Latest Tech News

Stay updated with the latest in technology, AI, cybersecurity, and more

Filtered by: use Clear Filter

On Mexico’s Caribbean Coast, There’s Lobster for the Tourists and Microplastics for Everyone Else

The fishermen of Puerto Morelos, on Mexico’s Caribbean coast, risk their lives every time they head out to sea to fish or dive for lobsters. Their bounty is dependent on luck, as the weather often makes it impossible to go out, while on other days the hooks they cast come back empty. These workers set out every day to find the best lobsters possible for the affluent vacationers who come to the region, while they and their families, cut off from many of the benefits of tourism development, get by

Hands on with Windows 11 Notepad's new markdown support

Notepad now lets you use markdown text formatting on Windows 11, which means you can write in Notepad just like you could in WordPad. The new formatting feature is turned on by default, and you just need to select one of the options in the new formatting toolbar. For example, when you highlight one of the lines in Notepad and choose your preferred heading, Notepad will instantly apply that formatting. You can use a heading, a subheading, or a body tag. That's up to you. You can also use bulle

Uncommon Uses of Python in Commonly Used Libraries (2022)

To learn how to build more maintainable and usable Python libraries, I’ve been reading some of the most widely used Python packages. Along the way, I learned some things about Python that are off the beaten path. Here are a few things I didn’t know before. Using super() in base classes Python’s super() lets us inherit base classes (aka super or parent classes) without having to explicitly refer to the base class. It’s usually used in the __init__ method. While this might be simply a nice-to-ha

I prefer Signal but use WhatsApp for this simple reason

Robert Triggs / Android Authority When WhatsApp changed its terms in 2021, I was one of the many users who looked for alternative messaging apps for Android. While I had heard about Signal before, the controversial move by WhatsApp prompted me to actually try the app out. I loved it then and I still love it now. But over all these years, I barely use Signal even though I prefer it greatly over WhatsApp. And that’s because of a major advantage WhatsApp has over the privacy-focused messaging app

Best VPN for Japan: Boost Your Privacy and Unblock Global Streaming Content

Why we like it ExpressVPN is the best overall VPN by CNET and the best VPN for Japan. We like that Express demonstrates a steadfast commitment to privacy and transparency. It’s a safe choice for privacy-conscious VPN users and also a fantastic option for casual users because it’s extremely simple to use, fast and excellent for streaming. ExpressVPN has servers in Osaka, Shibuya, Yokohama and Tokyo locations. In addition to ExpressVPN’s excellent coverage in Japan, there are also servers in 18 d

12 Best Kids Headphones (2025), Hearing Protection and More

Protect Those Headphones Satechi 2-in-1 Headphone Stand Photograph: Julian Chokkattu Even durable headphones are easy to damage. We have lost pairs to folks standing on them, cats and robot vacuums attacking the cables, and chairs rolling over them. I have learned that a stand or holder is worth the investment if it keeps those cans off the floor. Even if your kids only sometimes remember to use it, that could extend the likely lifespan of their headphones. We use the Satechi 2-in-1 Headphone

Volunteer finds Holy Grail of abolitionist-era Baptist documents

By MICHAEL CASEY GROTON, Mass. (AP) — Jennifer Cromack was combing through the American Baptist archive when she uncovered a slim box among some 18th and 19th century journals. Opening it, she found a scroll in pristine condition. A closer look revealed the 5-foot-long (1.5-meter-long) document was a handwritten declaration titled “A Resolution and Protest Against Slavery,” signed by 116 New England ministers in Boston and adopted March 2, 1847. Until its discovery in May at the archives in Gr

Injection Rejection (2006)

Matthias Winkelmann's company decided to go the ole' outsourcing route and hand off all development work for a fixed-bid project to a certain overseas company. As it turned out, the hourly rate for certain overseas programmers were less than half that of the in-house folks, so management did the math and figured they could profit that much more. The in-house programmers were told to spend "only a little bit of time" on the project -- no technical advice, no coding assistance, and no even lookin

The Prime Reasons to Avoid Amazon

Amazon’s now-legendary “Prime Day” is July 8-11. Much like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, this means sales on lots of items on Amazon’s vast marketplace, and as such many people flock to the giant’s website to get sweet deals on everything from computers to small kitchen appliances and more. While many of us are feeling the financial crunch more than ever, I urge you, dear reader, to resist the allure. I don’t typically have strong opinions about where people chose to shop or how they decide to s

Local-first software (2019)

Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg, and Mark McGranaghan. Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud. 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward!), October 2019, pages 154–178. doi:10.1145/3359591.3359737 This article has also been published in PDF format in the proceedings of the Onward! 2019 conference . Please cite it as: We share some of our findings from developing local-fi

Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud

Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg, and Mark McGranaghan. Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud. 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward!), October 2019, pages 154–178. doi:10.1145/3359591.3359737 This article has also been published in PDF format in the proceedings of the Onward! 2019 conference . Please cite it as: We share some of our findings from developing local-fi

ChatGPT Deep Research tests new connectors for more context

ChatGPT Deep Research, which is an AI research tool to automate research, is getting support for new connectors (integrations), including Slack. Deep Research is an AI agent that automates research for you. You just need to give it a brief prompt with all the necessary details, and it will crawl the internet to write a research paper. As spotted by Tibor on X, ChatGPT has references to a new connector called 'Slack.' Once integrated, ChatGPT can crawl your Slack messages and use them in the c

Ask HN: Worth leaving position over push to adopt vibe coding?

My company is increasingly pushing prompt engineering as the single way we "should" be coding. The CEO & CTO are both obsessed with it and promote things like "delete entire unit test file & have claude generate a new one" rather than manually address test failures. I'm a 'senior engineer' with ~5 years of industry experience and am considering moving on from this company because I don't want 1. Be pushed into a workflow that will cause my technical growth to stall or degrade 2. Be overseeing

Musk backs Sen. Paul's criticism of Trump's megabill in first comment since it passed

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who bombarded President Donald Trump's signature spending bill for weeks, on Friday made his first comments since the legislation passed. Musk backed a post on X by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who said the bill's budget "explodes the deficit" and continues a pattern of "short-term politicking over long-term sustainability." CNBC

Bombshell Research Finds a Staggering Number of Scientific Papers Were AI-Generated

Like any crappy human writer, AI chatbots have a tendency to overuse specific words — and now, scientists are using that propensity to catch their colleagues when they secretly use it in their work. As the New York Times reports, scientists estimate, based on an analysis of those overused terms, that there could already be hundreds of thousands of academic papers written with the assistance of AI. In a new study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers from Germany's University o

Is there a no-AI audience?

Published on July 2nd, 2025 how about no I recently saw a post on mastodon which said that someone was actively looking for a code editor that had absolutely no "AI" features. It did not strike me as a wishlist for nostalia's sake. It made me realize that in the rush to integrate artificial intelligence into every aspect of our digital lives, a growing number of companies have diminished the concept of opt-in by choice, it is now being turned into opt-in by default. I see a growing sentiment

Community Confused by "Rizzbot" Walking Around With Cowboy Hat and Chain, Complimenting Their Outfits in Gen Alpha Slang

Community Confused by "Rizzbot" Walking Around With Cowboy Hat and Chain, Complimenting Their Outfits in Gen Alpha Slang "Yo G, that sleeveless plaid shirt is straight bangin.'" Flex Zone A cowboy hat-toting bipedal robot, dubbed "Jake the Rizzbot," is wandering the streets of Austin, Texas, turning heads and flinging compliments using some truly cringeworthy — and equally hilarious — Gen Alpha slang. Videos on social media show the robot approaching strangers to compliment their appearance.

Developing with GitHub Copilot Agent Mode and MCP

I'm always looking for ways to work more efficiently and deliver better code faster. Recently, The GitHub Copilot Agent Mode in combination with Model Context Protocol (MCP) has transformed my development workflow. The magic starts with Customizing AI responses in VS Code. Instead of repeatedly explaining my preferences to the AI, I can now define: Custom instructions for consistent coding practices for consistent coding practices Custom prompts for reusable task templates for reusable task

The White House’s favorite source of pro-Trump news is … the White House’s YouTube channel

The most frequently curated content on the White House Wire, the Trump administration’s attempt to aggregate pro-Trump “real news” from across the right-wing media, doesn’t come from Truth Social, Breitbart, or even Fox News. It comes from YouTube — notably, from the White House’s own channel. The White House Wire was launched at the end of April on the official WH.gov page, around the time that the Trump comms team began ramping up its war on the mainstream journalists and outlets who covered

Not everyone is thrilled with Threads’ DMs

Earlier this week, Instagram Threads launched what the company said was its most-requested feature to date: direct messages, also known as DMs. However, the company is now facing a bit of a user backlash over the addition, as users, primarily women, are arguing that there should be a way to opt out of DMs entirely, citing harassment concerns. Although DMs are a part of other social networks similar to Threads, including X, Bluesky, Mastodon, and others, some Threads users appreciated that they

Poor Man's Back End-as-a-Service (BaaS), Similar to Firebase/Supabase/Pocketbase

Pennybase Poor man's Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS), similar to Firebase/Supabase/Pocketbase It implements core backend features in less than 1000 lines of Go code, using only standard library and no external dependencies: File-based storage using CSV with versioned records using CSV with versioned records REST API with JSON responses with JSON responses Authentication with session cookies and Basic Auth with session cookies and Basic Auth RBAC & ownership-based permissions Real-time updates

Meta is reportedly training its AI chatbots to send unprompted messages

Everyone’s been hit with a bitingly pass-agg "?" text after waiting just a bit too long to reply. And you might soon get similar (though likely more upbeat) treatment from AI chatbots you’ve previously engaged with on Meta platforms like Instagram or WhatApp. A new report from Business Insider claims that the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company is trialling a proactive feature in customizable chatbots created using its no-code AI Studio software, that will enable them to send unprompted follow-up mess

Topics: ai like meta send user

Microsoft investigates ongoing SharePoint Online access issues

​Microsoft is investigating an ongoing incident causing intermittent issues for users attempting to access SharePoint Online sites. Part of the Microsoft 365 suite, SharePoint Online is a cloud-based collaboration and document management platform that allows users to create websites, store and share documents, and collaborate on content over the Internet. As the company announced earlier today in an incident alert published in the message center, users are seeing "Something went wrong" errors

Everything you need to know about Flashes, the Bluesky-based Instagram alternative

Flashes this year launched an Instagram alternative built on top of the Bluesky social network. Now available on the App Store, the app offers a different way to browse the visual posts on Bluesky. Instead of viewing them in a timeline-like feed, similar to X, the app draws inspiration from photo-based social networks, like Instagram. What you can post The app, built by Berlin-based developer Sebastian Vogelsang, runs on the same underlying protocol that powers Bluesky, the AT Protocol (or atp

Android users can now (kinda) edit messages sent to iPhones, but not yet vice-versa

iPhones and Android smartphones started to play more nicely together after Apple finally opted to support the Rich Communication Services (RCS) standard. Prior to this, messages between the two platforms had to use the ancient and insecure text messaging service. Not all RCS features are supported as yet, with the all-important strong encryption waiting for RCS 3.0 support in iOS 26. Another RCS 3.0 feature is the ability to edit outgoing messages after sending them, and that one has started a

‘We Live in a Surveillance State’: Reddit Users Explode Over Reports of ICE’s New Face and Fingerprint Scanning App

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is reportedly using a new tool called Mobile Fortify, a smartphone-based facial recognition and fingerprint scanning app that allows agents to identify people in real time using only a phone camera. The tool taps into the same biometric system used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at ports of entry. But ICE is now using it inside the U.S., in field operations across the country. According to internal ICE emails reviewed by 404 Media, the app

Like Google, China's biggest search player Baidu is beefing up its product with AI to fight rivals

In this article BIDU Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT Pictured here is the Ernie bot mobile interface, with the Baidu search engine home page in the background. Future Publishing | Future Publishing | Getty Images Chinese tech giant Baidu has bolstered its core search platform with artificial intelligence in the biggest overhaul of the product in 10 years. Analysts told CNBC the move was a bid to keep ahead of fast-moving rivals like DeepSeek, rather than traditional search play

What's the difference between named functions and arrow functions in JavaScript?

Arrow functions (also known as ‘rocket’ functions) are concise and convenient. However, they have subtle differences compared to function declarations and function expressions. So how do you know which one to use, and when? Function declarations and function statements We have (at least) three ways of creating functions in JavaScript. The first is the function declaration. This binds a function to a given name. It looks something like this:1 1 I’ve used String.toLowercase() here, partly for b

ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral

In Brief ICEBlock, an iPhone app that allows users to anonymously report sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, has rocketed to one of the coveted top spots in Apple’s U.S. App Store rankings. The upshot: Criticism from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi helped get it there. Most of ICEBlock’s users — about 20,000 — were in Los Angeles, where ICE raids have become commonplace over recent weeks, according to CNN. Following Bondi’s remarks late Monday, the app went vira

What to build instead of AI agents

Paul: Today, the scene is owned by Hugo, a brilliant mind who advises and teaches teams building LLM-powered systems, including engineers from Netflix, Meta, and the U.S. Air Force. He runs a course on the LLM software development lifecycle, focusing on everything from retrieval and evaluation to agent design, and all the intermediate steps in between. Enough talking, I’ll let him dig into today’s controversial topic: “Stop building AI agents”. ↓🎙️ P.S. I agree with him. 🤫 Hugo: I've taught