fidzu : geek

"I believe artificial intelligence will displace workers at a scale many people don't yet realize," says Sal Kahn (founder/CEO of the nonprofit Khan Academy). But in an op-ed in the New York Times he also proposes a solution that "could change the trajectory of the lives of millions who will be displaced..." "I believe that every company benefiting from automation - which is most American companies - should... dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being displaced." This isn't charity. It is in the best interest of these companies. If the public sees corporate profits skyrocketing while livelihoods evaporate, backlash will follow - through regulation, taxes or outright bans on automation. Helping retrain workers is common sense, and such a small ask that these companies would barely feel it, while the public benefits could be enormous... Roughly a dozen of the world's largest corporations now have a combined profit of over a trillion dollars each year. One percent of that would create a $10 billion annual fund that, in part, could create a centralized skill training platform on steroids: online learning, ways to verify skills gained and apprenticeships, coaching and mentorship for tens of millions of people. The fund could be run by an independent nonprofit that would coordinate with corporations to ensure that the skills being developed are exactly what are needed. This is a big task, but it is doable; over the past 15 years, online learning platforms have shown that it can be done for academic learning, and many of the same principles apply for skill training. "The problem isn't that people can't work," Khan writes in the essay. "It's that we haven't built systems to help them continue learning and connect them to new opportunities as the world changes rapidly." To meet the challenges, we don't need to send millions back to college. We need to create flexible, free paths to hiring, many of which would start in high school and extend through life. Our economy needs low-cost online mechanisms for letting people demonstrate what they know. Imagine a model where capability, not how many hours students sit in class, is what matters; where demonstrated skills earn them credit and where employers recognize those credits as evidence of readiness to enter an apprenticeship program in the trades, health care, hospitality or new categories of white-collar jobs that might emerge... There is no shortage of meaningful work - only a shortage of pathways into it. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

28 Dec 2025 8:37am GMT

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal: Sending drones and robots into battle, rather than humans, has become a tenet of modern warfare. Nowhere does that make more sense than in the frozen expanses of the Arctic. But the closer you get to the North Pole, the less useful cutting-edge technology becomes. Magnetic storms distort satellite signals; frigid temperatures drain batteries or freeze equipment in minutes; navigation systems lack reference points on snowfields. During a seven-nation polar exercise in Canada earlier this year to test equipment worth millions of dollars, the U.S. military's all-terrain arctic vehicles broke down after 30 minutes because hydraulic fluids congealed in the cold. Swedish soldiers participating in the exercise were handed $20,000 night-vision optics that broke because the aluminum in the goggles couldn't handle the minus 40 degree Fahrenheit conditions.... An arctic conflict would force war planners back to basics. Extreme cold makes the most common components brittle. Low temperatures alter the physical properties of rubber, causing seals to lose their elasticity and leak. Traces of water or humidity freeze into ice crystals that can scratch pumps and create blockages. Wires should be insulated with silicone rather than PVC, which can crack. Oil and other lubricants thicken and congeal. In most standard hydraulic systems, fluid becomes syrupy and can affect everything from aircraft controls to missile launchers and radar masts. A single freeze-up can knock out an entire weapons platform or immobilize a convoy. Even the Aurora Borealis interferes with radio communications and satellite-navigation systems, according to the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

28 Dec 2025 4:44am GMT

An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget: OpenAI is looking for a new Head of Preparedness who can help it anticipate the potential harms of its models and how they can be abused, in order to guide the company's safety strategy. It comes at the end of a year that's seen OpenAI hit with numerous accusations about ChatGPT's impacts on users' mental health, including a few wrongful death lawsuits. In a post on X about the position, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledgedthat the "potential impact of models on mental health was something we saw a preview of in 2025," along with other "real challenges" that have arisen alongside models' capabilities. The Head of Preparedness "is a critical role at an important time," he said. Per the job listing, the Head of Preparedness (who will make $555K, plus equity), "will lead the technical strategy and execution of OpenAI's Preparedness framework, our framework explaining OpenAI's approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm." "These questions are hard," Altman posted on X.com, "and there is little precedent; a lot of ideas that sound good have some real edge cases... This will be a stressful job and you'll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately." The listing says OpenAI's Head of Preparedness "will lead a small, high-impact team to drive core Preparedness research, while partnering broadly across Safety Systems and OpenAI for end-to-end adoption and execution of the framework." They're looking for someone "comfortable making clear, high-stakes technical judgments under uncertainty."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

28 Dec 2025 1:34am GMT

If you're building a package manager and git-as-index seems appealing, look at Cargo, Homebrew, CocoaPods, vcpkg, Go. They all had to build workarounds as they grew, causing pain for users and maintainers. The pull request workflow is nice. The version history is nice. You will hit the same walls they did. ↫ Andrew Nesbitt It's wild to read some of these stories. I can't believe CocoaPods had 16000 directories contained in a single directory, which is absolutely bananas when you know how git actually works. Then there's the issue that git is case-sensitive, as any proper file system should be, which causes major headaches on Windows and macOS, which are dumb and are case-insensitive. Even Windows' path length limits, inherited from DOS, cause problems with git. There just so many problems with using git for a package managers' database. The basic gist is that git is not a database, and shouldn't be used as such. It's incredulous to me that seasoned developers would opt for "solutions" like this.

27 Dec 2025 12:57pm GMT

Christmas is already behind us, but since this is an announcement from 11 December - that I missed - I'm calling this a very interesting and surprising Christmas present. The team and I are beyond excited to share what we've been cooking up over the last little while: a full desktop environment running on QNX 8.0, with support for self-hosted compilation! This environment both makes it easier for newly-minted QNX developers to get started with building for QNX, but it also vastly simplifies the process of porting Linux applications and libraries to QNX 8.0. ↫ John Hanam at the QNX Developer Blog What we have here is QNX 8.0 running the Xfce desktop environment on Wayland, a whole slew of build and development tools like clang, gcc, git, etc.), a ton of popular code editors and IDEs, a web browser (looks like GNOME Web?), access to all the ports on the QNX Open-Source Dashboard, and more. For now, it's only available as a Qemu image to run on top of Ubuntu, but the plan is to also release an x86 image in the coming months so you can run this directly on real hardware. This isn't quite the same as the QNX of old with its unique Photon microGUI, but it's been known for a while now that Photon hasn't been actively developed in a long time and is basically abandoned. Running Xfce on Wayland is obviously a much more sensible solution, and one that's quite future-proof, too. As a certified QNX desktop enthusiast of yore, I can't wait for the x86 image to arrive so I can try this out properly. There are downsides. This image, too, is encumbered by annoying non-commercial license requirements and sign-ups, and this also wouldn't be the first time QNX starts an enthusiast effort, only to abandon it shortly after. Buyer beware, then, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

27 Dec 2025 10:12am GMT

Art and science converge in Lynn Gamwell's book, Conjuring the Void: The Art of Black Holes

26 Dec 2025 4:40pm GMT

Most things Privateer did have been done better, but it's still a classic.

26 Dec 2025 1:35pm GMT

A mix of expected sequels and out-of-nowhere indie gems made 2025 a joy.

26 Dec 2025 12:00pm GMT

We've got more X11-related news this day, the day of Xmas. Phoenix is a new X server, written from scratch in Zig (not a fork of Xorg server). This X server is designed to be a modern alternative to the Xorg server. ↫ Phoenix' readme page Phoenix will only support a modern subset of the X11 protocol, focusing on making sure modern applications from roughly the last 20 years or so work. It also takes quite a few pages out of the Wayland playbook by not having a server driver interface and by having a compositor included. On top of that, it will isolate applications from each other, and won't have a single framebuffer for all displays, instead allowing different refresh rates for individual displays. The project also intends to develop new standards to support things like per-monitor DPI, among many other features. That's a lot of features and capabilities to promise for an X server, and much like Wayland, the way they aim to get there is by effectively gutting traditional X and leaving a ton of cruft behind. The use of Zig is also interesting, as it can catch some issues before they affect any users thanks to Zig's runtime safety option. At least it's not yet another thing written in Rust like every other project competing with an established project. I think this look like an incredibly interesting project to keep an eye on, and I hope more people join the effort. Competition and fresh, new ideas are good, especially now that everything is gravitating towards Wayland - we need alternatives to promote the sharing of ideas.

25 Dec 2025 2:52pm 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