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Tech News
A technical explainer examines the internal workings of the coaster brake, a rear-hub braking system that has been used on bicycles for more than 100 years. The piece breaks down the mechanical components and physics that allow pedaling backward to engage stopping power without external levers or cables.
A tech columnist reports that AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude become noticeably less useful over long-term use as they accumulate stored memories from past conversations. Outdated, one-off, or hypothetical exchanges get retained and later influence unrelated responses, degrading the quality of answers even after an initial 'sweet spot' of personalization is reached. The fix involves periodically reviewing and deleting old memory entries through each platform's settings menu.
A commentary piece argues that if corporations enjoy legal personhood under the Fourteenth Amendment, they should also face the equivalent of capital punishment for serious wrongdoing. It traces this idea to 'judicial dissolution,' citing the 1889 New York Supreme Court case that forced the North River Sugar Refining Corporation—a 17-company sugar monopoly—to liquidate for abusing its charter through price-fixing and consolidation.
President Trump awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to Artemis II astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen, who flew around the moon in April. At the same ceremony, he signed an executive order establishing a Presidential Commission, chaired by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, to draft plans within 120 days for a new United States Space Academy meant to train personnel for NASA, the Space Force, and private space companies.
Samsung presented its Processing-in-Memory approach for LPDDR5X-9600 chips, embedding a MAC computation block into each of the 16 DRAM banks while keeping compatibility with standard memory controllers. By computing directly within each bank, the design taps into 614 GB/s of internal bandwidth versus the 76.8 GB/s ceiling of conventional two-bank DRAM access. Each PIM block includes an instruction register file, a source register file for activation vectors, and a scale register, with model weights fetched directly from the attached DRAM bank.
Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah Baldeo created a personalized AI chatbot trained on her texts, values and family rules so her 15-year-old son could seek her guidance while she traveled for work. Her son used the bot as intended for advice, but also tried to leverage it to convince the real Baldeo to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago, generating arguments she hadn't anticipated.
An MIT student reportedly worked with dimethyl mercury despite the university's policy prohibiting its purchase or synthesis on campus. MIT confirmed the compound's use was unauthorized, though details on how the student obtained it and the extent of exposure remain unclear.
For over a decade, computer science was seen as the surest path to a lucrative tech job, fueling a nearly 500% surge in CS degrees since 2008. Now, as artificial intelligence automates many coding tasks and shrinks entry-level tech hiring, some observers argue that math degrees may offer better long-term career security than CS.
A new piece on founder productivity argues that standard focus advice fails startup leaders because their job requires constantly switching between different types of work. It offers five tips aimed at helping founders keep their calendars aligned with their own priorities rather than being dictated by others' demands.
A report examines whether components and equipment sourced from Chinese manufacturers are quietly underpinning the rapid expansion of American data centers driving the AI buildout. The claim centers on supply chain dependencies that persist even as US-China tech tensions escalate publicly.
A worker identifying himself as a 'Legacy Media Completion Specialist' describes his job shredding and burning antique books after they've been sliced apart and scanned to train generative AI models. The satirical account follows revelations from a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, in which unsealed court documents showed the company used 'destructive scanning'—cutting spines off physical books to scan them faster, then discarding the remains—and allegedly tried to conceal the practice.
An independent developer has published lambdock, an open-source desktop dock built for Wayland using C, GTK4, and Guile Scheme, available on Codeberg. The project aims to fill a gap left by aging tools like Cairo-Dock and Plank as Linux users migrate away from X11, offering features such as fluid hover animations, auto-hiding, and dynamic window tracking. Its standout feature is a live embedded Lisp runtime that lets users inspect and modify the dock's behavior while it runs.