General AI News

Google has open sourced its Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) libraries for age assurance.

ZKP enables users to prove facts about themselves, like being over 18, without revealing any additional personal data.

Developers and organizations can now build privacy-enhancing applications and digital ID solutions using these tools.

The Peasant Railgun is a D&D 5e exploit using 2,280 peasants passing a dismantled ladder pole to deal massive damage.

It leverages the Ready action, the 6-second combat round, creature space rules, and Falling Object damage to output approximately 300d6 damage in one turn.

Real-world physics problems like acceleration, human handling limits, and aiming accuracy make it impractical despite being legal under RAW.

Author ported the entire tmux codebase from about 67,000 lines of C to 81,000 lines of unsafe Rust after finding C2Rust output unmaintainable.

Build process evolved from autotools and Makefile integration with a static Rust library to using a Rust-centric build.rs with the cc crate to compile remaining C files.

Common bugs included implicit C function declarations truncating pointer results and struct field type mismatches between C and Rust definitions.

Current Model Context Protocol (MCP) lacks true composability and demands excessive context, making it less efficient than writing code.

Using CLI tools or direct code to automate tasks is faster, more reliable, and uses context more efficiently than MCP calls.

Automation at scale is best achieved with repeatable code pipelines, where LLMs generate code, execute it, and then validate results with minimal inference.

gmailtail is a command-line tool for real-time monitoring of Gmail messages and outputting them as JSON for automation and integration.

It supports flexible filtering by sender, subject, labels, attachments, and Gmail search queries.

The tool offers checkpoint support to resume monitoring, multiple output formats, and YAML configuration files.

uv provides its own build backend (uv_build) optimized for performance and integrated tightly with uv.

By default, uv init uses hatchling, but you can switch to uv_build via pyproject.toml or uv init --build-backend uv.

The uv_build backend supports only pure Python projects; use another backend for extension modules.

Vitamin C increases epidermal thickness and promotes keratinocyte proliferation in a human 3D epidermal model.

Vitamin C acts as a cofactor for TET DNA demethylation enzymes, raising global 5-hydroxymethylcytosine levels.

Inhibition of TET enzymes blocks vitamin C–induced DNA demethylation and keratinocyte proliferation.

Researchers successfully sequenced the first whole genome of an Old Kingdom Egyptian individual dated to 2855–2570 BCE.

The Nuwayrat genome comprises about 78% North African Neolithic ancestry and approximately 22% ancestry from the eastern Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia.

This finding provides direct genetic evidence that ancient migration from the eastern Fertile Crescent reached Egypt, not only cultural exchanges.

A new interstellar object named 3I/ATLAS has been discovered visiting our Solar System.

It is only the third known interstellar visitor after 'Oumuamua and Comet 2I/Borisov.

The object was first detected by the ATLAS telescope in Chile on July 1 and confirmed by the Minor Planet Center.

GitHub Archive retains all public commits, including those removed by force-push, and lists them as zero-commit PushEvents.

By scanning every force-push event in GH Archive since 2020, the researcher uncovered thousands of leaked secrets and earned about $25k in bug bounties.

Truffle Security and Sharon Brizinov open-sourced the Force Push Scanner tool to automate scanning of an organization’s deleted commits for hidden secrets.