An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: NASA is 66 years old and feeling its age. Brilliant engineers are retiring. Others have fled to higher-paying jobs in the private space industry. The buildings are old, their maintenance deferred. The Apollo era, with its huge taxpayer investment, is a distant memory. The agency… Read More »
The Rust foundation is making “considerable progress” on a complete security audit of the Rust ecosystem, according to the coding news site I Programmer, citing a newly-released report from the nonprofit Rust foundation: The foundation is investigating the development of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) model for the Rust language, including the design and implementation… Read More »
With online dating apps, “Americans have increasingly been marrying someone more like themselves,” reports Bloomberg, citing new research that says this accounts for roughly half of the rise in household income inequality between 1980 and 2020: Using data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey from 2008 to 2021, when online dating quickly became prevalent,… Read More »
Wired published some thoughts from Hans Peter Brondmo, the former head of “Google’s seven-year mission to give AI a robot body”. An anonymous reader shared this report from Axios: Building AI-powered robots that can flexibly operate in the real world is going to take much longer than Silicon Valley believes and promises, according to the… Read More »
Samba is “a free software re-implementation of the SMB networking protocol,” according to Wikipedia. And now the Samba project “has secured significant funding (€688,800.00) from the German Sovereign Tech Fund to advance the project,” writes Jeremy Allison — Sam (who is Slashdot reader #8,157 — and also a long standing member of Samba’s core team):… Read More »
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Haiku (the MIT-licensed operating system, inspired by BeOS) has released its fifth beta for Haiku R1. Some new features include improved UI color management, improved dark mode coloring, Tracker improvements, TUN/TAP support for VPN connections, TCP throughput improvements, performance optimizations, UFS2 (BSD’s filesystem) read-only support, new FAT filesystem driver, improved… Read More »
“A two-day AI Labor Summit between AFL-CIO leaders and Microsoft executives this week reflects the tech giant’s revamped approach to unions,” writes GeekWire, “which includes a pledge by the company to incorporate feedback from labor unions and their members into the development of artificial intelligence.” But just two days later, “Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer… Read More »
Redmonk’s latest programming language ranking (attempting to gauge “potential future adoption trends”) has found evidence of “a landscape resistant to change.” Outside of CSS moving down a spot and C++ moving up one, the Top 10 was unchanged. And even in the back half of the rankings, where languages tend to be less entrenched and… Read More »
The Washingon Post reports that a regulatory dispute in Ohio may help answer a big question about America’s power grid: who will pay for the huge upgrades needed to meet soaring energy demand “from the data centers powering the modern internet and artificial intelligence revolution?” Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are fighting a proposal by… Read More »
Ars Technica’s Stephen Clark reports: A panel of independent experts reported this week that NASA lacks funding to maintain most of its decades-old facilities, could lose its engineering prowess to the commercial space industry, and has a shortsighted roadmap for technology development. “NASA’s problem is it always seems to have $3 billion more program than… Read More »