fidzu : computers

It's the first time a major U.S. newsroom has gone on strike partly to demand protections from AI-related layoffs, according to a report from Nieman Lab. They noted that one of the picketer's signs read "Thoughts not bots," : On Wednesday, roughly 150 members of the Propublica Guild, one of the largest nonprofit newsroom unions in the country, went on a 24-hour strike. About two dozen Guild members picketed ProPublica's headquarters in New York City's Hudson Square neighborhood during working hours, as simultaneous picket lines formed in front of the publication's offices in Chicago and Washington D.C... The Guild has been negotiating its first collective bargaining agreement for two and a half years, and the one-day action was intended to put new pressure on ProPublica's management to agree to several contract proposals. The union is seeking "just cause" protections for terminations, wage increases to keep up with the rising cost of living, and contract language that would prohibit layoffs resulting from AI adoption... Beyond the strike, the ProPublica Guild has also taken its dispute over newsroom AI adoption to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). On Monday, the Guild filed an unfair-labor-practice charge, citing a "unilateral implementation of AI policy." The filing claims that ProPublica published AI editorial guidelines on its website last month, without first bargaining with union members over its tenets and language... A petition launched Wednesday calling for ProPublica to agree to the Guild's contract terms had received roughly 4,200 signatures by Thursday morning... Susan DeCarava, the president of The NewsGuild of New York, joined strikers in front of the ProPublica offices yesterday. During a spare moment on the picket line, she told me that while this strike may be setting precedent for her union, it likely won't be the last over AI adoption in newsrooms. "We're going to see more and more concentrated conflicts between media bosses and journalists and media workers over who has a say and how AI is used in their workplaces," she said. For one, The New York Times Guild is currently in contract negotiations after its last agreement expired in February. Already, AI language has taken center stage in the Guild's initial bargaining sessions, including over a proposal that would see Guild members receive a share of the revenue earned when their work is licensed for AI training. "Management has offered expanded severance for AI-related layoffs as a counter proposal..." according to the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 Apr 2026 6:34pm GMT

In 2024 the Verge's consumer tech reporter paid $173 for a WD Black SN850X 2TB SSD. But "now that same SSD costs $649..." "Like with RAM, demand from the AI industry is swallowing up supply from a limited number of manufacturers, leading to a drastic reduction in the inventory that's available to consumers" - and skyrocketing prices: The price on my WD Black drive nearly quadrupled since November 2025, and consumer SSDs across the board are seeing similar increases, much like with RAM. The 4TB version of the popular Samsung 990 Pro SSD previously cost $320, but will now run you nearly $1,000. External SanDisk SSDs saw a 200 percent price hike at the Apple Store in March.... According to price trends from PC Part Picker, NVMe SSD prices began ticking upward in December 2025, with prices on 256GB to 4TB SSDs now double or triple what they were just a few months ago, and continuing to climb.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 Apr 2026 5:34pm GMT

Critics say social media is engineered to be as addictive as tobacco or gambling, writes the Washington Post - while adding that "the science has been moving in parallel with the court's recognition." A growing body of research links heavy social media use not only to declines in mental health but to measurable cognitive effects - on attention, memory and focus - that in some studies resemble accelerated aging. Science also suggests we have more control than we realize when it comes to reversing this damage, and the solution is surprisingly simple: Take a break... "Digital detoxes" can sound like a fad. But in one of the largest studies to date, published in PNAS Nexus and involving more than 467 participants with an average age of 32, even a short time away produced striking results - effectively erasing a decade of age-related cognitive decline. For 14 days, participants used a commercially available app, Freedom, to block internet access on their phones. They were still allowed calls and text messages, essentially turning a smartphone into a dumb phone. Their time online decreased from 314 minutes to 161 minutes, and by the end of the period the participants had improvements in sustained attention, mental health as well as self-reported well-being. The improvement in sustained attention was about the same magnitude as 10 years of age-related decline, the researchers noted, and the effect of the intervention on depression symptoms was larger than antidepressants and similar to that of cognitive behavioral therapy. But two things were even more mind-blowing... Even those people who cheated and broke the rules after a few days seemed to have positive effects from the break; and in follow-up reports after the two weeks, many people reported the positive effects lingered. "So you don't have to necessarily restrict yourself forever. Even taking a partial digital detox, even for a few days, seems to work," Kushlev said. The article also notes a November study at Harvard published in JAMA Network Open where nearly 400 people 'found that even a short break can make a measurable difference: After just one week of reduced smartphone use, participants reported drops in anxiety (16.1 percent), depression (24.8 percent) and insomnia (14.5 percent)..." "Other experiments point in the same direction - whether decreasing social media use by an hour a day for one week or stepping away from just Facebook and Instagram."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 Apr 2026 4:34pm GMT

Systems from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI struggle with the Premier League.

11 Apr 2026 11:15am GMT

"The work ahead is greater than the work behind us."

11 Apr 2026 3:24am GMT

"I can't imagine a better crew that just completed a perfect mission right now."

11 Apr 2026 1:21am GMT

My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.

11 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

It shouldn't be a surprise that companies - and for our field, technology companies specifically - working with the defense industry tends to raise eyebrows. With things like the genocide in Gaza, the threats of genocide and war crimes against Iran, the mass murder in Lebanon, it's no surprise that western companies working with the militaries and defense companies involved in these atrocities are receiving some serious backlash. With that in mind, it seems Red Hat, owned by IBM, is desperately trying to scrub a certain white paper from the internet. Titled "Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge", the 2024 white paper details how Red Hat's products and technologies can make it easier and faster to, well, kill people. Links to the white paper throw up 404s now, but it can still easily be found on the Wayback Machine and other places. It's got some disturbingly euphemistic content. The find, fix, track, target, engage, assess (F2T2EA) process requires ubiquitous access to data at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. Red Hat Device Edge embeds captured, analyzed, and federated data sets in a manner that positions the warfighter to use artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to increase the accuracy of airborne targeting and mission-guidance systems. Delivering near real-time data from sensor pods directly to airmen, accelerating the sensor-to-shooter cycle. Sharing near real-time sensor fusion data with joint and multinational forces to increase awareness, survivability, and lethality. The new software enabled the Stalker to deploy updated, AI-based automated target recognition capabilities. If the target is an adversary tracked vehicle on the far side of a ridge, a UAS carrying a server running Red Hat Device Edge could transmit video and metadata directly to shooters. ↫ Red Hat white paper titled "Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge" I don't think there's something inherently wrong with working together with your nation's military or defense companies, but that all hinges on what, exactly, said military is doing and how those defense companies' products are being used. The focus should be on national defense, aid during disasters, and responding to the legitimate requests of sovereign, democratic nations to come to their defense (e.g. helping Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion). There's always going to be difficult grey areas, but any military or defense company supporting the genocide in Gaza or supplying weapons to kill women and children in Iran is unequivocally wrong, morally reprehensible, and downright illegal on both an international and national level. It clearly seems someone at Red Hat feels the same way, as the company has been trying really hard to memory-hole this particular white paper, and considering its word choices and the state of the world today, it's easy to see why. Of course, the internet never forgets, and I certainly don't intend to let something like this slide. We all know companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Google have no qualms about making a few bucks from a genocide or two, but it always feels a bit more traitorous to the cause when it's an open source company doing the profiting. It feels like Red Hat is trying to have its cake and eat it too, by, as an IBM subsidiary, trying to both profit from the vast sums of money sloshing around in the US military industrial complex as well as maintain its image as a scrappy open source business success story shitting bunnies and rainbows. It's a long time ago now that Red Hat felt like a genuine part of the open source community. Most of us - both outside and inside of Red Hat, I'm sure - have been well aware for a long time now that those days are well behind us, and I guess Red Hat doesn't like seeing its kill cycle this compressed.

10 Apr 2026 8:04pm GMT

If you want to run FreeBSD on a laptop, you're often yanked back to the Linux world of 20 years ago, with many components and parts not working and other issues such as sleep and wake problems. FreeBSD has been hard at work improving the experience of using FreeBSD on laptops, and now this has resulted in a list of laptops which work effortlessly with the venerable operating system. There's only about 10 laptops on the list so far, but they do span a range of affordability and age, with some of them surely being quite decent bargains on eBay or whatever other used stuff marketplace you use. If you want to use FreeBSD on a laptop, but don't want to face any surprises or do any difficult setup, get one of the laptops on this list - a list which will surely expand over time.

10 Apr 2026 2:41pm GMT

It may sound unbelievable to some, but not everyone has a datacenter beast with 128GB of VRAM shoved in their desktop PCs. Around the world people tell the tale of a particularly fierce group of Linux gamers: Those who dare attempt to play games with only 8 gigabytes of VRAM, or even less. Truly, it takes exceedingly strong resilience and determination to face the stutters and slowdowns bound to occur when the system starts running low on free VRAM. Carnage erupts inside the kernel driver as every application fights for as much GPU memory as it can hold on to. Any game caught up in this battle for resources will surely not leave unscathed. That is, until now. Because I fixed it. ↫ Natalie Vock The solution is to use cgroups to control the kernel's memory eviction policies, so that applications that should get priority when it comes to VRAM allocation - like games - don't get their memory evicted from VRAM to system RAM. Basically, evict everything else from VRAM before touching the protected application. This way, something like a game will have much more consistent access to more VRAM, thereby reducing needless memory evictions that harm performance. It's a clever solution that makes use of a ton of existing Linux tools, meaning it's also much easier to upstream, implement, and support. Excellent work.

10 Apr 2026 1:26pm GMT

I have discovered and shared ~800 open source Rust CLI projects over the past 3 years.

03 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

All I wanted was to learn how to play guitar, but ended up building a DIY kit for it.

28 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT