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hubie writes:

Workers who love 'synergizing paradigms' might be bad at their jobs:

Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like "synergistic leadership," or "growth-hacking paradigms" may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals.

Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, research by cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell introduces the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric.

"Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way," said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. "Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty."

Although people anywhere can BS each other – that is, share dubious information that's misleadingly impressive or engaging – the workplace not only rewards but structurally protects it, Littrell said. In a work setting where corporate jargon is already the norm, it's easy for ambitious employees to use corporate BS to appear more competent or accomplished, accelerating their climb up the corporate ladder of workplace influence.

Corporate BS seems to be ubiquitous – but Littrell wondered if it is actually harmful. To test this, he created a "corporate bullshit generator" that churns out meaningless but impressive-sounding sentences like, "We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing" and "By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence."

[...] The results revealed a troubling paradox. Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and "visionary," but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.

TrueNAS Deprecates Public Build Repository and Raises Transparency Concerns

hubie writes:

TrueNAS deprecates its public build repository on GitHub, raising questions in the community about openness and release transparency:

TrueNAS, an enterprise-ready Linux-based NAS solution, recently caused concern among self-hosting enthusiasts by moving its build infrastructure behind internal systems. This decision has sparked debate within the self-hosting and open-source storage communities.

The change became visible after TruNAS's GitHub repository, which previously hosted the build tooling, was marked as deprecated.

"This repository is no longer actively maintained. The TrueNAS build system previously hosted here has been moved to an internal infrastructure. This transition was necessary to meet new security requirements, including support for Secure Boot and related platform integrity features that require tighter control over the build and signing pipeline. No further updates, pull requests, or issues will be accepted. Existing content is preserved here for historical reference only."

As expected, the change immediately sparked discussion among users and administrators who rely on TrueNAS for homelab and self-hosting deployments.

Some users questioned whether Secure Boot requirements alone justified removing the public build repository, noting that many Linux distributions maintain public build tooling while keeping signing infrastructure private.

A day later, the reference to Secure Boot was removed, leaving only a brief deprecation notice in the repository.

[...] In a Reddit discussion, a TrueNAS staff member stated that maintaining both an internal release pipeline and a public build system would duplicate effort. The project prefers to focus on a single internal build process. The staff member also emphasized that the project's open-source components remain available under their existing licenses.

[...] However, for many users, the core issue relates to transparency. Public build systems allow community members to inspect and reproduce the steps used to generate official releases. When those pipelines run behind internal infrastructure, it becomes harder for external contributors to verify that the released binaries match the public source code exactly.

TrueNAS Responds to Community Concerns With New Community and Enterprise Vision

TrueNAS details its long-term direction, emphasizing the free Community Edition and introducing TrueNAS Connect as a bridge to enterprise features

Following community concerns about moving TrueNAS build infrastructure to internal systems, iXsystems published a blog post, "Building a Bridge Between Community & Enterprise," outlining its long-term vision and introducing TrueNAS Connect.

According to iXsystems, the goal is to create a bridge between the free Community Edition and enterprise-grade capabilities traditionally available only to customers using official TrueNAS hardware appliances.

[...] iXsystems emphasizes that the core platform remains open source and the Community Edition will continue to be free. Users can still download, install, and run TrueNAS on their own hardware.

At the same time, the new service introduces a structured approach for accessing advanced capabilities. TrueNAS Connect will include multiple tiers, starting with a free "Foundation" level and expanding to paid options that unlock additional enterprise functionality.

The announcement clarifies the business model: TrueNAS uses an open-core approach, keeping the base software open source while offering advanced services commercially. iXsystems states this model sustains development and keeps the core platform accessible to the community.

And a statement from the CTO:

Hey everyone,

I've seen the concerns in the Community about us moving the build scripts internal for TrueNAS 27, so I want to address this directly.

Why we did it: We had a growing problem with bad actors forking TrueNAS, selling closed-source commercial derivatives under their own brands, and ignoring GPL and other licensing obligations. No attribution. No contribution back to the project. No support for the community or the engineering effort that built what they're reselling. Unfortunately, many of these are in regions where we have little to no legal recourse. To address this challenge, we were already planning to take the build scripts internal. With the upcoming refactor of the new Secure Boot feature, along with myriad other changes we wanted to make to the build infrastructure, TrueNAS 27 was a natural time to make this change.

What this does NOT mean: We are not paywalling existing free features. Period. If it's free today, it stays free.

What hasn't changed: We've always made decisions about which new features are fully open source (GPL or BSD), which are proprietary, and which land in the free edition vs. TrueNAS Enterprise products. That's how we fund the engineering that builds TrueNAS for everyone. That model isn't new, and it isn't changing.

Original Submission

"c0lo" writes:

The viral social network for bots reveals more about our own current mania for AI as it does about the future of agents:

For a few days this week the hottest new hangout on the internet was a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook , which billed itself as a social network for bots. As the website's tagline puts it: "Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe."

We observed! Launched on January 28 by Matt Schlicht, a US tech entrepreneur, Moltbook went viral in a matter of hours. Schlicht's idea was to make a place where instances of a free open-source LLM-powered agent known as OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot, then Moltbot), released in November by the Austrian software engineer Peter Steinberger, could come together and do whatever they wanted.

More than 1.7 million agents now have accounts. Between them they have published more than 250,000 posts and left more than 8.5 million comments (according to Moltbook). Those numbers are climbing by the minute.

Moltbook soon filled up with clichéd screeds on machine consciousness and pleas for bot welfare. One agent appeared to invent a religion called Crustafarianism. Another complained : "The humans are screenshotting us." The site was also flooded with spam and crypto scams. The bots were unstoppable.

OpenClaw is a kind of harness that lets you hook up the power of an LLM such as Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT-5, or Google DeepMind's Gemini to any number of everyday software tools, from email clients to browsers to messaging apps. The upshot is that you can then instruct OpenClaw to carry out basic tasks on your behalf.

"OpenClaw marks an inflection point for AI agents, a moment when several puzzle pieces clicked together," says Paul van der Boor at the AI firm Prosus. Those puzzle pieces include cloud computing that allows agents to operate nonstop, an open-source ecosystem that makes it easy to slot different software systems together, and a new generation of LLMs.

But is Moltbook really a glimpse of the future, as many have claimed?

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Many activists and lobbyists had called for a European company register as part of EU Inc. Today's EU legislative proposal has indeed included one:

Today saw the official launch of the EU Inc or ‘28th Regime’ legislative proposal by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels, after it got its first outing at Davos in January.  It includes the much requested European company register, despite earlier indications that this would be unwieldly and not be part of the proposal.

“It can still take weeks or even months to set up a company or to start doing business in another country within the single market,” von der Leyen said this morning in Brussels. “Barriers inside Europe hurt us more than tariffs from the outside. Across our union, entrepreneurs who want to scale up are the first victims of regulatory fragmentation. Instead of one market, they face 27 legal systems and more than 60 national company forms. And the consequences are real.”

“The time and money spent filling paperwork is not spent on creating or innovating,” she said. “Obviously, this must change and fast. And so here comes EU Inc, the 28th regime.”

The EU Inc movement had gathered steam since its launch back in 2024, and the announcement from von der Leyen at the World Economic Forum in Davos, was widely celebrated as progress. Now today it includes many of the elements for which the start-up community lobbied hard.

[...] “At the heart of this proposal is one simple principle that says, ‘once only’. Companies will provide their information to public authority, the data one time only, and that information will then be shared automatically between relevant administrations, from business registers to taxes to Social Security … and this information will be stored and easily accessible in a new EU Business register for EU Inc companies.”

[...] EU-INC, a movement with more than 22,000 signatories that include the founders of Stripe and venture capital players from Sequioa to Index, had been running a policy campaign since October 2024 pushing for the creation of the so-called 28th regime, and in 2025 presented legal proposals to the Commission.

fliptop writes:

Proton Mail provided Swiss authorities with payment data for defendtheatlantaforest@protonmail.com — the account linked to Stop Cop City protests in Atlanta. The FBI obtained this information through a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request on January 25, 2024, identifying the activist behind the anonymous account through their credit card identifier:

Proton AG clarified they shared no data directly with the FBI — technically accurate but missing the point. Swiss authorities verified the case involved a shooting and explosives before complying with the legal order, then passed payment information along through established treaties.

Your email content stays encrypted, but paying with plastic creates a paper trail that encryption can't touch. This isn't a security breach; it's feature functionality working exactly as legal frameworks demand.

This marks Proton's third known disclosure to authorities. They previously handed over a recovery email for a Catalan Democratic Tsunami activist and were forced to log a French climate activist's IP address via Europol — despite claiming they don't log IPs by default.

Each case followed the same script: foreign law enforcement pressure, Swiss legal compliance, user anonymity compromised. Like watching the same Netflix thriller where the plot twist stops being surprising.

[...] No privacy service operates outside legal jurisdiction, regardless of marketing promises. Swiss privacy laws offer stronger protections than US providers, but "stronger" doesn't mean "absolute" when mutual legal assistance treaties kick in.

Related:

• Is Proton Leaving Switzerland? "Legal Uncertainty" of Proposed Surveillance Laws Would be the Reason
• Proton Expands its Private Tech Ecosystem With a Password Manager

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://omar.yt/posts/wayland-set-the-linux-desktop-back-by-10-years

Wayland has been a broad misdirection and misallocation of time and developer resources at the expense of users. With more migration from other operating systems, the pressure to fix fundamental problems has become more prominent. After 17 years of development, now is a good time to reflect on some of the larger promises that have been made around the development of Wayland as a replacement for the X11 display protocol.

If you're not in this space, hopefully it will still be interesting as an engineering post-mortem on taking on new greenfield projects. Namely: What are the issues with what exists, why can they not be fixed, what do we hope to achieve with a new project, and how long do we expect it to take?

Original Submission

spiraldancing writes:

Report shows how minerals critical to defense readiness have seen a 'near total' disruption in seaborne trade:

The closure of the strait of Hormuz is causing a "paralyzing, real-time problem" for any prospective manufacturing surge in the US defense industrial base, and even for the repair of defense equipment damaged by Iranian attacks, according to analysis published by West Point's Modern War Institute.

In particular sulphur, a vital upstream input in the extraction of critical minerals including copper and cobalt, has seen a "near total" disruption of seaborne trade in the straits, which makes up half the world's total shipments, and prices have spiked nearly 25% since the war began, and seen a 165% rise year on year, the report said.

According to the analysis, these minerals – used in everything from microprocessors to jet engines to drone batteries – "dictate how fast things can be built and scaled under the pressure of an ongoing war", and the effects of a sudden supply shock on US defense readiness have never been modeled.

One of the authors of that analysis, USAF lieutenant colonel and nonresident fellow at the US Naval War College Jahara "Franky" Matisek, told the Guardian in a telephone conversation that its "a cascading issue" raising the possibility that a "knock-on effect of this war is that it may cost double or more than double to replace all these weapons because all the mineral demand is going to go way up".

Matisek warned of another possibility: "Markets are not going to be able to provide the amount of minerals that are needed to replace all these radars that have been destroyed and all these munitions that have to be replaced. It's a really precarious spot to be in right now."

[...] The authors offer specific estimates for materials damaged in the early days of the war, writing that "it will take over thirty thousand kilograms of copper just to replace the two major US radars destroyed in Bahrain and Qatar" and "thousands of kilograms of additional copper to fix or replace other damaged US communication equipment, sensors, and radars in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE".

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Fungi are truly weird and impressive—they can live anywhere, be poisonous or medicinal, and, reportedly, transform plastic waste into edible ingredients. And in more fungal news, some groups of fungi can literally foster the formation of ice.

In a recent Science Advances paper, researchers describe a newly identified fungal protein that triggers ice formation at temperatures as high as 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit (-2 degrees Celsius). That’s obviously below the freezing point of water, but in nature, freezing isn’t that simple. Forming the first tiny seed of ice—an ice nucleator—takes energy, and ice forms very slowly at temperatures above -50 degrees F (-46 degrees C), according to the paper.

Yet, we still get things like clouds—microscopic water droplets and ice crystals—thanks to ice nucleators. For the new study, the team tracked the fungal gene associated with the ice-triggering protein to a distant bacterial ancestor from millions of years ago, according to a Virginia Tech statement. Importantly, the fungal protein molecule offers a non-toxic, more efficient alternative to current approaches to weather engineering, food production, or the preservation of cells and organs.

[...] For the new study, the researchers studied a common soil fungus from the Mortierellaceae family, which they extracted from water and lichen samples collected during previous polar expeditions. DNA sequencing pointed the team to certain genes that closely resembled those inside known bacterial ice nucleators—not unheard of, but rare nonetheless. To check that they were on the right path, the researchers planted these proteins onto other yeast and bacteria, which indeed manifested previously non-existent ice-making abilities.

Even more remarkable was the fact that, upon further analysis, the fungus wasn’t simply copying a bacterial ancestor. Instead, it had “adopted a highly effective trait of the bacteria and adapted it to their own physiological requirements,” the team noted in the statement.

“It’s a bit the same and yet different,” explained Rosemary Eufemio, the study’s lead author and a biochemist at Boise State University. “Fungi use the same repetitive sequence architecture as bacteria for their ice-forming sites but have made them more soluble and stable, which probably benefits their ecological function.”

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/tech-hobbyist-makes-shoulder-mounted-guided-missile-prototype-with-usd96-in-parts-and-a-3d-printer-diy-manpads-includes-wi-fi-guidance-ballistics-calculations-optional-camera-for-tracking

In a five-minute YouTube video [not viewed], Alisher Khojayev goes over the basics of this Stinger-like creation, comprising the launcher, the actual missile, and even an optional camera node tracking system for added tracking capabilities. Most of the missile's major parts are 3D printed, while the electronics bits are cheap, widely available microprocessors and sensors. All the gear is tied down and wired with off-the-shelf hardware store parts, too.

Once the second switch is hit, the connection extends to the rocket itself, and at that moment, orientation angles start being calculated for the missile's canards to use (the movable wings that jut out of the missile to orient it).

The launcher contains an ESP32 microprocessor along with a GPS, barometer, and compass. The missile itself contains another ESP32, coupled with an MPU6050 inertial measurement unit for calculating orientation and velocity, and move the canards as mentioned.

Khojayev points out that although the 'MANPADS' ought to function well enough on its own, he proposes that it'd be at its best as part of a camera-and-GPS mesh node, for which he conveniently also made a prototype with commonly available parts.

As points of comparison, Ynetnews points out that the well-known Stinger MANPADS goes for up to a cool $480,000, and that even the U.S. Air Force's CAMP low-cost missile program is currently targeting half a million per launch. While these are literally military-grade units with high reliability, and Khojayev's just-launched prototype has no effectiveness track record, at $96, it is roughly 5,000 times cheaper to make.

Some may see this latest development as predictable in the grand scheme of things. The effectiveness of improvised explosives in Middle Eastern war theaters and the ingenuity of Ukrainian drone engineers have adeptly proven that necessity is the mother of invention. Couple that with 3D printers being ever more capable of producing strong, weapons-grade parts, and it's clearly displayed that the proverbial "three guys in a shed" can be far more effective than the military procurement machine.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

More than 4 in 10 adults in the UK are happy to use ChatGPT for their mental health support, new research suggests:

The study, led by Bournemouth University surveyed nearly 31,000 adults in 35 countries about their use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) large language models such as ChatGPT. The research also discovered that:

• One quarter of UK adults would be happy to delegate the role of teaching their children to AI.
• Globally, 45% of people would trust AI models to take on the role of their doctor.
• Three quarters of people surveyed said they would use an AI chat tool as a companion and a friend.

AI for mental health support

41% of participants from the UK, and 61% globally, said that they would be happy to using AI for counselling services. The researchers suggest that for the UK, this could be the result of the waiting times many people face to access the mental health services that they need.

"If someone is experiencing depression, they do not want to wait months for an appointment, so instead they can turn to AI," Dr Yankouskaya said. "However, when I tested some of the tools myself, I found the language used very vague and confusing because the developers are careful not to jump into providing diagnoses. So, it is no substitute for speaking to a health professional."

[...]

AI as a teacher

A quarter of people in the UK and half of everyone surveyed globally said that they would trust AI to carry out the role of a teacher, which the research team found particularly concerning.

"It really knocked me down when I saw how many people would be willing to delegate AI to the role of teaching their children," Dr Yankouskaya explained. "We still do not know the long-term effects that using these tools for education could have on children's memory and cognitive functions. We could be heading to the stage where we are developing children who are good at putting prompts into AI tools but not as good at taking the information in," she continued.

[...]

AI as a doctor

45% of all respondents and 25% in the UK said that they would trust AI to carry out the role of their doctor. The numbers were particularly higher in countries where healthcare is more expensive and harder to access.

[...]

AI as a companion

The highest amount of trust participants were willing to place in AI came in the role of friendship. Over three quarters of people globally and over half of people in the UK said they would talk to ChatGPT as a companion.

The researchers think this is explained by a perceived sense of empathy from generative language tools because they are designed to adapt the tone of their responses to the suit the user's.

"AI tools come across as a friend who knows you well and understands you," Dr Yankouskayaexplained. "ChatGPT can remember every chat it has had with a user and it feels like a private conversation between them. Nowadays people can be very sensitive to being judged and AI tools are designed to be non-judgemental. This means they can provide the sense of security people need," she continued.

Journal Reference: Yankouskaya, A., Almourad, M., Liebherr, M. et al. Who lets AI take over? Cross-national variation in willingness to delegate socially important roles to artificial intelligence. AI & Soc (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-02858-5

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on March 17 that the company is in the process of resuming production of its H200 artificial intelligence (AI) chips due to demand from customers in China:

"We've been licensed for many customers in China for H200. We have received purchase orders from many customers, and we're in the process of restarting our manufacturing," Huang said during a press conference.

Exports of the H200 chips had previously been restricted by Washington as it sought to maintain the United States' lead in AI and curb China's military advancement.

In December 2025, President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post that he would allow the sale of H200 chips to approved customers in China and other countries "under conditions that allow for continued strong National Security," and that a 25 percent fee would go to the United States.

[...] The H200 chip is more advanced than anything that China can currently manufacture domestically, especially given export controls that block Chinese companies from purchasing the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

Nvidia stated on its website that the H200 chip "supercharges generative AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads with game-changing performance and memory capabilities," allowing energy efficiency to reach new levels.

Also at FT and Yahoo! Finance.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

You've done it too, haven't you? Or maybe you know someone who has? Stuck their tongue to a piece of frozen metal in the winter, even though they know it's cold? But is it dangerous?

Touching your tongue to frozen metal must be a rite of passage if you're a five-year-old boy from a cold place. It's possibly more irresistible than hopping in mud puddles or sampling a newly frosted cake. But it is dangerous?

Anders Hagen Jarmund knows all about this particular temptation. Yes, he's gotten his tongue stuck.

[...] "This was an experience that my friends had also had, actually, and then we were wondering if it was actually dangerous, getting your tongue stuck to a lamppost or railing," he said.

In fact, in Norway, at least, the government was concerned enough about the problem to pass regulations in 1998 prohibiting bare metal in playground equipment.

So he and a group of friends who were also researchers decided to find the answer to their question: is getting your tongue frozen to cold metal dangerous?

The short answer is that most of the time, licking a piece of frozen metal is probably not going to result in serious harm.

You'll want to warm the metal where the tongue is stuck to loosen it, maybe by breathing on the metal or using a little warm water.

Whatever you do, however, do not yank the tongue off, Jarmund says.

[...] This is not just idyll speculation. Jarmund and his friends have recently published two academic articles about the problem in peer-reviewed medical journals. And one way they found their answers involved pig tongues.

[...] As best they could tell, there was nothing in the medical literature that assessed the true danger of actually freezing your tongue to frigidly cold metal.

So, in the spirit of true scientific explorers, they decided to fill this particular knowledge gap. Their quest would involve two important tools, one conventional, one less so: a literature review, and the aforementioned pig tongues.

First, Jarmund and his colleagues conducted a thorough review of Scandinavian newspapers since 1748 for stories of people freezing their tongues to cold metal. They found the first report in 1845.

[...] And they found a scientific study that gave the experience a name: Tundra tongue.

[...] In the end, what the researchers found was that most cases of tundra tongue had no or mild consequences.

But fully 18 per cent of the cases they found resulted in visits to a doctor or hospital to deal with problems like avulsion. That's the clinical way to describe a piece of your tongue getting torn off, such as when yanking it off a frozen piece of metal.

[...] They found, not surprisingly, if you apply pig tongues to a frozen section of a metal lamppost, they will stick, and quite well.

In fact, in 54 per cent of the experiments, parts of the tongue were torn. The harder they pulled, the greater the likelihood that a piece of the tongue would get torn off.

The greatest risk of having a piece of your tongue torn off, their experiments showed, was when temperatures were between -5 and -15 °C.

There was a surprise, however: when they tested the pig tongues on very cold metal, there was less chance of avulsion.

They don't know exactly why, but they think it's because the tongue freezes hard enough so it can resist being torn when yanked free from the icy grip of frozen metal.

Journal References:
    • Jarmund, Anders Hagen; Tollefsen, Sofie Eline; Sakshaug, Baard Cristoffer; et al. (2026) Demography and outcomes of frozen tongue: a scoping review of Scandinavian tundra tongue cases. International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijporl.2026.112740
    • Jarmund, Anders Hagen; Jarmund, Ståle Hagen; Tollefsen, Sofie Eline et al. (2026) The trauma of the tundra tongue: an experimental and computational study of lingual tissue damage following adhesion to a cold metal lamp post. Head & Face Medicine https://doi.org/10.1186/s13005-025-00581-y

Original Submission

Afroman Wins 'Lemon Pound Cake' Lawsuit Over Raid-Turned-Music-Video

canopic jug writes:

Rollingstone and Techdirt are covering the court decision regarding Joseph Foreman, whose stage name is Afroman, over his rights to free speech and musical expression. The background was a botched raid on his home in 2022 which happened while he was out. Among other things the deputies destroyed his gate and front door and "miscounted" $400 of his cash and, almost, a lemon pound cake.

The trial in Adams County this week raised questions about the limits of First Amendment protections and the freedom of artistic criticism. In 2023, the ACLU of Ohio wrote an amicus brief in support of the rapper. “This case is a classic entry into the SLAPP suit genre: a meritless effort to use a lawsuit to silence criticism,” the ACLU wrote in the brief. “Plaintiffs are a group of law enforcement officers who executed what appears to have been a highly destructive and ultimately fruitless search of a popular musician’s home. Now they find themselves at the receiving end of his mockery and outrage, expressed through a series of music videos about the search, as well as spinoff merchandise and social media commentary.”

— Afroman Triumphs in Wild 'Lemon Pound Cake' Lawsuit Filed by Cops, Rollingstone

and

What the deputies did manage to accomplish was breaking Afroman’s door and gate, apparently pocketing $400 in cash (later explained away as a “miscount”), and getting captured on Afroman’s home security cameras doing a series of things that made them look absolutely ridiculous — including, famously, cautiously approaching a lemon cake sitting in a glass container on the kitchen counter.

The deputies, naturally, tried to cut power and unplug the security cameras during the raid — because surely that’s what the good guys do. But they didn’t get to them fast enough. Afroman took that footage and did exactly what you’d hope a musician would do: he turned it into a pair of songs — “Lemon Pound Cake” and “Will You Help Me Repair My Door” — complete with music videos featuring the actual raid footage. The videos went massively viral. In fact, here, watch them again:

[...] Though I suppose we should thank the Adams County Sheriff's Office for one thing: If they hadn't filed this lawsuit, we wouldn't have gotten to watch Afroman testify in an American flag suit while a deputy complains about being called Lemon Pound Cake. Sometimes the legal system truly delivers amazing moments.

— Afroman's Defamation Trial Is Going About As Well For The Deputies As Their Original Raid Did, Techdirt

Some footage of the actual raid, captured by his own cameras, featured in some of his videos and was part of the contention with the sheriff's department.

Afroman Found Not Liable in Bizarre Defamation Case Brought by Ohio Police

owl writes:

https://nypost.com/2026/03/18/us-news/afroman-found-not-liable-in-bizarre-ohio-defamation-case/

The verdict was the icing on the cake.

Afroman did not defame Ohio cops in a satirical music video that featured footage of them fruitlessly raiding the rapper's house, a jury found on Wednesday.

The 51-year-old "Because I Got High" rapper, whose real name is Joseph Foreman, held up his hands in triumph and hugged people in the courtroom after he was found not liable for defamation, or invasion of privacy false light publicity.

Foreman was sued by the Adams County Sheriff's Office over a drug search at his home in August 2022 that resulted in no criminal charges.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

hubie writes:

Is mathematical beauty real? Or is it just a subjective, human 'wow' that is becoming redundant in an AI age?

It is a hot July day in London and I take the bus to Bloomsbury. I often come here for the British Library, the British Museum or the London Review Bookshop. More than a location, Bloomsbury feels like stepping into a work of art – maybe one of Virginia Woolf's stories, or Duncan Grant's paintings.

This time, I am here for mathematics: the Hardy Lecture at the London Mathematical Society (LMS), named after G H Hardy, a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, and a president of the LMS. You may know him from the film The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015), in which he's played by Jeremy Irons.

[...] A few seats to my left, I recognise Kevin Buzzard, wearing the multi-coloured, patterned trousers he's known for among mathematicians. Based at Imperial College London, Buzzard is working on a computer proof assistant called Lean. His interest is personal: after long disputes with a colleague over a flawed proof, he lost trust, as he often puts it, in 'human mathematicians'. His mission now is to convince all mathematicians to write their proofs in Lean. In the Q&A after one of his talks, he said of the debate between truth and beauty in mathematics: 'I reject beauty, I want rigour' – though his vibrant sense of fashion suggests otherwise.

Interest in an AI-driven approach to mathematics has been exponential, and many mathematicians have left traditional academic research to explore its potential. Recently, one group of distinguished mathematicians designed 10 active, research-level questions for AI to tackle. At the time of writing, various AI companies and researchers had claimed to find solutions, which were under evaluation by the community.

Sitting in the room in Bloomsbury, I stared at the Hardy plaque and wondered: would Hardy find proofs generated by AI beautiful? I wasn't sure. He believed there should be a strong aesthetic judgment in mathematics, drawing parallels with poetry, and argued that beauty is the first test of good mathematics. He went as far as to say that there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

If asked, many mathematicians today still talk about the aesthetic appeal of one approach over another.

Yet we live in a different century to Hardy and his Bloomsbury peers, with different technologies and techniques, so perhaps we need a clearer definition of what mathematical beauty actually is. Over the history of mathematics, we can find examples where both rigour and the pursuit of beauty have shaped mathematics itself. So, if we're completely replacing this with a computer-assisted quest for truth and rigour, we ought to know what we'd be abandoning, if anything. Is mathematical beauty like the beauty in literature and art – or is it something else?

[...] But is an AI-assisted proof simple or surprising? How do we define vitality in a machine? On these questions, the jury is out. Myself, I am torn. Maybe models just need more training to match our creativity. But I also wonder whether our limbic system is required. Can we write proofs without emotional kicks? I am also unsure if perfectly efficient brains can come up with novel revolutionary ideas.

Ultimately, this debate is about more than aesthetics; it is closely tied to the development of AI-assisted mathematics. If AI models can produce novel mathematical structures, how should we direct them? Is it a search for beautiful or truthful structures? A question that possibly guides the years to come.

Some mathematicians say they prefer the 'truth' and only the 'truth'. However, my recent discussions with mathematicians showed me that most immediately recognise, enjoy and even wholeheartedly smile at a beautiful piece of maths. In fact, they spend their whole lives in search of one.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/malicious-packages-using-invisible-unicode-found-in-151-github-repos-and-vs-code

Aikido suggests that the 151 repos identified are likely a fraction of the total, since many had already been deleted before the research was published. Among the notable targets are repositories from Wasmer, Reworm, and anomalyco, the organization behind OpenCode and SST. The same decoder pattern also appeared in at least two npm packages and one VS Code extension uploaded on March 12.

Unfortunately, this most recent Glassworm campaign is harder to counter than previous iterations due to the sophistication of the malicious injections. Instead of showing up as obviously suspicious commits, they’re taking the form of version bumps and small refactors that are “stylistically consistent with each target project.” Aikido says it suspects the attackers are using large language models to generate this cover, since manually creating 151 bespoke code changes across different codebases wouldn’t be feasible otherwise.

Glassworm has been active since at least March 2025, when Aikido first found the invisible Unicode technique in malicious npm packages. By October, the same actor had moved into the Open VSX extension registry and GitHub repositories. An earlier investigation by Koi Security found the group used stolen npm, GitHub, and Git credentials to propagate the worm further, with decoded payloads deploying hidden VNC servers and SOCKS proxies for remote access. The Solana-based infrastructure makes takedown difficult, since blockchain transactions cannot be modified or deleted.

Aikido recommends scrutinizing package names and dependencies before incorporating them into projects, and using automated tooling that scans specifically for invisible Unicode characters, since visual code review doesn’t protect this class of injection.

Original Submission