"Reverse-engineering games for converting them between systems is currently a hot topic, and it's getting messier by the day. According to multiple user claims, Anthropic's Claude Code and/or Opus 5.5 model are blocking attempts at innocuous reverse-engineering, including but not limited to those using the popular Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) tool. That issue may be linked to a text rule that's now in force, which allegedly instructs the model to avoid "[recreating] a specific existing game." The updated rule appears to be a move to limit a flood of AI-cracked and cloned titles, with some game devs even recently being hit by extortion scams that threaten to clone their game demos into complete games before they have a chance to finish and release the original.

According to Twitter user Chasm, the game-related textual rule is "Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user’s own designs and assets. Don’t build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original." There is no official or additional confirmation if this is the actual rule text, but it's plausible enough given the very clear refusals that devs have been encountering over the past week."

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/anthropics-ai-model-is-now-blocking-attempts-at-video-game-recreation-and-cloning-users-also-claim-non-malicious-generic-reverse-engineering-tasks-are-blocked

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Anthropic #Claude #Videogames #ReverseEngineering

""I thought that piece in the Atlantic made some good points, but the idea that reading has finished and we have moved into a kind of post-literate dark age strikes me as absurd,” Robert Darnton, a historian of the book and a former director of the Harvard University Library, told me. “ I have a little collection of jeremiads, and one is from 1928, when Walter Benjamin said, ‘Everything indicates that the book is nearing its end.’ ” He added, “There’s this unprecedented change in the technology of reading, and people are naturally reacting to that, because it’s disorienting. How do we make sense of changes that have hit us so fast?” “Every decade, there is a new scapegoat for why the reading public is diminishing,” Nancy Bass Wyden, who owns the Strand Book Store, told me. “The fact of the matter is that books are one of our most enduring forms of human expression.”
The illusion of decline might come in part because people consume books differently. Pew reported that, in 2025, the number of adults who read a print book during the year was eight percentage points less than it was in 2011—but that the number who read an e-book and the number who listened to an audiobook each increased
(...)
When I brought up the subject of reading decline one day with Daunt, he laughed. “Such nonsense,” he said. “It’s ‘Policemen always get younger’—we just go through an arc of life. Every single year of my bookselling life, somebody has popped up and said, ‘Literary fiction is dead!’ Now it’s ‘Nobody is reading nonfiction!’ ” His stores suggested the opposite. One of Barnes & Noble’s pandemic best-sellers had been “Middlemarch,” bought largely by people younger than forty-five. At all six stores in New York this summer, one of the top-selling books—helped along by Hollywood—was Emily Wilson’s twelve-thousand-one-hundred-and-ten-line verse translation of the Odyssey."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/10/26/james-daunt-profile

#Books #Bookstores #Reading #Publishing #BarnesAndNoble

Now this is what I call Psychedelic Music!! This album blew my mind. It's really amazing. It has been quite some time since the last time I heard a Rock/Pop record so good as this one. Although I mentioned "Rock" and "Pop", this album is so awesome that it puts Psychedelic Music right where it belongs, as a specific music genre that pick ups some pieces of Rock, Pop, Folk, and Experimental to form a very peculiar sound. I called it Psychedelic because it takes you to places very far away, both in time and space.

At the same time, this record is really one of the best examples of what is the "Elephant 6" sound. I'm very fond of many of the bands that came from that movement (Of Montreal, Neutral Milk Hotel, Circulatory Tapes, The Music Tapes). These names have been associated with some of the most groundbreaking sounds from the late 90s and most of aughties. Although this album does not neatly fit in the stereotypical drawers of "Rock" and "Pop", it ends up contributing to restoring a bit my faith in those two music styles. I started listening to way more electronic music because Rock and Pop were becoming very bland and conventional. Yet this album recovers a bit what I like the most in music: earth-shattering and exciting sounds that give you the feeling that you're listening to something really revolutionary.

https://oliviatremorcontrol.bandcamp.com/album/the-same-place

#OliviaTremorControl #Elephant6 #PsychedelicMusic #Psychedelic

“Part of the anger at AI, I suspect, is wounded vanity; the machine reflects our defects back at us, multiplied, and the new humanism that answers it (humans do it better, only humans have feelings, etc) conveniently forgets that the species being praised is also the one that commits genocides. Konior found the reading plausible and took it further. The emotional investment people pour into these debates betrays, in her view, something deeper than a dispute over copyright law; there is a hunger for a totalizing narrative, an ultimate evil whose dismantling would leave utopia on the other side, and critiques of AI strike at core humanist assumptions about our uniqueness. She was careful to distinguish two things that usually arrive entangled. Toward the political and economic critique she is sympathetic; toward the humanist philosophy that wants to preserve the uniqueness of the human she is not, and she said so with a directness I found refreshing, declaring her interest in machine cognition and in a hybrid human-robot society. Her allergy to the social lens has a biography behind it. Growing up in a post-communist country, she read intellectuals who resisted the demand that every work of art or thought serve social progress as currently defined, and she keeps faith with that legacy; political engagement matters, and so does preserving spaces of abstract thinking where the freedom to think is exercised fully.”

https://www.thephilosophicalsalon.com/do-not-answer-bogna-konior-and-the-dark-forest-of-the-internet/

#AI #Philosophy #MediaTheory #Internet #GenerativeAI

"There are growing calls for independent and embedded AI evaluation, especially of AI agents. But much remains unclear: what constitutes a “good” evaluation, what needs to be evaluated in the first place, and how best to coordinate and support the influx of people entering the burgeoning evaluation ecosystem.

Our group at Princeton has been working to improve the state of AI agent evaluation for about three years. We teamed up with people who’ve done foundational work on evaluation at Stanford, the UK AI Security Institute, and Brookings. Our paper is titled Emerging Trends in AI Agent Evaluation. We synthesized the trends we see across three dimensions—the science and methods, the research agenda, and the evaluation ecosystem—with the goal to help those who are upskilling for this new paradigm. We also aim to equip evaluators, funders, and the public with a set of questions to ask, and provide actionable recommendations."

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/new-paper-emerging-trends-in-ai-agent

#AI #AIAgents #LLMs #AIBenchmarks #AgenticAI

"Learn to identify areas of your site where the human view differs from the agent view. One way is to compare the Markdown mirror of a page against the rendered HTML view and see if the content differs.

Keep in mind that the mirror only approximates the agent view. Many agents fetch the HTML and convert it with their own converter, and their output can differ from your mirror. So also test the real path: ask an agent to fetch the page and tell you what’s in the table. That’s an easy way to catch problems like the ones in the tiered table above.

You can also create a skill that does this same task. The skill looks at each page in your docs, compares it against the Markdown mirror, and flags any discrepancies.

One caveat: not every agent reads text. Browser-using agents that work from screenshots will see the gray text. But the most common path today is fetch and convert, and that’s the path where styling disappears."

https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/identify-semantics-in-styling-agents

#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #AI #AIAgents #AgenticAI #WebDesign #WebDevelopment

That's what happens when you mistake a powerful automation and productivity tool with some kind of a mystical "Holy Grail" that should be embedded everywhere online and offline or else the Market God won't be appeased...

"Google-owner Alphabet lost just over $500bn (£374bn) in value on Thursday after it revealed its own artificial intelligence (AI) summaries were hitting search advertising revenue.

Chief business officer Philipp Schindler said Google's "AI mode", where it answers questions conversationally, was eating into the money it makes from ads which appear next to results to traditional search questions.

Yet, Schindler said he felt "very good about our trajectory" with an AI-focused version of the search engine.

Google's role in answering the world's questions has been challenged by the AI boom, with millions of people using programs such as ChatGPT and Claude instead.

Kim Scott, who formerly led Google's advertising business, told the BBC's Today programme that the company would "rather eat its own lunch than allow someone else to eat their lunch" by having its own AI summaries hit its search revenue.

She said that Google was founded on the idea of making long-term bets on technology – even if they hurt the firm in the short term.

"I think they're making a long-term bet on AI," she said."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm9qzdqpxy48o

#AI #GenerativeAI #Google #AIBubble #AISearch

"I have no interest in defending tech companies, but I am deeply committed to defending teenagers’ agency and choices in the world that we have given them. I am determined to make sure that those teens who don’t have supportive parents have pathways to get help. And my research has repeatedly led me to conclude that when we fail to empower teenagers to transition into adult worlds, we do them more harm. And when we focus on the tech, we fail to help those who need the help the most.

Many of the problems that I have with tech use are actually about adult tech use. Too many adults treat their phones as a pacifier to help them self-regulate. They’ve taught this bad habit to their kids. Too many adults fail to role model healthy sociality digitally and in-person friendship. Too many adults use their phones to be distracted from their own children. And then we’re surprised by the mirrors that teens offer back at us. “I learned it from watching you, dad.”

What kills me in the contemporary teens-and-tech debate is that there’s no space for actual research or critical nuance. You’re either opposed to the tech companies or in their pockets. And this week’s absurd discovery reinforces this infuriating polarity, painting those of us who are critical of Jonathan Haidt as being corporate shills. I find this especially frustrating because I did work in tech for a lot of my career. I played the role of friction inside many companies (although never Meta). I repeatedly got threatened by tech executives for challenging corporate mantras or providing research that contradicted their interests - and yet I persisted. Cuz many tech companies are far more complicated than people realize.

Still, I’ve had to grit and bear as I am attacked by other scholars for taking money from tech (as if any money in late-stage capitalism is clean money)."

https://made-not-found-by-danah-boyd.ghost.io/no-one-paid-me-to-disagree-with-jonathan-haidt-it-was-teenagers-who-taught-me-that-he-was-wrong/

#SocialMedia #MentalHealth #Meta #Facebook #Instagram #SocialSciences #BigTech

"Bolsonaro’s flight – and his brief but bogus claim to be “president-elect” of one of the world’s largest democracies – prompted an outpouring of opprobrium and ridicule.

“[This letter] seems to have been written by a foolhardy, loony halfwit,” Flávia Oliveira, a prominent political commentator, told the network GloboNews.

The Estado de São Paulo’s leader writers said: “Flávio’s letter isn’t worth the ink of this newspaper, but there’s no way the embarrassment can be ignored,” before savaging a man they called “a con artist of the highest order”.

The Rio broadsheet O Globo said Bolsonaro’s “shameful and sneaky” decision to abscond laid bare the “pathetic” nature of his political movement, Bolsonarismo, while the Folha de São Paulo said it exposed the true nature of the “authoritarian, ignorant, incompetent” Bolsonaro family.

José Casado, a columnist for the conservative magazine Veja, wrote: “The comedy storyline has already guaranteed him a spot in the pages of political satire.”

Merval Pereira, a conservative columnist for O Globo, called Bolsonaro “a madhouse Napoleon”."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/30/flavio-bolsonaros-president-elect-claim-mockery-brazil

#Brazil #Bolsonaro #USA #Politics #Elections #Trump #MoneyLaundering

"A five-month investigation led by Investigate Europe with media partners in nine countries into working conditions on data centre sites across Sweden, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands reveals that Sandu’s case is far from unique.

In extensive interviews with migrant workers at flagship sites where large US tech companies are operating, reporters found evidence of debilitating injuries, squalid living conditions, an unreported infectious outbreak, unpaid wages and exploitative employment practices.

Workers at one major Microsoft project described a culture of fear and intimidation where construction managers “rule on mental terror”. The testimonies are supported by dozens of health records, pay slips, phone messages, photographs and videos shared with reporters.

The investigation found a recurring pattern where tech companies and their many Irish construction partners embed US-style working practices, often in defiance of national working norms.

In Italy, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway unions told reporters they had difficulty accessing certain sites to speak with workers and document conditions. One union representative in Denmark said some sites are “more closed than a state prison”.

The European data centre industry is experiencing an infrastructure surge the continent has not seen in decades, dispatching tens of thousands of migrant workers to make its vision of tech sovereignty a reality."

https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/electrocutions-mental-terror-and-withheld-wages-the-exploited-workers-building-europes-data-centres

#EU #Europe #DataCenters #WageSlavery #Bigtech

"On Friday, Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, cancelled a series of nearly company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership, according to six current Proton employees and audio of an around two hour all-hands meeting obtained by 404 Media.

The move came after 404 Media published an investigation on Thursday, which showed how Yen was aggressively pushing AI across Proton, in some cases despite security concerns from employees. In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

The re-interview cancellations likely don’t address the concerns of many Proton users, who are more focused on Proton’s deprioritization of security; many Proton users have blasted the company’s leadership on social media over the last 24 hours and explicitly called for Yen to resign."

https://www.404media.co/protons-ceo-cancels-ai-re-interviews/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Privacy #Proton #CyberSecurity

I'm feeling like this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g3FwG4Sh9U