For a quarter century, the TIOBE Index has attempted to rank the popularity of programming languages by the number of search engine results they bring up — and this week they had an announcement. Over the last year the language showing the largest increase in its share of TIOBE's results was C#. TIOBE founder/CEO Paul Jansen looks back at how C++ evolved: From a language-design perspective, C# has often been an early adopter of new trends among mainstream languages. At the same time, it successfully made two major paradigm shifts: from Windows-only to cross-platform, and from Microsoft-owned to open source. C# has consistently evolved at the right moment. For many years now, there has been a direct battle between Java and C# for dominance in the business software market. I always assumed Java would eventually prevail, but after all this time the contest remains undecided. It is an open question whether Java — with its verbose, boilerplate-heavy style and Oracle ownership — can continue to keep C# at bay. While C# remains stuck in the same #5 position it was in a year ago, its share of TIOBE's results rose 2.94% — the largest increase of the 100 languages in their rankngs. But TIOBE's CEO notes that his rankings for the top 10 highest-scoring languages delivered "some interesting movements" in 2025: C and C++ swapped positions. [C rose to the #2 position — behind Python — while C++ dropped from #2 to the #4 rank that C held in January of 2025]. Although C++ is evolving faster than ever, some of its more radical changes — such as the modules concept — have yet to see widespread industry adoption. Meanwhile, C remains simple, fast, and extremely well suited to the ever-growing market of small embedded systems. Even Rust has struggled to penetrate this space, despite reaching an all-time high of position #13 this month. So who were the other winners of 2025, besides C#? Perl made a surprising comeback, jumping from position #32 to #11 and re-entering the top 20. Another language returning to the top 10 is R, driven largely by continued growth in data science and statistical computing. Of course, where there are winners, there are also losers. Go appears to have permanently lost its place in the top 10 during 2025. The same seems true for Ruby, which fell out of the top 20 and is unlikely to return anytime soon. What can we expect from 2026? I have a long history of making incorrect predictions, but I suspect that TypeScript will finally break into the top 20. Additionally, Zig, which climbed from position #61 to #42 in 2025, looks like a strong candidate to enter the TIOBE top 30. Here's how TIOBE estimated the 10 most popularity programming languages at the end of 2025 PythonCJavaC++C#JavaScriptVisual BasicSQLDelphi/Object PascalR

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"We will make the new ð algorithm...open source in 7 days," Elon Musk posted Saturday on X.com. Musk says this is "including all code used to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users," and "This will be repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed." Some context from Engadget: Musk has been making promises of open-sourcing the algorithm since his takeover of Twitter, and in 2023 published the code for the site's "For You" feed on GitHub. But the code wasn't all that revealing, leaving out key details, according to analyses at the time. And it hasn't been kept up to date. Bloomberg also reported on Saturday's announcement: The billionaire didn't say why X was making its algorithm open source. He and the company have clashed several times with regulators over content being shown to users. Some X users had previously complained that they were receiving fewer posts on the social media platform from people they follow. In October, Musk confirmed in a post on X that the company had found a "significant bug" in the platform's "For You" algorithm and pledged a fix. The company has also been working to incorporate more artificial intelligence into its recommendation algorithm for X, using Grok, Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot... In September, Musk wrote that the goal was for X's recommendation engine to "be purely AI" and that the company would share its open source algorithm about every two weeks. "To the degree that people are seeing improvements in their feed, it is not due to the actions of specific individuals changing heuristics, but rather increasing use of Grok and other AI tools," Musk wrote in October. The company was working to have all of the more than 100 million daily posts published to X evaluated by Grok, which would then offer individual users the posts most likely to interest them, Musk wrote. "This will profoundly improve the quality of your feed." He added that the company was planning to roll out the new features by November.

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An R&D lab under America's Energy Department annnounced this week that "Neuromorphic computers, inspired by the architecture of the human brain, are proving surprisingly adept at solving complex mathematical problems that underpin scientific and engineering challenges." Phys.org publishes the announcement from Sandia National Lab: In a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, Sandia National Laboratories computational neuroscientists Brad Theilman and Brad Aimone describe a novel algorithm that enables neuromorphic hardware to tackle partial differential equations, or PDEs — the mathematical foundation for modeling phenomena such as fluid dynamics, electromagnetic fields and structural mechanics. The findings show that neuromorphic computing can not only handle these equations, but do so with remarkable efficiency. The work could pave the way for the world's first neuromorphic supercomputer, potentially revolutionizing energy-efficient computing for national security applications and beyond... "We're just starting to have computational systems that can exhibit intelligent-like behavior. But they look nothing like the brain, and the amount of resources that they require is ridiculous, frankly," Theilman said.For decades, experts have believed that neuromorphic computers were best suited for tasks like recognizing patterns or accelerating artificial neural networks. These systems weren't expected to excel at solving rigorous mathematical problems like PDEs, which are typically tackled by traditional supercomputers. But for Aimone and Theilman, the results weren't surprising. The researchers believe the brain itself performs complex computations constantly, even if we don't consciously realize it. "Pick any sort of motor control task — like hitting a tennis ball or swinging a bat at a baseball," Aimone said. "These are very sophisticated computations. They are exascale-level problems that our brains are capable of doing very cheaply..." Their research also raises intriguing questions about the nature of intelligence and computation. The algorithm developed by Theilman and Aimone retains strong similarities to the structure and dynamics of cortical networks in the brain. "We based our circuit on a relatively well-known model in the computational neuroscience world," Theilman said. "We've shown the model has a natural but non-obvious link to PDEs, and that link hasn't been made until now — 12 years after the model was introduced." The researchers believe that neuromorphic computing could help bridge the gap between neuroscience and applied mathematics, offering new insights into how the brain processes information. "Diseases of the brain could be diseases of computation," Aimone said. "But we don't have a solid grasp on how the brain performs computations yet." If their hunch is correct, neuromorphic computing could offer clues to better understand and treat neurological conditions like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

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Is there a trend? This week four different articles appeared on various tech-news sites with an author bragging about switching to Linux. "Greetings from the year of Linux on my desktop," quipped the Verge's senior reviews editor, who finally "got fed up and said screw it, I'm installing Linux. They switched to CachyOS — just like this writer for the videogame magazine Escapist: I've had a fantastic time gaming on Linux. Valve's Windows-to-Linux translation layer, Proton, and even CachyOS' bundled fork have been working just fine. Of course, it's not perfect, and there's been a couple of instances where I've had to problem-solve something, but most of the time, any issues gaming on Linux have been fixed by swapping to another version of Proton. If you're deep in online games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, Destiny 2, GTAV or Battlefield 6, it might not be the best option to switch. These games feature anti-cheats that look for versions of Windows or even the heart of the OS, the kernel, to verify the system isn't going to mess up someone's game.... CachyOS is thankfully pre-packed with Nvidia drivers, meaning I didn't have to dance around trying to find them.... Certain titles will perform worse than their counterparts, simply due to how the bods at Nvidia are handling the drivers for Linux. This said, I'm still not complaining when I'm pushing nearly 144fps or more in newer games. The performance hit is there, but it's nowhere near enough to stave off even an attempt to mess about with Linux. Do you know how bizarre it is to say it's "nice to have a taskbar again"? I use macOS daily for a lot of my work, which uses a design baked back in the 1990s through NeXT. Seeing just a normal taskbar that doesn't try to advertise to me or crash because an update killed it for some reason is fantastic. That's how bad it is out there right now for Windows. "I run Artix, by the way," joked a senior tech writer at Notebookcheck (adding "There. That's out of the way...") I dual-booted a Linux partition for a few weeks. After a Windows update (that I didn't choose to do) wiped that partition and, consequently, the Linux installation, I decided to go whole-hog: I deleted Windows 11 and used the entire drive for Linux... Artix differs from Arch in that it does not use SystemD as its init system. I won't go down the rabbit hole of init systems here, but suffice it to say that Artix boots lightning quick (less than 10 seconds from a cold power on) and is pretty light on system resources. However, it didn't come "fully assembled..." The biggest problem I ran into after installing Artix on the [MacBook] Air was the lack of wireless drivers, which meant that WiFi did not work out of the box. The resolution was simple: I needed to download the appropriate WiFi drivers (Broadcom drivers, to be exact) from Artix's main repository. This is a straightforward process handled by a single command in the Terminal, but it requires an internet connection... which my laptop did not have. Ultimately, I connected a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, plugged the laptop directly into my router, and installed the WiFi drivers that way. The whole process took about 10 minutes, but it was annoying nonetheless. For the record, my desktop (an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H-based system) worked flawlessly out-of-the-box, even with my second monitor's uncommon resolution (1680x1050, vertical orientation). I did run into issues with installing some packages on both machines. Trying to install the KDE desktop environment (essentially a different GUI for the main OS) resulted in strange artifacts that put white text on white backgrounds in the menus, and every resolution I tried failed to correct this bug. After reverting to XFCE4 (the default desktop environment for my Artix install), the WiFi signal indicator in the taskbar disappeared. This led to me having to uninstall a network manager installed by KDE and re-linking the default network manager to the runit services startup folder. If that sentence sounds confusing, the process was much more so. It has been resolved, and I have a WiFi indicator that lets me select wireless networks again, but only after about 45 minutes of reading manuals and forum posts. Other issues are inherent to Linux. Not all games on Steam that are deemed Linux compatible actually are. Civilization III Complete is a good example: launching the game results in the map turning completely black. (Running the game through an application called Lutris resolved this issue.) Not all the software I used on Windows is available in Linux, such as Greenshot for screenshots or uMark for watermarking photos in bulk. There are alternatives to these, but they don't have the same features or require me to relearn workflows... Linux is not a "one and done" silver bullet to solve all your computer issues. It is like any other operating system in that it will require users to learn its methods and quirks. Admittedly, it does require a little bit more technical knowledge to dive into the nitty-gritty of the OS and fully unlock its potential, but many distributions (such as Mint) are ready to go out of the box and may never require someone to open a command line... [T]he issues I ran into on Linux were, for the most part, my fault. On Windows or macOS, most problems I run into are caused by a restriction or bug in the OS. Linux gives me the freedom to break my machine and fix it again, teaching me along the way. With Microsoft's refusal (either from pride or ignorance) to improve (or at least not crapify) Windows 11 despite loud user outrage, switching to Linux is becoming a popular option. It's one you should consider doing, and if you've been thinking about it for any length of time, it's time to dive in. And tinkerer Kevin Wammer switched from MacOS to Linux, saying "Linux has come a long way" after more than 30 years — but "Windows still sucks..."

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A founder of Twitter and a founder of Pinterest are now working on "social media for people who hate social media," writes a Washington Post columnist. "When I heard that this platform would harness AI to help us live more meaningful lives, I wanted to know more..." Their bid for redemption is West Co. — the Workshop for Emotional and Spiritual Technology Corporation — and the platform they're testing is called Tangle, a "purpose discovery tool" that uses AI to help users define their life purposes, then encourages them to set intentions toward achieving those purposes, reminds them periodically and builds a community of supporters to encourage steps toward meeting those intentions. "A lot of people, myself included, have been on autopilot," Stone said. "If all goes well, we'll introduce a lot of people to the concept of turning off autopilot." But will all go well? The entrepreneurs have been at it for two years, and they've scrapped three iterations before even testing them. They still don't have a revenue model. "This is a really hard thing to do," Stone admitted. "If we were a traditional start-up, we would have probably been folded by now." But the two men, with a combined net worth of at least hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, had the luxury of self-funding for a year, and now they have $29 million in seed funding led by Spark Capital... [T]he project revolves around training existing AI models in "what good intentions and helpful purposes look like," explained Long Cheng, the founding designer. When you join Tangle, which is invitation-only until this spring at the earliest, the AI peruses your calendar, examines your photos, asks you questions and then produces "threads," or categories that define your life purpose. You're free to accept, reject or change the suggestions. It then encourages you to make "intentions" toward achieving your threads, and to add "reflections" when you experience something meaningful in your life. Users then receive encouragement from friends, or "supporters." A few of the "threads" on Tangle are about personal satisfaction (traveler, connoisseur), but the vast majority involve causes greater than self: family (partner, parent, sibling), community (caregiver, connector, guardian), service (volunteer, advocate, healer) and spirituality (seeker, believer). Even the work-related threads (mentor, leader) suggest a higher purpose. The column includes this caveat. "I have no idea whether they will succeed. But as a columnist writing about how to keep our humanity in the 21st century, I believe it's important to focus on people who are at least trying..." "Quite possibly, West Co. and the various other enterprises trying to nudge technology in a more humane direction will find that it doesn't work socially or economically — they don't yet have a viable product, after all — but it would be a noble failure."

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A new study "compared how well top AI systems and human workers did at hundreds of real work assignments," reports the Washington Post. They add that at least one example "illustrates a disconnect three years after the release of ChatGPT that has implications for the whole economy." AI can accomplish many impressive tasks involving computer code, documents or images. That has prompted predictions that human work of many kinds could soon be done by computers alone. Bentley University and Gallup found in a survey [PDF] last year that about three-quarters of Americans expect AI to reduce the number of U.S. jobs over the next decade. But economic data shows the technology largely has not replaced workers. To understand what work AI can do on its own today, researchers collected hundreds of examples of projects posted on freelancing platforms that humans had been paid to complete. They included tasks such as making 3D product animations, transcribing music, coding web video games and formatting research papers for publication. The research team then gave each task to AI systems such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude. The best-performing AI system successfully completed only 2.5 percent of the projects, according to the research team from Scale AI, a start-up that provides data to AI developers, and the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit that works to understand risks from AI. "Current models are not close to being able to automate real jobs in the economy," said Jason Hausenloy, one of the researchers on the Remote Labor Index study... The results, which show how AI systems fall short, challenge predictions that the technology is poised to soon replace large portions of the workforce... The AI systems failed on nearly half of the Remote Labor Index projects by producing poor-quality work, and they left more than a third incomplete. Nearly 1 in 5 had basic technical problems such as producing corrupt files, the researchers found. One test involved creating an interactive dashboard for data from the World Happiness Report, according to the article. "At first glance, the AI results look adequate. But closer examination reveals errors, such as countries inexplicably missing data, overlapping text and legends that use the wrong colors — or no colors at all." The researchers say AI systems are hobbled by a lack of memory, and are also weak on "visual" understanding.

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Amazon "has submitted plans for a large-format store near Chicago that would be larger than a Walmart Supercenter," reports CNBC: As part of the plans, Amazon has proposed building a one-story, 229,000-square-foot building [on a 35-acre lot] in Orland Park, Illinois, that would offer a range of products, such as groceries, household essentials and general merchandise, the city said on Saturday. By comparison, Walmart's U.S. Supercenters typically average 179,000 square feet... The Orland Park Plan Commission approved Amazon's proposal on Tuesday, and it will now proceed to a vote from the full village board. That meeting is scheduled for January 19. In a statement cited by CNBC, an Amazon spokesperson called it "a new concept that we think customers will be excited about."

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"Scientists in China have made a breakthrough with fusion energy that could finally overcome one of the most stubborn barriers to realising the next-generation energy source," reports the Independent: A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said its experimental nuclear reactor, dubbed the 'artificial Sun', achieved a plasma density that was previously thought impossible... Through a new process called plasma-wall self organisation, the CAS researchers were able to keep the plasma stable at unprecedented density levels. By pushing plasma density well past long-standing empirical limits, the researchers said fusion ignition can be achieved with far higher energy outputs. "The findings suggest a practical and scalable pathway for extending density limits in tokamaks and next-generation burning plasma fusion devices," said Professor Ping Zhu from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, who so-led the research. Professor Zhu's team now plan to apply this new method on the EAST reactor to confirm that it will work under high-performance plasma conditions. The latest breakthrough was detailed in the journal Science Advances in a study titled 'Accessing the density-free regime with ECRH-assisted ohmic start-up on EAST'.

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This week Meta announced several new features for "Meta Ray-Ban Display" smartglasses: - A new teleprompter feature for the smart glasses (arriving in a phased rollout) - The ability to send messages on WhatsApp and Messenger by writing with your finger on any surface. (Available for those who sign up for an "early access" program). - "Pedestrian navigation" for 32 cities. ("The 28 cities we launched Meta Ray-Ban Display with, plus Denver, Las Vegas, Portland, and Salt Lake City," and with more cities coming soon.) But they also warned Meta Ray-Ban Display "is a first-of-its-kind product with extremely limited inventory," saying they're delaying international expansion of sales due to inventory constraints — and also due to "unprecedented" demand in the U.S. CNBC reports: "Since launching last fall, we've seen an overwhelming amount of interest, and as a result, product waitlists now extend well into 2026," Meta wrote in a blog post. Due to "limited" inventory, the company said it will pause plans to launch in the U.K., France, Italy and Canada early this year and concentrate on U.S. orders as it reassesses international availability... Meta is one of several technology companies moving into the smart glasses market. Alphabet announced a $150 million partnership with Warby Parker in May and ChatGPT maker OpenAI is reportedly working on AI glasses with Apple.

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It will be the first medical evacuation from the International space station in its 25-year history. The Guardian reports: An astronaut in the orbital laboratory reportedly fell ill with a "serious" but undisclosed issue. Nasa also had to cancel its first spacewalk of the year... The agency did not identify the astronaut or the medical problem, citing patient privacy. "Because the astronaut is absolutely stable, this is not an emergent evacuation," [chief health and medical officer Dr. James] Polk said. "We're not immediately disembarking and getting the astronaut down, but it leaves that lingering risk and lingering question as to what that diagnosis is, and that means there is some lingering risk for that astronaut onboard." "SpaceX says it's Dragon spacecraft at the International Space Station is ready to return its four Crew-11 astronauts home in an unprecedented medical evacuation on Jan. 14 and 15," reports Space.com: The SpaceX statement came on the heels of NASA's announcement that the Crew-11 astronauts were scheduled to undock from the space station on Jan. 14 and splashdown off the coast of California early on Jan. 15. The Crew-11 Dragon spacecraft will return NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke to Earth alongside Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platanov... NASA officials opted for a "controlled medical evacuation" in order to provide the astronaut better treatment on the ground, NASA chief Jared Isaacman has said... Dr. James Polk, NASA's chief medical officer, has said the medical issue is not an injury to the astronaut afflicted, but rather something related to the prolonged exposure to weighlessness by astronauts living and working on the International Space Station. "It's mostly having a medical issue in the difficult areas of microgravity and the suite of hardware that we operate in," Polk said.

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Yes, a federal judge blocked an attempt by Texas at an app store age-verification law. But this year Silicon Valley giants including Google and Apple "are expected to fight hard against similar legislation," reports Politico, "because of the vast legal liability it imposes on app stores and developers." In Texas, Utah and Louisiana, parent advocates have linked up with conservative "pro-family" groups to pass laws forcing mobile app stores to verify user ages and require parental sign-off. If those rules hold up in court, companies like Google and Apple, which run the two largest app stores, would face massive legal liability... California has taken a different approach, passing its own age-verification law last year that puts liability on device manufacturers instead of app stores. That model has been better received by the tech lobby, and is now competing with the app-based approach in states like Ohio. In Washington D.C., a GOP-led bill modeled off of Texas' law is wending its way through Capitol Hill. And more states are expected to join the fray, including Michigan and South Carolina. Joel Thayer, president of the conservative Digital Progress Institute and a key architect of the Texas law, said states are only accelerating their push. He explicitly linked the age-verification debate to AI, arguing it's "terrifying" to think companies could build new AI products by scraping data from children's apps. Thayer also pointed to the Trump administration's recent executive order aimed at curbing state regulation of AI, saying it has galvanized lawmakers. "We're gonna see more states pushing this stuff," Thayer said. "What really put fuel in the fire is the AI moratorium for states. I think states have been reinvigorated to fight back on this." He told Politico that the issue will likely be decided by America's Supreme Court, which in June upheld Texas legislation requiring age verification for online content. Thayer said states need a ruling from America's highest court to "triangulate exactly what the eff is going on with the First Amendment in the tech world. "They're going to have to resolve the question at some point."

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The Free Software Foundation's president Ian Kelling is also their senior systems administrator. This week he shared an example of how "the work we put in to making sure a program is free for us also makes it free for the rest of the world." During the COVID-19 pandemic, like everyone everywhere, the FSF increased its videoconferencing use, especially videoconferencing software that works in web browsers. We have experience hosting several different programs to accomplish this, and BigBlueButton was an important one for us for a while. It is a videoconferencing service which describes itself as a virtual classroom because of its many features designed for educational environments, such as a shared whiteboard... In BigBlueButton 2.2, the program used a freely licensed version of MongoDB, but it unintentionally picked up MongoDB's 2018 nonfree license change in versions 2.3 and 2.4. At the FSF, we noticed this [after a four-hour review] and raised the alarm with the BigBlueButton team in late 2020. In many cases of a developer changing to a nonfree license, free forks have won out, but in this case no one judged it worth the effort to maintain a fork of the final free MongoDB version. This was a very unfortunate case for existing users of MongoDB, including the FSF, who were then faced with a challenge of maintaining their freedom by either running old and unmaintained software or switching over to a different free program. Luckily, the free software world is not especially lacking in high quality database software, and there is also a wide array of free videoconferencing software. At the FSF, we decided to spend some effort to make sure MongoDB would no longer make BigBlueButton nonfree, to help other users of MongoDB and BigBlueButton. We think BigBlueButton is really useful for free software in schools, where it is incredibly important to have free software. On the tech team, especially when it comes to software running in a web browser, we are used to making modifications to better suit our needs. In the end, we didn't find a perfect solution, but we did find FerretDB to be a promising MongoDB alternative and assisted the developers of FerretDB to see what would be required for it to work in BigBlueButton. The BigBlueButton developers decided that some architectural level changes for their 3.0 release would be the path for them to remove MongoDB. As of BigBlueButton 3.0, released in 2025, BigBlueButton is back to being entirely free software...! As you can see, in the world of free software, trust can be tricky, and this is part of why organizations like the FSF are so important. Kelling notes he's part of a tech team of just two people reponsible for "63 different services, platforms, and websites for the FSF staff, the GNU Project, other community projects, and the wider free software community..."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: A company largely owned by the French and U.K. governments is pitching Canada on a roughly $250-million plan to provide the military with secure satellite broadband coverage in the Arctic, CBC News has learned. Eutelsat, a rival to tech billionaire Elon Musk's Starlink, already provides some services to the Canadian military, but wants to deepen the partnership as Canada looks to diversify defence contracts away from suppliers in the United States. A proposal for Canada's Department of National Defence to join a French Ministry of Defence initiative involving Eutelsat was apparently raised by French President Emmanuel Macron with Prime Minister Mark Carney on the sidelines of last year's G7 summit in Alberta. The prime minister's first question, according to Eutelsat and French defence officials, was how the proposal would affect the Telesat Corporation, a former Canadian Crown corporation that was privatized in the 1990s. Telesat is in the process of developing its Lightspeed system, a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation of satellites for high-speed broadband. And in mid-December, the Liberal government announced it had established a strategic partnership with Telesat and MDA Space to develop the Canadian Armed Forces' military satellite communications (MILSATCOM) capabilities. A Eutelsat official said the company already has its own satellite network in place and running, along with Canadian partners, and has been providing support to the Canadian military deployed in Latvia. "What we can provide for Canada is what we call a sovereign capacity capability where Canada would actually own all of our capacity in the Far North or wherever they require it," said David van Dyke, the general manager for Canada at Eutelsat. "We also give them the ability to not be under the control of a singular individual who could decide to disconnect the service for political or other reasons."

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Scientists are putting Einstein's claim that the speed of light is constant to the test. While researchers found no evidence that light's speed changes with energy, this null result dramatically tightens the constraints on quantum-gravity theories that predict even the tiniest violations. ScienceDaily reports: Special relativity rests on the principle that the laws of physics remain the same for all observers, regardless of how they are moving relative to one another. This idea is known as Lorentz invariance. Over time, Lorentz invariance became a foundational assumption in modern physics, especially within quantum theory. [...] One prediction shared by several Lorentz-invariance-violating quantum gravity models is that the speed of light may depend slightly on a photon's energy. Any such effect would have to be tiny to match existing experimental limits. However, it could become detectable at the highest photon energies, specifically in very-high-energy gamma rays. A research team led by former UAB student Merce Guerrero and current IEEC PhD student at the UAB Anna Campoy-Ordaz set out to test this idea using astrophysical observations. The team also included Robertus Potting from the University of Algarve and Markus Gaug, a lecturer in the Department of Physics at the UAB who is also affiliated with the IEEC. Their approach relies on the vast distances light travels across the universe. If photons of different energies are emitted at the same time from a distant source, even minuscule differences in their speeds could build up into measurable delays by the time they reach Earth. Using a new statistical technique, the researchers combined existing measurements of very-high-energy gamma rays to examine several Lorentz-invariance-violating parameters favored by theorists within the Standard Model Extension (SME). The goal was ambitious. They hoped to find evidence that Einstein's assumptions might break down under extreme conditions. Once again, Einstein's predictions held firm. The study did not detect any violation of Lorentz invariance. Even so, the results are significant. The new analysis improves previous limits by an order of magnitude, sharply narrowing where new physics could be hiding.

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Meta has signed long-term nuclear power deals totaling more than 6 gigawatts to fuel its data centers: "one from a startup, one from a smaller energy company, and one from a larger company that already operates several nuclear reactors in the U.S," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Oklo and TerraPower, two companies developing small modular reactors (SMR), each signed agreements with Meta to build multiple reactors, while Vistra is selling capacity from its existing power plants. [...] The deals are the result of a request for proposals that Meta issued in December 2024, in which Meta sought partners that could add between 1 to 4 gigawatts of generating capacity by the early 2030s. Much of the new power will flow through the PJM interconnection, a grid which covers 13 Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states and has become saturated with data centers. The 20-year agreement with Vistra will have the most immediate impact on Meta's energy needs. The tech company will buy a total of 2.1 gigawatts from two existing nuclear power plants, Perry and Davis-Besse in Ohio. As part of the deal, Vistra will also add capacity to those power plants and to its Beaver Valley power plant in Pennsylvania. Together, the upgrades will generate an additional 433 MW and are scheduled to come online in the early 2030s. Meta is also buying 1.2 gigawatts from young provider Oklo. Under its deal with Meta, Oklo is hoping to start supplying power to the grid as early as 2030. The SMR company went public via SPAC in 2023, and while Oklo has landed a large deal with data center operator Switch, it has struggled to get its reactor design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If Oklo can deliver on its timeline, the new reactors would be built in Pike County, Ohio. The startup's Aurora Powerhouse reactors each produce 75 megawatts of electricity, and it will need to build more than a dozen to fulfill Meta's order. TerraPower is a startup co-founded by Bill Gates, and it is aiming to start sending electricity to Meta as early as 2032.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: [P]erhaps AI can, in fact, learn in a more human way -- by figuring out interesting questions to ask itself and attempting to find the right answer. A project from Tsinghua University, the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI), and Pennsylvania State University shows that AI can learn to reason in this way by playing with computer code. The researchers devised a system called Absolute Zero Reasoner (AZR) that first uses a large language model to generate challenging but solvable Python coding problems. It then uses the same model to solve those problems before checking its work by trying to run the code. And finally, the AZR system uses successes and failures as a signal to refine the original model, augmenting its ability to both pose better problems and solve them. The team found that their approach significantly improved the coding and reasoning skills of both 7 billion and 14 billion parameter versions of the open source language model Qwen. Impressively, the model even outperformed some models that had received human-curated data. [...] A key challenge is that for now the system only works on problems that can easily be checked, like those that involve math or coding. As the project progresses, it might be possible to use it on agentic AI tasks like browsing the web or doing office chores. This might involve having the AI model try to judge whether an agent's actions are correct. One fascinating possibility of an approach like Absolute Zero is that it could, in theory, allow models to go beyond human teaching. "Once we have that it's kind of a way to reach superintelligence," [said Zilong Zheng, a researcher at BIGAI who worked on the project].

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Experts interviewed by NBC News warn that the rapid spread of AI-generated images and videos is accelerating an online trust breakdown, especially during fast-moving news events where context is scarce. From the report: President Donald Trump's Venezuela operation almost immediately spurred the spread of AI-generated images, old videos and altered photos across social media. On Wednesday, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a woman in her car, many online circulated a fake, most likely AI-edited image of the scene that appears to be based on real video. Others used AI in attempts to digitally remove the mask of the ICE officer who shot her. The confusion around AI content comes as many social media platforms, which pay creators for engagement, have given users incentives to recycle old photos and videos to ramp up emotion around viral news moments. The amalgam of misinformation, experts say, is creating a heightened erosion of trust online -- especially when it mixes with authentic evidence. "As we start to worry about AI, it will likely, at least in the short term, undermine our trust default -- that is, that we believe communication until we have some reason to disbelieve," said Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab. "That's going to be the big challenge, is that for a while people are really going to not trust things they see in digital spaces." Though AI is the latest technology to spark concern about surging misinformation, similar trust breakdowns have cycled through history, from election misinformation in 2016 to the mass production of propaganda after the printing press was invented in the 1400s. Before AI, there was Photoshop, and before Photoshop, there were analog image manipulation techniques. Fast-moving news events are where manipulated media have the biggest effect, because they fill in for the broad lack of information, Hancock said. "In terms of just looking at an image or a video, it will essentially become impossible to detect if it's fake. I think that we're getting close to that point, if we're not already there," said Hancock. "The old sort of AI literacy ideas of 'let's just look at the number of fingers' and things like that are likely to go away." Renee Hobbs, a professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island, added: "If constant doubt and anxiety about what to trust is the norm, then actually, disengagement is a logical response. It's a coping mechanism. And then when people stop caring about whether something's true or not, then the danger is not just deception, but actually it's worse than that. It's the whole collapse of even being motivated to seek truth."

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Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says the company is "going big time" into its 14A (1.4nm-class) process, signaling confidence in yields and hinting at at least one external foundry customer. Tom's Hardware reports: Intel's 14A is expected to be production-ready in 2027, with early versions of process design kit (PDK) coming to external customers early this year. To that end, it is good to hear Intel's upbeat comments about 14A. Also, Tan's phrasing 'the customer' could indicate that Intel has at least one external client for 14A, implying that Intel Foundry will produce 14A chips for Intel Products and at least one more buyer. The 14A production node will introduce Intel's 2nd Generation RibbonFET GAA transistors; 2nd Gen BSPDN called PowerDirect that will connect power directly to source and drain of transistors, enabling better power delivery (e.g., reducing transient voltage droop or clock stretching) and refined power controls; and Turbo Cells that optimize critical timing paths using high-drive, double-height cells within dense standard cell libraries, which boost speed without major area or power compromises. Yet, there is another aspect of Intel's 14A manufacturing process that is particularly important for the chipmaker: its usage by external customers. With 18A, the company has not managed to land a single major external client that demands decent volumes. While 18A will be used by Intel itself as well as by Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Defense, only Intel will consume significant volumes. For 14A, Intel hopes to land at least one more external customer with substantial volume requirements, as this will ensure that Intel will recoup its investments in the development of such an advanced node.

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Microsoft is testing a new Windows policy that lets IT administrators uninstall Microsoft Copilot from managed devices. The change rolls out via Windows Insider builds and works through standard management tools like Intune and SCCM. BleepingComputer reports: The new policy will apply to devices where the Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are both installed, the Microsoft Copilot app was not installed by the user, and the Microsoft Copilot app was not launched in the last 28 days. "Admins can now uninstall Microsoft Copilot for a user in a targeted way by enabling a new policy titled RemoveMicrosoftCopilotApp," the Windows Insider team said. "If this policy is enabled, the Microsoft Copilot app will be uninstalled, once. Users can still re-install if they choose to. This policy is available on Enterprise, Pro, and EDU SKUs. To enable this policy, open the Group policy editor and go to: User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows AI -> Remove Microsoft Copilot App."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a big business. While some SEO practices are useful, much of the day-to-day SEO wisdom you see online amounts to superstition. An increasingly popular approach geared toward LLMs called "content chunking" may fall into that category. In the latest installment of Google's Search Off the Record podcast, John Mueller and Danny Sullivan say that breaking content down into bite-sized chunks for LLMs like Gemini is a bad idea. You've probably seen websites engaging in content chunking and scratched your head, and for good reason -- this content isn't made for you. The idea is that if you split information into smaller paragraphs and sections, it is more likely to be ingested and cited by gen AI bots like Gemini. So you end up with short paragraphs, sometimes with just one or two sentences, and lots of subheads formatted like questions one might ask a chatbot. According to Google's Danny Sullivan, this is a misconception, and Google doesn't use such signals to improve ranking. "One of the things I keep seeing over and over in some of the advice and guidance and people are trying to figure out what do we do with the LLMs or whatever, is that turn your content into bite-sized chunks, because LLMs like things that are really bite size, right?" said Sullivan. "So... we don't want you to do that." The conversation, which begins around the podcast's 18-minute mark, goes on to illustrate the folly of jumping on the latest SEO trend. Sullivan notes that he has consulted engineers at Google before making this proclamation. Apparently, the best way to rank on Google continues to be creating content for humans rather than machines. That ensures long-term search exposure, because the behavior of human beings -- what they choose to click on -- is an important signal for Google.

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