Stripe and Advent Ditch $50 Billion PayPal Takeover Bid
Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have ditched their $53 billion pursuit of PayPal, ending a deal that would have been the largest fintech acquisition ever. “Stripe last week agreed to pay $8 billion for AI model marketplace OpenRouter, but a source said that the OpenRouter and PayPal deals were operating on independent tracks,” reports Axios.
[! … ⌘ Read more
The Linux Kernel Is Approaching 2,000 CVEs Per Release
With the proliferation of AI/LLM models analyzing the Linux kernel’s vast codebase, there has been a surge in the number of CVEs per kernel release. After typically being around 500 CVEs fixed per release, we are now approaching 2,000 CVEs fixed per release and perhaps will break that threshold for Linux 7.3… ⌘ Read more
Old IBM Driver Joins Insecure SGI Drivers In Being Removed For Linux 7.3
The char/misc changes were merged this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. While there is a lot of IIO driver churn as usual and updates to the likes of the Google Binder drivers, there continues to be the 2026 trend of removing old hardware drivers that are rarely updated these days and likely have no active users left on the mainline Linux kernel. This trend is further pushed along by the surplus of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches … ⌘ Read more
Lossless Scaling Frame Generation on Linux lsfg-vk moves away from GitHub, changes license due to AI slop forks
The developer behind the Lossless Scaling Frame Generation on Linux (lsfg-vk) project has made an announcement about a bunch of major changes.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/20 … ⌘ Read more
Canada Hires 48 Scholars Away From Top US Universities
Canada is recruiting 64 researchers to universities across the country (source paywalled; alternative source), including 48 from U.S. institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. The hires are backed by more than $364 million in government funding and are part of a broader effort to attract researchers in fields such as AI, climate science, and medicine. The New Yor … ⌘ Read more
AI’s Memory Crunch Is Coming For Android Apps
Google is imposing new memory-use limits on Android apps as the AI data center boom contributes to a broader memory chip shortage that could leave lower-cost phones with less RAM. Developers will have until February 2027 to meet new thresholds for memory and bitmap usage. To aid developers, Google is adding tools to flag apps that exceed the limits and help prevent slowdowns and … ⌘ Read more
OpenAI Is Developing a ‘Persistent’ AI Agent
Wired reports that OpenAI is testing a new “Persistent mode” for Codex that would let the agent keep working until explicitly “put to sleep,” proactively creating follow-up tasks for itself across sessions and using prior interactions and knowledge of the user to decide what to do next. Code alluding to the feature was spotted in the product’s code base, though it has not been rolled … ⌘ Read more
Ring Says New Encryption Limits What It Can Give Police
Ring is rolling out a new default encryption system called TAKE, or “Throw Away the Key Encryption,” that rotates video keys every five minutes and permanently deletes Ring’s copy after 24 hours. The system is designed to preserve cloud features such as smart alerts and AI video search while limiting what Ring can provide under legal process to non-video account inf … ⌘ Read more
Claude, Codex, and Hermes Installed Unowned Code Inside Corporate Networks
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents [including Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, and Nous Research’s Hermes]. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune … ⌘ Read more
Nvidia Agrees to Acquire Hugging Face For $13 Billion
The Information reported on Wednesday that Nvidia has agreed to buy open-source platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. “Deal talks began after Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform developers use to collaborate, test and share tools, received acquisition interest from another suitor,” reports CNBC, citing the (paywalled) report. Business Insider separately reporte … ⌘ Read more
AMD Jumps From ROCm 7.14 To ROCm 10.0 With ROCm.AI
Back in July ROCm 7.14 was announced as their new production release built atop TheRock build system and introducing Ryzen AI 400 series support. The versioning choice was a bit odd since ROCm 7.2 was the stable release at the time while ROCm 7.9+ turned into “tech preview” releases. With ROCm 7.14, it was declared stable. In clearing up that versioning mess, they have done a major version bump… to ROCm 10.0… ⌘ Read more
How Meta’s Plan To Replace Workers With AI Agents Fell Apart
Reuters reports that Meta explored shrinking some teams by as much as 60% as part of an “AI native” restructuring plan that would shift much of employees’ day-to-day work to AI agents and smaller teams of human “builders.” But the effort quickly ran into employee revolt and disappointing productivity gains, leading Zuckerberg to scrap a planned second wav … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 Adds RWF_DONTCACHE Support For Block Devices
With the never-ending quest for greater I/O performance in the HPC space and the demands all the more relentless in the AI era, the Linux kernel block subsystem activity continues to be as vibrant as ever along with the ongoing innovations in the IO_uring space… ⌘ Read more
Lemonade 11.8 Makes It Easy To Run DeepSeek V4 Flash On AMD Strix Halo
For those interested in making use of the recently released DeepSeek V4 Flash model, AMD developers have released Lemonade 11.8 that now makes it rather trivial to get DeepSeek V4 Flash up and running on AMD Ryzen AI+ Max “Strix Halo” systems… ⌘ Read more
Bill Gates Proposes Major Limits On AI Development
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates argued on Wednesday that artificial intelligence needs significant limits or else the harm to humans will outweigh any potential good. “AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice,” he said in a 6,000-word essay, entitled “The turbulent AI era is he … ⌘ Read more
OpenAI Releases Its Official Report On the Hugging Face Breach
TechCrunch reports that OpenAI released its official report Wednesday on the Hugging Face breach, “offering the clearest picture yet of how an unusual chain of events allowed an AI model to escape its testing environment and triggered a sprawling cybersecurity incident.” The AI company says the breach began when an unreleased cyber model, tested withou … ⌘ Read more
China’s Moonshot In Talks With Microsoft, Amazon, Google Over K3 Revenue Sharing
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: China’s Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet’s Google, that would allow the U.S. cloud giants to host its blockbuster Kimi K3 model, three people familiar with the talks said. Any deal could mark the fi … ⌘ Read more
Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books For AI Training
Last week, 404 Media published a story that revealed an Amazon warehouse where the company scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data. Today, the publication has released an interview with one of the Amazon employees at the warehouse. “The employee worked at Amazon’s VGT3 warehouse, which is housed in the same … ⌘ Read more
Chinese Government Fears AI Might Replace Human Intimacy
China has imposed new restrictions on AI companion services over concerns they can foster “emotional dependence or addiction” and replace real-world social interaction. Officials are also worried that increasingly satisfying AI relationships could deepen loneliness and further discourage marriage and parenthood. The Guardian reports: No country has rolled out AI … ⌘ Read more
New Zealand Introduces Under-16 Social Media, AI Companion Ban
New Zealand has introduced legislation that would ban children under 16 from social media platforms and AI companion services. “We have protections to keep children safe in the real world and we need them in the virtual world too,” said Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in announcing the bill. Jurist.org reports: The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Chil … ⌘ Read more
Perplexity and Nvidia Launch Fully Local AI Agent With Zero Token Costs
Perplexity and Nvidia have launched “Portable Computer,” a local-first version of Perplexity’s agent platform that runs AI models, files, tools, and workflows directly on Nvidia-powered Linux hardware. Local tasks incur no token charges and keep data on-device by default, with users asked for permission before the system escalates a step … ⌘ Read more
AI Is Hitting Entry-Level Jobs Hardest, Stanford Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, AI industry watchers of all stripes have been warning of a coming jobs apocalypse driven by ultra-intelligent AI systems that will be able to replicate most human tasks more cheaply. Now, newly updated research from Stanford University economists suggests AI seems to be causing significant entry … ⌘ Read more
AI/LLM Usage Becoming A “Denial of Service Attack” On Open-Source Project Maintainers
The latest criticism of the increased burden placed on open-source software project maintainers caused by AI / LLM agents is around too many bug reports effectively causing a “denial of service” attack on project maintainers… ⌘ Read more
Apple Announces New Mac Mini With M6 and M5 Pro Chips
Apple has unveiled a new Mac mini with either its new M6 chip or the M5 Pro chip released earlier this year. It adds faster CPU, GPU, storage, and AI performance along with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and 2.5Gb Ethernet as standard. There’s also a new higher starting price of $899, which is up from the previous $799 base price and far above the $599 starting price of th … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 Device Mapper Sees Many Fixes, Including Code Cleanups By Claude Opus
The Linux Device Mapper “DKM” framework for mapping block devices to higher-level virtual block devices doesn’t see any major new features for Linux 7.3 but there are many bug fixes, including code clean-ups carried out by AI… ⌘ Read more
Lots Of New Audio Hardware Support In Linux 7.3
Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE submitted all of the sound feature updates last week for the Linux 7.3 kernel. Besides the continued AI/LLM-generated patch churn, the sound code for Linux 7.3 sees a lot of new hardware support… ⌘ Read more
SEC Investigating Near-Implosion of AI Hedge Fund
The SEC is investigating the near-collapse of AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness, sending subpoenas to major Wall Street banks for details about the fund’s trades, borrowing, and communications with lenders. The fund, founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, managed over $30 billion and borrowed tens of billions more before leveraged bets unraveled, … ⌘ Read more
Nvidia Senior Manager Linked To Supermicro Scheme Smuggling AI Servers To China
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Taiwan has indicted nine people – reportedly including an Nvidia senior manager and two Supermicro employees based in the country – who allegedly helped forge documents to cover up illegal exports of high-end AI servers to China in violation of US export controls. O … ⌘ Read more
Dr. Dre Says He Uses AI To Produce Songs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Dr. Dre, the pioneering rapper and seven-time Grammy-winning producer behind hit songs like Tupac’s “California Love” and Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady,” is very much pro using artificial intelligence tools to make music. In an interview with the New York Times, Dr. Dre and Interscope Records co-founder Jimmy Iovine spoke about artificia … ⌘ Read more
One-Third of Web Pages are Now Written With AI, Says Pew Research
A Pew Research senior data scientist analyzed 500,000 English-language webpages from the past five years with an AI detection tool to estimate how many were likely written or edited by AI:
Of all the pages in this sample, 10% show significant signs of AI authorship… If we filter old webpages out of our samples and look at only the pages published … ⌘ Read more
Twitch And Amazon Hit With Lawsuit for Training AI With Streamers’ Content
A class action filed this week accused Amazon’s Twitch gaming service of using video streams to fuel its AI products without licensing or obtaining permission, reports Engadget:
Earlier this month, Twitch Support posted on X that it added an option to opt out of “having your channel content used to train generative AI content m … ⌘ Read more
Stanford Economist Now Believes an AI Job Apocalypse Is Unlikely
“There is still no sign of economy-wide job destruction,” says economist Erik Brynjolfsson. Working with researchers at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, Brynjolfsson has determined an AI “job apocalypse” is unlikely, reports the Washington Post, “even though it will likely impact entry-level jobs.”
And Brynjolfsson “predicts that demand for experi … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 Input Subsystem Updates Merged With Security Fixes, Other Improvements
The big set of input subsystem updates were merged earlier this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. It’s a random assortment of different improvements as well as bug/security fixes driven in part by the flow of AI/LLM generated discoveries… ⌘ Read more
Debian is Voting on Whether to Allow AI-Assisted Contributions
Debian developers are voting on whether to ban AI-assisted contributions, reports the blog Linuxiac, with a ballot listing eight proposals and a “None of the above” option.
The first one is still the original proposal to ban LLM-assisted contributions by changing the Debian Social Contract. This would stop generative AI from being used for direct D … ⌘ Read more
How Will AI Change the Field of Mathematics?
“AI went from being very terrible to seemingly genuinely quite good at a professional level in a very short space of time…” says the Verge’s AI reporter.
But AI systems “are still truly, truly terrible at some areas of math… even the days of the week.”
If you look at academic math papers, a lot of the time you won’t see numbers… So they’re still terrible, but they’re now also … ⌘ Read more
Flock is Secretly Building a Powerful New Prompt-Based AI Tool for Police
Slashdot reader fjo3 shared this article from Wired:
[Flock] has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone … ⌘ Read more
Is AI Really to Blame for High Unemployment Among Recent Graduates? What Economists Say
47% of recent graduates say AI has already impacted hiring in their field, according to an April survey from ZipRecruiter.
“But is AI really the problem, or is it more complicated?” asks NPR. “Here’s what economists have to say.”
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate … ⌘ Read more
Over 1 Million People Have Clicked LinkedIn’s AI Slop Button
According to a post from chief product officer Hari Srinivasan, “over a million people” have clicked on LinkedIn’s new “Seems like AI slop” button, which launched after one analysis found 41% of the platform’s longform posts were fully AI-generated. The Verge reports: In Thursday’s post, Srinivasan said that users are overall “now experiencing 40% less vie … ⌘ Read more
Apple Cuts Jobs In Siri, Vision Pro Immersive Video and Gaming Teams
Apple is cutting more than 200 jobs as it shifts resources toward a rebuilt, AI-powered Siri and other future products. Roughly 100 positions are being eliminated from the Vision Pro organization, including much of its gaming team and some immersive-video staff. Another 100 cuts are hitting the Siri and software teams. Bloomberg reports: I … ⌘ Read more
AI Boosted Homework Scores, Then Exam Scores Dropped
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Students and school children are increasingly using artificial intelligence. A survey last year by Chegg, an ed-tech firm, found that 80% of rich-world undergraduates used it in their studies. More recent polls put the figure at 94% in Britain and 93% in Germany. Such widespread adoption has fueled concerns about th … ⌘ Read more
Micron Unveils $10 Billion AI Memory Research Lab In Boise
Micron says it will spend $10 billion over the next decade on a new research lab in Boise focused on advanced memory technologies, computing systems, and future chip manufacturing. Here are some details, as reported by Reuters:
- Micron Research Labs will bring together customers, academia, government and the broader semiconductor ecosystem to pursue bre … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 Lands Improvements For Voodoo 3 / 4 / 5 & Vintage Atari Computers In 2026
At a time when Linux continues dropping older hardware drivers due to the influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches for hardware extremely unlikely to be used with modern versions of the mainline Linux kernel, Voodoo graphics cards and vintage Atari computers are seeing some reprieve with the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel release… ⌘ Read more
Linus Torvalds Endures A Debug Session From Hell, ‘Enormously Helped’ By AI
Linus Torvalds says AI “enormously helped” him track down a stubborn Intel Xe graphics driver bug that took 24 debugging patches and 18 kernel boots to isolate. “I’d like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it, … ⌘ Read more
Google Gives Publishers a ‘Preferred Sources’ Button to Fight AI-Driven Traffic Losses
Google is giving publishers a new way to fight declining referral traffic from AI-powered search by letting them embed a “Preferred Sources” button that readers can use to favor their sites across Search, Discover, and Google News. “The idea is to make it easier for readers to find links from the sites th … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Gives Task Manager Another Task: Watching AI Workloads
Microsoft is expanding Windows Task Manager to show per-process NPU and GPU neural-engine usage, giving users more visibility into which apps are consuming hardware for AI workloads. The Register reports: The Processes tab can show NPU use alongside CPU and GPU activity, while the Performance tab displays overall utilization. […] Microsoft was … ⌘ Read more
Linus Torvalds Endures A Debug Session From Hell, “Enormously Helped” By AI
It’s pretty rare to see Linus Torvalds author patches himself pertaining to the open-source Linux graphics drivers, but waking up this morning I was surprised to see he authored and committed an Intel Xe kernel graphics driver change himself. It ended up being after he encountered a “debug session from hell” but was ultimately helped by AI in fixing a bug that had been irking him… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 Network Changes Merged But Developers “Completely Overwhelmed” Due To AI/LLMs
All of the networking subsystem feature updates were merged today for the Linux 7.3 kernel’s merge window. There are a lot of wired and wireless networking improvements this cycle but also a ton of bug fixes – including many not so important fixes spun up by AI/LLM agents. The networking subsystem maintainers admit now they are “completely overwhelmed” due to this code churn from the output of AI large language models… ⌘ Read more
Voters Aren’t Waiting For November to Try Ousting Officials Over Data Centers
A growing backlash against AI data centers is spilling into local politics, with residents in more than a dozen communities pushing recall elections against officials who approved projects. “People are standing up and saying, ‘Sorry, we don’t want these data centers in our communities for a number of reasons,’” Senato … ⌘ Read more
Does Using AI to Edit an Op-Ed on Students’ Math Skills Undermine the Argument?
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing a “severe” math deficiency among students in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, admitted to using artificial intelligence to help edit the piece. The Standard published a 2,000-word piece … ⌘ Read more
Japan to Require AI Firms to Disclose Training Data
Japan is preparing a nonbinding “comply or explain” code that would urge generative AI companies, including foreign firms operating in Japan, to disclose what models they use, what training data they rely on, and how that data was collected. The proposal would also let rights holders ask whether specific webpages were included in training datasets. The Japan Times reports: … ⌘ Read more