Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. UK Scientists Achieve First Commercial Tritium Production
  2. Microsoft Open Sources Copilot Chat for VS Code on GitHub
  3. A Common Assumption About Aging May Be Wrong, Study Suggests
  4. XBOW’s AI-Powered Pentester Grabs Top Rank on HackerOne, Raises $75M to Grow Platform
  5. HPE Acquires Juniper Networks for $14B After Settling Antitrust Case
  6. Why Do Killer Whales Keep Handing Us Fish? Scientists Unpack the Mystery
  7. Will FaceTime In IOS 26 Freeze Your Call If Someone Starts Undressing?
  8. Two Sudo Vulnerabilities Discovered and Patched
  9. Nuclear Microreactors Advance as US Picks Two Companies for Fueled Testing
  10. Near Antarctica, Saltier Seas Mean Less Ice, Study Finds
  11. AI Coding Agents Are Already Commoditized
  12. EU Sticks With Timeline For AI Rules
  13. US Plans AI Chip Curbs on Malaysia, Thailand Over China Concerns
  14. There Is No Safe Amount of Processed Meat To Eat, According to New Research
  15. Moderna Says mRNA Flu Vaccine Sailed Through Trial, Beating Standard Shot

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.

UK Scientists Achieve First Commercial Tritium Production

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Interesting Engineering reports:
Astral Systems, a UK-based private commercial fusion company, has claimed to have become the first firm to successfully breed tritium, a vital fusion fuel, using its own operational fusion reactor. This achievement, made with the University of Bristol, addresses a significant hurdle in the development of fusion energy....

Scientists from Astral Systems and the University of Bristol produced and detected tritium in real-time from an experimental lithium breeder blanket within Astral’s multi-state fusion reactors. “There’s a global race to find new ways to develop more tritium than what exists in today’s world — a huge barrier is bringing fusion energy to reality,” said Talmon Firestone, CEO and co-founder of Astral Systems. “This collaboration with the University of Bristol marks a leap forward in the search for viable, greater-than-replacement tritium breeding technologies. Using our multi-state fusion technology, we are the first private fusion company to use our reactors as a neutron source to produce fusion fuel.”

Astral Systems’ approach uses its Multi-State Fusion (MSF) technology. The company states this will commercialize fusion power with better performance, efficiency, and lower costs than traditional reactors. Their reactor design, the result of 25 years of engineering and over 15 years of runtime, incorporates recent understandings of stellar physics. A core innovation is lattice confinement fusion (LCF), a concept first discovered by NASA in 2020. This allows Astral’s reactor to achieve solid-state fuel densities 400 million times higher than those in plasma. The company’s reactors are designed to induce two distinct fusion reactions simultaneously from a single power input, with fusion occurring in both plasma and a solid-state lattice.
The article includes this quote from professor Tom Scott, who led the University of Bristol’s team, supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering and UK Atomic Energy Authority. “This landmark moment clearly demonstrates a potential path to scalable tritium production in the future and the capability of Multi-State Fusion to produce isotopes in general.”

And there’s also this prediction from the company’s web site:
“As we progress the fusion rate of our technology, aiming to exceed 10 trillion DT fusions per second per system, we unlock a wide range of applications and capabilities, such as large-scale medical isotope production, fusion neutron materials damage testing, transmutation of existing nuclear waste stores, space applications, hybrid fusion-fission power systems, and beyond.”
“Scientists everywhere are racing to develop this practically limitless form of energy,” write a climate news site called The Cooldown. (Since in theory nuclear fusion “has an energy output four times higher than that of fission, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.”)

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the news.

So just to avoid misunderstandings…

By ffkom • Score: 3 Thread
… the “15 years of runtime” of their “operational fusion reactor” never produced any net energy gain - they were just after the isotope production, right?

Which means there is still only that tiny little detail missing before fusion reactors will replace all the other sources of energy… that detail being “becoming net energy positive, at costs where with the surplus energy can be sold cheaper than from established sources of energy”.

Microsoft Open Sources Copilot Chat for VS Code on GitHub

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“Microsoft has released the source code for the GitHub Copilot Chat extension for VS Code under the MIT license,” reports BleepingComputer.
This provides the community access to the full implementation of the chat-based coding assistant, including the implementation of “agent mode,” what contextual data is sent to large language models (LLMs), and the design of system prompts. The GitHub repository hosting the code also details telemetry collection mechanisms, addressing long-standing questions about data transparency in AI-assisted coding tools…

As the VS Code team explained previously, shifts in AI tooling landscape like the rapid growth of the open-source AI ecosystem and a more level playing field for all have reduced the need for secrecy around prompt engineering and UI design. At the same time, increased targeting of development tools by malicious actors has increased the need for crowdsourcing contributions to rapidly pinpoint problems and develop effective fixes. Essentially, openness is now considered superior from a security perspective.
“If you’ve been hesitant to adopt AI tools because you don’t trust the black box behind them, this move opensources-github-copilot-chat-vscode/offers something rare these days: transparency,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli"
Now that the extension is open source, developers can audit how agent mode actually works. You can also dig into how it manages your data, customize its behavior, or build entirely new tools on top of it. This could be especially useful in enterprise environments where compliance and control are non negotiable.

It is worth pointing out that the backend models powering Copilot remain closed source. So no, you won’t be able to self host the whole experience or train your own Copilot. But everything running locally in VS Code is now fair game. Microsoft says it is planning to eventually merge inline code completions into the same open source package too, which would make Copilot Chat the new hub for both chat and suggestions.

Transparency?

By Cley Faye • Score: 3 Thread

I wasn’t really worried about how my IDE would be able to read, edit, and write file, nor how it could highlight some differences, or how it would grab something I typed and send it to a backend.
I’m worried about that backend, receiving everything needed to supposedly make decisions about the code, being fully closed, operated by an unreliable third party, with said third party promising to play fair as the only security net.

More open source is great, but considering this a move to improve transparency and trust into AI “agent” or whatever is a joke. “you can audit everything up to the part you’re suspicious about”, eh?

A Common Assumption About Aging May Be Wrong, Study Suggests

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“Some of our basic assumptions about the biological process of aging might be wrong,” reports the New York Times — citing new research on a small Indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon. [Alternate URL here.]
Scientists have long believed that long-term, low-grade inflammation — also known as “inflammaging” — is a universal hallmark of getting older. But this new data raises the question of whether inflammation is directly linked to aging at all, or if it’s linked to a person’s lifestyle or environment instead. The study, which was published Monday, found that people in two nonindustrialized areas experienced a different kind of inflammation throughout their lives than more urban people — likely tied to infections from bacteria, viruses and parasites rather than the precursors of chronic disease. Their inflammation also didn’t appear to increase with age.

Scientists compared inflammation signals in existing data sets from four distinct populations in Italy, Singapore, Bolivia and Malaysia; because they didn’t collect the blood samples directly, they couldn’t make exact apples-to-apples comparisons. But if validated in larger studies, the findings could suggest that diet, lifestyle and environment influence inflammation more than aging itself, said Alan Cohen, an author of the paper and an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. “Inflammaging may not be a direct product of aging, but rather a response to industrialized conditions,” he said, adding that this was a warning to experts like him that they might be overestimating its pervasiveness globally.

“How we understand inflammation and aging health is based almost entirely on research in high-income countries like the U.S.,” said Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University. But a broader look shows that there’s much more global variation in aging than scientists previously thought, he added… McDade, who has previously studied inflammation in the Tsimane group, speculated that populations in nonindustrialized regions might be exposed to certain microbes in water, food, soil and domestic animals earlier in their lives, bolstering their immune response later in life.
More from The Independent:
Chronic inflammation is thought to speed up the ageing process and contribute to various health conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes… However, other experts shared a word of caution before jumping to conclusions from the study. Vishwa Deep Dixit, director of the Yale Center for Research on Aging, told the New York Times it’s not surprising that people less exposed to pollution would see lower rates of chronic disease.
Aurelia Santoro, an associate professor at the University of Bologna, also cautioned about the results, according to the Times. “While they had lower rates of chronic disease, the two Indigenous populations tended to have life spans shorter than those of people in industrialized regions, meaning they may simply not have lived long enough to develop inflammaging, Santoro said.”

And Bimal Desai, a professor of pharmacology who studies inflammation at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, told the Times that the study “sparks valuable discussion” but needs more follow-up “before we rewrite the inflammaging narrative.”

XBOW’s AI-Powered Pentester Grabs Top Rank on HackerOne, Raises $75M to Grow Platform

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
We’re living in a new world now — one where it’s an AI-powered penetration tester that “now tops an eminent US security industry leaderboard that ranks red teamers based on reputation.” CSO Online reports:
On HackerOne, which connects organizations with ethical hackers to participate in their bug bounty programs, “Xbow” scored notably higher than 99 other hackers in identifying and reporting enterprise software vulnerabilities. It’s a first in bug bounty history, according to the company that operates the eponymous bot…

Xbow is a fully autonomous AI-driven penetration tester (pentester) that requires no human input, but, its creators said, "operates much like a human pentester" that can scale rapidly and complete comprehensive penetration tests in just a few hours. According to its website, it passes 75% of web security benchmarks, accurately finding and exploiting vulnerabilities.

Xbow submitted nearly 1,060 vulnerabilities to HackerOne, including remote code execution, information disclosures, cache poisoning, SQL injection, XML external entities, path traversal, server-side request forgery (SSRF), cross-site scripting, and secret exposure. The company said it also identified a previously unknown vulnerability in Palo Alto’s GlobalProtect VPN platform that impacted more than 2,000 hosts. Of the vulnerabilities Xbow submitted over the last 90 days, 54 were classified as critical, 242 as high and 524 as medium in severity. The company’s bug bounty programs have resolved 130 vulnerabilities, and 303 are classified as triaged.

Notably, though, roughly 45% of the vulnerabilities it found are still awaiting resolution, highlighting the “volume and impact of the submissions across live targets,” Nico Waisman, Xbow’s head of security, wrote in a blog post this week… To further hone the technology, the company developed “validators,” — automated peer reviewers that confirm each uncovered vulnerability, Waisman explained.
“As attackers adopt AI to automate and accelerate exploitation, defenders must meet them with even more capable systems,” XBOW’s CEO said this week, as the company raised $75 million in Series B funding to grow its platform, bringing its total funding to $117 million. Help Net Security reports:
With the new funding, XBOW plans to grow its engineering team and expand its go-to-market efforts. The product is now generally available, and the company says it is working with large banks, tech firms, and other organizations that helped shape the platform during its early testing phase. XBOW’s long-term goal is to help security teams stay ahead of adversaries using advanced automation. As attackers increasingly turn to AI, the company argues that defenders will need equally capable systems to match their speed and sophistication.

Second place is a cow.

By backslashdot • Score: 4, Funny Thread

Looking at the rankings .. second best pentester is “moo im a cow”. Third place is “mayonnaise”. So humans got beat by AI, a cow, and a jar of mayonnaise?

HPE Acquires Juniper Networks for $14B After Settling Antitrust Case

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
This week Hewlett-Packard Enterprise settled its antitrust case with America’s Justice Department, “paving the way for its acquisition of rival kit maker Juniper Networks,” reported Telecoms.com:
Under the agreement, HPE has agreed to divest its Instant On unit, which sells a range of enterprise-grade Wi-Fi networking equipment for campus and branch deployments. It has also agreed to license Juniper’s Mist AIOps source code — a software suite that enables AI-based network automation and management. HPE can live with that, since its primary motivation for buying Juniper is to improve its prospects in an IT networking market dominated by Cisco, where others like Arista and increasingly Nokia and Nvidia are also trying to make inroads.
And after receiving regulatory clearance, HPE “very quickly closed the deal…” reports The Motley Fool. “In the press release heralding the news, the buyer wrote that it “doubles the size of HPE’s networking business and provides customers with a comprehensive portfolio of networking solutions.”
Investors were obviously happy about this, as according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence the company’s stock price ballooned by nearly 16% across the week, largely on the news.... The Justice Department had alleged, in a lawsuit filed in January, that an HPE/Juniper tie-up would essentially result in a duopoly in networking equipment. It claimed that a beefed-up HPE and networking incumbent Cisco would hold more than 70% combined of the domestic market.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

Re:I don’t understand

By SvnLyrBrto • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Why would there be one? This looks like a bog-standard corporate acquisition with some kowtowing to trump. Skeezy for the latter, but I don’t see any climate angle to Juniper’s networking kit.

memristors?

By ndsurvivor • Score: 3 Thread
I read a long time ago that HP was supposed to give us memristors. What happened to that? This is a troll comment, pay no attention to this poster.

What the fuck?!

By Nabeel_co • Score: 3, Insightful Thread

This is crazy. HPE is just buying up all the networking companies and the DOJ is just OK with this?!

This is insane!

First Aruba and now Juniper.

This kind of concentration of power is what’s wrong with Capitalism. This does nothing but reduces competition. Anyone who tells you capitalism is about free market competition, is an idiot. Capitalism is the antithesis of both free market and competition, because all capitalism does is breed monopolies that crush their competitors.

Re:What the fuck?!

By ndsurvivor • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
There is no DOJ in my humble opinion, they are just Trumps lawyers now. A nation of and for Billionaires.

Why Do Killer Whales Keep Handing Us Fish? Scientists Unpack the Mystery

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Science Daily reports:
Wild orcas across four continents have repeatedly floated fish and other prey to astonished swimmers and boaters, hinting that the ocean’s top predator likes to make friends. Researchers cataloged 34 such gifts over 20 years, noting the whales often lingered expectantly — and sometimes tried again — after humans declined their offerings, suggesting a curious, relationship-building motive…

“Orcas often share food with each other — it’s a prosocial activity and a way that they build relationships with each other,” said study lead author Jared Towers, of Bay Cetology in British Columbia, Canada. “That they also share with humans may show their interest in relating to us as well.”
The complete research was published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. Its title? “Testing the Waters: Attempts by Wild Killer Whales (Orcinus orca) to Provision People (Homo sapiens).”

Concerned for our health

By OrangeTide • Score: 5, Funny Thread

They’ve seen the obesity epidemic in America and are concerned we eat too much red meat and carbs.
They’re like: Try having a fish once in a while, fatso. Any maybe you’ll stop dumping garbage in our ocean if you have to eat out of it too.

Re:And no cat owner is surprised

By OrangeTide • Score: 4, Funny Thread

It’s a backhanded gift. Your cat thinks you’re in incompetent hunter and is trying to help you because he/she feels sorry for you.

If we can decode their communication…

By 93 Escort Wagon • Score: 4, Funny Thread

Orca 1: What are those things? They keep showing up at inconvenient times.
Orca 2: Yeah, I was trying to make moves on Orca 3, but one of those wouldn’t give us privacy! It’s maddening…
Orca 1: They look pretty dumb. I wonder if they can communicate?
Orca 2: Hey, let’s see if they’re as dumb as they look! I’ve been playing with this bird carcass - I’m gonna give it to them and see what happens.

Orca 1: Yup, they’re dumb. I saw they kept pushing it back towards you, each time you tried to give it to them. Hmm… perhaps it’s some primitive form of play? Orca 4 thinks he saw a couple of them waving those scrawny limbs at each other - I wonder if that serves as some really primitive level of communication?

Douglas Adams would cheer this on

By zuki • Score: 4, Funny Thread
"So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish" suddenly makes so much more sense now.

Re:And if they get tired of you

By Growlley • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
1. we smell 2. we taste bad 3, they are more intelligent than us and know we kill the entire pod in retaliation,

Will FaceTime In IOS 26 Freeze Your Call If Someone Starts Undressing?

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Apple news blog 9to5Mac:
iOS 26 is a packed update for iPhone users thanks to the new Liquid Glass design and major updates for Messages, Wallet, CarPlay, and more. But another new feature was just discovered in the iOS 26 beta: FaceTime will now freeze your call’s video and audio if someone starts undressing.

When Apple unveiled iOS 26 last month, it mentioned a variety of new family tools… “Communication Safety expands to intervene when nudity is detected in FaceTime video calls, and to blur out nudity in Shared Albums in Photos.” However, at least in the iOS 26 beta, it seems that a similar feature may be in place for all users — adults included.
That’s the claim of an X.com user named iDeviceHelp, who says FaceTime in iOS 26 swaps in a warning message that says “Audio and video are paused because you may be showing something sensitive,” giving users a choice of ending the call or resuming it.

9to5Mac says “It’s unclear whether this is an intended behavior, or just a bug in the beta that’s applying the feature to adults… [E]verything happens on-device so Apple has no idea about the contents of your call.”

It was a feature request from CNN

By drnb • Score: 4, Funny Thread
It was a feature request from CNN

“Jeffrey Toobin is back at CNN eight months after exposing himself on Zoom”
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/10…

Two Sudo Vulnerabilities Discovered and Patched

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
In April researchers responsibly disclosed two security flaws found in Sudo “that could enable local attackers to escalate their privileges to root on susceptible machines,” reports The Hacker News. “The vulnerabilities have been addressed in Sudo version 1.9.17p1 released late last month.”
Stratascale researcher Rich Mirch, who is credited with discovering and reporting the flaws, said CVE-2025-32462 has managed to slip through the cracks for over 12 years. It is rooted in the Sudo’s "-h” (host) option that makes it possible to list a user’s sudo privileges for a different host. The feature was enabled in September 2013. However, the identified bug made it possible to execute any command allowed by the remote host to be run on the local machine as well when running the Sudo command with the host option referencing an unrelated remote host. “This primarily affects sites that use a common sudoers file that is distributed to multiple machines,” Sudo project maintainer Todd C. Miller said in an advisory. “Sites that use LDAP-based sudoers (including SSSD) are similarly impacted.”

CVE-2025-32463, on the other hand, leverages Sudo’s "-R” (chroot) option to run arbitrary commands as root, even if they are not listed in the sudoers file. It’s also a critical-severity flaw. “The default Sudo configuration is vulnerable,” Mirch said. “Although the vulnerability involves the Sudo chroot feature, it does not require any Sudo rules to be defined for the user. As a result, any local unprivileged user could potentially escalate privileges to root if a vulnerable version is installed....”

Miller said the chroot option will be removed completely from a future release of Sudo and that supporting a user-specified root directory is “error-prone.”

When will sudo read email?

By TuballoyThunder • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
There is so much complexity incorporated into sudo that it may well be past the tipping point of perpetual vulnerabilities.

I don’t see what the big deal is

By rsilvergun • Score: 4, Funny Thread
I mean if these were real vulnerabilities sure but these are sudo.

sudo-rs

By CommunityMember • Score: 3 Thread
The alternative implementation, sudo-rs, written in rust to be memory safe, is not vulnerable to these bugs, but that is because it choose not to implement those particular (not commonly used) features. There may be something about cleaning up code that has benefits. Who would have thought?

Re:When will sudo read email?

By bjoast • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Yes, configuring sudo correctly, when granular command-level privileges are required, demands an understanding of the command you are allowing a user to execute. It’s very easy to insert an unintended privilege escalation point. As you mention, the general problem is not really solvable within the domain of sudo. Often, the correct solution when command-level access rights for administrators is the objective, is to develop an administration interface, be it a web application or an interactive shell, where an administrator can only perform the exact operations he has been allowed to, but nothing more. Sometimes, sudo is the wrong tool altogether.

Re:sudo-rs

By Uecker • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

It would have been much more useful to clean up the code that is widely deployed.

Nuclear Microreactors Advance as US Picks Two Companies for Fueled Testing

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
This week America’s Energy Department selected two companies to perform the first nuclear microreactor tests in a new facility in Idaho, saying the tests “will fast-track the deployment of American microreactor technologies… The first fueled reactor experiment will start as early as spring 2026.”

The new facility is named DOME (an acronym for Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments), and it leverages existing “to safely house and test fueled reactor experiments, capable of producing up to 20 megawatts of thermal energy,” according to a local newspaper.
[T]wo companies were competitively selected in 2023 and are currently working through a multi-phase Energy Department authorization process to support the design, fabrication, construction, and testing of each fueled reactor experiment. Both are expected to meet certain milestones throughout the process to maintain their allotted time in DOME and to ensure efficient use of the test bed, according to the release… The department estimates each DOME reactor experiment will operate up to six months, with the DOME test bed currently under construction and on track to receive its first experiment in early 2026… The next call for applications is anticipated to be in 2026.
The site Interesting Engineering calls the lab “a high-stakes proving ground to accelerate the commercialization of advanced microreactors…”
Based in Etna, Pennsylvania, Westinghouse will test its eVinci Nuclear Test Reactor, a compact, transportable microreactor that uses advanced heat pipe technology for passive cooling. Designed to deliver 5 megawatts of electricity on sites as small as two acres, eVinci could support applications ranging from remote communities to mining operations and data centers. Meanwhile, Radiant (El Segundo, California) will test its Kaleidos Development Unit, a 1.2 megawatt electric high-temperature gas reactor aimed at replacing diesel generators. Designed to run for five years, Kaleidos is fueled by TRISO fuel particles that could offer reliable backup power for hospitals, military bases, and other critical infrastructure.
Radiant’s CEO said “In short order, we will fuel, go critical, and operate, leading to the mass production of portable reactors which will jumpstart American nuclear energy dominance.”

More Paper Reactors

By Cyberpunk Reality • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
From Admiral Rickover’s 1953 ‘Paper Reactor’ memo, “An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: 1. It is simple. 2 It is cheap. 3.It is light. 4. It can be built very quickly. 5. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”). 6. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 7. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.” Time will, of course, prove the final test as to whether these “microreactor experiments” to produce a “compact, transportable microreactor” will successfully " fast-track the path from lab bench to commercial rollout” and eventually " support applications ranging from remote communities to mining operations and data centers” and “replace disel generators”. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Re:Yeah right

By Mr. Dollar Ton • Score: 4, Informative Thread

LOL, you’re not going to war with China.

It has nukes that can reach the US, and the US ruling class fears nothing more than nukes that can reach them.

Your current chieftain sold out to putin because of a telephone threat.

The Chinese reactors will be fine.

Surface area to volume ratio

By burtosis • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
The problem with miniature reactors is the cost of operation. Basically the amount of material that becomes contaminated and needs to be replaced and or disposed of is vastly higher on a lifetime $/kwh basis. It’s like running ten thousand one horsepower motors instead of one ten thousand horsepower motor. You are going to have incessant and massive component supply and disposal demand costs compared to the single reactor. Further, the mess from ten thousand units makes for rampant pollution whereas it’s easier to pin down and hold to account a single reactor. If you have a base in the Antarctic, or a satellite, these may be an option if the total supply is highly limited. But the ease and cost of a simple generator is going to price everyone out of miniature reactors except all but the least serviceable and hospitable applications.

Re:My only ‘gripe’ with nuclear

By aaarrrgggh • Score: 4, Informative Thread

If scientists had a preference we would be using breeder reactors that reduce waste and promote recycling.

Re:Yeah right

By Mr. Dollar Ton • Score: 4, Informative Thread

But not by the US. It was the pro-Iranian factions in Iraq who did that.

The very same pro-Iranian groups, by the way, who then booted most of the US military out of the place and put a fat cross on the hopes of the neocon wing to control the Iraqi oil as their own, the reason for the second Gulf war.

A loss which chieftain trump often laments.

Near Antarctica, Saltier Seas Mean Less Ice, Study Finds

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Some of the water around Antarctica has been getting saltier. And that has affected the amount of sea ice at the bottom of the planet. From a report:
A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that increases in salinity in seawater near the surface could help explain some of the decrease in Antarctic sea ice that have been observed over the past decade, reversing a previous period of growth.

“The impact of Antarctic ice is massive in terms of sea-level rise, in terms of global warming, and therefore, in terms of extremes,” said Alessandro Silvano, a senior scientist at the University of Southampton studying the Southern Ocean and lead author of the study. The findings mean “we are entering a new system, a new world,” he said.
The Times adds: “the Department of Defense announced it would be no longer be providing some of the satellite data that researchers use to monitor changes in sea ice.”

To me the real news here

By ndsurvivor • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
is that the DOD will not be providing any more satellite images. I am guessing that the reason is that if you deny something is happening, then it won’t.

This link provides more detail …

By schwit1 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

https://joannenova.com.au/2025…

NYTimes provided no links to the study.

Miracles: F’ing Science, How Do They Work?

By OrangeTide • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

You fellows get so excited whenever we have to revise the science around climate change.

I’m genuinely curious, do you believe we’ll one day revise it out of existence? If that’s your hope, I’m going to have to burst your bubble right now…

Re:Antarctica gaining ice…

By SoftwareArtist • Score: 5, Informative Thread

This article written by one of the authors of the study provides some insight on what is happening.

Normally, the cold, fresh surface water sits on top of warmer, saltier water deep below. This layering (or stratification, as scientists call it) traps heat in the ocean depths, keeping surface waters cool and helping sea ice to form.

Saltier water is denser and therefore heavier. So, when surface waters become saltier, they sink more readily, stirring the ocean’s layers and allowing heat from the deep to rise.

This upward heat flux can melt sea ice from below, even during winter, making it harder for ice to reform. This vertical circulation also draws up more salt from deeper layers, reinforcing the cycle.

A powerful feedback loop is created: more salinity brings more heat to the surface, which melts more ice, which then allows more heat to be absorbed from the Sun.

Re:Miracles: F’ing Science, How Do They Work?

By OrangeTide • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

The global warming people …

You think we all meet up and plan this stuff out and work in lock step? That climate science is all done in one building where we everyone sees each other everyday and attends the same meetings?

The messy reality is that there has been a flood of papers on the subject for 50 years from wide range of people and various disciplines. What you generally hear is only the bits and pieces that the media passes along to the public. Scientists that are neck deep in their actual subject are constantly trying to work out how to communicate their own research to each other. And a handful of them actively working out how to communicate those results to the public.

His home has a bigger carbon footprint than blocks of homes. Flies to eco conferences in hugely polluting jets. Its always do as I say not as I do.

Just because Al Gore is a hypocrite doesn’t invalid climate science. There are people who practice what they preach, and get ridiculed for that too. So damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

AI Coding Agents Are Already Commoditized

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Software engineer Sean Goedecke argues that AI coding agents have already been commoditized because they require no special technical advantages, just better base models. He writes:
All of a sudden, it’s the year of AI coding agents. Claude released Claude Code, OpenAI released their Codex agent, GitHub released its own autonomous coding agent, and so on. I’ve done my fair share of writing about whether AI coding agents will replace developers, and in the meantime how best to use them in your work. Instead, I want to make what I think is now a pretty firm observation: AI coding agents have no secret sauce.

[…] The reason everyone’s doing agents now is the same reason everyone’s doing reinforcement learning now — from one day to the next, the models got good enough. Claude Sonnet 3.7 is the clear frontrunner here. It’s not the smartest model (in my opinion), but it is the most agentic: it can stick with a task and make good decisions over time better than other models with more raw brainpower. But other AI labs have more agentic models now as well. There is no moat.

There’s also no moat to the actual agent code. It turns out that “put the model in a loop with a ‘read file’ and ‘write file’ tool” is good enough to do basically anything you want. I don’t know for sure that the closed-source options operate like this, but it’s an educated guess. In other words, the agent hackers in 2023 were correct, and the only reason they couldn’t build Claude Code then was that they were too early to get to use the really good models.

I still get terrible results from “coding” agents

By ffkom • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Working for a company that is almost obsessed in its attempts to utilize “coding agents”, I have attempted time and again to delegate mundane sub-tasks to such agents - for easy things like reading configuration files of a given format. And the results I got, up until today, are so awful, that even in the rare cases when they were not just defunct, I ended up rewriting the code to not be the one signing a commit of inefficient slop code into the repository.

I can only image what terrible code must be the norm in the places where the “coding agents” available today are considered “good enough”.

Re:I still get terrible results from “coding” agen

By gweihir • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

You are not the only one. I am beginning to think that _everybody_ reporting great sucesses in this space is lying, deep in delusion or only doing very simplistic code (and struggling to do even that by themselves).

Re:If this makes any sense to someone

By gweihir • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

It means “Must keep AI hype going! Must pretent it is the only true thing! Must make more money!”.

It can safely be ignored as total bullshit of the marketing variant.

On A Long Enough Timeline

By DewDude • Score: 3 Thread

This all fails. Everyone gets replaced with AI, no one has a job, no one has money to support companies.

It’s just they get to screw us first.

We need an AI ban. This is not going to be a good thing for society. It already isn’t. People are going to die because of bullshit decisions made by AI…likely already have. When the black box is making the decision and no one lets you look in the black box....is there really a black box?

We’re all fucked. Congrats. It’s only going to get worse before it gets better.

Re:Fuck “good enough”

By LinuxRulz • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The point they all miss is that writing code which works was never the problem. Any junior dev can do it.
Software engineering always was about balancing tradeoffs, figuring integration points, ensuring long term maintainability, structuring for release and deployment, aligning design with roadmap, communication and collaboration, etc.

Maybe an AI can eventually get there, but your prompt will be way bigger than the code. I’d rather write the code.
For the rest, we already had cookiecutters and snippets.

EU Sticks With Timeline For AI Rules

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Reuters:
The European Union’s landmark rules on AI will be rolled out according to the legal timeline in the legislation, the European Commission said on Friday, dismissing calls from some companies and countries for a pause.

Google owner Alphabet, Facebook owner Meta and other U.S. companies as well as European businesses such as Mistral and ASML have in recent days urged the Commission to delay the AI Act by years.
Financial Times adds:
In an open letter, seen by the Financial Times, the heads of 44 major firms on the continent called on European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to introduce a two-year pause, warning that unclear and overlapping regulations are threatening the bloc’s competitiveness in the global AI race.

[…] The current debate surrounds the drafting of a “code of practice,” which will provide guidance to AI companies on how to implement the act that applies to powerful AI models such as Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama and OpenAI’s GPT-4. Brussels has already delayed publishing the code, which was due in May, and is now expected to water down the rules.

Europeans follow rules?

By commodore73 • Score: 5, Funny Thread
As an American, I find this concept offensive.

Summary of rules

By JamesTRexx • Score: 3 Thread

https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/high-level-summary/

Feels like the EU is the only entity where corporations are forced to take responsibility like one would expect from adults.

US Plans AI Chip Curbs on Malaysia, Thailand Over China Concerns

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President Donald Trump’s administration plans to restrict shipments of AI chips from the likes of Nvidia to Malaysia and Thailand, part of an effort to crack down on suspected semiconductor smuggling into China. Bloomberg:
A draft rule from the Commerce Department seeks to prevent China — to which the US has effectively banned sales of Nvidia’s advanced AI processors — from obtaining those components through intermediaries in the two Southeast Asian nations, according to people familiar with the matter. The rule is not yet finalized and could still change, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Officials plan to pair the Malaysia and Thailand controls with a formal rescission of global curbs from the so-called AI diffusion rule, the people said.

bad news for us good news for China.

By bloodhawk • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
This is great news for China in the long term. They are rapidly catching up in the microprocessor and fab side of things, shit like this just spurs more investment from them and will leave the rest of us out in the cold as they move past us like they did with EV’s. These sort of artificial barriers are short term thinking from morons that can’t perceive the long term effects.

There Is No Safe Amount of Processed Meat To Eat, According to New Research

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A new study analyzing data from more than 60 previous research projects has found evidence that there is "no safe amount" of processed meat consumption — so much so that even small daily portions are being linked to increased disease risk.

The research, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, examined connections between processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages and trans fatty acids and the risk of type 2 diabetes, colorectal cancer and ischemic heart disease. People who ate as little as one hot dog daily showed an 11% greater risk of type 2 diabetes and 7% increased risk of colorectal cancer compared to those who consumed none. Drinking approximately one 12-ounce soda per day was associated with an 8% increase in type 2 diabetes risk and 2% increased risk of ischemic heart disease.

Well within the margin of error

By phantomfive • Score: 5, Informative Thread
An 11% difference in a study of self-reported food habits is inconclusive. For comparison, here is a graph of different studies conducted on different foods. The numbers on the bottom of that graph are 2 = twice as likely, .5 equals half as likely. We routinely see effects that are much, much larger being within the margin of error. Quoting the article,

the study “relied on people recalling their dietary patterns, which can leave room for misremembering or misreporting…Utilizing even the most sophisticated techniques does not really solve the problem that the information about diet is rather limited – which is obviously a big problem in nutritional epidemiology in general”

So you really want to see a much stronger correlation before drawing a conclusion. Eating hot dogs every day is weird. I have to imagine that someone who eats hot dogs every day probably has other things going on in their diet (like never eating vegetables).

Re:Correlation is not causality… again ffs

By whit3 • Score: 5, Informative Thread
Yeah, the headline ‘no safe amount’ reference is a clue. It’s unlikely
anyone can identify ‘safe amount’ subjects. The headline term ‘new research’
doesn’t hold water either, this was a review of many old studies.

Correlation can mean that health issues cause diet, or diet causes health issues.
Neither is unlikely.

I just ran across How to Lie with Statistics the other day.
My hardback is first edition, 1954.
Maybe we should pay the copyright holder and train AIs on that text?

The actual paper says: [Re:What about not eati…]

By XXongo • Score: 5, Informative Thread

There’s some usable truth in this article.

Some. But the summary ignores this sentence from the actual paper‘s abstract (which is a meta study, not new data):
"These associations each received two-star ratings reflecting weak relationships or inconsistent input evidence, highlighting both the need for further research and—given the high burden of these chronic diseases—the merit of continuing to recommend limiting consumption of these foods.”

To its credit, the actual paper also makes a point that this is a correlation, not showing causation.

A term with multiple nuanced meanings

By OrangeTide • Score: 5, Informative Thread

If food has been changed from its natural state, then it is processed. Bake an apple pie, that’s processed. You cooked the apples with added sugar and spices, perhaps in a crust made of flour and shortening.

Minimally processed would be like if you bought some shelled raw almonds. It’s not completely original, but it’s processed in a way that added no additional ingredients.

A classic example of processed food would be canned sardines. They have added oil and salt and are cooked in their can. They are not necessarily devoid of nutrition, but you as the consumer don’t have a lot of control over their preparation and ingredients. You’re buying them as a package deal.

Processed meats, is a whole other category beyond simply being a processed food. And the term can have a very specific meaning. For this context of this article, assume that processed meat being meat that is transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavor or improve preservation.

Ultra-processed food is a new category. It’s a little harder to pin down because part of the definition is the intent to create food produces through intensive manufacturing processes. A signature trait of ultra-processed foods are ingredients that are taken from other foods. Generally purified at a chemical level such as lactose, modified food starch, casein, whey, hydrogenated oils, protein isolate, maltodextrin, invert sugar, or high-fructose corn syrup.

Re:What about not eating it daily?

By Rei • Score: 5, Informative Thread

“Processed” usually means smoked, cured, or other means of preservation. Cured meats commonly have nitrates or nitrites (carcinogenic) and tons of sodium. Smoked meats have carcinogenic PAHs and HCAs.

Moderna Says mRNA Flu Vaccine Sailed Through Trial, Beating Standard Shot

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Moderna’s mRNA-based seasonal flu vaccine proved 27% more effective at preventing influenza infections than standard flu shots in a Phase 3 trial involving nearly 41,000 people aged 50 and above, the firm said this week.

The company announced that mRNA-1010 had an overall vaccine efficacy that was 26.6% higher than conventional shots, rising to 27.4% higher in participants aged 65 and older during the six-month study period. The 2024-2025 flu season hospitalized an estimated 770,000 Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Re:But not in the US

By newcastlejon • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

vaccines will only be approved if the control group in the trials got an inactive placebo. Why? No reason at all, it’s just an absurd requirement he made up.

I wouldn’t be so sure that it was RFK’s idea, but the effect is to stifle research. People working on new drugs and vaccines will be less willing to carry out tests subject to this restriction because it means knowingly putting the lives of the placebo group at risk. That makes it rather unethical I’d say. Compare this to a situation where the is no “current” treatment available to test against; the placebo group in that case face just the same risk as they would if the trial didn’t happen.

Re:But not in the US

By SoftwareArtist • Score: 5, Informative Thread

A double blind study means neither the patient nor the doctor knows whether they’re in the treatment group or the control group. It has nothing to do with what is used as the control. When there’s an existing safe, effective vaccine, you always use that for the control group. It would be unethical not to. It’s still a double blind study, because the patient still doesn’t know whether they’re getting the new vaccine or the old one. And it makes the resulting data stronger, not weaker. It tells you whether the new vaccine is more effective than the old vaccine, not just whether it’s more effective than no vaccine at all.

When there’s no existing vaccine, then you use an unrelated vaccine as the control. That’s essential. If you used an inactive placebo as the control, and a patient felt tired and achy the day after getting the shot, they could be pretty sure they were in the treatment group. That knowledge could affect their behavior and bias the results. So instead you use an unrelated vaccine with similar side effects as the control, so the patient can’t infer which group they’re in from side effects. This is standard practice.

But RFK has arbitrarily declared that won’t be accepted. Instead you must use an inactive placebo, even though that gives worse quality data.

Your revisionism is shocking

By OrangeTide • Score: 5, Informative Thread

No. you’re incorrect. The requirement in California never took practical effect for school children. It was contingent on FDA approval for age ranges of K-6 and 7-12 before going into full effect. It was not until the start of the 2023 school year when the FDA approval for covid-19 vaccine for ages 12 and up was announce, prior to that it was available only under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) and not mandated in California public schools.

Children in California public schools, depending on their vaccination status, were required to wear a mask or attend remotely. They were NOT required to vaccinate in order to attend public school in California. As such a requirement would violate the California State Constitution and probably violate some Federal statute or Dept of Education requirement (that’s more complicated to look up)

So keep digging for your bullshit. I already looked this up and you’re dead wrong.

Re:But not in the US

By wickerprints • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

In fact, it is UNETHICAL to use a placebo control in any clinical trial of an investigational product for which the existing standard of care already includes a product on the market.

In plain English, it is entirely unethical to give participants a placebo to test the efficacy of a new flu vaccine when we already have existing vaccines on the market. Doing so denies participants in the study from accessing effective treatment. If you have to test against a placebo, it will be impossible to recruit participants, because nobody will take the chance to receive placebo when they could just go to the pharmacy and get vaccinated.

There are only two possible explanations for such a position: either gross ignorance of basic scientific and ethical principles for conducting medical research in humans, or deliberate malicious intent to stop all research of investigational drugs. It doesn’t actually matter which one is the reason. Both are entirely unacceptable.

The fact that a huge segment of the American population does not understand even the most basic scientific principles is the reason why many people will die needlessly.

Re: Lol, you gullible retards

By Dantu • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
You seem to be cherry picking the narrative promoted by a handful of anti-vaxxers, which does include a handful of published studies, rather than the overwhelming body of contrary evidence.

https://www.factcheck.org/2024…