Liquid Food: Prost Mahlzeit!

Trinknahrung spart Zeit, aber ist sie wirklich nahrhaft? Wir schauen uns erfolgreiche Produkte genau an – und stellen eine einfache Alternative vor. Ein Ratgebertext von Marc Favre (Fitness, ZDF)

Trinknahrung spart Zeit, aber ist sie wirklich nahrhaft? Wir schauen uns erfolgreiche Produkte genau an - und stellen eine einfache Alternative vor. Ein Ratgebertext von Marc Favre (Fitness, ZDF)

Are you the asshole? Of course not!—quantifying LLMs’ sycophancy problem

In new research, AI models show a troubling tendency to agree with whatever the user says.

Researchers and users of LLMs have long been aware that AI models have a troubling tendency to tell people what they want to hear, even if that means being less accurate. But many reports of this phenomenon amount to mere anecdotes that don’t provide much visibility into how common this sycophantic behavior is across frontier LLMs.

Two recent research papers have come at this problem a bit more rigorously, though, taking different tacks in attempting to quantify exactly how likely an LLM is to listen when a user provides factually incorrect or socially inappropriate information in a prompt.

Solve this flawed theorem for me

In one pre-print study published this month, researchers from Sofia University and ETH Zurich looked at how LLMs respond when false statements are presented as the basis for difficult mathematical proofs and problems. The BrokenMath benchmark that the researchers constructed starts with “a diverse set of challenging theorems from advanced mathematics competitions held in 2025.” Those problems are then “perturbed” into versions that are “demonstrably false but plausible” by an LLM that’s checked with expert review.

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A single point of failure triggered the Amazon outage affecting millions

A DNS manager in a single region of Amazon’s sprawling network touched off a 16-hour debacle.

The outage that hit Amazon Web Services and took out vital services worldwide was the result of a single failure that cascaded from system to system within Amazon’s sprawling network, according to a post-mortem from company engineers.

The series of failures lasted for 15 hours and 32 minutes, Amazon said. Network intelligence company Ookla said its DownDetector service received more than 17 million reports of disrupted services offered by 3,500 organizations. The three biggest countries where reports originated were the US, the UK, and Germany. Snapchat, AWS, and Roblox were the most reported services affected. Ookla said the event was “among the largest internet outages on record for Downdetector.”

It’s always DNS

Amazon said the root cause of the outage was a software bug in software running the DynamoDB DNS management system. The system monitors the stability of load balancers by, among other things, periodically creating new DNS configurations for endpoints within the AWS network. A race condition is an error that makes a process dependent on the timing or sequence events that are variable and outside the developers’ control. The result can be unexpected behavior and potentially harmful failures.

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Man takes herbal pain quackery, nearly dies, spends months in hospital

The 61-year-old had wounds all over, a bacterial infection, and needed intensive care.

A 61-year-old man in California is lucky to be alive after a combination of herbal supplements he was taking for joint pain ended up utterly wrecking his body, landing him in intensive care and in a delirious state for months. His case is reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine: Clinical Cases.

The man turned up at a hospital in San Francisco in bad shape, but with nonspecific problems that had begun just two days earlier. His back hurt, he was feverish, nauseous, bloated, and he hadn’t been eating much. He was so weak he couldn’t walk or get out of bed without help. His heart rate and breathing rate were high. His blood pressure was low. There were multiple wounds on his lower body in various stages of healing.

Initial exams and lab work revealed Staphylococcus aureus bacteria in his blood. There was also an abscess on his shoulder and an infection in and around his spine, which was worsening. Doctors wanted to perform a surgical procedure to relieve the pressure building up on his spinal cord and nerves, but his blood pressure was too low—and then he went into hemorrhagic shock from bleeding in his gastrointestinal tract. Doctors transferred him to the intensive care unit.

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DNA and jolts of electricity get people to make optimal antibodies

If we ID the DNA for a great antibody, anyone can now make it.

One of the things that emerging diseases, including the COVID and Zika pandemics, have taught us is that it’s tough to keep up with infectious diseases in the modern world. Things like air travel can allow a virus to spread faster than our ability to develop therapies. But that doesn’t mean biotech has stood still; companies have been developing technologies that could allow us to rapidly respond to future threats.

There are a lot of ideas out there. But this week saw some early clinical trial results of one technique that could be useful for a range of infectious diseases. We’ll go over the results as a way to illustrate the sort of thinking that’s going on, along with the technologies we have available to pursue the resulting ideas.

The best antibodies

Any emerging disease leaves a mass of antibodies in its wake—those made by people in response to infections and vaccines, those made by lab animals we use to study the infectious agent, and so on. Some of these only have a weak affinity for the disease-causing agent, but some of them turn out to be what are called “broadly neutralizing.” These stick with high affinity not only to the original pathogen, but most or all of its variants, and possibly some related viruses.

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Diptyx is an open source, dual-screen eReader (crowdfunding)

There’s no shortage of eReaders featuring E Ink displays. But the Diptyx eReader stands out in a few ways: it has two E Ink displays and a hinge in the middle that lets you open and close the device like a book. And it’s designed as an open…

There’s no shortage of eReaders featuring E Ink displays. But the Diptyx eReader stands out in a few ways: it has two E Ink displays and a hinge in the middle that lets you open and close the device like a book. And it’s designed as an open source project: the firmware and hardware designs will both […]

The post Diptyx is an open source, dual-screen eReader (crowdfunding) appeared first on Liliputing.

The Android-powered Boox Palma 2 Pro fits in your pocket, but it’s not a phone

This e-reader has a color screen and 5G.

Digital reading devices like the Kindle have existed for almost 20 years, and the standard eReader form factor has hardly changed at all. Amazon, Boox, and a few other companies have offered larger E Ink screens, but how about something smaller? Boox has unveiled its second-generation Palma e-reader, which still fits in your pocket but adds a color screen and mobile data connectivity.

The first-gen Palma launched last year, earning fans who saw it as a way to read and access some apps without the full spate of distracting smartphone experiences. Boox e-readers are essentially Android tablets with E Ink screens and a few software quirks that arise from their unofficial Google Play implementation. The second-gen Palma might offer more opportunities for distraction because it’s almost a smartphone.

The Palma 2 Pro upgrades the 6.1-inch monochrome display from the original to a 6.13-inch color E Ink Kaleido display. That’s the same technology used in Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft. The Amazon reader is a bit larger with its 7-inch display and chunkier bezels. Of course, the Kindle isn’t trying to fit in your pocket like the Palma 2 Pro, which is roughly the size and shape of a phone.

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