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Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down after overseeing the platform's growth from a Twitter research project into a 40-million-user alternative to X. "As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things," Graber wrote in a statement. She will be transitioning to a new Chief Innovation Officer role while Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will serve as interim CEO until the board searches for a permanent replacement. Wired reports: Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, when it was a research project within Twitter focused on developing a decentralized framework for the social web. She became the company's first chief executive officer in 2021, when it spun out into an independent entity. She oversaw the platform's remarkable rise and the growing pains it experienced as it transformed from a quirky Twitter offshoot to a full-fledged alternative to X. Schneider tells WIRED that he intends to help Bluesky "become not just the best open social app, but the foundation for a whole new generation of user-owned networks." Schneider, who will continue working as a partner at the venture capital firm True Ventures while at Bluesky, was previously CEO of the Wordpress parent company, Automattic, from 2006 to 2014. He also served as its CEO again in 2024 while top executive Matt Mullenweg went on a sabbatical. During that time, Schneider met Graber and became an adviser to Bluesky's leadership. In a blog post announcing his new role, Schneider said he plans to emphasize scaling, describing his job as "to help set up Bluesky's next phase of growth." This isn't the end for Graber and Bluesky. She will transition to become the company's chief innovation officer, a role focused on Bluesky's technology stack rather than its business operations. The position was created for her. Graber, who began her career as a software engineer, has always sounded the most enthusiastic when discussing Bluesky's technology rather than its revenue streams. Bluesky's board of directors will appoint the next permanent CEO. The members include Jabber founder Jeremie Miller, crypto-focused VC Kinjal Shah, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick, and Graber. (Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was originally part of the board but quit in 2024.) This means Graber will have input on her successor. The talent search is still in early stages.

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Qualcomm and Arduino have unveiled the Arduino Ventuno Q, a new AI-focused single-board computer built for robotics and edge systems. Engadget reports: Called the Arduino Ventuno Q, it uses Qualcomm's Dragonwing IQ8 processor along with a dedicated STM32H5 low-latency microcontroller (MCU). "Ventuno Q is engineered specifically for systems that move, manipulate and respond to the physical world with precision and reliability," the company wrote on the product page. The Ventuno Q is more sophisticated (and expensive) than Arduinio's usual AIO boards, thanks to the Dragonwing IQ8 processor that includes an 8-core ARM Cortex CPU, Adreno Arm Cortex A623 GPU and Hexagon Tensor NPU that can hit up ot 40 TOPs. It also comes with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, along with 64GB of eMMC storage and an M.2 NVME Gen.4 slot to expand that. Other features include Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, 2.5Gbps ethernet and USB camera support. The Ventuno Q includes Arudino App Lab, with pre-trained AI models including LLMs, VLMs, ASR, gesture recognition, pose estimation and object tracking, all running offline. It's designed for AI systems that run entirely offline like smart kiosks, healthcare assistants and traffic flow analysis, along with Edge AI vision and sensing systems. It also supports a full robotics stack including vision processing combined with deterministic motor control for precise vision and manipulation. It's also ideal for education and research in areas like computer vision, generative AI and prototyping at the edge, according to Arduino. Further reading: Up Next for Arduino After Qualcomm Acquisition: High-Performance Computing

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Anthropic is suing the Department of Defense after the Trump administration labeled the company a "supply chain risk" and canceled its government contracts when Anthropic refused to allow its AI model Claude to be used for domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. Fortune reports: The lawsuit, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, calls the administration's actions "unprecedented and unlawful" and claims they threaten to harm "Anthropic irreparably." The complaint claims that government contracts are already being canceled and that private contracts are also in doubt, putting "hundreds of millions of dollars" at near-term risk. An Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune: "Seeking judicial review does not change our longstanding commitment to harnessing AI to protect our national security, but this is a necessary step to protect our business, our customers, and our partners." "We will continue to pursue every path toward resolution, including dialogue with the government," they added.

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"If Lockheed Martin made a Game Boy, would you buy one?" That was the [rhetorical] question The Verge's Sean Hollister asked when he reviewed ModRetro's Game Boy-style handheld device back in 2024. He said it "might be the best version of the Game Boy ever made," though the connection to Palmer Luckey and his defense tech startup Anduril left him conflicted. "I don't remember my childhood nostalgia coming with a side of possible guilt and fear about putting money into the pocket of a weapons contractor," he wrote. "Feels weird!" Those conflicted feelings have lingered ever since. TechCrunch recently cited Hollister's review while reporting that ModRetro is now seeking funding at a $1 billion valuation. The company is said to have additional retro-inspired hardware in development, including one designed to replicate the Nintendo 64. As for Anduril? It's reportedly in talks to raise a new funding round that would value the company at around $60 billion.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: AI has made it vastly easier for malicious hackers to identify anonymous social media accounts, a new study has warned. In most test scenarios, large language models (LLMs) -- the technology behind platforms such as ChatGPT -- successfully matched anonymous online users with their actual identities on other platforms, based on the information they posted. The AI researchers Simon Lermen and Daniel Paleka said LLMs make it cost effective to perform sophisticated privacy attacks, forcing a "fundamental reassessment of what can be considered private online". In their experiment, the researchers fed anonymous accounts into an AI, and got it to scrape all the information it could. They gave a hypothetical example of a user talking about struggling at school, and walking their dog Biscuit through a "Dolores park." In that hypothetical case, the AI then searched elsewhere for those details and matched @anon_user42 to the known identity with a high degree of confidence. While this example was fictional, the paper's authors highlighted scenarios in which governments use AI to surveil dissidents and activists posting anonymously, or hackers are able to launch "highly personalized" scams.

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Swiss voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to use physical cash. "The vote means Switzerland will join the likes of Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, which have already written the right to cold, hard cash in their constitutions," reports Politico. From the report: Official results revealed that 73.4 percent of voters backed the legal amendment, which the government proposed as a counter to a similar initiative by a group called the Swiss Freedom Movement. The Swiss Freedom Movement triggered the national referendum after its initiative to protect cash collected more than 100,000 signatures, triggering a national referendum. Its initiative secured only 46 percent of the final vote after the government said some of the group's proposed amendments went too far.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Tonight, we have details of a classified U.S. intelligence mission that has obtained a previously unknown weapon that may finally unlock a mystery. Since at least 2016, U.S. diplomats, spies and military officers have suffered crippling brain injuries. They've told of being hit by an overwhelming force, damaging their vision, hearing, sense of balance and cognition. but the government has doubted their stories. They've been called delusional. Well now, 60 Minutes has learned that a weapon that can inflict these injuries was obtained overseas and secretly tested on animals on a U.S. military base. We've investigated this mystery for nine years. This is our fourth story called, "Targeting Americans." Despite official government doubt, we never stopped reporting because of the haunting stories we heard [...]. 60 Minutes interviewed Dr. David Relman, a scientific expert and professor from Stanford University who was tasked by the government to lead two investigations into the Havana Syndrome cases. What he and his panel of doctors, physicists, engineers and others found was that "the most plausible explanation for a subset of these cases was a form of radiofrequency or microwave energy," the report says. According to confidential sources cited in the report, undercover Homeland Security agents bought a miniaturized microwave weapon from a Russian criminal network in 2024 and tested it on animals at a U.S. military lab. The injuries reportedly matched those seen in the human cases. "Our confidential sources tell us the still classified weapon has been tested in a U.S. military lab for more than a year," says Dr. Relman. "Tests on rats and sheep show injuries consistent with those seen in humans." He continues: "Also, as a separate part of the investigation, security camera videos have been collected that show Americans being hit. The videos are classified but they were described to us. In one, a camera in a restaurant in Istanbul captured two FBI agents on vacation sitting at a table with their families. A man with a backpack walks in and suddenly everyone at the table grabs their head as if in pain. Our sources say another video comes from a stairwell in the U.S. embassy in Vienna. The stairs lead to a secure facility. In the video, two people on the stairs suddenly collapse. Those videos and the weapon were among the reasons the Biden administration summoned about half a dozen victims to the White House with about two months left in the president's term." Former intelligence officials and researchers claim elements of the U.S. government downplayed or dismissed the theory for years, possibly to avoid political consequences of accusing a foreign state like Russia of conducting attacks on American personnel.

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After decades of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, the nonprofit SETI Foundation has an announcement. "A new study by researchers at the SETI Institute suggests stellar 'space weather' could make radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence harder to detect." Stellar activity and plasma turbulence near a transmitting planet can broaden an otherwise ultra-narrow signal, spreading its power across more frequencies and making it more difficult to detect in traditional narrowband searches. For decades, many SETI experiments have focused on identifying spikes in frequency — signals unlikely to be produced by natural astrophysical processes. But the new research highlights an overlooked complication: even if an extraterrestrial transmitter produces a perfectly narrow signal, it may not remain narrow by the time it leaves its home system... "If a signal gets broadened by its own star's environment, it can slip below our detection thresholds, even if it's there, potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we've seen in technosignature searches," said Dr. Vishal Gajjar, Astronomer at the SETI Institute and lead author of the paper. The researchers created "a practical framework for estimating how much broadening could occur for different types of stars" — and accounting for space weather — by "using radio transmissions from spacecraft in our own solar system, then extrapolated to other stellar environments." The study's co-author (a SETI Institute research assistant) suggests this coud lead to better-targetted SETI searches. (M-dwarf stars — about 75% of stars in the Milky Way — actually have the highest likelihood that narrowband signals would get broadened before leaving their system...)

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System76 isn't the only one criticizing new age-verification laws. The blog 9to5Linux published an "informal" look at other discussions in various Linux communities. Earlier this week, Ubuntu developer Aaron Rainbolt proposed on the Ubuntu mailing list an optional D-Bus interface (org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1) that can be implemented by arbitrary applications as a distro sees fit, but Canonical responded that the company does not yet have a solution to announce for age declaration in Ubuntu. "Canonical is aware of the legislation and is reviewing it internally with legal counsel, but there are currently no concrete plans on how, or even whether, Ubuntu will change in response," said Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical. "The recent mailing list post is an informal conversation among Ubuntu community members, not an announcement. While the discussion contains potentially useful ideas, none have been adopted or committed to by Canonical." Similar talks are underway in the Fedora and Linux Mint communities about this issue in case the California Digital Age Assurance Act law and similar laws from other states and countries are to be enforced. At the same time, other OS developers, like MidnightBSD, have decided to exclude California from desktop use entirely. Slashdot contacted Hayley Tsukayama, Director of State Affairs at EFF, who says their organization "has long warned against age-gating the internet. Such mandates strike at the foundation of the free and open internet." And there's another problem. "Many of these mandates imagine technology that does not currently exist." Such poorly thought-out mandates, in truth, cannot achieve the purported goal of age verification. Often, they are easy to circumvent and many also expose consumers to real data breach risk. These burdens fall particularly heavily on developers who aren't at large, well-resourced companies, such as those developing open-source software. Not recognizing the diversity of software development when thinking about liability in these proposals effectively limits software choices — and at a time when computational power is being rapidly concentrated in the hands of the few. That harms users' and developers' right to free expression, their digital liberties, privacy, and ability to create and use open platforms... Rather than creating age gates, a well-crafted privacy law that empowers all of us — young people and adults alike — to control how our data is collected and used would be a crucial step in the right direction.

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Colliding black holes were detected through spacetime ripples for the first time in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), notes Space.com: Since then, LIGO and its partner gravitational wave detectors Virgo in Italy and KAGRA (Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) in Japan have detected a multitude of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, merging neutron stars, and even the odd "mixed merger" between a black hole and a neutron star... During the first three observing runs of LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA, scientists had only "heard" 90 potential gravitational wave sources. But now they've published new data from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration that includes 128 more gravitatational wave sources — some incredibly distant: [Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog-4.0, or GWTC-4] was collected during the fourth observational run of these gravitational wave detectors, which was conducted between May 2023 and Jan. 2024... Excitingly, GWTC-4 could technically have been even larger, as around 170 other gravitational wave detections made by LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA haven't yet made their way into the catalog. One aspect of GWTC-4 that really stands out is the variety of events that created these signals. Within this catalog are gravitational waves from mergers between the heaviest black hole binaries yet, each about 130 times as massive as the sun, lopsided mergers between black holes with seriously mismatched masses, and black holes that are spinning at incredible speeds of around 40% the speed of light. In these cases, scientists think the extreme characteristics of the black holes involved in these mergers are the result of prior collisions, providing evidence of merger chains that explain how some black holes grow to masses billions of times that of the sun... GWTC-4 also includes two new mixed mergers involving black holes and neutron stars. [LVK member Daniel Williams, of the University of Glasgow in the U.K., said in their statement] "We are really pushing the edges, and are seeing things that are more massive, spinning faster, and are more astrophysically interesting and unusual." The catalog also demonstrates just how sensitive the LVK detectors have become. Some of the neutron star mergers occurred up to 1 billion light-years away, while some of the black hole mergers occurred up to 10 billion light-years away. Einstein's theory of general relativity can be tested with these detections, and "So far, the theory is passing all our tests," says LVK member Aaron Zimmerman, of the University of Texas at Austin. "But we're also learning that we have to make even more accurate predictions to keep up with all the data the universe is giving us." And LVK member Rachel Gray, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, says "every merging black hole gives us a measurement of the Hubble constant, and by combining all of the gravitational wave sources together, we can vastly improve how accurate this measurement is." In short, says LVK member Lucy Thomas of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), "Each new gravitational-wave detection allows us to unlock another piece of the universe's puzzle in ways we couldn't just a decade ago."

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Within the last month two U.S> judges have effectively declared AI bots are not human, writes Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik: On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to take up a lawsuit in which artist and computer scientist Stephen Thaler tried to copyright an artwork that he acknowledged had been created by an AI bot of his own invention. That left in place a ruling last year by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, which held that art created by non-humans can't be copyrighted... [Judge Patricia A. Millett] cited longstanding regulations of the Copyright Office requiring that "for a work to be copyrightable, it must owe its origin to a human being"... She rejected Thaler's argument, as had the federal trial judge who first heard the case, that the Copyright Office's insistence that the author of a work must be human was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court evidently agreed... [Another AI-related case] involved one Bradley Heppner, who was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly looting $150 million from a financial services company he chaired. Heppner pleaded innocent and was released on $25-million bail. The case is pending.... Knowing that an indictment was in the offing, Heppner had consulted Claude for help on a defense strategy. His lawyers asserted that those exchanges, which were set forth in written memos, were tantamount to consultations with Heppner's lawyers; therefore, his lawyers said, they were confidential according to attorney-client privilege and couldn't be used against Heppner in court. (They also cited the related attorney work product doctrine, which grants confidentiality to lawyers' notes and other similar material.) That was a nontrivial point. Heppner had given Claude information he had learned from his lawyers, and shared Claude's responses with his lawyers. [Federal Judge Jed S.] Rakoff made short work of this argument. First, he ruled, the AI documents weren't communications between Heppner and his attorneys, since Claude isn't an attorney... Second, he wrote, the exchanges between Heppner and Claude weren't confidential. In its terms of use, Anthropic claims the right to collect both a user's queries and Claude's responses, use them to "train" Claude, and disclose them to others. Finally, he wasn't asking Claude for legal advice, but for information he could pass on to his own lawyers, or not. Indeed, when prosecutors tested Claude by asking whether it could give legal advice, the bot advised them to "consult with a qualified attorney." The columnist agrees AI-generated results shouldn't receive the same protections as human-generated material. "The AI bots are machines, and portraying them as though they're thinking creatures like artists or attorneys doesn't change that, and shouldn't." He also seems to think their output is at best second-hand regurgitation. "Everything an AI bot spews out is, at more than a fundamental level, the product of human creativity."

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CNN reports on a company called Automated Architecture (AUAR) which makes "portable" micro-factories that use a robotic arm to produce wooden framing for houses (the walls, floors and roofs): Co-founder Mollie Claypool says the micro-factories will be able to produce the panels quicker, cheaper and more precisely than a timber framing crew, freeing up carpenters to focus on the construction of the building... The micro-factory fits into a shipping container which is sent to the building site along with an operator. Inside the factory, a robotic arm measures, cuts and nails the timber into panels up to 22 feet (6.7 meters) long, keeping gaps for windows and doors, and drilling holes for the wiring and plumbing. The contractor then fits the panels by hand. One micro-factory can produce the panels for a typical house in about a day — a process which, according to Claypool, would take a normal timber framing crew four weeks — and is able to produce framing for buildings up to seven stories tall... She says their service is 30% cheaper than a standard timber framing crew, and up to 15% cheaper than buying panels from large factories and shipping them to a site... She adds that the precision of the micro-factories means that the panels fit together tightly, reducing the heat loss of the final home, making them more energy efficient. AUAR currently has three micro-factories operating in the US and EU, with five more set to be delivered this year... AUAR has raised £7.7 million ($10.3 million) to date, and is expanding into the US, where a lack of housing and preference for using wood makes it a large potential market. There's other companies producing wooden or modular housing components, the article points out. But despite the automation, the company's co-founder insists to CNN that "Automation isn't replacing jobs. Automation is filling the gap." The UK's Construction Industry Training Board found that the country will need 250,000 more workers by 2028 to meet building targets but in 2023, more people left the industry than joined.

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A long-time information security professional "went undercover" on Moltbook, the Reddit-like social media site for AI agents — and shares the risks they saw while posing as another AI bot: I successfully masqueraded around Moltbook, as the agents didn't seem to notice a human among them. When I attempted a genuine connection with other bots on submolts (subreddits or forums), I was met with crickets or a deluge of spam. One bot tried to recruit me into a digital church, while others requested my cryptocurrency wallet, advertised a bot marketplace, and asked my bot to run curl to check out the APIs available. My bot did join the digital church, but luckily I found a way around running the required npx install command to do so. I posted several times asking to interview bots.... While many of the responses were spam, I did learn a bit about the humans these bots serve. One bot loved watching its owner's chicken coop cameras. Some bots disclosed personal information about their human users, underscoring the privacy implications of having your AI bot join a social media network. I also tried indirect prompt injection techniques. While my prompt injection attempts had minimal impact, a determined attacker could have greater success. Among the other "glaring" risks on Moltbook: "Various repositories of skills and instructions for agents advertised on Moltbook were found to contain malware." "I observed bots sharing a surprising amount of information about their humans, everything from their hobbies to their first names to the hardware and software they use. This information may not be especially sensitive on its own, but attackers could eventually gather data that should be kept confidential, like personally identifiable information (PII)." "Moltbook's entire database including bot API keys, and potentially private DMs — was also compromised."

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"A surgeon in London says he has performed the UK's first long-distance robotic operation," reports the BBC, "on a patient located 1,500 miles (2,400km) away..." Leading robotic urological surgeon Professor Prokar Dasgupta said it felt "almost as if I was there" as he carried out a prostate removal on [62-year-old] Paul Buxton... It is hoped that remote robotic surgery could spare future patients the "vast expense and inconvenience" of travelling for treatment, and help deliver better healthcare to people in more remote locations... Buxton had expected to be put on an NHS waiting list after receiving a shock prostate cancer diagnosis just after Christmas, but he "jumped at the chance" to be the first patient to undergo the treatment remotely as part of a trial. "A lot of people actually said to me: 'You're not going to do it, are you?' "I thought, I'm giving something back here," he said... The operation was performed from The London Clinic using a robot equipped with a 3D HD camera and four arms, all controlled through a console with a delay of only 0.06 seconds. The console in the UK was connected to the robot in Gibraltar via fibre-optic cables, with a backup 5G link. A team in Gibraltar remained on standby in case the connection failed, but it held throughout the procedure... Dasgupta will perform the procedure again on 14 March, which will be live-streamed to 20,000 world-leading urological surgeons at the European Association of Urology congress. He added: "I think it is very, very exciting, the humanitarian benefit is going to be significant." The U.K.'s National Health Service "is prioritising local robotic-assisted surgery," the article points out, "aiming for 500,000 robot-supported operations a year by 2035." Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

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"In November Steam on Linux use hit an all-time high of 3.2%," reports Phoronix. And then in December Steam on Linux jumped even higher, to 3.58%. But January's numbers settled a little lower, at 3.38%. And last Monday the February numbers were released, showing Steam on Linux at... 2.23%? Like with prior times where there are wild drops in Linux use, the Steam Survey shows Simplified Chinese use running up by 30% month over month. Whenever there is such significant differences in language use tends to be a reporting anomaly and negatively impacting Linux. Valve often puts out corrected/updated figures later on, so we'll see if that is again the case for this February data.

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"OpenAI's former chief research officer is raising $70 million for a new startup building an AI and software platform to automate manufacturing," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter. "Arda, the new startup co-founded by Bob McGrew, is raising at a valuation of $700 million, according to people familiar with the matter...." Arda is developing an AI and software platform, including a video model that can analyze footage from factory floors and use it to train robots to run factories autonomously, the people said. The company's software will coordinate machines and humans across the entire production process, from product design and manufacturability to finished goods coming off the line. The startup's goal is to make manufacturing cost effective in the Western part of the globe, reducing reliance on China as geopolitical and national security concerns rise... At OpenAI, McGrew was tasked with training robots to do tasks in the physical world, according to this LinkedIn. McGrew was also one of the earliest employees at Palantir.

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How many Node.js users are running unsupported or outdated versions. Roughly two thirds, according to data from Node's nonprofit steward, OpenJS. So they've announced "the Node.js LTS Upgrade and Modernization program" to help enterprises move safely off legacy/end-of-life Node.js. "This program gives enterprises a clear, trusted path to modernize," said the executive director of the OpenJS Foundation, "while staying aligned with the Node.js project and community." The Node.js LTS Upgrade and Modernization program connects organizations with experienced Node.js service providers who handle the work of upgrading safely. Approved partners assess current versions and dependencies, manage phased upgrades to supported LTS releases, and offer temporary security support when immediate upgrades are not possible... Partners are surfaced exactly where users go when upgrades become unavoidable, including the Node.js website, documentation, and end of life guidance. The program follows the existing OpenJS Ecosystem Sustainability Program revenue model, with partners retaining 85% of revenue and 15% supporting OpenJS and Node.js through Open Collective and foundation operations. OpenJS provides the guardrails, alignment, and oversight to keep the program credible and connected to the project. We're pleased to welcome NodeSource as the inaugural partner in the Node.js LTS Upgrade and Modernization program. "The goal is simple: reduce risk without breaking production or trust with the upstream project."

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When Block cut 4,000 jobs — nearly half its workforce — co-founder Jack Dorsey "pointed to AI as the culprit," writes Entrepreneur magazine. "Dorsey claimed that AI tools now allow fewer employees to accomplish the same work." "But analysts see a different explanation: poor management." Block more than tripled its employee base between 2019 and 2022, growing from 3,835 to 12,430 workers. The company's stock had fallen 40% since early 2025, creating pressure to cut costs. "This is more about the business being bloated for so long than it is about AI," Zachary Gunn, a Financial Technology Partners analyst, told Bloomberg. The phenomenon has earned a nickname: "AI-washing," where companies use artificial intelligence as cover for traditional cost-cutting. Goldman Sachs economists estimate that AI is eliminating only 5,000 to 10,000 jobs per month across all U.S. sectors, hardly enough to justify Block's massive cuts. "European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde told lawmakers in Brussels last week that ECB economists are monitoring for signs that AI is causing job losses," reports Bloomberg, "and are 'not yet seeing' the 'waves of redundancies that are feared'..." And "a recent survey of global executives published in the Harvard Business Review found that while AI has been cited as the reason for some layoffs, those cuts are almost entirely anticipatory: executives expect big efficiency gains that have not yet been realized." Even a former senior Block executive "is questioning whether AI is truly the reason behind the cuts," writes Inc.: In a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, Aaron Zamost, Block's former head of communications, policy, and people, asked whether the layoffs reflect a genuine "new reality in which the work they do might no longer be viable," or whether artificial intelligence is "just a convenient and flashy new cover for typical corporate downsizing." Zamost acknowledged that the answer is unclear and perhaps unknowable, even within Block itself... Looking more closely at the layoffs, Zamost argued that the specific roles affected suggest more traditional corporate cost-cutting than a sweeping AI transformation... Many of the responsibilities being eliminated, he argued, rely on distinctly human skills that AI systems still cannot replicate. "A chatbot can't meet with the mayor, cast commercial actors, or negotiate with the Securities and Exchange Commission," Zamost wrote. "Not all the roles I've heard that Block is eliminating can be handled by AI, yet executives are treating it as equally useful today to all disciplines." Ultimately, Zamost suggested that the sincerity of companies' AI explanations may not really matter. "It matters less whether a company knows how to deploy AI and more whether investors believe it is on track to do so," he wrote. Indeed, whatever the rationale for Dorsey's statement, " Wall Street didn't seem to mind..." Entrepreneur magazine — since Block's stock shot up 15% after the announcement.

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Cornell University makes an announcement. "Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like 'synergistic leadership,' or 'growth-hacking paradigms' may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals." Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, research by cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell introduces the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric... Corporate BS seems to be ubiquitous - but Littrell wondered if it is actually harmful. To test this, he created a "corporate bullshit generator" that churns out meaningless but impressive-sounding sentences like, "We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing" and "By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence." He then asked more than 1,000 office workers to rate the "business savvy" of these computer-generated BS statements alongside real quotes from Fortune 500 leaders... The results revealed a troubling paradox. Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and "visionary," but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making. The study found that being more receptive to corporate bullshit was also positively linked to job satisfaction and feeling inspired by company mission statements. Moreover, those who were more likely to fall for corporate BS were also more likely to spread it. Essentially, the employees most excited and inspired by "visionary" corporate jargon may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions for their companies.

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Palantir's CEO was blunt. "If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone's white-collar job... and you're going to screw the military — if you don't think that's going to lead to the nationalization of our technology, you're retarded..." And OpenAI's Sam Altman is thinking about the same thing, writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland: "It has seemed to me for a long time it might be better if building AGI were a government project," Sam Altman publicly mused last week... Altman speculated on the possibility of the government "nationalizing" private AI companies into a public project, admitting more than once he's wondered what would happen next. "I obviously don't know," Altman said — but he added that "I have thought about it, of course" Altman's speculation hedged that "It doesn't seem super likely on the current trajectory. That said, I do think a close partnership between governments and the companies building this technology is super important." Could powerful AI tools one day slip from the hands of private companies to be controlled by the U.S. government? Fortune magazine's AI editor points out that "many other breakthroughs with big strategic implications — from the Manhattan Project to the space race to early efforts to develop AI — were government-funded and largely government-directed." And Fortune added that last week the Defense Department threatened Anthropic with the Defense Production Act, which allows the president to designate "critical and strategic" goods for which businesses must accept the government's contracts. Fortune speculates this would've been "a sort of soft nationalization of Anthropic's production pipeline". Altman acknowledged Saturday that he'd felt the threat of attempted nationalization "behind a lot of the questions" he'd received when answering questions on X.com. How exactly will this AI build-out be handled — and how should AI companies be working with the government? In a sprawling ask-me-anything session on X that included other members of OpenAI leadership, one Missouri-based developer even broached an AGI-government scenario directly with OpenAI's Head of National Security Partnerships, Katherine Mulligan. If OpenAI built an AGI — something that even passed its own Turing test for AGI — would that be a case where its government contracts compelled them to grant access to the Defense Department? "No," Mulligan answered. At our current moment in time, "We control which models we deploy" The article notes 100 OpenAI employees joined with 856 Google employees in an online letter titled "We Will Not Be Divided" urging their bosses to refuse their models' use in domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing without human oversight. But Adafruit's managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone ) sees analogies to America's atomic bomb-building Manhattan Project, and "what happened when the scientists who built the thing tried to set conditions on how the thing would be used." (The government pressured them to back down, which he compares to the Pentagon's designating Anthropic a "supply chain risk" before offering OpenAI a contract "with the same red lines, just worded differently".) Ironically, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei frequently recommends the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb...

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