America's Vice President "expressed confidence Friday that a deal to sell TikTok and keep the social media app running in the U.S. would largely be in place by an April deadline," reports NBC News. (Specifically the Vice President said "There will almost certainly be a high-level agreement that I think satisfies our national security concerns, allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise.") The article adds that TikTok owner ByteDance "has not publicly confirmed negotiations with any potential U.S. buyer, nor has it confirmed its willingness to sell TikTok to a U.S. bidder." But ByteDance "favors" a deal with Oracle, according to an X.com post on Thursday from tech-publication The Information. And today Politico adds that Oracle "is accelerating talks with the White House on a deal to run TikTok, though significant concerns remain about what role the app's Chinese founders will play in its ongoing U.S. operation, according to three people familiar with the discussions." [Oracle's discussions are happening] amid ongoing warnings from congressional Republicans and other China hawks that any new ownership deal — if it keeps TikTok's underlying technology in Chinese hands — could be only a surface-level fix to the security concerns that led to last year's sweeping bipartisan ban of the app. Key lawmakers, including concerned Republicans, are bringing in Oracle this week to discuss the possible deal and rising national security concerns, according to four people familiar with the meetings. One of the three people familiar with the discussions with Oracle said the deal would essentially require the U.S. government to depend on Oracle to oversee the data of American users and ensure the Chinese government doesn't have a backdoor to it — a promise the person warned would be impossible to keep. "If the Oracle deal moves forward, you still have this [algorithm] controlled by the Chinese...." The data security company HaystackID, which serves as independent security inspectors for TikTok U.S., said in February that it has found no indications of internal or external malicious activity — nor has it identified any protected U.S. user data that has been shared with China.

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After Meta convinced an arbitrator to temporarily prevent a whistleblower from promoting their book about the company (titled: Careless People), the book climbed to the top of Amazon's best-seller list. And the book's publisher Macmillan released a defiant statement that "The arbitration order has no impact on Macmillan... We will absolutely continue to support and promote it." (They added that they were "appalled by Meta's tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement.") Saturday the controversy was even covered by Rolling Stone: [Whistleblower Sarah] Wynn-Williams is a diplomat, policy expert, and international lawyer, with previous roles including serving as the Chief Negotiator for the United Nations on biosafety liability, according to her bio on the World Economic Forum... Since the book's announcement, Meta has forcefully responded to the book's allegations in a statement... "Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment. Since then, she has been paid by anti-Facebook activists and this is simply a continuation of that work. Whistleblower status protects communications to the government, not disgruntled activists trying to sell books." But the negative coverage continues, with the Observer Sunday highlighting it as their Book of the Week. "This account of working life at Mark Zuckerberg's tech giant organisation describes a 'diabolical cult' able to swing elections and profit at the expense of the world's vulnerable..." Though ironically Wynn-Williams started their career with optimism about Facebook's role in the app internet.org. . "Upon witnessing how the nascent Facebook kept Kiwis connected in the aftermath of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, she believed that Mark Zuckerberg's company could make a difference — but in a good way — to social bonds, and that she could be part of that utopian project... What internet.org involves for countries that adopt it is a Facebook-controlled monopoly of access to the internet, whereby to get online at all you have to log in to a Facebook account. When the scales fall from Wynn-Williams's eyes she realises there is nothing morally worthwhile in Zuckerberg's initiative, nothing empowering to the most deprived of global citizens, but rather his tool involves "delivering a crap version of the internet to two-thirds of the world". But Facebook's impact in the developing world proves worse than crap. In Myanmar, as Wynn-Williams recounts at the end of the book, Facebook facilitated the military junta to post hate speech, thereby fomenting sexual violence and attempted genocide of the country's Muslim minority. "Myanmar," she writes with a lapsed believer's rue, "would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived." And what is true of Myanmar, you can't help but reflect, applies globally... "Myanmar is where Wynn-Williams thinks the 'carelessness' of Facebook is most egregious," writes the Sunday Times: In 2018, UN human rights experts said Facebook had helped spread hate speech against Rohingya Muslims, about 25,000 of whom were slaughtered by the Burmese military and nationalists. Facebook is so ubiquitous in Myanmar, Wynn-Williams points out, that people think it is the entire internet. "It's no surprise that the worst outcome happened in the place that had the most extreme take-up of Facebook." Meta admits it was "too slow to act" on abuse in its Myanmar services.... After Wynn-Williams left Facebook, she worked on an international AI initiative, and says she wants the world to learn from the mistakes we made with social media, so that we fare better in the next technological revolution. "AI is being integrated into weapons," she explains. "We can't just blindly wander into this next era. You think social media has turned out with some issues? This is on another level."

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"The number of discrete GPU developers from the U.S. and Western Europe shrank to three companies in 2025," notes Tom's Hardware, "from around 10 in 2000." (Nvidia, AMD, and Intel...) No company in the recent years — at least outside of China — was bold enough to engage into competition against these three contenders, so the very emergence of Bolt Graphics seems like a breakthrough. However, the major focuses of Bolt's Zeus are high-quality rendering for movie and scientific industries as well as high-performance supercomputer simulations. If Zeus delivers on its promises, it could establish itself as a serious alternative for scientific computing, path tracing, and offline rendering. But without strong software support, it risks struggling against dominant market leaders. This week the Sunnyvale, California-based startup introduced its Zeus GPU platform designed for gaming, rendering, and supercomputer simulations, according to the article. "The company says that its Zeus GPU not only supports features like upgradeable memory and built-in Ethernet interfaces, but it can also beat Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 by around 10 times in path tracing workloads, according to slide published by technology news site ServeTheHome." There is one catch: Zeus can only beat the RTX 5090 GPU in path tracing and FP64 compute workloads. It's not clear how well it will handle traditional rendering techniques, as that was less of a focus. In speaking with Bolt Graphics, the card does support rasterization, but there was less emphasis on that aspect of the GPU, and it may struggle to compete with the best graphics cards when it comes to gaming. And when it comes to data center options like Nvidia's Blackwell B200, it's an entirely different matter. Unlike GPUs from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia that rely on proprietary instruction set architectures, Bolt's Zeus relies on the open-source RISC-V ISA, according to the published slides. The Zeus core relies on an open-source out-of-order general-purpose RVA23 scalar core mated with FP64 ALUs and the RVV 1.0 (RISC-V Vector Extension Version 1.0) that can handle 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit data types as well as Bolt's additional proprietary extensions designed for acceleration of scientific workloads... Like many processors these days, Zeus relies on a multi-chiplet design... Unlike high-end GPUs that prioritize bandwidth, Bolt is evidently focusing on greater memory size to handle larger datasets for rendering and simulations. Also, built-in 400GbE and 800GbE ports to enable faster data transfer across networked GPUs indicates the data center focus of Zeus. High-quality rendering, real-time path tracing, and compute are key focus areas for Zeus. As a result, even the entry-level Zeus 1c26-32 offers significantly higher FP64 compute performance than Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 — up to 5 TFLOPS vs. 1.6 TFLOPS — and considerably higher path tracing performance: 77 Gigarays vs. 32 Gigarays. Zeus also features a larger on-chip cache than Nvidia's flagship — up to 128MB vs. 96MB — and lower power consumption of 120W vs. 575W, making it more efficient for simulations, path tracing, and offline rendering. However, the RTX 5090 dominates in AI workloads with its 105 FP16 TFLOPS and 1,637 INT8 TFLOPS compared to the 10 FP16 TFLOPS and 614 INT8 TFLOPS offered by a single-chiplet Zeus... The article emphasizes that Zeus "is only running in simulation right now... Bolt Graphics says that the first developer kits will be available in late 2025, with full production set for late 2026." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader arvn for sharing the news.

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Slashdot reader rikfarrow summarizes an article they wrote for Usenix.org about the Open Source Python compiler Codon: In 2023 I tried out Codon. At the time I had difficulty compiling the scripts I most commonly used, but was excited by the prospect. Python is essentially single threaded and checks the shape (type) of each variable as it interprets scripts. Codon fixes types and compiles Python into compact, executable binaries that execute much faster. Several things have changed with their latest release: I have successful compiles, the committers have added a compiled version of NumPy (high performance math algorithms), and changed their open source license to Apache 2. "The other big news is that Exaloop, the company that is behind Codon, has changed their license to Apache 2..." according to the article, so "commercial use and derivations of Codon are now permitted without licensing."

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A ransomware-as-a-service variant called "Medusa" has claimed over 300 victims in "critical infrastructure sectors" (including medical), according to an joint alert from CISA, the FBI, and the Multi-State Information Sharing Analysis Center. And that alert reminds us that Medusa is a globe-spanning operation that recruits third-party affiliates to plant ransomware and negotiate with victims, notes the Register. "Even organizations that have good ransomware recovery regimes, meaning they don't need to unscramble encrypted data as they have good backups and fall-back plans, may consider paying to prevent the release of their stolen data, given the unpleasant consequences that follow information leaks. Medusa actors also set a deadline for victims to pay ransoms and provide a countdown timer that makes it plain when stolen info will be sprayed across the internet. If victims cough up $10,000 in cryptocurrency, the crims push the deadline forward by 24 hours. The advisory reveals one Medusa actor has taken things a step further. "FBI investigations identified that after paying the ransom, one victim was contacted by a separate Medusa actor who claimed the negotiator had stolen the ransom amount already paid," the advisory states. That separate actor then "requested half of the payment be made again to provide the 'true decryptor'," the advisory states, describing this incident as "potentially indicating a triple extortion scheme." The security groups' advisory stresses that they "do not encourage paying ransoms as payment does not guarantee victim files will be recovered. Furthermore, payment may also embolden adversaries to target additional organizations..." (But "Regardless of whether you or your organization have decided to pay the ransom, FBI, CISA, and MS-ISAC urge you to promptly report ransomware incidents...) Besides updating software and operating systems, the alert makes these recommendations for organizations: Require VPNs (or jump hosts) for remote network access Block remote access from unknown/untrusted origins, and disable unused ports Segment networks to help prevent the spread of ransomware Use a networking monitoring tool to spot and investigate abnormal activity — including lateral movement (using endpoint detection and response tools). Log all network traffic, and monitor it for unauthorized scanning and access attempts. Create recovery plans with encrypted offline backups of sensitive/proprietary data and servers Require multifactor authentication, use strong (and long) passwords, and "consider not requiring frequently recurring password changes, as these can weaken security." (Also audit access control following the principle of least privilege, and watch for new and/or unrecognized accounts.) Disable command-line and scripting activities and permissions.

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The Washington Post reports: Oceans last year reached their highest levels in three decades — with the rate of global sea level rise increasing around 35% higher than expected, according to a NASA-led analysis published Thursday... Last year's rate of average global sea level rise was 0.23 inches per year, higher than the expected 0.17 inches per year, NASA said in a news release. The rate of global sea level rise follows a trend of rapidly increasing rates over the past 30 years. From 1993 to 2023, the rate of global sea level rise doubled, increasing from 0.08 inches per year to 0.18 inches, another NASA-led study showed. Overall, the global sea level has climbed by 4 inches since 1993. More details from ABC News: Climate change was a major driver to an unexpected level of sea level rise in 2024, according to a new NASA analysis... The majority of the difference between predicted and actual sea level rise was attributed to thermal expansion — or the ocean waters expanding as they warm, researchers said. An unusual amount of ocean warming, combined with meltwater from land-based ice such as glaciers, led to the increase of sea level rise last year, according to NASA. About two-thirds of sea level rise in recent years has resulted from the melting of ice sheets and glaciers, with a third coming from thermal expansion, according to NASA. In 2024, those metrics flipped, with two-thirds of the rise attributed to expanding ocean water and one-third attributed to contributions from melting ice. "With 2024 as the warmest year on record, Earth's expanding oceans are following suit, reaching their highest levels in three decades," said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, head of physical oceanography programs and the Integrated Earth System Observatory at NASA... Human-amplified climate change is the primary cause for present-day rising sea levels, climate research shows.

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"A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit," reports the BBC, "in the Brazilian city of Belém." The highway will ease traffic into the city, which will host over 50,000 people at the conference this November: The state government touts the highway's "sustainable" credentials, but some locals and conservationists are outraged at the environmental impact... Along the partially built road, lush rainforest towers on either side — a reminder of what was once there. Logs are piled high in the cleared land which stretches more than 13km (8 miles) through the rainforest into Belém. Diggers and machines carve through the forest floor, paving over wetland to surface the road which will cut through a protected area... The road leaves two disconnected areas of protected forest. Scientists are concerned it will fragment the ecosystem and disrupt the movement of wildlife... The state government of Pará had touted the idea of this highway, known as Avenida Liberdade, as early as 2012, but it had repeatedly been shelved because of environmental concerns. Now a host of infrastructure projects have been resurrected or approved to prepare the city for the COP summit. But on the bright side, Adler Silveira, the state government's infrastructure secretary, said the highway would have wildlife crossings for animals to pass over, as well as climate-friendly bike lanes and solar-powered lighting...

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"Why can't we each have our own AI software that runs locally," asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM — and that doesn't steal the work of others. Imagine a powerful-but-locally-hosted LLM that "doesn't spy... and no one else owns it." We download it, from souce-code if you like, install it, if we want. And it assists: us... No one gate-keeps it. It's not out to get us... And this is important: because no one owns it, the AI software is ours and leaks no data anywhere — to no one, no company, for no political nor financial purpose. No one profits — but you! Their longer original submission also asks a series of related questions — like why can't we have software without AI? (Along with "Why is AMD stamping AI on local-processors?" and "Should AI be crowned the ultimate hype?") But this question seems to be at the heart of their concern. "What future will anyone have if anything they really wanted to do — could be mimicked and sold by the ill-gotten work of others...?" "Could local, open-source, AI software be the only answer to dishearten billionaire companies from taking and selling back to their customers — everything we have done? Could we not...instead — steal their dream?!" Share your own thoughts and answers in the comments. Where are the open-source, local-only AI solutions?

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"For the first time in history, a privately operated lunar lander has captured images of a total eclipse from the Moon's surface," reports Daily Galaxy. While the Athena lunar lander tipped over and ended its mission, elsewhere on the moon Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander "continues to beam home incredible imagery," writes Space.com, and since its landing on March 2 "has been sending us stunning photos and videos..." A new video of Blue Ghost's moon-side view captures the eerie red light on the moon (caused by sunlight refracting through the atmosphere over the edges of the earth). "Blue Ghost turns red!" Firefly writes on their mission updates page. A SpaceX photographer also captured the eclipse as it happened over a Falcon 9 rocket waiting to launch to the International Space Station, in a remarkable time-lapse photograph. And Space.com collects more interesting lunar-eclipse photos taken from around the world, including Appin, Scotland; Canberra, Australia; and Palm Springs, California...

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Long-time Slashdot reader BenFenner writes: For the third time in recent memory, CloudFlare has blocked large swaths of niche browsers and their users from accessing web sites that CloudFlare gate-keeps. In the past these issues have been resolved quickly (within a week) and apologies issued with promises to do better. (See 2024-03-11, 2024-07-08, and 2025-01-30.) This time around it has been over six weeks and CloudFlare has been unable or unwilling to fix the problem on their end, effectively stalling any progress on the matter with various tactics including asking browser developers to sign overarching NDAs. That last link is an update posted today by Pale Moon's main developer: Our current situation remains unchanged: CloudFlare is still blocking our access to websites through the challenges, and the captcha/turnstile continues to hang the browser until our watchdog terminates the hung script after which it reloads and hangs again after a short pause (but allowing users to close the tab in that pause, at least). To say that this upsets me is an understatement. Other than deliberate intent or absolute incompetence, I see no reason for this to endure. Neither of those options are very flattering for CloudFlare. I wish I had better news. In a comment, Slashdot reader BenFenner shares a list posted by Pale Moon's developer of reportedly affected browsers: Pale MoonBasiliskWaterfoxFalkonSeaMonkeyVarious Firefox ESR flavorsThorium (on some systems)Ungoogled ChromiumK-MeleonLibreWolfMyPal 68Otter browser Slashdot reader Z00L00K speculates that "this is some kind of anti-bot measure that fails. I suspect that the reason for them wanting a NDA to be signed is to prevent ways to circumvent the anti-bot measures..."

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Cities in Europe "are dramatically scaling back their relationship with the car," reports the Washington Post: They are removing parking spaces and creating dedicated bike lanes. They are installing cameras at the perimeter of urban centers and either charging the most-polluting vehicles or preventing them from entering. Some are going so far as to put entire neighborhoods off-limits to vehicles. In Norway, Oslo promotes "car-free livability." Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo touts the "end of car dependence." And while those ideas might sound radical to car-loving Americans, they are fast becoming the norm across the Atlantic, where 340 European cities and towns — home to more than 150 million people — have implemented some kind of restrictions on personal car usage... [V]irtually every major European city is imposing some kind of rule. Milan has a system similar to New York's, charging for access to the city core — while entirely banning older, highly polluting vehicles. London charges vehicles that don't meet emissions standards, in what it calls the "largest clean-air zone in the world." The programs are not just the purview of liberal Western Europe: Warsaw, Poland, and Sofia, Bulgaria, recently adopted similar schemes. Even little Italian villages have added vehicle restrictions to reinforce their historic feel. And the Netherlands just broke ground on a 12,000-person neighborhood that will be entirely car-free. The neighborhood, known as Merwede, will be connected by public transport to Utrecht, a medium-size city that — perhaps no surprise — has a low-emissions zone of its own... Perhaps the most elaborate and transformative effort has come in Paris, where Anne Hidalgo was elected mayor in 2014. Since then, Paris has banned the most-polluting vehicles from the city, eliminated 50,000 parking spaces and added hundreds of miles of bike lanes. It turned a bank of the Seine from a busy artery into a pedestrian zone, and closed off the famed Rue de Rivoli to traffic... Journeys by car in Paris have dropped by about 45 percent since 1990. The city has now become a source for striking before-and-after photos: of clogged streets that have transitioned into tree-lined areas where people can walk and play. In London government officials say inhalable particular matter has fallen, according to the article, while combustion-produced nitrogen dioxide "is 53% lower than it would have been without the restrictions."

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"SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said his Starship rocket will head to Mars by the end of next year," writes the BBC, "as the company investigates several recent explosions in flight tests." Human landings could begin as early as 2029 if initial missions go well, though "2031 was more likely", he added in a post on his social media platform X... The billionaire said in 2020 that he remained confident that his company would land humans on Mars six years later. In 2024, he said he would launch the first Starships to Mars in 2026, with plans to send crewed flights in four years. Musk has said that the coming Mars mission would carry the Tesla humanoid robot "Optimus", which was shown to the public last year.

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"Is everything we see around us is sealed within a black hole?" asks Space.com. Because here's the thing. The $10 billion James Webb Space telescope (in operation since 2022) "has found that the vast majority of deep space and, thus the early galaxies it has so far observed, are rotating in the same direction. While around two-thirds of galaxies spin clockwise, the other third rotates counter-clockwise." In a random universe, scientists would expect to find 50% of galaxies rotating one way, while the other 50% rotate the other way. This new research suggests there is a preferred direction for galactic rotation... "It is still not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations," team leader Lior Shamir, associate professor of computer science at the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering, said in a statement. "One explanation is that the universe was born rotating. "That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole. "But if the universe was indeed born rotating, it means that the existing theories about the cosmos are incomplete." Black hole cosmology, also known as "Schwarzschild cosmology," suggests that our observable universe might be the interior of a black hole itself within a larger parent universe. The idea was first introduced by theoretical physicist Raj Kumar Pathria and by mathematician I. J. Good. It presents the idea that the "Schwarzchild radius," better known as the "event horizon," (the boundary from within which nothing can escape a black hole, not even light) is also the horizon of the visible universe. The article cites a theory by Polish theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski of the University of New Haven that ultimately black holes don't compress indefinitely into a singularity. "The matter instead reaches a state of finite, extremely large density, stops collapsing, undergoes a bounce like a compressed spring, and starts rapidly expanding," Poplawski explained to Space.com... The scientist continued by adding that rapid recoil after such a big bounce could be what has led to our expanding universe, an event we now refer to as the Big Bang... "I think that the simplest explanation of the rotating universe is the universe was born in a rotating black hole." Team leader Shamir offers another theory: that we just need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe. (Which could also explain the difference in the expansion rates in the universe "and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself.")

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"Alphabet's Waymo autonomous vehicles are programmed to follow the rules of the road..." notes the Washington Post. But while the cars obey speed limits and properly use their turn signals — they also "routinely violate parking rules." Waymo vehicles driving themselves received 589 tickets for parking violations in 2024, according to records from San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Agency... The robots incurred $65,065 in fines for violations such as obstructing traffic, disobeying street cleaning restrictions and parking in prohibited areas... [Waymo is responsible for 0.05% of the city's fines, according to statistics from the article.] Parking violations are one of the few ways to quantify how often self-driving companies' vehicles break the rules of the road... Some parking violations, such as overstaying in a paid spot, cause inconvenience but do not directly endanger other people. Others increase the risk of crashes, said Michael Brooks, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety. Anytime a vehicle is obstructing the flow of traffic, other drivers might be forced to brake suddenly or change lanes, he said, creating risks for drivers, pedestrians or other road users... San Francisco transit operators lost 2 hours and 12 minutes of service time in 2024 because of Waymo vehicles blocking or colliding with transit vehicles, according to San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency records. Autonomous vehicles have obstructed firefighters responding to emergency scenes in San Francisco, triggering city officials to ask for tougher oversight from state regulators. The article adds that driverless Waymo vehicles in Los Angeles received 75 more tickets in 2024 — "with $543 in fines still outstanding, according to records from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation."

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Slashdot has run nearly a dozen stories about Michael Mann, one of America's most prominent climate scientists and a co-creator of the famous "hockey stick" graph of spiking temperatures. In 2012 Mann sued two bloggers for defamation — and last year Mann finally won more than $1 million, reports the Washington Post. "A jury found that two conservative commentators had defamed him by alleging that he was like a child molester in the way he had 'molested and tortured' climate data." But "Now, a year after that ruling, the case has taken a turn that leaves Mann in the position of the one who owes money." On Wednesday, a judge sanctioned Mann's legal team for "bad-faith trial misconduct" for overstating how much the scientist lost in potential grant funding as a result of reputational harm. The lawyers had shown jurors a chart that listed one grant amount Mann didn't get at $9.7 million, though in other testimony Mann said it was worth $112,000. And when comparing Mann's grant income before and after the negative commentary, the lawyers cited a disparity of $2.8 million, but an amended calculation pegged it at $2.37 million. The climate scientist's legal team said it was preparing to fight the setbacks in court. Peter J. Fontaine, one of Mann's attorneys, wrote in an email that Mann "believes that the court committed errors of fact and law and will pursue these matters further." Fontaine emphasized that the original decision — that Mann was defamed by the commentary — still stands. "We have reviewed the recent rulings by the D.C. Superior Court and are pleased to note that the court has upheld the jury's verdict," he said.

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"Cuba's power grid collapsed Friday night," reports CNN, "triggering a nationwide power outage and plunging its more than 10 million people into darkness." Video filmed by CNN in the capital Havana showed streets and buildings shrouded in total darkness, as people used electric torches to navigate the streets. By Saturday morning, the Cuban government officials said that "microsystems" — pockets of electricity — had been restored in some cities. However, it remains unclear when the island's power system would be fully online again and most people remained in the dark... It marks the latest in a series of failures on the Caribbean island struggling with creaking infrastructure, natural disasters and economic turmoil... For nearly a week in October, most of Cuba suffered near-total blackouts, the worst energy outages in decades. While Cubans are used to frequent power outages, to have another nationwide backcourt — the fourth in six months — was unsettling for many people who need electricity to cook and refrigerate food that otherwise spoils quickly in the tropical heat. "Many residents posted on online sites looking for propane, charcoal, and fuel for generators..."

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Tuesday Microsoft "surprised everyone," writes Neowin, "by announcing a new change that will radically improve TypeScript performance" — porting TypeScript to Go. InfoWorld writes that "The initiative promises dramatic improvements in editor startup speed, build times, and memory usage, making it easier to scale TypeScript to large code bases, Microsoft said." Microsoft's TypeScript team expects to be able to preview command-line type-checking in Go-based tsc by mid-2025, and to deliver a feature-complete Go implementation of TypeScript by the end of the year. [You can build and run the Go code now from Microsoft's new working repository.] Developers who use Go-based TypeScript in the Visual Studio Code editor will feel the increased speed in the editor, Microsoft said. The company promises an 8x improvement in project load times, instant comprehensive error listings across entire projects, and greater responsiveness for all language service operations including completion lists, quick information, go to definition, and find all references. The new TypeScript will also support more advanced refactoring and deeper insights that were previously too expensive to compute, the company said. Microsoft believes native Go implementations reduce build times by up to 10x, notes Neowin. But "Developers can expect TypeScript 6.0 to have some deprecations and breaking changes to support the upcoming Go-based version." Later this year, Microsoft will be releasing this new native Go implementation as TypeScript 7.0. The current JS-based TypeScript codebase will continue development into the 6.x series until TypeScript 7+ reaches sufficient maturity and adoption, since some projects may depend on certain API features, legacy configurations, or other things that are not supported by TypeScript 7+. TypeScript's original creator Anders Hejlsberg recorded an announcement video — and also shared his thoughts in a GitHub discussion titled simply... "Why Go?" The TypeScript compiler's move to Go was influenced by specific technical requirements, such as the need for structural compatibility with the existing JavaScript-based codebase, ease of memory management, and the ability to handle complex graph processing efficiently. After evaluating numerous languages and making multiple prototypes — including in C# — Go emerged as the optimal choice... Let's be real. Microsoft using Go to write a compiler for TypeScript wouldn't have been possible or conceivable in years past. However, over the last few decades, we've seen Microsoft's strong and ongoing commitment to open-source software, prioritizing developer productivity and community collaboration above all. Our goal is to empower developers with the best tools available, unencumbered by internal politics or narrow constraints. This freedom to choose the right tool for each specific job ultimately benefits the entire developer community, driving innovation, efficiency, and improved outcomes. And you can't argue with a 10x outcome! Hejlsberg also addressed their choice of Go in an online interview with the Michigan TypeScript meetup.

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"Wind and solar energy generated more electricity in the U.S. than coal for the first time last year," reports the Wall Street Journal, "according to analysis from clean-energy think tank Ember. "The two renewable energy sources accounted for 17% of the country's power mix while coal fell to a low of 15%, it said." Solar was the fastest-growing energy source, according to Ember's analysis of data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, increasing 27% from the year before, while wind rose 7%... Natural gas generation increased 3.3% in 2024, according to Ember, and remains by far the largest source of electricity in the U.S., accounting for 43% of the mix... California and Nevada both surpassed 30% annual share of solar in their electricity mix for the first time last year (32% and 30%, respectively). California's battery growth was key to its solar success. It installed 20% more battery capacity than it did solar capacity, which helped it transfer a significant share of its daytime solar to the evening. Texas installed more solar and battery capacity than even California. Yet the growth of solar was uneven — 28 states generated less than 5% of their electricity from solar in 2024, highlighting significant untapped potential — even before adding battery storage. The article includes this observation from Dave Jones, chief analyst at Ember. "The fall in battery costs is a gamechanger for how much solar the U.S. electricity grid could integrate in the near future." Electrek notes that "After being stagnant for 14 years, electricity demand started rising in recent years and saw a 3% increase in 2024, marking the fifth-highest level of rise this century..." Natural gas grew three times more than the decline in coal, increasing power sector CO2 emissions slightly (0.7%). Coal fell by the second smallest amount since 2014, as gas and clean energy growth met rising electricity demand, whereas historically, they have replaced coal. Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline. The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Broadband TV News: The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) urging the agency to establish a clear, industry-wide transition plan for the full deployment of Next Gen TV (ATSC 3.0). The proposal outlines a two-phased transition while modernizing regulatory requirements to support consumer access and innovation. [...] Under the plan, stations in the top 55 markets, covering 70% of the US population, would transition by February 2028, with all remaining full-power and Class A stations following in or before February 2030. The petition also calls for updates to FCC rules to ensure television reception devices support Next Gen TV, maintain existing MVPD carriage obligations and eliminate regulatory hurdles that could slow adoption. To clarify, ATSC 1.0 is the current standard for free over-the-air (OTA) TV. While ATSC 3.0 (also called NextGen TV) is its intended replacement, it's not backward-compatible, meaning consumers need new equipment to receive it. NAB's petition is to allow a complete shutdown of ATSC 1.0 to accelerate the transition to ATSC 3.0, meaning older TV setups relying on free OTA signals would stop working unless consumers upgrade their equipment. Their argument is that ATSC 3.0 adoption has been slow, and networks would benefit more from shifting away from OTA broadcasting entirely. Reddit user bshensky argues that shutting down OTA TV would benefit large media corporations and harm independent stations. It's also worth noting that OTA TV operates on valuable spectrum, which could be repurposed for mobile broadband (this has happened before), benefiting cellular providers.

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Astronomers using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope have discovered 128 new moons around Saturn, bringing its total to 274 -- more than all the other planets combined. CBC News reports: Jupiter and Saturn have been locked in a battle for the most moons for years -- with Saturn stealing the crown from Jupiter only two years ago when the same group of researchers found 64 additional moons orbiting it. But scientists say this discovery likely settles the score once and for all. [...] He and the other scientists working on the project made the discovery using the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, a 3.6-meter optical telescope on the summit of the dormant volcano Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. Scientists have been capturing pictures of the moons using the telescope since 2019. The researchers aligned and layered 44 of those images on top of one another in order to enhance the appearance of the moons and determine what they were. These moons are nothing like Earth's very own, however. Sara Mazrouei, a planetary scientist and educational developer at Humber Polytechnic, says that while we tend to think of a spherical shape when we hear the word moon, anything that orbits a planet, or another body in space that is not a sun, is considered a moon. Mazrouei says many of the moons surrounding other planets in our solar system -- including the ones observed here -- are in fact only a few kilometers across in size and oddly shaped, like an asteroid.

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