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- Posted on Thursday January 01, 1970
 Microsoft Copilot "isn't doing as well as the company would like," reports XDA-Developers.com (citing a report from startup/VC industry site Newcomer).
The Redmond giant has invested billions of dollars and a lot of manpower into making it happen, but as a recent report claims, people just don't care. In fact, if the report is to be believed, Microsoft's rise in the AI scene has already come to a screeching halt:
At Microsoft's annual executive huddle last month, the company's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Thursday January 01, 1970
"Google's DeepMind UK team reportedly seeks to unionize," reports TechCrunch:
Around 300 London-based members of Google's AI-focused DeepMind team are seeking to unionize with the Communication Workers Union, according to a Financial Times report that cites three people involved with the unionization effort.
These DeepMind employees are reportedly unhappy about Google's decision to remove a pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance from its website. They're also concerned about the company's work with the Israeli military, including a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract that has prompted protests elsewhere at Google.
At least five DeepMind employees quit, according to the ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Thursday January 01, 1970
"Not so long ago, working in tech meant job security, extravagant perks and a bring-your-whole-self-to-the-office ethos rare in other industries," writes the Wall Street Journal.
But now tech work "looks like a regular job," with workers "contending with the constant fear of layoffs, longer hours and an ever-growing list of responsibilities for the same pay."
Now employees find themselves doing the work of multiple laid-off colleagues. Some have lost jobs only to be rehired into positions that aren't eligible for raises or stock grants. Changing jobs used to be a surefire way to secure a raise; these days, asking for more ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Thursday January 01, 1970
The university blamed it on "the significant number of students" who violated their coding competition's rules.
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp quotes this report from The Logic: Finding that many students violated rules and submitted code not written by themselves, the University of Waterloo's Centre for Computing and Math decided not to release results from its annual Canadian Computing Competition (CCC), which many students rely on to bolster their chances of being accepted into Waterloo's prestigious computing and engineering programs, or land a spot on teams to represent Canada in international competitions. "It is clear that many students submitted code that they ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Thursday January 01, 1970
"The U.S. and Canadian websites for Lenovo offered U.S. $140 and CAD $211 off on the same ThinkPad X1 Carbon model when choosing any one of the Linux-based alternatives," reports It's FOSS News:
This was brought to my attention thanks to a Reddit post... Others then chimed in, saying that Lenovo has been doing this since at least 2020 and that the big price difference shows how ridiculous Windows' pricing is...
Not all models from their laptop lineup, like ThinkPad, Yoga, Legion, LOQ, etc., feature an option to get Linux pre-installed during the checkout process. Luckily, there is an easy way ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Thursday January 01, 1970
80-year-old George Lucas appeared this week at a 45th anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back, reports CNN — and finally gave a good explanation for why Yoda speaks the way he does. "He explained that it came about in order to ensure that the little alien's usually profound messages really landed with audiences."
"Because if you speak regular English, people won't listen that much," Lucas said at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival, per Variety . "But if he had an accent, or it's really hard to understand what he's saying, they focus on what he's saying." Yoda was "basically the ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Thursday January 01, 1970
Some patches for Linux 6.15-rc4 (updating the kernel driver for the Bcachefs file system) triggered some "straight-to-the-point wisdom" from Linus Torvalds about case-insensitive filesystems, reports Phoronix.
Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet started the conversation, explaining how some buggy patches for their case-insensitive file and folder support were upstreamed into the Bcachefs kernel driver nearly two years ago:
When I was discussing with the developer who did the implementation, I noted that fstests should already have tests. However, it seems I neglected to tell him to make sure the tests actually run... It is _not_ enough to simply rely on the automated tests. ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Thursday January 01, 1970
"4chan, down for more than a week after hackers got in through an insecure script that handled PDFs, is back online," notes BoingBoing. (They add that Thursday saw 4chan's first blog postin years — just the words "Testing testing 123 123...") But 4chan posted a much longer explanation on Friday," confirming their servers were compromised by a malicious PDF upload from "a hacker using a UK IP address," granting access to their databases and administrative dashboard.
The attacker "spent several hours exfiltrating database tables and much of 4chan's source code. When they had finished downloading what they wanted, they began ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Thursday January 01, 1970
An anonymous reader shared this report from Business Insider:
A Lufthansa flight carrying 461 passengers had to divert after someone's tablet became "jammed" in a business-class seat.
The Airbus A380 took off from Los Angeles on Wednesday, bound for Munich, and had been flying for around three hours when the pilots diverted to Boston Logan International Airport. In a statement to Business Insider, an airline spokesperson said the tablet had become "jammed in a Business Class seat" and had "already shown visible signs of deformation due to the seat's movements" when the flight diverted. [The aviation site] Simply Flying, which first ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Thursday January 01, 1970
"Future moon astronauts may find water more accessible than previously thought," writes Space.com, citing a new NASA-led experiment:
Because the moon lacks a magnetic field like Earth's, the barren lunar surface is constantly bombarded by energetic particles from the sun... Li Hsia Yeo, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, led a lab experiment observing the effects of simulated solar wind on two samples of loose regolith brought to Earth by the Apollo 17 mission... To mimic conditions on the moon, the researchers built a custom apparatus that included a vacuum chamber, where the samples were placed, ... Continue Reading »
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