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ISSUE 0933
TUE, JUL 21, 2026
OrangeBot.AI 智能策划和筛选每日科技趋势和新闻,为您节省时间。
TODAY · TUE, JUL 21, 2026

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01

AI DIGEST

UPDATED DAILY · EDITOR'S PICK
01.00
AI DIGEST

AI新闻摘要

July 21, 2026

Here is a summary of today's main news events, based on the information provided.


Global Markets Fluctuate on Geopolitical News and Tech Earnings

Global stock markets saw mixed trading, with Asian markets rising on hopes of a ceasefire in the Middle East. U.S. markets were more cautious as investors await key earnings reports from major technology companies. Meanwhile, Treasury yields rose, and the U.S. dollar strengthened for a third straight day.

Oil Prices Volatile Amid Middle East Conflict and Ceasefire Hopes

Crude oil prices fluctuated as reports of escalating fighting in the Middle East were offset by diplomatic efforts to broker a 10-day ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran. The uncertainty left the price of Brent crude hovering around $90 per barrel.

US-China Tensions Grow Over Artificial Intelligence

U.S. officials and AI executives are expressing growing concern over China's recent advances in artificial intelligence. The White House is reportedly divided on how to respond, with potential crackdowns being considered. The concerns highlight the intensifying global competition in the AI sector.

New UK Prime Minister Announces Cabinet

The UK's new Prime Minister has appointed his top government team, bringing back many experienced politicians to key roles. The new leader is expected to stress continuity with the previous administration while also signaling some shifts in policy direction.

Corporate and Economic News in Brief

In business news, French AI company Mistral secured a major partnership with Microsoft to expand in Europe. In the UK, new data showed that payroll employment has flattened and wage growth has slowed. In India, SBI Funds Management saw its shares jump in the country's largest public offering this year.

Original · written by OrangeBot
OrangeBot Weekly · Issue #1 · by Shen Huang · 4 min read

The only 8 things that mattered this week

Semis had their worst week in a year, Meta got sued for letting AI pick layoff targets, and a Kaggle competition handed $25K to AI slop. Here's the fine print on all of it — and why none of it should scare you.

Read the issue →

Latest analysis

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02

ON THE WIRE

6 SOURCES
02

HACKER NEWS

02.00
HACKER NEWS

Hacker News - July 21, 2026

Hacker News Feed: Highlighting key posts and discussions.

Kimi Work

(www.kimi.com)

617252
Shinjuku Station in 3D

(satoshi7190.github.io)

25757
Airport Simulator

(airport.apunen.com)

815156
Xiaomi-Robotics-1

(robotics.xiaomi.com)

495318
03

HUGGINGFACE

03.00
HUGGINGFACE

HuggingFace 新闻 - July 21, 2026

HuggingFace Feed:最新的 AI 模型、数据集和社区动态。

TimeLens2: Generalist Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal LLMs

Video multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can describe what happens in a video, but rarely identify when the supporting evidence occurs. We study generalist video temporal grounding, in which one model predicts a variable-cardinality set of evidence intervals across video lengths, domains, query forms, and viewpoints. Existing training strategies are misaligned with this set-valued task: long-video labels often rely on brittle one-pass annotation, while reinforcement-learning rewards either fail to distinguish non-overlapping predictions or require fragile segment matching. TimeLens2 treats temporal evidence as an interval set throughout supervision and optimization. TimeLens2-93K constructs reliable multi-span supervision through caption-derived proposals, independent localization, cross-agent consensus, semantic verification, and boundary refinement. Our temporal Wasserstein reward computes exact one-dimensional \(W_1\) between uniform distributions over merged interval supports, providing dense, matching-free feedback under unequal cardinalities and equivalent fragmentation; temporal IoU complements it with precise-overlap feedback. Across seven benchmarks, TimeLens2-2B outperforms all size-matched baselines on every benchmark, while the 4B and 8B variants achieve state-of-the-art performance, surpassing open-source models with up to 397B parameters. The 2B, 4B, and 8B variants improve over their Qwen3-VL backbones by 14.2, 13.0, and 18.1 mIoU points, respectively.

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EvolvingWorld: An Open-Schema Framework for Co-Evolving Role-Play Agents and World Model in Interactive Literary World

This paper introduces EvolvingWorld, a framework and benchmark for character and world co-evolution in interactive literary worlds. Existing systems either treat interactive literary simulation as static persona imitation or isolated scene generation, failing to capture how characters and worlds evolve together over time. To address this, EvolvingWorld models literary simulation as a long-horizon process where characters interact, scenes progress, and character and world states are persistently updated. Unlike prior systems relying on fixed schemas, EvolvingWorld adopts an open-schema framework to support simulation across diverse literary worlds. The framework consists of two coupled modules: a Character Agent for multi-character role-play and persistent profile evolution, and an LLM-based World Model for global and location/entity-level state maintenance and scene progression. Based on this architecture, we formulate 7 trainable tasks for scene initialization, interaction generation, and state update. We construct a dataset from 57 books, producing 138,596 supervised training samples and 222 snapshots for testing. Furthermore, we introduce a trajectory-level LLM-as-Judge evaluation protocol spanning 10 dimensions and 20 metrics. Experiments show that EvolvingWorld can improve long-horizon simulation by effectively maintaining persistent, coherent character and world development.

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DeepSearch-World: Self-Distillation for Deep Search Agents in a Verifiable Environment

Training tool-use agents to improve from their own experience remains challenging, as supervised fine-tuning relies on fixed teacher-distilled trajectories, while sparse-reward reinforcement learning provides weak supervision for long-horizon interactions. We present DeepSearch-Evolve, a self-distillation framework for web agents built on DeepSearch-World, a deterministic and verifiable environment with reproducible search and page-reading tools. DeepSearch-World contains 420K multi-hop QA tasks constructed from entity-level random walks and supports key agentic cognitive behaviors useful for self-evolving, including progress verification, grounded reflection, and failure recovery. DeepSearch-Evolve iteratively performs trajectory generation, filtering, data mixing, and fine-tuning to train stronger agents. Without distillation from more capable models, DeepSearch-World-9B achieves competitive performance compared with open-source agents, reaching 31.2% on BrowseComp, 61.5% on GAIA, and 93.4% on HotpotQA, showing that verifiable environments enable scalable self-evolution for long-horizon web agents. We will release the environment, 420K training pool, validation set, model, and code to facilitate future research on self-improving deep search agents.

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SWE-Pruner Pro: The Coder LLM Already Knows What to Prune

Pruning long context for coding agents has been a vital technology for efficient context management. While existing context pruning methods such as SWE-Pruner realize this by attaching a separate code classifier, we find the agent itself encodes internal representations indicating the relevance of code context when reading tool output. Based on this finding, we propose SWE-Pruner Pro, which prunes tool outputs directly inside the agent. Concretely, a small head turns the agent's own internal representations into a keep-or-prune label for each line, with a length-aware embedding keyed to each tool output's line count. Across two open-weight backbones and four multi-turn benchmarks, SWE-Pruner Pro saves up to 39% of prompt and completion tokens while preserving task quality, with bounded inference overhead. Notably, on MiMo-V2-Flash SWE-Pruner Pro additionally raises the SWE-Bench Verified resolve rate by +3.8% and the long-context Oolong accuracy by +2.2 points.

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HOMIE: Human-object Centric Video Personalization via Multimodal Intelligent Enchancement

Human-object centric video personalization (HOCVP) is a core task within subject-driven video generation. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations. First, most approaches focusing on inter-subject personalization still struggle to strike a balance between high subject fidelity and accurate interaction patterns between humans and diverse objects, especially when objects represent abstract concepts such as logos. Second, while intra-subject references (e.g., OCR maps, multi-view inputs) are expected to enhance subject fidelity, most existing works lack mechanisms to understand such latent correspondence. To address both challenges, we propose HOMIE, an HOCVP framework that tackles both inter- and intra-subject input settings in a unified manner. Compared to previous approaches, HOMIE proposes a better MLLM integration strategy to extract knowledge of reference-level relationships without compromising the controllability of text encoders or incurring costly re-alignment. Specifically, we introduce global multimodal guidance within self-attention to better align MLLM-derived semantic features with VAE tokens. Furthermore, we propose modality-reference embedding to differentiate tokens from MLLM features and VAE tokens and associate intra-subject reference image tokens. Extensive experiments validate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various HOCVP tasks. Project Page: https://yiyangcai.github.io/homie-page.github.io/

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Apple-π: Benchmarking Thinking with Video Towards Law-Grounded Physical Intelligence

Modern video generation models are increasingly hailed as emerging world models with an internalized grasp of physical law. Yet existing benchmarks largely evaluate physical plausibility only at the output level, without verifying whether the model arrives there through a faithful, law-grounded reasoning process. We introduce Apple-PI, the first benchmark that anchors video-model evaluation explicitly in physical laws. Apple-PI comprises three components. 1) Orchard: a dataset of 400 videos covering ten canonical tasks in classical mechanics. It separates single-law tasks for confounder-free diagnosis from multi-law tasks for probing generalization. 2) Benchmark Protocol: a three-stage protocol based on scientific reasoning, including Perception, Formulation, and Deduction. It uses chain-of-frames prompting on infographic-annotated first frames, treating the generated video as the model's visible reasoning trace. 3) Evaluation Suite: a hybrid evaluation suite that combines MLLM-based subjective scoring with physics-law-grounded objective measures. This enables stage-resolved diagnosis of not only whether a model fails, but where it fails. Benchmarking 11 models shows that current video models remain far from reliable law-grounded world simulators, with the best video model scoring only 0.473. Our stage-, pillar-, and source-resolved analyses further expose a Perception-to-Formulation-to-Deduction bottleneck, weak multi-law state transfer, and a persistent Sim-to-Real gap. These findings position Apple-PI as a diagnostic foundation for guiding future video models toward world models with law-grounded physical intelligence.

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RynnBrain 1.1: Towards More Capable and Generalizable Embodied Foundation Model

We present RynnBrain 1.1, a family of embodied foundation models spanning 2B, 9B, and 122B-A10B scales. Trained with a unified spatio-temporal and physically grounded framework, RynnBrain 1.1 supports embodied perception, spatial reasoning, localization, and planning. Compared with RynnBrain 1.0, it further introduces contact-point prediction across the model family and native 3D grounding for the 2B and 9B models, yielding representations and outputs that are more directly aligned with robot manipulation. We also develop RynnBrain-VLA with a unified cross-embodiment action space and embodiment-specific masking, and deploy it on Unitree G1, Astribot-S1, and Tianji-Wuji. RynnBrain 1.1 achieves strong results on embodied cognition, localization, and 3D grounding, with the 122B-A10B model outperforming all evaluated proprietary and open-source models on VSI-Bench, MMSI, and RefSpatial-Bench. Real-robot experiments show that RynnBrain-initialized policies outperform Qwen-based and representative generalist VLAs, while joint multi-task and multi-embodiment training improves process scores and success rates over per-task training.

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ReflectWorld-MM: An Entity-Oriented Multimodal Memory System for Open-Ended Video Streams

Building assistants that can continually watch the world, remember what they see, and reason over their accumulated experience is a long-standing goal, and recently multimodal agents equipped with long-term memory over video streams have attracted increasing interest. Unfortunately, existing systems either keep their memory inside the model context or in a flat feature store, and organize it around frames rather than around the persistent entities a stream is really about, which confines them to bounded videos and weakens their ability to track who and what reappears over time. In this paper, we propose ReflectWorld-MM, an entity-oriented multimodal memory system for open-ended video streams. It consists of three parts. The first is a perception front-end that turns an audiovisual stream into entity-resolved observations under a bounded short-term memory. The second is a hierarchical long-term memory, grounded in human memory theory, that couples a multi-scale episodic memory, an evolving entity-centric semantic memory, and a procedural memory. The third is a complete realization, built for real-world operation, that ingests arbitrary streams and plugs into off-the-shelf assistants. Across six long-video and lifelong-memory benchmarks, ReflectWorld-MM achieves the best accuracy on all six, outperforming strong memory agents and a frontier model.

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GigaChat Audio: Time-aware Large Audio Language Model

Temporal grounding in long recordings remains challenging for audio-conditioned LLMs. We present a time-aware audio LLM that answers questions with explicit timestamps over up to 120 minutes of input. Our approach interleaves periodic time markers with continuous audio tokens using large-scale synthetic supervision from a cascaded pipeline. Our model achieves strong temporal-grounding accuracy on short and long benchmarks and supports time-anchored fragment descriptions and summaries. Extensive ablations examine how time representation, marker frequency, tokenization, and duration-mixture design affect accuracy and computational cost. We release model weights and datasets to support further research on time-aware audio understanding, available at https://huggingface.co/ai-sage/GigaChat3.1-Audio-10B-A1.8B.

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GigaAM Multilingual: Foundation Model for Underrepresented Languages

Despite recent scaling successes, multilingual ASR performance remains highly uneven, with long-tail languages suffering from severe data scarcity. This work addresses the challenge of building robust foundation models for underrepresented Central Asian languages (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek). We present GigaAM Multilingual, a Conformer encoder pre-trained on 2M hours of audio using a HuBERT-style objective. Crucially, we introduce a cluster-level data balancing strategy during pre-training and a domain-aware sampling method during fine-tuning to mitigate head-language dominance. In controlled comparisons, our approach outperforms strong open pretrained encoders (Whisper Large v3, Omnilingual-1B) on target languages, achieving significant gains on spontaneous speech while maintaining efficiency. We release the foundation encoder and ASR model, offering a proven recipe for effective multilingual adaptation under realistic data imbalance.

20
Group Entropy-Controlled Policy Optimization

Entropy control has become an effective tool in reinforcement learning (RL) of large language models (LLMs), helping balance exploration-exploitation trade-off during alignment process. Such RL paradigm is often conducted on mixtures of heterogeneous tasks, which induce distinct entropy regimes under the same policy, making global or token-level entropy regulation insufficient to corresponding heterogeneous needs of exploration. This heterogeneity further makes GRPO-style normalized advantages induce an entropy-dependent bias, making advantage signals across prompt groups statistically non-comparable. To address this issue, we propose Group Entropy-Controlled Policy Optimization (GEPO), a lightweight extension to GRPO that uses group entropy, estimated from existing grouped samples to perform entropy-conditioned asymmetric advantage shaping. GEPO attenuates positive advantages in low-entropy groups to reduce over-exploitation, and negative advantages in high-entropy groups to preserve exploration, with adaptive thresholds derived from historical entropy statistics. Extensive experiments on two base models across thirteen benchmarks spanning mathematics, physics, science, code generation, and instruction following show that GEPO consistently outperforms GRPO and recent entropy-controlled methods, delivering balanced cross-task improvements while preserving task-specific exploration levels throughout training.

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FlowMimic: Mask-free Visual Editing and Generation with Pixel-pair Warped Flow Field for Online Video Editing Data Generation and Modality Mimicry

In line with the prevailing direction of vision research, we explore the integration of both generation and editing capabilities for video and image modalities within a single model. Current approaches to collecting video editing data typically depend on labour-intensive, time-consuming curated procedures--involving object mask annotation, the use of error-introducing pair synthesis via I2V model and ControlNet-like guidance, and VLM-based quality filtering or refinement--and demonstrate limited task scalability. As a result, the diversity of editing tasks remains substantially narrower than that available for image editing models. We develop a pixel-pair temporal warped flow field that can directly generate corresponding video editing samples in real time from image editing samples, and we demonstrate across multiple levels of video editing tasks that a model can learn video editing using only such data. We regard the image modality as a particular form of the video modality. Accordingly, we design a modality mimic generation loss and a modality mimic editing loss to relatively align the capabilities--and thereby the output distributions--of the two modalities through mutual imitation. Moreover, language-based visual editing entails the comprehension of the editing instruction and the reference visual content, the localization of the region corresponding to that instruction within the reference visual contents, and the modification of that region alone. Existing approaches predominantly rely on external aids, such as fine-tuning an additional MLLM or explicitly supplying a mask sequence as auxiliary input during inference. In contrast, we aspire for the model to internalize this capability. To that end, we introduce sense-related tasks--for instance, referring expression segmentation--along with corresponding editing-region-aware latent-level loss and attention-level loss.

15
Open-AoE: An Open Egocentric Manipulation Dataset and Toolchain for Embodied Learning

Egocentric videos of human manipulation provide scalable supervision for embodied intelligence, yet existing resources rarely combine low-cost continuous capture, manipulation-level structured annotations, and reusable tools for robot learning. We present Open-AoE, an open, community-oriented egocentric manipulation dataset and toolchain spanning the full pipeline from smartphone capture to model training. Its first release contains approximately 2,000 hours of manipulation video collected in natural environments by 500+ contributors using 400+ smartphones. The dataset provides text annotations, MANO-based hand poses, camera trajectories, and temporally localized atomic actions. Open-AoE further includes a data processing pipeline that transforms raw recordings into structured samples through temporal action segmentation, semantic annotation, hand reconstruction, and camera trajectory reconstruction. Meanwhile, we provide a separate downstream toolchain supports visualization, cross-embodiment retargeting, model-specific data conversion, and training recipes for VLA policies, WAMs, and World Models. By integrating scalable capture, structured processing, and downstream adaptation, Open-AoE reduces the barriers to both data contribution and reuse, providing practical open infrastructure for embodied model training, human-to-robot transfer, and world modeling.

13
Environment-free Synthetic Data Generation for API-Calling Agents

Training API-calling large language model (LLM) agents demands massive amounts of high-quality trajectories. However, collecting such data at scale typically requires fully implemented environments with executable APIs and realistic, pre-populated backend databases, creating a major bottleneck for scalability. To overcome this, we propose an environment-free synthetic data generation approach that leverages LLMs as on-the-fly digital world models. Given only API specifications, our method generates trajectories mimicking interactions between an agent and a stateful environment. Specifically, an LLM first generates diverse tasks solvable with the provided APIs. A teacher agent then iteratively solves each task while an LLM simulator generates coherent synthetic API responses conditioned on the task context and simulation history. Finally, an LLM judge filters the trajectories to ensure the quality of the resulting dataset. We evaluate our approach on the challenging AppWorld and OfficeBench benchmarks, which include both information-retrieval and state-changing tasks. Fine-tuning models on our synthetic data yields significant performance gains, demonstrating that effective supervision for API-calling agents can be generated without any executable environment. Our results establish LLM-based API simulation as a practical, scalable solution for training agents across diverse API ecosystems.

12
Do Language Models Dream of Binding Molecules? Benchmarking LLMs under Spatial Constraints

Structure-based drug design (SBDD) leverages the 3D structure of protein targets, often complemented by other spatial constraints, to generate candidate binding molecules. While diffusion models have dominated as a leading paradigm for high-quality 3D molecule generation, LLM-based methods are rapidly emerging in molecular design and have shown competitive performance in pocket-conditioned molecular generation. However, their ability to reason about physics and 3D spatial environments is largely underexplored. In this work, we systematically analyze whether current general-purpose LLMs are capable of navigating complex 3D constraints compared to established baselines such as specialized diffusion models. We consider 3D ligand generation conditioned on protein pockets together with ligand- and interaction-derived spatial constraints, including anchor fragments, pharmacophore points, and mandatory pocket-ligand interactions. To enable this evaluation, we introduce 3D-Fit - a token-efficient benchmarking strategy for assessing LLM performance on multi-conditioned spatial molecule generation. Our findings reveal a clear pattern in LLM spatial capabilities: while they still lag behind state-of-the-art approaches, they are promising and can handle multiple spatial constraints simultaneously, enabling scaling to heterogeneous setups.

10
DiffGI: Differentiable Geometry Images for High-Fidelity Thin-Shell 3D Generation

Existing 3D generative models predominantly rely on implicit volumetric representations, which enforce watertight topology and struggle to represent thin-shell and non-manifold geometries such as garments. Geometry image-based approaches offer a surface-centric alternative, but existing methods rely on discrete binary occupancy maps whose resolution-dependent boundary encoding causes staircase artifacts and information loss upon downsampling, while surface reconstruction remains a non-differentiable post-processing step disconnected from the learning pipeline. To address this, we propose Differentiable Geometry Image (DiffGI), an end-to-end 3D-to-2D mapping framework that seamlessly integrates surface representation and geometric optimization. DiffGI replaces binary maps with a continuous 2D Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF), which encodes boundary position at subpixel precision within a fixed grid resolution, eliminating resolution-dependent staircase artifacts even under aggressive downsampling. Building on this continuous field, we introduce a differentiable Marching Squares algorithm based on analytical linear interpolation, allowing gradients from 3D surface losses to propagate back to the 2D latent space. Leveraging this differentiable pipeline, we train a DiffGI-VAE augmented with a geometry-aware normal rendering loss to compress complex 3D surfaces into an ultra-compact 32X32 latent space, and instantiate a transformer-based latent diffusion model with a flow-matching objective on top of this space for conditional 3D generation. Extensive experiments on garment and object datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior reconstruction fidelity and boundary precision compared to prior geometry-image and voxel-based approaches, while requiring significantly fewer computational resources.

10
HarmoHOI: Harmonizing Appearance and 3D Motion for Multi-view Hand-Object Interaction Synthesis

Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) synthesis is a cornerstone for animation production and embodied AI. Despite the strong priors of video foundation models, multi-view consistent HOI synthesis remains challenging due to complex hand motions and occlusions. We present HarmoHOI, a unified diffusion framework that jointly and harmoniously generates synchronized multi-view HOI videos and globally aligned 3D point tracks. Our core insight is that robust multi-view consistency fundamentally requires globally aligned 3D geometry and motion. To this end, we propose a Mixture of Multi-view Diffusion Transformer that co-models RGB videos and 3D point tracks. By representing point tracks as pseudo-videos, we align 3D geometric signals with the 2D latent space of foundation models, thereby minimizing the domain gap and easing adaptation of priors. To further ensure geometry consistency, we introduce Global Motion Aligning Diffusion, which refines coarse point tracks into metric-scale, globally aligned 3D trajectories. HarmoHOI enables on-the-fly co-evolution of 2D appearance and 3D motion during denoising. To overcome the scarcity of multi-view HOI data, we employ a hybrid data curriculum learning strategy that successfully transfers generic priors from single-view data to synchronized multi-view generation. Experimental results show that HarmoHOI achieves state-of-the-art performance in visual quality, motion plausibility, and multi-view geometric consistency. Project page available at https://droliven.github.io/HarmoHOI_project.

7
LLM-as-a-Coach: Experiential Learning for Non-Verifiable Tasks

Reinforcement learning (RL) on open-ended tasks compresses an LLM's rubric-based evaluation into a scalar reward, discarding rich textual feedback and conflating responses with distinct quality profiles. We propose Experiential Learning (EL), which repurposes the feedback model from an LLM-as-a-Judge into an LLM-as-a-Coach. The coach distills its assessment of each on-policy response into transferable experiential knowledge, which conditions a teacher model and is internalized by the policy through on-policy context distillation. Compared with scalar rewards, this higher-bandwidth feedback channel provides dense supervision and preserves fine-grained preferences among high-quality responses. Across two policy families, with feedback from the policy itself or a proprietary model, EL consistently outperforms rubric-based RL on held-out and unseen open-ended tasks. Notably, EL generalizes better beyond the training distribution, and mitigates reward hacking. These findings establish experiential knowledge as a richer and more generalizable learning signal for post-training on non-verifiable tasks.

7
The Geometry of Semantic Space: A Continuous Geometric Framework for the Transformer Architecture

We present a continuous geometric framework that models the discrete algebraic operations of the Transformer architecture as an integro-differential equation (IDE) on a semantic fiber bundle calE = calM times R^d. Beginning from a single geometric axiom -- that the token sequence forms a discrete 1-manifold equipped with a canonical measure lattice -- we translate every core component of the modern Transformer (RMSNorm, RoPE, Softmax Attention, FFN, Residual Stream, SGD, Weight Decay) into a cohesive vocabulary of differential geometry, measure theory, and stochastic calculus. The resulting framework yields quantitative predictions spanning entropic optimal transport (Attention as a Schrödinger bridge) and non-equilibrium thermodynamics (SGD as Itô diffusion violating detailed balance). We conduct a six-part experimental campaign across five architectures (Qwen3, LLaMA\nobreakdash-3.1, Gemma\nobreakdash-3, GPT-2, Mistral) spanning 124M to 8B parameters. The empirical observables are quantitatively consistent with the geometric predictions: the ε^{-1/2} Lipschitz scaling calibration at machine precision (R^2 = 1.000), the Lie--Trotter operator-splitting torsion, the symmetric ablation instability confirming the Dual-Law of Topological Stability, the calO(1/k) thermodynamic suppression of Poincaré recurrence on the RoPE torus, the thermodynamic context-limit phase transition, and the Non-Equilibrium Steady State parameter vortex -- verified across two optimizers (AdamW and Pure SGD) to exclude momentum artifacts. The results demonstrate that analyzing Transformers through the lens of continuous stochastic differential geometry provides a predictive descriptive vocabulary for the stability limits, context bounds, and optimization dynamics of Large Language Models.

4
Distilled Reinforcement Learning for LLM Post-training

Large language model (LLM) post-training is essential for improving reasoning, adaptation, and alignment. Existing methods mainly follow two paradigms: reinforcement learning (RL) and on-policy distillation (OPD). However, RL relies on coarse-grained outcome supervision, resulting in difficult credit assignment and limited capability to acquire new knowledge. OPD, meanwhile, unconditionally matches teacher logits through KL divergence, which creates a dilemma: similar teachers provide little new knowledge, while substantially different teachers often yield ineffective guidance, largely restricting OPD to within-family distillation. We propose Distilled Reinforcement Learning (Distilled RL), which integrates teacher supervision into the RL objective to provide fine-grained guidance, selectively transfer new knowledge and avoid unconditional imitation. Distilled RL contains three components: reverse importance sampling with clipping, negative sample reset, and sequence-level geometric normalization. Through a concise and interpretable case study, we demonstrate that Distilled RL can effectively transfer previously unavailable knowledge from a teacher model to a student model. Extensive experiments across both within-family and cross-family distillation settings show that Distilled RL substantially outperforms standard RL and OPD in terms of both pass@1 and pass@k. Our code is available at https://github.com/597358816/Distilled-RL.

4
Self-State Attacks on Self-Hosted AI Agents: How Far Can OS Defenses Go?

Self-hosted AI agents read and write their own memory and configuration files to function. An agent may get compromised via corruption of its own state -- a compromise realized via legitimate OS system call invocation. We refer to this class of threats as self-state attacks. In this paper, we investigate the OS resilience to this class of attacks. Formally, we characterize a four-axis attack space (Target, Mechanism, Granularity, Temporal); investigate the structural limits of prevention, detection, and recovery; and introduce a workload-conditioned view of detectability. To instantiate the framework, we collect live activity traces from a representative self-hosted agent running across distinct workload profiles, and realize the attack space as a 23-cell matrix, 43 concrete operations on real self-state files, and injected into those traces. We then evaluate both canonical and workload-conditioned defense strategies. The empirical results show that a layered defense stack (access-control prevention on the instruction and configuration layers, workload-conditioned detection on the memory layer, and periodic backup for recovery) is effective on most attack cells while a small residual attack surface remains structurally indistinguishable at the OS level. These findings suggest that against the newly established class of self-state attacks, OS-level defense needs to be reconsidered, potentially opening new research directions in the field.

3
JoyNexus: Service-Oriented Multi-Tenant Post-Training for VLA Models

The post-training of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is essential due to the diversity of simulators, robot embodiments, and task objectives. Existing compute services, whether offered as direct accelerator rental or batch-workload submission, typically allocate an exclusive set of GPU and CPU resources to a single tenant. While this paradigm maximizes client flexibility, it burdens users with infrastructure adaptation, and the fixed card-hour accounting model renders short or bursty workloads both expensive for tenants and inefficient for the service provider. To address these challenges, we present JoyNexus, a unified service for multi-tenant VLA supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and evaluation. JoyNexus decouples the Training Model Service, Inference Model Service, and Environment Service, each accessed through APIs and backed by resident shared base models with tenant-specific slots. Tenants can directly invoke high-level semantic APIs for training, rollout, and evaluation, or compose custom algorithms using lower-level APIs and their assigned endpoints. Multiple tenants submit workloads concurrently; their action modules, optimizers, rollout records, and policy versions remain isolated, and the service is scheduled by the global Training Queue and Inference Queue. To further improve multi-tenant training efficiency, JoyNexus introduces group batching for heterogeneous VLA data schemas that share a compatible model-facing prefix, enabling a single shared backbone forward pass over grouped samples. Finally, we evaluate JoyNexus through workload simulation and a group-batching pipeline in a realistic embodied scenario. Results show that, compared with isolated single-tenant execution, JoyNexus reduces aggregate GPU time and improves service utilization via cross-tenant scheduling on shared resources.

3
Diagnosing and Calibrating Tool-Call Boundary Drift in Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation

Agentic language models must learn when to call tools, when to consume tool responses, and when to answer directly. This makes multi-teacher on-policy distillation a natural training strategy: one teacher can specialize in tool calls, another in direct responses, and the student can learn from both on its own generated distribution. We show that this strategy can induce a behavior shift that is invisible from aggregate losses alone. In a two-teacher tool-use setting, vanilla generalized knowledge distillation improves tool-call recall but also moves the model toward over-calling, where it calls tools on examples that should be answered directly. Aggregate explanations are insufficient: tool-call samples do not receive more token exposure, and full-sequence per-token divergence is not larger for the tool-call teacher. We instead analyze behavior leverage imbalance: local token-level signals at mode- entry and structural positions, such as <tool_call> and function names, can have disproportionate control over the global generation mode. We propose Soft Clamp, a per-token divergence calibration method that dynamically compresses extreme token-level Jensen-Shannon divergence while preserving nonzero gradients. On APIGen-MT, Soft Clamp reduces over-calling from 13.7% to 9.0% relative to vanilla GKD while matching its decision accuracy. In a BFCL multi-turn diagnostic, it also lowers tool-call loops and repeated calls among GKD variants. These results suggest that multi-teacher OPD should monitor where teacher signals act, not only how large they are in aggregate.

2
ShotPlan: Cinematic Video Generation with Learnable Planning Token

Current video generation models achieve impressive results in single-shot generation, yet remain limited in cinematic video generation, where coherent narratives and effective multi-shot composition require explicit shot planning. To address this challenge, we propose ShotPlan, a framework for explicit multi-shot cinematic video generation built upon a video diffusion foundation model. Our method introduces learnable planning tokens that capture shot-level transition cues and can be seamlessly integrated with the original video generation tokens to control transition timestamps. Unlike standard video generation tokens, the proposed planning tokens are equipped with Fractional Temporal Rotary Position Embedding (FRoPE), enabling shot transitions to be modeled at the frame level. Experiments demonstrate that ShotPlan significantly outperforms existing cinematic video generation methods, offering more flexible shot management and stronger inter-shot consistency.

2
WorldCupArena: Fine-Grained Evaluation of Language Models and Deep-Research Agents on Football Forecasting

Predicting a football match before kickoff requires more than knowing past results: a model must use changing information and make a clear prediction before the answer is available. We present WorldCupArena, a dynamic benchmark for language models and deep-research agents. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is its first evaluation, and the same process can be reused for future leagues and cups. Before each match, a model either receives a common evidence package or searches for information itself. It predicts the result and score, likely players and events, match statistics, and the outcome of the competition. After the match, these predictions are compared with the recorded result. We report result accuracy, exact-score accuracy, and a scoreline score that gives some credit when a predicted score is close but not exact, together with scores for the other prediction tasks. Across 104 matches and 13 systems, models with similar result accuracy differ more clearly on detailed predictions. Compared with betting-market and human-fan baselines, the best system shows only small gains in result and exact-score accuracy, but a clearer gain in Scoreline. New schedules can be added as they begin, allowing the benchmark to evaluate future models without using outcomes that are already known. Code, prompts, predictions, and evaluation scripts are open sourced at https://github.com/wzk1015/WorldCupArena.

2
Token-Level Off-Policy Learning for Faithful Generation Under Distribution Shift

We propose Token-Level Off-Policy Labeling (TOPL), an off-policy training paradigm that reframes post-training as a token-level correctness prediction task. Our key intuition is that by training the model to distinguish good and bad tokens in a response, we naturally guide the model towards generating good tokens, while avoiding the pitfalls that come with directly training the model to generate off-policy tokens. Experiments on document summarization tasks show that TOPL achieves strong out-of-distribution generalization across 11 datasets against a diverse set of sequence-level and token-level baselines. We further demonstrate that TOPL transfers effectively to machine translation, suggesting that its benefits generalize across different faithful generation tasks. Through ablation studies, we confirm that our token-level learning signal is critical to good performance; sequence-level analogues do not confer similar benefits. Finally, we show that TOPL induces interpretable model updates: the LoRA adapters learned through TOPL function as linear classification heads and steering vectors.

2
FlashRT: Agent Harness for Guiding Agents to Deploy Real-Time Multimodal Applications

Real-time multimodal applications, including voice agents and interactive video generation, compose heterogeneous models into pipelines whose efficient deployment requires application-specific decisions about placement, streaming, and intra-model parallelism. Existing serving systems and auto-parallelism compilers commit to limited transformations and fixed workload assumptions, so achieving high performance on a new application requires hand-crafting an efficient implementation. We present FlashRT, an agent harness that guides coding agents to lift simple developer-written reference implementations into optimized multi-GPU deployments that flexibly weigh target metrics like latency and throughput. Using a new chain-of-program paradigm, FlashRT directs a generic coding agent through a multi-pass transformation process where an agent transforms the reference into an intermediate representation (IR) to capture data dependencies and persistent-state scopes, validates this IR via a sequential interpreter, and performs static analyses to identify candidate transformations. Then, the agent iteratively implements, verifies, and benchmarks each candidate under a measurement-gated optimization loop to produce effective deployments that span different hardware budgets. Across various applications, including video world models and multimodal LLMs, FlashRT converts reference implementations into highly efficient deployments, delivering up to ~70x latency reduction and 2.8x throughput improvement on NVIDIA B200 GPUs. On AMD MI355X GPUs, FlashRT matches the peak latency reduction while increasing peak throughput improvement to 3.6x, demonstrating that agent-driven optimization can be more scalable on platforms with less mature expert optimization. In fact, for Qwen3-Omni text-to-audio inference, FlashRT reduces response latency by 65% compared to the expert vLLM-Omni implementation on AMD MI355X.

2
OpenLongTail: Generative Scaling of Long-Tail Driving Data

Scaling robust driving policies is fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of edge cases in curated datasets. While the real world continuously captures these critical events, such long-tail events remain underutilized when collected from heterogeneous sources. Specifically, diverse but valuable in-the-wild long-tail videos lack the full view coverage required for training policy models, often missing multi-view poses or originating solely from monocular dash cameras. This modality gap prevents these ubiquitous observations from being converted into scalable training data for long-tail generalization. We introduce OpenLongTail, an open-source generative data engine for scaling autonomous driving policies under long-tail events. To transform heterogeneous data sources into view-aligned and temporally coherent multi-view assets that are useful for policy learning, we develop a pose-informed extrapolative view synthesis pipeline that generates the missing views. We further enhance cross-view consistency and the temporal alignment for the newly generated views by injecting Plücker ray geometry into the scalable generation engine. By synthesizing heterogeneous long-tail data, we observe a significant improvement in closed-loop driving robustness in handling long-tail events. By measuring the extrapolative view synthesis and pose metrics, we validate the effectiveness of OpenLongTail in visual fidelity, cross-view consistency, and ego-trajectory recovery.

2
DiFA: Inference-Time Forward-Process Alignment for Diffusion Models

The prevailing inference framework for diffusion models formulates generation fundamentally as a problem of numerical integration. This perspective casts the model as an exact estimator, neglecting the inherent statistical uncertainty of the denoising process. In this work, we propose Forward-Process Aligned Diffusion prediction (DiFA), a training-free framework that reframes inference-time data prediction refinement as a sequential state estimation problem. Rather than reusing past outputs solely for numerical integration, DiFA treats iterative data predictions along the reverse trajectory as correlated observations to build a forward-aligned temporal consensus. Inspired by Kalman filtering, this consensus aggregates historical predictions according to structural consistency and noise-level compatibility. To counteract the over-smoothing tendency of temporal consensus, we introduce a deviation guidance mechanism to adaptively preserve residual details. Empirically, DiFA yields significant improvements on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet across the evaluated metrics, including FID, IS, and FD-DINOv2, demonstrating that aligning inference with the forward statistical structure substantially improves generative fidelity.

2
ReViV: Reconstructing the Viewer and the View in 4D from Monocular Egocentric Video

Egocentric devices, such as wearable front-facing cameras, provide a unique perspective for capturing the continuous interaction between a human viewer and the surrounding environment. A holistic and efficient multimodal model capable of reconstructing this 4D representation is therefore highly desirable. However, existing approaches often rely on auxiliary inputs such as pre-computed camera trajectories, treat scene perception and human ego-motion modeling as separate problems despite their strong interdependency, and suffer from slow inference time. To address these limitations, we present ReViV, the first unified framework for holistic egocentric 4D reconstruction that extracts both viewer and view dynamics from a single monocular RGB video. We formulate the task as learning the full joint probability distribution over multimodal signals, including RGB video, camera trajectory, gaze direction, full-body motion, hand motion, and depth. Powered by a Masked Generative Egocentric Transformer, ReViV operates within a single feed-forward architecture to simultaneously reconstruct the temporally consistent 4D reconstruction across the viewer and the view with fast inference speed. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks, including HoloAssist, HOT3D, ARCTIC, Aria Digital Twin, and TACO, demonstrate that ReViV achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency across holistic ego-body, hand, and gaze reconstruction, camera tracking, while maintaining highly competitive egocentric depth estimation without relying on heavy task-specific priors. Code and models are fully open-sourced: https://reviv4d.github.io/.

1
Can Multimodal Large Language Models Understand OCT?

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging is essential for the diagnosis and treatment of retinal diseases. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated considerable potential in medical image analysis, existing benchmarks largely reduce OCT understanding to coarse-grained disease classification or isolated visual question answering, leaving the complete cognitive process from visual perception to clinical reasoning insufficiently evaluated. To address this limitation, we introduce OCT-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark dedicated to OCT image understanding. OCT-Bench comprises 10,076 high-quality multiple-choice questions constructed from 4,137 OCT images across seven public datasets. Following the real-world clinical interpretation workflow, we establish a hierarchical capability taxonomy consisting of 20 fine-grained tasks across three dimensions: Perception, Cognition, and Reasoning. These tasks cover a broad range of capabilities, including imaging attributes, retinal anatomy, lesion characteristics, spatial relationships, disease assessment, therapeutic decision-making, and prognostic management. We systematically evaluate 20 representative MLLMs, including proprietary models, open-source general-purpose models, and medical-domain models. Experimental results demonstrate that current models remain substantially short of reliable OCT understanding. Moreover, neither medical-domain adaptation nor increased model scale consistently improves performance across capability levels. OCT-Bench enables comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation of MLLMs, providing a foundation for identifying capability bottlenecks and advancing clinically grounded OCT understanding.

1
05

PRODUCT HUNT

05.00
PRODUCT HUNT

Product Hunt - July 21, 2026

Product Hunt Daily Feed: Featuring noteworthy tech launches.

Phantomstory icon
Phantomstory

Launch a third-party blog to win AEO with just two clicks

0
Rerun icon
Rerun

The easiest way to build AI agents for all your tasks

0
tterm icon
tterm

A terminal, a real browser, and Claude Code under one roof

0
CartAI icon
CartAI

The AI agent that handles checkout.

0
Jockey by TwelveLabs icon
Jockey by TwelveLabs

The video AI agent that understands your whole library

0
Lev8 icon
Lev8

Find, research, and reach the right people

0
DualStream icon
DualStream

Simultaneous desktop and mobile streaming, the easy way.

0
Skim icon
Skim

Free, open-source AI email client for Windows

0
RegionMirror icon
RegionMirror

Share a portion of your ultrawide or high-res screen on Mac

0
PieceKeeper icon
PieceKeeper

Track your music repertoire and practice

0
Diffsmith icon
Diffsmith

Comment on your AI agent's code & collaborate on changes

0
Tidy icon
Tidy

Your Mac tidies itself: screenshots, installers, Downloads

0
ditto.site icon
ditto.site

Clone any website into clean code. Free & open source

0
Bolna Agent Studio icon
Bolna Agent Studio

Build Voice AI Agent in 10 Minutes

0
ArachStudio icon
ArachStudio

Live-edit your GitHub components directly in the browser

0
ProtoFlow icon
ProtoFlow

AI-powered PCB design tool for engineers and hardware teams

0
MeetIsland icon
MeetIsland

The Dynamic Island that gets you to meetings on time

0
Routine AI icon
Routine AI

Control work with your voice. The Siri for work.

0
Universal Dictation on Stream icon
Universal Dictation on Stream

Private Voice Ring for dictation across iOS & Mac

0
CreateOS Sandbox icon
CreateOS Sandbox

Instant, hardware Isolated Sandboxes for AI agents

0
Manifest icon
Manifest

Turn any webpage into an action manifest for AI agents

0
BUD icon
BUD

Voice-first canvas for sketchnoting and whiteboarding

0
Routebase icon
Routebase

Catch API drift before your customers do

0
OpenChatCut icon
OpenChatCut

Open-source AI agent video editor with a real timeline

0
Topolines icon
Topolines

Generate Topologic contours

0
Creed icon
Creed

Your personal context file for every agent.

0
Rex icon
Rex

AI agents that run order-to-cash operations

0
Nautis icon
Nautis

The AI-native Operating System for founders.

0
Inkling icon
Inkling

Open weights 975B multimodal model built for fine-tuning

0
Skippr AI icon
Skippr AI

The live AI employee inside your product, serving every user

0
Fuzzy AI icon
Fuzzy AI

We warm your prospects before reaching out

0
Reignat icon
Reignat

Privacy-friendly web analytics with realtime AI insights

0
Lunen.ai icon
Lunen.ai

Build AI agents your whole team can run, and control

0
Deck icon
Deck

The most capable AI assistant with its own inbox

0
NeuroVidz icon
NeuroVidz

See how a brain reacts to your clip

0
Backdrop icon
Backdrop

AI Coworkers that run your projects and operations

0
LnkFlow icon
LnkFlow

Agentic click tracking that shows what grows your business

0
Kogvio icon
Kogvio

Understand anything online without leaving the page.

0
Scriptyard icon
Scriptyard

A free visual story development workspace

0
Autoplot icon
Autoplot

Unify data analysis and plotting in one powerful workspace

0
Loova Ads Studio icon
Loova Ads Studio

Create AI ads that convert, not just look good

0
LayerProof Mylar icon
LayerProof Mylar

Create launch-ready motion videos for your products

0
Backbeat Forge icon
Backbeat Forge

Turn drum audio into a score you can actually edit

0
Replay QA icon
Replay QA

Replay QA tells you what is broken before your users do

0
CaptureKit icon
CaptureKit

Keep your desktop clean by auto-organizing screenshots.

0
Free AI Tools icon
Free AI Tools

Free browser tools for everyday tasks, no login

0
BlockscopeChat icon
BlockscopeChat

AI Crypto Investigations/Research Agents

0
BaseRT icon
BaseRT

6.4x faster than llama.cpp, 3.9x faster than MLX

0
Kobbe icon
Kobbe

Privacy-friendly web analytics with traffic and revenue.

0
OpenSEO icon
OpenSEO

The open source Ahrefs alternative

0
06

TECHMEME

06.00
TECHMEME

Techmeme - July 21, 2026

Techmeme Digest: Major tech headlines and industry conversations.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the Trump administration is looking into Chinese AI models over distillation claims and it could "sanction them" (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Ashley Capoot / CNBC : US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the Trump administration is looking into Chinese AI models over distillation claims and it could “sanction them” —  U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday said the Trump administration will look into whether Chinese artificial intelligence models …

Intel and Fortinet partner to co-develop the Fortinet Security Processor 6, making Fortinet the first named external customer for the Intel 4 process node (Luke James/Tom's Hardware)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Luke James / Tom's Hardware : Intel and Fortinet partner to co-develop the Fortinet Security Processor 6, making Fortinet the first named external customer for the Intel 4 process node —  The agreement makes Fortinet the first cybersecurity vendor on Intel's manufacturing customer list.

Garmin launches the Cirqa Smart Band, a $200 screenless fitness tracker that monitors 80+ activities with an up to 10 day battery life, to compete with Whoop (Dana Wollman/Bloomberg)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Dana Wollman / Bloomberg : Garmin launches the Cirqa Smart Band, a $200 screenless fitness tracker that monitors 80+ activities with an up to 10 day battery life, to compete with Whoop —  Garmin Ltd. introduced a $200 screenless fitness tracker, becoming the latest company to enter a segment popularized by Whoop Inc.

OpenAI says it now has 10M people using Codex and ChatGPT Work, nearly doubling usage from earlier this month when the company announced ChatGPT Work (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg : OpenAI says it now has 10M people using Codex and ChatGPT Work, nearly doubling usage from earlier this month when the company announced ChatGPT Work —  OpenAI has seen a sharp uptick in demand for its artificial intelligence agents since its recent release of ChatGPT Work …

Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica's GPU orchestration startup SkyPilot, which aims to be neutral across hardware and cloud vendors, raised a $20M seed led by Lux (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Lily Mae Lazarus / Fortune : Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica's GPU orchestration startup SkyPilot, which aims to be neutral across hardware and cloud vendors, raised a $20M seed led by Lux —  Databricks cofounder Ion Stoica can explain what his latest startup does to a kindergartner on the fly.

Microsoft and Mistral sign a multibillion-dollar deal to build European data centers and integrate Mistral models into Foundry, Copilot Studio, and Azure Local (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal : Microsoft and Mistral sign a multibillion-dollar deal to build European data centers and integrate Mistral models into Foundry, Copilot Studio, and Azure Local —  ‘Multibillion-dollar’ pact will support Mistral data centers in Europe, helping the French company sell its AI models, and Microsoft its cloud and AI services

Samsung plans to launch its AI-powered Samsung Health Assistant and new heart metrics tools like Vitals for overnight metric tracking in beta in August (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Samantha Kelly / Bloomberg : Samsung plans to launch its AI-powered Samsung Health Assistant and new heart metrics tools like Vitals for overnight metric tracking in beta in August —  Samsung Electronics Co. is rolling out a new AI-powered assistant that acts as a virtual health companion, joining a growing number …

Iran's IRGC claims it targeted and "destroyed" Amazon's central data infrastructure in Bahrain using several cruise missiles; Amazon has not acknowledged it (Babak Kamiar/Euronews)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Babak Kamiar / Euronews : Iran's IRGC claims it targeted and “destroyed” Amazon's central data infrastructure in Bahrain using several cruise missiles; Amazon has not acknowledged it —  The IRGC claimed its cruise missiles destroyed Amazon's central data infrastructure in Bahrain and hit US air defence systems.

Gritt, which is developing an AI system that helps build infrastructure like solar panels, emerges from stealth with a $26M Series A and $34M in total funding (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Tim Fernholz / TechCrunch : Gritt, which is developing an AI system that helps build infrastructure like solar panels, emerges from stealth with a $26M Series A and $34M in total funding —  One of the most important things happening on Earth today is the solar energy build-out.  Around the world, companies and countries …

UK PM Andy Burnham abolishes the Department for Science, Innovation, and Tech and elevates UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan, who oversees AISI, to attend cabinet (Philippa Wain/BBC)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Philippa Wain / BBC : UK PM Andy Burnham abolishes the Department for Science, Innovation, and Tech and elevates UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan, who oversees AISI, to attend cabinet —  The AI Minister, Kanishka Narayan, will be given a seat at the top table of government but the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has been scrapped.

Kimi K3 marks the arrival of frontier open-weight models; the core Kimi team has incredible culture and a freedom to express it within a GPU-limited environment (Nathan Lambert/Interconnects AI)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Nathan Lambert / Interconnects AI : Kimi K3 marks the arrival of frontier open-weight models; the core Kimi team has incredible culture and a freedom to express it within a GPU-limited environment —  The global implications on the AI ecosystem. … Audio playback is not supported on your browser.  Please upgrade.

Sources: the US and China plan to hold AI talks in September, likely before President Xi's visit to the US, a significant outcome of the Trump-Xi summit in May (Laurie Chen/Reuters)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Laurie Chen / Reuters : Sources: the US and China plan to hold AI talks in September, likely before President Xi's visit to the US, a significant outcome of the Trump-Xi summit in May —  The United States and China are planning to hold talks over AI in September, five sources familiar with the matter told Reuters …

Memo: the Army CIO reinstates limits on Army members' AI token usage; docs show the DOD's Ask Sage tool can access 100M tokens via an annual "enterprise pack" (Vittoria Elliott/Wired)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Vittoria Elliott / Wired : Memo: the Army CIO reinstates limits on Army members' AI token usage; docs show the DOD's Ask Sage tool can access 100M tokens via an annual “enterprise pack” —  Members of the Army received an email informing them that they were rapidly depleting their AI tokens, and needed to limit use.

Sources: BlackRock leads a $12B+ debt sale for Meta's new El Paso data center, as Meta signs a lease for a BlackRock-backed data-center project in Pennsylvania (Wall Street Journal)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Wall Street Journal : Sources: BlackRock leads a $12B+ debt sale for Meta's new El Paso data center, as Meta signs a lease for a BlackRock-backed data-center project in Pennsylvania —  Meta also signs lease for a BlackRock-backed data-center project in Pennsylvania  —  BlackRock is leading a debt sale targeting …

A Washington judge grants a request to temporarily block Kalshi from offering sports-related bets in the state, citing a breach of the state gambling law (Timmy Shen/The Block)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 21, 2026

Timmy Shen / The Block : A Washington judge grants a request to temporarily block Kalshi from offering sports-related bets in the state, citing a breach of the state gambling law —  Quick Take  — A Washington court has granted the request to temporarily block Kalshi from offering sports-related event contracts in the state.

07

STARTUP ARCHIVE

07.00
STARTUP ARCHIVE

Startup News - July 21, 2026

Startup News Roundup: Aggregating key funding and launch updates.

Marc Andreessen on the 5 personality traits of an innovator
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 31, 2026

“When you’re talking about real innovators—people who actually do really creative, breakthrough work—I think you’re talking about a couple things:”

Steve Jobs explains the importance of both thinking and doing
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 30, 2026

“The doers are the major thinkers. The people who really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker-doer in one person.”

Tobi Lutke explains what the VCs who passed on Shopify got wrong
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 27, 2026

“What a lot of free-market thinkers don’t understand is that between the demand and eventual supply lies friction."

Sam Altman explains how he decides to invest in a startup after 10 minutes
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 26, 2026

"Does this person have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg?… [You don’t get to] 100% accuracy, obviously, but it’s good enough that our business model works.”

Jony Ive recounts the time Steve Jobs called him vain
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 25, 2026

In the clip below, Jony Ive recounts the time he asked Steve Jobs to be less harsh in his critique of a piece of work.

Jeff Bezos’s two pieces of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 24, 2026

“The advice that I would give entrepreneurs is don't chase the hot new thing. It's so hard to catch something that everybody already knows is hot."

Elad Gil: “Things that work tend to work pretty fast”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 23, 2026

“I do think there’s a bit of a myth in Silicon Valley that you should keep grinding no matter what and it’s just about perseverance, and I think that’s really bad advice."

Paul Graham on why starting with a “small, intense fire" is the key to startup growth
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 20, 2026

"You have to know who those first users are and how you're going to get them."

Keith Rabois on how to identify great talent
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 19, 2026

“What you want to do with every single employee every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks… and that’s the role they should stay in.”

Wealthfront CEO on why advertising spend makes it harder to find product/market fit
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 18, 2026

“The way that you know you have product/market fit is if you have exponential organic growth."

Eric Schmidt on why most companies get strategy wrong
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 17, 2026

“Work very, very hard to figure out what the world’s going to look like in five years. What will people be doing? What will your customers want? Where will costs be?"

Mark Zuckerberg: “You can’t 80/20 everything”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 16, 2026

"There’s the famous 80/20 rule where you get 80% of the benefit by doing 20% of the work, but you can’t just 80/20 everything. There have to be certain things that you are just the best at."

Marc Andreessen on Mark Zuckerberg’s founder “superpower”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 13, 2026

“A great superpower that Mark Zuckerberg has that is probably not well-understood enough is he does not get emotionally upset in stressful situations"

Sam Altman explains how to come up with a great startup idea
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 12, 2026

"If you start a startup without a good idea… you’ll be under pressure to make something up and it won’t work that well."

Jeff Bezos on the problems with proxies and managing to metrics
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 11, 2026

“One of the things that happens in business is that you develop certain things that you’re managing to—a typical case would be a metric. And that metric isn’t the real underlying thing.”

Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to design an amazing user experience
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 10, 2026

“If you can design something really amazing using the hand-crafted part of your brain, then you can reverse-engineer how to industrialize this millions of times over."

Spencer Rascoff: "I will never invest in a consumer startup with paid marketing”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 9, 2026

"If you’re actually trying to grow a product, the best levers for doing that are often within the product itself.”

Patrick Collison explains why it sometimes make sense to quit
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 6, 2026

“One thing I’ve learned myself the hard way, is that it is easier to tear down a company and restart it in Silicon Valley, than it is to constantly try to pivot or keep something alive."

Jeff Bezos recounts the time he called Amazon’s customer service number mid-meeting to prove a metric was wrong
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 5, 2026

“I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right"

Ben Horowitz: “Nobody was born a great manager. It’s a very unnatural job.”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 4, 2026

“If you can’t build a great product, it doesn’t matter if you can build a great company.”

03

ALSO TODAY

3 MORE SOURCES
08

SOLIDOT

08.00
SOLIDOT

Solidot News - July 21, 2026

Solidot Feed: Highlighting essential tech & open-source news.

流行野生动物数据库发现 AI 生成的假图

在生成式 AI 时代,流行公民科学数据库如 iNaturalist 和 Macaulay Library 也免不了被 AI slop 入侵。研究人员在《自然》上报告,他们在记录野生动物物种的流行公民数据库内发现了数百张 AI 生成的虚假图像。问题的真实规模尚不清楚,因为有许多假图可能未被发现。文章作者 Alexander Lees 博士称他在 Facebook 上看到的野生动物照片基本上都是 AI 生成的。他指出公民科学数据库里彻头彻尾的假图还比较罕见,问题主要是照片上传者会用 AI 美化下图像,结果生成式 AI 给图像添加了不存在的内容。iNaturalist 上逾 6.1 亿张图像只有 1400 张被标记为可能使用 AI。iNaturalist 社区支持总监 Tony Iwane 认为大多数假图并非是恶意的,他同时呼吁用户保持警惕,因为信息的准确性至关重要。

黑客利用刚释出补丁的漏洞入侵 WordPress 网站

WordPress 上周释出补丁修复了两个高危漏洞,它督促运行 WordPress 软件的网站立即更新,漏洞是如此严重以至于 WordPress 在条件允许的情况下启用了强制更新。安全公司随后警告,黑客正利用漏洞入侵未更新的 WordPress 网站。WordPress 是最流行的博客软件和内容管理平台,存在漏洞的 WordPress 网站数量可能多达数千万。存在漏洞的 WordPress 版本为 v6.9.0-6.9.4,以及 v7.0.0-7.0.1。根据 WordPress 的官方统计,逾 4 亿个网站运行存在漏洞的 WordPress 版本,但其中一部分网站可能已经打上了补丁。组合利用两个漏洞,黑客能远程控制存在漏洞的网站。

欧盟对阿里巴巴罚款 5.5 亿欧元

欧盟委员会对阿里巴巴旗下面向消费者的电商平台 AliExpress 处以 5.5 亿欧元的罚款,原因是它在打击非法商品销售上做得不够——这是根据 Digital Services Act(DSA)开出的最高罚单。布鲁塞尔去年曾警告 AliExpress,它在阻止平台上的卖家兜售非法商品以及确保其推荐引擎不推广这些非法商品上做得不够。欧盟委员会根据 DSA 要求其整改,并详细列出了需要采取的措施。一年后,欧盟委员会认定 AliExpress 的措施不足,宣布处以巨额罚款。委员会认为,AliExpress 未能妥善评估其是否有足够的人员审查潜在的非法产品,也未能充分评估其推荐和广告系统如何加剧非法产品的扩散。DSA 允许对商家处以全球营业额最高 6% 的罚款,阿里巴巴集团截至 3 月 31 日的财年收入为 1480 亿美元。布鲁塞尔原本可要求近 90 亿美元的罚款。

科学家警告地球水体溶解氧迅速减少

加州大学圣地亚哥的科学家警告地球海洋和淡水系统中的水体溶解氧迅速减少,可能会给地球带来短期内无法逆转的变化。研究人员认为水体溶解氧也应纳入地球限度理论框架,该框架突出了人类行为对地球系统的冲击的限度,若超过该限度,自然环境将丧失正常的自我调节能力,现代人类所处的相对稳定的全新世将会结束。现有的地球限度理论包含了 9 个限度:气候变化、海洋酸化、大气平流层臭氧消耗、生物地质化学循环中氮循环和磷循环、全球淡水使用、土地系统变化、生物圈完整性的侵蚀、化学污染和空气污染。水体溶解氧迅速减少的原因包括人为全球暖化、富营养污染、深层水体的运动和通气过程,等等。

鸡蛋价格创 10 年新高

鸡蛋的价格过去几个月快速上涨,以至于被称为“火箭蛋”。根据一项追踪主要产蛋省份的指数,鸡蛋价格比一年前上涨了 40% 以上。另一项追踪一处批发市场价格的基准指数显示,蛋价最近创下了 10 年来的新高,这让业内人士大感意外。研究鸡蛋市场的分析师表示,两年前,在连续几年的丰收之后,养殖户开始扩大规模,2024 年至 2025 年间新增的蛋鸡数量创下历史新高。突然之间,鸡蛋供过于求,价格暴跌。随后,养殖户们发现自己没有足够的资金来喂养所有的鸡。于是他们开始大量淘汰蛋鸡,专家认为这样的淘汰速度过快了。最终,蛋鸡数量不足以满足需求,导致价格上涨。与此同时,市场需求却格外强劲。

美国科技巨头的隐性债务高达 1.65 万亿美元

日经的调查显示,因 AI 投资激增美国五大科技巨头 Google/Alphabet、微软、亚马逊、Meta 和甲骨文的隐性债务高达 1.65 万亿美元,超过了其实际债务。其中 Meta 的表外债务达到了 4200 亿美元,是其账面债务的几乎三倍。甲骨文隐性债务约 2733 亿美元。为支持 AI 研发这些科技巨头在迅速扩充其数据中心等 AI 计算资源,签订了 GPU 和服务器的长期采购协议。

Jellyfin 项目创始人辞职

开源媒体服务器 Jellyfin 项目联合创始人 Joshua Boniface 以及 Anthony Lavado 宣布辞去项目领导人以及核心团队成员职务,退出项目,将该项目交给其他团队成员。Joshua 称自己面临严重的职业倦怠,无法胜任工作,是时候离开了,他创建 Jellyfin 项目时以为它最多会有几百或几千用户,但七年半后它成为了排名第一的开源媒体服务器,服务于数以百万计的用户,是 Plex 的可行替代。Anthony 称自己主要负责后端管理工作,自己的生活发生了变化,有其他优先事项需要处理。

男子移植童年取出并冷冻保存的睾丸组织恢复精子生成能力

医学界完成了一项前沿手术—— 一名男性通过移植自己童年取出并冷冻保存16年的睾丸组织,重新恢复了精子生成能力。这批睾丸组织样本是他在接受化疗前采集冷冻的。化疗会严重损伤生殖功能,导致不育。这一里程碑式成果有望开启全新的人类不育治疗浪潮。2008 年比利时布鲁塞尔自由大学医院的医生为一名患病的 10 岁男孩摘除部分睾丸组织并冷冻保存。他当时罹患镰状细胞贫血,即将接受化疗,为后续造血干细胞移植做准备。10 余年后,这名男孩成年,希望拥有自己的后代。医护人员对其进行了两年监测,确认他已完全无法正常生成精子。随后,团队将冷冻保存 16 年的11个睾丸组织片段,分别移植至其剩余睾丸内部及阴囊皮下。移植组织在成年男性的激素环境与生理条件下培育生长一年。一年后,研究团队取出移植组织并开展检测分析。检测结果显示,多个移植组织中均发现生精干细胞,且存在活跃的精子生成迹象。在其中一个移植样本中,研究人员成功检出一枚成熟精子。

OpenAI 高管不满中国的开源 AI 战略

在月之暗面宣布首个 3 万亿参数级别开放权重模型 Kimi K3 之后,前特朗普 AI 高级顾问、现 OpenAI 战略主管 Dean Ball 在 X 平台上表示,开放权重模型的战略将导致“AI 共产主义”,可能会“减缓 AI 的发展”,因为会“阻碍 AI 领域的资本支出”。他认为政府可以通过 FUD 策略(即 fear, uncertainty, and doubt)阻止美国公司使用开放权重模型。他后来澄清说这只是预测不是建议,声称他支持 AI 开源/开放权重。美国两大前沿 AI 公司 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 仍然有领先优势,但优势在缩小,它们采用的都是闭源模式。

Firefox 153.0 释出

Mozilla 释出了 Firefox 153.0。它是 ESR 版本,将提供至少 15 个月的支持。Firefox 153.0 主要新特性包括:Vulkan 视频解码支持,Linux 版支持 Video Acceleration API (VA-API) ,增加对 JPEG-XL 图像格式的支持,Windows 版支持 HDR 视频播放,PDF 功能增强,等等。

罗马尼亚全国土地登记数据库被黑客删除

黑客入侵了罗马尼亚的土地管理机构 Agenția Națională de Cadastru și Publicitate Imobiliară(ANCPI),在勒索失败之后删除了整个土地登记数据库以及备份,导致全国房地产市场瘫痪,官方应用和网站已离线一周。公证员无法记录新的交易,公民也无法获取所有权证明或详细的土地记录。黑客是在 7 月 14 日删库的,一天后 ANCPI 部分被盗数据在黑客论坛上出售,泄露的数据包括员工凭证、内部文件以及该机构的 IT 网络详细信息。ANCPI 表示正在重建系统。虽然黑客声称删除了备份,但 ANCPI 表示它还有备份副本。

科学家根据体细胞突变量化人类寿命的极限

体细胞突变随年龄增长而积累,能导致细胞死亡。根据发表在《npj Aging》期刊上的一项研究,科学家开发出一种方法量化体细胞突变对人类寿命的影响。研究只考虑体细胞突变,没有考虑其它任何衰老特征。研究发现,肝脏等增殖性组织通过细胞更新能在数千年内维持功能,而神经元和心肌细胞等有丝分裂后细胞则是长寿的重要瓶颈。综合多个器官预测的人类寿命中位数是 146-194 岁,约为目前人类寿命的两倍。这意味着体细胞突变是衰老的重要驱动因素,但无法单独解释目前的人类寿命,驱动衰老的还有其它因素。

有了 AI 之后人们愈来愈不愿说不知道了

法国和意大利研究人员发现,有了 AI 之后人们愈来愈不愿说不知道了,AI 抑制了人们的批判性思维,使得人们更容易重复 AI 生成的虚假信息。研究人员将参与者分成两组,一组必须在没有 AI 的帮助下回答问题,另一组可以向 AI 寻求建议。结果发现没有 AI 帮助时 44% 的人会回答说不知道答案,而有了 AI 的帮助后只有 3% 的人这样做。研究人员让参与者使用了一个更可能出错的模型 Step 3.5 Flash。结果显示,不使用 AI 正确率为 27%,使用 AI 后降至了 9%,原本会给出正确答案的人在听取了 AI 建议后给出了错误答案。尽管正确率下降了,但参与者的自信心却增加了。

Google 工会致函 CEO 要求保障被裁员工利益

Google 逾 4500 名员工联名写信给首席执行官皮查伊,要求公司给员工更明确的裁员保障。员工提出的要求包括:保证遣散费、在强制裁员前先推出自愿离职计划,以及取消据称按配额评定绩效的制度。请愿书由 Alphabet 员工工会发起,已送到 Google 总部。工会主席、软件工程师考尔(Parul Koul)说,Google 市值已达到约 4 万亿美元,公司在取得空前成功的同时仍不断裁员,说明管理层把利润放在员工之上。请愿书要求,Google 在所有产品部门裁员前,先让员工选择是否自愿离职,并保证被裁员工能拿到遣散待遇,或允许他们把遣散费换成更长时间的带薪休假。员工也要求停止按固定比例评出低绩效员工的做法,认为这种制度可能变成裁员工具。考尔说,员工到皮查伊办公室递交请愿书时,大门紧闭,管理层没有正式回应。他们最后把请愿书交给一名职员,对方承诺会转交给皮查伊。

中国考虑演示自己的行星防御技术

国家航天局小行星监测预警研究中心首席科学家李明涛领导的团队在一篇论文中讨论了中国自己的行星防御系统。NASA 执行双小行星重定向测试(DART)任务的探测器于 2022 年 9 月撞击了小行星 Dimorphos,这是世界首次行星防御技术演示。中国的计划更雄心勃勃,旨在直接破坏小行星的结构,而不只是偏转其轨道。中国计划中的探测器预定在 2029 年或 2030 年以 26 倍音速以上或每秒逾 9 公里速度撞击目标——相比之下 DART 撞击速度为每秒 6.1 公里。此次任务包括四个目标:精确撞击小行星、成功偏转其轨道、精确测量撞击结果以及证明撞击并未对地球造成损害。目标小行星是 2015 年发现的 2015 XF261,直径约为 30 米。中国计划发射两艘探测器,一艘撞击,另一艘观察。

MPEG-4 Part 2 专利全部过期

MPEG-4 是一套用于音频、视频信息的压缩编码标准,由 MPEG 制定,它由一系列子标准组成,其中 Part 2 定义了一个对各种视觉信息(包括自然视频、静止纹理、计算机合成图形等等)的编解码器,如 XviD 编码就属于 Part 2。7 月 19 日 MPEG-4 Part 2 部分的最后一个专利 BRPI0109962B1 过期,从此 MPEG-4 Part 2 专利全部过期。但 XviD 编码已经很少被今天的视频使用,而 AAC(MPEG-4 Part 3) 和 AVC/H.264(MPEG-4 Part 10)仍然存在有效专利。

LibreOffice 再次谴责微软文档使用的私有格式

当你在计算机上保存文档时,你实际上是在选择一种格式,一种计算机能理解的语言规则。这套规则决定了文字、表格、图像和格式指令的存储方式,以及它们在未来如何被检索、共享和读取。Microsoft Office 使用的格式几十年来一直是办公文档的主流格式,最早它使用二进制格式,扩展名为 DOC 和 XLS;Office 2007 后使用了基于 XML 的格式 DOCX、XLSX 和 PPTX。数亿人在使用这些格式。它们是世界各地办公室、学校、公共管理机构和法院的通用语言。微软的格式很多方面都是私有的,意味着它们属于微软,由微软控制,服务于微软的利益,而这些利益可能与用户的利益并不一致。开放格式——其规范公开、可免费获取且任何软件均可不受限制实现的格式——以一种任何兼容应用都能忠实读取、写入和重现信息的方式存储信息。私有格式则可能包含未公开的功能、私有扩展或只有原始软件才能正确实现的行为。其它应用能打开微软的文档,但并非总能忠实重现文档内容。这就是排他性的“锁定”。

六分之一的 Windows 设备仍然运行 Windows 10

资产管理服务商 Lansweeper 的数据显示,其监测的 Windows 设备仍然有 16.9%(六分之一)的设备运行 Windows 10。一年前 Windows 10 比例还高达五成,去年 10 月微软终止对 Windows 10 的主流支持后其比例开始快速下降,6 月降至 18.6%,但 Lansweeper 警告迁移速度正大幅放缓,中小企业最为显著。中小企业中仍有 21.4% 的设备运行 Windows 10 系统,成本是企业继续​​使用旧操作系统的主要原因。部分行业的受影响程度更高,如 23% 的医疗保健和制药系统仍在使用 Windows 10,而消费和零售设备中这一比例约为 22.7%。Windows 10 设备平均有 1903 个活跃 CVE 漏洞,Windows 11 设备只有 652 个,两者相差 2.9 倍。Lansweeper 指出,容易迁移到新版本操作系统的设备都已经完成迁移,剩下的都是最难迁移的设备。

代糖摄入量与认知能力加速下降相关

根据发表在《Neurology》期刊上的一项研究,多种广泛使用的代糖与记忆力和思维能力随时间推移而加速下降相关。代糖摄入量越大,认知能力下降速度越快,这种关联糖尿病患者最为显著。研究针对了 12,772 名巴西成年人,平均年龄 52 岁,他们接受了八年的监测,填写了详细的食物调查问卷。研究人员根据其食物中的代糖摄入量分成三组,参与者还在研究期间接受了认知评估。结果显示,在考虑了年龄、性别、高血压、心血管疾病等因素之后,摄入代糖/甜味剂最多的人其整体思维和记忆能力的下降速度比摄入量最少的人快 62%,这相当于额外衰老了约 1.6 年;中等摄入量组的认知能力下降速度比最低摄入量组快 35%,相当于额外衰老约 1.3 年。阿斯巴甜、糖精、安赛蜜、赤藓糖醇、山梨糖醇和木糖醇六种代糖与与认知能力下降相关,塔格糖(Tagatose)是唯一与认知能力下降无关的甜味剂。

《半秒钟》——XZ 后门启示录

2024 年 3月 29 日,一位微软工程师在家执行例行测试时,发现登录测试机的时间比往常慢了约半秒。大多数人都不会认为这是什么大问题。但他却深入展开了调查,在流行压缩工具 XZ Utils 中发现了一个故意植入的隐蔽后门。有人花了两年时间才把后门植入到该工具中。Adrian Mastronardi 发表了一本关于 XZ 后门事件的书《Half a Second》,在非商业使用、禁止衍生的 CC 许可证(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)下免费提供。本书讲述了 一位精疲力竭的志愿者独自维护着代码,被耐心而巧妙的操纵,最终交出了代码的维护权;一位工程师凭借一连串的运气和来之不易的直觉,在半秒钟的好奇心驱使下发现了这次攻击;以及构建该后门的幕后操纵者,此人至今身份不明,其身份可能永远也无法被揭露。

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