Latest News
Last updated 04 May, 12:33 AM
BBC News
Iran says US has responded to its latest peace proposal - The US is yet to formally confirm it has responded. However, Trump reportedly told Israel's Kan News it was unacceptable.
The threat to summer holidays looming from jet fuel shortages - What impact might shortages have on our summer holidays - and what could be done about it?
Rudy Giuliani in critical condition in hospital - The long-time champion of Trump and former New York mayor is in hospital, according to his spokesman.
'I was trying to save a life,' man who intervened in Golders Green attack tells BBC - Ashkan Asadian said he acted on the spur of the moment without thinking about the danger of the situation.
UK to enter talks to join £78bn EU loan scheme for Ukraine - Sir Keir Starmer will meet leaders at the European Political Community summit in Armenia on Monday.
The Register
Microsoft's turned Windows into a cesspool, but it wants to do better - Windows is a mess, GitHub keeps wobbling, Copilot draws flak - what’s wrong at Redmond? kettle When it comes to making decisions that piss off your user base, no one knows how to do it like Microsoft. …
Inference is giving AI chip startups a second chance to make their mark - In a disaggregated AI world, Nvidia can be both a friend and an enemy AI adoption is reaching an inflection point as the focus shifts from training new models to serving them. For the AI startups vying for a slice of Nvidia's pie, it's now or never.…
Royal Navy chief backs drones, autonomous weapons in ‘Hybrid Navy’ - Plan mixes crewed ships, robot escorts, and long-range strike to bolster a stretched fleet The leader of Britain’s Royal Navy has outlined a “Hybrid Navy” built on a mix of crewed, uncrewed, and autonomous platforms to ensure it can continue to defend the nation and operate overseas.…
Job's a good 'un: Bank of England tech project wins watchdog praise - PAC: Now why can't everybody else in public sector do it like this? Parliament's spending watchdog has held up a successful large-scale public sector tech transformation as a rare example worth emulating, in a striking departure from the usual diet of failure and overspend.…
Usage-based pricing killing your vibe - here's how to roll your own local AI coding agents - Take those token limits and shove them by vibe coding with a local LLM With model devs pushing more aggressive rate limits, raising prices, or even abandoning subscriptions for usage-based pricing, that vibe-coded hobby project is about to get a whole lot more expensive. Fortunately, you're not without cost-saving options.…
New Scientist - Home
Why dinosaurs lived much more complex lives than we thought - A wave of dinosaur discoveries over the past decade has completely reshaped our understanding of these long-extinct animals. Palaeontologist Dave Hone spills the secrets of how dinosaurs lived, from how social they were to how much they really fought
Is consciousness more fundamental to reality than quantum physics? - The idea that everything that exists can be built from the bottom up has long held sway among physicists. Now, a new kind of science is under construction that centres conscious experience – and might unravel the universe’s biggest mysteries
Our verdict on Red Mars: Mostly great, with a few quibbles - The New Scientist Book Club read Kim Stanley Robinson's acclaimed science fiction story about the first settlers on Mars in April – and had a lot to say about it
Ann Leckie continues to shine with new sci-fi novel Radiant Star - Set on a planet whose population lives underground, Radiant Star is Ann Leckie's latest Radch-universe novel. Its rich characterisation and meticulous world-building shine through, says our science-fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson
2026 will be the hottest year on record, leading scientist predicts - The second half of this year will almost certainly see the start of an El Niño phase that could lead to extreme heat across much of the globe, and James Hansen expects that to make this year surpass 2024 as the hottest on record
Hacker News
The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility - Comments
BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth - Comments
The 'Hidden' Costs of Great Abstractions - Comments
Agentic Coding Is a Trap - Comments
Let's Buy Spirit Air - Comments
Slashdot
OpenAI Introduces AI-Generated Pets for Its Codex App - "Vibe coding just got a whole lot more adorable," writes Engadget: OpenAI introduced AI-generated pets to the Codex app, its agentic tool that helps with coding. These "optional animated companions" don't do any coding themselves, but serve as a floating overlay that can tell you what Codex is working on, notify you when Codex completes a task or whether it needs your input on something. The new feature lets developers see Codex's active thread, without having to switch away from your current open app. "The feature ships with eight built-in variations — including a cat and dog," reports Mashable. "But the more interesting play is the custom pet creator." Users can prompt Codex directly to generate their own companion, then share it online. A quick scroll through the homepage reveals the community has already gotten to work. Current creations include Goku, Patrick Star, Microsoft's long-retired Clippy, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and — naturally — a goblin. There's also Grogu, Dobby, a tiny Bob Rossi, and a "Doge-style Shiba Inu dog"... Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AI Cameras are Being Deployed Across the Western US for Early Detection of Wildfires - The Associated Press reports: On a March afternoon, artificial intelligence detected something resembling smoke on a camera feed from Arizona's Coconino National Forest. Human analysts verified it wasn't a cloud or dust, then alerted the state's forest service and largest electric utility. One of dozens of AI cameras installed for the utility Arizona Public Service had spotted early signs of what came to be known as the Diamond Fire. Firefighters raced to the scene and contained the blaze before it grew past 7 acres (2.8 hectares). As record-breaking heat and an abysmal snowpack raise concerns about severe wildfires, states across the fire-prone West are adding AI to their wildfire detection toolbox, banking on the technology to help save lives and property. Arizona Public Service has nearly 40 active AI smoke-detection cameras and plans to have 71 by summer's end, and the state's fire agency has deployed seven of its own. Another utility, Xcel Energy in Colorado, has installed 126 and aims to have cameras in seven of the eight states it serves by year's end... ALERTCalifornia is a network of some 1,240 AI-enabled cameras across the Golden State that work similar to the system in Arizona.... Pano AI, whose technology combines high-definition camera feeds, satellite data and AI monitoring, has seen a growing interest in its cameras since launching in 2020. They've been deployed in Australia, Canada and 17 U.S. states, including Oregon, Washington and Texas... Last year, its technology detected 725 wildfires in the U.S., the company said... Cindy Kobold, an Arizona Public Service meteorologist, said the technology notifies them about 45 minutes faster on average than the first 911 call. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Carbon Pollution Is Making Food Less Nutritious, Risking the Health of Billions - A new meta-analysis found nutrients in food decreased over the last 40 years, reports the Washington Post. "Many of humanity's most important crops — including wheat, potatoes, beans — contain fewer vitamins and minerals than they did a generation ago." "The invisible culprit behind this damaging phenomenon? Carbon dioxide pollution." Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow — from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc... "The diets we eat today have less nutritional density than what our grandparents ate, even if we eat exactly the same thing," said Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington's Center for Health and the Global Environment. People in wealthy countries with strong health care systems will have many tools to cope with the change, experts said. But for the world's poorest and most vulnerable, the consequences could be devastating. One study concluded that by the middle of the century the phenomenon could put more than a billion additional women and children at risk of iron-deficiency anemia — a condition that can cause pregnancy complications, developmental problems and even death. Meanwhile, some 2 billion people across the globe who already suffer from some form of nutrient shortage could see their health problems grow even worse. "The scale of the problem is huge," Ebi said. Plants depend on carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis — but that doesn't mean they grow better when there's more carbon in the air, scientists say. A sweeping survey of changes among 32 compounds in 43 crops found that nearly every plant that humans eat is harmed by rising CO2 levels... On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader GameboyRMH for sharing the news. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Robots Are Building Clay Homes In Texas Using Dirt From the Ground - A startup south of Austin is using robots to build homes out of clay pulled directly from the ground, reports a local news station: The materials are gathered on site, mixed, and placed on a build plate. From there, a robot lowers from above, picks up the clay with a claw, carries it to the wall and drops it into place. Later, the same robot switches tools, using a hammer attachment to pound the material into shape. "It's kind of trying to replicate how a human might build an adobe house," said software engineer Anastasia Nikoulina... Using machine learning, the system constantly evaluates the wall, adjusting how it builds to create a flat, solid surface... The project is underway at Proto-Town, a ranch between Lockhart and Luling where startups test new technologies, from anti-drone systems to nuclear reactors. The company plans to build their next home on the property, with hopes to do more than 20 homes over the next year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It's Goodbye Time for Jeeves and Ask.com - Relics of Yesterday's Internet - A 1999 press release bragged "Jeeves" answered 92.3 million questions in just three months. "In the digital wilds of Y2K, we came to him with our most probing questions," remembers the New York Times — whether it was Britney Spears or tamagotchis: We asked, and he answered: Jeeves, the digital butler of information, the online valet who led us into the depths of cyberspace. Now, like so many other relics of yesterday's internet, Jeeves — and his home, Ask.com — are no more. After almost 30 years, the question-and-answer service and former search engine shuttered on Friday. "To you — the millions of users who turned to us for answers in a rapidly changing world — thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty, and your trust," the company said in a notice posted on its now-defunct website... Created in Berkeley, Calif., in the days of the dot-com gold rush, Ask Jeeves first appeared on computer screens in 1996.... Their mascot, Jeeves, was modeled on the clever English butler character from the famed P.G. Wodehouse book series. Its search function was simple — type in a question, get an answer. But the quality of its responses was uneven, and the website was quickly eclipsed by Google and Yahoo as the world's go-to search engines. The site was bought by InterActive Corp. for more than $1 billion in 2005, and was given an injection of cash to help it compete as a search engine. It rebranded as Ask.com and as part of the reimagining, the site also ditched the character of Jeeves in 2006. Scrappy but inventive, the site was one of the first to introduce hyperlocal map overlays to its searches and incorporate thumbnails of webpages. "They are doing a lot of clever and interesting things," a Google executive noted of Ask.com at the time. Still, Ask.com struggled to compete and returned in 2010 to its bread and butter: question-and-answer style prompts. Even then, it faltered against newer, crowdsourced iterations like Quora and Google's unyielding march to the internet fore — the platform now dominates search traffic, and the world's general experience of the internet. A statement at Ask.com ends "by thanking its millions of users, and saying, 'Jeeves' spirit endures'," notes this article from Engadget: As sad as it is to see a relic of the early Internet days fade into obscurity, we still have Ask Jeeves to thank for why some users still punch in full questions when querying Google. On top of that, Jeeves was built to provide detailed answers in natural language, which could have arguably acted as a precursor to today's AI chatbots like ChatGPT. "Now, Ask.com joins the Internet graveyard that includes competitors like AltaVista, which shut down in 2013," the article points out. "With Ask.com gone, alongside AIM and AOL dial-up services also sunsetting, we're truly coming to an end of a specific era of the Internet." And the New York Times argues the memory of Jeeves now rests somewhere between Limewire and Beanie Babies... Slashdot reader BrianFagioli calls it "a quiet reminder of how quickly the web moves, and how even widely recognized names can drift into obscurity once the underlying technology leaves them behind." Read more of this story at Slashdot.