatives that replicate some or all of those capabilities. Now, one developer is using AI-powered reverse engineering to mimic the look, feel, and functionality of Adobe's well-known software with what he hopes will soon be perfect fidelity.

Artcraft got its start last year as a "controllable AI for artists" that allows for precise post-generation editing of AI-crafted images and videos. Over the weekend, though, the brand debuted its pivot to a suite of seven open source apps recreating the user interface and tools found in Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.

In announcing those new apps on Reddit earlier this week, software developer Brandon Thomas said he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to create "clean-room replacements" for Adobe's closed source software in Rust (with WebAssembly versions available for use in a browser). And while commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere have taken pains to point out the new software's many current shortcomings, Thomas make the grandiose promise that the current "super early alpha" state will soon lead to something just as functional as anything Adobe has ever put out.

"We're going to reach 100% [feature] parity within a month," Thomas stated on Reddit of his plans to quickly squash bugs and add features with the help of community reports. Days later, on Hacker News, he amended that position slightly to say that "99% parity will take a while, but I'm sure it'll be measured in months and not years."

Thomas, who says he has about a decade of experience working on large-scale Rust projects, wrote on Hacker News that he was inspired to create his own open source Adobe software alternatives after being "bit by the dark pattern 'cancellation fee' one too many times." Development of the totally free options offered here under MIT/Apache licenses will be funded, Thomas wrote, by selling token-based access to the pre-existing Artcraft visual AI model and IDE, which is offered as an imagery-generation option inside the apps alongside third-party models. This revenue stream will help ensure these apps aren't "going to be some orphaned small-team project," Thomas wrote. "We have a team building popular software for filmmakers, so supporting this is fully funded."

Thomas is the latest in a long line of coders using AI tools to speed up the long-standing but labor-intensive practice of reverse engineering (i.e., replicating the functionality of a piece of software without directly copying the code itself). While that practice has generally been found legally acceptable, the ArtCraft apps could still face legal trouble if their "trade dress" too closely mimics Adobe's familiar appearance and interface.

After coding exclusively with AI tools since February, Thomas said he foresees a near future when everyday developers can re-create open source versions of popular paid software to "take back the internet and own tech forever."

"Now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you," Thomas wrote. "We'll replace Google Search, we'll build our own smartphones, we'll build better infra. We'll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world."

"Software is over," he gloated in an earlier comment, claiming to have "one-shotted Photoshop. The whole thing."

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/10/pediatricians-renew-call-to-ban-raw-milk-as-anti-science-rhetoric-reigns/

As many doctors are moving ahead with the latest advances of modern medicine—from powerful obesity drugs to breakthrough cancer treatments—pediatricians are being forced to turn back, fighting to maintain advances in children's health that were hard-won decades ago.

With anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has spent a considerable amount of time and resources in the past year fiercely defending lifesaving vaccinations—safe, routine shots that have saved the lives of millions of children over decades and thwarted untold suffering and disability.

But just this week, The New York Times reported that Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, has opened aggressive investigations against pediatricians simply because they vaccinated their patients. Paxton falsely claims vaccines are part of a "multi-level, multi-industry scheme." But critics say his anti-vaccine campaign appears more aimed at currying favor with Kennedy, President Trump, and their supporters as Paxton runs for the US Senate.

Meanwhile, the AAP this week had to renew another decades-old stance for children's health—one against unpasteurized dairy, aka raw milk. Since the early 20th century, dairy producers in the US have briefly heated milk to kill the array of dangerous pathogens that naturally dwell in and around cattle and can easily migrate into milk. The simple intervention of pasteurization contributed to a sharp, "remarkable" drop in infant deaths and illnesses.

But, much like vaccines, a flood of misinformation has eroded trust and understanding of this public health triumph. And again, Kennedy has been among the advocates working to reverse this health victory.

In recent years, state laws have been loosening on raw milk, despite a federal ban on interstate commerce. At least 27 states now allow raw milk sales. In turn, outbreaks from raw milk have increased over the past two decades, the AAP highlights. Nearly half the illnesses in these outbreaks are in children—who are particularly vulnerable to foodborne pathogens.

Last week, ProPublica reported the heart-wrenching story of a 17-month-old girl in California, who nearly died after acquiring E. coli O157:H7 from drinking raw goat milk. She developed a life-threatening complication called hemolytic uremic syndrome that destroys red blood cells and damages blood vessels in the kidneys, which can lead to kidney failure and death. She required intensive care, and although she survived, she will have lasting effects from the ordeal. Her speech and motor development were halted, and she faces long-term kidney problems, requiring monitoring by a nephrologist every six months.

Prior to the girl's infection, her mother was unaware of the dangers of unpasteurized dairy and trusted information on social media, which falsely claimed that raw milk has health benefits over pasteurized milk. Such myths have persisted despite experts pointing out for years that they are unfounded or plainly false. The girl's mother now strongly regrets ever giving her daughter the raw milk and has tried to raise awareness of the risk—only to get barred from online groups for speaking out.

In the AAP's policy renewal this week, pediatricians review all the reasons health experts have, for decades, endorsed consuming only pasteurized dairy products.

"The AAP also endorses a ban on the sale or distribution of unpasteurized milk and milk products throughout the United States," the AAP wrote. "This recommendation is based on the multiplicity of data regarding the burden of illness associated with consumption of unpasteurized milk and milk products, especially among pregnant people, fetuses and neonates, and infants and young children, as well as the strong scientific evidence that pasteurization does not alter the nutritional value of milk."

Original Submission

looorg writes:

It's that time of the year. It's Nobel Prize week. A million SEK for your scientific (and other) career and achievements.

  economic sciences (Monday) not yet announced as I made this submission.

Nobel Prize in Physics 2026
Francis Halzen

        "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin"

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026
Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai

        "for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis"

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel

        "for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics"

Nobel Prize for Literature 2026
Anne Carson

        "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature"

Nobel Peace Prize 2026
Navanethem "Navi" Pillay

       "for her efforts to promote peace and international law"

https://www.nobelprize.org/
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes/
https://time.com/article/2026/10/05/nobel-prize-2026-winners/
https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/articles/announcement-of-the-nobel-peace-prize-2026
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2026/pillay/facts/

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2276609/ice-is-reportedly-using-a-palantir-database-to-compile-dossiers-on-protestors/

As revealed by unsealed court documents, Department of Homeland Security agents are allegedly creating dossiers on those that are accused of observing or protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. As first reported by Wired, these DHS files on protestors reportedly include sensitive info like photos and license plate numbers and are stored in a database built by Palantir called Investigative Case Management.

The new information comes from a partially unsealed court filing about a January ICE operation that took place in Maine, according to Wired. The filing is part of a class action lawsuit, which led to a redacted version becoming available to the public on Friday and revealing the purported database of ICE protestors.

According to the lawsuit, DHS agents would track and intimidate observers or protestors, sometimes by driving by their homes or labeling them as "Threat to Law Enforcement, Professional Protestor." In one example, an agent reportedly called one of the plaintiffs on her cell and suggested that she tell her spouse "not to do anything like that in the future because people who are doing things like that might get added to a domestic terrorism watchlist."

The lawyers representing the plaintiffs said that this sort of database creates a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of protestors. On the other side, a DHS spokesperson told Wired that the case was "meritless" and denied the existence of such a database that labels and tracks "domestic terrorists."

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/trade-group-crunches-numbers-on-trumps-impossible-push-for-100-us-made-tech/

One of Donald Trump's biggest goals as president is to increase domestic manufacturing and reshore supply chains so that the most in-demand technologies in the world can be 100 percent made in the United States.

By executive order last December, he launched his "Genesis Mission," an ambitious plan seeking to leverage US dominance in AI to maintain or seize an edge in advanced robotics, biotechnology, semiconductors, and nuclear technologies. According to Trump, that plan works best with self-sustaining supply chains. Not even neighboring countries or longtime allies should be relied upon to manufacture a single component of any US product in his ideal world.

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) has long warned that Trump's reshoring goals are not grounded in reality, but only recently has America's largest technology trade association attempted to estimate what it would cost businesses and consumers to follow through on Trump's plan.

"It is no longer enough to say that reshoring is difficult," the CTA acknowledged. "The practical questions are what it would cost, product by product, what it would physically require, and who would pay for it."

In new research shared with members this week, the CTA warned that reaching full US production of 10 categories of products most commonly found in US homes by 2031 "would require between $185 and $230 billion in capital expenditure, 555,000 to 668,000 additional full-time employees, and 19.1-19.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year."

While the costs are eye-popping, the labor demand might be the bigger problem, requiring more than double the "existing US computer and electronics manufacturing workforce," the CTA said. Additionally, the energy demand required to reshore all supply chains at once would clash with huge energy needs of AI data centers over the same time period.

Product categories included computer monitors, laptops, robotic vacuums, smart speakers, smartphones, smartwatches, televisions, video game consoles, wireless earbuds, and wireless headphones.

Smartphones are in a "league of their own," the CTA said, emerging as the most expensive product to make in the US and the product that Americans consider least dispensable. Taking into account tariffs in place today, the cost of fully manufacturing a smartphone in the US would go up by 152 percent, CTA estimated, and some of those costs would inevitably have to be covered by consumers to maintain profit margins and keep investors happy.

The largest cost increases would be in products with processors, memory, and advanced displays, the CTA said. Building laptops would cost 93 percent more, and smartwatches 97 percent more. On the lower end of the spectrum, TVs would cost 41 percent more to build entirely in the US.

In this scenario, most tech companies wouldn't immediately pass all extra costs on to their customers. But any big price jumps could hurt Americans already pinching pennies. CTA's research indicated that companies could pass on between 25 and 50 percent of the cost increase.

On average, CTA estimated that "the 10 products in our report would see a weighted average price increase of 27 to 55 percent." For the most cash-vulnerable and value-seeking US families, that could quickly add up as the devices they depend on wear down.

"A household replacing a phone, a laptop, and a television over a typical replacement cycle would face that increase on each purchase," the CTA reported.

Households already facing budget strains—including rising costs of rent, groceries, and fuel—are already delaying technology purchases until prices come down in the US, the CTA reported. And while most people are unwilling to go without smartphones for very long, the fewer products that tech companies can sell over time, the worse their margins will get as they continue to absorb higher costs. As returns diminish, that could spook investors, the CTA suggested, making it even harder to reshore supply chains, despite Trump insisting that reshoring will ultimately attract more investment in the US. With each product category taking years to fully reshore, the jury is out on how many businesses could afford that, the CTA suggested.

Instead of rushing companies to invest in domestic manufacturing on expedited timelines that hardly anybody can afford, the CTA recommended a "first step" that could help tech firms manage costs while pursuing some reshoring.

As reported on https://www.espn.com/racing/f1/story/_/id/50100614/formula-1-2026-bahrain-grand-prix-malaysia-engine-delays-happened-verstappen and elsewhere:

The Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia {relocated due to war in Iran} already had a farcical name. Formula 1's unnecessarily complicated hybrid engines ensured the race will be remembered as one of the biggest farces in the sport's recent history.

F1's current engines, which feature a near 50-50 split between internal combustion energy and electrical battery elements, are already considered the biggest mistake the sport has made in recent times. Whenever they are consigned to the scrapheap, the foremost memories will be of Sunday's two formation laps in the rain.
[...]
Several corners into the first formation lap is where things started going wrong, when the cars encountered a software bug baked into the algorithms that dictate F1's new complicated engines. During rain, for safety reasons, engine modes run at a maximum deployment of 250 kilowatts of deployment in certain sectors, down from 350kW in dry conditions. Once Verstappen, leading the pack but tiptoeing around on the cold intermediates{tires}, dropped below a speed of 50 km/h, the algorithms dictating the behaviour of his engine started having problems: essentially, the MGU-K [part of the hybrid power unit] no longer kicked in to feed power into his low-revving engine. The restriction on the car's hybrid-electric component is meant to prevent teams from effectively using it as a traction control device at the start of a race; this time, however, the combination of not running on wet tires with an extremely wet tarmac meant drivers were applying much less throttle than normal.

The algorithm did not spot the difference, so kicked in. With the additional power boost locked out, the internal combustion engine was effectively dying without a surge of recovery power from the electrical side.
[...]
"There was a bit of a combination of circumstances which caused this bug to kick in. Basically, [on] the formation lap, some cars went very slowly, almost came to a standstill. There was a bit of a concertina effect between cars, and some cars almost stopped completely. That bug prevented the power from being redeployed, and for the cars to start again. I think if we had had a bit more testing, we probably would have managed to catch it in time, and not have such a situation.

"Once the problem happened, our guys realised very quickly what was happening, and had to work under a lot of time pressure for an update to the software, which was issued to the teams, and the teams had to install it on their cars.

The FIA {sanctioning body} later gave a simpler statement on what had happened, blaming a perfect storm of various factors. The governing body said "an unprecedented combination of low engine speed, low-grip conditions, wet-weather energy management settings and the Sepang circuit's sector configuration led to an unintended loss of power for a number of cars".

The remedy was a software update -- code Tombazis admitted was a "cobbled up, hurried solution." Rewriting and sending the new code to the teams to install in their systems led to another delay. It meant the worst of the rain also disappeared, we got only a handful of laps on the intermediates and the prospect of a genuine wet-weather classic disappeared.

A few bits of explanation for non-F1 fans added {inside braces} by the submitter. After they got past the delay at the start, it was an entertaining race, on a track that the drivers generally like. The story link has a few additional humorous quotes and more details.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

We are exposed to a much narrower range of knowledge through AI chatbots than through a basic web search:

"Let me just ask the chatbot." For many of us, this has become an everyday phrase. Where we used to turn to Google to find information, AI chatbots have become a common way of getting answers to everything from what to make for dinner and how to word that difficult email to the boss, to what it actually means when interest rates rise.

But the large language models underpinning AI chatbots give us a significantly narrower range of information than a conventional web search. This is the finding of a new study led by researchers at the Department of Computer Science (DIKU) at the University of Copenhagen.

"Every language model we tested provides users with more uniform information than a simple Google search across all the topics we looked at. In other words, people are to a large extent exposed to the same information over and over again. So AI chatbots are not just changing how we find knowledge, but also which knowledge we have access to," says first author Dustin Wright, a former postdoctoral researcher at DIKU who is now an assistant professor at Aalborg University.

[...] according to the researchers, the low level of diversity in language models is partly a result of how the models basically work. They compress the vast amount of text they are trained on and learn the patterns that occur most frequently. In the process, information that deviates from the most common patterns is filtered out.

The effect could be amplified if language models are increasingly trained on text produced by other AI models – something the researchers expect to happen. In that case, models would learn from their own outputs, which are already less diverse than the human-written texts on which they were originally trained.

If this process is repeated over several generations of models, the range of information could gradually become narrower. This is what the researchers refer to as 'knowledge collapse'.

"It's a worrying thought. However, we can see that the more recent models produce slightly more diverse answers than older models, so knowledge collapse is not happening yet. But the mechanism that could trigger it in the longer term is already there. So it is something we should be aware of," says Isabelle Augenstein.

[...] "AI chatbot summaries can of course be useful – that is why so many people use them. But it is still important to seek out different sources in order to understand the nuances and get a broader picture – especially for the younger generation growing up with AI. We must not become so dependent on the technology that we stop understanding and thinking for ourselves," says Isabelle Augenstein.

arXiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04226

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.club386.com/3dfx-voodoo-history-ross-smith-interview/

30 years ago, on 7 October 1996, PC gaming changed forever. On that day, the Orchid Righteous 3D was unleashed into the wild, the first card bearing 3dfx's Voodoo Graphics chipset, having been announced 11 months earlier at Comdex. What followed was a rewriting of the 3D gaming rulebook, as the PC became the games machine to beat. With graphics that made the PlayStation and N64 look positively stone age, you just couldn't believe what you were seeing when you fired up one of 3dfx's demos for the first time the future of gaming was here, and it was on PC.

I loved my Guillemot Maxi Gamer 3D that I bought with my student loan in 1997 to this day, I consider it the best PC upgrade I've ever bought in terms of the difference it made. How on earth did something as cool as the Voodoo Graphics chipset get made in the mid 90s? As the fabled 3D accelerator passes its 30th birthday, I caught up with 3dfx cofounder Ross Smith to talk about its development behind the scenes.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/chemistry-nobel-goes-to-reactions-like-those-that-gave-life-a-hand/

Life is remarkably selective. Life relies on many molecules with what is termed "handedness"—they're chemically identical but are mirror images of each other. Most chemical reactions will make a 50-50 mix of the left- and right-handed forms of a chemical, but life uses only one of them. In fact, because of the differences between left- and right-handed chemicals, most of the key enzymes used by organisms will fail to work if they're presented with chemicals that have the wrong handedness.

That poses a bit of a challenge for origin-of-life research, as we're forced to explain how a world that may have started with an even mix of left- and right-handed chemicals produced organisms that only used one of them.

Today's Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to two individuals, Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai, who discovered chemical reactions could be biased, producing large excesses of one of the two forms of a chemical.

The technical term for molecular handedness is "chirality," and scientists replace left and right with dextro (D) and levo (L). But the ideas are largely the same. Your hands have all the same components—fingers and thumbs—organized in the same way. Yet if you point your thumb upward, the fingers curl in opposite directions, making one the mirror image of the other. Depending on the arrangements of the chemical bonds, many molecules can form similar mirror-image forms, with all the same parts oriented slightly differently in space.

(For the geekier among the readership: carbon atoms have four potential sites that can form bonds, spread evenly across the surface of the atom's sphere. If each of those sites is linked to a different chemical, then swapping the chemicals located in any two of them can potentially change the way it's arranged in 3D space.)

This can really matter when it comes to enzymes, which typically latch onto chemicals using binding sites that are sculpted by evolution to fit only that chemical and its close relatives. Try to feed the enzyme the mirror-image version of that same chemical, and it will often fail to fit the binding site. Since life uses nothing but the D form of sugars, all of its enzymes are optimized to latch onto those, and many cannot interact at all with the L form.

There are two ways this could have happened. The first life may not have been as picky about the reactions it catalyzed and only evolved chirality preferences slowly. Or life could have evolved in an environment where one chiral form dominated. Or there was some combination of the two. But either of the latter two cases simply pushes the question back a bit: How could chemistry create an environment where one chiral form dominates?

Over the years, there have been a number of ideas about how this might occur. Several of those trace back to a physicist, Frederick Charles Frank, who addressed this issue in a data-free, theory-focused paper. (It's clear from the Nobel Prize Committee's writing that, were Frank still alive, he might have shared in this award.) One option is that a catalyst with only a slight preference for forming a D or L molecule could, over time, produce a large excess of that form. Another is that a chiral reaction product could itself serve as a catalyst for forming more of the same form. Or the chiral reaction product could inhibit the formation of its mirrored form.

hubie writes:

Professor Madhab Neupane and collaborators have demonstrated experimental evidence of altermagnetism in a layered material:

To build the ultrafast computers of the future, scientists are looking beyond the electrical charge of electrons to another property: their spin. While conventional hardware relies entirely on the movement of charge to process data, the ability to tap into this intrinsic quantum property could enable researchers to completely reinvent how information travels through a circuit.

Now, a team led by UCF Professor of Physics Madhab Neupane has identified a promising candidate. Neupane and his collaborators found evidence of altermagnetism, an emerging form of magnetism that combines useful characteristics of the two more familiar types of magnetism: ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism.

Ferromagnetism produces the behavior most people associate with everyday magnets. In these materials, magnetic moments align in the same direction, creating a magnetic field. That property can be useful in electronics, but the resulting stray magnetic fields can interfere with nearby components.

Antiferromagnets behave differently. Their magnetic moments point in opposing directions and cancel one another out, largely avoiding the stray fields. However, they lack some of the useful electronic properties found in ferromagnets.

Altermagnets offer another possibility by combining desirable characteristics of both.

Like antiferromagnets, they can avoid producing unwanted stray magnetic fields. But they can also generate and detect spin currents — the movement of electron spins through a material — that researchers hope to use for future electronics.

Neupane and his collaborators experimentally identified signatures of this unusual magnetic state in Co₁/₄TaSe₂, a layered material containing magnetic cobalt atoms. The discovery gives researchers a promising, versatile platform for studying altermagnetism and could help advance future electronic and spintronic technologies.

"These materials are distinguished from more conventional antiferromagnets by their ability to generate and detect spin currents without the negative effect of producing stray fields," Neupane says. "This new property makes them very well positioned for use in many different applications — including spintronics, ultrafast memory devices, terahertz networks and energy-efficient electronics."

[...] Finding evidence of altermagnetism was only part of what made Co₁/₄TaSe₂ interesting to researchers.

The material is built from extremely thin layers stacked on top of one another. Because those layers are weakly bound, scientists can separate and combine them into extremely thin structures, making layered materials promising for use in thin-film devices and other emerging technologies.

Scientists call this family of layered materials transition-metal dichalcogenides, or TMDs.

[...] Most conventional electronics rely on the electrical charge of electrons to transmit and process information. But electrons possess another property, their spin, that researchers are exploring as another way to carry information.

This emerging field is known as spintronics.

Altermagnets could be particularly useful for spintronics because they can generate and detect spin currents without producing the stray magnetic fields that can interfere with densely packed electronic components.

"As electronic devices continue to shrink, researchers need new materials that can operate faster while consuming less energy," Neupane says.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

No more cheap phones. We can all guess the reason. It's good old AI again, the gift that keeps on giving. The market for cheap chips is shifting due to AI datacenter demands. So to enjoy your future AI fun you now need to get a better, ie more expensive, phone.

It is possibly not a large market segment in Europe and the USA. Unless you are seriously into burner phones for one reason or another. But for the rest of the world the "cheap" phone is a substantial market.

The AI boom is making the world's cheapest smartphones disappear
AI data centers are driving demand for memory chips, pushing phone makers to raise prices and abandon some of their most affordable models.

The world's cheapest smartphones are disappearing because AI infrastructure is absorbing the components.

Prices of existing smartphone models have risen by about 15% globally this year, while newly launched models are roughly 25% more expensive than last year. A global memory chip shortage, driven by demand from AI data centers, is pushing up the cost of making smartphones.

For the world's poorest consumers, the problem is not simply that smartphones are getting more expensive. It's that the cheapest phones are disappearing.

When smartphones remain available but become unaffordable, consumers make difficult sacrifices to keep themselves online. They might delay upgrading, borrow or share their devices, remain on older feature phones, or go offline when they are unable to replace a device that is no longer working or stolen. Often, it means they won't have an internet-enabled device at all

https://restofworld.org/2026/ai-data-center-memory-chip-shortage-cheap-smartphones-digital-divide/

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Relying on social media for investment advice linked to higher confidence but lower actual knowledge:

Investment advice is only a scroll away. But new research from the University of Georgia suggests social media may leave some investors feeling more knowledgeable than they actually are.

The researchers found people who relied on social media to guide their investment decisions felt very confident in their investment knowledge. But they struggled to answer basic questions on investment-related topics like corporate stocks and selling short.

People who gleaned their investment information from traditional media, such as newspapers, magazines, TV and radio, felt like they knew their stuff and actually did.

"People have a lot of ways to access information now," said Xiaoyuan Sun, first author of the study and a doctoral student in UGA's College of Family and Consumer Sciences. "But if they're getting their investment information off social media, they probably don't know the deeper things. They don't know how it works, and they cannot verify that an investment product is the right fit for them."

"Basically, we find that when people are using social media, it increases their confidence but not their real knowledge," added Swarn Chatterjee, corresponding author of the study and a professor of financial planning, housing and consumer economics.

[...] That doesn't mean social media is all bad news for investors. Platforms like YouTube and Reddit make financial information easier to find, especially for people who may have previously found investing intimidating or confusing.

"In some ways, social media is democratizing that," Chatterjee said. "So it's helping expand access to people."

But easier access doesn't always mean better information.

Financial professionals have rules and regulations that govern what they do; people on social media don't. On social media, anyone can offer financial information or opinions. And while short videos and posts can make complicated topics easier to understand, details can get lost along the way.

The researchers aren't telling investors to delete their apps. But they do advise consumers to get better at questioning the financial information they find there.

Chatterjee compared it to searching for medical advice online. The internet might give you an idea of what's wrong, but you should probably consult a doctor before making an important medical decision.

The same principle applies to money.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Meta says FDA isn't sufficient to Muse reading messages. Apple begs to differ.

Apple says it is changing its macOS privacy settings to stop third-party app developers from misusing them to access message histories.

Friday's announcement comes two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said that Meta's new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a co-worker over Apple Messages. Aten said he never granted Muse permissions to read his messages and had assumed they were off-limits. Social media last week blew up with masses of people who agreed and said the incident showed that AI assistants given access to calendars, emails, messages, shopping accounts, and other resources are akin to a skill saw or other power tool. While potentially useful, they can do real damage if not used carefully.

Meta CTO David Singleton joined the fray with a rebuttal that appeared solid. For Muse to access Apple Messages, a user must manually give it two privileges. One is full-disk access, a macOS system-level permission. The other is to enable a Messages connector setting in Muse.

"The Messages integration in the Muse Mac app is opt in," Singleton said. "Your Muse can only read Messages content if macOS system-level Full Disk Access is granted and the Messages connector is enabled."

Singleton's implication was clear. Muse could have read Aten's Messages communications only if he had enabled both settings, and if so, the columnist had only himself—and certainly not Meta—to blame.

Earlier this week, I spoke to macOS security expert Patrick Wardle, who questioned Singleton's denial. His reasoning: "From a technical point of view, with FDA (full-disk access), any (non-root file), is readable, browsing history, browser cookies, chats, etc etc etc." I asked Meta how Muse couldn't read messages when the app had full disk access, while every other app with that privilege could. Meta PR's only response was to requote Singleton saying: "The Messages integration in the Muse Mac App is opt-in. Your Muse can only read Messages content if macOS system-level Full Disk Access is granted and the Messages connector is enabled."

Now, Apple is setting the record straight. In explaining why it was going to make changes to the FDA permission setting, the company wrote:

Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems—including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history—without users' full knowledge and understanding. For communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating with.

[...] Taken together, the events suggest that Muse may not be worthy of the extraordinary access it must have to work as billed by Meta. People who use the assistant should configure permissions carefully, though as Aten's experience suggests, that precaution only goes so far.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Fresh analysis of First Dynasty mass burials finds signs of fatal blunt force trauma on 39 percent of skulls:

Egyptologists have long debated whether the earliest pharoahs of the First Dynasty were buried with various servants and officials to serve them in the afterlife—a form of human sacrifice. But there is very little archaeological evidence available, given that many of the earliest Egyptian tombs were plundered and/or hastily excavated. A new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology reassesses a collection of skulls excavated from tombs in the 1920s and concludes that over one-third show evidence of blunt force trauma. This suggests that they may have been victims of so-called "retainer sacrifice."

Author Roselyn Campbell is a bioarchaeologist at Purdue University who has long been fascinated with the history of human sacrifice. "I'm interested in how we as human beings decide which types of violence are okay and which are not, and how we even define violence," Campbell told Ars. "It's very context specific. We have to be careful not to extend our own ideas about what violence is and how it's used into other cultures. With Egypt, we have such a long history of European and colonial archeology; they came in with very specific ideas about what this culture was. You really have to make an effort to contextualize the legacy data we have."

Naturally she found the debate over whether ancient Egyptians practiced retainer sacrifice pertinent to her interests. "People tend to fall into one of two camps," said Campbell. "Either retainer sacrifice definitely happened, end of discussion, or it definitely didn't happen, end of discussion. But nobody's actually looked at the bones in a very long time." Forensic science has advanced considerably over the last century, so re-analysis could be useful. Complicating matters is the fact that older sets of remains are often incomplete and/or modified for preservation, destroying vital forensic information in the process.

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/trumps-ai-voluntary-accord-wont-make-ai-safe-experts-say/

Leaders from major tech companies met at the White House on Tuesday to discuss what’s been on everyone’s mind this summer: AI safety. Afterward, President Trump announced that the group had reached a consensus to implement AI safety measures in a voluntary accord.

The accord, which Trump posted on Truth Social, outlines four main layers of controls that AI companies should implement. It also misspells United as “Unites” in Trump’s title under his signature.

Signees are a “who’s who” of Big Tech, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI president Greg Brockman. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was delivering the opening keynote of OpenAI’s DevDay in San Francisco on Tuesday.)

It’s a ceremonial move, as is Trump’s new executive order to refer to AI as “super intelligence.” Trump told reporters on Tuesday that the accord is “morally binding” rather than legally mandatory. It doesn’t have the power of law or any way to enforce it.

Big tech companies are already self-policing, Trump said. The Trump administration has taken a hands-off approach to regulating AI, with a few exceptions when the White House identified certain AI tools as a threat to national security.

Most executive action on AI has been purely discretionary — from the Biden administration’s AI safety pledge to Trump’s ratepayer protection pledge to address data center-driven increases in utility bills. While many big tech companies have agreed in theory, their emphasis on growth and investor cash flow downplays concerns about the environment, rising consumer costs and safety.