fidzu : geek

The Trump administration is moving to dismantle the National Science Foundation's $368 million Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of more than 900 deep-sea instruments used to monitor ocean currents, marine ecosystems, carbon absorption, heat waves, fisheries, coastal flooding, and climate change. The NSF said it would send ships in June to begin the removal of the instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea. The New York Times reports: The ocean observation system began operating in 2016 and was expected to continue for 25 years. Jim Edson, a marine meteorologist who led the Ocean Observatories Initiative, called it "the world's most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems." When it was first proposed, the science foundation said it was important to have a long-term presence at scientifically important sites in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Removing the instruments could take 15 months. Seismic instruments positioned around an active underwater volcano off Oregon will continue operating until 2028. Each observation station consists of several moorings that secure long arrays of devices connected to wires. The devices measure ocean currents as well as chemical and biological conditions from the water's surface down thousands of feet. The instruments were hardened to resist the pressure of the deep ocean, corrosive seawater as well as marine plants and animals that can foul electronics. Remotely controlled robotic vehicles and gliders around the moorings collect and transmit data to research laboratories. It cost $48 million annually to operate the network. The Trump administration repeatedly tried to shutter it, proposing to cut its funding by 80 percent in both 2025 and again in 2026. Congress pushed back, restoring the money. To try to reduce costs, managers turned off some of the instruments and collected less data, according to a December 2025 presentation about the observatories at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, a nonprofit organization of scientists. Still, the science foundation moved ahead to decommission the observatory network.

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03 Jun 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: A team inside Microsoft has been quietly building a platform for devices that run AI agents instead of apps, based on Android instead of Windows, with two working hardware designs so far, and an initial set of big-name companies lined up to run pilots. The platform, dubbed "Project Solara," is Microsoft's bet that AI will open up entirely new scenarios for computing -- using agents to avoid the constraints of traditional software, and off-the-shelf components to develop new devices quickly and inexpensively. [...] The company unveiled Solara on Tuesday at its Build conference in San Francisco, describing it as a new platform that spans from chip to cloud. GeekWire got a behind-the-scenes look at the project during a briefing last week in Redmond, including demos of the first two concept devices based on the platform: - A desktop hub that sits beside a PC and responds to voice commands, signs users in using facial recognition, and surfaces the day's most pressing items. With a monitor attached, it becomes a full Windows machine running in the cloud. - A wearable badge that reimagines the standard employee ID card. A fingerprint button wakes an agent in one press; a single tap records and transcribes a conversation; and a built-in camera lets the agent act on what the user sees. Microsoft says it won't ship these devices itself. Instead, it envisions hardware makers and other industry partners turning the reference designs into implementations of their own, each intended for a specific industry, company, or scenario. For example, in one demo shown by the company, the high-tech badge ran on agents designed for use by a health-care worker, including the ability to scan a patient's QR code, record and transcribe the visit, log vitals, and start a prescription. In another application of the same badge, the built-in camera scanned a brainstorm board with ideas for an office revamp, and made a suggestion: add some plants. The two devices are a starting point. The bigger opportunity, the company says, is all the tasks and workflows where a PC or phone gets in the way or isn't practical to use. [...] In the coming months, companies including AccuWeather, Best Buy, CVS Health, Levi's, and Target are expected to begin pilots of devices based on the reference designs. The operating system is the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform, or MDEP, an enterprise version of Android that Microsoft developed for devices including Teams meeting-room hardware. The company says it chose MDEP over Windows deliberately, to run on smaller, lower-power devices while keeping the management and security features IT departments expect: patch and over-the-air updates, device integrity, Microsoft Defender, Intune, and Entra ID sign-in. While the project is still in the early stages, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella encouraged the team to show it at Build sooner than the company would normally show its work in public. "That underscores just how competitive and fast-moving the AI world is right now, but it also illustrates the pace that the new technologies are enabling," reports GeekWire. The report notes that the business model for the platform still needs to be worked out. The devices run on Microsoft's Azure cloud, but beyond that, "the economics are still taking shape." Qualcomm and MediaTek have been chosen as the first chip partners. "The badge runs on a new Qualcomm wearable chip; the desk hub runs on MediaTek IoT silicon," reports GeekWire. "Both are off-the-shelf, not custom, which is central to how Microsoft plans to keep devices cheap and fast to build."

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03 Jun 2026 3:30am GMT

"It's a reminder of how human activity is changing the natural world in unanticipated ways."

02 Jun 2026 11:05pm GMT

A new Leiden Declaration, endorsed by the International Mathematical Union and published on June 2, 2026, warns that AI could undermine mathematics by flooding the field with plausible but flawed proofs, weakening attribution, shifting incentives, and giving tech companies too much influence over research priorities. "Mathematicians should find it quite striking that tech companies are suddenly interested in their work," said Kevin Buzzard, a mathematician at Imperial College London, in a statement. "The Leiden Declaration is a well-thought-through response to what is currently happening, as AI continues to disrupt this space." Ars Technica reports: The Leiden Declaration, which has already drawn hundreds of signatories, warns that recent AI developments are threatening "characteristic values" of mathematical research, "often in ways that disproportionately affect students and early-career mathematicians, and hence the long term future of the discipline." First, it points out how AI models can "produce plausible but unreliable (or even incorrect) arguments which are difficult to distinguish from correct mathematical proofs." Such developments put reviewers under increasing pressure and are "jeopardizing our ability to implement traditional standards for the correctness, transparency, and independent verifiability of proof," the declaration warns. "Inaccurate AI-generated drafts are cheap to produce, and there is a risk of cluttering the literature with claimed results that are simply wrong," said Leslie Ann Goldberg, head of computer science at the University of Oxford, in a statement. "Once that happens, the errors are likely to propagate as new results are built on faulty foundations." Second, the declaration highlights how "models trained on published works frequently return outputs that do not properly cite the human works they synthesize," while also pointing out that many current AI models were trained on data obtained through "exploiting licenses and access arrangements" or "simply violating copyright protections." Third, the declaration describes how the use of AI "may become incentivized for its own sake, disrupting our mechanisms for hiring, funding and recognition" while leaving out researchers who lack access or are "unwilling to use technologies controlled by organizations whose values they do not share." Fourth, the declaration warns against mathematics research "communicated through informal channels such as press releases or blog posts, often without any research paper or other disclosure of information necessary for scientific evaluation." Such communication strategies can lead to "oversimplification" in media reporting that overemphasizes AI tools' significance at the expense of prior human contributions, and "misleadingly uses specific mathematical tasks as metrics for the general reasoning capacities of commercial products." Fifth, the declaration describes "increasing involvement of technology companies in mathematical research" as threatening the "autonomy of mathematics," especially as university budgets are under pressure and researchers may feel greater professional incentive to collaborate with technology companies on "asymmetric terms." This also raises the risk that mathematics research questions amenable to AI-driven techniques may be prioritized. What can mathematicians do about this? The Leiden Declaration urges them to treat AI as a tool, not a substitute for human responsibility. Individual mathematicians should disclose AI use, remain accountable for the correctness of their work, continue crediting human authors, and use AI tools only when they align with the declaration's values. It also warns that mathematics can be applied to "warfare, oppression, mass surveillance, and the undermining of democracy," so mathematicians should weigh the ethics of tech-industry partnerships carefully. Professional organizations are encouraged to develop AI-use guidelines for publication and review, protect researchers from having their work used as training data without consent, support peer-reviewed publishing, and "actively prepare to become involved if major mathematical results are claimed using unconventional means." For policymakers, the recommendations are blunt: "protect the rights of authors," "regulate the artificial intelligence industry," and "invest in public computational infrastructure." The declaration also urges people to "don't believe the hype," warning that tech companies have "a strong commercial incentive... to overstate the capabilities of their products."

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02 Jun 2026 11:00pm GMT

One hardware announcement and several software highlights from Microsoft Build.

02 Jun 2026 10:51pm GMT

Microsoft missed the boat on apps, so get ready for agents.

02 Jun 2026 8:47pm GMT

With KDE Plasma 6.7 almost ready for release, developers have moved on to working on 6.8, and with that release comes probably one of the biggest deprecations in KDE's history: as of today, the X11 session is gone from KDE. Of course, this change won't make it to people's computers until 6.8 actually releases, but as far the code goes, the X11 session is gone. Once 6.8 is actually released, you will only be able to log into a Wayland KDE session. This won't affect KDE applications running in other X11 desktop environments, and of course, X11 applications will keep working in KDE as well thanks to XWayland. It's also important to note that this won't affect anyone sticking to older versions of KDE Plasma; it's not like X11 session support will be yanked retroactively. From here on out, a lot of X11 code will be removed from KDE, and developers will be able to focus on just one code path, instead of accommodating the lowest common denominator in X11. Our internal metrics within KDE show that over 95% of users of Plasma 6.6 are on Wayland, with a gradual increase every release. The metrics also show that basically no one is testing or developing Plasma on X11 anymore. The platform was already, for all intents and purposes, abandoned by KDE contributors. ↫ David Edmundson The transition from legacy X11 to Wayland has been a long, painful journey, but I'm glad we're finally reaching the destination. If you're still having issues with KDE on Wayland, be sure you're using an up-to-date distribution - not an LTS one - and see how that goes for you.

02 Jun 2026 6:08pm GMT

Yesterday, a slew of Instagram accounts, including some high profile ones like the Obama White House account, seemingly got hacked. Look, I'm no spring chicken. I've spent almost a decade and a half identifying vulnerabilities and exploits at unicorn scale, but this is hands down the most unserious, "almost too stupid to be true" of them all. ↫ Sid at 0xsid.com …it's "AI" isn't it? All the attacker needs to kick this off is your account username. Then, they hop on a VPN or proxy close to your city so Instagram's security algorithms don't suspect a thing. (You can quite easily get this from your public profile or "About" section or a hundred other ways.) Once it looks like the request is coming from the correct region, they tell the Meta support AI that the account is hacked and ask it to send the verification codes to an arbitrary email address they control. ↫ Sid at 0xsid.com It's "AI". Yes, all that you need to do to gain control over big, massively popular Instagram accounts is ask Facebook's "AI" to send the verification codes to whatever email address you desire. That's it. There's no other steps, no other checks, no other verification. And the worst part is that this isn't even a hack; this is "AI" working entirely as intended. And these tools are now coding the Linux kernel, LLVM, systemd, PulseAudio, rsync, your browser, and so much more. What could possibly go wrong?

02 Jun 2026 2:23pm GMT

You're a smart cookie, so you opted to buy a copy of Microsoft Office for macOS back in 2019 or 2021, eschewing the Office 365 subscription, so you could keep on using Office 2019/2021 forever if you wanted to. Just like in the old days. I've got some bad news. Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion (2026) is a scheduled remote degradation of perpetually-licensed Microsoft Office software for macOS and iOS, set for July 13, 2026 when a license-validation certificate used by the Office apps expires. After Office 2019 for Mac reached end of support in October 2023, Microsoft assured customers their installed apps would "continue to function." The July 13, 2026 conversion instead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined "reduced functionality mode," in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved. By May 30, 2026, the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the "continue to function" clause was removed. ↫ Consumer Rights Wiki Microsoft's advice to the users they're stealing from is to keep using the applications as mere viewers, switch to the free Office 365 web applications, pay for a 365 subscription, or buy a brand new regular copy of Office 2024. None of these make any sense, and clearly, all of this should be illegal, but it's not because the software industry is a clown show. Proprietary software is unethical.

01 Jun 2026 5:52pm 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