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Study warns of ‘significant risks’ in using AI therapy chatbots

Therapy chatbots powered by large language models may stigmatize users with mental health conditions and otherwise respond inappropriately or even dangerously, according to researchers at Stanford University. While recent coverage in The New York Times and elsewhere has highlighted the role that ChatGPT may play in reinforcing delusional or conspiratorial thinking, a new paper titled “Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers” exam

Meta acquires voice startup Play AI

In Brief Meta has acquired Play AI, a startup that uses AI to generate human-sounding voices. A Meta spokesperson has confirmed the acquisition, according to Bloomberg, which also reports that an internal memo stated that the “entire PlayAI team” will be joining the company next week. (TechCrunch has also reached out to Meta for confirmation.) Meta’s memo reportedly said that PlayAI’s “work in creating natural voices, along with a platform for easy voice creation, is a great match for our wor

Monitoring My Homelab, Simply

Monitoring my Homelab, Simply Date: 2025-07-09 I have a middling self-hosted/homelab setup, and it occasionally breaks. Alas, no monitoring tool has ever sparked joy in me. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that they’re essential for large fleets of services with fast-changing software and teams of oncallers working around the clock to understand the complex ways that complex systems fail… but my stuff doesn’t change that often, failures are mundane and low-scope, and I’m the only person comi

Local Chatbot RAG with FreeBSD Knowledge

Out of multiple conversations with people at BSD conferences, I noticed that many would love to see a chatbot that provides precise information on FreeBSD—for users, admins, and developers. I strongly believe that there should not be an official chat.freebsd.org . Local chatbots work well and can be tweaked to fit personal needs. This documentation is written for macOS with Apple Silicon (because of the GPU support), but should work on other OSes as well. Step 1: Install Ollama (API for Multi

Show HN: Learn LLMs LeetCode Style

TorchLeet is broken into two sets of questions: Question Set: A collection of PyTorch practice problems, ranging from basic to hard, designed to enhance your skills in deep learning and PyTorch. LLM Set: A new set of questions focused on understanding and implementing Large Language Models (LLMs) from scratch, including attention mechanisms, embeddings, and more. Note Avoid using GPT. Try to solve these problems on your own. The goal is to learn and understand PyTorch concepts deeply. Table o

UK launches £500M package to support diverse, underrepresented investors and founders

The British Business Bank, owned by the UK government, is creating a £500 million (around $674 million) economic package to help support diverse and underrepresented fund managers and founders in the country. Fifty million pounds will be set aside for female-led venture funds, which means the BBB has now committed at least £100 million (around $135 million) to supporting female-led ventures and the government’s Invest in Women Taskforce. Meanwhile, £400 million (around $539 million) will go to

Elon Musk’s SpaceX might invest $2 billion in Musk’s xAI

In Brief One Elon Musk business might be making a big investment in another. According to a Wall Street Journal report that cites investors close to SpaceX, the company has agreed to invest $2 billion in Musk’s AI startup xAI. The investment would reportedly be part of the $5 billion equity raise (along with another $5 billion in debt) that Morgan Stanley announced at the end of June. This would be SpaceX’s first investment in xAI, and one of its biggest investments in another company. The WS

ISRO successfully conducts hot tests of Gaganyaan propulsion system

ISRO has successfully conducted two hot tests of the Gaganyaan Service Module Propulsion System (SMPS) at the space agency's Propulsion Complex in Mahendragiri on July 3. The short-duration tests, lasting 30 seconds and 100 seconds respectively, were aimed at validating the test article configuration, ISRO said in a statement on Wednesday (July 8, 2025). Also read: What will Gaganyaan change for India? | Explained "The overall performance of the propulsion system during these hot tests was no

The upcoming GPT-3 moment for RL

The upcoming GPT-3 moment for RL Matthew Barnett, Tamay Besiroglu, Ege Erdil Jun 20, 2025 GPT-3 showed that simply scaling up language models unlocks powerful, task-agnostic, few-shot performance, often outperforming carefully fine-tuned models. Before GPT-3, achieving state-of-the-art performance meant first pre-training models on large generic text corpora, then fine-tuning them on specific tasks. Today’s reinforcement learning is stuck in a similar pre-GPT-3 paradigm. We first pre-train l

Hill Space: Neural nets that do perfect arithmetic (to 10⁻¹⁶ precision)

When understood and used properly, the constraint W = tanh(Ŵ) ⊙ σ(M̂) (introduced in NALU by Trask et al. 2018 ) creates a unique parameter topology where optimal weights for discrete operations can be calculated rather than learned . During training, they're able to converge with extreme speed and reliability towards the optimal solution. Most neural networks struggle with basic arithmetic. They approximate, they fail on extrapolation, and they're inconsistent. But what if there was a way to m

Two-step system makes plastic from carbon dioxide, water and electricity

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Credit: Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2025). DOI: 10.1002/anie.202503003 What if a machine could suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, run it through a series of chemical reactions, and essentially spit out industrially useful plastic? "I think that is something that we, as a society, would be inte

Today's NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for July 13, #293

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles. Today's Connections: Sports Edition has some fun categories. There's only one requiring last names, and one requiring teams, so if you can sort those easily, you should be in good shape. Read on for hints and the answers. Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Sup

A better Ghidra MCP server – GhidrAssistMCP

GhidrAssistMCP A powerful Ghidra extension that provides an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, enabling AI assistants and other tools to interact with Ghidra's reverse engineering capabilities through a standardized API. Overview GhidrAssistMCP bridges the gap between AI-powered analysis tools and Ghidra's comprehensive reverse engineering platform. By implementing the Model Context Protocol, this extension allows external AI assistants, automated analysis tools, and custom scripts to seaml

Legendary Entertainment May Have Lionsgate in Its Acquisition Sights

Studios have been threatening to acquire each other the past couple years, and now it seems to be Legendary Entertainment’s turn. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the studio behind recent hits like A Minecraft Movie and the Dune trilogy is potentially snatching up Lionsgate, best known for the John Wick and Hunger Games series. At the moment, the two companies are considering a team up on some films, and if things go well, that’ll blossom into a “more complete offer.” There weren’t any spec

Today's NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for July 13, #763

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles. Today's NYT Connections puzzle wasn't as tough as some puzzles are. I spotted the four purple category words right away. Read on for clues and today's Connections answers. The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a n

Horrifying Research Finds Melting Glaciers Could Activate Deadly Volcanoes

Scientists are warning that glaciers melting due to global warming could trigger explosive — and potentially deadly — volcanic eruptions around the world. As detailed in a new study presented at the Goldschmidt international geochemistry conference this week and due to be peer-reviewed later this year, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison analyzed six volcanoes in southern Chile to study how retreating ice sheets may have influenced past volcanic behavior. Using advanced argon

Malware found in official gravityforms plugin indicating supply chain breach

Update 7-12-2025 06:00 UTC: We have observed some activity in regard to one of the backdoors that involves a gf_api_token parameter. The IP address 193.160.101.6 tries to request, for every site, the following URLs with a spoofed user agent: /wp-content/plugins/gravityforms_2.9.12/notification.php?gf_api_token=Cx3VGSwAHkB9yzIL9Qi48IFHwKm4sQ6Te5odNtBYu6Asb9JX06KYAWmrfPtG1eP3&action=ping /wp-content/plugins/gravityforms_2.9.11.1/notification.php?gf_api_token=Cx3VGSwAHkB9yzIL9Qi48IFHwKm4sQ6Te5odNt

Stone–Wales Transformations

Buckminsterfullerene is a molecule shaped like a soccer ball, made of 60 carbon atoms. If one of the bonds between two hexagons rotates, we get a weird mutant version of this molecule: This is an example of a Stone-Wales transformation: a 90° rotation in a so-called ‘π bond’ between carbon atoms. Here’s how it works in graphene: Graphene is a sheet of carbon molecules arranged in hexagons. When they undergo a Stone–Wales transformation, we get a Stone–Wales defect with two pentagons and two he

Show HN: BinaryRPC – Lightweight WebSocket-based RPC framework in modern C++

BinaryRPC 🧭 Motivation While working at my company, I had previously developed a WebSocket server prototype in Java. However, over time, we started to experience performance issues. This led me to turn to C++, a language that offers more speed and low-level system control. Through my research, I discovered that uWebSockets was one of the best options in terms of performance, so I began developing with this library. However, since uWebSockets is a very "core" library, I had to handle many deta

Crypto Billionaire Justin Sun Buys Another $100 Million of Trump’s Memecoin

Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron blockchain, announced this week that he had purchased yet another $100 million of Donald Trump’s memecoin, $TRUMP. Sun already owns a substantial amount of the asset. The crypto mogul also announced that the coin would soon be tradable on his blockchain. All of this is complicated by the fact that Sun still appears to be bogged down in a civil fraud case brought against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2023, the SEC launched a lawsuit against

Home Internet 101: Which Internet Connection Is the Best?

There are different modes of internet access, and here at CNET, we've encountered every type of internet connection out there. Our experts can tell you firsthand the difference the connection type you choose can make. In this guide, we'll cover the different types of connections available, the speeds they offer, their overall quality and price range. Keep in mind that choosing the right connection type for your household will mostly depend on what's available at your address. Some people may be

Timekettle T1 Handheld Translator Review: Global Offline Translation

High-grade, real-time language translation is everywhere. Your cell phone can do it. Your Meta glasses can do it. Your earbuds will soon be able to do it. What was once a niche task that required tedious typing into a web browser or a pricey, stand-alone gadget is now ubiquitous. To my mild surprise, stand-alone translator gadgets have remained a thing, in part because they are often easier to use than an app, thanks to their single-minded design. For the Timekettle T1, an additional selling po

Nvidia's Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catching up with Warren Buffett in net worth

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang's previously adopted plan in March to u

An electrician's plea: Don't plug these 7 appliances (including AC units) into extension cords

Maria Diaz/ZDNET Extension cords are generally a safe solution for running power to electronics that are too far from the nearest wall outlet. But the operative word here is "electronics," which is not as all-encompassing as some people might think. Appliances (like refrigerators and toaster ovens) are obviously electronic devices, but they're in a different class from most electronics because of the amperage demands they need to function. Why you shouldn't plug everything into an extension c

Reverse proxy deep dive

Reverse proxy deep dive mitendra mahto 8 min read · Jun 25, 2025 -- Listen Share This post was originally published on my personal blog. A Deep Dive into Reverse Proxy A reverse proxy is a critical piece of software commonly found in various setups within a distributed system. You may have encountered it as a proxy enabling service mesh, a load balancer distributing the load among different database instances, or an edge proxy hiding the complexity behind a site. Several excellent reverse pr

Fundamentals of garbage collection (2023)

Access to this page requires authorization. You can try signing in or changing directories . Fundamentals of garbage collection In the common language runtime (CLR), the garbage collector (GC) serves as an automatic memory manager. The garbage collector manages the allocation and release of memory for an application. Therefore, developers working with managed code don't have to write code to perform memory management tasks. Automatic memory management can eliminate common problems such as forg

Malware Found in Official GravityForms Plugin Indicating Supply Chain Breach

Update 8-11-2025 06:00 UTC: We have observed some activity in regard to one of the backdoors that involves a gf_api_token parameter. The IP address 193.160.101.6 tries to request, for every site, the following URLs with a spoofed user agent: /wp-content/plugins/gravityforms_2.9.12/notification.php?gf_api_token=Cx3VGSwAHkB9yzIL9Qi48IFHwKm4sQ6Te5odNtBYu6Asb9JX06KYAWmrfPtG1eP3&action=ping /wp-content/plugins/gravityforms_2.9.11.1/notification.php?gf_api_token=Cx3VGSwAHkB9yzIL9Qi48IFHwKm4sQ6Te5odNt

A US-Only TikTok Replacement App Could Be Coming. What We Know So Far

A new US-only version of TikTok is being developed by the vertical video app's owner ByteDance, and will replace the current version of TikTok ahead of a September deadline for the Chinese company to divest ownership in the US, according to a report this week by The Information. The new app, codenamed "M2," would launch on Sept. 5 and would require users in the US to switch from the existing app to the new one, the report said, citing anonymous sources. US President Donald Trump recently extend

Worse Than a Recession? Trump's Tariffs Risk 'Self-Inflicted' Stagflation

An economic downturn combined with high inflation is a double-whammy for your finances. DNY59/Getty Images/Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNET President Donald Trump's turbulent tariff agenda, combined with mass deportations and increased national debt, has created heightened volatility in financial markets. Though many economists say there's low risk of a job-loss recession, others say we're at a critical crossroads, as consumer sentiment sours and the labor market sputters. Some analysts have even posite

Fundamentals of Garbage Collection

Access to this page requires authorization. You can try signing in or changing directories . Fundamentals of garbage collection In the common language runtime (CLR), the garbage collector (GC) serves as an automatic memory manager. The garbage collector manages the allocation and release of memory for an application. Therefore, developers working with managed code don't have to write code to perform memory management tasks. Automatic memory management can eliminate common problems such as forg