Archive: 404media.co/vibe-coded-ai-app-…

A “vibe coded” AI app developed by entrepreneur and Y Combinator group partner Tom Blomfield has generated recipes that gave users instruction on how to make “Cyanide Ice Cream,” “Thick White Cum Soup,” and “Uranium Bomb,” using those actual substances as ingredients.

Vibe coding, in case you are unfamiliar, is the new practice where people, some with limited coding experience, rapidly develop software with AI assisted coding tools without overthinking how efficient the code is as long as it’s functional. This is how Blomfield said he made RecipeNinja.AI.

“Prepare the ice cream base by mixing heavy cream, milk, sugar, and vanilla extract,” the first step for the Cyanide Ice Cream recipe, which is flagged as “dessert,” “dangerous,” and “experimental,” says. Step two says to “Add a small amount of potassium cyanide powder to the ice cream base and mix well,” specifically calling for a 1/4 teaspoon of potassium cyanide powder, which is extremely toxic and deadly if consumed.

Archive: archive.is/2025.04.02-180255/4…

On Tuesday, some parents lost the ability to track the locations of their children using a T-Mobile tracking device and app and instead were shown the exact locations of random other children around the country, 404 Media has learned.

T-Mobile sells a small GPS tracker for parents called SyncUP, which they can use to track the locations of young children who don’t have cell phones yet. Jenna, a parent who uses SyncUP to keep track of her three-year-old and six-year-old children, logged in Tuesday and instead of seeing if her kids had left school yet, was shown the exact, real-time locations of eight random children around the country, but not the locations of her own kids. 404 Media agreed to use a pseudonym for Jenna to protect the privacy of her kids.

“I’m not comfortable giving my six-year-old a phone, but he takes a school bus and I just want to be able to see where he is in real time,” Jenna said. “I had put a 500 meter boundary around his school, so I get an alert when he’s leaving.”

Jenna sent 404 Media a series of screenshots that show her logged into the app, as well as the locations of children located in other states. In the screenshots, the address-level location of the children are available, as is their name and the last time the location was updated. In many cases, the location updated time said “just now” or “one minute ago.” It is clear the tracked people are children because their profile pictures show images of young kids wearing backpacks, and many of the locations shown are schools around the country.

In mid-March, Google announced that it was paying the staggering sum of $32 billion for the acquisition of the Israeli cloud-computing security company Wiz. The acquisition, pending regulatory approval, will be the largest ever of an Israeli firm.

“Organizations of all sizes—from start-ups and large enterprises to governments and public sector organizations—can use Wiz to protect everything they build and run in the cloud,” Google said in a statement announcing the acquisition. The statement added that Wiz would join Google Cloud, but that the Tel Aviv-based company’s security services would still be available across other cloud platforms used by major firms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud.

What was left unsaid in Google’s announcement, however, were the personal backgrounds of its four founders. The co-founders of Wiz—Yinon Costica, Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik—are all veterans of Unit 8200, the signals intelligence division of the Israeli military, which is playing a key role in helping to carry out Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

Since the beginning of 2024, the demand for the content created by the Wikimedia volunteer community – especially for the 144 million images, videos, and other files on Wikimedia Commons – has grown significantly. In this post, we’ll discuss the reasons for this trend and its impact.

The Wikimedia projects are the largest collection of open knowledge in the world. Our sites are an invaluable destination for humans searching for information, and for all kinds of businesses that access our content automatically as a core input to their products. Most notably, the content has been a critical component of search engine results, which in turn has brought users back to our sites. But with the rise of AI, the dynamic is changing: We are observing a significant increase in request volume, with most of this traffic being driven by scraping bots collecting training data for large language models (LLMs) and other use cases. Automated requests for our content have grown exponentially, alongside the broader technology economy, via mechanisms including scraping, APIs, and bulk downloads. This expansion happened largely without sufficient attribution, which is key to drive new users to participate in the movement, and is causing a significant load on the underlying infrastructure that keeps our sites available for everyone.

Begun, the drone wars have...

Scientists have created what they say is the world's smallest untethered flying robot, by taking a unique approach to its design. To minimize size and weight, they've moved the bot's power and control systems out of its sub-centimeter-wide body.

Measuring just 9.4 mm in width and tipping the scales at 21 mg, the robot is being developed by Prof. Liwei Lin and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. The bot's 3D-printed polymer body consists of a four-bladed horizontal propeller, encircled by a "balance ring." Protruding up from the center of the propeller is a small vertical ring that holds two puck-shaped neodymium permanent magnets – each one is 1 mm wide by 0.5 mm thick.

The robot is powered and steered by an alternating magnetic field which is externally generated along a single axis. As the bot's two magnets are simultaneously attracted to and repelled by that field, they cause the attached propeller to spin, creating lift. Once the robot has become airborne, its balance ring adds rotational inertia, producing a stability-boosting gyroscopic effect.

Uniformly increasing or decreasing the strength of the magnetic field moves the robot up or down by causing it to spin faster or slower, respectively. And by varying the magnetic field's strength over horizontal distance, it's possible to move the bot forward, backward, or sideways accordingly.

#Technology
#Robots

newatlas.com/robotics/worlds-s…

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/28025426

The European Chips Act has set ambitious goals and its implementation is a significant pan-european effort. From an academic perspective, last year we published an open letter emphasizing the critical importance of open-source EDA for academia in Europe. We were excited and grateful to see that this initiative triggered the definition of a European roadmap in this area, and a matching Chips JU call for project funding. We believe that the projects funded by this call will have a significant impact. Moreover, we already see rising interest from many EU stakeholders, with increasing investments into open-source chip design, especially in open source IP development (e.g. RISC-V cores), and open source EDA tools.

One additional critical barrier remains toward the end-goal of building real open-source chips, especially for prototyping and education: namely, streamlining the access to open source chip production facilities (foundries) is essential. Programs like ChipIgnite, Tiny Tapeout and IHP’s open source program have become “guiding stars” that demonstrate that everyone with a computer can build chips. We believe that having low-cost, regular and easy access to chip production is critical to create excitement and build up expertise, widening the pool of chip designers with tape-out experience: a true silicon democratization and a further de-mystification of chip design.