The Thirty Billion Scans You Didn't Know You Made

Dutch newspaper Trouw revealed that Niantic Spatial's Visual Positioning System — trained on 30 billion scans by Pokémon Go players since 2021 — has been integrated with Vantor's military drone navigation software for GPS-denied operations. Players consented to transferable data rights in optional in-game terms, but were never told of possible military use, and once data is baked into a model, tracing it back is essentially impossible.

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OpenCV Turns 25 and Learns to Run LLMs

OpenCV 5.0 ships a ground-up rewrite of its DNN engine: ONNX operator coverage jumps from 22% to 80%+, and native LLM/VLM support lands in a library already deployed across embedded systems, medical devices, and industrial hardware that can't run PyTorch.

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