fact or fiction

Is it fact or merely fiction? Fact or Fiction explores the myths and beliefs we hold about cyber safety, artificial intelligence, dystopian futures and our everyday gadgets.

AI, the “Devil” of Our Age? Is Artificial Intelligence Slipping Beyond Human Control?
Artificial intelligence is advancing at a pace that is forcing governments, researchers and technology companies to confront a difficult question: how much control will humans retain as AI systems become increasingly capable?
By Sahby Mehalla11 days ago in 01
Sheathed Wings
Six years is an eternity in consumer technology. In 2020, Huawei took the global stage for the Mate 40 series. Then, the world shifted. Sanctions hit, overseas markets slipped away, and the company went quiet on the international front—retreating to its home turf, licking its wounds, and recalibrating.
By Jin11 days ago in 01
One Second of Silence in the Boardroom
Every tech company had five or more Agents. Two for code. Three for office. Names blurred together. Users couldn't remember them. Products looked alike. Features overlapped. No one knew which one to open.
By Jin11 days ago in 01
The Day Tesla’s Driverless Taxi Met the Regulator
When a driverless taxi met a regulator on its first day On September 3, 2026, Tesla started running Cybercab taxis in Austin, Texas. These are the first L4 autonomous vehicles sold to the public that have no steering wheel, no brake pedal, no accelerator, and no mirrors. No driver sits inside. Only passengers, a screen, and software.
By Jin11 days ago in 01
Your AI Rules Are Now Your Biggest Problem – Here's Why GPT‑6 Astra Demands You Delete Them
You open your project. Your AI coding assistant reads AGENTS.md , loads every Skill description, and stops. "This rule says read all documentation before every edit. That rule says load only on demand. Which should I follow?" It's not being difficult. It's doing exactly what you asked.
By Jin12 days ago in 01
The War You Never See
Zero In Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem , there is a quiet but devastating setup: the sophon destroys no hardware, kills no one. It does only one thing: interfere with humanity's experiments observing the microscopic world.
By Jin12 days ago in 01
Why Your 5GHz Computer Still Spins the Wait Cursor
1985. A Commodore 64 runs at 1 MHz, with a clock cycle of 1000 nanoseconds. When it fetches data from memory, it takes about 200 nanoseconds. In that 200‑nanosecond wait, the CPU could have executed 0.2 instructions. So each wait costs it one‑fifth of an instruction.
By Jin12 days ago in 01
What Happened When AI Was Let Loose on a 350‑Year‑Old Math Problem
Late at night. Tianyi Peng refreshed his monitoring dashboard. Dozens of green nodes lit up across a vast dependency graph. Each node was a theorem the Lean proof assistant had just verified. Three days earlier, the count had been zero. Now nearly thirty thousand nodes glowed in a solid patch.
By Jin12 days ago in 01
The $100 Line of Code
I. The Receipt at 3 AM The lights on the twenty‑third floor of a Hangzhou office building were still on at three in the morning.
By Jin13 days ago in 01
The $70 Billion Bet: Why ByteDance Is Turning Itself Into a Data‑Center Empire
On September 3, 2026, Yicai reported that ByteDance had secured a $29.6 billion offshore syndicated loan. The initial target was $20 billion. Subscriptions surged past $30 billion, pushing the final size to $29.6 billion. The interest rate is SOFR plus 68 basis points, 17 basis points lower than the 85 bps on its $10.8 billion loan in 2024. Syndicate members and final allocations are still being confirmed. The agreement has not been formally signed.
By Jin13 days ago in 01
THE $2,500 COMPROMISE
There are fewer than two weeks to go until 1:00 a.m. on September 10. The lawns at Apple Park have already been mowed three times. Security barriers are going up around the Steve Jobs Theater. Two extra cleaning shifts have been added to the campus schedule. A note beside the coffee machines in the cafeteria reads, "Extended hours until 2 a.m. starting Wednesday." The staff who go through this every September are now in that peculiar state: everything is ready, yet something still doesn't feel quite ready.
By Jin14 days ago in 01
The Drop of Oil
0. A Word That Must Not Be Used Get this out of the way immediately. Almost every news piece about this event begins with: "Artificial intelligence has once again shocked the mathematical community." That is a template opener. It carries zero information; it substitutes emotion for fact. Under the constraint rules we are using, such collective exclamations of "shock", "stupefaction", or "vertigo" are forbidden as empty rhetoric.
By Jin14 days ago in 01