Latest News

Last updated 11 Mar, 01:33 PM

BBC News

Mortgage rates rise and deals pulled over Iran war turmoil - Average mortgage rates hit highest since last August in the biggest upheaval since the mini-Budget.

Boy, 16, arrested after girl is stabbed at school - Sources tell the BBC that pupils had to hide under their desks as the incident unfolded.

Inside the Russian explosives plot that sent incendiary parcels to the UK - Aleksandr Suranovas, charged with carrying out an act of terrorism for Russia, speaks to the BBC.

March organised by Iran-linked group banned after police request - Organisers say it is a peaceful pro-Palestinian event but it has been criticised for representing the Iranian regime.

Pop music's bias towards English is fading, says Spotify - Songs in 16 languages featured in the global chart last year, as genres like Brazilian Funk explode.

The Register

Intel finds its Zen undercutting AMD with Arrow Lake refresh - Let them eat cores Intel has a new strategy for shoring up its eroding market share: Offering PC buyers more cores per dollar than arch-rival AMD in a refresh of its Arrow Lake range.…

Ayar Labs taps Wiwynn to cram 1,024 GPUs into a photonic rack system - Reference design to stitch more than a thousand accelerators into a single enormous server. Exclusive If you thought Nvidia or AMD's 72-GPU rack systems were enormous, silicon Ayar Labs has something much bigger in the works.…

Lightmatter says latest photonics will slash datacenter fiber bills in half - Latest optical engine may not be CPO, but it's still better than pluggables Photonics startup LightMatter says that its latest optical engine can cut the amount of fiber used by modern datacenters in half, and perhaps more importantly, it doesn't rely on co-packaging to do it.…

Microsoft ships VS Code weekly, adds Autopilot mode so AI can wreak havoc without bothering you - Google also enables auto-approval of AI agents while their documentation warns against it Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is moving to a weekly release cycle, as well as joining Google in encouraging agentic AI development without manual approval with a new Autopilot feature.…

Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after USB keys fail to decrypt them - Officials suspend Basel-Stadt trial and launch probe A Swiss canton has suspended its pilot of electronic voting after failing to count 2,048 votes cast in national referendums held on March 8.…

New Scientist - Home

Start-up is building the first data centre to use human brain cells - Cortical Labs is building two data centres that will house its neuron-filled chips. The technology is still in the very early stages of development

Orcas may be to blame for some mass dolphin strandings - Two mass strandings involving hundreds of dolphins in Argentina probably happened because the pods were being hunted by orcas, highlighting the role of predators in these mysterious events

I was accused of killing over 100 million rabbits across Australia - When New Scientist reporter James Woodford was assigned to a story about a virus designed to kill rabbits, he never expected to be accused of spreading it

Mathematics is undergoing the biggest change in its history - The speed at which artificial intelligence is gaining in mathematical ability has taken many by surprise. It is rewriting what it means to be a mathematician

Sharing genetic risk scores can unwittingly reveal secrets - Statistics that quantify a person’s predisposition to diseases such as diabetes and cancer can be reverse-engineered to reveal the underlying genetic data, prompting privacy concerns

Hacker News

Microsoft BitNet: 100B Param 1-Bit model for local CPUs - Comments

PeppyOS: A simpler alternative to ROS 2 (now with containers support) - Comments

Building a TB-303 from Scratch - Comments

Zig – Type Resolution Redesign and Language Changes - Comments

Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns - Comments

Slashdot

Yann LeCun Raises $1 Billion To Build AI That Understands the Physical World - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a new Paris-based startup cofounded by Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, announced Monday it has raised more than $1 billion to develop AI world models. LeCun argues that most human reasoning is grounded in the physical world, not language, and that AI world models are necessary to develop true human-level intelligence. "The idea that you're going to extend the capabilities of LLMs [large language models] to the point that they're going to have human-level intelligence is complete nonsense," he said in an interview with WIRED. The financing, which values the startup at $3.5 billion, was co-led by investors such as Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions. Other notable backers include Mark Cuban, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and French billionaire and telecommunications executive Xavier Niel. AMI (pronounced like the French word for friend) aims to build "a new breed of AI systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan, and are controllable and safe," the company says in a press release. The startup says it will be global from day one, with offices in Paris, Montreal, Singapore, and New York, where LeCun will continue working as a New York University professor in addition to leading the startup. AMI will be the first commercial endeavor for LeCun since his departure from Meta in November 2025. [...] LeCun says AMI aims to work with companies in manufacturing, biomedical, robotics, and other industries that have lots of data. For example, he says AMI could build a realistic world model of an aircraft engine and work with the manufacturer to help them optimize for efficiency, minimize emissions, or ensure reliability. LeCun says AMI will release its first AI models quickly, but he's not expecting most people to take notice. The company will first work with partners such as Toyota and Samsung, and then will learn how to apply its technology more broadly. Eventually, he says, AMI intends to develop a "universal world model," which would be the basis for a generally intelligent system that could help companies regardless of what industry they work in. "It's very ambitious," he says with a smile. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Valve Faces Second, Class-Action Lawsuit Over Loot Boxes - Valve is facing a new consumer class-action lawsuit two weeks after New York sued the video game company for "letting children and adults illegally gamble" with loot boxes. The new lawsuit is similar, alleging that loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2 are "carefully engineered to extract money from consumers, including children, through deceptive, casino-style psychological tactics." "We believe Valve deliberately engineered its gambling platform and profited enormously from it," Steve Berman, founder and managing partner at law firm Hagens Berman, said in a press release. "Consumers played these games for entertainment, unaware that Valve had allegedly already stacked the odds against them. We intend to hold Valve accountable and put money back in the pockets of consumers." PC Gamer reports: The system is well known to anyone who's played a Valve multiplayer game: Earn a locked loot box by playing, pay $2.50 for a key, unlock it, get a digital doohickey that's sometimes worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars but far more often is worth just a few pennies. Is that gambling? If these cases go to court, we'll find out. The full complaint points out that the unlocking process is even designed to look like a slot machine: "Images of possible items scroll across the screen, spinning fast at first, then slowing to a stop on the player's 'prize.' Players buy and open loot boxes for the same reason people play slot machines -- the hope of a valuable payout." Loot boxes, the complaint continues, are not "incidental features" of Valve's games, but rather "a deliberate, carefully engineered revenue model." So too is the Steam Community Market, and Steam itself, which the suit claims is "deliberately designed" to enable the sale of digital items on third-party marketplaces through "trade URLs," despite Valve's terms of service prohibiting off-platform sales. And while the debate over whether loot boxes constitute a form of gambling continues to rage, the suit claims Valve's system does indeed qualify under Washington law, which defines gambling as "staking or risking something of value upon the outcome of a contest of chance or a future contingent event not under the person's control or influence." "Valve's loot boxes satisfy every element of this definition," the lawsuit alleges. "Users stake money (the price of a key) on the outcome of a contest of chance (the random selection of a virtual item), and the items received are 'things of value' under RCW 9.46.0285 because they can be sold for real money through Valve's own marketplace and through third-party marketplaces that Valve has fostered and facilitated." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 1,300-Pound NASA Spacecraft To Re-Enter Earth's Atmosphere - Van Allen Probe A, a 1,300-pound (600 kg) NASA satellite launched in 2012 to study Earth's radiation belts, is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere this week. While most of it is expected to burn up during descent, "some components may survive," reports the BBC. "The space agency said there is a one in 4,200 chance of being harmed by a piece of the probe, which it characterized as 'low' risk." From the report: The spacecraft is projected to re-enter around 19:45 EST (00:45 GMT) on Tuesday the U.S. Space Force predicted, according to Nasa, though there is a 24-hour margin of "uncertainty" in the timing. [...] The spacecraft and its twin, Van Allen Probe B, were on a mission to gather unprecedented data on Earth's two permanent radiation belts. It was not immediately clear where in Earth's atmosphere the satellite is projected to re-enter. NASA and the U.S. Space Force has said it will monitor the re-entry and update any predictions. [...] Van Allen Probe B is not expected to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere before 2030. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After Outages, Amazon To Make Senior Engineers Sign Off On AI-Assisted Changes - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Amazon's ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a "deep dive" into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant said there had been a "trend of incidents" in recent months, characterized by a "high blast radius" and "Gen-AI assisted changes" among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. Under "contributing factors" the note included "novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established." "Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently," Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email, also seen by the FT. The note ahead of Tuesday's meeting did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss. [...] Treadwell, a former Microsoft engineering executive, told employees that Amazon would focus its weekly "This Week in Stores Tech" (TWiST) meeting on a "deep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate term initiatives" the group hopes will limit future outages. He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added. Amazon said the review of website availability was "part of normal business" and it aims for continual improvement. "TWiST is our regular weekly operations meeting with a specific group of retail technology leaders and teams where we review operational performance across our store," the company said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tony Hoare, Turing Award-Winning Computer Scientist Behind QuickSort, Dies At 92 - Tony Hoare, the Turing Award-winning pioneer who created the Quicksort algorithm, developed Hoare logic, and advanced theories of concurrency and structured programming, has died at age 92. News of his passing was shared today in a blog post. The site I Programmer also commemorated Hoare in a post highlighting his contributions to computer science and the lasting impact of his work. Personal accounts have been shared on Hacker News and Reddit. Many Slashdotters may know Hoare for his aphorism regarding software design: "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." Read more of this story at Slashdot.