Wine Ported to OpenBSD
The biggest limitation seems to be the lack of support for WoW64, so 32bit Windows software won’t work. Still, this is a massive milestone for OpenBSD, and makes especially gaming a somewhat viable option on OpenBSD.
The biggest limitation seems to be the lack of support for WoW64, so 32bit Windows software won’t work. Still, this is a massive milestone for OpenBSD, and makes especially gaming a somewhat viable option on OpenBSD.
Many weekend screenings in cities like New York and Los Angeles were sold out despite the three-hour running time. The film’s distributor, A24, called it “one of the largest limited-release openings of the 21st century.” “You Can See Everything” opened on fewer than 900 screens following a jaw-dropping surprise premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last month.Further reading: Will New Documentary Make Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes More Sympathetic?
Fielder and Oppenheim worked on the project in secret for years, filming with Holmes and her partner Billy Evans in the weeks before Holmes went to prison in 2023. Holmes was convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud Theranos investors, but she tried to convince the filmmakers of her innocence.
Fielder, who appears on camera interviewing Holmes and Evans, takes the film in unexpected directions, thrilling critics and theatergoers. The film has an extraordinarily high 99% “fresh score” on Rotten Tomatoes and a record-high 4.8 rating on Letterboxd.
No. Opened on fewer than 1,000 sceens.
Perhaps the “Massive Opening” of the headline?
It’s pretty wild, and there is good reason for the hype around it. It’s really stuck in my mind.
It’s a dive into deception and manipulation, and the relationships between some deeply pathological people. Ostensibly it is about the particular scammers depicted and the people making the movie themselves, but there’s a couple moments where you see Toto pulling back the curtain a bit about the grift being more endemic in these Silicon Valley startup types in general.
It is not an entirely conventional documentary. Someone else suggested the category of “meta documentary” (it gets pretty meta), but perhaps it’s a deconstruction of a documentary, or a documentary for a post truth environment? I’m not sure. If you’ve seen other Nathan Fielder works like the Rehearsal the way it goes off the rails will be familiar. And no, the movie does not hide the ball about questions about its objectivity or ethics what the movie is doing itself, it shoves it in your face in downright unsettling ways.
John Carreyrou, the WSJ journalist behind the piece that kicked off the spiraling downfall of Theranos and the most comprehensive chronicler of that fraud, gave You Can See Everything a glowing review.
No commercial nuclear reactor is known to have resumed generating electricity after beginning the decommissioning process that takes one out of service, though some reactors have restarted after long outages. The Department of Energy is lending as much as $4.4 billion to restart the Palisades Power Plant in Michigan, the Crane Clean Energy Center on Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island and the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa to restore a combined 2.25 gigawatts of electricity, which can power roughly 2 million homes and businesses. All three of the plants closed before their licenses expired, largely because the electricity they produced was considered too expensive… Restarting a reactor is a fairly quick way to get a lot of electricity, and it’s cheaper than building a new, large reactor, said nuclear engineering expert Todd Allen…
Edwin Lyman, at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the taxpayer money being used should go toward addressing safety risks. For example, most U.S. plants were built between 1970 and 1990 and were designed to withstand natural disasters of that era, said Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at UCS. But climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent and severe. “It’s possible, if they set the right level of safety and spend the necessary funds to meet that, they could restore these plants to operable condition,” he said. “That’s not happening at this point....”
NextEra Energy and Google are collaborating to restart Duane Arnold by early 2029… Microsoft has a contract with the Crane Clean Energy Center on Three Mile Island just outside Harrisburg. The plant was the site of the nation’s worst commercial nuclear power accident in 1979. The accident destroyed one reactor, leaving the plant with one functioning. In 2019, Constellation Energy’s then-parent company Exelon shut down the functioning reactor, saying it was losing money and that Pennsylvania lawmakers had refused to subsidize it. Constellation Energy announced in 2024 that it would spend $1.6 billion to restart the reactor under a 20-year agreement with Microsoft. It hopes to bring the plant back online in 2027…
Palisades is expected to be the first nuclear plant in the world to resume generating power after beginning the decommissioning process.
The major expense of a nuclear reactor is in decommissioning, the shutdown and cleanup at it’s retirement. This process can take 20 years itself and require billions of dollars.
Where will that decommissioning money come from? Will it be the rate payers and tax payers as has been in the past? You betcha!
Also… If the reactor was already entering the decommissioning phase, we must assume that it was in bad shape. So now they are going to squeeze another twenty years of use out of a worn out reactor? And then go through a 20 year decommissioning process?
We all know that when you re-wire a house, it costs a shit-ton more than new wiring, because you always run into unexpected issues. That exact problem is going to bite them in the ass here, too: they are going to uncover all kinds of shite they have to deal with, not least because of the radioactivity, temperatures, pressures, corrosive chemicals, etc that are inherent to nuclear power plants.
Palisades is already blowing past its budget and timings estimates for this exact reason: 1,163 steam generator tubes with stress corrosion cracking, way more than expected, leaks in underground water pipes, valves requiring replacement, major turbine refurbishment etc.
There is a real problem with the Data Center model. It will always be “How much energy do we need? How much energy is available? Twice that amount.” Then twice more, then to infinity, and beyond.
Have the Tech bros considered RBMK reactors? Maybe creating a star for direct fusion power? And what happens when the present data centers need new data centers for centering datasets data?
I’m not even fundamentally against AI. I do however feel that there is a real lack of vision. going on Remember early electronic computers? Behemoths of vacuum tubes, sucking up power, some needing constant tube replacement because with that many tubes, some will go bad in normal use.
That is where AI, and even the Data Centers are now. And the Data Center Bros are in a mindset that people who thought ENIAC and Goliath were going to be forever computers. Maybe some time should be taken to move from the infinity based model, to getting control over it.
Now, I could be wrong, but some idea of history and technology, and bubbles, tells me that at least my opinion is thought out, and the present paradigm is not sustainable.
We’re going to switch our nuclear power plants to be monitored by AI to reduce staffing needs
“They’ll do the minimum the law requires to respect user choice,” explains Kush Amlani, Mozilla’s counsel overseeing global competition and regulatory work… Mozilla recently marked 100 days since it released an 87-page report detailing the ways in which Microsoft pushes Edge on Windows PCs.... One example is how Windows often displays a “Let’s finish setting up your PC” pop-up after an OS update. This screen has an enabled-by-default option to “use recommended browser settings,” which makes Edge the default web browser.The last line of the article sums up Mozilla’s main point. “No one should have to fight their OS this hard on something as simple as a browser preference.”
However, that screen doesn’t appear in Europe. European laws now force Microsoft to make Windows more respectful of user choices. For instance, in European countries, the Start menu opens links in your default web browser rather than in Edge, as it does everywhere else. Amlani says Mozilla wants Microsoft to release the European version of Windows to the rest of the world. However, he thinks this will require government action. As he puts it, “Microsoft can do better when it’s forced.”
Yeah it does. I mean we have a lot of other things that are blocked in Europe but we very much do still get the “Finish setting up your PC” window during feature updates. Maybe they meant EU and maybe the windows is locale dependent? I do have mine set to English UK despite being in an EU country.
Microsoft tries its best to force you to use Edge to open a pdf. If I have Adobe Reader set as my default pdf reader, that should be the end of it. Nope. Certain updates have reverted to using Edge so I, and others at my place of work, have to go in and reset the default.
Once someone has something set as their default, it should never be tampered with unless it’s done by the user.
Firefox losing to Edge has more to do with the long-term enshitification of Firefox than any anti-competive behavior by Microsoft. Google Chrome trounces Edge despite Microsoft.
The browser you use to download the browser you want.
The timing of Anthropic’s public fund announcement is both mandatory to prepare for an initial public offering, and “beneficial from an image perspective,” especially as AI reshapes the jobs market, Lise Buyer, partner at IPO advisory firm Class V Group, told CNBC…Anthropic’s announcement hints the fund could address job-market displacements. It says the fund “might” explore “large donations to traditional nonprofits” — or, that it “might” explore “direct distributions to specific populations. One example is labor market impacts.”
Anthropic said it will share more about the fund structure and governance in the coming months, including valuation milestones that may increase the stake. It said it will also share progress on the fund in an upcoming public benefit report. In response to Anthropic’s announcement, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on X that he “recommend[s] giving the shares directly to the public.”
> direct distributions to specific populations
Let me guess, a legal fund for jailed AI Executives?
Reality: No. They’re forming a wholly-owned LLC, not a 501(c)(3) charity. They’re treated as a disregarded entity for tax purposes. Transferring shares from Anthropic to the new LLC is just moving money from Anthropic’s left pocket to its right pocket. You don’t get a tax deduction from that. To get a deduction from IRC 170, you have to make an irrevocable transfer to a qualified 501(c)(3) charity.
If Anthropic later donates from this LLC to actual charities, it could then claim a corporate charitable deduction (against up to 10% of their profits - and note that word, profits; also, there’s no breaks for UBI programs targeted at individuals). But the formation of this entity and transfer of 5% of their shares to it does not give them any sort of a tax break whatsoever, and there’s no difference between donating from this structure to a charity and donating directly from Anthropic. In fact, by forming this structure, they’re skipping a potential tax break that they could get by forming and donating to a 501(c)(3) upfront.
(If your next question is “why not a 501(c)(3), then?”, the answer is because there’s all sorts of IRS restrictions on 501(c)(3)s, including distributing at least 5% of assets annually, excise taxes on investment gains, strict limits on cash transfers to individuals, etc)
I get that it’s popular for mod points to be cynical, but at least focus your cynicism on factuality. Try this: “We found a PR cheat! And how to turn things our CEO wants to do anyway and might not do until many years from now into a pre-IPO press release!”
Wearing spiked gloves, a helmet and protective padding, the 5-foot-6, 205-pound LaPenna held his own against all three bots. He dominated his first opponent, referred to at the fight as "the child robot.” Next came an imposing "Terminator”-inspired humanoid, which was listed on the fight video as 6-feet and 200 pounds with a kick force of 850 pounds. The robot landed several hard kicks, including one that knocked LaPenna across the mat and another with an impact that brought the humanoid to the ground and caused its head to come off — but the human seemed to gain strength as the match went on and eventually stood triumphantly with his foot on the machine’s crumpled body.“The crowd of about 100 (humans, not humanoids) was thrilled,” writes the New York Times. (After beating his first robot opponent, LaPenna told his interviewer, “Clankers zero, humans one.”)
LaPenna was dominant early in his final match, in which he faced a robot that resembled a “Predator” from the movies of the same name. After landing several punches and kicks and taking his opponent to the ground multiple times, LaPenna eventually became fatigued and called for the match to be ended. “He doesn’t get tired. He doesn’t stay down,” LaPenna said in a postmatch interview.
“It’s very unfair to put a human in with a heavily motorized system that’s only going to dominate,” said Ken Goldberg, a professor who oversees the automation lab at the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s nothing surprising about that....” He said he understood the appeal of the fights that Robot Entertainment Kombat (REK) was staging, noting that it tapped “into some of the fear and frustration with robots that people feel.... I mean, they love to see the human kick the robot’s gearbox,” he said. But the odds of that human fighter getting his gearbox kicked are much greater, Dr. Goldberg said, given that REK’s humanoid robots can weigh several hundred pounds and are made of steel.To be fair, it looked like sometimes the robot just fell over. (And the robots were human-controlled, not programmed with split-second reactions…)
On Sept. 23, the California State Athletic Commission sent a cease-and-desist order to REK, its CEO Cix Liv and “all persons holding, promoting, advertising or sponsoring unsanctioned human versus humanoid robot cage fight.” The letter states that “any boxing or mixed martial arts contest, match, or exhibition, involving any human in the State of California” requires the prior approval of the commission and that it is a misdemeanor to hold such an event without obtaining a license or permit from the state. A spokesperson for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the CSAC, said in a statement emailed to The Times that the commission is “committed to protecting the safety of the public and integrity of combat sports.”
“Unsanctioned activity puts the physical and financial well-being of all those involved at risk and such activity will not be tolerated,” the statement said.
How would he do against The Crushinator - or Destructo?
More seriously… I decided to watch the video of the guy against that “Terminator” non-autonomous robot. Just about everything the guy did had ZERO effect on the robot. The robot’s attacks, on the other hand, were clearly dominant. But the robot fell over on its own, twice… and after the second fall the guy just walked over and declared “victory”. It was pretty bogus.
It’s perfectly possible to build a machine that will incapacitate a human at close range; all of the world’s militaries have been doing it for years.
It’s also possible to deliberately dial down the machine’s combat effectiveness to the point where a fight against a human might not be a foregone conclusion.
OTOH, having done the latter, what have we learned? That we can design and build a robot that we nerfed just enough that it usually loses in hand-to-hand combat?
Not sure what’s meant to be demonstrated here
The extremely unsurprising excitement of AI boosters to see a person beat up by an anthropomorphic robot.
but don’t a “boxing match” need *two* opponents?
Legally, isn’t just livestreaming a workout with *very* specialized exercise equipment?
The fifth best-selling game of 2024 in the U.S. was NBA 2K25. Every year, fans dump hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars into the grindy NBA basketball sim. But just a little over two years after its release, 2K Games confirmed it’s already pulling the plug on it. The game will be delisted from digital storefronts on October 30. By January 1, 2027, online servers will go offline as well, making it impossible to play the most popular modes. A game millions paid $70 for will become mostly useless. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres wants to change that.Representative Torres “did not confirm if the bill will have any cosponsors,” the article acknowledges, “or whether any of his Republican colleagues will sign on to support it.”
“I think there should be a simple rule: if you pay for it, you own it,” Torres told Kotaku in a phone interview this week. To make that the law of the land, the U.S. representative for New York’s 15th congressional district since 2021 plans to introduce legislation in Congress called the Power To The Players Act. The bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to create regulations protecting ownership rights for video games. Companies selling digital games would need to grant players more than just a license that can expire at any time, and games with online features would need to provide offline modes that still work even when servers eventually shut down…
The Power To The Players Act noticeably leaves out other types of digital media like movies and music, though Terminator 2 and a bunch of other movie purchases were ripped from people’s digital libraries earlier this year.
In Europe, it is. Article 6 of the Software Directive grants an “interoperability exemption”. The lawful licensee of software has the statutory right to strip DRM in order to achieve interoperability. Any EULA terms that prohibit reverse engineering for interoperability are automatically treated as void. Article 5(1) of Directive 2009/24/EC also grants the ability to decompile to fix bugs that impair the ability to use the software, even if the supplier prohibits it. So long as you don’t then start sharing your “offline mode” version of the software, you’re within your rights
People in Europe are within their rights to task an AI to decompile and tweak a game they own make an “offline mode” version of it, or to create their own servers or whatnot if the manufacturer plans to shut them down or otherwise strip features that the user paid for.
Of course, the US is less consumer-friendly in this regard.
BTW, this also applies to old games. Have an old game that no longer runs on modern operating systems? In Europe, you have the right to task an AI to fix it so it will run.
Adding *new features*, mind you, is trickier. You’re not allowed to decompile and alter a program to add new features, but you *are* allowed to decompile for interoperability purposes. So you are within your rights to task an AI to decompile a program to figure out how to link a mod into it and then to write a mod.
Why did this Mr. Torres (Democrat from NY — That part is important) leave this out? Is it because the film industry is all democrat and the tech industry is libertarian? Can’t be.
Or maybe because it isn’t needed? Movies and music are available in a format you own.
For music - they’re basically all DRM free so you buy it you own it. You can also buy it on CD, vinyl, cassette tape or other formats.
For movies, well, you can still buy DVDs and Blu-Rays, and you buy those you own them.
For videogames, other than GoG, that doesn’t exist. You buy PC games with the courtesy from Valve/Steam, Epic, Microsoft, Sony, etc. If they say you aren’t allowed to play the game anymore, they can block you from playing it.
But with my CDs, purchased music, DVDs and Blu-Rays, no one can prevent me from watching it.
Nscale’s problem is not really Nscale’s. It is Britain’s. Grid-connection times have become the single biggest brake on new data centres. Some UK projects face waits stretching close to a decade for enough power. One estimate found more than a quarter of data-centre capacity slipped in 2025 alone.“The data centre was due to receive its power supply at the end of the year,” reports the BBC. “But as first reported by the Telegraph on Sunday, Nscale has been told this will not happen until the 2030s.” (Though Nscale and Microsoft are still working together on other projects in Norway, Portugal and America.)
Microsoft’s decision threatens to undermine Nscale’s attempts to push ahead with a Wall Street flotation worth up to $35bn (£26bn), despite a brutal sell-off in AI computing stocks. Rival data centre developers have seen their share prices plunge over the last week on concerns that they will struggle to repay their debts as interest rates and inflation continue to rise.... Tech analyst Gartner said last week that $3.5 trillion could be written off by 2030 if the AI boom fails to deliver on its promises.And “our research indicates that enterprise and consumer AI revenue will be insufficient to support profitable returns on all planned AI capital expenditures during this period,” Gartner wrote:
“In 2026, AI providers are expected to spend nearly $1 trillion on AI infrastructure, and are forecast to invest an additional $6 trillion between 2027 and 2030,” said Will Sommer, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner.... Failure to achieve sustainable return on investment capital (ROIC) on rapidly depreciating assets would almost certainly necessitate write-downs. Based on Gartner projections, a continued AI infrastructure investment trajectory could leave more than $4 trillion in asset value exposed to write-down risk through 2032. In this scenario, Gartner does not expect the 12% ROIC to be achieved until the end of 2032 at earliest…
Gartner estimates AI-optimized IaaS spending will grow from $66 billion in 2027 to $174 billion in 2030. “The growth in spending on AI-optimized IaaS will be too low for most AI compute providers to recover their AI investments before the current generation of AI semiconductors is replaced,” said Sommer. By 2030, Gartner predicts that cost pressure and a lack of a differentiating business model will force over 80% of neocloud [AI-specialized infrastructure] providers to cease independent operations.
Sooner or later people are going to realize that AI is just another name for Linear Algebra and all this will come crashing down
There are at least four problems with this. First, linear algebra is from a math standpoint insanely powerful. For example, all of representation theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representation_theory is using linear algebra to understand groups. Much of the study of modular forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_form involves understanding the behavior of modular forms over SL_2(Z) which has heavy linear algebra elements to it. People who see linear algebra as somehow a weak thing are often people who took a single semester of it and didn’t do much else with it.
Second, the idea that these AI systems are just linear algebra isn’t accurate anyhow. While there’s a lot of linear involved, a major part of how transforms like LLMs work is the intervening non-linear layers, which use ReLu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectified_linear_unit, Softplus, or a similar function. So, summarizing this as just linear algebra isn’t accurate. It is linear algebra with some spice.
Third, even if this were somehow just linear algebra, that shouldn’t therefore be a reason to think that there’s any limits to what is going on. At the end of the day, the empirical success is what matter, and systems which can do things like prove the quasi-Riemann Hypothesis or solve other major math problems are pretty impressive regardless of what is under the hood. So, if one does think this is just linear algebra, that’s not a reason to dismiss the systems but a reason to increase your estimate of what can be done with mere linear algebra.
Fourth, slowing down connections like this may make crashes *less likely.* In particular, the main way we could have a serious bubble here is over-investment. Delays including power grid delays force bottlenecks on the investment level, and make that sort of problem less likely.
We may be in a bubble here. Certainly some elements look very bubble-like. In the late 1990s, during the dot-com boom, one had people making perfectly normal businesses but just tacking on “on the internet” to it and it would get millions of dollars of funding automatically. See for example pets.com . And we’re seeing some of that now; we’ve had a whole bunch of businesses see their stock price shootup just because they mention AI. So we may be in a bubble, and it may crash now, or might crash never or decades from now. (Arguably the US had an 80 year automobile bubble that didn’t crash until the late 2000s which then forced the auto bailout.) But the other thing to keep in mind is that a crash does not mean the tech goes away. In 1873, the US had a devastating collapse of the railroad bubble, and yet railroads continued to grow, with the amount of track not peaking until around 1910 https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter5/rail-transportation-pipelines/rail-track-mileage-united-states/. Similarly, although the internet bubble burst, by 2015, one had more internet use than even the most internet hyping person in 1998 would have likely dreamed of. A bubble bursting does not mean the tech itself goes away.
The problem is UK energy policy. It is to build large amounts of intermittent power generation in places where there is no demand.
The business case for doing this rests on LCOE calculations which omit the costs of remedying intermittency and also the cost of getting the power to where there is demand, in the present case, Essex, but in general in the Midlands and South.
The result is that the UK has to build a hugely expensive new transmission network from the wind farms off the north coast of Scotland to the Midlands and South. It still has no specific problem for how to supply continuous reliable power from wind - the only solution is of course gas fired generation, but that is politically incorrect.
The country has the highest electricity prices in the OECD. Which as inevitable - however you fake the numbers with LCOE, the costs are real and have to be recovered somehow.
The program also involves large amounts of solar. However, the UK is the second worst country in the world for solar power generation (the worst is Ireland). This doesn’t help either, and just increases the size of the intermittency problem.
What is coming towards the UK is probably a nationwide blackout, and certainly rolling regional ones. If they are sucessful in the other part of their program they will increase demand substantially by converting heating to heat pumps and transport to EVs. And by persuading companies to install lots of data centers for AI etc. Sooner or later these plans will run into the one or two week period which occurs most years, when there is a blocking high to the southwest and dead calms. Wind generation falls well below 10% of faceplate and stays there for a couple of weeks. At 4pm, this being winter, solar vanishes - there has been negligible amounts anyway even earlier in the day, this being winter at these latitudes. There are no plans to keep supply going when this happens. They need plans to build out masses of new gas - because the old installations they depend on at the moment are reaching end of life. Are there any such plans? Of course not. And if you were building out that much gas, why do you need all that wind and transmission?
You don’t!
This cannot work. You would have to be blinkered or silly (or paid off with tax breaks, and even then its not clear these could be big enough) to contemplate investing heavily in a data center operation in the UK till they get this turned around, as in U-turn, abolish the net zero silliness and build reliable low cost generating capacity. And stop building transmission links to nowhere.
As for Global Warming and Climate Change, its irrelevant. Whatever is happening with the climate, there is nothing that UK energy policy can do to have any effect on it. All the current programs can do is make a nationwide blackout more likely. And the world will then, if it happens, watch a world first: a country trying to restart its grid using wind power. Good luck with that one.
Roughly 84.4% of the world’s coral reefs suffered bleaching-levels of heat stress during the last major marine heat wave from January 2023 to September 2025, with over half already lost compared to coral coverage in the 1950s… But there’s some good news, thanks to a new study published this Wednesday in the journal Science Advances: Marine ecologists at Stanford have discovered that bleached corals can be revived via contact with a healthy coral neighbor, who (like a good neighbor) shares their photosynthetic, symbiotic algae (Symbiodiniaceae) with their peers.
“This incredible new result — that fast and full recovery is possible in bleached coral — can inspire solutions that eventually may be scalable,” [Fiorenza Micheli, a marine ecologist with Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions and study co-author, told the journal Nature]… Unlike their controls, bleached coral in contact with healthy coral recovered in just eight weeks… [T]he surprise discovery of this method alongside the other techniques that marine conservationists are now actively pursuing — including the successful deep-freezing and revival of at-risk coral sampled from Hawaii — could offer threatened reefs the lifeline they need. Coral contact could super-charge other efforts, like the selective breeding of heat-tolerant corals and the cultivation of protected coral nurseries
OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won’t play nice?
In recent weeks, users of services like Meta’s Muse, xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking tickets on behalf of users. JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have also confirmed that they’re blocking AI agents from accessing accounts due to security concerns. Some users say sites that previously worked with their AI agent are no longer accessible, including Cars.com and Amtrak, suggesting other companies could be quietly blocking them....
Muse, Meta’s deceptively cute AI assistant, most recently faced the wrath of Amazon, which said its “continued access” violates its site policies. There are reports of xAI’s Grok, Instinct’s AI agent, and OpenAI’s Dots being unable to use Amazon as well. xAI owner Elon Musk responded by saying that maybe he “should start a competitor to Amazon.” The more places bots struggle to access, the greater the questions about how useful they are....
Instead of trying to fight Amazon, [Meta] has partnered with retailers like Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Best Buy, and others, allowing Muse to shop on their sites. At the same time, Shopify has also opened its network of storefronts to AI agents.
Next the agents drive the actual browser, and thus become indistinguishable from a meatsack.
> when the rest of the internet won’t play nice?
Umm, let’s see, Agents pound sites and do unexpected things. Then people block Agents from sites. People making Agents claim the Internet won’t play nice. Sure, makes perfect sense that it is the entire Internet that is wrong and Agents are perfect if lawless entities.
We live in the wackiest timeline.
To be fair, websites don’t respect people’s rights to say “no” to user tracking and serving up ads, trying their darndest to defeat ad blockers and such.
This kind of automation ultimately causes problems for ‘regular’ every day consumers and gets hijacked by a smaller group of assholes; plus the technology isn’t mature enough to be trusted. So what happens when an agent runs amok, buys a too many of x, and the user says ‘wait! I didn’t want 100, I want to you to eat the cost of me returning it, and company y says, too fucking bad you bought it’ — who’s liable? (my answer is the dumbass with the agent, but who knows how it will pan out)
Only a few years ago some of the kind of stuffs agents do (or at least have access to) we’d call a virus or malware, how things change.
xAI owner Elon Musk responded by saying that maybe he “should start a competitor to Amazon.”
Classic Musk: Underestimating the talent and effort needed to break into a business. It took Amazon nine years to become profitable. At the most his attempt will just be “MAGA Temu” and he’ll hide the folly by merging it into a business that is working, like he’s already done with other properties he owns.
Conceals (poorly) a recording device, then leaves a similar device lying around in a bag with his wallet and ID? It’s so blatantly incompetent that it makes me wonder if this isn’t some red herring in a larger plot.
A report published in July by Pangram, a research firm that tracks AI content online, found that more than 40% of long-form posts on the platform were AI-generated, compared to around 30% on X and Medium and a smaller percentage on Reddit and Substack.... LinkedIn previously offered AI tools to edit or rewrite posts, although it recently scaled the offerings back. But low-quality AI posts are a business problem for LinkedIn. They all start to sound the same, [according to LinkedIn Editor-in-Chief Dan Roth Roth]. If users see too many generic AI posts, instead of content that really teaches them something or gives them a deeper understanding of a professional connection, LinkedIn risks losing them to other platforms.
In August, LinkedIn rolled out a button letting users flag when a post “seems like AI slop,” which was clicked more than 1 million times within its first two weeks. Now, the company is trying to use its own AI systems to help weed out AI slop on the platform and to remind LinkedIn users how to post like humans. The company built a team largely made up of former journalists and social media experts who have an eye for recognizing generic, sloppy content. These experts help train LinkedIn’s AI model on what authentic, useful posts look like. If the model flags a post as low-quality, AI-generated content, it’ll be less likely to be distributed beyond that user’s direct connections.
Also key to the strategy is a creator management team that acts as “content therapists” for executives, subject matter experts and other LinkedIn users, many of whom have gotten accustomed to the convenience of using AI to write what, on the surface, appear to be polished posts, Roth said. “A lot of times now today, they’ll run it through Claude or Gemini or wherever, they’ll post it on LinkedIn and it will perform poorly. And then they come to the team and they’re like, ‘Why did this do badly?’" Roth said. “And the best thing you can do is give it back to them and be like, ‘Did you enjoy reading this? Do you see yourself in this?”
The efforts are showing early signs of success. Improvements to LinkedIn’s detection systems have resulted in a 40% decline in views of content classified as AI slop, the platform said last month. That’s not to say LinkedIn is entirely opposed to AI, Roth said, adding that “not everyone is a born communicator.” But failing to edit or personalize content means it’s less likely to reach a wide audience on the platform.
People writing content for content’s sake. People trying to be “thought leaders” without doing the thought part. Nobody reads that stuff anyway, they just like it in a big old networking circle jerk.
I stopped using LinkedIn when they seemingly decided my account wasn’t about me (despite having obvious and publicly verifiable details right there in the description) and wanted me to verify my ID using one of the US-based services with a questionable reputation to get my access back. That’s not going to happen, so I just don’t use the site any longer.
As far as I can tell, that has made zero difference to my career, and it’s one fewer drain on my time. The only thing I have missed is seeing the occasional good news story where a past colleague has been promoted or the like, but I’m not giving up my government-issued credentials to the US-based data harvesting industry for that.
Wait, so major AI player upset AI is used on their platform?
Seriously?
Are they even listening to themselves? Not that consistency matters in this timeline anymore..
The TIOBE Index is a monthly indicator of programming-language popularity based on factors including skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. The October 2026 rankings show a largely stable top 10, with R overtaking SQL and Julia returning to the top 20 for the first time in three years. [SQL has risen to #9 from #10 in October of 2025 — back when R ranked only #13.]Dropping out of the top ten is Go, which fell from #8 in October of 2025 to #11. And Delphi/Object Pascal has plummeted from #9 to #19.
Python remains No. 1, followed by C, C++, Java, C#, and JavaScript, while Rust holds its No. 10 position. [A year ago Rust ranked only #16.] Outside the top 10, Julia climbs from No. 21 to No. 18, and TIOBE introduces Mandarin Chinese search terms into its methodology to broaden the index’s geographic representation.
Python offers an accessible, high-level approach to numerical computing, but performance can become a bottleneck. C++, on the other hand, delivers excellent performance but comes with a steeper learning curve and a lower level of abstraction. Julia aims to bridge this gap by combining the best of both worlds…
Apart from Julia, two other languages are knocking on the door of the TIOBE top 20: Dart and OCaml. Dart jumps from #41 to #27 this month. Thanks to its popular UI toolkit Flutter, Dart has been hovering around the edge of the top 20 for quite some time. OCaml, on the other hand, might come as a surprise. It jumps from #38 to #26 this month, driven in part by its growing use in real-time trading systems and parsing technology.
With more and more software development being turned over to AI coding agents, in many respects the language itself no longer matters. However I’m not surprised Rust is growing in popularity, driven by AI code generation. And it’s a good match for that. While a lot of human developers find Rust difficult to learn and work with, AI agents have no such difficulties and the Rust compiler guarantees help mitigate some of the problems from mediocre, generated code.
I’ve seen quite a few projects introduced lately that all use AI code generation and Rust. And frankly that’s probably the only way I’m going to use Rust myself.
TIOBE is based on counts of web search hits using the query "[language name] programming”.
This methodology (that was questionable even when humans turned to web content created by other humans to seek help about programming languages) is now absolutely useless when humans use AI coding agents for programming.
The interactions that used to appear publicly in sites like Stack Overflow (new monthly questions posted down 98% from its peak) now belong in private chats between developers and their AIs, out of reach from web search indexers and thus invisible to TIOBE.
What TIOBE sees is mostly the fossilized landscape of two years ago. The rest is noise.
Fair point.
Go still sucks though.
I don’t know how to code in Dart, but I’ve put a lot of sloppy dart code on github recently.
That’s because while I’ve been coding for decades, I hate coding GUI libraries and I’ve not done much GUI as a result. The libraries are constantly changing and what you learned last year is out of date and you have to learn the next fashion statement library.
But AIs don’t hate GUI code, so I’ve been making a bunch of GUI programs I wouldn’t otherwise make.
Flutter is a quite good cross platform GUI library and you program it in Dart and the programs compile to MacOs, IOS, Android, Windows, Linux and Web. This works better than any other cross platform system I’ve used over the years. The on-ramp is short because Claude knows how to code for it.
So a load of command line and TUI programs of mine have sprouted out into full GUIs coded by AI. GUI programming seems to be mostly boilerplate and functions with tens of parameters, which AI is quite capable at.
The making core crypto and analysis algorithms that are my day to day thing is for now the domain of humans. AI has never seen it before and so it doesn’t know how to do it.
The collection includes historical SDKs, developer conference presentations, technical documentation, programming examples, limited source code, and development utilities. (ROM images, commercial applications, and simulator binaries have deliberately been excluded....) Making a broader collection of development resources available to the retrocomputing community, the archive is available at GitHub.com/ardiri/dev-palmos and is intended for historical preservation, education, and research, particularly as enthusiasts continue working to maintain, emulate, and revive the platform… Ardiri has also written an auto-biography and has started explored the engineering principles behind these systems in his books.And somewhere along the way, Ardiri rediscovered the original source code for "The Palm OS Virus That Never Was — Lost for 25 Years, Found in 2026.” Lurking on a CompactFlash card containing files dated June 2001, he found the self-replicating Palm OS virus that he’d developed and tested in June 2001, months before the planned PalmSource developer conference in San Jose.
Named ‘Virii,’ the virus intercepted Palm OS system calls to progressively infect legitimate applications while preserving their original functionality. Infected applications could then spread between handheld devices through infrared beaming, potentially allowing an infection to propagate among hundreds of developers exchanging software at the conference. The virus also included a date-triggered payload designed to interfere with system time reporting between October 23 and 27, 2001, potentially causing erratic clocks, unreliable alarms, and missed appointments.He promises the functional source code and binaries will remain private.
The restriction is not new: the relevant checks were introduced in the device firmware around 2024. However, these hardware handcuffs have only recently received wider attention. Though a user can desolder the original memory and install electrically compatible RAM, the nonfree firmware may refuse to recognize the additional memory, or simply decide not to boot the computer at all. Even replacement RAM of the same capacity can be rejected.Hackaday recently argued the restriction was "no big deal.” noting there’s ways to bypass the restriction”
This is worse than Raspberry Pi’s longstanding dependence on nonfree firmware in an important way. It is not only nonfree software, but it is Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), used in this case to prevent the owner of the computer from making a modification that the hardware is otherwise capable of supporting. That distinction matters. Soldered RAM is difficult for most people to replace since it is a physical characteristic of the hardware. In the case of Raspberry Pi boards, users have demonstrated that the hardware itself can be modified successfully....
Raspberry Pi justifies the use of DRM on the basis of being able to identify altered computers. There may be legitimate reasons for wanting to identify such altered computers. Unscrupulous sellers have reportedly replaced memory on lower-capacity boards and resold them as more expensive models, sometimes using unreliable or defective components. But preventing fraud and maintaining quality does not require taking control away from users. A Raspberry Pi could record its original factory configuration in a cryptographically verifiable form. Raspberry Pi could use free software that warns the user when the installed RAM differs from original factory configuration. Raspberry Pi could provide tools allowing buyers to verify what hardware originally shipped with a board. None of those measures requires a software-enforced limit on what an owner may do with the computer…
If compatible hardware can be installed successfully, the manufacturer should not create restrictions to prevent the owner from using it. Restrictions on hardware upgrades are deeply troubling from an organization like Raspberry Pi that has stated their commitment to longevity as a guiding principle. Free software is ultimately about who controls the computer. The user should control it, not the manufacturer that sold it....
The people who own these computers must also have the freedom to modify, repair, and upgrade them, without restrictions imposed by nonfree software limiting their potential.
The bootloader is stored in the SPI flash chip, which can be reflashed using the built-in mask ROM over USB and rpiboot, and you are not prevented from flashing older versions of the bootloader, so far… If you have the skills to upgrade your RAM, you most certainly have the skills to downgrade the Raspberry Pi bootloader…
My advice: don’t lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they’re only slightly harder to perform now. Very few hackers ever performed them, the main audience for them turned out to be dodgy hardware resellers online… Think of the users that will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon, especially now that the perverse incentives for board mods and reusing harvested RAM chips are at their highest.
> especially given they’re only slightly harder to perform now.
> Think of the users that will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon
these are incompatible claims. Either ram upgrades are still easy to accomplish -OR- ‘dodgy hardware resellers’ will no longer be able to continue installing bad ram. You cannot have both.
Now, of course, raspberry pi *cloud* actually close of that avenue, but they’d have to lock down the bootloader to do so. That’s probably their next step. I imagine the apologists at Hackaday would find a way to rationalize that too.
Not sure I see the point of the pi any more. For roughly the same price you can now buy a used NUC with a faster processor, enough memory, and SSD storage. Why mess around running stuff from usb sticks? Or even from external extra SSDs? Put the distro of choice on it. And isn’t the memory expandable too on the NUC and similar?
raspi or similar still makes sense if power consumption is a significant consideration. If you are running from battery you will want to look at ARM. If space is a serious consideration, likewise, like if it absolutely has to be very small. For all other types of install you’re definitely better off with a used NUC. If you want some GPIO you can get it with a $3 nano.
How many gpio pins does a NUC have available? How about schematics?
American keyboards have an “A” key, while Canadian keyboards have an “Eh” key?
Fielder in Wired magazine
An interesting, albeit somewhat meandering, Wired interview with Fielder about the film:
https://www.wired.com/story/na…