GoKawiil
Tech News
Despite widespread claims that artificial intelligence is destroying the value of computer science degrees, employers say demand for graduates remains strong. However, hiring managers now expect candidates to demonstrate practical skill working alongside AI tools rather than just traditional programming knowledge.
On September 11, an attacker exploited two flaws in Symbiosis Finance's smart contracts: a hidden privilege-escalation bug granting fake admin rights, and a missing check that allowed negative transaction fees. Using just 330 satoshi, roughly 25 cents, the attacker set fees to negative values across 12 transactions, minting 46 billion wrapped syBTC tokens on a network meant to represent real Bitcoin. They then sold the fabricated tokens against legitimate wrapped-BTC pairs like WBTC and cbBTC, draining liquidity pools and converting about $336,000 into cash via Uniswap before being blocked.
At Huawei Connect, Huawei revised its AI accelerator roadmap, moving up the release of its next-generation Ascend 960 NPUs by several quarters while also disclosing specifications for the upcoming Ascend 970 and 980 chips. The company also introduced a new Peerium interconnect architecture built on UnifiedBus and expanded its broader AI infrastructure lineup, including CPUs and SuperPoD systems.
Commentary on the AI industry notes that the widening gap between techno-optimists and doomsayers has left the public without a clear, trustworthy voice to follow. Both camps are accused of overstating their cases—one promising utopia, the other predicting catastrophe—while much of the underlying hype serves commercial interests rather than sober analysis.
David Baker, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for computational protein design, is leading a new initiative called AI BioDesign, backed by the Allen Institute, University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. The project pairs AI models with large-scale lab experiments to design molecules and biological functions that don't exist in nature but are chemically feasible, aiming to build public databases and tools for future medicines and technologies.
Natasha Singer's book 'Coding Kids' traces how Code.org and its founder Hadi Partovi convinced schools that coding was essential to economic survival, paving the way for tech companies to influence curricula. In an interview with The 74, Singer argues today's AI push by Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google into classrooms mirrors that earlier coding campaign, despite growing public distrust of Big Tech.
Samsung has released Gallery Assistant, a Good Lock module that adds seven new tools to the Gallery app on Galaxy phones, including size reduction, rotate and flip, image clipping, watermarking, image comparison, and PDF export. Many of these tools support batch processing, letting users apply the same edit to multiple images or videos simultaneously instead of repeating actions one by one.
ATF agents arrested 19-year-old Emani Rey Justavino of Jacksonville after he sold undercover agents 3D-printed 'Glock switches,' devices that convert semiautomatic pistols into fully automatic weapons, in two separate transactions in August. Investigators traced the sales back to Instagram accounts advertising the parts, with Justavino allegedly offering dozens more printed devices and a Glock 19 handgun during the deal. He was formally charged on September 3 and taken into custody on September 10.
The US Climate Prediction Center says above-normal temperatures will persist across much of the country through late September, driven by a strong El Niño pattern and an atmospheric ridge trapping warm air. Some regions, including the Upper Midwest and Deep South, could see readings 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, extending a summer that already set numerous heat records nationwide.
Mophie's MagSafe 3-in-1 Charging Stand, which charges an iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods simultaneously, is now on sale at roughly 49 percent off its usual price. The stand's standout feature is a telescoping pole that lets the iPhone pad extend from 7.5 to 16 inches and tilt, and the charger is both MFi and Qi certified, delivering up to 15 watts to the phone and 5 watts each to the watch and earbuds. It ships with a 36-watt power supply and a 5-foot USB-C cable.
Newly unsealed documents in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal remarks from Microsoft's Brent Hecht, who predicted the public would eventually see large language model training as unprecedented theft of labor. The filing also cites OpenAI's Greg Brockman acknowledging that ChatGPT can reproduce and complete sentences from NYT articles verbatim.
OpenJev is a browser-based experiment that runs a local AI model entirely on a user's own GPU, with no backend or waitlist required. It lets users compare how quickly a model can read probability scores for a set of allowed options versus generating the same distribution token by token, using models like MiniCPM5 2B or the lighter Qwen3 0.6B for smaller devices.