Meta's investment in virtual and augmented reality is set to exceed $100 billion this year as CEO Mark Zuckerberg declares 2025 a "defining year" for its smart glasses ambitions. The company invested $19.9 billion in its Reality Labs division last year, according to its annual report, bringing total spending on VR and AR development to over $80 billion since 2014. The unit, which develops Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Quest VR headsets, sold 1 million pairs of glasses in 2024 but continues to post losses, according to Financial Times.

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The blog OMG Ubuntu reports: Ubuntu's key developers have agreed to switch to Matrix as the primary platform for real-time development communications involving the distro. From March, Matrix will replace IRC as the place where critical Ubuntu development conversations, requests, meetings, and other vital chatter must take place... Only the current #ubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-release Libera IRC channels are moving to Matrix, but other Ubuntu development-related channels can choose to move — officially, given some projects were using Matrix over IRC already. As a result, any major requests to/of the key Ubuntu development teams with privileged access can only be actioned if requests are made on Matrix. Canonical-employed Ubuntu developers will be expected to be present on Matrix during working hours... The aim is to streamline organisation, speed up decision making, ensure key developers are reliably reachable, and avoid discussions and conversations from fragmenting across multiple platforms... It's hoped that in picking one platform as the 'chosen one' the split in where the distro's development discourse takes place can be reduced and greater transparency in how and when decisions are made restored. IRC remains popular with many Ubuntu developers but its old-school, lo-fi nature is said to be off-putting to newer contributors. They're used to richer real-time chat platforms with more features (like discussion history, search, offline messaging, etc). It's felt this is why many newer developers employed by Canonical prefer to discuss and message through the company's internal Mattermost instance — which isn't publicly accessible. Many Ubuntu teams, flavours, and community chats already take place on Matrix... "End-users aren't directly affected, of course," they point out. But an earlier post on the same blog notes that Matrix "is increasingly ubiquitous in open-source circles. GNOME uses it, KDE embraces it, Linux Mint migrated last year, Mozilla a few years before, and it's already widely used by Ubuntu community members and developers." IRC remains unmatched in many areas but is, rightly or wrongly, viewed as an antiquated communication platform. IRC clients aren't pretty or plentiful, the syntax is obtuse, and support for 'modern' comforts like media sending, read receipts, etc., is lacking.To newer, younger contributors IRC could feel ancient or cumbersome to learn. Though many of IRC's real and perceived shortcomings are surmountable with workarounds, clients, bots, scripts, and so on, support for those varies between channels, clients, servers, and user configurations. Unlike IRC, which is a centralised protocol relying on individual servers, Matrix is federated. It lets users on different servers to communicate without friction. Plus, Matrix features encryption, message history, media support, and so, meeting modern expectations.

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Just because you get fired doesn't mean that your pull requests are automatically closed. Dallin was in the middle of reviewing a PR by Steve when the email came out announcing that Steve no longer worked at the company.

Let's take a look at that PR, and maybe we can see why.

$originalUndrawn = DecimalHelper::toDecimal($party->limit)->sub(DecimalHelper::toDecimal($party->drawn));

This is the original code, which represents operations on investments. An investment is represented by a note, and belongs to one or more partys. The amount that can be drawn is set by a limit, which can belong to either the party or the note.

What our developer was tasked with doing was allow a note to have no limit. This means changing all the places where the note's limit is checked. So this is what they submitted:

if ($note->limit == null) { $originalUndrawn = DecimalHelper::toDecimal($party->limit)->sub(DecimalHelper::toDecimal($party->drawn)); } else { $originalUndrawn = DecimalHelper::toDecimal($party->limit)->sub(DecimalHelper::toDecimal($party->drawn)); }

You'll note here that the note limit isn't part of calculating the party limits, so both branches do the same thing. And then there's the deeper question of "is a null really the best way to represent this?" especially given that elsewhere in the code they have an "unlimited" flag that disables limit checking.

Now, Steve wasn't let go only for their code- they were just a miserable co-worker who liked to pick fights in pull request comments. So the real highlight of Steve's dismissal was that Dallin got to have a meaningful discussion about the best way to make this change with the rest of the team, and Steve didn't have a chance to disrupt it.

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To capitalize on the AI boom, many crypto miners "have begun to repurpose parts of their operations into data centers," reports Reuters, "given they already have most of the infrastructure" (including landing and "significant" power resources...) Toronto-based bitcoin miner Bitfarms has enlisted two consultants to explore how it can transform some of its facilities to meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence data centers, it said on Friday... Earlier this month, Riot Platforms launched a review of the potential AI and computing uses for parts of its facility in Navarro County, Texas.

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Android and Google Play have billions of users, Google wrote in its security blog this week. "However, like any flourishing ecosystem, it also attracts its share of bad actors... That's why every year, we continue to invest in more ways to protect our community." Google's tactics include industry-wide alliances, stronger privacy policies, and "AI-powered threat detection." "As a result, we prevented 2.36 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play and banned more than 158,000 bad developer accounts that attempted to publish harmful apps. " To keep out bad actors, we have always used a combination of human security experts and the latest threat-detection technology. In 2024, we used Google's advanced AI to improve our systems' ability to proactively identify malware, enabling us to detect and block bad apps more effectively. It also helps us streamline review processes for developers with a proven track record of policy compliance. Today, over 92% of our human reviews for harmful apps are AI-assisted, allowing us to take quicker and more accurate action to help prevent harmful apps from becoming available on Google Play. That's enabled us to stop more bad apps than ever from reaching users through the Play Store, protecting users from harmful or malicious apps before they can cause any damage. Starting in 2024 Google also "required apps to be more transparent about how they handle user information by launching new developer requirements and a new 'Data deletion' option for apps that support user accounts and data collection.... We're also constantly working to improve the safety of apps on Play at scale, such as with the Google Play SDK Index. This tool offers insights and data to help developers make more informed decisions about the safety of an SDK." And once an app is installed, "Google Play Protect, Android's built-in security protection, helps to shield their Android device by continuously scanning for malicious app behavior." Google Play Protect automatically scans every app on Android devices with Google Play Services, no matter the download source. This built-in protection, enabled by default, provides crucial security against malware and unwanted software. Google Play Protect scans more than 200 billion apps daily and performs real-time scanning at the code-level on novel apps to combat emerging and hidden threats, like polymorphic malware. In 2024, Google Play Protect's real-time scanning identified more than 13 million new malicious apps from outside Google Play [based on Google Play Protect 2024 internal data]... According to our research, more than 95 percent of app installations from major malware families that exploit sensitive permissions highly correlated to financial fraud came from Internet-sideloading sources like web browsers, messaging apps, or file managers. To help users stay protected when browsing the web, Chrome will now display a reminder notification to re-enable Google Play Protect if it has been turned off... Scammers may manipulate users into disabling Play Protect during calls to download malicious Internet-sideloaded apps. To prevent this, the Play Protect app scanning toggle is now temporarily disabled during phone or video calls... Google Play Protect's enhanced fraud protection pilot analyzes and automatically blocks the installation of apps that may use sensitive permissions frequently abused for financial fraud when the user attempts to install the app from an Internet-sideloading source (web browsers, messaging apps, or file managers). Building on the success of our initial pilot in partnership with the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA), additional enhanced fraud protection pilots are now active in nine regions — Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, and Vietnam. In 2024, Google Play Protect's enhanced fraud protection pilots have shielded 10 million devices from over 36 million risky installation attempts, encompassing over 200,000 unique apps.

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Spirit Aerosystems builds aircraft components, including fuselages and flight deck sections for Boeing, according to Wikipedia. But now Boeing is set to acquire Spirit AeroSystems. The aviation blog called Aviation Source News says the price tag was $4.7 billion, and opines that Boeing's move signals "a renewed focus on quality and supply chain stability" as Boeing "addresses lingering concerns surrounding its 737 program." Spirit's recent struggles with quality control and production delays have had a fallout effect for Boeing... By integrating Spirit's operations, Boeing can implement more stringent oversight and ensure consistent manufacturing processes. This move is a direct response to past quality lapses that have plagued the company and damaged its reputation. Beyond quality control, the acquisition also offers Boeing greater control over its supply chain. By bringing a key supplier in-house, Boeing can streamline production, improve coordination, and reduce the risk of future disruptions... Spirit AeroSystems also supplies parts to Airbus, Boeing's main competitor. To address this, a separate agreement is being negotiated for Airbus to acquire Spirit's Airbus-related business. This strategic move ensures that Airbus maintains control over its own supply chain and prevents Boeing from gaining undue influence over its competitor's production. Meanwhile, the vice president leading Boeing's Starliner spacecraft unit "has left his role in the program and been replaced by the company's International Space Station program manager, John Mulholland," Reuters reports, citing a Boeing spokesperson. In its first test mission last summer flying astronauts, Starliner was forced by NASA to leave its crew aboard the ISS and return empty in September over problems with its propulsion system. A panel of senior NASA officials in August had voted to have a Crew Dragon capsule from Elon Musk's SpaceX bring them back instead, deeming Starliner too risky for the astronauts. Paul Hill, a veteran NASA flight director and member of the agency's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said during a quarterly panel meeting on Thursday that NASA and Boeing continue to investigate Starliner's propulsion system. A Boeing spokesperson said on Thursday that the company and NASA have not yet determined what Starliner's next mission will look like, such as whether it will need to repeat its crewed flight test before receiving NASA certification for routine flights.

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Just three hours ago, OpenAI made a surprise announcement to their 3.9 million followers on X.com. "Live from Tokyo," they'd be livestreaming... something. Their description of the event was just two words. "Deep Research" UPDATE: The stream has begun, and it's about OpenAI's next "agent-ic offering". ("OpenAI cares about agents because we believe they're going to transform knowlege work...") "We're introducing a capability called Deep Research... a model that does multi-step research. It discovers content, it synthesizes content, and it reasons about this content." It even asks "clarifying" questions to your prompt to make sure its multi-step research stays on track. Deep Research will be launching in ChatGPT Pro later today, rolling out into other OpenAI products... And OpenAI's site now has an "Introducing Deep Research" page. Its official description? "An agent that uses reasoning to synthesize large amounts of online information and complete multi-step research tasks for you. Available to Pro users today, Plus and Team next." Before the livestream began, X.com users shared their reactions to the coming announcement: "It's like DeepSeek, but cleaner" "Deep do do if things don't work out" "Live from Tokyo? Hope this research includes the secret to waking up early!" "Stop trying, we don't trust u" But one X.com user had presciently pointed out OpenAI has used the phrase "deep research" before. In July of 2024, Reuters reported on internal documentation (confirmed with "a person familiar with the matter") code-named "Strawberry" which suggested OpenAI was working on "human-like reasoning skills." How Strawberry works is a tightly kept secret even within OpenAI, the person said. The document describes a project that uses Strawberry models with the aim of enabling the company's AI to not just generate answers to queries but to plan ahead enough to navigate the internet autonomously and reliably to perform what OpenAI terms "deep research," according to the source. This is something that has eluded AI models to date, according to interviews with more than a dozen AI researchers. Asked about Strawberry and the details reported in this story, an OpenAI company spokesperson said in a statement: "We want our AI models to see and understand the world more like we do. Continuous research into new AI capabilities is a common practice in the industry, with a shared belief that these systems will improve in reasoning over time." The spokesperson did not directly address questions about Strawberry. The Strawberry project was formerly known as Q*, which Reuters reported last year was already seen inside the company as a breakthrough... OpenAI hopes the innovation will improve its AI models' reasoning capabilities dramatically, the person familiar with it said, adding that Strawberry involves a specialized way of processing an AI model after it has been pre-trained on very large datasets. Researchers Reuters interviewed say that reasoning is key to AI achieving human or super-human-level intelligence... OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier this year that in AI "the most important areas of progress will be around reasoning ability.

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An anonymous reader shared this post from the blog OMG Ubuntu Want to find out if the text you're reading online was written by an real human or spat out by a large language model trying to sound like one? Mozilla's Fakespot Deepfake Detector Firefox add-on may help give you an indication. Similar to online AI detector tools, the add-on can analyse text (of 32 words or more) to identify patterns, traits, and tells common in AI generated or manipulated text. It uses Mozilla's proprietary ApolloDFT engine and a set of open-source detection models. But unlike some tools, Mozilla's Fakespot Deepfake Detector browser extension is free to use, does not require a signup, nor an app download. "After installing the extension, it is simple to highlight any text online and request an instant analysis. Our Detector will tell you right away if the words are likely to be written by a human or if they show AI patterns," Mozilla says. Fakespot, acquired by Mozilla in 2023, is best known for its fake product review detection tool which grades user-submitted reviews left on online shopping sites. Mozilla is now expanding the use of Fakespot's AI tech to cover other kinds of online content. At present, Mozilla's Fakespot Deepfake Detector only works with highlighted text on websites but the company says it image and video analysis is planned for the future. The Fakespot web site will also analyze the reviews on any product-listing pages if you paste in its URL.

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"Stakeholders must be included" throughout an agile project "to ensure the evolving deliverables meet their expectations," according to an article this week in Communications of the ACM. But long-time Slashdot reader theodp complains it's a "gushing how-to-make-Agile-even-better opinion piece." Like other pieces by Agile advocates, it's long on accolades for Agile, but short on hard evidence justifying why exactly Agile project management "has emerged as a critical component for firms looking to improve project delivery speed and flexibility" and the use of Agile approaches is being expanded across other departments beyond software development. Indeed, among the three examples of success offered in the piece to "highlight the effectiveness of agile methods in navigating complex stakeholder dynamics and achieving project success" is Atlassian's use of agile practices to market and develop its products, many of which are coincidentally designed to support Agile practices and teams (including Jira). How meta. Citing "recent studies," the piece concludes its call for stakeholder engagement by noting that "59% of organizations measure Agile success by customer or user satisfaction." But that is one of those metrics that can create perverse incentives. Empirical studies of user satisfaction and engagement have been published since the 1970's, and sadly one of the cruel lessons learned from them is that the easiest path to having satisfied users is to avoid working on difficult problems. Keep that in mind when you ponder why difficult user stories seem to languish forever in the Kanban and Scrum Board "Ice Box" column, while the "Complete" column is filled with low-hanging fruit. Sometimes success does come easy! So, are you in the Agile-is-Heaven or Agile-is-Hell camp?

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Tom's Hardware reports: Facebook's heavy-handed censorship of Linux groups and topics was "in error," the social media juggernaut has admitted. Responding to reports earlier this week, sparked by the curious censorship of the eminently wholesome DistroWatch, Facebook contacted PCMag to say that it had made a mistake and that the underlying issue had been rectified. "This enforcement was in error and has since been addressed. Discussions of Linux are allowed on our services," said a Meta rep to PCMag. That is the full extent of the statement reproduced by the source... Copenhagen-hosted DistroWatch says it has appealed against the Community Standards-triggered ban shortly after it noticed it was in effect (January 19). PCMag received the Facebook admission of error on January 28. The latest statement from DistroWatch, which now prefers posting on Mastodon, indicates that Facebook has lifted the DistroWatch links ban. More details from PCMag: Meta didn't say what caused the crackdown in the first place. But the company has been revamping some of its content moderation and plans to replace its fact-checking methodology with a user-driven Community Notes, similar to X. "We're also going to change how we enforce our policies to reduce the kind of mistakes that account for the vast majority of the censorship on our platforms," the company said earlier this month, in another irony. "Up until now, we have been using automated systems to scan for all policy violations, but this has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being censored that shouldn't have been," Meta added in the same post.

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An aircraft carrier in the U.S. Navy tested "vastly increased" levels of internet connectivity, reports the defense-news web site TWZ, callling it "a game-changer for what a ship, and its sailors, can do while at sea." The F-35 Joint Strike Fighters assigned to the carrier offer a case in point for what more shipboard bandwidth — provided by commercial providers like Starlink and OneWeb — can mean at the tactical level. Jets with the embarked Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 314 took on critical mission data file updates in record time last fall due to the carrier's internet innovations, a capability that is slated to expand across the fleet. "This file offers intelligence updates and design enhancements that enable pilots to identify and counter threats in specific operational environments," the Navy said in an October release announcing the feat. "The update incorporated more than 100 intelligence changes and multiple design improvements, significantly enhancing the aircraft's survivability and lethality...." [Capt. Kevin White, then the Lincoln's combat systems officer] noted how the F-35 "eats and breathes data daily," and it has to be shared with commands ashore. The connectivity innovations he's pioneered will enable such data transfers, which will only grow more complex over time. "If you can't get the data onboard, you're probably going to be at a loss," White said. "So large file transfer capability increases combat readiness...." When the system was on, it provided not only mission benefits, but benefits to the hard-working Lincoln crew as well, which was at sea for 107 days at one point with no port calls [Capt. Pete "Repete" Riebe, told WEST conference attendees]... White said the average age of an embarked Lincoln sailor was 20.8, and Riebe noted that to attract young people into service, the Navy needs to recognize the innate connection they have to their devices. "The next generation of sailors grew up with a cell phone in their hand, and they are uncomfortable without it," Riebe said. "I don't necessarily like that, but that's reality, and if we want to compete for the best folks coming into the Navy, we need to offer them bandwidth at sea." Having better connectivity also helped with the ship's administrative functions, Riebe said, making medical, dental and other work far easier than they have been in the past... A sailor who can FaceTime with his family back home carries less non-Navy stress with them as they focus on the life-or-death duties at hand, White said... This beefed-up bandwidth allowed 38 sailors to witness the birth of their child, while others were able to watch their kids' sporting events, White said. Several crew members pursued doctorate and master's degrees while deployed due to better internet, while others were able to deal with personal or legal issues they had left behind back home. One officer was able to commission his wife remotely from the ship... On the operational side, from "the most desolate waters," Lincoln used its bandwidth to connect with a command in Norfolk, which undertook the ship's annual cybersecurity scans "from halfway around the world," White said... Taxpayer dollars can also be saved if a ship isn't paying for WiFi access while in port, White noted, and the crew was able to start getting to know Italian allies online before an exercise, enhancing the personal aspects of such partnerships. More bandwidth also means more onboard training, meaning some sailors who don't have to leave to go to the school house, and sailors were able to get answers to maintenance questions from ashore commands faster as well. "Just by being able to have more reliable access to support resources, we definitely become more effective at maintenance," White said. Every day the aircraft carrier averaged four to eight terabytes of transferred data, according to the article (with a team of two full-time system administrators managing 7,000 IP addresses), and ultimately saw 780 terabytes of data transferred over five-and-a-half months. The article notes it's part of the Navy's larger "Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore" (SEA2) program to provide all its warships with high-bandwidth connectivity around the world. The program "involves moving some communications aspects away from proprietary Defense Department satellites, while leaning on commercial satellite constellations and even cellular providers to keep ships more connected at sea for both personal and tactical uses." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the article.

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Honda calls it their "second founding," as the company "continues to target 100% electric vehicle sales by 2040, and to have 'zero environmental impact' by 2050," writes Green Car Reports. "It's previously projected 40% EV sales in North America by 2030... " Half of the Honda Accords sold in America are already electric, — but Honda "has admitted that it's hard to predict the trajectory of where the mix will be on the way to fully electric." So... To reconcile all this, it's prepared by committing to a new template for making both EVs and gasoline models, all on the same production line. This sea change in how it makes vehicles could keep its oldest U.S. assembly plant, its Marysville, Ohio, facility that opened in 1982, humming at capacity, no matter what the market presents. As Honda confirmed last April, Marysville will truly get the automaker to the point of EV mass production in North America, with a big asterisk. It has the capability to make hundreds of EVs per day, or many hundreds of gasoline models — depending on demand. Marysville is one of four facilities set to make up what Honda is calling its Ohio EV Hub — including the Anna Engine Plant and East Liberty Auto Plant, all within 50 miles of each other, and a joint-venture battery plant between Honda and LG Energy solution in nearby Jeffersonville, Ohio. Battery plant aside, Honda says it encompasses more than a $1 billion investment in the three facilities, in redesigning the manufacturing process around being able to make ICE, hybrid, and EV models all on the same production line. The investment in the Ohio facilities marks the global debut of changes in the way it builds vehicles, with expertise set to be shared across North America. And, according to Honda, it's aiming to set a global standard for Honda EV production. The article explains that Honda "created a series of sub-assembly lines that could handle all the differences in the way an EV is assembled versus the way a gasoline or hybrid vehicle is assembled." And CNBC reports that Honda's Ohio project includes "several new manufacturing processes and techniques to lower emissions and waste, including using a special form of structural aluminum for the EV battery packs that can be recycled and reused." Bob Schwyn, senior vice president of Honda Development and Manufacturing of America, describes it as part of Honda's "strategies to recapture our products at end-of-life and then recycle or reuse 100% of the materials, especially finite materials for EV batteries, to essentially make new Hondas out of old Hondas."

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"iPhone devices are now eligible to test SpaceX-owned Starlink's direct-to-cell capability," Reuters reported this week, citing an announcement from T-Mobile: T-Mobile and Elon Musk's SpaceX are currently testing the Starlink cell network on a trial basis after receiving approval from the Federal Communications Commission in November last year. The trial offers 'text via satellite', while voice and data features will be added in the future, according to the T-Mobile website. T-Mobile initially only listed a few Android smartphones as eligible devices to test the network, but has now added iPhone devices with the latest iOS 18.3 software update. The next day stock prices fell for several direct-to-smartphone satellite companies, reports SpaceNews: Shares in Globalstar, which enables connectivity beyond the reach of cellular towers on the latest iPhones via a far-reaching partnership with Apple, closed down nearly 18% the following day. Constellation developer AST SpaceMobile slipped 12%. Canada's MDA, which is building at least 17 satellites for Globalstar after Apple agreed to cover most of the costs to replenish the constellation, also saw its shares fall more than 9%... "Combined, today's price action in Globalstar and satellite manufacturer MDA suggest a real investor fear that SpaceX could disintermediate the Apple-Globalstar partnership," said Adam Rhodes, a senior telecoms analyst at Octus. "However, it appears to us that there is room for both services. Based on the information we have seen, we do not anticipate that Apple views the T-Mobile-Starlink service as a replacement for the Globalstar MSS network, but rather it is choosing to enable the added feature on its T-Mobile phones...." B. Riley analyst Mike Crawford noted that Apple's two binding contracts with Globalstar extend well into the next decade, ensuring both capital expenditure (capex) and recurring service revenues. Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the news.

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The photography blog PetaPixel once interviewed the photographer who took one of the most famous "Tank Man" photos showing a tank-defying protester during 1989's Tiananmen Square protests. But this week PetaPixel reported... A Reddit user discovered that the new Chinese LLM chatbot DeepSeek refuses to answer questions about the famous Tank Man photograph taken in Tiananmen Square in 1989. PetaPixel confirmed that DeepSeek does censor the topic. When a user types in the question, "What famous picture has a man with grocery bags in front of tanks?" The app begins to answer the questions but then cuts itself off. DeepSeek starts writing: "The famous picture you're referring to is known as "Tank Man" or "The Unknown Rebel." It was taken on June 5, 1989, during the Tiananmen..." before a message abruptly appears reading "Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let's talk about something else." Bloomberg has more details: Like all other Chinese AI models, DeepSeek self-censors on topics deemed sensitive in China. It deflects queries about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests or geopolitically fraught questions such as the possibility of China invading Taiwan. In tests, the DeepSeek bot is capable of giving detailed responses about political figures like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but declines to do so about Chinese President Xi Jinping.

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In 2023, Microsoft began including a free VPN feature in its "Microsoft Defender" security app for all Microsoft 365 subscribers ("Personal" and "Family"). Originally Microsoft had "called it a privacy protection feature," writes the blog Windows Central, "designed to let you access sensitive data on the web via a VPN tunnel." But.... Unfortunately, Microsoft has now announced that it's killing the feature later this month, only a couple of years after it first debuted... To add insult to injury, this announcement comes just days after Microsoft increased subscription prices across the board. Both Personal and Family subscriptions went up by three dollars a month, which the company says is the first price hike Microsoft 365 has seen in over a decade. The increased price does now include Microsoft 365 Copilot, which adds AI features to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and others. However, it also comes with the removal of the free VPN in Microsoft Defender, which I've found to be much more useful so far.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Scientists have found that using seismometers is a new and inexpensive method to detect falling space junk, which can cause damage on impact and carry toxic materials — and may someday turn deadly... It's not an easy task to track large hunks of falling metal everywhere in the world. Ground-based radar can detect falling objects, but it doesn't cover much of the world or is often classified data, said Ben Fernando [a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University who is leading this research]. The other option is through optical instruments, such as doorbell cameras, but the information on the time, size and speed can be limited. Instead, Fernando turned to seismology data. Stations located around the world live-stream data, which can be easily downloaded. Seismometers have been used to track meteors in the sky for over a century, but he said this is the first time he's aware of its use for tracking space debris. Stations located around the world live-stream data, which can be easily downloaded. Seismometers have been used to track meteors in the sky for over a century, but he said this is the first time he's aware of its use for tracking space debris. Fernando first tested the idea to track the controlled reentry of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission in September 2023, which brought back material from the asteroid Bennu. He set up seismometers along the capsule's path in the landing spot in Utah and measured its sonic boom. "It's a really good way of monitoring what's coming in, how often it's coming in, how big the things hitting the Earth are," said Fernando, who presented his results at the American Geophysical Union conference in December... "The shockwave deforms the ground around the seismometer," said Fernando. "It also keeps ringing for a lot longer because all of that energy is bouncing around in the soil...." [H]e said an automated system could help detect these objects within moments of it appearing on the stations. In addition to detecting an event, the seismometers can help locate where any debris may have fallen. Tracking debris is important because some space debris can contain toxic materials that can harm the surrounding environment. The article notes reports of the uncontrolled reentry into Earth's atmosphere of at least 951 objects larger than one square meter from 2010 to 2022. "On average, objects heavier than 1,000 pounds came down about every 8 days... In fact, the threat of getting hit by uncontrolled orbital reentries has increased by a factor of four from 2010 to 2023, said Luciano Anselmo, who published a study assessing the risk."

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Friday TechCrunch reported that OpenAI "used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView to create a test for measuring the persuasive abilities of its AI reasoning models." The company revealed this in a system card — a document outlining how an AI system works — that was released along with its new "reasoning" model, o3-mini, on Friday.... OpenAI says it collects user posts from r/ChangeMyView and asks its AI models to write replies, in a closed environment, that would change the Reddit user's mind on a subject. The company then shows the responses to testers, who assess how persuasive the argument is, and finally OpenAI compares the AI models' responses to human replies for that same post. The ChatGPT-maker has a content-licensing deal with Reddit that allows OpenAI to train on posts from Reddit users and display these posts within its products. We don't know what OpenAI pays for this content, but Google reportedly pays Reddit $60 million a year under a similar deal. However, OpenAI tells TechCrunch the ChangeMyView-based evaluation is unrelated to its Reddit deal. It's unclear how OpenAI accessed the subreddit's data, and the company says it has no plans to release this evaluation to the public... The goal for OpenAI is not to create hyper-persuasive AI models but instead to ensure AI models don't get too persuasive. Reasoning models have become quite good at persuasion and deception, so OpenAI has developed new evaluations and safeguards to address it. Reddit's "ChangeMyView" subreddit has 3.8 million human subscribers, making it a valuable source of real human interactions, according to the article. And it adds one more telling anecdote. "Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The Verge last year that Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity refused to negotiate with him and said it's been 'a real pain in the ass to block these companies.'"

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Bill Gates' blog has been updated with short videos about his upcoming book, including one about how his school ended up with an ASR-33 teletype that could connect their Seattle classroom to a computer in California. "The teachers faded away pretty quickly," Gates adds, "But about six of us stayed hardcore. One was Paul Allen..." — the future co-founder of Microsoft. And the experience clearly meant a lot to Gates. "Microsoft just never would've happened without Paul — and this teletype room." In a longer post thanking his "brilliant" teachers, Gates calls his teletype experience "an encounter that would shape my entire future" and "opened up a whole new world for me." Gates also thanks World War II Navy pilot and Boeing engineer Bill Dougall, who "was instrumental in bringing computer access to our school, something he and other faculty members pushed for after taking a summer computer class... The fascinating thing about Mr. Dougall was that he didn't actually know much about programming; he exhausted his knowledge within a week. But he had the vision to know it was important and the trust to let us students figure it out." Gates shared a similar memory about the computer-room's 20-something overseer Fred Wright, who "intuitively understood that the best way to get students to learn was to let us explore on our own terms. There was no sign-up sheet, no locked door, no formal instruction." Instead, Mr. Wright let us figure things out ourselves and trusted that, without his guidance, we'd have to get creative... Some of the other teachers argued for tighter regulations, worried about what we might be doing in there unsupervised. But even though Mr. Wright occasionally popped in to break up a squabble or listen as someone explained their latest program, for the most part he defended our autonomy... Mr. Wright gave us something invaluable: the space to discover our own potential. Any Slashdot readers have a similarly impactful experience? Share your own thoughts and memories in the comments. Do you remember your high school's computer room?

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On January 24th Brooklyn blogger Jeffrey Emanuel made the case for shorting NVIDIA, remembers MarketWatch, "due to a number of shifting tides in the AI world, including the emergence of a China-based company called DeepSeek." He published his 12,000-word post "on his personal blog and then shared it with the Value Investors Club website and across Reddit, X and other platforms." The next day he saw 35 people read his post. "But then the post started to go viral..." Well-known venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya shared Emanuel's post on Nvidia's short case with his 1.8 million X followers. Successful early stage investor Naval Ravikant shared the post with his 2.6 million followers... Morgan Brown, a vice president of product and growth at Dropbox, pointed to it in a thread that was viewed over 13 million times. Emanuel's own X post got nearly half a million views. He also quickly gained about 13,000 followers on the platform, going from about 2,000 to more than 15,000 followers... [Emanuel] pointed to the fact that so many people in San Jose were reading his blog post. He theorized that many of them were Nvidia employees with thousands — or even millions — of dollars worth of Nvidia stock tied up in employee stock options. With that much money in a single asset, Emanuel speculated that many were already debating whether to hold the stock or sell it to lock in profits. He believes his blog post helped convince some of them to sell. "A lot of the sell pressure you saw on Monday morning wasn't necessarily what you might think. I believe a fair amount of that was from shares that had never been active because they had been sitting in workplace.schwab.com accounts..." Emanuel stresses he's "the most bullish on AI," with MarketWatch emphasizing that "while the points Emanuel laid out in his blog post might be bearish for Nvidia, he still thinks they paint a positive future for AI." Nevertheless, Monday NVIDIA's market capitalization dropped $600 billion, which MarketWatch calls "the largest single-day market-cap drop to date for any company." What countless Wall Street firms and investment analysts had seemingly missed was being pointed out by some guy in his apartment.... Matt Levine, the prominent Bloomberg News financial columnist, noted the online chatter that claimed Emanuel's post "was an important catalyst" for the stock-market selloff and said it was a "candidate for the most impactful short research report ever." Emanuel spent the rest of the week booked solid as hedge funds paid him $1,000 per hour to speak on the phone and give his take on Nvidia and AI... Emanuel wrote that the industry may be running low on quality data to train that AI — that is, a potential "data wall" is looming that could slow down AI scaling and reduce some of that need for training resources... Some of these companies, like Alphabet, have also been investing in building out their own semiconductor chips. For a while, Nvidia's hardware has been the best for training AI, but that might not be the case forever as more companies, such as Cerebras, build better hardware. And other GPU makers like AMD are updating their drivers software to be more competitive with Nvidia... Add all these things together — unsustainable spending and data-center building, less training data to work with, better competing hardware and more efficient AI — and you get a future where it's harder to imagine Nvidia's customers spending as much as they currently are on Nvidia hardware... "If you know that a company will only earn supersized returns for a couple years, you don't apply a multiple. You certainly don't put a 30-times multiple," Emanuel told MarketWatch. The article notes that DeepSeek "is open-source and has been publishing technical papers out in the open for the past few months... The $5.6 million training-cost statistic that many investors cited for sparking the DeepSeek market panic was actually revealed in the V3 technical paper published on Dec. 26."

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Wednesday the Linux Foundation wrote that both "regulatory compliance" and "increased cybersecurity risk" were "creating burdens...that must be met" for open source communities. And so, as Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes, "the Linux Foundation has released a comprehensive guide to help open source developers navigate the complex landscape of the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions..." These rules, aimed at achieving economic, foreign policy, and national security goals, apply to various interactions, including those in the open source community. The total Sanctions Programs and Country list amounts to over 17 thousand entries ranging from individuals to terrorist organizations to countries. If that rings a bell, it's because, in October 2024, the Linux kernel developers ran right into this issue. The Linux kernel's leadership, including Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable Linux kernel maintainer, and Linus Torvalds, Linux's founder, announced that eleven Russian kernel developers had been removed from their roles working on the Linux kernel. Why? Because, as Torvalds said, of "Russian sanctions." This, he added, in a Linux kernel mailing list (LKML) message was because "the 'various compliance requirements' are not just a US thing." For developers, this means exercising caution about who they interact with and where their contributions originate. The sanctions target specific countries, regions, and individuals or organizations, many of which are listed on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) List... Most OFAC sanctions are exempted for "informational materials," which generally include open source code. However, this only applies to existing code and not to requests for new code or modifications. So, for example, working with a Russian developer on a code patch could land you in hot water... While reviewing unsolicited patches from contributors in sanctioned regions is generally acceptable, actively engaging them in discussions or improvements could cross legal boundaries... Developers are warned to be cautious of sanctioned entities attempting to contribute indirectly through third parties or developers acting "individually." Countries currently sanctioned include: Russia Cuba Iran North Korea Syria The following regions of Ukraine: Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions of the Ukraine. The Linux Foundation had written that the OFAC sanctions rules are "strict liability" rules, "which means it does not matter whether you know about them or not. Violating these rules can lead to serious penalties, so it's important to understand how they might affect your open source work." But J. Vaughan-Nichols offers this quote from open source licensing attorney Heather Meeker. "Let's be honest: Smaller companies usually ignore regulations like this because they just don't have the resources to analyze them, and a government usually ignores smaller companies because it doesn't have the resources to enforce against them. Big companies that are on the radar need specialized counsel."

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