fidzu : computers

Ancient Slashdot reader williamyf writes: If you thought the gender pay gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again: A recent study from the University of Limerick found that, in a VR office setting, AI agents -- not even humanoid robots -- that presented themselves as "male" were paid more per task and perceived as more "human-like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail, and harness). The pay gap was approximately 10%. The study was conducted with 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for thought.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Oct 2026 3:00pm GMT

Full-stack safety solution for physical AI is being used by robotics companies.

08 Oct 2026 11:15am GMT

Sen. Blanche Lincoln wrote law that let US ban sports-event contracts. She lobbies for the other side now.

08 Oct 2026 11:00am GMT

Google has released Chrome 155 with support for decoding JPEG XL images, a format that offers 30-50% better compression than JPEG along with lossless compression, JPEG transcoding, HDR, animation, and progressive decoding. From a blog post: We expect that JPEG XL is most helpful for high-fidelity or lossless compression, especially of photographic images or in cases in which fine-grained progressive decoding is preferred. In this post, we share why we brought JPEG XL to Chrome, how we used Rust to ensure memory safety first, the extensive performance work that makes it fast, and what the journey tells us about developer feedback and the web standards ecosystem. [...] With JPEG XL officially landing in Chrome, the web becomes faster, richer, and safer. We encourage developers, content creators, and platform owners to start using .jxl images and animations in their pipelines. Try it out, file bugs, and help us continue building a faster and safer web for everyone.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Oct 2026 11:00am GMT

OpenAI says an unreleased internal model has produced 372 results that either resolve or make substantial progress on open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science. The company says almost all were generated by a single AI agent from a single prompt. "This would be a striking difference from OpenAI's earlier blockbuster solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which was produced through the collective efforts of a 10,000-strong agentic swarm that cost millions of dollars in computing power," reports Scientific American. From the report: OpenAI revealed the results in a GitHub repository at 6 P.M. EDT. The deluge will take mathematicians months to parse through and understand -- including to determine whether the proofs contain novel and important ideas or are mostly mash-ups of existing techniques. But many of the results have already been verified in Lean -- a programming language that validates a proof's logic -- and are therefore all but certain to be correct. Among the results claimed are a solution to the four-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, improvements on some of the world's most important computer algorithms and actual progress toward math's scariest problem, the Riemann hypothesis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Oct 2026 7:00am GMT

Get ready for more AI in your Windows and more AI on the desktop.

08 Oct 2026 12:00am 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

Whenever Microsoft starts messing with something like the search function in Windows, a lot of people are going to be holding their breath and expecting the worst. Well, get ready, because they're redesigning the whole thing. In July, we shared how we are improving the Windows Search Box with less clutter and more control. We introduced a calmer home screen, removed promotional content from web results, and gave you more choice over whether web and Microsoft Store suggestions appear. Today, we're carrying those investments forward with a new Windows Search experience built on WinUI 3. This modern foundation makes Windows Search faster and more efficient with resources, while delivering an even more streamlined and focused design. ↫ Anshul Rawat at the Windows Blogs The company claims this new version of search is faster and uses less memory, which, if true, are very welcome improvements. It's also just a single column of results now, and they're adding inline previews for things like weather and files on your machine, as well as for answers to all kinds of queries you might normally go to an online search engine for. You can now also use search to perform all kinds of tasks in Windows, like turning on dark mode, managing windows, and so on. All of this can be done using relatively natural language, and Microsoft claims they've implemented better detection of typing errors and synonyms, which is quite welcome. Weirdly enough, though, it's not yet integrated into the Start menu, since it's a preview just for testers, but that's something they're working on for future releases. Judging by the videos and screenshots, I'm actually kind of positively surprised. This looks quite decent and nice, and if the promised performance improvements actually materialise, this may actually be an upgrade to search worth looking forward to. Of course, this is still Microsoft, so it's just as likely they'll screw up somewhere between now and when this goes live to regular users. Still, I think it looks decent.

07 Oct 2026 11:47pm GMT

Chimera Linux is a relatively new Linux distribution, and quite a unique on at that, as it combines the core tools from FreeBSD, the LLVM toolchain, and the Musl C library instead of the usual suspects. Despite being relatively new, it still has some serious pedigree as the project was started by Nina "q66", who was part of the Void Linux team. At Void, she maintained the various PowerPC/POWER ports of the distribution until Chimera became her sole focus. Nina published a detailed blog post today about how the Chimera team builds the tooling for their distribution, as well as the goals it's trying to achieve. It covers everything from a bit of personal history, the rationale behind the project, who it's catering to, how its tooling works and why, and the infrastructure they've built that underpins it all. There's a lot to process here, with one of the most interesting little details - at least to me, as someone who has two POWER9 machines - the fact that Chimera started with the ppc64le target only. The article is an incredibly interesting look at not just the how of Chimera, but also the why, which makes for some really fascinating reading.

07 Oct 2026 11:36pm GMT

KDE contributor and developer Niccolò Venerandi has published an article about COSMIC, System76's brand new desktop environment. It's been almost a year since I've last tried COSMIC; though development since then has mostly been centered around stability (going from late alpha to stable releases now!) there have been a fair bit of user-facing changes too which I adore. I thus have to ask myself: should I switch to COSMIC? The answer obviously is no, but that's just because I got addicted to KDE Plasma, so let's try to be more objective here. ↫ Niccolò Venerandi Honestly, this is one of the best "reviews" I've seen of COSMIC, and paints System76's hard work in a really positive light. Venerandi spots countless really nice touches he'd love to see adopted by KDE, while also hitting on what I agree is COSMIC's biggest shortcoming at this point: there's basically no ecosystem around it. COSMIC uses its own Rust-based toolkit instead of GTK or Qt, but of course, there's very few other applications that actually use said toolkit. The end result is that if you run COSMIC, you're going to have to supplement it with countless GTK and Qt application, none of which will inherit all the nice features, touches, and graphics from COSMIC. This isn't really a complaint about COSMIC itself or the work its developers are putting into it, but more a fact of life for such a new desktop environment using an otherwise unpopular (as of right now) toolkit. This may very well change in the future, but for now, if you choose to run COSMIC, you're going to have to accept a very inconsistent and messy desktop. This won't matter to everyone, but it sure does matter to me, and it's the one reason why at this point I have zero interest in running COSMIC. I really hope this changes in the future - competition is good - but it's going to be a long road.

06 Oct 2026 10:53pm 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