fidzu : computers

Sci-fi author/tech journalist Cory Doctorow on his new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.

23 Jun 2026 12:00pm GMT

Canada has unveiled a national strategy to build up to 10 new nuclear reactors over the next 15 years as it seeks to double electricity-grid capacity by 2050. Energy Minister Tim Hodgson called it a plan for a "new civilian nuclear renaissance." "If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy and the clean, reliable baseload power it provides," Hodgson said. "There is no credible plan for Canada to become an energy superpower if we choose not to build upon one of the strongest energy advantages we have." CBC News reports: The strategy calls for construction to start on two new large-scale reactors by 2035, for five more to be planned or under development by 2040 and for at least one reactor to be under construction outside Ontario by 2035. It also calls for a Canadian-made microreactor to be finalized by 2035 and deployed to a remote community by the late 2030s. [...] Right now, Canada has four nuclear power plants -- three in Ontario and one in New Brunswick -- which generate about 15 per cent of Canada's electricity. A new proposed facility at the existing nuclear plant in Darlington, Ont., would see the first small modular reactor in the G7, capable of producing up to 300 megawatts per unit. Saskatchewan is also looking at the potential to bring small nuclear reactors online by the mid 2030s. The energy deal between Ottawa and Alberta also committed to collaborating on developing a strategy to build a nuclear power plant. Officials from Natural Resources Canada told reporters in a background briefing that construction of the reactors outlined in the new national strategy could cost more than $100 billion. The strategy does not say how Canada would pay for them, though an official pointed to the Canadian Infrastructure Bank and the Canada Growth Fund as possible funding sources. Hodgson said the strategy would double the 90,000 jobs in Canada's nuclear sector "over the coming decades." The plan also looks to expand sales of Candu reactors to new export markets. It says the government wants to break into at least four new international markets by 2040 and "engage six to 10 new nuclear entrant markets over a 15-year horizon, cementing Canada as their partner of choice." Thirty Candu reactors currently operate around the world, including in South Korea, China, India, Argentina, Pakistan and Romania, and there are plans to build two more. [...] "Reactor exports are not transactional. They establish multi-decade partnerships, creating durable geopolitical and commercial relationships that advance Canada's broader foreign policy interests," the strategy says. "As Canada works to diversify its trading relationships and strengthen ties with middle powers, Candu can be a central instrument of that strategy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Jun 2026 11:00am GMT

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has arrived at Kennedy Space Center ahead of a Falcon Heavy launch targeted for no earlier than August 30. The observatory will survey the sky about 1,000 times faster than Hubble with a field of view at least 100 times wider, helping scientists study dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets. Spaceflight Now reports: NASA's next great observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, arrived at the Kennedy Space Center aboard the agency's massive Pegasus barge late Sunday morning. The spacecraft was nestled inside its protective case, which NASA nicknamed the "Chariot" in keeping with the "Roman" theme. That said, telescope is named not for the ancient empire, but instead for NASA's first Chief of Astronomy, Nancy Grace Roman. "She was a key person in our exploration of space. She understood that in order to better understand the universe, you have to go in space," said Lucas Paganini, the program executive for Roman. "That's why she's called the 'Mother of Hubble' because she made Hubble possible." [...] Roman is designed to operate near a fixed point in space called Lagrange Point 2, about 1.5 million km away from the Earth on the side opposite the Sun. It's designed to operate there for a minimum of five years, but Paganini said with the propellant onboard, it will likely last for 10 years or more. The telescope is+ equipped with a 300 megapixel camera called the Wide Field Instrument, which features 18 detectors. It was developed by BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace). "It's going to allow us to observe at least 100 times wider field of view than what we can do with Hubble. Same resolution, but a wider area, 1000 times faster," Paganini said. "So what takes Roman a year to observe, it would take Hubble thousands of years. So it's definitely much more efficient." The observatory also features a chronograph instrument, developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which will allow Roman to observe the faint light of exoplanets near their stars. Paganini said Roman will also help scientists better understand dark matter and dark energy, the combination of which he calls the "dark universe." "100 years ago, we discovered that the universe was expanding. 25 years ago, we discovered that it was expanding at an accelerated pace and that's what led to a Nobel Prize," Paganini said. "What we don't quite know yet is if that acceleration is changing in ways. We don't know if it's actually dark energy, what is producing it, or is it simply that we don't understand gravity at all. "So eventually, we'll see if the laws of physics that we use these days are the right ones for what we are observing. But at the end is, we're trying to understand a very human question, which is where do we come from and where are wea heading in this universe that is our neighborhood?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Jun 2026 7:00am GMT

The purpose of Starfall is to support the "transport and delivery of goods through space."

23 Jun 2026 5:25am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Dozens of new robot arms have been installed at General Motors' flagship electric vehicle factory in Detroit -- even as 1,300 workers remain out of work following what was supposed to be a temporary layoff. The latest automation push has spurred union pushback over a potentially existential issue for automakers and their workers. General Motors installed approximately 50 robot arms at GM's Factory Zero plant in Detroit, Michigan, according to reporting by Crain's Detroit Business. Made by the Japanese robotics company FANUC, the robots are designed to help attach various components to vehicles during the assembly line process. But leaders at United Auto Workers (UAW), the primary US union for autoworkers, reacted with anger to the new robotic presence, given how GM has not yet called back any of the workers affected by supposedly temporary layoffs in March. More than 1,000 union members are still "laid off indefinitely," James Cotton, president of UAW Local 22, told The Detroit News. He said that the company could bring some of those members back to work instead of installing the 50 robots. The temporary layoffs were preceded by permanent layoffs involving another 1,200 workers at GM's Factory Zero in October 2025. Many automakers, including Stellantis NV and Ford Motor Company, have deployed assembly-line robots, such as Fanuc robot arms, as they push to automate more of their US operations. Hyundai Motor Company plans to deploy Atlas humanoid robots made by Boston Dynamics -- which Hyundai acquired in 2020 -- to start working in the automaker's flagship EV facility in Georgia by 2028. "Technological development has the capability of making work safer for the working class and enabling workers to have a shorter work week without losing pay," said Andrew Bergman, a Local 22 member and union organizer who was among those laid off by GM. "But in the bosses' and billionaires' hands it's used to pad profits and lay off workers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Jun 2026 3:30am GMT

US autoworkers union warns of robot automation as dark factory future looms.

22 Jun 2026 9:52pm GMT

The developer working on Xfwl4, the Wayland compositor for Xfce, has published the new compositor's very first alpha release. Considering it's only been six months or so of work, it's impressive to see the effort reach this state already. The end goal of xfwl4 is to behave as closely as possible to an Xfce desktop running on an X server. Ideally a user could switch between the two without even knowing there's a difference. In reality, of course, it won't be quite that seamless, and there's still more work to be done to get as close as possible to that ideal. This is a first solid cut at it, at the very least. ↫ Brian Tarricone Being the very first alpha release, it won't surprise you there's a few things missing or broken at this point. Still, if you're brave, you can download and build the release and try it out.

22 Jun 2026 6:49pm GMT

Valve officially made the Steam Machine available (sort of but not really) today, and if you were hoping for the president of the Yacht Collectors' Club to have found a loophole through the RAM and storage crisis, I'll be the bearer of bad news: the base Steam Machine model with 512GB of storage and no controller costs $1049 or €1039. It's clear that this price is significantly higher than Valve had originally anticipated, as the company dedicates the first part of its press announcement to this sticker shock. Steam Machine, like our other hardware products, is made up of many components that we source from manufacturers around the world. The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023. That understanding was born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices - primarily, that it tends to get cheaper over time as new technology arrives. Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we're sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we've secured them over the past 6 months. Price wasn't the only thing impacted by all of this: availability was as well. There were periods where we found we couldn't source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this has impacted the number of units we've been able to produce for launch. ↫ Valve press announcement As Valve mentions, availability is also going to be an issue, and thus they've had to settle on a complex reservation and lottery system. Between now and 25 June, you can sign up for a model, after which the entire pool of reservations will be randomised to determine a waitlist order. As machines become available, they will simply go down the list from first to last as determined by that randomisation. In other words, you can't just go out and buy one right away. At this price and for the hardware the Steam Machine contains - an AMD Zen 4 CPU with 6c/12t up to 4.8 Ghz, a custom RDNA3 GPU, and 16GB of DDR5 RAM and 8GB of DDR6 video RAM - you're probably better off sticking with what you already have. Until the "AI" bubble pops and prices come down again, that is. Thanks, "AI" techbros. Everybody despises you.

22 Jun 2026 5:55pm GMT

In macOS, you can apparently create files and directories in the Finder with names that include slashes. If you then go into the terminal and take a look with ls, you'll see that the slashes are actually colons. I don't understand all the nuances, but I know this is a side-effect of the fact that macOS has not one but two path separators: the slash (/) and the colon (:). The two separators are used in different contexts, and the system will translate between them as needed. These two separators reflect the two parent systems of modern macOS: classic Mac OS and the Unix-like NeXTSTEP. When they were joined together, Apple's engineers had to build a file system that was compatible with both the classic Mac's file system (the Mac OS Extended File System, aka HFS+), and with NeXTSTEP's file system (the Unix file system, aka UFS). Among other differences, these systems had different path separators: HFS+ used a colon, while UFS used a slash. ↫ Alex Chan (article from 2021) I had no idea macOS worked this way, but it makes sense considering the platform's dual history. What's interesting is that when Apple moved to APFS almost a decade ago, this duality in path separators remained, most likely for backwards compatibility reasons. In a sense, this is somewhat similar to Windows supporting both backward and forward slashes, with the former being a leftover from DOS, and the latter an addition (to Windows) from the UNIX world. None of that beats Windows when using the Japanese or Korean locale, though. Because Japanese and Korean Windows use different codepages than Windows in the Americas and Western Europe, these versions of Windows render the backslash as the yen sign (¥) and and won (₩) sign respectively. As such, something like the Program Files directory actually renders like C:¥Program Files¥ and C:₩Program Files₩. Similar issues occurred in other Windows locales as well, but the impact of this in Japan and South Korea were so widespread that people just expect it to be that way, even if it's easily fixed today. I can't find if Windows 11 still uses ¥/₩ in Japan/South Korea, since the last references of it I can quickly uncover all point to Windows 10.

21 Jun 2026 9:09pm 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