Your AI coding tools may soon cost more than you

By 2028, the AI tools a developer uses could cost more than the developer’s salary, Gartner warns. AI coding costs are climbing fast, and most companies cannot even see what they are spending. The AI coding boom has a bill, and it is growing fast. By 2028, AI coding costs will overtake the average developer’s […]

Supreme Court Gives Pesticide Corporations Immunity from Cancer Lawsuits

“Ruling has Trump’s name written all over it”

Ford Rehires 350 Engineers After AI Fails To Preserve Expertise or Train Juniors - Slashdot

After Ford's automated quality-control systems and AI tools fell short, the automaker hired 350 veteran engineers over the past three years to mentor younger staff and reprogram the underperforming technology. "Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it's only as good as the information you...

Assessing early effects of Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Act on adolescents’ social media use: observational study

Objectives To examine the early effect of a world first national policy (Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024, which established a national minimum age of 16 years for holding accounts on designated social media platforms) on adolescent social media use, and to describe adolescent use of social media platforms subject to the Act, experience of age verification strategies, any efforts to circumvent them, and any perceived behavioural substitution or displacement. Design Observational study. Setting Community based study conducted across Australia. Participants Australian adolescents aged between 12 and <17 years at the time of implementation of the age restrictions. Intervention The Australian Government’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024), which requires designated social media platforms to implement reasonable measures to prevent users under 16 years of age from holding accounts. Main outcome measures Data were collected immediately before (baseline) and approximately three months after introduction of the Act. Co-primary outcomes were adolescents’ self-reported use of social media in the previous seven days (every day versus not every day) and time spent using social media per day. A sharp regression discontinuity design was used to evaluate the impact of the Act on social media use. Differences in outcomes at each side of the age threshold were estimated using local linear regression with triangular kernel function. Results Follow-up data were available from 408 of the 436 adolescents recruited at baseline. More than 85% of participants aged under 16 years reported using social media platforms subject to the Act at follow-up, predominately via use of their own accounts (54-68%), 66% of whom reported exposure to platform age verification, most commonly self-declared age (24-39%) or uploading of a picture (“selfie”) (13-27%). Efforts to circumvent restrictions, such as use of a “fake” account (15-19%) or social media access via a private browser (6-11%) were also reported. Between baseline and follow-up, daily social media use was stable among 12-13 year olds; reduced somewhat among those aged 14-15 years (from 78% to 69%), and increased for those aged >16 years (from 80% to 89%). Time spent per day using social media was relatively stable between baseline and follow-up for 12-13 year olds and those aged >16 years but was lower at follow-up for those aged 14-15 years (from 3.40 to 3.13 units on an ordinal scale). In regression discontinuity design analyses, insufficient evidence was available to support a discontinuity in social media use on these primary outcomes (P≥0.60). Conclusions Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years. Trial registration Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry [ACTRN12625001056482][1]. Data sharing: Use of data not covered by the current ethics approval will require additional ethics approval before the data are made available. Anyone seeking to access the data will need to contact the lead investigator, along with seeking appropriate ethics clearances. Only once those approvals are granted will de-identified data be shared via an encrypted communication channel. [1]: /lookup/external-ref?link_type=CLINTRIALGOV&access_num=ACTRN12625001056482&atom=%2Fbmj%2F393%2Fbmj-2026-363695.atom

Why the spread of powerful local AI models makes copyright enforcement even harder

<p>The central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is the growing incompatibility between traditional copyright law and the digital, online world. The culmination of that process was the EU Copyright Directive, passed in 2019. The Directive was supposed to be transposed into local laws by 2021, but a year after that …</p>

Tell HN: OpenAI has started putting ads on paid programs | Hacker News

Spain’s Internet Blocks Have A Flimsy Legal Basis, While Lacking Both Oversight & Accountability

Afew weeks ago, Walled Culture wrote about Hadopi, France’s infamous copyright enforcement mechanism. The so-called “graduated response” – aka “three strikes and you are out” – has been around…

AI's brain is getting bloated with AI content

Simulations show how repetition could turn into web consensus.