fidzu : computers

Meta has begun laying off more than 1,000 employees from its Reality Labs division as the company redirects resources away from virtual reality and metaverse products toward AI wearables and smartphone features. The cuts amount to roughly 10% of Reality Labs' 15,000-person workforce, according to an internal post from CTO Andrew Bosworth reviewed by Bloomberg. Reality Labs has lost more than $70 billion since the start of 2021, and top executives discussed budget cuts as deep as 30% for the metaverse group in December. Meta plans to continue developing its Horizon metaverse platform, but the focus will shift almost exclusively to mobile phones rather than the fully immersive VR headsets the company originally envisioned.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 Jan 2026 2:44pm GMT

Microsoft announced Tuesday what it calls a "community first" initiative for its AI data centers, pledging to pay full electricity costs and reject local property tax breaks following months of growing opposition from residents facing higher power bills. The announcement in Washington, D.C. marks a clear departure from past practices; Microsoft has previously accepted tax abatements for data centers in Ohio and Iowa. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said the company has been developing the initiative since September. Residential power prices in data center hubs like Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio jumped 12-16% over the past year, faster than the U.S. average. Three Democratic senators launched an investigation last month into whether tech giants are raising residential bills. Microsoft also pledged a 40% improvement in water efficiency by 2030 and committed to replenishing more water than it uses in each district where it operates.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 Jan 2026 2:06pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: President Donald Trump said in a social media post on Monday that Microsoft will announce changes to ensure that Americans won't see rising utility bills as the company builds more data centers to meet rising artificial intelligence demand. "I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Therefore, my Administration is working with major American Technology Companies to secure their commitment to the American People, and we will have much to announce in the coming weeks." [...] Trump congratulated Microsoft on its efforts to keep prices in check, suggesting that other companies will make similar commitments. "First up is Microsoft, who my team has been working with, and which will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't 'pick up the tab' for their POWER consumption, in the form of paying higher Utility bills," Trump wrote on Monday. Utilities charged U.S. consumers 6% more for electricity in August from a year earlier, including in states with many data centers, CNBC reported in November. Microsoft is paying close to attention to the impact of its data centers on local residents. "I just want you to know we are doing everything we can, and I believe we're succeeding, in managing this issue well, so that you all don't have to pay more for electricity because of our presence," Brad Smith, the company's president and vice chair, said at a September town hall meeting in Wisconsin, where Microsoft is building an AI data center. While Microsoft is moving forward with some facilities, the company withdrew plans for a data center in Caledonia, Wisconsin, amid loud opposition to its efforts there. The project would would have been located 20 miles away from a data center in the village of Mount Pleasant.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 Jan 2026 1:00pm GMT

Users can give Claude access to a folder and tell it what to do for them.

12 Jan 2026 11:42pm GMT

"We can't keep everyone living on that first ship that sailed to North America."

12 Jan 2026 11:04pm GMT

WBD calls Paramount's lawsuit "meritless" and its offer deficient.

12 Jan 2026 10:49pm GMT

The PDP-10 family of computers (under different names) was manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation between 1964 and 1983. Designed for time-sharing, batch and real-time systems, these computers were popular with universities, scientific companies and time-sharing bureaux. Several operating systems were available, some from DEC and some built by its users. It had a large influence on operating system design, artificial intelligence (especially at MIT and Stanford), programming languages (LISP, ML), applications (TeX, Emacs), online communication (ARPANET, Compuserve), games (Advent, Zork) and even helped development of Microsoft's first version of BASIC. ↫ Rupert Lane The importance, impact, and legacy of the PDP series of computers cannot be understated, running like a red thread through the early days and development of several important and crucial technologies. Lane is going to cover a number of the operating systems created for the PDP-10, so if you're interested - keep a bookmark.

12 Jan 2026 3:52pm GMT

Are you an author writing HTML? Just so we're clear: Not XHTML. HTML. Without the X. If you are, repeat after me, because apparently this bears repeating (after the title): You are not required to close your <p>, <li>, <img>, or <br> tags in HTML. ↫ Daniel Tan Back when I still had to write OSNews' stories in plain HTML - yes, that's what we did for a very long time - I always properly closed my tags. I did so because I thought you had to, but also because I think it looks nicer, adds a ton of clarity, and makes it easier to go back later and make any possible changes or fix errors. It definitely added to the workload, which was especially annoying when dealing with really long, detailed articles, but the end result was worth it. I haven't had to write in plain HTML for ages now, since OSNews switched to WordPress and thus uses a proper WYSIWYG editor, so I haven't thought about closing HTML tags in a long time - until I stumbled upon this article. I vaguely remember I would "fix" other people's HTML in our backend by adding closing tags, and now I feel a little bit silly for doing so since apparently it wasn't technically necessary at all. Luckily, it's also not wrong to close your tags, and I stick by my readability arguments. Sometimes it's easy to forget just how old HTML has become, and how mangled it's become over the years.

12 Jan 2026 3:41pm GMT

We all knew this was going to happen, so let's just get it over with. Microsoft is testing a new feature that integrates Copilot into the File Explorer, but it's not going to be another 'Ask Copilot' button in the right-click menu. This time, Copilot will live inside File Explorer, likely in a sidebar or Details/Preview-pane-like interface, according to new references in Windows 11 preview builds. ↫ Mayank Parmar at Windows Latest What am I even supposed to say at this point? Who wants this? Why utterly destroy what little reputation and goodwill Windows has left? Has the hype bubble become this clouded and intoxicating? Even system administrators who want to turn off Copilot in their organisations or device fleets in an official, supported way are getting punched in the face by Microsoft. The company rolled out a new Group Policy to disable Copilot, but it's such a useless mess it might as well not be there at all. This essentially means that IT admins will only be able to uninstall the Copilot app for customers where their device has both Copilot apps installed by either a clean install or by the IT team itself, as long as the Copilot app has not been opened in a month. So, even if you accidentally open the Copilot app for a second because it's there in your Windows taskbar, the Copilot app won't be uninstalled. ↫ Usama Jawad at Neowin You shouldn't be using Windows.

11 Jan 2026 10:02pm GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In 2024 the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) started funding work on the ALPM project, which provides a Rust-based framework for Arch Linux Package Management. Refer to the project's FAQ and mission statement to learn more about the relation to the tooling currently in use on Arch Linux. The funding has now concluded, but over the time of 15 months allowed us to create various tools and integrations that we will highlight in the following sections. We have worked on six milestones with focus on various aspects of the package management ecosystem, ranging from formalizing, parsing and writing of …

10 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

Did you know you can have newlines in pathnames? The design is very human and this absolutely doesn't have any unforeseen consequences! Also a friendly reminder that you can store anything on a nameserver if you try hard enough.

Originally posted by me on donotsta.re (2025-12-23)

09 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT