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02 Apr 2026 10:13pm GMT

OpenAI is acquiring tech news podcast TBPN, a fast-growing daily show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays. OpenAI says TBPN will keep its editorial independence, even though the acquisition is widely viewed as part of a broader effort to influence public discourse around AI. CNBC reports: In the announcement, OpenAI CEO of AGI Deployment Fidji Simo wrote that their mission of bringing artificial general intelligence comes with a responsibility to have a space for "constructive conversation about the changes AI creates." Altman has appeared on TBPN multiple times and is a frequent presence across media and podcasts, even hitting NBC's "Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" in December. The announcement says TBPN will maintain editorial independence and continue to choose its own guests. "TBPN is my favorite tech show. We want them to keep that going and for them to do what they do so well," Altman wrote in a post on X. "I don't expect them to go any easier on us, am sure I'll do my part to help enable that with occasional stupid decisions." OpenAI did not disclose the terms of the deal but said TBPN will be housed within its strategy organization. "While we've been critical of the industry at times, after getting to know Sam and the OpenAI team, what stood out most was their openness to feedback and commitment to getting this right," wrote Hays in a statement. "Moving from commentary to real impact in how this technology is distributed and understood globally is incredibly important to us."

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02 Apr 2026 10:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon will start charging sellers who use its shipping services a 3.5% "fuel and logistics" surcharge later this month, joining the ranks of shipping companies raising prices as the war in Iran pushes oil prices higher. The fees take effect on April 17 for customers of the company's Fulfillment by Amazon service -- which is used by many of the independent sellers who list their products on Amazon's retail sites -- in the US and Canada. Items shipped by Amazon on behalf of merchants who sell on their own sites or at other retailers will carry the surcharge beginning May 2. "Elevated costs in fuel and logistics have increased the cost of operating across the industry," Ashley Vanicek, an Amazon spokesperson, said on Thursday. "We have absorbed these increases so far, but similar to other major carriers, when costs remain elevated we implement temporary surcharges to partially recover these costs." Vanicek notes that the fee will apply to the sum Amazon charges to ship an item, not the product's sale price. Last month, USPS announced that it would impose its first-ever fuel surcharge on packages.

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02 Apr 2026 9:00pm GMT

Amazon denies violation, says SpaceX caused conflict by lowering Starlink satellites.

02 Apr 2026 8:32pm GMT

IBM and Arm are teaming up to let Arm-based software run on IBM Z mainframes. Network World reports: The two companies plan to work on three things: building virtualization tools so Arm software can run on IBM platforms; making sure Arm applications meet the security and data residency rules that regulated industries must follow; and creating common technology layers so enterprises have more software options across both platforms, IBM said in a statement. IBM has not said whether the virtualization work will happen at the hypervisor level, through its existing PR/SM partitioning technology, or via containers -- a question enterprise architects will need answered before they can assess the collaboration's practical value. IBM described the effort as serving enterprises that run regulated workloads and cannot simply move them to the cloud, the statement said. IBM mainframe customers have largely missed out on the efficiency and price-performance gains Arm has already delivered in the cloud. "Arm says close to half of all compute shipped to top hyperscalers in 2025 runs on Arm chips, with AWS, Google, and Microsoft deploying their own Arm silicon through Graviton, Axion, and Cobalt, respectively," reports Network World. That gap is precisely what IBM and Arm's collaboration intends to address. "This is a mainframe adjacency play," says Rachita Rao, senior analyst at Everest Group. "The intent is to extend IBM Z and LinuxONE environments by enabling Arm-compatible workloads to run closer to systems of record. While hyperscalers use Arm to lower their own internal power costs and pass savings to cloud-native tenants, IBM is targeting the sovereign and air-gapped market."

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02 Apr 2026 8:00pm GMT

Google Vids brings together Google's most capable AI creation tools.

02 Apr 2026 7:58pm GMT

A receptor that's used to find prey is also activated by progesterone.

02 Apr 2026 7:48pm GMT

AmiMoJo shares a report from Phoronix: Raspberry Pi prices are going up yet again due to the continued memory squeeze on the industry. To help offset the memory prices for some use-cases, Raspberry Pi also announced the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 3GB model at $83 to help fill the void between the 2GB and 4GB options. The 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 was announced at $83.75 USD for those not needing quite 4GB of RAM and looking to save some memory given the ongoing price increases. The Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 4GB models are seeing new $25 price increases, the 8GB models seeing $50 price increases, and the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 is going up by $100. The Raspberry Pi 500+ is seeing a $150 price increase. The Raspberry Pi Compute Modules are also seeing increases from $11.25 to $100 USD.

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02 Apr 2026 7:00pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 6:49pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 6:24pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 6:22pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 6:21pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 6:16pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 6:15pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 6:13pm GMT

Collection of fossils includes Ediacaran, Cambrian species, suggesting a transition.

02 Apr 2026 6:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's Gemini AI models have improved by leaps and bounds over the past year, but you can only use Gemini on Google's terms. The company's Gemma open-weight models have provided more freedom, but Gemma 3, which launched over a year ago, is getting a bit long in the tooth. Starting today, developers can start working with Gemma 4, which comes in four sizes optimized for local usage. Google has also acknowledged developer frustrations with AI licensing, so it's dumping the custom Gemma license. Like past versions of its open-weight models, Google has designed Gemma 4 to be usable on local machines. That can mean plenty of things, of course. The two large Gemma variants, 26B Mixture of Experts and 31B Dense, are designed to run unquantized in bfloat16 format on a single 80GB Nvidia H100 GPU. Granted, that's a $20,000 AI accelerator, but it's still local hardware. If quantized to run at lower precision, these big models will fit on consumer GPUs. Google also claims it has focused on reducing latency to really take advantage of Gemma's local processing. The 26B Mixture of Experts model activates only 3.8 billion of its 26 billion parameters in inference mode, giving it much higher tokens-per-second than similarly sized models. Meanwhile, 31B Dense is more about quality than speed, but Google expects developers to fine-tune it for specific uses. The other two Gemma 4 models, Effective 2B (E2B) and Effective 4B (E4B), are aimed at mobile devices. These options were designed to maintain low memory usage during inference, running at an effective 2 billion or 4 billion parameters. Google says the Pixel team worked closely with Qualcomm and MediaTek to optimize these models for devices like smartphones, Raspberry Pi, and Jetson Nano. Not only do they use less memory and battery than Gemma 3, but Google also touts "near-zero latency" this time around. The Apache 2.0 license is much more flexible with its terms of use for commercial restrictions, "granting you complete control over your data, infrastructure, and models," says Google. Clement Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, called it "a huge milestone" that will help developers use Gemma for more projects and expand what Google calls the "Gemmaverse."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Apr 2026 6:00pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 5:29pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 5:26pm GMT

Both GDDRHammer and GeForge hammer GPU memory in ways that compromise the CPU.

02 Apr 2026 5:00pm GMT

And solar power accounted for about three quarters of the renewables.

02 Apr 2026 5:00pm GMT

Even on NASA's Artemis II mission around the moon, astronauts apparently still have to deal with broken Microsoft Outlook. One of the crew members, Reid Wiseman, jokingly reported that he had "two Microsoft Outlooks" and neither worked. 404 Media reports: On April 1, four astronauts from the U.S. and Canada embarked on a 10-day flight to loop around the moon. Spotted by VGBees podcast host Niki Grayson on the NASA livestream of live views from the , around 2 a.m. ET, mission control acknowledges an issue with a process control system and offers to remote in -- yes, like how your office IT guy would pause his CoD campaign to log into Okta for you because you used the wrong password too many times. One of the astronauts, Reid Wiseman, says that's chill, but while they're in there: "I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working." Astronauts are trained for decades in some of the most physically and mentally grueling environments of any career. They're some of the smartest people on the planet, and they have to be, before we strap them to 3.2 million pounds of jet fuel and make them do complex experiments and high-stakes decisions for days on end. And yet, once they get up there, fucking Outlook is borked.

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02 Apr 2026 5:00pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 4:10pm GMT

Gemma 4 brings the first major update to Google's open models in a year.

02 Apr 2026 4:01pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 4:00pm GMT

Only three race cars have ever gone quicker around this famous track.

02 Apr 2026 4:00pm GMT

Nvidia has begun rolling out a beta feature that automatically compiles game shaders while a PC is idle. It won't eliminate shader compilation the first time a game runs, but Ars Technica reports it could help reduce those repeated wait times. From the report: Nvidia's new Auto Shader Compilation system promises to "reduc[e] the frequency of game runtime compilation after driver updates" for users running Nvidia's GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.97 WHQL or later. When the feature is active and your machine is idle, the app will automatically start rebuilding DirectX drivers for your games so they're all set to roll the next time they launch. While the feature defaults to being turned off when the Nvidia App is first downloaded, users can activate it by going to the Graphics Tab > Global Settings > Shader Cache. There, they can set aside disk space for precompiled shaders and decide how many system resources the compilation process should use. App users can also manually force shader recompilation through the app rather than waiting for the machine to go idle. Unfortunately, Nvidia warns that users will still have to generate shaders in-game after downloading a title for the first time. The Auto Shader Compiler system only generates the new shaders needed after subsequent driver updates following that first run of a new title.

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02 Apr 2026 4:00pm GMT

But the effort to stop the spread of leaked Claude Code client code is an uphill battle.

02 Apr 2026 3:40pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 3:32pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 3:26pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 3:08pm GMT

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02 Apr 2026 3:04pm GMT

Valve's March 2026 Steam Survey shows Linux gaming usage jumping to a record 5.33% share -- more than double macOS's 2.35%. Phoronix reports: Steam on Linux was never above 5% and easily an all-time high for the Linux gaming marketshare, especially in absolute numbers. It was a massive 3.1% spike in March while macOS also jumped surprisingly by 1.19% to 2.35%. The Steam Survey numbers show Windows losing 4.28%, down to 92.33%. Part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers. Month over month they report a 31.85% drop to the Simplified Chinese language use and English use increasing by 16.82% to 39.09%. Other languages also showed gains amid the massive decline in Simplified Chinese use. The latest numbers for March show around a quarter of the Linux gamers are running Steam OS. Due in part to the Steam Deck APU being a custom AMD product and the popularity of AMD hardware on Linux for its open-source nature, AMD CPU use by Steam on Linux gamers remains just under 70%.

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02 Apr 2026 3:00pm GMT

NASA has struggled to deal with the widespread sentiment that NASA has "been there, done that."

02 Apr 2026 2:46pm GMT

Between January and March, Tesla built 50,000 more cars than it could sell.

02 Apr 2026 2:10pm GMT

Amazon wants in on the low-Earth orbit Internet action.

02 Apr 2026 2:03pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: OpenAI hasn't been shy about spending money lobbying for favorable laws and regulations. But when it comes to its involvement with child safety advocacy groups, the company has apparently decided it's best to stay in the shadows -- even if it means hiding from the people actually pushing for policy changes. According to a report from the San Francisco Standard, a number of people involved in the California-based Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition were blindsided to learn their efforts were secretly being funded by OpenAI. Per the Standard, the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition was a group formed to push the Parents and Kids Safe AI Act, a piece of California legislation proposed earlier this year that would require AI firms to implement age verification and additional safeguards for users under the age of 18. That bill was backed by OpenAI in partnership with Common Sense Media, which proposed the legislation as a compromise after the two groups had pushed dueling ballot initiatives last year. But when the coalition started to reach out to child safety groups and other advocacy organizations to try to get them to lend support to the bill, OpenAI was apparently conveniently left off the messaging. The AI giant was also left out of the marketing on the coalition's website, according to the Standard. That reportedly led to a number of groups and individuals lending their support to the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition without realizing that they were aligning themselves with OpenAI. As it turns out, OpenAI isn't just one of the members of the coalition; it is the group's biggest funder. In fact, the Standard characterized the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition as being "entirely funded" by OpenAI. While it's not clear exactly how much the company has funneled to this particular group, a Wall Street Journal report from January said OpenAI pledged $10 million to push the Parents and Kids Safe AI Act. Gizmodo notes that OpenAI's backing of the Parents and Kids Safe AI Act "could be self-serving for CEO Sam Altman," who just so happens to head a company called World that provides age verification services.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Apr 2026 11:00am GMT

Scientists say extreme March heat caused an unusually rapid collapse of snowpack across the American West that's leaving major basins at record or near-record lows. "This year is on a whole other level," said Dr Russ Schumacher, a Colorado State University climatologist. "Seeing this year so far below any of the other years we have data for is very concerning." The Guardian reports: [...] The issue is extremely widespread. Data from a branch of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which logs averages based on levels between 1991 and 2020, shows states across the south-west and intermountain west with eye-popping lows. The Great Basin had only 16% of average on Monday and the lower Colorado region, which includes most of Arizona and parts of Nevada, was at 10%. The Rio Grande, which covers parts of New Mexico, Texas and Colorado, was at 8%. "This year has the potential of being way worse than any of the years we have analogues for in the past," Schumacher said. Even with near-normal precipitation across most of the west, every major river basin across the region was grappling with snow drought when March began, according to federal analysts. Roughly 91% of stations reported below-median snow water equivalent, according to the last federal snow drought update compiled on March 8. Water managers and climate experts had been hopeful for a March miracle -- a strong cold storm that could set the region on the right track. Instead, a blistering heatwave unlike any recorded for this time of year baked the region and spurred a rapid melt-off. "March is often a big month for snowstorms," Schumacher said. "Instead of getting snow we would normally expect we got this unprecedented, way-off-the-scale warmth." More than 1,500 monthly high temperature records were broken in March and hundreds more tied. The event was "likely among the most statistically anomalous extreme heat events ever observed in the American south-west," climate scientist Daniel Swain said in an analysis posted this week. "Beyond the conspicuous 'weirdness' of it all," Swain added, "the most consequential impact of our record-shattering March heat will likely be the decimation of the water year 2025-26 snowpack across nearly all of the American west." Calling the toll left by the heat "nothing short of shocking," Swain noted that California was tied for its worst mountain snowpack value on record. While the highest elevations are still coated in white, "lower slopes are now completely bare nearly statewide."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Apr 2026 7:00am GMT

Reuters reports that SpaceX has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO, reportedly targeting a valuation above $1.75 trillion. Reuters reports: SpaceX puts more rockets in space than any other company and promises a chance to invest in humanity's return to the moon and attempt to colonize Mars. The company aspires to put artificial intelligence data centers in space, while running a lucrative satellite communications system that opens up much of the earth to the internet and is increasingly used in war. [...] A public listing at a potential valuation of more than $1.75 trillion comes after SpaceX merged with Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI in a deal that valued the rocket company at $1 trillion and the developer of the Grok chatbot at $250 billion. SpaceX is hosting an analyst day on April 21, encouraging research analysts to attend in person, [...]. The company is also offering analysts an optional visit to xAI's "Macrohard" data center site in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 23, and plans to hold a virtual session on May 4 to discuss financial models with banks' research analysts, the source said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Apr 2026 3:30am GMT

Liftoff of Artemis II with four astronauts occurred at 6:35 pm EDT (22:35 UTC) on Wednesday.

02 Apr 2026 12:04am GMT

NASA's Artemis II mission has launched four astronauts around the moon and back, marking humanity's first crewed lunar voyage in 53 years and the first test flight of NASA's Orion capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) with people on board. Five minutes into the flight, Commander Reid Wiseman saw the team's target: "We have a beautiful moonrise, we're headed right at it," he said from the capsule. The Associated Press reports: Artemis II set sail from the same Florida launch site that sent Apollo's explorers to the moon so long ago. The handful still alive cheered this next generation's grand adventure as the Space Launch System rocket thundered into the early evening sky, a nearly full moon beckoning some 248,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) away. Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman led the charge into space with "Let's go to the moon!" accompanied by pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada's Jeremy Hansen. It was the most diverse lunar crew ever with the first woman, person of color and non-U.S. citizen riding in NASA's new Orion capsule. Carrying three Americans and one Canadian, the 32-story rocket rose from NASA's Kennedy Space Center where tens of thousands gathered to witness the dawn of this new era. Crowds also jammed the surrounding roads and beaches, reminiscent of the Apollo moonshots in the 1960s and '70s. It is NASA's biggest step yet toward establishing a permanent lunar presence. Visit NASA's Artemis II Launch Day blog for the latest updates. Developing...

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01 Apr 2026 11:00pm GMT

Longtime Slashdot reader Elektroschock writes: When Ubisoft pulled the plug on The Crew's servers without warning, players were left with a worthless game they'd already paid for. Now, consumer watchdog UFC-Que Choisir is fighting back, demanding gamers' right to play regardless of publisher whims. Supported by the "Stop Killing Games" movement, this landmark case challenges unfair terms before the Creteil Judicial Court (Val-de-Marne near Paris), and aims to protect players from disappearing games. The lawsuit that UFC-Que Choisir filed against Ubisoft on Tuesday alleges that the video game publisher "misled consumers about the permanence of their purchase and imposed abusive contractual clauses stripping players of ownership rights," reports Reuters.

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01 Apr 2026 10:00pm GMT

ZipNada writes: Two software researchers recently demonstrated how modern AI tools can reproduce entire open-source projects, creating proprietary versions that appear both functional and legally distinct. The partly-satirical demonstration shows how quickly artificial intelligence can blur long-standing boundaries between coding innovation, copyright law, and the open-source principles that underpin much of the modern internet. In their presentation, Dylan Ayrey, founder of Truffle Security, and Mike Nolan, a software architect with the UN Development Program, introduced a tool they call malus.sh. For a small fee, the service can "recreate any open-source project," generating what its website describes as "legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems." It's a test case in how intellectual property law -- still rooted in 19th-century precedent -- collides with 21st-century automation. Since the US Supreme Court's Baker v. Selden ruling, copyright has been understood to guard expression, not ideas. That boundary gave rise to clean-room design, a method by which engineers reverse-engineer systems without accessing the original source code. Phoenix Technologies famously used the technique to build its version of the PC BIOS during the 1980s. Ayrey and Nolan's experiment shows how AI can perform a clean-room process in minutes rather than months. But faster doesn't necessarily mean fair. Traditional clean-room efforts required human teams to document and replicate functionality -- a process that demanded both legal oversight and significant labor. By contrast, an AI-mediated "clean room" can be invoked through a few prompts, raising questions about whether such replication still counts as fair use or independent creation.

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01 Apr 2026 9:00pm GMT

Microsoft, Intel are also working on their own solutions for the issue.

01 Apr 2026 8:46pm GMT

A persistent agent, stealth "Undercover" mode, and... a virtual assistant named Buddy?

01 Apr 2026 8:04pm GMT

In classic Cloudflare fashion, the CDN provider used April Fool's Day to unveil an actual, "not a joke" product. Today, the company announced EmDash -- an open-source "spiritual successor" to WordPress that aims to solve plugin security. Phoronix reports: With the help of AI coding agents, Cloudflare engineers have been rebuilding the WordPress open-source project "from the ground up." EmDash is written entirely in TypeScript and is a server-less design. Making plug-ins more secure than the WordPress architecture, EmDash plug-ins are sandboxed and run in their own isolate. EmDash builds upon the Astro web framework. EmDash doesn't rely on any WordPress code but is designed to be compatible with WordPress functionality. EmDash is open-source now under the MIT license. The EmDash code is available on GitHub.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

01 Apr 2026 8:00pm GMT

Sperm gets lost in space; raccoons solve puzzles; the physics of folding a crepe; and more.

01 Apr 2026 7:53pm GMT