The new program was outlined by chairman and CEO David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz in a memo to staffers Monday. “As we bring our teams together, we recognize that not everyone will see their future here, and we respect that. To give eligible employees the option to move on in a way that works for them, we are introducing a Voluntary Buyout (VBO) Program,” the execs wrote. “Those who qualify will receive an individual communication with their personalized details and terms, and a window to decide whether to accept this one-time offer.”

They added, “Please know we don’t take any of this lightly. We are clear about what we’re building: a company that tells the stories people around the world love, embraces new ways to connect with audiences, and leads the next era of media and entertainment. We have the talent, the creative firepower and the ambition to do it, and we will get there together.”

[…] In the Oct. 26 memo, Ellison and Kreiz also said the new Skydance is moving to a mandatory five-days-per-week in-office policy across the company. “We believe in-person collaboration is vital to our culture and to the success of our business. Especially in a creative company like ours, the best ideas come from people in the same room, sharing perspectives, challenging one another and solving problems,” the execs said. “We truly believe this is in the best interest of our company and our people. We’ve seen the benefits firsthand at Paramount, and we want every part of Skydance to share in them.”

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has been against doing longform video on the platform “for a long time,” he says in a six-and-a-half-minute video (here’s the widescreen version) with VP of product Tessa Lyons, saying that “one of my concerns has been, how do we make sure that we keep Instagram not just about entertainment, but about connecting with friends.” If you watch a longform video, “it’s a lot of Reels, photos, and carousels that you might not have sent to a friend,” meaning less likes and shares. Now, though, the team is working on making shortform and longform video “symbiotic,” according to Mosseri, like podcasts or comedy specials that can be both long videos and broken up into shorter ones.

The announcement of this widescreen video push also follows the launch of Instagram’s TV app late last year. That app launched first as a Reels-focused experience and as a pilot for Amazon Fire TV devices in the US, but it’s since expanded to Google TVs, Samsung TVs and Apple TV, and Instagram launched new features like the ability to watch Stories earlier this year.

Walter Koenig, the actor who played Pavel Chekov in the original “Star Trek” series and several movies, has died, his rep confirmed to CBS News. He was 90. Koenig died Sunday night at his home in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, talent rep Zachery McGinnis said in a statement. He died surrounded by his daughter and niece, McGinnis said.

In ‘Star Trek,’ Ensign Chekov was the sole member of the spaceship Enterprise bridge staff from what was the Communist bloc. His friendly, supportive presence showed how the rival nations (in the far-off future in which the show was set) were capable of working together. Speaking heavily Russian-accented English, Chekov embodied stereotypical Russian personality traits, including fierce pride, love of poetry and blind loyalty.

Here’s how they said thieves get away with it: First, thieves hack freight brokers’ accounts on shipment-listing websites and post fake shipments to lure real bids, then send a malicious link to any trucking companies that respond. Once victims click, thieves install software to take control of their accounts and start bidding on real shipments. Sometimes, a real delivery driver is hired to collect the cargo, unaware of the scam, and other times fake driver’s licenses are used to get accomplices hired. Either way, the goods are eventually transferred to a driver working with the thieves to resell the gear, and, in one of the largest thefts, tracking coordinates were spoofed to prevent digital monitoring. Equipment commonly targeted includes “servers, fiber-optic cables, computer memory chips, copper wires, and bitcoin mining machines,” NBC News reported.

Some trailers hit seem to be carrying only data center equipment, like two stolen freights found in Illinois. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office estimated those contained $300,000 worth of copper wire spools and about $1 million in “custom-made data center modular power solutions equipment,” NBC News reported. Other trucks impacted were carrying additional freight, like a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department case where “data center cooling equipment” bound for Deepcool AI was recovered among nicotine pouches, televisions, shoes, printers, speakers, and skin care cosmetics. Experts worry that means Americans may be broadly harmed by the thefts, not just the AI industry.

While some stolen goods have been recovered, in two of the largest thefts that NBC News found, none of the equipment was found, and off-duty cops hired to escort the shipments were targeted in hit-and-runs. […] Broadly, cargo thieves are infiltrating email accounts to find lucrative shipments, misdirecting shipments, disrupting GPS tracking, and using AI to create fake driver’s licenses to get accomplices hired as delivery drivers. LASD’s Sgt. David Pantoja told NBC News “that’s how most of it is being done,” which is a big shift from the past when highway thefts were largely opportunistic.

Despite having a slightly bigger display than the 8.3-inch screen on its predecessor, Apple says the device maintains the same small footprint thanks to bezels that are 24 percent slimmer. The iPad Mini is 5.4mm thick as well, making it thinner and lighter than the previous generation, according to Apple. It also comes with an IP67 rating for protection against water and dust.

Aside from an OLED display, the new iPad Mini features an upgraded A20 Pro chip. This enables support for some of Apple’s new Siri AI features, including the ability to tweak the expressiveness and pace of the assistant’s voice. Apple says the upgraded iPad Mini also comes with two times the peak brightness than the previous generation. iPad Mini’s 12MP front-facing camera is now on the long edge of the device, making it easier for video calls in landscape orientation.

Microsoft is offering buyouts to about 60,000 employees, or roughly a quarter of its workforce, as the company tries to control its head count while avoiding layoffs. The Redmond-based tech giant announced Monday morning that eligible employees at the vice president level and below in the U.S., Canada, India and the United Kingdom would receive a “voluntary exit offer” of a standard severance package, based on their location.

In a memo to employees, Microsoft Chief People Officer Amy Coleman said the move was building off the voluntary retirement program earlier this year, which was available to more than 8,700 U.S.-based employees, roughly one-third of whom took the offer. Since May 2025, Microsoft has been trying to reduce its corporate workforce, first through waves of mass layoffs and now through more creative buyout programs. The company laid off about 15,000 employees last year over the course of several months, affecting about 3,200 Washington-based workers.

The filing did not include a potential share price, the number of shares to be offered or a valuation for the whole company, all of which will be determined after Anthropic holds a “road show” with investors, prospective investors and its bankers. […] The company plans to spend at least $110 billion with Amazon for cloud services through April 2036 and another $120 billion with SpaceX through 2029. Anthropic also said it planned to spend $115 billion with Google and $45 billion with Microsoft, both through 2033, for computing infrastructure.

The filing said that the company recorded revenue growth of “1,368% year over year for the three months ended June 30, 2026.” The cost of renting servers and chips grew by 300% over the same period. Anthropic’s net loss for the first six months of 2026 was $80.7 billion. For the entirety of 2025, the company reported a $42 billion net loss.

Anthropic added that it expects its current cash and sales to be sufficient for the next 12 months but warned that future revenue growth depends on a number of important factors, including the cost of infrastructure. As a result, it said, “we may be required to seek additional financing sooner than we currently anticipate.” The company said it has raised about $141 billion of capital through the end of June and is sitting on $112.4 billion of cash.

r/opensource, Reddit’s primary “subreddit for everything open source related,” has banned all AI-assisted and AI-related projects.... As reported by The Verge, the subreddit’s October 24 post, titled “Your tokens aren’t valuable: No more AI,” features four new main rules: all projects must now be at least “1 year old,” have “multiple contributors,” be posted by someone who must “speak English,” and cannot be “made by” or “intended for” AI… [T]he ban on AI is simple; as the subreddit’s moderators explain, “AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community.” Unsurprisingly, this is the part that’s upset the majority of the users in the thread....

[T]he moderator who posted the new guidelines stated in a separate comment that the overwhelmingly negative response is due to “some guy on twitter claiming to be alternative news” who posted an “opinionated editorial pointing hundreds of people to the thread.” Given the timing of when the thread was posted, alongside the fact that the X post in question mentions “the Linux kernel,” they are presumably referring to this post by The Lunduke Journal. The moderator may be correct, as almost all of the top comments on the post are from users who have never posted in r/opensource before.

• r/TrueOpenSource
• r/OpenSourceWare
• r/ActuallyOpenSource

UPDATE (10/26): Monday saw a new comment from the moderator stressing that “Adjustments will be made.”

“Linux is not, nor could conceivably ever be banned. Interpreting any set of rules as such is simply bad faith. Someone’s pet project pumped out in two claude code session limits will not be welcome. The line is somewhere between those, and it will likely move over time from continuous feedback.

“We will cater to humans, and as many and as inclusively as possible. No rule will ever target or favor any ethnicity or social strata.”

Official satellite data showed the rainforest lost 3,335 square kilometers (1,300 square miles) from Aug. 2025 through July 2026, the period used to calculate the annual rate…

During Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, from 2019 to 2022, Amazon deforestation surged by about 60%, with more than 45,000 square kilometers (17,400 square miles) cleared, according to official data. Under Lula, deforestation has fallen 71% since 2023, the government said. One of Lula’s first moves after taking office in January 2023 for a third, non-consecutive term was to revive the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon, known by its Portuguese acronym, PPCDAm. Launched in 2004 during his first administration, the plan had been shelved under Bolsonaro....

The plan has four pillars: strengthening monitoring and enforcement; promoting a sustainable economy; managing protected areas and determining how undesignated public forests should be used; and using regulations and financial incentives to curb deforestation. Measures included restoring sanctions for illegal forest clearing detected by satellites, a practice seen as the most effective tool to curb deforestation that was halted under Bolsonaro. The government also proposed barring properties with illegal deforestation from receiving bank loans and allocated more funding to priority Amazon municipalities that demonstrated reductions in forest loss. It also funded efforts to fight environmental crime and develop subsidized credit for sustainable businesses in the Amazon…

Deforestation and other land-use changes are Brazil’s largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, which drive global warming. The stakes are especially high in the Amazon, which stores vast amounts of carbon dioxide and generates atmospheric moisture that helps regulate weather far beyond South America… Degradation from wildfires, logging and drought affects about 40% of the Amazon and has outpaced clear-cutting in recent years. A strong El Niño, a periodic warming of the equatorial Pacific, could intensify those threats in 2026 and 2027 by bringing hotter, drier conditions that fuel wildfires.

Available under the MIT License, Scope supports a continuous Developer Agent Experience (DevAx) learning loop grounded in repeatable experiments.

The Azure Cosmos DB team’s experience shows what that loop can deliver… “The evaluations led to 20 Agent Kit issues and 27 documentation issues resolved,” [says Jay Gordon, Senior Program Manager, Azure Cosmos DB]… These results connect evaluation to decisions a product team can make: which documentation needs clarification, where tooling needs a fix, and whether an update changes agent behavior.... [The gains] demonstrate how targeted changes, informed by observed behavior, can improve the way agents use a product.

For more on the shift from building for human developers to supporting agents, watch Your Product Was Built for Humans. Is It Ready for Agents? or join us at AI DevCon NYC conference in November.

The challenges behind agent experience aren’t unique to one product or organization. SDK maintainers, tool authors, researchers, and agent developers are all asking how agents behave and what helps them succeed. No single team can represent every language, workflow, or integration. An open project can bring more scenarios, more failure cases, and more viewpoints into the evaluation process… Opening Scope’s execution and evaluation code gives contributors a way to question the methods, investigate unexpected results, and improve the evaluation itself. A shared foundation also reduces duplicated infrastructure. Agent integrations, reusable criteria, and trace-analysis improvements can help other teams study their own products without rebuilding the same machinery. The goal isn’t one universal benchmark or definition of success. It’s a common starting point that teams can adapt to their needs.

The MIT License lets teams use and extend Scope, while self-managed deployments let them evaluate private workloads without publishing their code or run data.... Scope streams activity as the agent works and retains interactions and workspace snapshots for later review. Your team can follow tool calls, inspect generated files, and connect a failed requirement to the steps that preceded it. Those traces provide observable evidence of what the agent did, helping turn a failure into a concrete documentation, SDK, or tooling improvement.

LF Research is the Linux Foundation’s research arm. It was set up in 2021 and publishes studies on how open source is built and used, drawing on surveys and project data. Its latest report, Navigating Open Source Software Development in the Generative AI Era, surveyed 234 contributors and maintainers on how generative AI is affecting the way open source gets made…

64% say reviews now take longer. Burnout is their top concern at 63%, narrowly ahead of contribution quality at 60%.

You will also find that policies have not caught up to the AI-assisted coding and vulnerability reporting trend. Of the 119 respondents who answered the question, 35% said their project has a formal policy permitting AI use. Another 32% have none and no plans for one, 23% plan to write one, and 10% ban AI contributions outright....

Most maintainers (71%) say AI makes it easier for newcomers to start contributing.

• “Respondents estimate average time reductions across all six OSS development activities measured, including proposal discussions (19%) and code authoring (52%). For high-complexity tasks, however, 21% of respondents report taking more time when using GenAI.”

• “71% of maintainers agree GenAI reduces barriers to entry for OSS, but 53% of maintainers disagree that GenAI has improved community trust.”

• Developers are reinvesting the time they save back into open source: 66% report using productivity gains to address technical debt, 63% to develop new features and 58% for learning and upskilling.

• Continued investment in human mentorship remains important: 46% of maintainers say GenAI increases the need for mentorship of new contributors, compared with 32% who say it decreases that need.

OpenSSF and LF AI & Data also helped support the study.

Core systemd code like the systemd library doesn’t yet support Rust code, but for the various systemd programs / leaf components there is now support for using Rust… The new systemd-keyring-setup utility in Rust is used for provisioning keyrings and enrolling X.509 certificates into the kernel’s dm-verity / fs-verity / BPF keyrings during the boot process while dealing them afterward. This systemd-keyring-setup code hasn’t been merged yet but is expected soon now that the Rust infrastructure has landed. Originally it was all part of a single big commit before being split-up for the Rust enablement, systemd-keyring-setup, and other preparations for this new component.

Systemd developers aren’t planning on porting existing C code to Rust, all the Rust code is built with Meson [no Cargo usage], and C linkage only is mandated.

Systemd Rust components come out slightly larger than C with a test program being 32KB compared to 20KB for its C twin. For now at least the systemd Rust support is optional and toggled by the -Drust= Meson option with it being auto by default.

Richard Borcherds, a UC Berkeley professor and Fields medalist, no longer grades his students’ homework. After seeing how many of his students used AI to consistently receive top scores, he felt there was “no point” in paying readers to grade for correctness in homework, as AI use is now unavoidable.

Borcherds revealed this in a sit-down interview Tuesday, following OpenAI’s announcement that AI agents apparently solved one of mathematics’ most difficult unsolved problems, the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. “If AI continues to improve at present rate, then, in a few years, there’ll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can’t do better,” Borcherds said.

Borcherds said he currently grades on completion if a student hands in their homework. He admitted that it is “not a very good system,” but at the moment, he has no alternative… Campus has tried several AI detection tools, including Turnitin and Rumi, but have determined that these tools aren’t adequate enough to be standardized on campus.

Filesystems that can repair damage, like Btrfs and ZFS, usually do it by falling back on a spare copy of the data. BeamFS skips that and stores Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes inside every block. Every read gets checked against those codes, and small amounts of damage are corrected before the data reaches the application. If the filesystem can tell the damage is beyond repair, the read fails with an error instead of returning the wrong bytes…

In his technical report, ext4 and ext3 returned wrong data without any error, while Btrfs refused to read the file. BeamFS returned the correct file every time except once, when a flip hit a pointer to the file’s data and it refused the read.