GoKawiil
Tech News
Nikon disqualified Ning Xu's winning Small World in Motion video of cilia after an investigation found it violated competition rules regarding AI use, following researcher complaints about anomalies and apparent AI watermarks in source files. Nguyen Nam Nhat of Vietnam, whose video shows a roundworm and a single-celled organism, has been named the new winner, with other finalists moving up one place.
A writer recounts a studio jam session with a friend, Jon, where they built a song by deliberately borrowing elements from other artists: matching tempos, adopting chord progressions, converting a guitar riff into a vocal rhythm, and splicing drum loops. The author contrasts this approach with their teenage insistence on originality, which left early songwriting attempts unfinished.
Microsoft has released Microsoft-Decision-1, a model built specifically for decision-scoring tasks like routing, classification, prioritization, verification, and workflow control. It is available now through Microsoft Foundry, with OpenRouter access coming soon. Microsoft reports the model topped a 36-benchmark comparison covering nearly 150,000 questions, running 4.5 times faster than the runner-up, Quyet-1.0-Large, and 35 times faster than GPT-6 Sol.
ANBERNIC has announced the RG DDS, a flagship retro gaming handheld that adopts a clamshell dual-screen design reminiscent of the Nintendo 3DS, updated with modern internals. Pricing and release date for the device have not yet been disclosed.
An opinion column examines why some technologists have adopted pessimistic, 'doomer' views about AI's risks to humanity. It cites commentary from an AI cybersecurity specialist who attributes this shift to the growing influence of the effective altruism philosophy within tech circles.
The Debian project is accepting community-submitted artwork themes for its upcoming Forky release, named Debian 14. Submissions must look distinctively Debian, work without patching core software, and hold up visually over time, with a November 26 deadline. The winning theme will appear on boot screens, login prompts, and desktop wallpapers for users of the release.
Cloudflare engineers describe building a deterministic simulation testing (DST) tool for celld, a runtime for running Workers and Durable Objects applications outside Cloudflare's infrastructure using only an S3-compatible object store as an external dependency. The simulator, still in development and not yet public, controls event ordering, timing, and storage responses so that failures involving delayed messages, failed writes, or node restarts can be reliably reproduced and debugged.
The Onion has launched its first video game, a satirical title centered on the act of voting. Players can navigate obstacles like poll watchers by double-jumping to cast a ballot, or choose an alternate path of staying home instead of voting.
A new Entrepreneur opinion piece cites iHire's 2026 Toxic Workplace Trends Report, which found 79% of employees who experienced a toxic workplace blamed poor leadership and management rather than vague cultural issues. The author, drawing on nearly 20 years of corporate observation and an interview with Intero Digital's Jana Boone, argues executives often default to blaming 'culture' because it spreads responsibility rather than naming specific leadership decisions.
NASA has published nearly a terabyte of scientific data from the Artemis II mission, including 11,000 full-resolution images and videos, 8.5 hours of recorded astronaut observations, handwritten notes, transcripts, and Orion capsule camera footage. The agency also issued three accompanying reports detailing lunar science findings and operations from the mission, and made the archive accessible through its Planetary Data System.
The Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, has announced plans to livestream the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the former Army officer convicted of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting that killed 13 people. Officials have not specified which platform would host the stream, leaving open questions about whether sites like X would need to apply or waive their own violent-content rules to allow it.
President Trump has begun promoting the term 'Artificial Super Intelligence' in place of 'AI,' reportedly describing those who resist the shift as 'the enemy.' OpenAI, which has built close ties to the Trump administration, has not commented on whether it will alter its branding to match the new terminology.