An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The cost of cleaning up Sellafield is expected to spiral to 136 billion pounds ($175 billion USD) and Europe's biggest nuclear waste dump cannot show how it offers taxpayers value for money, the public spending watchdog has said. Projects to fix buildings containing hazardous and radioactive material at the state-owned site on the Cumbrian coast are running years late and over budget. Sellafield's spending is so vast -- with costs of more than 2.7 billion pounds a year -- that it is causing tension with the Treasury, the report from the National Audit Office (NAO) suggests. Officials from finance ministry told the NAO it was "not always clear" how Sellafield made decisions, the report reveals. Criticisms of its costs and processes come as the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, prepares to plug a hole of about 40 billion pounds in her maiden budget. Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said: "Despite progress achieved since the NAO last reported, I cannot conclude Sellafield is achieving value for money yet, as large projects are being delivered later than planned and at higher cost, alongside slower progress in reducing multiple risks." He added: "Continued underperformance will mean the cost of decommissioning will increase considerably, and 'intolerable risks' will persist for longer." David Peattie, the NDA's chief executive, said: "Sellafield is one of the most complex environmental programs in the world. We're proud of our workforce and achievements being made, including the unprecedented retrieval of legacy waste from all four highest hazard facilities. But as the NAO rightly points out there is still more to be done. This includes better demonstrating we are delivering value for money and the wider significant societal and economic benefits through jobs, the supply chain and community investments."

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Former Google chief Eric Schmidt thinks the US Army should expunge "useless" tanks and replace them with AI-powered drones instead. From a report: Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia this week, he said: "I read somewhere that the US had thousands and thousands of tanks stored somewhere," adding, "Give them away. Buy a drone instead." The former Google supremo's argument is that recent conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine, have demonstrated how "a $5,000 drone can destroy a $5 million tank." In fact, even cheaper drones, similar to those commercially available for consumers, have been shown in footage on social media dropping grenades through the open turret hatch of tanks. Schmidt, who was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, then executive chairman to 2015, and executive chairman of Alphabet to 2018, founded White Stork with the aim of supporting Ukraine's war effort. It hopes to achieve this by developing a low-cost drone that can use AI to acquire its target rather than being guided by an operator and can function in environments where GPS jamming is in operation. Notably, Schmidt also served as chair of the US government's National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), which advised the President and Congress about national security and defense issues with regard to AI. "The cost of autonomy is falling so quickly that the drone war, which is the future of conflict, will get rid of eventually tanks, artillery, mortars," Schmidt predicted.

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AzWa Snowbird writes: Burning Man is urgently calling for millions more in donations amid faltering ticket sales and staff layoffs. The nonprofit's CEO, Marian Goodell, primarily blamed flagging higher-priced ticket sales and increased operating costs since the pandemic. The festival has sold a tier of higher-priced tickets since at least 2016. In 2023, a limited number of more expensive advance tickets were available between Feb. 1 and Feb. 3, with 1,000 tickets costing $2,750 each and 3,000 costing $1,500, according to an archived version of Burning Man's 2023 ticket page. Ticket sales for the annual bacchanal in Black Rock City flopped this year after a rain-plagued 2022, and scores of burners later resold their tickets, eating huge losses.

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Google is advancing the release timeline for Android 16, shifting it to the second quarter of 2025 to better align with new device launches and accelerate access to its latest AI and machine learning resources. It should also "enable app creators and phone companies to prepare their products for the new software more quickly," reports CNET. From the report: [I]n a big-picture sense, the change could help facilitate a new wave of apps with more AI integration, considering developers will get access to Google's latest machine learning and AI resources even sooner. "We're in a once-in-a-generation moment to completely reimagine what our smartphones can do and how we interact with them," Google's Seang Chau, who took on the role of vice president and general manager of the Android Platform earlier this year, said in an interview with CNET. "It's a really exciting time for smartphones, and we've been putting a lot of thought into what we want to do next with them." In addition to moving up the major release, Google will roll out a minor update in the fourth quarter of 2025 with feature updates, optimizations and bug fixes. It's a notable switch from Google's usual release timeline, but it's just one of several changes the company has made to the way it distributes Android updates in an effort to add features more frequently. [...] "Things are moving quite fast in the AI world right now," Chau said. "So we want to make sure that we get those developer [application programming interfaces], especially around machine learning and AI, available to our developers so they can build these capabilities faster and get them out to our users faster."

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With Windows 10 support set to expire on October 14, 2025, Microsoft is offering a one-time, one-year Extended Security Updates plan for consumers. "For $30, you'll receive 'critical' and 'important' security updates -- basically security patches that will continue to protect your Windows 10 PC from any vulnerabilities," reports PCWorld. "That $30 is for one year's worth of updates, and that's the only option at this time." From the report: Microsoft has been warning users for years that Windows 10 support will expire in 2025, specifically October 14, 2025. At that point, Windows 10 will officially fall out of support: there will be no more feature updates or security patches. On paper, that would mean that any Windows 10 PC will be at risk of any new vulnerabilities that researchers uncover. Previously, Microsoft had quietly hinted that consumers would be offered the same ESU protections offered to businesses and enterprises, as it did in December 2023 and again in an "editor's note" shared in an April 2024 support post, in which the company said that "details will be shared at a later date for consumers." That time is now, apparently. Back in December 2023, Microsoft offered the ESU on an annual basis to businesses for three years, one year at a time. The fees would double each year, charging businesses hundreds of dollars for the privilege. Consumers won't be offered the same deal, as a Microsoft representative said via email that it'll be a "one-time, one-year option for $30."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: If you've recently been laid off and have started the arduous process of looking for a new job, you've probably seen them on networking platforms like LinkedIn: postings for roles that are 30 days old, maybe more, with suspiciously wide salary ranges. They usually have hundreds, or even thousands, of hopeful applicants vying for the same position, but if you do a quick cross-check and notice that the role isn't posted on the company's actual website -- or any of their social media pages -- you should probably stop drafting that cover letter, because it's possible they're not hiring at all. "Ghost jobs," or ads for positions that aren't actually open, are a common phenomenon in the tech industry, which has been plagued by layoffs and budget cuts over recent years. As unemployed workers struggle to regain their footing, recruiters and career coaches who spoke with SFGATE warned that these fake jobs posted by real companies serve multiple, sometimes insidious purposes. According to a 2024 survey from MyPerfectResume, 81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled. While some respondents said employers did it to maintain a presence on job boards and build a talent pool, it's also used to commit psychological warfare: 25% said ghost jobs helped companies gauge how replaceable their employees were, while 23% said it helped make the company appear more stable during a hiring freeze. Another damning 2024 report from Resume Builder said that 62% companies posted them specifically to make their employees feel replaceable. They also made ads to "trick overworked employees" into believing that more people would be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workload. After interviewing 1,641 hiring managers, Resume Builder researchers found that 40% of employers posted fake job listings in 2024, and that three in 10 currently had ghost jobs listed. The idea to post them mostly trickled down from HR, followed by senior management and executives, their June 2024 article continued. Though the listings were posted on multiple hiring platforms, the majority of them appeared on LinkedIn and the companies' websites. Evidence suggests this trend is taking hold throughout the Bay Area, too. A collaborative document circulating online reveals a growing list of employers accused of posting ghost jobs. Many of them, it turns out, are tech companies with offices based in California.

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Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE) revealed a sustained cyber campaign by the People's Republic of China, targeting Canadian government and private sector networks over the past five years. The report also flagged India, alongside Russia and Iran, as emerging cyber threats. The Register reports: The biennial National Cyber Threat Assessment described the People's Republic of China's (PRC) cyber operations against Canada as "second to none." Their purpose is to "serve high-level political and commercial objectives, including espionage, intellectual property (IP) theft, malign influence, and transnational repression." Over the past four years, at least 20 networks within Canadian government agencies and departments were compromised by PRC cyber threat actors. The CSE assured citizens that all known federal government compromises have been resolved, but warned that "the actors responsible for these intrusions dedicated significant time and resources to learn about the target networks." The report also alleges that government officials -- particularly those perceived as being critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) -- were attacked. One of those attacks includes an email operation against members of Interparliamentary Alliance on China. The purpose of the cyber attacks is mainly to gain information that would lead to strategic, economic, and diplomatic advantages. The activity appears to have intensified following incidents of bilateral tension between Canada and the PRC, after which Beijing apparently wanted to gather timely intelligence on official reactions and unfolding developments, according to the report. Canada's private sector is also in the firing line, with the CSE suggesting "PRC cyber threat actors have very likely stolen commercially sensitive data from Canadian firms and institutions." Operations that collect information that could support the PRC's economic and military interests are priority targets.

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Zoox, an Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company, is set to roll out dozens of its purpose-built robotaxis in San Francisco and Las Vegas, starting with employee rides in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood and the Las Vegas Strip. "We have achieved that internal safety readiness" required to launch the service, said co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson on the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 stage. TechCrunch reports: The announcement comes a decade after Zoox was founded and four years since it was acquired by Amazon and unveiled its purpose-built robotaxi. In that time, the nascent autonomous vehicle industry has gone through the full hype cycle that led to multi-billion-dollar valuations and later a wave of shutdowns and consolidation. "We still exist," Levinson said, in a nod to the tumult the industry has gone through in recent years. Levinson said Zoox is going to take a "measured approach" to rolling out its robotaxi service, and noted that his company has been working closely with local and federal safety regulators. "I can say that in the next few weeks, we're actually going to have a couple dozen Zoox robotaxis across our Foster City, San Francisco and Las Vegas, geofences that will expand several fold over the next year," he said. "And then, you know, 2026 is when we're going to really start cranking out production vehicles at very large scale." He also said Zoox will launch an "explorer" program of early riders who will be able to use the robotaxis for free before opening the service up to paying customers. (Rival Waymo operated a similar invite-only early rider program before opening its service to the paying public.) These early riders, or explorers, will gain access to the Zoox vehicles early next year starting with Las Vegas, Levinson said. The Zoox AVs will operate throughout the "most busy 16 hours" of the day, Levinson said, noting that it's "so boring at four in the morning, we don't think we would learn very much."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More than 500 Amazon workers reportedly signed a letter to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) CEO this week, sharing their outrage over Amazon's upcoming return-to-office (RTO) policy that will force workers into offices five days per week. In September, Amazon announced that starting in 2025, workers will no longer be allowed to work remotely twice a week. At the time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the move would make it easier for workers "to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture." Reuters reported today that it viewed a letter from a swath of workers sent to AWS chief Matt Garman on Wednesday regarding claims he reportedly made during an all-hands meeting this month. Garman reportedly told attendees that 9 out of 10 employees he spoke with support the five-day in-office work policy. The letter called the statements "inconsistent with the experiences of many employees" and "misrepresenting the realities of working at Amazon," Reuters reported. "We were appalled to hear the non-data-driven explanation you gave for Amazon imposing a five-day in-office mandate,'" the letter reportedly stated. [...] In the letter, hundreds of Amazon workers reportedly lamented what they believe was a lack of third-party data shared in making the RTO policy. It said that Garman's statements "break the trust of your employees who have not only personal experience that shows the benefits of remote work but have seen the extensive data which supports that experience." The letter included stories from 12 anonymous employees about medical, familial, and other challenges that the new RTO policy could create. The letter also reportedly pointed out the obstacles that a five-day in-office work policy has on groups of protected workers, like those providing childcare. The new policy will not align with Amazon's "'Strive to be Earth's Best Employer' leadership principle,'" the letter said. In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters that Amazon's benefits include commuter benefits, elder care, and subsidized parking fees.

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Microsoft is once again delaying the roll out of its controversial Recall feature for Copilot Plus PCs. From a report: The software giant had planned to start testing Recall, which creates screenshots of mostly everything you see or do on a Copilot Plus PC, with Windows Insiders in October. Now, Microsoft says it needs more time to get the feature ready. "We are committed to delivering a secure and trusted experience with Recall. To ensure we deliver on these important updates, we're taking additional time to refine the experience before previewing it with Windows Insiders," says Brandon LeBlanc, senior product manager of Windows, in a statement to The Verge. "Originally planned for October, Recall will now be available for preview with Windows Insiders on Copilot Plus PCs by December."

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OpenAI on Thursday launched a search feature within ChatGPT, its viral chatbot, that positions the high-powered AI startup to better compete with search engines like Google, Microsoft's Bing and Perplexity. From a report: ChatGPT search offers up-to-the-minute sports scores, stock quotes, news, weather and more, powered by real-time web search and partnerships with news and data providers, according to the company. It began beta-testing the search engine, called SearchGPT, in July. The release could have implications for Google as the dominant search engine. Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, Alphabet investors have been concerned that OpenAI could take market share from Google in search by giving consumers new ways to seek information online.

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Amazon, in what it described as a "difficult decision," is winding down Kindle Vella and shutting it down completely in February 2025. From a report: When the company launched the serialized story platform in 2021, it said Vella was a way for readers to discover new fictional stories and a new way for authors to earn from the Kindle Direct Publishing service. But it hasn't caught on as it had hoped, Amazon explains on its website, and it has decided to throw in the towel three years after Vella's debut. Authors can only publish stories on Vella until December 4, which is also the last day readers can purchase tokens. While readers will no longer be able to purchase tokens after that, they can continue using those tokens to unlock episodes until the program closes in February. The good news for those who've been following specific authors or stories on Vella is that they won't lose their access to whatever episodes they've already unlocked even after the platform shuts down.

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid down the newest marker in generative AI training on Wednesday, saying that the next major release of the company's Llama model is being trained on a cluster of GPUs that's "bigger than anything" else that's been reported. From a report: Llama 4 development is well underway, Zuckerberg told investors and analysts on an earnings call, with an initial launch expected early next year. "We're training the Llama 4 models on a cluster that is bigger than 100,000 H100s, or bigger than anything that I've seen reported for what others are doing," Zuckerberg said, referring to the Nvidia chips popular for training AI systems. "I expect that the smaller Llama 4 models will be ready first." Increasing the scale of AI training with more computing power and data is widely believed to be key to developing significantly more capable AI models. While Meta appears to have the lead now, most of the big players in the field are likely working toward using compute clusters with more than 100,000 advanced chips. In March, Meta and Nvidia shared details about clusters of about 25,000 H100s that were used to develop Llama 3.

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Growing numbers of veteran video game developers are leaving large studios to work on smaller projects, citing bureaucratic burnout and creative constraints at major publishers. Nate Purkeypile, former lead artist on Bethesda's "Starfield," quit in 2021 after facing up to 20 meetings weekly coordinating with a 400-person team across four offices. He has since released "The Axis Unseen," a horror game he developed solo. The trend, reported by Bloomberg, coincides with ballooning development costs in the industry. Sony's "Uncharted 2" cost $20 million in 2009, while 2020's "The Last of Us: Part 2" exceeded $200 million. "Small studios are not burdened by stockholder expectations," Renee Gittins, International Game Developers Association board chair, told the publication. They're "more nimble, [and] able to take greater risks." Recent indie successes like "Balatro" and "Animal Well," created by solo developers, have also demonstrated the commercial viability of smaller productions.

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iPod creator and Nest founder Tony Fadell criticized OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and warned of AI dangers during TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco this week. "I've been doing AI for 15 years, people, I'm not just spouting shit. I'm not Sam Altman, okay?" Fadell said, drawing gasps from the audience. Fadell, whose Nest thermostat used AI in 2011, called for more specialized and transparent AI systems instead of general-purpose large language models. He cited a University of Michigan study showing AI hallucinations in 90% of ChatGPT-generated patient reports, warning such errors could prove fatal. "Right now we're all adopting this thing and we don't know what problems it causes," Fadell said, urging government regulation of AI transparency. "Those could kill people. We are using this stuff and we don't even know how it works."

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Amazon has postponed the rollout of its AI-enhanced Alexa voice assistant to 2025, a significant setback in its race to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to Bloomberg. The delay underscores Amazon's challenges in modernizing Alexa's decade-old architecture, which relies on rigid command-response patterns rather than advanced language models. Further reading: Alexa, Where's My Star Trek Computer?

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After closing a $69 billion deal to buy virtualization technology company VMware a year ago, Broadcom wasted no time ushering in big changes to the ways customers and partners buy and sell VMware offerings -- and many of those clients aren't happy. ArsTechnica: To get a deeper look at the impact that rising costs and overhauls like the end of VMware perpetual license sales have had on VMware users, Ars spoke with several companies in the process of quitting the software due to Broadcom's changes. Here's what's pushing them over the edge. For some, VMware prices more than tripled under Broadcom Broadcom closed its VMware acquisition in November 2023, and by December 2023, the company announced that it would stop selling perpetual VMware licenses. VMware products were previously sold under 8,000 SKUs, but they have now been combined into a few bundle packages. Additionally, higher CPU core requirements per CPU subscription have made VMware more expensive for some reseller partners. "As on-premises virtualization projects move from [enterprise license agreements] and perpetual licenses to new bundling, socket-to-core ratios, and consumption models, the costs and pricing can increase two or three times," Gartner's 2024 Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure Technologies report that released in June reads. Numerous VMware customers I spoke with said their VMware costs rose 300 percent after Broadcom's takeover. Some companies have cited even higher price hikes -- including AT&T, which claimed that Broadcom proposed a 1,050 percent price hike. AT&T is suing Broadcom over perpetual license support and says it has looked into VMware alternatives.

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A new study examining a large sample of privately insured patients with obesity found that use of drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy as anti-obesity medications more than doubled from 2022 to 2023. During that same period, there was a 25.6% decrease in patients undergoing metabolic bariatric surgery to treat obesity. From a report: The study, by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Brown School of Public Health, is published in JAMA Network Open. "Our study provides one of the first national estimates of the decline in utilization of bariatric metabolic surgery among privately insured patients corresponding to the rising use of blockbuster GLP-1 RA drugs," said senior author Thomas C. Tsai, a metabolic bariatric surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Using a national sample of medical insurance claims data from more than 17 million privately insured adults, the researchers identified patients with a diagnosis of obesity without diabetes in 2022-2023. The study found a sharp increase in the share of patients who received glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, or GLP-1 RAs, during the study period, with GLP-1 RA use increasing 132.6% from the last six months of 2022 to the last six months of 2023 (from 1.89 to 4.41 patients per 1,000 patients). Meanwhile, there was a 25.6% decrease in use of bariatric metabolic surgery during the same period (from 0.22 to 0.16 patients per 1,000 patients). Among the sample of patients with obesity, 94.7% received neither form of treatment during the study period (while 5% received GLP-1 RAs and 0.3% received surgery). Compared to patients who were prescribed GLP-1 RAs, patients who underwent surgery tended to be more medically complex.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Last month at Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta AI was "on track" to become the most-used generative AI assistant in the world. The company has now passed a significant milestone toward that goal, with Meta AI passing the 500 million user mark, Zuckerberg revealed during the company's latest earnings call. The half billion user mark comes just barely a year after the social network first launched its AI assistant last fall. Zuckerberg said the company still expects to become the "most-used" assistant by the end of 2024, though he's never specified how the company is measuring that metric. Zuck said that AI-driven improvements in feed and video recommendations have led to an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook and 5% increase on Instagram this year. Advertisers have also leveraged the company's AI tools to generate over 15 million ads in just the past month. Separately, Meta's Threads app is gaining over a million new sign-ups daily, with nearly 275 million total monthly users.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Behind the Black: According to a new very detailed engineering analysis into the causes of the collapse of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 2020, the failure was caused first by a surprising interaction between the radio electronics of Arecibo and the traditional methods used to anchor the cables, and second by a failure of inspections to spot the problem as it became obvious. The surprising engineering discovery is illustrated [here (PNG)]. The main antenna of Arecibo was suspended above the bowl below by three main cables. The figure shows the basic design of the system used to anchor the cable ends to their sockets. The end of the cable bunches would be inserted into the socket, spread apart, and then zinc would be poured in to fill the gap and then act as a plug and glue to hold the cables in place. According to the report, this system has been used for decades in many applications very successfully. What the report found however was at Arecibo over time the cable bunch and zinc plug slowly began to pull out of the socket, what the report labels as "zinc creep." This was noted by inspectors, but dismissed as a concern because they still believed the engineering margins were still high enough to prevent failure at this point. In fact, this is exactly where the structure failed in 2020, with the first cable separating as shown in August 2020. The second cable did so in a similar manner in November 2020. The report concluded that the "only hypothesis the committee could develop that provides a plausible but unprovable answer to all these questions and the observed socket failure pattern is that the socket zinc creep was unexpectedly accelerated in the Arecibo Telescope's uniquely powerful electromagnetic radiation environment. The Arecibo Telescope cables were suspended across the beam of 'the most powerful radio transmitter on Earth.'"

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