Comment on China and India Race To Amass Gold Reserves

Reddit is staying out of the current revolt against social media website X and, to a lesser degree, Meta, on its platform. Since Tuesday, hundreds of subreddits have discussed and/or implemented bans against the site formerly called Twitter, as reported by 404 Media. Dozens of subreddits have already agreed to disallow the sharing of any links to X, with moderators (volunteer Reddit users) agreeing to enforce the bans. The trend seemed to start among subreddits focused on sports-related topics, like the subreddits for the NFL, the Vancouver Canucks NHL team, and the Liverpool Football Club, as reported by Mashable.

On Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI models may surpass human capabilities "in almost everything" within two to three years, according to a Wall Street Journal interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Speaking at Journal House in Davos, Amodei said, "I don't know exactly when it'll come, I don't know if it'll be 2027.

The open source Wine project—sometimes stylized WINE, for Wine Is Not an Emulator—has become an important tool for companies and individuals who want to make Windows apps and games run on operating systems like Linux or even macOS. The CrossOver software for Mac and Windows, Apple's Game Porting Toolkit, and the Proton project that powers Valve's SteamOS and the Steam Deck are all rooted in Wine, and the attention and resources put into the project in recent years have dramatically improved its compatibility and usefulness. Yesterday, the Wine project announced the stable release of version 10.0, the next major version of the compatibility layer that is not an emulator.

The Department of Homeland Security has terminated all members of advisory committees, including one that has been investigating a major Chinese hack of large US telecom firms. "The Cyber Safety Review Board—a Department of Homeland Security investigatory body stood up under a Biden-era cybersecurity executive order to probe major cybersecurity incidents—has been cleared of non-government members as part of a DHS-wide push to cut costs under the Trump administration, according to three people familiar with the matter," NextGov/FCW reported yesterday. A memo sent Monday by DHS Acting Secretary Benjamine Huffman said that in order to "eliminate[e] the misuse of resources and ensur[e] that DHS activities prioritize our national security, I am directing the termination of all current memberships on advisory committees within DHS, effective immediately.

Samsung announced the Galaxy S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra at its Unpacked event today. What is different from last year's models? With the phones themselves, not much, other than a new chipset and a wide camera. But pure AI optimism? Samsung managed to pack a whole lot more of that into its launch event and promotional materials. The corners on the S25 Ultra are a bit more rounded, the edges are flatter, and the bezels seem to be slightly thinner.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are puzzling phenomena because their details are so difficult to resolve, and observations to date have been inconsistent. Astronomers added another piece to the puzzle with the detection of an FRB that seems to originate in a dead galaxy that is no longer producing new stars, according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, along with a related paper on the event from scientists at Northwestern University. As we've reported previously, FRBs involve a sudden blast of radio-frequency radiation that lasts just a few microseconds.