Meta has officially confirmed it is shifting investment away from the metaverse and VR toward AI-powered smart glasses, following a Bloomberg report of an up to 30% budget cut for Reality Labs. "Within our overall Reality Labs portfolio we are shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables given the momentum there," a statement from Meta reads. "We aren't planning any broader changes than that." From the report: Following Bloomberg's report, other mainstream news outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider have published their own reports corroborating the general claim, with slightly differing details...

Business Insider's report suggests that the cuts will primarily hit Horizon Worlds, and that employees are facing "uncertainty" about whether this will involve layoffs. One likely cut BI's report mentions is the funding for third-party studios to build Horizon Worlds content. The New York Times report, on the other hand, seems more definitive in stating that these cuts will come via layoffs. The Reality Labs division "has racked up more than $70 billion in losses since 2021," notes Fortune in their reporting, "burning through cash on blocky virtual environments, glitchy avatars, expensive headsets, and a user base of approximately 38 people as of 2022."

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Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from the BBC: Do you find yourself getting increasingly irate while scrolling through your social media feed? If so, you may be falling victim to rage bait, which Oxford University Press has named its word or phrase of the year. It is a term that describes manipulative tactics used to drive engagement online, with usage of it increasing threefold in the last 12 months, according to the dictionary publisher.

Rage bait beat two other shortlisted terms -- aura farming and biohack -- to win the title. The list of words is intended to reflect some of the moods and conversations that have shaped 2025. "Fundamental problem with social media as a system is that it exploits people's emotional thinking," comments sinij. "Cute cat videos on one end and rage bait on another end of the same spectrum. I suspect future societies will be teaching disassociation techniques in junior school."

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Linus Torvalds recently defended Windows' infamous Blue Screen of Death during a video with Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips, where the two built a PC together. It's FOSS reports: In that video, Sebastian discussed Torvalds' fondness for ECC (Error Correction Code). I am using their last name because Linus will be confused with Linus. This is where Torvalds says this: "I am convinced that all the jokes about how unstable Windows is and blue screening, I guess it's not a blue screen anymore, a big percentage of those were not actually software bugs. A big percentage of those are hardware being not reliable."

Torvalds further mentioned that gamers who overclock get extra unreliability. Essentially, Torvalds believes that having ECC on the machine makes them more reliable, makes you trust your machine. Without ECC, the memory will go bad, sooner or later. He thinks that more than software bugs, often it is hardware behind Microsoft's blue screen of death. You can watch the video on YouTube (the BSOD comments occur at ~9:37).

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CNN's prediction for 2026? "Any device that uses memory, from phones to tablets and smartwatches, could get pricier." But will it be a little or a lot?

The article cites an analysis from multinational strategy/management consulting firm McKinsey & Company which found America's data center demand could continue growing by 20 to 25 percent per year" through 2030. "That's prompted memory manufacturers like Micron and Samsung to shift their focus to data centers, which use a different type of memory, meaning fewer resources for consumer products. (Jaejune Kim, executive VP for memory at Samsung, said in October that their third quarter saw strong demand for memory for AI and data centers, and that they expected the supply shortage for mobile and PC memory to "intensify further.")

Memory prices are rising for consumer products because major manufacturers are instead ramping up production for AI data centers as artificial intelligence companies boom. "It's pretty much brutal and crunched across the board," said Yang Wang, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research.

The International Data Corporation, a global market research firm, reported earlier this week that the smartphone market is expected to decline by 0.9% in 2026 in part because of memory shortages. Memory prices are expected to surge by 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and may climb an additional 20% early next year, Counterpoint Research said last month... TrendForce, a research firm that follows the semiconductor industry, estimates memory price hikes have made smartphones 8% to 10% more expensive to produce in 2025 (higher production costs don't always translate into higher consumer prices for a variety of reasons).

Some smartphones could cost more as soon as early next year, said Nabila Popal, a senior research director for the International Data Corporation. Cheap Android phones may see the biggest impact, since less expensive products usually have thinner margins. "It's going to be almost impossible for them to not raise prices" of cheaper Android phones, said Popal. Companies may also postpone phone launches to focus on expensive models that may be more profitable. The average selling price for smartphones is expected to climb to $465 in 2026, compared to $457 in 2025, according to Popal, putting the smartphone market at a record high value of $578.9 billion.

But the pendulum is expected to swing back in the other direction late next year as the supply chain adjusts, according to Popal and Wang, potentially bringing prices back down or at least capping increases.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/12/06/068215/the-ai-boom-could-increase-prices-for-phones-and-tablets-next-year?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

While Netflix hopes to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $72 billion, CNBC reports a senior official in America's federal government said the administration was viewing the deal with "heavy skepticism. And that's not the only hurdle:

On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Paramount, in a letter to lawyers for Warner Bros. Discovery [WBD], had warned that a sale to Netflix likely would "never close" because of regulatory challenges in the United States and overseas. "Acquiring Warner's streaming and studio assets 'will entrench and extend Netflix's global dominance in a matter not allowed by domestic or foreign competition laws,' Paramount's lawyers wrote," the Journal reported.

Paramount "is now weighing its options about whether to go straight to shareholders with one more improved bid," CNBC reported Friday, "perhaps even higher than the $30-per-share, all-cash offer it submitted to Warner Bros. Discovery this week."

And CNBC reported Friday that the review by America's Department of Justice "can take anywhere from months to more than a year."
Netflix said Friday it expects the transaction to close in 12 to 18 months, after Warner Bros. Discovery spins out its portfolio of cable networks into Discovery Global... As part of the deal, Netflix has agreed to pay a $5.8 billion breakup fee to Warner Bros. Discovery if the deal were to get blocked by the government.

Netflix's planned move is already drawing high-powered criticism, reports CNN:

"The world's largest streaming company swallowing one of its biggest competitors is what antitrust laws were designed to prevent. The outcome would eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers, raise prices for consumers, and reduce the volume and diversity of content for all viewers...." the Writers Guild of America union representing Hollywood writers.
"Producers are rightfully concerned... Our legacy studios are more than content libraries — within their vaults are the character and culture of our nation." — The Producers Guild of AmericaThe deal raises "many serious questions" about the entertainment industry's future, "especially the human creative talent whose livelihoods and careers depend on it." — SAG-AFTRA, Hollywood's biggest actors union
"This is not a win for consumers. Netflix has already aggressively raised prices, increased ad load, and stopped people from sharing passwords. Absorbing a competitor with strong content will only lead to its service becoming more expensive and give consumers less choice." — Ross Benes, a senior analyst at eMarketer, told CNN. [Benes also thinks this could mean fewer companies spending heavily on movies and TV shows. "This contracts the industry."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/12/06/0455236/could-netflixs-deal-for-warner-bros-fall-apart?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

What happened when a school in Los Angeles gave a sixth grader an iPad for use throughout the school day? "He used the iPad during school to watch YouTube and participate in Fortnite video game battles," reports NBC News.

His mother has now launched a coalition of parents called Schools Beyond Screens "organizing in WhatsApp groups, petition drives and actions at school board meetings and demanding meetings with district administrators, pressuring them to pull back on the school-mandated screen time."

Los Angeles Unified is the first district of its size
to face an organized — and growing — campaign by parents
demanding that schools pull back on mandatory screen time. The
discontent in Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district
in the country, reflects a growing unease nationally about the amount of time children spend
learning through screens in classrooms. While a majority
of states prohibit children from using cellphones in class, 88%
of schools provide students with personal devices, according to the
National
Center for Education Statistics, often Chromebook laptops or iPads. The parents hope getting a district
that has over 409,000 students across nearly 800 schools to change
how it approaches screen time would send a signal across public
school districts to pull back from a yearslong effort to digitize
classrooms....

[In the Los Angeles school district] Students in grade levels as low as
kindergarten are provided iPads, and some schools require them to
take the tablets home. Some teachers have allowed students to opt
out of the iPad-based assignments, but other parents say they've
been told that they can't. Parents can also opt their children out
of having
access to YouTube and several
other Google products... The billion-dollar 2014 initiative to
give tablet computers to everyone became
a scandal after the bidding process appeared to heavily favor
Apple, and it faced criticism once it became clear that students
could bypass security protocols and that few
teachers used the tablets. Currently, the district leaves it up
to individual schools to decide whether they want students to take
home iPads or Chromebooks every day and how much time they spend on
them in class...

Around 300 parents attended listening sessions the district held
last month about technology in the classroom. Nearly all who spoke
criticized how much screen time schools gave their children in class,
pointing to ways their behavior and grades suffered as students
watched YouTube and played Minecraft... Several also asked district
officials to explain why children as young as kindergartners were
asked to sign
a form to use devices in which they promised they would honor
intellectual property law and refrain from meeting people in person
whom they met online. "Is it possible for children to meet people
over the internet on school-issued devices?" one father asked. The
district officials declined to answer, saying it was meant to be a
listening session.

In 2022, Los Angeles Unified started requiring students to complete benchmark assessments on educaitonal software i-Ready, the article points out, which generates unique questions for each students. "But parents and teachers are unable to see what children are asked, in part because the company that makes the program considers them proprietary information..."

One teacher says his school's administartors are requiring him to use i-Ready even though it doesn't have any material for the science class he's actually teaching. He's also noticed some students will use answers from AI chatbots, bypassing the school's monitoring software by creating alternate user profiles. But the monitoring software company suggests the school misconfigured their software's settings, adding "More commonly, when students attempt to bypass filtering or monitoring, they do so by using proxies."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/25/12/06/0714222/why-these-parents-want-schools-to-stop-issuing-ipads-to-the-their-children?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

What happened when a school in Los Angeles gave a sixth grader an iPad for use throughout the school day? "He used the iPad during school to watch YouTube and participate in Fortnite video game battles," reports NBC News.

His mother has now launched a coalition of parents called Schools Beyond Screens "organizing in WhatsApp groups, petition drives and actions at school board meetings and demanding meetings with district administrators, pressuring them to pull back on the school-mandated screen time."

Los Angeles Unified is the first district of its size
to face an organized — and growing — campaign by parents
demanding that schools pull back on mandatory screen time. The
discontent in Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district
in the country, reflects a growing unease nationally about the amount of time children spend
learning through screens in classrooms. While a majority
of states prohibit children from using cellphones in class, 88%
of schools provide students with personal devices, according to the
National
Center for Education Statistics, often Chromebook laptops or iPads. The parents hope getting a district
that has over 409,000 students across nearly 800 schools to change
how it approaches screen time would send a signal across public
school districts to pull back from a yearslong effort to digitize
classrooms....

[In the Los Angeles school district] Students in grade levels as low as
kindergarten are provided iPads, and some schools require them to
take the tablets home. Some teachers have allowed students to opt
out of the iPad-based assignments, but other parents say they've
been told that they can't. Parents can also opt their children out
of having
access to YouTube and several
other Google products... The billion-dollar 2014 initiative to
give tablet computers to everyone became
a scandal after the bidding process appeared to heavily favor
Apple, and it faced criticism once it became clear that students
could bypass security protocols and that few
teachers used the tablets. Currently, the district leaves it up
to individual schools to decide whether they want students to take
home iPads or Chromebooks every day and how much time they spend on
them in class...

Around 300 parents attended listening sessions the district held
last month about technology in the classroom. Nearly all who spoke
criticized how much screen time schools gave their children in class,
pointing to ways their behavior and grades suffered as students
watched YouTube and played Minecraft... Several also asked district
officials to explain why children as young as kindergartners were
asked to sign
a form to use devices in which they promised they would honor
intellectual property law and refrain from meeting people in person
whom they met online. "Is it possible for children to meet people
over the internet on school-issued devices?" one father asked. The
district officials declined to answer, saying it was meant to be a
listening session.

In 2022, Los Angeles Unified started requiring students to complete benchmark assessments on educaitonal software i-Ready, the article points out, which generates unique questions for each students. "But parents and teachers are unable to see what children are asked, in part because the company that makes the program considers them proprietary information..."

One teacher says his school's administartors are requiring him to use i-Ready even though it doesn't have any material for the science class he's actually teaching. He's also noticed some students will use answers from AI chatbots, bypassing the school's monitoring software by creating alternate user profiles. But the monitoring software company suggests the school misconfigured their software's settings, adding "More commonly, when students attempt to bypass filtering or monitoring, they do so by using proxies."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/25/12/06/0714222/why-these-parents-want-schools-to-stop-issuing-ipads-to-their-children?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

To build three-wheeled, solar electric vehicles, Aptera has now launched its "validation" vehicle assembly line, reports the San Diego Business Journal.

"The validation line will set a technical foundation for the company's eventual low-volume assembly line, ensuring that manufacturing processes are optimized and refined, particularly for the company's composite body structure."

To date, Aptera has produced three validation vehicles, two of which are in use driving around the San Diego region, with plans to build another 10 in the coming weeks as progress continues on the validation manufacturing line. "You learn things when you start to put miles on vehicles, putting 10s of thousands of miles on these validation vehicles and learning a lot from the durometer of the suspension, ride quality, spring rates and braking pressure," Aptera co-founder and co-CEO Chris Anthony said. "We've been able to incorporate a lot of the usability stuff back, but also, just as we've gone through the process of building these, a lot of order-of-operation stuff that's educated us on what's going to make for the best initial assembly lines," he added....

Aptera made its public debut on October 16, with the company's executive team participating in the Nasdaq closing bell ceremony that evening. Shares of SEV have hovered between $6.50 and $8.50 for much of the company's first month on the exchange. The company's equity line of credit also took effect in mid-November... expected to aid in Aptera generating at least a portion of the $65 million the company has said it will need to complete validation manufacturing and begin low-volume production for customers. Aptera previously raised some $135 million from more than 17,000 investors in what the company touts as the most successful crowdfunding effort of all time, but Anthony argued Aptera will soon need to invest larger sums of capital to scale its production needs.

"Publicly listing the company gives us a lot more funding mechanisms to get into production," he said. "So just having access to the public markets, public liquidity and the kind of instruments and tools that banks offer to public companies, it just seemed like now is the right time." Alongside the IPO, Aptera made its formal transition to a Public Benefit Corporation, giving the company a legal obligation to consider its effect on employees, communities and customers in addition to the profit motives of its shareholders.
California's state government also awarded Aptera $21 million "to support its push toward scaled manufacturing," the article points out.

It also notes that Aptera's vehicles "are technically classified as motorcycles rather than standard passenger cars, presenting a potentially cheaper alternative for consumers on the hunt for an electric vehicle."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/06/0840202/apteras-solar-powered-evs-take-another-step-toward-production?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.