Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. OpenAI Unleashes Hundreds More Math Results Upon a Field Already In Shock
  2. Campus Censorship Wars, 25 Years After a Slashdot Q&A
  3. Google, Unity Launch Platform To Create Video Games From Prompts
  4. Microsoft and Nvidia Unveil Surface Laptop Ultra For $2,599
  5. Xbox Secures Exclusive GTA 6 Streaming Rights
  6. Francis Halzen Wins Nobel Physics Prize For Antarctic ‘Ghost Particle’ Hunt
  7. Google Enters Massive 3.6-GW Power Deal With Constellation Energy
  8. South Korea Says AI Agents May Have Been Used to Hack the Country’s Banks
  9. Canadian Analysis: Permanent Daylight Saving Harms Sleep and Mental Health
  10. HubSpot Cuts 660 Jobs In AI Restructuring
  11. Alexa Can’t Control the AUX Input On Amazon Echo Speakers Anymore
  12. Asos Confirms Hackers Sent ‘Unauthorized’ Notification to App Users
  13. IBM and Red Hat Find More Than 400 New Vulnerabilities In Popular Java Code
  14. Licensing Costs Driving 90% of VMware Users To Explore Options, Survey Finds
  15. Mistral Unveils New ‘Le Chonk’ AI Model It Says Rivals Best Open Systems From China

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 Unleashes Hundreds More Math Results Upon a Field Already In Shock

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
OpenAI says an unreleased internal model has produced 372 results that either resolve or make substantial progress on open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science. The company says almost all were generated by a single AI agent from a single prompt. “This would be a striking difference from OpenAI’s earlier blockbuster solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which was produced through the collective efforts of a 10,000-strong agentic swarm that cost millions of dollars in computing power,” reports Scientific American. From the report:
OpenAI revealed the results in a GitHub repository at 6 P.M. EDT. The deluge will take mathematicians months to parse through and understand — including to determine whether the proofs contain novel and important ideas or are mostly mash-ups of existing techniques. But many of the results have already been verified in Lean — a programming language that validates a proof’s logic — and are therefore all but certain to be correct.

Among the results claimed are a solution to the four-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, improvements on some of the world’s most important computer algorithms and actual progress toward math’s scariest problem, the Riemann hypothesis.

Campus Censorship Wars, 25 Years After a Slashdot Q&A

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Slashdot reader carlk22 writes:
In February 2001, Slashdot readers asked Carl Kadie about censorship and privacy at colleges, and he answered. Now Kadie, who founded the Computers and Academic Freedom project at EFF in 1991, has written its history. In Part 1, Ohio State kicks a student off its network, then out of school, after a prank routes his “fuck you” into rec.aquaria, and a supercomputing center fires a student over an email from saddam@iraq.bunker.gov. In Part 2, Nebraska bans the project’s own newsletter, the FBI asks a conference attendee to show them his leg, and Playboy calls. The original archive is on GitHub.

Google, Unity Launch Platform To Create Video Games From Prompts

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg:
Alphabet’s Google and gaming tools developer Unity Software announced a new platform that will allow people to create video games from simple text prompts, marking the latest incursion of generative artificial intelligence into artistic and creative industries. The initiative, called Playground, will “put game creation in the hands of millions of new creators, and bring new experiences to billions of players worldwide,” the companies said in a statement on Oct 7.

With its debut, Playground will let people 18 and older generate and customize games using natural language prompts, “no coding required.” Later in 2026, a new expanded creation experience called Unity Spark, will be integrated with Playground, providing “robust, professional-level” mechanics and high-fidelity 3D capabilities. Creators will be able to build “immersive, superlative experiences” with a simple text prompt, according to the release. Playground builds on Google’s push into world models, a type of AI that generates virtual environments in real time from text prompts, rather than just video.
Google and Unity’s partnership “could reduce fears that AI will make Unity’s core game-building software less necessary, while posing limited medium-term risk to Roblox’s advantage as a social gaming platform,” says Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Nathan Naidu.
The introduction of Unity Spark later in 2026 “could broaden Unity’s creator base and support its game-development business,” which represent about a third of sales.

Oh good.

By MachineShedFred • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Because we don’t have enough AI slop clogging everything up already.

I hope they realize people hate slop

By Kisai • • Score: 3 • Thread

I hope Unity and Google eventually realize people hate AI slop, and doing all these slop-enabling AI things is just going to erode the trust in the actual market.

Right now this is pushing people to support indie games that proudly say they don’t use generative AI assets. Unity has picked losers before, and I expect Unity and Unreal to eventually have to dial back some of their investments in generative AI slop because it risks people abandoning the platform.

And no, Roblox is not a serious gaming platform. All Roblox is, is a bunch of stolen game concepts made into a common ugly avatar platform.

Re: More public domain games

By taustin • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

It hasn’t been to SCOTUS yet, but the current position of the Library of Congress (whose decision it is, so far) is that stuff created by AI is not, in fact, copyrightable. There’s case law on it.

That is how it works. So far.

Microsoft and Nvidia Unveil Surface Laptop Ultra For $2,599

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
At a press event today, Microsoft unveiled the new Surface Laptop Ultra featuring an NVIDIA RTX Spark platform with a Blackwell-based GPU capable of up to one petaflop of AI compute. The laptop supports up to 128GB of unified memory for running models as large as 120 billion parameters locally, while also adding a 15-inch mini-LED display, expanded ports, upgraded cooling, and support for hundreds of AAA games. It’s available for pre-order today starting at $2,599. Neowin reports:
To keep the device’s temperature under control, Microsoft has also developed a new cooling system that offers up to 2.5 times the thermal capacity of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7th Edition. The Surface Laptop Ultra comes with a 15-inch PixelSense Ultra mini-LED touchscreen with a 3:2 aspect ratio, a pixel density of 262 PPI, and peak HDR brightness of up to 2,000 nits.

Despite its beefy specs, the Surface Laptop Ultra measures less than 18mm thick and weighs under 4.5 pounds (around 2kg). The laptop will be available in Platinum and Nightfall finishes. Microsoft has also increased the size of the precision haptic touchpad by more than 30% compared to the Surface Laptop 7th Edition for improved haptic input. The Surface Laptop Ultra includes a broader selection of ports, featuring USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a full-size SD card reader. It also features the world’s first built-in USB-C magnetic charging.

finally

By zlives • • Score: 4, Funny • Thread

my windows update patching can happen in mere hours.

Re:Scant details in the article

By stabiesoft • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread
Am well aware. I’m also well aware my newer thinner laptop throttles way sooner than my old one. The faster processor on it is literally not just useless, and performs worse than my old slower one because it throttles within a couple seconds. That one petaflop spec is going to last a tenths of a second I expect. I did see another article since my post from a different source and it was touting the cloud access the new machine gets and how a few tasks could be run locally. So I’d expect that this is just a terminal into the cloud in reality. Run the task in the cloud, it’ll be fast. Assuming you have a fast connection. Run it local and have dinner, a good nights sleep and it might be ready in the morning. Bonus, fry your eggs on it.

Fatal flaw

By Smonster • • Score: 3 • Thread
It runs a modern Windows OS.

Desktop version? please?

By Fly Swatter • • Score: 3 • Thread
Dump the screen, keyboard, ridiculous cooling solution, use standard sized components - and it’s a desktop! which should be relatively affordable to the laptop version.

With no battery and no thermal throttling after 30 seconds, it sounds like a no-brainer. Oh wait, but it’s 2026…

poor benchmark

By u19925 • • Score: 3 • Thread

I selected NVIDIA RTX Spark N1X (6144-core GPU, 20-core ) and the price with 64 GB + 2 TB went to $4700.
Then I did Apple M5 Max 64 GB + 2 TB. It was $5400

Benchmark: Apple 58000 vs 39000 on cpubenchmark site (multi-core). Even more percentage difference for single core. I would rather pay 17% more and get 50% more performance.

Only Windows lovers will buy this.

Xbox Secures Exclusive GTA 6 Streaming Rights

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Microsoft has reportedly secured exclusive cloud-streaming rights for Grand Theft Auto VI, meaning Xbox Cloud Gaming will be the only service able to stream the game at launch. “Rockstar Games still hasn’t announced a PC version of Grand Theft Auto VI, so this deal will allow Xbox to market its Xbox Cloud Gaming service to PC players who would otherwise need an Xbox Series X / S or PS5 console,” reports The Verge. From the report:
News of the streaming rights comes around a month after Microsoft announced some major changes to Xbox Cloud Gaming. From November, the same month Grand Theft Auto VI releases, Microsoft is limiting streaming hours to just 15 hours for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, 10 hours for Premium subscribers, and just five hours for Game Pass Essential. Microsoft is also opening up access to Xbox Cloud Gaming with a pay-as-you-go option next month, rather than being limited to Game Pass subscriptions. The pay-as-you-go option is perfectly timed for Grand Theft Auto VI, allowing those who don’t own an Xbox, or who primarily play from a phone, to stream the game by paying for a bundle of hours.

This was denied

By HalAtWork • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

The IGN article debunking this

It wouldn’t make sense after Xbox heavily restricted Xbox Cloud Streaming to a limit of 15 hours per month for subscribers.

Re:This was denied

By fleeped • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

It wouldn’t make sense after Xbox heavily restricted Xbox Cloud Streaming to a limit of 15 hours per month for subscribers.

15 hours is a day or two, max, for the starved GTA fans who think this is the second (well, 6th) coming. That limit is hilarious.

Re:Unless I can play it offline, I won’t buy it

By MikeDataLink • • Score: 4 • Thread

they decided to go “online only”, which immediately reduced my interest in this game to zero.

Your whole post is making up something that’s not true, and then bitching about it. You must be a politician.

Update from Xbox

By nimbusarch • • Score: 3, Informative • Thread
UPDATE: Xbox Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball has clarified via his personal social media that GTA 6 will not be streaming to PC upon its launch via the cloud, following a report today that Xbox will be the exclusive place to stream GTA 6 via the cloud at launch. “While the excitement for GTA VI and Xbox is great to see, it has also led to some misreporting,” Ball states. “We are looking forward to launching GTA VI on Xbox November 19, though the game will not be streaming exclusively or to PC.”

Re:Unless I can play it offline, I won’t buy it

By tlhIngan • • Score: 4 • Thread

because there is no disc to “authenticate your ownership” to the Xbox, so it will attempt to reach some remote server to look at your “account”.

You can play it offline. But only on one console. Xbox has the concept of “home console” or “primary console”. You can download a game to it and as long as the console checks in every so often (once a year or so) the license will be valid on it.

All other consoles you log into must be online to validate the license.

So it’s not truly offline play but you could play the campaign offline as it doesn’t need to do a license check on your primary console. Note that this only works to keep that console offline - you put it online and it’ll refresh the licenses you have so if it got transferred it’ll stop working. Or after a year, which ever happens first.

Francis Halzen Wins Nobel Physics Prize For Antarctic ‘Ghost Particle’ Hunt

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
University of Wisconsin-Madison physicist Francis Halzen has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to understanding astrophysical neutrinos. Halzen led the development of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory beneath the Antarctic ice, which has helped trace high-energy neutrinos back to cosmic sources such as supermassive black holes and opened a new era of “multi-messenger” astronomy. Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from UW-Madison:
Embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, IceCube uses thousands of light sensors to survey the universe for neutrinos, nearly massless particles that rarely interact with other matter. Neutrinos provide information about the workings of black holes, galaxies and other objects in the cosmos. “IceCube is like no other telescope in the world,” says UW-Madison interim Chancellor Eric M. Wilcots. “And there is no other scientist quite like Francis Halzen, whose idea to create a neutrino detector under almost a mile of ice has led to a remarkable multinational and multi-institutional scientific collaboration and a fundamental shift in how we think about the universe.”

Unlike the neutral neutrino, cosmic rays are charged particles whose paths cannot be traced directly back to their sources. But the powerful cosmic accelerators that produce them, like supermassive black holes, will also produce neutrinos. These so-called “ghost particles” travel nearly undisturbed from their accelerators, giving scientists an almost direct pointer to their source. Along with observations by other telescopes, the neutrino first detected by IceCube provided the first-ever evidence of a source of high-energy cosmic rays, whose origins have been notoriously difficult to pinpoint since their discovery over 100 years ago by 1936 physics Nobel laureate Victor Hess.

Nice!

By gweihir • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

These projects are not very visible, but they are right there in the rather large hole we have in known Physics. Anything getting us a bit more is very welcome.

Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead

By AmiMoJo • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

Just because everyone was operating on the assumption that high energy cosmic neutrinos exist doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth proving that beyond all doubt. It wouldn’t be the first time if the results was unexpected, or if it turned out a whole load of accepted physics were based on a faulty assumption.

Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead

By excelsior_gr • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
Yeah! Besides computers, telecommunications, medical equipment and energy production, what have particle physics done for us, heh?

Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead

By Rei • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

“Okay, nuclear power. Yeah. Yeah, they did give us that. That’s true. "

“And industrial-scale superconducting magnets!”

“Don’t forget GPS satellite relativistic corrections!”

“And radioisotope therapy!”

“Electron beam therapy?”

“World Wide Web, wasn’t that created by particle physicists?”

“Yeah, they did do that.”

“Capacitative touchscreens too, you know.”

“All right, all right, FAIR ENOUGH! But APART from computers, telecommunications, nuclear power, PET scans, MRIs, satellite communications, superconductors, radioisotope therapy, electron beam therapy, heat-shrink tubing, cargo and baggage screening, smoke detectors, muon tomography, capacitative touchscreens, and the World Wide Web, WHAT HAS PARTICLE PHYSICS EVER DONE FOR US?!”

“Synchrotron light sources for drug discovery?”

“Oh, drug discovery?! GROW UP!”

Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead

By TrekkieGod • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

As Sabine Hossenfelder accurately observed in her latest video

Quoting Sabine Hossenfelder as anything just outs you as anti-science. She has pivoted years ago to making videos that stir the pot of controversy, aiming at those who don’t like “academics”. If you want any proof of that claim, you can check out her video saying that Physicists are afraid of Eric Weinstein. Eric Weinstein has a bulshit “geometric unity” theories thoroughly debunked, where it’s not even that he can’t get published: he doesn’t *want* to get published, claims in his copyright notice for that paper that it’s for “entertainment only” and requires his express permission to write any papers that build upon what he has written: so you technically can’t publish a paper debunking without violating his copyright, if anyone actually *cared* to, because physicists that have looked at it like Sean Carroll pointed out his paper isn’t rigorous enough to say anything testable.

She allies herself with quacks to get views, and you’re falling for her bs.

Google Enters Massive 3.6-GW Power Deal With Constellation Energy

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters:
Google has contracted for 3,590 megawatts of power from Constellation Energy on the largest US power grid, with new nuclear energy accounting for about a quarter of that supply, the companies said on Tuesday. Constellation will make more than $4.3 billion of new investments in its fleet as part of the agreement, which involves adding capacity at several of the power company’s nuclear reactors in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions, the companies said.

[…] Over the last two years, Constellation unveiled an agreement to restart its Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania to serve Microsoft data centers, while Google contracted to restart NextEra Energy’s nuclear power plant in Iowa. In the latest arrangement, Google entered into a 20-year power purchase agreement for 890 megawatts of electricity from multiple Constellation-owned nuclear power plants, which would be upgraded to produce more electricity from existing reactors. Electricity from the first of the upgraded plants is expected to be delivered in 2028, the companies said.

Google also entered into a 15-year supply agreement for an additional 2,700 megawatts of power from Constellation in the PJM power grid. That power is not tied to a specific generation source and serves as long-term revenue certainty for Constellation’s operating plants, Google said. Maryland-based Constellation is the largest US nuclear power plant operator and owns a major fleet of natural-gas-fired power plants as well as geothermal energy following its acquisition of electricity producer Calpine Corp earlier this year. […] The 11 nuclear units expected to be upgraded as part of the arrangement with Google are in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, within the footprint of the largest US electric grid — PJM Interconnection.
Joe Dominguez, chairman, president and CEO of Constellation, said the arrangement with Google is a “model for how technology companies and the energy industry can work together to responsibly develop the digital economy and invest in our nation’s energy infrastructure in a way that delivers grid-wide benefits for all, funded by private entities.”

Re:CEO Translator

By Mr. Dollar Ton • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

The translator got the last part wrong. Instead of quoting verbatim the CEO’s statement that it will be “funded by private entities.”, the translator should have replaced it with the proper meaning: “funded by tax breaks and other subsidies to private entities.”

Don’t forget everyone....

By Computershack • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
Don’t forget that we’ve not got to waste energy, we’ve got to make sure we use low energy light bulbs, change to energy efficient appliances, make sure that we don’t leave stuff turned on unnecessarily because it all contributes to climate change. But that only applies to us lowly serfs. Meanwhile if you’re a mega corp that’s made a net zero pledge you can just waste as much as you want.

Re:Risk reward and perverse incentives

By thegarbz • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

One of the bigger problems with nuclear is the complete collapse of investment and the industry in the past 30 years. Rectors have a design life. Society learns, develops, improves. Industries are built to support other industries.

Here we are now with proposals not to build new reactors, but rather to restart ones that are well and truly end of life. Reliability bathtub curves are a thing, and end of life reliability rapidly drops. Add to that nuclear reactors are virtually impossible to bring to an as new state due to irradiation of the system’s materials, eventually the reactors need to be shutdown and replaced. We used to do that. We don’t do that anymore. As such the rate of 3 incidents across 400 reactors throughout the past century in the USA is not a rate that can be used looking forward. We should have been building reactors in the 90s, not talking about restarting reactors now from the 70s. The same argument was in place for Germany recently. The question should never have been whether they should shut down nuclear reactors, all but about 5 of them were already beyond their design life and should have been shut down already anyway had the industry followed their own healthy and functioning cadence.

As for the industry part of my comment, when we don’t build something, the services required to build them disband. This doesn’t just magically get stood up when we want to build something again. Nuclear engineering has been a dead degree for a while, expertise is hard to come by, EPCMs who are capable of building a nuclear power plant are hard to come by (and that’s one of the reasons why every project seems to suffer such catastrophic cost/time overruns). I’m reminded of the discussions in Australia a few years ago. During the election the Liberals had a plan to build 8 nuclear power stations in Australia. Leave aside the NIMBYs, and the banks, and the legal hurdles, one of the most outspoken critics of the plan was … the nuclear industry in Australia, who barely has the resources to keep OPAL running. They said we need a decade of education, before we can start talking about designing and building new reactors to say nothing of the fact that the largest contractors all said they don’t have the resources for the plan.

Show me the bill

By CustomBuild • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

Getting another 890 MW out of existing reactors sounds like money well spent, and having a customer commit to buying the output for 20 years should help get the work funded. I’d read the other 2,700 MW part more carefully, though. That’s a supply contract, so the full 3,590 MW isn’t new generating capacity. What I’d like to see behind the “grid-wide benefits for all” line is who pays for any transmission upgrades and what happens to residential bills as these data centers come online. A company paying for its electricity doesn’t, by itself, answer those questions. Maybe the agreements cover all of that; the quoted statement certainly doesn’t explain it. I’m glad the reactor upgrades are happening. I’d still want the cost allocation spelled out before accepting the claim that everyone benefits.

Those nuclear companies

By hdyoung • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
Had better be sure that the contracts are as bulletproof as the domes over their reactors. The silicon valley, tech-bro mindset is absolutely 180 degrees from the way that nuclear needs to be done. Google has a reputation for ruthlessly abandoning projects, pretty much “whenever they feel like it”. If the AI bubble bursts and Google doesnt need the billion-trillion-gaajjillion-gigawats of power they were expecting, they will dump the agreement as fast as it takes to slam out a code update, if they can.

Those nuclear companies had better watch their asses. The tech companies do not give a rats ass about the wreckage they leave behind. That attitude is antithetical to nuclear stuff.

South Korea Says AI Agents May Have Been Used to Hack the Country’s Banks

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung says there are signs AI models may have been used in recent cyberattacks against several major banks. “In some hacking incidents, signs have emerged of AI being used, causing considerable public concern and anxiety,” Lee said during a cabinet meeting. “Please establish the circumstances swiftly and clearly, and concentrate personnel and resources on minimizing the damage.” Reuters reports:
South Korea’s police have launched a full-scale investigation into the hacking attacks against commercial banks that led to a breach of customers’ personal information, the Yonhap news agency reported on Tuesday. Shinhan Bank, KB Kookmin Bank and others had reported cyberattacks, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) said on Friday, while Yonhap reported that Hana Bank and Woori Bank also suffered breaches. Authorities have not yet disclosed details on what kind of AI tools were used in the hacking incidents or the full scale of the breaches.

On Sunday, FSC Chairman Lee Eog-weon convened an emergency meeting with financial industry associations, regulators and executives from affected institutions, warning that the sector must respond with the highest level of vigilance. Financial watchdog the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) and the Financial Security Institute shared data about 28 unique IP addresses and some country information linked to the recent hacking attempts with the financial sector, the FSS said on Tuesday.

Re: On the plus side …

By angryman77 • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
If I tell an AI agent to aquire as much money as possible, would I be liable for it robbing one or more banks?

Re: On the plus side …

By MachineShedFred • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

That depends.

If you are a regular pleb, yes. You would be prosecuted to the fullest extent.

If you are a billionaire running a “frontier lab”, no. You will be afforded the ability to “self-regulate” and any incident like this will be met with a “gawrsh, you can’t get progress nobody is asking for without some bad things happening, so suck it up petunia”

Re:On the plus side …

By Zocalo • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
And if a rogue AI agent actually *causes* one of those more damaging attacks, what then? “To err is human, but to really fsck things up takes a computer” and all that?

What seems to be missing here isn’t just any clarity in legislation about liability for AI agents, especially labs running frontier models who seem to get free legal passes that would absolutely not be afforded to regular plebs who - potentially entirely by accident - cause an agent to hack someone else, but any serious discussion about putting those legal frameworks in place is also lacking. Seriously, WTF is up with that? How many incidents that are clearly in breach of existing computer misuse legislation do we need to get some action here, either under existing laws (including, potentially, civil law) or to start working on tweaks to existing laws to provide some specific clarity relating who is liable for any misuse of AI agents?

I get the AI labs almost certainly have a tacit “don’t sue us, and we won’t sue you” agreement in place for things like this to try and avoid regulation they definitely do not want because their actions are quite obviously not aligned with the regulation they are claiming they want put into place. Third parties like South Korean banks are under no such terms however, and given they are in the financial sector (or health sector in another recent example) probably have legal obligations of their own as well, so again - why are we not even hearing of any talk of legal action?

Such a great technology

By gweihir • • Score: 3 • Thread

The cost for all the negative side-effects is already larger than any potential benefits can ever be.

Canadian Analysis: Permanent Daylight Saving Harms Sleep and Mental Health

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
“With the push to eliminate the twice yearly clock change, Permanent Daylight Savings Time has emerged as the favorite for most states and provinces,” writes longtime Slashdot reader kbahey, sharing the findings from a recent analysis published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Sci.News reports:
“Ending the clock change solves one problem, but it creates another decision: which time should we live on year-round?” said University of British Columbia’s Professor Raymond Lam, lead author of the study. “The health evidence points to standard time, largely because morning light matters for our body clocks, sleep, and mood.” Professor Lam and colleagues examined the health consequences of the two possible permanent systems rather than the broader question of whether seasonal clock changes should be abolished. They concluded that the accumulated evidence favors permanent standard time, which keeps the clock more closely aligned with human circadian biology.

This distinction, according to the team, becomes particularly important during winter. Permanent daylight saving time would push sunrise an hour later. In cities such as Toronto, for example, the latest winter sunrise would occur at 8:51 a.m., compared with 7:51 a.m. under permanent standard time. In Calgary, the corresponding times would be 9:40 a.m. and 8:40 a.m. The extra hour of morning darkness could leave people traveling to work or school before sunrise, while shifting more daylight into the evening. The change could have consequences for sleep, mood, learning and productivity, particularly among people who already have difficulty sleeping or who must follow early schedules. The reason is rooted in the body’s internal clock.

“Our biological clocks need morning light to stay synchronized with the 24-hour day,” said Simon Fraser University’s Professor Ralph Mistlberger, co-author of the study. “Permanent daylight saving time moves that light an hour later just when winter mornings are already darkest.” The analysis also highlights concerns about seasonal depression. […] By delaying natural morning light, permanent daylight saving time would act in the opposite direction, potentially weakening an important circadian signal.

even worse!

By Black Parrot • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

With permanent DST we won’t get the stories twice a year.

We already tried this

By syntap • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

DST was made permanent in the USA in 1974, and it was so unpopular it got repealed the same year.

It sounds good until you have to live it… there are also morning people among us, and kids trying to walk to school where further darkness presents a safety issue. Not everyone benefits from potential extra sunlight to extend happy hour.

Interestingly few articles speculate on what happens to electronic devices with long-deprecated firmware that will change their clocks anyway. Could be a micro-Y2K, except without all the global budget heaved into remedies.

Re:The Ultimate Bike Shed

By HighOrbit • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
LOL, haven’t heard Bike Shed used in a long time. Kudos. My uninformed opinion is we should just stick with standard time because it is the natural rhythm and stop screwing around the with the clocks.

Latitude matters

By MDMurphy • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
First: I’m on the side of eliminating DST.

Second: Most discussions seem to ignore latitude. This article sort of touches on it, as Canada is mostly north of the US lower 48. Further south in US the swings in hours of daylight aren’t as big as the north. In the north the days are so much longer in the summer, much shorter in the winter. ( a 7.5 hour difference in Seattle vs a 4.5 hr difference in San Diego). While both in the same time zone; the difference in daylight hours is much greater than the current time change.

You know what’s the same in both cities? Solar noon. Set the clock to match solar noon, or PDT, and the localities will sort out what works best for them for operating hours, school start times, etc.

And in the WTF dept: Alaska observes DST. Juneau peaks around 18.5 hrs of daylight at the summer solstice. Do they really need more hours of daylight after work? And the days are so short in December, kids would go to school *and* come home in the dark. I guess you could shift the clock a bit so only one is in the dark?

Re:Summary …

By Ol Olsoc • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

I seem to be in a small minority on this issue

Skipping the mod points to specifically agree. The time switch has always been a minor thing to me. It’s effectively crossing *one* time zone.

And I regularly felt coast to coast USA, That three time zone difference should have killed me outright, if the westward flight didn’t coming back east should have. Here’s the truth. The earth is a oblate spheroid rotating on a tilted axis relative to the sun.

As it orbits the sun, that tilt creates different light/dark cycles. over the course of the orbit

Near the equator, there is not much difference over the course of the year. And it is not unusual for people living there to find the clock changes silly.

As the latitude increases, people there experience larger and larger changes in teh day/night respective lengths. Here in PA, it is significant, some hours one way or the other between summer and winter.

A bit further, like say Canadian cities, it becomes even more extreme. DST to ST? . You’ll probably Go to work in the dark, and drive home in the dark. But it still helps

Finally, at the really high latitudes, no amount of correction helps. Their summers, there is no dark cycle, and the winters, no light cycles.

We tried permanent Daylight savings time during the Arab Oil Crisis. And people hated it, we went back to ST/DST pretty quickly.

Oddly enough, permanent DST was sold as the way to save money on fuel. It didn’t. Some politicians seemed to even think that it would somehow make the day longer. I do not see that the general IQ and smarts these days.

So we have stupid people wanting permanent DST, we have ostensibly smart people who didn’t think about the latitude issue, and solipsistic people living at low latitudes that don’t care about those at the higher latitudes.

HubSpot Cuts 660 Jobs In AI Restructuring

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
HubSpot is cutting about 7% of its workforce, or roughly 660 employees, as it restructures into what CEO Yamini Rangan described as a “flatter organization” with fewer management layers. Rangan said the layoffs were “not driven by AI-related efficiencies,” though AI remains central to HubSpot’s strategy as the company adjusts its organization around AI-driven customer outcomes. Fast Company reports:
The layoffs come as investors have spent months questioning whether AI will reduce the need for businesses to pay for software like HubSpot’s, a fear dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse.” HubSpot’s platform helps companies manage their customers, sales, and marketing. The company was removed from the FTSE All-World Index (USD) last month after a decline in its stock price, a report from Simply Wall St noted. The stock is down more than 43% this year as of this writing.

Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot, explicitly told employees in a memo that the layoffs were “not driven by AI-related efficiencies.” Rather, the aim was to focus on “aligning our organization with our strategy and how we need to operate going forward,” Rangan wrote. She added that the goal is to “build a flatter organization with fewer layers” by cutting back on management.

Still, artificial intelligence has been central to the company’s concerns. In August, Rangan blamed AI for why the company “got off to a slow start” in April as HubSpot was trying to adjust its product and pricing. “We’re in the middle of a real transition to AI, and we are making deliberate choices to lead in it,” she said on an earnings call.

The restructuring is estimated to cost between $65 and $75 million, mostly in severance packages. The company said that laid-off employees will receive 20 weeks of base pay, one week per year of service (capped at 30 weeks), five months of COBRA and Modern Health healthcare benefits, and they will be allowed to keep their laptops.

“Aligning”

By darkain • • Score: 3 • Thread

Every time I read that a company is “Aligning” the only thing I can assume that is being aligned is the C-suite’s pocket books.

Severance is pretty reaonable

By hwstar • • Score: 3 • Thread

“laid-off employees will receive 20 weeks of base pay, one week per year of service (capped at 30 weeks), five months of COBRA and Modern Health healthcare benefits, and they will be allowed to keep their laptops.”

Most small tech companies gave much less than that to employees affected by a layoff.

Heck, after 27 years at one company all I got was my back pay, and vacation pay when the reaper finally came for me. The company was on the decline so I guess that was to be expected. Had to live off savings for a while.

As much as I complain about AI…Saas is…

By BitterEpic • • Score: 3 • Thread

AI is also a poster child for the problem of SaaS. Saas while possibly lucrative, creates a twisted relationship with your users. In many cases, the users become the product and there is a perversion of the value of work.

Netflix, Spotify, etc are great. But with the buffet style… people become mentally prohibited form purchasing the music video or other creative product. Furthermore, that savings is taken from the artist hurting the whole ecosystem.

In the case of AI platforms, if you are not paying your inputs are used to train future models without any real warning. What is supposed to be a service is a secret mining tool. That data is also sold to other companies… because people are conditioned not to pay for a service.

The internet needs a rework. Companies need a rework. Laws need a rework. Everything that is being done now is breaking old assumptions about good will of everyone involved. People deserve to be payed for their work. People making things deserve respect.

Re:What does HubSpit do again?

By bmajik • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

We use Hubspot. Here’s what we use it for:

- the “live chat with support person” bubble on our web application
- single funnel for incoming/outgoing support tickets & support communications with our customers

Adopting it was an old decision.

We would love to not use hubspot; the service delivered vs. the ongoing costs seem like a bad deal now.

At some point, we’ll get around to migrating to something else.

Alexa Can’t Control the AUX Input On Amazon Echo Speakers Anymore

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Amazon has removed Alexa voice control for the 3.5mm aux input on several older Echo speakers, meaning users can no longer ask Alexa to play or pause audio coming through the wired connection. It’s unclear why the feature was removed. The Verge reports:
Ars Technica points to this Reddit poster claiming they received a message from Amazon and says an unnamed spokesperson confirmed the change. When contacted by The Verge, Amazon did not provide an on-the-record statement. The message does not include any explanation for why the feature was removed. It also doesn’t mention any changes to audio output functionality like connecting an external speaker to an Echo Dot, and it appears that control of the port from within the app’s settings menu still works.

It’s just a message

By dskoll • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
It’s a message from Amazon: “Yeah, we are too big to be stopped and we just do occasional enshittification to remind you who’s boss. So tough luck, suckers!!!!”

Just a guess

By dmomo • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

They want to sell something that this would compete with.

Re: Aux port - how could it even technically pause

By Zero__Kelvin • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread
Not by asking Alexa to do it anymore, that’s for sure.

Using an old echo dot

By dutt • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

I can confirm that it no longer can play audio via Spotify using the line in to the Sonos speaker I have it on.

Weird that they’ve stopped the function. I guess it’s time to decommission Alexa. It’s age is starting to show.

Well duh.

By ThumpBzztZoom • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

They can’t collect any data from an aux jack. They don’t know the device name,type, or MAC address. If you don’t turn on bluetooth, they won’t know when you arrive at your house or when you leave. They won’t get the song metadata to profile what to advertise to you. Of course they disabled the Aux input control, you didn’t think they’d just let you keep on playing music without giving something to them, did you?

Asos Confirms Hackers Sent ‘Unauthorized’ Notification to App Users

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ASOS says hackers gained unauthorized access to third-party platforms it uses and sent an “ASOS HACKED” push notification directly to customers, apparently as part of an extortion attempt. The clothing and beauty store says some basic personal information may have been accessed but does not believe payment-card data or passwords were affected. The BBC reports:
In an email to customers on Tuesday night, the company apologized and urged customers not to engage with the notification. And it said the website and app are “operating as usual” promising customers they can “shop with confidence” while it investigates the incident. The company has not as of yet informed the UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commission’s Office (ICO), about any breach.

Exactly how many Asos customers received the notification on Tuesday remains unclear, but Google’s Play store says the ASOS app has been downloaded to android devices more than 10 million times. The British retailer has a substantial global footprint — serving around 17 million customers each year across more than 150 markets. Some Asos app users in Australia, France, Sweden and the Republic of Ireland had also received the notification, according to local reports on Tuesday.

[…] Users of the Asos app appeared to have received the alarming notification at around 10:00 BST on Tuesday. Headlined “ASOS HACKED” and addressed to the company’s data protection officer and IT teams, it said: “We have fully compromised the Snowflake instance.” “Engage with us, or we will leak it,” it added, before linking to a Telegram channel. The message left many ASOS customers confused. […] Meanwhile Snowflake — whose tools are used by dozens of firms to collect, analyze and store data — told the BBC its investigation was ongoing, but it had so far found “no compromise” of its platform.

Shop as usual

By TwistedGreen • • Score: 3 • Thread

Funny, when I get a push notification from them all I see is

CONSUME
OBEY
NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT
DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY

Is anyone else seeing this?

App for clothes store?

By Uldis Segliņš • • Score: 3 • Thread
I might sound like old man yells at clouds, but why on earth would I have an app for such a business running on my hardware? Are they paying me for that? What are they using my compute resources for?

Meanwhile, Slashdotters ask…

By coofercat • • Score: 3 • Thread

Slashdotters ask, “What the hell is Asos?”

And the answer comes: “It’s a bit like Shein and Temu”

(Still blank looks, awkward shuffling about)

“It’s a clothes store”

“Oh, like Amazon, you mean?”

“No not quite, like Amazon but for on-trend fashion clothes”

“Why would anyone want that?”

IBM and Red Hat Find More Than 400 New Vulnerabilities In Popular Java Code

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IBM and Red Hat say their AI-powered Lightwell initiative has identified and helped remediate more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities across widely used Java libraries. Phoronix reports:
They announced this feat today as part of their promoting Lightwell Clearinghouse to GA, which is an enterprise service for their customers to submit open-source software dependencies for priority review and remediation.

From today’s announcement: “The milestone addresses a growing business risk. As autonomous AI agents become capable of combining several lower-risk software weaknesses into a more serious attack, companies need to do more than identify vulnerabilities. They need a practical way to develop, test and deploy fixes in the software that supports critical applications.”

Which 400 libs?

By awwshit • • Score: 3 • Thread

TFA only says there are 400 fixed libs, can’t find that list. All I can find is ads for Lightwell, the AI.

Slashvertisment.

AI is helping us improving our lives!

By Futurepower(R) • • Score: 3 • Thread
Quote: “IBM and Red Hat say their AI-powered Lightwell initiative has identified and helped remediate more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities across widely used Java libraries.”

AI is helping us improve our lives! Technology is moving forward rapidly.

Licensing Costs Driving 90% of VMware Users To Explore Options, Survey Finds

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
VMware customers face multiple obstacles as they rethink their virtualization strategy to reduce dependence on VMware. Today, Rimini Street published its “2026 IT Virtualization Survey — What’s Next for VMware Users.” The survey examined 300 organizations worldwide that use VMware. Notably, Rimini sells third-party support for VMware and other software, including Oracle and SAP. That means there’s an incentive for Rimini to portray VMware users as experiencing obstacles. However, the survey was also conducted by a third-party research company, Unisphere Research, and the results align with other recent reports about VMware customers. For example, 90 percent of participants in Rimini’s survey said they’re exploring VMware alternatives due to VMware’s higher licensing costs, while 54 percent pointed to Broadcom killing support for perpetual license holders.

Since Broadcom took over VMware, customers have said that their VMware costs increased by as much as 1,000 percent, with many more pointing to more modest price hikes of around 100 to 300 percent. In Rimini’s survey, 73 percent of participants pointed to cost savings as a top priority in their virtualization roadmap decisions. In today’s announcement, Rimini pointed to “significant barriers to progress” for organizations exploring virtualization options, with the most cited barriers being operational complexity (named by 40 percent of respondents), multi-vendor management challenges (38 percent), securing the increased attack surface (37 percent), and team skills requirements (37 percent). “These findings suggest that while organizations are actively pursuing change, they are also looking for ways to reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption,” Rimini’s announcement said.

[…] Rimini reported that 60 percent of the organizations it surveyed are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, which is indicative of “growing interest in more flexible, mixed environments that support both operational and financial goals.” “In addition, 47 percent are favoring a hybrid IT virtualization environment consisting of hypervisors and containers for ‘best of both worlds’ workload placement,” the announcement said. Rimini noted that 48 percent of respondents aren’t planning to move any of their assets to VMware’s hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation.

There are still VMWare customers?

By gweihir • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

I would have though that by now they are all gone. Probably those left are the ones that stupidly painted themselves into a corner and never thought about exist strategies.

Re:There are still VMWare customers?

By pak9rabid • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
See also: All the companies that are vendor-locked to their cloud providers.

This Was Broadcom’s Entire Plan

By machineghost • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Let me be clear: Broadcom did not buy VMWare to go into the virtualization business!

They bought them with the following plan:

1. Jack up the prices (by an insane amount) while reducing costs in extreme ways
2. Most customers are large enterprise users: they will change eventually … but it will take the time, and in the meantime they will pay
3. Eventually everyone leaves VMWare … but Broadcom (or rather the people behind it) have already pocketed enough from step #2 to pay for acquiring VMWare in the first place, plus a profit
4. VMWare, even with few/no customers, still has tons of assets like real estate: you liquidate all that and now you’ve made a massive profit over what it cost to buy VMWare

This was not some secret: it’s a playbook Broadcom has used on acquisitions before. Maintaining a virtualization company was never their goal: it was to make money fleecing the company’s corpse.

Re:This Was Broadcom’s Entire Plan

By jhoegl • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
This, and this is why private equity firms are a negative to capitalism.

Migrating is not so easy.

By williamyf • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

1.) VMware had (and still has) a lot of goodies on vSphere that were (and some still) are not on competing products. If your Virtualization strategy depended on any of these, migrating is hard.

2.) Take point #1 and multiply by 20x if you have (private/public/hybrid) cloud foundation.

3.) If you were a single-virtualization or single-(private)cloud vendor based shop, you probably want to migrate to a multivendor stack as part of THIS migration, so that, if one of your new vendors goes rogue (just like VMware/broadcom did) you are not trapped again. This complicates even more the migrations, as, you will need to handle a multivendor environmet, and more so, for a while you will have to juggle 3 vendors (WMware + the other 2)

4.) For ages VMware was a model citizen, which means everyone certified agaist them. Before the migration you need to make sure all your workloads are certified. This is 4x valid for purposes of regulation, certification, compliance, and (cyber) insurance

Is a very complex issue, for many an organization is not as simple as “I migrated the VMs in my homelab in an afternon so how hard can it be?”. And the timelines are heavily compressed.

Mistral Unveils New ‘Le Chonk’ AI Model It Says Rivals Best Open Systems From China

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot
Mistral has unveiled Mistral Large 4, or “le Chonk,” a 1-trillion-parameter model that it says is the strongest open-weight AI model developed outside China by a wide margin. The model is entering preview for developers, cybersecurity teams and governments before a broader release later this month. CNBC reports:
ML4 was trained on 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs over two months that were deployed in Mistral’s own data centers in Europe. When its core parameters are released, ML4 will rank among the top open-weight models globally on aggregate benchmark performance, Mistral said in a statement. The company added that ML4 was the strongest open-weight model developed outside China by a “substantial margin.” The new model still lags behind the frontier in areas such as coding.

“The model capabilities will further improve as we scale up our training capacity, following our Series D fundraise,” said Guillaume Lample, co-founder and chief scientist of Mistral. “Further, the cyber defense capabilities will enable enterprises and governments to defend themselves against threat actors that are jailbreaking closed models to perform cyber attacks,” he added.
Further reading: Mistral CEO Says US AI Safety Debate Masks Competitors’ ‘Negligence’

Meanwhile, back at the benchmarks

By FunOne • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

https://artificialanalysis.ai/ has them 38 overall on their “intelligence index” compared to mid-50s for the current leading models. That puts it alongside the current leading open weight models, but not ahead at all, or even by a “substantial margin.”

1T parameters is huge, although I’m sure active is a much smaller margin of that. If not, the active memory required for inference will be huge. The MoE / MoI system that Qwen-Flash-Next has adopted might be the new path forward here, since it offloads parameters into the mixture of information system, reducing overall memory pressure.

Re:Meanwhile, back at the benchmarks

By higuita • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

notice the choose of words:

“The company added that ML4 was the strongest open-weight model developed outside China”

So yes, Chinese open models are still better, they are comparing with OTHER open-weight models outside China (most much smaller).

So competitive with other open-weight models, independent from USA and China, not yet as good for coding, but that should also improve quickly

Valid alternatives is good for competition and as we all know, when the bubble burst, only a few of those will remain. so having alternatives is a good thing

Re: Meanwhile, back at the benchmarks

By Rei • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

There are well known, reputable abliterators on HuggingFace.

Also, censorship usually (not always) is something you care about for chats, not agentic work.

A .safetensors or .gguf model cannot run code unless you let it. No agentic framework = all it can do is write text. It can’t hurt you directly. At worst, it can only lie to you.

Re:Meanwhile, back at the benchmarks

By Rei • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

It actually makes RAM needs worse than a dense model, for a given quality.

That said, inference techniques like FreeToken are improving MoE swapping performance, so it’s not as bad as it once was. Honestly, I would not be at all surprised if we start doing training in a swap-aware manner, where expert cache misses count as loss and models can queue experts to start loading before they’re needed. Could even train in two tiers of loading - RAM and disk. Wouldn’t that be great? Could run multi-terabyte models on consumer hardware. Training would tend to tend to concentrate key logic and reasoning on small number of very active experts, mixed reasoning/knowledge on less common experts that are usually kept in RAM, and rarer knowledge on experts that usually remain on-disk until needed.

Re: Meanwhile, back at the benchmarks

By sg_oneill • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

A lawyer friend of mine uses a little fleet of small Qwens for paperwork and general office bureaucracy (He’s not prepared to let them anywhere near actual lawyering for obvious reasons*) in his one man practice, and they work shockingly well. And I’m not being colorful when I say “bureaucracy” , these things are *really* bureaucratic. They’ve internally come up with procedures for everything including procedures for coming up with procedures. They run off a 512gb M4 mac studio and can be a little slow, but it means he gets to run it all offline airgapping them away from doing something stupid that might expose his clients data to the internet.

*He did experiment with using them to create mock trials to battletest legal arguments, and the result WAS impressive, but not impressive enough to use as part of regular legal practice and its still ia use that could anger the gods should they screw up and cite a fake case or something, so that was more for experimental purpose, though he’s convinced it’d be a pretty lethal way of filtering out bad legal arguments if he monte-carloed the mock trials to figure out what sort of arguments a prosecutor could use against his own arguments.