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      GitHub will be folded into Microsoft proper as CEO steps down

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 3 days ago - 19:06

    Microsoft has owned GitHub since 2018, but the widely used developer platform has operated with at least a little independence from the rest of the company, with its own separate CEO and other executives. But it looks like GitHub will be more fully folded into Microsoft's org chart starting next year—GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced today that he would be leaving GitHub and Microsoft "to become a founder again."

    "GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon," Dohmke wrote. "I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world."

    Axios reports that Microsoft isn't directly replacing Dohmke, and GitHub's leadership team will be reporting to multiple executives in the CoreAI division.

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      Wikipedia loses UK Safety Act challenge, worries it will have to verify user IDs

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 3 days ago - 17:48

    Wikipedia's parent organization lost a challenge to the UK Online Safety Act but can bring another case if the government tries to force it to verify the identity of Wikipedia users.

    The High Court of Justice in London dismissed claims from the Wikimedia Foundation, which challenged the lawfulness of the categorization system used to determine which sites must comply with obligations. But Justice Jeremy Johnson stressed "that this does not give Ofcom and the Secretary of State a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia's operations."

    The Online Safety Act has forced social media sites like Reddit to verify UK users' ages before letting them view adult content. The Wikimedia Foundation is worried that it will be classified as a "Category 1" operator later this summer and criticized the categorization regulations as "especially broad and vague."

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      Why does Jeff Bezos keep buying launches from Elon Musk?

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 3 days ago - 17:30

    Early Monday morning, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from its original launch site in Florida. Remarkably, it was SpaceX's 100th launch of the year.

    Perhaps even more notable was the rocket's payload: two-dozen Project Kuiper satellites, which were dispensed into low-Earth orbit on target. This was SpaceX's second launch of satellites for Amazon, which is developing a constellation to deliver low-latency broadband Internet around the world. SpaceX, then, just launched a direct competitor to its Starlink network into orbit. And it was for the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who owns a rocket company of his own in Blue Origin.

    So how did it come to this—Bezos and Elon Musk, competitors in so many ways, working together in space?

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      LLMs’ “simulated reasoning” abilities are a “brittle mirage,” researchers find

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 3 days ago - 17:16 • 1 minute

    In recent months, the AI industry has started moving toward so-called simulated reasoning models that use a "chain of thought" process to work through tricky problems in multiple logical steps. At the same time, recent research has cast doubt on whether those models have even a basic understanding of general logical concepts or an accurate grasp of their own "thought process." Similar research shows that these "reasoning" models can often produce incoherent, logically unsound answers when questions include irrelevant clauses or deviate even slightly from common templates found in their training data.

    In a recent pre-print paper , researchers from the University of Arizona summarize this existing work as "suggest[ing] that LLMs are not principled reasoners but rather sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text." To pull on that thread, the researchers created a carefully controlled LLM environment in an attempt to measure just how well chain-of-thought reasoning works when presented with "out of domain" logical problems that don't match the specific logical patterns found in their training data.

    The results suggest that the seemingly large performance leaps made by chain-of-thought models are "largely a brittle mirage" that "become[s] fragile and prone to failure even under moderate distribution shifts," the researchers write. "Rather than demonstrating a true understanding of text, CoT reasoning under task transformations appears to reflect a replication of patterns learned during training."

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      RFK Jr. posted fishing pics as CDC reeled from shooting linked to vaccine disinfo

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 3 days ago - 17:06

    Staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta are reeling from a deadly shooting that unfolded Friday evening.

    The shooting left one local police officer dead, at least four agency buildings riddled with bullet holes, and terrified staffers feeling like "sitting ducks." Fortunately, no CDC staff or civilians were injured. But, it quickly drew a spotlight to US health secretary and zealous anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who critics accused of fueling the violence with his menacing and reckless anti-vaccine rhetoric.

    Kennedy publicly responded to the shooting on social media at about 11 am Eastern Time on Saturday, roughly 18 hours after the event. Former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams subsequently slammed Kennedy's delayed response as " tepid " in a critical essay published in Stat. The news outlet separately pointed out that Kennedy had posted on his personal social media account about 30 minutes prior to his response to the shooting, in which he shared pictures of a fishing trip .

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      Trump strikes “wild” deal making US firms pay 15% tax on China chip sales

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 3 days ago - 16:31 • 1 minute

    Ahead of an August 12 deadline for a US-China trade deal, Donald Trump's tactics continue to confuse those trying to assess the country's national security priorities regarding its biggest geopolitical rival.

    For months, Trump has kicked the can down the road regarding a TikTok ban , allowing the app to continue operating despite supposedly urgent national security concerns that China may be using the app to spy on Americans. And now, in the latest baffling move, a US official announced Monday that Trump got Nvidia and AMD to agree to "give the US government 15 percent of revenue from sales to China of advanced computer chips," Reuters reported . Those chips, about 20 policymakers and national security experts recently warned Trump , could be used to fuel China's frontier AI, which seemingly poses an even greater national security risk.

    Trump’s “wild” deal with US chip firms

    Reuters granted two officials anonymity to discuss Trump's deal with US chipmakers, because details have yet to be made public. Requiring US firms to pay for sales in China is an "unusual" move for a president, Reuters noted, and the Trump administration has yet to say what exactly it plans to do with the money.

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      Scientists hid secret codes in light to combat video fakes

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 3 days ago - 15:45 • 1 minute

    It's easier than ever to manipulate video footage to deceive the viewer and increasingly difficult for fact checkers to detect such manipulations. Cornell University scientists developed a new weapon in this ongoing arms race: software that codes a "watermark" into light fluctuations, which in turn can reveal when the footage has been tampered with. The researchers presented the breakthrough over the weekend at SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and published a scientific paper in June in the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics.

    “Video used to be treated as a source of truth, but that’s no longer an assumption we can make,” said co-author Abe Davis , of Cornell University, who first conceived of the idea. “Now you can pretty much create video of whatever you want. That can be fun, but also problematic, because it’s only getting harder to tell what’s real.”

    Per the authors, those seeking to deceive with video fakes have a fundamental advantage: equal access to authentic video footage, as well as the ready availability of advanced low-cost editing tools that can learn quickly from massive amounts of data, rendering the fakes nearly indistinguishable from authentic video. Thus far, progress on that front has outpaced the development of new forensic techniques designed to combat the problem. One key feature is information asymmetry: an effective forensic technique must have information not available to the fakers that cannot be learned from publicly available training data.

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      Ford bets big on “Universal EV Production System” and $30k truck

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 3 days ago - 14:30

    Ford will debut a new midsize pickup truck in 2027 with a targeted price of $30,000, the automaker announced today. The as-yet unnamed pickup will be the first of a series of more affordable EVs from Ford, built using a newly designed flexible vehicle platform and US-made prismatic lithium iron phosphate batteries.

    For the past few years , a team of Ford employees have been hard at work on the far side of the country from the Blue Oval's base in Dearborn, Michigan. Sequestered in Long Beach and taking inspiration from Lockheed's legendary "skunkworks," the Electric Vehicle Development Center approached designing and building Ford's next family of EVs as a clean-sheet problem, presumably taking inspiration from the Chinese EVs that have so impressed Ford's CEO.

    It starts with a pickup

    Designing an EV from the ground up, free of decades of legacy cruft, is a good idea, but not one unique to Ford. In recent months we've reviewed quite a few so-called software-defined vehicles, which replace dozens or even hundreds of discrete single-function electronic control units with a handful of powerful modern computers (usually known as domain controllers) on a high-speed network.

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      Experiment will attempt to counter climate change by altering ocean

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 3 days ago - 14:28

    Later this summer, a fluorescent reddish-pink spiral will bloom across the Wilkinson Basin in the Gulf of Maine, about 40 miles northeast of Cape Cod. Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will release the nontoxic water tracer dye behind their research vessel, where it will unfurl into a half-mile wide temporary plume, bright enough to catch the attention of passing boats and even satellites.

    As it spreads, the researchers will track its movement to monitor a tightly controlled, federally approved experiment testing whether the ocean can be engineered to absorb more carbon, and in turn, help combat the climate crisis.

    As the world struggles to stay below the 1.5° Celsius global warming threshold—a goal set out in the Paris Agreement to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change—experts agree that reducing greenhouse gas emissions won’t be enough to avoid overshooting this target. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, published in 2023, emphasizes the urgent need to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere, too.

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