A Nuclear Reactor Backed By Bill Gates Gets Federal Approval To Start Building
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A novel type of nuclear power plant in Wyoming backed by Bill Gates received a key federal permit on Wednesday, making it the first new U.S. commercial reactor in nearly a decade to receive clearance to begin construction. The Nuclear Regulatory Commissio … ⌘ Read more

Google Ends Its 30% App Store Fee, Welcomes Third-Party App Stores
Google is eliminating its traditional 30% Play Store fee and introducing lower commissions, while at the same time allowing alternative billing systems and making it easier for third-party app stores to operate on Android. The changes stem largely from Google’s settlement with Epic Games. Engadget reports: The biggest change is to how Goo … ⌘ Read more

New App Alerts You If Someone Nearby Is Wearing Smart Glasses
A new Android app called Nearby Glasses alerts users when Bluetooth signals from smart glasses are detected nearby. The Android app, called Nearby Glasses, “launches at a time as there is an increasing resistance against always-recording or listening devices, which critics say process information about nearby people who do not give their consent,” repor … ⌘ Read more

Hacked Tehran Traffic Cameras Fed Israeli Intelligence Before Strike On Khamenei
An anonymous reader shares a CTech article with the caption: “A brilliantly executed operation.” From the report: Years before the air strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Israeli intelligence had been quietly mapping the daily rhythms of Tehran. According to reporting by the Financial Times (paywalled), near … ⌘ Read more

British Columbia To End Time Changes, Adopt Year-Round Daylight Time
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: The B.C. government says this Sunday will be the last time British Columbians have to change their clocks. The province will be permanently adopting daylight time and the March 8 “spring forward” will be the last time change, Premier David Eby announced Monday. “We are done waiting. British C … ⌘ Read more

Time rotate into archive feeds again.

Americans Listen to Podcasts More Than Talk Radio Now, Study Shows
“Podcasts have officially overtaken AM/FM talk radio as the more popular medium for spoken-word audio in the United States,” reports TechCrunch, citing Edison Research’s Share of Ear survey:

The researchers have tracked these statistics over the last decade, and almost always, the percentage of time people spent listening to podcasts increased … ⌘ Read more

Google Quantum-Proofs HTTPS
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google on Friday unveiled its plan for its Chrome browser to secure HTTPS certificates against quantum computer attacks without breaking the Internet. The objective is a tall order. The quantum-resistant cryptographic data needed to transparently publish TLS certificates is roughly 40 times bigger than the classical cryptographic material used today. Today’s X.509 c … ⌘ Read more

Rubin Observatory Has Started Paging Astronomers 800,000 Times a Night
On February 24th, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory activated its automated alert system, sending out roughly 800,000 real-time notifications flagging asteroids, supernovae, flaring black holes and “other transient celestial events,” reports Scientific American. And this is only the beginning – that number is projected to climb into th … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Raises $110 Billion in the Largest Private Funding Round Ever
OpenAI has closed what is now the largest private financing in history – a $110 billion round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation that more than doubles the $40 billion raise it completed just a year ago, itself a record for a private tech company at the time.

Amazon invested $50 billion, SoftBank put in $30 billion, and Nvidia committed $3 … ⌘ Read more

@kingdomcome@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh, that brings back memories! I’ve played minetest one and half centuries ago. Some classmates and I tried to recreate our computer science building at the time. The proportions didn’t work out, but it still kinda worked. Minetest was one of the very few games I played a bit more extensively.

EBay Is Laying Off About 800 Workers, 6% of Global Workforce
EBay is cutting about 800 jobs, or 6% of its full-time employees, saying the layoffs are needed to align its workforce with strategic priorities. From a report: “We are taking steps to reinvest across our business and align our structure with our strategic priorities, which will affect certain roles across our workforce,” the San Jose, California-based company … ⌘ Read more

Prediction Market Platform Kalshi Discloses First Insider Trading Enforcement Action
Kalshi, the prediction market platform regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has for the first time publicly disclosed the results of an insider trading investigation, naming an editor for YouTube’s biggest creator as the offender.

The company identified Artem Kaptur, an editor for MrBeast, who … ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.4 Released With More Improvements For Old Direct3D On Vulkan Under Linux
D7VK is the open-source project that began implementing the Direct3D 7 APIs atop Vulkan and with time the scope expanded to include Direct3D 6 support as well as Direct3D 5 support. Out today is D7VK 1.4 for continuing to enhance the support for these older D3D versions on Vulkan under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Still enjoying my command-line set up where I can log my time, keep notes and a daily journal all through a few aliases and functions, and it stores everything in plain text files. #KISS

Texas Is About To Overtake California In Battery Storage
U.S. battery storage installations hit a record 57.6 GWh in 2025, and Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nationâ™s largest storage market in 2026. Electrek reports: According to the US Energy Storage Market Outlook Q1 2026 from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, installations are now four times … ⌘ Read more

Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ Explores Stablecoin For Gaza
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Officials working with Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” are exploring setting up a stablecoin for Gaza as part of efforts to reshape the devastated Palestinian enclave’s economy, according to five people familiar with the discussions. The talks around introducing a stablecoin – a type of cryptocurrency whose v … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Accuses Chinese Companies of Siphoning Data From Claude
U.S. artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic said three Chinese AI companies set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to help their own systems catch up. From a report: The three companies – DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax – prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic’s system to … ⌘ 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

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

Has the AI Disruption Arrived - and Will It Just Make Software Cheaper and More Accessible?
Programmer/entrepreneur Paul Ford is the co-founder of AI-driven business software platform Aboard. This week he wrote a guest essay for the New York Times titled “The AI Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun,” arguing that Anthropic’s Claude Code “was always a helpful coding assista … ⌘ Read more

Ask Slashdot: What’s Your Boot Time?
How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and “You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?”

And more importantly, why is it all taking so long?
In a world of 4-5 GHz CPU’s that are thousands of times faster than they were, … ⌘ 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

T2 Linux Restores XAA In Xorg, Making 2D Graphics Fast Again
Berlin-based T2 Linux developer René Rebe (long-time Slashdot reader ReneR) is announcing that their Xorg display server has now restored its XAA acceleration architecture, “bringing fixed-function hardware 2D acceleration back to many older graphics cards that upstream left in software-rendered mode.”

Older fixed-function GPUs now regain smooth window … ⌘ 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

Is ‘Brain Rot’ Real? How Too Much Time Online Can Affect Your Mind.
Can being “very online” really affect our brains, asks the Washington Post:

Research suggests that scrolling through short videos on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube Shorts is affecting our attention, memory and mental health. A recent meta-analysis of the scientific literature found that increased use of short-form video was linked with poorer co … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Sweet! So glad that Twtxt still lives, and that everyone’s been keeping busy. My main computer is broken, It’ll take me some time to setup jenny on the R-pi and try to catch-up.

Have a blessed week-end everyone!

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

Mark Zuckerberg Grilled On Usage Goals and Underage Users At California Trial
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg faced a barrage of questions about his social-media company’s efforts to secure ever more of its users’ time and attention at a landmark trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday. In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta’s grow … ⌘ Read more

LLM-Generated Passwords Look Strong but Crack in Hours, Researchers Find
AI security firm Irregular has found that passwords generated by major large language models – Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini – appear complex but follow predictable patterns that make them crackable in hours, even on decades-old hardware. When researchers prompted Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 fifty times in separate conversations, only … ⌘ Read more

A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments
India’s digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it’s a cheap plastic speaker that sits o … ⌘ Read more

A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments
India’s digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it’s a cheap plastic speaker that sits o … ⌘ Read more

EPA Faces First Lawsuit Over Its Killing of Major Climate Rule
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The first shot has been fired in the legal war over the Environmental Protection Agency’s rollback of its “endangerment finding,” which had been the foundation for federal climate regulations. Environmental and health groups filed a lawsuit on Wednesday morning in the U.S. Court of Appeals f … ⌘ Read more

Meta Begins $65 Million Election Push To Advance AI Agenda
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta is preparing to spend $65 million this year to boost state politicians who are friendly to the artificial intelligence industry, beginning this week in Texas and Illinois, according to company representatives. The sum is the biggest election investment by Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagra … ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Discontinued Open-Source OpenPGL Project Finds A New Home
Back in 2022 Intel announced OpenPGL as an open-source library for path guiding to help enhance the quality of path-based renderers. With time Blender began making use of OpenPGL and other industry interest and adoption. Unfortunately, Intel quietly ended work on OpenPGL in 2025 but has now fortunately found a new home… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD’s KDE Desktop Install Option Ready For Testing
As part of enhancing the FreeBSD experience on laptops and desktops, FreeBSD developers have been working toward adding a convenient desktop install option to their text-based installer for easily deploying the KDE Plasma desktop along with the necessary GPU drivers. After it didn’t get wrapped up in time for the FreeBSD 15.0 release, that desktop installer option is now ready for testing… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD’s KDE Desktop Install Option Ready For Testing
As part of enhancing the FreeBSD experience on laptops and desktops, FreeBSD developers have been working toward adding a convenient desktop install option to their text-based installer for easily deploying the KDE Plasma desktop along with the necessary GPU drivers. After it didn’t get wrapped up in time for the FreeBSD 15.0 release, that desktop installer option is now ready for testing… ⌘ Read more

AMD Preparing Linux Kernel For “RMPOPT” To Help Reduce Overhead On SEV-SNP Servers
AMD sent out a set of Linux kernel patches today for enabling use of a new instruction dubbed RMPOPT. Given the timing of these patches, RMPOPT is presumably a feature coming with next-gen AMD EPYC Zen 6 “Venice” processors… ⌘ Read more

There was an endless coming and going of sun, clouds and rain. Not to forget about the wind. I called it quits a bit earlier and went into the woods.

Towards the end I was completeley surrounded by rain curtains in all directions. This looked super cool. I thought I might make it home just in time without having to use my umbrella, but the rain clouds were way quicker than I anticipated. Just after the rain hit me, I met an acquaintance who just started his walk. The wind picked up hard and rain hammered down, mixed with snow. Holding the umbrella was a workout. Shortly after I returned, the rain stopped again.

I didn’t notice the kestrel sitting on the tree when I took the last photo. That was a nice surprise when I sorted through the nearly 300 pics.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-02-17/

The siblings who built a $537 billion giant in five years
The staggering growth of AI has seen the value of companies surge in quick time. It also has markets very nervous. ⌘ 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

Will Tech Giants Just Use AI Interactions to Create More Effective Ads?
Google never asked its users before adding AI Overviews to its search results and AI-generated email summaries to Gmail, notes the New York Times. And Meta didn’t ask before making “Meta AI” an unremovable part of its tool in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

“The insistence on AI everywhere — with little or no option to turn it off — r … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Merges The Code To Replace The Tux Boot Logo At Build Time
Linus Torvalds merged the code this weekend that allows easily replacing the Tux penguin boot logo used during the boot process. This new code optionally allows specifying an alternative boot logo at compile/build time… ⌘ Read more

Rivian’s Stock Spikes 27% After Reporting $144 Million Profit in 2025
Rivian’s stock skyrocketed 27% Friday after the electric car maker “shocked the market with strong earnings results,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “proving itself an outlier in the EV market, which has been struggling with the end of government subsidies and cooling consumer excitement.”

They add that Rivian’s strong earnings results su … ⌘ Read more

DNA Mutations Discovered In the Children of Chernobyl Workers
Researchers performed genome sequencing scans on 130 people whose fathers were Chernobyl cleanup workers. Comparing the scans to control groups, they found evidence for the first time for “a transgenerational effect” from the father’s prolonged exposure to low-dose ionizing radiation.

ScienceAlert reports:

Rather than picking out new DNA mutation … ⌘ Read more

Linux Kernel Improvement Can Make Hibernation Several Times Faster With Slow SSDs
A patch series sent out for review this weekend can significantly improve the system hibernation performance under Linux. Particularly for those with slower SSDs, the patches can make Linux hibernate up to several times faster… ⌘ Read more

These are the games Nintendo hopes will help make Switch 2 its biggest ever hit
The original Switch is Nintendo’s best-selling machine ever. But tough times may be ahead for its successor. ⌘ Read more

Social Networks Agree to Be Rated On Their Teen Safety Efforts
Meta, TikTok, Snap and other social neteworks agreed this week to be rated on their teen safety efforts, reports the Los Angeles Times, “amid rising concern about whether the world’s largest social media platforms are doing enough to protect the mental health of young people.”

The Mental Health Coalition, a collective of organizations focused on des … ⌘ Read more