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Last updated 18 Mar, 09:41 AM

BBC News

Total repression and air strikes bring unrelenting dread for Iranians - Tehran residents tell the BBC they're caught between US-Israeli bombing and an Iranian regime trying to reassert its power.

Scotland's assisted dying bill rejected after emotional debate - Scotland would have become the first part of the UK to legalise the process had MSPs backed the proposals.

Morocco awarded Africa Cup of Nations title after Senegal win overturned - Morocco declared the winners of the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations after the Confederation of African Football overturns the result of their final defeat by Senegal.

Ukraine faces missile shortage due to Middle East war, says Zelensky - In an exclusive interview with the BBC, the Ukrainian president says Putin wants a "long war" between the US and Iran.

Angela Rayner's explosive speech reignites leadership speculation - The ex-deputy PM did not name Keir Starmer in her attack on Labour's direction and policies - but she did not have to.

The Register

Europe's cloud minnows tell Brussels to stop big tech 'sovereignty-washing' - 24 execs sign open letter demanding control-based definitions and reserved procurement Execs from 24 European cloud and digital service providers are urging the European Commission to legislate for real tech sovereignty – not the illusion of it – in the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA).…

Iran's cyberattack against med tech firm is 'just the beginning' - Even without a navy, or air power, 'They'll still have the ability to hack' Businesses should expect that Iran will conduct more aggressive cyber-ops as the war escalates, according to security analysts.…

Alibaba Cloud hikes prices by up to 34 percent, blames hardware costs and AI demand - Compute, storage, and SaaS all slugged - even on Alibaba's own silicon Alibaba Cloud today informed users it will increase prices for many services by up to 34 percent.…

Water company wasted $200k on bad answers from an AI model – so built its own slop filtering system - 'Rozum' orchestrates multiple flaky models and drives them to reasonable conclusions Tech companies have in recent years developed a reputation for being rapacious rent-seekers, but can also be unwittingly generous because their penchant to prioritize popularity over quality leaves room for others to sell improvements or repairs.…

Linux Foundation kicks off effort to shield FOSS maintainers from AI slop bug reports - Big Tech donates $12.5 million to get things rolling Half a dozen Big Tech players have together delivered $12.5 million in grants towards a project that aims to help maintainers of open source projects to cope with AI slop bug reports.…

New Scientist - Home

Social media is a defective product - Two lawsuits are being brought against giant tech firms for the dangers their apps pose to young people. Columnist Annalee Newitz says the outcome of those cases could dramatically change social media for the better

A very serious guide to buying your own humanoid robot butler - You can now buy a humanoid robot housekeeper for less than the price of a second-hand car. But before splashing out, there’s something you need to know

Your partner may wake you up six times a night – but does it matter? - People who share a bed with a partner are woken by them multiple times per night, but don’t remember most of these disturbances

The ancient Goths were an ethnically diverse group - Ancient DNA reveals that the Goths of eastern Europe, some of whom would ultimately sack the city of Rome, may have been a mix of peoples from three continents

Particle discovered at CERN solves a 20-year-old mystery - Physicists working on the LHCb experiment have spotted an elusive and fleeting particle, a heavier and more charming cousin to the proton, that has been sought for decades

Hacker News

JPEG Compression - Comments

Write up of my homebrew CPU build - Comments

Mistral AI Releases Forge - Comments

A Decade of Slug - Comments

Celebrating Tony Hoare's mark on computer science - Comments

Slashdot

Nvidia Announces Vera Rubin Space-1 Chip System For Orbital AI Data Centers - Nvidia unveiled its Vera Rubin Space-1 system for powering AI workloads in orbital data centers. "Space computing, the final frontier, has arrived," said CEO Jensen Huang. "As we deploy satellite constellations and explore deeper into space, intelligence must live wherever data is generated." CNBC reports: In a press release, the company said that its Vera Rubin Space-1 Module, which includes the IGX Thor and Jetson Orin, will be used on space missions led by multiple companies. The chips are specifically "engineered for size-, weight- and power-constrained environments." Partners include Axiom Space, Starcloud and Planet. Huang said Nvidia is working with partners on a new computer for orbital data centers, but there are still engineering hurdles to overcome. "In space, there's no convection, there's just radiation," Huang said during his GTC keynote, "and so we have to figure out how to cool these systems out in space, but we've got lots of great engineers working on it." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI Job Loss Research Ignores How AI Is Utterly Destroying the Internet - An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: Over the last few months, various academics and AI companies have attempted to predict how artificial intelligence is going to impact the labor market. These studies, including a high-profile paper published by Anthropic earlier this month, largely try to take the things AI is good at, or could be good at, and match them to existing job categories and job tasks. But the papers ignore some of the most impactful and most common uses of AI today: AI porn and AI slop. Anthropic's paper, called "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence," essentially attempts to find 1:1 correlations between tasks that people do today at their jobs and things people are using Claude for. The researchers also try to predict if a job's tasks "are theoretically possible with AI," which resulted in this chart, which has gone somewhat viral and was included in a newsletter by MSNOW's Phillip Bump and threaded about by tech journalist Christopher Mims. (Because everything is terrible, the research is now also feeding into a gambling website where you can see the apparent odds of having your job replaced by AI.) In his thread, Mims makes the case that the "theoretical capability" of AI to do different jobs in different sectors is totally made up, and that this chart basically means nothing. Mims makes a good and fair observation: The nature of the many, many studies that attempt to predict which people are going to lose their jobs to AI are all flawed because the inputs must be guessed, to some degree. But I believe most of these studies are flawed in a deeper way: They do not take into account how people are actually actually using AI, though Anthropic claims that that is exactly what it is doing. "We introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily," the researchers write. This is based in part on the "Anthropic Economic Index," which was introduced in an extremely long paper published in January that tries to catalog all the high-minded uses of AI in specific work-related contexts. These uses include "Complete humanities and social science academic assignments across multiple disciplines," "Draft and revise professional workplace correspondence and business communications," and "Build, debug, and customize web applications and websites." Not included in any of Anthropic's research are extremely popular uses of AI such as "create AI porn" and "create AI slop and spam." These uses are destroying discoverability on the internet, cause cascading societal and economic harms. "Anthropic's research continues a time-honored tradition by AI companies who want to highlight the 'good' uses of AI that show up in their marketing materials while ignoring the world-destroying applications that people actually use it for," argues Koebler. "Meanwhile, as we have repeatedly shown, huge parts of social media websites and Google search results have been overtaken by AI slop. Chatbots themselves have killed traffic to lots of websites that were once able to rely on ad revenue to employ people, so on and so forth..." "This is all to say that these studies about the economic impacts of AI are ignoring a hugely important piece of context: AI is eating and breaking the internet and social media," writes Koebler, in closing. "We are moving from a many-to-many publishing environment that created untold millions of jobs and businesses towards a system where AI tools can easily overwhelm human-created websites, businesses, art, writing, videos, and human activity on the internet. What's happening may be too chaotic, messy, and unpleasant for AI companies to want to reckon with, but to ignore it entirely is malpractice." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arizona Charges Kalshi With Illegal Gambling Operation - Arizona has filed criminal charges against Kalshi, accusing it of operating an illegal gambling business. "Kalshi may brand itself as a 'prediction market,' but what it's actually doing is running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections, both of which violate Arizona law," Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement. The case could ultimately head to the Supreme Court to decide whether federal oversight by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission overrides state gambling laws. Bloomberg reports: While state regulators have taken steps to crack down on what they say is unlicensed betting on Kalshi's site, Arizona appears to be the first state to escalate to criminal charges. The charges cited in the complaint are misdemeanors, which carry less serious penalties than felonies. [...] Prediction market exchanges like Kalshi have said they should continue to be regulated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission despite opposition from some state officials, who argue the trading should come under state gambling laws. Arizona's criminal complaint follows Kalshi's move last week to block the state's gaming department from taking enforcement action against the company. "These are the first criminal charges of any kind filed against Kalshi in any court in the United States, but it will likely be the first of several," said Daniel Wallach, a sports and gaming attorney. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rural Ohioans Seek To Ban Data Centers Through Constitutional Amendment - Residents in rural Ohio are pushing a constitutional amendment to ban large data centers over 25 megawatts, citing concerns about energy use, water consumption, and lack of transparency around proposed projects. "My biggest concern is because I love Adams County," Nikki Gerber told Cleveland.com. "What it feels like they are doing is just taking advantage of the unzoned rural areas of Ohio, where they can go ahead and put in whatever they want." From the report: Gerber and a handful of residents from Adams and Brown counties gathered about 1,800 signatures in eight days to start the ballot process. They submitted those petitions to the Ohio attorney general's office on Monday. That's the first step before supporters can begin collecting signatures statewide. State law requires at least 1,000 valid voter signatures to begin the process. The petitions must also include the full text of the proposed amendment and a summary explaining what it would do. Attorney General Dave Yost's office now has 10 days to decide whether the summary fairly and truthfully describes the proposal. If it does, the measure will move to the Ohio Ballot Board. Supporters would then need to gather about 413,000 valid signatures by July to place the amendment before voters this November. The report notes that a 25-megawatt limit "would effectively block most modern data centers from being built in Ohio." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gamers React With Overwhelming Disgust To DLSS 5's Generative AI Glow-Ups - Kyle Orland writes via Ars Technica: Since deep-learning super-sampling (DLSS) launched on 2018's RTX 2080 cards, gamers have been generally bullish on the technology as a way to effectively use machine-learning upscaling techniques to increase resolutions or juice frame rates in games. With yesterday's tease of the upcoming DLSS 5, though, Nvidia has crossed a line from mere upscaling into complete lighting and texture overhauls influenced by "generative AI." The result is a bland, uncanny gloss that has received an instant and overwhelmingly negative reaction from large swaths of gamers and the industry at large. While previous DLSS releases rendered upscaled frames or created entirely new ones to smooth out gaps, Nvidia calls DLSS 5 -- which it plans to launch in Autumn -- "a real-time neural rendering model" that can "deliver a new level of photoreal computer graphics previously only achieved in Hollywood visual effects." Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said explicitly that the technology melds "generative AI" with "handcrafted rendering" for "a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression." Unlike existing generative video models, which Nvidia notes are "difficult to precisely control and often lack predictability," DLSS 5 uses a game's internal color and motion vectors "to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame." That underlying game data helps the system "understand complex scene semantics such as characters, hair, fabric and translucent skin, along with environmental lighting conditions like front-lit, back-lit or overcast," the company says. Nvidia's announcement video and detailed Digital Foundry breakdown can be found at their respective links. "Reactions have compared the effect to air-brushed pornography, 'yassified, looks-maxed freaks,' or those uncanny, unavoidable Evony ads," writes Orland. "Others have noted how DLSS 5 seems to mangle the intended art direction by dampening shadows in favor of a homogenized look." Thomas Was Alone developer Mike Bithell said the technology seems designed "for when you absolutely, positively, don't want any art direction in your gaming experience." Gunfire Games Senior Concept Artist Jeff Talbot added that "in every shot the art direction was taken away for the senseless addition of 'details.' Each DLSS 5 shot looked worse and had less character than the original. This is just a garbage AI Filter." DLSS 5's "AI dogshit is actually depressing," said New Blood Interactive founder and CEO Dave Oshry, adding that future generations "won't even know this looks 'bad' or 'wrong' because to them it'll be normal." Read more of this story at Slashdot.