GoKawiil
Tech News
The UN General Assembly passed a resolution urging governments, schools and tech firms to adopt equal-area map projections like Equal Earth instead of the Mercator projection, which distorts continents' relative sizes. The measure passed 164-1, with only the United States opposed and six countries abstaining; it does not ban Mercator maps but recommends alternatives where accurate size comparisons matter.
A Fast Company opinion series on corporate AI argues that current AI systems are being built and controlled at far too low a level of abstraction, comparing the state of the field to the internet in 1991 before the web existed. The author contends that the core issue holding back enterprise AI isn't a lack of intelligence in the models themselves, but the primitive 'programming language' or interface layer through which businesses interact with and direct that intelligence.
Developer Rabah Shihab is porting his 1993 Amiga 500 game Babylonian Twins, written entirely in raw 68000 assembly under wartime sanctions in Baghdad, to the modern Godot engine. He is using a large language model to help parse and interpret the decades-old low-level assembly code that directly manipulated Amiga hardware like the copper list, blitter and CIA chips. This follows an earlier manual port to iPhone made in 2010 by the same original team.
California lawmakers passed AB 1709, which would bar platforms from offering recommendation algorithms and basic follow/like features to users under 16 starting in January. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is asking Governor Gavin Newsom to veto the bill, arguing it effectively locks minors out of most modern digital services by banning tools essential to how those platforms function.
California's Assembly Bill 1856 has passed both chambers of the state legislature and now heads to Engrossing and Enrolling before reaching Governor Gavin Newsom's desk. The bill retains an amendment carving out open-source operating systems from its age-verification mandates, an exemption first added back in May. Covered operating systems will need to collect birth date or age information during account setup and share a coarse age-range signal with app stores and developers via API.
A GitHub project called HelloAssembly, tied to Dave's Garage YouTube episodes, challenges developers to build the smallest possible uncompressed Windows executable that still runs a full message loop, a working title bar with minimize/maximize/close buttons, a system menu, and centered text. The repo hosts multiple competing versions—an optimized original, a shellcode-style variant, and one with a hand-written PE header—showing how far low-level tricks can shrink a working GUI app.