标签：#ics

Recent findings provide one of the most detailed pictures to date of the genetic architecture of schizophrenia, opening up new avenues for research into the disorder.

As AI commoditizes code output, system comprehension silently decays, creating cognitive debt that threatens safe architectural evolution. This article explores why human understanding must be treated as an essential architectural characteristic, offering actionable strategies, socio-technical metrics, and design checkpoints to preserve intent across modern engineering teams. By Jacobus Meintjes, Narayana Rengaswamy, Paul Katsande, Sureshbabu Bikki

"Smile because it happened" — Dr. Seuss The Setup Earlier this year, I took on a short-term trial role with an early-stage robotics startup. The premise was straightforward: help with data collection, annotation, and evaluation workflows—essentially the backbone of any modern robotics or embodied-AI system. The trial didn't work out long-term. I was let go after about two months — a decision that, honestly, came down in part to my bandwidth as a student. Balancing a full course load with a startup trial was harder than I anticipated. But that's not the story I want to tell. What I do want to share are the technical lessons I took away — lessons about building robust data pipelines, about the gap between theory and practice, and about what I'd do differently next time. These aren't company secrets. They're about the general engineering challenges that anyone working with robotics data pipelines will encounter — challenges I'd read about in papers but hadn't truly internalized until I was standing in front of them. 1. The Data Pipeline Shape Is Universal—But the Details Aren't If you've spent any time in ML or robotics, you've seen this described: Data Collection → Annotation → Evaluation It's a standard three-stage pipeline. Industry vendors describe it explicitly in their robotics content. Academic projects model this structure. It's the field's shared vocabulary. Companies such as Scale AI and Toloka use similar industry workflows involving data collection, annotation, and evaluation. What isn't shared are the specifics: the sensor setup, the calibration procedures, the annotation rubric, and the evaluation metrics. Those are where a company's IP lives. The pipeline shape? That's just the map. And the map is public. What I'd do differently: Simulate before you collect. Data collection is expensive — in time, hardware wear, and cognitive load on operators. Before running a full session, run a feasibility study with a small batch. Verify your sync and capture scripts

A draft rule reviewed by WIRED would prevent the census from counting undocumented immigrants. To protect against “distortions,” it would also bar questions about race and sexual orientation.

We expected them to be there, but they had previously been too small to see.

The AI system makes genetically distant versions of a bacteria-killing virus.

In modern Data Engineering, there is an unspoken fetish for "Real-Time." If you ask any business stakeholder how fast they need their dashboard to update, the default answer will always be: "As fast as possible." This drives well-intentioned engineers to design incredibly complex architectures. We spin up Kafka clusters, implement Flink, and wrestle with latency, late-arriving data, and tumbling windows. All to have data flowing in milliseconds. But the harsh reality is that the vast majority of companies are building Ferraris just to sit in rush-hour traffic. 1. The Actionability Gap (The Golden Question) The biggest mistake when choosing a streaming architecture isn't technical; it's a business mistake. Before implementing real-time pipelines, the only question that matters is: "Does the company have the operational capacity to make a decision in milliseconds?" If you are building a credit card fraud detection system or a live e-commerce recommendation engine, yes, every millisecond counts. But if the data is feeding a financial dashboard that the executive board only reviews during their Monday morning meeting, updating that screen every second is a colossal waste of money and effort. Real-time data has zero value if the human action is batch. 2. The Hidden Complexity and the Cloud Bill Batch processing is forgiving. If a pipeline fails at 3 AM, you trigger a rerun, and by 8 AM, everything is fine. Batch is cheap, predictable, and easy to debug. Streaming, on the other hand, is unforgiving. Handling application state, event duplication (exactly-once semantics), out-of-order events, and sudden traffic spikes requires a senior engineering team dedicated solely to keeping the infrastructure alive. Furthermore, the cloud bill for 24/7 continuous processing is orders of magnitude higher than spinning up your compute clusters on a schedule. 3. "Micro-Batch" Solves 99% of Your Problems There is a perfect middle ground that the hype industry tries to ignore: the micro-ba

The era of set broadcast ownership limits is officially over, after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted Thursday to end the national ownership cap rule. The agency's two Republicans, Chair Brendan Carr and Commissioner Olivia Trusty, voted to end the ownership cap, which restricts broadcast owners from holding stations that reach a combined more than […]

Today, I’m talking with Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter here at The Verge, about the growing backlash against AI data centers. Gaby recently reported a fantastic piece about Hernando County, Florida, where last month the county commission unanimously approved a yearlong moratorium on data center construction. She attended a protest there organized by a […]

Zulfi Alam thinks his team doesn’t need to “prove” they engineered a new state of matter in their bid to reinvent computing. Science would disagree.

WIRED spoke with an engineer who was interviewed by Edward “Big Balls” Coristine for a government engineering role at the NDS, the White House agency staffed by other DOGE veterans.

Company noted for building quantum annealers now also making gate-based hardware.

Comparisons between SAFi and techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, are useful only up to a point. Constitutional AI is a closer conceptual comparison because it introduces explicit principles into the process of generating and evaluating responses. Even so, these approaches address a different layer of the problem. RLHF and Constitutional AI primarily shape how a model behaves. SAFi governs how an AI agent operates. That distinction matters because an AI agent is not only a language model producing text. It may interpret requests, reason about possible responses, decide whether to act, call tools, access information, modify data, and produce an answer that must be accountable to the organization deploying it. The conventional architecture: the model at the center Much of today’s AI governance consists of filters, classifiers, guardrails, monitors, and policy checks placed around the model. The general pattern looks like this: A request reaches the model. The model generates a response or proposes an action. External controls inspect the input, output, or tool request. The system allows, blocks, modifies, or records the result. This architecture can be valuable. External controls can detect prohibited content, restrict certain actions, and provide monitoring or enforcement. They are often necessary parts of a responsible deployment. But the architecture still places the model at the center of the process. Governance is positioned around the model as an additional control mechanism. In many systems, the evidence needed for explanation and audit is also collected after the model has produced its output or proposed its action. That creates a basic separation between execution and governance: The model produces the draft. The governance system evaluates the draft. The monitoring system records what happened. The controls may be effective, but governance remains an external activity surrounding the primary intelligence. SAFi’s architectur

Joe Kent says that he and other anti–Donald Trump MAGA figures have formed a new movement. They want Tucker Carlson to run for the presidency in 2028.

TL;DR If you're a five-person startup shipping a Node.js API and you want a metrics dashboard by Friday, send your telemetry to a managed backend and keep only the instrumentation layer inside your own repo. The alternative — standing up a time-series database, an object store for long-term blocks, and a dashboard service — puts three more components on an on-call rotation that hasn't earned its first SLO yet. Settle the wire format now and treat the backend as a config line you can change later. I own the platform team's roadmap, which in practice means I'm the person who defends the monitoring bill in a budget review and also the person who gets paged when a disk fills at 03:00. Those two jobs pull in opposite directions, and most of the advice online is written by people who only hold one of them. Usually the pager wins the argument. Should a startup run its own metrics stack, or pay for a managed dashboard? Start with capacity, because that's the step everyone skips before signing anything. A moderately instrumented Node.js API — say 40 HTTP routes, two queue workers, default runtime and event-loop metrics, one latency histogram with ten buckets — sits somewhere around 3,000 to 8,000 active series per process. Multiply by replicas. Multiply again by every environment you keep alive, including the staging cluster nobody admits to. You are at 50k active series before a single engineer has written a custom counter, and a self-hosted scraper will chew through that on a 2 GB VM without noticing. It will still be fine at 500k. Past a few million active series you're into sharding, remote storage, and a retention argument with whoever pays for object storage — that's the point where the self-hosted route stops being free and turns into a project with a headcount attached. None of that work is hard. It's just never zero. Dimension Self-hosted stack Managed metrics backend Time to first dashboard 1–3 days under an hour Who owns retention you, plus the storage bill vendor

People type 2+2 into Google. They type 9+10 . They type 7*8 when they can't remember whether it's 54 or 56. Each of those is a real, high-volume search query — and most of the results are identical calculator widgets. So when I built Wrongulator , a calculator that returns a confidently wrong answer on purpose, I had a question worth asking: what if every expression were its own page, ranking for the exact arithmetic people already search? That is programmatic SEO — generating a page per parameter instead of writing pages by hand. And doing it across 17 languages means programmatic SEO with hreflang, where each generated page also declares its 16 translated siblings. The trap is that most programmatic surfaces are thin, duplicative, and get buried by Google. This one isn't, for a specific reason: every page has a real, unique answer baked into the HTML before any JavaScript runs. This post is about how — and the honest costs nobody mentions. Why a Permalink Per Expression Is Even Possible A page per expression only works if /2+2 reproduces the same result for everyone, forever, with no database behind it. That property isn't free — it's the result of one design decision I cover in detail in why a viral toy must be wrong the same way every time : the wrong answer is a pure function of the expression, seeded by a stable hash, with no per-user state. The relevant consequence here is what that property unlocks for SEO. Because f("2+2") always returns the same wrong answer, the server can compute that answer on demand for any expression in the URL, with zero storage. There's no pages table, no CMS, no pre-generation job. A request for /64+5 runs the engine, gets 67 ("the only correct number"), and renders a complete page around it. The programmatic surface is, in effect, infinite — but it costs nothing to hold, because nothing is stored. The pure function is what makes thousands of unique pages possible without a database. That's the foundation. Everything below is about

Part of "AI, engineering and what survives production", a series on the parts of building with AI that hold up once real traffic hits them. There is a claim going round that you have probably absorbed by now: AI-assisted development is making codebases worse. Refactoring is down, duplication is up, we are all writing more and revising less. The numbers behind it are real, the samples are enormous, and I found I had started repeating the conclusion in conversation without ever having checked it. Then it occurred to me that those figures are averages taken across hundreds of millions of changes from thousands of organisations, not one of which is mine. So what is the rate in your repository? Nobody has told you, and on current evidence nobody is going to. I set out to find mine, assumed it would take an afternoon, and spent three days discovering that the answer is far harder to get at than the confident version suggests. So this is not a piece about what AI does to code. It is about how to ask that question of your own repository without arriving at a wrong answer, which turned out to be the genuinely difficult part. The tool I built to do it is git-habits : free, local, and it reads no source code whatsoever. What git can actually tell you Git history is a surprisingly rich behavioural record. Not of quality, about which it knows nothing at all, but of habits: how often you commit, how large those commits are, whether you go back and change what you wrote last month, and whether anybody still touches the old code. That is a narrower thing than quality and it is the thing the industry claims has changed, so it is the thing worth measuring. Four signals are computable from commit metadata alone, without opening a single source file: Moved lines. The share of changed lines sitting in files git detected as renamed or copied. It is the closest thing history offers to "somebody went back and reorganised this." Legacy touch. The share of changes landing on files nobody has

In less than a week, Spider-Man: Brand New Day raked in $1 billion worldwide and had the biggest box office opening weekend in Hollywood history. The feature has been a reminder of why Sony is probably never going to give up the Spider-Man film rights, and highlighted how Marvel Studios was smart to strike a […]

The Trump administration shared the details of its plan with OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI labs on Tuesday. For now, the public remains in the dark.

Quotient CEO Lizzie Matusov explains why soaring AI spend often fails to improve software delivery. She presents a research-backed AI maturity framework designed to help engineering leaders move beyond vanity metrics like token usage, align organizational AI adoption, and address critical bottlenecks across the software development life cycle to deliver measurable business outcomes. By Lizzie Matusov