"NASA engineers have spent the past decade developing a rugged, partially autonomous lander designed to explore Europa, one of Jupiter's most intriguing moons," reports Gizmodo. But though NASA "got cold feet over the project," the engineers behind the project are now suggesting the probe could instead explore Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn: Europa has long been a prime target in the search for extraterrestrial biology because scientists suspect it harbors a subsurface ocean beneath its icy crust, potentially teeming with microbial life. But the robot — packed with radiation shielding, cutting-edge software, and ice-drilling appendages — won't be going anywhere anytime soon. In a recent paper in Science Robotics, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) outlined the design and testing of what was once the Europa Lander prototype, a four-legged robotic explorer built to survive the brutal surface conditions of the Jovian moon. The robot was designed to walk — as opposed to roll — analyze terrain, collect samples, and drill into Europa's icy crust — all with minimal guidance from Earth, due to the major communication lag between our planet and the moon 568 million miles (914 million kilometers) away. Designed to operate autonomously for hours at a time, the bot came equipped with stereoscopic cameras, a robotic arm, LED lights, and a suite of specialized materials tough enough to endure harsh radiation and bone-chilling cold.... According to the team, the challenges of getting to Europa — its radiation exposure, immense distance, and short observation windows — proved too daunting for NASA's higher-ups. And that's before you take into consideration the devastating budget cuts planned by the Trump administration, which would see the agency's funding fall from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion. The lander, once the centerpiece of a bold astrobiology initiative, is now essentially mothballed. But the engineers aren't giving up. They're now lobbying for the robot to get a second shot — on Enceladus, Saturn's ice-covered moon, which also boasts a subsurface ocean and has proven more favorable for robotic exploration. Enceladus is still frigid, but `has lower radiation and better access windows than Europa.

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In late April Meta introduced its Meta AI app, which included something called a Discover feed. ("You can see the best prompts people are sharing, or remix them to make them your own.") But while Meta insisted "you're in control: nothing is shared to your feed unless you choose to post it" — just two days later Business Insider noticed that "clearly, some people don't realize they're sharing personal stuff." To be clear, your AI chats are not public by default — you have to choose to share them individually by tapping a share button. Even so, I get the sense that some people don't really understand what they're sharing, or what's going on. Like the woman with the sick pet turtle. Or another person who was asking for advice about what legal measures he could take against his former employer after getting laid off. Or a woman asking about the effects of folic acid for a woman in her 60s who has already gone through menopause. Or someone asking for help with their Blue Cross health insurance bill... Perhaps these people knew they were sharing on a public feed and wanted to do so. Perhaps not. This leaves us with an obvious question: What's the point of this, anyway? Even if you put aside the potential accidental oversharing, what's the point of seeing a feed of people's AI prompts at all? Now Mozilla has issued their own warning. "Meta is quietly turning private AI chats into public content," warns a new post this week from the Mozilla Foundation, "and too many people don't realize it's happening." That's why the Mozilla community is demanding that Meta: - Shut down the Discover feed until real privacy protections are in place. - Make all AI interactions private by default with no public sharing option unless explicitly enabled through informed consent. - Provide full transparency about how many users have unknowingly shared private information. - Create a universal, easy-to-use opt-out system for all Meta platforms that prevents user data from being used for AI training. - Notify all users whose conversations may have been made public, and allow them to delete their content permanently. Meta is blurring the line between private and public — and it's happening at the cost of our privacy. People have the right to know when they're speaking in public, especially when they believe they're speaking in private. If you agree, add your name to demand Meta shut down its invasive AI feed — and guarantee that no private conversations are made public without clear, explicit, and informed opt-in consent.

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Last month, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn "shared on LinkedIn an email he had sent to all staff announcing Duolingo was going 'AI-first'," remembers the Financial Times. "I did not expect the amount of blowback," he admits.... He attributes this anger to a general "anxiety" about technology replacing jobs. "I should have been more clear to the external world," he reflects on a video call from his office in Pittsburgh. "Every tech company is doing similar things [but] we were open about it...." Since the furore, von Ahn has reassured customers that AI is not going to replace the company's workforce. There will be a "very small number of hourly contractors who are doing repetitive tasks that we no longer need", he says. "Many of these people are probably going to be offered contractor jobs for other stuff." Duolingo is still recruiting if it is satisfied the role cannot be automated. Graduates who make up half the people it hires every year "come with a different mindset" because they are using AI at university. The thrust of the AI-first strategy, the 46-year-old says, is overhauling work processes... He wants staff to explore whether their tasks "can be entirely done by AI or with the help of AI. It's just a mind shift that people first try AI. It may be that AI doesn't actually solve the problem you're trying to solve.....that's fine." The aim is to automate repetitive tasks to free up time for more creative or strategic work. Examples where it is making a difference include technology and illustration. Engineers will spend less time writing code. "Some of it they'll need to but we want it to be mediated by AI," von Ahn says... Similarly, designers will have more of a supervisory role, with AI helping to create artwork that fits Duolingo's "very specific style". "You no longer do the details and are more of a creative director. For the vast majority of jobs, this is what's going to happen...." [S]ocietal implications for AI, such as the ethics of stealing creators' copyright, are "a real concern". "A lot of times you don't even know how [the large language model] was trained. We should be careful." When it comes to artwork, he says Duolingo is "ensuring that the entirety of the model is trained just with our own illustrations".

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The New York Times reports: California State University announced this year that it was making ChatGPT available to more than 460,000 students across its 23 campuses to help prepare them for "California's future A.I.-driven economy." Cal State said the effort would help make the school "the nation's first and largest A.I.-empowered university system..." Some faculty members have already built custom chatbots for their students by uploading course materials like their lecture notes, slides, videos and quizzes into ChatGPT. And other U.S. campuses including the University of Maryland are also "working to make A.I. tools part of students' everyday experiences," according to the article. It's all part of an OpenAI initiative "to overhaul college education — by embedding its artificial intelligence tools in every facet of campus life." The Times calls it "a national experiment on millions of students." If the company's strategy succeeds, universities would give students A.I. assistants to help guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customized A.I. study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot's voice mode to be quizzed aloud ahead of a test. OpenAI dubs its sales pitch "A.I.-native universities..." To spread chatbots on campuses, OpenAI is selling premium A.I. services to universities for faculty and student use. It is also running marketing campaigns aimed at getting students who have never used chatbots to try ChatGPT... OpenAI's campus marketing effort comes as unemployment has increased among recent college graduates — particularly in fields like software engineering, where A.I. is now automating some tasks previously done by humans. In hopes of boosting students' career prospects, some universities are racing to provide A.I. tools and training... [Leah Belsky, OpenAI's vice president of education] said a new "memory" feature, which retains and can refer to previous interactions with a user, would help ChatGPT tailor its responses to students over time and make the A.I. "more valuable as you grow and learn." Privacy experts warn that this kind of tracking feature raises concerns about long-term tech company surveillance. In the same way that many students today convert their school-issued Gmail accounts into personal accounts when they graduate, Ms. Belsky envisions graduating students bringing their A.I. chatbots into their workplaces and using them for life. "It would be their gateway to learning — and career life thereafter," Ms. Belsky said.

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It's no longer a hypothetical question, writes the Washington Post. "In recent years, scientists have devised powerful genetic tools that may be able to eradicate mosquitoes and other pests once and for all." But along with the ability to fight malaria, dengue, West Nile virus and other serious diseases, "the development of this technology also raises a profound ethical question: When, if ever, is it okay to intentionally drive a species out of existence...?" When so many wildlife conservationists are trying to save plants and animals from disappearing, the mosquito is one of the few creatures that people argue is actually worthy of extinction. Forget about tigers or bears; it's the tiny mosquito that is the deadliest animal on Earth. The human misery caused by malaria is undeniable. Nearly 600,000 people died of the disease in 2023, according to the World Health Organization, with the majority of cases in Africa... But recently, the Hastings Center for Bioethics, a research institute in New York, and Arizona State University brought together a group of bioethicists to discuss the potential pitfalls of intentionally trying to drive a species to extinction. In a policy paper published in the journal Science last month, the group concluded that "deliberate full extinction might occasionally be acceptable, but only extremely rarely..." It's unclear how important malaria-carrying mosquitoes are to broader ecosystems. Little research has been done to figure out whether frogs or other animals that eat the insects would be able to find their meals elsewhere. Scientists are hotly debating whether a broader "insect apocalypse" is underway in many parts of the world, which may imperil other creatures that depend on them for food and pollination... Instead, the authors said, geneticists should be able to use gene editing, vaccines and other tools to target not the mosquito itself, but the single-celled Plasmodium parasite that is responsible for malaria. That invisible microorganism — which a mosquito transfers from its saliva to a person's blood when it bites — is the real culprit. A nonprofit research consortium called Target Malaria has genetically modified mosquitoes in their labs (which get core funding from the Gates Foundation and from Open Philanthropy, backed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife). ), and hopes to deploy them in the wild within five years...

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The Associated Press reports that on Friday, U.K. High Court justice Victoria Sharp and fellow judge Jeremy Johnson ruled on the possibility of false information being submitted to the court. Concerns had been raised by lower-court judges about "suspected use by lawyers of generative AI tools to produce written legal arguments or witness statements which are not then checked." In a ruling written by Sharp, the judges said that in a 90 million pound ($120 million) lawsuit over an alleged breach of a financing agreement involving the Qatar National Bank, a lawyer cited 18 cases that did not exist. The client in the case, Hamad Al-Haroun, apologized for unintentionally misleading the court with false information produced by publicly available AI tools, and said he was responsible, rather than his solicitor Abid Hussain. But Sharp said it was "extraordinary that the lawyer was relying on the client for the accuracy of their legal research, rather than the other way around." In the other incident, a lawyer cited five fake cases in a tenant's housing claim against the London Borough of Haringey. Barrister Sarah Forey denied using AI, but Sharp said she had "not provided to the court a coherent explanation for what happened." The judges referred the lawyers in both cases to their professional regulators, but did not take more serious action. Sharp said providing false material as if it were genuine could be considered contempt of court or, in the "most egregious cases," perverting the course of justice, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

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Last year's Pentagon report reviewing UFO reports "left out the truth behind some of the foundational myths about UFOs," reports the Wall Street Journal. "The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames, in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation." The congressionally ordered probe took investigators back to the 1980s, when an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51, a top-secret site in the Nevada desert. He gave the owner photos of what might be flying saucers. The photos went up on the walls, and into the local lore went the idea that the U.S. military was secretly testing recovered alien technology. But the colonel was on a mission — of disinformation. The photos were doctored, the now-retired officer confessed to the Pentagon investigators in 2023. The whole exercise was a ruse to protect what was really going on at Area 51: The Air Force was using the site to develop top-secret stealth fighters, viewed as a critical edge against the Soviet Union. Military leaders were worried that the programs might get exposed if locals somehow glimpsed a test flight of, say, the F-117 stealth fighter, an aircraft that truly did look out of this world. Better that they believe it came from Andromeda. That's not the only example. The Journal spoke to Robert Salas, now 84, who in 1967 was a 26-year-old Air Force captain "sitting in a walk-in closet-sized bunker, manning the controls of 10 nuclear missiles in Montana." Suddenly all 10 missiles were disabled after reports of "a glowing reddish-orange oval was hovering over the front gate... The next morning a helicopter was waiting to take Salas back to base. Once there he was ordered: Never discuss the incident." 58 years later, the Journal reports.... The barriers of concrete and steel surrounding America's nuclear missiles were thick enough to give them a chance if hit first by a Soviet strike. But scientists at the time feared the intense storm of electromagnetic waves generated by a nuclear detonation might render the hardware needed to launch a counterstrike unusable. To test this vulnerability, the Air Force developed an exotic electromagnetic generator that simulated this pulse of disruptive energy without the need to detonate a nuclear weapon... But any public leak of the tests at the time would have allowed Russia to know that America's nuclear arsenal could be disabled in a first strike. The witnesses were kept in the dark. To this day Salas believes he was party to an intergalactic intervention to stop nuclear war which the government has tried to hide. "We were never briefed on the activities that were going on, the Air Force shut us out of any information," Salas tells the Journal. But it's not just secrecy. Some military men were told directly that they were working on alien technology, according to Pentagon investigator Sean Kirkpatrick: A former Air Force officer was visibly terrified when he told Kirkpatrick's investigators that he had been briefed on a secret alien project decades earlier, and was warned that if he ever repeated the secret he could be jailed or executed. The claim would be repeated to investigators by other men who had never spoken of the matter, even with their spouses. It turned out the witnesses had been victims of a bizarre hazing ritual. For decades, certain new commanders of the Air Force's most classified programs, as part of their induction briefings, would be handed a piece of paper with a photo of what looked like a flying saucer. The craft was described as an antigravity maneuvering vehicle. The officers were told that the program they were joining, dubbed Yankee Blue, was part of an effort to reverse-engineer the technology on the craft. They were told never to mention it again. Many never learned it was fake. Kirkpatrick found the practice had begun decades before, and appeared to continue still... Investigators are still trying to determine why officers had misled subordinates, whether as some type of loyalty test, a more deliberate attempt to deceive or something else. After that 2023 discovery, Kirkpatrick's deputy briefed President Joe Biden's director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, who was stunned... "We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of people. These men signed NDAs. They thought it was real." The article also notes that rep9rts of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon "skyrocketed" after May of 2023 — but that "Many pilot accounts of floating orbs were actually reflections of the sun from Starlink satellites, investigators found."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from The New York Times: Russian counterintelligence agents are analyzing data from the popular Chinese messaging and social media app WeChat to monitor people who might be in contact with Chinese spies, according to a Russian intelligence document obtained by The New York Times. The disclosure highlights the rising level of concern about Chinese influence in Russia as the two countries deepen their relationship. As Russia has become isolated from the West over its war in Ukraine, it has become increasingly reliant on Chinese money, companies and technology. But it has also faced what the document describes as increased Chinese espionage efforts. The document indicates that the Russian domestic security agency, known as the F.S.B., pulls purloined data into an analytical tool known as "Skopishche" (a Russian word for a mob of people). Information from WeChat is among the data being analyzed, according to the document... One Western intelligence agency told The Times that the information in the document was consistent with what it knew about "Russian penetration of Chinese communications...." By design, [WeChat] does not use end-to-end encryption to protect user data. That is because the Chinese government exercises strict control over the app and relies on its weak security to monitor and censor speech. Foreign intelligence agencies can exploit that weakness, too... WeChat was briefly banned in Russia in 2017, but access was restored after Tencent took steps to comply with laws requiring foreign digital platforms above a certain size to register as "organizers of information dissemination." The Times confirmed that WeChat is currently licensed by the government to operate in Russia. That license would require Tencent to store user data on Russian servers and to provide access to security agencies upon request.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from SFGate about a lawsuit alleging a "warrantless drone surveillance program" that's "trampling residents' right to privacy": Sonoma County has been accused of deploying hundreds of drone flights over residents in a "runaway spying operation"... according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. The North Bay county of Sonoma initially started the 6-year-old drone program to track illegal cannabis cultivation, but the lawsuit alleges that officials have since turned it into a widespread program to catch unrelated code violations at residential properties and levy millions of dollars in fines. The program has captured 5,600 images during more than 700 flights, the lawsuit said... Matt Cagle, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, said in a Wednesday news release that the county "has hidden these unlawful searches from the people they have spied on, the community, and the media...." The lawsuit says the county employees used the drones to spy on private homes without first receiving a warrant, including photographing private areas like hot tubs and outdoor baths, and through curtainless windows. One plaintiff "said the county secretly used the drone program to photograph her Sonoma County horse stable and issue code violations," according to the article. She only discovered the use of the drones after a county employee mentioned they had photos of her property, according to the lawsuit. She then filed a public records request for the images, which left her "stunned" after seeing that the county employees were monitoring her private property including photographing her outdoor bathtub and shower, the lawsuit said.

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AppleInsider reports: The engineer behind much of the Mac's early graphical user interfaces, QuickDraw, MacPaint, Hypercard and much more, William D. "Bill" Atkinson, died on June 5 of complications from pancreatic cancer... Atkinson, who built a post-Apple career as a noted nature photographer, worked at Apple from 1978 to 1990. Among his lasting contributions to Apple's computers were the invention of the menubar, the selection lasso, the "marching ants" item selection animation, and the discovery of a midpoint circle algorithm that enabled the rapid drawing of circles on-screen. He was Apple Employee No. 51, recruited by Steve Jobs. Atkinson was one of the 30 team members to develop the first Macintosh, but also was principle designer of the Lisa's graphical user interface (GUI), a novelty in computers at the time. He was fascinated by the concept of dithering, by which computers using dots could create nearly photographic images similar to the way newspapers printed photos. He is also credited (alongside Jobs) for the invention of RoundRects, the rounded rectangles still used in Apple's system messages, application windows, and other graphical elements on Apple products. Hypercard was Atkinson's main claim to fame. He built the a hypermedia approach to building applications that he once described as a "software erector set." The Hypercard technology debuted in 1987, and greatly opened up Macintosh software development. In 2012 some video clips of Atkinson appeared in some rediscovered archival footage. (Original Macintosh team developer Andy Hertzfeld uploaded "snippets from interviews with members of the original Macintosh design team, recorded in October 1983 for projected TV commercials that were never used.") Blogger John Gruber calls Atkinson "One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history." If you want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore.org site and (re-)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here's just one, with Steve Jobs inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect. Here's another (surely near and dear to my friend Brent Simmons's heart) with this kicker of a closing line: "I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied." Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware... In addition to his low-level contributions like QuickDraw, Atkinson was also the creator of MacPaint (which to this day stands as the model for bitmap image editorsâ — âPhotoshop, I would argue, was conceptually derived directly from MacPaint) and HyperCard ("inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985"), the influence of which cannot be overstated. I say this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best computer programmer who ever lived. Without question, he's on the short list. What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us.

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Is copyrighted material a requirement for training AI? asks the Washington Post. That's what top AI companies are arguing, and "Few AI developers have tried the more ethical route — until now. "A group of more than two dozen AI researchers have found that they could build a massive eight-terabyte dataset using only text that was openly licensed or in public domain. They tested the dataset quality by using it to train a 7 billion parameter language model, which performed about as well as comparable industry efforts, such as Llama 2-7B, which Meta released in 2023." A paper published Thursday detailing their effort also reveals that the process was painstaking, arduous and impossible to fully automate. The group built an AI model that is significantly smaller than the latest offered by OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, but their findings appear to represent the biggest, most transparent and rigorous effort yet to demonstrate a different way of building popular AI tools.... As it turns out, the task involves a lot of humans. That's because of the technical challenges of data not being formatted in a way that's machine readable, as well as the legal challenges of figuring out what license applies to which website, a daunting prospect when the industry is rife with improperly licensed data. "This isn't a thing where you can just scale up the resources that you have available" like access to more computer chips and a fancy web scraper, said Stella Biderman [executive director of the nonprofit research institute Eleuther AI]. "We use automated tools, but all of our stuff was manually annotated at the end of the day and checked by people. And that's just really hard." Still, the group managed to unearth new datasets that can be used ethically. Those include a set of 130,000 English language books in the Library of Congress, which is nearly double the size of the popular-books dataset Project Gutenberg. The group's initiative also builds on recent efforts to develop more ethical, but still useful, datasets, such as FineWeb from Hugging Face, the open-source repository for machine learning... Still, Biderman remained skeptical that this approach could find enough content online to match the size of today's state-of-the-art models... Biderman said she didn't expect companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to start adopting the same laborious process, but she hoped it would encourage them to at least rewind back to 2021 or 2022, when AI companies still shared a few sentences of information about what their models were trained on. "Even partial transparency has a huge amount of social value and a moderate amount of scientific value," she said.

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TweakTown writes that the Switch 2 "has reportedly beaten the record for the most-sold console within 24 hours and is on track to shatter the two-month record," selling over 3 million units and tripling the PlayStation 4's previous launch day sales. So Nintendo's first console in 8 years becomes "one of the most successful hardware releases of all time," writes Barron's, raising hopes for the future: [2017's original Switch] ultimately sold more than 152 million units... Switch 2's big advantage is its backward compatibility, allowing it to play current-generation Switch games and giving gamers solace that their large investments in software are intact... Many older Switch games also play better on the Switch 2, taking advantage of the extra horsepower. Bloomberg writes that its bigger screen and faster chip "live up to the hype: Despite the hype and a $150 increase over the launch price for the original, the second-generation system manages to impress with faster performance, improved graphics, more comfortable ergonomics and enough tweaks throughout to make this feel like a distinctly new machine... This time, it's capable of outputting 4K resolution and more impactful HDR video to your TV screen... It's a bigger, faster, more polished version of a wildly successful gadget. The "buzzy launch drew long lines" at retailers like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Gamestop, according to the article. (See the photos from AOL.com and USA Today.) "The era of spending hours waiting in line for the latest iPhone is long gone, but the debut of a new video game console is still a rare enough event that Nintendo fans didn't think twice about driving to retailers in the middle of the night to secure a Switch 2." The Verge also opines that "the Switch 2's eShop is much better," calling it "way faster... with much less lag browsing through sections and loading up game pages." Or, as Barron's puts it, "Ultimately, Nintendo is winning because it has a different strategy than its competition, the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox. Instead of trying to appeal to tech snobs like me, who are obsessed with graphics resolution and hardware statistics like teraflops, Nintendo focuses on joy and fun."

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Mike Judge always seemed to have secret geek sympathies. He co-created the HBO series Silicon Valley, as well as the movie Office Space (reviewed in 1999 by Slashdot contributor Jon Katz). Now comes the word that besides rebooting Buffy the Vampire Slayer — and an animated scifi/action/horror film called Predator: Killer of Killers — Hulu is also relaunching Judge's animated series King of the Hill on August 4th. And Cinemablend notes they took great pains to ensure the inclusion of internet-loving neighbor Dale Gribble despite the death of voice actor Johnny Hardwick: Co-creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels joined the cast of returning voice actors for a revealing Q&A at ATX Fest while also revealing longtime cast member Toby Huss took over the role of Dale Gribble... Hardwick passed away in August 2023 at 64, with fans and co-stars paying tribute soon after. It was revealed at the time that he'd recorded some audio for the new season, but it was clear that another actor would be needed to fill those intimidating and conspiracy-obsessed shoes. Among other characters, Huss provided the voice of Cotton Hill and Kahn Sr. in the O.G. run, and feels to me like a natural fit to take over as Dale. And he sounds humbled to have been given the task, telling the ATX Fest crowd: "Johnny was one-of-a-kind and a wonderful fellow. I'm not trying to copy Johnny...I guess I'm trying to be Johnny. He laid down a really wonderful goofball character...he had a lot of weird heart to him and that's a credit to Johnny. So all I'm trying to do is hold on to his Dale-ness. We love our guy Johnny and it's so sad that he's not here...." I can already hear Dale himself questioning why he sounds different, and whether or not the government has replaced him with a lizard creature or some other sentient organism... In the immediate aftermath of Johnny Hardwick's death, the word was that the actor had filmed a couple of episodes' worth of material for the Hulu revival, but Mike Judge went on the record at ATX Fest to reveal that initial assessment undershot things entirely. From the voice of Hank Hill himself: "Johnny Hardwick is in six episodes. He's still going to be in the show." Hulu uploaded the new opening credits to YouTube eight days ago — and it's already been viewed 2.1 million times, attracting 55,000 upvotes and 7,952 comments... Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shared the official blurb describing the new show: After years working a propane job in Saudi Arabia to earn their retirement nest egg, Hank and Peggy Hill return to a changed Arlen, Texas to reconnect with old friends Dale, Boomhauer and Bill. Meanwhile, Bobby is living his dream as a chef in Dallas and enjoying his 20s with his former classmates Connie, Joseph and Chane.

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LSD "is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction," notes Science Daily. And now a microbiology student "has found a long sought-after fungus that produces effects similar to the semisynthetic drug..." Morning glory plants live in symbiosis with fungi that produce the same ergot alkaloids the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann modified when he invented LSD in the late 1930s. Hofmann hypothesized that a fungus in morning glories produced alkaloids similar to those in LSD, but the species remained a mystery... The researchers dubbed the fungus "Periglandula clandestina" for its ability to have eluded investigators for decades.

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Once upon a time, long-time Slashdot reader tgibson learned how to type on a manual typewriter, back in an 8th grade classroom. And to this day, they write, "my bias is to nod approvingly at touch typists and roll my eyes at those who need to stare at the keyboard while typing..." But how true is that for computer professionals today? After 15 years I left industry and became a post-secondary computer science educator. Occasionally I rant to my students about the importance of touch-typing as a skill to have as a software engineer. But I've been out of the game for some time now. Those of you hiring or working with freshly-minted software engineers, what's your take? One anonymous Slashdot reader responded: Oh, you mean the kid in the next cubicle that has said "Hey Siri" 297 times this morning? I'll let you know when he starts typing. A minor suggestion to office managers... please purchase a very quiet keyboard. Fellow cube-mates who are accomplished typists would consider that struggling audibly to be akin to nails on a blackboard... Share your own thoughts in the comments. How important is it for programmers to learn touch typing?

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MIT comp-sci professor Ryan Williams suspected that a small amount of memory "would be as helpful as a lot of time in all conceivable computations..." writes Quanta magazine. "In February, he finally posted his proof online, to widespread acclaim..." Every algorithm takes some time to run, and requires some space to store data while it's running. Until now, the only known algorithms for accomplishing certain tasks required an amount of space roughly proportional to their runtime, and researchers had long assumed there's no way to do better. Williams' proof established a mathematical procedure for transforming any algorithm — no matter what it does — into a form that uses much less space. What's more, this result — a statement about what you can compute given a certain amount of space — also implies a second result, about what you cannot compute in a certain amount of time. This second result isn't surprising in itself: Researchers expected it to be true, but they had no idea how to prove it. Williams' solution, based on his sweeping first result, feels almost cartoonishly excessive, akin to proving a suspected murderer guilty by establishing an ironclad alibi for everyone else on the planet. It could also offer a new way to attack one of the oldest open problems in computer science. "It's a pretty stunning result, and a massive advance," said Paul Beame, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

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Meta's Facebook and Instagram apps "were siphoning people's data through a digital back door for months," writes a Washington Post tech columnist, citing researchers who found no privacy setting could've stopped what Meta and Yandex were doing, since those two companies "circumvented privacy and security protections that Google set up for Android devices. "But their tactics underscored some privacy vulnerabilities in web browsers or apps. These steps can reduce your risks." Stop using the Chrome browser. Mozilla's Firefox, the Brave browser and DuckDuckGo's browser block many common methods of tracking you from site to site. Chrome, the most popular web browser, does not... For iPhone and Mac folks, Safari also has strong privacy protections. It's not perfect, though. No browser protections are foolproof. The researchers said Firefox on Android devices was partly susceptible to the data harvesting tactics they identified, in addition to Chrome. (DuckDuckGo and Brave largely did block the tactics, the researchers said....) Delete Meta and Yandex apps on your phone, if you have them. The tactics described by the European researchers showed that Meta and Yandex are unworthy of your trust. (Yandex is not popular in the United States.) It might be wise to delete their apps, which give the companies more latitude to collect information that websites generally cannot easily obtain, including your approximate location, your phone's battery level and what other devices, like an Xbox, are connected to your home WiFi. Know, too, that even if you don't have Meta apps on your phone, and even if you don't use Facebook or Instagram at all, Meta might still harvest information on your activity across the web.

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"Everyone has a blog these days, even Claude," Anthropic wrote this week on a page titled "Claude Explains." "Welcome to the small corner of the Anthropic universe where Claude is writing on every topic under the sun". Not any more. After blog posts titled "Improve code maintainability with Claude" and "Rapidly develop web applications with Claude" — Anthropic suddenly removed the whole page sometime after Wednesday. But TechCrunch explains the whole thing was always less than it seemed, and "One might be easily misled into thinking that Claude is responsible for the blog's copy end-to-end." According to a spokesperson, the blog is overseen by Anthropic's "subject matter experts and editorial teams," who "enhance" Claude's drafts with "insights, practical examples, and [...] contextual knowledge." "This isn't just vanilla Claude output — the editorial process requires human expertise and goes through iterations," the spokesperson said. "From a technical perspective, Claude Explains shows a collaborative approach where Claude [creates] educational content, and our team reviews, refines, and enhances it...." Anthropic says it sees Claude Explains as a "demonstration of how human expertise and AI capabilities can work together," starting with educational resources. "Claude Explains is an early example of how teams can use AI to augment their work and provide greater value to their users," the spokesperson said. "Rather than replacing human expertise, we're showing how AI can amplify what subject matter experts can accomplish [...] We plan to cover topics ranging from creative writing to data analysis to business strategy...." The Anthropic spokesperson noted that the company is still hiring across marketing, content, and editorial, and "many other fields that involve writing," despite the company's dip into AI-powered blog drafting. Take that for what you will.

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Cybercriminals have been increasingly turning to "residential proxy" services over the past two to three years to disguise malicious web traffic as everyday online activity, according to research presented at the Sleuthcon cybercrime conference. The shift represents a response to law enforcement's growing success in targeting traditional "bulletproof" hosting services, which previously allowed criminals to maintain anonymous web infrastructure. Residential proxies route traffic through decentralized networks running on consumer devices like old Android phones and low-end laptops, providing real IP addresses assigned to homes and offices. This approach makes malicious activity extremely difficult to detect because it appears to originate from trusted consumer locations rather than suspicious server farms. The technology creates particular challenges when attackers appear to come from the same residential IP ranges as employees of target organizations.

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Britain is moving toward major nuclear power commitments after years of delays, as government officials acknowledge they can no longer postpone critical energy infrastructure decisions. The U.K. Treasury has exhausted options for delaying nuclear power choices, Politico reported this week, citing sources within Whitehall and the nuclear industry. The urgency stems from Britain's aging nuclear infrastructure, where five power plants currently supply 15% of the country's total energy needs but face shutdown by 2030. This timeline has created significant pressure on policymakers to secure replacement capacity or risk substantial gaps in the nation's electricity supply.

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