Technology

We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

I, however, believe the problem runs a little deeper than the economy, which is a symptom of a bigger, virulent, and treatment-resistant plague that has infected the minds of those currently twigging at the levers of power — and really, the only levers that actually matter.

The incentives behind effectively everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company — an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money —has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, focusing heavily on short-term gains and growth at all costs. In doing so, the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.

This is the Rot Economy, which is a useful description for how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products in order to placate shareholders, transforming useful — and sometimes beloved — services into a hollow shell of their former selves as a means of expressing growth. But it’s worth noting that this transformation isn’t constrained to the tech industry, nor was it a phenomena that occurred when the tech industry entered its current VC-fuelled, publicly-traded incarnation.

HTML Paper

Discord has evolved from a gaming-focused communication tool into a versatile platform supporting diverse online communities. Despite its large user base and active public servers, academic research on Discord remains limited due to data accessibility challenges. This paper introduces Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024), the most extensive Discord public server's data to date. The dataset comprises over 2.05 billion messages from 4.74 million users across 3,167 public servers, representing approximately 10% of servers listed in Discord's Discovery feature. Spanning from Discord's launch in 2015 to the end of 2024, it offers a robust temporal and thematic framework for analyzing decentralized moderation, community governance, information dissemination, and social dynamics. Data was collected through Discord's public API, adhering to ethical guidelines and privacy standards via anonymization techniques. Organized into structured JSON files, the dataset facilitates seamless integration with computational social science methodologies. Preliminary analyses reveal significant trends in user engagement, bot utilization, and linguistic diversity, with English predominating alongside substantial representations of Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Additionally, prevalent community themes such as social, art, music, and memes highlight Discord's expansion beyond its gaming origins.

Hacker News Discussion

Epic Games' popular multiplayer shooter game "Fortnite" is available again on Apple's App Store in the US, capping a ban of nearly five years and marking a major win for the video game company.

Today we’re announcing SynthID Detector, a verification portal to quickly and efficiently identify AI-generated content made with Google AI. The portal provides detection capabilities across different modalities in one place and provides essential transparency in the rapidly evolving landscape of generative media. It can also highlight which parts of the content are more likely to have been watermarked with SynthID.

When we launched SynthID — a state-of-the-art tool that embeds imperceptible watermarks and enables the identification of AI-generated content — our aim was to provide a suite of novel technical solutions to help minimise misinformation and misattribution.

SynthID not only preserves the content’s quality, it acts as a robust watermark that remains detectable even when the content is shared or undergoes a range of transformations. While originally focused on AI-generated imagery only, we’ve since expanded SynthID to cover AI-generated text, audio and video content, including content generated by our Gemini, Imagen, Lyria and Veo models across Google. Over 10 billion pieces of content have already been watermarked with SynthID.

It is unclear whether the Best Summer Reading of 2025 list was a "paid insert" or published as branded content, but the Chicago Sun-Times is taking the heat for unedited AI slop regardless.

Of the books named on this reading list, Brit Bennet, Isabel Allende, Andy Weir, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Min Jin Lee, Rumaan Alam, Rebecca Makkai, Maggie O'Farrell, Percival Everett, and Delia Owens' titles are all books that DO NOT EXIST!!!

• Source.
• Company response.

The ZEUS laser facility at the University of Michigan has roughly doubled the peak power of any other laser in the U.S. with its first official experiment at 2 petawatts (2 quadrillion watts).

At more than 100 times the global electricity power output, this huge power lasts only for the brief duration of its laser pulse—just 25 quintillionths of a second long.

• Adobe has announced pricing changes to its Creative Cloud subscriptions that will take effect from the middle of next month.
• It cited “continued innovation” as a reason to overhaul the pricing for its creative software suite.
• The changes only affect users in the US, Canada, and Mexico for now.

Google is testing removing the site names from the search result snippets and just showing the site's URL at the top - title link - position of the snippet.

Karlena Hamblin was sitting on a stool in her Brownsville, Brooklyn apartment waiting for the Administration for Children’s Services to knock on her door for a weekly check-in. She’d just fed her infant daughter, who she held cradled in her arms.

ACS, which is responsible for investigating child welfare in New York City, had been watching her and her family since she was three months pregnant, when the agency held a pre-birth conference to talk over her family’s future. “The baby’s not even here yet and you’re already talking about removing her?” she said. “I didn’t even know what I was having yet.” She sobbed at night from fear.

Now, investigators check her daughter for signs of abuse or neglect, and could report anything they learn to a family court judge. Hanging over every visit is the chance that a misstep leads to her losing her daughter, who’s now just a few months old, to the foster care system.

“I’m always worried,” Hamblin said. “I get more anxious around any court date, and even though I tell myself, ‘No, I’m not doing nothing wrong, I don’t have nothing to hide,’ it’s like I’m programmed to be scared because I’ve been afraid since day one.”

Hamblin has a good idea why she’s under surveillance. She grew up in foster care. Shortly after aging out, she got pregnant and later, she says, developed symptoms of postpartum depression. She checked herself into the psych ward while her sister cared for her infant son. She lost him to foster care in 2017.

• Huawei is no longer running Windows OS on its latest laptops, as the company has opted instead for its home-grown system.
• HarmonyOS 5 will be running on brand new MateBook Pro and MateBook Fold models.
• The PC-version of the OS looks strikingly similar to Windows, at least in official promotional images.

• Young Indonesians applying for tech jobs via Facebook and Telegram are trafficked to scam farms.
• Scammers use deepfakes, voice clones, and other technologies to dupe victims around the world.
• Americans alone lost $12.5 billion last year, mostly to investment scams.

I post this here because I think there is a interesting discussion out of this, what do you people think about this?

In the summer of 2020, two issues dominated the headlines: the COVID pandemic and the widespread unrest surrounding George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and the “racial reckoning.” It was in this environment, with the country also at or near the apex of “cancel culture,” that the University of Central Florida tried to fire associate professor of psychology Charles Negy for his tweets about race and society. Negy fought back and sued.

Five years later, his lawsuit continues — and last week, it brought good news not just for Professor Negy but for everyone who cares about free speech on campus.

Last week, Judge Carlos E. Mendoza of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida ruled that Negy’s lawsuit could proceed against four of the five administrators he sued. Importantly, the court denied claims of qualified immunity, a doctrine that says public officials aren’t liable for unconstitutional activity unless they knew or should have known their actions were unconstitutional. By denying qualified immunity to UCF’s administrators, Judge Mendoza formally recognized what was obvious from the very beginning: UCF knew or should have known that what it was doing violated the First Amendment, but they went ahead and did it anyway.

Let’s set the stage. Picture a semi-governmental company. Around $130 million in annual revenue. They build and operate very expensive things — in space. Hundreds of physical hosts. Nearly 4,000 VMs. Most of their IT stack, in fact, runs on our platform.

Are they paying customers?

No.

Are they using the fully open-source version, from source?

Also no.

Instead, they discovered our Xen Orchestra Appliance (XOA): a turnkey virtual machine, with Xen Orchestra pre-installed, regularly tested, easy to deploy and update (and yes, still running fully on-prem). A supported and stable experience, designed for teams that don’t want to git pull on master branch in production.

But they didn’t want to pay for it. So they came up with a creative workaround: abusing our 30-day trial (initially 15 days until recently), over and over again.

It all started back in April 2015 — yes, a full decade ago. At first, they used their corporate emails to request trials. One here, one there. Nothing suspicious. But over the years, the pattern grew. More emails. More trials. Enough that, when we looked back, we realized we could chart it. Literally. Here's what the "creative licensing strategy" has looked like over time:

As you can imagine, we ended up with what looked like the entire staff directory. Developers, sysadmins, managers… pretty sure we even had the janitor signed up for a trial at some point.

When those ran out, they switched to personal Outlook or Gmail addresses. Every time: starting with a new (real!) person with their… personal email, a new 30-day trial. And then go incrementally with it. johndoe01@outlook.com, then johndoe02@outlook.com… We're now well past johndoe60. Same company name, every time… which is impressive considering the field isn’t even required in order to register your account. Hard to say if it was a mistake, a flex, or just their way of making sure we didn’t miss who was milking the trials.

Yes, they’re that committed. Committed to not paying.