Technology

There's nothing like retro gaming on the Raspberry Pi but we haven't quite seen a gaming rig like this. Leave it to the Pi community to blow our minds and expectations out of the water. This project, created by maker and developer John Park is using our favorite SBC — the Raspberry Pi 5 — to drive a cool wall arcade featuring RGB LED matrix panels as the main display.

According to Park, this setup doesn't just look the part. You can actually play games on the system like a real arcade using wired USB controllers. That said, you're limited by the display capabilities of the matrix panel display. It can run demos with cool retro-style animations but also play a few homebrew games that are created using the PICO-8 Fantasy console.

Google employees and human rights groups have raised concerns about the tech giant’s purchase of an Israeli start-up in an unprecedented $32bn deal.

Google on Tuesday announced the all-cash acquisition of Wiz, an Israeli cloud security firm which was founded by former members of Unit 8200, an elite Israeli army cyber-espionage and surveillance unit.

The deal comes with the Google already facing internal and external pressure over its controversial Project Nimbus contract, through which along with Amazon it provides cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli government and military.

A spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid, a coalition of Google and Amazon workers campaigning against the companies' involvement with Israel, said Google was "playing with fire" by buying Wiz.

Today, we’re excited to announce AI Labyrinth, a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect “no crawl” directives. When you opt in, Cloudflare will automatically deploy an AI-generated set of linked pages when we detect inappropriate bot activity, without the need for customers to create any custom rules.

And it's "free"! (visibility in to all of that traffic is more than sufficient payment for them 🤑)

Here are some perhaps-contradictory highlights from their blog post (emphasis mine), which I'm pretty sure was itself written with LLM assistance:

No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense.

When these links are followed, we know with high confidence that it's automated crawler activity, as human visitors and legitimate browsers would never see or click them. This provides us with a powerful identification mechanism, generating valuable data that feeds into our machine learning models. By analyzing which crawlers are following these hidden pathways, we can identify new bot patterns and signatures that might otherwise go undetected.

But as bots have evolved, they now proactively look for honeypot techniques like hidden links, making this approach less effective.

AI Labyrinth won’t simply add invisible links, but will eventually create whole networks of linked URLs that are much more realistic, and not trivial for automated programs to spot. The content on the pages is obviously content no human would spend time-consuming, but AI bots are programmed to crawl rather deeply to harvest as much data as possible. When bots hit these URLs, we can be confident they aren’t actual humans, and this information is recorded and automatically fed to our machine learning models to help improve our bot identification. This creates a beneficial feedback loop where each scraping attempt helps protect all Cloudflare customers.

This is only the first iteration of using generative AI to thwart bots for us. Currently, while the content we generate is convincingly human, it won’t conform to the existing structure of every website. In the future, we’ll continue to work to make these links harder to spot and make them fit seamlessly into the existing structure of the website they’re embedded in. You can help us by opting in now.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27168422

Alt. Link: https://archive.is/zOnze

BYD first announced plans for a car plant in Mexico in 2023, along with intentions to make cars in Brazil, Hungary and Indonesia. It said the Mexican plant would create 10,000 jobs and produce 150,000 vehicles a year.

Authorities feared Mexico would gain unrestricted access to BYD’s advanced technology and knowhow, they said, even possibly allowing US access to it. “The commerce ministry’s biggest concern is Mexico’s proximity to the US,” said one of the people.

Beijing is also giving preference to projects in countries that are part of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure development programme, according to the people.

Trump’s team has accused Mexico of being a “back door” for Chinese goods to enter the US duty-free through the USMCA. The Mexican government denies this but has responded to US pressure by placing tariffs on Chinese textiles and launching anti-dumping investigations into steel and aluminium products originating from China. “Mexico’s new government has taken a hostile attitude towards Chinese companies, making the situation even more challenging for BYD,” said the second person.

In November, shortly after Trump’s re-election, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said there was still no “firm” investment proposal from any Chinese company to set up in Mexico, despite BYD having reaffirmed its intent to invest $1bn earlier that month.

“The Mexican government obviously would like to get some of the investments [from China], but [its] trading relationship with the US is a lot more important,” said Gregor Sebastian, a senior analyst at US-based consultancy Rhodium Group.

It doesn’t “make business sense” for BYD to hasten the construction of a production facility in Mexico at the moment, Sebastian added, pointing out that the lack of a robust automotive supply chain would force BYD to import numerous components from China, subjecting them to higher tariffs.

In February last year, Li had said it would select a location for the factory by the end of 2024. BYD reported sales of more than 40,000 vehicles in Mexico last year. It has said it wants to double sales volume and open 30 new dealerships in the country in 2025.

BYD sold 4.3mn EVs and hybrids globally in 2024 and unveiled its “God’s Eye” advanced driving system in February, with plans to install it on its entire model line-up.

Earlier this month, Tesla’s main rival raised $5.6bn in a Hong Kong share sale, with the proceeds expected to help fuel its overseas expansion. But it has suffered a setback with its $1bn development in Brazil, which was delayed in December when the authorities halted construction over workers being subject to “slavery”-like conditions. BYD subsequently fired a Chinese subcontractor.

BYD unveils battery system that charges EVs in five minutes

https://fortune.com/2025/03/17/byd-battery-system-charging-5-minutes-tesla-superchargers/

BYD Shares Jump to Record on Five-Minute EV Battery Charging

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-17/byd-unveils-battery-system-that-charges-an-ev-in-five-minutes

Cheap Chinese Cars Are Taking Over Roads From Brazil to South Africa

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-03-17/chinese-carmakers-threaten-ford-gm-stellantis-in-global-markets

Tesla Is Flailing in China and BYD’s Rapid Rise Is to Blame

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-09/tesla-is-flailing-in-china-and-the-rapid-rise-of-byd-is-to-blame

“This is a completely different approach to what people have done before. The writing’s on the wall that this is going to transform things, it’s going to be the new way of doing forecasting,” Turner said. He said the model would eventually be able to produce accurate eight-day forecasts, compared with five-day forecast at present, as well as hyper-localised predictions.

Dr Scott Hosking, the director of science and innovation for environment and sustainability at the Alan Turing Institute, said the breakthrough could “democratise forecasting” by making powerful technologies available to developing nations around the world, as well as assisting policymakers, emergency planners and industries that rely on accurate weather forecasts.