fidzu : computers

Thousands of Chicago-area Zillow and Trulia listings disappeared after Midwest Real Estate Data cut off Zillow's access to its feed, "in the latest escalation of a legal battle with Lisle-based Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED)," reports the Chicago Sun-Times. "The fight is over MRED's private listing network, where homes for sale are shared among real estate professionals. And MRED followed through on a threat to cut Zillow's access to its listing data feed." From the report: There were nearly 5,000 Chicago homes listed on Zillow Tuesday, but as of Wednesday afternoon, that number plummeted to about 1,700. Meanwhile, other listing sites like Redfin and Realtor.com show about 5,000 to 8,000 listings in Chicago. MRED manages listings -- submitted by brokers -- throughout Illinois, as well as parts of Wisconsin and Indiana. The regional multiple listing service has more than 43,000 members and processed more than 264,000 listings worth $43 billion in 2025. The loss of listings on Zillow's websites have made a behind-the-scenes real estate industry fight public. And it now hinders some consumers in their search to buy a home, while also limiting the marketing opportunity for sellers. The legal fight is basically over who gets to control how home listings are marketed and displayed online. Zillow recently adopted a rule saying that if a home is marketed privately, such as behind a paywall, login, or private listing network, it should not also appear on Zillow. The policy, the real estate marketplace says, is meant to discourage "pocket listings," preserve transparency, and make sure buyers can see the full market. MRED sees it differently. It expanded its private listing network and partnered with Compass, which wants to give sellers more control over whether their homes are broadly publicized or marketed privately first. MRED argues that Zillow is violating MLS rules and licensing agreements by refusing to display certain listings, including private Compass listings. Consumers are now caught in the middle...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 May 2026 11:00pm GMT

"The move to AcuRite NOW has not been as smooth as some customers expected ..."

21 May 2026 10:26pm GMT

After Google killed its search engine a few days ago, one question remained: how exactly does advertising fit into all of this? Google is obviously not going to move to chatbot search without somehow adding ads to your conversation with the pachinko machine, so everybody was wondering how that was going to work, exactly. Well, we have the answer, and it's an obvious one. When researching a topic, consumers want to know exactly how a product suits their unique situation. In fact, 75% of people report making faster, more confident decisions using AI Mode in Search. 1 That's why we're testing two new types of ads, built with Gemini, that offer relevant product details along with helpful guidance. To help people evaluate their choices, both of these new formats will feature an independent AI explainer as part of the ad. Our Gemini model evaluates and synthesizes information about a product or service, and displays that context alongside the advertiser's creative. This coherent, independent response ensures transparency and builds trust. These formats will also continue to be clearly labeled as "Sponsored." ↫ Google's Ads & Commerce Blog Of course they're going to just generate the ads with "AI", too. Google will offer two types of "AI"-generated ads in their new chatbot search tool, the first of which will simply be an "AI"-generated answer to a user's question. If you ask the Google chatbot "how can I clean my bed sheets of unintended nightly slop discharge?", Google will generate an ad based on the features of a slopcleaner washing machine detergent product and show that to you. The second type comes in when a user asks something like "what is the best way to kill a search engine?" Google's chatbot will then show a number of ways to kill a search engine, and one of the items in that list might be an ad generated by Google, alongside the customary unrelated information, wrong information, and made-up nonsense. Google claims both of these types of ads will be labeled as such, but I doubt that small label will be noticed by many, and of course, there's no way to know any of the other answers the chatbot generates aren't paid-for either. Here, too, though, we must ask the question what the end game is. This new chatbot search engine is clearly trying to keep you on Google's website, but in doing so, it'll deprive large numbers of websites of the traffic they need to survive. If they can't survive, they're die. If they're dead, they can't produce the content Google "AI" needs to slobber up to spit back out in Google's chatbot search. Chatbot search is also an agent of its own destruction, because you can't generate improved slop with nothing but slop. Because, and I can't repeat this often enough, nobody has ever used "AI" to produce anything of value.

21 May 2026 10:04pm GMT

Vivaldi 8.0 is being pitched as the browser's "most significant design overhaul" yet, featuring a new unified, edge-to-edge interface, six preset layouts, and deeper customization across tabs, toolbars, panels, and themes. The company is also taking a swipe at rivals chasing questionable AI features. Neowin reports: After updating to version 8.0, Vivaldi will present you with the ability to select one of the six pre-built styles. You can select a minimal edge-to-edge theme, one with the UI fully hidden for focused work, or a power user variant with everything on the screen. The update comes with a built-in collection theme, and users are free to select one of over 7,000 community themes available on the official website. Vivaldi says that while other browsers were busy adding questionable AI features, it focused on "a foundation that no other browser can match" with flexible tab management, built-in productivity tools, and advanced customization. At the same time, Vivaldi does not force the new design onto its users, so those who prefer the previous user interface can go back to it at any moment in settings. "With 8.0, we have done something we have been working toward for a long time: we have given the browser itself a visual system worthy of everything it can do," says Vivaldi's CEO and co-founder, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner. "With this update Vivaldi feels like one considered, coherent tool." You can download Vivaldi 8.0 and view the changelog at their respective links.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 May 2026 10:00pm GMT

SpaceX IPO filing pitches orbital data centers as Grok lags rival AI services.

21 May 2026 9:51pm GMT

Suppose your manager asks you next week to demonstrate that the AI coding tools your company signed up for are worth the subscription cost. Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more productive? Each of those approaches is flawed in a different way; the sections below explain why. ↫ Greg Wilson Every single study that claims to prove "AI" has a positive effect on productivity falls into one or more of these categories. Again, nobody has ever used "AI" to produce anything of value.

21 May 2026 9:43pm GMT

The stories of "AI" bots and crawlers absolutely ravaging websites and services keep on coming, and the amount of work people have to do just to survive these "AI" bot and crawler assaults is insane. I run Weird Gloop, which hosts some of the biggest video game wikis ever, like Minecraft, OSRS and League. Over the last 3 years, we've had to spend more and more of our time fighting with this bot traffic that is spiky, disproportionately expensive, and getting harder to distinguish from humans. If we weren't constantly mitigating the bots, they would use ~10x more of our compute resources than everything else put together - even though that "everything else" includes tens of millions of (human) pageviews and tens of thousands of edits a day. Everyone who runs wikis is dealing with the exact same problem. The Wikimedia Foundation has a post about it impacting operations, every major wiki farm has had varying degrees of service outages, and some smaller independent wikis have been knocked completely offline. Overall, I'd guess that about 95% of all server issues in the wiki ecosystem this year have been caused by bad scrapers. ↫ cookmeplox at the Weird Gloop blog "AI" tools are a quintessential example of "shitting where you eat". All of these tools just suck up huge amounts of content created by actual humans, only to regurgitate bits and pieces of that content upon request according statistical models. If in that process of sucking up everybody's content, these tools are placing such amounts of undue stress and cost on the people making and hosting that content that said people stop making and hosting such content, where are these "AI" tools going to get their content from next? With every person that throws up their hands in the air in utter frustration as they see they're hosting bills skyrocket and their sites become unusable, "AI" tools are agents of their own destruction, since ingesting the slop they themselves create only makes these "AI" tools worse. Nobody has ever used "AI" to produce anything of value, after all.

21 May 2026 9:35pm GMT

AT&T asks a court and the FCC to block California phone requirements.

21 May 2026 9:10pm GMT

Trump called off a planned AI executive order just hours before a signing ceremony because he said he was worried the framework could slow America's lead over China. "We're leading China, we're leading everybody, and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead," Trump told reporters. The Associated Press reports: The order would have established a framework for the government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems before their public release, according to a person familiar with the White House's deliberations with the tech industry but not authorized to speak about it publicly. The directive was being characterized as a voluntary collaboration with participating U.S.-based tech companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, the person said. There are competing factions within the administration, said Serena Booth, a computer science professor at Brown University and former AI policy fellow in a Democratic-led Senate committee. "We do see this kind of public fighting," she said. "'We will release an executive order. No, we won't. We're going to sign it this afternoon. Oh, the signing is canceled.' I think this whiplash is because we're seeing these fractures.'" Some of those divides are balancing what Booth said is a "reasonable idea" to test the most capable AI models before their public release, with a concern that government scrutiny, if it takes too long, could burden AI developers. "It does come at a potential very large cost to innovation and speed of development," she said. "There is, I think, a real risk here and I do see both sides." [...] "They don't want to do it because it's politically risky in a million different ways," said Dean Ball, now at the Foundation for American Innovation. Ball said he would welcome an executive order that would get those companies working more closely with the government on cybersecurity but "ultimately, I'm fine with them taking time to get this right."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 May 2026 9:00pm 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

My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.

11 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT