Alistair sends us a pretty big blob of code, but it's a blob which touches upon everyone's favorite design pattern: the singleton. It's a lot of Java code, so we're going to take this as chunks. Let's start with the two methods responsible for constructing the object.

The purpose of this code is to parse an XML file, and construct a mapping from a "name" field in the XML to a "batch descriptor".

/** * Instantiates a new batch manager. */ private BatchManager() { try { final XMLReader xmlReader = XMLReaderFactory.createXMLReader(); xmlReader.setContentHandler(this); xmlReader.parse(new InputSource(this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("templates/" + DOCUMENT))); } catch (final Exception e) { logger.error("Error parsing Batch XML.", e); } } /* * (non-Javadoc) * * @see nz.this.is.absolute.crap.sax.XMLEntity#initChild(java.lang.String, * java.lang.String, java.lang.String, org.xml.sax.Attributes) */ @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { final BatchDescriptor batchDescriptor = new BatchDescriptor(); // put it in the map batchMap.put(attributes.getValue("name"), batchDescriptor); return batchDescriptor; }

Here we see a private constructor, which is reasonable for a singleton. It creates a SAX based reader. SAX is event driven- instead of loading the whole document into a DOM, it emits an event as it encounters each new key element in the XML document. It's cumbersome to use, but far more memory efficient, and I'd hardly say this.is.absolute.crap, but whatever.

This code is perfectly reasonable. But do you know what's unreasonable? There's a lot more code, and these are the only things not marked as static. So let's keep going.

// singleton instance so that static batch map can be initialised using // xml /** The Constant singleton. */ @SuppressWarnings("unused") private static final Object singleton = new BatchManager();

Wait… why is the singleton object throwing warnings about being unused? And wait a second, what is that comment saying, "so the static batch map can be initalalised"? I saw a batchMap up in the initChild method above, but it can't be…

private static Map<String, BatchDescriptor> batchMap = new HashMap<String, BatchDescriptor>();

Oh. Oh no.

/** * Gets the. * * @param batchName * the batch name * * @return the batch descriptor */ public static BatchDescriptor get(String batchName) { return batchMap.get(batchName); } /** * Gets the post to selector name. * * @param batchName * the batch name * * @return the post to selector name */ public static String getPostToSelectorName(String batchName) { final BatchDescriptor batchDescriptor = batchMap.get(batchName); if (batchDescriptor == null) { return null; } return batchDescriptor.getPostTo(); }

There are more methods, and I'll share the whole code at the end, but this gives us a taste. Here's what this code is actually doing.

It creates a static Map. static, in this context, means that this instance is shared across all instances of BatchManager.They also create a static instance of BatchManager inside of itself. The constructor of that instance then executes, populating that static Map. Now, when anyone invokes BatchManager.get it will use that static Map to resolve that.

This certainly works, and it offers a certain degree of cleanness in its implementation. A more conventional singleton would have the Map being owned by an instance, and it's just using the singleton convention to ensure there's only a single instance. This version's calling convention is certainly nicer than doing something like BatchManager.getInstance().get(…), but there's just something unholy about this that sticks into me.

I can't say for certain if it's because I just hate Singletons, or if it's this specific abuse of constructors and static members.

This is certainly one of the cases of misusing a singleton- it does not represent something there can be only one of, it's ensuring that an expensive computation is only allowed to be done once. There are better ways to handle that lifecycle. This approach also forces that expensive operation to happen at application startup, instead of being something flexible that can be evaluated lazily. It's not wrong to do this eagerly, but building something that can only do it eagerly is a mistake.

In any case, the full code submission follows:

package nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.template; import java.io.IOException; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Collection; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Iterator; import java.util.Map; import java.util.ResourceBundle; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.KupengaException; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.SafeComparator; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.sax.XMLEntity; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.selector.Selector; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.selector.SelectorItem; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.BatchValidator; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.Validatable; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.ValidationException; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.business.BusinessObject; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.database.EntityHandler; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.database.SQLEntityHandler; import org.apache.log4j.Logger; import org.xml.sax.Attributes; import org.xml.sax.ContentHandler; import org.xml.sax.InputSource; import org.xml.sax.SAXException; import org.xml.sax.XMLReader; import org.xml.sax.helpers.XMLReaderFactory; /** * The Class BatchManager. */ public class BatchManager extends XMLEntity { private static final Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(BatchManager.class); /** The Constant DOCUMENT. */ private final static String DOCUMENT = "Batches.xml"; /** * The Class BatchDescriptor. */ public class BatchDescriptor extends XMLEntity { /** The batchSelectors. */ private final Collection<String> batchSelectors = new ArrayList<String>(); /** The dependentCollections. */ private final Collection<String> dependentCollections = new ArrayList<String>(); /** The directSelectors. */ private final Collection<String> directSelectors = new ArrayList<String>(); /** The postTo. */ private String postTo; /** The properties. */ private final Collection<String> properties = new ArrayList<String>(); /** * Gets the batch selectors iterator. * * @return the batch selectors iterator */ public Iterator<String> getBatchSelectorsIterator() { return this.batchSelectors.iterator(); } /** * Gets the dependent collections iterator. * * @return the dependent collections iterator */ public Iterator<String> getDependentCollectionsIterator() { return this.dependentCollections.iterator(); } /** * Gets the post to. * * @return the post to */ public String getPostTo() { return this.postTo; } /** * Gets the post to business object. * * @param businessObject * the business object * @param postHandler * the post handler * * @return the post to business object * * @throws ValidationException * the validation exception */ private BusinessObject getPostToBusinessObject( BusinessObject businessObject, EntityHandler postHandler) throws ValidationException { if (this.postTo == null) { return null; } final BusinessObject postToBusinessObject = businessObject .getBusinessObjectFromMap(this.postTo, postHandler); // copy properties for (final String propertyName : this.properties) { String postToPropertyName; if ("postToStatus".equals(propertyName)) { // status field on batch entity refers to the batch entity // itself // so postToStatus is used for updating the status property // of the postToBusinessObject itself postToPropertyName = "status"; } else { postToPropertyName = propertyName; } final SelectorItem destinationItem = postToBusinessObject .find(postToPropertyName); if (destinationItem != null) { final Object oldValue = destinationItem.getValue(); final Object newValue = businessObject.get(propertyName); if (SafeComparator.areDifferent(oldValue, newValue)) { destinationItem.setValue(newValue); } } } // copy direct selectors for (final String selectorName : this.directSelectors) { final SelectorItem destinationItem = postToBusinessObject .find(selectorName); if (destinationItem != null) { // get the old and new values for the selectors Selector oldSelector = (Selector) destinationItem .getValue(); Selector newSelector = (Selector) businessObject .get(selectorName); // strip them down to bare identifiers for comparison if (oldSelector != null) { oldSelector = oldSelector.getAsIdentifier(); } if (newSelector != null) { newSelector = newSelector.getAsIdentifier(); } // if they're different then update if (SafeComparator.areDifferent(oldSelector, newSelector)) { destinationItem.setValue(newSelector); } } } // copy batch selectors for (final String batchSelectorName : this.batchSelectors) { final Selector batchSelector = (Selector) businessObject .get(batchSelectorName); if (batchSelector == null) { throw new ValidationException( "\"PostTo\" selector missing."); } final BusinessObject batchObject = postHandler .find(batchSelector); if (batchObject != null) { // get the postTo selector for the batch object we depend on final BatchDescriptor batchDescriptor = batchMap .get(batchObject.getName()); if (batchDescriptor.postTo != null && postToBusinessObject .containsKey(batchDescriptor.postTo)) { final Selector realSelector = batchObject .getBusinessObjectFromMap( batchDescriptor.postTo, postHandler); postToBusinessObject.put(batchDescriptor.postTo, realSelector); } } } businessObject.put(this.postTo, postToBusinessObject); return postToBusinessObject; } /* * (non-Javadoc) * * @see * nz.this.is.absolute.crap.sax.XMLEntity#initChild(java.lang.String, * java.lang.String, java.lang.String, org.xml.sax.Attributes) */ @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { if ("Properties".equals(qName)) { return new XMLEntity() { @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { BatchDescriptor.this.properties.add(attributes .getValue("name")); return null; } }; } else if ("DirectSelectors".equals(qName)) { return new XMLEntity() { @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { BatchDescriptor.this.directSelectors.add(attributes .getValue("name")); return null; } }; } else if ("BatchSelectors".equals(qName)) { return new XMLEntity() { @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { BatchDescriptor.this.batchSelectors.add(attributes .getValue("name")); return null; } }; } else if ("PostTo".equals(qName)) { return new XMLEntity() { @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { BatchDescriptor.this.postTo = attributes .getValue("name"); return null; } }; } else if ("DependentCollections".equals(qName)) { return new XMLEntity() { @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { BatchDescriptor.this.dependentCollections .add(attributes.getValue("name")); return null; } }; } return null; } } /** The batchMap. */ private static Map<String, BatchDescriptor> batchMap = new HashMap<String, BatchDescriptor>(); /** * Gets the. * * @param batchName * the batch name * * @return the batch descriptor */ public static BatchDescriptor get(String batchName) { return batchMap.get(batchName); } /** * Gets the post to selector name. * * @param batchName * the batch name * * @return the post to selector name */ public static String getPostToSelectorName(String batchName) { final BatchDescriptor batchDescriptor = batchMap.get(batchName); if (batchDescriptor == null) { return null; } return batchDescriptor.getPostTo(); } // singleton instance so that static batch map can be initialised using // xml /** The Constant singleton. */ @SuppressWarnings("unused") private static final Object singleton = new BatchManager(); /** * Post. * * @param businessObject * the business object * * @throws Exception * the exception */ public static void post(BusinessObject businessObject) throws Exception { // validate the batch root object only - it can validate the rest if it // needs to if (businessObject instanceof Validatable) { if (!BatchValidator.validate(businessObject)) { logger.warn(String.format("Validating %s failed", businessObject.getClass().getSimpleName())); throw new ValidationException( "Batch did not validate - it was not posted"); } ((Validatable) businessObject).validator().prepareToPost(); } final SQLEntityHandler postHandler = new SQLEntityHandler(true); final Iterator<BusinessObject> batchIterator = new BatchIterator( businessObject, null, postHandler); // iterate through batch again posting each object try { while (batchIterator.hasNext()) { post(batchIterator.next(), postHandler); } postHandler.commit(); } catch (final Exception e) { logger.error("Exception occurred while posting batches", e); // something went wrong postHandler.rollback(); throw e; } return; } /** * Post. * * @param businessObject * the business object * @param postHandler * the post handler * * @throws KupengaException * the kupenga exception */ private static void post(BusinessObject businessObject, EntityHandler postHandler) throws KupengaException { if (businessObject == null) { return; } if (Boolean.TRUE.equals(businessObject.get("posted"))) { return; } final BatchDescriptor batchDescriptor = batchMap.get(businessObject .getName()); final BusinessObject postToBusinessObject = batchDescriptor .getPostToBusinessObject(businessObject, postHandler); if (postToBusinessObject != null) { postToBusinessObject.save(postHandler); } businessObject.setItemValue("posted", Boolean.TRUE); businessObject.save(postHandler); } /** * Instantiates a new batch manager. */ private BatchManager() { try { final XMLReader xmlReader = XMLReaderFactory.createXMLReader(); xmlReader.setContentHandler(this); xmlReader.parse(new InputSource(this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("templates/" + DOCUMENT))); } catch (final Exception e) { logger.error("Error parsing Batch XML.", e); } } /* * (non-Javadoc) * * @see nz.this.is.absolute.crap.sax.XMLEntity#initChild(java.lang.String, * java.lang.String, java.lang.String, org.xml.sax.Attributes) */ @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { final BatchDescriptor batchDescriptor = new BatchDescriptor(); // put it in the map batchMap.put(attributes.getValue("name"), batchDescriptor); return batchDescriptor; } } .comment { border: none; } [Advertisement] Keep all your packages and Docker containers in one place, scan for vulnerabilities, and control who can access different feeds. 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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: California's statewide power grid operator is poised to become the first in North America to deploy artificial intelligence to manage outages, MIT Technology Review has learned. "We wanted to modernize our grid operations. This fits in perfectly with that," says Gopakumar Gopinathan, a senior advisor on power system technologies at the California Independent System Operator -- known as the CAISO and pronounced KAI-so. "AI is already transforming different industries. But we haven't seen many examples of it being used in our industry." At the DTECH Midwest utility industry summit in Minneapolis on July 15, CAISO is set to announce a deal to run a pilot program using new AI software called Genie, from the energy-services giant OATI. The software uses generative AI to analyze and carry out real-time analyses for grid operators and comes with the potential to autonomously make decisions about key functions on the grid, a switch that might resemble going from uniformed traffic officers to sensor-equipped stoplights. But while CAISO may deliver electrons to cutting-edge Silicon Valley companies and laboratories, the actual task of managing the state's electrical system is surprisingly analog. Today, CAISO engineers scan outage reports for keywords about maintenance that's planned or in the works, read through the notes, and then load each item into the grid software system to run calculations on how a downed line or transformer might affect power supply. "Even if it takes you less than a minute to scan one on average, when you amplify that over 200 or 300 outages, it adds up," says Abhimanyu Thakur, OATI's vice president of platforms, visualization, and analytics. "Then different departments are doing it for their own respective keywords. Now we consolidate all of that into a single dictionary of keywords and AI can do this scan and generate a report proactively." If CAISO finds that Genie produces reliable, more efficient data analyses for managing outages, Gopinathan says, the operator may consider automating more functions on the grid. "After a few rounds of testing, I think we'll have an idea about what is the right time to call it successful or not," he says.

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Saudi Arabia has asked consultants to reassess the feasibility of The Line, its ambitious 170km linear city project and centerpiece of the Neom initiative, as rising costs and falling oil prices force the kingdom to scale back its megaprojects. Middle East Eye reports: In April, The Financial Times reported that the CEO of Neom had launched a "comprehensive review" of the kingdom's megaproject. Neom, along with luxury Red Sea hotels and a ski resort, is the flagship project of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 plan to transform the kingdom's economy and reduce its dependence on oil revenue. Bloomberg reported in 2024 that Saudi Arabia was cutting back plans for The Line. Instead of 1.5 million people living there by 2030, Saudi officials were said to anticipate fewer than 300,000 residents. Meanwhile, only 2.4km of the city is expected to be completed by 2030. In April, Goldman Sachs painted a bleak picture for Saudi Arabia's projects in a note to clients, projecting "pretty significant" budget deficits and more scaling back of megaprojects. Neom has already faced internal challenges. Nadhmi al-Nasr, who managed Neom's construction from 2018 to 2024, departed from his post in November. Nasr earned a chilling reputation managing Neom. He bragged that he put everyone to work "like a slave," adding, "When they drop down dead, I celebrate. That's how I do my projects." Two other foreign executives also left Neom at the end of 2024, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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Microsoft is testing a new adaptive energy saver mode in Windows 11 that automatically turns energy saver on or off based on system workload instead of battery percentage, aiming to extend laptop battery life without dimming screen brightness. The feature is currently available to Windows Insider testers and expected to roll out later this year. The Verge reports: The energy saver mode in Windows 11 typically dims a display brightness by 30 percent, disables transparency effects, and stop apps running in the background. Non-critical Windows update downloads are also paused, and certain apps like OneDrive, OneNote, and Phone Link may not sync fully while energy saver is enabled. This new adaptive energy saver mode, which will only be available on devices with a battery, will automatically enable or disable without affecting screen brightness. That will make it less noticeable on devices like laptops, tablets, and handhelds. "Adaptive energy saver is an opt-in feature that automatically enables and disables energy saver, without changing screen brightness, based on the power state of the device and the current system load," explains Microsoft's Windows Insider team.

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The U.S. Department of Defense has awarded contracts worth up to $200 million each to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI to scale adoption of advanced AI. "The contracts will enable the DoD to develop agentic AI workflows and use them to address critical national security challenges," reports Reuters, citing the department's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. From the report: Separately on Monday, xAI announced a suite of its products called "Grok for Government", making its advanced AI models -- including its latest flagship Grok 4 -- available to federal, local, state and national security customers. The Pentagon announced last month that OpenAI was awarded a $200 million contract, saying the ChatGPT maker would "develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains." The contracts announced on Monday deepen the ties between companies leading the AI race and U.S. government operations, while addressing concerns around the need for competitive contracts for AI use in federal agencies. "The adoption of AI is transforming the (DoD's) ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries," Chief Digital and AI Officer Doug Matty said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Investing.com: Meta's newly formed superintelligence lab is discussing potential changes to the company's artificial intelligence strategy that could represent a major shift for the social media giant. A small group of top members of the lab, including 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, Meta's new chief A.I. officer, talked last week about abandoning the company's most powerful open source A.I. model, called Behemoth, in favor of developing a closed model, according to a report in the New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter. Meta has traditionally open sourced its A.I. models, making the computer code public for other developers to build upon, and any shift toward a closed A.I. model would mark a significant philosophical change for Meta. Meta had completed training its Behemoth model by feeding in data to improve it, but delayed its release due to poor internal performance. After the company announced the formation of the superintelligence lab last month, teams working on the Behemoth model, which is considered a "frontier" model, stopped conducting new tests on it. The discussions within the superintelligence lab remain preliminary, and no decisions have been finalized. Any potential changes would require approval from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

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France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Greece will pilot an age verification app to better protect children online, as part of the EU's push to enforce its Digital Services Act. Reuters reports: The setup for the age verification app is built on the same technical specifications as the European Digital Identity Wallet which will be rolled out next year. The five countries can customize the model according to their requirements, integrate into a national app or keep it separately. The landmark legislation, which became applicable last year, requires Alphabet's Google, Meta, ByteDance's TikTok and other online companies to do more to tackle illegal and harmful online content. EU regulators said the new guidelines would help online platforms to tackle addictive design, cyberbullying, harmful content and unwanted contact from strangers.

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Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI has released Kimi K2, a trillion-parameter open-source language model that outperforms GPT-4 in key benchmarks with particularly strong performance on coding and autonomous agent tasks. VentureBeat reports: The new model, called Kimi K2, features 1 trillion total parameters with 32 billion activated parameters in a mixture-of-experts architecture. The company is releasing two versions: a foundation model for researchers and developers, and an instruction-tuned variant optimized for chat and autonomous agent applications. "Kimi K2 does not just answer; it acts," the company stated in its announcement blog. "With Kimi K2, advanced agentic intelligence is more open and accessible than ever. We can't wait to see what you build." The model's standout feature is its optimization for "agentic" capabilities -- the ability to autonomously use tools, write and execute code, and complete complex multi-step tasks without human intervention. In benchmark tests, Kimi K2 achieved 65.8% accuracy on SWE-bench Verified, a challenging software engineering benchmark, outperforming most open-source alternatives and matching some proprietary models. [...] On LiveCodeBench, arguably the most realistic coding benchmark available, Kimi K2 achieved 53.7% accuracy, decisively beating DeepSeek-V3's 46.9% and GPT-4.1's 44.7%. More striking still: it scored 97.4% on MATH-500 compared to GPT-4.1's 92.4%, suggesting Moonshot has cracked something fundamental about mathematical reasoning that has eluded larger, better-funded competitors. But here's what the benchmarks don't capture: Moonshot is achieving these results with a model that costs a fraction of what incumbents spend on training and inference. While OpenAI burns through hundreds of millions on compute for incremental improvements, Moonshot appears to have found a more efficient path to the same destination. It's a classic innovator's dilemma playing out in real time -- the scrappy outsider isn't just matching the incumbent's performance, they're doing it better, faster, and cheaper.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Samuel Herman and Alexander Baciu never liked using Comcast's cable broadband. Now, the residents of Saline, Michigan, operate a fiber Internet service provider that competes against Comcast in their neighborhoods and has ambitions to expand. "All throughout my life pretty much, I've had to deal with Xfinity's bullcrap, them not being able to handle the speeds that we need," Herman told Ars. "I lived in a house of 10. I have seven other brothers and sisters, and there's 10 of us in total with my parents." With all those kids using the Internet for school and other needs, "it just doesn't work out," he said. Herman was particularly frustrated with Comcast upload speeds, which are much slower than the cable service's download speeds. "Many times we would have to call Comcast and let them know our bandwidth was slowing down... then they would say, 'OK, we'll refresh the system.' So then it would work again for a week to two weeks, and then again we'd have the same issues," he said. Herman, now 25, got married in 2021 and started building his own house, and he tried to find another ISP to serve the property. He was familiar with local Internet service providers because he worked in construction for his father's company, which contracts with ISPs to build their networks. But no fiber ISP was looking to compete directly against Comcast where he lived, though Metronet and 123NET offer fiber elsewhere in the city, Herman said. He ended up paying Comcast $120 a month for gigabit download service with slower upload speeds. Baciu, who lives about a mile away from Herman, was also stuck with Comcast and was paying about the same amount for gigabit download speeds. Herman said he was the chief operating officer of his father's construction company and that he shifted the business "from doing just directional drilling to be a turnkey contractor for ISPs." Baciu, Herman's brother-in-law (having married Herman's oldest sister), was the chief construction officer. Fueled by their knowledge of the business and their dislike of Comcast, they founded a fiber ISP called Prime-One. Now, Herman is paying $80 a month to his own company for symmetrical gigabit service. Prime-One also offers 500Mbps for $75, 2Gbps for $95, and 5Gbps for $110. The first 30 days are free, and all plans have unlimited data and no contracts. "We are 100 percent fiber optic," Baciu told Ars. "Everything that we're doing is all underground. We're not doing aerial because we really want to protect the infrastructure and make sure we're having a reliable connection." Each customer's Optical Network Terminal (ONT) and other equipment is included in the service plan. Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router if the customer prefers not to use their own router. They don't charge equipment or installation fees, Herman and Baciu said. Prime-One began serving customers in January 2025, and Baciu said the network has been built to about 1,500 homes in Saline with about 75 miles of fiber installed. Prime-One intends to serve nearby towns as well, with the founders saying the plan is to serve 4,000 homes with the initial build and then expand further. [...] A bit more than 100 residents have bought service so far, they said. Herman said the company is looking to sign up about 30 percent of the homes in its network area to make a profit. "I feel fairly confident," Herman said, noting the number of customers who signed up with the initial construction not even halfway finished.

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Apple is facing pressure to shake up its corporate playbook to invigorate its struggling artificial intelligence efforts. From a report: Alarmed by a share slump that's erased more than $640 billion in market value this year and frustrated with delays in rolling out AI features, investors are calling for Apple to break with long-standing traditions to make a big acquisition and more aggressively pursue talent. "Historically Apple does not do big mergers and acquisitions," said Citigroup Inc. analyst Atif Malik, noting that the last major deal was its takeover of Beats in 2014. But, he argues, "investors would turn more positive if Apple could acquire or invest a meaningful stake in an established AI provider." Apple shares have fallen 16% this year while traders bid up the shares of peers like Meta, which is spending lavishly on AI. While Apple faces other problems, including its exposure to tariffs and regulatory issues, disappointment in bringing compelling AI features to its vast ecosystem of devices has become top of mind for investors.

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Armagh Observatory is marking a very special meteorological milestone as the institute celebrates 230 years of continuous weather observation. From a report: The unbroken tradition of handwritten data makes it the longest sequence of continuous weather information gathered anywhere in the UK and Ireland. Events are being held at Armagh Observatory on Monday to mark the significant anniversary. Nowadays, most weather data is gathered only by automated weather stations, but not in Armagh, where the human touch remains. The first handwritten recording was made on the evening of 14 July 1795, when a measurement of the temperature and air pressure was recorded on a graph at the observatory that sits above the city of Armagh. The measurement was repeated the next day and every subsequent day for the next 230 years.

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A small fraction of hyperactive social media users generates the vast majority of toxic online content, according to research by New York University psychology professor Jay Van Bavel and colleagues Claire Robertson and Kareena del Rosario. The study found that 10% of users produce roughly 97% of political tweets, while just 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts known as the "disinformation dozen" created most vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic, the research found. In experiments, researchers paid participants to unfollow divisive political accounts on X. After one month, participants reported 23% less animosity toward other political groups. Nearly half declined to refollow hostile accounts after the study ended, and those maintaining healthier newsfeeds reported reduced animosity 11 months later. The research describes social media as a "funhouse mirror" that amplifies extreme voices while muting moderate perspectives.

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A Department of Justice filing aiming to recover fraudulently obtained cryptocurrency may have inadvertently revealed the scam's victims as the CEO and CFO of crypto payment firm MoonPay. From a report: The filing, which aims to seize around $40,350 in USDT frozen by Tether, reveals that two victims sent $250,300 in USDT to a person posing as Steve Witkoff, co-chair of the President Trump's inaugural committee. However, records obtained from Binance revealed that the wallet that received the funds was registered to Ehiremen Aigbokhan, a man based in Lagos, Nigeria. The victims are identified in the filing only as "Ivan" and "Mouna." However, as outlet NOTUS noticed, Crypto payment firm Moonpay's CEO is Ivan Soto-Wright and its CFO is Mouna Ammari Siala. Furthermore, a wallet involved in the $250,300 transaction is listed by Etherscan as a MoonPay wallet.

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Cognition AI, an artificial intelligence startup that offers a software coding assistant, said on Monday that it had bought rival Windsurf as part of an escalating battle to lead in the technology. From a report: The move follows a $2.4 billion deal by Google to acquire some of Windsurf's top executives and license the start-up's technology, which was revealed on Friday. Google's deal appeared to leave Windsurf in a difficult position as a stand-alone start-up. OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot, had also been in talks to buy Windsurf before the Google deal. "We've long admired the Windsurf team and what they've built," said Scott Wu, a co-founder of Cognition, in an email to employees viewed by The New York Times. "Within our lifetime, engineers will go from bricklayers to architects, focusing on the creativity of designing systems rather than the manual labor of putting them together."

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Air India's chief executive urged staff to avoid drawing premature conclusions about what caused one of the airline's Boeing triangle jets to crash last month, after a preliminary investigation ruled out mechanical or maintenance issues, turning attention to the pilots' actions. WSJ: Campbell Wilson told staff that the probe into the crash was "far from over," according to an internal memo, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, in which he set out some of the findings of a report issued by India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau at the end of last week. Wilson's memo didn't mention one of the AAIB's findings: that the airplane's fuel-control switches had been turned off one by one, seconds after takeoff, starving both engines of fuel. The switches, which sit between the two seats in the cockpit, were turned back on about 10 seconds later, but the engines apparently couldn't fully restart and gain thrust fast enough, the report said. The crash of the London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner killed all but one of the 242 passengers and crew on board, as well as 19 people on the ground, when the plane slammed into a residential area beyond the airport in the Indian city of Ahmedabad. In the memo, Wilson said "over the past 30 days, we've seen an ongoing cycle of theories, allegations, rumours and sensational headlines, many of which have later been disproven."

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A scientific paper featuring an AI-generated image of a rat with an oversized penis was retracted three days after publication, highlighting broader problems plaguing academic publishing as researchers struggle with an explosion of scientific literature. The paper appeared in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology before widespread mockery forced its withdrawal. Research studies indexed on Clarivate's Web of Science database increased 48% between 2015 and 2024, rising from 1.71 million to 2.53 million papers. Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan called the publishing system "broken and unsustainable," while University of Exeter researcher Mark Hanson described scientists as "increasingly overwhelmed" by the volume of articles. The Royal Society plans to release a major review of scientific publishing disruptions at summer's end, with former government chief scientist Mark Walport citing incentives that favor quantity over quality as a fundamental problem.

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Google will merge ChromeOS and Android into a unified platform, according to Sameer Samat, President of Android Ecosystem at Google. "We're going to be combining ChromeOS and Android into a single platform, and I am very interested in how people are using their laptops these days and what they're getting done," Samat said during a recent interview.

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Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that Meta would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers for superintelligence, intensifying his pursuit of a technology that he has chased with a talent war for top AI engineers. From a report: The social media giant is among the large technology companies that have chased high-profile deals and doled out multi-million-dollar pay packages in recent months to fast-track work on machines that can outthink humans on most tasks. Unveiling the spending commitment in a Threads post on Monday, CEO Zuckerberg touted the strength in the company's core advertising business to support the massive spending that has raised concerns among tech investors about potential payoffs. "We have the capital from our business to do this," Zuckerberg said. He also cited a report from a chip industry publication Semianalysis that said Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring online a 1-gigawatt-plus supercluster, which refers to a massive data center built to train advanced AI models.

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VPN provider BulletVPN has shut down its servers with immediate effect, leaving subscribers without service regardless of their subscription terms. The company announced the closure on its website, citing "shifts in market demand, evolving technology requirements, and sustainability of operations." Users with active subscriptions can receive a free six-month subscription to competitor Windscribe, "along with discounted long-term plans." Windscribe clarified it has not acquired BulletVPN or assumed control of its operations, and no user data including email addresses or account information was shared between the companies.

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Bay Area Michelin-starred restaurants are conducting extensive background research on diners before they arrive, mining social media profiles and maintaining detailed guest databases to personalize dining experiences. Lazy Bear maintains records on 115,000 people and employs a guest services coordinator who creates weekly reports by researching publicly available social media information. Staff study color-coded Google documents containing guest data before each service. SingleThread's reservation team researches social media, Google, and LinkedIn profiles for guests, where meals cost over $500 on weekends. General manager Akeel Shah told SFGate the information helps "tailor the experience and make it memorable." Acquerello has collected guest data for 36 years, initially handwritten in books. Co-owner Giancarlo Paterlini said their director of operations reviews each reservation for dining history and wine preferences to customize service.

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