fidzu : computers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: For the first time, scientists say they have used viruses designed by artificial intelligence to treat a human patient. Researchers announced on Tuesday that they had administered the virus, known as a phage, to a patient suffering from a deadly bacterial infection. Phages attack bacteria, and the hope is that this one will kill the microbes causing the infection. Radical Numerics, the start-up that created the viruses, posted a technical report about them on its website. But the company declined to provide information about the patient or the doctors running the trial, citing confidentiality requirements. [...] In 2025, researchers at the Arc Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., created an A.I. model called Evo 2, which they trained on millions of DNA sequences, including phage genes. They prompted Evo 2 to make new genomes similar to those in a group of phage species. The A.I. generated 700,000 virus genomes. The team synthesized DNA molecules from 285 genomes and inserted them into bacteria. The researchers found that 16 of the genomes gave rise to viable viruses. Three members of the Evo team, including Dr. Nguyen, left to found Radical Numerics. In June, the company unveiled a new A.I. model, called Omnii, based on some of the same principles as Evo. Omnii can be trained not just on DNA but also on other aspects of biology, such as the structures of proteins and molecules that keep genes turned on or off. The company is now using Omnii to tackle a range of challenges, including designing cancer vaccines and recognizing the risk that a virus may cause a pandemic. Among these efforts is the first trial of A.I.-designed phage therapy. The researchers created variations of a phage called T7. The virus, which only infects E. coli, looks like a microscopic Apollo lunar lander: a ball-shaped protein shell that holds its DNA atop six leglike protrusions. To infect a bacterium, T7 lands on its surface, using its legs to anchor in place. It then injects its DNA into the cell. Omnii generated new viral genes altering the shapes of T7's legs, according to Dr. Nguyen and his colleagues. While some of the new legs were significantly different from natural ones, Omnii's phages could still infect bacteria. Once the researchers were confident their strategy had worked, they partnered with doctors treating a patient with a stubborn E. coli infection. The bacteria had resisted not just antibiotics but all the available phages. The researchers said they had trained Omnii with information about the resistant strain and told it to design T7 phages with legs that could grab onto the bacteria. Once the A.I. generated genomes for new viruses, the scientists said they produced the corresponding DNA molecules and inserted them in bacteria. The bacteria became infected and produced T7 phages that could successfully infect, and kill, other microbes. After running tests to make sure the phages were safe, Radical Numerics presented them to the doctors. The F.D.A. authorized a trial. While the trial was authorized by the FDA, it's worth noting that the research has not yet been peer-reviewed in a scientific journal and there's no guarantee the AI-designed phages will work. However, if it does prove successful, it could help speed phage therapy by cutting down the time it takes to create a new virus tailored to each patient's infection. "We think we can get it done in days," said Dr. Eric Nguyen, the chief executive officer of Radical Numerics.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

22 Oct 2026 3:30am GMT

eBay plans to cut about 1,000 jobs, or 9% of its workforce, as CEO Jamie Iannone moves to redirect resources toward the company's fastest-growing businesses. Reuters reports: The company had 12,300 employees at the end of last year. It also let go about 6% of its workforce, or 800 employees, in February as part of efforts to streamline operations. EBay has set itself apart from rivals by pushing into authenticated luxury goods, collectibles and refurbished products, which draw enthusiasts willing to pay more for valuable items. That has helped its shares rise nearly 40% this year, outperforming the benchmark S&P 500's around 12% gain. "Our strategy is working," Iannone said in the memo, adding that "continuing to capture the significant opportunity ahead requires us to make thoughtful choices about where we focus and invest." He said affected staff would be informed in the coming days.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 Oct 2026 11:00pm GMT

Ex-FCC chairs say Brendan Carr aims to scare broadcasters into self-censorship.

21 Oct 2026 10:17pm GMT

Time-based a la carte charges come on top of the purchase price for the games themselves.

21 Oct 2026 10:06pm GMT

AMD has published Linux kernel patches for an official Ryzen overclocking driver that allows users to adjust CPU power and current limits through a firmware interface exposed via sysfs. Phoronix reports: AMD engineer Shyam Sundar S K posted the patches for the AMD Overclocking "AOD" WMI driver as an interface to the platform firmware for managing overclocking and power/current limits of modern Ryzen CPUs. The driver in its initial form allows setting via sysfs a number of CPU tunables including the Package Power Tracking (PPT), Thermal Design Current (TDC), and Electrical Design Current (EDC) limits along with reading their supported range. SMT toggling can also be done via the interface as an alternative to the likes of Linux's "nosmt" option in disabling SMT at the platform level rather than kernel disabling. The current memory clocks can also be read via this AOD driver. The power tunables aren't applied in real-time but go into effect at next reboot. The firmware does support many more commands compared to the few initially wired up and hopefully in time more of these controls will be enabled with this driver.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 Oct 2026 10:00pm GMT

Survey of 2,018 IT heads at big firms points to a lack of leverage.

21 Oct 2026 9:48pm GMT

Early 2025, I wrote about how I think macOS' UNIX certification was basically a lie. It required so many convoluted and cumbersome changes to macOS that literally nobody applies to their system that it the certification had kind of become a farce. At the end of the article I wondered for how much longer Apple would be playing this little charade to hammer macOS through a meaningless UNIX-shaped hole, and it turns out the answer was "about 18 months". When you go to the Open Group's website and the list of certified UNIX operating systems, macOS is no longer listed. For the past few weeks, it was still listed if you drilled down specifically to the UNIX 03 certification, but that, too, has now been removed. Assuming macOS 27 doesn't return in the near future with a brand new certification, we can safely say that Apple got tired of paying a few employees to get its desktop operating system certified. With one more operating system gone from the list, there's now only one UNIX operating systems left: AIX. While the registry also lists HP-UX, z/OS, and UnixWare/OpenServer, those either only conform to really old UNIX certifications (from the '90s), or simply aren't developed anymore (HP sunset HP-UX at the end of last year). Only one operating system version conforms to the latest version of the certification, UNIX 07, and that's AIX 7.2 TL5 "and later", which possibly includes AIX 7.3, the most recent version of AIX. Not that any of this really matters.

20 Oct 2026 9:41pm GMT

Hot on the heels of Wine being ported to OpenBSD, we now have the release of OpenBSD 8.0. It adds hibernate support for arm64, switches the sparc64 toolchain to LLVM, and updates the DRM graphics drivers to Linux 6.18.53, which also adds support for Intel Arc A-Series (DG2/Alchemist) graphics cards. There's a whole bunch of improvements, fixes, and changes for RISC-V and ARM in general, of course, as well as to the various Wi-Fi drivers. On top of that, it also comes with new versions of OpenSSH and LibreSSL, as well as a massive list of other improvements and fixes. If you've never installed OpenBSD before, be sure to read this detailed guide to know what to do once everything's installed, while listening to the official release song, of course.

20 Oct 2026 5:50pm GMT

Apparently, macOS 27 comes with a small mystery people are trying to figure out. Recently, while troubleshooting a PATH issue, I noticed an entry for /pkg/env/global/bin. At first, I worried that something had gone horribly wrong. Turns out, this is part of macOS 27.0… though no one is sure what it's for yet. In a post about how macOS's boot volume structure has been updated, Howard Oakley explains that the pkg directory was added to the Data volume in macOS 26.4, but not added to the root of the Signed System Volume until 27.0. He also notes that this is sort of a big deal. The weird thing is, as far as I can tell, no one seems to know what this new directory is for! It's odd that Apple would update their filesystem structure, add it to everyone's PATH, and there not be some explicable reason. ↫ Gavin Anderegg I guess we'll find out eventually, but this does highlight something that I find extremely unsettling about this. With proprietary software like macOS, you literally are at the mercy of whatever Apple decides to do to "your" operating system. You install an update, and aside from all the documented changes, there's going to be changes you simply have no idea what they're for, or why they're there. Don't get me wrong, there's obviously not something nefarious going on in this particular case, but it still feels wild to me that people just willingly accept this. In the open source world, stuff like this simply does not happen. You're not going to install a bunch of Fedora updates one day and find a mysterious, undocumented folder in your PATH. Such a change will be documented, but even in the unlikely event it's not, you can just go through the commit history and find out exactly why the new folder is there, and what its intended purpose is or is going to be. Considering the state of the world and the people corporations like Apple really answer to, I would not be comfortable with letting them dictate even something as simple as my PATH.

19 Oct 2026 10:26pm GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT