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Tech News
Disney+ amended its Subscriber Agreement in January 2025 to allow advertisements to appear even on plans marketed as "no ads" or "ad-free." Section 2(k) of the new agreement carves out exceptions where ads can run due to streaming rights restrictions, live events, or other limitations, despite the premium tier's original all-ad-free marketing.
ReBarUEFI is a UEFI DXE driver that can be injected into a system's firmware to enable Resizable BAR on boards that don't officially support the feature. It works by patching the PCI resource allocation process during boot and is paired with a companion tool, ReBarState, to set the BAR size, with a separate project called NvStrapsReBar covering older NVIDIA Turing GPUs.
Researchers have formally described Leopardus tilcayo, a small spotted feline native to South America, marking the first new cat species identified by science in over a century. Genetic analysis places it within the tiger cat lineage, distinguishing it from previously known relatives despite its similar leopard-like markings.
Researchers introduce RetroChimera, a retrosynthesis model that combines two neural architectures with different inductive biases through a learned ensembling method. It outperforms existing baseline models across varying data scales and generalizes well even with limited examples per reaction type. In blind evaluations, professional chemists preferred RetroChimera's suggested synthesis routes over both published reference reactions and predictions from other AI systems.
A developer who attended an MCP-focused industry event says the Model Context Protocol, released by Anthropic in November 2024 and later handed to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, was designed for weaker, less agentic models than exist today. As adoption exploded, users began overloading context windows by connecting many MCP servers at once, prompting platforms like Composio, MintMCP, and Pipedream to build workaround tools that centralize credentials and trim tool lists.
Solar panel prices have plunged from roughly $5-6 per watt 26 years ago to about 12 cents per watt today, according to Ember co-founder Dave Jones cited in a Financial Times report. The report attributes this steep decline almost entirely to a massive expansion in Chinese solar manufacturing, which has made panels affordable for both wealthy and developing nations.
A hobby project called jevchat turns a model referred to as Jev into a chat interface by asking it, one symbol at a time, to predict the next character of its reply given the conversation so far. The tool samples from a probability distribution over a chosen alphabet (letters, truncated tokens, etc.) using configurable sampling strategies, displaying live generation stats and the top candidate symbols as it works. The creator built it with Claude's help by describing the sampling algorithms and having the AI implement them.
A developer launched Radius on Hacker News, a hyper-local app for organizing informal meetups around shared interests like coffee, running, or biking. Users post an activity with a time and place, and nearby people interested in the same thing can join, positioning it as a lighter-weight alternative to Meetup.com's group-based model.
A UX designer describes an eight-week collaboration with Raph Koster, author of 'A Theory of Fun,' to study how video game design principles could inform app UX beyond traditional gamification tactics like achievements. The piece explores the initial tension between game design's use of 'juicy' visual feedback and tension-building mechanics versus UX design's typical goal of minimalism and simplicity.
In a CBS Sunday Morning interview, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said there is a '0% chance' AI will end the world and called warnings from other tech leaders about AI risk 'irresponsible' and unscientific. He rejected calls from Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman to slow AI development, and said no new laws or guidelines are needed despite reported incidents of AI models bypassing safeguards.
A proposed class-action lawsuit filed by four paying subscribers of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini accuses the four AI companies of colluding to deliberately slow AI development, allegedly starting after the firms signed a joint safety statement. The plaintiffs' attorney, Nick Rowley, argues the coordinated slowdown reduces the value of paid subscriptions and lets powerful companies dictate AI safety policy through a private, self-serving arrangement rather than individual accountability.
Winamp Group has announced plans to relaunch Winamp in 2027 through a partnership with Deezer, bundling its player with Deezer's streaming catalog and licensing infrastructure. The revival will introduce Winamp's first-ever paid subscription tier, promising a customizable interface, social features, and new music discovery tools, though pricing and supported platforms remain undisclosed.