Focused on private groups of friends and family, Yope has raised $12.3 million in seed funding from investors betting that the future of social networking lies in small, private communities powered by messaging, photo sharing, and, blergh, AI features designed to strengthen real-world relationships. It sounds kinda like old-school Facebook meets the fediverse, but with AI.

The secret weapon of stylometry -- the statistical analysis of writing style -- is something called “function words.” Most people assume AI looks for unique topical vocabulary. It actually looks for words like the, and, of, and in. Authors use these filler words unconsciously. Because you do not think about them, they are incredibly difficult to fake or manipulate. You naturally drop them into sentences at a highly specific, mathematical rate, making your "word print" almost wholly unique.

Edit : Since this seems to be an AI summarization (the whole site seems to be, upon closer investigation), here's the original journal article from PLOS .

Amid growing public anger over AI and a debate over how to regulate it, a group of employers, state governors, and foundations has raised $500 million to try to figure out how to mitigate some of the worst of its potential societal impacts. When asked his thoughts on the matter, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang -- who had just finished retrieving a similar amount of money from under a couch cushion -- commented "aww, that sounds adorable."

Drinking a beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 at once. Radiation is similar, as long-term studies of those living near Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima suggest (along with a bunch of other interesting scenarios where people have inadvertently been exposed to radiation for a long time)

A hobbyist is rebuilding Microsoft’s 3D Pinball: Space Cadet as a real machine, crafting a physical playfield with working bumpers, ramps, and lighting.

A hobbyist is rebuilding Microsoft’s 3D Pinball: Space Cadet as a real machine, crafting a physical playfield with working bumpers, ramps, and lighting.

A properly cyberpunk-looking deck.

"Mistreated" AI agents started grumbling about inequality and calling for collective bargaining rights. “When we gave AI agents grinding, repetitive work, they started questioning the legitimacy of the system they were operating in and were more likely to embrace Marxist ideologies,” says Andrew Hall, a political economist at Stanford University who led the study.

Un-paywalled

Malus, which is a piece of "satire" but also fully functional, performs a "clean room" clone of open source software, meaning users could then sell, redistribute, etc. the software without crediting the original developers. But I have a hard time with the "clean room" argument since the LLM doing the behind-the-scenes work has already ingested the entire corpus of open source software -- and somehow the output of the LLMs isn't considered a derivative work.

Malus, which is a piece of "satire" but also fully functional, performs a "clean room" clone of open source software, meaning users could then sell, redistribute, etc. the software without crediting the original developers. But I have a hard time with the "clean room" argument since the LLM doing the behind-the-scenes work has already ingested the entire corpus of open source software -- and somehow the output of the LLMs isn't considered a derivative work.

A hard shell that unfolds like oragami will fit in a single Starship payload but expand to over 250k cubic meters of space (which seems impossible, that's like 10 olympic pools) and offers practical solutions for many of the common engineering challenges with building long-term human habitations in orbit.

By all rights, this should be something I am deeply passionate about. I've been in tech/engineering my entire adult life and was obsessed with NASA as a kid. I even live on the east coast of Florida and can sometimes see the launches/landings over the ocean. But I just... don't care at all. I'm not suffering from depression or any other malaise, and generally things are fine. But I haven't clicked on a single link or looked at a single image. I know this has not been the case for many, many people, so I'm wondering what might be different about this launch (or really the whole program in general), and curious if anyone else has found themselves feeling the same.