Hacker NewsFriday, January 23

The curl open source project accepts security vulnerability reports through designated contact channels. They offer no monetary rewards but provide acknowledgments for confirmed issues. The project warns against submitting low-quality reports and provides clear documentation on their disclosure policy and procedures.

This content documents verified hallucinations in AI-generated academic citations, showing how AI models fabricate fake research papers with non-existent authors, incorrect publication details, invalid DOIs, and made-up arXiv IDs across various computer science and AI research topics.

This study examined brain activity and writing performance of 54 participants using either ChatGPT, search engines, or no tools for essay writing. EEG data revealed that LLM users showed the weakest brain connectivity and cognitive engagement compared to brain-only users who had the strongest neural networks. When LLM users switched to writing without AI assistance, they exhibited reduced brain activity and struggled with tasks like quoting their own work. The research suggests that while AI tools provide convenience, they may create "cognitive debt" by reducing mental effort and potentially harming long-term learning abilities.

A commenter concerned about moral absolutes sparked extensive debate over whether objective moral truths exist or if ethics are culturally relative. Discussions ranged from universal principles like "don't torture babies" to philosophical arguments about moral realism vs relativism.

A developer created isometric.nyc, a large isometric pixel art map of New York City using nano banana and coding agents without writing any code themselves. Despite being no-code, the project required significant manual engineering work and labor beyond initial expectations.

A team has open-sourced a 1.5B parameter AI model that predicts code edits by using recent editing history as context, similar to Cursor. The model is small enough to run locally while outperforming larger models on speed and accuracy, and is available for download or through their JetBrains plugin.

Skip, a cross-platform mobile development tool that enables iOS and Android apps from Swift/SwiftUI code, has removed all licensing requirements and open-sourced its core engine "skipstone." The company is transitioning from a paid subscription model to community-supported sponsorship to achieve mass adoption while maintaining independence from big tech investment.

For the first time, wind and solar supplied more power than fossil fuels to the E.U. in 2024, generating 30% of power compared to fossil fuels' 29%. Solar energy is expanding rapidly across all E.U. countries, with some nations like Hungary and Spain getting over 20% of power from solar alone. Coal is retreating, with 19 countries using less than 5% coal power. However, drought reduced hydropower output, forcing increased natural gas use. Cheap batteries are beginning to replace gas during evening peak hours, potentially stabilizing energy prices.

This blog post discusses Google's search monopoly, controlling 90% of web searches, and how a 2024 U.S. court ruling found Google guilty of antitrust violations. The author argues this monopoly stifles AI innovation since search indexes power AI systems. Kagi, a search company, details their failed attempts to license search data directly from Google and Bing, forcing them to use third-party providers. The Department of Justice's proposed remedies include mandatory data sharing and search syndication, which could enable more competition. The post envisions a layered search ecosystem with both commercial and public options for information access.

Qwen3-TTS is a powerful open-source speech generation system developed by Qwen that supports voice cloning, voice design, and natural language-based voice control across 10 languages. It features ultra-low latency streaming generation, intelligent text understanding, and comes in two model sizes (1.7B and 0.6B parameters) with state-of-the-art performance in voice synthesis tasks.