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Submission + - LLM-inspired study sheds light on how brain cells encode the meaning of words (medicalxpress.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: To investigate how the brain encodes the meaning of words, the researchers first recorded the activity of individual neurons in the hippocampus of 10 people who were listening to stories. Their recordings were collected using tiny wire electrodes that were implanted in the participants' brains as part of clinical monitoring procedures for epilepsy.

The team then used mathematical models to analyze the language used in the stories and the brain recordings. This allowed them to examine whether information about the meaning of words could predict the recorded neuronal activity.

"We recorded responses of hippocampal neurons while individuals listened to narrative speech," wrote Melissa Franch and her colleagues in their paper. "Using an encoding model approach, we find robust encoding of semantics, even after controlling for phonemics and grammar. Individual words had complex selectivities that included multiple words in multiple semantic categories."

Submission + - ChatGPT, Gemini Call BS on Microsoft's PERM Program Ban 'Comment'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Asked to comment on the merits of the Microsoft Comment on Recent Immigration Questions, which was posted without attribution on the Microsoft On The Issues blog in response to the U.S. Government's suspension of Microsoft, Adobe, and IT outsourcing giants from the Green Card program (PERM), ChatGPT suggested it was a red herring defense at best: "The central issue is whether Microsoft has complied with the requirements governing permanent labor certification, including whether qualified American workers were genuinely considered for positions being offered to foreign workers. Microsoft instead emphasizes that 80% of its H-1B applications involved existing employees rather than new hires. That framing encourages readers to think the government's concern rests on a basic misunderstanding: that the government is counting existing workers as new foreign hires. But that is not necessarily the government's argument. Existing H-1B employees can subsequently be sponsored for permanent residency, and their employers must still comply with the applicable PERM requirements."

Asked to provide a second AI opinion, Google's Gemini agreed: "Microsoft’s response is a classic piece of defensive corporate communication. It successfully highlights true statistics—such as its high median wages and the fact that most H-1B filings are internal extensions—to counter the narrative that it is a low-wage outsourcing shop. However, its statement completely sidesteps the central accusation: that its ongoing sponsorship of thousands of green cards via the PERM program ran afoul of labor regulations while it was concurrently laying off thousands of domestic American workers. By omitting this tension, Microsoft's response answers questions the administration wasn't actually asking while ignoring the underlying compliance and fraud investigations that triggered the freeze."

Microsoft is hardly the only tech giant whose PERM program hiring practices have attracted U.S. government scrutiny. In August 2026, the U.S Dept. of Justice's Civil Rights Division announced a $3.2 million settlement involving OpenAI OpCo LLC and its analytics provider Statsig that addressed allegations of "discriminating against U.S. workers" during the PERM hiring process. And in 2023, Apple was required by the U.S. Dept. of Justice to pay up to $25 million in backpay and civil penalties to "resolve allegations that Apple illegally discriminated in hiring and recruitment against U.S. citizens and certain non-U.S. citizens." And in 2021, Facebook agreed to pay up to $14.25 million to settle civil claims by the U.S. government that the social media company discriminated against American workers and violated federal recruitment rules.

Submission + - For The First Time Ever, Quantum Spins Shift a Centimeter-Scale Object (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: There's another notable first in the field of quantum physics to report on, and it's all to do with electron spin: the tiny, built-in magnetism of these particles, as if each one is carrying a microscopic compass needle.

Previously, the force of these spins has only proved enough to nudge individual atoms in one direction or another. Now though, researchers have managed to shift something much, much bigger.

A team from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan has published a new study in Science Advances that details how a centimeter-sized object can be nudged by these quantum forces.

Submission + - Blinding headlights finally being addressed (reuters.com)

Submitted by technology_dude
technology_dude writes: It's about time! The NHTSA is going to modernize standards and address the brightness problem. Of course it will take some time before we see the change. Only new vehicles will have the new tech so all of existing blinding headlights will still be on the road for quite some time but it is a step in the right direction.

Submission + - "Software is over" Developer uses AI builds Adobe clones after cancellation fees (techspot.com) 2

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Ars Technica reports, developer Brandon Thomas is taking on seven of Adobe's best-known applications through Artcraft. The project extend beyond Adobe's famous photo editing program to video production, vector graphics, page layouts, and PDF tools.

In his Reddit announcement, Thomas says he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to build the replacements in Rust. Photocraft imitates Photoshop, while Vectorcraft and Filmcraft take on Illustrator and Premiere. Lightcraft, Effectcraft, Designcraft, and Printcraft are the alternatives to Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro, respectively.

The apps are open source and free, with no subscription required. Users can download the source code, modify it, and contribute fixes. Thomas describes himself as a software industry veteran with 15 years of experience, including roughly a decade working with Rust. He also insists the project has team support and will not be abandoned after launch.

"We're going to reach 100% parity within a month," he said, which is an ambitious claim.

For now, the software remains at an early stage, and commenters have reported problems with basic functionality. They might look like Adobe's apps, but it doesn't sound like they're able to replace the long-established programs just yet.

Thomas says Adobe's cancelation fees helped motivate the project, which is understandable.

Thomas believes other developers will follow suit, predicting a future where free, near-identical open-source versions of popular paid apps will be widely available.

"Now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you," Thomas wrote. "We'll replace Google Search, we'll build our own smartphones, we'll build better infra. We'll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world."

"Software is over," he declared, somewhat boldly. And hopefully cancellation fees.

Submission + - Margret Hamilton, Director Working on the Apollo Guidence Computer, Passes Away

Submitted by BrendaEM
BrendaEM writes: From Wikipedia: Margaret Hamilton (née Heafield; August 17, 1936 – September 30, 2026) was an American computer scientist. She directed the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, where she led the development of the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer for the Apollo program. She later founded two software companies, Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fscienc...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

Submission + - Canonical facing Distributed Denial of Service Attack against its web infrastruc (phoronix.com)

Submitted by devphaeton
devphaeton writes: Unfortunately, Ubuntu is once again facing a distributed denial of service "DDoS" attack against its web infrastructure. This isn't the first time they have experienced this issue and Canonical's IT team is currently working to mitigate the attack.

Those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources today are finding the site inoperable amid what's now confirmed as an ongoing distributed denial of service attack.

Submission + - Microsoft îs temporarily barred from using H1-B Visas (apnews.com)

Submitted by Smonster
Smonster writes: "Mr. Vance said on Thursday that companies like Microsoft have used the H-1B visa program to exploit the Labor Department’s permanent labor certification program, which allows H-1B visa recipients to obtain a green card and potentially stay in the United States indefinitely. He said the system was effectively enabling companies to hire “indentured servants” to replace American workers for a fraction of the cost."

Mr. Vance said that in the last year, the company had laid off 6,000 American workers, while it benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards.

Anthony D’Esposito, the inspector general of the Labor Department, also announced that the agency was launching investigations into several universities for potential abuses of the J-1 visa, a cultural exchange program that allows foreign students to work and study in the United States. Among the nine schools are Harvard, Stanford, Arizona State and M.I.T.

Submission + - Audacious space heist aims to bring home bits of mysterious martian moon (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In 1543, Portuguese merchants caught in stormy winds ran aground on Tanegashima, a verdant island enveloped by crystal-blue waters just south of the Japanese mainland. To those living there, these sailors—the first Europeans known to set foot in Japan—were nothing short of aliens from a distant land, bringing with them strange customs, an unfamiliar language, and new technology.

Nearly 5 centuries later, the island is once again serving as a bridge to an alien world. On 20 October, a rocket will blast off from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA’s) Tanegashima Space Center, flinging a spacecraft the size of a car to Mars. When it arrives, it’ll swoop around the planet before landing on a lumpy island floating above it. And that’s when the real drama begins.

We live in an age of space heists. In recent years, the United States and Japan have retrieved material from several asteroids with smash-and-grab spacecraft. After reaching an asteroid this summer, China is set to return samples from it next year, and it recently conducted the first sample return from the far side of the Moon.

But Japan’s $350 million Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is going to do something even more audacious: Fly to Phobos (ancient Greek for “fear”), one of the two small, battered moons of Mars, and land on the roughly Manhattan-size body not once, but twice. Using two novel extractors, MMX will gather several tablespoons’ worth of material and return the treasure to Earth in 2031. “Phobos will be the second best known moon in the Solar System,” says Matija Cúk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute.

Those precious few grams of material could resolve the mystery of Phobos’s origin—and, potentially, that of its diminutive partner, Deimos (“dread”). Scientists are split on whether the moons are captured asteroids or the consolidated remnants of material thrown up by a long-ago martian impact. But regardless of their genesis, MMX researchers say it’s likely they have since picked up a dusting of material blasted off Mars itself. “This is not going to be just a Phobos sample return mission,” says Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built one of MMX’s sample extractors. “It’s going to be Phobos and Mars.”

Submission + - AI slop or the future of development: Adobe Apps "re-implemented" in Rust (github.com) 2

Submitted by jbarr
jbarr writes: Looks like a team has used Claude Opus 5.5 to vibe-code "re-implementations" of several Adobe applications, including...

Photoshop > PhotoCraft
Acrobat > PrintCraft
Premier > FilmCraft
After Effects > EffectsCraft
Lightroom > LightCraft
Illustrator > VectorCraft
InDesign > DesignCraft

They released standalone versions for many platforms as well as web-hosted versions. They install and load extremely fast, and are surprisingly small. Since they have been out for only a few days, they are not 100% feature-complete, but the update rate has been fast.

Some say they will be sued quickly, but allegedly, the developers used Claude to recreate these apps without decompiling or reverse engineering, so that could be an interesting legal challenge to follow.

Submission + - Why can't I use normally the app I created for myself using the Antigravity?

Submitted by Max_W
Max_W writes: I created for myself an app, which I use for my daily work. I do not want neither publish, nor sell this app. I used the Antigravity agent, and it took me about twenty minutes to build this app.
It works perfectly, doing exactly what I need. I could not find anything even remotely so good for years. Still I have to use it on my smartphone in the Developer Mode. And I do not want to keep my smartphone in Developer Mode constantly as it is not safe.
My question is the following. Now when we can easily build an app for ourselves, for our specific needs, with the help of an AI agent, can we expect to have a possibility to use it on our own smartphone normally without going through Apple Store or Play Store hoops?

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