GoKawiil
Tech News
Pew Research analyzed 500,000 English-language webpages using an AI detection tool and found that 10% of all sampled pages showed significant signs of AI authorship. Among pages published after ChatGPT's release, that figure jumps to more than one-third, with .com domains showing roughly double the AI-signal rate of .org sites and ten times that of .edu or .gov domains.
Alibaba is issuing new shares to raise approximately $10.20 billion, with proceeds earmarked for further investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure and technology. The move comes as the company continues to pour capital into AI development amid intense competition among Chinese and global tech giants.
Xiaomi announced price hikes of up to ¥20,000 (about $137) on several Xiaomi, Redmi, and POCO devices in Japan, citing surging memory and component costs. The Xiaomi 17T Pro and multiple POCO X8 Pro and X8 Pro Max configurations see the steepest jumps, some rising nearly 25%, while tablets face smaller increases of ¥2,000 to ¥10,000. The new prices take effect September 1 for Xiaomi and Redmi products and September 4 for POCO models.
A longtime Synology NAS owner attempted to transfer files to a new Ubiquiti UniFi UNAS Pro 8 over a 10-gigabit network, expecting the SMB file copy to be routine. Windows Explorer failed partway through with file system limitation errors, prompting a switch to Robocopy, which stalled at 92% with error 665 on certain files, including one called '05 Wires.m4p'. The user traced part of the slowdown to Robocopy's restartable /Z mode, a feature they had relied on since 2007 but which now dramatically hurt transfer speed.
A commentary argues that government contracts, grants and procurement rules for frontier technologies—space, AI and quantum computing—are quietly locking in dominant suppliers rather than fostering open competition. The authors point to the space sector, where repeated launch contracts to the same firms like SpaceX build data and performance advantages that make it harder for rivals to break in, and warn similar patterns are emerging in AI and quantum funding decisions.
A developer created Varkos, an AI-driven companion mod for Skyrim that can fight, loot, fetch items, and carry out multi-step commands in real time using local inference instead of cloud-based LLM calls. The project aims to fix the latency and weak world-interaction problems common in existing AI NPC dialogue systems, while giving Varkos a persistent personality that evolves with shared gameplay experiences.
An engineer spent two weeks pointing an AI coding agent, Claude Opus 5, at the firmware and update tools of everyday USB peripherals—a microphone, a webcam, and a key light. The agent extracted a full command shell from the microphone, found a way to disable the webcam's recording LED while it still captures video, and discovered the key light accepts unauthenticated memory writes from any device on the same WiFi network.
A lawsuit accuses Twitch and its parent company Amazon of using streamers' broadcasted content to train artificial intelligence systems without proper consent or compensation. The suit claims this practice exploited creators' work for commercial AI development purposes they never agreed to.
An independent developer has released pngine, a declarative language and runtime built over 2.5 years that lets programmers describe WebGPU shaders and pipelines using S-expressions mirroring the WebGPU spec directly. The tool validates configurations via WGSL reflection without needing a live GPU context, offers an LSP for real-time error checking, and can export projects as a single HTML file, a ZIP, or even a self-contained PNG image holding compiled bytecode.
A team training a generative model to paint with code (using p5.brush) found their nine-signal reward rubric caused the model to plateau at flat, repetitive outputs. Investigation revealed four quality judges and prompt adherence were nearly identical measurements, while a code-length metric saturated early and stopped providing useful feedback, leaving only one signal actually driving learning. The fix replaced absolute 0-10 scoring with pairwise comparisons against a curated pool of 1,664 hand-rated reference images.
A developer released Thoreau BASIC, an interpreter compatible with GW-BASIC that can boot directly on bare-metal UEFI machines, with a Windows version also available. It supports classic BASIC constructs like DEF FN, GOSUB, error trapping, and graphics commands such as PSET, LINE, CIRCLE, and PAINT, working at native framebuffer resolution with 16-color EGA or 24-bit RGB.
Connecticut-based streamer Warren Pandiscia has filed a class action lawsuit against Twitch and Amazon, alleging the companies used his streams and videos to train AI models without licensing or consent. The suit follows Twitch's recent rollout of an opt-out (rather than opt-in) setting for AI training use of channel content, with a Twitch executive admitting few users would opt in if given the choice upfront.