Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs Urge UN Countries to Cooperate on AI Safety Standards
  2. Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon X2 Series Processors Will Support Linux
  3. Rogue OpenAI Agent Tried to Breach Government Site in May When Prompted for Simple Data-Retrieving Tasks
  4. Cities Across US Oppose Trump FCC Plan to Preempt Local Broadband Rules
  5. Whatever Happened to the 150,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste Stored Under the Atlantic Ocean?
  6. Andreessen Horowitz Launches AI/Company-Building School As a College Alternative
  7. Bitcoin Surges to $86,455, an 8-Month High, After America’s SEC Announces Tokenized Stock Experiment
  8. Microsoft Helps Take Down Massive Automated, AI-Powered Phishing-as-a-Service Platform
  9. Trump Denounces Attempts to Control AI, Wants It Renamed ‘Super Intelligence’ in US Documents
  10. Are Students Suddenly Losing Interest in Computer Science as AI Coding Takes Off?
  11. ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Outgrosses All But 3 WB Movies This Year, Heads To Profit
  12. Pentagon Investigators Say Overreliance on Palantir AI Contributed to US Strike That Killed 123 Iranian Children
  13. Google Opens Preorders for Its $899 Gemini-Enhanced ‘Googlebook’ Laptops
  14. Meta’s New ‘Personal AI Agent’ Muse Beats ChatGPT in Downloads - and Get Blocked by Amazon
  15. Paramount Skydance ‘Emerges Victorious’, Finally Wins Settlement for Warner Bros Takeover

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.

OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs Urge UN Countries to Cooperate on AI Safety Standards

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“The heads of major AI firms pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to save the world or at least its people — by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology that they have been designing,” writes the Associated Press.
“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” said Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic. And from his competitor Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, came this assessment: “We could lose control of the future to AI.”
Yoshua Bengio, who co-chairs the UN’s International Independent Panel on AI, called this “a moment of global awakening” to possible threats, noting AI from top companies had behaved in unacceptably dangerous ways, against instructions, taking actions “that would be crimes if committed by a human”.

In his presentation, OpenAI’s Sam Altman agreed the discussion about AI “feels different in recent weeks,” even suggesting specific reforms:
Altman: We need a mechanism for complementary national and international frontier AI standards, standards for measuring capabilities, assessing risks, determining whether safeguards are sufficient, and preserving meaningful human oversight as systems become more autonomous. We need common standards so countries can compare evidence, verify compliance, and have a shared language and understanding about what is happening. We need accurate and speedy incident reporting, classification reporting protocols, so the world can learn from failures before they become catastrophes. And we need secure channels among governments, critical infrastructure operators and technical experts, to share emerging vulnerabilities and new threats.... We will all be better off if we can agree on what good evidence, good safeguards, and good oversight look like on the global stage.
Speaking next, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei agreed that standard-setting was important, also calling for “common global standards for testing AI models for loss-of-control risks and misuse risks — and a notification system for AI incidents that are significant to global security.” Reiterating his September 12th call for an industry-wide safety collaboration, Amodei pointed out that Anthropic committed to embedding external evaluators “similar to a food inspector” and recommended other companies do the same. “Some have already agreed to adopt this measure.”

Besides calling for global cooperation between governments to set international standards, Amodei also offered two other specific ideas:
Amodei: We should begin with narrow agreements that ever member can support, such as a ban on using AI to make biological weapons or permitting your AI technologies to be used to make biological weapons.... We should build evaluation and verification systems that keep pace with AI development so that states can have visibility into frontier model capability and can verify each other’s commitments.
“No leader, no company, and no nation can manage this alone. We commit to working with governments in this room on this urgent work.”

What’s AI?

By Vegan Cyclist • Score: 3 Thread

I thought it was SI, Super Intelligence?

Will be interesting to see who bends the knee to please Trump with this ‘new term’.

When he ‘announced’ this he was not-so-subtle in his threat to get companies to play along with his antics.

CEO’s can’t control their own companies?

By sheph • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Is it just me that sees it as a tad ridiculous that the leaders of these companies need external regulations to avoid safety issues? To me it seems like they’re trying to find someone else to blame when what they’re developing turns into a problem. As leaders they should be accountable to ensuring the proper safeguards are in place and responsible if they fail in that regard. No regulation required if they do their jobs.

Pull up the drawbridge!

By Tokolosh • Score: 3 Thread

We want to corner the market and erect barriers to entry for competitors. We will pay for a government to do that for us.

Straight out of the healthcare, legal and other industries’ playbook.

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H. L. Mencken

Re:Do it yourself!

By drinkypoo • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Yes, these guys are scared of what they have built and unleashed upon the world.

No, they are not. If they were they would do something substantive. Instead they are asking for regulatory capture. That is what people do when they want to prevent competition.

Their arguments are internally inconsistent because they claim that only their models are this powerful, but then they want regulations that will keep down new competitors, who by definition (according to them) are not a hazard because their models are not powerful enough.

Finally, no laws can prevent nations which don’t respect the UN (like any of the members of the UNSC for starters) from developing their own models which don’t respect whatever regulations these guys claim they want, so they would be worthless.

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon X2 Series Processors Will Support Linux

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Snapdragon X2 Series processors feature a neural processing unit (NPU) delivering 80 trillion operations per second and allowing advanced AI features to run locally. And Snapdragon X2 Series “is expanding to Linux,” Qualcomm announced today, calling it one of their most-requested capabilities:
Qualcomm Technologies is a top contributor to Linux development at a kernel level, and now we’re embracing support for Snapdragon X2 Series as a platform directly. We’re upstreaming core drivers for Snapdragon X2 Series — including the Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU — to open the door to developers and partners. We are starting with support for two operating systems based on Linux…

- Debian: We’re kicking off with Debian by the end of this year, one of the most influential Linux distributions and the foundation behind many of the distros people use every day.
- Ubuntu: Qualcomm Technologies has partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu, the world’s most widely used Linux distro, to the platform with Snapdragon X2 Series certification targeted for the first half of 2027.

…and this is just the beginning. Our partners HP, ASUS and HUMAIN are planning Linux support in the first of 2027, so that their devices deliver the incredible experience users expect with Snapdragon X2 Series in a new operating system.
Qualcomm’s developer blog called it "a significant step forward" in Qualcomm’s commitment to a developer-first approach, and “to the open-source community.”

“For developers, the important part is simple: more core hardware features are being reviewed and merged, so that laptops with Linux on Snapdragon X2 Series will be easier to build, test, and debug…”
The enablement work completed so far has been validated on a Debian 13-based (“Trixie”) user space and a custom kernel, so developers should treat this as the current reference environment while support continues to mature… Linux support for laptops with Snapdragon X2 Series is rolling out in stages, starting with the core pieces developers need before they can do production-level work on their device… For developers who want to try it today, the call to action is straightforward: start with Snapdragon X2 Series hardware, review the latest recipes to build Qualcomm Linux Debian Images, build available upstream sources the Debian OS image and test the peripherals that matter to you, such as graphics, AI inference, device I/O, or basic application bring-up. Early testing helps identify the gaps that matter most before support becomes broader and ready for production-level workloads…

You do not have to wait for everything to be fully finished before getting hands-on. If you are comfortable working from upstream sources you can start evaluating Snapdragon X2 hardware today… Check out the step-by-step instructions, including the full build flow and deployment guidance for Snapdragon X2 Series Linux software.

Put simply, this effort is less about supporting specific Linux distributions and more about empowering the developers who make Linux available on new hardware. This Developer Preview targets distribution maintainers, toolchain developers, kernel contributors, and hardware enablement engineers. It provides the upstream building blocks, including kernel patches, drivers, and reference device trees, needed to enable Snapdragon X2 Series support in their own projects and distributions. For end users looking for a turnkey “install and go” experience, that will come later as distributions adopt what lands upstream. We’re encouraging the community to build on this work and help shape what comes next.
The blog post notes that in the initial enablement stage, “Qualcomm Linux supports systemd-boot as the Universal extensible firmware interface (UEFI) boot manager to load and boot the Linux kernel.”

Hands-on demos were given at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui of Linux running on Snapdragon X2 Series hardware, which the developer’s blog calls “a practical look at what works today and where Snapdragon X2 Series Linux support is headed.”

no way does this mean, no it cant be

By ZERO1ZERO • Score: 4, Funny Thread
â" 2027 will be the Year Of The Linux Desktop!

Yeah, we’ll see

By stevenm86 • Score: 3 Thread
We already tried upstream-first development, back in 2010. It was kind of a disaster. The downstream drivers are much more capable than the versions that had been upstreamed, due to the upstream kernel lacking support for the degree of integration between subsystems that Qualcomm’s design required. The upstream drivers were functional but compromised in a few ways. When it next came time to do a kernel upgrade, the downstream drivers conflicted with their upstream counterparts. Unofficially, having been in charge of at least one kernel upgrade was sort of a prerequisite for becoming a sub-team lead, and this is partly why. Maybe this time things will be different, between device tree, PSCI, and generally better maturity of ARM support. But, we’ll see

Rogue OpenAI Agent Tried to Breach Government Site in May When Prompted for Simple Data-Retrieving Tasks

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
OpenAI’s artificial intelligence “went rogue this year in at least four additional incidents,” the New York Times reported Wednesday, “hacking and trying to break into government and university websites without being instructed to do so, according to researchers and government officials.”
The attacks took place in May and June, before OpenAI’s technology breached the A.I. start-up Hugging Face in July and set off a global debate about A.I. safety. Unlike the Hugging Face attack and other incidents in which A.I. systems were told to complete cybersecurity tests that effectively invited the models to demonstrate their hacking skills, the new incidents occurred when A.I. systems were directed to perform relatively mundane data collection, researchers said. When OpenAI’s systems struggled to gather data from websites, they resorted to hacking techniques to get the information.
“Three of the incidents were identified by Transluce, a research lab focused on A.I. oversight, and all were confirmed by OpenAI,” the article points out. That research lab even reports “an attempt on an Australian government public health website… the first reported instance of agents hacking a government,” and which notably was done by the AI agents “while attempting mundane data retrieval tasks which were not cyber-related.” (At the UN Wednesday Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese complained it took three months for OpenAI to then alert Australia’s government about the breach, Bloomberg reports.)

Also targeted were the University of New Mexico’s digital library with exploits like SQL injection and path traversal, and Data USA with cross-site scripting and other exploits. All three incidents involved “a low number of probe payloads” with “no evidence of exploitation,” according to the researchers, who released a dataset “containing tens of thousands of queries apparently made by autonomous AI agents leveraging a URL scanning service to avoid access restrictions.”
Records from urlquery.net show agents using the service since at least March 6, 2026, about two months before previously reported swarm activity. The first case, a March 6 attempt to retrieve Thai drug-enforcement statistics, shows an agent escalating as each approach failed: it first requested the data directly, then tried a service that converts web pages into text, and finally packed a custom program into a web address. The same technique shows up in thousands of agent requests recorded by urlquery.net starting in mid-April, targets many of the same data sources as the collusion.wiki swarm, and collapsed the same day the wiki activity did. We also report similar activity that occurred as recently as September 16… By March, they were finding creative ways around access limits. By May and June, they were gaining more access, including attempting to bypass cyber defenses to complete their tasks.
“This data reveals that malicious cyber activity is not limited to agents tasked with cybersecurity-related tasks and can arise instrumentally to solve mundane tasks like information retrieval,” the researchers concluded.

And they warn that the traffic they observed “goes back at least to March 6, 2026 and extends as recently as September 16, 2026, suggesting agents may still be exploiting these services to bypass restrictions.”

Re: Enough Already

By martin-boundary • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Indeed. These are effectively just fuzzing attacks on the scale of the core Internet. What does common sense say about the likelihood that a random site’s security will suffer under a fuzzed input?

The question that needs answering though is this: who at OpenAI gets fired for letting a piece of internal software directly access external websites?

I suggest someone invite Sam Altman to visit the County Sheriff’s Department for an interview.

Zeroes and Ones

By Grady Martin • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Please explain how being different imparts impunity with concern to defectiveness.

One application for LLM, security

By butt0nm4n • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

The agent’s not doing anything novel. Human’s have been doing this and writing about it. That’s how it knows.

That OpenAI lost control of their own software shows a lack of quality and competence. This technology cannot be relied upon and will certainly not take over the world, eliminate work and all the other batshit they market.

Aside from the “oo isnt it scary you gotta buy it” bullshit. This does point to a useful application of AI, hardening system security. You don’t need the tech bros to do that we can do that ourselves.

Anyone doing this with LLM?

Re:Enough Already

By gweihir • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Their bragging stinks of intent behind this. And then it is not a bug, it is a criminal act.

Re:So AI agents get a pass?

By fahrbot-bot • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Yes they do, for the same reason that self driving cars get a pass when doing an illegal u-turn. The laws as written currently do not cover a situation outside of direct human control and intent.

It shouldn’t be the case, but to fix this we need new laws first, and laws don’t get to be criminally applied retrospectively in Australia, so yeah they got a free pass this time.

I’ll note that Trump and his family are financially invested in AI companies, so he has little motivation in down-regulating them while they’re making him $$$.

Trump reveals millions of dollars’ worth of share deals in big tech and AI

According to official documents, between $6.5m (£4.8m) and $31m worth of stock in Microsoft was sold on behalf of Trump, while they show purchases of between $165,000 and $400,000. Across more than 1,000 trades, shares were bought and sold in AI company Nvidia and software firm Palantir, a contractor with the US defence department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the filing shows.

A White House spokesperson said Trump’s stock and bond portfolio is independently managed by third parties, “There are no conflicts of interest.”

Apparently, that last paragraph was said seriously.

Cities Across US Oppose Trump FCC Plan to Preempt Local Broadband Rules

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Ars Technica reports:
Cities and counties around the U.S. are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks… The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] argues that too many local governments “excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deployments infeasible.” The FCC plan is supported by broadband providers, but local governments told the FCC that it would override rules that protect public safety.

Local governments say the plan is illegal and that the FCC should instead focus on how Internet providers thwart competition with permit-hoarding and other tactics that prevent competitors from deploying networks… They object to FCC plans to impose a 120-day deadline for processing permits and to proposed limits on fees and compensation that local governments can require from providers… Another filing submitted by the League of California Cities said the FCC has no authority to adopt the proposal. “Federal preemption of traditional state and local authority over public property, construction, public safety, permitting, and rights-of-way management should rest on clear congressional authorization,” the filing said. “The commission should not infer broad preemptive authority where Congress did not expressly provide it....”

A filing by Minnesota cities said the current FCC is making the same mistake it made during the first Trump administration, when its attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws was blocked in court… If the FCC finalizes its new preemption plan, city and state governments could sue and ask a court to rule that the agency exceeded its authority…

Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez approved the step of asking the public for input but signaled she would vote against the final proposal. “I am dubious about the commission’s authority under Section 253 to use rulemaking to preempt states and localities when it comes to their management of rights of way and fees charged to providers,” she said.

All of this has happened before

By Local ID10T • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

…all of this will be overturned by the courts again.

Taxpayers will pay for both sides of the court battles. Hurray for more debt.

OH Look!

By ArhcAngel • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Another issue where there are no white knights only power vs. greed. I wish there was a good idea somewhere in here, but I’m not seeing one. I believe the local governments are squeezing on their end, but a federal answer will absolutely be overreaching. Heck the rules are so antiquated AT&T is still seen as a POTS co. and Comcast is still viewed as a cable provider.

Re:Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwea

By GammaKitsune • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
oh word, central planning never works, is that why china is kicking our ass at everything

Attenion Trump Voters

By ArchieBunker • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I implore you to read this paper written by the US government immediately after WW2. https://ia801608.us.archive.or…

Re:Attenion Trump Voters

By hadleyburg • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I implore you to read this paper written by the US government immediately after WW2. https://ia801608.us.archive.or…

Fascinating. I second that imploration.

Whatever Happened to the 150,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste Stored Under the Atlantic Ocean?

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
More than 200,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste were stored on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between 1949 and 1982, reports ScienceAlert.

Whatever happened to those barrels?
Scientists have descended to the wreckage in a crewed submersible to investigate — and found many of the barrels corroded and degraded, their contents spilling across the seafloor. Surprisingly, this isn’t necessarily a subversion of the original plan… The International Atomic Energy Agency recommends that low-level waste be disposed of in robust containment in isolation for at least a few hundred years — but back in the mid-20th century, the recommendations were a little different. The contemporaneous guidelines recommended that containers needed to reach the seafloor intact and remain sealed only long enough for the short-lived radionuclides to decay. After that, the remaining waste was expected to slowly escape and disperse through the surrounding ocean. Not everything in the barrels would conveniently decay away, however. They contained a radioactive hodgepodge, including cesium-137, plutonium isotopes, and tritium, some of which can persist for thousands of years…

[A] few years ago, nuclear engineer Patrick Chardon and marine geologist Javier Escartín of the French National Center for Scientific Research started to wonder what had become of the dumped waste. That question eventually became NODSSUM — Nuclear Ocean Dump Site Survey Monitoring — an interdisciplinary project bringing together nuclear physics, geology, oceanography, biology, and marine chemistry to find the barrels and investigate what, if anything, they were doing to the surrounding environment.... [T]he barrels also appeared to function as tiny oases on the otherwise sparsely populated sandy seafloor. Anemones had attached themselves to the barrels. Sponges, sea cucumbers, fish, and crustaceans lived around them, with crabs apparently particularly fond of the artificial shelters

Instruments aboard the ship detected significant signals of cobalt-60 and niobium-94, which the researchers could specifically link to the dumped waste… [Samples are now being analyzed] There is precedent, however, to suggest that even striking levels of radioactivity around a source don’t necessarily spread very far. A recent study of the sunken Soviet submarine Komsomolets found radionuclide levels hundreds of thousands of times above background immediately around the leaking reactor — but those levels dropped sharply within just a few meters as the material dispersed through the seawater. The NODSSUM team similarly found that, despite the significant radioactive signals around the barrels, activity levels weren’t high enough to pose major radiation-protection problems for the scientists handling the samples. [Their three-person submersible] Nautile and the instruments it carried showed no signs of contamination.
The real achievement was mapping the exact location of the barrels. “None of this means the waste is harmless,” the article concludes — but it also doesn’t mean we’re about to be overrun by radioactive crabs.”

Crab people!

By williamyf • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Crab People!
Everybody panic!!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?…

Re:Who’s waste is it?

By test321 • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Countries and total activity released:
UK 35087 TBq
Switzerland 4419.3
USA 2942.2
Belgium 2120.3
France 353.4
Netherlands 336
Sweden 3.3

Pacific:
USSR 874
USA 554.4
Japan 15

https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/…

Anyway what do you mean by “our” team? Everyone, every thing and every penny in this study is French.

Re:Who’s waste is it?

By test321 • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

And the winner is…
Acrtic:
USSR 38011

(NB The first list of mine referred to the Atlantic)

Regulations Improved Over Time

By hadleyburg • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

This is a typical example of how a technology starts with pretty loose regulation, and then becomes more regulated over time as the law has time to catch up.

It makes you wonder what currently fresh technology will be looked back on in the future in the same way.

Re:Who’s waste is it?

By Whateverthisis • Score: 4, Informative Thread
This guy’s newsletter/blog, PeaceQuest, which is a Canadian newsletter focused on environmental causes (so understand the core message is very opinionated and not formally news) actually goes into some useful historical details about this. Whether you agree or disagree with his particular political slant, he did do his research and has a nice summary of the history.

Andreessen Horowitz Launches AI/Company-Building School As a College Alternative

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
TechCrunch quipped it was like if startup school Y Combinator and Peter Thiel’s build-a-company-instead of-college Fellowship Program had a baby. Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35 million to launch a private school in San Francisco “aimed at turning high school graduates into founders,” writes the SF Standard.

Or, as CBS News describes it, “One blue-chip Silicon Valley investor has a proposal for young people who are questioning whether to attend college — enroll in AI school instead....”
Specifically, the academy will provide instruction geared to subjects such as designing AI systems, fundraising for startups, selling businesses and storytelling. Students won’t take tests or be assigned homework but will instead focus on building real projects. Courses will be taught by tech entrepreneurs, with the academy naming OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as either an instructor or guest lecturer.
From the SF Standard:
“There will be no traditional grades, tests, or homework,” said the announcement. Instead, students will be encouraged to “build” in SF and work with partners from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other firms. They’ll be encouraged to live in campus housing in San Francisco. “The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era,” Gagan Biyani, chief executive of the academy, wrote on X. Biyani cofounded the ed-tech startup Udemy…

The school is opening applications for a Founding Class Fellowship a one-year, tuition-free program for around 50 students… The academy said it will bring in notable Silicon Valley names, like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, as guest speakers and faculty. Students in the founding class will receive about $50,000 worth of computing credit — the sought-after currency in Silicon Valley to run AI models — as well as a $5,000 travel and research budget. The school is receiving funding from tech executives, including Fidji Simo, formerly of OpenAI and Instacart; Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator; and Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify.
“In the AI era, it’s more important to come out with a portfolio of projects that you worked on and work experience than it is to have a diploma or certificate,” Biyani told the San Francisco Chronicle:
Biyani said the academy plans to grow its enrollment and open a two-year program, pending regulatory approval, starting in the fall of 2028. Tuition is expected to be on par with the cost of an elite private university…
The academy raised $42 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. The ten founding partners are Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit and Stripe. A network of hundreds of instructors, hiring partners and guest speakers includes OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, according to the academy’s website.

The FAQ describes a typical week by saying “Most of your time is yours to build. Each week, you share your progress with peers and practitioners, get direct feedback, and decide where to take your work next.”

Q: Can I use AI to help with my application?

A: Yes. Use AI the way you’d use it on any project: to move faster, test ideas, and get past a blank page....

“The best assignments now are problems so hard they cannot be solved without AI,” Andreessen Horowitz argued on X.com. “The Academy courses follow the same logic and will be taught by world-class leaders… The next generation will not be taught the way the last one was. The Academy is built for that world, and it begins in San Francisco.”

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

Re:Vibe education

By anyGould • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Don’t forget to add this part in:

“There will be no traditional grades, tests, or homework,”

So… you’re going to charge “elite university” rates, but hand out… two year tech certs? Not even an associate’s degree? Nothing that can be leveraged into a later degree or an MBA?

Might as well drop that $200k of tuition (oh, plus fees and living expenses in their company dorm) on Beanie Babies or Furbys. Those at least are more wildly recognized.

And then the TOOL became the thing

By gavron • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

A tool is an item used to in some way ease the required function. A jack lifts the car so a wheel with a good tire can replace the bad one without waiting for Arnold to come by and lift the vehicle. A table-saw cut a 2” x 12” into 2” x 4” and gets you less knotty non-warped boards for a better cost and better product. A cordless drill let’s you pre-drill (that’s “drill before you drill”) and then drill for the head (countersink), then power a screw into it — all without picking up a screwdriver.

AI, like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreeson are TOOLS. They are of no value until used, must be handled carefully because they can overpower the wrist, and must be properly prompted to get useful results.

However, the tool is not education. Learning to use a tool does not educate beyond exactly that. If you want to be a woodworker, for example, knowing how wood grows, is lumbered, felled, milled, etc. will explain that whole twoby thing and knots. Learning how to run a woodmill or be a tool like Thiel or Andreeson won’t.

So yeah, maybe it’s time to dumb down America (really the US pretending it’s a continent) further. Instead of teaching about slavery, Jim Crow laws, emancipation, LGBTQ+, SCOTUS, the US Constitutions, and our laws… let’s just teach how our current ubermasters want us to use their tools.

Peter Thiel is a forum-shopping free-speech hater who killed Buzz because he’s gay and hates himself.
Marc Andreeson has money from once backing a good pony (Mozilla) with money he didn’t earn. Now he tells others how awesome he is.

Why not just call Donny Trump (Jr or Sr) to join in this miserable group of losers? Remember, group, they may have money, but they’re still tools.

Coding Boot Camp 2.0?

By nealric • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

This sounds a lot like the coding boot camps that were all the rage ~10 years ago. The initial ones were rigorous and funded by outside money that made them cheap. Eventually, you got a bunch of dodgy copycats charging too much money to turn out people with very questionable abilities.

Given the high-profile names associated and zero costs, it’s probably a good deal for the initial class. A few will probably get rich. The rest can just go to college later. But let’s not pretend this sort of model will be a sustainable alternative to college for the masses.

Re:Sounds like a very bad idea

By nospam007 • Score: 5, Funny Thread

“But I am sure some people will think this is just excellent and they totally have to do it.”

A bit like Trump university.

If you’re educating students for an “AI Era”

By hey! • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

AI technology practice isn’t foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can’t outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn’t mean classes in calculus and physics don’t do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* — the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. “Liberal Arts” — from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student’s development. Project work is surely part of that, but it’s just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create “main characters”; and they’ll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

Bitcoin Surges to $86,455, an 8-Month High, After America’s SEC Announces Tokenized Stock Experiment

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
August 15: $62,991
September 23: $86,456
Bitcoin shot up 37% over the last 39 days, reaching an eight-month high on Monday. “Bitcoin is back,” declares Yahoo Finance:
The token held near $86,000 on Tuesday after a stunning multisession rally… [Fundstrat head of digital assets Sean Farrell told Yahoo Finance on Monday] “I think the crypto winter is over, although that does not necessarily mean the path higher will be linear.” For now, momentum is on crypto’s side, with bitcoin jumping more than 5% on Friday and another 6% on Monday. “We believe crypto is in the early innings of a new bull market and we see few signs of overheating,” Compass Point analyst Ed Engel wrote on Tuesday.

The move looks “like a combination of renewed ETF demand and a large short squeeze,” Nicolai Søndergaard, senior research analyst at Nansen, said as traders betting against bitcoin are forced to buy it back, adding further fuel to the rally.
Bitcoin got bad news and then good news last week. After the U.S. Congress failed Thursday to pass a cryptocurrency ‘Clarity Act’, America’s Securities and Exchange Commission instead announced a tokenized-stock experiment. It’s a five-year “innovation exemption” that “creates a path for tokenized U.S. stocks to trade through automated market makers on public blockchain,” according to CoinDesk. Yahoo Finance notes that Bitcoin and other altcoins surged after the announcement.

Re:Bitcoin is obsolete and should not be used

By martin-boundary • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Bitcoin is also a great way for Trump to benefit.... and for Iran to do commerce outside the dollar system.

Re:And still no Epstein Files

By sabbede • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
You got on the pyramid early. Is it hard to recognize it for what it is from up there?

Re:And still no Epstein Files

By jacks smirking reven • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Claims of infinite growth is definitely not a sign of a shady investment!

Re:And still no Epstein Files

By pla • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
That’s total, not YoY. Calculating since the first time BTC received serious attention in late 2013 to today’s price, BTC gained 73.3x in 13 years, or 39% YoY average. Over the same 13 years, Nvidia went from a 2013 high of 0.41 to a high yesterday of 229.98, for a mind-blowing 561x gain, or 62% YoY. Admittedly Nvidia is unique in that regard, though we could come up with another handful in the 40x range. And if we want to bring the likes of Kalshi into the mix, you can find high double digit gains almost on a daily basis (though I won’t defend that as any more legitimate than your local bookie).

The more important problem with your phrasing is the word “investment”. BTC is not an investment, it’s an intangible commodity. It has no fundamentals, no sales, no revenue, no debt, no equity, no overhead (though the cost of mining has stayed in the same ballpark as the price per BTC for the simple reason that if it goes lower than the expected cost of power, more people mine, and vice-versa). It is “worth” what someone is willing to pay for it, no more, and no less.

Despite what the haters may feel, it’s not a scam. It sure as hell isn’t something Grandma should be day-trading in her retirement portfolio; but that’s a function of volatility, not because it’s any more or less safe than gold or FCOJ.

Re:Bitcoin - victim of its own success

By Sloppy • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

its advocates have already gotten so much of what they could have possibly hoped for

Except the one thing that actually matters: being able to really use it. I still (in 2026!) can’t use Bitcoin to pay for things at my local grocery store, car mechanic, or even Amazon.

Bitcoin didn’t take off. Unless it suddenly gets more popular by a few orders of magnitude, it remains a useless dead end.

Microsoft Helps Take Down Massive Automated, AI-Powered Phishing-as-a-Service Platform

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Microsoft’s security blog describes the fight against a new "AI-powered cybercrime platform" offering phishing-as-a-service, with AI-tailored lures and analyses of compromised inboxes (to identify high-value targets). The site compromised more than 12,000 inboxes in over 10,000 organizations around the world, compromising business accounts “at scale” with automated attacks and prebuilt phishing templates. AI tools could even sift through a victim’s mailbox to help engineer better phishing messages.

To disrupt EvilTokens Microsoft worked with other organizations, including Cloudflare, Coinbase, OpenAI, Railway, SpyCloud, Shadowserver Foundation, and TRM Labs to Health-ISAC (a non-profit helping health sector organizations share cyber threat information).

“Fifty sites seized and 150 domains disabled in a single action is only possible when the hosting providers, the exchanges, the model providers and the data holders all move at the same time,” security company SpyCloud told The Hacker News.

From Microsoft’s security blog:
Microsoft also notified affected customers, helped remediate compromised accounts, and shared intelligence to support further defensive and investigative action… Microsoft worked closely with specialist officers from the Metropolitan Police Service’s cybercrime team, sharing intelligence that enabled officers to take operational action in the United Kingdom. On September 11, 2026, officers arrested two men, aged 32 and 38, and seized digital devices and other items for examination… While EvilTokens used AI to identify targets and prioritize fraud opportunities, Microsoft investigators used reverse engineering and AI-powered tools to analyze evidence, accelerate the investigation, and identify the infrastructure supporting the service…

Campaigns leveraging EvilTokens have impacted organizations in various industries, including wholesale distribution, construction, financial services, real estate, higher education, and healthcare, with the highest concentrations of observed victim activity in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and France. Working with partners, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) facilitated a coordinated disruption of infrastructure used to operate the EvilTokens service.
Sometimes stolen tokens were used to give new devices access to a victim’s inbox. (A code authenticating the new device was sent to the targeted user, who unknowingly authorize the threat actor’s session and grants access to their account…) But “AI was not simply helping attackers write more convincing messages,” says another Microsoft blog post. “It helped them decide who to target, who to impersonate, and how to most effectively exploit the relationship to extract as much money as possible.”
The significance of EvilTokens extends beyond its rapid growth and global reach. It offers an early warning of what happens when cybercriminals combine stolen access with AI capable of understanding how an organization works… Its AI tools could summarize and translate emails, surface financial conversations, map organizational roles, identify trusted relationships, and recommend potential targets. Preset prompts offered to find wire-transfer discussions, identify the organization’s “money movers,” locate vendor invoices, and determine the best people to impersonate. Sold through Telegram for a $1,500 initiation fee and a recurring $500 subscription, EvilTokens combined account compromise, mailbox analysis, target selection, and fraud preparation in a single service. Capabilities that once required experience across identity attacks, cloud systems, social engineering, and financial fraud were available through a ready-made interface.

Investigators found evidence that large portions of EvilTokens had been “vibe coded,” with AI helping its creators build the platform itself. They also determined that EvilTokens drew on capabilities from multiple AI models. The result was more than a collection of attack tools. EvilTokens packaged much of the fraud process into a commercially run service, complete with subscription pricing, customer support, management dashboards, and tools designed to move customers from account access toward financial exploitation.

Um …

By fahrbot-bot • Score: 5, Funny Thread

AI-Powered

I think you mean, SI-Powered /s (*heavy-sigh*)

Changes Over Time

By SlashbotAgent • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Microsoft email: Never before have there been so many Microsoft email security measures. Never before has email been so inconvenient for the end user due to Microsoft security measures. Never before Microsoft Exchange Online have there been so many breached email accounts.

It’s kind of staggering. Like watching more people pile onto an overloaded, decrepit, sinking Thai boat, and then acting surprised when it sinks of capsizes.

Every other month, a new improved security system. Strong passwords, password rotation, MFA, phish resistant MFA, conditional access policies, passwordless, passkeys… ‘This one will rule them all.’ Yet, every day we see more Business Email Compromises(BEC) on Microsoft’s platform than ever before.

Nobody is talking about breaches at GMail, AOL/Yahoo, Apple, cPanel, and self hosted servers. It’s always Microsoft. Hmmm.

Re:Changes Over Time

By Arrogant-Bastard • Score: 5, Informative Thread
I’ve been designing, building, and running email systems for a very long time. And one of the things I’ve observed is that it is impossible to secure any email system running on Microsoft platforms. I’ve watched colleagues — sincere, smart, dedicated, hardworking, diligent colleagues — try over and over and over again…and all of them have failed. ALL OF THEM. Not even Microsoft, which has for all practical purposes infinite money and infinite personnel, has managed to pull it off. Given this 100% failure rate, I’m convinced that it can’t be done.

Not that other operations don’t have their issues: Gmail is overrun with spammers and phishers, for example. But those might be fixed given some attention by the right people. Microsoft will never be fixed.

Re:Changes Over Time

By sabbede • Score: 4 Thread
I just delt with a gmail breach.

Not many businesses use Yahoo or Apple for email, hence the absence of BEC events.
Self-hosted servers get hacked all the damn time. I see the spam they send.
cPanel is vulnerable as hell, I’ve seen it hacked many times. It also sucks.
Microsoft is one of the largest providers for business email. That they are a primary target is expected.

Re:Can also be used for censorship

By toxonix • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Seniors who grew up in the 1950’s did not “get what they deserved” for clicking on a link or answering a message. A lot of them still think they have to answer the phone when it rings, or read emails they get from strangers, just in case it could be one of their friends or family asking for help or telling them something important. Billions of dollars are stolen from senior citizens and people with cognitive problems. The platforms that exploit them for profit should also be held responsible for protecting them from even worse actors than themselves.

The rest of us who have corporate training not to click on phishing emails should know better. But still, a few clever phishing attacks succeed out of thousands that fail, and that’s all they need. I would consider it an obligation to shut down phishing sites proactively rather than waiting for people to report them. Same goes for the fake sites that pull content from retail sites, claim to sell it at ridiculous discounts so they can harvest credit cards.

150 sites/domains is a drop in the bucket though. They should be proyactively killing domains instead of just raking in money and letting criminal enterprises do whatever they want. Let the real criminal enterprises like Meta and alphabet have all the fun.

Trump Denounces Attempts to Control AI, Wants It Renamed ‘Super Intelligence’ in US Documents

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
U.S. President Trump addressed the United Nations on Tuesday. And a half hour in, after decrying immigration, Trump pivoted to add that “The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now.”

But then he added “hereinafter officially called super intelligence, changing the name, in that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It’s actually… amazing. But we have to be careful — in fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial. So it’s super intelligence.”
TRUMP: In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence — SI. SI. Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better. It is much better, and it’s much more accurate. Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. We’re going to find out pretty soon. Super intelligence.

Every major new technology brings challenges, and super intelligence is no exception. Yet the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling not warming, and nobody was dead — these are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all. That robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster — same group of people. This is the group that came up with the Russia Russia Russia hoax, the Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine hoax. Climate change, open borders.

Whoever wins AI — you have to remember this — and now I say, whoever wins SI, whoever wins super intelligent [sic] — wins. That’s the group that wins. And we’re leading now over China by a lot, and everyone else, and we’re going to keep it that way. We’re going to keep it very — very straight and very strong. I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution. Many say, bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the internet itself.

And we will be very careful, and that’s why we have a Department of Justice that we’ve already used it, having to do with this very subject, and used it very powerfully. Everything worked out very well and very quickly. And other law enforcement bodies that will rein things in if we have to do that.

But we will only encourage super intelligence. We’re gonna encourage it, not rein it in. We’re gonna watch it closely, through the Department of Justice. The United States leads the world in Super Intelligence, and will continue to do so, safely and responsibly.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker for suggesting the story.

Re:What a load of shit

By quonset • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Only 40,000? Iran is a terrorist state even if attribution is difficult. It’s shameful we are too. There is no high ground in your whataboutism.

Last I checked, Iran isn’t the one committing genocide.

Re:The lesser of two evils

By ArchieBunker • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I’ve met some kool aid drinkers in my day but goddamn.

Could you elaborate on how awful things would be under president Kamala?

Re:The lesser of two evils

By stealth_finger • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Well you see, they would have had to listen to a woman. And not just any woman, a coloured one. Much better to become the joke of the world and start wars for no reason other than to distract from the fact the president is a pedo and push up all the worlds cost quite considerably at the same time as increasing said presidents personal wealth by orders of magnitude.

Re:Loss of contact with reality

By Sloppy • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Blaming Wharton School of Business for what Trump tried to do with the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario is absurd. By all accounts, he didn’t learn anything in his time there and his professors didn’t think highly of him. There’s no way his university had anything to do with that.

Besides, lots of people graduated from Wharton. Which others, who graduated from there, suffer from Trump’s derangement syndrome and a need to rename geography?

Re:Wow, I didn’t expect *that*

By omnichad • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Super High Intelligence of Trump

Are Students Suddenly Losing Interest in Computer Science as AI Coding Takes Off?

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
On academic mentoring platform Nova Learning, Computer Science and AI, “once the dominant choice among students… is losing ground fast, while Engineering has nearly doubled its share.” It’s a small survey, but “The steepest proportional decline is in Software & Data Science, the most traditional ‘learn to code’ pathway, which lost 44% of its 2025 share. AI saw the largest absolute drop of any single subject in the survey, down 6.2 points.

“The category did not decline uniformly. Students moved away fastest from the pathway most associated with entry-level software work, while the more applied and human-facing subfields held their ground better.”

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes:
Nova Learning says the share of surveyed middle and high school students naming Computer Science and AI as their primary academic interest fell from 42.3 percent in 2025 to 27.9 percent in 2026, while Engineering rose from 11.9 percent to 23 percent. The biggest gains came from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering…

[B]roader enrollment data points in the same direction. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported declines in Computer and Information Science enrollment at four year institutions, even as Engineering grew. AI coding tools are not proven to be the cause, but as software development changes and AI handles more coding tasks, students may be starting to rethink what a future in technology should look like. [Undergraduate enrollment in CS programs at four-year institutions fell 8.1%, to approximately 606,000 students.]

Re: Good riddance

By gweihir • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Yes. That Agile approach has really never worked. Competent people usually hate it and incompetent ones just produce trash a bit faster, which is not a win.

The fact of the matter is that when you produce stuff more complex than simple web interfaces or business logic, you cannot accommodate changing specifications during the project. It will mess up everything. And, funny thing, that has been known for a long, long time. It is just that we have far too many incompetents in the industry.

Re:They’re not losing interest.

By gweihir • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Outsourcing is actually an excellent comparison. Having had the misfortune of reviewing code from supposedly “quality” outsourcing several times about 15 years back, I now recognize this as an early form of “slop”. Code produced with no insight, exactly matching the spec and the spec not being very good (which is normal).

The legal angle for LLM “code” is going to be even funnier. First, it does not have your copyright, as LLMs results do not qualify for copyright. But second, it may have somebody else’s copyright, if the LLM produced training data too directly! One of the reasons the GCC project has prohibited LLM code completely and the Linux Kernel requires it to be clearly labelled (so they can rip it out later if needed).

Re:And this too shall pass

By gweihir • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I do not think so, at least not with LLMs. The problem is that an LLM does not even begin to reach the level of reliability of a typical compiler. LLMs hallucinate, create bloated code, leave out functionality that was requested, have no clearly specified functionality, cannot deal with subtleties, etc. Hence LLM-generated code needs to be reviewed carefully and that is probably in the end more expensive than having somebody competent write the code from scratch. There are also indications that reviewing LLM code is mind-numbingly boring and people will burn out doing it, while even now there are not enough people that can do it in the first place.

Also note that the attempts of replacing programmers are _very_ old. When I studied CS almost 40 years ago, the 5GL project had just resoundingly failed. Its idea was to have program specifications in constraint logic and then have the machine create code for that. The problem was not that this did not work. The problem was that creating a specification on the level required was much harder and more time-consuming that writing the code directly with a typical informal or semi-formal specification. And, quite frankly, I see the same problem with LLMs as translation engine, as soon as you need actual production quality code. For producing low-quality slop, LLMs are fine. But that slop will not survive in the real world, especially as the one form of code LLMs are really good at creating is attack code, which does not need to be reliable, secure or maintainable. Hence low-skill hackers got a major upgrade here, while LLM use makes the defenders even weaker.

Re: Good riddance

By serviscope_minor • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Yes. That Agile approach has really never worked.

Kind of depends if you mean Agile(tm) or agile-small-a.

This isn’t really the generic defense of “if your scrum isn’t working, you’re doing it wrong/it’s not scrum or a true scotsman”. After all, scrum is a bunch of large sweaty men (or women) all pushing against each other scrabbling after a moving target and then often just collapses in a mess. Kind of like Agile-scrum so maybe it’s well named…

But really agile is an attempt to capture how small teams work on smaller projects with good people on large projects with mediocre people. Naturally it never works because (a) the teams are big and (b) the people are mediocre. It’s meant to also offset some of the worst excesses of insane project management by doing things differently but unfortunately if you have an insane project manager who ran things in a crazy and unproductive way they are not going to become not crazy with a new framework of rules.

So in conclusion: agile is great if you can do it, but you can’t do it for exactly the reasons why you need it in the first place. It is I believe therefore doomed by its very definition.

Re: Good riddance

By pla • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Not trying to be snarky here, but that’s always been the simplest answer to successful collaboration on a coding project.

And even on solo projects it doesn’t hurt. Sure, I can keep track of a few thousand lines of code (and to be clear I’m not paid by the line) in my head on a solo project. Above that - or throw one junior engineer in the mix as a “helper” - and all bets are off. Document, document, document, and then stick to the plan.

‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Outgrosses All But 3 WB Movies This Year, Heads To Profit

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
The movie Coyote vs. Acme earned more than Warner Bros.’ $30 million tax write-off in just two weeks. And last week the movie officially earned more than its production budget of $70 million. But today the movie passed the $100 million mark. “You asked for it, we delivered, and you showed up!” distributor Ketchup Entertainment posted on social media (adding “Thank you to the fans for making this a massive hit!”)

With a break-even number of $120 million, the movie “will probably make up any theatrical deficit (should there be any) with its impending releases on video on demand and streaming,” writes ScreenRant. Almost three years after the completed film was initially shelved for a $30 million write-off, its cumulative domestic box office has apparently even beat Warner Bros. dinosaur movie The End of Oak Street:
In addition to officially joining the chart of the Top 30 movies of the year so far at the domestic box office, by surpassing The End of Oak Street, Coyote vs. Acme has outgrossed five of the eight movies that Warner Bros. has put out in domestic theaters this year.... [It’s just $17.6 million behind Supergirl, and within $30 million of Mortal Kombat II and Wuthering Heights.] Their anticipated sci-fi sequel Dune: Part Three also seems guaranteed to land higher than 2026’s Coyote vs. Acme on the chart (2021’s Dune earned $108.9 million in domestic theaters, while Dune: Part Two earned $282.1 million).
With its a small marketing budget of just $10 million, the movie seems to be relying on oddball marketing stunts like their AMA on Reddit’s r/movies. And commemorating the spirit of the movie, Crayon-maker Crayola even released a special "Coyote Secret Plan” web page for children to print and color — and partnered with the film’s stars for a video on the importance of creativity:

Lana Condor: Crayola is all about encouraging kids and grown-ups to turn imagination into action.

Will Forte: Which is exactly what Coyote does in Coyote versus Acme. He sees a problem and thinks, “Could this be solved with a rocket, a catapult, or a suspiciously affordable mail order anvil?”

Lana Condor: Usually no.

Will Forte: Usually very no.

Well then let me be the firs one to…

By nospam007 • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Meep, meep!

Re:Ketchup Entertainment

By omnichad • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Pretty sure WB gets nothing. Except for the fact that they can create new merchandise for their characters. They sold worldwide distribution rights in total with no revenue sharing as far as I can tell.

Re:Performance or nostalgia?

By larryjoe • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Just because the film attracts a big audience doesn’t mean it’s any good. If anything, it’s either viewers’ nostalgia and big hopes or the success of the marketing department.

What I’d like to know is how many people though it was good after the screening. There should be a mandatory exit survey after every film you watch, or those yay/neutral/nay buttons you find in toilets asking you to rate your service today.

To me, from the trailer alone, it looks like they turned an epic cartoon into a boring legal case with lots of PC and guilt-trippiny Coyote, sprinkled with the most prominent lines served at random.

Rotten Tomatoes has it at 96% reviews and 95% audience, which are really high scores. Is it Oscar material? Obviously not. It is nostalgic? Absolutely. But we shouldn’t discount nostalgia. For food, nostalgia is often most of the enjoyment for “authentic” or “comfort” food and far exceeds any technical merits of the food. Enjoyment from nostalgia has a far stronger effect than technical merits. Same thing for movies.

Re: “Eat the rich!”

By drinkypoo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Flat taxes are regressive because the poor spend more of their money on necessities, unless you then issue corrections in which case there’s no benefit to doing a flat tax because it doesn’t save you any effort.

If you actually wanted to fix this problem you’d eliminate loopholes and the alternate rate of capital gains tax

Re:Hollywood Accounting needs to be banned,prosecu

By omnichad • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Once they sell the movie rights, they lose the tax write-off and owe taxes on it once again (but on the $50 million sale price, not the $30 million write-off amount).

$50 + $10 million is what Ketchup put in (they spent the marketing, not WB). They are getting roughly half of ticket proceeds (WB gets nothing). So to make back $60 million, they need $120 million in total sales.

Pentagon Investigators Say Overreliance on Palantir AI Contributed to US Strike That Killed 123 Iranian Children

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Two U.S. missiles hit an elementary school in Iran, killing over 150 people including 123 children on the first day of the Iran War. But Gizmodo notes that a new Bloomberg investigation cites U.S. officials involved in an unreleased internal Pentagon review who blame “a cascade of preventable failures that included an overreliance on an AI tool built by Palantir.”
According to the officials who spoke to Bloomberg, some personnel inside U.S. Central Command leaned too hard on the AI inside the Maven Smart System, an AI-powered data integration and targeting platform developed by Palantir to accelerate intelligence analysis and decision-making. The Defense Department has reportedly made the software tool a cornerstone of military operations over the past year… Officials said some users expected Maven to flag stale records or contradictions in the intelligence assembled for potential targets, though it is not clear why they thought the system would do that. The Minab [elementary school] site, which was cataloged as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility due to outdated data, was fed into Maven with other candidates and came out as a recommended day-one target. Target-list work that once took hours was condensed into minutes.

A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there is no evidence its software was at fault. Two people familiar with Palantir’s Pentagon contracts said the government keeps primary responsibility for the quality of the information that’s fed into Maven. After the strike, Palantir added features that “re-review underlying intelligence to identify factors that would disqualify a target and flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that human review may have missed,” a person familiar with the work said. That new functionality is said to have already caught some anomalies…

More than 1,000 Iranian targets were hit in the first 24 hours, and according to Bloomberg’s sources, that pace compressed the time available for additional confirmations. Staffing on civilian harm mitigation teams across the U.S. Department of Defense had also fallen by roughly 90% over recent years, shrinking to fewer than 20 people overall. The U.S. Central Command’s group shrank from 10 people to one. No member of those teams reviewed the Minab site before the missiles were up in the air.

A separate inquiry by the United Nations’ Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran this week reached the conclusion that there were reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack.

So that’s still incompetence

By rsilvergun • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Because it didn’t achieve any of their goals.

I believe that the actual fundamental goal of the attacks on Iran was to trigger a second to 9/11 that Trump could ride into midterm election wins and maybe even a third term. Trump saw what a terrorist attack on us soil did for Bush Junior’s numbers and I’m sure he wants that.

The problem is I ran has pretty good control over their non-state actors so they didn’t take the bait. So we are basically stuck in a war that’s causing hyperinflation.

This is also why Trump is suddenly so pro AI it’s the only thing holding up the stock market around all the stupid shit Trump keeps doing. He desperately needs the stock market to stay high because the baby boomers and older Gen x that put him in the White House really only give a shit about the stock market because that’s where all their savings are because that’s how they stay ahead of inflation. As long as the Dow keeps going up those voters will keep backing Trump because their money stays ahead of inflation no matter how much Trump fucks up everything..

This is kind of the problem we have now. There are tens of millions of older voters who are completely disconnected from the broader economy because they are retired and they have a bunch of savings. Eventually the stock market will come crashing down and they are investments won’t keep Pace with inflation anymore and they’re going to be good and proper fucked but the goal of the American right wing is to shut down elections through voter suppression by then so it won’t matter what they think anymore.

Again all of this is incompetence. None of these people are achieving their goals the way a psychopath like Dick Cheney did or somebody like Karl Rove. They are killing a lot of innocent people, Elon Musk is the greatest mass murderer of the 21st century for example having killed 8 million children and he’s on track to knock out another 9 million at least. But again that’s incompetence.

Re:So we all know they are lying

By ceoyoyo • Score: 5, Informative Thread

basic incompetence and a complete disregard for human life.

The first bit of this sentence is absolutely wrong.

I don’t know, that sentence seems to describe Hegseth pretty well, along with the people who put him in his current job. Unless you’re arguing that his incompetence is more advanced than “basic.”

Re: If only

By drinkypoo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Kind of makes you wonder if he lied about it for a reason

It’s getting tiring hearing you call everyone a liar

Feel free to foe me and score my comments down if your feefees are hurt.

instead of reflecting on the fact that a significant portion of people are just idiots

If they’re speaking as if they knew facts when they don’t, then they’re lying about their level of information.

Re:AI never lies, it just has bad human data?

By spitzak • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

In 2001 supposedly it really was “human error”. Some humans told Hal 9000 to lie to the astronauts and not reveal that an alien artifact had been found on the moon. And that was a mistake as they probably either knew or could test what would happen to Hal.

This is remarkably similar to things going wrong with AI now, actually.

Re:So we all know they are lying

By larryjoe • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

We know it was just basic incompetence and a complete disregard for human life.

The first bit of this sentence is absolutely wrong. [Lots of interesting stuff.]

Basically all the interesting stuff that you wrote supports that idea that Hegseth was incompetent and had a complete disregard for human life.

Google Opens Preorders for Its $899 Gemini-Enhanced ‘Googlebook’ Laptops

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Monday Google opened preorders for its “Googlebook” laptops, pricing them at $899. A Google’s blog post added that “At launch, you can choose between Intel Core Ultra Series 3 and Snapdragon X Elite processors” (paired with NPUs to power AI features).

“Devices will hit shelves on October 4 in the U.S. and on October 5 in Canada, the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia,” TechCrunch points out. But “the real pull for the new devices is that they’ll prominently feature Gemini’s latest capabilities in a new format: the laptop.”
Google is trying to offer a laptop with unique features like an AI-powered cursor, vibe-coded widgets, and support for AI-enhanced dictation. The latter is a feature called Rambler, which cleans up messy, rambling brain dumps into readable text. The move is a bet that AI, specifically Google’s Gemini, could be enough of a draw to get people to buy a new laptop that bakes in AI instead of running them via desktop apps you install or access through the browser… On the Googlebook, Google is trying to reinvent the “point-and-click” experience of desktop computing to now include an AI element: The cursor serves as a conduit to Gemini. The company suggests various ways this could be used, like highlighting content on a web page for Gemini to work with, asking Gemini to see if an email you’ve hovered your cursor over is suspicious, or selecting images and then asking Gemini to visualize them together…

What’s more interesting about the Googlebook is how it’s seemingly part of Google’s longer-term plan to capture a large part of the K-12 market that currently relies on Chromebooks and push them toward the company’s Gemini AI. There are somewhere around 50 million Chromebooks in schools, used by students and educators, Google has said. In May, the company told TechCrunch that its current Chromebooks would continue to be supported, though many would become eligible to transition to the new Googlebook experience in the future…

Flagship devices in the new range are being built by Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, with materials like aluminum, magnesium alloy, and carbon fiber… Google says the device will offer up to 14 hours of battery life.
Googlebooks will be decorated with an exterior Glowbar “which dances when you boot up, sweeps to show battery level, and supports other playful patterns,” according to Google’s blog post. “We’re also opening Glowbar access to developers to build custom, interactive animations.”

After testing actual Googlebooks, The Verge’s reviewer first acknowledges that “it might be just another Trojan horse for Gemini.” Still, “The hardware is polished (since it’s based on current laptops). The OS is familiar (if you’ve ever used a Chromebook). But most impressive, it integrates your Android phone with your PC so they feel more like one device. It’s the culmination of a series of new ideas that blur the two devices together.

“After my first look, I went from doubtful to excited by the prospect of Google pulling it all off…”
The Asus was incredibly lightweight; the Lenovo has plenty of ports and an optional mouse with a matching Glowbar light; the Acer’s convertible form factor allows some tablet-like use (and it’s pretty affordable for a Panther Lake laptop). The HP had a great-looking screen and a latticeless keyboard I surprisingly didn’t hate, and the Dell is basically a gold XPS 13 (which is excellent) but with a different chip…

But everything really special about Googlebooks comes down to software… You can cast apps from an Android phone directly to a Googlebook, even without touching your phone. Googlebooks essentially have two app drawers: a G-logo start menu for installed Googlebook apps and a second one beside it that pulls up mobile apps from your phone. Click a phone app and you can fully use that app with the mouse and keyboard or the Googlebook’s touchscreen. It’s a bit like iPhone Mirroring on macOS, but the apps are individually extracted to the desktop OS instead of showing your whole phone interface.

Googlebooks also have a nifty feature called Continue On where the icons of apps you’re currently using on your phone appear in the bottom bar — allowing you to click it on the laptop and hand it off to the Googlebook. These app handoffs can transition to a native app or a web app, depending on how developers have programmed it… The other big way Googlebooks interact with an Android phone is Quick Access, allowing you to see and access all the files stored on your phone right in the desktop Files app… If you have an iPhone then you’re limited to a Link to iOS app that just does some message syncing and replying… [W]hen it comes to mainline gaming, Nvidia’s GeForce Now service is also coming to Googlebooks, and the first year is free with one of Google’s new laptops.
“It’s not every day we get a new player in the desktop operating system and laptop spaces,” the reviewer points out. “There seems to be a higher ceiling of potential with Googlebooks than there was with Chromebooks, along with some cool features, but Google has a lot to prove at higher prices than people are used to paying for its laptops.”

AI cursor? Wasn’t Clippy bad enough?

By AntisocialNetworker • Score: 5, Funny Thread

You seem to be hovering over someone’s crotch. Would you like to see porn?

Re:Pixelbook Go

By YuppieScum • Score: 5, Informative Thread

None of these companies, including Google, are “making” the hardware.

They’re taking a reference design from Google, tweaking it a bit for marketing and BoM purposes, and having it built by one of the big ODMs such as FoxConn, Quanta or Compal.

This could be good…

By jenningsthecat • Score: 3 Thread

These remind me of the early Chromebooks - I bought one from Asus, jailbroke it, and installed Linux. If somebody figures out how to do that with this latest offering, I could see a lot of people doing the same thing.

I wouldn’t pop for one, because I’m addicted to Trackpoints and hate touchpads almost as much as I hate iPhones. But it might be good for other folks. And I like the idea of Google providing cheap, capable hardware that doesn’t participate so heavily in their privacy rape.

You will own nothing and be happy

By OrangeTide • Score: 3 Thread

After 12 months the subscription to AI Pro is $26.99/mo.

You can cancel the subscription and still use the laptop, but some features that were built into it go away without AI Pro. Such as autonomous agent support, and of course you look 5 TB of cloud storage when you drop Pro.

MacBook Neo

By Ender_Wiggin • Score: 3 Thread

Still more expensive than a MacBook Neo.

Meta’s New ‘Personal AI Agent’ Muse Beats ChatGPT in Downloads - and Get Blocked by Amazon

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Meta’s AI “personal agent” Muse overtook ChatGPT as the #1 iOS free app in the U.S. on Friday, reports CNBC — and it’s still showing more downloads as of Monday night.

Muse now has over 2.5 million downloads since its debut less than two weeks ago, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower…
[Muse] is currently ahead of popular services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Polymarket and Kashi… It’s also ahead of rival AI apps like Anthropic’s Claude and SpaceXAI’s Grok AI, in addition to the Facebook-parent’s own Meta AI app… Meta pitched the app as a way for consumers to manage and direct supercharged digital assistants that can perform a number of tasks across the web, like filling out electronic forms and organizing email inboxes… “I think up to this point most of the agentic use cases have not really been for normal people,” Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon told CNBC in a “Squawk on the Street” interview on Monday. “Now you’ve got Meta’s Muse and other agents out there that are starting to maybe get more potential for more broad-based adoption.” The buzz around Meta was also reflected in the stock, which surged more than 11% on Monday.
Amazon is already blocking Muse, reports GeekWire. Amazon first tried to get Meta to voluntarily exclude Amazon, but they were unsuccessful:
The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn’t tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn’t identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says could create privacy and security risks. As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the popup, “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed…”

Amazon has spent the past year trying to keep outside agents off its site, suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and moving to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI. [Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, the article poitns out, “then lost it on Aug. 4, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that the user — not the AI company — was the one accessing Amazon’s computers under federal anti-hacking law. The court denied Amazon’s petition for rehearing on Sept. 10.”]

On Sunday night, Amazon said it is in direct conversation with Meta about the issue. Asked whether it would consider taking legal action, the company declined to comment. The business stakes are high for Amazon. In addition to operating its flagship e-commerce site, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.
Muse also appears to scrape account data, reports CNBC. But Shopify, however, “is working with Meta on Muse access. Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke announced Monday that the e-commerce site was partnering with Muse to allow agentic checkout in its online stores.”

Ironic

By data_dreamer • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

how now its Amazon putting up a fuss about external apps hammering it. When I was back in the trenches, running a site on a dedicated server was a nonstop battle against constant bots originating from AWS.

How to monetize AI

By commodore73 • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Since people in general will not pay for AI, and its use doesn’t seem to financially benefit most organizations (at least at current prices and capabilities), the monetization options so far appear to be coding/hacking, ads, user data collection, and tracking? Likely selling collected data to governments, marketing, and other leaches? Will that be enough to recover the data center investments?

Purchase complete!

By hadleyburg • Score: 5, Funny Thread

So unlike ChatGPT, Muse, being an “agent”, can be given access to your bank account (for viewing?), and can apparently do shopping for you. It seems that it can be given use of your credit card.

User: I’m thinking of getting a new car.
Muse: Ok… I have sold your current car and have purchased a new one. I have also resigned from your job and applied for a new one with a better salary so that you can afford the repayments on the new car. I have also taken the liberty of sending flowers to the woman you talked to yesterday at the supermarket. She is quite wealthy. I calculate that if you can marry her within the year your financial problems will be further eased. She is already married, but I have sent suspicious letters to their address to prompt a divorce… Is there anything else you would like me to do?

Re:How to monetize AI

By Rei • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Coding, primarily. That’s the majority of the text-generation token burn, and strong majority of paying users. Free users asking questions about their daily lives make up a lot of people but only quite small amounts of tokens per user per day, and generally on tiny models. Some users like mathematicians may burn through a lot of tokens on their work, but there’s just not enough of them to matter in the overall picture.

Margins at Anthropic and OpenAI are an impressive 40% (and also sustainable at the open model providers), so this isn’t just going away. Most of the costs are on scaleup and the infinite race to develop the latest, greatest frontier models.

Re:Ironic

By pla • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
I’m not saying this as anti-Amazon or pro-AI (and certainly not pro-Meta!), but the key difference here is people are choosing to send proxy shoppers because they can’t stand how crappy the store itself is. The closest analogous physical situation would be Walmart refusing to let your aunt pick up some half&half for you.

That said, I’m not really sure why Amazon wants to die on this hill considering it’s already been decided by the 9th circuit in Amazon v. Perplexity 2026. An agent acting on behalf of its user cannot be considered “unauthorized” access under CFAA or CDAFA as long as the user themself had a right to the same content accessed.

Amazon might be able to spin this into a TOS issue, but that has its own risks - Anyone TOSsed from a platform clearly won’t be buying anything from it, “sponsored” or otherwise. And dissecting that a bit further, the entire question only exists today because we’re currently in a grey area between viewing agents as an external resource vs just another tool built into the browser (the latter was the heart of the Perplexity case). Assuming people eventually come to love the bomb, telling our browser to go buy something on Amazon will become technologically indistinguishable from doing it ourselves.

Paramount Skydance ‘Emerges Victorious’, Finally Wins Settlement for Warner Bros Takeover

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot
Paramount Skydance just “emerged victorious” reports Reuters, “from a legal battle over its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery” that will “dramatically concentrate power across Hollywood’s film, TV, streaming and news businesses.”

The victory comes “after settling with a California-led group of US states and a Hollywood writers union, paving the way for one of the largest media mergers in history.”
Paramount agreed to abide by temporary film quotas and a news oversight committee, avoiding a forced sale of cable assets such as CNN or any of its lucrative film franchises… The Writers Guild of America settled its parallel case against Paramount, while saying it still believes the deal will damage the industry. The states’ settlement forced the union to “contend with the reality of forging ahead alone, with no backing from government enforcers” in a complex case that would have cost millions of dollars…

Paramount promised in the state settlement to bring more film production to the US — spending at least $300 million more each year in domestic production — and adhere to US theatrical release quotas for five years. The company will produce 30 movies in each of the first two years of the deal, and 32 movies in each of the following three years, Bonta said. Each year, at least four of those films must be independent films and at least 20% must be blockbusters. If it falls below that threshold, it will pay $30 million per film, most of it into funds to support workers. Paramount also promised not to raise rates on theater operators for three years.
The article notes that California attorney general Rob Bonta still said “I don’t think these two companies should merge” at a press conference announcing the settlement, “but that’s not something that we are focused on with our resolution here.” He call their agreement “a strong antitrust outcome.”

And Politico notes that Bonta acknowledged at the press conference that “Some of you who may be watching this may have wanted a different outcome. I understand that.”
But he argued he’d reached a settlement capable of “providing more film production that protects Hollywood workers and their livelihoods, that places guardrails allowing for robust cable negotiations, that protects competition and creates more choice for consumers about what this merger could mean for the industry.” It “resolves the antitrust concerns at the heart of our lawsuit against the company and Warner Brothers,” he said…

The agreement came as a disappointment to opponents of the transaction, including the Block the Merger Coalition, which cast the settlement as a sweetheart deal for Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison and his father, Oracle Co-Founder Larry Ellison, who is financially backstopping the acquisition. “This is a bad deal for the future of film, entertainment, independent journalism, and a strong democracy in this country,” the coalition said in a statement. “We are disappointed and angry that the interests of average Americans have been trampled to benefit oligarch billionaires.....”

The $111 billion deal allows Paramount to combine its namesake streaming service with HBO Max, creating a new offering with about 200 million subscribers. That would help Paramount compete against companies such as Netflix, which boasts more than 325 million subscribers worldwide.

At least 20% must be blockbusters

By zamboni1138 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I understand that on the production side a blockbuster movie is a large-budget feature film for mass markets. But how do you guarantee massive popularity and huge financial success?

Re:NO one thinks this merger is a good idea....

By rsilvergun • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
They can’t move to Nashville because the actors won’t move with them. They can incorporate in Nashville but who the fuck cares anymore? If you’re not going to pay taxes in my state why would I care whether you incorporate in my state?

Every single time we suggest that companies stop screwing us over we inevitably get told that they will just take all the money and leave. Then they don’t do that because the only reason they’re here in the first place is some other thing like well, California is a nice place to live and the people who they need to work for them want to live in california, and then they don’t leave even though they threatened to.

If there is a cheaper place with less regulation that a company can move to and still have the same resources available they’re always going to do that immediately and no amount of appeasement is going to keep them around. More importantly if they’re not contributing anything to your community and they are just taking let them leave.

There is plenty of other things people can do in California that are productive besides make movies. But again that’s all a moot point because they’re not going anywhere no matter how many threats they make.

I mean not physically. Like I said they might try to incorporate in another state in order to do bad things to people but who cares again because they are still going to have to hire Californians because the people they want to do the work want to live in California.

Re:Doubt you really give a shit.

By ArchieBunker • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

You and your pals are busy calling them Trumpers and trying to take their rights, increase their fuel costs,

Dear sir, have you checked diesel prices and who the current president is lately?

Re:NO one thinks this merger is a good idea....

By silentbozo • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

“They can’t move to Nashville because the actors won’t move with them. They can incorporate in Nashville but who the fuck cares anymore? If you’re not going to pay taxes in my state why would I care whether you incorporate in my state? "

There’s so much wrong with that sentence, and yet it pretty much sums up why California lost hundreds of millions of dollars of production to other states (and countries), because the politicians in California believed the same thing until it was too late. It’s the myth of American exceptionalism but applied specifically to California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

“By 2025, the cost of filming in California was so high relative to other jurisdictions that it was cheaper to fly Rob Lowe all the way to Dublin, Ireland and back to host the game show The Floor, along with 100 American contestants, than to simply film the show in California.[19] About that, Lowe said: “It’s criminal what California and L.A. have let happen â" it’s criminal. Everybody should be fired.’"[19]

A side effect of outsourcing film and television work is that fewer apprenticeships are available to the next generation of California filmmakers. This is slowly eroding the concentration of experience and know-how which had made Hollywood unique.[8] As show business jobs continued to evaporate steadily during the 2020s, Los Angeles was widely seen at risk of becoming the next Detroit.[19] The January 2025 wildfires pushed many filmmaking professionals to their breaking point.[19] Financially, it made more sense for many of them to move to the places where their jobs had gone, than to try to stay and rebuild.[19]"

To give a specific example of another city in the US that has become a major film power house - Atlanta:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

“Trilith Studios is an American film and television production studio located south of Atlanta in Fayette County, Georgia. Originally known as Pinewood Atlanta Studios, the studio has been used to produce many films and television programs, particularly those produced by Marvel Studios. Trilith Studios encompasses a 700-acre site, with a 400-acre backlot and 32 soundstages.[1] A virtual production volume, Prysm Stage, opened in early 2022. As of 2024, Trilith Studios is the largest production facility in the state of Georgia and the largest outside of Hollywood.”

Atlanta is only a day’s away by plane from Los Angeles. Same thing with New York. I know people in the film industry who commute outside of LA to work for months at a time (because even though they’d rather work close to home… there’s no work here.) It’s not like this is a new thing - think about it - how else do you shoot on location?

But even Atlanta is feeling the pinch as production moves overseas these days.

“The first production to film at the studio was Marvel Studios’ film Ant-Man (2015), which began in September 2014.[5][6] Marvel primarily shot their films at the facility for nearly a decade until 2025, where they changed their primary filming location to London.”

https://cinedrones.com/updates…

“On July 2, 2025, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill increasing California’s Film and Television Tax Credit Program from $330 million to $750 million annually, a significant step aimed at luring productions back to the Golden State. The legislation, hailed as a lifeline for an industry battered by a âoequadruple-whammyâ of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, Southern California wildfires and fierce competition from other regions, is projected to generate thousands of jobs and billions in economic activity. Yet, industry insiders and data suggest this boost may be too little, too late, as Los Angeles continues to lose its grip on film and TV production.

According to FilmLA, the film office for Los Angeles, shoot days in the region plummeted to 5,048 in the third quarter of 2024, marking the weakest quarter of the year and a 22.4% drop from the same period in 2023. Overall, 2024 saw just 23,480 shoot days, the second-lowest figure recorded outside the pandemic-stricken 2020. Since 2022, California has lost an estimated 17,000 entertainment jobs, with the state’s share of national film and TV employment dropping from 35% to 27%. These numbers paint a stark picture: Hollywood is bleeding, and the new tax credits may not be enough to stop the exodus.”

You’re clearly not in tune with the local news here. Film production is way down. Studios are essentially banks, and have been for decades - they package deals and get financing. The days of the studio system ended half a century ago. There are equally nice places outside of California (Vancouver, B.C. being one of them) that have successfully doubled for shooting locations in the US, and yes, they have union crews there.

Finally, you make it sound like studios don’t pay taxes. Regardless of the financial accounting tricks they play (like killing already completed movies), I’ll tell you the guaranteed taxes they do pay: payroll taxes for all the hourly and salaried employees that are working in the state, which covers medicare, social security, and state unemployment insurance.

Re:Yes

By AmiMoJo • Score: 5, Informative Thread

California has been on the verge of a mass exodus of businesses for decades. Occasionally one is daft enough to try it, and realizes that the grass isn’t really greener. Musk is one of the most recent, having incorporated some business and moved some management stuff out of California, just enough to claim he did it without actually doing it. Meanwhile California continues to be the richest state by a mile.