fidzu : geek

"Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated," reports the Verge: After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it's starting to mess with headlines in the traditional "10 blue links," too. We've found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process. For example, Google reduced our headline "I used the 'cheat on everything' AI tool and it didn't help me cheat on anything" to just five words: "'Cheat on everything' AI tool." It almost sounds like we're endorsing a product we do not recommend at all. What we are seeing is a "small" and "narrow" experiment, one that's not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how "small" that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results - headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it's tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news. The good news, for now, is that these changed headlines seem to be few and far between, and they're not yet the kind of tripe we've seen in Google Discover. (For example, Google Discover told me this week that the PlayStation Portal was getting a 1080p streaming mode, when it actually got a higher bitrate mode instead.) Compared to that and other lying Google Discover headlines like "US reverses foreign drone ban" - on a story reporting the opposite - the nonsense headlines we're seeing in Google Search are downright tame. The article points out that Google "originally told us its AI headlines in Google Discover were an experiment too. A month later, it told us those AI headlines are now a feature..." "Google confirmed that the test uses generative AI, but claimed that 'if we were to actually launch something based on this experiment, it would not be using a generative model and we would not be creating headlines with gen AI'..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

22 Mar 2026 3:34pm GMT

CNBC reports: Amazon has acquired Rivr, a Swiss robotics company developing machines for "doorstep delivery," the company confirmed Thursday... It announced the deal in a notice sent to third-party delivery contractors... "We believe this technology, when working alongside your [delivery associates], has the potential to further improve safety outcomes and the overall customer experience, particularly in the last steps of the delivery process...." In its notice to delivery service partner owners, Amazon said Rivr's technology, which includes a four-legged robot on wheels, will allow it to research and test how the devices can be integrated into delivery operations, including "helping [delivery associates] carry packages from delivery vehicles to customer doorsteps."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

22 Mar 2026 2:34pm GMT

Sure, it's cheesy in many respects, but its central mythology still resonates even decades later.

22 Mar 2026 2:10pm GMT

America's cable TV industry "is undergoing its most dramatic collapse in history," reports Cord Cutters News, "with operators large and small waving the white flag on traditional TV service and pointing their customers toward streaming platforms instead." Just in 2025 Comcast lost 1.25 million pay-TV subscribers (ending the year with just 11.3 million), while Charter Spectrum also lost hundreds of thousands of customers each quarter. But "for smaller regional operators, who lack the scale and diversified revenue streams of giants like Comcast, those kinds of losses are simply unsurvivable," they write. And "the companies that once delivered hundreds of channels through coaxial cables are now either shutting down entirely or reinventing themselves as internet providers." Pay-TV subscriptions have plummeted from nearly 90% of U.S. households in the mid-2010s to roughly half by the end of 2025, resulting in billions in lost revenue and forcing many smaller operators to conclude that continuing linear TV services is no longer viable... [This year over U.S. 50 cable TV companies - primarily smaller and midsize providers - are "expected to cease operations entirely or shut down their television services," Cord Cutters News reported earlier.] YouTube TV's pricing is so competitive that the platform is projected to have close to 12.6 million subscribers by the end of 2026, positioning it to become the largest paid TV distributor in the United States. Exclusive content deals, such as YouTube TV's acquisition of NFL Sunday Ticket rights, have further eroded the value proposition of traditional cable at every level of the market... As older cable subscribers age out of the market, there is no new generation of customers waiting to replace them... [Cable TV] operators like WOW! are betting that their physical infrastructure - now increasingly upgraded to fiber - is more valuable as an internet delivery system than as a cable TV platform. [WOW! serves customers across Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Alabama - but is "phasing out its proprietary streaming live TV service and directing all customers toward YouTube TV," the article notes.] Industry observers see this as part of a broader trend: operators shedding unprofitable video segments to focus on broadband, where returns and network investments are prioritized. By the end of 2026, non-pay-TV households are expected to surge to 80.7 million, outnumbering traditional pay-TV subscribers at 54.3 million - a milestone that would have seemed unthinkable just a decade ago. For the cable companies still standing, the math is now inescapable: the era of the cable bundle is ending, and the only real question left is how gracefully each operator manages its exit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

22 Mar 2026 11:34am GMT

Policymakers debate if we even need deep ocean mining and if we can do it safely.

22 Mar 2026 11:00am GMT

This week's result is just the latest in a growing collection of discoveries.

21 Mar 2026 11:00am GMT

Earlier this year, Microsoft openly acknowledged the sorry state of Windows 11, and made vague promises about possible improvements somewhere in the near future, but stayed away from making any concrete promises. Today, the company published a blog post with some more details, including some actual concrete, tangible changes it's going to implement over the coming two months. In coming builds, you'll be able to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, instead of it being locked to the bottom, thereby reintroducing a feature present since Windows 95. They're also scaling back their obsession with ramming "AI" in every corner of Windows, and will be removing Copilot integrations from Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad. Furthermore, and this is a big one among Windows users I'm sure, Windows Update will be placed under user control once again, allowing them to ignore updates, postpone them indefinitely, reboot without applying updates, and so on. These are the tangible improvements we'll be able to point to and say the company kept their word, and they all feel like welcome changes. There's also a few promises that feel far more vague and less tangible, like the ever-present, long-running promise to "improve File Explorer". I feel like Microsoft's been promising to fix their horrible file manager for years now, without much to show for it, so I hope this time will be different. The company also wants to improve Widgets, the Windows Insider Program, and the Feedback Hub application. These all feel less tangible, and will be harder to quantify and benchmark. Beyond these first round of improvements that we're supposed to be seeing over the coming two months, Microsoft also promises to implement wider improvements across the board, with the usual suspects like better performance, quicker application launches, improved reliability, lower memory usage, and so on. They also promise to move more core Windows user interface components to WinUI 3, including the Start menu, which is currently written in React. Windows Search is another common pain point among Windows users, and here, Microsoft promises to improve its performance and clearly separate local from online results (but no word on making search exclusively local). There's some more details in the blog post, but overall, it sounds great. However, words without actions are about as meaningful as a White House statement on the war with Iran, so seeing is believing.

20 Mar 2026 11:02pm GMT

When Google said they were going to require verification from every single Android developer that would end the ability to install applications from outside of the Play Store (commonly wrongfully referred to as "sideloading"), it caused quite a backlash. The company then backtracked a little bit, and said they would come up with an "advanced flow" to make sure installing applications from outside of the Play Store remained possible. Well, Google has detailed this "advanced flow", and as everyone expected, it's such a massive list of onerous hoops to jump through they might as well just lock Android down to the Play Store and get it over with. First, if a developer is verified, you can download their applications to your device and install them the same way you can do now. Second, developers with "limited distribution accounts", such as students or hobby projects, can share their applications with up to 20 devices without verification. Third, and this is where the fun starts, we have unverified developers - basically what all Android developers sharing applications outside of the Play Store are now. Here's the full "advanced flow" as described by Google to allow you to install an application from an unverified developer: Setting aside the fact that developer verification is, in and of itself, a massive problem, I'm kind of okay with a few scary warnings, a disclaimer, and perhaps a single reboot to enable installing applications outside of the Play Store - a few things to make normal people shrug their shoulders and not bother. However, adding enabling developer mode and a goddamn 24-hour waiting period is batshit insanity, and clearly has the intention of discouraging everyone, effectively locking Android to the Play Store. Android is already basically an entirely locked-down, closed-source platform, and once this "advanced flow" comes into force, there's virtually no difference between iOS and Android, especially for us Europeans who get similarly onerous anti-user nonsense when trying to install alternative application stores on iOS. I see no reason to buy Android over iOS at this point - might as well get the faster phone with better update support.

19 Mar 2026 11:51pm GMT

What happens if you make a Linux syscall in a Windows application? So yeah, you can make Linux syscalls from Windows programs, as long as they're running under Wine. Totally useless, but the fact that such a Frankenstein monster of a program could exist is funny to me. ↫ nicebyte at gpfault.net The fact that this works is both surprising and unsurprising at the same time.

19 Mar 2026 9:10pm GMT

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade! Most of the things I've self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

19 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT