fidzu : computers

Last May Duolingo's stock peaked at $529.05. But while the learning app passed $1 billion in revenue in 2025 and 50 million daily active users, today its stock price has dropped more than 81%, to $100.51. And there's been other changes, reports Entrepreneur: In April 2025, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn made headlines after writing a memo calling the company "AI-first." In the memo, von Ahn announced that the language-learning platform would track employees' AI use in performance reviews. Now, a year later, von Ahn is backtracking and rethinking how he measures employee performance. He told the Silicon Valley Girl podcast earlier this month that Duolingo no longer considers AI use in performance reviews. The change arose after employees started to ask, "Do you just want us to use AI for AI's sake?" von Ahn explained. "We said no, look - the most important thing in your performance is that you are doing whatever your job is as well as possible. A lot of times, AI can help you with that, but if it can't, I'm not going to force you to do that," von Ahn said on the podcast. He felt as though the company was "trying to push something that in some cases did not fit" instead of "being held accountable for the actual outcome." The CEO is, however, still sticking to other "constructive constraints" he introduced in the April 2025 memo, including stopping contractor hiring in cases where AI can assume their workload... Von Ahn also mentioned that a few months ago, Duolingo had a day dedicated to vibe coding, or prompting AI to create an app without manually writing a single line of code. Every single person at the company, from engineers to human resources professionals, had to vibe code an app. Vibe coding has made an impact at the company. One of Duolingo's latest offerings, a course teaching users how to play chess, arose when two people vibe-coded the first prototype of it, the CEO said. Neither of them knew how to play chess or program, but they managed to use AI to create the whole chess curriculum and a prototype of the app in about six months last year. Now chess is Duolingo's fastest-growing course, according to von Ahn. "At this point, we have seven million daily active users that are learning chess," the CEO said on the podcast.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

19 Apr 2026 3:34am GMT

After Artemis II's astronauts returned to earth, "NASA has Artemis III in its sights," reports the Associated Press: In a mission recently added to the docket for next year, Artemis III's yet-to-be -named astronauts will practice docking their Orion capsule with a lunar lander or two in orbit around Earth. Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are racing to have their company's lander ready first. Musk's Starship and Bezos' Blue Moon are vying for the all-important Artemis IV moon landing in 2028. Two astronauts will aim for the south polar region, the preferred location for [NASA Administrator Jared] Isaacman's envisioned $20 billion to $30 billion moon base. Vast amounts of ice are almost certainly hidden in permanently shadowed craters there - ice that could provide water and rocket fuel. The docking mechanism for Artemis III's close-to-home trial run is already at Florida's Kennedy Space Center. The latest model Starship is close to launching on a test flight from South Texas, and a scaled-down version of Blue Moon will attempt a lunar landing later this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

19 Apr 2026 1:34am GMT

"A trailer has been released for the first film to star an authorised generative AI version of a major Hollywood actor," writes The Guardian: Val Kilmer was cast in western As Deep As the Grave before his death in April 2025. Production delays meant he never shot any scenes, but the creative team worked with UK-based company Sonantic to create an AI speaking voice based on his old recordings. His estate and daughter Mercedes collaborated with the film-makers on the visual deepfake of the actor. Kilmer, who was diagnosed with throat cancer, was also assisted by technology for his cameo in 2022's Top Gun: Maverick... Writer-director Coerte Voorhees confirmed that Kilmer is seen for around an hour of the film's running time... Voorhees has said that the production followed Sag-Aftra [union] guidelines, and that Kilmer's estate - which provided archival material for them to use - was compensated financially. "Kilmer's likeness can be seen portraying Father Fintan, a Catholic priest and Native American spiritualist," adds The Hollywood Reporter. But the AV Club calls it "ghoulish puppet show time." "Having your AI Val Kilmer puppet whisper 'Don't fear the dead, and don't fear me' in a movie trailer is a bold choice..." He is accompanied (per Variety) by a whole host of disclaimers, caveats, and explanations offered by writer-director Coerte Voorhees and his associates: Kilmer deeply wanted to be in the movie, but was too sick to do so. His family endorses and supports his inclusion. He was a big fan of technology, including, presumably, its use in turning his own image into a digital avatar to then shove into movies... The fact is, of course, that nobody would be paying a fraction of this attention to As Deep As The Grave - about early female archeologist Ann Axtell Morris - if it weren't now being used as the stage on which Voorhees was very publicly accepting the dare to go full-on ghoulish with AI tech. "The filmmakers said they hoped they were showing Hollywood how to use the technology in a positive way..." notes Australia's ABC News. But their articles add that "Some have called the trailer 'terrifying' and 'disgusting' on social media." Mashable writes: "Very fitting that this trailer includes a scene where a corpse is unceremoniously yanked out of the ground," read one of the top comments on As Deep as the Grave's trailer at time of writing... [O]nline commenters have labelled it disgusting and disrespectful, not only for digitally reanimating Kilmer but also for the damaging precedent As Deep as the Grave's use of AI could set for the film industry as a whole.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Apr 2026 10:34pm GMT

The sharks might also be the most physiologically vulnerable to warming waters.

18 Apr 2026 11:07am GMT

Grinex says needed hacking resources "available exclusively to ... unfriendly states."

17 Apr 2026 9:28pm GMT

Probation for man who used stolen logins and posted private info on social media.

17 Apr 2026 7:31pm GMT

The title of my article on age verification in Linux and other operating systems had a "for now" added for a reason, and here we are, with two members of the US Congress introducing a bill to add age verification to operating systems. The text of the proposed bill was only published today, and it's incredibly vague and wishy-washy, without any clear definitions and ton of open-ended questions. Still, if passed, the bill would require actual age verification, instead of mere voluntary age reporting that current state-level bills cover. It also seems to eschew the concept of age brackets, giving application developers access to specific ages of users instead. It's a vague mess of a bill that no sane person would ever want passed, but alas, sanity is a rare commodity these days, especially in US Congress. It's introduced by Democrat Josh Gottheimer and Republican Elise M. Stefanik, so it has that bipartisan sheen to it, which could increase its odds of going anywhere. At the same time, though, US Congress is about as useful as a box of matches during a house fire, so for all we know, this will end up going nowhere as its members focus on doing absolutely nothing to reign in the flock of coked-up headless chickens passing for an executive branch over there. If something like this gets passed, every US-based operating system - which includes most open source operating systems and Linux distributions - will probably fall in line when faced with massive fines and legal pressure. This isn't going to be pretty.

16 Apr 2026 8:07pm GMT

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, doesn't only support x86. It also has a branch for SPARC, which tends to run behind its x86 counterpart a little bit and has a few other limitations related to the fact SPARC is effectively no longer being developed. The Tribblix SPARC branch has been updated, and now roughly matches the latest x86 release from a few weeks ago. The graphical libraries libtiff and OpenEXR have been updated, retaining the old shared library versions for now. OpenSSL is now from the 3.5 series with the 3.0 api by default. Bind is now from the 9.20 series. OpenSSH is now 10.2, and you may get a Post-Quantum Cryptography warning if connecting to older SSH servers. 'zap install' now installs dependencies by default. 'zap create-user' will now restrict new home directories to mode 0700 by default; use the -M flag to choose different permissions. Support for UFS quotas has been removed. ↫ Tribblix release notes There's no new ISO yet, so to get to this new m34 release for SPARC you're going to have to install from an older ISO and update from there.

15 Apr 2026 8:18pm GMT

Another Haiku monthly activity report, but this time around, there's actually a big ticket item. Haiku has been in a pretty solid and stable state for a while now, so the activity reports have been dominated by fairly small, obscure changes, but during March a major milestone was reached for the ARM64 port. smrobtzz contributed the bulk of the work, including fixes for building on macOS on ARM64, drivers for the Apple S5L UART, fixes to the kernel base address, clearing the frame pointer before entering the kernel, mapping physical memory correctly, the basics for userland, and more. SED4906 contributed some fixes to the bootloader page mapping, and runtime_loader's page-size checks. Combined, these changes allow the ARM64 port to get to the desktop in QEMU. There's a forum thread, complete with screenshots, for anyone interested in following along. ↫ waddlesplash While it's only in QEMU, this is still a major achievement and paves the way for more people to work on the ARM64 port, possibly increasing its health. There's tons of smaller changes and fixes all over the place, too, as usual, and the team mentions beta 6 isn't quite ready yet, still. Don't let that stop you from just downloading the latest nightly, though - Haiku is mature enough to use it.

15 Apr 2026 3:10pm GMT

My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.

11 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

I have discovered and shared ~800 open source Rust CLI projects over the past 3 years.

03 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

All I wanted was to learn how to play guitar, but ended up building a DIY kit for it.

28 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT