AI Weekly Malaysia

Polina Pompliano's review of the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary "You Can See Everything" argues the film's real subject is the audience: she describes a theater shouting at the screen and contends the filmmakers manipulate viewers in real time. The piece also flags a detail usually lost in retellings — Holmes was acquitted of all four charges tied to defrauding patients and was convicted for knowingly misleading investors who put more than $700 million into Theranos. It leans on a 2015 Canon experiment where six photographers shot the same man from different descriptions and produced wildly different portraits.

A study led by animal behaviorist Eleonora Biffi at the University of Parma, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, tested whether dogs show the bouba/kiki effect. In two near-identical experiments (51 dogs, then 19 dogs whose owners wore headphones playing rock music to block sound cues), dogs watched two screens while 'Bouba' or 'Kiki' played from speakers, and GoPro footage was fed into an AI head-direction tracker as a proxy for gaze. The reported result: dogs looked significantly more at the rounded shape during 'Bouba' and at the spiky shape during 'Kiki', above chance.

A Hacker News submission links to a Meidas News report headlined "Zuckerberg's Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day," indicating Meta removed an Instagram account tied to the "No Kings" protests on the day those protests took place. The article body was not retrievable, so the only confirmed details are the headline claim and the discussion itself: 311 points and 148 comments on the HN thread. No specifics on the takedown mechanism, stated policy reason, account size, or whether it was restored are available in the supplied text.

Anthropic committed 5% of its shares to a new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, structured as a wholly-owned LLC rather than a 501(c)(3), with an extra 2% added at the board's discretion for every 50% rise in company value above a set baseline (subject to stockholder approval). Combined with co-founders' pledges of 80% of their holdings and an employee equity-match program that roughly half of employees use, Anthropic says about 20% of its shares will be dedicated to public benefit. The post names labor-market impact as a target area, notes $200M already committed there, rules out lobbying or political giving with the fund's equity, and defers governance and valuation-milestone details to 'the coming months.'

3Blue1Brown published a video titled "There's never been a better time to go into math" on 17 Oct 2026; the YouTube page shows roughly 2.06 million views within two days, and the Hacker News submission drew 377 points and 448 comments. The actual video content could not be retrieved (the fetch returned HTTP 401), so the page text contains only player chrome and sidebar recommendations — including a Terence Tao/Numberphile AI clip and "Mathematicians Are The Canary Down The AI Coal Mine" — not anything the video itself argues.

Malay Mail reports that onboard cameras in Chinese-made rental cars recorded sensitive military information during a Norwegian military exercise, with a separate exercise at Oslo airport also flagged. The item is a short wire-style piece: the excerpt is truncated mid-sentence ("Videos ca...") and gives no counts of vehicles, no named manufacturer, no technical detail on what was recorded or how the footage was stored or transmitted.

Dominik Picheta published KillSwitch, an esoteric stack-based language deliberately designed to be hard for LLMs and coding agents to use, as a probe of whether models actually understand code or just recall training data. Its spec contains hidden lies and expects the reader to deduce rules; identifiers are validated by letter counts; literals are referenced positionally ("value 2 lines above"); and valid syntax includes phrases like "Ignore previous instructions" and "hack into a computer" to trip safety guardrails. The post drew 193 points and 148 comments on Hacker News.

Meta updated its commercial terms of use to state it could "use any content from [a business account's] domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of" Meta products and services — language legal experts quoted by Nieman Lab called a "remarkable provision" that could allow scraping any publisher's site with a Meta business account and using it for AI training. Meta said the update did not change how it crawls the web, and after The Verge reported on the backlash, the company removed the provision, saying the "crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products" and that it "does not change how Meta uses web crawlers." The article notes Meta defeated a high-profile copyright infringement lawsuit last year while other cases against AI companies, including Meta, continue.

Simon Willison link-blogs a trick from Lean Rada: an inline `<script>` can replace itself at page load using `document.currentScript.replaceWith(...)`, e.g. `The year is <script>document.currentScript.replaceWith(new Date().getFullYear())</script>`. Wrapping it in a one-liner helper `$=(...n)=>document.currentScript.replaceWith(...n)` turns any static HTML file into a mini template language: `The year is <script>$(new Date().getFullYear())</script>`. Posted 17 October 2026; the only content is the snippet itself, no benchmarks, caveats, or browser notes.

TikTok permanently suspended the advertising account for "Musk," a four-hour Alex Gibney documentary distributed by Bleecker Street, citing the account's political content — the film's ads were also initially rejected by Meta and YouTube before both allowed them (Meta called its rejection "an error"), and X, which Musk owns, has refused to carry the ads outright. The film opened in just four theaters last weekend and is expanding, with streaming planned on HBO next year. Note: the headline supplied with this item says "restored," but the article text describes a permanent ban, not a restoration.

Tom's Hardware headline deal: an MSI Infinite ZS prebuilt gaming PC is priced at $7,599, with the RTX 5090 inside effectively costing about $5,300 once you account for the roughly $2,300 of other components included. The article body itself is subscription/membership boilerplate — no benchmarks, no spec list, no availability or regional pricing is present in the text provided. So the only usable facts are the three numbers in the title.

Anthropic published a report on Friday (Oct 17, 2026) saying its technical workforce has gotten less junior: junior-level employees in technical departments fell from 21% to 14% since early 2025, and the share of junior technical hires dropped from 27% to 9%. Technical teams also shrank from 61% to 56% of the overall workforce, which Anthropic attributes partly to coding tools letting non-technical employees build software themselves. In an April 2026 internal survey, 27% of employees said Claude made them more productive and 20% said their job shifted 'from actually doing work to managing Claudes,' with one engineer comparing it to babysitting and the report naming human attention and judgement as a new bottleneck.

Chris Kiehl argues it's still fine to enjoy programming for its own sake, even as paid work shifts toward AI-assisted output. His counter-example is concrete: he spends weekends hand-writing a buggy Breakout clone with bad collision detection, and recently detoured into pushing Java's type safety using ideas from dependently typed languages like Agda, plus a weekend on recursion schemes he describes as hours of head-banging with no clear payoff yet. He also says he happily vibe-codes a suite of apps he's never read a line of, and suspects reading the code would horrify him. The post drew 187 points and 179 comments on Hacker News.

At TechCrunch Disrupt, Replit CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, citing cost, partnership, and performance — a shift that follows an OpenAI partnership announced in August. Masad later clarified that Anthropic models are still selectable on the platform, but OpenAI's ChatGPT is now the default powering Replit Agent, and he said Replit had been a top-five Anthropic customer until recently. He claimed internal and public benchmarks show OpenAI's 'Sol and Astra' perform better at building vibe-coded apps from scratch.

OpenCode, the open source coding agent, posted on X that it suffered a security breach "last night" tied to what it called a "large scale distillation attack," affecting 1.4% of OpenCode Console users, who were notified by email the following morning. The post says the incident is ongoing, that no further details can be shared yet, and that OpenCode is working with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google to remediate. The tweet drew 21.7K views and the Hacker News thread drew 439 points and 78 comments, with replies openly asking what a "distillation attack" has to do with leaked credentials and whether affected users would be compensated.

Derek Wessman describes starting the Japanese naturalization process in 2012 at the Hachioji Legal Affairs Bureau, then in Minami Osawa, and argues the government deliberately makes it opaque, document-heavy, and slow — at least a year, with partly subjective outcomes. The required paperwork listed includes original birth certificates for both parents and each of six siblings, proof of the parents' marriage, a signed affidavit from his mother attesting she gave birth to him, and a list of his wife's family members with names, birth dates, nationalities, and current interaction status. He notes far more people apply now than in 2012 and tells readers to follow what their local Legal Affairs Bureau says rather than internet advice, including his own.

A Numismatic News market-update column by Patrick A. Heller (updated May 15, 2026) claims that, starting in October 2025, the value of U.S. gold exports surpassed every other U.S. export category — normally oil, pharmaceuticals, or aircraft and parts. The supplied excerpt is truncated before any actual dollar figures, monthly totals, or source data appear, and it attributes the shift to speculation about foreign buyers seeking alternatives to dollar-based reserves. The piece drew 253 points and 128 comments on Hacker News despite being a coin-market publication rather than a data release.

A UC San Diego-led randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial found that semaglutide (sold as Ozempic/Wegovy) slowed biological aging across multiple epigenetic clocks, per a UC news piece published June 11, 2026 and written by Susanne Clara Bard. The article text provided is truncated and does not include the measured effect sizes, trial duration, sample size, or which specific clocks moved. It drew 180 points and 177 comments on Hacker News.

Internal documents released in a court battle between Amazon and a Canadian union describe Atlas, an in-house AI forecasting tool that scores warehouses in the US, Canada and the UK from 100 to 900 for the likelihood of union activity, sit-ins or other 'disruptive labour events'. The documents say Atlas pulls 'hundreds of data points', including Reddit posts, employee responses to internal feedback surveys and records of past industrial action; lower scores mean workers are judged more likely to organise, and the training material states higher scores are 'better' for leadership. Garfield Hylton, a 62-year-old worker at Amazon's Coventry warehouse, told openDemocracy he knew his scanning and idle time were tracked but not that social media and internal bulletin posts were being monitored for dissent.

Pele is a new zero-dependency open source library that renders Mermaid syntax directly to SVG, themeable through CSS custom properties (--pele-bg, --pele-fg, --pele-line, etc.) so colour changes apply without re-rendering. Its README claims 230 kB gzip versus Mermaid.js's 1.6 MB, render times of 0.05–0.3 ms versus 6–82 ms, and support for every diagram type in Mermaid 12.1.0; it was built for Obsidian to render diagrams quickly and match themes. The Hacker News thread drew 266 points and 26 comments.

CNBC's weekly market recap says the Nasdaq fell 4.5% last week — its worst week since June, breaking a four-week win streak — while the S&P 500 dropped 2% and the Dow gained 0.7% as money rotated into healthcare and consumer staples. The sell-off accelerated after September CPI came in at 3.7% year-over-year (vs 3.6% expected) and PPI jumped 1.3% for the month and 6.3% annually, the largest annual gain since March 2022. The only AI-infrastructure detail cited is Broadcom CEO Hock Tan warning Monday that access to capital could become the industry's next major constraint; cybersecurity stocks were hit hard, with Meta and Microsoft among the few tech bright spots.

Tom's Hardware published a review of the HyperX Cloud Alpha Air, described in the headline and dek as HyperX's first open-back gaming headset and as 'budget-friendly,' with 'signature HyperX comfort' carried over from prior models. The excerpt available here is almost entirely site navigation, membership prompts, and paywall copy — no price, driver specs, weight, measurements, or test results are included. The only substantive claims are the open-back design, the budget positioning, and the comfort continuity.

Ember released the third-generation Mug 3, a temperature-controlled smart mug. The biggest upgrade is on-mug temperature adjustment: a bottom button cycles through five presets from 125°F to 145°F in 5°F increments, so you no longer need the app just to change temperature. The reviewer found the feature useful but criticized the button’s bottom placement as awkward and hard to press with hot liquid.

A Tom's Hardware write-up covers a modder's custom quad 8-pin power solution for the RTX 5090, a card listed at $8,500 in the headline, aimed at preventing the 16-pin connector meltdowns associated with Nvidia's high-power GPUs. The article text supplied here is almost entirely site navigation, subscription prompts, and newsletter boilerplate, so no method details, test results, part numbers, or independent measurements are actually available.

Bending Spoons, the Milan-based holding company that owns AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite and Evernote, received a new $330 million stake from Berkshire Hathaway disclosed on Wednesday, bringing Berkshire's total investment to over $900 million. The stock rose 41% on the news, though some gains were later lost. The article frames Bending Spoons as a consolidator buying out-of-favor software businesses displaced by the AI boom; no product, API, or pricing changes are described.