Adafruit: From Ultimate Driving Machine to Ultimate Rent-Seeking Machine: The BMW Logo Screw Patent.

If you haven’t already heard, BMW’s R&D teams have been busy “innovating.” Unfortunately, they aren’t focusing on the things that actually matter—like stellar engine performance or the legendary driving dynamics that gearheads love. Instead, the C-suite execs decided that the best use of their engineering budget was to design a proprietary security screw specifically intended to prevent BMW drivers from fixing their own cars.

Archive.today.

Anthropic’s artificial-intelligence tool Claude was used in the U.S. military’s operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, highlighting how AI models are gaining traction in the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter.

Dr. Mehmet Oz is pitching a controversial fix for America's rural health care crisis: artificial intelligence.

"There's no question about it — whether you want it or not — the best way to help some of these communities is gonna be AI-based avatars," Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said recently at an event focused on addiction and mental health hosted by Action for Progress, a coalition aimed at improving behavioral health care. He said AI could multiply the reach of doctors fivefold — or more — without burning them out.

The AI proposal is part of the Trump administration's $50 billion plan to modernize health care in rural communities. That includes deploying tools such as digital avatars to conduct basic medical interviews, robotic systems for remote diagnostics, and drones to deliver medication where pharmacies don't exist.

Stable Video Infinity: Infinite-Length Video Generation with Error Recycling.

Today, anyone can create realistic images in just a few clicks with the help of AI. Generating videos, however, is a much more complicated task. Existing AI models are only capable of producing videos that work for less than 30 seconds before degrading into randomness with incoherent shapes, colors and logic. The problem is called drift, and computer scientists have been working on it for years.

At EPFL, researchers at the Visual Intelligence for Transportation (VITA) Laboratory have taken a novel approach – working with the errors instead of circumventing or ignoring them – and developed a video-generation method that essentially eliminates drift. Their method is based on recycling errors back into the AI model so that it learns from its own mistakes.

Microsite.

After a sharp decline from 2021 to 2023, direct emissions from chip production are rising again. Could artificial intelligence be driving the increase? This brief explores one likely factor: surging demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Vertically stacking more memory layers requires more frequent etching and cleaning, which results in higher fluorinated gas use. We unpack the technology behind HBM, the market forces shaping demand, and the varying emission trends among leading memory chip manufacturers.

• Keystone-SDA;
• Bloomberg.

Switzerland is to hold a landmark vote on a right-wing party’s proposal to restrict the nation’s population to 10 million, amid divisions over immigration.

The proposal, put forward by the country’s largest political grouping the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), would require the government to act before the population – currently at 9.1 million – rises to the proposed 10 million upper limit.

If the vote, due to be held on June 14, is passed, the government would have to refuse entry to newcomers including asylum seekers and the families of foreign residents once the population reaches 9.5 million.

If the population hits 10 million, the government would be forced to end its free-movement agreement with the European Union (EU), which is Switzerland’s largest trading partner.

The UK, Sweden, France, Germany and The Netherlands are confident that Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a lethal toxin.

This is the conclusion of our Governments based on analyses of samples from Alexei Navalny. These analyses have conclusively confirmed the presence of epibatidine.

Epibatidine is a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America. It is not found naturally in Russia.

In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, dating apps typically see a spike in new users and activity. More profiles are created, more messages sent, more swipes logged.

Dating platforms market themselves as modern technological solutions to loneliness, right at your fingertips. And yet, for many people, the day meant to celebrate romantic connection feels lonelier than ever.

This, rather than a personal failure or the reality of modern romance, is the outcome of how dating apps are designed and of the economic logic that governs them.

These digital tools aren’t simply interfaces that facilitate connection. The ease and expansiveness of online dating have commodified social bonds, eroded meaningful interactions and created a type of dating throw-away culture, encouraging a sense of disposability and distorting decision-making.

Hacker News.

Author blog about that.

AI generated quotes in a story about AI clanker writing a blog post about a human developer because they didn't accept their code contributions.

How deep can someone go here.