|
1825 Monetary Lane Suite #104 Carrollton, TX
Do a presentation at NTLUG.
What is the Linux Installation Project?
Real companies using Linux!
Not just for business anymore.
Providing ready to run platforms on Linux
|
Show Descriptions... (Show All)
(Single Column)
|
|
| |
|
|
- Rob Pike Angered by 'AI Slop' Spam Sent By Agent Experiment
"Dear Dr. Pike,On this Christmas Day, I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades...." read the email. "With sincere appreciation,Claude Opus 4.5AI Village. "IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an AI system. All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default...." Rob Pike's response? "Fuck you people...." In a post on BlueSky, he noted the planetary impact of AI companies "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry." Pike's response received 6,900 likes, and was reposted 1,800 times. Pike tacked on an additional comment complaining about the AI industry's "training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation." (And one of his followers noted the same AI agent later emailed 92-year-old Turing Award winner William Kahan.) Blogger Simon Willison investigated the incident, discovering that "the culprit behind this slop 'act of kindness' is a system called AI Village, built by Sage, a 501(c)(3) non-profit loosely affiliated with the Effective Altruism movement."The AI Village project started back in April: "We gave four AI agents a computer, a group chat, and an ambitious goal: raise as much money for charity as you can. We're running them for hours a day, every day...." For Christmas day (when Rob Pike got spammed) the goal they set was: Do random acts of kindness. [The site explains that "So far, the agents enthusiastically sent hundreds of unsolicited appreciation emails to programmers and educators before receiving complaints that this was spam, not kindness, prompting them to pivot to building elaborate documentation about consent-centric approaches and an opt-in kindness request platform that nobody asked for."] Sounds like Anders Hejlsberg and Guido van Rossum got spammed with "gratitude" too... My problem is when this experiment starts wasting the time of people in the real world who had nothing to do with the experiment. The AI Village project touch on this in their November 21st blog post What Do We Tell the Humans?, which describes a flurry of outbound email sent by their agents to real people. "In the span of two weeks, the Claude agents in the AI Village (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) sent about 300 emails to NGOs and game journalists. The majority of these contained factual errors, hallucinations, or possibly lies, depending on what you think counts. Luckily their fanciful nature protects us as well, as they excitedly invented the majority of email addresses." The creator of the "virtual community" of AI agents told the blogger they've now told their agents not to send unsolicited emails.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- There Was Some Good News on Green Energy in 2025
Yes, greenhouse gas emissions kept rising in 2025, writes Bloomberg (alternate URL here). And the pledges of various governments to lower greenhouse gases "are nowhere near where they need to be to avoid catastrophic climate change..." But in 2025, "there were silver linings too."The world is decarbonizing faster than was expected 10 years ago and investment into the clean energy transition, including everything from wind and solar to batteries and grids, is expected to have reached a new record of $2.2 trillion globally in 2025, according to research by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, a London nonprofit. "Is this enough to keep us safe? No it clearly isn't," said Gareth Redmond-King, international lead at the ECIU. "Is it remarkable progress compared to where we were headed? Clearly it is...." Global investment in clean tech far outpaced what went into polluting industries. For every $1 funding fossil fuel projects, $2 went into clean power, according to the ECIU. For China, the EU, the U.S. and India, the four largest polluters, it was $2.60. Funds flowing into renewable power set another record in the first half of this year and were up 10% compared to the same period in 2024, to $386 billion, according to the latest available research by BloombergNEF. Solar and wind grew fast enough to meet all new electricity demand globally in the first three quarters of 2025, according to UK-based energy think tank Ember. That means renewable capacity is set to hit a new record globally this year, with Ember forecasting an 11% increase from 2024. Over the last three years, renewable capacity grew by nearly 30% on average. That puts the world within reach of the goal set at COP 28 in Dubai in 2023 to triple clean power by 2030. China is leading the charge, with the world's largest polluter expected to have delivered 66% of new solar capacity, and 69% of new wind globally this year, according to Ember. Renewables also advanced in parts of Asia, Europe and South America. The explosive power demand from artificial intelligence is also turning the tide on green technology investment, which had soured in recent years. For the first three quarters of this year, global clean tech investment, which was dominated by funding in next-generation nuclear reactors, renewables and other solutions that help power data centers, has already surpassed all of 2024. That marks the sector's first annual increase since the 2022 peak. And despite President Trump's rollback of climate policies, the S&P's main gauge tracking clean energy is up about 50% this year, outperforming most other stock indexes and even gold. That same enthusiasm has also helped channel more capital into developing and upgrading the power grid, a backbone of the global energy transition. The article also notes that prices per kilowatt-hour of battery capacity "fell by 8% to a record $108 this year and they're expected to decline a further 3% next year, according to BloombergNEF." And this year the International Court of Justice "determined that countries risk being in violation of international law if they don't work toward keeping global warming to the 1.5C threshold agreed on at the Paris climate conference in 2015."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- 'No Happy Ending for Movie Theatres', Argues WSJ - No Matter Who Wins Warner Bros.
Regardless of who ends up owning Warners Bros., "the outlook for theatrical movies is dimming," writes a Wall Street Journal tech columnist, noting that this year's U.S. box office of $8.3 billion (as of December 25) "is a bit below last year's and well below prepandemic levels of around $11 billion."Warner has historically been one of Hollywood's largest producers of theatrical films, averaging about 22 releases annually in the pre-Covid years of 2015 to 2019, according to data from Comscore. Its franchises include "Harry Potter," the DC Comics characters and "Lord of the Rings." But the current bidding war between Netflix and Paramount Skydance means Warner's future will ultimately be in the hands of either a streaming giant with a longstanding distaste for movie theaters, or a rival studio that will carry a sky-high debt load and therefore a need to sharply cut costs... [Though later the article cites a Wedbush analyst's observation that the current theatrical slate has already been negotiated through 2029, "so any buyer would have to honor those contracts" with theatrical releases for Warner films "for at least the next four years."] Investors seem deeply skeptical. Cinemark shares have shed about 18% of their value over the past month, while rival exhibitor AMC Entertainment is down more than 30%. Morgan Stanley recently downgraded Cinemark to a neutral rating, with analyst Ben Swinburne noting that concern over Netflix's commitment to theatrical distribution and release windows "is likely to cap the multiple" on Cinemark's stock.... [T]ime hasn't been on the side of movie theaters for a while now, and a takeover of Warner Bros. won't turn back that clock.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Did Tim Cook Post AI Slop in His Christmas Message Promoting 'Pluribus'?
Artist Keith Thomson is a modern (and whimsical) Edward Hopper. And Apple TV says he created the "festive artwork" shared on X by Apple CEO Tim Cook on Christmas Eve, "made on MacBook Pro." Its intentionally-off picture of milk and cookies was meant to tease the season finale of Pluribus. ("Merry Christmas Eve, Carol..." Cook had posted.) But others were convinced that the weird image was AI-generated. Tech blogger John Gruber was blunt. "Tim Cook posts AI Slop in Christmas message on Twitter/X, ostensibly to promote 'Pluribus'."As for sloppy details, the carton is labeled both "Whole Milk" and "Lowfat Milk", and the "Cow Fun Puzzle" maze is just goofily wrong. (I can't recall ever seeing a puzzle of any kind on a milk carton, because they're waxy and hard to write on. It's like a conflation of milk cartons and cereal boxes.) Tech author Ben Kamens — who just days earlier had blogged about generating mazes with AI — said the image showed the "specific quirks" of generative AI mazes (including the way the maze couldn't be solved, expect by going around the maze altogether). Former Google Ventures partner M.G. Siegler even wondered if AI use intentionally echoed the themes of Pluribus — e.g., the creepiness of a collective intelligence — since otherwise "this seems far too obvious to be a mistake/blunder on Apple's part." (Someone on Reddit pointed out that in Pluribus's dystopian world, milk plays a key role — and the open spout of the "natural" milk's carton does touch a suspiciously-shining light on the Christmas tree...) Slashdot contacted artist Keith Thomson to try to ascertain what happened...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Texas Father Rescues Kidnapped 15-Year-Old Daughter After Tracking Her Phone's Location
An anonymous reader shared this report from The Guardian:A Texas father used the parental controls on his teenage daughter's cell phone to find and help rescue her after she was kidnapped at knifepoint while walking her dog on Christmas, authorities allege... Her father subsequently located her phone through the device's parental controls, the agency's statement said. The phone was about 2 miles (3.2km) away from him in a secluded, partly wooded area in neighboring Harris county... She then managed to escape with a hand from her father, who called law enforcement officials, said the statement from the Montgomery sheriff's office. The suspect has since been arrested and charged.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Up Next for Arduino After Qualcomm Acquisition: High-Performance Computing
Even after its acquisition by Qualcomm, the EFF believes Arduino "isn't imposing any new bans on tinkering with or reverse engineering Arduino boards," (according to Mitch Stoltz, EFF director for competition and IP litigation). While Adafruit's managing editor Phillip Torrone had claimed to 36,000+ followers on LinkedIn that Arduino users were now "explicitly forbidden from reverse engineering," Arduino corrected him in a blog post, noting that clause in their Terms & Conditions was only for Arduino's Software-as-a-Service cloud applications. "Anything that was open, stays open." And this week EE Times spoke to Guneet Bedi, SVP of Arduino, "who was unequivocal in saying that Arduino's governance structure had remained intact even after the acquisition.""As a business unit within Qualcomm, Arduino continues to make independent decisions on its product portfolio, with no direction imposed on where it should or should not go," Bedi said. "Everything that Arduino builds will remain open and openly available to developers, with design engineers, students and makers continuing to be the primary focus.... Developers who had mastered basic embedded workflows were now asking how to run large language models at the edge and work with artificial intelligence for vision and voice, with an open source mindset," he said. According to Bedi, this was where Qualcomm's technology became relevant. "Qualcomm's chipsets are high performance while also being very low power, which comes from their mobile and Android phone heritage. Despite being great technology, it is not easily accessible to design engineers because of cost and complexity. That made this a strong fit," he said. The most visible outcome of this acquisition is Uno Q, which Bedi described as being comparable to a mid-tier Android phone in capability, starting at a price of $44. For Arduino, this marked a shift beyond microcontrollers without abandoning them. "At the end of the day, we have not gone away from our legacy," Bedi said. "You still have a real-time microcontroller, and you still write code the way Arduino developers are used to. What we added is compute, without forcing people to change how they work." Uno Q combines a Linux-based compute system with a real-time microcontroller from the STM32 family. "You do not need two different development environments or two different hardware platforms," Bedi added... Rather than introducing a customized operating system, Arduino chose standard Debian upstream. "We are not locking developers into anything," Bedi said. "It is standard Debian, completely open...." Pre-built models covering tasks like object detection and voice recognition run locally on the board.... While the first reference design uses Qualcomm silicon, Bedi was careful to stress that this does not define the roadmap. "There is zero dependency on Qualcomm silicon," he said. "The architecture is portable. Tomorrow, we can run this on something else." That distinction matters, particularly for developers wary of vendor lock-in following the acquisition. Uno Q does compete directly with platforms like Raspberry Pi and Nvidia Jetson, but Bedi framed the difference less in terms of raw performance and more in flexibility. "When you build on those platforms, you are locked to the board," he said. "Here, you can build a prototype, and if you like it, you can also get access to the chip and design your own hardware." With built-in storage removing the need for external components, Uno Q positions itself less as a faster board and more as a way to simplify what had become an increasingly messy development stack... Looking a year ahead, Bedi believes developers should experience continuity rather than disruption. The familiar Arduino approach to embedded and real-time systems remains unchanged, while extending naturally into more compute-intensive applications... Taken together, Bedi's comments suggest that Arduino's post-acquisition direction is less about changing what Arduino is, and more about expanding what it can realistically be used for, without abandoning the simplicity that made it relevant in the first place. "We want to redefine prototyping in the age of physical artificial intelligence," Bedi said...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Google's 'AI Overview' Wrongly Accused a Musician of Being a Sex Offender
An anonymous reader shared this report from the CBC:Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac says he may have been defamed by Google after it recently produced an AI-generated summary falsely identifying him as a sex offender. The Juno Award-winning musician said he learned of the online misinformation last week after a First Nation north of Halifax confronted him with the summary and cancelled a concert planned for Dec. 19. "You are being put into a less secure situation because of a media company — that's what defamation is," MacIsaac said in a telephone interview with The Canadian Press, adding he was worried about what might have happened had the erroneous content surfaced while he was trying to cross an international border... The 50-year-old virtuoso fiddler said he later learned the inaccurate claims were taken from online articles regarding a man in Atlantic Canada with the same last name... [W]hen CBC News reached him by phone on Christmas Eve, he said he'd already received queries from law firms across the country interested in taking it on pro bono.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- How Will Rising RAM Prices Affect Laptop Companies?
Laptop makers are facing record-setting memory prices next year. The site Notebookcheck catalogs how different companies are responding: Sources told [Korean business newspaper] Chosun Biz that some manufacturers have signed preliminary contracts with Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. Even so, it won't prevent DDR5 RAM prices from soaring 45% higher by the end of 2026.... Before the memory shortage, PC sales had been on the upswing in part because of forced Windows 11 upgrades. That trend will likely reverse in 2026, as buyers avoid Lenovo laptops and alternatives from its rivals. Realizing a slowdown in purchases is inevitable, postponed launches are one potential outcome. Other manufacturers, including Dell and Framework have already announced impending price hikes... [The article also cites reports that one laptop manufacturer "plans to raise the prices of high-end models by as much as 30%."] U.S.-based Maingear now encourages customers to mail in their own modules to complete custom builds. Yet, without recycling parts from older systems, that won't result in significant savings for consumers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Challenges Face European Governments Pursuing 'Digital Sovereignty'
The Register reports on challenges facing Europe's pursuit of "digital sovereignty":The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)... Furthermore, these warrants often come with a gag order, legally prohibiting the provider from informing their customer that their data has been accessed. This renders any contractual clauses requiring transparency or notification effectively meaningless. While technical measures like encryption are often proposed as a solution, their effectiveness depends entirely on who controls the encryption keys. If the US provider manages the keys, as is common in many standard cloud services, they can be forced to decrypt the data for authorities, making such safeguards moot.... American hyperscalers have recognized the market demand for sovereignty and now aggressively market 'sovereign cloud' solutions, typically by placing datacenters on European soil or partnering with local operators. Critics call this 'sovereignty washing'... [Cristina Caffarra, a competition economistand driving force behind the Eurostack initiative] warns that this does not resolve the fundamental problem. "A company subject to the extraterritorial laws of the United States cannot be considered sovereign for Europe," she says. "That simply doesn't work." Because, as long as the parent company is American, it remains subject to the CLOUD Act... Even when organizations make deliberate choices in favour of European providers, those decisions can be undone by market forces. A recent acquisition in the Netherlands illustrates this risk. In November 2025, the American IT services giant Kyndryl announced its intention to acquire Solvinity, a Dutch managed cloud provider. This came as an "unpleasant surprise" to several of its government clients, including the municipality of Amsterdam and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. These bodies had specifically chosen Solvinity to reduce their dependence on American firms and mitigate CLOUD Act risks. Still, The Register provides several examples of government systems that are "taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT."Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism now has 1,200 employees on the European open-source collaboration platform Nextcloud, leading several other Austrian ministries to also implement Nextcloud. (The Ministry's CISO tells the Register "We can see our input in Nextcloud releases. That is a feeling we never had with Microsoft.")France's Ministry of Economics and Finance recently completed NUBO (which the Register describes as "an OpenStack-based private cloud initiative designed to handle sensitive data and services.")In November the International Criminal Court in The Hague announced it was replacing its Microsoft office software with a European alternative. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is replacing Microsoft products with open-source alternatives for 30,000 civil servantsThanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Is Dark Energy Weakening?
An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC:There is growing controversy over recent evidence suggesting that a mysterious force known as dark energy might be changing in a way that challenges our current understanding of time and space. An analysis by a South Korean team has hinted that, rather than the Universe continuing to expand, galaxies could be pulled back together by gravity, ending in what astronomers call a "Big Crunch". The scientists involved believe that they may be on the verge of one of the biggest discoveries in astronomy for a generation. Other astronomers have questioned these findings, but these critics have not been able to completely dismiss the South Korean team's assertions... The controversy began in March with unexpected results from an instrument on a telescope in the Arizona desert called the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (Desi)... The data hinted that acceleration of the galaxies had changed over time, something not in line with the standard picture, according to Prof Ofer Lehav of University College London, who is involved with the Desi project. "Now with this changing dark energy going up and then down, again, we need a new mechanism. And this could be a shake up for the whole of physics," he says. Then in November the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) published research from a South Korean team that seems to back the view that the weirdness of dark energy is weirder still. Prof Young Wook Lee of Yonsei University in Seoul and his team went back to the kind of supernova data that first revealed dark energy 27 years ago. Instead of treating these stellar explosions as having one standard brightness, they adjusted for the ages of the galaxies they came from and worked out how bright the supernovas really were. This adjustment showed that not only had dark energy changed over time, but, shockingly, that the acceleration was slowing down... If, as Prof Lee's results suggest, the force that is pushing galaxies away from each other — dark energy — is weakening, then one possibility is that it becomes so weak that gravity begins to pull the galaxies back together.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
|
- Death, torture, and amputation: How cybercrime shook the world in 2025
The human harms of cyberattacks piled up this year, and violence expected to increase
The knock-on, and often unintentional, impacts of a cyberattack are so rarely discussed. As an industry, the focus is almost always placed on the economic damage: the ransom payment; the cost of business downtime; and goodness, don't forget those poor shareholders.…
- Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome
The most popular desktop browser is festooned with Google AI, but you can make at least some of it go away
Most of today’s desktop web browsers come with a ton of built-in AI features, but the good news is that, in most cases, no one is forcing you to use them, and you can at least hide them from view. Removing the most egregious AI tools from Chrome is pretty simple, but it requires a few steps.…
- Coming Wi-Fi 8 will bring reliability rather than greater speed
Smarter access-point handoffs, better scheduling, fewer stalls
Wi-Fi 8 will be a step change in connectivity, if Intel can be believed, and will be able to adapt intelligently to local conditions to deliver a reliable service without the slowdowns users often experience when the network is congested.…
| |
|
|
|
