"Robotic bird decoys are being deployed at Grand Teton National Park," reports Interesting Engineering, "to influence the behavior of real sage grouse and help restore a declining population.". Robotics mentor Gary Duquette describes the machines as "kind of a Frankenbird." (SFGate shows one of the robot birds charging up with a solar panel... "Recorded breeding calls are played at the scene, with clucking and cooing beginning at 5 a.m. each day.") ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Rust's rise shows signs of slowing," argues the CEO of TIOBE.
Back in 2020 Rust first entered the top 20 of his "TIOBE Index," which ranks programming language popularity using search engine results. Rust "was widely expected to break into the top 10," he remembers today. But it never happened, and "That was nearly six years ago...."... [ Read it >> ]

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A new powerful chipset has arrived to take on x86 CPUs and Apple's M5, writes Wccftech.

The blog Windows Central writes that "Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 processors are here" — and they run Windows:

Microsoft has done a massive amount of work to improve compatibility and has also convinced developers to embrace Windows 11 on Arm. Users of Windows 11 on Arm PCs spend 90% of their time on Arm-based apps that run natively. Additionally, apps that do not run natively can often run through Prism emulation, which has improved dramatically since launch... ... [ Read it >> ]

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Bloomberg describes him as a "former Harvard Medical School professor whose research has focused on the intersection of AI and neuroscience."
"For the past 20 years, I studied how the human brain stores and retrieves memories," Kreiman writes on LinkedIn. And now "My co-founder Spandan Madan and I built a new algorithm to endow humans with perfect and infinite memory."... [ Read it >> ]

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The Super Mario Galaxy Movie "is officially the year's highest-grossing film to date with $629 million at the global box office," reports Variety — and it will likely earn over $1 billion. Project Hail Mary now becomes the year's second highest-grossing movie, with four-week ticket sales over $510, notes The Hollywood Reporter:... [ Read it >> ]

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"RGB LED TVs have been the talk of the TV world this year," argues The Verge, with models coming from all the manufacturers."
And the first one of 2026 is here — the UR9 from China's Hisense — "the first look at the viability of the new backlight technology outside of demo rooms." They call it "a step above the traditional mini-LED TVs of years past." and "a great first shot against OLED's bow."... [ Read it >> ]

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Mississippi has one warehouse — run by a contractor — that sells all the liquor for the entire state of 2.9 million people. "If a restaurant or store anywhere in Mississippi wanted a bottle of Jim Beam, they had to order it from the wholesale warehouse," reports the Washington Post. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Bloomberg describes him as a "former Harvard Medical School professor whose research has focused on the intersection of AI and neuroscience."
"For the past 20 years, I studied how the human brain stores and retrieves memories," Kreiman writes on LinkedIn. And now "My co-founder Spandan Madan and I built a new algorithm to endow humans with perfect and infinite memory."... [ Read it >> ]

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The biotech industry's engineered cells could become an $8 trillion market by 2035, notes Phys.org. But how do you keep them from being stolen? Their article notes "an uptick in the theft and smuggling of high-value biological materials, including specially engineered cells."
... [ Read it >> ]

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The word clanker — a disparaging term for AI and robots — "has made its way into the Linux kernel," reports the blog It's FOSS "thanks to Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux stable kernel maintainer and the closest thing the project has to a second-in-command."

He's been quietly running what looks like an AI-assisted fuzzing tool on the kernel that lives in a branch called "clanker" on his working kernel tree. It began with the ksmbd and SMB code. Kroah-Hartman filed a three-patch series after running his new tooling against it, describing the motivation quite simply. ["They pass my very limited testing here," he wrote, "but please don't trust them at all and verify that I'm not just making this all up before accepting them."] Kroah-Hartman picked that code because it was easy to set up and test locally with virtual machines. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Forbes estimates he's worth roughly $110 billion, "placing him ahead of Bill Gates."

And now Changpeng Zhao, the 49-year-old billionaire founder of Binance, "has written a memoir..."

It arrives with the unmistakable timing of a man determined to tell the world his version of his meteoric crypto rise and fall, and foreshadow his comeback. The book, Freedom of Money: A Memoir of Protecting Users, Resilience, and the Founding of Binance, runs 364 pages, self-published in English and Chinese.... Zhao also recounts Binance's long battle with U.S. regulators, the company's record $4.3 billion settlement for fostering unscrupulous money launderers, his four-month prison sentence in California, where he says he began writing the book, and his recent pardon by President Trump... ... [ Read it >> ]

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Remember that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free"? It was Anthropic's experiment, with setup handled by a startup named Andon Labs (which also built the hardware and software integration). But for their latest experiment, Andon Labs co-founders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," reports Business Insider, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store." ... [ Read it >> ]

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175 million people in Brazil now use its instant-payment system "Pix", developed by the country's central bank for real-time payments using QR codes or keys, and American Banker notes that the central banks of Argentina and Costa Rica also have developed their own widely used digital systems for instant payments.... [ Read it >> ]

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Arizona state prosecutors allege Kalshi is running an illegal gambling operation, charging the prediction market with 20 "wagering" misdemeanors. But Friday a federal judge "temporarily barred Arizona from enforcing its gambling laws against predictive market operators," reports the Associated Press, "and put the brakes on a criminal wagering case that the state has filed against Kalshi. ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Breathable oxygen has been created from Moon dust," reports the Telegraph, "in a world first that paves the way for a lunar base."

Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin ""announced this week that it had developed a reactor that could successfully release oxygen from lunar soil by using an electric current."... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon's Luna cloud gaming service is making some changes, reports Engadget:

It's no longer possible to buy Ubisoft+ and Jackbox Games subscriptions or standalone games through Luna. Amazon will automatically cancel any active subscriptions bought through Luna at the end of customers' next billing cycle. If you have a Ubisoft+ subscription that you bought directly from Ubisoft instead, you'll still be able to access games on that service through Luna until June 10. The Bring Your Own Library option — which allows users to play games they own on the likes of EA, GOG and Ubisoft on Luna — is going away too. You won't be able to access games from those storefronts via Amazon's streaming service after June 3. ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Only about 2% of visually impaired people in the United States use guide dogs," notes StudyFinds.com, "partly because breeding and training takes years and fewer than half the dogs in training actually graduate."

But someday there could be another option:

What if you could ask your guide dog where the nearest water fountain is and hear it answer back, complete with directions and an estimated walk time? Researchers at the State University of New York at Binghamton have built a robotic guide dog that can do something close to that, holding simple back-and-forth conversations about navigation with its handler, describing the surrounding environment, and talking through route options as it leads the way... Their work, presented at the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pairs a large language model, a system that understands and generates language, with a navigation planner. Together, the two let the robot understand open-ended requests, suggest destinations, and adjust plans on the fly. ... [ Read it >> ]

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A 17,000-word expose in the New Yorker reveals "several executives connected to OpenAI have expressed ongoing reservations about Altman's leadership." Reporters Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spoke to "a hundred people with firsthand knowledge of how Altman conducts business," including current and former OpenAI employees and board members. ... [ Read it >> ]

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It's the first time a major U.S. newsroom has gone on strike partly to demand protections from AI-related layoffs, according to a report from Nieman Lab.

They noted that one of the picketer's signs read "Thoughts not bots," :

On Wednesday, roughly 150 members of the Propublica Guild, one of the largest nonprofit newsroom unions in the country, went on a 24-hour strike. About two dozen Guild members picketed ProPublica's headquarters in New York City's Hudson Square neighborhood during working hours, as simultaneous picket lines formed in front of the publication's offices in Chicago and Washington D.C... ... [ Read it >> ]

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In 2024 the Verge's consumer tech reporter paid $173 for a WD Black SN850X 2TB SSD. But "now that same SSD costs $649..."

"Like with RAM, demand from the AI industry is swallowing up supply from a limited number of manufacturers, leading to a drastic reduction in the inventory that's available to consumers" — and skyrocketing prices:... [ Read it >> ]

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Critics say social media is engineered to be as addictive as tobacco or gambling, writes the Washington Post — while adding that "the science has been moving in parallel with the court's recognition."

A growing body of research links heavy social media use not only to declines in mental health but to measurable cognitive effects — on attention, memory and focus — that in some studies resemble accelerated aging. Science also suggests we have more control than we realize when it comes to reversing this damage, and the solution is surprisingly simple: Take a break... "Digital detoxes" can sound like a fad. But in one of the largest studies to date, published in PNAS Nexus and involving more than 467 participants with an average age of 32, even a short time away produced striking results — effectively erasing a decade of age-related cognitive decline. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Critics say social media is engineered to be as addictive as tobacco or gambling, writes the Washington Post — while adding that "the science has been moving in parallel with the court's recognition."

A growing body of research links heavy social media use not only to declines in mental health but to measurable cognitive effects — on attention, memory and focus — that in some studies resemble accelerated aging. Science also suggests we have more control than we realize when it comes to reversing this damage, and the solution is surprisingly simple: Take a break... "Digital detoxes" can sound like a fad. But in one of the largest studies to date, published in PNAS Nexus and involving more than 467 participants with an average age of 32, even a short time away produced striking results — effectively erasing a decade of age-related cognitive decline. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Phoronix staged "a showdown" between Firefox and Chrome, testing them both on an Intel Panther Lake laptop running Ubuntu 26.04.

JetStream 3.0 was announced at the end of March as the latest major web browser benchmark. This updated version of JetStream is focused on intensive portions of modern JavaScript and WebAssembly web applications... Google Chrome 147 came in at 1.47x the performance of Mozilla Firefox 149. A very strong showing for Google's web browser and to not much surprise Google engineers have been heavily involved in JetStream 3 as part of its open governance model. Chrome debuts very well on JetStream 3 while it will be interesting to see what optimizations Mozilla engineers pursue in the months ahead... ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Every single Star Trek series has been canceled..." reports ScreenRant. "There is "no Star Trek in production or greenlit for the first time in nearly a decade."

While there were five active Star Trek series just a few years ago, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds filmed its fifth and final season in the fall of 2025, and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy "wrapped filming its second and final season at the end of February." (Though ironically, both Star Trek series still have seasons yet to premiere, with two season of Strange New Worlds mean it may continue airing through 2027.)... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Trump administration has stepped up an effort to unmask a Reddit user who criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After failing to obtain information through a summons issued (PDF) to Reddit, the government reportedly issued a subpoena demanding that Reddit provide the information and appear before a grand jury in Washington, DC. The Intercept described the subpoena today. "According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month," the article said.... [ Read it >> ]

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Attackers briefly hijacked part of CPUID's backend and swapped legitimate download links on its site with malware-laced ones. "The issue hit tools like HWMonitor and CPU-Z, with users on Reddit and elsewhere starting to notice something wasn't right when installers tripped antivirus alerts or showed up under odd names," reports The Register. From the report: CPUID has since confirmed the breach, pinning it on a compromised backend component rather than tampering with its software builds. "Investigations are still ongoing, but it appears that a secondary feature (basically a side API) was compromised for approximately six hours between April 9 and April 10, causing the main website to randomly display malicious links (our signed original files were not compromised)," one of the site's owners said in a post on X. "The breach was found and has since been fixed."... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: As the Trump administration seeks to fill a national shortage of air traffic controllers, officials are targeting a new talent pool: gamers. The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday is making a recruiting push aimed at avid players of video games, as the agency strives to fill thousands of vacancies that lawmakers have said leave the traveling public less safe. In a new YouTube ad, the agency is using flashy graphics and the promise of six-figure salaries to convince video game enthusiasts to apply their trigger fingers in service of air safety.... [ Read it >> ]

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NASA's Artemis II crew safely splashed down off the California coast after completing a 10-day trip around the moon and back. "This is not just an accomplishment for NASA," sad NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "This is an accomplishment for humanity, again, a historic mission to the moon and back." From a report: Isaacman is aboard the USS John. P Murtha Navy recovery vessel, where the astronauts will be brought once they've been retrieved from the Orion capsule, and he shared "there is a lot to celebrate right now on on a mission well accomplished for Artemis II."... [ Read it >> ]

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Researchers say the world's largest known wild chimpanzee community in Uganda fractured into rival factions and has been locked in a vicious "civil war" for the last eight years. "It is not clear exactly why the once close-knit community of Ngogo chimpanzees at Uganda's Kibale National Park are at loggerheads, but since 2018 the scientists have recorded 24 killings, including 17 infants," reports the BBC. From the report: [O]ver several decades, [lead author Aaron Sandel] said the nearly 200 Ngogo chimpanzees had lived in harmony. There were divided into two sets - known to researchers as Western and Central - but they had existed overall as a cohesive group. Sandel said he first noticed them polarizing in June 2015, when the Western chimpanzees ran away and were chased by the Central group. "Chimpanzees are sort of melodramatic," he said, explaining that following arguments there would ordinarily be "screaming and chasing" and then later, they would grooming and co-operating.... [ Read it >> ]

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Bruce66423 shares a report from the Guardian: The European parliament has blocked the extension of a law that permits big tech firms to scan for child sexual exploitation on their platforms, creating a legal gap that child safety experts say will lead to crimes going undetected. The law, which was a carve-out of the EU Privacy Act, was put in place in 2021 as a temporary measure allowing companies to use automated detection technologies to scan messages for harms, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM), grooming and sextortion. However, it expired on April 3, and the EU parliament decided not to vote to extend it, amid privacy concerns from some lawmakers.... [ Read it >> ]

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San Francisco police arrested a suspect after a Molotov cocktail was allegedly thrown at Sam Altman's home and threats were later made outside OpenAI's headquarters. "Thankfully, no one was hurt," said OpenAI in a statement to WIRED. "We deeply appreciate how quickly SFPD responded and the support from the city in helping keep our employees safe. The individual is in custody, and we're assisting law enforcement with their investigation." From the report: "At approximately 3:45am PT, an unidentified individual approached Sam's residence and threw an incendiary device toward the property. The device landed nearby and extinguished. There were no injuries and only minimal damage was reported," the message to staff reads. "Shortly afterward, an individual matching the suspect's description was contacted by security outside MB1," the message continues, referring to OpenAI's headquarters in San Francisco's Mission Bay neighborhood. "This person made threatening statements about the building."... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft has started stripping Copilot branding out of Notepad in Windows 11, replacing the old Copilot menu with a more generic "writing tools" label. The AI features themselves aren't going away, but Microsoft seems to be backing off the heavy-handed Copilot branding and extra entry points. Windows Central reports: As promised, Microsoft is now beginning its effort to reduce and remove Copilot branding across Windows 11, with the latest Notepad update for Insiders outright removing the Copilot icon and phrasing. Now, the AI menu is simply called "writing tools," and maintains the same functionality as before. Additionally, Microsoft has also removed references to AI in the Settings area in Notepad. Now, the ability to turn on or off these AI powered writing tools are now listed under "Advanced features."... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant's iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device's push notification database, multiple people present for FBI testimony in a recent trial told 404 Media. The case involved a group of people setting off fireworks and vandalizing property at the ICE Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas in July, and one shooting a police officer in the neck. The news shows how forensic extraction -- when someone has physical access to a device and is able to run specialized software on it -- can yield sensitive data derived from secure messaging apps in unexpected places. Signal already has a setting that blocks message content from displaying in push notifications; the case highlights why such a feature might be important for some users to turn on.... [ Read it >> ]

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Futurism found that Google News is surfacing Polymarket betting pages alongside traditional news sources. "The bets often appear in the 'For you' section of Google News, which is tailored to a user's personal interests," the publication reports. "In one instance, it was even the very top result, as with this bet on the price of Bitcoin." From the report: In our testing, Polymarket bets are also showing up on the Google News home page. But links from the prediction market can pop up all over Google News, including in searches. In further tests, looking up "will ships transit the strait," referring to the Strait of Hormuz, returned numerous credible sources like Financial Times, The Guardian, and Reuters. Just below them, however, was a Polymarket bet on the number of ships that would be allowed to pass through the critical oil passageway.... [ Read it >> ]

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Gmail's end-to-end encryption is now available on all Android and iOS devices, letting enterprise users send and read encrypted emails directly in the app without any extra tools. "This launch combines the highest level of privacy and data encryption with a user-friendly experience for all users, enabling simple encrypted email for all customers from small businesses to enterprises and public sector," Google announced in a blog post. BleepingComputer reports: Starting this week, encrypted messages will be delivered as regular emails to Gmail recipients' inboxes if they use the Gmail app. Recipients who don't have the Gmail mobile app and use other email services can read them in a web browser, regardless of the device and service they're using.... [ Read it >> ]

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France says it plans to move some government computers from Windows to Linux as part of a broader push for digital sovereignty and reduced dependence on U.S. technology. TechCrunch reports: In a statement, French minister David Amiel said (translated) that the effort was to "regain control of our digital destiny" by relying less on U.S. tech companies. Amiel said that the French government can no longer accept that it doesn't have control over its data and digital infrastructure. The French government did not provide a specific timeline for the switchover, or which distributions it was considering. Microsoft did not immediately comment on the news.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: An auto dealer software company is pitching AI-powered kiosks designed to replace car salesmen on showroom floors. Automotive News says the industry is "skeptical." But be honest -- would you really rather deal with the average car lot shark than a computer?... [ Read it >> ]

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Meta has started removing ads from law firms seeking clients for social media addiction lawsuits, just weeks after a jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in a landmark case involving harm to a young user. "Lawyers across the country now are seeking new plaintiffs, in the hopes of bringing a class action lawsuit that could result in lucrative verdicts," reports Axios. From the report: Axios has identified more than a dozen such ads that were deactivated today, some of which came from large national firms like Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law. Almost all of them ran on both Facebook and Instagram. Some also appeared on Threads and Messenger, plus Meta's Audience Network -- which distributes ads to thousands of third-party sites.... [ Read it >> ]

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Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from NewScientist: According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) -- widely considered to be our best theory for describing the strong force, which binds quarks inside protons and neutrons -- even a perfect vacuum isn't truly empty. Instead, it is filled with short-lived disturbances in the underlying energy of space that flicker in and out of existence, known as virtual particles. Among them are quark-antiquark pairs. Under normal conditions, these fleeting pairs vanish almost as soon as they appear. But if enough energy is injected into a vacuum, QCD predicts they can be promoted into real, detectable particles with measurable mass. Now, the STAR collaboration -- an international team of physicists working at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state -- has observed this process for the first time.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Women in the U.S. gave birth to roughly 710,000 fewer children last year compared with the nation's peak in 2007, according to preliminary data released (PDF) this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lead researcher Brady Hamilton, a demographer with the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, said the latest one percent drop in "general fertility" from 2024 to 2025 is part of a long-running downward trend. "Since 2007, there's been a decline in the general fertility rate [in the U.S.] of 23%," Hamilton told NPR.... [ Read it >> ]

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"One of VMware's biggest competitors, Nutanix, claims to have swiped tens of thousands of VMware customers," reports Ars Technica. They said higher prices, forced bundling, licensing changes, and more strained partner relationships have frustrated customers and driven them away from the leading virtualization firm. From the report: Speaking at a press briefing at Nutanix's .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said that "about 30,000 customers" have migrated from VMware to the rival platform, pointing to customer disapproval over Broadcom's VMware strategy, SDxCentral, a London-based IT publication, reported today. "I think there's no doubt that the customer sentiment continues to be negative about Broadcom," Ramaswami said, per SDxCentral.... [ Read it >> ]

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BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla is accusing Microsoft of stacking the deck against Firefox, arguing that design choices in Windows steer users toward Edge even when they explicitly choose another browser. According to Mozilla, parts of Windows still open links in Edge regardless of the default browser setting, including results from the taskbar search and links launched from apps like Outlook and Teams. Mozilla says this means Firefox often never even gets the opportunity to handle those links, which quietly shifts user activity back into Microsoft's ecosystem.... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company may eventually sell its Trainium AI chips directly to outside customers, not just through AWS, which would put Amazon in more direct competition with Nvidia. "There's so much demand for our chips that it's quite possible we'll sell racks of them to third parties in the future," Jassy wrote in his annual shareholder letter Thursday. He also revealed the company's chip business is already running at more than $20 billion annually, with demand so strong that current and even future generations are largely spoken for. Quartz reports: Access to Amazon's chips is currently limited to Amazon Web Services, with customers paying for cloud-based usage rather than owning any physical hardware. Selling to AWS and external customers alike, as standalone chipmakers do, would put annual revenue at around $50 billion, up from the $20 billion the company estimates for the year, Jassy said. The $20 billion figure spans three product lines: Trainium, the AI accelerator chip; Graviton, a general-purpose processor; and Nitro, a chip that helps run Amazon's EC2 server instances. All three are growing at triple-digit rates year over year, Jassy claimed in his letter.... [ Read it >> ]

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OpenAI is reportedly preparing a new cybersecurity product for a small group of partners, out of concern that a broader rollout could wreak havoc if it were released more widely. If that move sounds familiar, it's because Anthropic took a similar limited-release approach with its Mythos model and Project Glasswing initiative. Axios reports: OpenAI introduced its "Trusted Access for Cyber" pilot program in February after rolling out GPT-5.3-Codex, the company's most cyber-capable reasoning model. Organizations in the invite-only program are given access to "even more cyber capable or permissive models to accelerate legitimate defensive work," according to a blog post. At the time, OpenAI committed $10 million in API credits to participants. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A hacker has allegedly stolen a massive trove of sensitive data -- including highly classified defense documents and missile schematics -- from a state-run Chinese supercomputer in what could potentially constitute the largest known heist of data from China. The dataset, which allegedly contains more than 10 petabytes of sensitive information, is believed by experts to have been obtained from the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin -- a centralized hub that provides infrastructure services for more than 6,000 clients across China, including advanced science and defense agencies.... [ Read it >> ]

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After nearly 20 years on the platform, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it is leaving X. "This isn't a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue," the digital rights group said. "The math hasn't worked out for a while now." From the report: We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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Waymo is launching a pilot with cities and Google's Waze to share pothole data collected by its robotaxis, giving local transportation departments a new way to find and fix road damage more quickly. "We realized, hey, once we're at scale, we can actually share this data with cities, which is something that they've asked for and something that we collect at scale," said Arielle Fleisher, Waymo's policy development and research manager. "And so we figured out a way to make that happen." The Verge reports: Waymo uses its perception hardware, including cameras and radar, as well as accelerometers and the vehicle's physical feedback system, to log every pothole its vehicles encounter. These sensors detect physical changes to the road's surface, such as tilt and movement when the vehicle encounters irregularities. Originally, Waymo knew it needed the ability to detect potholes so it could ensure that its vehicles slowed down to avoid damage or injury to the passenger. Later, the company realized this could be invaluable data for cities, too.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: [Five skilled workers aged 50 and older spoke] to the Guardian about how, after struggling to find work in their fields, they have turned to an emerging and growing category of work: using their expertise to train artificial intelligence models. Known as data annotation, the work involves labeling and evaluating the information used to train AI models like Open AI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini. A doctor, for example, might review how an AI model answers medical questions to flag incorrect or unsafe responses and suggest better ones, helping the system learn how to generate more accurate and reliable responses. The ultimate goal of training is to level up AI models until they're capable of doing a job as well as a human could -- meaning they could someday replace some of these human workers.... [ Read it >> ]

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BrianFagioli writes: Little Snitch, the well known macOS tool that shows which applications are connecting to the internet, is now being developed for Linux. The developer says the project started after experimenting with Linux and realizing how strange it felt not knowing what connections the system was making. Existing tools like OpenSnitch and various command line utilities exist, but none provided the same simple experience of seeing which process is connecting where and blocking it with a click. The Linux version uses eBPF for kernel level traffic interception, with core components written in Rust and a web based interface that can even monitor remote Linux servers.... [ Read it >> ]

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A federal appeals court denied Anthropic's bid to temporarily block the Pentagon's blacklisting, meaning the company remains shut out of Defense Department contracts while the case continues, even though a separate court has allowed other federal agencies to keep using Claude for now. CNBC reports: "In our view, the equitable balance here cuts in favor of the government," the appeals court said in its decision. "On one side is a relatively contained risk of financial harm to a single private company. On the other side is judicial management of how, and through whom, the Department of War secures vital AI technology during an active military conflict. For that reason, we deny Anthropic's motion for a stay pending review on the merits." With the split decisions by the two courts, Anthropic is excluded from DOD contracts but is able to continue working with other government agencies while litigation plays out. Defense contractors will be prohibited from using Claude in their work with the agency, but they can use it for other cases.... [ Read it >> ]

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