fidzu : computers

"South Korea plans to train every single member of its nearly half-million-strong military to operate drones as easily as they handle personal firearms," reports Ars Technica: The goal is to make drones a "universal combat tool" for all troops by training them to use drones like a "second personal weapon," said Ahn Gyu-back, South Korea's Minister of National Defense, in a June 26 briefing reported by Reuters and other media outlets. The announcement coincides with broader plans to equip individual military units with more cheap and expendable drones for surveillance and strike missions, along with deploying more counter-drone lasers and microwave weapons. Meanwhile, South Korea's former drone operations command headquarters that used to have direct command authority over combat units will be reorganized to focus on collaborating with South Korean industry on developing and procuring commercial drone technology, according to The Korea Times. The South Korean defense minister specifically cited the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as inspiring such military reforms with a focus on drone technologies... Ukraine's use of drones and military robots as a force multiplier to offset its numerical disadvantage on the battlefield versus Russia's larger military may carry special resonance for South Korea, given that the South Korean military's current active-duty strength of 450,000 personnel faces a numerical disadvantage against North Korea's active-duty military consisting of more than 1.2 million soldiers... The defense ministry is starting out by providing 11,000 "training drones" to military personnel this year, with the goal of eventually deploying 60,000 drones across the military by 2029. An additional complication comes from the South Korean military looking to procure drones with 100 percent domestically produced components and no Chinese components due to security concerns, according to the defense minister's comments reported by Reuters... South Korean companies are building new military attack drones, but the defense ministry may struggle to find enough commercial drones made without Chinese components to train hundreds of thousands of military conscripts, said Min-Cheol Jung, a cofounder of the Team Retriever counter-drone red team based in South Korea, in a War on the Rocks article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

30 Jun 2026 12:34am GMT

There's something poetic about the World Cup taking place in North America while Microsoft keeps scoring own goals like this. Microsoft updated its Surface buying guide to describe 8GB RAM as "great for everyday use like browsing, streaming, schoolwork, and productivity apps." A companion FAQ adds that 16GB or more is what unlocks Copilot+ PC features. No acknowledgment that, for two years, Microsoft was the loudest voice telling everyone that 16GB was non-negotiable for a good Windows 11 experience. What makes this infuriating is that Microsoft is one of the biggest reasons why the RAM situation got so bad in the first place. ↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest This industry is a joke.

29 Jun 2026 11:33pm GMT

Operation by two Russia-state groups has been ongoing since at least March.

29 Jun 2026 10:05pm GMT

South Korea targets physical AI lead and commercial humanoid robots by 2028.

29 Jun 2026 9:09pm GMT

Astral is a hobby operating system written in C for 64bit architectures, with a collection of ported software like X.org, fvwm, the xbps package manager, and tons more. I think it's quite a neat system - the code's on GitHub - made even neater by the fact it can run not only Minecraft, but now also has a working port of Wine that can run a few games. A few months ago, I posted about Astral, a hobby OS I have been working on over the years, running Minecraft. Since then, others have gotten modern versions of Minecraft to run as well as Factorio (using a glibc compatible libc). However, while these games are made or packaged in a way that makes it easier to get them to run under a new OS, most games are not. A lot of games are closed source and compiled for Windows, which makes something like Wine a necessity for playing them. One of my favorite games, Cogmind, falls under that umbrella. It is a 32-bit Windows only roguelike, and it became my goal to run it under Astral. While there was already an existing Wine port, it was extremely incomplete, as not even notepad.exe worked properly. To run Cogmind, the Wine port had to be finished, which also meant adding the ability to run 32-bit code on an otherwise 64-bit-only OS. ↫ Blog post on the Astral website This process obviously is quite involved, but in the end, they managed to get it working. Quite impressive.

29 Jun 2026 8:19pm GMT

Small-scale solar helped renewables hit nearly triple coal's generation in the US.

29 Jun 2026 8:12pm GMT

Imagine your favorite team just scored an incredible, last-second goal at the World Cup. So you log online to celebrate with other fans. But, using data it's already collected on you, the social media platform you like to post on wrongly guesses that you're under 16 so it forces you to go to a third-party verification app and provide images of your face or your government-issued ID. You don't really know much about the verification app, what country it's based out of, what happens with your information, and whether you're protected from hackers or data breaches. You're not happy about it, but you hand over a photo of your passport and hope it doesn't come back to haunt you. Now imagine that instead of posting about sports, you're criticizing a powerful politician, or talking about your experiences with abuse or addiction, or discussing embarrassing medical issues you're facing. Suddenly this "papers, please" approach to the internet sounds even more invasive, right? Unfortunately, that's the direction we're all headed - even here in the United States - and we have good reason to be wary of the global rush to sacrifice user privacy on the altar of age verification. ↫ Sarah McLaughlin at Expression The insane push for age verification on the internet is the biggest threat to whatever's left of the free internet. I have two young children - 3 and 5, currently - and I'm diametrically opposed to any kind of creepy verification processes that they claim are designed to keep kids like mine "safe". Not only is their safety not predicated on giving up their privacy, my children are also not my or anyone else's property; they have rights, and the right to privacy is one of them. Nobody mentioned in the Epstein files has been charged, by the way.

29 Jun 2026 8:03pm GMT

"Amid growing public anger over A.I. and a debate over how to regulate it, a group of employers, state governors and foundations has raised $500 million to try to answer some of those questions themselves," reports the New York Times. "Just how many jobs will AI upend?" asks the Wall Street Journal, reporting that the new coalition says it's time to ready the U.S. workforce for a "major" disruption - no matter how large it turns out to be. The coalition "has so far raised more than $500 million - about half of its multiyear goal - from companies and nonprofit groups. It will initially work with state governments in Arkansas, Maryland, Utah and Connecticut. OpenAI and Anthropic are also involved, and academics including MIT economist David Autor sit on an advisory board." [The new "RAISE US" coalition] will be led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who served under former President Joe Biden, and former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican. Its mandate, they said, isn't just to build retraining programs but also to reconsider decades-old policies such as unemployment insurance and act as a working lab for testing the most effective ways to transition workers to new fields. The group will explore corporate incentives for employers to hold on to workers whose jobs are disrupted by AI and prep them for new roles... The mission of the group is to "pull all the levers at once," Raimondo said. That means teaming up with employers to find ways to help workers gain skills or new roles and joining with educators to roll out different types of training. It also plans to propose policy changes such as tweaking unemployment benefits to let displaced workers continue to get them while they, for instance, start new businesses with AI... In Maryland, the group plans to expand a service-year option in the state to help people gain exposure to such growing fields as healthcare. An effort in Arkansas will focus on supporting "an AI-powered career navigation platform." More from New York Times: The organization will work primarily with governors... The theory: States generally control their community college systems, which can translate work force policy through course offerings and industry partnerships. The bulk of the budget will fund pilot programs overseen by about 15 staff members and consultants. For example, Maryland will expand a "service year" for recent high school graduates to provide experience in fields where there are shortages, such as health care. In other states, Raise Us hopes to offer "wage insurance" for workers who take lower-paying jobs rather than dropping out of the work force entirely. The group plans to furnish technical assistance for companies that want to retain workers as A.I. changes their roles, rather than eliminating them. Microsoft, one of the companies backing the organization, said it had already found a promising model: cross-training its entry-level lawyers in different parts of the organization and equipping them with A.I. skills in order for them to be repositioned as technology evolves. "You can think of doing that with almost any job we have," said Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft. "It creates an opportunity to transfer people from jobs that are being eliminated to jobs that are being created...." Ms. Raimondo and her colleagues are not fans of a universal basic income, an idea that has gained popularity in Silicon Valley as an answer to job disruption. They emphasize that work provides more than just wages, and plan to focus on helping people find pathways to new jobs. But it's unclear whether A.I. will create jobs at the rate that it will destroy them. Jack Malde studied work force policy for the Bipartisan Policy Center and is now going to work for the Windfall Trust, another A.I.-focused think tank. He said long-term income support might be necessary, even if better models for transitioning workers were found. "The truth is, there's still a lot of uncertainty," Mr. Malde said. "What we think is resilient now might not be resilient later. We're not going to get everything right, so we're going to need those strong safety-net programs." Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: If you think you've seen this movie before, prior to "partnering with governors, employers, and training partners to help the American workforce make a successful transition to an AI economy" with RAISE US, Raimondo and Holcomb partnered with governors, employers and training partners to help U.S. K-12 students make a successful transition to a CS economy with the Governors for Computer Science coalition.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

29 Jun 2026 7:34pm GMT

IBM has unveiled "what it says is the world's first sub-1-nanometer chip technology," reports ZDNet, "designed to pack nearly 100 billion transistors on a fingernail-size die, roughly doubling the density of IBM's earlier 2-nm test chip, first shown in 2021... Today, the smallest, most powerful chips top out at about 80 billion transistors." At the heart of the announcement is NanoStack. This is a three-dimensional, nanosheet-based transistor design that scales vertically, or along the z-axis, by stacking and staggering CMOS devices. Unlike today's nanosheet architectures, which IBM also pioneered and which are being adopted by leading foundries at 3 nm and 2 nm, NanoStack bonds two nanosheet transistors into a single vertical structure, with each tier optimized independently and contacted from opposite sides. Each transistor in the demonstrated structure uses three sub-5 nm-thick nanosheets, about "15 silicon atoms" across, separated by roughly 9 nm spacers. Two such devices are then bonded vertically using an ultra-thin dielectric process IBM describes as a key innovation. Because the top and bottom devices can use different channel materials, dielectrics, and metals, IBM argues NanoStack is less a single trick and more a transistor platform that can be extended through multiple generations: 7 angstrom (Å), 5 Å, 3 Å, and potentially down to 1 Å in its internal roadmap. An angstrom, by the by, is one ten-billionth of a meter. In terms of chips, an angstrom is a tenth of a nanometer. "This is the world's first sub-1 nanometer chip technology with a new transistor architecture," said Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, during a press briefing. "We're not just making smaller transistors, we're reinventing how chips are built to deliver dramatically more power and energy efficiency...." Based on internal benchmarking against its 2 nm node, the company said its new chips will deliver up to 50% higher performance at the same power, or up to 70% lower power for the same performance. Big Blue also highlighted a 40% improvement in the scaling of static random-access memory (SRAM) cell area relative to its 2 nm technology. This is a change IBM described as a "step the industry hasn't seen in over a decade" and one that could be particularly important for AI accelerators that live or die on on-chip memory bandwidth... According to Huiming Bu, IBM's VP of silicon technology R&D, NanoStack is a new paradigm. It's moving chips to scaling fully into three dimensions and giving the industry at least "another decade" of logic advances as it crosses from nanometers into angstroms... The 40% SRAM density bump could also help architects push caches and on-die memory closer to compute units, cutting data movement overhead in training and inference workloads. IBM sees a path to production use "in as early as the next 5 years", according to the article, and "expects NanoStack to eventually underpin CPUs, GPUs, mobile SoCs, and SRAM arrays." IBM's VP of silicon technology R&D says the new innovation "can improve performance by 50% compared to the best available chip today, and at the same time can reduce power by 70%."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

29 Jun 2026 2:34pm GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Just trying to answer one simple question: What if the terminal was 3D?

11 May 2026 12:00am GMT

Break the pattern today or the loop will repeat tomorrow.

18 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT