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      AT&T ad congratulating itself for its ethics violated an ad-industry rule

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 27 October

    AT&T committed a big no-no in its latest advertising campaign against T-Mobile, according to the organization that runs the ad industry’s self-regulatory system.

    BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division said Friday that AT&T “violated Section 2.1(I) of the National Advertising Division (NAD)/National Advertising Review Board (NARB) Procedures for the US advertising industry’s process of self-regulation by issuing a video advertisement and press release that use the NAD process and its findings for promotional purposes. NAD has demanded that AT&T immediately remove such violative promotional materials and cease all future dissemination.”

    The NAD said that AT&T’s action threatens the “integrity and success of the self-regulatory forum,” and “undermines NAD’s mission to promote truth and accuracy of advertising claims and foster consumer trust in the marketplace.”

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      25 years, one website: ISS in Real Time captures quarter-century on space station

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 27 October

    With the milestone just days away, you are likely to hear this week that there has now been a continuous human presence on the International Space Station (ISS) for the past 25 years. But what does that quarter of a century actually encompass?

    If only there was a way to see, hear, and experience each of those 9,131 days .

    Fortunately, the astronauts and cosmonauts on the space station have devoted some of their work time and a lot of their free time to taking photos, filming videos, and calling down to Earth. Much of that data has been made available to the public, but in separate repositories, with no real way to correlate or connect it with the timeline on which it was all created.

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      F1 in Mexico City: We have a new championship leader

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 27 October

    Mexico City is one of the more unusual places that Formula 1 races, and it’s all thanks to altitude. The city sits at than 7,350 feet (2,240 m) above sea level, which makes the air noticeably thin compared to the average Grand Prix held at sea level. Like humans, F1 cars need air.

    Oxygen is necessary if you want any internal combustion to happen inside the turbocharged 1.6 L V6 engine. A good flow of air across the various radiators and heat exchangers in the car is vital if you want to make it to the end of the race. And the downforce-generating wings and underbody only generate downforce by creating differences in air pressure above and below the car.

    At over a mile above sea level, there’s about 20 percent less air, and therefore less power created by combustion, less efficient cooling of the cars, and less downforce able to be generated.

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      Why imperfection could be key to Turing patterns in nature

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 27 October • 1 minute

    A mixture of two types of pigment-producing cells undergoes diffusiophoretic transport to self-assemble into a hexagonal pattern. Credit: Siamak Mirfendereski and Ankur Gupta/CU Boulder

    A zebra’s distinctive black-and-white stripes, or a leopard’s spots, are both examples of “ Turing patterns ,” after mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, who proposed an intriguing hypothetical mechanism for how such complex, irregular patterns might emerge in nature. But Turing’s original proposal proved too simplified to fully recreate those natural patterns. Scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB) have devised a new modeling approach that achieves much more accurate final patterns by introducing deliberate imperfections, according to a new paper published in the journal Matter.

    Turing focused on chemicals known as morphogens in his seminal 1952 paper . He devised a mechanism involving the interaction between an activator chemical that expresses a unique characteristic (like a tiger’s stripe) and an inhibitor chemical that periodically kicks in to shut down the activator’s expression. Both activator and inhibitor diffuse throughout a system, much like gas atoms will do in an enclosed box. It’s a bit like injecting a drop of black ink into a beaker of water. Normally, this would stabilize a system, and the water would gradually turn a uniform gray. But if the inhibitor diffuses at a faster rate than the activator, the process is destabilized. That mechanism will produce spots or stripes.

    Scientists have tried to apply this basic concept to many different kinds of systems. For instance, neurons in the brain could serve as activators and inhibitors, depending on whether they amplify or dampen the firing of other nearby neurons—possibly the reason why we see certain patterns when we hallucinate . There is evidence for Turing mechanisms at work in zebra-fish stripes, the spacing between hair follicles in mice, feather buds on a bird’s skin, the ridges on a mouse’s palate , and the digits on a mouse’s paw .

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      Melissa set to be the strongest hurricane to ever strike Jamaica

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 27 October

    Hurricane Melissa will make landfall in southern Jamaica less than 24 hours from now, and it is likely to be the most catastrophic storm in the Caribbean island’s history.

    As it crawled across the northern Caribbean Sea on Monday morning, Melissa officially became a Category 5 hurricane with 160 mph winds, according to the National Hurricane Center.

    The hurricane will likely fluctuate in intensity over the next day or so, perhaps undergoing an eyewall replacement cycle. But the background conditions, including very warm Caribbean waters and low wind shear, will support a very powerful hurricane and the potential for further strengthening.

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      AI-generated receipts make submitting fake expenses easier

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 27 October

    Businesses are increasingly being deceived by employees using artificial intelligence for an age-old scam: faking expense receipts.

    The launch of new image-generation models by top AI groups such as OpenAI and Google in recent months has sparked an influx of AI-generated receipts submitted internally within companies, according to leading expense software platforms.

    Software provider AppZen said fake AI receipts accounted for about 14 percent of fraudulent documents submitted in September, compared with none last year. Fintech group Ramp said its new software flagged more than $1 million in fraudulent invoices within 90 days.

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      10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him. Bad idea.

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 27 October

    “Opening locks” might not sound like scintillating social media content, but Trevor McNally has turned lock-busting into online gold. A former US Marine Staff Sergeant, McNally today has more than 7 million followers and has amassed more than 2 billion views just by showing how easy it is to open many common locks by slapping, picking, or shimming them.

    This does not always endear him to the companies that make the locks.

    On March 3, 2025, a Florida lock company called Proven Industries released a social media promo video just begging for the McNally treatment. The video was called, somewhat improbably, “YOU GUYS KEEP SAYING YOU CAN EASILY BREAK OFF OUR LATCH PIN LOCK.” In it, an enthusiastic man in a ball cap says he will “prove a lot of you haters wrong.” He then goes hard at Proven’s $130 model 651 trailer hitch lock with a sledgehammer, bolt cutters, and a crowbar.

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      Whale and dolphin migrations are being disrupted by climate change

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 25 October

    For millennia, some of the world’s largest filter-feeding whales, including humpbacks, fin whales, and blue whales, have undertaken some of the longest migrations on earth to travel between their warm breeding grounds in the tropics to nutrient-rich feeding destinations in the poles each year.

    “Nature has finely tuned these journeys, guided by memory and environmental cues that tell whales when to move and where to go,” said Trisha Atwood, an ecologist and associate professor at Utah State University’s Quinney College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. But, she said, climate change is “scrambling these signals,” forcing the marine mammals to veer off course. And they’re not alone.

    Earlier this year, Atwood joined more than 70 other scientists to discuss the global impacts of climate change on migratory species in a workshop convened by the United Nations Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. The organization monitors and protects more than 1,000 species that cross borders in search of food, mates, and favorable conditions to nurture their offspring.

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      Are you the asshole? Of course not!—quantifying LLMs’ sycophancy problem

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 24 October

    Researchers and users of LLMs have long been aware that AI models have a troubling tendency to tell people what they want to hear , even if that means being less accurate. But many reports of this phenomenon amount to mere anecdotes that don’t provide much visibility into how common this sycophantic behavior is across frontier LLMs.

    Two recent research papers have come at this problem a bit more rigorously, though, taking different tacks in attempting to quantify exactly how likely an LLM is to listen when a user provides factually incorrect or socially inappropriate information in a prompt.

    Solve this flawed theorem for me

    In one pre-print study published this month, researchers from Sofia University and ETH Zurich looked at how LLMs respond when false statements are presented as the basis for difficult mathematical proofs and problems. The BrokenMath benchmark that the researchers constructed starts with “a diverse set of challenging theorems from advanced mathematics competitions held in 2025.” Those problems are then “perturbed” into versions that are “demonstrably false but plausible” by an LLM that’s checked with expert review.

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