fidzu : geek

oumuamua writes: Anthropic researchers have identified an internal activation subspace, J-space, that acts as a functional digital equivalent to the human brain's global workspace. The significance of this discovery lies in demonstrating that Claude's internal architecture satisfies five key cognitive properties of human conscious access -- verbal report, directed modulation, internal reasoning, flexible generalization, and selectivity -- meaning it processes complex, deliberate reasoning within this workspace while routing automatic tasks outside of it. Suppressing this J-space severely degrades Claude's capacity for inference, creative composition, and multi-step logic, while also altering its stream-of-consciousness self-narration. The tool to inspect J-space, Jacobian lens or J-lens, has profound implications for AI safety and alignment auditing, as it allows researchers to read the model's silent, strategic reasoning, detect situational awareness in "blackmail" scenarios, identify hidden malicious dispositions in reward-hacking models, and observe how post-training installs a self-monitoring "point of view." Another way to think of it is as an ocean, reports VentureBeat. "If the mind is an ocean, as the paper's authors write in their opening line, they have spent the last year charting its currents in a system that has no biology, no evolution, and no body -- and found, beneath the surface, a structure that looks unsettlingly like the one we use to think."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Jul 2026 11:00pm GMT

John Deere has agreed to a 10-year FTC-supervised right-to-repair settlement requiring it to provide farmers and independent repair shops with the same repair resources available to authorized dealers. The deal resolves antitrust claims from the FTC and five states alleging Deere monopolized equipment repair services, contributing to higher costs and delays for farmers. Wired reports: The full statement (PDF) lays out obligations for John Deere's repair services, requiring the company to give farmers and third-party repair shops access to the same equipment and repair resources it provides to official John Deere dealers. This includes software capabilities, such as reading and resetting codes and pairing with other software, which customers have long had limited access to, creating delays when diagnosing equipment problems. Delayed fixes can mean delayed harvests, which many farmers saw as a fundamental threat to their livelihoods. Under the agreement, John Deere will be required to provide this level of access, equipment, and services for the next 10 years, monitored by the FTC. [...] John Deere has maintained that it already has robust repair resources for its customers, including service manuals and diagnostic equipment. In John Deere's press release, the company says the settlement is in line with what it has been doing all along, saying that "the agreement reinforces Deere's continued innovation toward more flexible repair options, emphasizing increased access and transparency for customers. It formalizes Deere's ongoing commitment to expanding access to diagnostic and repair tools."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Jul 2026 10:00pm GMT

AI cheating leads to "a failed society," professor says.

08 Jul 2026 9:42pm GMT

Meta is rolling out an update that will disable the camera on its smart glasses if the device detects that someone has tampered with or destroyed the privacy LED. "The update is meant to address modders who have taken actions such as physically drilling into the LED light," reports The Verge. "Meta has previously tried to discourage tampering with the LED light. For example, starting with its second generation glasses, blocking the light with tape or other objects will trigger a prompt asking users to uncover the recording light. However, many modders have found various workarounds for that particular measure."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Jul 2026 9:00pm GMT

More young girls sue X over Grok CSAM; X accused of shielding child predators.

08 Jul 2026 7:56pm GMT

Kalshi tried to ignore gambling laws on its prediction market, NY governor says.

08 Jul 2026 7:14pm GMT

About a month ago, Flathub announced a ban on slopcoded applications. Evangelos "GeopJr" Paterakis, developer of a number of popular Linux applications and ton of other things, did some research into just how many applications tagged with "AI slop", a tag Flathub reviewers used to keep track of slopcoded applications submitted to Flathub, actually survived the test of time. The results are exactly what you'd expect. Of the 120 unique repos, 32 were maintained and 88 were abandoned. No seriously, a big portion of them was completely deleted, nowhere to be found, others stopped 6 months ago, right after submitting to Flathub. ↫ Evangelos "GeopJr" Paterakis That's absolutely soul-crushing. Why should Flathub's reviewers spend their precious, limited time talking to lazy slopcoders' "AI" agents to get their slopcoded applications into Flathub, when 70% of these applications are abandoned or outright deleted from existence within mere months of being submitted? Minimal effort for the slopcoders, maximum effort for the reviewers. Just dump a bunch of shitty code over the fence, let a chatbot handle the interactions with the reviewers, and pretend you made a valuable contribution. This is the contradiction slopcode enthusiasts really don't want to talk about. If these "AI" tools are so great, where is all the amazing new software? Where's the massive gains in software quality? Isn't the story that "AI" tools do the menial work, giving programmers more time to focus on improving their software? Reality does not seem to match the story we're being sold. Despite these slopcode tools being out and available for years now, there's no influx of great applications and other software, there's no rise in software quality, nothing. What we mostly seem to be getting are slopcoded projects nobody, not even their "creators" care about, so they just get abandoned and deleted as quickly as they were dredged up from the bottom of the programming barrel. These aren't applications created because someone wanted them to exist; these are applications created because some mid programmer got high on their "AI" supply and fancied themselves better at programming than they really are - only to realise once the comedown hits they've got crappy, barely working, entirely unmaintainable gibberish vaguely looking like code nobody can make head nor tails of. And then they abandon the project, ready for the next high - leaving everyone else to clean up their mess. What a miserable workflow.

07 Jul 2026 11:18pm GMT

Only a few days ago we had Linux on the Mega Drive, and someone took that as a challenge, so now we have Linux on the Atari Jaguar. The Jaguar has a very different architecture than the Mega Drive, but does happen to use a processor from the same 68000-family. Interestingly enough, to this day, Linux has architecture code for the 68000-family of processors. 68040, 68030, 68010… and even the original base 68000 processor. All neatly structured under arch/m68k/. ↫ Joel Bueno And, well, that means Linux can indeed be made to work on the Jaguar, with some hacking and magic, of course.

07 Jul 2026 9:06pm GMT

Wherever in the world you go, the smartphone landscape is dominated by Android and iOS, and while this has always been problematic, recent events have made the dependency on two American tech giants for what is probably our most personal computing device even more problematic than it already was. We use our smartphones to keep our secrets, do our banking, interact with our governments, share our deepest thoughts with our friends and family, and a whole lot more. Having this invaluable tool the vast majority of us depend on tied entirely to Google and Apple is not just bad for the market, it's also a downright threat to the national security of anyone not living in the US. Here in Europe, there's been an awakening lately, with governments, companies, and people alike finally realising that having our entire digital infrastructure controlled by foreign, adversarial interests is a terrible idea. Sadly, breaking free from our Android and iOS chains is not so easy. The most ideal solution would be a truly open source alternative smartphone operating system, but that's a hard sell for 99.9% of smartphone users who need the applications required to do their finances, talk to their friends, or interact with their governments. The cold and harsh truth is that with very few exceptions, these applications simply do not (yet) exist for smartphone operating systems that aren't Android or iOS. The only viable alternative at this point in time is to take whatever's left of the Android Open Source Project, remove anything that ties it to Google and its services, fill in the gaps with alternative services and applications, and sell it as a Google-free or de-Googled Android platform. There's several projects in this space, and with Europe drunkenly stumbling out of the technological hole it dug itself into, it's no surprise that two of the more popular alternatives to Apple or Google-controlled smartphones come from Europe (and from the same country, no less). Today, we're taking a look at one of these: iodéOS. Iodé is a company based in Toulouse, France, which focuses on offering a Google-free Android called iodéOS, either preinstalled on phones you can buy, or as a ROM you can install yourself on supported devices. As a company, iodé makes its money through selling devices with iodéOS preinstalled, through an optional premium subscription (that I didn't take a look at), and through donations, and all of their code is published as open source on their Gitlab instance hosted in France. Iodé loaned me a Fairphone 6 with iodéOS preinstalled, one of he many smartphones and tablets they sell through their online store for review. This isn't going to be an Android review; you already know what Android is like, and there's no need for me to rehash any of that. Instead, I want to focus on the things that make using de-Googled Android different from using Google Android. Don't be afraid of microG There are various ways to go about making a de-Googled Android variant, and iodéOS chose the LineageOS route, with microG installed on top. For those unaware, microG is a project which aims to replace the various proprietary parts of Google Play Services, required by many Android applications, with open source reimplementations. While it doesn't offer 100% compatibility, it works exceptionally well, and you'll be hard-pressed to find applications just don't work at all with microG. IodéOS updates its microG installation through a dedicated F-Droid repository that's obviously enabled by default, so you don't have to do anything yourself. Using microG instead of Google Play Services doesn't mean you have to rely solely on whatever's available in F-Droid, since there are a variety of alternative Play Store frontends available. IodéOS ships with the Aurora Store, which is an open-source frontend to the Play Store that can be used with or without a Google account. If you use it with your Google account, you'll gain access to whatever applications you already own, including paid ones, but you won't be able to buy applications inside Aurora. You can, however, buy an application on the Play Store website, after which it will show up in Aurora as well, assuming you're logged in with the same account. Aurora also comes with something something called FakeStore, which is sadly an important part of the puzzle; it's a stub application that has the same package name as the real Play Store. Some applications check whether the Play Store is available before working properly, so this is sadly needed to ensure maximum compatibility. The only issue I sometimes ran into with Aurora is that it would load up its listings, but then any application I tapped on said it was unavailable. When this happened, reloading the Aurora application always fixed the issue. Annoying, but not gamebreaking. A few things did not work for me when using microG on iodéOS, and they're exactly the things you'd expect not to work. If you have a WearOS device, you're out of luck; WearOS devices simply do not work when using microG, but there is a bounty to add support for it. If you want to use a smartwatch with iodéOS, there are various options available, such as Garmin devices, which is what I used during my testing and it worked flawlessly. Another feature from "regular" Android that simply won't work is RCS. There's only one RCS client available on Android, Google Messages, and as you can imagine, Google is in no rush to allow devices without Google Play Services to register for and use RCS messaging. Tying to register with Google Messages will fail, and there are no other RCS clients available (save for a few China and India-specific clients). There's a microG bounty for this, too, but no luck so far. Of course, there are countless messaging platforms that work just fine on iodéOS - regular SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, and so on - and especially if you're European, it's unlikely RCS support matters to you at all. I just don't

05 Jul 2026 9:29pm GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Just trying to answer one simple question: What if the terminal was 3D?

11 May 2026 12:00am GMT

Break the pattern today or the loop will repeat tomorrow.

18 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT