“A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules,” reports Live Science. “It’s not only exceeding the ‘speed limit’ of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions — two features that are not predicted to coexist…” “How is this rule-breaking behavior even possible? In a paper published Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical...

When one company asked job applicants to submit a video where they answer a question, most of the 300 responses were “eerily similar,” reports the Washington Post (with a company executive saying it was “abundantly clear” they’d used AI.)Job seekers are turning to AI to help them land jobs more quickly in a tough labor market…. Employers say that’s having an unintended consequence: Many...

This week Raspberry Pi saw its stock price surge more than 60% above its early-February low (before giving up some gains at the end of the week). Reuters notes the rise started when CEO Eben Upton bought 13,224 pounds worth of shares — but there could be another reason. “The rally in the roughly $800 million company has materialised alongside social-media buzz that demand for its single-board...

Russia’s domestic intelligence agency claimed Saturday that Ukraine can obtain sensitive information from troops using the Telegram app on the front line, reports Bloomberg. The fact that the claims were made through Russia’s state-operated news outlet RIA Novosti signals “tightening scrutiny over a platform used by millions of Russians,” Bloomberg notes, as the Kremlin continues efforts to...

Fossil fuels produce NO2, which is linked to asthma attacks, bronchitis, and higher risks of heart disease and stroke, according the EV news site Electrek. But the nonprofit news site Grist.org notes a new analysis showing that those emissions decreased by 1.1% for every increase of 200 electric vehicles — across nearly 1,700 ZIP codes.”A pretty small addition of cars at the ZIP code level...

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:Jeopardy time. A. This company spurred CEOs to make huge speculative capital expenditures based on wild unverified claims of future demand, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of workers to reduce the resulting expenses, harming their core businesses. Q. What is OpenAI? Sorry, the correct response is, “What is WorldCom?” In 2002, WorldCom, the...

Google and Microsoft contributed $5 million to launch Alpha-Omega in 2022 — a Linux Foundation project to help secure the open source supply chain. But its co-founder Michael Winser warns that open source registries are in financial peril, reports The Register, since they’re still relying on non-continuous funding from grants and donations. And it’s not just because bandwidth is expensive, he...

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot writes: Researchers have developed a robotic hand that can not only skitter about on its fingertips, it can also bend its fingers backward, connect and disconnect from a robotic arm, and pick up and carry one or more objects at a time. This article in Science News includes footage of the robotic arm reattaching itself to the skittering robot hand, which can...

Imagine a 280-unit apartment complex offering no on-site leasing office with a human agent for questions. “Instead, the entire process has been outsourced to AI…” reports SFGate, “from touring to signing the lease to completing management tasks once you actually move in.” Now imagine it’s far more than just one apartment complex…At two other Jack London Square apartment buildings, my initial...

Friday Amazon published a blog post “to address the inaccuracies” in a Financial Times report that the company’s own AI tool Kiro caused two outages in an AWS service in December. Amazon writes that the “brief” and “extremely limited” service interruption “was the result of user error — specifically misconfigured access controls — not AI as the story claims.” And “The Financial Times’ claim...

A software engineer tried steering his robot vacuum with a videogame controller, reports Popular Science — but ended up with “a sneak peak into thousands of people’s homes.”While building his own remote-control app, Sammy Azdoufal reportedly used an AI coding assistant to help reverse-engineer how the robot communicated with DJI’s remote cloud servers. But he soon discovered that the same...