Tech news, summarized and translated.
Inception Labs releases Mercury 2.5, a diffusion-based LLM boasting 40% quality gains over Mercury 2, 1,107 tokens/sec throughput, and pricing that undercuts mainstream models. The update targets latency-critical workloads like voice agents and coding subagents.
Gamers Nexus and security researchers found LG OLEDs continuously upload data about nearby devices, record microphone audio in standby, and use ACR to identify what you watch — even when the TV is offline.
Cloudflare's Automatic Key Exchange uses origin scanning to pick the right TLS key agreement algorithm on the first try, cutting HelloRetryRequests from 52% to 3.7% and enabling automatic post-quantum connections for hundreds of thousands of domains.
Brown University researchers trained a robot to hand-write Japanese characters, then watched it generalize to Hindi, Greek, English, and even a Mona Lisa sketch—without retraining. The key: separating local stroke control from global pen movement.
Weird Gloop reports that Google's March 2024 core update has effectively jailed new domains, preventing all but the main page from appearing in search results—a catastrophic blow for independent wikis moving off Fandom.
Jellyfin 12.0 rewrites playlist storage for speed, adds episode alternate versions, and moves book/comic support into the server core. Major version bump means a required migration and full rescan.
Mistral's €3B Series D at a €21B valuation is a bet that enterprises and governments want frontier AI without vendor lock-in. The question is whether open-weight can keep pace with closed models.
The Library of Congress has released 11,710 color slides by photographer John Margolies, documenting America's vernacular roadside architecture—from whale-shaped car washes to giant buffalo statues—into the public domain.
The authors of the seminal Dataflow Model paper revisit their work after winning a Test of Time award, grading what aged well, what aged badly, and what they missed—concluding that streaming's future lies in SQL and materialized views, not triggers.
MartyPC's author decodes the NEC V20's microcode from 5.6-gigapixel die photography, using a convolutional neural network to classify 29,928 ROM bits—a milestone for cycle-accurate emulation of the V20 CPU.
One year after EU repairability rules took effect, over 80% of new smartphones still lack required repair information. Manufacturers self-report top scores while leaving fields blank or linking to Temu. Enforcement is nonexistent.
Switzerland's federal government is piloting open-source alternatives to Microsoft 365 across 3,000 workstations, targeting completion by end of 2027. The move follows a successful proof-of-concept and a new digital sovereignty law.