geek

05 Jul 2026

Slashdot

Meta is Quietly Launching Pocket, an App for Vibe-coding and Scrolling Small 'Gizmos'

"Mozilla shut down the well-loved read-it-later Pocket app last year, and now Meta is launching an app called Pocket with an entirely different, AI-focused pitch," writes The Verge. While it's not available for downloads in most locations, Meta's Pocket will allow people "to generate small, interactive apps and games using AI prompts," writes TechCrunch. They're called "gizmos", and Pocket "also offers a scrollable feed where you can play with gizmos others have made." Some context from The Verge: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is all in on AI as the new social media, and he's previously described a vision of how users could use AI to make interactive experiences and share them with people. The launch of Pocket appears to be one manifestation of that idea... It follows Meta hiring engineers from a company called Atma Sciences Inc., which made an app called Gizmo, as Business Insider reported in March. On a help center page, Meta also describes a gizmo as a "playable AI-generated experience," and when you post one, Meta says you can choose to let other people remix them. "Based on the app's screenshots in Google Play, there are many similarities to Gizmo's original app, which is still listed," notes TechCrunch. "Pocket is another example of Meta's push to make AI creation tools more mainstream, extending its earlier efforts, which included AI-generated images created via its Meta AI app and AI videos created with its app called Vibes. It has also added AI features across its social platforms... " Given that Meta has not officially announced Pocket's debut, it's likely that Pocket is still in its initial experimentation phase. Its counterpart Gizmo, however, had generated 635,000 lifetime installs across both iOS and Google Play, according to Appfigures, which noted it had a 98% positive sentiment.

Big Companies That Invest Heavily in AI Also Hire More People, Report Suggests

"Companies spending heavily on AI are growing headcount faster, even in the entry-level roles that many fear are doomed," writes TechCrunch. That's the conclusion of new report tracking AI spending from Ramp's corporate card/bill pay data as well as Revelio Labs' workforce records from 21,599 U.S. firms: According to the report, "high-intensity adopters" - firms that spend on average $30 per employee per month on AI in the first three months - saw headcount increase 10.2%. Headcount also rose across functions, including engineering, sales, administration, customer service, finance, marketing, and scientist roles. The strongest job growth among high-intensity adopters was in the information sector, which includes software, internet, media, and tech-adjacent firms. Despite these positive signals, the data isn't as rosy as it seems. It skews heavily toward tech-forward, knowledge-work firms - ones that might have VC-backing and are growing fast anyway, making it difficult to say whether AI is contributing to the hiring or just showing up at companies that are expanding anyway. "This paper does not show that AI universally creates jobs," the paper's authors admit, "but it does counter claims that AI will lead to broad job losses." It also counters claims that AI is killing all junior jobs. Recent research from Goldman Sachs found that AI has already erased about 16,000 net jobs per month over the past year, with Gen Z and entry-level workers taking the brunt of the burden. But in tech-forward firms, the report finds that entry-level headcount actually rose by 12%... "For software and technology firms, AI can make core output cheaper or faster to produce: writing code, debugging, building internal tools, producing technical documentation, and supporting product development," the report reads. "Lower production costs in these workflows can raise the return to expanding the whole firm, not just the engineering team." But companies that buy subscriptions and run pilots, yet did not go on to make sustained investments, don't tend to see any gains in headcount, per the report. That sets up the potential for a widening gap between firms that have the resources - like capital, technical staff, founder networks, and management bandwidth - to turn AI adoption into actual business gains and those that are stuck experimenting with subscriptions. In other words, this report suggests that firms that already have the resources are the ones that will see the largest gains. CNBC argues another AI "narrative" was challenged this week: that open source can't make money. "The assumption was that giving your model away for free meant no business. That's breaking too, as open-model companies start posting real revenue and enterprises move from renting AI to running their own."

OSnews

Review: iodéOS offers a frictionless de-Googled Android experience

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

Slashdot

Microsoft and Amazon Commit Billions to New AI Implementation Units for Businesses

Microsoft is investing $2.5 billion in a new group "assisting clients with AI implementations," reports CNBC: [Microsoft] said Thursday that 6,000 employees will be embedded with clients, in a practice that's become known as forward deployed engineering [or FDE]... The announcement comes two days after cloud rival Amazon said it was putting $1 billion behind an FDE initiative to support fast-paced AI engagements. Leading AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI both established FDE groups in May, partnering with private equity firms, banks and consulting firms. Alongside its technology peers, Microsoft has sunk tens of billions of dollars into building data centers that run generative AI models. Microsoft has also released a variety of AI services, with mixed results. The Microsoft 365 Copilot AI assistant has yet to gain anything approaching ubiquity in the business world, and the GitHub Copilot coding agent has ceded market share to newer players. Microsoft's stock has slumped 21% this year, by far the worst performance among the mega-cap tech companies. One concern on Wall Street is that AI models that quickly compose code might threaten mature software companies... Microsoft has for years provided support and implementation services to customers. The company generated about $2.1 billion in revenue from enterprise and partner services in the March quarter, up 2.5% from a year earlier.

OSnews

Improved DEC Alpha emulator runs Windows 2000 for Alpha and OpenVMS and Tru64 with X11

Colour me positively surprised, as I had no idea Alpha emulation had progressed this much. As you might know, I'm involved a bit in the OpenVMS community and the Alpha emulation side via AXPBox. AXPBox (github) is a fork of the es40 alpha emulator by Camiel Vanderhoeven (who is now Chief Architect at VSI, the company that makes OpenVMS, for x86 nowdays). There have been many forks of es40 in the past and recently a new one has popped up with some great new features. Like speedups via a JIT compiler, S3 graphics port from MAME and ARC support, resulting in the ability to run Windows 2000 for the DEC Alpha. ↫ Remy van Elst Not only can you run the unreleased Alpha version of Windows 2000 on this forked emulator, it's also capable of running OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX. In fact, both OpenVMS and Tru64 can run their full X11 CDE desktops on the emulator as well, which is incredibly cool and a huge milestone. As the name of the original emulator implies, it's emulating an AlphaServer Es40 from the turn of the century, which should be fast enough for enthusiast use. The last AlphaStation ever made, the ES47, is still very high on my list of computers I desperately want but will never have - they are incredibly rare, and whenever they do come up for sale, incredibly expensive. If you have one, consider yourself lucky, and please, write about it! Tell the world!

05 Jul 2026 8:27pm GMT

LineageOS and Android’s upcoming developer verification: what it is, and how it affects you

LineageOS, the de-Googled Android ROM that serves as the backbone for pretty much the entire custom Android ROM community, has published an article about what the Android developer verification changes mean for them. I really like the factual tone of their article, especially this part: Critics such as F-Droid, EFF, and "Keep Android Open" point out that this also happens to route every install path through Google-controlled infrastructure, hands Google a kill switch over any app or developer worldwide, and arrives shortly after Google's antitrust lawsuits. Both things can be true at once: real fraud is a problem and the restriction of developers is a convenient side effect of solving it this way - and we're not in a position to pretend we know Google's internal reasoning. We're just telling you what they've said and what it changes; you can weigh the "why" yourself. ↫ Nolen Johnson on the LineageOS website For LineageOS, these new verification measures don't really mean much, as they don't affect the project's work or software. The developer verification infrastructure is a separate application that is part of Google Mobile Services, and LineageOS does not ship GMS nor does it ever intend to. As such, they don't have to do anything, as this won't be an issue unless LineageOS users choose to install a GApps package that happens to include the developer verification infrastructure. If Google were to move the developer verification infrastructure into Play Services in the future, LineageOS makes it clear they'll disable it globally, as they have done with a number of other "annoying Play Services-provided over-the-air update implementations". There really isn't much more they can do; the rest is up to users and projects that use LineageOS as their base.

05 Jul 2026 8:11pm GMT