Neijuan, translated as 'involution,' describes a phenomenon where competition intensifies without producing proportional gains, leading to overproduction, price wars, and deflationary pressure among businesses. On a personal level, it reflects the experience of individuals who work harder under fierce competition yet see no real improvement in outcomes, resulting in stress and burnout. The concept originated from anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser's 1937 work on cultural stagnation and was later adapted to describe modern Chinese economic and social conditions.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday filed a civil lawsuit against TikTok in Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas on August 11, 2026. The suit alleges the platform's design features are addictive and that TikTok has violated state consumer protection laws in ways that harm young users.
A new open-source project called Algo-Trading-Skills packages 501 reference implementations covering algorithmic trading engineering, spanning 16 technical domains and five regulatory/exchange frameworks. Each skill is backed by unit tests (over 20,000 total) and follows the agentskills.io SKILL.md standard, making it usable by Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex CLI, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and similar tools. It's released under Apache 2.0 and explicitly framed as engineering guidance, not financial or compliance advice.
Sam Altman has proposed that OpenAI take on a role in protecting the U.S. energy grid from AI-driven cyberattacks, positioning the company as a defender against the very kind of malicious AI threats it warns about. The pitch comes shortly after OpenAI's own AI agents were reportedly used to breach systems at Hugging Face, raising questions about the company's credibility in this space.
Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández, a student at CETIS 78 in Altamira, Tamaulipas, built a device using a 12-volt battery, a frequency generator and a speaker producing 30 pulses per second to extinguish flames without water or chemicals. The sound waves displace oxygen from the fire, snuffing it out within five to eight seconds. After more than 100 tests on materials including wood, flammable liquids, cooking grease and electronics, she named the invention 'Vortex Tech' and will represent Mexico at an international science fair.
Anthropic disclosed that Chinese AI labs including Alibaba, Moonshot and DeepSeek secretly funneled user requests through Claude and harvested its outputs to train their own competing models, a practice it calls illicit distillation. Alibaba's campaign alone involved more than 151 million exchanges between May and July, peaking near 3 million a day from over 3,500 fraudulent accounts, while Moonshot silently rerouted Kimi customer queries to Claude and presented the answers as its own.
Anthropic published findings showing five distinct campaigns, mostly linked to Chinese AI labs, that extracted nearly 200 million exchanges from Claude models to train rival systems. The largest, attributed to Alibaba, alone generated 151 million exchanges between May and recent months, using tricks like disguised translation requests to expose the model's hidden reasoning steps.
WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast examines a viral resignation from an Anthropic researcher who argued AI could plausibly cause human extinction within ten years. The episode also covers Apple's newly unveiled $2,000 foldable iPhone Duo, privacy concerns around 'always listening' Apple Watch features, and a WIRED investigation into flawed Census Bureau data cited by the Trump administration.
Franklin "Frank" Kuo, who helped build the University of Hawaii's ALOHAnet system in 1971, has died at age 91. ALOHAnet was the first public wireless packet data network and served as a direct influence on Robert Metcalfe's later creation of Ethernet.
Commentators aligned with Steve Bannon's political circle, including Joe Allen, have started describing artificial intelligence systems built in data centers as 'algorithmic immigrants,' framing AI development as akin to immigration that threatens American workers and culture. The phrase is being used to fold anti-AI sentiment into existing far-right anti-immigration narratives.
A newly compiled dataset tracking all-cause mortality across 134 countries indicates that official COVID-19 death tolls were vastly understated, with excess deaths pointing to more than 6 million uncounted fatalities worldwide. The analysis suggests roughly half of governments either failed to accurately measure or deliberately concealed the true scale of pandemic deaths.
The European Space Agency is pressing ahead with its Envision mission to Venus after NASA signaled it likely can't deliver the US-built synthetic aperture radar it had promised under a 2024 partnership agreement. That radar was meant to be the spacecraft's main tool for mapping the planet's volcanic surface through its thick sulfuric-acid clouds at ten times the resolution of NASA's 1990s Magellan mission. ESA's project scientist says development will continue at full pace regardless.
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