Sony has filed a lawsuit in California court against Tencent, alleging the Chinese company's upcoming game Light of Motiram constitutes a "slavish clone" of Sony's Horizon series. The complaint details extensive similarities between the games, from post-apocalyptic robot dinosaur settings to red-haired female protagonists. Tencent had approached Sony for licensing deals in 2024, which Sony rejected twice.

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Britain's Competition and Markets Authority concluded that Microsoft and Amazon hold "significant unilateral market power" in cloud services and recommended investigating both companies under new competition rules. The regulator said it had concerns about practices creating customer "lock-in" effects through egress fees and unfavorable licensing terms that trap businesses in difficult-to-exit contracts. Microsoft and Amazon each control roughly 30-40% of the infrastructure-as-a-service market, while Google holds 5-10%. Microsoft disputed the findings, calling the cloud market "dynamic and competitive." Amazon said the probe recommendations were "unwarranted."

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Beijing has summoned Nvidia over alleged security issues with its chips, in a blow to the US company's push to revive sales in the country after Washington granted approval for the export of a made-for-China chip. From a report: China's cyber regulator on Thursday said it had held a meeting with Nvidia over what it called "serious security issues" with the company's artificial intelligence chips. It said US AI experts had "revealed that Nvidia's computing chips have location tracking and can remotely shut down the technology." The Cyberspace Administration of China requested that Nvidia explain the security problems associated with the H20 chip, which was designed for the Chinese market to comply with US export restrictions, and submit documentation to support their case.

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Microsoft has reached a $4 trillion market cap, becoming only the second company to achieve this milestone. Investors drove the stock up 4.62% following the company's fourth-quarter earnings report, which showed strong growth in cloud-computing services fueled by artificial intelligence demand. Microsoft's Azure cloud business generated $75 billion in annual revenue, representing a 34% increase from the previous fiscal year. Nvidia became the first company to reach the $4 trillion market cap earlier this month.

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A Nature survey of more than 1,100 physicists reveals fundamental disagreements about quantum mechanics' relationship to reality, despite the theory's century-long track record as one of science's most successful frameworks. The survey, conducted to mark quantum mechanics' 100th anniversary, found 36% of researchers favor the Copenhagen interpretation while 17% prefer epistemic approaches that treat quantum states as information rather than physical reality. Another 15% support the many-worlds interpretation. Researchers split evenly on whether a boundary exists between quantum and classical worlds -- 45% said yes, 45% said no. When asked about the wavefunction's nature, 47% called it a mathematical tool while 36% considered it a representation of physical reality. Only 24% of respondents expressed confidence their chosen interpretation was correct, with others viewing their preference as merely adequate or useful in certain circumstances. The survey contacted over 15,000 researchers whose recent papers involved quantum mechanics, plus attendees of a centenary meeting on Heligoland island. Despite quantum mechanics enabling technologies from computer chips to medical imaging, physicists remain divided on the physical reality underlying the mathematics.

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Developers are growing increasingly frustrated with AI coding tools that produce deceptively flawed solutions, according to Stack Overflow's latest survey of over 49,000 programmers worldwide. The 2025 survey exposes a widening gap between AI adoption and satisfaction: while 84% of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, their trust has cratered. Only 33% trust AI accuracy today, down from 43% last year. The core problem isn't broken code that developers can easily spot and discard. Instead, two-thirds report wrestling with AI solutions that appear correct but contain subtle errors requiring significant debugging time. Nearly half say fixing AI-generated code takes longer than expected, undermining the productivity gains these tools promise to deliver.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Australia said on Wednesday it will add YouTube to sites covered by its world-first ban on social media for teenagers, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site and potentially setting up a legal challenge. The decision came after the internet regulator urged the government last month to overturn the YouTube carve-out, citing a survey that found 37% of minors reported harmful content on the site, the worst showing for a social media platform. "I'm calling time on it," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a statement highlighting that Australian children were being negatively affected by online platforms, and reminding social media of their social responsibility. "I want Australian parents to know that we have their backs." The decision broadens the ban set to take effect in December. YouTube says it is used by nearly three-quarters of Australians aged 13 to 15, and should not be classified as social media because its main activity is hosting videos. "Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens. It's not social media," a YouTube spokesperson said by email.

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sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Peacocks have a secret hidden in their brightly colored tail feathers: tiny reflective structures that can amplify light into a laser beam. After dyeing the feathers and energizing them with an external light source, researchers discovered they emitted narrow beams of yellow-green laser light. They say the study, published this month in Scientific Reports, offers the first example of a laser cavity in the animal kingdom. [...] Scientists have long known that peacock feathers also exhibit "structural color" -- nature's pigment-free way to create dazzling hues. Ordered microstructures within the feathers reflect light at specific frequencies, leading to their vivid blues and greens and iridescence. But Florida Polytechnic University physicist Nathan Dawson and his colleagues wanted to go a step further and see whether those microstructures could also function as a laser cavity. After staining the feathers with a common dye and pumping them with soft pulses of light, they used laboratory instruments to detect beams of yellow-green laser light that were too faint to see with the naked eye. They emerged from the feathers' eyespots, at two distinct wavelengths. Surprisingly, differently colored parts of the eyespots emitted the same wavelengths of laser light, even though each region would presumably vary in its microstructure. Just because peacock feathers emit laser light doesn't mean the birds are somehow using this emission. But there are still ramifications, Dawson says. He suggests that looking for laser light in biomaterials could help identify arrays of regular microstructures within them. In medicine, for example, certain foreign objects -- viruses with distinct geometric shapes, perhaps -- could be classified and identified based on their ability to be lasers, he says. The work also demonstrates how biological materials could one day yield lasers that could be put safely into the human body to emit light for biosensing, medical imaging, and therapeutics. "I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans," Dawson says, "some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process."

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In my career, several times I've ended up being the pet programmer for a team of engineers and CNC operators, which frequently meant helping them do automation in their CAD tools. At its peak complexity, it resulted in a (mostly unsuccessful) attempt to build a lens/optics simulator in RhinoCAD.

Which brings us to the code Nick L sends us. It sounds like Nick's in a similar position: engineers write VB.Net code to control their CAD tool, and then Nick tries desperately to get them to follow some sort of decent coding practice. The result is code like:

'Looping Through S_Parts that have to be inital created For Each Item As Object In RootPart.S_PartsToCreate If Item.objNamDe IsNot String.Empty Then If Item.objNamEn IsNot String.Empty Then If Item.artCat IsNot String.Empty Then If Item.prodFam IsNot String.Empty Then If Item.prodGrp IsNot String.Empty Then 'Checking if the Mandatory Properties are in the partfamilies and not empty If Item.Properties.ContainsKey("From_sDesign") Then ' I omitted 134 lines of logic that really should be their own function Else MsgBox("Property From_SDesign is missing or empty.", MsgBoxStyle.DefaultButton2, "Information RS2TC") Exit Sub End If Else MsgBox("Property prodGrp is missing or empty.", MsgBoxStyle.DefaultButton2, "Information RS2TC") Exit Sub End If Else MsgBox("Property prodFam is missing or empty.", MsgBoxStyle.DefaultButton2, "Information RS2TC") Exit Sub End If Else MsgBox("Property artCat is missing or empty.", MsgBoxStyle.DefaultButton2, "Information RS2TC") Exit Sub End If Else MsgBox("objNamEn is missing or empty.", MsgBoxStyle.DefaultButton2, "Information RS2TC") Exit Sub End If Else MsgBox("objNamDe is missing or empty.", MsgBoxStyle.DefaultButton2, "Information RS2TC") Exit Sub End If Next

All of their code is stored in a single file called Custom.vb, and it is not stored in source control. Yes, people overwrite each other's code all the time, and it causes endless problems.

Nick writes:

I really wish we'd stop letting engineers code without supervision. Someone should at least tell them about early returns.

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