SUNDAY, 17 MAY 2026, 15:44
xAI has launched Grok Build, “a coding agent of its own to serve as competitor to its rivals’ products, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code,” reports Engadget:As Bloomberg notes, xAI has been trying to catch up to its rival companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Elon Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, previously admitted that it has fallen behind its competitors when it comes to coding. A couple of...
The Oto Smart Sprinkler makes it easy to keep your lawn watered—as long as it gets three hours a day of direct sun to stay charged.
Experts say slashed funding and growing misinformation are some of the greatest challenges facing public health
The hantavirus outbreak, while unlikely to spark the next big pandemic, is shining a spotlight on the ways public health has deteriorated in the US: its ability to test for rare diseases, its expertise on outbreak prevention and response, its ability to battle misinformation and...
I grilled, smoked, seared, cleaned, and synced digital temp controllers to find the best grill option for every cookout and tailgate.
These free debt calculators help you set up payment plans to get back in the black.
Bowling centers apply oil to their lanes using a machine that works like a giant inkjet printer. The pattern in which it’s applied can change everything about how the ball travels.
The discovery from the Trinity nuclear test site shows how extreme conditions can result in materials never before seen in nature or in the lab.
As reconstruction materials remain blocked, Palestinians are crushing debris into interlocking blocks to build shelters from destruction.
Computer Weekly reports on “the long-awaited reform of Britain’s outdated Computer Misuse Act of 1990 — which has hamstrung the work of the nation’s cyber security professionals and researchers for years.” The Computer Misuse Act was passed 35 years ago in response to a high-profile hacking incident involving no less than the King’s father, the late Duke of Edinburgh. It defined the offence...
Today Amazon ends support for first- and second-generation versions of Kindles and Kindle Fire tablets, along with the Kindle Touch, the 9.7-inch Kindle DX, and other devices released in 2012 or earlier. Owners can continue reading ebooks that they’ve already downloaded, and they can also still sideload books using a USB cable (from, for example, Project Gutenberg). And PCMag points out that...
An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: A Nevada utility just told 49,000 Lake Tahoe residents that it’s redirecting 75% of their electricity supply to data centers, and they have less than a year to find a new power source. It’s one of the starkest examples yet of the AI boom’s impact on everyday Americans… NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers being built by Google,...
“Every link leads to an entry that does not exist yet,” explains the GitHub page for a Wikipedia-like site called Halupedia. “Until you click it, at which point an LLM pretends it has always existed and writes it for you, in the deadpan register of a 19th-century scholarly press…”Every article is invented on demand. The footnotes are also lies… The hardest problem with an infinite, on-demand...
Former Microsoft programmer Keith Curtis “wrote and self-published After the Software Wars to explain the caliber of free and open source software,” according to his entry on Wikipedia, “and why he believes Linux is technically superior to any proprietary OS.” He’s also KeithCu (long-time Slashdot reader #925,649), and has written a blog post on “How I added an LLM-based grammar checking + TeX...
Bloomberg reports that Apple’s two-year-old partnership with OpenAI “has become strained, according to people familiar with the matter.” Bloomberg describes OpenAI as “failing to see the expected benefits from the deal and now preparing possible legal action.”OpenAI lawyers are actively working with an outside legal firm on a range of options that could be formally executed in the near future,...
“Most of the plastic waste in California is about to lose the recycling symbol,” writes the Washington Post’s “climate coach.”The “chasing arrows” symbol, created in 1970 by a college student inspired by the burgeoning environmental movement, has been stamped indiscriminately on plastic bottles, clamshell takeout containers, chip bags and more for decades. The majority of the items emblazoned...
“The vulnerability is simple in practice,” writes Tom’s Hardware: “run a command as a standard user and gain root (administrator) access to the machine.”And it was Mythos Preview that helped the security researchers at Palo Alto-based Calif bypass a five-year Apple security effort in just five days. The blog 9to5Mac reports:Last year, Apple introduced Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), a...
Variety reports:Amazon MGM Studios started auditioning actors for the part of 007 in the past few weeks, Variety has learned… The next James Bond film will be directed by Denis Villeneuve, the filmmaker behind the “Dune” franchise, “Arrival” and “Sicario.” Amy Pascal of the “Spider-Man” films and David Heyman of the “Harry Potter” series will produce the picture, which will feature a script...
The blog It’s FOSS has an update on the Fedora AI Developer Desktop Initiative, a proposed platform for AI/machine learning workloads on Fedora. It’s now been blocked “after two Fedora Council members retracted their earlier approval votes.”The initiative was proposed by Red Hat engineer Gordon Messmer, aiming to deliver an Atomic Desktop with accelerated AI workload support, covering developer...
USA Today reports:Trump Mobile phones are being shipped this week, the company exclusively confirmed to USA TODAY in an email May 11…. The company’s first smartphone — the T1 Phone — was originally scheduled for release in August. However, the golden gadget’s release was later delayed to October before being pushed back again to this week. Now, Trump Mobile CEO Pat O’Brien told USA TODAY,...
What’s going on with the U.S. job market? “The economy is growing. Unemployment is low,” notes the Washington Post. “And yet, for millions of workers, finding a job has become harder than at almost any other point in decades,” with the hiring rate “well below pre-pandemic levels for more than a year.” Part of the problem? “Of the net 369,000 positions added across the entire economy since the...
The Linux 7.1 kernel has added new documentation clarifying what qualifies as a security bug and how AI-assisted vulnerability reports should be handled. Phoronix reports: Stemming from the recent influx of security bugs to the Linux kernel as well as an uptick in bug and security reports from discoveries made in full or in part with AI, additional documentation was warranted. Longtime Linux...