fidzu : computers

Longtime Slashdot reader MrFreak shares a public radio interview from 2015 discussing artificial intelligence as inference over abstract inputs, along with scaling limits, automation, and governance models, where for-profit engines are constrained by nonprofit oversight: Recorded months before OpenAI was founded, the conversation treats intelligence as math plus incentives rather than something mystical, touching on architectural bottlenecks, why "reasoning" may not simply emerge from brute force, labor displacement, and institutional design for advanced AI systems. Many of the themes align closely with current debates around large language models and AI governance. The recording was revisited following recent remarks by Sergey Brin at Stanford, where he acknowledged that despite Google's early work on Transformers, institutional hesitation and incentive structures limited how aggressively the technology was pursued. The interview provides an earlier, first-principles perspective on how abstraction, scaling, and organizational design might interact once AI systems begin to compound.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

24 Dec 2025 10:00am GMT

theodp writes: We all mix pictures, emojis, and text freely in our communications. So why not in our code? That's the premise of "Fun With Python and Emoji: What Might Adding Pictures to Text Programming Languages Look Like?" (two-image Bluesky explainer; full slides), which takes a look at what mixing emoji with Python and SQL might look like. A GitHub repo includes a Google Colab-ready Python notebook proof of concept that does rudimentary emoji-to-text translation via an IPython input transformer. So, in the Golden Age of AI -- some 60+ years after Kenneth Iverson introduced the chock-full-of-symbols APL -- are valid technical reasons still keeping symbols and pictures out of code, or is their absence more of a programming dogma thing?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

24 Dec 2025 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Across Uzbekistan, a network of about a hundred banks of high-resolution roadside cameras continuously scan vehicles' license plates and their occupants, sometimes thousands a day, looking for potential traffic violations. Cars running red lights, drivers not wearing their seatbelts, and unlicensed vehicles driving at night, to name a few. The driver of one of the most surveilled vehicles in the system was tracked over six months as he traveled between the eastern city of Chirchiq, through the capital Tashkent, and in the nearby settlement of Eshonguzar, often multiple times a week. We know this because the country's sprawling license plate-tracking surveillance system has been left exposed to the internet. Security researcher Anurag Sen, who discovered the security lapse, found the license plate surveillance system exposed online without a password, allowing anyone access to the data within. It's not clear how long the surveillance system has been public, but artifacts from the system show that its database was set up in September 2024, and traffic monitoring began in mid-2025. The exposure offers a rare glimpse into how such national license plate surveillance systems work, the data they collect, and how they can be used to track the whereabouts of any one of the millions of people across an entire country. The lapse also reveals the security and privacy risks associated with the mass monitoring of vehicles and their owners, at a time when the United States is building up its nationwide array of license plate readers, many of which are provided by surveillance giant Flock.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

24 Dec 2025 3:30am GMT

The launch laid "an important foundation for subsequent launches and reliable recovery."

23 Dec 2025 9:22pm GMT

It's purportedly the first of four planned teasers, one per week, showing before Avatar: Fire and Ash.

23 Dec 2025 7:45pm GMT

US drone makers are happy-US drone hobbyists, not so much.

23 Dec 2025 5:29pm GMT

Elementary OS, the user-friendly Linux distribution with its own unique desktop environment and applications, just released elementary OS 8.1. Its minor version number belies just how big of a punch this update packs, so don't be fooled here. We released elementary OS 8 last November with a new Secure Session-powered by Wayland-that ensures applications respect your privacy and consent, a brand new Dock with productive multitasking and window management features, expanded access to cross-platform apps, a revamped updates experience, and new features and settings that empower our diverse community through Inclusive Design. Over the last year we've continued to build upon that work to deliver new features and fix issues based on your feedback, plus we've improved support for a range of devices including HiDPI and Multi-touch devices. ↫ Danielle Foré at the elementary OS blog The biggest change from a lower-level perspective is that elementary OS 8.1 changes the default session to Wayland, leaving the X11 session as a fallback in case of issues. Since the release of elementary OS 8, a ton of progress has been made in improving the Wayland session, fixing remaining issues, and so on, and the team now feels it's ready to serve as the default session. Related to this is a new security feature in the Wayland session where the rest of the screen gets dimmed when a password dialog pops up, and other windows can't steal focus. The switch to Wayland also allowed the team to bring fractional scaling to elementary OS with 8.1. Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu, and this new release brings an updated Hardware Enablement stack, which brings things like Linux 6.14 and Mesa 25. This is also the first release with support for ARM64 devices that can use UEFI, which includes quite a few popular ARM devices. Of course, the ARM64 version comes as a separate ISO. Furthermore, there's a ton of improvements to the dock - which was released with 8 as a brand-new replacement for the venerable Plank - including bringing back some features that were lost in the transition from Plank to the new dock. Animations are smoother, elementary OS' application store has seen a slew of improvements from clearer licensing information, to a controller icon for games that support them, to a label identifying applications that offer in-app purchases, and more. There's a lot more here, like the accessibility improvements we talked about a few months ago, and tons more.

22 Dec 2025 7:09pm GMT

Mount Amiga filesystem images on macOS/Linux using native AmigaOS filesystem handlers via FUSE. amifuse runs actual Amiga filesystem drivers (like PFS3) through m68k CPU emulation, allowing you to read Amiga hard disk images without relying on reverse-engineered implementations. ↫ Amifuse GitHub page Absolutely wild.

22 Dec 2025 2:47pm GMT

Almost two months ago, a tape containing UNIX v4 was found. It was sent off to the Computer History Museum where bitsavers.org would handle the further handling of the tape, and this process has now completed. You can download the contents of the tape from Archive.org - which is sadly down at the moment - while squoze.net has a readme with instructions on how to actually run the copy of UNIX v4 recovered from the tape.

22 Dec 2025 2:21pm GMT

With the update to driver version 590, the NVIDIA driver no longer supports Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs or older. We will replace the nvidia package with nvidia-open, nvidia-dkms with nvidia-open-dkms, and nvidia-lts with nvidia-lts-open. Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment. Intervention required for Pascal/older users: Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support:

• Uninstall the official nvidia, nvidia-lts, or nvidia-dkms packages.
• Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR

Users with Turing (20xx and GTX 1650 series) and newer GPUs will automatically transition to the open kernel modules on upgrade and require no manual intervention.

20 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

Peter Jung via arch-announce wrote:

With the update to driver version 590, the NVIDIA driver no longer supports Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs or older. We will replace the 'nvidia' package with 'nvidia-open', 'nvidia-dkms' with 'nvidia-open-dkms', and 'nvidia-lts' with 'nvidia-lts-open'. Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment. Intervention required for Pascal/older users: Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support:

• Uninstall the official 'nvidia', 'nvidia-lts', or 'nvidia-dkms' packages.
• Install 'nvidia-580xx-dkms' from the AUR

Users with Turing (20xx and GTX 1650 series) and newer GPUs will automatically transition to the open kernel modules on upgrade and require no manual intervention.

https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-590-d … l-modules/

20 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

The following packages may require manual intervention due to the upgrade from 9.0 to 10.0:

• aspnet-runtime
• aspnet-targeting-pack
• dotnet-runtime
• dotnet-sdk
• dotnet-source-built-artifacts
• dotnet-targeting-pack

pacman may display the following error failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies) for the affected packages. If you are affected by this and require the 9.0 packages, the following commands will update e.g. aspnet-runtime to aspnet-runtime-9.0: pacman -Syu aspnet-runtime-9.0 pacman -Rs aspnet-runtime

11 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT