GoKawiil
Tech News
A new Use.AI survey of over 15,000 respondents found that 53% now verify explanations from doctors, teachers, and other professionals using AI before accepting them, while 46% say professional credentials carry less weight than before. Use.AI calls this shift an 'expertise recession,' describing a decline in automatic trust toward trained professionals as AI tools let people independently investigate claims.
More than 80 performers, including Matt Lucas, Hugh Bonneville, Siobhán McSweeney and singer Sandi Thom, have signed a letter urging the UK government to introduce legislation protecting performers from unauthorised AI voice cloning. The signatories argue current law fails to safeguard an artist's voice, face and identity as AI technology advances. The letter follows earlier warnings from legal experts that existing UK rules are outdated and cannot fully protect personal likeness or voice.
Microsoft has released the KB5120998 preview cumulative update for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, bundling 35 changes centered on taskbar positioning, a compact taskbar mode, and new Start menu size and layout options. The optional update also begins rolling out Administrator Protection, a feature using just-in-time privileges to limit elevation-of-privilege attacks, though it remains off by default and needs Intune or Group Policy to enable.
A technical write-up explains how SMPTE timecode, particularly the Bi-Phase Mark 'LTC' sync tone, is recorded onto audio or video tape tracks to keep equipment synchronized, alongside notes on VITC and BCD data encoding. The author traces the origin of the research to building a low-cost MIDI tape sync device, which became a long-running product called the TS1 supporting SMPTE Drop Frame and MIDI Time Code.
US District Judge Rita Lin ruled that the Defense Department's labeling of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was illegal and unconstitutional, blocking certain federal agencies from enforcing Trump's directive to stop using the company's Claude AI tools. The conflict began after Anthropic refused Pentagon pressure to remove safeguards preventing Claude from being used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons, leading Trump to order a government-wide phase-out of Anthropic products. Anthropic had sued in two federal courts over separate bans, and this ruling resolves one of those cases in its favor.
Google is letting Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) users import select owned ebooks from Google Play Books directly into notebooks for analysis. The feature, called Expert Intelligence, covers over 100,000 titles from publishers like Penguin Random House and O'Reilly Media, and includes partnerships with 15 bestselling authors. Users can then apply Gemini Notebook tools like Audio Overviews and Infographics to the imported book content, and combine multiple titles in one notebook.
Hugging Face, the widely used repository for open-source AI models and developer tools, is reportedly the target of a potential investment or acquisition move by Nvidia. The platform is a central hub where developers share, download and test AI models, giving it outsized influence over the open model ecosystem despite limited public name recognition.
Reports indicate that widespread adoption of ChatGPT is subtly changing how people write, with certain AI-favored words and phrasing patterns appearing more frequently in everyday communication. The trend suggests that heavy exposure to AI-generated text is influencing human writing habits beyond just those who use the tool directly.
OpenAI has begun showing advertisements to users on its free tier and the 399-rupee ($4) Go plan in India, one of its biggest markets by user activity. The feature, already active in 38 countries including the US, Japan, South Korea and much of Europe, excludes users who are or are predicted to be under 18.
Tim Cook announced Apple will make a donation to support relief and rebuilding efforts after flash floods and mudslides killed hundreds of people in Nepal and Tibet. The disaster was triggered by a partial glacier collapse in the Himalayas that dammed a river before bursting, sending debris downstream and damaging homes, roads and bridges.
US district judge Rita Lin ruled that the Pentagon's February designation of Anthropic as a national security risk was unconstitutional retaliation, vacating defense secretary Pete Hegseth's order and lifting sanctions imposed by nine federal agencies. The ruling does not force the Pentagon to use Anthropic's Claude models, but it removes the legal barriers that had blocked contractors from doing business with the company.
At the FOSSY conference held this year at the University of British Columbia, developer Timothy Sample presented on bootstrappable builds, a lesser-known cousin of reproducible builds. He explained the concept as a chain of increasingly capable compilers that starts from a tiny, fully auditable seed program and eventually builds an entire modern Linux user space. Sample traced his own decade-long involvement in the effort back to his early use of GNU Guix, a functional package manager similar to Nix.