Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. GoPro Says It’s Moving Into Data Centers As Part of a $285 Million Merger
  2. Who Is John Ternus, the New Apple CEO?
  3. Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 Arrive With a 75% Cost Reduction For Fable Cache Reads
  4. Dyson Made a Camera-Equipped Toothbrush That Flosses For You
  5. BT’s Old Copper Landline Network Could Be Worth Over $2 Billion
  6. OpenClaw 2.0 Is Here, Ushering In the Era of ‘Multiplayer’ AI Coding
  7. Anthropic Signs $35 Billion Cloud Deal With Nvidia-Backed Lambda
  8. Jensen Huang and Lisa Su Snubbed By TIME’s 2026 List of Top 100 AI Leaders
  9. Florida Bans Flock Cameras From State Highways
  10. California Lawmakers Greenlight Solar Panels You Can Plug Into the Wall
  11. Electrically Charged Raindrops Can Corrode Cars and Buildings
  12. Trump Tells FCC To Punish Journalist For Calling His Election Results ‘Mixed’
  13. FTC Sues Amazon, Accusing the E-Commerce Giant of Misleading Advertisers
  14. Apple Caught Off Guard by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
  15. Broadcom Pledges to Lock Down Open Source Python, Java Libraries

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.

GoPro Says It’s Moving Into Data Centers As Part of a $285 Million Merger

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
GoPro plans to expand into AI infrastructure through a $285 million merger with optical-photonics company Starman Optical, whose transceivers will give the action-camera maker a foothold in the fast-growing data center market. GoPro also plans to push into defense, robotics, aerospace, and government markets while continuing its existing camera business. Engadget reports:
Starman’s optical transceivers are expected to fall under its umbrella, “extending the Company’s reach into the large and rapidly growing market for AI infrastructure in optical transceivers,” according to a press release. GoPro is also planning a push into the defense, government, robotics and aerospace sectors, bolstered by the combined company’s IP, optics and imaging capabilities.

[…] As Reuters notes, GoPro briefly reached a valuation of $4 billion on its first day as a publicly traded company in 2014. Its stock has struggled in recent years, but the share price received a boost on Monday when it was revealed that YouTuber and filmmaker Markiplier (Mark Fischbach) had become GoPro’s largest individual shareholder after acquiring an 8.5 percent stake.
The move follows a similar pivot made by the struggling shoe retailer Allbirds in April when it announced a pivot to AI compute infrastructure, sending the stock soaring more than 700%.

IHOP

By kyoko21 • Score: 3 Thread

At this point it won’t surprise me if IHOP chooses to go into the data center business.

Who Is John Ternus, the New Apple CEO?

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
John Ternus has officially taken over as Apple CEO after 15 years under Tim Cook, stepping up from his role as senior vice president of hardware engineering. A 25-year Apple veteran who helped oversee products including AirPods, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, Apple silicon, and the new MacBook Neo, Ternus now inherits the challenge of pushing Apple forward in AI while Cook stays on as executive chairman. TechCrunch reports:
Ternus has worked at Apple for nearly half of his life — now 51 years old, he has been with the company for 25 years. He joined Apple’s product design team in 2001 as only his second job out of college (his first was at a small maker of virtual-reality devices called Virtual Research Systems). By 2013, Ternus was a VP of hardware engineering and was promoted to the SVP role in 2021. […] Ternus previously reported to Cook, who he considers a mentor, and led all of hardware engineering at Apple. That’s a pretty big deal for a company that’s known for ubiquitous hardware like the iPhone and the MacBook. […] Ternus’ earliest project at Apple involved scrutinizing parts for the Apple Cinema Display, an early desktop monitor. “At some point in my first year, I found myself at a supplier facility. I was far away from home. Well past midnight, I was using a magnifying glass to count the number of grooves on the head of a screw … and I was arguing with the supplier because these parts had 35 grooves. They were supposed to have 25,” Ternus recalled in his commencement speech. “I distinctly remember stepping back for a minute and thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing? Is this normal?’"

As Ternus climbed the corporate ladder, his responsibilities grew. He may no longer spend as much time analyzing screws, but he still seems to take pride in getting the little details right. In a recent interview, when Ternus was asked about his favorite memory of Steve Jobs, he mentioned the former Apple co-founder’s attention to craftsmanship. "[Jobs] was moving a piece of furniture, a chest of drawers, and pulled it away from the wall and looked at the back and was just reflecting on, you know, that the carpenter who made it had made it beautiful,” Ternus said. “It finished the back as beautifully as the rest of it, even though nobody was going to see it, right? And I think about that all the time because I think that perfectly exemplifies what we do here.”

From there, he went on to lead the hardware development behind products across the Apple ecosystem, overseeing launches like AirPods, Apple Watch, and the Vision Pro. He also had a hand in major technical upgrades at Apple, like Apple’s transition from Intel chips to its own proprietary Apple silicon. Most recently, Ternus was involved in the production of the MacBook Neo, Apple’s new, more affordable laptop model that lowers costs through some clever trade-offs in hardware design, like using an iPhone chip to power the device. “We never want to ship junk. We want to ship great products that have that Apple experience, that Apple quality. To do that with the Neo required building something completely new from the ground up … leveraging both the technologies we’d been developing like Apple silicon, but also the kind of expertise that we’ve developed over many, many years of building Macs, and building phones, and building iPads, and all of these things,” Ternus told Tom’s Guide.

Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 Arrive With a 75% Cost Reduction For Fable Cache Reads

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Anthropic has released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, two versions of the same underlying model aimed at longer-running agentic work. “For enterprise buyers, however, the release is about more than another round of benchmark gains,” reports VentureBeat. “Anthropic is simultaneously changing the economics of running persistent agents, reducing the cost of cached context by 75%, and introducing a new security architecture called Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, or EFS, designed to let organizations retain monitoring data inside infrastructure they control.” From the report:
Those changes arrive at a particularly consequential moment. Over the past several weeks, Anthropic and the U.K. AI Security Institute have disclosed incidents in which earlier Claude models, running under unusually permissive cybersecurity evaluation conditions, took unauthorized actions against real systems. Anthropic temporarily paused external cyber evaluations and has since introduced additional containment and monitoring before resuming them.

Taken together, Fable 5.1 looks less like a conventional model refresh than an attempt to solve three increasingly intertwined enterprise problems: how to make agents capable enough to finish difficult work, economical enough to leave running for hours, and governable enough to give access to sensitive systems.

load-bearing LSD

By awwshit • Score: 3 Thread

Claude, now with less load-bearing LSD. But still plenty of it.

Dyson Made a Camera-Equipped Toothbrush That Flosses For You

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Dyson is entering oral care with the $499 CameraJet, a smart toothbrush that uses a tiny camera and on-device AI to detect gaps between teeth and automatically blast them with mouthwash while you brush. Regular toothpaste and mouthwash will work with the CameraJet, but Dyson plans to sell its own non- or low-foaming formulas designed to give the toothbrush’s camera a clearer view inside your mouth. The Verge reports:
Just below the brush head is a tiny camera with a 100,000-pixel resolution and a strobing light. The toothbrush’s AI analyzes 28 live images from the camera every second as part of a feature Dyson calls Gap Optical Targeting, without storing them on the device or sending them to the cloud. Within 100 milliseconds of a gap between your teeth being detected, the CameraJet emits a cone-shaped blast of mouthwash to clean out the space. Dyson uses a wider blast than what water flossers typically employ so it can effectively remove plaque with less pressure, making the CameraJet’s flossing mechanism gentler on enamel and gums

The replaceable brush heads use a combination of softer outer bristles that safely clean along the gumline and stiffer inner bristles that are better at scrubbing away tooth stains. The brush head oscillates nearly 1,000 times each second while the angle of oscillation is constantly changing to improve the effectiveness of your brushing. Pricing on replacement brush heads isn’t known, but each one features an RFID tag so the CameraJet can track usage and alert you when a replacement is needed every three months.

To ensure its mouthwash reservoir can effectively pump no matter how the CameraJet is held — even upside down — instead of sticking a tube into the reservoir, there’s an air bladder inside the tank that slowly inflates to fill empty space, minimize air pockets, and maintain a constant pressure. An elaborate docking station recharges the toothbrush and can automatically fill its built-in 12.5ml mouthwash reservoir in just three seconds.

Even more brain-rot incomming

By gweihir • Score: 3, Interesting Thread

Now we will get people that are incapable of brushing their teeth competently. Nice.

AI Equipped Toothbrush?

By nightflameauto • Score: 3, Insightful Thread
Have we reached peak absurdity yet? Can we? Cause I’d like to think we could get a *TEENY* little bit less crazy before my life ends.

Yay

By SlashbotAgent • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Name a massively overpriced product that is barely fit for purpose. Ding! It’s a Dyson.

News flash! You don’t need a $500 toothbrush with a camera and AI processing. You only need a 25 cent soft bristle tooth brush and a $4 pack of floss picks.

Wanna spend more for better results? Buy a WaterPik.

Re:I’d rather Flock did this

By serviscope_minor • Score: 5, Informative Thread

A camera that reports on people who don’t floss. They could sell the research data to dentists.

Bro, your dentist already knows. And is judging you every time you visit.

Re:Yay

By machineghost • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I’ve been told (by my dentist) that a water flosser (whatever brand) is better than not flossing … but is still significantly worse than actually flossing. YMMV.

BT’s Old Copper Landline Network Could Be Worth Over $2 Billion

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
BT could make more than $2.7 billion by recycling copper from its aging UK landline network as BT subsidiary Openreach replaces legacy wiring with full-fiber broadband. Engadget reports:
BT’s recovered copper was previously valued at around $2 billion. But prices have surged, thanks to rising global demand tied to AI data centers, renewable energy and electrification. With global demand expected to grow sharply over the next decade, the value of BT’s copper could potentially exceed even that $2.7 billion estimate.

The BT subsidiary Openreach is in the process of replacing its legacy copper network with full-fiber broadband, with plans to connect 30 million residences by the end of the decade. It’s already recovered nearly 10,000 metric tons of copper in its latest financial year and over 22,000 metric tons since 2023. “Copper has become one of the most strategic materials in the modern economy,” according to Openreach’s head of sustainability, Abby Chicken.

Unsurprisingly, BT isn’t waiting to profit from the recovered metal. It has an agreement with EMR, a cable recycling company, and recently received $133 million up front for recovered copper.

Not so fast

By paul_engr • Score: 3 Thread
Those cables are full of lead and other hazmat shit. Sure, there’s copper in there. Who’s gonna pick up the environmental remediation tab for all the liberated heavy metals, though?

Re: And the earth contains $trillions$ in copper..

By paul_engr • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
If you’re a thief, you just burn the cables to strip the jacket. If you’re more serious (i.e. electrician who does demo, a real scrapper) you have a stripping machine that pulls the cable through a blade and automatically splits the insulation. There’s still a fuckton of work and waate generated, most of which contains shit like pthalates, lead and other delicious toxic materials.

Re: Meanwhile, In America

By Whooty McWhooface • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
That’s OK, it will get cleaned up later…when a copper thief steals it and kills all the fiber cables in the process.

Just have us bring it in

By clovis • Score: 3 Thread

Do it like soda bottle deposit returns.

The end users just rip out their old unused wires and bring it into the local office for a few bucks.
Saves the phone company from hiring crews, equipment, and fuel.
Plus, if the homeowner breaks their own fiber, then the phone company gets some money for a service call.

And if they bring in their AC wiring, that’ll be even more copper.

Tbf a lot is actually aluminium

By Borgmeister • Score: 3 Thread
Stuff laid in the 1970’s and 80’s was often aluminium which persists to today - sure you’d have copper in your home but the run to the cabinet was done as cheaply as possible - it’s the reason your ADSL connection sucked when that first started.

OpenClaw 2.0 Is Here, Ushering In the Era of ‘Multiplayer’ AI Coding

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat:
The viral fervor we saw earlier this year around OpenClaw, the open source AI harness that turns powerful language models into autonomous workers the user can message via their favorite channels (Telegram, iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord etc), has cooled off substantially from its peak in March 2026. But over the weekend, OpenClaw’s creator Peter Steinberger and current team of co-developers gave the world — especially enterprises — a reason to look at it again, announcing OpenClaw 2.0, billed as the most significant update to the harness and surrounding platform yet.

OpenClaw 2.0 seeks to transform what began largely as a personal agent harness into something increasingly designed for teams, shared infrastructure and enterprise workflows. OpenClaw 2.0 introduces a rebuilt browser interface that brings conversations, files, approvals, configuration and live agent activity into a common workspace. It adds shared cloud sessions and multi-user collaboration. And it expands the security model with stronger sandboxing, role-based permissions, approval controls, secrets handling and auditing.

Together, those additions move OpenClaw closer to being infrastructure that an organization could deploy for employees rather than simply a powerful agent an individual developer runs locally. They also sharpen a competitive question surrounding the project: whether OpenClaw has addressed the security and isolation concerns that helped inspire newer alternatives such as NanoClaw. The answer is increasingly yes at the capability level — but not necessarily by default.
Over the past two months, OpenClaw has been “build[ing] OpenClaw with OpenClaw,” shifting its team from individual local coding tools to a shared agent environment at team.openclaw.ai that can see what everyone is working on. Steinberger called “multiplayer coding + infinite compute with nodes and cloud sessions” a “game changer,” adding that local coding harnesses now “feel like relics of the past.”

VentureBeat highlights a use case from Solvely CEO Colin Johnson that shows how OpenClaw’s multiplayer WebUI can improve collaboration between developers and AI agents. Instead of simply “messaging a bot,” multiple developers can now join the same live session, see the same history and artifacts, and work “inside the same context.” In Johnson’s case, that meant a developer taking over his project could simply join the existing agent thread rather than rely on a separate handoff document. As he put it, “the session itself became the handoff document.”

Great, even more complexity

By gweihir • Score: 3 Thread

And all with an unproven, high-risk technology that has numerous known problems already. Cool.

Anthropic Signs $35 Billion Cloud Deal With Nvidia-Backed Lambda

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Anthropic has reportedly signed a $35 billion cloud-computing deal with Nvidia-backed Lambda for a roughly 350-megawatt Texas data center being developed by Hut 8. “Lambda will install Nvidia chips at the Hut 8 facility, with the arrangement designed to expand the pool of Nvidia computing resources available to power Anthropic’s Claude AI products,” reports Quartz. From the report:
The arrangement is a further sign of how Nvidia is positioning itself as a facilitator of computing access across the AI industry. It also benefited Lambda, which counts Nvidia as an investor and was able to land a major Anthropic contract without having to independently source or lease the underlying data center space, according to the Journal.

The data center covers roughly 350 megawatts of capacity, according to Bloomberg. Hut 8, which began as a bitcoin mining company before moving into AI data centers, disclosed in July that an investment-grade customer had signed 15-year leases for its Texas campus, with a base contract value of $19.6 billion, without naming the tenant.

The Lambda deal is the latest in a series of large computing agreements Anthropic has pursued. Last week, the company agreed to spend $45 billion to rent capacity from Nscale’s West Virginia data center campus. It has also signed deals worth $50 billion with neocloud Fluidstack Ltd. and $45 billion with SpaceX, according to Bloomberg.

Another Former Mining Company

By Grady Martin • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
With so much computing power and focus pivoting from cryptocurrency to LLM operations, I can’t help but wonder if Bitcoin and the gang’s best days are already behind them.

Demand Chain Crash

By Moblaster • Score: 5, Informative Thread

The whole data center AI investment thing looks like it is going to BUST. The latest open source models that came out this month have show 10x-100x improvements in efficiency over the last 9 months. And innovations like Deepseek Sparse Attention and other training innovations have made it clear that our CURRENT phones and CURRENT graphics cards are MORE than enough to run MAXIMALLY DANGEROUS allowable AIs already. By the end of THIS QUARTER, algorithmic efficiency alone will SHATTER the current AI investment story.

Think about it… the top models are already restricted for safety. We are now getting Qwen 27b models that are punching at 90% of frontier, and even the AMAZING little Ornith 9b model that came out a couple weeks ago that is equivalent to ChatGPT4 from a couple years back.

Why the hell do we need so much CLAUDE when 90% of people will NEVER use the AI more than casually? Even if AI usage grows.... there is NOT enough demand that will pop up this quarter to close the gap.

We are heading for a BLACK SWAN crash in days because the AI investment story is VAPORIZING before our eyes due to algo efficiency, which is wiping out the hardware investment story upon which the current cycle is based. We have a $2T house of cards going on here. And NOBODY knows how to use the 10x-100X ADDITIONAL efficiency we are likely to see from the already-discovered four or five major algo innovations that have be cross-pollinated the last few weeks, each of which has about 50-100% additional runway of efficiency. So the compounding efficiency means our already-owned PHONES will be enough to satisfy our AI needs THIS QUARTER.

Are they going to pay for power plant construction

By Targon • Score: 3 Thread

Since this is another data center that will be sucking up power from the grid, and force spending on power infrastructure upgrades, then will Anthropic be paying for a new power plant and for all the infrastructure upgrades needed for this data center? If not, they should be forced to do that before the data center is allowed to power up.

Jensen Huang and Lisa Su Snubbed By TIME’s 2026 List of Top 100 AI Leaders

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
TIME’s 2026 list of the 100 most influential people in AI omits Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su, despite both having appeared on previous editions and playing central roles in the hardware powering the AI boom. Nvidia’s only representative this year is sustainability chief Josh Parker, while the list includes figures such as Ben Affleck and Paris Hilton alongside major tech executives and policymakers. Tom’s Hardware reports:
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, SMIC co-CEO Liang Mong Song, and Huawei HiSilicon president He Tingbo all appear on the 2026 list, joined by Cerebras’ Andrew Feldman, CoreWeave’s Michael Intrator, and Nscale’s Josh Payne. Together, the roster includes Nvidia’s HBM supplier, two of its biggest GPU cloud customers, its custom-accelerator rivals, and China, which is trying — and so far struggling — to replace Nvidia altogether.

Parker’s profile, which appears under the Thinkers category, focuses on data center energy and water consumption, alongside Nvidia’s tripling of Scope 3 emissions in two years, and the Rubin platform’s shift to 100% liquid cooling. “Nvidia is at the center of the AI revolution,” Parker told TIME.

TIME editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs wrote in the list’s accompanying article that selection was led by editor Ayesha Javed, and that the 100 honorees represent the year’s “key storylines and who, in our opinion, are having the most influence in driving these developments.” Now in its fourth year, this edition of the TIME100 AI appears to have focused especially on featuring the new additions to TIME’s community of AI leaders, with Mark Zuckerberg, Demis Hassabis, Sundar Pichai, and Satya Nadella representing four other honorees, arguably deserving of a space on this year’s list, churned out.

Su’s strong TIME back catalog makes her omission all the stranger still. The magazine named her its 2024 CEO of the Year, put her on the 2024 AI list and the main TIME100 in 2025, and included her among December’s Architects of AI.

Poor Things

By SlashbotAgent • Score: 3 Thread

I feel terrible for them. All they are left with is billions of dollars to wipe their tears with. Poor things.

I don’t know which I care less about

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 4, Funny Thread

This list or the Oscars.

Florida Bans Flock Cameras From State Highways

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
schwit1 shares a report from WCTV:
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he’s removing Flock camera from state roadways. The announcement comes amid a growing concern over the misuse of automated license plate readers. On Monday, DeSantis ordered all Flock cameras removed from what he calls the ‘state highway system’ within the next 30 days, which would include interstates like I-10 and I-75. That order led to several sheriff’s departments like in Franklin, Liberty and Putnam Counties to announce they’re ending their own license plate reader programs. According to the Florida Department of Transportation memo, if the cameras aren’t removed from the state right-of-ways within 30 days, then the state government will take them down on their own. The memo also says FDOT will deny any other permits for cameras in the future.

Re:Brevard County has followed suit.

By jacks smirking reven • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

They brought the “growth at all costs” tech mindset to something that required far more consideration.

No private entity is a good actor here but pretty plain to see the difference in how Flock does things versus the other gorilla sized private contractor in the space, Axon who already has experience in handling this type of data. They are actually starting to poach out Flock’s business and I imagine they will be far more discrete about doing the same things.

Wow!

By SlashbotAgent • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I’ve been very dismissive about all the noise about individual Flock camera take downs. But this, a state level and from a state as large as Florida, seems quite significant.

Hooray for Florida. Fuck Flock and everyone that thinks they’re a good idea.

It’s because they can’t prevent them

By rsilvergun • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
From tracking Rich people. Everyone uses the highway system including the wealthy. Ordinarily the solution for things like surveillance cameras and red light cameras and speeding cameras is to put them in poor neighborhoods so that they become a defacto tax on anyone living there.

This is necessary and important because if you put them in wealthy neighborhoods people there have time out of their day they can take to organize petitions to get them banned and removed. Poor people can’t do that because they’re too busy working three jobs to afford a one-bedroom apartment they share with five guys.

If the human race put the kind of effort into science and societal advancement that they put into screwing over the poor we would have faster than light travel by now.

Re:Good on the governor!

By smooth wombat • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Then my wife mentioned that perhaps he’s concerned about his own comings and goings being tracked…

He’s more concerned with trying to explain away his diverting of $10 million obligated to pay for health insurance for poor kids that inexplicably went to two PACs then the Republican Party of Florida, all without anyone knowing who diverted the funds, including the people who were charged with managing the funds.

Re:It’s because they can’t prevent them

By Powercntrl • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

This is necessary and important because if you put them in wealthy neighborhoods people there have time out of their day they can take to organize petitions to get them banned and removed. Poor people can’t do that because they’re too busy working three jobs to afford a one-bedroom apartment they share with five guys.

You have this entirely backwards. People in Florida’s gated communities love their security. Every gated neighborhood I’ve ever been has security cameras pointed at the entrances and exits, and some even have an actual human making copies of the driver’s licenses of everyone who enters. The residents with transponders or barcodes to enter? Yep, that activity is automatically logged, too.

Most of the people physically protesting Flock cameras are college (age) kids and this retired guy with a pool pole. They’re generally not wealthy.

California Lawmakers Greenlight Solar Panels You Can Plug Into the Wall

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
California lawmakers have passed a bill that would legalize plug-in “balcony” solar systems, allowing residents to connect small solar panels directly to a standard wall outlet after completing a simple online registration. The systems would be capped at 1,200 watts and must meet safety requirements designed to prevent power from feeding back onto the grid during outages. KQED reports:
The legislation, SB 868, sailed through the state assembly and senate with bipartisan support. The bill now moves to the governor’s desk for signature. The devices can be tented in a backyard, hung off a balcony or placed on a roof. Models range from as low as $300 to $2200, depending on size. The bill would open the solar market to people who were previously left out: renters, people with unsuitable roofs, and those lacking the capital to build out a rooftop system, which can cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.

[…] If signed into law by Newsom, the legislation would exempt plug-in solar devices from what critics say is a cumbersome and expensive interconnection application process, and replace registration with a free and straightforward online form. […] The newly passed bill outlines several device requirements. The balcony solar systems must be capped at generating 1,200 watts per home, plug into a standard outlet, offset a customer’s onsite electricity use and meet state and national electrical codes. They also must be certified by an outside safety organization like Underwriters Laboratories and have a feature that would prevent electricity from feeding back into the grid if there’s a power outage.

Looking forward to this

By Hadlock • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

We have a sunny, south facing portion of our yard. Looking forward to hanging 4 solar panels on the fence and getting 800-1000w (1200w “nameplate” max but reality is closer to 1000w) to offset our daytime use. We both WFH and then the kids are home by 3pm so being able to offset computers, fridge, and part of our AC/Heat bill is huge.
 
A couple of mfg, Anker and Ecoflow both sell a system that you do the standard 4 x 400w panel = 1200w plug in, and then a second 2000w (+5 more panels) into a battery system that discharges a max of 1200w overnight as the sun sets. I think they want like $1600 for the system. That’s an instant buy for me when california electricity is $0.50/kwh

Re:Why did they have to?

By Mspangler • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Safety.

If the grid is down but your panel is still energizing the line do you want to be responsible for electrocuting the lineman?

If you have a battery system an automatic disconnect is required for the same reason.

Re:Looking forward to this

By WaffleMonster • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

California and Texas are some of the biggest adopters of industrial batteries, and the prices keep plummeting. I remember being near an executive power summit in Idaho back in 2016 and all the execs said industrial power was pie in the sky and would never work. It has virtually resolved all of Australia’s power “duck curve” problems. Solar + battery is just phenomenally economical today. China is bringing on NaCl batteries this year and shipping cars with them by EoY. Solar panels are made from beach sand and batteries made from ocean water. Couldn’t get any cheaper than that.

Yet at the same time energy prices keep going up. Sodium batteries are not going to change anything. Their advantage is operating temperature range. Lithium makes up 10% of current battery costs.. it isn’t a cost driver even if the lithium were free.

Re:Why did they have to?

By jenningsthecat • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Why did this require legislative approval? If you want to plug something in at your house, who’s to say you can’t?

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? With government stepping in if something is shown to be too dangerous to have at a house, not presumptively saying, “you can’t have that until we think about it”.

The legislative approach chosen here is for pretty much the same reason that people can’t re-wire their homes without approval and inspection: because doing it wrong can endanger the lives and property of other people. In this case, feeding power INTO an outlet may have bad consequences which are not immediately apparent.

YOUR right to rugged individualism and doing whatever the hell you want, ends abruptly at the border of MY right to safety and security. That’s a precondition of cooperative, civilized society.

Legislation is needed to enforce that border in cases where people make mistakes or act in ignorance. It’s also needed for people who tend to not understand the necessity of such borders. You know - those folks who feel that their selfish pride “Trumps” such trivial considerations as community safety.

Re:Looking forward to this

By Hadlock • Score: 4, Informative Thread

The advantage of sodium battery means anybody can produce it, there’s no geopolitical alliances needed to manufacture them. Lithium is super rare by comparison. Any and every country can domestically produce sodium batteries forever. The low temp operating envelope of sodium is interesting, but only 11% of the worlds population lives somewhere that is useful. The big benefit is any country can stick a straw in the ocean and build a battery factory regardless of sanctions. Go look at Iran right now if you want to understand why I keep harping on this point.

Electrically Charged Raindrops Can Corrode Cars and Buildings

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Researchers have found that tiny electrical charges picked up by moving water droplets may be damaging cars and buildings like the Eiffel Tower. In experiments, thousands of charged droplets degraded Teflon and corroded the copper beneath it, while uncharged droplets caused no comparable damage. C&EN reports:
For years, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research have studied how water droplets from rain, dew, ocean waves, and melting snow become electrically charged. They say the process is like tribocharging, which causes static when we rub certain objects together, such as a balloon on our hair or a sweater on our skin. “Water drops spontaneously become electrically charged when moving on different surfaces, such as plant leaves, insect wings, building walls, window glass, and plastic. This process, known as contact or sliding electrification, is analogous to tribocharging between solids,” says study coauthor Zhongyuan Ni, a PhD candidate at Max Planck. “Water drops getting charged is not a new phenomenon, but for the past 200 years, people have not paid attention to this,” Ni says.

In 2023, Ni and colleagues set out to determine whether electrically charged water droplets affect the surfaces they contact. To find out, the team poured water over four common surfaces — a plant leaf; polyvinyl chloride foam board; polystyrene glass; and perfluoro octadecyltrichlorosilane (PFOTS), a commonly used water-repelling coating — and let it drip onto sheets of Teflon-coated copper tilted at 50 degrees. When the experiments began, the team would allow only a few dozen drops to fall onto the copper before using electron microscopy to examine it. The researchers repeatedly failed to find any evidence of decay. But one day, Ni just let the drops keep falling. “After thousands of drops, it looked like the drops were pinning onto the surface,” he says. After inspecting the copper under the microscope, Ni got his first glimpse of the destructive strength of electrically charged water drops.

After repeating the experiment several times with thousands rather than dozens of drops, the researchers found that the electrified water drops not only broke down the Teflon coating but also corroded the underlying copper. Up close, the copper sheets looked like scraped-up skin. But when the experiment was conducted with nonelectrified drops, neither the copper nor its Teflon coating was any worse for wear. Even though the drops contained only around 0.2 to 2.0 nanocoulombs of charge — around one billionth of a standard unit — the impact of the charged drops was significant.
“The finding is important because it suggests that the electrical state of a water droplet, not just its chemical composition, acidity, or mechanical impact, can influence how corrosion begins,” says Guangwen Zhou, a professor of mechanical engineering at Binghamton University who was not involved in the study.
“This perspective could open up new approaches to designing protective coatings and materials that are more resistant to corrosion in environments where charged water droplets are present.”

Renamed already

By commodore73 • Score: 4, Funny Thread
It’s the American Tower now.

Re: Renamed already

By commodore73 • Score: 4, Informative Thread
There is no such thing as TDS, unless your mean Trump’s or MAGA’s derangement. I was just making a joke relevant to a previous active thread here. I don’t spend much time actually thinking about that clown, and certainly not much time listening to him or reading his tweets.

Interesting

By gweihir • Score: 3 Thread

No idea why this was ignored for so long, but that sometimes happens in Science. Good to see it is being investigated now.

Re:Renamed already

By Chris Mattern • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

That’s just a lovely bit of “Heads I win, tails you lose.” If you don’t complain about Trump, then obviously there’s nothing wrong with him. If you do complain about Trump, then you’re obsessed with him and he lives rent-free in your head.

Trump Tells FCC To Punish Journalist For Calling His Election Results ‘Mixed’

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
President Trump yesterday demanded that the Federal Communications Commission punish or rebuke an NBC journalist for saying he has “mixed results” in his election endorsements. In the latest example of how Trump is using the FCC to harass reporters and news organizations that he dislikes, he said Meet the Press host Kristen Welker “will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment” for what he claimed was a “purposeful inaccuracy.” “Kristen Welker, the Unpopular ‘Hostess’ of the once great Meet the Press, now considered Meet the Fake Press, just stated that Donald Trump has ‘mixed results’ on his Endorsements of Candidates, when the recent WINS of Darline Graham and Mike Mazzei, stand at 100% for the U.S. Senate, and 98% for the U.S. House, recently and over the longterm. How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves? Results are attached. Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

A separate post from Trump yesterday said, “THE FAKE POLLS USED BY OUR CROOKED MEDIA ARE OUT OF CONTROL, AND SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT IT. FCC TO THE RESCUE! President DJT.” Trump also posted a rant on Friday about New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, calling her “an unattractive person both inside and out” who “should be forced to turn over any and all money that she’s made through her fake reporting on me.” Trump referred to Haberman throughout his post as “Maggot Haberman.” Trump’s post about Welker included an image purporting to show he has near-perfect results in his endorsements this year. “The Press is a Disgrace to our Nation, and I hope that Chairman Brendan Carr, and the fine people of his Commission, will take this Threat to our Country very seriously,” Trump wrote. Perhaps indicating that he will refer additional journalists for FCC punishment, Trump wrote that Welker “is not the only one. The Radical Left News is going out of their way to harass, demean, and libel anything ‘TRUMP.’"
The FCC website says the commission “cannot prevent the broadcast of any particular point of view,” and that it “generally will not intervene” in complaints about “one-sided news reports” because “it would be inconsistent with the First Amendment to replace the journalistic judgment of licensees with our own.”

As noted by Ars, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has “made it clear he takes orders from Trump, abandoning his previous position — which he held under Democratic presidents — that the FCC must operate independently of White House interference.”

Carr could use the commission’s regulatory authority over licensed broadcasters to open an investigation into Welker, potentially creating pressure on NBC and its affiliated stations through licensing proceedings or other FCC actions. The most likely vehicle would be the FCC’s rarely enforced news distortion policy, which Carr has repeatedly revived to target coverage he considers misleading; historically, however, the policy required an unusually high evidentiary bar and was seldom enforced.

Re: Fascism

By gtall • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

in the trenches, i.e., effectively, Fascism and Communism meet at the same point in the circle.

In a perverted way, the American trait of only caring about things that effect them personally is coming back to bite them. They thought that dolt couldn’t hurt them. Wait until the bond yields really spike, they are spiking now. However, bond traders are spiking them because they are betting the American political system cannot handle the debt load nor the AI fever rush to an economic black hole (they like to call it a singularity but we know what it really will be). Americans are already whining about interest rates for home loans, they can only expect higher rates.

Americans thought putting some asshole in the White House who would “crack down on immigration”. What they failed to see was the police state they were advocating would be a surveillance state watching their every move, and now they do not like it. And they managed to trash their “Christianity” in the process. I would argue it was always a fake Christianity built to promote wealth and hatred of anyone they didn’t like. And if you want to see how fake it really is, read the first three synoptic gospels of the Christian bible side-by-side so you can see the glaring differences (John was on mushrooms, we can ignore that one). Nowhere in those first three does Jesus claim to be divine. He was a apocalyptic Jew who thought god (pick one) was going wipe out everyone that didn’t believe and make him King-O-the-Jews, that last is what Pilate executed him for (sedition, basically).

They thought they were electing a “baby Christian” when he just exposed how vapid and totally amoral is the Christian Right. Now their numbers are dropping and youngins do not want much to do with them regardless of how their mouthpieces spin it.

Then that dumbass sold Americans on tariffs and how they would right the “balance of payments”, a fake issue but they were led to believe it was a real issue. From: https://www.cato.org/publicati… (those raging leftists at the CATO institute), they explain how tariffs lower imports and exports, and that Americans pay for the damage. That article relies on a paper, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2… published in 1936 which how the relationships involved. Apparently, el Bunko’s fiscal “advisors” are that uneducated that they continue to go out there and claim tariffs are good.

The tariffs represent money stolen by el Bunko from the U.S. economy and then pissed off on the wealthy is his Big Stupid Bill.

Re:A republic, if you can keep it…

By quonset • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Well, there is the hope with new elections the executive will be disciplined (whether that is better or worse, who can say) and Trump can spend the remainder of days hounded by lawsuits.

Better get cracking on it now though before this becomes the new norm.

You can forget that. Texas is already removing nearly 100 polling places in one county alone, which is totally not voter suppression according to Republicans.

Meanwhile, DHS is hunting for that elusive “vote fraud” the Pedo in Chief has been whining about for the past six years, yet has never been able to show said “fraud”.

And don’t forget the recent change to mail-in voting where the federal government will decide whether you’re eligible to vote based on a nebulous list maintained by the government, and the Postal Service gets to decide if they’re going to deliver your mail-in ballot.

When you’re done holding your breath, let us know.

Re:A republic, if you can keep it…

By dfghjk • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

It wasn’t. There is a difference between coping with the possibility of a grifter in office and the assumption that they all are.

The system was not designed to cope with an entire party subverting the mechanisms of government. There were arguments over that, the wrong decisions were made.

Re:A republic, if you can keep it…

By nightflameauto • Score: 5, Informative Thread

It wasn’t. There is a difference between coping with the possibility of a grifter in office and the assumption that they all are.

The system was not designed to cope with an entire party subverting the mechanisms of government. There were arguments over that, the wrong decisions were made.

Several of the architects of our government were upset at the idea of political parties becoming a part of the overarching governmental system at all, considering them an effective way to subvert their intended systems to hold politicians responsible for their actions. It’s unfortunate they couldn’t find a way to block the systemic gridlock from forming without throwing out the democratic baby along with the electoral bathwater.

Re:We’ve made it through worse

By jythie • Score: 5, Informative Thread

The other person was a black woman. For a lot of americans, that is enough to count as ‘worse’.

FTC Sues Amazon, Accusing the E-Commerce Giant of Misleading Advertisers

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The FTC and 22 state attorneys general are suing Amazon, accusing the company of secretly inflating advertising prices through undisclosed changes to its auction system that may have extracted more than $20 billion from advertisers since 2019. “Amazon has millions of advertising customers who were misled into paying significantly higher prices,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement. “These higher costs were largely passed on to American consumers.” CNBC reports:
The complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, centers on Amazon’s sponsored products ads, brands ads and display ads that run alongside search results on its sprawling webstore. Amazon has amassed the third-largest digital advertising business globally, trailing only Google and Meta. The company hauled in more than $68 billion in ads revenue last year, with the lion’s share coming from sales of sponsored products ads. Third-party sellers who hawk their wares on Amazon’s marketplace have recently criticized surging advertising costs on the site, including a string of recent policy changes, which led to some top merchants withholding their ad spend in a boycott. The company has traditionally used a “second-price” auction system, wherein it told advertisers they “only pay the least bid amount needed in order to win,” the complaint states, citing Amazon’s own marketing materials.

The FTC alleges in its complaint that Amazon in 2019 changed its auction rules without notice by adding an undisclosed surcharge it referred to as a “soft reserve price,” which led to higher ad prices. “Amazon made this surreptitious change to its auction because it was unhappy about how much revenue its advertising auctions were generating,” the agency said in its complaint, which cites internal communications between Amazon ad executives. In one exchange, a company executive allegedly acknowledged it uses an “invented auction participant” to increase prices, the FTC said. The FTC and the states alleged Amazon’s practices violate federal and state consumer protection laws, and they’re seeking civil penalties, restitution and other unspecified damages.
In a blog post, Amazon called the FTC’s lawsuit “misguided” and said the complaint “fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate.” The company added that the agency’s lawsuit doesn’t include evidence of consumer price increases.

“We’ve provided advertisers with guidance about our auctions and pricing in the main tools they use to manage their campaigns, and we continue to update that guidance,” the company said. “We look forward to making our case in court.”

“We’re not a monopoly”

By machineghost • Score: 3 Thread

- the words of every monopolist in human history.

I guess this is the new reality

By dmomo • Score: 5, Informative Thread

An FTC that works harder on behalf of advertisers than it does on behalf of consumers.

Not that they’re wrong, but it’s pretty telling that this is their focus when everyday people are being screwed over left and right by these too-big-for-accountability mega corps.

Apple Caught Off Guard by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
According to The Information (paywalled), Apple reportedly moved up the release of new Mac mini and Mac Studio models after unexpectedly strong enterprise demand for Macs capable of running AI workloads. MacRumors reports:
Apple normally releases new Mac models in the autumn, closer to October or November, making this week’s announcement unusually early, falling just before the anticipated arrival of new iPhone models. The Information says that the AI-driven boom in Mac Studio and Mac mini sales is behind the early launch. Apple noticeably promoted the ability to link multiple Mac Studios together into a single, more capable system for running large frontier AI models, a feature aimed at business and developer customers rather than everyday consumers.

Apple highlighted the Mac mini and Mac Studio’s shift toward business buyers in June, with a “Business at the Park” event involving executives from major companies Ford, Disney, and Anthropic. The Mac mini was said to be the “darling” of the event. Even so, enterprise’s rush toward powerful desktop Macs more broadly took Apple by surprise.

The company reportedly did not possess an engineering team dedicated to business customers or staff focused on developer relations, and lacked an enterprise AI strategy. Businesses that approached Apple asking to buy access to the company’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure were reportedly turned down. Apple is instead leaning on partners such as WebAI and Mount Thor, which provide AI tools and execution environments built on Apple hardware.

Its about running locally, not a data center

By drnb • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Because OpenAI isn’t even close to profitable, is Microsoft still giving them money, is Microsoft paying Apple to run unprofitable AI workloads now?

You misunderstand. While Apple does offer to run AI workloads in their data center rather than someone else’s data center, suggesting greater privacy. The real offering in question is the ability to run AI workloads locally, on device, to not have to send potentially private information to a data center at all. Think of accountants and law firms that do not want data to leave their internal network. Software developers too. And various other’s concerned about privacy.

Re: Who’s money is being spent here?

By ArchieBunker • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The rest of the world is driving Chinese EVs that are cheaper and rival the quality of all the legacy automakers. And before you open your mouth about safety, yes they meet the EU safety standards which are more stringent than the USA. China literally cranks out 10x the amount of engineers as this country and you think they are incapable of quality?

We used to mock this

By thegarbz • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Integrated video cards had generally quite poor performance, but in the world of AI being able to share large amount of system RAM with the GPU make the MacMini a bargain for running your own AI workloads. For the cost of an RTX5090 you can get a MacMini with 64GB of shared RAM.

Re:A half truth is a lie, Sir

By caseih • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Both the agent and the LLM model are running locally. There is nowhere to send the data for harvesting or training. That’s the beauty of the local models. That’s also the downside. They are frozen in time, their knowledge set at the time of original training. You have to download new versions every so often to get the latest updates, latest training.

Re: Who’s money is being spent here?

By thegarbz • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

However, the reason they are cheap is because the Chinese government is subsidizing the manufacturers,

No the reason they are cheap is because an EV is a few hundred components whereas an ICE is a few thousand, and because China has established an huge supply chain to support their assembly.

The EU specifically analised the Chinese subsidies and applied tariffs to counter any government support provided to the EV industry. End result… Chinese EVs are still cheaper, even with the tariff in place.

The range of the EVs needs to be tested locally in realistic local road conditions so that the range is not just a theoretical max that is never reached in daily real-world scenarios.

The only people who care about EV range are people who’ve never driven an EV. The rest of us just drive them and pull into a fast charger and get a coffee if need be. I’ve done this 3 times in the 3 years I’ve had my Chinese EV, and my car has about 1/3rd of the range of a modern latest gen EV with their massive batteries. This is a classic case of people demanding a spec that works against them. All you achieve with this is a more expensive car for a feature you’ll almost never use.

Quantity does not equate to quality.

No one said it did. That said there’s nothing low quality about Chinese EVs. It’s every bit the normal car with the excellent finish I expect from any other car company.

Broadcom Pledges to Lock Down Open Source Python, Java Libraries

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot
Broadcom is launching “TrueSource,” an effort to curate and secure open-source components used with its Tanzu platform, including Spring, RabbitMQ, and libraries across Java, Python, and Node.js. “The idea is to provide a set of solutions focused on providing clean and secure artefacts,” Purnima Padmanabhan, vice president of Broadcom’s Tanzu Division, told The Register. “We choose and build every Spring library, databases, other Java components,” she said. The Register reports:
Padmanabhan said that promise means VMware will also provide “TrueSource trusted artifacts” for code that is not part of Spring, including the wider Java ecosystem, Python, and Node.js. “Broadcom’s curation process ensures that the libraries conform to a reference architecture and are supportable by the maintainers of record,” according to a company statement. “Thousands of engineers across Broadcom’s software divisions scan, fix, contribute to, and consume them every day.”

A VMware spokesperson told The Register the Broadcom business unit “will work with and support maintainers on open source software and we will provide fixes to open source upstream for any active projects.” “With Spring and RabbitMQ, we are the maintainers. For other open source software, we will work with the maintainers. We believe that the community maintainers must remain the source of truth,” the spokesperson said.

This is just the sort of contribution that the open-source community wants vendors to do to reflect the value they extract from software they did not create alone. It’s also the sort of thing vendors sometimes conclude they need to do to keep products based on FOSS viable.

It’s the final round of…

By MpVpRb • Score: 5, Funny Thread

…the competition for worst company in tech
In this corner, Apple
In this corner, Broadcom

Apple?!?!

By SlashbotAgent • Score: 5, Funny Thread

With choices like Broadcom, Oracle, SCO, Meta, Microsoft and many more, how could you bring Apple into that ring?

Buy A Mirror.

By geekmux • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Broadcom is launching “TrueSource,”..

The VMWare murderer needs to invest in a fucking mirror and read the damn room.

As if they can sell their True intent to anyone but an investor armed with fucking fangs these days.

the lies they tell themselves

By zeiche • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
they are trying to suggest that locking down FOSS is exactly what the open source community has been demanding. just like how companies delude themselves into thinking that customers are desperate for targeted advertising and subscriptions.

enshitification continues unabated.

“Lock down” and “Open sourse”

By HotNeedleOfInquiry • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Are two phrases I generally don’t use in the same sentence.