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A cyberattack on Mackay Sugar, Australia's second-largest sugar producer, is hitting farmers where it hurts most — their harvests. The company disclosed the breach on June tenth, and with processing operations still restricted, growers are being forced to leave crops in the ground, putting real income at risk during what should be peak season.
Shifting to a concern closer to the AI research community, a new paper out of arXiv is raising uncomfortable questions about how we measure language model performance. Researchers found that pruned large language models can score well on multiple choice benchmarks while completely failing to generate coherent open-ended answers — suggesting our standard tests may be measuring something far narrower than actual intelligence.
And in the gaming world, Slopmith, a fan-built guitar game inspired by Rocksmith, has been hit with a DMCA takedown notice. It's a familiar story — a passionate community project thriving in a space a major publisher abandoned, only to be reminded that copyright doesn't expire just because commercial interest does. The community is watching closely to see what comes next.
That's the beat for today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
