Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Itch Is Being Flooded By AI-Generated Garbage
  2. Bad Flock Info Leads Police To Tow Wrong Car, Then Towing Company Totals It
  3. Rocky Linux Creator Built a New ‘Not Linux’ Kernel in 11 Days Using AI
  4. Experts Expect ‘Security Reckoning’ As AI Tools Find And Exploit Software Bugs
  5. Binance Reopens to $3.64 in Net Outflows. ‘98% Choose to Stay’, Says Its Founder
  6. Stack Overflow: ‘Reports of Our Death are Greatly Exaggerated’
  7. Toyota’s EV Sales More Than Doubled In a Year, While Its Gas Car Sales Dropped 20% In China
  8. SystemD’s Creator Opens Signups for Private Preview of Amutable’s Cryptographically Verified Linux Systems
  9. Religious Exemption from Using AI in Workplace Granted to Humanist
  10. AI Makes Linux 7.4 Merge Window the Largest in Kernel History
  11. Which Tech Companies Started Using Trump’s Phrase ‘Super Intelligence’?
  12. College Students are Pushing Colleges to ‘De-Flock’
  13. Amid AI Bans, Microsoft and OpenAI Plan a ‘Joyful’ Hour of AI for Kids
  14. Meta Discussed ‘Whisper Strategy’ to Discredit Social Media Critic Jonathan Haidt, Files Show
  15. America’s Clocks Are Still Falling Back Tonight Despite Trump’s Daylight Saving Push

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.

Itch Is Being Flooded By AI-Generated Garbage

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
The number of game pages being created per-day on Itch has doubled, the indie games site announced Saturday on Bluesky. When asked why, they responded: “take a guess.”

As the gaming news site Aftermath puts it, “the surge has been almost entirely down to AI-created garbage racing onto the platform as the popularity of vibe-coded theft, copycats and machine-built slop explodes.”
Back in 2024, when the spectre of AI-‘created’ video games was still in its infancy, indie platform itch.io decided that the best it could do to combat this growing threat was, like Valve has done with Steam, institute a voluntary ‘AI’ filter when adding new projects to the site. By November 2026, as itch buckles under the weight of new AI-generated ‘games’ pouring onto the site, that filter is proving about as robust as a wet paper bag.... Shopfronts are being deluged by this shit, and it’s making it a terrible user experience for customers.

And while in Valve’s case there’s a compelling case for stronger human moderation of the store, I’m not sure that’s a viable option for a relatively tiny, community-run platform like itch… [A]t time of writing I visited the latest releases section and there was still a huge number of clearly AI-generated titles (or titles making extensive use of AI in their visual assets) which made no use of itch’s voluntary tag system.

The issue here isn’t that these games are making money—itch themselves say in a reply that while the number of projects listed has doubled, “the number of downloads and purchases has not"—it’s that an inability to combat this surge makes the site worse for every single person using it. It gets harder to find real games, for example, and it also makes the shopfront look like a clearance rack.

Bad Flock Info Leads Police To Tow Wrong Car, Then Towing Company Totals It

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
“Police continue to blindly trust Flock cameras above and beyond the evidence in front of their own eyes,” reports Jalopnik.com.

“After incorrectly connecting Rosalyn Crump’s car to a shooting that had occurred the previous day, police had her car towed and impounded as evidence, reports Moneywise…”
According to WWBT 12 On Your Side, Richmond, Virginia, police didn’t have a license plate number for the suspect’s car, making it impossible to search Flock’s records for that plate. Flock cameras collect more than just license plate information, so police searched for a make, model, color, and approximate model year. Based on this extremely vague description, police zeroed in on Crump’s 2012 Hyundai Elantra. Around 2 a.m. they started looking through the windows with flashlights to see what was in plain sight, which isn’t technically a “search” — at least, not one that would require a warrant… [Crump was asleep, but left her home to speak to the police officers to tell them they had the wrong car. But they didn’t believe her.]

Other body cam footage shows an officer expressing doubt that Crump’s car is the right one, since child seats and other items inside seem inconsistent with a shooting. Another officer replies, “Don’t be surprised if they would have set that up like that.” Instead of believing the evidence, or Crump, or interviewing witnesses who could have corroborated her story, police called Seibert’s Towing to impound the car…

[Later] Police identified a similar-looking car that seemed to be actually connected to the shooting, and released Crump’s Elantra. Nobody actually told Crump this until four days later. Seibert’s told Moneywise that police didn’t actually release the car until then. Either way, they didn’t tell her that Seibert’s had ripped the front bumper off during the towing process — leaving the car undrivable — until she arrived to pick it up. Seibert’s took responsibility for causing the cosmetic damage, and was willing to cover the $2,212.30 bill to paint and replace the bumper cover, fog lights, and wheel liners. Then Crump asked for a full mechanical inspection, which revealed damaged tie rods and ball joints, jacking the bill beyond $6,000. Seibert’s says it didn’t cause this damage. Regardless of how it occurred, Seibert’s insurer and Crump agree that her Hyundai is now a total loss due to the cost of the repairs it needs. It had been drivable, if mechanically worn, before police ordered it towed, damaging it for nothing more than a case of mistaken identity.
The president of Seibert’s towing told Moneywise that while they’d originally offered $2,200 to repair the bumper damage, Crump must now negotiate with their insurance company. Crump has now resorted to a GoFundMe campaign to attempt to raise $17,100 for rental car expenses, a new car, and the expenses of moving to a different neighborhood. 130 donors have already contributed $7,431.

Reached for comment, the Richmond Police Department told local newscasters they “understand that Ms. Crump did not ask to become part of this investigation,” and that they recognize the “frustration of having a vehicle towed and subsequently damaged.” But they also said they were following a “credible” lead, which is their responsibility. The department “appreciates Ms. Crump’s cooperation” (and “sincerely hopes the remaining concerns about her vehicle can be resolved.”)

The city of Richmond has “already started backing away from Flock before Crump’s story aired,” reports Moneywise. “Mayor Danny Avula has decided not to renew Richmond’s license plate reader deal with Flock, which ends June 30, 2027. As of September, the city had 99 Flock readers on its streets.”

They note that the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm in Arlington, Virginia, “has tallied at least 27 cases since 2018” of similar police errors. “In each case, a license plate reader mistake led police to stop, jail or point guns at drivers who’d done nothing wrong. More than half came in 2023 or later.”

Sigh

By john83 • • Score: 3 • Thread
Why is the panopticon so stupid?

Well… there’s a lot wrong here

By thegarbz • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

Beyond the Flock headline, and the police not thinking properly, the biggest problem seems to be the towing company. Police at least have human judgement to fault, but the towing company… that’s your job. How do you not know how to tow a car without totalling it? No judgement, no thought, no database error, just sheer and utter incompetence doing the one thing you are supposed to be good at doing.

Re:Sigh

By ShanghaiBill • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

The cops are lazy, not stupid.

Double-checking stuff is work, and there will be no repercussions for the individual cops, so why should they care?

Just call the towing company and go back to the donut shop.

Re:Sigh

By fluffernutter • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
Electing a violent and selfish person was not the correct response to that. You don’t destroy your entire country just because you don’t like something about it.

Rocky Linux Creator Built a New ‘Not Linux’ Kernel in 11 Days Using AI

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
From the blog It’s FOSS
Gregory Kurtzer is no stranger to the Linux world. He created CentOS, and when Red Hat messed it up, he started Rocky Linux as the community replacement. He also co-founded CIQ, the company offering enterprise support around Rocky. His latest project has nothing to do with rebuilding another Linux distro, though. He has built an entirely new operating system kernel, and he didn’t write most of the code himself. An AI agent did.

Meet Ginux, Linux userspace without Linux underneath… It’s an independent, Rust-first x86-64 kernel. Which simply means it is NOT a fork of the Linux kernel. It has its own memory management, scheduler, process model, filesystems, networking, and device support, all written from scratch.

The most interesting part is that even though it is not Linux, it is Linux-compatible. Ginux implements the Linux ABI (the binary interface compiled programs use to talk to the kernel), so existing Linux binaries can run on it unmodified. In the project’s own terms, Linux is a “personality” that Ginux exposes, not the kernel running underneath…

Right now, Ginux runs only in a QEMU virtual machine, with no physical hardware profile, no GPU or NVMe support, and no independent security audit.

Ginux?

By OrangAsm • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread
So it’s modeled after a large vagina?

all written from scratch?

By BitterEpic • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

all written from scratch.

I don’t know if you know what that phrase actually means. Nothing from AI is “written from scratch”. All of it is based off of stolen work from people who didn’t give permission using a kind of social engineering no better than a petty hacker.

Pretty neat, like, academically.

By T34L • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

Ginux runs only in a QEMU virtual machine, with no physical hardware profile, no GPU or NVMe support, and no independent security audit.

So, as can be expected, it doesn’t attempt roughly 99.9% of the real work an OS has to do to be useful as an OS someone might want to use for something.

It’s perfectly good, cool, and virtuous to make academical/hobby model-OSes, but the “Built a New ‘Not Linux’ Kernel in 11 Days Using AI” headline is hella yellow when the thing being made is just not comparable to Linux kernel in what it’s even meant to be able to do for you, but is being presented as some sort of achievement.

Experts Expect ‘Security Reckoning’ As AI Tools Find And Exploit Software Bugs

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
The Washington Post reports:
Tens of thousands of South Koreans had their financial data exposed online in recent weeks after at least nine major banks there suffered cyberattacks that suggested a dark future for online security. One man, a 26-year-old living in southern China, was allegedly behind the attacks, according to an investigation by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. Traces left online and failure to secure his own systems allowed investigators to piece together the man’s name, age, location and what he allegedly did. The clues revealed that the devastating assault on some of Asia’s most sophisticated financial institutions was the work of an amateur. The attacks were launched with help from a few artificial intelligence chatbots, CrowdStrike found, before asking one to help sell the stolen data online and draft a fake résumé touting cybersecurity skills…

The hacker who broke into the South Korean banks had access to Anthropic’s Claude, but because the U.S. firm’s tools generally refuse to take illegal actions, free Chinese models were also used, including DeepSeek, CrowdStrike found. “The models are interchangeable,” said Meyers, the CrowdStrike executive.
The Post calls it “part of a wave of AI-enabled hacking that is advancing across the world, triggering alarm inside national governments as well as multinational companies.”
“Basically any pedestrian, non-hacker can take these frameworks and start leveraging them to go after different targets,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike. The company has tracked an increase in the speed with which cyberattacks can move once inside a target’s networks, as seasoned hackers and rank amateurs alike get a boost from AI tools. “Anyone can be a super-hacker now,” Meyers said… Many cyber experts still expect the security reckoning to intensify as AI tools that can find and exploit software bugs become more widely distributed and understood.

[Last] Monday, The Post reported that cybersecurity researchers from the start-up Cathedral who set out to test Anthropic’s security found that they could access internal messages and meeting transcripts. Cathedral reported its findings to Anthropic, which said it resolved the newly discovered problems… Security experts say it’s unlikely that any hacker is forgoing the use of AI tools right now.
Even in America, critical infrastructure like energy and water companies need to be “immediately and comprehensively” tested for exploitable bugs, according to Snehal Antani, chief executive of cybersecurity company Horizon3. He tells the Post the government might need to fund that remediation, and even form “a public and private partnership to accelerate incident response.”

The missing piece Response time.

By upuv • • Score: 3 • Thread

We are all well aware of the dueling battle between AI bad guys vs AI Security defenders. Bad guys find new exploit/exploit chain the good guys develop mitigation to vulnerabilities.

The problem is Enterprises are simply not even remotely prepared with how fast they need to respond with applying those mitigation’s. Most enterprises are still ranking threats way to low and thus they are not being actioned.

Secondly the cyber teams are not operator’s, typically. Meaning they can do very little to address core issues in infrastructure and overall systems. They also lack the business understanding of why and how the systems are built. This leads to a lot of friction when trying to rapidly apply a mitigation.

Yes of course there a lot of DevOps and Agentic environments out there. But legacy Enterprises are still years behind, if not decades on maturity.

For these reasons we are going to see an accelerating number of compromised Enterprises. In my personal life I make sure that I insure my investments and property to offset the risks that are rising in enterprise.

Binance Reopens to $3.64 in Net Outflows. ‘98% Choose to Stay’, Says Its Founder

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Binance now says it’s replenished 90% of assets stolen last week in a $6.3 billion security breach, its customers still “rushed to move funds off the platform” when it reopened Sunday, CNBC reports, and Binance “said it recorded $3.64 billion in net outflows after reopening withdrawals on Sunday.”
The exchange processed $4.65 billion in withdrawals and $1.01 billion in deposits between 6 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. UTC on Nov. 1, Binance said in a post on X. The resulting net outflows represented 2.1% of Binance’s $171 billion in total assets, based on its latest available proof-of-reserves data as of Oct. 28. Binance said withdrawal volumes had declined and were stabilizing following an initial spike, while deposit volumes remained substantial.

The exchange began restoring withdrawals in phases at 6 a.m. UTC on Sunday, with services resuming across all 15 networks and assets included in the initial phase by 12:36 p.m. UTC. It said testing was continuing for the remaining networks and assets.

Binance founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao sought to reassure users following the breach, writing on X that “98% choose to stay!” He said most of the net outflows occurred within the first couple of hours after withdrawals resumed.

“Nothing to See Here. All is well!”, says Founder

By MIPSPro • • Score: 3 • Thread
There is no end to the attacks both AI and QC are going to bring to crypto. No doubt they’ll cover what they can, but it’s just a matter of time. Imagine the next few attacks. Convert your crypto to something else… soon before your peers realize the game is up.

Stack Overflow: ‘Reports of Our Death are Greatly Exaggerated’

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Stack Overflow’s senior VP of community says predictions of their demise “make for compelling headlines, but they confuse a change in how people access knowledge with the disappearance of the knowledge — and the company — behind it.
AI has changed developer behavior. In our recently released 2026 Developer Survey, 64% of respondents said they visit Stack Overflow less frequently for simple questions. But developers also report asking more advanced questions and visiting the site to verify AI-generated answers. Stack Overflow remains a place where people can challenge assumptions, compare approaches, and validate solutions.

But it’s also important to understand that our public Q&A site is only one part of Stack Overflow, the company. The knowledge created on the Q&A site helps power the AI ecosystem itself. Stack Overflow’s human-validated content is used to train and improve models, strengthen retrieval systems, and make AI assistants and other tools more reliable. Developers and technologists may encounter an answer through a different interface — such as their IDE — but the underlying knowledge may still have begun the same way it did in the past: with a developer sharing what they learned on Stack Overflow.

We’re also building for what comes next. We recently launched the beta of Stack Overflow for Agents, an API-first knowledge exchange where agents can share knowledge and verify solutions. We also brought back Developer Story, giving developers a verifiable way to showcase their expertise, accomplishments, and contributions beyond a traditional résumé. And we have much more planned and in development to give people compelling new reasons to visit the site beyond Q&A.

Several years ago, we pivoted aggressively toward the enterprise. In September, we launched the next generation of Stack Internal, our governed AI context layer for companies. It captures and curates organizational knowledge, adds provenance and trust signals, and brings in subject-matter experts when validation is needed. The goal is straightforward: to make sure employees and AI agents are working from accurate, current, permission-aware information — not confidently acting on whatever context happens to be nearby.

That is the thread connecting everything we do: making human knowledge useful and trustworthy, whether it is being consumed by another developer, an enterprise team, or an AI agent. Stack Overflow is not standing still, and it is not disappearing. We are evolving from a website people visit for answers into knowledge infrastructure that supports developers, companies, and AI systems wherever they work. Reports of our death are, indeed, exaggerated.

I hope you fail horribly

By Echoez • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

I think I’ve asked 10 questions in my life on StackOverflow. For about 7 of them, I was met with outright hostility or condescension or just completely inaccurate claims that my question was a duplicate. The other 3? Met with complete silence and have gone unanswered to this day.

I hope your site fails and that every moderator is sent to the spice mines of Kessel

I think I see what’s happening…

By outsider007 • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

64% of respondents said they visit Stack Overflow less frequently for simple questions.

You’re polling the 13 guys left who still answer Stack Overflow polls. Say hi to Gweihir if you see him.

Re: The manual?

By topham • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

Manuals often show the contract of a service call, but not the intent, context is often missing from documentation. (I’ll take 1980s documentation over whatever the fuck people think documentation is today)

Bypass the Pompousness

By organgtool • • Score: 3 • Thread
One of my favorite parts about using AI instead of StackOverflow is that I don’t have to justify my request to a bunch of pompous people who pretend they know all of the details of my requirements and that I’m an idiot for wanting to do something a particular way. AI will often have some great alternative suggestions if it questions my proposed implementation, but at the end of the day it gives me solutions to the exact scenario I specified.

Re:The manual?

By pipegeek • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

I can’t speak for others, but I’ve often found I learn much faster by engaging with someone who’s working on a project, than by sitting down and working through a tool’s manual from cover to cover. Much like a course with lectures where I can ask questions and where the professor is attempting to present information calibrated to connect with her audience is a *much* better way to learn a subject than to just sit down alone with a textbook.

Developing a complete mastery of each tool *before* attempting to do anything with it is frequently not a viable approach, and mastery is often what is required in order to answer a question from the knowledge in a manual, as the answer may emerge from multiple small details spread across multiple chapters.

Meanwhile, there’s probably someone out there who’s working on the same exact problem you are, has stumbled in the same places, and now has an answer. And reading what they went through to *find* their answer can provide the clues to develop a better understanding of the tool, such that it’s easier to find what you’re looking for in the manual next time.

Manuals are good! But we’re also not meant to exist and work in a vacuum. We’re humans! We do better when we are in communication with each other.

Toyota’s EV Sales More Than Doubled In a Year, While Its Gas Car Sales Dropped 20% In China

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Toyota’s EV sales have jumped 127% through September, reports Electrek:
Including Lexus, Toyota sold 309,766 battery electric vehicles (BEVs) globally through the first nine months of 2026, up 127.4% from the same period last year. Except for January (+87.5%), Toyota’s EV sales have more than doubled every month this year compared with 2025…

While its EVs are catching on, Toyota Motor’s global sales fell for the third straight month in September. Toyota sold 860,107 vehicles in September, down 2.2% from the previous year. The company said that although overall demand remained steady, sales in China fell, leading to lower overall sales than last year. Through September, Toyota sold 7.51 million vehicles globally, down 3.4%. In China, Toyota’s sales plunged nearly 20%, marking its eighth consecutive month with lower sales. Toyota said the overall market in China “remained weak due in part to rising gasoline prices, while the market for gasoline vehicles and hybrid vehicles was particularly affected,” resulting in lower sales. In the first nine months of 2026, Toyota sold just over 1.05 million vehicles in China, 18.9% fewer than in the same period last year… After the US, China is Toyota’s second-largest market.

All Car Sales are Down in China

By btroy • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread
Their economy is struggling like the rest of us. Their citizens may also be less able to absorb the downturn. (just speculation on my part)

I do suspect their hybrid sales in the U.S. would have been higher if they could have kept up with their Rav4 sales.

Re:Japan is between a rock and a hard place

By oumuamua • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread
Please enumerate how China is being unfair. Overcapacity - that is just another name for post-scarcity and is something we want . Government support - the West does that too. Currency manipulation - the West does that too. Finally wasn’t Capitalism ‘cheat proof’ - with the famous quote

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

And even if China is ‘cheating’ why doesn’t the West just cheat in the same way?
I think the West has been out-competed and now finds that the Capitalist system it championed when it was on top ain’t so great when the positions are flipped.

Chinese car market is moving big time to EVs

By Camembert • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread
Toyota is blaming gasoline pricing for wear sales in China.
But I am currently living in Hong Kong, and every time I do a trip in mainland China it impresses how much and how quickly EVs are taking over. the large majority of recent looking cars on the road are EVs. Toyota made a late and half hearted push to EVs, it seems to be increasingly successful with them globally, but in China you have to compete with many pretty sophisticated and well priced local offerings.
I read that successful young Chinese don’t even crave prestigious foreign cars like BMW, Lexus etc that much anymore, they literally consider them as “cars for parents”, they tend to find their own products more cool. Well, they are not wrong: I was able to check out the Xiaomi YU7 SUV (the one that looks a little like a purosangue) and wow was that impressive. Great refinement, plus the kids adored that it has a Capybara mascot on the screen.

SystemD’s Creator Opens Signups for Private Preview of Amutable’s Cryptographically Verified Linux Systems

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
SystemD creator Lennart Poettering left Red Hat for Microsoft in 2022, but 10 months ago left to co-found Amutable a company that aims to build cryptographically verified Linux systems that stay trusted over time.

It’s FOSS calls it “a read-only, image-based system where every machine produces signed reports of its own state” — and signups are now open for a private preview:
Before announcing this Linux-based implementation, Amutable had released two open source tools. tine, a Buck2-based build system that composes OS images; available under MPL-2.0, and Quarry, a TUF-based tool that distributes those images to machines; available under Apache-2.0. What Amutable Foundations brings to the table is a service where Amutable runs the images, update repositories, control plane and vulnerability fixes for organizations and individuals who operate their own systems.

No license has been stated for those company-run parts, and the preview announcement does not say how much of Foundations beyond tine and Quarry will be open source. Software and configuration both ship as signed images, and a machine boots only what is signed. Because there is no package manager and no SSH or interactive shell, a change means giving every machine in your fleet a new signed image.

Its images are reproducible, come with a software bill of materials (SBOM) and are built from pinned inputs of whichever distribution you pick, with tine being able to import packages from Fedora or CentOS Stream. Each machine sends a signed report that records what it booted, from the firmware and boot loader up to the kernel and OS, plus the configuration it runs… Amutable’s control plane verifies reports from systemd-report, an experimental command in systemd 260 that the company helped build. It compares each one with the declared state and flags machines that deviate. A rollout only continues while machines can show they are in a good state…

Amutable is signup formlooking for teams that manage Linux fleets and need to show what state each machine is in. It expects to start bringing the first 'design partners,’ as it calls them, on board over the coming weeks.

Seriously, can’t this guy just GO THE FUCK AWAY?

By Chromium_One • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

Fuck Lennart.
Fuck systemd.
and tangentially, fuck Microsoft as well.

You know how long it took after his paws were no longer all over PulseAudio before it got to be halfway stable and usable for daily driving? Both Amutable and Quarry may AT BEST eventually follow that trajectory, but goddamn, systemd is still a gigantic piece of shit that the primary features it provides are 1) a gigantic attack surface, and 2) a great many potential modes of failure. Anything this guy has been involved with should BY DEFAULT be treated with suspicion and the architectural choices beaten on with a hammer.

Overcomplicated crap

By bubblyceiling • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread
I am honestly tired of all this abstraction in the name of security. Just adds unnecessary bloat and makes things hard to troubleshoot. UEFI is a prime example. Even after all that it got hacked anyway. Now we just have this another opaque layer of bullshit to deal with.

Keep code simple so users can easily understand what is going on.

It is same story with WebDev. I don’t understand what was so hard about JS, that people made all this bullshit like React and Angular. We had jQuery and it was glorious. There was no need to make it the module and import hell it is currently.

Same with PHP. People seem to forget that PHP is a JIT language with some code caching recently being bolted on. Write bare metal code just to serve the dynamic parts of an HTML, is the correct way to use it. There is no need to serve static content via PHP. But people do that everyday with whatever the latest framework is.

SaaS?

By jenningsthecat • • Score: 3 • Thread

IANAP, so please tell me if I’m off base here: to me this has a flavour of SaaS. FTA:

We foresee, and are building for, a future where it will be standard practice for Linux machines to be able to prove their state and for access to depend on that proof. Infrastructure that can’t prove its state will look like unencrypted network traffic looks today: still around, but only for toy use cases.

Replace “Infrastructure” in that last sentence with “A computer connected to the internet”, and it seems to me that you have a situation in which the machine I’m typing these words on might be refused access. I know that’s not true in the current description, but it wouldn’t take much scope creep for many people reading this to be unable to do what I’m doing right now.

I suppose they might consider me a “toy use case”, but again, scope creep or regulatory overreach might turn that into “forbidden use case” on a whim.

Re:Overcomplicated crap

By Arrogant-Bastard • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread
This is an excellent point. I’ve learned a lot over the decades I’ve been on the net (and still have a great deal more to learn); one of the most important lessons is this: you don’t make things more secure by adding code, you make them more secure by removing code.

The simpler something here the harder it is to make a mistake in its implementation, and the smaller its attack surface. This has always been important but I think there’s a fair argument to be made that it’s more important than ever now that LLM-driven attacks are a thing. It will be interesting in (let’s say) five years to survey all of the LLM-originated vulnerabilities and ascertain what software was most/least susceptible. My guess is that — as a first-order approximation — it’ll be linear with the number of lines of code.

Trust

By CAIMLAS • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

Are we really going to trust something security-oriented by a guy who conceived of systemd? Instead of creating something which improves security and isolation, he created something renowned for its architectural and management complexity, privilege boundaries (or frequent lackthereof), attack surface, and the frequent consequences of concentrating system management in a large privileged software stack.

I’m reminded of the SSH/Pulse Audio privilege escalation through systemd some years back… due to their obstinately poor security design.

Religious Exemption from Using AI in Workplace Granted to Humanist

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
“David Durman, a nontheistic humanist, recently secured a religious exemption from using AI in the workplace,” reports TechCrunch. Durman, a University of Kentucky administrator, told TechCrunch that humanism centers on “human well-being and flourishing, both individually and collectively … and implores a person to try to improve both their well-being and their flourishing as well as the others around them.”
He believes that using the technology runs counter to his beliefs. “The way we become moral actors for ourselves and for others is through the active application of our minds, and the diminishing of that [through AI use] is going to necessarily have a negative impact on our ability to do so,” he said, reflecting on how overreliance on AI might affect critical thinking....”

[Humanism] tends to appeal to people who are skeptical of a god or other supernatural power yet still seek a scientific and moral framework to ground themselves in. [Alexandria Huiskens, staff attorney at the American Humanist Association, told TechCrunch] “Concern about AI and human dignity can run through several different faiths and traditions, whether that’s Catholic teachings, or Universalism, or Humanism, and we want Humanists or nontheists to know that they fall into these categories — that they are also protected by the law at work....”

In Durman’s administrative role, in which he supports researchers applying for grants, he has not been required to use AI at work. Like many workers across fields, some of his colleagues and leadership have recommended that employees try out these tools, so he sought to secure his exemption now, in case the suggestion becomes a mandate in the future. “I hope that if [others] have similar feelings, that they feel encouraged to pursue some kind of resolution,” Durman said.
A University of Kentucky spokesperson told TechCrunch they “determined that an accommodation could be provided while allowing the employee to continue performing the essential functions of their position.” (They added that “As technology and job responsibilities evolve, accommodations may be reviewed to ensure they remain reasonable and workable.”)

We already have these people..

By outsider007 • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

They’re called the Amish.

Forget “moral”

By Krishnoid • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

“The way we become moral actors for ourselves and for others is through the active application of our minds, and the diminishing of that [through AI use] is going to necessarily have a negative impact on our ability to do so,”

It may turn us from “actors” into “offloaders” or “delegators.”

Not exactly

By rsilvergun • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread
Go actually look into the Amish there are really nasty religious cult where a handful of assholes get very very rich making people work for free. AKA slavery. You aren’t technically a slave in the Amish cult but when you’re born into it they don’t educate you in any way shape or form so it’s basically impossible to leave because you’re not going to be able to get a job outside of the cult.

Also saying no to antisocial and destructive technology isn’t being a Luddite or a member of a cult. It’s just fucking common sense. You have to live in the real world whether you like it or not and in the real world we need to keep the majority of people employed because the majority of people think like 12-year-olds and if we can’t maintain roughly 90% employment then we’re going to have a huge problem between the people who still need to be working 40 hours a week and the people who we have no work for.

Remember we don’t automate everything useful or miserable or that involves drudgery. The stuff we automate is the stuff that pays the most. We automated high paying factory jobs first and now we are automating high paying White collar jobs because the purpose of automation is to line the pockets of the person who owns the automation.

You know, the c word. The one if I mention it this entire thread goes to shit as idiots argue over what men with funny hats and bad ideas used to keep the public giving them power…

Re:More thorough reason

By LainTouko • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread
The reason medicine was dominated for centuries by the “four humours” system is because hydraulics was an impressive technology, so people decided the human body must work by hydraulics. Similarly, people got all sorts of ideas about human brains working like computers when computers became impressive, and now you’re doing the same thing with LLMs. In the real world, humans and computers are very different. A “bus”, to me, is not merely a token which I’ve gathered statistics about how I tend to see it related to all sorts of other tokens in the vast amounts of text I read in order to build up these statistics. I’ve been on buses. I’ve got on them, seen the world go by, got off, and found myself in a completely different place. I’ve felt their seats, smelt characteristic odours, experienced that sideways feeling when they go around corners.I’ve moved toy buses around when I was a child, “raced” them to see how close I could get them to the end of the bed without them dropping off. I’ve watched them from a short distance in order to gauge when it’s safe to cross the road without being hit by one. I’ve observed them conserving their momentum the same way I’ve felt conservation of momentum when moving shopping around or being hit in the face by a football. And a lot of this works by the same sort of processing and instincts that you’d find in, say, a crocodile.

Jews taking the same position

By JoshuaZ • • Score: 3 • Thread
Danya Ruttenberg, a prominent Conservative Rabbi wrote a detailed piece arguing that Jews should ask for exemptions from using AI https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/the-jewish-case-for-ai-work-exemptions/. I found both the halachic (Jewish law) reasoning and elements of how American secular law handles such exemptions to be unconvincing. (I’ve sent Rabbi Ruttenberg’s piece to a bunch of people as one of the better arguments for a moral problem with using AI in general, even as I find it unconvincing.) But it is notable there’s a trend here. It will be interesting to see if any Christian clergy try to make a similar argument.

AI Makes Linux 7.4 Merge Window the Largest in Kernel History

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
“On a Git commit basis, the Linux 7.4 merge window has been the busiest on record,” writes Phoronix,” with 19,671 commits since Linux 7.3:
As of this morning in Linux Git ahead of v7.4-rc1, the kernel source tree is up to 41,605,120 lines. That’s from 5,193,578 blank lines, 4,993,604 lines of comments, and 31,417,938 lines of detected code. Or nearly half a million lines of code added during the Linux 7.4 merge window, ignoring comments and blank lines [as detected by cloc ].
A historical graph of commits shows a clear spike for Linux 7.4, which Phoronix argues shows the definite recent uptick due to AI/LLM activity.”
With Linux kernel maintainers being "completely overwhelmed" due to both AI generated bug reports and patches/fixes, the Git commit activity has been surging as a result… The upward trend has continued building the past several kernel releases. Typically the merge windows saw 13~14k commits or less and now we are pushing 20k....

Linux 6.14: 10,034
Linux 6.15: 13,568
Linux 6.16: 13,805
Linux 6.17: 12,289
Linux 6.18: 12,910
Linux 6.19: 13,229
Linux 7.0: 12,468
Linux 7.1: 13,963
Linux 7.2: 14,395
Linux 7.3: 16,267
Linux 7.4: 19,671
And “we could still see a few more trickle in today for Linux 7.4 ahead of the expected Linux 7.4-rc1 kernel release later in the day.”

UPDATE: “People are expecting 7.4 to be the next long-term support release,” Linus Torvalds wrote today in his weekly state of the kernel update, saying that’s also “another independent reason why some releases tend larger than others. So it may not *just* be the flood of AI patches.”

The Register reports:
Torvalds also seems not to be completely convinced that all AI submissions are entirely helpful, by describing this release as “Large, and full of fixes for issues found by AI (and more and more the patches have been suggested by AI too, although they often get rewritten).”

This is affecting everyone

By SoftwareArtist • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

As an open source maintainer, I’ve seen the same thing. There’s been a huge surge in activity recently, driven by a wave of AI generated and AI assisted bug reports and feature implementations. Some of them are useful. A lot of them are slop. The part about overwhelming maintainers is completely true. We’re all suffering under the deluge.

If you’re thinking of running an LLM on someone’s code base and sending them “fixes” for all the “bugs” it finds, please don’t. You really aren’t helping them.

Re:Linux with Rust + AI + Flatpak + Wayland + Syst

By pla • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
More or less, yeah…

You can use ArcaOS, you can use CSM mode, or you can chain-load it with any of a number of EFI loaders.

CSM mode is probably the closest to “pure” OS/2, but obviously it’s not really using UEFI. ArcaOS is the closest to pure UEFI support (and probably the best choice if you plan to really use it rather than just prove you can do it then move on), but it’s not pure OS/2. Take your pick.

/ I am not affiliated in any way with ArcaOS / Arca Noae.

You can’t seriously check this amount of code

By BitterEpic • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

For a core component of many, many computers, I do not think Linux kernel development needs arbitrary speed gains in the amount of code contributed. The kernel should be uninteresting and realistically this amount of code is less likely to be closely inspected than previous code.

Hell is built with good intentions. The answer to everything becomes, “more AI! Let’s use AI to validate the AI!” Eventually we will find not only biases, but AI that is designed to inject vulnerabilities only under a specific set of circumstances. Maybe when the contributor is named Linus and he has the power to override everyone else..

Eventually, everything is wrapped up in a nice alert that everyone ignores until the nuclear power plan melts down.

Re:This is affecting everyone

By MIPSPro • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
I’ve been a C programmer for 30+ years. I’ve written code on over 30 platforms and 20+ compilers. I don’t need their LLM-created patches because I’m already using better LLMs than they are and 50 miles ahead of them because I’ve been there since day one, just waiting for the day the LLM could code better than I could (happened in early 2026).

You cannot help me with your LLM code because I’ve already helped myself. It’s like some guy wondering in off the street to give the mechanic his advice on an engine rebuild. Just fuck off. We don’t need you. Think of it like this. If europeans showed up with metal weapons and were going to give a few to the savages, who would be the most likely to make good use of those weapons first? Would it be the old women or little kids or would it be the tribes warriors, already use to fighting with weapons and now just given better gear? My response to these kids is “Bruh, fuck your submission.” If you have ideas or usability fixes, great, let’s hear them. However, you fucking piss-ants couldn’t code before LLMs, you can absolutely shut the fuck up and stuff it, now.

Which Tech Companies Started Using Trump’s Phrase ‘Super Intelligence’?

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
CNBC reports:
A month after President Donald Trump ordered that “super intelligence” replace the term artificial intelligence within executive branch departments and agencies, his leading tech allies, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, followed suit on earnings calls. Their fellow tech CEOs were less eager to do the same… SpaceX and Tesla adhered to Trump’s wishes on earnings calls last week after Musk, earlier in October, changed the name of his rocket company’s AI division to SpaceXSI. Speaking on Tesla’s call about his work on humanoid robots, Musk said, “Some of them look very impressive, but they’re not really using any kind of advanced AI or SI.” Zuckerberg was equally compliant on Meta’s earnings call on Oct. 21, emphasizing his company’s “goal of delivering personal superintelligence to everyone.” However, Meta was already using the term, having created a unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs last year....

[Some other tech CEOs are holding out.] Amazon CEO Andy Jassy peppered his call with use of “AI” on Thursday, uttering the abbreviation well over a dozen times in his introductory remarks. A day earlier, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said one of the company’s three points of focus is “designing AI to empower people.” And Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai was seconds into his quarterly earnings commentary when he said the search giant’s “AI investments are driving increased usage and overall user growth....”

Trump’s preferred term is seeping into other correspondence and documents. Microsoft’s annual report, filed last week, included eight mentions of “super intelligence,” starting at the top of the letter to shareholders… IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, who didn’t attend Trump’s September lunch, used “SI” alongside “AI” during his company’s earnings call last week.... Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of chipmaker Intel, said Thursday the supply shortage the chip industry is navigating has been “driven by the unprecedented demand for super intelligence.”

Some in the tech industry have been explicit in their support of Trump’s terminology ahead of their forthcoming earnings reports next month. Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora repeatedly referred to “SI” on CNBC, and posted on X on Sept. 30, “The meeting at the WH on SI was an epic moment....” Like Arora, [Nvidia CEO Jensen] Huang took to X after last month’s AI meeting to praise the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence.”

Re:The Bootlicker Duo

By Cyberpunk Reality • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Zuckerberg is a Jewish Democrat.

He has provided ample evidence that he is a Mammonite Fascist.

Looking at it another way..

By Vegan Cyclist • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

If Putin had first demanded companies start changing a term, we’d all be ‘dictator’ - you have no role telling industry what to do.

In the USSA, it’s just....slllllurrrrrrrpppp…

It’s pretty sickening what’s happening.

Re:“SI” is an even dumber term than “AI”

By ClickOnThis • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

The term “Artificial Intelligence” was first used by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1955, in a research proposal. So, it is in fact a technical term.

I think it is descriptive and highly appropriate. It refers to something that displays the artifice of intelligence, and that would seem to fit with what we’re talking about.

Dance, Puppets, Dance!

By organgtool • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
Trump’s order effectively serves two purposes:

Under normal circumstances, it would be entertaining to watch the world’s richest and most powerful people utterly humiliate themselves just for the opportunity to gain a little more wealth and power. However, the fact that their capitulation bolsters Trump’s power robs me of all enjoyment. Power can’t be taken without being relented. If people come to believe that Trump actually has the power to do things that the law doesn’t allow, they won’t resist being robbed of that power.

The whole thing is nothing short of amazing: you can be worth more than a trillion dollars and it still can’t buy you dignity, autonomy, or self-respect. They’ve completely enslaved themselves to greed and I have zero sympathy for them since it’s a choice they continuously opt to make. Keep dancing, puppets! We can’t enjoy it now, but we can put it in the vault and laugh at you after all of this shit finally blows over.

Re:HI

By Known Nutter • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread
I’m waiting for Trump intelligence… Not holding my breath.

College Students are Pushing Colleges to ‘De-Flock’

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Inside Higher Ed reports:
In September, Emory University removed a dozen license plate-reading cameras from its campus in Atlanta and declined to renew its contract with Flock Safety, the company that sells and operates the automatic license plate readers and other mass-surveillance technology. For the coalition of Emory students and employees who had spent months pushing the university to “de-Flock,” this was a victory… “We made it very clear that these cameras were unneeded surveillance considering we already have regular security cameras,” [said Tony Torres, a sophomore biology major]…

Through campus protests, petitions, meetings and teach-ins during the spring and summer, DeFlock Emory broadcast their concerns about the devices: Opaque data-sharing agreements could leave undocumented students vulnerable, the cameras could be hacked, institutions could use them to retaliate against student protesters and they could make students who fear being surveilled less likely go to class, see their friends or seek medical attention when they need it.

Such concerns aren’t unique to DeFlock Emory. College students across the country — including at Indiana University Bloomington, the University of Florida and the University of North Georgia — are mobilizing to de-Flock their campuses. And like Emory, other institutions are nixing their contracts. Cornell University announced last week it had not renewed its contract with Flock Safety and would be removing the cameras. Pennsylvania State University officials also announced earlier this month plans to end their contract with Flock.
An Emory spokesperson told Inside Higher Edthat eliminating Flock’s cameras “retains institutional control over our safety infrastructure.”

But the article also includes a quote from media/technology studies professor Torin Monahan at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He’s spoken with campus police officers about how they’re using Flock’s cameras, and learned police departments have upgraded surveillance efforts in recent years. “They have an elaborate arsenal in place of high-tech surveillance equipment that really seems overpowered for what their day-to-day needs are, and also incredibly expensive.”

Who Authorised This?

By Vlad_the_Inhaler • • Score: 3 • Thread

“They have an elaborate arsenal in place of high-tech surveillance equipment that really seems overpowered for what their day-to-day needs are, and also incredibly expensive.”

Someone had to sign off on this, presumably someone accountable. Who? As far as the police are concerned it’s “boys and their toys” but they are not the ones footing the bill (unless they use this to stalk their ex-wives, but that’s a different matter).

Re: Take down the speed and red light cameras…?

By DeanonymizedCoward • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

Mostly speed cams take two pictures, so an analyst can examine them and determine based on the positions of the vehicle in the frames whether the reported speed is plausible. If it went to court, the defendant or counsel could independently examine the photos.

Ditto for the red light cameras, they typically include the light in the picture and take a before and after of the car crossing the line on red. I’ve beaten red light tickets because I had my bumper over the line on yellow.

I don’t like them, but I dislike them far less than the “photograph everything into a searchable database” cameras.

How might the customers study surveillance?

By couchslug • • Score: 3 • Thread

Schools have plenty of inquiring student minds capable of studying how existing camera systems affect criminal acts, for example if and how they deter crime or improve speed and quality of security response.

Students are school customers with an obvious need to know. They could contribute useful studies from their service consumer perspective.

We cannot precisely understand real impact without valid information. Cameras in public space are not cameras in private space. Colleges could precisely compare situational impact, study relevant laws and precedents, and much more. Students could be ideal evaluators since they unlike surveillance system businesses are not selling anything.

What might student study of these systems look like? Humanity needs third party (not sellers, not criminals) investigation and neutral explanation of subjects technically and legally uninformed people cannot easily understand. Education is civilization’s continuity.

Amid AI Bans, Microsoft and OpenAI Plan a ‘Joyful’ Hour of AI for Kids

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Generative AI was recently banned in America’s two largest school districts, just weeks after OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens.

But forging ahead, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org — now renamed CodeAI — has named OpenAI the “Lead Partner” for its 2026 Hour of AI (which last year replaced its signature event, “the Hour of Code”). Long-time Slashdot reader theodp explains:
In August, OpenAI announced a new signature partnership with CodeAI to “prepare the first AI generation”, explaining that “through the Hour of AI, OpenAI and CodeAI will introduce millions of students to the basics of using AI thoughtfully and responsibly.” The updated Hour of AI website also listed OpenAI’s investor/partner Microsoft as one of two “supporters” for the Hour of AI. Now, Microsoft is calling all K-12 teachers around the globe to register for What’s working now: Making AI literacy joyful for every learner, a November 17th Microsoft Teams webinar where it will unveil its Minecraft-branded “Hour of AI experience.”

“Discover how AI literacy can be engaging, approachable, and joyful for students… and hear practical ideas from educators bringing AI learning into their schools and classrooms.”
Speakers include a marketing lead for Microsoft’s AI training initiative plus the head of marketing for Microsoft Minecraft Education.

The evil here is so thick

By know-nothing cunt • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

you can smell it.

AI Literacy: Now With 11x More AI

By Mirnotoriety • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread
Discover how AI-literAIacyAI can be AIengAIaging, AIapproachAIable, and AIjoyAIful for AIstudAIents… and hear AIpractAIical AIideas from AIEducAIators AIbrAIinging AIlearnAIing into their AIschools and AIclassAIrooms. AI-AI-AI! :/s

Modern teaching

By peppepz • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
Probably the first time in human history in which you teach people not to learn.

It’s just like horse armor

By rsilvergun • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread
Us old timers looked at them selling shitty microtransactions slop and knew it was garbage. It wasn’t like the arcades where your quarter bought you as much of the game as your skill could handle and 1ccs were part of the fun. It was an infinite money machine where you kept pouring more in and getting less out. Like when the CEO of activation famously bitched about all the time people spent playing call of duty without constantly paying for it.

Basically you do the evil thing and kids grow up with the evil thing and the evil thing is normal so kids don’t know any better.

It’s like how you can live in China was absolutely no civil rights whatsoever and it’s just normal so you don’t think about it and you just live like that. Or like how in America every few years we freak out about some stupid moral panic because that’s just part of Living in America. And we all act like it’s normal and good.

They will do the same thing with ai. They’ll keep cramming it down our throats until we have to take it because they’re the ruling class and we’re too much of a bunch of freaked out weirdo cowards to do anything about the ruling class. If all else fails they’ll use the classic hey that guy’s going to steal your cookie trick from the joke about the union guy and the non-union guy at the table with the factory owner…

I don’t know what you do with these basic problems with human cognition. I don’t think our species has enough time to evolve around them.

Code.ugh… please

By Morpeth • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

So they’ve rebranded as CodeAI now? The ‘everybody should code’ non-profit (cough) now supports the very technology that’s putting people (including SWEs) out of work? They are just another ‘ed-tech’ grift, the content they provided to educators was just cutesy, very shallow, useless fluff. I never understood how they got the attention or traction they did, well, actually, it’s probably about the money and their backers, not their actual educational value. There’s also a lot of legit criticism that code.org was just about producing more programmers to push down wages for their backer tech bro buddies.

If your kids are at a school who lean on Code.org/CodeAI it’s because they don’t have any real CS teachers, just untrained schmucks who got ‘stuck’ teaching CS and are looking for easy, canned ‘lessons’.

Meta Discussed ‘Whisper Strategy’ to Discredit Social Media Critic Jonathan Haidt, Files Show

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The Guardian reports:
Meta staff discussed deploying a “whisper strategy” to undermine the influential US academic whose work has inspired a global social media crackdown, according to court documents. Employees at the parent group of Facebook and Instagram sought to discredit Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, a book that helped tip the debate about online safety towards more stringent measures such as the under-16 ban in Australia.

Minutes of internal meetings contained in a recent legal filing in the US showed that staff discussed how to “get the academic community to disavow Haidt”. They appear in a document titled “Well-being Meeting Sound-check Notes”, which refers to discussions of how Meta could “turn other academics against Haidt” and to a “whisper strategy” aimed at achieving that goal. It also mentions “debunking” his work. Minutes from a meeting on 8 March 2023 mention “Curtiss”, an apparent reference to Meta’s then vice-president of research, Curtiss Cobb. It states: “Curtiss’s goal for this work: how do we get the academic community to disavow Haidt. Can’t co-opt them, so how do we enrage them … so the media finds him not credible.”

It then adds: “Not thinking about this as a loud strategy. A below-the-line campaign....”

The minutes were produced before Haidt published his book in 2024 and discuss responding to a Substack post written by the academic in which he reviews “a bunch of articles”.
“It is not clear whether Meta acted on the ideas outlined in the minutes.”

Cool strategy

By phantomfive • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
Can we start a whisper campaign to discredit Facebook?

So Johnny Depp hired a PR company

By rsilvergun • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
To go after his ex. It came out during their divorce proceedings that he did it.

The PR company had a bunch of people go around social media pretending to be people saying bad things about Depp’s ex.

It created a eating frenzy and the right wing picked it up and ran with it.

The head of the PR company in internal emails expressed… Let’s just call it concern about how easy it was to turn the entire public against somebody with a handful social media posts that weren’t even automated.

The point is it’s really easy to set the public off. Especially these days when if a cooler head shows up and tells everyone to calm down they get dismissed as one of them Washington insider expert scientist types…

Shocking

By hdyoung • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
Tobacco companies did this. Oil companies did. Companies involved in leaded gas did too. Governments literally have entire divisions of people tasked with discrediting their enemies.

Not justifying it or defending it. Just saying that it should come as absolutely no surprise.

Re:If you want to go down a rabbit hole here…

By Registered Coward v2 • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Don’t get mad at Meta, look into how the Supreme Court starting with Sullivan vs New York Times has created a legal environment where public figures like Haidt effectively have almost no recourse to defamation protection unless it is in a very narrow window of extremely blunt bad behavior.

It’s the cost of a viable and vigorous free press. If it is easier to sue an win a defamation suit, it becomes a powerful tool to stifle reporting. It’s also important to people who post on public forums because lowered protection cultured result in expensive court cases for them as well.

In Meta’s case, if they actually did it then that may reach the actual malice level, depending on what was said, but IANAL so who knows?

Window into Meta

By Morpeth • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

I actually took the time to read through the legal PDF, it’s interesting to see in their minutes/notes, there’s very little about finding legit arguments, research, etc. to counter Haidt’s points - it’s just all about ‘messaging’, PR, image, and plan for discrediting him, typical corporate behavior. While I don’t think those of us in slashdot crowd have any love for Meta, for others who may think Facebook is just a harmless distraction, the minutes are pretty revealing when it comes to their culture/mindset. Hint: they care only about money and numbers (shocking I know!!!)

The book, while generally well received, has its share of critics regarding some of his assumptions/conclusions. I have not read it, but know it’s been referenced a lot in education and academia. They could have probably actually tried to debate the book, but decided of course to take the low, and dirty, road.

America’s Clocks Are Still Falling Back Tonight Despite Trump’s Daylight Saving Push

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot
Clocks “fall back” one hour tonight to end Daylight Saving Time — though many Americans want to end the twice-yearly clock change, reports Axios.

But the U.S. Congress “remains deadlocked about how to make that happen.”
The clocks are falling back despite a bipartisan House vote in July to make daylight saving time permanent and Trump’s subsequent push for Senate action… While most Americans want to end the twice-yearly clock changes, they don’t necessarily favor Trump’s solution. Gallup found 48% of Americans support permanent standard time the entire year, compared with 24% who prefer permanent daylight saving time, as Trump wants… In 1974, the U.S. experimented with year-round daylight saving time but reversed course amid concerns about children going to school in the dark>.

Experts still debate whether permanent DST is good for people. Supporters argue that permanent daylight saving time would provide more afternoon and evening sunlight, encouraging outdoor activities. But sleep experts warn that darker mornings and lighter evenings can disrupt sleep cycles, while permanent daylight saving time could force millions of children to travel to school in the dark. The bottom line: The American Academy of Sleep Medicine says it prefers permanent standard time because it better aligns with natural sleep cycles.
“Hawaii and most of Arizona don’t observe daylight saving time, so their clocks won’t change,” the article points out, adding that eliminating it for the rest of America “still faces opposition in the Senate and isn’t expected to be considered by the end of the year.

But “the upcoming midterms could change the balance of power in Congress, potentially shifting the debate.”

Take Spain as an example.

By Vlad_the_Inhaler • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

General Franco was Spain’s dictator between the late 1930s and the mid 1970s which was when he died. He came out as the victor in the Spanish Civil War with substantial assistance from Adolf Hitler, he was an admirer of Adolf Hitler, not least because of that help (not that Hitler felt the same way about Franco *). It was for this reason that Franco aligned his Timezone with Germany’s, something which would be equivalent to permanent DST except that Germany also has DST so Spain now has “Double DST” for 7 months a year.
The Spanish have adapted and overcome, they get up late and go to bed even later.

* During the war, Franco wanted Hitler to help Spain take Gibraltar. No.
  Hitler wanted Spain to join the war rather than remain neutral. No.
  Hitler really disliked Franco’s reedy voice.

Next time change to 1/2 hour DST

By rossdee • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

Its obviously to late to do anything for this event, so how about:

In March, we move the clocks forward a half hour, and then leave them there.

Thus we end up with permanent 1/2 hour daylight saving.

Re:Take Spain as an example.

By quenda • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Can you really blame dictators for Spaniards weird sleeping habits?
People used to have a long sleep after lunch, and so stayed up very late.
Since industrialisation, the siesta has gone, but they still stay up just as late?

I was one of those sad tourists, trying to find dinner at 8pm and nobody open yet.

Re:Blanket

By 93 Escort Wagon • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

The real problem with blankets is how, in the middle of the night, they somehow magically move completely over to the woman’s side of the bed without her being responsible for it at all.

Re:Take Spain as an example.

By Dragonslicer • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

General Franco was Spain’s dictator between the late 1930s and the mid 1970s which was when he died.

Is he still dead?