fidzu : computers

"If tired or wasted passengers fall asleep in a traditional taxi or rideshare, the driver can shout or shake them awake," reports Bloomberg. "Not so in a robotaxi..." Ditto Kasendar remembers soft music drifting from the robotaxi's speakers as he rode home late at night from a friend's birthday party in 2025. The next moment, Los Angeles firefighters were opening the door and asking if he was OK. His six-minute trip had ended nearly an hour before. A remote Waymo assistant, dialling in through the car's speakers, repeatedly tried to rouse him and finally called 911 when he wouldn't stir... Kasendar's robocab nap was, unfortunately, not an isolated incident. As companies like Alphabet and Tesla bring self-driving taxis to more cities, the messier aspects of serving unpredictable humans are becoming harder to ignore. Passengers are falling asleep, spilling drinks, dropping food, vomiting, experiencing medical emergencies and, in at least two instances, giving birth in the cars. They stumble out of the vehicles and forget to close the doors, forcing the operators to pay nearby gig workers to do it. These seemingly minor nuisances are becoming a drain on municipal resources and complicating the roll-out of robotaxi service. So many robotaxi customers have nodded off in the midst of a ride that Austin police and firefighters even have a name for the incidents: "sleepers". The Texas capital recorded 99 such calls in Waymo's first nine months of service there, said Roger Patterson, a commander with Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services... Remote assistants monitoring the cars try talking through the speakers and checking on passengers with interior cameras. But if they get no response, company protocols often require them to call 911. And first responders have to assume the worst. Austin dispatchers treat an incident as a potential heart attack if the remote assistant can't tell whether the passenger is breathing, Patterson said. In the end, only about 3% of such calls require transporting the passenger to a hospital, he said. But the incidents tie up personnel who might be needed elsewhere.

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19 Jul 2026 11:09pm GMT

"On the first attempt, reaching orbit, I never thought it was possible."

19 Jul 2026 10:11pm GMT

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times: A federal judge has halted California's groundbreaking "Truth in Recycling" law, which aims to reduce consumer confusion about which packaging can be recycled. [Originally planned to take effect October 4th], California's recyclable packaging law prohibits manufacturers from using a "chasing arrows" recycling symbol on products or materials unless they are actually being recycled in a meaningful way, which the law quantifies... A coalition of farming, forestry, restaurant and packaging organizations sued the state in March, arguing the law violates their right to free speech. They argued that Senate Bill 343 operates as "government-imposed censorship." Judge William Hayes agreed that their challenge has merit, and on Tuesday ordered California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, the defendant in the case, to pause enforcement of the law "until further order of the Court...." Advocates of reducing plastic use disagreed. "The court got it wrong, and I'm confident that the state will ultimately prevail," said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste. "S.B. 343 does not violate the 1st Amendment; it requires companies to tell the truth when they make recyclability claims. Suggesting that the 1st Amendment protects misleading environmental marketing is inconsistent with the basic principles of consumer protection that states like California have implemented for decades." In January, CalRecycle, the state's waste agency, reported that less than 10% of most single-use plastic materials in the state were being recycled. Even yogurt containers and margarine tubs - made of ubiquitous polypropylene, or No. 5 plastic - are being recycled at a rate of only 2% in the state, the report said. Only 5% of colored shampoo and detergent bottles, made from polyethylene, or No. 1 plastic, are getting recycled... Plastic materials that can't be recycled are typically sent to landfills or sometimes illegally shipped overseas, where they are burned or end up in landfills, rivers and waterways. The bill's author told the Los Angeles Times "All you have to do is look at the numbers. These products are not getting recycled, despite what the industry is claiming. They are just confusing consumers, clogging the waste stream, polluting the environment, leading to higher and higher prices for local governments and ratepayers." He argues the symbols shouldn't be used to "confuse people who see the symbols [on products] and assume they can be recycled." The article also quotes Judith Enck, former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator and president of the nonprofit Beyond Plastics. "Given the long history of the plastics industry deceiving the public about plastics recycling, this is an especially bad outcome. It is a reminder that the plastics industry has enough money to fight even the most modest policy designed to protect people and the planet."

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19 Jul 2026 9:04pm GMT

"Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have been given a glimpse of the mechanisms that supermassive black holes use to feed themselves," reports Space.com: The powerful cosmic titans get really puzzling when astronomers using the JWST spot them before the universe was even 1 billion years old. That's because the mechanisms by which black holes devour matter to grow and then merge to create even more massive black holes should take at least 1 billion years to achieve supermassive status. This is even more confusing because theories also say the most ravenously feeding black holes (and thus the fastest growing) should also push the matter they use for this growth away, in effect putting themselves on a diet. So, with all this in mind, how did supermassive black holes grow so rapidly in the early universe? One explanation suggests supermassive black holes push away gas, starving themselves as predicted, but also that this matter eventually cools and falls back to the black hole. That would allow for another period of feeding and thus growth. This explanation further suggests that as this gas cools down, it forms "streamers," or filaments, of gas just a few hundred light-years wide but which stretch thousands of light-years long. These would fall back to the center of the galaxy and form a swirling disk around its incumbent black hole, once again feeding it and triggering a new period of growth. This would then restart the jets from the black hole, which would again cut off the cosmic titan's food supply, allowing the whole process to begin once more. The process would in essence be a self-regulating cycle of feasting followed by fasting. However, the connection between these filaments and supermassive black holes has been elusive, meaning this mechanism has resisted confirmation. To solve the mystery of feasting black holes, the JWST turned its attention to a relatively close AGN situated at the heart of the central galaxy of the Centaurus Cluster, NGC 4696, located just 145 million light-years from Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope previously studied this galaxy, uncovering a strange, hook-shaped swirl of gas near the central supermassive black hole of NGC 4696. The JWST followed up this discovery by producing a detailed map of gas flowing at the heart of the galaxy. This revealed the hook-shaped feature is around 800 light-years wide and is composed of gas moving at incredible speeds of around 1.3 million miles per hour (600 kilometers per second). More excitingly, the swirl of gas appears to be connected to a vast filament of material falling in toward the central supermassive black hole. The team tested the JWST observations against a computer simulation, finding gas in the infalling filament scenario would indeed take a shape similar to that seen in NGC 4696. "JWST is now showing us the final link of this closed loop," team member Helen Russell of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. said in the statement. "The vast filamentary network of gas flows ultimately funnels gas down to a disk that fuels the black hole." The team's research was published on Wednesday (July 16) in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "We are finally seeing this self-sustaining cycle in action," team leader Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of the Université de Montréal said in a statement.

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19 Jul 2026 7:05pm GMT

Monitoring is expensive and labor intensive. But it helps public health officials stop outbreaks.

19 Jul 2026 11:19am GMT

The government is piloting a program that uses AI for insurance-coverage decisions.

18 Jul 2026 11:18am GMT

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel and git, is employed by the Linux Foundation. This Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to, as the name obviously implies, the promotion of Linux. The primary use of the funds it collects is to "help fund the infrastructure and fellows, including Linus Torvalds, who help develop the Linux kernel". The list of megacorporations donating most of the Foundation's funds is long. The Linux Foundation has twelve platinum members, which donate $500000 per year, followed by twelve gold members, who donate $100000 per year. Below these two primary tiers lie the silver peasants, who each donate $5000-$25000 per year, based on number of employees. Looking at the list of twelve platinum members, I noticed something interesting. Of the twelve platinum companies, six are "AI" companies or companies with massive investments in "AI": Google, Huawei, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM/Red Hat. Then there's Samsung Electronics, which is raking in stupendous amounts of money thanks to the "AI" bubble. Additionally, one of the gold members is Anthropic, another major "AI" company and makers of "Claude", the sloppiest of slopcoding tools. Many of these companies are unimaginably deep in the red when it comes to "AI", with very little indication they're ever going to be able to recover any of it. The situation is particularly bad for Oracle and IBM/Red Hat. Oracle's debt has been downgraded to one notch above junk status because of its "AI" spending, while IBM's shares experienced the largest crash in its 115 year history only a few days ago. By the way, in the first half of 2025, "AI-related capital expenditures contributed 1.1% to GDP growth, outpacing the U.S. consumer as an engine of expansion". Fun fact: since most of The Netherlands is effectively a swamp, most of the country's buildings are built on massive wooden or concrete poles (piles) hammered deep into the ground until they hit something more stable than mushy clay and wet sand. Otherwise, buildings in the country would simply sink into the ground. Every Dutch person who ever lived near a construction site has heard the rhythmic kathunk, kathunk, kathunk, all day long, as the massive piledriver machines spread their gospel. I guess something reminded me of this just now. Anyway, a large chunk of the funding the Linux Foundation, Linus Torvald's employer, receives is coming from increasingly desperate companies frantically trying to convince a populace deeply skeptical and often downright hostile towards "AI" to spend money on "AI" before the bubble bursts. For some reason, I thought this was interesting.

18 Jul 2026 5:27am GMT

As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the Korean war than to 9/11 which is itself an event that happened a quarter of a century ago. (Sorry…) The processor was extremely successful, being used in many 8 bit microcomputers, including early personal computers, home & hobby computers, as well as many embedded, industrial applications. Together with the 8080 & 8085 that it is binary compatible with, it contributed to creating a de facto hardware standard for 8 bit micros, allowing a de facto software standard of CP/M, and Microsoft BASIC. ↫ David Oberhollenzer The only device I actively remember using with a (sort-of) Z80 in it was the Game Boy, but most likely I've used a ton more over the decades that I don't remember or simply was never ware of. I did a little surface-level digging, and there we are: the TI-83, one of Texas Instruments' stupidly popular and eternally overpriced graphing calculators, release in 1996. I was part of the first wave of high school children in The Netherlands for whom a TI-83 graphing calculator was mandatory. During my high school years I used that thing extensively, for far more than just math class - I programmed applications for and on it, and played so many games on it. A friend and I even bought a communication cable so we could play competitive 1v1 Bomberman in class. Good times, made possible by the Z80.

17 Jul 2026 10:33pm GMT

Rumours had been circulating for a while, but now it's official: OnePlus is effectively retreating from the European and US markets. Today, our hearts are undoubtedly heavy and mixed with emotion. As part of the proactive global strategy adjustment, OnePlus has decided to conclude new product rollouts in Europe and North America. ↫ OnePlus statement Once OnePlus' co-founder Carl Pei left the company (and founded Nothing), things have been feeling shaky for OnePlus, once the undisputed darling of the more technical part of the Android crowd. Their phones got more expensive, their minimalist, close-to-stock Android version got progressively worse, and they started lagging in updates, too. My OnePlus Watch 3, for instance, which was promised to get WearOS 6 at some point, but never got it - meanwhile, WearOS 7 has already been released. No, this news is not particularly surprising. Luckily, the company claims it will honour its warranty and update support obligations for existing products in Europe and the US, which is nice, but also something they're legally obligated to do (at least in the EU). A snag here is that the only update path the company offers is to ColorOS, from its parent company Oppo, which many more traditional Android and OnePlus users certainly won't be happy about. Something is better than nothing, I suppose, and I'll reserve judgment until I see what ColorOS 17 will be like on my other OnePlus product, a OnePlus Pad 3. It's just one more victim of western markets (illegally) consolidating on Apple and Samsung (while a few Pixels rummaging in the margins).

16 Jul 2026 10:31pm 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