Google Maps Will Let You Hide Your Identity When Writing Reviews
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: Four new features are coming to Google Maps, including a way to hide your identity in reviews. Maps will soon let you use a nickname and select an alternative profile picture for online reviews, so you can rate a business without linking it to full name and Google profile photo. Google says it will m … ⌘ Read more

‘AI Can’t Think’
In an essay published in The Verge, Benjamin Riley argues that today’s AI boom is built on a fundamental misunderstanding: language modeling is not the same as intelligence. “The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language – and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own,” writes Riley … ⌘ Read more

Jakarta Moves Ahead of Tokyo As World’s Most Populated City
schwit1 writes: Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, tops a ranking that is increasingly dominated by Asia: the world’s most populated city. It edged out Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, and Japan’s Tokyo to earn the title in a new United Nations report. [PDF]

With an estimated population of nearly 42 million residents, Jakarta soared from 33rd place in the previou … ⌘ Read more

NTFSPLUS Driver Updated As It Works Toward The Mainline Kernel
Announced last month was the NTFSPLUS driver as a new NTFS file-system driver for the Linux kernel with better write performance and more features compared to the existing NTFS options. A second iteration of that driver was recently queued into “ntfs-next” raising prospects that this NTFSPLUS driver could soon attempt to land in the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

libinput 1.30 Released With Support For Writing Plug-Ins In Lua
Red Hat’s leading Linux input expert Peter Hutterer released libinput 1.30 today as the newest update to this input handling library used on both X.Org and Wayland desktops… ⌘ Read more

Trump Launches Genesis Mission, a Manhattan Project-Level AI Push
BrianFagioli writes: President Trump has issued a sweeping executive order that creates the Genesis Mission, a national AI program he compares to a Manhattan Project level effort. It centralizes DOE supercomputers, national lab resources, massive scientific datasets, and new AI foundation models into a single platform meant to fast track research … ⌘ Read more

Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal
“Three years ago, Google removed JPEG XL support from Chrome, stating there wasn’t enough interest at the time,” writes the blog Windows Report. “That position has now changed.”

In a recent note to developers, a Chrome team representative confirmed that work has restarted to bring JPEG XL to Chromium and said Google “would ship it in Chrome” once long-term ma … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Announces ‘TABS API’ For Developers Building AI Agents
“Fresh from announcing it is building an AI browsing mode in Firefox and laying the groundwork for agentic interactions in the Firefox 145 release, the corp arm of Mozilla is now flexing its AI muscles in the direction of those more likely to care,” writes the blog OMG Ubuntu:

If you’re a developer building AI agents, you can sign up to get early acces … ⌘ Read more

Amazon’s AI-Powered IDE Kiro Helps Vibe Coders with ‘Spec Mode’
A promotional video for Amazon’s Kiro software development system took a unique approach, writes GeekWire. “Instead of product diagrams or keynote slides, a crew from Seattle’s Packrat creative studio used action figures on a miniature set to create a stop-motion sequence…”

“Can the software development hero conquer the ‘AI Slop Monster’ to u … ⌘ Read more

As Windows Turns 40, Microsoft Faces an AI Backlash
Microsoft’s push to transform Windows into an “agentic OS” that allows AI agents to control PCs is drawing user backlash similar to the Windows 8 controversy, as the company marks the operating system’s 40th anniversary this week, writes Tom Warren, a reporter at The Verge who has been covering Microsoft for nearly two decades. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri announced the ag … ⌘ Read more

Verizon Cutting More Than 13,000 Jobs As It Restructures
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. wireless carrier Verizon said Thursday it will cut more than 13,000 jobs in its largest single layoff as it works to shrink costs and restructure operations. Verizon also said it plans to convert 179 corporate-owned retail stores into franchised operations and close one store.

Verizon’s new CEO, Dan Schulman, said in a note to employe … ⌘ Read more

Saudi Makes Big Bet On AI Films As Hollywood Moves From Studios To Datacenters
pbahra writes: Saudi Arabia is betting that the future of Hollywood won’t be built in physical stages but in datacenters. In a push to anchor itself in next-generation film production, Riyadh-based Humain has led Luma AI’s latest Series C round, backing the shift towards cloud-based, AI-generated video rather … ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Explains Its Worst Outage Since 2019
Cloudflare suffered its worst network outage in six years on Tuesday, beginning at 11:20 UTC. The disruption prevented the content delivery network from routing traffic for roughly three hours. The failure, writes Cloudflare in a blog post, originated from a database permissions change deployed at 11:05 UTC. The modification altered how a database query returned information about … ⌘ Read more

Chinese Spies Are Trying To Reach UK Lawmakers Via LinkedIn, MI5 Warns
MI5 has warned U.K. lawmakers that Chinese intelligence operatives are using LinkedIn and recruitment fronts to target them for information gathering and long-term cultivation. PBS reports: Writing to lawmakers, House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle said a new MI5 “espionage alert” warned that Chinese nationals were “using LinkedIn pro … ⌘ Read more

Is vim really good for writing though? ⌘ Read more

The afternoon didn’t start better: we got a talk about the EUDI, with the implied idea that an “European ID” is automatically an example of digital sovereignty, when in fact what is being implemented isn’t.

I could go further into it, but instead I’ll leave here a link to the comment I was impelled to write on the EUDI project after the presentation:

https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technical-specification/discussions/19#discussioncomment-15001433

The #EUDI panel was followed by Caroline Stage Olsen, Minister for Digital Affairs of Denmark. The tldr; of her keynote - which had two points of note: 1) “I support AI gigafactories” (because all that is shiny and new is something we should invest in), and “innovation is sovereignty” which is her way of saying that she wants to use the sovereignty topic not to talk about sovereignty but as an excuse to promote “innovation” - in that ideology brand that supports the idea that in order to innovate more we need to simplify and de-regulate…

Why Hotel-Room Cancellations Disappeared
Hotel cancellation policies have transformed over the past seven years. Travelers once could cancel reservations up until the day before check-in without penalty. That flexibility has largely vanished.

The shift began around 2018 when third-party travel-booking sites deployed “cancel-rebook” strategies, the Atlantic writes. These platforms would monitor hotel rates after securing initial reservati … ⌘ Read more

Florida Bill Would Require Cursive Instruction in Elementary Schools
An anonymous reader shares a report: Elementary-school students would have to learn how to write in cursive, under a bill set to be vetted by a House committee next week. Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, filed a similar proposal (SB 444) on Monday. The House Student Academic Success Subcommittee is set to review the measure (HB 127) on Nov. … ⌘ Read more

More Tech Moguls Want to Build Data Centers in Outer Space
“To be clear, the current economics of space-based data centers don’t make sense,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

“But they could in the future, perhaps as soon as a decade or so from now, according to an analysis by Phil Metzger, a research professor at the University of Central Florida and formerly of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. … ⌘ Read more

What I wanna know at this point @bender@twtxt.net is this; What is this “Notes” thing. Is it just a uugo static site you maintain or something else? 🤔 Did you write all the CSS yourself? 😅

Could C# Overtake Java in TIOBE’s Programming Language Popularity Rankings?
It’s been trying to measure the popularity of programming languages since 2000 using metrics like the number of engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. And “The November 2025 TIOBE Index brings another twist below Python’s familiar lead,” writes TechRepublic. “C solidifies its position as runner-up, C++ and Java lose … ⌘ Read more

Copy-and-Paste Now Exceeds File Transferring as the Top Corporate Data Exfiltration Vector
Slashdot reader spatwei writes: It is now more common for data to leave companies through copying and pasting than through file transfers and uploads, LayerX revealed in its Browser Security Report 2025. This shift is largely due to generative AI (genAI), with 77% of employees pasting data into AI … ⌘ Read more

A Quantum Error Correction Breakthrough?
The dream of quantum computers has been hampered by the challenge of error correction, writes the Harvard Gazette, since qubits “are inherently susceptible to slipping out of their quantum states and losing their encoded information.”

But in a newly-published paper, a research team “combined various methods to create complex circuits with dozens of error correction layers” that “suppresses erro … ⌘ Read more

EV Sales Are Still Rising. They Have Not Slumped
“Media headlines suggesting some slowdown in EV sales are simply incorrect,” writes the site Electrek, “and leave out the bigger picture that gas car sales actually are dropping…”

Over the course of
the last two years or so, sales of battery electric vehicles, while
continuing to grow, have posted lower year-over-year percentage
growth rates than they had in years prior. … ⌘ Read more

Five People Plead Quilty To Helping North Koreans Infiltrate US Companies
“Within the past year, stories have been posted on Slashdot about people helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs at U.S. corporations, companies knowingly assisting them, how not to hire a North Korean for a remote IT job, and how a simple question tripped up a North Korean applying for a remote IT job,” writes longtime Slashdot … ⌘ Read more

Logitech Reports Data Breach From Zero-Day Software Vulnerability
BrianFagioli writes: Logitech has confirmed a cybersecurity breach after an intruder exploited a zero-day in a third-party software platform and copied internal data. The company says the incident did not affect its products, manufacturing or business operations, and it does not believe sensitive personal information like national ID numbers or … ⌘ Read more

Hyundai Data Breach May Have Leaked Drivers’ Personal Information
According to Car and Driver, Hyundai has suffered a data breach that leaked the personal data of up to 2.7 million customers. The leak reportedly took place in February from Hyundai AutoEver, the company’s IT affiliate. It includes customer names, driver’s license numbers, and social security numbers. Longtime Slashdot reader sinij writes: Thanks … ⌘ Read more

How to Turn Off Journal “Time to Write” Reminders on iPhone & Apple Watch
Once you use the Journal app, it will send a daily notification to your iPhone and Apple Watch (yuck) with a reminder that says “Time to Write”, nudging you to create a new journal entry for the day. If you’re annoyed by the Journal “Time to Write” alerts on your iPhone or Apple Watch, you … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/11/14/how-to-turn-off-journal-time-to-write-re … ⌘ Read more

China Plans To Limit How Fast Your Car Accelerates To 62 MPH At Startup
bobthesungeek76036 writes: Beijing’s proposed regulation aims to tame rapid launches by forcing cars to boot up in a restricted performance mode after every ignition.

Under a proposed update to the National Standard, every passenger car would need a default mode in which it takes no less than five seconds to reach 100 km/h (62 mph) … ⌘ Read more

Proton Might Recycle Abandoned Email Addresses
BrianFagioli writes: Popular privacy firm Proton is floating a plan on Reddit that should unsettle anyone who values privacy, writes Nerds.xyz. The company is considering recycling abandoned email addresses that were originally created by bots a decade ago. These addresses were never used, yet many of them are extremely common names that have silently collected misdirected emails, pa … ⌘ Read more

Cagent Comes to Docker Desktop with Built-In IDE Support through ACP
Docker Desktop now includes cagent bundled out of the box. This means developers can start building AI agents without a separate installation step. For those unfamiliar with cagent: it’s Docker’s open-source tool that lets you build AI agents using YAML configuration files instead of writing code. You define the agent’s behavior and tools, and cagent… ⌘ Read more

Ask Slashdot: Are There Any Good Android Tablets Out There?
Longtime Slashdot reader hadleyburg writes: For a user with an Android phone and who’s happy to stick within the Google ecosystem, an Android tablet might seem like the more obvious choice over an iPad. Of course, iPads are a lot more popular, and asking about Android tablets is likely to invite advice about sticking with what everyone else has.

The Slashdot … ⌘ Read more

Visual Studio 2026 Released
Dave Knott writes: Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2026, the first major version of their flagship compiler in almost four years. Release notes are available here. The compiler has also been updated, including improved (but not yet 100%) C++23 core language and standard library implementations.

[

Image

@bender@twtxt.net Sounds about right.

I had a brainfart yesterday, though. For whatever reason I thought of subdomains, which are modeled with server entries in nginx. So, each could define its own access_log location. However, there are no subdomains in place! Searching around, I didn’t find any solution to give each user their own access log file.

One way would be a cronjob, aeh, systemd timer as I learned the other day, that greps the main access log and writes all user access log files with only the relevant stuff.

Firefox 145 Drops Support For 32-bit Linux
BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla has released Firefox 145.0, and the standout change in this version is the official end of support for 32-bit Linux systems. Users on 32-bit distributions will no longer receive updates and are being encouraged to switch to the 64-bit build to continue getting security patches and new features. While most major Linux distributions have already moved past 32-bit … ⌘ Read more

UK Secondary Schools Pivoting From Narrowly Focused CS Curriculum To AI Literacy
Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: The UK Department for Education is “replacing its narrowly focused computer science GCSE with a broader, future-facing computing GCSE [General Certificate of Secondary Education] and exploring a new qualification in data science and AI for 16-18-year-olds.” The move aims to … ⌘ Read more

The PHP Foundation Is Seeking a New Executive Director
New submitter benramsey writes: The PHP Foundation has launched a search for its next executive director.

The Executive Director serves as the operational leader of the PHP Foundation, defining its strategic vision and translating it into reality while managing day-to-day operations and serving as the primary bridge between the Board, staff, community, and sp … ⌘ Read more

Android shopping list apps disappointed me too many times, so I went back to writing these lists by hand a while ago.

Here’s what’s more fun: Write them in Vim and then print them on the dotmatrix printer. 🥳

And, because I can, I use my own font for that, i.e. ImageMagick renders an image file and then a little tool converts that to ESC/P so I can dump it to /dev/usb/lp0.

(I have so much scrap paper from mail spam lying around that I don’t feel too bad about this. All these sheets would go straight to the bin otherwise.)

How the Trump Administration Is Giving Even More Tax Breaks to the Wealthy
Jesse Drucker,  Investigative Tax Reporter  -  The New York Times

Stephan: The federal minimum wage for 2025 remains at $7.25 per hour. Elon Musk just got a one trillion dollar pay deal, a number so large most Americans could not even write it – $1,000,000,000,000, (one followed by 12 zeros).
_Why? Because the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) minimum has not changed since 20 … ⌘ 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

**How I Used AI to Become Someone Else (And Why Your Face Is No Longer Your Password) **

Image

Free Link 🎈

[Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups »](https://infosecwriteups.com/how-i-used-ai-to-b … ⌘ Read more

**The Authorization Circus: Where Security Was the Main Clown **

Image

Free Link 🎈

[Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups »](https://infosecwriteups.com/the-authorization-circus-where-security-was-the-main-clown-f4b84ca9356f?source=rss—-7b … ⌘ Read more

How I turned Membership into a Paycheck

Image

Hacking leaderboard on chess.com to get paid

Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups » ⌘ 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

‘Stratospheric’ AI Spending By Four Wealthy Companies Reaches $360B Just For Data Centers
“Maybe you’ve heard that artificial intelligence is a bubble poised to burst,” writes a Washington Post technology columnist. “Maybe you have heard that it isn’t. (No one really knows either way, but that won’t stop the bros from jabbering about it constantly.)”

“But I can confidently tell you that the m … ⌘ Read more

Double congrats, @thecanine@twtxt.net! \o/

I’m not a fan of the gemtext limits. This being only a single page (which probably doesn’t get updated a whole lot), the efforts of having two dedicates files are not all that big, or so I’d at least naively imagine.

I always recommend checking the W3C validator results, even though I’m very guilty of not doing that myself. It just doesn’t occur to me in the heat of the moment. I reckon if I were writing HTML on a more regular basis, I would pick up on making that a real habit. Anyway, your HTML being generated, you probably can’t address the findings, though. So, might not be even worth the time heading over to the validator.

From a privacy point of view, personally, I would definitely host the CSS myself. Other than that, nice link collection. :-)

‘Vibe Coding’ Named Word of the Year By Collins Dictionary
Collins Dictionary has named “vibe coding” its 2025 word of the year – a term coined by Andrej Karpathy for when a user makes an app or website by describing it to AI rather than writing programming code manually. The term, which is confusingly made up of two words, was “one of 10 words on a shortlist to reflect the mood, language and preoccupations of 2025,” repo … ⌘ Read more

‘Nintendo Has Too Many Apps’
The Verge’s Ash Parrish writes: Nintendo has released a new store app on Android and iOS giving users the ability to purchase hardware, accessories, and games for the Switch and Switch 2. When I open my phone and scroll down to the N’s, I get a neat, full row dedicated entirely to Nintendo. That’s four apps: the Switch app, the music app, the Nintendo Today news app, and now the store. (The tally increases to five if … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

We chose OCaml to write Stategraph
Comments ⌘ Read more