Aggregator

The Rust Foundation has a responsibility to "shed light on the impact of supporting the often unseen work" that keeps the Rust Project running. So this week they announced a new initiative "to provide consistent, transparent, and long term support for the developers who make the Rust programming language possible." It's the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund, "an initiative we'll shape in close collaboration with the Rust Project Leadership Council and Project Directors to ensure funding decisions are made openly and with accountability." In the months ahead, we'll define the fund's structure, secure contributions, and work with the Rust Project and community to bring it to life. This work will build on lessons from earlier iterations of our grants and fellowships to create a lasting framework for supporting Rust's maintainers... Over the past several months, through ongoing board discussions and input from the Leadership Council, this initiative has taken shape as a way to help maintainers continue their vital development and review work, and plan for the future... This initiative reflects our commitment to Rust being shaped by its people, guided by open collaboration, and backed by a global network of contributors and partners. The Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund will operate within the governance framework shared between the Rust Project and the Rust Foundation, ensuring alignment and oversight at every level... The Rust Foundation's approach to this initiative will be guided by our structure: as a 501( C)(6) nonprofit, we operate under a mandate for transparency and accountability to the Rust Project, language community, and our members. That means we must develop this fund in coordination with the Rust Project's priorities, ensuring shared governance and long-term viability... Our goal is simple: to help the people building Rust continue their essential work with the support they deserve. That means creating the conditions for long term maintainer roles and ensuring continuity for those whose efforts keep the language stable and evolving. Through the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund, we aim to address these needs directly. "The more companies using Rust can contribute to the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund, the more we can keep the language and tooling evolving for the benefit of everyone," says Rust Foundation project director Carol Nichols.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With several prominent buildings lying empty and Colchester high street continuing to evolve, residents offered their thoughts on decline.

Alfie Wilson, 20, had developed a secret relationship with a girl when he and the complainant were 16. He denies rape and sexual assault.

With several prominent buildings lying empty and Colchester high street continuing to evolve, residents offered their thoughts on decline.

The town has luxurious homes and is described as a 'peaceful' place to live

The nonprofit Dust-to-Digital Foundation is making thousands of historic songs accessible to the public for free through a new partnership with the University of California, Santa Barbara. The songs represent "some of the rarest and most uniquely American music borne from the Jazz Age and the Great Depression," according to the university, and classic blues recordings or tracks by Fiddlin' John Carson and his daughter Moonshine Kate "would have likely been lost to landfills and faded from memory." Launched in 1999 by Lance and April Ledbetter, Dust-to-Digital focused on preserving hard-to-find music. Originally a commercial label producing high-quality box sets (along with CDs, records, and books), it established a nonprofit foundation in 2010, working closely with collectors to digitize and preserve record collections. And there's an interesting story about how they became familiar with library curator David Seubert... Once a relationship is established, Dust-to-Digital sets up special turntables and laptops in a collector's home, with paid technicians painstakingly digitizing and labeling each record, one song at a time. Depending on the size of the collection, the process can take months, even years... In 2006, they heard about Seubert's Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project getting "slashdotted," a term that describes when a website crashes or receives a sudden and debilitating spike in traffic after being mentioned in an article on Slashdot. Here in 2025, the university's library already has over 50,000 songs in a Special Research Collections, which they've been uploading it to a Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) database. ("Recordings in the public domain are also available for free download, in keeping with the UCSB Library's mission for open access.") Over 5,000 more songs from Dust-to-Digital have already been added, says library curator Seubert, and "Thousands more are in the pipeline." One interest detail? The bulk of the new songs come from Joe Bussard, a man whose 75-year obsession with record collecting earned him the name "the king of the record collectors and "the saint of 78s".

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Did BBC deliberately try to mislead me? Did they lie to me, just as their reporter lied to Princess Diana to get her to pour her heart out to the nation in the now notorious Panorama programme back in 1995?

The huge wave crashed down on a pier Saturday in the popular northern city resort of Puerto de la Cruz as strong winds and treacherous weather struck the Spanish island.

A photo of the actor, 48, has gone viral online after he posed with actress Rachel Lynn Matthews, who was dressed as the singer for Halloween.

The Emmy-nominated actress, 28, explained how she and her co-stars approached the fight scenes during production of the motion picture.

Licensing expert worries they’ll be out of control on day one

Microsoft has teased what it’s calling “a new class” of AI agents “that operate as independent users within the enterprise workforce.”…

Former EastEnders star, Shona McGarty, has become the third contestant to touch down in Brisbane Airport ahead of I'm A Celebrity which airs next Sunday. 

The Culture Secretary confirmed that the funding given to Labour by David Kogan was discussed in his interview for the £130,000 role.

In what has become a tradition for the BBC show, the professional dancers delivered a moving nod to the armed forces, accompanied by music from the Band of the Royal Air Force Regiment.

The pair were among four favourites from the iconic BBC series who suffered injuries during filming for the main show, which is set to return in January 2026.

A Newsnight producer 'with strong views on trans issues' labelled the Harry Potter author 'very problematic' during an editorial meeting, according to ex-diplomatic editor Mark Urban.

Naomi Watts wasn't afraid to show some skin at Kris Jenner's 70th birthday party.

It is the perfect transitional jacket for autumn and winter - and it's now on sale for just £17.50

Fraudster Jamiel Slaney-Summers, 65, tried to snatch 85-year-old Rita Barnsley's £175,000 lifesavings by drawing up the 'dodgy' document on the day she died in 2021.

The literary magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa society argues "the replacement of human readers by AI has lately become a real possibility. "In fact, there are good reasons to think that we will soon inhabit a world in which humans still write, but do so mostly for AI." "I write about artificial intelligence a lot, and lately I have begun to think of myself as writing for Al as well," the influential economist Tyler Cowen announced in a column for Bloomberg at the beginning of the year. He does this, he says, because he wants to boost his influence over the world, because he wants to help teach the AIs about things he cares about, and because, whether he wants to or not, he's already writing for AI, and so is everybody else. Large-language-model (LLM) chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude are trained, in part, by reading the entire internet, so if you put anything of yourself online, even basic social-media posts that are public, you're writing for them. If you don't recognize this fact and embrace it, your work might get left behind or lost. For 25 years, search engines knit the web together. Anyone who wanted to know something went to Google, asked a question, clicked through some of the pages, weighed the information, and came to an answer. Now, the chatbot genie does that for you, spitting the answer out in a few neat paragraphs, which means that those who want to affect the world needn't care much about high Google results anymore. What they really want is for the AI to read their work, process it, and weigh it highly in what it says to the millions of humans who ask it questions every minute. How do you get it to do this? For that, we turn to PR people, always in search of influence, who are developing a form of writing (press releases and influence campaigns are writing) that's not so much search-engine-optimized as chatbot-optimized. It's important, they say, to write with clear structure, to announce your intentions, and especially to include as many formatted sections and headings as you can. In other words, to get ChatGPT to pay attention, you must write more like ChatGPT. It's also possible that, since LLMs understand natural language in a way traditional computer programs don't, good writing will be more privileged than the clickbait Google has succumbed to: One refreshing discovery PR experts have made is that the bots tend to prioritize information from high-quality outlets. Tyler Cowen also wrote in his Bloomberg column that "If you wish to achieve some kind of intellectual immortality, writing for the Als is probably your best chance.... Give the Als a sense not just of how you think, but how you feel — what upsets you, what you really treasure. Then future Al versions of you will come to life that much more, attracting more interest." Has AI changed the reasons we write? The Phi Beta Kappa magazine is left to consider the possibility that "power over a superintelligent beast and resurrection are nothing to sneeze at" — before offering another thought. "The most depressing reason to write for AI is that unlike most humans, AIs still read. They read a lot. They read everything. Whereas, aided by an AI no more advanced than the TikTok algorithm, humans now hardly read anything at all..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.