An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has edited Gemini's AI response in a Super Bowl commercial to remove an incorrect statistic about cheese. The ad, which shows a small business owner using Gemini to write a website description about Gouda, no longer says the variety makes up "50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption."

In the edited YouTube video, Gemini's response now skips over the specifics and says Gouda is "one of the most popular cheeses in the world." Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler initially defended the response, saying on X it's "grounded in the Web" and "not a hallucination."

Tom Blomfield, founder of Monzo, challenges the notion that Americans work harder than Europeans, attributing the U.S.'s economic edge to a culture of "positivity, optimism, and ambition" rather than sheer work ethic. He argues that the "know your place, don't get too big for your boots" mindset stifles innovation, whereas the U.S.' "American Dream" fosters a more dynamic start-up culture, making it easier for entrepreneurs to bounce back from failure. Fortune reports: Blomfield said the American dream wasn't a reality that a lot of people in the U.S. get to live, but it was one that a lot of them experience. "That idea that anyone can create anything if they try hard enough is so deeply American, and it's so antithetical to the British culture," he said. Blomfield was 28 when he co-founded Monzo in 2015. While he said people in the U.K. "looked at me like I was crazy" as he tried to get a banking license, he had a much more supportive reaction in the States. The Brit said his fellow countrymen were more inclined toward a "know your place, don't get too big for your boots" attitude that stifles innovation.

In Blomfield's view, this filters down to the career decisions made by the country's most promising university students. In the U.K., Blomfield says the most ambitious thing for students to do is work at a trading firm like James Street or a consultancy like McKinsey. Indeed, he suggests the default choice for PhD students in computer science is to join Goldman Sachs. In the U.S., meanwhile, Blomfield says he'll often get pitched start-up ideas by students from unexpected backgrounds, including English Literature undergrads. [...]

In April, Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norway's $1.6 trillion sovereign wealth fund, sparked a debate with his comments that there was a difference in the "general level of ambition" between U.S. and European workers, adding that Americans work harder. Blomfield said he had read data suggesting that the latter wasn't the case. But his thoughts do align with another of Tangen's points, namely that it is easier to start again in the U.S. if a business fails than in the U.K. Backed by the "American dream" ideal that Blomfield mentioned in his interview, the U.S. has long been more closely associated with entrepreneurialism and disruption than Britain, and Europe more widely. Since these comments were made last May (reprinted yesterday via Fortune), we'd like to open this up for a "Slashdot Asks" discussion. Do you think the "know your place" mindset Blomfield cited stifles innovation? How does it compare to the mindset in the United States or elsewhere? Any insights or examples to support your point are appreciated and will contribute to a more meaningful discussion.

Warner Bros. Discovery has quietly begun releasing dozens of its older films for free on YouTube, marking an unexpected shift in how the major studio handles its back catalog. Over the past month, the company has uploaded more than 30 full-length movies across five YouTube channels, without digital rights management or regional restrictions.

The collection includes both critically acclaimed films like "Waiting for Guffman" and "Michael Collins," as well as commercial disappointments like the 2002 Eddie Murphy film "The Adventures of Pluto Nash." Some releases have significant historical value, such as "Oh, God!" - a 1977 George Burns comedy that earned $51 million at release (equivalent to $265 million in 2024). This move represents a departure from traditional studio practices of protecting content through strict digital rights management and paid streaming services. Warner Bros. owns multiple distribution channels, including the Max streaming service and Turner Classic Movies, which makes the decision to release these films freely on YouTube particularly notable.

A developer has successfully run the classic video game Doom on Apple's $50 Lightning to HDMI adapter, exploiting the device's built-in system-on-chip that runs a simplified iOS version.

A recent video from retro tech YouTuber Clint "LGR" Basinger takes a deep dive into the history of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium, exploring how former Air Force pilot Jim Sachs transformed a lackluster Windows 95 screensaver into a 25-year digital phenomenon. PC Gamer reports: The story centers on Jim Sachs, a man with one of those "they don't make this type of guy anymore" life stories so common to '80s and '90s computing, one Sachs recounted to the website AmigaLove back in 2020. After a six-year career in the US Air Force flying C-141 Starlifters, Sachs taught himself programming and digital art and began creating games for Commodore 64 and Amiga computers. From his first game, Saucer Attack, to later efforts like Defender of the Crown or his large portfolio of promotional and commissioned pieces, Sach's pixel art remains gorgeous and impressive to this day, and he seems to be a bit of a legend among Commodore enthusiasts.

It's with this background in games and digital art that Sachs looked at Microsoft's simple aquarium-themed screensaver for Windows 95 and 98 and thought he could do better. "Microsoft had an aquarium that they gave away with Windows where it was just bitmaps of fish being dragged across the screen," Sachs told the Matt Chat podcast back in 2015. "And they had that for like, three or four years. And I thought, I've given them enough time, I'm taking them to market. I'm gonna do something which will just blow that away."

Using reference photographs of real aquariums -- Sachs thanked a specific pet shop that's still around in an early version of his website" -- Sachs created the 3D art by hand and programmed the screensaver in C++, releasing the initial version in July 2000. Even looking at it all these years later, the first iteration of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium is pretty gorgeous, and it has the added charm of being such a distinctly Y2K, nostalgic throwback.

The standalone screensaver sold well, but then things came full circle with Microsoft licensing a version of the Marine Aquarium for the Windows XP Plus Pack and later standard releases of the OS. Since that time, the Marine Aquarium has continued to see new releases, and a section on the SereneScreen website keeps track of its various appearances in the background of movies and TV shows like Law and Order. Over on the SereneScreen website, you can purchase a real time, 3D-accelerated version of the Marine Aquarium for Mac, iOS, Android, and the original Windows. Echoing the Windows XP deal, Roku actually licensed this 3.0 version for its TVs, bringing it to a new generation of users.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Video Game History Foundation has officially opened up digital access to a large portion of its massive archives today, offering fans and researchers unprecedented access to information and ephemera surrounding the past 50 years of the game industry. Today's launch of the VGHF Library comprises more than 30,000 indexed and curated files, including high-quality artwork, promotional material, and searchable full-text archives over 1,500 video game magazine issues. This initial dump of digital materials also contains never-before-seen game development and production archival material stored by the VGHF, such as over 100 hours of raw production files from the creation of the Myst series or Sonic the Hedgehog concept art and design files contributed by artist Tom Payne.

In a blog post and accompanying launch video, VGHF head librarian Phil Salvador explains how today's launch is the culmination of a dream the organization has had since its launch in 2017. But it's also just the start of an ongoing process to digitize the VGHF's mountains of unprocessed physical material into a cataloged digital form, so people can access it "without having to fly to California." The VGHF doesn't require any special credentials or even a free account to access its archives, a fact that might be contributing to overloaded servers on this launch day. Despite those server issues, amateur researchers online are already sharing crucial library-derived information about the history of describing games as "immersive" or that one time Garfield ranked games in GamePro, for instance. Unfortunately, digital libraries cannot offer direct, playable access to retail video games due to DMCA restrictions, notes Ars. However, organizations like the VGHF "continue to challenge those copyright rules every three years," raising hope for future access.

The UK is considering making households who only use streaming services such as Netflix and Disney pay the BBC license fee, as part of plans to modernize the way it funds the public-service broadcaster. Bloomberg: Extending the fee to streaming applications is on a menu of options being discussed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer's office, the Treasury and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named discussing internal government deliberations. Alternatives under discussion include allowing the British Broadcasting Corp. to use advertising, imposing a specific tax on streaming services, and asking those who listen to BBC radio to pay a fee.

The government is the early stages of examining how to overhaul the funding of Britain's public broadcaster when its current 11-year charter ends on Dec. 31, 2027. Ministers are looking to either retain and alter the current television license fee model or scrap it and instead fund the BBC through alternative models such as taxation or subscription. That's because viewing habits have changed as users gravitate toward on-demand services. [...] The license fee dates back to 1946, when consumers watched programs at the time of broadcast. It currently costs households who watch live TV or use BBC iPlayer $210.6 a year, an amount that usually rises annually with inflation. Even if they don't watch BBC programs, households are required to hold a TV license to view or stream programs live on sites including YouTube and Amazon Prime Video. However it's not needed by those who only watch on-demand, non-BBC content.

At December's "Microsoft Excel World Championship" in Las Vegas, "finance professionals fluent in spreadsheets were treated like minor celebrities," writes the New York Times, "as they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people, and more watching an ESPN3 livestream."

The Times notes that "many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN's annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess and the World Dog Surfing Championships." But the contest's organizer envisions tournaments with "more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize" — even though this year's prize was $5,000 and a pro wrestling-style championship belt. The format for the finals was a mock-up of World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game. It required the 12 men (this particular nerdfest was mostly a guy thing) to design Excel formulas for tracking 20 avatars and their vital signs... To prepare, [competitor Diarmuid] Early adjusted the width of his Excel columns with the precision of a point guard lining up a 3-point shot. [Andrew] Ngai queued up a YouTube compilation of "focus music". After an announcer kicked off the 40-minute event — "Five, four, three, two, one, and Excel!" — the 12 players leaned over their keyboards and began plugging in formulas. One example: "=CountChar (Lower (D5),"W")" allowed one competitor, Michael Jarman, to figure out how many times the letter "W" appeared in a spreadsheet.
ZDNet points out that there's a seven-hour livestream of the event that's "worth checking out for the opening theme song alone."

The New York Times closes their article with a quote from super-fan Erik Oehm, a software developer from San Francisco who called the event "the Super Bowl for Excel nerds". Oehm watched excitedly from the front row as this year's winner — Michael Jarman — finally raised the championship belt overhead while someone dumped glitter on him. And then he said...

"You'd never see this with Google Sheets. You'd never get this level of passion."

Slashdot reader jenningsthecat writes: 3D printer manufacturer Bambu Labs has faced a storm of controversy and protest after releasing a security update which many users claim is the first step in moving towards an HP-style subscription model.
Bambu Labs responded that there's misinformation circulating online, adding "we acknowledge that our communication might have contributed to the confusion." Bambu Labs spokesperson Nadia Yaakoubi did "damage control", answering questions from the Verge: Q: Will Bambu publicly commit to never requiring a subscription in order to control its printers and print from them over a home network?

A: For our current product line, yes. We will never require a subscription to control or print from our printers over a home network...

Q: Will Bambu publicly commit to never putting any existing printer functionality behind a subscription?

Yes...
Bambu's site adds that the security update "is beta testing, not a forced update. The choice is yours. You can participate in the beta program to help us refine these features, or continue using your current firmware."

Hackaday notes another wrinkle: This follows the original announcement which had the 3D printer community up in arms, and quickly saw the new tool that's supposed to provide safe and secure communications with Bambu Lab printers ripped apart to extract the security certificate and private key... As the flaming wreck that's Bambu Lab's PR efforts keeps hurtling down the highway of public opinion, we'd be remiss to not point out that with the security certificate and private key being easily obtainable from the Bambu Connect Electron app, there is absolutely no point to any of what Bambu Lab is doing.
The Verge asked Bambu Labs about that too: Q: Does the private key leaking change any of your plans?

No, this doesn't change our plans, and we've taken immediate action.
Bambu Labs had said their security update would "ensure only authorized access and operations are permitted," remembers Ars Technica. "This would, Bambu suggested, mitigate risks of 'remote hacks or printer exposure issues' and lower the risk of 'abnormal traffic or attacks.'" This was necessary, Bambu wrote, because of increases in requests made to its cloud services "through unofficial channels," targeted DDOS attacks, and "peaks of up to 30 million unauthorized requests per day" (link added by Bambu).
But Ars Technica also found some skepticism online: Repair advocate Louis Rossmann, noting Bambu's altered original blog post, uploaded a video soon after, "Bambu's Gaslighting Masterclass: Denying their own documented restrictions"... suggesting that the company was asking buyers to trust that Bambu wouldn't enact restrictive policies it otherwise wrote into its user agreements.
And Ars Technica also cites another skeptical response from a video posted by open source hardware hacker and YouTube creator Jeff Geerling: "Every IoT device has these problems, and there are better ways to secure things than by locking out access, or making it harder to access, or requiring their cloud to be integrated."

Consumer spending on apps is projected to reach $150 billion globally in 2024, up 13% from the prior year. According to Sensor Tower's annual "State of Mobile" report, it's being fueled by a 200% surge in spending on generative AI apps like ChatGPT and Gemini, which collectively drew $1.1 billion. TechCrunch reports: If this rate of growth is sustained, this category of apps could move into the top 10 by consumer spending within a year, the firm notes. Though the release of new AI models, like OpenAI's GPT-4o last summer, helped drive app revenue up to record numbers at times, consumer demand for AI apps was consistent throughout the year -- not only during these peak surges. As a result, consumers spent nearly 7.7 billion hours using AI apps in 2024, while apps mentioning "AI" were also downloaded 17 billion times in the year.

ChatGPT alone reached 50 million monthly active users -- faster than Temu, Disney+, or YouTube Music, for comparison. This indicates there's still a growing appetite for AI apps and those with AI features.

At Galaxy Unpacked today in San Jose, California, Samsung unveiled the new Galaxy S25 series of flagship smartphones loaded with AI capabilities and LLMs. "Currently, the Galaxy S25 range is comprised of the Galaxy S25 ($800), Galaxy S25+ ($1,000), and Galaxy S25 Ultra ($1,300)," reports Wired. "The phones are available for preorder today and will officially go on sale February 7." Since the hardware is relatively unchanged from last year's Galaxy S24 series, here's what Wired has to say about the new AI smarts: The Galaxy S25 is a tale of two AIs: Gemini and Bixby. Yes, while Google's Gemini AI assistant sits at the forefront -- it can finally be triggered through a long press of the power button-- Samsung is bringing its original Bixby voice assistant out from the shadows. Bixby has been enhanced with large language models but is still designed to handle phone functions, like changing device settings. Gemini is meant to be used for general web queries and more complex actions. You can even have two hot words, one for each assistant. I foresee all of this being confusing [...].

The highlight AI feature debuting on the Galaxy S25 series is "cross-app experiences." These are tasks you can ask Gemini to perform, even if the task requires multiple apps. For example, you can ask for the schedule of this season's Arsenal matches and then add it to your calendar; Gemini will then search and add every Arsenal FC game in the season to your schedule. Or you can ask it to find pet-friendly vegan restaurants nearby and text the list to a friend. It even works with images too -- snap a pic of your fridge and ask Gemini to find you a recipe based on the available ingredients. These cross-app experiences work with Google apps, Samsung's Galaxy apps, and select third-party apps, like WhatsApp and Spotify.

All these AI features have culminated in a new app: Now Brief. Samsung calls this proactive assistance (remember Google's Now on Tap?) where a morning brief arrives with the weather, upcoming calendar events, stock details, news articles, and suggestions to trigger routines. There's also an evening brief with a summary of the day's events with photos. Since the feature can plug into email, it'll send reminders about expiring coupons and upcoming travel tickets. Samsung claims it can even suggest changing an 8:45 am alarm even earlier if it sees a 9 am meeting on the schedule. On the lock screen, a "Now Bar" widget persists at the bottom, much like Apple's Live Activities. It'll offer quick access to the Now Brief app, but it will also show updates for favorite sports teams, along with glanceable directions from Google Maps.

The rest of the AI features are playing a bit of catch-up to Apple and Google's Pixel phones. There's Drawing Assist, a generative AI tool to craft new images in different art styles based on sketches or text prompts. AI Select works with the S Pen stylus on the S25 Ultra and understands what is selected -- for example, if a video is selected, it will suggest turning it into a GIF. Audio Eraser is an editing tool to cut out background noise in videos post-capture, canceling out the sound of a crowd's chatter or an ambulance's siren. Finally, Samsung's Generative Edit feature, which lets you erase unwanted objects in images, now works locally on the device and is much more accurate and faster. A full list of specs can be found here. You can watch a recording of the event on YouTube.

YouTube Premium subscribers can now stream music videos at 256kbps bitrate audio quality, matching the high-fidelity standard previously exclusive to YouTube Music, the video platform said.

The audio upgrade comes as part of an expanded experimental features program that allows Premium users to test multiple new features simultaneously, departing from its previous single-experiment limitation, the company said.

An anonymous reader quotes an op-ed from 404 Media's Jason Koebler: If it wasn't already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction. [...] Mastodon's ActivityPub and Bluesky's AT.Protocol have provided the base technology layer to make this possible, and have laid important groundwork over the last few years to decorporatize and decentralize the social internet.

The problem with decentralized social media platforms thus far is that their user base is minuscule compared to platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, meaning the cultural and political influence has lagged behind them. You also cannot directly monetize an audience on Bluesky or Mastodon -- which, to be clear, is a feature, not a bug -- but also means that the value proposition for an influencer who makes money through the TikTok creator program or a small business that makes money selling chewing gum on TikTok shop or a clothes brand that has figured out how to arbitrage Instagram ads to sell flannel shirts is not exactly clear. I am not advocating for decentralized social media to implement ads and creator payment programs. I'm just saying that many TikTok influencers were directing their collective hundreds of millions of fans to follow them to Instagram or YouTube, not a decentralized alternative.

This doesn't mean that the fediverse or that a decentralized Instagram or TikTok competitor that runs on the AT.Protocol is doomed. But there is a lot of work to do. There is development work that needs to be done (and is being done) to make decentralized protocols easier to join and use and more interoperable with each other. And there is a massive education and recruitment challenge required to get the masses to not just try out decentralized platforms but to earnestly use them. Bluesky's growing user base and rise as a legitimately impressive platform that one can post to without feeling like it's going into the void is a massive step forward, and proof that it is possible to build thriving alternative platforms. The fact that Meta recently blocked links to a decentralized Instagram alternative shows that big tech sees these platforms, potentially, as a real threat. "This is all to say that it is possible to build alternatives to Elon Musk's X, Mark Zuckerberg's Instagram, and whatever TikTok will become," concludes Koebler. "It is happening, and it is necessary. The richest, most powerful people in the world have all aligned themselves and their platforms with Donald Trump. But their platforms' relevance and importance doesn't necessarily have to last forever. A different way is possible, if we build it."

Further reading: 'The Tech Oligarchy Arrives' (The Atlantic)

Many of the world's largest tech companies, including Meta, Google, TikTok, and X, have pledged to European lawmakers that they will do more to prevent and remove illegal hate speech on their platforms. The revised set of voluntary commitments unveiled on Monday aim to help platforms "demonstrate their compliance" with the Digital Services Act (DSA) obligations regarding illegal content moderation. The Verge reports: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, X, YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Dailymotion, Jeuxvideo.com, Rakuten Viber, and Microsoft-hosted consumer services have all signed the "Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online Plus" -- which is not a terribly named streaming service but an update to a 2016 Code. The revised code commits signatories to transparency around hate speech detection and reduction, to allowing third-party monitors to assess how hate speech notices are reviewed by the platforms, and to review "at least two-thirds of hate speech notices" within 24 hours. These EU Codes of Conduct are voluntary commitments and companies face no penalties if they decide to back out of the agreement [...].

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A powerful AI tool can predict with high accuracy the location of photos based on features inside the image itself -- such as vegetation, architecture, and the distance between buildings -- in seconds, with the company now marketing the tool to law enforcement officers and government agencies. Called GeoSpy, made by a firm called Graylark Technologies out of Boston, the tool has also been used for months by members of the public, with many making videos marveling at the technology, and some asking for help with stalking specific women. The company's founder has aggressively pushed back against such requests, and GeoSpy closed off public access to the tool after 404 Media contacted him for comment.

Based on 404 Media's own tests and conversations with other people who have used it and investors, GeoSpy could radically change what information can be learned from photos posted online, and by whom. Law enforcement officers with very little necessary training, private threat intelligence companies, and stalkers could, and in some cases already are, using this technology. Dedicated open source intelligence (OSINT) professionals can of course do this too, but the training and skillset necessary can take years to build up. GeoSpy allows essentially anyone to do it. "We are working on something for LE [law enforcement] but it's ," Daniel Heinen, the founder of Graylark and GeoSpy, wrote in a message to the GeoSpy community Discord in July.

GeoSpy has been trained on millions of images from around the world, according to marketing material available online. From that, the tool is able to recognize "distinct geographical markers such as architectural styles, soil characteristics, and their spatial relationships." That marketing material says GeoSpy has strong coverage in the United States, but that it also "maintains global capabilities for location identification." [...] GeoSpy has not received much media attention, but it has become something of a sensation on YouTube. Multiple content creators have tested out the tool, and some try to feed it harder and harder challenges. Now that it's been shut off to the public, users have to request access, which is "available exclusively to qualified law enforcement agencies, enterprise users and government entities," according to the company's website.

The law enforcement-version of GeoSpy is more powerful than what was publicly available, according to Heinen's Discord posts. "Geospy.ai is a demo," he wrote in September. "The real work is the law enforcement models."

Canon has launched a new iOS livestreaming app that allows users to switch between three camera views -- but initially excludes support for Canon cameras. The "Live Switcher Mobile" app, compatible only with Apple devices, offers automated camera switching and streaming to platforms including YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook through RTMP protocol.

The free version supports 720p resolution with ads and watermarks, while an $18 monthly subscription unlocks 1080p quality and additional features. Canon plans to add support for its cameras in future updates, it says.

Further reading: Canon Draws Fire for Charging Subscription Fee To Use Cameras as Webcams.

The Los Angeles Times calls it "a guns-blazingly funny documentary about two out-of-work British actors who spent a chunk of their COVID-19 lockdown staging Shakespeare's masterpiece on the mean streets of Grand Theft Auto V."

Grand Theft Hamlet won SXSW's Jury Award for best documentary, and has now opened in U.S. theatres this weekend (and begun streaming on Mubi), after opening in the U.K. and Ireland. But nearly the entire film is set in Grand Theft Auto's crime-infested version of Los Angeles, the Times reports, "where even the good guys have weapons and a nihilistic streak — the vengeful Prince of Denmark fits right in." Yet when Sam Crane, a.k.a. @Hamlet_thedane, launches into one of the Bard's monologues, he's often murdered by a fellow player within minutes. Everyone's a critic.

Crane co-directed the movie with his wife, Pinny Grylls, a first-time gamer who functions as the film's camera of sorts. What her character sees, where she chooses to stand and look, makes up much of the film, although the editing team does phenomenal work splicing in other characters' points of view. (We're never outside of the game until the last 30 seconds; only then do we see anyone's real face....) The Bard's story is only half the point. Really, this is a classic let's-put-on-a-pixilated-show tale about the need to create beauty in the world — even this violent world — especially when stage productions in England have shuttered, forcing Crane, a husband and father, and Mark Oosterveen, single and lonely, to kill time speeding around the digital desert...

To our surprise (and theirs), the play's tussles with depression and anguish and inertia become increasingly resonant as the production and the pandemic limps toward their conclusions. When Crane and Oosterveen's "Grand Theft Auto" avatars hop into a van with an anonymous gamer and ask this online stranger for his thoughts on Hamlet's suicidal soliloquy, the man, a real-life delivery driver stuck at home with a broken leg, admits, "I don't think I'm in the right place to be replying to this right now...."
In 2014 Hamlet was also staged in Guild Wars 2, the article points out. "This is, however, the first attempt I'm aware of that attempts to do the whole thing live in one go, no matter if one of the virtual actors falls to their doom from a blimp.

"As Grylls says, 'You can't stop production just because somebody dies.'"

Google computer scientists have been using LLMs to streamline internal code migrations, achieving significant time savings of up to 89% in some cases. The findings appear in a pre-print paper titled "How is Google using AI for internal code migrations?" The Register reports: Their focus is on bespoke AI tools developed for specific product areas, such as Ads, Search, Workspace and YouTube, instead of generic AI tools that provide broadly applicable services like code completion, code review, and question answering. Google's code migrations involved: changing 32-bit IDs in the 500-plus-million-line codebase for Google Ads to 64-bit IDs; converting its old JUnit3 testing library to JUnit4; and replacing the Joda time library with Java's standard java.time package. The int32 to int64 migration, the Googlers explain, was not trivial as the IDs were often generically defined (int32_t in C++ or Integer in Java) and were not easily searchable. They existed in tens of thousands of code locations across thousands of files. Changes had to be tracked across multiple teams and changes to class interfaces had to be considered across multiple files. "The full effort, if done manually, was expected to require hundreds of software engineering years and complex crossteam coordination," the authors explain.

For their LLM-based workflow, Google's software engineers implemented the following process. An engineer from Ads would identify an ID in need of migration using a combination of code search, Kythe, and custom scripts. Then an LLM-based migration toolkit, triggered by someone knowledgeable in the art, was run to generate verified changes containing code that passed unit tests. Those changes would be manually checked by the same engineer and potentially corrected. Thereafter, the code changes would be sent to multiple reviewers who are responsible for the portion of the codebase affected by the changes. The result was that 80 percent of the code modifications in the change lists (CLs) were purely the product of AI; the remainder were either human-authored or human-edited AI suggestions.

"We discovered that in most cases, the human needed to revert at least some changes the model made that were either incorrect or not necessary," the authors observe. "Given the complexity and sensitive nature of the modified code, effort has to be spent in carefully rolling out each change to users." Based on this, Google undertook further work on LLM-driven verification to reduce the need for detailed review. Even with the need to double-check the LLM's work, the authors estimate that the time required to complete the migration was reduced by 50 percent. With LLM assistance, it took just three months to migrate 5,359 files and modify 149,000 lines of code to complete the JUnit3-JUnit4 transition. Approximately 87 percent of the code generated by AI ended up being committed with no changes. As for the Joda-Java time framework switch, the authors estimate a time saving of 89 percent compared to the projected manual change time, though no specifics were provided to support that assertion.

According to Axios, Google has told the EU it will not add fact checks to search results and YouTube videos or use them in ranking or removing content, despite the requirements of a new EU law. From the report: In a letter written to Renate Nikolay, the deputy director general under the content and technology arm at the European Commission, Google's global affairs president Kent Walker said the fact-checking integration required by the Commission's new Disinformation Code of Practice "simply isn't appropriate or effective for our services" and said Google won't commit to it. The code would require Google to incorporate fact-check results alongside Google's search results and YouTube videos. It would also force Google to build fact-checking into its ranking systems and algorithms.

Walker said Google's current approach to content moderation works and pointed to successful content moderation during last year's "unprecedented cycle of global elections" as proof. He said a new feature added to YouTube last year that enables some users to add contextual notes to videos "has significant potential." (That program is similar to X's Community Notes feature, as well as new program announced by Meta last week.)

The EU's Code of Practice on Disinformation, introduced in 2022, includes several voluntary commitments that tech firms and private companies, including fact-checking organizations, are expected to deliver on. The Code, originally created in 2018, predates the EU's new content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), which went into effect in 2022.

The Commission has held private discussions over the past year with tech companies, urging them to convert the voluntary measures into an official code of conduct under the DSA. Walker said in his letter Thursday that Google had already told the Commission that it didn't plan to comply. Google will "pull out of all fact-checking commitments in the Code before it becomes a DSA Code of Conduct," he wrote. He said Google will continue to invest in improvements to its current content moderation practices, which focus on providing people with more information about their search results through features like Synth ID watermarking and AI disclosures on YouTube.

SpaceX conducted its seventh test flight of the Starship rocket on Thursday with mixed results. The upper stage was lost nine minutes after launch, but the Super Heavy booster successfully landed back at the launch site, marking a second successful recovery. CNBC reports: SpaceX said in a post on X that the ship broke up during its ascent burn and that it would "continue to review data from today's flight test to better understand root cause." After the rocket lost communication, social media users posted photos and videos of what appeared to be fireballs in the sky near the Caribbean islands. Starship's launch trajectory takes it due east from Texas, which means the fireballs are likely debris from the rocket breaking apart and reentering the atmosphere.

Starship launched from SpaceX's private "Starbase" facility near Brownsville, Texas, shortly after 5:30 p.m. ET. A few minutes later, the rocket's "Super Heavy" booster returned to land at the launch site, in SpaceX's second successful "catch" during a flight. It did not catch the booster on the last flight. There were no people on board the Starship flight. However, Elon Musk's company was flying 10 "Starlink simulators" in the rocket's payload bay and planned to attempt to deploy the satellite-like objects once in space. This would have been a key test of the rocket's capabilities, as SpaceX needs Starship to deploy its much larger and heavier upcoming generation of Starlink satellites. You can watch a recording of the launch here.