Author: Carter

is often introduced through a long list of algorithms. SARSA, Q-learning, PPO, DQN, SAC etc. Each name seems to point to a different method, a different trick, or a different mathematical formulation. But many of these algorithms are built around a much simpler question: Should an agent learn only from the behavior it is currently using, or can it also learn from behavior generated in some other way? That is the central difference between on-policy and off-policy learning. To make that distinction intuitive, we need one basic definition. In reinforcement learning, a policy is the rule or strategy an agent uses to decide what action to…

The Pentagon is quietly overhauling one of its most entrenched systems: how it sources and buys modern technology — and by extension, who controls it. After a public split with Anthropic, the Defense Department is cutting deals across the tech industry, assembling a line-up of top-performing commercial players to deploy their models on its classified networks. In this emerging model, different layers of capability come from different firms: connectivity and battlefield resilience are expected from SpaceX; frontier model intelligence from OpenAI and Google; compute and hardware acceleration from Nvidia; open-weight model ecosystems from Reflection; and enterprise deployment at scale from…

Jada Jones/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.It’s become my custom to bring along two pairs of the latest headphones or earbuds when I have air travel planned — one pair for my outbound flight and one for my return.  Although I can gauge a pair of headphones’ performance on trips to the grocery store or while working in my home office, there’s no more authentic testing ground than the most overstimulating place I know: Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.Also: I wore 5 different headphones across 8 flights – here’s how each pair handled my stress tests (2025)This time, I…

. The functions had grown too long and the variable names made no sense anymore. Every time I wanted feedback on a file, I stopped, opened the chat, copied the whole thing in, and waited. Then went back to the editor, applied the change, opened the next file, and did it again. At some point I counted. Six files. Eleven pastes. Twenty minutes of switching before I wrote a single new line. The obvious fix was to give the AI tool direct access to my project folder. That’s when I ran into MCP — the Model Context Protocol — which…

On June 3, 2026, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson posted “I’m taking a break. TTYL” on X, triggering a fresh 10% ADA sell-off. This came just one day after he warned about a wave of failures in the ecosystem, following the collapse of analytics platform TapTools. The token sank to $0.15 for the first time in more than five years. What is happening at Cardano is not a bad week in a down market. It is a full-scale network breakdown. And it is forcing uncomfortable questions about the structural health of other major blockchains, including XRP and Ethereum. Governance Became the…

Including npm packages in software development projects saves time but can introduce unseen but known vulnerabilities. CVE Lite CLI is a lightweight command line security scanner that operates on lockfiles during software development. It focuses on JavaScript and Typescript files and is an OSV-powered dependency scanner supporting npm, pnpm and Yarn. It is an open source tool developed by Sonu Kapoor, now community supported and recently adopted as an OWASP Incubator Project. Kapoor has been a software developer for 25 years and has experienced and understands all the frustrations and delays in the secure software development process. It is these…

There isn’t a CIO on the planet not worried about AI spend right now. CFOs are increasingly nervous, too.For fear of falling behind, many companies have pushed their employees to use AI as aggressively as possible. The edict was clear: “Move fast, we’ll figure out the bill later.” And for the most part, it worked: AI has been genuinely transformational for the teams that leaned in.But the costs are real: we’ve heard countless horror stories of huge bills and painful overages on token spend.Today, we’re announcing spend controls in Cloudflare AI Gateway, and a closed beta for identity-driven budgets and…

  # Introduction  A model that says it is 90% confident should be right 90% of the time. When that relationship breaks down, you get a miscalibration problem. The model’s scores stop telling you anything useful about reliability. For large language models (LLMs), miscalibration is widespread. A 2024 NAACL survey found that confidence scores diverge from actual correctness rates across factual QA, code generation, and reasoning tasks. Another study on biomedical models found mean calibration scores ranging from only 23.9% to 46.6% across all tested models. The gap is consistent. The standard solution in classical machine learning is post-hoc recalibration: fit…

1,000W, 10-port charger for $45… predictably disappointing.  Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysThings that look “too good to be true” invariable are just that.This example got dangerously hot in a short period of time before dying. There’s no legitimate charger that comes close to delivering on the 1,000W promise.Being a tech reviewer for a living means that I get offered some very interesting things. Not interesting as in Bugatti supercars or jewel-encrusted Fabergé eggs, but interesting as in “this thing could easily be a fire hazard — want to take a look?”Also: The best GaN…

At ICRA 2026, GENISOM AI may have been new to many international attendees — but it is not a concept-stage robotics startup. Founded in December 2023, the company said it has already produced and delivered more than 10,000 units, making it one of the few robotics companies to reach production scale in under three years. GENISOM AI said that milestone puts it in a different position than many early-stage physical AI companies entering the global market. Like Unitree, GENISOM AI is building around manufacturable platforms designed to move beyond laboratory demonstrations and reach customers at scale. However, the Beijing-based company…