“The big set of open-source graphics driver updates for Linux 6.15 have been merged,” writes Phoronix, “but Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn’t particularly happy with the pull request.”The new “hdrtest” code is for the Intel Xe kernel driver and is around trying to help ensure the Direct Rendering Manager header files are self-contained and pass kernel-doc tests — basic maintenance checks on...

“Microsoft built things. It broke things.” That’s how the Seattle Times kicks off a series of articles celebrating Microsoft’s 50th anniversary — adding that Microsoft also gave some people “a lucrative retirement early in their lives, and their own stories to tell.” What did they remember from Microsoft’s earliest days?Scott Oki joined Microsoft as employee no. 121. The company was small;...

What happens when you ask Copilot to “write a program that can be run on an iPhone 16 to select 15 random photos from the phone, tint them to random colors, and display the photos on the phone”? That’s what TouchDevelop did for the long-discontinued Windows Phone in a 2013 Microsoft Research ‘SmartSynth’ natural language code generation demo. (“Write scripts by tapping on the screen.”)...

The U.S. and China “are racing to build a truly useful humanoid worker,” the Wall Street Journal wrote Saturday, adding that “Whoever wins could gain a huge edge in countless industries.” “The time has come for robots,” Nvidia’s chief executive said at a conference in March, adding “This could very well be the largest industry of all.”China’s government has said it wants the country to be a...

Slashdot reader jrnvk writes: The Verge is reporting that Microsoft will soon make it harder to run the well-publicized bypassnro command in Windows 11 setup. This command allows skipping the Microsoft account and online connection requirements on install. While the command will be removed, it can still be enabled by a regedit change — for now. “However, there’s no guarantee Microsoft will...

The giant financial news site Bloomberg “has been experimenting with using AI to help produce its journalism,” reports the New York Times. But “It hasn’t always gone smoothly.” While Bloomberg announced on January 15 that it would add three AI-generated bullet points at the top of articles as a summary, “The news outlet has had to correct at least three dozen A.I.-generated summaries of...

As Rust approaches its 10th anniversary, “there is an important piece of documentation missing that many other languages provide,” notes the Rust Foundation. While there’s documentation and tutorials — there’s no official language specification:In December 2022, an RFC was submitted to encourage the Rust Project to begin working on a specification. After much discussion, the RFC was approved...

A former Facebook director of global policy recently published “the book Meta doesn’t want you to read,” a scathing takedown of top Meta executives titled Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. But Wednesday RestofWorld.org published additional thoughts from Meta’s former head of public policy for Bangladesh (who is now an executive director at the nonprofit...

The New York Times notes that white-collar workers have faced higher unemployment than other groups in the U.S. over the past few years — along with slower wager growth. Some economists wonder if this trend might be irreversible… and partly attributable to AI:After sitting below 4% for more than two years, the overall unemployment rate has topped that threshold since May… “We’re seeing a...

“After a long run, Google is sunsetting two of its signature Nest products,” reports PC World:Google has just announced that it’s discontinuing the 10-year-old Nest Protect and the 7-year-old Nest x Yale lock. Both of those products will continue to work, and — for now — they remain on sale at the Google Store, complete with discounts until supplies run out. But while Google itself is...

Cloud providers like the security of running things in virtual machines “at scale” — even though VMs “are not known for having fast cold starts or a small footprint…” noted Microsoft’s Open Source blog last November. So Microsoft’s Azure Core Upstream team built an open source Rust library called Hyperlight “to execute functions as fast as possible while isolating those functions within a...