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Last updated 23 Feb, 03:47 AM

BBC News

Germans vote in high-stakes election watched closely by Europe and US - Conservative Friedrich Merz is expected to win, but the far-right AfD is set for a strong second place.

Pope remains in 'critical' condition after 'respiratory crisis' - Pope Francis is "more unwell than yesterday", the Vatican says, adding his prognosis "remains guarded".

I'll back Ukraine in talks with Trump, Starmer tells Zelensky - The prime minister called Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky for the second time in four days.

Israel indefinitely delays Palestinian prisoner release as hostages freed - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the prisoners won't be freed until the next release of hostages is guaranteed.

List accomplishments or resign, Doge tells US federal workers in email - The weekend email comes as Elon Musk leads an effort to aggressively curtail the government workforce.

The Register

California goes ape with bill to crown Bigfoot official state cryptid - Beast remains as mythical as the return on AI investment Some muy importante legislation is stuck in the cogs of Californian bureaucracy – an Assembly Bill to recognize Bigfoot, aka Sasquatch, as the official state cryptid.…

Binned off staff, slashed stock options. What's next? Ah yes, bigger C-suite bonuses - And really, nothing out of the ordinary for Silicon Valley After another round of mass layoffs and reports of slashed stock options for remaining employees, Meta has like clockwork opted to reward its top executives with a substantial bonus increase.…

Docker delays Hub pull limits by a month, tweaks maximums, stalls storage billing indefinitely - Image fetches to be capped on hourly basis for Personal, unauthenticated use, paid-for plans get unlimited access Docker has delayed its plan to limit image pulls – the downloading of container images – from Docker Hub, by one month and has altered previously published quotas.…

Data is very valuable, just don't ask us to measure it, leaders say - After fifteeen years decade of big hype, less than 25% of orgs measure value of data, analytics Fifteen years of big data hype, and guess what? Less than one in four of those in charge of analytics projects actually measure the value of the activity to the organization they work for.…

Los Alamos boffins slap blinkers on satellites so we know who to blame in a crash - Extremely Low Resource Optical Identifier no brighter than LED, but readable with telescopes Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) have come up with a cheap and simple way for satellites to be identified from the ground using lights to blink out an ID code.…

New Scientist - News

Hair conditioner made from wood is black and smelly, but eco-friendly - Hair conditioner made using lignin, a polymer found in wood and bark, works just as well as a commercial product - as long as you don't mind the smell

How one farm is testing multiple carbon-capture tricks all at once - Rock dust, compost and biochar can all help capture carbon dioxide and boost crop yields when spread on soil – but researchers are discovering they may be even more effective when used in combination

US stops sharing flu data with WHO amidst one of its worst flu seasons - The US withdrawal from the World Health Organization formally takes one year, but the country has already stopped sharing influenza surveillance with the international body, which could impact the efficacy of the next flu vaccine

The bold plan to bring back Tasmanian devils across mainland Australia - Tasmanian devils are already being released inside predator-proof sanctuaries in New South Wales, and rewilding advocates believe they could suppress feral cats and foxes across the continent

Time can move both forwards and backwards at the quantum scale - Physicists use mathematical assumptions in many situations that forbid time from moving backwards – but that isn’t necessarily a reflection of quantum reality

Hacker News

OpenBSD Innovations - Comments

FFmpeg School of Assembly Language - Comments

Ask for no, don't ask for yes (2022) - Comments

Clang Static Analyzer and the Z3 constraint solver - Comments

Electronics Teardown: Stelo 2-Week Continuous Glucose Monitor (2024) - Comments

Slashdot

AI May Not Impact Tech-Sector Employment, Projects US Department of Labor - America's Labor Department includes the fact-finding Bureau of Labor Statistics — and they recently explained how AI impacts their projections for the next 10 years. Their conclusion, writes Investopedia, was that "tech workers might not have as much to worry about as one might think." Employment in the professional, scientific, and technical services sector is forecast to increase by 10.5% from 2023 to 2033, more than double the national average. According to the BLS, the impact AI will have on tech-sector employment is highly uncertain. For one, AI is adept at coding and related tasks. But at the same time, as digital systems become more advanced and essential to day-to-day life, more software developers, data managers, and the like are going to be needed to manage those systems. "Although it is always possible that AI-induced productivity improvements will outweigh continued labor demand, there is no clear evidence to support this conjecture," according to BLS researchers. Their employment projections through 2033 predict the fastest-growing sector within the tech industry will be computer system design, while the fastest-growing occupation will be data scientist. And they also project that from 2023 through 2033 AI will "primarily affect occupations whose core tasks can be most easily replicated by GenAI in its current form." So over those 10 years they project a 4.7% drop in employment of medical transcriptionists and a 5.0% drop in employment of customer service representatives. Other occupations also may see AI impacts, although not to the same extent. For instance, computer occupations may see productivity impacts from AI, but the need to implement and maintain AI infrastructure could in actuality boost demand for some occupations in this group. They also project decreasing employment for paralegals, but with actual lawyers being "less affected." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Will Consumer Data Collection Lead to Algorithm-Adjusted 'Surveillance Pricing'? - An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post's "Tech Brief": Last fall, reports that Kroger was considering bringing facial recognition technology into its stores sparked outcry from lawmakers and customers. They worried personalized data could be used to charge different prices for different customers based on their shopping habits, financial circumstances or appearance. Kroger, the country's largest supermarket chain, had already been using digital price tags in its stores. Kroger told lawmakers that it doesn't use facial recognition to help it set prices, a stance the company reiterated to the Tech Brief on Thursday. Still, the uproar helped to spark a push by consumer advocates who warn that the threat of invasive, personalized pricing schemes is real. Now, Democratic lawmakers in several states are working to ban so-called "surveillance pricing" — when businesses charge customers more or less for the same item based on their personal information. Besides a bill in California, three more bill were introduced this month in Colorado, Georgia, and Illinois that also ban "surveillance wages," which the article defines as employers adjusting wages based on how much data an employee collects. "Both surveillance pricing and surveillance wages really disrupt fundamental ideals of fairness," University of California, Irvine law professor Veena Dubal tells the Washington Post. Dubal is one of the consumer advocates behind a new report which notes information released last month by America's consumer-protecting FTC that "suggests that surveillance pricing tools are being actively developed and marketed across a range of industries, including consumer-facing businesses like 'grocery stores, apparel retailers, health and beauty retailers, home goods and furnishing stores, convenience stores, building and hardware stores, and general merchandise retailers such as department or discount stores." The consumer advocates (which include the Electronic Privacy Information Center) put it this way. "Imagine walking into a grocery store and seeing a price for milk that's higher than what the next shopper pays because an algorithm calculated that you're willing to spend more..." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New EV Batteries are Making Electric Cars Cheaper and Safer - The Washington Post looks at a new kind of battery that "could make American EVs cheaper and safer, experts say." If you bought an EV with a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery, you could expect lower car payments, less fire risk and more years of use out of your car — but you wouldn't be able to go as far on a single charge as you could with the nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) batteries commonly found in American and European electric cars. That trade-off has made LFP batteries the go-to choice for standard-range EVs in China, helping to make electric cars more affordable and limit pollution. Now, American companies are starting to build their own LFP batteries to catch up to their Chinese rivals... But there are plenty of barriers for U.S. companies that want to adopt a technology dominated by Chinese firms. Tariffs and tax credit restrictions have made it too expensive for most American automakers to import LFP batteries from China, and national security concerns have made it hard for American companies to partner with Chinese battery makers to build factories in the United States... Although American scientists invented LFP batteries in 1997, U.S. automakers didn't invest in the technology. Instead, they bet on NMC batteries because they have longer range, a big concern for American EV buyers. "Everyone in the West thought LFP was a nonstarter five or six years ago," said Adrian Yao, who founded STEER, a technology research group within Stanford University. "We really did have a myopic focus on" range, he added. That left the door open for Chinese companies to perfect LFP batteries, which have a few advantages. Instead of pricey nickel and cobalt, they use iron, which makes them 20 percent cheaper than NMC batteries, according to the International Energy Agency. While NMC batteries can be recharged up to about 1,000 times before they go kaput — which is enough to put 200,000 miles on most EVs — LFP batteries can last two or three times as long, according to Moura. Plus, LFP batteries' chemistry makes them less likely to catch fire and easier to extinguish. An NMC battery, on the other hand, is so flammable that "you could put it underwater or in space, and it'll keep burning because the oxygen it needs to keep the flame going is embedded within itself," Moura said. That safety advantage is key, because Chinese firms figured out they could pack LFP cells closer together inside a battery pack without risking a fire. That meant they could cram more energy into LFP batteries and nearly catch up to the range of NMC batteries. Last year, the Chinese battery giant CATL made the first LFP battery with more than 600 miles of range. Since LFP batteries are made from common materials and last longer, they also have a smaller environmental footprint than NMC batteries. Ford used LFP batteries in its Mach-E sedan (2023) and F-150 Lightning pickup trucks (2024), according to the article, "while Rivian began using them in the basic trims of its R1S SUV and R1T pickup truck this year... American LFP factories are slated to open this year in St. Louis and next year in Arizona." And an environmental engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley predicts LFP battery factories in the U.S. will "grow quite rapidly over the next five to 10 years." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rust Developer Survey Finds Increasing Usage, Especially on Linux - This year's "State of Rust" survey was completed by 7,310 Rust developers. DevClass note some key findings: When asked about their biggest worries for Rust's future, 45.5 percent cited "not enough usage in the tech industry," up from 42.5 percent last year, just ahead of the 45.2 percent who cited complexity as a concern... Only 18.6 percent declared themselves "not worried," though this is a slight improvement on 17.8 percent in 2023... Another question asks whether respondents are using Rust at work. 38.2 percent claimed to use it for most of their coding [up from 34% in 2023], and 13.4 percent a few times a week, accounting for just over half of responses. At the organization level there is a similar pattern. 45.5 percent of organizations represented by respondents make "non-trivial use of Rust," up from 38.7 percent last year. More details from I Programmer: On the up are "Using Rust helps us achieve or goals", now 82% compared to 72% in 2022; "We're likely to use Rust again in the future", up 3% to 78%; and "Using Rust has been worth the cost of Adoption". Going down are "Adopting Rust has been challenging", now 34.5% compared to 38.5% in 2022; and "Overall adopting Rust has slowed down our team" down by over 2% to 7%. "According to the survey, organizations primarily choose Rust for building correct and bug-free software (87.1%), performance characteristics (84.5%), security and safety properties (74.8%), and development enjoyment (71.2%)," writes The New Stack: Rust seems to be especially popular for creating server backends (53.4%), web and networking services, cloud technologies and WebAssembly, the report said. It also seems to be gaining more traction for embedded use cases... Regarding the preferred development environment, Linux remains the dominant development platform (73.7%). However, although VS Code remains the leading editor, its usage dropped five percentage points, from 61.7% to 56.7%, but the Zed editor gained notable traction, from 0.7% to 8.9%. Also, "nine out of 10 Rust developers use the current stable version, suggesting strong confidence in the language's stability," the report said... Overall, 82% of respondents report that Rust helped their company achieve its goals, and daily Rust usage increased to 53% (up four percentage points from 2023). When asked why they use Rust at work, 47% of respondents cited a need for precise control over their software, which is up from 37% when the question was asked two years ago. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Glitches for Windows 11 Update Include Breaking File Explorer - Five days ago on Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released patch KB5051987 for Windows 11 version 24H2, writes the XDA Developers site. But "As reported by Windows Latest and various communities like Reddit and Microsoft's help forum, many users have encountered a major issue..." Some have reported that, in addition to File Explorer failing to launch, they're unable to open folders from the desktop, save Office files, or even download files. Clicking on a folder icon may display its subfolders, but the contents within remain inaccessible... Some users on Microsoft's help forum and Reddit have also reported that the KB5051987 patch fails to install entirely. The update gets stuck at a certain percentage for hours before eventually displaying an error code. While these are among the most widely reported issues, others have surfaced as well, including problems with Taskbar preview animations, the camera, and more. "Microsoft keeps running into brick walls with the 2024 version of Windows 11," writes ZDNet. "Each new update designed to fix the outstanding bugs ends up introducing other problems..." Among the glitches resolved were ones that affected digital audio converters, USB audio drivers, USB cameras, and passkeys. The update also patched several security vulnerabilities, including some that were deemed critical.... Other glitches that may pop up include a stuttering mouse, an undetectable camera, .NET apps that cannot be installed inside the Windows Sandbox, and the Taskbar's new preview animation that does not work properly. You may also encounter other roadblocks. One person in the Windows Feedback Hub said that after installing the update, the battery life shows only 2.5 hours versus 6 hours previously. Another person found that the clipboard history no longer copies items from Microsoft Word... Each annual Windows update can suffer from bugs, especially after being rolled out to millions of users. However, Windows 11 24H2 has been more problematic than usual. Since its official launch last October, the 2024 version has carried with it a host of known issues, many of which still haven't been resolved. Read more of this story at Slashdot.