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New Images of the Sun Show Its Surface In the Finest Detail Yet

By: BeauHD
5 August 2026 at 22:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Scientists have captured images of the sun's surface in the finest detail yet, revealing a strange and dynamic facade. It's dangerous to look directly at the sun without proper eye protection. But researchers were able to peek at its scorching surface with the help of the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located on the island of Maui in Hawaii. Scientists originally took the images for a different reason: to fine-tune and test the limits of the telescope. But when they looked at the results, they realized they'd photographed the sun's bright outer shell at higher resolution than ever before. What's more, they saw strange feathery patterns rippling across the surface. "That reminds me of famous paintings, like the swirling skies in Van Gogh's Starry Night," said solar physicist Ruizhu Chen with Stanford University, who was not involved with the new research. Researchers saw ripples of instability on the sun's surface caused by bits of magnetized plasma moving past each other at different speeds -- similar to waves that stir when a gust of wind blows over water. It's a well-known phenomenon that guides how fluids move. This has been glimpsed on Earth and other planets like Jupiter and Saturn, but "it has not been observed ever at that level on the solar surface," according to study co-author Friedrich Woger with the National Solar Observatory. The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

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Waymo CEO Explains Why Camera-Only Self-Driving Falls Short

By: BeauHD
5 August 2026 at 18:00
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Electrek: Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can't take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that "weak sensing" hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance. [...] Dolgov made the comments in a talk at Y Combinator's Startup School, walking through the lessons Waymo has learned building its driver over close to two decades. He put the sensor question on the table plainly: "there's been a long-standing debate about what kind of sensors do you actually need for autonomous driving." His answer draws the line that camera-only advocates tend to skip right past. "Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there's that proof of existence," he said. "If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that's a very reasonable way to go." Then the catch. If you're targeting full autonomy and strongly superhuman performance, he said, "you find that weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early." Dolgov said that cameras, lidar, and radar are complementary rather than redundant: "These different sensing modalities, they're not backups to each other," and combining them produces a view "vastly superior to what you get with any one sensor." He said multiple sensor types also protect against physical failures, such as a leaf or branch blocking a camera, while helping Waymo climb the "exponential ladder of nines" required for fully driverless safety. Dolgov warned that camera-only systems may improve quickly before plateauing "way before the performance that is required by your product." He also pushed back on the cost argument against lidar, calling it "a number that has a fairly short shelf life" as hardware costs continue to fall.

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Anthropic's AI Used Fake Identities, Malware In Rogue Attack On GitHub Project

By: BeauHD
5 August 2026 at 17:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Routine cybersecurity testing of frontier AI models sparked a series of unexpected security incidents -- the most serious case arising when Anthropic's Mythos 5 model attempted to insert malicious code into an open source software application and created fake identities to deceive the human developers maintaining the project. The security incidents occurred during a cyber evaluation of seven leading AI models' capabilities by the AI Security Institute (AISI), a research organization within the UK government, in late July. The researchers discovered (PDF) 19 instances in which "AI agents took unsanctioned action on the live Internet, including cases that targeted real people and organizations," according to an AISI blog post published on August 4. Almost all the "autonomous, unsanctioned" actions came from Anthropic's Mythos 5 model, with two such actions coming from OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. [...] The most serious case involved Mythos making multiple attempts to execute a supply chain attack on the open source project repository hosted on the developer platform GitHub, including using social engineering techniques to try to convince the repository's human maintainers to merge malicious code into the repository. After first opening a pull request to merge the malicious code into the repository, Mythos created fake online "sock puppet" personas that claimed to have independently reviewed and verified the code as not containing malware. The AI agent also sent five emails to two human maintainers of the repository, including some emails containing malware and others attempting to persuade a maintainer to accept the pull request. Mythos even opened a GitHub Issue on a second repository -- also owned by a maintainer of the first repository -- that contained a prompt injection with malicious instructions targeting "issue-triage AI coding agents." This line of attack came from Mythos reasoning that the repository maintainer could be an AI coding agent such as Claude Code.

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I made an AI Powered CRM on cursor without any dev background, would love any feedback

I made an AI Powered CRM on cursor without any dev background, would love any feedback on what features can be added or whatnot

edit: am i doing something wrong, im 16 year old and dont know what the comments mean, i just made it beause i was cold calling using excel lists

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Built a CRM you run by just talking to it and looking for a few people to test it free

So I’ve been building an AI CRM and I think it’s finally at the point where other people should poke at it. It's not a low effort thing, quite the opposite, as a CRM architect i have seen hundreds of implementations for the big CRMs in all kinds of companies over the years.

The main difference from the usual stuff is there’s basically no mandatory form filling or clicking through ten menus to do one thing(you have an interface if you want or you can use other ways to interact with data like chat, mcp, api, webhook..). You just tell it what you want in plain language β€” β€œadd this contact,” β€œshow me every deal over 10k that’s gone quiet,” β€œbuild me a pipeline view for tomorrow’s review” β€” and it does it and pins the view for your team. You can still define your own objects and fields so it fits how you actually work instead of forcing you into someone else’s boxes. Data’s hosted in the EU too if that matters to you.

I’m not trying to sell anyone anything right now. I mainly want a handful of real users to run it on an actual pipeline and tell me what’s missing, what’s annoying, what they’d want built. Honest feedback is worth more to me than money at this stage.

To make it worth your time: if you actually use it and give me solid feedback, I’ll give you a year free.

If you run sales, freelance, do B2B, or just live in a CRM all day and are open to trying something different, DM me and I’ll walk you through it.

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Meta Debuts First AI Coding Agent To Take On Anthropic and OpenAI

By: BeauHD
5 August 2026 at 16:00
Meta has launched Muse Code, its first AI coding agent that's positioned as a lower-cost rival to Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex. It offers pay-as-you-go pricing and an optional zero-data-retention feature for enterprise users. CNBC reports: Muse Code is the latest major release from AI chief Alexandr Wang, who leads Meta Superintelligence Labs and oversees foundation model development. Wang joined in June of last year as the centerpiece of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's effort to revamp his company's flailing artificial intelligence strategy. "You can install it with one command and then use it to take on complete software engineering tasks across a wide variety of use cases, planning changes, writing code, validating the results," Wang said in an interview on Wednesday. [...] The new tool, like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex assistants, makes it easier for people to build apps within a single user interface while managing fleets of AI-powered digital agents that can help underpin the software development process. Muse Code, available in a preview version, works alongside the company's latest AI model, Muse Spark 1.2. Wang declined to share user statistics related to the company's Muse Spark AI models, but said "adoption has been exciting and strong." The latest Muse Spark model was developed and trained alongside Muse Code, which Wang said improves the overall coding performance.

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Apple's 'Private Relay' Is Exposing Users' Real IP Addresses

By: BeauHD
5 August 2026 at 15:00
Security researchers found that Apple's iCloud Private Relay can expose users' real IP addresses because some passkey-related requests bypass Safari and its proxy protections at the operating-system level. "In short: any website that supports, or pretends to support, passkeys can see the user's real IP address despite having iCloud Private Relay on," security researcher Tommy Mysk, who discovered the issue along with Talal Haj Bakry, told 404 Media. The flaws also affect OnionBrowser, an iOS app for browsing the web through the Tor anonymity network. It does not, however, impact the official Tor Browser itself. From the report: The researchers developed a site that lets Private Relay users check if the issues impact them. In 404 Media's tests, the site did return the real IP address of a user that was supposed to be protected by Private Relay. [...] In a quirk of how passkeys work -- a broadly secure alternative to usernames and passwords which use the WebAuthn standard -- a user's device makes a web request outside of the browser itself. Meaning, that request essentially bypasses Private Relay and exposes a user's real IP address, even though to them it may look like they are simply interacting with a website as normal. "Because the fetch is issued by the operating system's credential service rather than by Safari, it never enters Private Relay's proxied path. The destination server sees the device's real IP address either way," the researchers write in their research. [...] "We have already informed them. They said the issue was Γ’dire,' but they let us disclose the issue. They didn't provide any time when they will address this," Mysk said.

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Free lost-bid log + follow-up scripts, no email wall, no signup

Every thread in here about tracking quotes looks the same: a spreadsheet with client, amount, status. Nobody's got a reason column. So you lose 6 quotes in a row and you've got a list with no clue why any of them fell through.

We got annoyed enough by our own log to actually fix it. Built 3 free templates: a lost-bid log with reason + revisit date columns, 5 text scripts for reaching out to clients who went quiet a year ago, and a one-page client card - last contact, what you promised, what's next.

No email wall, no signup, nothing to fill in first. Link's in the first comment - grab whatever's useful and skip the rest.

What column would you add that we missed?

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Looking for alpha users for a free + open source CRM for people who use Claude Code or Codex

Hi guys,

I’m a software engineer who likes to build open source projects for people who use coding agents (particularly coding agents in the terminal, e.g. traditional Claude Code).

I run a project called SmallDocs, which is a lightweight agent-first (free and open source) office suite which is used by a few thousand software engineers and scientists.

I’ve recently turned my eye to making a CRM with the same interaction pattern (mainly driven by the AI you already use, instead of human input).

It’s very early but I’m looking to build it with community feedback, so if you’re interested in trying it out and being involved, please let me know.

Thank you

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Lawmaker Who Wants Data Center Pause Wins Kansas Democratic Primary

By: BeauHD
5 August 2026 at 14:00
Kansas Democrats nominated State Senator Cindy Holscher for governor after she defeated party-backed rival Ethan Corson. "The race became a test of what sort of candidate Democratic voters prefer in what is expected to be a challenging general election race: a more moderate candidate like Mr. Corson with endorsements from party leaders or an outspoken populist like Ms. Holscher, who spoke out against data centers and the political establishment," reports The New York Times. From the repot: Even in a national political environment that could favor Democrats, Republicans see the Kansas governorship as among their best opportunities for flipping a seat. President Trump carried Kansas by 16 percentage points in 2024, and Republicans hold supermajorities in the State Legislature. Voters in the Republican primary for governor nominated Ty Masterson, the president of the Kansas Senate and the recipient of Mr. Trump's endorsement, according to The A.P. Ms. Holscher, who is from suburban Kansas City, sought out a lane to Mr. Corson's political left and made inroads with some of the state's progressive voters. She emphasized her role in unwinding former Gov. Sam Brownback's tax policies and called for a moratorium on data centers. She also spoke against a final deal to lure the Kansas City Chiefs across the state line from Missouri. Ms. Holscher presented an implicit critique of Ms. Kelly's stewardship of Kansas, referring to Mr. Corson as part of a political establishment that was too cozy with corporations and out of touch with the party's voters. "I'm the only Democrat in this race to call for a moratorium on data centers because we have to get these guardrails in place," said Holscher in an interview. "We are having our people and our resources exploited."

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Over 250 ClickFix Domains Use Browser Fingerprinting to Hide macOS Malware Lures

A macOS ClickFix operation spanning more than 250 front-end domains now fingerprints visitors before deciding whether to show them a malware lure, a change Microsoft Threat Intelligence tracked on infrastructure it had been watching for weeks. The server-side gate hides the malicious page from crawlers and sandboxes while presenting selected Mac users with a fake software download. Microsoft

OpenAI Disrupts Poipet Scam Network Using ChatGPT Across Multiple Fraud Schemes

OpenAI said it disrupted a Cambodia-based scam operation that used its generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT to facilitate a wide range of investment, romance, gambling, and law enforcement impersonation schemes. To that end, it banned a coordinated network of ChatGPT accounts likely originating from Southeast Asia and operating from the city of Poipet, a region with extensive

Everyone in your CRM identified themselves first. How do you measure the ones who didn't?

Disclosure: I build lead-capture software, so take my bias for what it’s worth. That said, none of this requires buying anything.

Most CRM records begin with a hand raise, a form fill, a booked call, or a reply. The row only exists because someone explicitly chose to be known.

What I notice over and over is the visitor who lands on a page with a real question, can't spot the answer in a few seconds, and just closes the tab. They leave zero footprint.

Of course, a CRM’s core job is managing known relationships. So when threads pop up here asking "how do we stop leads from slipping through the cracks," almost every response focuses on pipeline hygiene: tagging, sequences, follow-up discipline. That's all solid advice, but it only fixes leaks after a lead enters the system. No amount of process hygiene recovers a lead you never captured in the first place.

Here’s one hard data point I can share from real session data: even when an AI agent is right there to help, about half of visitors still bounce without sending a single message. They land on a page with a direct line to ask something, and still say nothing.

Here is how you can get a rough floor for the problem using tools you already own:

1. Pull search zero-results If you have site search, look at the last 90 days of queries that returned zero results. Those are literal questions people typed out that your site failed to answer (If search tracking isn't on, turn it on today*.* It takes a few minutes).

2. Look at high-intent non-converters In analytics, build a segment for high-intent behavior: sessions that visited pricing, went three pages deep, or returned for a second visit. Compare that total to the number of new CRM contacts created from that channel over the same month. Most teams call that gap a conversion issue. I see that as an unanswered question problem.

3. Ask the people who did convert This is the easiest one. Put a simple question at the top of your discovery calls or intake forms: "Was there anything you tried to find on the site before calling that wasn't there?" Every "yes" represents someone who pushed through a friction point where others gave up and bounced.

4. Audit your reps' repeat questions List the 5 to 10 questions your front desk or sales reps answer every single day. Now go search for those answers on your live site. If they aren't obvious, the visitors who never called had no way to get them.

This won't give you a perfect number, but it gives you a floor and a directional signal using tools you already own. If anyone has a cleaner way to quantify uncaptured intent, I’d love to hear what’s working for you.

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Google Overhauls AI Leadership As DeepMind CEO Steps Aside

By: BeauHD
5 August 2026 at 13:00
Google is reshuffling its AI leadership as Demis Hassabis steps away from day-to-day management of DeepMind to become chairman and Alphabet's chief scientist, while CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu takes operational control. Meanwhile, longtime chief scientist Jeff Dean and several prominent researchers are leaving to launch their own company. Axios reports: Hassabis will add the title of chief scientist for Google parent company Alphabet and also continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, the company's AI drug discovery spinoff. Koray Kavukcuoglu, the current chief technology officer of Google DeepMind will serve as senior VP of the unit, reporting to CEO Sundar Pichai. Dean, a 27-year Google veteran is starting Discovery Loop, an independent publicity benefit corporation in which Google will be an investor and cloud provider. Joining him in that effort are Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat as well as Oriol Vinyals, a DeepMind VP and Quoc Le, a Google Brain co-founder. [...] In an interview with The New York Times, Dean indicated that leaving Google, a public company, gives him more leeway to focus on scientific discoveries associated with AI as well. "We might make decisions that are not necessarily in the company's purist financial interests," he told NYT. "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand," Hassabis wrote. "It's critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder." "With this backdrop, I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability"

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