computers

29 Jul 2026

Slashdot

Your Brain Can Rewire Itself To Allow True Multitasking

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: [I]n a new study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center in the U.S. have revealed that we can put certain tasks on autopilot in a way that enables something closer to true multitasking. Driving is the perfect example: When you take your test, your entire mental and physical energy is concentrated on executing the right combinations of movements and thoughts. After a decade behind the wheel, the brain is no longer consciously thinking everything through in great detail. In the new study, the researchers found that after extensive practice, the brain can effectively reroute some tasks around the brain's main computing center -- like a bypass road around a city -- to reduce mental overload and improve multitasking capability. "We have another stepping stone in our understanding of how the brain learns," says neuroscientist Maximilian Riesenhuber, senior author of the study. "The encouraging part is that you really can learn to multitask. There is actually a way to remodel your brain architecture and use other parts of your brain." [...] "Previous studies have shown that parts of the temporal cortex can be activated by particular object categories in experienced observers -- birds, cars, even Pokemon -- but a limitation of all of those studies is that they only looked after people became experts," says psychologist Patrick Cox, first author of the study. "We measure before and after training, so we can see that extensive training essentially put a category-selective area in the temporal lobe that was not there before." The study culminated in a dual-task experiment, in which the participants were asked to identify cars and take on another challenge. The individuals whose brains had offloaded more car-sorting work to the temporal cortex did better at the second task.

Trump Administration Bans New Chinese Humanoid Robots

The Trump administration has banned newly authorized foreign-made humanoid and four-legged robots, along with power inverters, citing "unacceptable risks" to the country's national security. FCC chairman Brendan Carr said the agency was doing its part "to secure America's critical supply chains." The BBC reports: The FCC has added the items to its Covered List -- a register of goods and services that are deemed a risk to US national security. The ban applies to new foreign-produced advanced robotic devices and power inverters and does not prevent the sale or import of any existing models that had been previously authorized by the FCC. The FCC cited concerns that the use of foreign-made inverters could allow overseas firms to turn them off, steal data, facilitate remote access and surveillance by "foreign government actors, or be otherwise exploited through a cyberattack." It added that the use of robots made outside the US could allow "malign actors to surveil Americans, enhance the capabilities of foreign intelligence services, or to remotely commandeer the robots."

Workplaces Look For Cheaper AI As 'Tokenmaxxing' Fades As a Corporate Fad

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: A corporate fad of "tokenmaxxing" on artificial intelligence technology is hitting its limits as workplaces throwing AI at everything are seeing the costs rise without a similar spike in productivity. What started as tech industry-fueled springtime hype over squeezing as much AI-generated work as possible out of products like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude has shifted to a summertime backlash. [...] Just a few months ago, Silicon Valley executives were promoting high token consumption as a signal of high-performing employees. The stereotypical tokenmaxxer was staying up late -- perhaps ignoring their significant other -- while orchestrating an army of 24-hour AI agents performing work on their behalf. [...] The trend boosted revenue for leading AI large language model developers like Anthropic and OpenAI, but it fizzled as it became apparent it wasn't necessarily the best strategy for everyone else. [...] Bain & Company management consultant Jue Wang said many of the big businesses her firm advises have been taking a closer look at returns on their AI investments. "The token cost for them has been doubling, almost every other month," she said. "Let's say $200 per developer per month. Multiply that by 20,000 developers, which is often what we're dealing with at these companies, and that quickly gets you to a number that is not a line item that any general manager has planned for." Sometimes that just means not using the AI equivalent of a sledgehammer to crack a nut. "Not everything needs a Claude Opus 4.6," she said of one of Anthropic's more capable models suited to software engineering or deep research. "And yet you see so many companies, so many users, default to using Opus for everything, including generating emails." That's led to a search for tools that do AI "model routing" -- in which easier queries get automatically sent to cheaper and more efficient AI systems and more complex tasks go to more powerful models. [...] At the same time, those who favor racking up as many tokens as possible are having a field day with new open-source models from Chinese startups like Moonshot's Kimi or Zhipu's GLM, which nearly match the capabilities of top U.S. models at a fraction of the price. "There is some validity to the theory that this could push tokenmaxxing a little bit further," said Raffi Krikorian, the chief technology officer at Mozilla. "But if we look at the industry overall, I think it's realizing that tokenmaxxing is a dumb thing." It's similar, Krikorian said, to how software companies once considered how many lines of code a programmer wrote to be a good metric of productivity. That later fell out of favor. "I think tokenmaxxing is moving through the exact same pattern," he said. "I think this is going to be an interesting blip that we're all going to look back to laugh at in a year."

Ars Technica

Audi has a new flagship designed with the US in mind: The 2027 Q9

The new full-size flagship SUV starts at $87,700 when it goes on sale in Q4.

29 Jul 2026 1:00am GMT

28 Jul 2026

Ars Technica

Reaction wheel failures leave Swift rescue mission spinning in orbit

"Preliminary investigation shows that two of Link's three reaction wheels currently are not operable."

28 Jul 2026 10:09pm GMT

College lab class ends with 32 people on antibiotics for deadly germ exposure

Lab students were supposed to ID a mild germ. They all identified a deadly pathogen.

28 Jul 2026 9:49pm GMT

27 Jul 2026

OSnews

Windows NT got its name from one of Intel’s failed x86 replacements

Dave Farquhar published an article today about Windows NT 3.1's place in the market when it was originally released, and while the article is interesting and a fun read, it does mention this: Microsoft took its nascent code that it intended to form the base of OS/2 3.0, renamed it Windows New Technology, and eventually released it as Windows NT 3.1. ↫ Dave Farquhar While Microsoft did, in fact, use the "New Technology" branding as a marketing trick, this is not what "NT" originally stood for. Two developers from the original Windows NT development team, Mark Lucovsky and David Thompson, explained all the way back in 2003 that "NT" came from the codename for Intel's then-new RISC platform, the Intel i860 (Raymond Chen confirmed the veracity of their story). The i860 was the first target platform for Windows NT, and it was codenamed "N-10" - NT. Finally, it was time to start writing some code. "We checked the first code pieces in around mid-December 1988," Lucovsky said, "and had a very basic system kind of booting on a simulator of the Intel i860 (which was codenamed "N-Ten") by January." In fact, this is where NT actually got its name, Lucovsky revealed, adding that the "new technology" moniker was added after the fact in a rare spurt of product marketing by the original NT team members. "Originally, we were targeting NT to the Intel i860, a RISC processor that was horribly behind schedule. Because we didn't have any i860 machines in-house to test on, we used an i860 simulator. That's why we called it NT, because it worked on the 'N-Ten.'" ↫ Paul Thurrott The i860 was one of Intel's many attempts over the years to replace x86 with something more modern, but - as would become tradition with Intel and attempting to replace its x86 architecture - it suffered from endless delays, missed targets, and lacklustre performance. It saw only sporadic use in the market, and ended up on the chopping block after only a few years. Intel tried to replace x86 again soon after with Itanium, which suffered an identical fate. Still, the engineers working on the i860 platform in the late '80s and early '90s at Intel can at least take some pride in that to this day, the most popular desktop operating system in the world got its name from the product they developed. Intel's i860 might barely even be worthy of a footnote today, but billions of PC users log into their Windows "N-10" machines every day, unwittingly carrying a torch for the failed x86 replacement.

27 Jul 2026 11:37pm GMT

The Fedora 45 sausage factory

This is a walkthrough of how Fedora turns source code and packages into the artifacts you download and install. It follows the a package from a packager's git push to a composed release: ISOs, cloud images, container images, and OSTree deployments. ↫ Simon de Vlieger Linux distributions - good ones like Fedora, at least - are really complex operations, with a ton of checks and balances to ensure no git push eventually ends up causing problems on individual users' machines way down the line. The fact so many people involved in this complex web of processes also happen to be volunteers doing all of this out of the goodness of their hearts is amazing. Of course, this doesn't just apply to Fedora, but also the countless other distributions out there, especially those not owned by some giant corporation like IBM. If you're just a casual Fedora user, there's really no reason you have to know or be aware of any of this, but it's still fun and interesting to understand the inner workings of your distribution of choice.

27 Jul 2026 7:33pm GMT

Comanche: Maximum Overkill from 1992 does weird things on Intel processors

Let's do another article about weird code in video games. The original 1992 Comanche release is extremely picky about memory managers. The game refuses to work with EMM emulators and crashes when EMM386 is active. The game may also hang or reboot the system when HIMEM.SYS is not loaded (the problem seems to be system configuration dependent). These issues are clearly noted in the Comanche documentations, but at the same time they're also all signs of a substandard DOS extender. On top of that, the game authors accomplished a remarkable feat: By only loosely following Intel's instructions on how to enter protected mode, NovaLogic managed to write a game which worked on the then-existing 386 and 486 processors, but under some circumstances failed to run on Pentium and later processors. ↫ Michal Necasek at OS/2 Museum As usual, a great read from Michal Nacesek.

27 Jul 2026 7:23pm GMT