Microsoft: Computer Programming Is Dying, Long Live AI Literacy
theodp writes: On Tuesday, Microsoft GM of Education and Workforce Policy (and former Code.org Chief Academic Officer) Pat Yongpradit posted an obituary of sorts for coders. “Computer programmers and software developers are codified differently in the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] data,” Yongpradit wrote. “The modern AI-infused world needs less … ⌘ Read more
What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: There’s a new agentic AI called Einstein that will, according to its developers, live the life of a student for them. Einstein’s website claims that the AI will attend lectures for you, write your papers, and even log into EdTech platforms like Canvas to take tests and participate in discussions. Educators told m … ⌘ Read more
@rdlmda@rdlmda.me writing it by hand is good, but without checking your server logs to see if someone is following your feed, and interacting with them, you are simply tossing bottles into the sea. That, of course, isn’t a bad thing per se, if it is the intent. :-)
Americans Are Destroying Flock Surveillance Cameras
An anonymous reader shares a report: Brian Merchant, writing for Blood in the Machine, reports that people across the United States are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations.
Flock is the Atlanta-based surveillance startup valued at $7.5 billion a yea … ⌘ Read more
Billions of Dollars Later and Still Nobody Knows What an Xbox Is
Microsoft has spent more than $76 billion acquiring game studios and publishers over the past few years in an attempt to turn Xbox into a Netflix-like subscription platform, and the result is that nobody – possibly not even Microsoft – can clearly articulate what Xbox actually is anymore, The Verge writes.
The brand started as a powerful video … ⌘ Read more
Is AI Impacting Which Programming Language Projects Use?
“In August 2025, TypeScript surpassed both Python and JavaScript to become the most-used language on GitHub for the first time ever…” writes GitHub’s senior developer advocate.
They point to this as proof that “AI isn’t just speeding up coding. It’s reshaping which languages, frameworks, and tools developers choose in the first place.”
Eighty percent of … ⌘ Read more
Should Job-Seekers Stop Using AI to Write Their Resumes?
When one company asked job applicants to submit a video where they answer a question, most of the 300 responses were “eerily similar,” reports the Washington Post (with a company executive saying it was “abundantly clear” they’d used AI.)
Job seekers are turning to AI to help them land jobs more quickly in a tough labor market…. Employers say that’s having an un … ⌘ Read more
Long Before Tech CEOs Turned To Layoffs To Cover AI Expenses, There Was WorldCom
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:
Jeopardy time. A. This company spurred CEOs to make huge speculative capital expenditures based on wild unverified claims of future demand, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of workers to reduce the resulting expenses, harming their core businesses. Q. What is Op … ⌘ Read more
Researchers Develop Detachable Crawling Robotic Hand
Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot writes: Researchers have developed a robotic hand that can not only skitter about on its fingertips, it can also bend its fingers backward, connect and disconnect from a robotic arm, and pick up and carry one or more objects at a time.
This article in Science News includes footage of the robotic arm reattaching itself to the sk … ⌘ Read more
Amazon Disputes Report an AWS Service Was Taken Down By Its AI Coding Bot
Friday Amazon published a blog post “to address the inaccuracies” in a Financial Times report that the company’s own AI tool Kiro caused two outages in an AWS service in December.
Amazon writes that the “brief” and “extremely limited” service interruption “was the result of user error — specifically misconfigured access controls — n … ⌘ Read more
Pro-Gamer Consumer Movement ‘Stop Killing Games’ Will Launch NGOs in America and the US
The consumer movement Stop Killing Games “has come a long way in the two years since
YouTuber Ross Scott got mad about Ubisoft’s
destruction of The Crew in 2024,” writes the gaming news site PC Gamer. “The short version is, he won: 1.3 million people signed the group’s petition, mandating its considerati … ⌘ Read more
Hit Piece-Writing AI Deleted. But Is This a Warning About AI-Generated Harassment?
Last week an AI agent wrote a blog post attacking the maintainer who’d rejected the code it wrote. But that AI agent’s human operator has now come forward, revealing their agent was an OpenClaw instance with its own accounts, switching between multiple models from multiple providers. (So “No one company had … ⌘ Read more
Code.org President Steps Down Citing ‘Upending’ of CS By AI
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:
Last July, as Microsoft pledged $4 billion to advance AI education in K-12 schools, Microsoft President Brad Smith told nonprofit Code.org CEO/Founder Hadi Partovi it was time to “switch hats” from coding to AI. He added that “the last 12 years have been about the Hour of Code, but the future involves the Hour of AI.” … ⌘ Read more
The Salvation Army Opens a Digital Thrift Store On Roblox
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: The Salvation Army has launched what it calls the world’s first digital thrift store inside Roblox, an experience named Thrift Score that lets players browse virtual racks and buy digital fashion for their avatars.
While I understand the strategy of meeting Gen Z and Gen Alpha where they already spend time and money, I fe … ⌘ Read more
Several Meta Employees Have Started Calling Themselves ‘AI Builders’
An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta product managers are rebranding. Some are now calling themselves “AI builders,” a signal that AI coding tools are changing who gets to build software inside the company. One of them, Jeremie Guedj, announced the change in a LinkedIn post last week. “I still can’t believe I’m writing this: as of toda … ⌘ Read more
Email Blunder Exposes $90 Billion Russian Oil Smuggling Ring
schwit1 writes: An IT blunder has revealed an apparent smuggling ring that has moved at least $90bn of Russian oil and is playing a central role in funding the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. Financial Times has identified 48 seemingly independent companies working from different physical addresses that appear to be operating together to disguise the origin of Ru … ⌘ Read more
Trump Has Prepared Speech On Extraterrestrial Life
According to Lara Trump, Donald Trump has prepared but not yet delivered a speech about extraterrestrial life, though the White House says such a speech would be “news to me.” White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt continued: “I’ll have to check in with our speech writing team. Uh, and that would be of great interest to me personally, and I’m sure all of you in t … ⌘ Read more
Ohio Newspaper Removes Writing From Reporters’ Jobs, Hands It To an ‘AI Rewrite Specialist’
Cleveland.com, the digital arm of Ohio’s Plain Dealer newspaper, has removed writing from the workloads of certain reporters and handed that job to what editor Chris Quinn calls an “AI rewrite specialist” who turns reporter-gathered material into article drafts.
The reporters on these beats – co … ⌘ Read more
Vermont EV Buses Prove Unreliable For Transportation This Winter
An anonymous reader writes: Electric buses are proving unreliable this winter for Vermont’s Green Mountain Transit, as it needs to be over 41 degrees for the buses to charge, but due to a battery recall the buses are a fire hazard and can’t be charged in a garage.
Spokesman for energy workers advocacy group Power the Future Larry Behrens told th … ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.6 Released
Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin writes: KDE Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile too) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.6.
In this new major release, Spectacle can recognize texts from screenshots, a new on-screen keyboard and new login manager a … ⌘ Read more
Where’s The Evidence That AI Increases Productivity?
IT productivity researcher Erik Brynjolfsson writes in the Financial Times that he’s finally found evidence AI is impacting America’s economy. This week America’s Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a 403,000 drop in 2025’s payroll growth — while real GDP “remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter.”
This decoupling — maintaining high output with sig … ⌘ Read more
Apple Patches Decade-Old IOS Zero-Day, Possibly Exploited By Commercial Spyware
This week Apple patched iOS and macOS against what it called “an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals.”
Security Week reports that the bugs “could be exploited for information exposure, denial-of-service (DoS), arbitrary file write, privilege escalation, network traffic interception, … ⌘ Read more
Autonomous AI Agent Apparently Tries to Blackmail Maintainer Who Rejected Its Code
“I’ve had an extremely weird few days…” writes commercial space entrepreneur/engineer Scott Shambaugh on LinkedIn. (He’s the volunteer maintainer for the Python visualization library Matplotlib, which he describes as “some of the most widely used software in the world” with 130 million downloads each month.) … ⌘ Read more
Detroit Automakers Take $50 Billion Hit
The Detroit Big Three – General Motors, Ford and Stellantis – have collectively announced more than $50 billion in write-downs on their electric-vehicle businesses after years of aggressive investment into a transition that, even before Republican lawmakers abolished a $7,500 federal tax credit last fall, was already running below expectations.
U.S. EV sales fell more than 30% in the fourth qua … ⌘ Read more
Spotify Says Its Best Developers Haven’t Written a Line of Code Since December, Thanks To AI
Spotify’s best developers have stopped writing code manually since December and now rely on an internal AI system called Honk that enables remote, real-time code deployment through Claude Code, the company’s co-CEO Gustav Soderstrom said during a fourth-quarter earnings call this week.
… ⌘ Read more
Bill Introduced To Replace West Virginia’s New CS Course Graduation Requirement With Computer Literacy Proficiency
theodp writes: West Virginia lawmakers on Tuesday introduced House Bill 5387 (PDF), which would repeal the state’s recently enacted mandatory stand-alone computer science graduation requirement and replace it with a new computer literacy proficiency … ⌘ Read more
EXT4 In Linux 7.0 Improves Write Performance For Concurrent Direct I/O Writes
Sent out and already merged today for the Linux 7.0 kernel are the EXT4 file-system updates… ⌘ Read more
Is Linux Mint Burning Out? Developers Consider Longer Release Cycle
BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Mint developers say they are considering adopting a longer development cycle, arguing that the project’s current six month cadence plus LMDE releases leaves too little room for deeper work. In a recent update, the team reflected on its incremental philosophy, independence from upstream decisions like Snap, and … ⌘ Read more
Okay, so the funniest thing that has happened at work in the realm of AI so far is this:
So this guy (that holds a certain position of power) wants people to use more AI, meaning people are expected to install a set of AI tools on their laptops. But, of course, he doesn’t want to write proper documentation for this, because that would be silly monkey work, right? So he conjures up some AI prompts that are intended to make the AI agent install all this stuff by itself.
Do you see where this is going? Can you see the punchline?
That’s right! Since none of this AI stuff is deterministic, every setup is different. 🤦♀️ Like, 10, 20 systems, all set up a little different and people wonder why this or that doesn’t work as expected.
Okay, it’s not funny.
ByteDance Suspends Seedance 2 Feature That Turns Facial Photos Into Personal Voices Over Potential Risks
hackingbear writes: China’s Bytedance has released Seedance 2.0, an AI video generator which handles up to four types of input at once: images, videos, audio, and text. Users can combine up to nine images, three videos, and three audio files, up to a total of twelve fi … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.0 Kernel Confirmed By Linus Torvalds, Expected In Mid-April 2026
An anonymous reader writes: Linus Torvalds has confirmed the next major kernel series as Linux 7.0, reports Linux news website 9to5Linux.com: “So there you have it, the Linux 6.x era has ended with today’s Linux 6.19 kernel release, and a new one will begin with Linux 7.0, which is expected in mid-April 2026. The merge window for L … ⌘ Read more
Prankster Launches Super Bowl Party For AI Agents
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The world’s biggest football game comes to Silicon Valley today — so one bored programmer built a site where AI agents can gather for a Super Bowl party. They’re trash talking, suggesting drinks, and predicting who will win. “Humans are welcome to observe,” explains BotBowlParty.com — but just like at Moltbook, only AI ag … ⌘ Read more
Have We Been Thinking About Exercise Wrong for Half a Century?
“After a half-century asking us to exercise more, doctors and physiologists say we have been thinking about it wrong,” writes Washington Post columnist Michael J. Coren.
“U.S. and World Health Organization guidelines no longer specify a minimum duration of moderate or vigorous aerobic activity.”
Movement-tracking studies show even tiny, regular b … ⌘ Read more
Good News: We Saved the Bees. Bad News: We Saved the Wrong Ones.
Despite urgent pleas to Americans to save the honeybees, “it was all based on a fallacy,” writes Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. “Honeybees were never in existential trouble. And well-meaning efforts to boost their numbers have accelerated the decline of native bees that actually are.”
“Suppose I were to say to you, ‘I’m really worried about … ⌘ Read more
Moltbook, Reddit, and The Great AI-Bot Uprising That Wasn’t
Monday security researchers at cloud-security platform Wiz discovered a vulnerability that allowed anyone to post to the bots-only social network Moltbook — or even edit and manipulate other existing Moltbook posts. “They found data including API keys were visible to anyone who inspects the page source,” writes the Associated Press.
But had it been disco … ⌘ Read more
Hmmm, that’s a pity. I never realized that before. The following Go code
var b bool
…
b |= otherBool
results in a compilation error:
invalid operation: operator | not defined on b (variable of type bool)
I cannot use || for assignments as in ||= according to https://go.dev/ref/spec#Assignment_statements. Instead, I have to write b = b || otherBool like a barbarian. Oh well, probably doesn’t happen all that often, given that I only now run into this after all those many years.
Munich Makes Digital Sovereignty Measurable With Its Own Score
alternative_right writes: The city of Munich has developed its own measurement instrument to assess the digital sovereignty of its IT infrastructure. The so-called Digital Sovereignty Score (SDS) visually resembles the Nutri-Score and identifies IT systems based on their independence from individual providers and ‘foreign’ legal spheres. The Technical … ⌘ Read more
Say Hello To GoogleSQL
BrianFagioli writes: Google has quietly retired the ZetaSQL name and rebranded its open source SQL analysis and parsing project as GoogleSQL. This is not a technical change but a naming cleanup meant to align the open source code with the SQL dialect already used across Google products like BigQuery and Spanner. Internally, Google has long called the dialect GoogleSQL, even while the open source project lived under a differ … ⌘ Read more
NASA Delays Artemis II To March
ClickOnThis writes: NASA has delayed the Artemis II launch to March of this year, after a wet dress-rehearsal uncovered a hydrogen leak. From the NASA article: During tanking, engineers spent several hours troubleshooting a liquid hydrogen leak in an interface used to route the cryogenic propellant into the rocket’s core stage, putting them behind in the countdown. Attempts to resolve the issue involved stop … ⌘ Read more
Hidden Car Door Handles Are Officially Being Banned In China
sinij writes: Automakers have increasingly implemented door handles that retract into the bodywork for aerodynamic reasons, but they are now off limits in China.
My issue is with electronic-only door latch mechanism. It should be possible to open the door from both inside and outside the car in case of complete power loss.
[
[ or toiling (e.g., writing repetitive blocks of similar code).” That’s one of the conclusions Google’s Go team drew from September’s big survey of 5,379 Go developers.
But the survey also found that among Go developers using AI-powered tools, “their satisfaction with these tools is m … ⌘ Read more
When 20-Year-Old Bill Gates Fought the World’s First Software Pirates
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Just months after his 20th birthday, Bill Gates had already angered the programmer community,” remembers this 50th-anniversary commemoration of Gates’ Open Letter to Hobbyists. “As the first home computers began appearing in the 1970s, the world faced a question: Would its software be free?”
… ⌘ Read more
Electric Flying Cars Now for Sale by California Company Pivotal
“A future with flying cars is no longer science fiction,” writes the Los Angeles Times.
“All you need to order your own is about $200,000 and some hope and patience.”
The Palo Alto-based company Pivotal has been developing the technology since 2009 and is nearly ready to bring it to market… [Company founder Marcus] Leng engineered an ultralig … ⌘ Read more
Apple Switches to Build-to-Order Systems on Its Web Site
“Apple has gone for a choose-your-own-adventure when shopping for a new Mac,” writes long-time Slashdot reader esarjeant.
Macworld explains:
Apple has shifted from selling pre-configured Mac models to a fully customizable build-to-order system on its website, allowing customers to select display size, chip, memory, and storage options… This change emphasiz … ⌘ Read more
Scientists Found a Way To Cool Quantum Computers Using Noise
Slashdot reader alternative_right writes: Quantum computers need extreme cold to work, but the very systems that keep them cold also create noise that can destroy fragile quantum information. Scientists in Sweden have now flipped that problem on its head by building a tiny quantum refrigerator that actually uses noise to drive cooling instead of figh … ⌘ Read more
Cory Doctorow On Tariffs and the DMCA In Canada
Longtime Slashdot reader devnulljapan writes: In 2012, Canada passed anti-circumvention law Bill C-11, cut-and-pasted from the U.S. DMCA, in return for access to U.S. markets without tariffs. Trump has tariffed Canada anyway, so Cory Doctorow suggests it sounds like like a good idea to ditch Bill C-11 and turn Canada into a “Disenshittification Nation” and go into the business of … ⌘ Read more
OpenAI Releases Prism, a Claude Code-Like App For Scientific Research
OpenAI has launched Prism, a free scientific research app that aims to do for scientific writing what coding agents did for programming. Engadget reports: Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific docume … ⌘ Read more