AI Models Are Starting To Learn By Asking Themselves Questions
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: [P]erhaps AI can, in fact, learn in a more human way – by figuring out interesting questions to ask itself and attempting to find the right answer. A project from Tsinghua University, the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI), and Pennsylvania State University shows that AI ca … ⌘ Read more
AI Is Intensifying a ‘Collapse’ of Trust Online, Experts Say
Experts interviewed by NBC News warn that the rapid spread of AI-generated images and videos is accelerating an online trust breakdown, especially during fast-moving news events where context is scarce. From the report: President Donald Trump’s Venezuela operation almost immediately spurred the spread of AI-generated images, old videos and altered photos ac … ⌘ Read more
Intel Is ‘Going Big Time Into 14A,’ Says CEO Lip-Bu Tan
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says the company is “going big time” into its 14A (1.4nm-class) process, signaling confidence in yields and hinting at at least one external foundry customer. Tom’s Hardware reports: Intel’s 14A is expected to be production-ready in 2027, with early versions of process design kit (PDK) coming to external customers early this year. To that end … ⌘ Read more
i heard you like spreadsheets | https://nilfm.cc/coreio.html
Microsoft May Soon Allow IT Admins To Uninstall Copilot
Microsoft is testing a new Windows policy that lets IT administrators uninstall Microsoft Copilot from managed devices. The change rolls out via Windows Insider builds and works through standard management tools like Intune and SCCM. BleepingComputer reports: The new policy will apply to devices where the Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are both installe … ⌘ Read more
Google: Don’t Make ‘Bite-Sized’ Content For LLMs If You Care About Search Rank
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a big business. While some SEO practices are useful, much of the day-to-day SEO wisdom you see online amounts to superstition. An increasingly popular approach geared toward LLMs called “content chunking” may fall into that catego … ⌘ Read more
CES Worst In Show Awards Call Out the Tech Making Things Worse
Longtime Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, isn’t just about shiny new gadgets. As AP reports, this year brought back the fifth annual Worst in Show anti-awards, calling out the most harmful, wasteful, invasive, and unfixable tech at the Las Vegas show. The coalition behind the awards – including Repair.org, iFixi … ⌘ Read more
Latest SteamOS Beta Now Includes NTSYNC Kernel Driver
Valve has added the NTSYNC kernel driver to the SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, laying the groundwork for improved Windows game synchronization performance via Wine and Proton. Phoronix reports: For gearing up for that future Proton NTSYNC support, SteamOS 3.7.20 enables the NTSYNC kernel driver and loads the module by default. Most Linux distributions are at least already buil … ⌘ Read more
Italy Fines Cloudflare 14 Million Euros For Refusing To Filter Pirate Sites On Public 1.1.1.1 DNS
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM imposed a record-breaking 14.2 million-euro fine on Cloudflare after the company failed to implement the required piracy blocking measures. Cloudflare argued that filtering its global 1.1.1.1 … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Windows Media Player Stops Serving Up CD Album Info
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is celebrating the resurgence of interest in physical media in the only way it knows how… by halting the Windows Media Player metadata service. Readers of a certain vintage will remember inserting a CD into their PC and watching Windows Media Player populate with track listings and album artwork. No more … ⌘ Read more
Identity and Ideology in the School Boardroom
The abstract of a paper on NBER: School boards have statutory authority over most elementary and secondary education policies, but receive little attention compared to other actors in education systems. A fundamental challenge to understanding the importance of boards is the absence of data on the policy goals of board members – i.e., their ideologies – forcing researchers to condu … ⌘ Read more
The Golden Age of Vaccine Development
Microbiology had its golden age in the late nineteenth century, when researchers identified the bacterial causes of tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, and a dozen other diseases in rapid succession. Antibiotics had theirs in the mid-twentieth century. Both booms eventually slowed. Vaccine development, by contrast, appears to be speeding up – and the most productive era may still lie ahead, Works in … ⌘ Read more
America Is Falling Out of Love With Pizza
The restaurant industry is trying to figure out whether America has hit peak pizza. From a report: Once the second-most common U.S. restaurant type, pizzerias are now outnumbered by coffee shops and Mexican food eateries, according to industry data. Sales growth at pizza restaurants has lagged behind the broader fast-food market for years, and the outlook ahead isn’t much brighter.
“Pizza i … ⌘ Read more
Amazon’s New Manager Dashboard Flags ‘Low-Time Badgers’ and ‘Zero Badgers’
Amazon has begun equipping managers with a dashboard that tracks not just whether corporate employees show up to the office but how long they stay once they’re there, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. The system, which started rolling out in December, flags “Low-Time Badgers” who average less than four hour … ⌘ Read more
Torvalds Tells Kernel Devs To Stop Debating AI Slop - Bad Actors Won’t Follow the Rules Anyway
Linus Torvalds has weighed in on an ongoing debate within the Linux kernel development community about whether documentation should explicitly address AI-generated code contributions, and his position is characteristically blunt: stop making it an issue. The Linux creator was responding … ⌘ Read more
Craigslist at 30: No Algorithms, No Ads, No Problem
Craigslist, the 30-year-old classifieds site that looks virtually unchanged since the dial-up era, continues to draw more than 105 million monthly users and remains enormously profitable despite never spending a cent on advertising or marketing. The site ranks as the 40th most popular website in the United States, according to Internet data company Similarweb.
University of … ⌘ Read more
iOS 26 Shows Unusually Slow Adoption Months After Release
Apple’s iOS 26 appears to be witnessing the slowest adoption rate in recent memory, with third-party analytics from StatCounter indicating that only 15 to 16% of active iPhones worldwide are running the operating system nearly four months after its September release. The figures stand in stark contrast to iOS 18, which had reached approximately 63% adoption by … ⌘ Read more
Amazon Wants To Know What Every Corporate Employee Accomplished Last Year
Amazon is now requiring its corporate employees to submit a list of three to five accomplishments that represent their best work as part of an overhauled performance review process, according to Business Insider, which cites internal documents.
The company’s internal Forte review system previously asked employees softer questions li … ⌘ Read more
Send To Kindle from Microsoft Word is Discontinued
Microsoft is discontinuing its Send to Kindle integration in Word, ending a feature that allowed Microsoft 365 subscribers to send documents directly to their Kindle e-readers and preserve complex formatting through fixed layouts.
The company updated its documentation to announce that beginning February 9th, 2026, the Send to Kindle feature will no longer work across Web, Wi … ⌘ Read more
Why Care About Debt-to-GDP?
Abstract of a paper on NBER: We construct an international panel data set comprising three distinct yet plausible measures of government indebtedness: the debt-to-GDP, the interest-to-GDP, and the debt-to-equity ratios. Our analysis reveals that these measures yield differing conclusions about recent trends in government indebtedness. While the debt-to-GDP ratio has reached historically high levels, the other two indicators … ⌘ Read more
Record Ocean Heat is Intensifying Climate Disasters, Data Shows
The world’s oceans absorbed yet another record-breaking amount of heat in 2025, continuing an almost unbroken streak of annual records since the start of the millennium and fueling increasingly extreme weather events around the globe. More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s carbon emissions ends up in the oceans, making ocean heat content one … ⌘ Read more
Shin'ya M. > grep bridge.twtxt.net /var/log/pleroma.log
14:01:33.937 path=/api/v1/accounts/B26ukWUhEh8kKl0oPw/follow user=shinyoukai [error] Follower/Following counter update for https://bridge.twtxt.net/users/c350a5e5fb9d9457 failed.
14:01:35.541 path=/users/shinyoukai [error] Could not decode user at fetch https://bridge.twtxt.net/keys/bridge, :not_found
14:01:38.286 path=/users/shinyoukai/outbox [error] Could not decode user at fetch https://bridge.twtxt.net/keys/bridge, :not_found
Targeting just Mastodon will get anyone nowhere
Fusion Physicists Found a Way Around a Long-Standing Density Limit
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: At the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), physicists successfully exceeded what is known as the Greenwald limit, a practical density boundary beyond which plasmas tend to violently destabilize, often damaging reactor components. For a long time, the Greenwald limit wa … ⌘ Read more
There‘s only one Green Day. Nobody would even think of starting a band called Green Day—or they’d quickly abandon the idea. But with lesser-known bands, name conflicts are a recurring problem on streaming services.https://maurice-renck.de/en/blog/2026/there-can-only-be-one-artist
Ultimate Camouflage Tech Mimics Octopus In Scientific First
Researchers at Stanford University have created a programmable synthetic “skin” that can independently change color and texture, “a feat previously only available within the animal kingdom,” reports the Register. From the report: The technique employs electron beams to write patterns and add optical layers that create color effects. When exposed to wate … ⌘ Read more
Some Super-Smart Dogs Can Learn New Words Just By Eavesdropping
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: [I]t turns out that some genius dogs can learn a brand new word, like the name of an unfamiliar toy, by just overhearing brief interactions between two people. What’s more, these “gifted” dogs can learn the name of a new toy even if they first hear this word when the toy is out of sight – as long … ⌘ Read more
YouTube Will Now Let You Filter Shorts Out of Search Results
YouTube is updating search filters so users can explicitly choose between Shorts and long-form videos. The change also replaces view-count sorting with a new “Popularity” filter and removes underperforming options like “Sort by Rating.” The Verge reports: Right now, a filter-less search shows a mix of longform and short form videos, which can be annoying … ⌘ Read more
Lawsuit Over OpenAI For-Profit Conversion Can Head To Trial, US Judge Says
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk persuaded a judge on Wednesday to allow a jury trial on his allegations that ChatGPT maker OpenAI violated its founding mission in its high-profile restructuring to a for-profit entity. Musk was a cofounder of OpenAI in 2015 but lef … ⌘ Read more
Illinois Health Department Exposed Over 700,000 Residents’ Personal Data For Years
Illinois Department of Human Services disclosed that a misconfigured internal mapping website exposed sensitive personal data for more than 700,000 Illinois residents for over four years, from April 2021 to September 2025. Officials say they can’t confirm whether the publicly accessible data was ever viewed. TechC … ⌘ Read more
Google Is Adding an ‘AI Inbox’ To Gmail That Summarizes Emails
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Google is putting even more generative AI tools into Gmail as part of its goal to further personalize user inboxes and streamline searches. On Thursday, the company announced a new “AI Inbox” tab, currently in a beta testing phase, that reads every message in a user’s Gmail and suggests a list of to-dos a … ⌘ Read more
French Court Orders Google DNS to Block Pirate Sites, Dismisses ‘Cloudflare-First’ Defense
Paris Judicial Court ordered Google to block additional pirate sports-streaming domains at the DNS level, rejecting Google’s argument that enforcement should target upstream providers like Cloudflare first. “The blockade was requested by Canal+ and aims to stop pirate streams of Champions League game … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Turns Copilot Chats Into a Checkout Lane
Microsoft is embedding full e-commerce checkout directly into Copilot chats, letting users buy products without ever visiting a retailer’s website. “If checkout happens inside AI conversations, retailers risk losing direct customer relationships – while platforms like Microsoft gain leverage,” reports Axios. From the report: Microsoft unveiled new agentic AI tools for retailers … ⌘ Read more
Wi-Fi Advocates Get Win From FCC With Vote To Allow Higher-Power Devices
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission plans to authorize a new category of wireless devices in the 6 GHz Wi-Fi band that will be permitted to operate at higher power levels than currently allowed. The FCC will also consider authorizing higher power levels for certain wireles … ⌘ Read more
The Gap Between Premium and Budget TV Brands is Quickly Closing
The long-standing hierarchy in the TV market – Sony, Samsung and LG at the top, TCL and Hisense fighting it out in the midrange – is eroding as the budget brands close the performance gap and increasingly lead on technology innovation, The Verge writes. Hisense debuted the first RGB LED TV last year, and TCL’s X11L announced at CES 2026 … ⌘ Read more
Iran in ‘Digital Blackout’ as Tehran Throttles Mobile Internet Access
An anonymous reader shares a report: Internet access available through mobile devices in Iran appears to be limited, according to several social media accounts that routinely track such developments. Cloudflare Radar, which monitors internet traffic on behalf of the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, said on Thursday that IPv6 (Inte … ⌘ Read more
(#115861340124577669) #MusiQuinta com a pauta “músicas que viraram tatuagens de vocês, mas também valem músicas sobre tatuagem, que vocês planejem fazer tatuagem sobre, que conheçam alguém que tatuou a letra, que acha bonito ou que acha tatuável”:
Marilyn Manson - Tatooed in Reverse
I’m un-stabled, I’m not a show horse
I can’t be bridled, of course
I’m un-scabbed and un-regretted
I got tattooed in reverse
Woah, in reverse
https://marilynmanson.bandcamp.com/track/tattooed-in-reverse
‘The Downside To Using AI for All Those Boring Tasks at Work’
The promise of AI-powered workplace tools that sort emails, take meeting notes, and file expense reports is finally delivering meaningful productivity gains – one software startup reported a 20% boost around mid-2025 – but companies are discovering an unexpected tradeoff: employees are burning out from the relentless pace of high-level cognitive work.
Roge … ⌘ Read more
implemented curl, grep, jq, head & tail in javascript for my website, zsh now knows the difference between hi;hi and "hi;hi", and a bunch of documentation has been written for all that, too! i do normal people things for fun :3
TV Makers Are Taking AI Too Far
TV manufacturers at CES 2026 in Las Vegas this week unveiled a wave of AI features that frequently consume significant screen space and take considerable time to deliver results – all while global TV shipments declined 0.6% year over year in Q3, according to Omdia. Google demonstrated Veo generating video from a photo on a television, a process that took about two minutes to produce eight seconds of f … ⌘ Read more
Former Google CEO Plans To Singlehandedly Fund a Hubble Telescope Replacement
An anonymous reader shares a report: Prior to World War II the vast majority of telescopes built around the world were funded by wealthy people with an interest in the heavens above.
However, after the war, two significant developments in the mid-20th century caused the burden of funding large astronomical instrument … ⌘ Read more
Tailwind CSS Lets Go 75% Of Engineers After 40% Traffic Drop From Google
Adam Wathan, the creator of the popular CSS framework Tailwind CSS, has let go of 75% of his engineering team – reducing it from four people to one – because AI-generated search answers have decimated traffic to the project’s documentation pages.
Traffic to Tailwind’s documentation has fallen roughly 40% since early 2023 despite th … ⌘ Read more
Samsung Hit with Restraining Order Over Smart TV Surveillance Tech in Texas
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has secured a temporary restraining order against Samsung, blocking the company from continuing to collect data through its smart TVs’ Automated Content Recognition technology.
The ACR system captured screenshots of what users were watching every 500 milliseconds, according to the state’s la … ⌘ Read more
Germany’s Dying Forests Are Losing Their Ability To Absorb CO2
Germany’s Harz mountains, once known for their verdant spruce forests, have become a graveyard of skeletal trunks after a bark beetle outbreak ravaged the region starting in 2018 – an infestation made possible by successive droughts and heatwaves that fatally weakened the trees. Between 2018 and 2021, Germany lost half a million hectares of forest, n … ⌘ Read more
China Hacked Email Systems of US Congressional Committee Staff
China has hacked the emails used by congressional staff on powerful committees in the US House of Representatives, as part of a massive cyber espionage campaign known as Salt Typhoon. An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese intelligence accessed email systems used by some staffers [non-paywalled source] on the House China committee in addition … ⌘ Read more
How Did TVs Get So Cheap?
A 50-inch TV that would have set you back $1,100 at Best Buy during Black Friday 2001 now costs less than $200, and the price per area-pixel – a metric accounting for both screen size and resolution – has dropped by more than 90% over the past 25 years. The story behind this decline is largely one of liquid crystal display technology maturing from a niche product to a mass-manufactured commodity.
LCDs represente … ⌘ Read more
Disney+ To Add Vertical Videos In Push To Boost Daily Engagement
Disney+, which is looking to catch up with some streaming and digital rivals in terms of daily engagement, is adding vertical videos to the service. From a report: The arrival of the new format later this year was one of several advertising-oriented announcements the company made Wednesday at its Tech + Data Showcase at CES in Las Vegas. … ⌘ Read more
LEGO Says Smart Brick Won’t Replace Traditional Play After CES Backlash
LEGO has responded to concerns that its newly announced Smart Brick technology represents a departure from the company’s foundation in physical, non-digital play, a day after the official reveal at CES drew criticism from child development advocates. Federico Begher, SVP of Product, New Business, told IGN the sensor-packed bricks are “an a … ⌘ Read more
SteamOS Continues Its Slow Spread Across the PC Gaming Landscape
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: SteamOS’s slow march across the Windows-dominated PC gaming landscape is continuing to creep along. At CES this week, Lenovo announced it will launch a version of last year’s high-priced, high-powered Legion Go 2 handheld with Valve’s gaming-focused, Linux-based OS pre-installed starting in J … ⌘ Read more