Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. FCC Plans Robocall Scorecard to Grade Phone Companies On Spam Call Blocking
  2. 1Password Wades Into a Right-Wing Mess After Funding a Linux Project
  3. CERN Transitioning From RHEL To Debian
  4. OpenAI’s Altman Says the Use of AI is ‘Non-Negotiable’
  5. NYC Public Schools Ban AI Use Through Middle School
  6. Google Defeats US Bid to Force Ad Tech Sale
  7. Uber Is Laying Off 10% of Its Workforce
  8. FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses
  9. Dell Stock Surges On Record Orders For AI Servers
  10. Sonos Has New Devices, a New OS, and Yes, a New App
  11. NASA Selects Blue Origin As Mars Telecommunications Network Provider
  12. LZ Experiment Sees Surprising Result In Search For Dark Matter
  13. GoPro Says It’s Moving Into Data Centers As Part of a $285 Million Merger
  14. Who Is John Ternus, the New Apple CEO?
  15. Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 Arrive With a 75% Cost Reduction For Fable Cache Reads

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.

FCC Plans Robocall Scorecard to Grade Phone Companies On Spam Call Blocking

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The FCC is proposing (PDF) a public “robocall mitigation scorecard” that would grade phone companies on how well they block illegal spam calls while avoiding false positives on the legitimate ones. “The Scorecard will empower consumers and encourage providers to continue to combat illegal robocalls by providing the public with an assessment of the effectiveness of voice service providers’ efforts to protect consumers from illegal robocalls,” the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau said in a public notice. Ars Technica reports:
The scorecards could include call-blocking statistics along with data on customer complaints and enforcement actions. The FCC said scorecards could grade providers on a number scale, with letter grades, or by classifying providers as low risk, medium risk, or high risk. The proposed tool would rate wireless, wireline, and VoIP providers on efforts to block robocalls and their “actual results in protecting [consumers] from illegal robocalls,” the FCC said. “In practice, that means moving beyond a simple administrative checklist (i.e., did the provider file the right paperwork, did they offer the right tools) and toward a composite set of metrics that reflects both operational practices and measurable outcomes, including how often legitimate calls are blocked.”

Whether the tool is useful for consumers will depend on how it’s designed, how easy each provider’s scorecard is to find, and what data sources it relies on. The proposed scorecard would apply to domestic voice service providers with retail customers, but not telcos that operate solely as wholesale or intermediate providers. “Combatting the scourge of illegal robocalls remains the FCC’s top consumer protection priority… As proposed in today’s public notice, the FCC aims to develop a scorecard that will give consumers more information about the measures providers are taking to fight illegal robocalls, and it will also incentivize providers to improve their efforts,” FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a press release.

Something useful

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 3, Funny Thread

Keep it quiet everyone there’s something useful that they forgot to cancel from the Biden administration

1Password Wades Into a Right-Wing Mess After Funding a Linux Project

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
1Password is facing customer and internal employee backlash after pledging $300,000 to support a Linux distro created by David Heinemeier Hansson, who has regularly published racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric. “The popular password manager is now a 'distinguished corporate patron' of Omacom, the nonprofit foundation that oversees a popular Linux distribution known as Omarchy,” reports The Verge. From the report:
One viral blog post declared that 1Password “Supports the Ethnic Cleansing of Europe” because of the donation. Others on social media asked for suggestions for alternative password managers so they would not support the funding of a project from Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH. The donation has also resulted in internal pushback from employees of 1Password who are disappointed by the affiliation, The Verge has learned. 1Password CEO David Faugno and cofounder Roustem Karimov have since posted internal messages addressing what Faugno describes as “concerns, both internally and externally” that have been raised “due to the polarizing nature” of DHH.

DHH is a Danish entrepreneur best known for creating Ruby on Rails, Basecamp, and the Hey email client. Omarchy is DHH’s “opinionated” version of Linux, meaning it’s Linux the way he likes to use it. It’s based on Arch Linux, with certain apps that install by default. It’s also, apparently, one of 1Password’s big customer environments. […] In an internal Slack message obtained by The Verge, 1Password’s Karimov downplayed the overtly racist comments from DHH, telling staff the following: “As I said, people have different personal opinions. You believe in your heart that DHH is evil, that you have the moral high ground, and that nothing will change your mind. However, not everyone believes that. It is not fair to claim a monopoly and ostracize team members who might disagree with you. There are people who are afraid to speak up simply because they will be personally attacked.”

1Password CEO Faugno took a different approach, trying to reassure staff that “1Password does not endorse hateful, dehumanizing, or exclusionary views, including those shared publicly by DHH.” Nonetheless, it seems the company has sacrificed a moral position for a “mission-driven” position. In the same message to staff, Faugno says “the scale and growth of [Omarchy’s] use among our customers is significant — Omarchy has grown to be the second most used Linux distribution among 1Password users.” Faugno then tries to create distance, telling staff that its contribution is “to the Omacom Foundation, not an individual.” Still, he says “we recognize that Omarchy is associated with DHH, its founder. Our donation is not in any way an endorsement of his personal views or conduct.”

Always direct quote when your story is about what

By physicsphairy • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I know nothing about this guy or this project. But the author of the summary apparently feels that, in the spirit of deep investigation and journalistic corroboration, the evidence we *really* need to evaluate is an unnamed blogger:

One viral blog post declared that 1Password “Supports the Ethnic Cleansing of Europe”

and not the actual quote from the guy apparently supporting the ethnic cleansing of Europe?

Either that quote exists, and is infinitely more significant evidence for us to see and evaluate, or it doesn’t exist, and the author is just helping to propagate slander.

Given the author’s choice I’ll take a guess which.

Re: Just typical Partisan bullshit

By drinkypoo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Hahajhahahhaahhahahahhahahah

You think leftists don’t want to debate you because THEIR ideas don’t hold up? Clown shit.

Re:Right Wing????

By gweihir • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Sorry, but since when is literal fascism and overt racism the position of an “ordinary liberal”?

It never has been. But these assholes are trying to “normalize” their deeply evil positions.

Re:Always direct quote when your story is about wh

By spitzak • Score: 5, Informative Thread

From Wikipedia, judge for yourself. You are right it would have been nice to include this in the summary!

In 2025, Hansson published a blog post[30] expressing support for far-right British activist Tommy Robinson and the 2025 British anti-immigration protests, as well as mourning that London is “no lounger full of native Brits”, defining “native Brit” to mean white. Hansson published another blog post[34] in July of 2026 comparing the Romani population of Copenhagen to Denmark’s struggles with its wolf population growth, stating that “When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.” Anil Dash and Rebecca Bailey expressed criticism of Hansson’s post, decrying its “dehumanizing rhetoric” against the Romani people.[35][36]

Re:Ew

By Mousit • Score: 4 Thread

But also…just because a lot of 1Password users are using Omarchy, that doesn’t mean 1Paassword has a reason to give Omarchy money.

I’m quite weirded out by Faugno’s quoted assertion that it’s the second most used Linux distro among 1P users. This article is the first I’ve ever even heard of Omarchy. Hell, from what I can find about its founding, it is literally only a year old. I know 1P users aren’t representative of overall Linux users, but I have trouble imagining Omarchy as anything but a very niche distro with any particular group of users, 1P or otherwise. Not unless it’s seen astoundingly phenomenal adoption and growth since its debut.

And if it truly has, then that.. quite possibly may say something about 1P’s userbase, really, or at least its Linux userbase.

Guess I might need to consider switching to Bitwarden.

CERN Transitioning From RHEL To Debian

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Longtime Slashdot reader Microsplat:
CERN plans to have all 2,200+ industrial computers and embedded systems in its accelerator-control infrastructure running Debian 13 by the end of 2026. These are systems used for accelerator control, laboratory equipment and other operational functions … They also generate and interact with a hefty amount of data, although this Linux.com article refers more broadly to CERN’s computing infrastructure. It’s unclear whether the Debian migration covers all server infrastructure or what scientific-research-based systems are included. Our shops have done much the same in recent years, mostly due to CentOS and CFEngine getting the can.
Phoronix adds some additional context in its article: CERN was a longtime RHEL/CentOS shop, previously co-maintained the Scientific Linux RHEL derivative, moved to CentOS in 2015, and later considered CentOS Stream. CERN says Red Hat’s adoption of the "-march=x86-64-v2” compiler flag by default, which it viewed as “forced obsolescence” of older hardware, was the “straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Rocky Linux

By KermodeBear • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

I’m a bit surprised they didn’t go for Rocky Linux. Nothing wrong with Debian, mind, but Rocky is downstream from CentOS/RHEL and would be an easier migration.

“I never thought I’d see a Resonance Cascade, let

By Joe_Dragon • Score: 4, Funny Thread

“I never thought I’d see a Resonance Cascade, let alone create one…”

RHEL versus Debian philosophy?

By ctilsie242 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

With RHEL 10 adding more complex stuff like Lightspeed and immutable kernels, it is starting to have a lot more moving parts. RHEL used to be the production choice, but as time went on, there is a lot of oddball stuff, and oddball decisions made. For example, even though Fedora has btrfs, RHEL doesn’t have btrfs, even as a -supported- option. (Yes, you can slap ZFS on it, but supported is the big thing).

Debian, on the other hand, doesn’t have snaps, flatpaks, or other subsystems present by default. It “just works” out of the box. Plus, other systems like Proxmox can be installed on vanilla Debian with ease.

I would assert that because that fewer moving parts are needed, it makes things easier. You can take filesystem snapshots without Stratis, for example.

It’s a treadmill

By BentMetal • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
On the stated “straw that broke the camel’s back” for CPU architecture:-

RHEL 8 / Rocky 8 just needs x86-64-v1, which is really old and is essentially all 64-bit x86 CPUs
RHEL 9 / Rocky 9 requires x86-64-v2 (if you’re on x86), and I understand it’s supported until 2032 - if that featured in their decision
RHEL 10 / Rocky 10 requires x86-64-v3 (see https://docs.rockylinux.org/10… ) and can make 2013-era Xeons obsolete.

I’ve an older Dell R720 server that can’t run RHEL 10/ Rocky10 on bare metal, but it’s still quite functional otherwise. So I suppose it comes down to what hardware CERN have available and want to keep operational, whilst using the same OS across the whole campus.
If interested, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… has more details on the CPU levels.

And I’ll note for completeness that like Debian, AlmaLinux still only requires x86-64-v1, so CERN did have the option of an “almost clone” of RHEL.

Re:It’s a treadmill

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 4, Informative Thread

New Intel Elkhart Lake CPUs without x86-64-v3 and AVX2 were still being introduced as recently as 2023!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

OpenAI’s Altman Says the Use of AI is ‘Non-Negotiable’

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI adoption is “non-negotiable” for countries, comparing rejecting it to refusing electricity a century ago and predicting it will unleash an unprecedented boom in entrepreneurship. “The economic growth and benefit to people that can come from this, the value to a country, is too high to ignore,” he said. His comments were made during a fireside chat with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. CNBC reports:
Altman thinks the public won’t be talking as much about AI a decade from now — it’ll be expected everywhere. “A kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful,” he said.

Altman referenced the adoption of electricity multiple times in his comments and drew a line between that and AI. “I think it would be approximately as bad of an idea to say we’re not going to have AI in our country as it was to say we’re not going to have electricity in our country, you know, back 100 plus years ago,” he said.

Altman called cybersecurity one of the biggest challenges to navigate in the age of AI and one that leaders shouldn’t sidestep. “I think some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently,” he said. Altman said that falling short in cyber defense and other areas “could set this technology back a great deal.”
You can watch a recording of the chat on YouTube.

Totally unbiased statement

By wed128 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
“The use of the snake oil I’m selling is non-negotiable” — Sam Altman

Re:Totally unbiased statement

By jacks smirking reven • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

For real, why is this news, it’s a press release. It’s like asking the owner of Kunkleman Chevrolet if we should all buy new cars and which brand is the best.

AI is mandatory, vaccines are optional

By Required Snark • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
One is pure hype and the other is pure science.

We’re screwed.

Re:Same Altman: Snake Oil Salesman

By dfghjk • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

There will always be improvements, but AI is fundamentally more sociopathic than the worst human on the planet. That will not change because sociopaths control it.

Will AI be “worth the price” when deaths are part of the price? It’s coming.

It’s been 4 years! Where’s the entrepreneurship??

By Somervillain • Score: 3 Thread

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI adoption is “non-negotiable” for countries, comparing rejecting it to refusing electricity a century ago and predicting it will unleash an unprecedented boom in entrepreneurship.

You’ve been out for 4 years! Where is all the entrepreneurship? Where are all the startups leveraging AI to take over existing non-AI industries? There were several major startups revolutionizing non-computing segments of the business world 4 years after the introduction of commercial internet (1999)…as well as the iPhone (2011). All I hear about are pick and shovel vendors making money off FOMO. Every business who invests in AI is unsure if it’s saving them money.

To date, I can say AI has accomplished the following:

1. Given AI-is-my-religion zealots a cool toy to play with and dream about a future whenever this shit starts actually working
2. Made money for a half dozen players in a circular economy ponzi scheme
3. Been used to AI-wash layoffs without any evidence and suppress wages, masking big tech’s challenges with rising interest rates.
4. Made the cost of devices we want and actually use skyrocket.

AI has made the future pretty bleak, personally. It doesn’t work and is causing a RAMpocalypse…and if it ever actually does, it will cause a white-collar-jobpocalypse and massive social unrest. However, don’t take my word for it.

After 4 years, Steve Jobs didn’t have to go on press tours to convince people of the utility of an iPhone. No one had to sell the internet as a useful thing in 1999. The fact that Sam Altman has to sell his ware so hard shows even he’s not confident about his product. We’ve all used ChatGPT Sam…We know what it is. We weren’t impressed enough to pay for your massive investment to build it.

NYC Public Schools Ban AI Use Through Middle School

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
New York City Public Schools is banning generative AI for students from pre-K through eighth grade for the 2026-27 school year, affecting more than half a million students in the nation’s largest school district. ABC News reports:
In a statement to ABC News, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that the city is implementing a moratorium on generative AI for students in pre-school or 2-K through eighth grade and will spend the next year “studying the impacts of this technology.” Mamdani wrote in part, “the tech industry wants us to believe that A.I.-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary.” “We do not see it that way,” he added.

[…] The district said it is implementing the most expansive AI moratorium in the nation, eliminating software that uses student-facing AI and banning companion chatbots. The city’s AI moratorium does not apply to high school students. The district said it will offer twice-yearly AI literacy classes designed to help high school students “think critically” about the technology before they start to “rely” on it.

Good

By awwshit • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I think for schools AI is kind of like digital clocks or calculators. You need to learn the basics before you automate the basics.

Re:Good

By OrangeTide • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

If no human being interacts with AI until age 20, what is the harm? We know this already works.

The burden of proof is on those who want to change the current status quo.

Re:Good

By Fly Swatter • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
But there is data just for having computers. They don’t help in the early years and only add distraction and harmful shortcuts.

No one asked, but I don’t think this ban goes far enough because it stops at ‘AI’. It should include computers in anything but computer class. Oh and phones.

Re:Good

By Touvan • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Agreed - but this is the wrong target. They should ban computers and “smart” devices entirely, not just AI. Books and hand written tests/homework. Like you said, we already know this works.

Ah the romanticized 1960s / 70s

By drnb • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

If no human being interacts with AI until age 20, what is the harm?

Possibly producing another generation that has an even greater desire to vote for the party that wants to roll things back to some romanticized version of the past?.

True, the radical 1960s/70s is inaccurately romanticized. While the real protesters just wanted to see Civil Rights attained and the Vietnam War end, the self styled socialist revolutionaries and radicals crossed the line in arson, assassination, bombings, etc. They really were marxist and maoist inspired domestic terrorists who wanted to tear down the USA and build a communist order. Not my opinion, they admitted this, Weatherman, etc. After Vietnam ended they lost support, were very upset student were no longer rallying to their revolutionary cause, and decided to attack the system from the inside. In particular to enter academia and train the next generation of revolutionaries to undermine the system from the inside. Today we are seeing the fruits of their labors.

Google Defeats US Bid to Force Ad Tech Sale

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters:
Alphabet’s Google escaped a breakup of its advertising technology business on Wednesday, when a judge in Virginia rejected U.S. antitrust enforcers’ bid to force a sale of Google’s online advertising exchange. While the ad exchange is a small part of Google’s business, the ruling is the second powerful symbolic victory against the U.S. Department of Justice in its efforts to force Google to sell assets to address illegal monopolies. U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, declined to make Google sell AdX, where publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when users load websites. She accepted most of the parties’ proposed behavioral remedies.

The DOJ and a broad coalition of states sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites. In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google holds illegal monopolies on servers that host publisher ads and ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers. Google unlawfully locked publishers on its ad server into using its AdX, the judge found. The tech giant’s anticompetitive conduct “substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” Brinkema said at the time.

At a trial last year on remedies in the case, the DOJ argued that Google cannot be trusted to run AdX, given its past behavior. Google argued that a forced sale would be technically difficult and result in a long and painful transition that would hurt customers. During the remedies trial, Google’s lawyers warned that forcing it to sell parts of its ad-tech business would cause disruption and damage. […] The ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has rejected a bid by U.S. antitrust enforcers to break up Big Tech in a crackdown that started during President Donald Trump’s first term. In another major Google antitrust case, a judge similarly rejected the DOJ’s push to force Google to sell Chrome. It is likely to fuel questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking the industry’s unprecedented power over the U.S. economy.

We Need to Strengthen Our Anti-Trust Laws

By machineghost • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

It’s insane that the judge ruled this way, but it’s not his fault: the law is ancient and terrible.

There’s a good chance we’re going to have a very different Congress next year: lets pressure them to strengthen anti-trust law.

Ummm

By CEC-P • Score: 3 Thread
Was their argument actually that Youtube and Google search would then be ripped off on pricing by the new ad company because they’d have a monopoly?

Re:We Need to Strengthen Our Anti-Trust Laws

By PPH • Score: 4, Funny Thread

So, she’s ancient and terrible too.

Uber Is Laying Off 10% of Its Workforce

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Uber is laying off about 3,300 employees, or roughly 10% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring aimed at cutting management layers and redirecting investment toward ridesharing, delivery, and robotaxis. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced the changes in an internal email that was also published online.TechCrunch reports:
According to the email, the layoffs are part of a restructuring exercise that would shrink the number of managers by 20%, and some personnel in these roles would work as individual contributors going forward.

The ridesharing giant is reducing the number of teams with one or two members by 50%, and letting go staff who are “more than seven layers down from the CEO,” per Bloomberg. Khosrowshahi’s email said the company is combining its engineering, science, and delivery divisions. The company is also bringing together its delivery operations across restaurants, retail, and direct divisions.

Remote jobs at the company are going away, too, with Uber only allowing less than 1% of its staff to work remotely.

We’ve built the company....

By Puls4r • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
And now it’s time to get rid of the builders and only keep the maintainers so we can turn a short term profit. Woooooo Investors.

The Zuck school of management

By sinkskinkshrieks • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Round-after-round of layoffs to pause raises (suppressing wages) and demoralize remaining workers with maximum stress in order to do another stock buyback. Stock buybacks used to be illegal because they’re a form of stock manipulation from the Securities Exchange Act (SEA) of 1934 until repealed by SEC’s Rule 10b-18 under Reagan in 1982.

They have that many employees?

By sentiblue • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
Wow, I had no idea they were that big.. I’m guessing the infrastructure/application are stable enough that some jobs can be let go. Plus some of the jobs can truly be replaced by AI.

Are they making anything?

By Cyberax • Score: 3 Thread
Are they making anything, anyway? Their food delivery website is a disaster, and it’s been getting worse. The ride-hailing app has also not changed in years.

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
A dark-web identity theft service called Nexus claims to be selling scans of more than 153 million U.S. and Canadian driver’s licenses, along with millions of other identity documents. “Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase through the service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely used Louisiana-based identity verification company,” reports KrebsOnSecurity. The outlet also reports that the FBI’s New Orleans field office has launched an official inquiry into the source of the images. From the report:
On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit. The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.

[…] The people behind Nexus claim the license images are coming from an active breach at “a major identity verification company” whose customers include multiple Fortune 500 companies. “We have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database,” the service enthused in its introductory post on Exploit. “Records are available to preview before purchase with pertinent information redacted. Customer photos are displayed if available.” Indeed, over the past 24 hours, the number of drivers license records listed as available in Nexus has increased by nearly 400,000, suggesting that freshly stolen license data is being harvested and uploaded to this service on a semi-regular basis.
KrebsOnSecurity traced the apparent source by comparing timestamps on stolen license images with when their owners had their IDs scanned, including at Hertz rental counters and a Planet13 dispensary. Both companies use identity-verification services from Louisiana-based idscan.net, whose technology also scans IDs using infrared and ultraviolet light.
Since the story was published, Krebs reports that the Nexus identity theft service website “vanished from the darkweb, replacing its login page with a plain text message that reads, ‘This service is no longer available.’"

In A Surpise To Only The Stupidest Of People

By SlashbotAgent • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The KYC verified identities are leaking exactly was expected.

The present age verification laws are creating FAR more problems than they solve.

This will come as a surprise only to the stupidest and most moronic people around. A cohort that vastly outnumbers the rest.

Re:In A Surpise To Only The Stupidest Of People

By justMichael • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

including at Hertz rental counters and a Planet13 dispensary

These are not online age verifications, the dispensary may be age related, but it’s also residency so they know how much you can purchase, Hertz on the other hand is not going to rent you a car if you don’t have a valid license.

Holy crap!

By jenningsthecat • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

170 million? That’s fairly close to being half of the combined population of USA and Canada!

When you adjust for the people who don’t have driving licences, that would seem to be pretty close to the total number of legal drivers in the two countries. Ouch!

“Selling” isn’t the root problem

By pla • Score: 5, Informative Thread
Oh, goody, the website selling our licenses is down. Whelp, toothpaste back in the tube, we can all rest easy knowing that the day is saved!

Of course, the next obvious step if they can’t sell them is to simply release the entire batch into the wild. And how dare any of you think this might somehow be the fault of sweet innocent idscan.net for inadequately protecting the highly sensitive data they were grudgingly entrusted with in the first place.

We need a hell of a lot more CEOs in prison, and we need any politicians that requires / supports / allows this bullshit to join them. Of course, absolutely none of that is going to happen because Joe Sixpack has zero clue any of this is going on; and even if he somehow catches wind of it from a Facebook meme, oh well, it’s just one more breach, who cares, he gets notices of those on a monthly basis and has been intentionally trained to treat them as junk mail.

This is why

By nehumanuscrede • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

This right here is why people are so adamantly against giving websites a copy of their ID card
to prove their age.

These vendors then become priority targets for ID theft since the laws, as currently written, do
not force them to take security of said data very seriously. When there is a breach, the company
gets a slap on the wrist, a laughable fine and then it’s right back to business as usual.

In the meantime, everyone who gave their ID to said company is now on the hook for potential
ID thieves and the nightmare that goes with it should they draw the short straw.

Before we implement any sort of mandatory age verification that requires your ID going into any
sort of digital online storage, the laws need to be rewritten to make the financial penalties so painful,
that the company in question will find it cheaper to simply do security the right way the first time.

Dell Stock Surges On Record Orders For AI Servers

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Dell reported record fiscal Q2 results as AI server demand surged, booking $60.9 billion in AI server orders and ending the quarter with a $95 billion backlog. From a report:
The company posted record revenue of $47 billion, up 58% year over year. Earnings per share came in at $6.34, up 273% from a year ago. Adjusted earnings rose 203% to $7.04 per share.

“With AI momentum accelerating and our opportunity expanding across the portfolio, we’re raising our full-year FY27 revenue outlook by $25 billion to $192 billion, up nearly 70% year over year,” said Jeff Clarke, CEO of Dell Technologies, in the company’s earnings release.

Dell has seen its orders balloon as enterprise customers adopt artificial intelligence and use AI servers locally to run agentic AI queries. Dell stock is up more than 230% year to date. Peer Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which also moved up 110% since the start of the year, jumped in after-hours trading.

Makes sense

By Somervillain • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Good for Dell and HP. I hope they use this windfall to strengthen their core businesses and realize that AI is a bubble that can’t pop soon enough. Obviously people will buy AI servers after the pop, AI is here to stay, but this massive surge isn’t long for the world. HP is the biggest disappointment in tech, rivaling Oracle for the least respected company in Silicon Valley, despite such a great history. They seem to do nothing well. Their printers are still good, but poisoned by a strategy of exploiting customers for toner/ink, including forcing DRM chips to ensure you spent $400 for a set of toner cartridges when they’re available 3rd party for about $60 now. HP computers? fuck that…they’re overpriced and mostly suck…occasionally I’ll notice a well built laptop from them, but it almost seems like an accident.

Dell is also just very disappointing to me. I always thought they’d be better than they are today. Their monitors are good and their offerings are OK…but they never seem to compete with the leaders. They have the resources to compete and take on Apple, but they don’t bother. They let Apple eat their lunch in the business world. From what I know, few companies ever gave out apple laptops 15+ years ago. Now in my area, most serious software companies give out macbook pros and even many businesses are doing it now for regular office workers.

I switched over to Mac 10 years ago from desktop Linux and am happy with it. I switched to the Apple ecosystem 5 years ago…all my devices will be coming from Apple for the next few years, but....fuck if I wish there were good alternatives. I with it was a hard choice. I wish Dell offered something 90% as good for 75% of the cost, like they used to 15 years ago. Now it’s like 75% as good for 90% of the cost.

No matter who I buy from, competition is good. I want Apple to earn my dollars, not win by default like they’re doing today. Also, Apple isn’t really a business hardware company. They sell luxury products that are good at business tasks…mostly because the business players fell asleep at the wheel and are selling you laptops that are nearly the same as they were 20 years ago, only without removable batteries. The world needs a serious business computing provider. Dell could easily be that, but they just don’t seem interested in being anything beyond mediocre.

I preferred it when Apple computing products were an indulgence and not the only (serious) game in town.

Corruption has nothing to do with this. Nothing.

By Required Snark • Score: 3 Thread
Dell wins a $9.7 billion Pentagon software deal after donating to Trump accounts.

Sonos Has New Devices, a New OS, and Yes, a New App

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired:
Sonos has a new app. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The smart speaker company, long a darling of the audio industry, undid much of the goodwill it earned with its multiroom speakers through a bevy of software updates that broke its app in 2024. Almost all app users hated it, citing the loss of features like volume control and accessibility tools meant to help blind people use the wireless speaker system. Sonos eventually owned up to the mistake, considered bringing back the old app again, then booted its CEO and marched its new leaders out to apologize profusely to win back the company’s furious customers.

Now, Sonos says it has a brand-new app update, infused with lots of generative AI features. The company also announced a new soundbar and its second pair of over-the-ear headphones. Sonos representatives say it doesn’t want to be seen as a speaker company anymore, but as something bigger and more holistic. “For years people have been seeing us as a speaker company,” says Brandon Holley, the interim hardware lead at Sonos. “What we actually are is an audio operating system.” The company is calling that operating system Sonos 27, and it manifests in a few ways.

[…] This is a lot of change for Sonos, something the company hasn’t always handled gracefully. Sonos’ home systems already aren’t the easiest to set up, sometimes requiring separate apps for older products. The company may be rejiggering itself as an “audio operating system,” but its software has long been the source of its troubles with getting its products to work right. Will AI smarts fix that? Maybe for its newer devices. But anyone with an existing system may still struggle. The AI features on products and in the Sonos 27 app will be opt-in, meaning you can avoid them entirely. “That really is our new approach to our app release,” Patel says. “We’re going to bring our customers along. We’re going to listen more.” That would be a good plan. Sounds like Sonos’ speakers will be listening more, too.
Sonos is emphasizing a more “customer-centric feedback listening approach” after the backlash to its previous redesign. Improvements include easier tab navigation, better room sorting, revamped volume controls, and new system-health tools for diagnosing connection problems.
The centerpiece is Sonos 27voice, a generative AI voice assistant that can handle conversational music requests, connect with services like ChatGPT through Model Context Protocol, and power customizable “Sonos Custom Agents” for tasks such as automatically activating certain speakers. “Obviously AI is something that’s very hot these days,” Sonos software VP Sid Patel said. “So we have integrated various pieces of AI into our system.” However, the features will only work with the newer S2 app, and Sonos cautions that “not every product will support every new feature,” with detailed compatibility information coming later.

Sonos is also branding its multiroom networking technology Sonos Fabric, which what Patel calls “the magic that has existed for what Sonos was built on.” New Fabric features include portable surround, which lets users temporarily move speakers between rooms and have them automatically configure themselves for surround sound, and Headphone Linking, which lets users seamlessly switch audio between Sonos speakers and headphones.

Yeah no

By AcidFnTonic • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Yeah no. Watched my friend get bitten by this company. Never again. You dont return to abusive relationships. Everything has changed baby they sayâ¦. Yeah then you get smacked again and others will mock you for going back because there was prior evidence of the abuse.

Re:New and improved VENDOR LOCK IN!!!!!

By Slashvertisment • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
I see it less as a Slashvertisment and more of a Slashwarning.

Doubling down

By red_dragon • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Sonos eventually owned up to the mistake, considered bringing back the old app again, then booted its CEO and marched its new leaders out to apologize profusely to win back the company’s furious customers.
Now, Sonos says it has a brand-new app update, infused with lots of generative AI features.

So, instead of bringing back the things that customers wanted, they doubled down on shoving what nobody asked for. LOL. LMAO, even.

A load of bullshit

By dutt • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Having a Sonos system at home with 20 speakers, I’m sticking with the old S1 app and not adding any new speakers that require another app. All the issues that have been reported with the new app is a top of the iceberg of issues that they’ve created for us customers. Ultimately they want to drive more Sonos speaker sales by only having the newer speakers run with the latest app version.

The Ai fluff in this new app will hardly add the functionality that is truly needed. The most important part is sound quality and app reliability. You don’t want a spinning app when wanting to turn down the volume or searching for a song. The new functionality with Ai functions added will not fix the fundamentals, but require the latest speakers that are only compatible with the newer S2 app. This is another marketing gimmick to drive more speaker sales.

Out of touch much?

By Voyager529 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

“For years people have been seeing us as a speaker company,”

Yes Brandon, this is the thing that people generally like. When the speakers work, they sound very good.

“What we actually are is an audio operating system.” …And this is the part that has been somewhere between tolerable and the biggest liability. Yes, when it works, it’s great, but it’s been so focused on being “automagic” that when there’s a problem, it’s like a Bugatti hitting a speed bump.

If Sonos wanted to claw back some good will, all they had to do was to implement a “generic Bluetooth mode” and an aux jack. This way, it ensures people can still use the speaker (the most liked and most reliable part) irrespective of whether the software is good or bad. …But, since they’d rather cram AI into it, they’ll likely continue to bleed users and installers, who will implement Bluesound or WiiM instead and become the Oracle of multi-room audio - obscenely priced, running on an increasingly niche user base, and circling the drain for a while longer than most, but ultimately fail as more and more people consider the Sonos “operating system” radioactive.

NASA Selects Blue Origin As Mars Telecommunications Network Provider

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
NASA has awarded Blue Origin a contract worth up to $700 million to build and operate a dedicated Mars telecommunications network for current and future missions to the Red Planet. Blue Origin is expected to deliver the spacecraft by the end of 2028, with the network targeted to become operational by 2030. From a press release:
Blue Origin will design, develop, integrate, launch, and operate the network as a part of the agency’s broader space communications and navigation infrastructure. The architecture will consist of a high-performance telecommunications spacecraft orbiting Mars, transmitting science data, imagery, navigation information, and critical mission communications for spacecraft operating on and around the planet.

The award marks a milestone in NASA’s strategy to expand communications and navigation services beyond Earth and the Moon, establishing the foundation for sustained exploration of Mars in the coming decades.

Starlink

By SuperDre • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
And SpaceX will probably launch their own network too, probably even before Blue Origin has its craft ready. As SpaceX its target is also Mars, and they need to communicate with their Starships and robots, Starlink will be their comms.

Re: Merit?

By ArmoredDragon • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Blue origin is kind of the exact opposite of SpaceX — very top heavy, highly bureaucratic, little to no interest in efficiency, optimization, or cost reduction, no desire to get anything done in a timely manner. While they did land a booster, which is no small feat of engineering, it’s only a third of what makes it economically viable: They need to produce the boosters at scale and turn them around quickly after each use, and for that to make any sense they would also need to find or create an economic demand to meet that supply. Space tourism just won’t cut it unless you can get the cost much lower and do more than a ten minute suborbital microgravity flight. For the money, tourists can do way better than that without even passing the karman line, let alone going suborbital or even orbital.

Short of that, they’re going to run into exactly the same problems that NASA, the ESA, and a host of others pointed at when pooh-poohing Elon for wanting to do it (and for whatever reason, the ESA is now trying to chase after Falcon 9, will manage to replicate it 5 years after it’s already obsolete, only to find out at that time that they won’t be able to come anywhere close to replicating SpaceX’s operational costs or launch cadence.)

Re:Merit?

By Ol Olsoc • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

As much as it pains me to say it, I don’t think Blue Origin is that far behind. They just have a different methodology to SpaceX. Instead of failing fast and often while they iterate, Blue Origin does a lot of testing and then a successful launch. So it’s very hard to say exactly where they are in comparison to SpaceX, but we will find out in the next few years when they are supposed to deliver the first crewed lunar lander to NASA.

Correct, they aren’t that far behind. We have armchair engineers in here claiming that BO’s big achievement is Launching a suborbital flight with Pop Stars, that Bezos paid baksheesh to the orange shitgibbon, when they’ve already put satellites into orbit on New Glenn rockets.

This is how the system is supposed to run, with multiple vendors. BO is on their learning curve.

Re:Barely making it to the Kármán Line

By nightflameauto • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

“Wonder what their competitive edge was over other applications besides the size of their legal team. " Bezos support for el Bunko.

Bezos was smart enough to be supportive from a distance. Musk’s mistake was believing he could be super-chums and not end up in an ego-battle with the current chief when they inevitably had a minor squabble. And say what you will about Donald Trump, the man can hold a grudge like it’s a sacred artifact in a holy temple. SpaceX won’t lose current contracts, but I would bet there’s a mandate hanging out there to seek alternatives first for new plans, rather than handing any more potential influence to Musk, who bruised Donald’s ego by daring to have some minor disagreements and actually state them publicly. Meanwhile, Bezos pays tribute and STFU otherwise, not bothering to jump into the thick of it, and not having one of his children telling Donald to shut up on a live web feed.

Re: Competition

By SuperDre • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Uhh, Boeing and SpaceX both got the contract to develop a human capable capsule, but Boeing got $4.2 billion and SpaceX got $2.6 billion. Crew dragon’s first commercial flight was in 2020, Starliner still hasn’t flown a commercial flight, and might even be cancelled alltogether, as ut was meant for ISS.

LZ Experiment Sees Surprising Result In Search For Dark Matter

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
New submitter greytree shares a report from Brown University:
LUX-ZEPLIN, an experiment co-led by Brown University faculty and students, observed a particle interaction that could be interpreted as a signal from WIMPs, a dark matter candidate — but researchers need more data to confirm. […] The result does not yet meet the statistical threshold required to claim a discovery, but it is the most compelling hint of dark matter reported by the experiment to date. “We’re very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up, and the competing backgrounds are very low,” said Rick Gaitskell, a professor of physics at Brown University and the spokesperson for LZ. “With only one event, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input.” […]

If the anomalous event was caused by dark matter, the WIMP that generated it would likely have a mass of at least 200 GeV/c2 (gigaelectronvolts), or more than 200 times the mass of a proton. The LZ results have not reached “5-sigma” significance, the statistical threshold in physics that an event must reach to be considered a discovery. The new analysis is 2.6 sigma, meaning there is approximately a 0.5% chance that the event could be explained by known backgrounds. With additional data, researchers can test whether the finding continues to grow in significance or fades away. LZ has already accumulated the world’s largest dark matter dataset and will continue to accrue WIMP search data at SURF, substantially improving their search statistics.

JiJi Fan, an associate professor of physics at Brown not involved in the LZ experimental research but whose theoretical work is cited in the new LZ paper, said the new findings were “very intriguing.” While the event recorded by LZ could not have been the simplest type of WIMP interaction, there are other types of possible interactions that could explain it, she said. Had a WIMP interacted in the simplest way at the high energy associated with this recent event, the detector would have recorded many recoil events at lower energies following the initial event. LZ recorded a single event, however, which requires an expanded theoretical explanation. “There are well-motivated theoretical extensions, including inelastic scattering and momentum-dependent elastic scattering, that could potentially account for this single event,” Fan said. “This also sets up a target for on-going dark matter hunting, not only at direct detection experiments such as LZ but also at other complementary experimental frontiers.”
The results were presented in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan on Tuesday, Sept. 1. A paper detailing the finding can be found here (PDF).

Derivation of the Radial Acceleration Relation

By little1973 • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

The RAR equation is an empirical equation based on 100+ galaxies data. No derivation of the equation exists.

I have an elastic vacuum model from which I derived the exact equation. The interpretation is that RAR (and MOND) describers the transient
region how cosmic expansion recovers from H=0 inside the galaxy to full H=H0. Within the elastic vacuum model the RAR equation is a prediction.

You can read the Postulates and you can jump right into chapter 9 and read also the Appendinx. You do not have to concern yourself with the GR stuff in the document.

At this point, I see 3 options.
1. The derivation is false and I use totally wrong math
2. I am extremely lucky to get this out of the vacuum model and it is just a weird coincidence
3. Maybe there is something here and treating the vacuum as a real material may have some merit.

https://www.researchgate.net/p…

If any physicist read this, feel free to contact me and point out any errors and/or inconsistencies concerning the derivation or other topics in the document.

Re:Derivation of the Radial Acceleration Relation

By ffkom • Score: 4, Funny Thread
I wonder if Lempel, Ziv, and Roshal appreciate their legendary abbreviations “LZ” and “RAR” being diluted by some obscure dark matter research :-)

Re:I know its not an original idea

By Sique • Score: 4, Informative Thread
To be frank, physicists have a whole list of things it can’t be, because otherwise, they would be able to see the effects of it. This is a common misconception, to confuse not knowing what it is with knowing what it is not.

And they can rule out interaction of Dark Matter with itself on a large scale of magnitudes, e.g. everything above the Weak Force.

JiJi Fan and the SURF WIMPs

By almitydave • Score: 3 Thread

JiJi Fan and the Surf Wimps used to be my favorite band. Some say that they stopped performing because they just ran out of energy, but the actual circumstances leading to their departure from the public eye are a dark matter indeed.

2.6 sigma = Yawn

By cosmicl • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
This proponents are working in a tough competitive field. The threshold for discovery is 5 sigma. Informal threshold for claiming a “hint” of something is 3 sigma. For fun, search up “particle physics papers with results less than 3 sigma.

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: 5, Funny Thread

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

Re:IHOP

By az-saguaro • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Would bring a whole new meaning to the concept of “tip your server”.

When random companies move into the DC business…

By Ritz_Just_Ritz • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The big valuation correction can’t be far off. We’ve seen this movie before.

Re:Yep, GoPro is going bye bye

By ledow • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Like an online bookseller turning into a global retail warehouse then renting out their datacenter services, producing talking home assistants, and launching rockets into space?

Re:Yep, GoPro is going bye bye

By nightflameauto • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Yeah, GoPro’s stock went from almost $100 in 2014 to under a dollar for the past few months. They’re looking for almost any vehicle to attach their dead horse to.

They saw the valuation increase for All Birds, the shoe company that only announced interest in AI data centers and suddenly gained billions in potential value, and decided that had to be the only move left to them. Then people say that the AI thing isn’t a bubble, but the insanity of the investors in any company willing to vaguely hint at AI sure makes it look like a bubble.

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.

Who is John Apple?

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 5, Funny Thread

He’s the new Tim Apple.

Re:A conservative nomination

By commodore73 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Sometimes it would be nice if slashdot would allow things to be modded below -1.

Re:Most importantly

By ArchieBunker • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

No, he’s scared of upsetting the king. The only people who do speak out against the cult are retiring or have terms ending.

Re:Welcome

By haruchai • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Trump will call him Johnny Appleseed

Engineer just imports data from USGS

By drnb • Score: 5, Informative Thread
Nope. As an engineer he understands that Apple Maps is fed by the Geographic Names Information System which is maintained by the United States Geological Survey. A scientific agency of the United States government. Errors in GNIS are someone else’s problem. He’s got Apple Silicon chips that need to be made faster and less expensive.

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
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.

But…

By SlashbotAgent • Score: 3 Thread

ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek are a fraction of the cost of Claude Fable 5.1 total(actual) price.

load-bearing LSD

By awwshit • Score: 3 Thread

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

Cheap, Fast, Good

By Local ID10T • Score: 3 Thread

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.

Pick two.

Claude is already FAR behind. Here’s why.

By MIPSPro • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
I am a user of all those except for Gemini. I have pro-level ($200-$300) a month accounts with each one and I rotate them all weekly (because they all gouge for additional-time/tokens, so I just switch a lot instead). I also use Cursor and others. At this point every one of them is beating the stuffing out of Anthropic/Claude.

Let me explain why with an example. I have a whole huge desktop DE I work on that’s like 600k+ lines of C. The only security related code is password-checking stuff like crypt hashes and SHA hash comparisons and system auth for my XDMCP greeter and my screensaver lock-screen code. That tiny bit alone is enough to trigger Claude Code’s safety protocols and it’ll refuse to work on my project without identifying any actual issue other than “safety protocols” it refuses to elaborate on. This prevents me from using Fable, their 6th-gen model that’s mostly available for general use and the only one that comes close to competing with other models of the same age. They won’t let you use Mythos (their leading model) at all, while others have no such compunctions (not that Cursor and Grok weren’t beating Claude Code already). All that Hype about Mythos might as well be fantasy: nobody can use it except spooks and assholes.

At this point, Grok Build is much better. It generates less code to get the job done, clearer code, and most importantly in less wall clock “thinking” time. So does OpenAI CODEX but it also has “safety panic” issues quite often (but it’s at least still usable). If you pay Anthropic for their pro-level account then you cannot use it to work on your project, it’s worse than useless. I’ve canceled Anthropic twice now because they cannot figure out how to run their operations properly.

Re:Cheap, Fast, Good

By coofercat • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

In my experience, the problem of long-running agent tasks is that they sort of end up chasing their tails too much. That is, you ask for something, it goes off and fails to do it, so googles up solutions, it then goes down some more rabbit holes, googles some more, fails to do something that’s required for the main task, then goes off trying to solve for that, etc etc. When this happens, a quick “stop” and a new prompt limiting the scope of what’s being asked for usually does the trick. Then you do 5 more smaller jobs and you’re done.

The same sort of thing happens if you give it a to-do list of tasks that somewhat (or completely) depend on each other. The ‘drift’ from the first is amplified by the second, and so on. By the time it’s got to the end, it’s done something very different than you asked for.

To date, I haven’t yet found a way to say “do this but don’t be a dick about it, if you can’t do it, just stop and I’ll help you”. But then stopping and asking for help would mean it’s no longer a long-running job that I could happily leave to run overnight. It won’t be a lot of use if it stops to ask me something 5 minutes after I’ve left it.

So I’ll pick “capable” and “economical”, because if they can fix those two, then you can actually leave them running without them “going off on one”. In some sense, that’s the governance piece, although not rigorously enough to placate even the most lenient compliance officer.