Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Judge Orders Meta To Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting Anna’s Archive, Libgen
  2. Ukraine Claims World’s First Drone Evacuation of Wounded Soldier
  3. Sony Updates the Walkman As a $5,900 Gold-Plated MP3 Player
  4. AMD Is Bringing FSR 4.1 to Xbox Consoles and Handhelds
  5. Google Support Pages Start Defaulting to AI Chatbots
  6. DHS Lied About Why It Wanted To Search Activist’s GrapheneOS Phone
  7. OpenBSD 8.0 Released
  8. Meta Muse Exposes Users’ Personal, Business Secrets When They Share Conversations
  9. US Bans DeepSeek From Government Use
  10. Nscale, Anthropic In Talks For New $45 Billion AI Cloud Deal
  11. Microsoft Abandons UK AI Supercomputer As Grid Struggles to Keep Up
  12. Japan Launches Historic MMX Sample-Return Mission to Mars’ Moon Phobos
  13. Amazon To Fund 12 Small Nuclear Reactors At Former Indiana Coal Plant
  14. Professor Calls To Abolish Business Schools For Failing Society
  15. TP-Link Moves to Assemble Routers In the US Following Import Ban

Alterslash picks up to the best 5 comments from each of the day’s Slashdot stories, and presents them on a single page for easy reading.

Judge Orders Meta To Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting Anna’s Archive, Libgen

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak:
Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books. These logs would presumably reveal how Meta’s torrent clients were set up, including any changes to their upload settings. […] The server logs could reveal what happened on Meta’s machines. However, publisher Entrepreneur Media also wants to know who approved the torrenting activity.

Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of the related lawsuits where it accuses Meta of contributing to piracy by uploading (seeding) works to third parties, similar to the authors’ contributory infringement claim. To find out more, the publisher asked Meta to identify everyone who “made, authorized, or approved” the decisions to obtain the shadow library datasets, and to do so via BitTorrent.

Meta’s answers named several people who are believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. However, Meta said it couldn’t identify anyone who “formally” made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus, Meta argued. When it came to the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads, describing their choices as technical decisions.

Meta added that the acquisition of data from Anna’s Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024, which involved its in-house lawyers. In other words, the company didn’t name anyone higher up who approved the use of BitTorrent. “On that construction no one at Meta decided to torrent anything, yet Meta torrented shadow libraries repeatedly from 2022-2024,” Entrepreneur Media countered.
An internal Meta logbook warned that using torrents would involve sharing copyrighted material with others. “Using torrents would entail seeding the file such as sharing content outside. This would be legally not okay,” the logbook stated.
Although Meta admits downloading data from LibGen and Anna’s Archive via BitTorrent, it claims no one “made, authorized, or approved” a decision to distribute the material and that measures were taken to limit seeding. Meta’s own expert previously estimated that uploads from its AWS servers amounted to no more than roughly 30% of the data downloaded during a period in 2024.

Judge Thomas Hixson is not convinced and ordered (PDF) the company to identify everyone involved in approving the downloads, including those who decided “whether or how to seed, or to mitigate seeding.”

Ukraine Claims World’s First Drone Evacuation of Wounded Soldier

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Ukraine says it carried out the world’s first evacuation of a wounded soldier by aerial drone, using a heavy-lift hexacopter after enemy drones and landmines made conventional ground evacuation too dangerous. NBC News reports:
Shared by the 92nd Separate Assault Brigade on Monday, the video shows the soldier strapping himself into a large drone and being flown at what appears to be relatively low altitude over blurred-out territory. The drone carefully lowers him, and the drone operator greets him with “Welcome back to the ground!” The video also shows blurred faces of drone operators who carried out the mission.

The post said the unidentified infantryman was wounded at his position. “Due to intense enemy drone activity and the presence of landmines, evacuation using conventional unmanned ground vehicles was impossible,” the brigade said. “At that point, the specialists in our unit took it upon themselves to attempt something that had never been done before: evacuating a serviceman using an aerial drone,” it added.

The craft was a heavy-lift hexacopter, it said, originally designed as a bomber by a Ukrainian manufacturer. It looks about twice the size of the soldier in the video. The specialists working on the mission had to ensure the drone could carry a human being without flipping over or swaying excessively, according to the unit.

Re:2024 called : been there, done that already

By Rei • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

You do realize the difference between a controlled demo of a drone that can go a max 10 meters for a max 6 minutes in pristine conditions, and getting to a guy who’s been trapped in a concrete drainage pipe for 491 days well behind enemy lines, all rescue attempts failed, his comrades dead, constantly being shelled, one foot rotted off and fallen off, the other cut off by him, relying on random drone airdrops of supplies to stay alive, and getting out to him - again, under fire - hoisting him and his rotted legs up, and escaping under fire, maneuvering low around obstacles for cover, without him or the drone being jammed or shot down or him being shot?

You understand the difference, right? The challenge was not “make an object that can lift a weight”.

Re:We really should stop jerking Ukraine around

By Rei • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

Honestly, European defense is pretty screwed if Ukraine falls. We’d be losing a million-man veteran force with the experience in the most modern warfare on the planet, and instead Russia gaining their entire defense industry, as well as seizing their land, economy, and propagandizing to their kids and preparing to draft them into its own military - to turn all of that against other states in eastern Europe.

Sony Updates the Walkman As a $5,900 Gold-Plated MP3 Player

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Sony has revived its Walkman lineup with three Android 16-powered high-end music players ranging from $1,900 to $5,900, topped by the gold-plated NW-WM1ZM3 with 256GB of storage. The Register reports:
The Japanese giant named the new models the NW-WM1ZM3, NW-WM1AM3 and NW-ZX900. All can store and play many codecs, including MP3s, WMA, and FLAC files, plus others like Direct Stream Digital (DSD) and Apple Lossless, which use various tricks to avoid nasty artefacts accruing during the digitization process. Sony also says it has used “key components made from oxygen-free copper” because that apparently delivers “uncompromising sound quality.”

The machines also include “screws featuring a low-resistance gold-plated treatment … providing a stable ground connection that delivers powerful bass, an expansive soundstage and smooth, extended high frequencies.” Sony claims even the cabling it’s used in the devices “further reduces noise and preserves signal integrity for rich, detailed sound.” They’re also housed in carefully-milled slabs of copper — gold-plated in the case of the NW-WM1ZM3 — because that apparently improves sound, too.

And then Sony’s gone and spoiled it all by offering Bluetooth connectivity, a notorious music-mangler, in addition to wired headphone ports. Sony’s US site lists all three devices, which run Android 16 and include Wi-Fi so they can access streaming music services. All are USB-chargeable and Sony claims their batteries allow 30-odd hours of music playback.

Why?

By dgatwood • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

As far as I can tell, this is an Android phone minus the phone. It is the iPod Touch of the Android world (which Apple discontinued years ago for lack of any real-world demand beyond use as a developer test device).

Why are they building this?

The Sony NW-ZX900 digital music player pairs an aluminum-alloy main frame with a gold-plated oxygen-free copper (OFC) rear chassis.

Oh. For “audiophiles” (in the “I don’t understand how anything works, but making the back of the device out of some special kind of metal sounds like it could make the sound better, so I’ll spend thousands of dollars on it” sense of the word). Now I understand.

Oh boy!

By Bahbus • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

A device that costs a minimum 2x more than my phone, looks to be roughly 2x the size of my phone, runs the same software as my phone, but isn’t a phone… all for a negligible increase in audio quality over my phone? Zero increase if using Bluetooth?

…yeah. Not even a little bit worth the money. Take your extremely overpriced, overrated products and go fuck yourself Sony.

Do people still remember “oxygen-free copper”?

By pla • • Score: 3 • Thread
“Key components made from oxygen-free copper” are irrelevant to “uncompromising [digital] sound quality”.

“Screws featuring a low-resistance gold-plated treatment” are irrelevant to “providing a stable ground connection that delivers powerful [digital] bass, an expansive [digital] soundstage and smooth, extended [digital] high frequencies”.

“Carefully-milled slabs of copper” are irrelevant to “improved [digital] sound”.

C’mon Sony, do better! At least in the analog world nobody could disprove the audiophiles’ ridiculous superstitions. Digital, however, is either mathematically flawless, or fundamentally broken by design. There is no “better” or “worse” - Well, at least not until you run it over Bluetooth, which takes all of the above as a challenge to make it worse.

Losers In This Thread

By SlashbotAgent • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

The losers in this thread don’t even know what this is. This is an epic release from Sony.

This Walkman combined with a nice set of $8,000 high oxygen copper low electron bias wired ear buds gives some of the most authentic audio reproduction available today. At any price.

Of course the tone deaf losers here are going to be clueless and complain about the price. LOL! IFYKYK

Reasonable amount to spend

By OrangeTide • • Score: 3 • Thread

On a used motorcycle. Which is both more fun, more practical, and more likely to help you impress the sex of your preference.

AMD Is Bringing FSR 4.1 to Xbox Consoles and Handhelds

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
AMD is expanding its FSR 4.1 upscaling technology beyond Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs to Xbox Series X/S consoles, Xbox Ally handhelds, laptops, and Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards. The Verge reports:
AMD launched its FSR 4.1 update for Radeon RX 9000-series graphics cards in March, and promised to bring the technology to older GPUs and handhelds this year. FSR 4.1 can improve performance in more than 300 supported games, including Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield 6, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

[…] While owners of Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs and Gorgon Halo- or Strix Halo-powered devices will get FSR 4.1 today with the latest Adrenalin Edition 26.10.1 drivers, Xbox console owners will have to wait a little longer. “We’ve worked very closely with AMD to optimize this technology, giving developers another powerful tool for great performance and visual quality for players,” says Xbox CTO Scott Van Vilet.

Anything less would be a disappointment…

By ffkom • • Score: 3 • Thread
… given that 6 years ago, when the Xbox series was introduced, they specifically touted its “AI” computation (8-bit integer) support in hardware, unlike the PS5, which has no such support - but already enjoys “QSSR” upscaling.

Google Support Pages Start Defaulting to AI Chatbots

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Google is beginning to replace traditional support articles with “Ask Google Help,” a Gemini-powered interface that summarizes documentation and lets users troubleshoot through a chatbot. 9to5Google reports:
"Ask Google Help" will display a condensed version of the support article with direct troubleshooting steps, with the user then able to type in queries to have Gemini help figure out the next step forward. A “View Sources” button at the bottom of the AI response allows users to still access the original article, but direct links to any of these articles now defaults to the AI experience.

An example can be seen below on the "Secure a hacked or compromised Google account” page that Google’s own support account directed users to within the past few days. It can also be seen on the "Fix common issues with 2-Step Verification" page and, as far as we can tell, any support pages on the Google Account Help forum.

Google, as of right now, appears to only be testing this on select support topics. The Google Pixel Help section, for instance, still defaults to articles, whereas the Google Chrome topic has also moved to the new experience. Beyond support pages alone, this new design also impacts the central hub, with links to topics no longer showing by default in exchange for an AI chatbot that helps you find the relevant page.

Ok

By drinkypoo • • Score: 4, Funny • Thread

So you will go from getting no help to… Getting no help? And nothing of value was lost.

Re:Ok

By Locke2005 • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread
The economic argument is simple: providing no help while maintaining positive deniability by insisting you do have a customer service “agent”, is the cheapest way of providing pretend customer service!

It Is Indeed Terrible

By SlashbotAgent • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

In an alternate universe, the human agent would have answered the phone and then solved the issue.

No voice prompts. No AI. No AI “boss”. No wasted time. No frustration. No aneurysm.

DHS Lied About Why It Wanted To Search Activist’s GrapheneOS Phone

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
New court records reportedly show that DHS targeted Stop Cop City activist Samuel Tunick at an Atlanta airport because he was under investigation for suspected “terrorist activities.” However, the CBP officers told him instead that they wanted to search his phone for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Tunick, who is not accused of terrorism or any other crime beyond allegedly wiping his GrapheneOS phone during the encounter, faces up to five years in prison. 404 Media reports:
Instead of saying he was being targeted for suspected terrorism — although this search happened just at the start of the second Trump administration, it has dramatically broadened what organizations or people may be considered such — they said they needed his phone to look for “kiddie p*rn.” “Good afternoon,” an email sent from a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) official, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to CBP and other officials reads. “The following subject is scheduled to arrive in ATL [Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport] today via DL 1778 @ 1930 Hours. TUNICK is under investigation by HSI/JTTF for suspected terrorist activities.” The email includes a photo of Tunick, and asks the officials to direct him to secondary inspection, retain all of his electronics, and collect their passcodes.

As 404 Media first revealed in December, Tunick was charged because he allegedly “did knowingly destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, and otherwise take any action to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel cellular phone, for the purpose of preventing and impairing the Government’s lawful authority to take said property into its custody and control.” Matthew Dodge, one of Tunick’s lawyers, previously told 404 Media he only found one other case using the same obscure law, a drug trafficking case. “This is extraordinarily rare,” Dodge said.

Tunick was part of the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, which broadly protested the building of a large police training center, and which authorities investigated for arson, vandalism, and doxing. Tunick is not suspected of any crime beyond the alleged wiping of the phone, and has previously put his current prosecution in the context of the wide spanning cases against other Stop Cop City protesters. The newly filed court record, in which Tunick’s lawyers argue that evidence should be thrown out, include new photos and descriptions of the airport encounter. The CBP officials asked Tunick if they were going to find “kiddie p*rn” on his phone, which Tunick immediately denied.
“As the evidentiary hearing made clear, these unfounded accusations were nothing more than pretext for a fishing expedition into the depths of Mr. Tunick’s devices,” the lawyers wrote. They added, “Officer Findley acknowledged that officers had no reason whatsoever to believe Mr. Tunick possessed child p*rnography,” referring to one of the officials.

They are explicitly allowed to lie

By drinkypoo • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

Even when not undercover, police are not just allowed to lie, they are encouraged to do so in training.

That’s how you know they don’t work for us.

Re: anyone can be searched on entry

By UnknowingFool • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
Your person and luggage can be searched without a warrant; however, seizure is limited to specific things. Contraband, food, etc. There are conflicting federal court rulings as to whether devices can be searched without a warrant. In this case, DHS was arguing that they did not need a warrant because Turnick was not under investigation yet they knew to search him because he was under investigation.

Lying

By Archangel Michael • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Police are allowed to lie during an investigation.

This is the end of the conversation. All interactions ought to be considered suspect from the beginning.

“I don’t consent. I want a lawyer. I invoke my rights to remain silent”.

Then STFU. You don’t have to say anything, or do anything other than provide ID. The contents of the phone are important, then it will go into a tamper resistant chain of custody bag and sealed. If they can crack it, great, then they’ll have to answer for that if they didn’t get court search warrant. Let your lawyer protect you. You have no chance by yourself. Hence STFU.

Re:anyone can be searched on entry

By thegarbz • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

Being searched is not the same as taking lawful possession of something of yours. This has been analysed to death already, the DHS is very likely to lose this case as they rely on an obscure law that actually requires a very specific set of conditions to apply. A generic search of you or your possessions fails the criteria for lawful possession and therefor tampering with your stuff that is being searched doesn’t fall afoul of this law.

Now if the department had a specific warrant detailing that they needed to take the device because it contained specific materials, that would be a different matter. But if they did have that then this case would be over already.

Re:anyone can be searched on entry

By MachineShedFred • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

Searched, yes.

Siezed, no.

And no law forces you to give up evidence against yourself without a warrant - in fact we even have a whole Constitutional amendment about that. If they want hair / blood samples, that requires a warrant. Why do you think that forcing someone to unlock their phone would not?

OpenBSD 8.0 Released

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
OpenBSD 8.0 has been released with major virtualization and hardware upgrades, including support for up to 64 vCPUs per VM, Intel Arc graphics, ARM64 hibernation, and expanded RISC-V support. Linuxiac points out that it marks the "61st release of the security-focused Unix-like operating system.” From the report:
Several fixes improve compatibility with 32-bit Linux guests, while changes to virtual machine ownership management and interrupt emulation make the virtualization infrastructure more capable. Graphics support has also been upgraded, with DRM drivers updated to those from Linux kernel 6.18.53. Notably, OpenBSD 8.0 adds support for Intel Arc A-Series (Alchemist) graphics cards through the inteldrm driver.

Another important change increases the amd64 kernel’s virtual address space from 4 GB to 512 GB, allowing the system to map over 4 GB of video memory. The release also addresses GPU timeout issues affecting some Intel Alder Lake systems. […] For security, OpenBSD 8.0 adds checks and fixes across the kernel and system utilities, including improvements to pledge and unveil, tighter validation of executable files, and protections against memory corruption and information disclosure.
A full list of changes can be found here.

Further reading: Wine Ported to OpenBSD

Re:wow

By bmajik • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

They didn’t support SMP for a long time either.

OpenBSD tends to lag behind most OSes in “workstation quality of life” features, whereas they tend to be world-leading on unambiguous specs, and code correctness. (And man pages, IMO)

Their excellent security reputation is well deserved, and is downstream of their priorities… which I would describe as “skeptical of shiny new things with ambiguous semantics”

Why switchh?

By JustAnotherOldGuy • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

I always ask “What might be some compelling features that would make me interested in switching to OpenBSD from another distro?”

So, what does OpenBSD offer that would be of benefit for users to switch over to it?

Re:Why switchh?

By ArchieBunker • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

So, what does OpenBSD offer that would be of benefit for users to switch over to it?

It starts out with a minimal amount of packages. You don’t have a dozen half assed text editors or file managers. You add pieces as you need them. Plus the documentation is top notch and always up to date. How do you set an ip address in linux using the command line? Is it ifconfig, ip, connman, netplan, or whatever systemd cooked up this week.

It’s how linux used to be in the 90s.

Re: Why switchh?

By Viol8 • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

Try slackware linux. Non of that systemd trojan horse crap, just plain init, and a relatively sane amount of packages.

Re:Why switchh?

By Arrogant-Bastard • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
1. Security
2. Security
3. Security
OpenBSD’s maintainers are focused on security because they recognize that if you can’t compute securely…you can’t compute. They’re (relatively) quick to remove code, (relatively) slow to add code, because — as we’ve learned — this is just about always the path to improved security.

4. Simplicity. The base OpenBSD install is small and runs efficiently on minimal hardware: I have a test system that’s over 20 years old and it just hums along with each new version. Of course you can add any of thousands of packages, but they’re not cluttering up everything by default. Note that this minimal install is also aligned with security: “ps” on base install doesn’t show much running and ‘netstat -a” doesn’t show much listening. Contrast with many contemporary Linux distributions that install and run all kinds of things by default.

5. Firewall. OpenBSD’s “pf” is the best firewall available, period. it’s easy to configure (uses text files), easy to maintain, runs well with minimal CPU and memory, and in almost all cases, is only bandwidth-limited by the speed of the network interfaces.

6. Robustness. OpenBSD continues to stay functional in situations that would lock up or just crash other distributions. A few months ago, one of my systems was hit with a novel DoS attack that pushed the load average over 40; that system was still responsive at the command line and I was able to squelch the attack…and then everything just went back to normal. No reboot necessary. Of course that’s how everything should work but it’s not how most things really work.

7. Stability. While of course there are occasionally flag days on which old things stop working, for the most part, OpenBSD is very stable. Code that you compiled and ran on OpenBSD 5.7 is highly likely to compile and run on OpenBSD 8.0. Yes, there are scattered exceptions to this — but worth noting is that some of those aren’t the fault of OpenBSD, they’re the fault of bad code.

8. FAST response to security issues. If something turns up, OpenBSD developers drop everything and deal with it. Fixes show up quickly, even to obscure bugs that are difficult to exploit or for which there is no known exploit.

The closest thing to OpenBSD in the Linux world is Slackware (and I run it on a few systems). But as good as it is…it’s not OpenBSD.

Meta Muse Exposes Users’ Personal, Business Secrets When They Share Conversations

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Security researchers say Meta’s Muse AI assistant exposed thousands of users’ shared conversations because conversation titles were placed in subdomains that could be discovered through public DNS records. Meta has since suspended the sharing feature while it considers making changes. Ars Technica reports:
Like many online services, Muse has allowed users to share searches, conversations, images, and similar content with other people. Such share features usually involve clicking an option to create a unique URL that anyone can use to load a page hosting the content. To keep potentially sensitive information from being accessible to unintended people, the URLs typically contain a long sequence of text that can’t be easily guessed.

Muse, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month was “built from the ground up for privacy and security,” seems to take the same precautions. But a central design decision for constructing URLs has made the links easy to discover. As a result, researchers from security firm Claroc said they were able to enumerate 6,800 links Muse users created for sharing conversations with others. After opening a few hundred of them, the researchers found information that was clearly not intended to be publicly available… […]. “If you had asked us beforehand, we would have guessed that gathering these would take real effort,” the researchers wrote. “It took one query.”

[…] The easiest way to discover the URLs is to perform a passive DNS search through one of many available commercial services. Passive DNS records store the historical resolution of domain names to IP addresses, as well as nameserver, and mail-server records over time. Passive DNS systems typically collect DNS responses from sensors positioned at recursive DNS resolvers or other infrastructure. A passive DNS record is generally created when a monitoring system observes a DNS response. In the case here, once the intended party clicks on the share link, the DNS information is recorded in a searchable database.

Claroc researchers were able to discover the Muse share links because all of them use the domain name cf.metaaiusercontent.com. Discovery is further made easy by the decision to add the conversation name to the URL, along with a long string of text. Simplified examples of such links are home-sale-budget-9f21c8a3.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, and loan-application-draft-a4c9e2.cf.metaaiusercontent.com. It’s this last design decision, putting the conversation title in the subdomain rather than in the URL path, that makes public discovery possible.

Re:Move fast,

By Locke2005 • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread
I’ve worked for Meta. I couldn’t get anything done quickly, because every system I needed to move quickly was broken!

Makes no difference to me

By Locke2005 • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
I’ve never trusted that beady-eyed bastard in the first place, and I’m never going to start trusting. Remember, Meta’s entire business model is based on selling your personal data to advertisers!

MetaZuckerberg and etcâ¦

By FudRucker • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread
That all the marketing points about privacy and security is a lie, your data is not safe with that scumbag and his websites

Never Meta!

By JKanoock • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread
All the AI companies are shady as hell but Meta takes the cake. Why do people continue to believe Zuck and friends? They have been shown, time and time again, to ignore privacy in the place of profits, people are fools.

US Bans DeepSeek From Government Use

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
The Trump administration has banned DeepSeek AI from most US civilian federal agencies, ordering the removal of the Chinese company’s models and technology developed using them. The Department of Homeland Security did not specify the security threats behind the decision. The BBC reports:
The order (PDF) is broad, as it requires agencies to ditch “all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations.” Complying will be tricky as it is not clear which third-party products and services have been developed using DeepSeek’s wares. Nor is it clear whether “developed using” means providing ongoing access to DeepSeek models via API or simply refers to any app vibe-coded with the help of DeepSeek.

It also leaves open the question of AI gateways. Services such as OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway make DeepSeek’s models available through APIs. And those using gateway services may find themselves using DeepSeek models without meaning to do so. OpenRouter, for example, “routes requests to the best available providers for your model.” It selects what the service deems to be the best fit provider of AI services. Vercel AI Gateway does the same by default. So federal civilian agencies could be using DeepSeek models inadvertently, if they haven’t taken steps to constrain their AI providers.

This is fine but still, what a mess

By jacks smirking reven • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Why would this have been getting use with Federal Agencies already? Seems like the Federal government has been left to be the wild west in terms of what AI systems to use and how to use them. Have we been letting agencies use a Chinese developed AI system for the better part of a year?

Glad our supposedly pro-AI (ahem, sorry, “Super Intelligence”, don’t want to get black bagged here) has not a plan in place for any of this. If only they knew about this thing called “Congress” and that they can pass these things called “laws”. Oh well, maybe in a couple years we can unearth that lost knowledge.

That’s right!

By dmomo • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

We don’t want China to have access to government information. We reserve that strictly for mega corps.

Re:This is fine but still, what a mess

By Kernel Kurtz • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Why would this have been getting use with Federal Agencies already?

Pretty good question. Thing to do now is: see who complains and start watching them.

Because smart people use the best tool for the job. And this administration is very afraid of smart people.

trust US US AI ?

By sit1963nz • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread
Should the world trust US AI ?

NO, which is why the EU is pulling all their tech needs back into sovereign ownership

The “off switch” has already been used when the Fat man did not get his peace prize, so the risk is real.
The “off switch” also go used against Ukraine, again the WH demand.

Nscale, Anthropic In Talks For New $45 Billion AI Cloud Deal

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters:
Nscale is in talks to sell AI computing power to Claude maker Anthropic in a new deal that could be worth about $45 billion, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday. The data center developer is seeking another major deal with the AI lab for a second facility at its Monarch data center campus in West Virginia, the person said. In August, Anthropic struck a deal to spend $45 billion to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale’s West Virginia data center campus. A second Monarch building would deliver 460 megawatts of computing power using Nvidia’s advanced Vera Rubin AI chips, according to the source. […] According to the Nscale prospectus, Microsoft and Anthropic are expected to be the company’s major customers in the future.
Further reading: Microsoft Abandons UK AI Supercomputer As Grid Struggles to Keep Up

Re:More compute is not needed

By nightflameauto • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

I don’t understand that instead of spending a few million on improving the code and the algorithmd they are instead spending billions on infrastructure? Is this all a racket? It makes no sense. Even I can help them optimise so they don’t need this (it’s what I am doing in my job anyhow), but it seems like there’s something else going on that we are not supposed to know…?

The optimistic (fantasy) view: They hope the hardware will be useful for something else when a sea-change optimization happens in the AI world.

The pessimistic (realist) view: Everybody involved from the tech bros to the investors are so busy sniffing their own and each other’s farts that they can’t be bothered to look at reality and are instead letting the vapor trail suck them up into the stratosphere with zero protections or parachutes, because even the few left with an eye toward reality have a firm belief that the government will throw the public under them to protect them when they inevitably fall from their lofty heights. What’s really sad is? They have plenty of reasons to believe it. It’s happened before when big ideas failed. It’ll likely happen again. And the more of the economy they can suck into the scheme before the inevitable “correction” comes along, the more sure they can be that they’ll get that sweet, sweet bailout relief at the expense of everybody else.

Re:More compute is not needed

By Fly Swatter • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
All this AI ‘success’ is more about the ability to massively scale up processing hardware and storage than it is about developing a better mousetrap. The models only ever get bigger needing more RAM. The distilled ‘economy’ versions suck by comparison.

This is a hoarding situation on the part of AI datacenters.

At this point I would consider the current hardware availability situation a national emergency and regulate that some share of the hardware production be required to go to anything not having to do directly with an AI customer. Specifically RAM.

anyone turning this into a political discussion please just don’t.

Microsoft Abandons UK AI Supercomputer As Grid Struggles to Keep Up

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Microsoft has reportedly abandoned plans to serve as the anchor customer for Britain’s largest proposed AI supercomputer after learning that the project’s Essex data center might not receive sufficient grid power until the early to mid-2030s. “Its departure leaves Nscale without a publicly announced customer for the site, although the neocloud insists the project is still going ahead,” reports The Register. From the report:
When the deal was announced in September 2025, the plan was to pack 23,040 Nvidia GB300 GPUs into a 50MW facility, with room to expand to 90MW. Microsoft would use the computing power for its Azure cloud services, with the first chips expected in early 2027. One important detail remained: how to power it.

As The Guardian reported last month, UK Power Networks warned Nscale that the grid capacity needed might not be available until the 2030s. A UK Power Networks spokesperson told The Register it could not discuss individual connections due to obligations under Section 105 of the Utilities Act. “However, in general, many datacenters, whilst they can connect to our distribution network, are awaiting works on the national transmission network which we do not own,” the spokesperson said.

Nscale, meanwhile, isn’t letting the small matter of losing its biggest customer dampen its enthusiasm. “We remain committed to both the Loughton project and the UK and we are exploring alternative power sources for the site, in addition to other expansion sites in the UK. Our relationship with Microsoft remains strong and long-term, and this unfortunate London-wide grid issue has no impact on our other contracts,” Nscale told The Register.

FAKE NEWS

By haruchai • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

some very fine people assured us fears of grid strain by datacenters are nothing but FUD by Luddites

Re:FAKE NEWS

By Zocalo • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
That’s over simplifying things a bit, but yeah, we have fundamental infrastructure issues in the UK with any proposed mass rollout of AI DCs. While we do have surplus generating capacity, to the point that we occasionally need to pay people to use it, and more generating/storage capacity (especially local domestic, which frees up baseload capacity for industrial uses) is being added all the time, there are some other more fundamental UK issues. Firstly, the national power distribution grid is in need of some serious upgrades to support some of this. The South West in particular is on a very thin high tension thread that currently has insufficient capacity for the the planned relocation of the UK’s nuclear deterrent subs to Devonport and associated growth, for instance. Secondly, and this seldom gets mentioned in the context of all these new AI DCs that are being planned or the “shouty kids/let’s save water” adverts currently being run, is that we have some severe water supply pressures as a result of climate change combined with a decades long lack of investment in new reservoirs and upgrading leaky Victorian era distribution networks. Care which part of the country is currently experiencing the brunt of a “once in several decades (but is now expected to happen every few years)" severe drought event? Yup, it’s the home counties, where most of the planned DCs are supposedly going to get built!

Those all have technical/construction solutions though, the third does not, and that is that the home counties in particular are notorious for the NIMBYism, although they are far from alone in that - just a few days ago a massive planned solar/storage facility in Scotland got pushed back, and possibly nixed, because of it. Sure, there are totally valid arguments against concreting over large expanses of what is currently greenbelt to some extent, even before you get to water/power shortages, pollution (including noise), additional traffic, and all the other impacts, but there have to be some limits. One solution I like for this (albeit not without some quite complex zoning issues due to suitable areas for building supply not being equal to where the supply is needed) is to make supply, or cost of supply, proportionate to acceptance of local capacity build outs. If you want your power to be generated in someone else’s backyard, then you’ll pay more for the privilege while they get a rebate. If you object to that proposed new local reservoir, then you don’t get to complain if you need to start buying potable water in bulk during the next drought. If, as in the case of DCs, you are putting in disproportionately high demands for supply, then you either pay - up front - for a suitable proportion of the required upgrades, or commit to some other form of reimbursement with suitable early termination clauses if you want a longer timescale.

Then again, this *could* just be Microsoft wriggling off the hook because they’re starting to think the AI bubble might be somewhat overinflated and therefore they might not be needing all that capacity they’ve been saying they are going to build afterall, but don’t want to start the stampede for the exits until they’re already through the door.

Re:The Register == Joke Site == Assume FAKE NEWS

By mikeymikec • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

> Do you have some evidence for your claim? Reproduction steps: - Read a story in The Register. - Note down the many factual inaccuracies. - Send them to The Register. - Report back here when the inaccuracies are fixed.

So no citation then.

The BBC is also not so good with correcting lies and misinformation, as any Trump will tell you, but I’ll take it over a joke site.

Ah yes, Donald Trump, a man well-known for his honesty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch…
https://www.factcheck.org/2020…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
https://thehill.com/homenews/a…

Bubble. Popped.

By Tailhook • • Score: 3, Interesting • Thread

Elice (South Korea) shares plunged 30% on IPO. LOL.
Firmus (Australia) abandoned its planned $5 billion IPO
AirTrunk (Singapore) postponed its REIT
Microsoft threw Nscale (UK) in the trash.

This is all this morning. The Microsoft news appeared yesterday.

Re:FAKE NEWS

By haruchai • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

storage is great but you still need generation

Japan Launches Historic MMX Sample-Return Mission to Mars’ Moon Phobos

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Japan has successfully launched its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission to study Mars’ two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Scheduled to arrive in August 2027, “MMX will become the first spacecraft to land on and return samples from Phobos for study back on Earth, which scientists think could shed light on a decades-old mystery about the moons’ origins” and resolve whether they were formed from a giant impact or were captured asteroids, reports Space.com. From the report:
It was the 10th liftoff of Japan’s expendable, two-stage H3 rocket, which was jointly developed by JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. After clearing its launch pad today, the 207-foot-tall (63 meters) launch vehicle flew a nominal trajectory through its ascent corridor over the Pacific Ocean, jettisoning its four solid boosters in pairs just before the flight clock reached two minutes. The rocket shed its payload fairings about one minute and 20 seconds later, exposing MMX to the vacuum of space for the first time. […] MMX is now under its own power, and on course for Mars.

The interplanetary transit will last about 10 months, with the spacecraft scheduled to arrive at the Red Planet in August 2027. When it does, MMX’s propulsion module will execute an orbital insertion burn to place itself in a quasi-satellite orbit (QSO) around Phobos, which places MMX within the space around the moon as both circle Mars. MMX will spend about three years in the Martian system, devoting much of that time to studying the 14-mile-wide (22 km) Phobos with its science instruments. The spacecraft also carries the IDEFIX rover, a joint effort of the space agencies of France and Germany, which is scheduled to deploy to the surface of Phobos in late 2028 or early 2029.

After a mapping campaign to select suitable landing sites, MMX will perform two separate touchdowns on Phobos to collect and stow samples in the spacecraft’s return capsule. Following its second landing and sample collection, MMX will briefly return to QSO with Phobos before transferring to a more elongated orbit around Mars that intersects with the planet’s smaller moon, Deimos, which is just 8 miles (14 km) in diameter. During the last several months of its time around Mars, MMX will perform a series of Deimos flybys before departing for Earth in November 2030. If all goes according to plan, the MMX sample-return capsule will land in Australia in 2031.
You can watch a recording of the launch on YouTube.

Sorry to say it, but MMX will fail

By backslashdot • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

What if the conditions on Phobos require it to float at various points? MMX can’t do floating at any point, and so they’ll have to wait for the American Micro Devices that can do it and copy that and SSEnd those instead.

Re: Sorry to say it, but MMX will fail

By Quakeulf • • Score: 4, Funny • Thread

The overall instruction set will be good enough for a flythrough… of a castle.

Re:Sorry to say it, but MMX will fail

By Mr. Dollar Ton • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

I’ve chainsawed more than one imp with MMX present, no worries.

Too late ?

By greytree • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread
It now be called the MMXXVI probe, shurely ?

Re:Sorry to say it, but MMX will fail

By evanh • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

More likely an age thing. Someone born in the last 30 years isn’t likely to know. But then someone born in the last 30 years probably has never seen Slashdot either.

Amazon To Fund 12 Small Nuclear Reactors At Former Indiana Coal Plant

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch:
Amazon is funding development of a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Indiana and would be the first customer to buy its power, the companies announced Monday. Utility company American Electric Power (AEP) would operate the plant. X-energy, which designs small modular nuclear reactors and went public in April, would supply the reactors. The new power plant would consist of 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors and be located on the site of a demolished coal power plant just south of Terre Haute. The deal is the second commercial agreement between Amazon and X-energy, and it’s three times larger than the first, which was announced two years ago.

Amazon has invested heavily in X-energy, leading a $700 million Series C-1 round in October 2024. The two companies have said they ultimately plan to build 5 gigawatts of new nuclear generating capacity in the U.S. by 2039. Unlike many newly announced power plants, these reactors would be connected to the public electric grid, though Amazon says the power would also serve its data centers.

The companies’ aggressive timeline still depends on X-energy successfully delivering its first power plant at a Dow Chemical plant southeast of Houston, Texas. The site, called Seadrift, has recently been at the center of a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas, which accuses the plant of “habitual non-compliance” with water and solid-waste regulations and permits. X-energy has yet to break ground at Seadrift, which will host four Xe-100 reactors to provide the chemical plant with heat and electricity. The company said its construction permit is in the final phases of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s review process.

I’m honestly torn…

By jenningsthecat • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

On the one hand, the power generated may offset the CO2 emitted to build the plant, and then possibly offset even more CO2 by preventing other fossil-fuel plants from being built. Gaining experience with SMRs could be critical for the survival of our civilization.

On the other hand, I trust neither Amazon nor private utility companies. This kind of project belongs in the public sector, and for the public good, not under the control of billionaires as another scheme for extracting wealth from the people they consider to be expendable nobodies. Also, a proliferation of nuclear power has its own risks. And I’m sure we can find better uses for the power than more fscking data centres.

I guess I’d be cautiously in favour of the SMR plan if it was for the public good and not for the good of Bezos and his buds. But as it is, I hope the whole thing falls flat. We need to stop handing power - both political and electrical - to the parasite class. It’s time to start shutting these fuckers down.

Bezos doing atomics

By Rosco P. Coltrane • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

What can go wrong?

I wonder if the control room technicians will be allowed bathroom breaks…

Re:Bezos doing atomics

By Waffle Iron • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

****1/2 “Customers say that this is a great small modular nuclear reactor. They like the compact size and the fact that it’s not too much power for a data center or industrial site. They especially appreciate the ease of setup and that the ultimate waste disposal question has been deferred yet again so that they don’t have to worry about it. However, some customers report problems with cost overruns, vaporware, and availability of suitable fuel. Some customers note a larger terrorist attack surface per megawatt relative to full-sized reactors and question the security arrangements. There are also reports of real-world reliability problems with the novel design, with one customer reporting a catastrophic meltdown in their urban installation.”

Re:Bezos doing atomics

By shilly • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

This is overstated. According to X-energy’s regulatory disclosures, the Xe-100 has four main operator-controlled variables: control rod position, He circulator operation, feedwater pump operation, and turbine throttle valve position. It’s more automated than older plants, but not completely automated, and older plants are also quite automated. It does use more passive safety features, though. And of course, it’s not actually been built yet, so it’s all theoretical at this stage.

Re:What if…

By shilly • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

That’s the theory, but it’s not the practice. They are taking just as long as large reactors. In some senses longer, because none has actually been put into commercial operation, whereas new large reactors have come online. And they turn out to have very little actual modularity and scalability, because there’s more than 150 designs out there, so no-one is winning enough of the market for repeatable learnings, and anyway, you’ll never get to volume manufacturing for the parts involved, because the quantities are just too small, and everything still requires literal nuclear-grade engineering.

Take a motor-operated isolator valve that you’d find in a cooling system. You find plenty of these outside SMR applications, often 4 to 6 inch sizes, and they might cost something like 3 to 10k USD in a typical demanding industrial application. But they will cost more like 30 to 100k USD in an SMR, because they need to be made from nuclear-grade materials with documented material traceability, need seismic qualification, need nuclear-specific quality assurance, inspection and documentation, and need highly secure supply chains (no-one wants a counterfeit component showing up in a nuclear safety system). And they won’t get much cheaper, because of strict configuration control, which limits the extent of any changes to components, materials and manufacturing processes.

It’s also important to recognise that the economies of learning that apply afe fundamentally different and more limited for construction projects, which is what every SMR is, than for component manufacturing. That reflects the facts that (1) different places have different ground conditions, seismic risk, regulatory requirements, humidity, water access, etc, etc, and (2) huge amounts of stuff still have to be constructed on site by humans (even if assisted by machines), compared with a factory line that can be automated. This is still a problem even for solar, where the panels themselves can be cheap compared to the install costs, which is why there are various attempts being made to turn more of the deployment into a manufactured process rather than a construction process. Eg https://5b.co/en/5b-maverick

Professor Calls To Abolish Business Schools For Failing Society

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
joshuark writes:
Professor Christopher Marquis makes a provocative argument about business schools: “We need to abolish them.” A 20-year business educator at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge, Marquis argues in The New York Times and on LinkedIn that MBA programs sanctify profit-driven dealmaking at the expense of public life. “That’s not the institution failing,” he writes. “Sadly, it’s the institution working.”
“Business school doesn’t just hand out skills and a network,” argues Marquis, “it quietly reshapes how people see the world, rewarding dealmaking, simplification, and optimization for financial metrics, while workers and communities become afterthoughts.”
Marquis points to research suggesting that business-school-trained CEOs often benefit shareholders at the expense of workers, without delivering measurable improvements in company performance… "[W]hen a business-school-trained CEO takes over a firm, wages fall and labor’s share of income drops, with no gain in productivity,” writes Marquis. “In both the U.S. and Denmark, what passes for the ‘managerial skill’ of business-school graduates turns out to be a transfer of wealth away from workers and toward shareholders. Students deserve better than a machine that narrows their sense of what’s possible.”

Re:Building wealth

By Required Snark • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
When you say “We live in a capitalistic society that builds wealth” your are using “we” to exclude people. Your “we” explicitly excludes at least the lower 50% of the US population. Besides not having the option of owning a home, which was doable for a lot of people in the post WW2 era, many people don’t have any retirement savings except Social Security. And there are also far too many Americans who are a paycheck or two away from homeliness. People are buying groceries on credit, which is insane.

Even though you won’t admit it, your position has the direct effect of condemning millions of people of poverty and an early death. The population in the socialist Europe has a better life experience and increasing life expectancy while the US is falling behind. (That is an actual fact so I’m sure it makes you uncomfortable, and you may even try to refute it. I’ve had others of your ilk on Slashdot ask me to prove IRL facts. Do your homework and don’t spread lies.)

You are benefiting from the current corrupt system and you literally don’t care if people are dying in the street, as long as doesn’t happen in front of you. That’s what your professing when you end by saying “but don’t change capitalism”.

The IRL factual information supporting my position is the graph of the distribution of wealth in the US post 1950. Around the time of Regan the fortunes of normal humans started to go down while the (literal) fortunes of the rich started climbing. Follow the money: for over 50 years there has been a transfer of wealth from the bottom and middle to the top.

(Since you people are so predictable I will reference the riots in France. They have riots every so often, and so do we. However the ongoing daily violence in both urban and rural America dwarfs any similar activity in even the poorer parts of Europe. The statistics on IRL violence, including homicide, are undeniable. Not that that will effect your position.)

Sounds like …

By PPH • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

… Marquis taught at some shitty business schools. The whole point of an MBA is to teach people who are experts in other domains the details of accounting, law, contracts, and finance needed to maximize the performance (however one chooses to measure that) of an organization. If he or the rest of the faculty couldn’t put together some case studies of companies that have figured out how to balance happy customers, happy employees and happy shareholders to demonstrate such an optimization problem, he shouldn’t be teaching.

True, some of the bad apple stakeholders will take a zero sum view of the operation (every dollar the employees get is a dollar that the shareholders lose). But being a good CEO is knowing how to deal with such people. Even to the point of letting them go.

Anecdote: A big investor in Berkshire Hathaway went to visit Buffett in his Omaha office to express some concerns. After Warren met him and listened to his input, he asked how many shares the investor held. Upon being told, he turned to his secretary and said, “Cut him a check for his shares.” Then turned and walked back into his office.

Re:Yes

By jenningsthecat • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

… the concept of ‘corporation’ is for me interchangeable with the concept of ‘company’, which is literally translated into ‘group or gathering’. How you succeed in accomplishing things that require more than a few people in some other fashion is something I cannot fathom.

We don’t need “some other fashion” - we need good regulations, and we need effective enforcement of those regulations. That includes brutal fines, the occasional imprisonment of C-levels as required, and the ‘execution’ of corporations where appropriate.

The basic model is fine - people organizing in a hierarchy to work toward a common goal approved by society for its greater good. The problem is allowing predatory psychopaths to turn the operation into an anti-social wealth-extraction scheme which ends in the psychopaths holding the reins of power.

Now, how best to reverse that psychopathic tide would be the subject of several PhD theses. Too bad the fuckers at the top have already co-opted higher education. And that brings us back to the topic of TFS. Which brings ME back to the torches and pitchforks scenario I mention here fairly frequently. Because make no mistake - this IS a war.

Re: Yes

By DarkOx • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Not to defend China - its amoral indefensible blight on the planet - but the average Chinese citizen being one 1/3 as productive is not the only way the math works out. It certainly can be the case that we are not measuring productivity accurately and/or are using the wrong metrics as a proxy.

For on thing productivity is a measure of progress toward a goal, does China have the same goals we do? I am not sure “Biggest GDP” is really what Xi is after.

I think looking at Europe is good example. They are mostly capitalist but the best parts of it also using the petrol chemical cheat code. Germany is struggling, they have trouble even trying to allocate and spend their own stimulus packages. The rest of the EU make the US debt spiral situation look solvable ;-) by comparison and the bond market does not share that view.

I think you could say that hard-nosed brand of capitalism is what has carried us this far and why we don’t look like France right now. I mean seriously compare the BLM unrest, or Jan 6 (if you like) in the US to what is happening in France right now. There is no comparison, in terms of how destructive and destabilizing it is/was. Take away all the various politicking and window dressing about what is going in France right now and it boils down to - a large segment public accustomed to increasing socialism is upset the government won’t give them nicer stuff, and government that is by no-means opposed to affording people lots for entitlements pushing back on doing so because those in office recognize it isnt sustainability affordable.

The problem isn’t capitalism and it isn’t how ‘hard-nosed’ that capitalism might be it is an ownership and direction problem. Capitalism as described by someone like Adam Smith assumes self interest but it assumed the owner of the capital would be in control of it. That is if you are the owner of a company you want it to continue to grow for at-least-your-life-time but probably that of your children and grand children. Today the CEO is employee and the owners are largely inactive shareholders (they don’t vote on much, read board meeting records etc) they are not interested in how the company will perform 20 years from now they are ONLY interested at most in how it will perform between now and maybe the next dividend date. The CEO is only interested in the current quarter and perhaps next, he does not plan to be there longer than 18mons in anycase and is perfectly happy to move on if the quarterly bonus are not fat.

Ross Perot tried to explain this to the public when he said ‘Giant Sucking Sound’. Anyone with a brain could see ‘trade modernization’ was going to create massive windfalls for ownership short term as the divested expensive American workers, real-estate, and regulatory environments and bought cheap labor in Mexico and further afield; but anyone with a brain could see what that was going to mean 30 years on.. Well here we are. An America that can’t make things, and I don’t think has bright economic future at all, unless we make some PAINFUL choices today to course correct. Because guess what AI datacenters dont care where they are at and models/IP will always be stolen by whoever wants it enough. In the end you have to make things - physical things - people want.

Re:my experience among the apes

By fropenn • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

you just described literally every university degree in every country ever

I hang around students in the helping professions all the time. As people with empathy and concern for the fellow humans, they find the behavior described above (which is not atypical of the psychopath business students) gross and cringey.

Let’s not normalize anti-social behavior.

TP-Link Moves to Assemble Routers In the US Following Import Ban

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot
TP-Link plans to begin assembling routers in Mississippi as early as 2027 after the FCC banned imports of new foreign-made consumer routers over security concerns. Engadget reports:
The company has signed a letter of intent with manufacturer Key Tronic and, pending approval from regulators, TP-Link says stateside assembly of its routers could start at a Mississippi production line as soon as early 2027.

Once things are up and running, Wi-Fi 8 routers are expected to be among the first TP-Link products that Key Tronic assembles. TP-Link claims that the agreement is part of its “long-term effort to accelerate US investment in high-tech manufacturing and job creation, designing and assembling next-generation products for American consumers here on American soil.”

The company said it will still have to source components from outside the US. “Many [components] are just not available from a domestic source, and this is not a TP-Link issue,” TP-Link’s corporate affairs officer Steve Kovsky told PC Mag. “This is an issue for all manufacturers that are trying to onshore manufacturing.”

So, a $0.50 step at the very end?

By gweihir • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Yeah, great win. Probably will charge customers $10 more for that “Assembled in the USA!” line on the box.

Multiplier effect to wages paid to a worker.

By drnb • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
If a factory opens in a less prosperous state isn’t that a good thing? Keep in mind that there is a multiplier effect to wages paid to a worker. That worker will in turn spend money locally that helps support additional jobs. That factory sounds like a way to help a region reduce poverty.

Re:So, a $0.50 step at the very end?

By rsilvergun • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
Also modern factory automation means that I won’t be any jobs. Go look up stuff like how the old steam controller is assembled. The Gundam factory is pretty crazy too there’s like three people that are responsible for manufacturing every single Gundam model kit on the planet.

Years ago I remember a sleeping bag company going out of business because they couldn’t compete with the larger companies. But at their peak they made something like a third of the sleeping bag sold in the country and they did that with technology from maybe 20 years ago and about 120 or 130 employees.

We should be talking more about how automation has hollowed out the middle class but I don’t think anyone has a solution for it. It would be one thing if magic machines automated all the work away but that’s not what they did. A shitload of jobs have been automated but a lot of people still need to work. But we are rapidly approaching the time when we have a large population of people for who there is absolutely no useful work. At the same time there’s a population of people who we really do need to do work and there isn’t a lot of overlap between the two. The people whose jobs got replaced by machines aren’t really capable of doing all that much more. They didn’t suddenly become super genius mathematicians or doctors or something.

So we’re going to basically have a rather nasty fight between a shitload of people who we don’t have any place for in society and a shitload of people who are needed to do what work is left. And I do not see how that fight resolves itself especially with the Epstein class egging both sides on

Cybersecurity or bringing a few jobs stateside?

By Zero__Kelvin • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) banned imports of new, foreign-made consumer wireless routers due to severe national security, supply chain, and cybersecurity risks. They already say that they will need to import components. Furthermore, is sounds like they are just assembling the devices here, not manufacturing them. Are they importing the PCBs then just putting them into other imported boxes here? Surely nobody would think that doing this somehow mitigates in any way any “cybersecurity risk”. I’m not against creating a few jobs in the US, but let’s not try to claim this has anything to do with cybersecurity. This may create a few jobs, but won’t mitigate any risk, and will likely cost citizens more while TP-Link increases its profits on our backs as we pay extra for that “Made in America” sticker.

Forklift drivers will get offshored

By rsilvergun • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread
Just like taxi cab drivers will. Internet is fast enough now that you can pilot vehicles remotely.

A very small number of jobs requiring physical presence will continue to exist but they will pay very very little because there will be so many desperate people fighting for the small amount of work that is left. It’s supply and demand and there’s a huge supply of labor and did not much demand.

We could create more demand through government spending but good fucking walk with that. Because we allowed the government to become so hopelessly corrupt while we indulged in moral panics and freaking out about drag queens and trans girls the money from that just goes straight to the top. A good example is one of the Trump officials funneled half a billion dollars to a Trump donor that she was asking to pay off her credit card bills.

When people are faced with this corruption they just throw their hands up and say everybody is corrupt so who cares who I vote for but then they turn around and vote for right-wing politicians who are openly corrupt every single time. And good luck getting somebody to understand the nuanced difference between using the occasional insider stock tip versus sending half a billion dollars of corrupt contracts to your buddies…

The real problem is about 60% of the country thinks and operates at the level of a 12 year old and I don’t know what the fuck you do about that. That was fine when most people were just dirt farmers but it just doesn’t fly in a modern mechanized society.