Bezos’s Blue Origin postpones rocket launch over weather
Blue Origin, the space company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, was forced Sunday to postpone the anticipated launch of its New Glenn rocket due to unfavorable weather conditions. ⌘ Read more
Nonprofit Releases Thousands of Rare American Music Recordings Online
The nonprofit Dust-to-Digital Foundation is making thousands of historic songs accessible to the public for free through a new partnership with the University of California, Santa Barbara. The songs represent “some of the rarest and most uniquely American music borne from the Jazz Age and the Great Depression,” according to the … ⌘ Read more
What Happens When Humans Start Writing for AI?
The literary magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa society argues “the replacement of human readers by AI has lately become a real possibility.
“In fact, there are good reasons to think that we will soon inhabit a world in which humans still write, but do so mostly for AI.”
“I write about artificial intelligence a lot, and lately I have begun to think of myself as writing for Al as well, … ⌘ Read more
Work After Work: Notes from an Unemployed New Grad Watching the Job Market Break
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Apple Explores New Satellite Features for Future iPhones
In 2022 the iPhone 14 featured emergency satellite service, and there’s now support for roadside assistance and the ability to send and receive text messages.
But for future iPhones, Apple is now reportedly working on five new satellite features, reports LiveMint:
As per Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is building an API that would allow developers to add sat … ⌘ Read more
Genetically Engineered Babies Are Banned in the US. But Tech Titans Are Trying to Make One Anyway
“For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby,” reports the Wall Street Journal:
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, … ⌘ Read more
Python Foundation Donations Surge After Rejecting Grant - But Sponsorships Still Needed
After the Python Software Foundation rejected a $1.5 million grant because it restricted DEI activity, “a flood of new donations followed,” according to a new report. By Friday they’d raised over $157,000, including 295 new Supporting Members paying an annual $99 membership fee, says PSF executi … ⌘ Read more
Blue Origin Livestreams Attempt to Launch Unique “EscaPADE’ Mission to Mars
Blue Origin is livestreaming the launch of its New Glenn rocketreports CNN, “where they will investigate why the barren red planet began to lose its atmosphere billions of years ago.” By observing two Mars locations simultaneously, this mission can measure how Mars responds to space weather in real time — and how the Marti … ⌘ Read more
‘AI Slop’ in Court Filings: Lawyers Keep Citing Fake AI-Hallucinated Cases
“According to court filings and interviews with lawyers and scholars, the legal profession in recent months has increasingly become a hotbed for AI blunders,” reports the New York Times:
Earlier this year, a lawyer filed a motion in a Texas bankruptcy court that cited a 1985 case called Brasher v. Stewart. Only the case doesn’t e … ⌘ Read more
Iconic Andean monument may have been used for Indigenous accounting
Sediment analysis and drone photography of the iconic South American monument of Monte Sierpe (aka “Band of Holes”) support a new interpretation of this mysterious landscape feature as part of an Indigenous system of accounting and exchange. ⌘ Read more
Lost Unix v4 Possibly Recovered on a Forgotten Bell Labs Tape From 1973
“A tape-based piece of unique Unix history may have been lying quietly in storage at the University of Utah for 50+ years,” reports The Register. And the software librarian at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum, Al Kossow of Bitsavers, believes the tape “has a pretty good chance of being recoverable.”
Long-time Slashdot reade … ⌘ Read more
Neurodiverse Professionals 25% More Satisfied With AI Tools and Agents
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:
Neurodiverse professionals may see unique benefits from artificial intelligence tools and agents, research suggests. With AI agent creation booming in 2025, people with conditions like ADHD, autism, dyslexia and more report a more level playing field in the workplace thanks to generative … ⌘ Read more
America’s FAA Grounds MD-11s After Tuesday’s Crash in Kentucky
UPDATE (11/9): America’s Federal Aviation Administration has now grounded all U.S. MD-11 and MD-11F aircrafts after Tuesday’s crash “because the agency has determined the unsafe condition is likely to exist or develop in other products of the same type design,” according to an emergency airworthiness directive obtained by CBS News.
American multinatio … ⌘ Read more
Rust Is Coming To Debian’s APT Package Manager
A maintainer of Debian’s Advanced Package Tool (APT) “has announced plans to introduce hard Rust dependencies into APT starting May 2026,” reports the blog It’s FOSS.
The integration targets critical areas like parsing .deb, .ar, and tar files plus HTTP signature verification using Sequoia. [APT maintainer Julian Andres Klode] said these components “would strongly benefit from m … ⌘ Read more
Hilarious Unused Audio From 2003 Baseball Game Rediscovered by Video Game History Foundation
After popular arcade games like Mortal Kombat and Spy Hunter, Midway Games jumped into the home console market, and in 2003 launched their baseball game franchise “MLB Slugfest” for Xbox, PS2, and GameCube. But at times it was almost a parody of baseball, including announcers filling the lo … ⌘ Read more
Thank you for https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-11-09/0/POSTING-en.html, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! I never configured systemd timers, but I would have gotten it wrong, too. Good to know when I eventually stumble across that in the future. I’m still using cron. Yeah, its field order sucks and I always have to look it up (because I don’t deal with that all that often). Indeed, systemd’s order sounds more reasonable.
Why hurricanes rarely kill in Cuba
Hours before Hurricane Melissa roared toward Cuba’s second-largest city, Santiago de Cuba, the island’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, announced that 735,000 people had been evacuated—1 of every 15 Cubans. The storm had already smashed into Jamaica, the most powerful to ever strike the island, causing landslides, power failures and deaths. ⌘ Read more
3 In 4 Admit They’re More Stressed About Nation’s Future Than Before
Study Finds Research Staff, - Study Finds
_Stephan: As the Trump Republican fascist coup continues more and more Americans are waking up to what is happening to democracy and equality in the United States, and are thinking about where they might emigrate to. This is what classically happens when democracies are transformed into fascist authoritarian oligarchies. The only good news is wh … ⌘ Read more
Israel’s underground jail, where Palestinians are held without charge and never see daylight
Emma Graham-Harrison, Chief Middle East Correspondent - The Guardian (U.K.)
_Stephan: In my opinion, the central geopolitical fallacy distorting peace in the Middle East is the failure of politicians to discern the difference between the Jewish religion and the government of Israel. Why do they fail to make this distinction? Because of the … ⌘ Read more
MAGA’s ‘big tent’ is burning down amid explosion of antisemitism, racism
Anita Chabria, Columnist - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: Christian antisemitism dates back to the Middle Ages, as I said in the previous article, it is part of why Israel exists. It has now combined with virulent White supremacy racism. It is these hates that lie at the core of MAGAt world, and it has taken over the Republican Party as this article describes.
 complaint about Windows 11 so far: If its connection to the Internet is poor, the entire OS is very slow. Even opening a local offline program like Handbrake takes over a minute. Task Manager does not show any extra load on CPU or RAM in the meantime. I’ve seen it on 3 different installs with various hardware components. I can’t explain why it happens.
Common Crawl Criticized for ‘Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers’
For more than a decade, the nonprofit Common Crawl “has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet,” notes the Atlantic, making it freely available for research.
“In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose: AI companies including OpenAI, Goo … ⌘ Read more
Scientists Edit Gene in 15 Patients That May Permanently Reduce High Cholesterol
A CRISPR-based drug given to study participants by infusion is raising hopes for a much easier way to lower cholesterol, reports CNN:
With a snip of a gene, doctors may one day permanently lower dangerously high cholesterol, possibly removing the need for medication, according to a new pilot study published Sat … ⌘ Read more
Debugging BeagleBoard USB boot with a sniffer: fixing omap_loader on modern PCs
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Debugging BeagleBoard USB boot with a sniffer: fixing omap_loader on modern PCs
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Bank of America Faces Lawsuit Over Alleged Unpaid Time for Windows Bootup, Logins, and Security Token Requests
A former Business Analyst reportedly filed a class action lawsuit claiming that for years, hundreds of remote employees at Bank of America first had to boot up complex computer systems before their paid work began, reports Human Resources Director magazine:
… ⌘ Read more
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Shifts Bulk of Philanthropy, ‘Going All In on AI-Powered Biology’
The Associated Press reports that “For the past decade, Dr. Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have focused part of their philanthropy on a lofty goal — ‘to cure, prevent or manage all disease’ — if not in their lifetime, then in their children’s.”
During that decade they also f … ⌘ Read more
World’s Largest Cargo Sailboat Completes Historic First Atlantic Crossing
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from Marine Insight:
The world’s largest cargo sailboat, Neoliner Origin, completed its first transatlantic voyage on 30 October despite damage to one of its sails during the journey. The 136-metre-long vessel had to rely partly on its auxiliary motor and its remaining sail af … ⌘ Read more
Bombshell Report Exposes How Meta Relied On Scam Ad Profits To Fund AI
“Internal documents have revealed that Meta has projected it earns billions from ignoring scam ads that its platforms then targeted to users most likely to click on them,” writes Ars Technica, citing a lengthy report from Reuters.
Reuters reports that Meta “for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that … ⌘ Read more
Japanese Volunteer Translators Quit After Mozilla Begins Using Translation Bot
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from Linuxiac:
The Japanese branch of Mozilla’s Support Mozilla (SUMO) community — responsible for localizing and maintaining Japanese-language support documentation for Firefox and other Mozilla products (consisting of Japanese native speakers) — has officially dis … ⌘ Read more
UPS (and FedEx) Ground Dozens of MD-11 Aircraft After Tuesday’s Crash in Kentucky
American multinational freight company UPS “has grounded its fleet of MD-11 aircraft,” reports the Guardian, “days after a cargo plane crash that killed at least 13 people in Kentucky. The grounded MD-11s are the same type of plane involved in Tuesday’s crash in Louisville. They were originally built by McDonnell Do … ⌘ Read more
What if your Tamagotchi was alive and glowing? This toy prototype is full of bacteria
Children and bacteria—normally they’re a parental nightmare, a cocktail of late-night pediatrician calls and ruined weekends. ⌘ Read more
Bacteria use sugar-fueled currents and molecular gearboxes to move without flagella
New studies from Arizona State University reveal surprising ways bacteria can move without their flagella—the slender, whip-like propellers that usually drive them forward. ⌘ Read more