Bcachefs 1.37 Released With Linux 7.0 Support, Erasure Coding Stable & New Sub-Commands
Kent Overstreet today released Bcachefs 1.37 as the newest feature release to this out-of-tree file-system driver and user-space tooling for this next-gen, copy-on-write file-system… ⌘ Read more

Uber Co-founder Travis Kalanick’s Newest Venture? ‘Gainfully Employed Robots’
Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick launched a new venture that “will focus on creating ‘gainfully employed robots’ for the food, mining and transport industries,” Bloomberg reports.

“I left Uber in 2017 heartbroken,” writes Kalanick on the new company’s web site. Kalanick resigned under pressure in 2017, and complains he … ⌘ Read more

New Study Raises Concerns About AI Chatbots Fueling Delusional Thinking
“Emerging evidence indicates that agential AI might validate or amplify delusional or grandiose content, particularly in users already vulnerable to psychosis,” writes Dr Hamilton Morrin, a psychiatrist and researcher at King’s College in London, in a paper published last week in the Lancet Psychiatry. Morrin and a colleague had already … ⌘ Read more

How a Raspberry Pi Saved the Super Nintendo’s Infamously Inferior Version Of ‘Doom’
“Just the anachronism of seeing Doom, one of the poster children for the moral panic around violent video games, on a Nintendo console is novel,” writes Kotaku — especially with the console’s underpowered “Super FX” coprocessor

Hampered by a nearly unplayable framerate, especially in later levels, and mired by … ⌘ Read more

Gaming Site Editor Jailbreaks an Amazon Echo Show
“A few developers found a way, for now, to turn a few of these increasingly mediocre Amazon Show devices into friendly, useful, open computers,” writes the co-founder of the gaming/tech news site Aftermath. For under $50 each, he bought some used versions of the devices and tested their instructions, partly to escape the full-screen ads Amazon began showing late last year, an … ⌘ Read more

AI’s Productivity Boost? Just 16 Minutes Per Week, Claims Study
“A new study suggests the productivity boost from AI may be far smaller than executives claim,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli:

According to research cited in Foxit’s State of Document Intelligence report, while 89% of executives and 79% of end users say AI tools make them feel more productive, the actual time savings shrink dramatically once peo … ⌘ Read more

Two Long-Lost Episodes of ‘Doctor Who’ Found
Longtime Slashdot reader tsuliga writes: Two new episodes of Doctor Who that were previously lost have been found. The original Doctor Who episodes were wiped or deleted by the BBC because they were not aware of the future use of re-runs of these shows. Ninety-five of the 253 episodes from the program’s first six years are currently missing. How many more episodes are out there … ⌘ Read more

Digg Relaunch Fails
sdinfoserv writes: After running a Reddit clone for a couple of months, the Digg beta shut down again. The website is a splash memo from CEO Justin Mezzell, blaming the latest “Hard Reset” on bots. “Building on the internet in 2026 is different,” writes Mezzell. “We learned that the hard way. Today we’re sharing difficult news: we’ve made the decision to significantly downsize the Digg team…”

The decision was made after struggling … ⌘ Read more

Google Chrome Is Finally Coming To ARM64 Linux
BrianFagioli writes: Google says it will finally release Chrome for ARM64 Linux in the second quarter of 2026, bringing the company’s full browser to a platform that has existed for years without official support. Until now, Linux users running Arm hardware have largely relied on Chromium builds or unofficial packages if they wanted something close to Chrome. Google says the new b … ⌘ Read more

Judges Find AI Doesn’t Have Human Intelligence in Two New Court Cases
Within the last month two U.S> judges have effectively declared AI bots are not human, writes Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik:

On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to take up a lawsuit in which artist and computer scientist Stephen Thaler tried to copyright an artwork that he acknowledged had been created by an AI bot of his … ⌘ Read more

Jack Dorsey’s Block Accused of ‘AI-Washing’ to Excuse Laying Off Nearly Half Its Workforce
When Block cut 4,000 jobs — nearly half its workforce — co-founder Jack Dorsey “pointed to AI as the culprit,” writes Entrepreneur magazine. “Dorsey claimed that AI tools now allow fewer employees to accomplish the same work.”

“But analysts see a different explanation: poor management.”

Block more … ⌘ Read more

AI CEOs Worry the Government Will Nationalize AI
Palantir’s CEO was blunt. “If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone’s white-collar job… and you’re going to screw the military — if you don’t think that’s going to lead to the nationalization of our technology, you’re retarded…”

And OpenAI’s Sam Altman is thinking about the same thing, writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland:

“It has seemed to me … ⌘ Read more

Seagate Just Unleashed 44TB Hard Drives
“Seagate says it is now shipping its Mozaic 4+ HAMR-based hard drives at up to 44TB per drive,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, “with production deployments already underway at two hyperscale cloud providers.

“The company claims the platform is the only heat-assisted magnetic recording [HAMR] implementation currently operating at scale, and it is targeting a path from today’s 4+TB pe … ⌘ Read more

First Solar Car Rolls Off Validation Assembly Line At Aptera
“Reservation holders, it’s finally time to get ready,” writes long-time Slashdot reader AirHog. The EV news site Electrek reports:

Aptera Motors, “the little startup that could,” announced another important milestone… completing the first example of its flagship solar EV on its validation assembly line in Southern California…

While the validation l … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Is Working On a Big Firefox Redesign
darwinmac writes: Mozilla is working on a huge redesign for its Firefox browser, codenamed “Nova,” which will bring pastel gradients, a refreshed new tab page, floating “island” UI elements, and more. “From the mockups, it appears Mozilla took some inspiration from Googles Material You (or at least, the dynamic color extraction part of it) because the browser color accent appears influ … ⌘ Read more

Python ‘Chardet’ Package Replaced With LLM-Generated Clone, Re-Licensed
Ancient Slashdot reader ewhac writes: The maintainers of the Python package `chardet`, which attempts to automatically detect the character encoding of a string, announced the release of version 7 this week, claiming a speedup factor of 43x over version 6. In the release notes, the maintainers claim that version 7 is, “a ground … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de oh god, make it stop!

Recently the guy maintaining chardet changed its GPL license to MIT because “it is a complete re-write” (by AI, of course). It was called out by the original author. Changing the license is something the current maintainer wanted to do for long time, getting nos, and nos then. That didn’t stop him 12 years later.

US Cybersecurity Adds Exploited VMware Aria Operations To KEV Catalog
joshuark writes: The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a VMware Aria Operations vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-22719 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, flagging the flaw as exploited in attacks. VMware Aria Operations is an enterprise monitoring platform that helps organizations track t … ⌘ Read more

Father Sues Google, Claiming Gemini Chatbot Drove Son Into Fatal Delusion
A father is suing Google and Alphabet for wrongful death, alleging Gemini reinforced his son Jonathan Gavalas’ escalating delusions until he died by suicide in October 2025. “Jonathan Gavalas, 36, started using Google’s Gemini AI chatbot in August 2025 for shopping help, writing support, and trip planning,” reports TechCrunch. “On … ⌘ Read more

Vehicle Tire Pressure Sensors Enable Silent Tracking
Longtime Slashdot reader linuxwrangler writes: Dark Reading reports that a team of researchers has determined that signals from tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMSs), required in U.S. cars since 2007, can be used to track the presence, type, weight, and driving pattern of vehicles. The researchers report (PDF) that the TPMS data, which includes unique sensor IDs, is … ⌘ Read more

LibreOffice Says Its UI Is Way Better Than Microsoft Office’s
darwinmac writes: While many users choose Microsoft Office over LibreOffice because of its support for the proprietary formats (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx), others prefer Office for its “better” ribbon interface. These users often criticize LibreOffice for having a “clunky” UI instead of the “standard” ribbon interface you would find in Word, Excel, and ot … ⌘ Read more

What’s Driving the SaaSpocalypse
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: One day not long ago, a founder texted his investor with an update: he was replacing his entire customer service team with Claude Code, an AI tool that can write and deploy software on its own. To Lex Zhao, an investor at One Way Ventures, the message indicated something bigger – the moment when companies like Salesforce stopped being the automatic default. … ⌘ Read more

Does a New Theory Finally Explain the Mysteries of the Planet Saturn?
“Saturn and some of its 274 moons are pretty weird,” writes Smithsonian magazine:

[Saturn moon] Titan has strangely few impact craters, Hyperion is tiny and misshapen, and Iapetus has a tilted orbit. What’s more, planets tend to wobble along their rotational axes as they spin, like an off-kilter spinning top in the moments before i … ⌘ Read more

Collabora Clashes With LibreOffice Over Move To Revive LibreOffice Online
Slashdot reader darwinmac writes: The Document Foundation (TDF), the organization behind LibreOffice, has decided to bring back its LibreOffice Online project which been inactive since 2022. Collabora, a company that was a major contributor to the original LibreOffice Online, is not pleased with this development. After the origin … ⌘ Read more

Galileo’s Handwritten Notes Discovered in a Medieval Astronomy Text
In a library in Florence, Italy, historian Ivan Malara noticed handwritten notes on a book printed in the 1500s — and recognized the handwriting as Galileo’s. The finding “promises new insights into one of the most famous ideological transitions in the history of science,” writes Science magazine — since the book Galileo annotated was a r … ⌘ Read more

New ‘Star Wars’ Movies Are Coming to Theatres. But Will Audiences?
“The drought of upcoming Star Wars movies is coming to an end soon,” writes Cinemablend. In May the The Mandalorian and Grogu opens, and one year later there’s the release of the Ryan Gosling-led Star Wars: Starfighter.

But “there are some insiders who already believe that Starfighter will be a bigger hit than The Mandalorian and Grogu … ⌘ Read more

Hyperion Author Dan Simmons Dies From Stroke At 77
Author Dan Simmons, best known for the epic sci-fi novel Hyperion and its sequels, has died at 77 following a stroke. Ars Technica’s Eric Berger remembers Simmons, writing: Simmons, who worked in elementary education before becoming an author in the 1980s, produced a broad portfolio of writing that spanned several genres, including horror fiction, historical fiction, and sc … ⌘ Read more

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. :-)

Weird. My timestamps are all being shown (on https://twtxt.net and https://darch.dk/timeline) one hour ahead of what I expected. Am I manually writing my timestamps wrong? Are the clients interpreting something I’m not aware of? Let me write this one on the “Z” timezone to try to debug it.

Someone on #twtxt or #yarn.social on IRC told me to use a client that supports extensions and replies. Uhh… Client? I’m writing my microblogging by hand! (Hides in a very weird mix of pride and shame)

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