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The European Commission has issued preliminary findings that TikTok's For You algorithm creates a 'rabbit hole effect,' repeatedly pushing users toward content tied to sadness, isolation and body image, in violation of the Digital Services Act. Officials say TikTok's existing safeguards against this effect are not working. The company must redesign the feed or face fines of up to 6% of its global annual turnover.
The European Commission said preliminary findings show TikTok's recommendation algorithm creates a 'rabbit hole effect,' repeatedly exposing users to content tied to sadness, isolation, or body image. The Commission says TikTok's existing mitigation controls are insufficient and the platform must redesign its For You feed or risk fines up to 6 percent of global annual turnover.
Netflix is rolling out a new 'AI Discover' tab in its TV app that groups recommendations under themes such as 'Something Light,' 'Family Movie Night,' or 'Quick Watches.' Users can reject suggestions they dislike, and Netflix says the system will remember that feedback going forward. The feature is powered by what the company calls a new 'intelligence layer' and is initially rolling out to English-language US users on supported TVs.
A blog post on argmin examines the history of attempts to formally define algorithmic efficiency in computer science, starting with Jack Edmonds' 1965 paper on finding maximum matchings in graphs. The piece argues that Edmonds struggled to find rigorous language for 'efficient' or 'good' algorithms, distinguishing them from brute-force approaches that scale exponentially with problem size, and that this gap spawned a field of complexity theory that drifted from real-world applications.
A developer used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 model to build HackerTube.org, a YouTube-style site populated only with videos that commenters recommended on Hacker News. The project scraped HN comments from 2007-2026, filtered roughly 40,000 video recommendations down to 6,454 videos across 150 topics using Claude Sonnet, then wrapped the results in a YouTube-like interface with custom recommendations stored locally rather than via user accounts.
Samsung is rolling out an upgraded sleep apnea detection feature powered by a new AI algorithm, offering more detailed reports that classify severity as mild, occasional, or frequent. The feature launches in Korea in November for the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2, Watch 9, and Galaxy Ring, with Watch 7 and 8 getting it via future software updates, though a US release date hasn't been confirmed.
The 2014 post traces how the Lwan web server's integer-to-string conversion evolved from using snprintf() to a naive divide-and-modulus algorithm that built digits in reverse and then flipped the string. The author then replaced it with a version that writes digits directly into a buffer from the end backwards, avoiding the separate string-reversal step and using a buffer sized via a trick based on multiplying sizeof(int) by three.
Meta is rolling out a feature letting Facebook users open a new 'your algorithm' panel on posts and Reels to mark topics as interests or 'not interested,' plus a text box to describe in their own words what they want to see. Meta says the tool works because it now uses large language models in its ranking systems, allowing it to interpret natural-language requests rather than just inferring interests from engagement. The feature follows a similar rollout on Instagram earlier this year.
Meta has launched 'Your Algorithm' on Facebook, a feature first introduced on Instagram that lets users describe in their own words what content they want more or less of in Feed and Reels. The tool is integrated into the three-dot menu alongside existing 'Interested' and 'Not interested' options, and Meta says it may ask follow-up questions to refine recommendations, with changes applied in real time.
A developer's blog post explains a 'two-stack' method for computing sliding-window aggregations—such as minimum, maximum, or quantiles—that works even when the aggregation operator has no inverse. The technique, drawn from a paper by Tangwongsan et al. on low-latency sliding-window aggregation, achieves amortized constant-time updates using two stacks instead of a double-ended queue, and the author says it renders their own earlier six-year-old min/max algorithm obsolete.
Meta is rolling out a 'Your Algorithm' feature on Facebook that lets users mark topics as 'interested' or 'not interested' directly from posts or a dedicated menu, with the feed and Reels updating in real time. The feature, which already launched on Instagram and as 'Dear Algo' on Threads, also lets users type natural-language feedback about what they want to see more or less of. Meta says it is using large language models in its ranking systems to interpret this feedback and adjust recommendations within the same session.
A technical blog post from researcher Ben Recht examines a math result released by OpenAI that claimed to compute faster Fourier transforms. Recht explains the mathematics behind the Fast Fourier Transform, originally devised by Cooley and Tukey in 1965, and argues that OpenAI's claimed speedup does not represent a genuine algorithmic breakthrough.