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"Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages," reports the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the state hasn't implemented rotating power outages since 2020. Because "Over the last few years, California has quietly but dramatically increased the resiliency of its electrical grid through a significant expansion in battery energy storage." These batteries hold onto solar energy captured during the day, so it can be sent to the grid as demand peaks in the evening and morning, when most people are at home running air conditioners and other appliances. During the August heat wave of 2020, the California Independent System Operator, which manages the flow of electricity for most of the state, declared a Stage 3 Emergency and hundreds of thousands of households lost power in rolling outages. At the time, the system had less than 100 megawatts of battery storage available, according to system spokesperson Jayme Ackemann. Today, it has more than 17,000 megawatts available.... According to Ackemann, the system seeks to add 20,000 to 25,000 megawatts of battery storage capacity by 2045 - the same year it has set a goal of achieving carbon neutrality. That means the state would remove as many carbon emissions from the atmosphere as it emits. In recent years, California has steadily grown the share of electrical power generated by renewable sources - such as solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower - which bolstered the resiliency of the grid by increasing the overall amount of energy available. An uptick in people installing rooftop solar panels has provided an additional power boost, Ackemann said. In May, California became the first known large-scale power system in the world to have relied on more than 50% solar power for an entire month.... California's grid is also now integrated with electrical systems across much of the Western United States. This means that if there is an extreme heat event in Southern California, energy from a cooler area such as the Pacific Northwest can be imported to help meet regional demand. All of this has collectively helped the state's electrical system weather this year's long-lasting heat. "Southern California continued to break temperature records this week when Long Beach and Anaheim reached a blistering 107 degrees and Escondido hit 112 degrees..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Sep 2026 4:04pm GMT

Nearly 1900 Blizzard Entertainment workers "voted to ratify their first union contract with parent company Microsoft after over two years of bargaining," reports Kotaku, "consolidating Blizzard's many smaller unions into three larger bargaining units." The workers now gain new protections "on issues such as generative AI, crediting, remote work, and layoffs." [The contract] acknowledges that AI tools "may be useful in the game development process to support human judgment and creativity and that AI-assisted workflows remain subject to appropriate human control and review for accuracy and quality." But it also stipulates that any implementation of AI technology that would materially impact work performed by union employees must have its impacts bargained over before it can be implemented. Other sections cover issues such as crediting (guaranteeing that current and former employees are credited by name in all games they work on) and remote work (designating certain roles as hybrid in-office and providing procedures for individuals to apply for their roles to be fully remote). It also contains a lengthy section on how layoffs may be conducted, including a required 60-day notice period (or pay in lieu of notice), a guarantee of one week of severance for every six months of employment, and 14 months of recall rights. The contract also guarantees successorship, meaning if Blizzard is ever acquired by another company, the contract would remain intact. "Workers also contractually locked in their current hybrid work schedule," reports the gaming news site Aftermath, "meaning that Blizzard can't suddenly change it, as has been a labor-unfriendly trend in the games industry over the past couple years." Fully remote workers scored a big win as well. "I'm remote, and we grandfathered everyone who is remote to stay remote, so we can't be magically called to an office that we've never worked at before," [said Diablo senior environment artist Mahreen Fatima]. And "The contract also elevated pay floor," reports the Yakima Herald-Republic. "Across the board, workers secured a 1.25% pay increase, but some workers who were paid below $50,000 per year will walk away with pay increases that are as much as 34%."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Sep 2026 11:34am GMT

Silicon Valley giants and national security experts "are calling for action against Chinese companies engaged in model distillation," reports CNBC. But "I would do nothing," says Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. "We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime." Distillation is the process of using the outputs of a more capable AI model to train a smaller or less capable one, sometimes illicitly... Anthropic has accused Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and MiniMax of the practice, while OpenAI believes DeepSeek's V3 and R1 model architectures were distilled from its own GPT-4 and GPT-4o models. In the midst of this, the U.S.'s National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Federal Bureau of Investigation released an official cyber security advisory warning on the topic on Tuesday... But Tan believes regulators should focus less on curbing distillation and more on creating an equilibrium between open weight models and frontier models - as long as frontier models retain a price premium that allows their business model to remain feasible. "This is actually the ideal case. You want open weight models to give people freedom and access," he explained. "If I were a regulator, that's what I would go after." Tan acknowledged that this is a hard balance to strike, calling it "a tightrope." Nevertheless, he says it's a balance worth pursuing - saying it "could result in the best possible outcome." Tan later told TechCrunch he'd like to see America with more open-weight options that aren't Chinese, built by smaller U.S. open-weight AI labs using those same training techniques on products from America's frontier AI labs: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had previously publicly called on U.S. regulators to crack down on distillation. It's notable that the commander of Silicon Valley's prestigious and prolific startup accelerator doesn't agree. To be clear, Tan isn't advocating for American AI labs to use stolen credentials to distill. He wants them to be free to come in the front door. In fact, his argument is twofold. He feels it's an overreach for AI labs to dictate what their customers can do with the information their models share with them. He also notes that the proprietary AI labs didn't ask permission when they vacuumed up as much human knowledge as they could to train their models. They famously ingested plenty of copyrighted material without the permission of those intellectual property holders. "Controlling what users and customers do with API calls to closed weight models feels constraining, and there's a role government can play here to normalize the fact that access to intelligence that was trained on broad public access data should itself also be more a form of a public good than something locked away behind restrictive terms of service," he told TechCrunch when asked why American labs should be free to distill, too... To him, the true AI doomer scenario is for all the immense power of frontier AI to wind up in the hands of a single powerful, proprietary provider. "The nightmare scenario, the doomer scenario for AI is that there's just one company," he said. "It has the best access to capital. It has the best AI researchers. It runs away with it and suddenly there's one company that's monolithic. And that would be bad."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Sep 2026 7:04am GMT

The 40-year-old unvaccinated woman reportedly had underlying health conditions.

13 Sep 2026 9:56pm GMT

The manufacturer has a service that lets owners repair their own equipment.

13 Sep 2026 11:00am GMT

Unitree might be the world's most important robotics company.

12 Sep 2026 11:00am GMT

On the Windows side of the age verification question, Microsoft is obviously following trends among lawmakers the world over. To address this, Windows is introducing a new platform capability: the Windows Age API. This API brings age awareness beyond the operating system by making it available across the entire Windows ecosystem so that apps and services can deliver age-appropriate experiences using the same trusted foundation. By making age awareness available as a platform capability, Windows helps developers build safeguards into experiences from the start rather than placing the burden on children and families to manage protections app by app. ↫ Rob Mauceri at the Windows Blogs Meanwhile, on the Linux side of things, there's been some cheering as at least California passed amendments to its age verification law to exempt open source operating systems. These amendments redefine the term "operating system provider" to exclude any person or entity that distributes an OS or application "under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software." Any software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses satisfies that test, which removes the likes of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from AB 1856's scope. ↫ Luke James at Tom's Hardware I think this is not at all the good news that many make it out to be. Exempting Linux, BSD, and other open source operating systems from age verification obligations may seem like a good thing at first glance, but in reality, I think services and applications will simply choose to not work at all on platforms that do not implement age verification. The fear of legal ramifications, especially when it involves children, will be enough for existing and future popular services and applications to exclusively work on platforms that implement age verification - whether those fears are founded or not. In fact, I'm fairly sure a company like Microsoft, which has actually been feeling the squeeze from the Linux side recently - even if it is modestly so - is quite happy to see open source operating systems excluded from these obligations. Google, too, is probably none too unhappy to see any possible open source mobile operating system competitors not implement age verification. The fear of missing out is real, and most people are not as invested in fighting big tech and government surveillance as the average OSNews reader is going to be. If using Linux means not being able to play the latest hit games or use that new successful service, people will choose to stick with Windows or macOS. Let me be very clear that I do not support these age verification laws in any way, shape, or form, and I definitely do not want the open source world to embrace age verification. What I'm worried about is that the open source world will cheer on these exceptions and consider the battle won, when in reality, they feel more like Pyrrhic victories. Age verification laws must be fought and destroyed at ballot boxes the world over, because otherwise I fear they will become just another tool in big tech's toolbox, exemptions or not.

11 Sep 2026 10:06pm GMT

Do tech companies ever stop to think about the misery they unleash on people's lives? The Apple Watch Series 12 uses "Audio Intelligence" that, as well as secretly taking notes, also has a Live Rewind feature that can replay the last 15 seconds of recently detected audio and view a text transcript. ↫ Matt Growcoot at PetaPixel Another win for us Europeans: this dystopian nightmare will not be available in the EU.

09 Sep 2026 9:50pm GMT

Although Solaris is now mostly defunct, its influence remains substantial; technologies pioneered by Solaris can still be found across a wide range of software A lot of Solaris' inventions have been described and talked about ad nauseam (such as the Slab Allocator), but one I rarely see discussed is its use of turnstiles. Despite being relatively obscure, the idea has quietly spread far beyond Solaris. Variations of it can now be found in major operating systems, web browsers, and language runtimes. In fact, you're probably using several implementations of the same basic concept right now! ↫ Loïc Grégoire I'm not going to pretend to understand all of this, but I know you people do, and many of you will definitely find this interesting to read. Also note that Grégoire develops their own operating system kernel called zag.

09 Sep 2026 9:07pm 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

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT