Latest News
Last updated 04 Apr, 07:00 PM
BBC News
UN watchdog voices 'deep concern' as Iran reports new attacks on nuclear plant - The International Atomic Energy Agency urges restraint to avoid a nuclear accident at Iran's Bushehr plant.
Amber wind warning issued as Storm Dave set to hit parts of UK - Yellow wind warnings will cover parts of all four UK nations by Saturday evening.
Fourth suspect arrested over Jewish charity ambulance arson attack - Three men charged following the attack appeared at court this morning, and have since been remanded in custody.
Artemis II crew now halfway to Moon as they take 'spectacular' image of Earth - The snap was taken aboard the Orion capsule by its commander, Reid Wiseman, as the crew head towards the Moon.
Two arrested after boy killed and two hurt in crash - Police say a vehicle collided with three teenagers, two riding a bike and another on a scooter.
The Register
Netflix, Meta, and IBM speakers: AI will make anyone a 10x programmer, but with 10x the cleanup - Agents to check the work of the agents All Things AI AI is easy to use, but not quite as easy as just barking "Alexa! Make me an e-commerce site." And, no, adding "DON'T HALLUCINATE" to the instruction loop won't help.…
Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus - The cloud service's woes reflect a crisis made worse by AI – under-investment in people In 2024, federal cybersecurity evaluators reportedly dismissed Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High (GCC High) as garbage, although they used a more colorful term. To understand why, it helps to consider the history of the underlying Azure infrastructure.…
PrismML debuts energy-sipping 1-bit LLM in bid to free AI from the cloud - Bonasi 8B model is competitive with other 8B models but 14x smaller and 5x more energy efficient PrismML, an AI venture out of Caltech, has released a 1-bit large language model that outperforms weightier models, with the expectation that it will improve AI efficiency and viability on mobile devices, among other applications.…
Trump wants to take a battle axe to CISA again and slash $707M from budget - Ex-CISA official tells The Reg: 'this would weaken the system for managing cyber risk' The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's budget will see yet another deep cut if Congress approves President Trump's proposal to slash CISA's spending by $707 million in fiscal year 2027.…
Netflix - yes Netflix - jumps on the AI bandwagon with video editor - Video-language model revises how objects interact when things get removed from a scene A new Netflix model promises to rewrite the way we make movies. Just imagine this. As the director of the multi-million dollar epic Car Crash III: Suddenest Impact, you've just finished filming the finale where your star, Cruz Control, drives straight into an onrushing semi.…
New Scientist - Home
Stark photos show quest for profit cutting swathes through the Amazon - Photographer Lalo de Almeida has been documenting the industrialisation taking place in the Amazon rainforest after the Brazilian government relaxed environmental controls
Michael Pollan: 'Consciousness is really under siege' - A psychedelic experience set author Michael Pollan on a quest to understand consciousness in his new book A World Appears. He tells Olivia Goldhill what he learned – and how it changed him
We may have seen a 'dirty fireball' star explosion for the first time - An incredibly powerful flash of X-rays spotted by the Einstein Probe telescope appears to be a kind of explosion first theorised more than 30 years ago
The profound effect the heart-brain connection has on your health - Cognitive decline, mental health and heart disease are all shaped by the deep links between heart and brain – with major implications for diagnoses and treatment
How worried should you be about an AI apocalypse? - Fears that artificial intelligence could rise up to wipe out humanity are understandable given our steady diet of sci-fi stories depicting just that, but what is the real risk? Matthew Sparkes looks at what the experts say
Hacker News
Show HN: A game where you build a GPU - Comments
Simple self-distillation improves code generation - Comments
Show HN: TurboQuant-WASM – Google's vector quantization in the browser - Comments
Scientists observe an immune signaling complex forming inside cells - Comments
Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta - Comments
Slashdot
No, AMD Is Not Buying Intel - "The April 1st timing should have been your first clue," writes Gadget Review. TechSpot's false story was just an April Fool's prank — although Gadget Review thinks it's still funny how "something about this particular piece of satire felt uncomfortably plausible." Maybe it's because AMD stock sits around $196 while Intel hovers near $41, or perhaps it's the poetic justice of the underdog finally eating the giant. The semiconductor world has witnessed stranger reversals, but none quite this dramatic. Your gaming rig's CPU battle represents decades of corporate warfare, legal grudges, and technological leapfrogging that makes Game of Thrones look like a friendly board game. Picture this: In 1975, AMD reverse-engineered Intel's 8080 processor, creating the Am9080 clone. The audacity was breathtaking — AMD spent 50 cents per chip to manufacture something they sold for $700. That's a 1,400% markup on borrowed technology, making today's GPU prices look reasonable. This relationship evolved from copying to partnership to bitter rivalry. The companies signed second-sourcing deals in the late 1970s, with AMD becoming Intel's official backup supplier. Then came the lawsuits. AMD sued Intel for antitrust violations in 2005, eventually settling for $1.25 billion in 2009. That settlement money helped fund the Ryzen revolution that's currently eating Intel's lunch. The historical irony runs deeper than your typical tech rivalry. AMD literally started as Intel's shadow, creating chips by studying Intel's designs under microscopes. Today, Intel engineers probably study AMD's Zen architecture the same way... This April Fool's joke works because it captures something true about power shifts in technology. The site TipRanks notes that both companies saw their stock price rise Wednesday, though that might not be related to the false article. "Positive analyst coverage from Wells Fargo could be acting as a catalyst for AMD stock today. Intel also announced plans to buy back its 49% equity interest in a joint venture with Apollo Global Management APO." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon Must Negotiate With First Warehouse Workers Union, US Labor Board Rules - Amazon "must negotiate with a labor union representing some 5,000 workers at a company warehouse on Staten Island," reports Reuters, citing a ruling Wednesday from America's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The union formed in 2022, according to the article, and "has been seeking to negotiate with Amazon over pay, working conditions and other matters." The NLRB said in its ruling that Amazon "has engaged in unfair labor practices" by refusing to bargain with the labor group or to recognize its legitimacy... Amazon said on Thursday it disagreed with the NLRB's ruling. "Representatives of the NLRB improperly influenced this election," the company said in a statement, suggesting it planned to appeal. "We're confident an unbiased court will overturn the original certification, and we look forward to the opportunity for our team to fairly voice their opinions." An appeal would likely preclude Amazon from having to comply with the NLRB's order while it makes its way through the courts... Related to the Staten Island case, Amazon has argued that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional and sued to block the agency from ruling on it. The matter is still pending. After forming independently, that union "has since aligned with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters," the article points out. The Teamsters represent 1.3 million American workers, according to a statement they issued this week, which also includes this quote from the president of Amazon Labor Union-e Local 1. "We are making history at Amazon, and we are doing it through undiluted worker power..." Their statement adds that the ruling "came only one day after the union announced another historic victory that upheld Amazon Teamsters' right to strike." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Document Foundation Removes Dozens of Collabora Developers - Long-time GNOME/OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice contributor Michael Meeks is now general manager of Collabora Productivity. And earlier this month he complained when LibreOffice decided to bring back its LibreOffice Online project, as reported by Neowin, which had been inactive since 2022. After the original project went dormant — to which Collabora was a major contributor — they forked the code and created their own product, Collabora Online. But this week Meeks blogged about even more changes, writing that the Document Foundation (the nonprofit behind LibreOffice) "has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners. That includes over thirty people who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice for many years." Meeks argues the ejections were "based on unproven legal concerns and guilt by association." This includes seven of the top ten core committers of all time (excluding release engineers) currently working for Collabora Productivity. The move is the culmination of TDF losing a large number of founders from membership over the last few years with: Thorsten Behrens, Jan 'Kendy' Holesovsky, Rene Engelhard, Caolan McNamara, Michael Meeks, Cor Nouws and Italo Vignoli no longer members. Of the remaining active founders, three of the last four are paid TDF staff (of whom none are programming on the core code). The blog It's FOSS calls it "LibreOffice Drama." They've confirmed the removals happened, also noting recently adopted Community Bylaws requiring members to step down if they're affiliated with a company in an active legal dispute with the Foundation. But The Documentation Foundation "also makes clear that a membership revocation is not a ban from contributing, with the project remaining open to anyone, and expects Collabora to keep contributing 'when the time comes.'" Collabora's Meeks adds in his blog post that there's "bold and ongoing plans to create an entirely new, cut-down, differentiated Collabora Office for users that is smoother, more user friendly, and less feature dense than our Classic product (which will continue to be supported for years for our partners). This gives a chance to innovate faster in a separate place on a smaller, more focused code-base with fewer build configurations, much less legacy, no Java, no database, web-based toolkit and more. We are excited to get executing on that. To make this process easier, and to put to bed complaints about having our distro branches in TDF gerrit [for code review], and to move to self-hosted FOSS tooling we are launching our own gerrit to host our existing branch of core... We will continue to make contributions to LibreOffice where that makes sense (if we are welcome to), but it clearly no longer makes much sense to continue investing heavily in building what remains of TDF's community and product for them — while being excluded from its governance. In this regard, we seem to be back where we were fifteen years ago. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
'Cognitive Surrender' Leads AI Users To Abandon Logical Thinking, Research Finds - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual flaws in responses. On the other side are those who routinely outsource their critical thinking to what they see as an all-knowing machine. Recent research goes a long way to forming a new psychological framework for that second group, which regularly engages in "cognitive surrender" to AI's seemingly authoritative answers. That research also provides some experimental examination of when and why people are willing to outsource their critical thinking to AI, and how factors like time pressure and external incentives can affect that decision. Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time. The researchers say this "demonstrate[s] that people readily incorporate AI-generated outputs into their decision-making processes, often with minimal friction or skepticism." In general, "fluent, confident outputs [are treated] as epistemically authoritative, lowering the threshold for scrutiny and attenuating the meta-cognitive signals that would ordinarily route a response to deliberation," they write. These kinds of effects weren't uniform across all test subjects, though. Those who scored highly on separate measures of so-called fluid IQ were less likely to rely on the AI for help and were more likely to overrule a faulty AI when it was consulted. Those predisposed to see AI as authoritative in a survey, on the other hand, were much more likely to be led astray by faulty AI-provided answers. Despite the results, though, the researchers point out that "cognitive surrender is not inherently irrational." While relying on an LLM that's wrong half the time (as in these experiments) has obvious downsides, a "statistically superior system" could plausibly give better-than-human results in domains such as "probabilistic settings, risk assessment, or extensive data," the researchers suggest. "As reliance increases, performance tracks AI quality," the researchers write, "rising when accurate and falling when faulty, illustrating the promises of superintelligence and exposing a structural vulnerability of cognitive surrender." In other words, letting an AI do your reasoning means your reasoning is only ever going to be as good as that AI system. As always, let the prompter beware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Colorado's New Speed Camera System Makes Waze Nearly Useless - Colorado is rolling out an average-speed camera system that tracks vehicles across multiple points instead of catching them at a single camera, making it much harder for drivers to dodge tickets with apps like Waze and Radarbot. Motor1 reports: The state's new automated vehicle identification systems (AVIS) use several cameras to calculate your average speed between them, and if it is 10 miles per hour or more over the limit, you get a ticket. No longer will you be able to slow down as you approach a camera and speed back up after passing it, not that you should be speeding on public roads in the first place. Colorado began deploying this new camera system after legislators changed the law in 2023, allowing AVIS for law enforcement use. The systems, installed on various roads and highways throughout the state, first began issuing warnings, but police began issuing tickets late last year. The most recent section of road to fall under surveillance is a stretch of I-25 north of Denver, which brought the state's growing panopticon to our attention. It began issuing tickets on April 2. The Colorado Department of Transportation installed the cameras along a construction zone. The fine is $75 and zero points for exceeding the speed limit, and the police issue it to the vehicle's owner, regardless of who is driving. Read more of this story at Slashdot.