Technology

cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/45826210

The US Department of Defense has a lot of congressionally mandated homework to do every year involving hundreds of required reports on various national security topics. But Pentagon officials have been proudly describing a new shortcut—using generative AI tools to write such reports for Congress.

Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael highlighted AI-generated reports to Congress as a key example of how the Department of Defense—stylized as the Department of War under the Trump administration—has adopted generative AI during an event hosted by the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, DC, on June 12. The Pentagon has made AI tools, starting with Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government, widely available to members of all six military branches through the department’s bespoke GenAI.mil platform since December 2025.

“I have to report to Congress every year on this thing,” Michael said. “Let me load all the papers onto it and have it draft me a congressional report that would otherwise take 200 hours of staffing time and do it in five hours.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/66266973

Mechanical Watch | a guide to build a mechanical watch

As promised, this story just keeps getting stupider.

Never though much about how stuff like UTF-8 actually works.

This article take a very good approach (starts with UTF-32 and shows how one can optimize it to save space).

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1198777/instagram-alternative-loops-is-now-on-google-play

PSN briefly allowed users to claim single-letter Online IDs like A, B, X, and Z, even though Sony’s public username rules require 3–16 characters. It looks less like a planned feature and more like a validation failure somewhere in PSN’s identity stack, showing why client-side checks are never enough and why all platforms need consistent server-side validation across APIs, account services, and databases.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1198508/openai-losses-increased-nearly-8x-in-2025-with-spending-hitting-34-billion