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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: America's largest power grid is under strain as data centers and AI chatbots consume power faster than new plants can be built. Electricity bills are projected to surge by more than 20% this summer in some parts of PJM Interconnection's territory, which covers 13 states -- from Illinois to Tennessee, Virginia to New Jersey -- serving 67 million customers in a region with the most data centers in the world. The governor of Pennsylvania is threatening to abandon the grid, the CEO has announced his departure and the chair of PJM's board of managers and another board member were voted out. The upheaval at PJM started a year ago with a more than 800% jump in prices at its annual capacity auction. Rising prices out of the auction trickle down to everyday people's power bills. Now PJM is barreling towards its next capacity auction on Wednesday, when prices may rise even further. The auction aims to avoid blackouts by establishing a rate at which generators agree to pump out electricity during the most extreme periods of stress on the grid, usually the hottest and coldest days of the year. High prices out of the auction should spur new power plant construction, but that hasn't happened quickly enough in PJM's region as aging power plants continue to retire and data center demand explodes. PJM has made the situation worse by delaying auctions and pausing the application process for new plants, according to more than a dozen power developers, regulators, energy attorneys and other experts interviewed by Reuters. PJM says the supply and demand crunch has been caused largely by factors outside of its control, including state energy policies that closed fossil-fuel fired power plants prematurely and data center growth in "Data Center Alley" in Northern Virginia and other burgeoning hubs in the Mid-Atlantic. "Prices will remain high as long as demand growth is outstripping supply -- this is a basic economic policy," said PJM spokesman Jeffrey Shields. "Right now, we need every megawatt we can get." New projects totaling about 46 gigawatts -- enough capacity to power 40 million homes -- have been cleared in recent years, "but are not getting built because of local opposition, supply chain backups or financing issues that have nothing to do with PJM," Shields said. PJM has lost more than 5.6 net gigawatts in the last decade as power plants shut faster than new ones enter service, according to a PJM presentation filed with regulators this year. PJM added about 5 gigawatts of power-generating capacity in 2024, fewer than smaller grids in California and Texas. Meanwhile, data center demand is surging. By 2030, PJM expects 32 gigawatts of increased demand on its system, with all but two of those gigawatts coming from data centers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Jul 2025 3:30am GMT

"Max" has officially reverted back to "HBO Max," two years after Warner Bros. Discovery dropped the HBO branding. Variety reports: The switch had been anticipated to take place sometime this summer, but Warner Bros. Discovery hadn't revealed an exact day for the reversal until now. The timing is key: Execs wanted to restore the "HBO Max" name prior to next week's Emmy nominations announcement on July 15. The decision to turn "Max" back into "HBO Max" was first announced in May, timed to Warner Bros. Discovery's upfronts presentation. At the time, WBD said in a press release that "returning the HBO brand into HBO Max will further drive the service forward and amplify the uniqueness that subscribers can expect from the offering. It is also a testament to WBD's willingness to keep boldly iterating its strategy and approach -- leaning heavily on consumer data and insights -- to best position itself for success." The streamer launched as HBO Max in 2020, but then WBD opted to excise HBO from the streamer's name in 2023, changing it to just "Max." (HBO and Max continued to compete under one "HBO/Max" label for industry awards; for next week's Emmy noms, they can once again just be called "HBO Max.") The streaming giant put out a marketing spot announcing that the change was done.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Jul 2025 2:02am GMT

"Honored to accept this mission. Time to take over space. Let's launch."

10 Jul 2025 1:32am GMT

Over 240 browser extensions with nearly a million total installs have been covertly turning users' browsers into web-scraping bots. "The extensions serve a wide range of purposes, including managing bookmarks and clipboards, boosting speaker volumes, and generating random numbers," reports Ars Technica. "The common thread among all of them: They incorporate MellowTel-js, an open source JavaScript library that allows developers to monetize their extensions." Ars Technica reports: Some of the data swept up in the collection free-for-all included surveillance videos hosted on Nest, tax returns, billing invoices, business documents, and presentation slides posted to, or hosted on, Microsoft OneDrive and Intuit.com, vehicle identification numbers of recently bought automobiles along with the names and addresses of the buyers, patient names and the doctors they saw, travel itineraries hosted on Priceline, Booking.com, and airline websites, Facebook Messenger attachments and Facebook photos, even when the photos were set to be private. The dragnet also collected proprietary information belonging to Tesla, Blue Origin, Amgen, Merck, Pfizer, Roche, and dozens of other companies. Tuckner said in an email Wednesday that the most recent status of the affected extensions is: - Of 45 known Chrome extensions, 12 are now inactive. Some of the extensions were removed for malware explicitly. Others have removed the library. - Of 129 Edge extensions incorporating the library, eight are now inactive. - Of 71 affected Firefox extensions, two are now inactive. Some of the inactive extensions were removed for malware explicitly. Others have removed the library in more recent updates. A complete list of extensions found by Tuckner is here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Jul 2025 1:25am GMT

The year is 2013 and I am hopping mad. systemd is replacing my plaintext logs with a binary format and pumping steroids into init and it is laughing at me. The unix philosophy cries out: is this the end of Linux (or, as many are calling it, GNU plus Linux)? The year is 2025 and I'm here to repent. Not only is systemd a worthy successor to traditional init, but I think that it deserves a defense for what it's done for the landscape - especially given the hostile reception it initially received (and somehow continues to receive? for some reason?). No software is perfect - except for TempleOS - but I think that systemd has largely been a success story and proven many dire forecasts wrong (including my own). I was wrong! ↫ Tyler Langlois The article goes into detail on a number of awesome features, niceties, and clever things systemd has, and they're legion. Even as a mere user, I like systemd, as every time I have had to or wanted to interact with it, it's been a joy to use, with excellent documentation making it remarkably easy even for someone like me to get into it without doing any damage or breaking anything. Every time I read up on system'd more advanced features, I'm surprised by how well thought out and implemented it all seems to be. I've experienced several major leaps forward in the Linux world that made using Linux on my computers easier and more reliable, and the adoption of systemd stands among them as one of the biggest leaps forward desktop Linux has ever made. The idea of going back to a random piles of non-standardized init scripts with nebulous dependencies from varying sources and wildly different levels of quality seems like a complete nightmare to me. There's a lot of charm in doing things 'the old way', and I'm not saying you're wrong for wanting an init system that tries to do less, or that's easier to read and parse for you, or whatever, but that doesn't mean systemd is bad, evil, or part of a Red Hat conspiracy to kill Linux.

09 Jul 2025 10:28pm GMT

Soundslice caught OpenAI's bot telling users about a fake music notation feature-then built it.

09 Jul 2025 9:59pm GMT

In Chrome, Skia is used to render paint commands from Blink and the browser UI into pixels on your screen, a process called rasterization. Skia has powered Chrome Graphics since the very beginning. Skia eventually ran into performance issues as the web evolved and became more complex, which led Chrome and Skia to invest in a GPU accelerated rasterization backend called Ganesh. Over the years, Ganesh matured into a solid highly performant rasterization backend and GPU rasterization launched on all platforms in Chrome on top of GL (via ANGLE on Windows D3D9/11). However, Ganesh always had a GL-centric design with too many specialized code paths and the team was hitting a wall when trying to implement optimizations that took advantage of modern graphics APIs in a principled manner. This set the stage for the team to rethink GPU rasterization from the ground up in the form of a new rasterization backend, Graphite. Graphite was developed from the start to be principled by having fewer and more comprehensible code paths. This forward looking design helps take advantage of modern graphics APIs like Metal, Vulkan and D3D12 and paradigms like compute based path rasterization, and is multithreaded by default. ↫ Michael Ludwig and Sunny Sachanandani at the Chromium Blog The level of complexity in browsers and their rendering engines blows my mind every time I read about it. When I first got access to the internet, it consisted of static pages with text and still images, but now browser engines are almost as complex as entire operating systems. Not all of that progress has been good - boy has a lot of it not been good - but we're stuck with it now, and thus people making browsers have to deal with stuff like this. If you ever wonder why there really only are two browser engines in the world - Google's Blink and Apple's WebKit - this is your answer. Who in their right mind wants to develop something like this from scratch and compete with Google and Apple?

09 Jul 2025 9:48pm GMT

GlobalFoundries today announced a definitive agreement to acquire MIPS, a leading supplier of AI and processor IP. This strategic acquisition will expand GF's portfolio of customizable IP offerings, allowing it to further differentiate its process technologies with IP and software capabilities. ↫ Press release about the acquisition MIPS has a long and storied history, most recently as it abandoned its namesake instruction set architecture in favour of RISC-V. MIPS processors are still found in a ton of devices though, but usually not in high-profile devices like smartphones or whatever. Their new RISC-V cores haven't yet seen a lot of uptake, but that's a problem all across the RISC-V ecosystem.

09 Jul 2025 9:03pm GMT

Cloudflare pushes Google to separate bots for AI Overviews and search indexing.

09 Jul 2025 9:00pm GMT

With 20250613.12fe085f-5, we split our firmware into several vendor-focused packages. linux-firmware is now an empty package depending on our default set of firmware. Unfortunately, this coincided with upstream reorganizing the symlink layout of the NVIDIA firmware, resulting in a situation that Pacman cannot handle. When attempting to upgrade from 20250508.788aadc8-2 or earlier, you will see the following errors: linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad103 exists in filesystem linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad104 exists in filesystem linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad106 exists in filesystem linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad107 exists in filesystem To progress with the system upgrade, first remove linux-firmware, then reinstall it as part of the upgrade: # pacman -Rdd linux-firmware # pacman -Syu linux-firmware

21 Jun 2025 12:00am GMT

On Plasma 6.4 the wayland session will be the only one installed when the users does not manually specify kwin-x11. With the recent split of kwin into kwin-wayland and kwin-x11, users running the old X11 session needs to manually install plasma-x11-session, or they will not be able to login. Currently pacman is not able to figure out your personal setup, and it wouldn't be ok to install plasma-x11-session and kwin-x11 for every one using Plasma. tldr: Install plasma-x11-session if you are still using x11

20 Jun 2025 12:00am GMT

We are transitioning the wine and wine-staging package to a pure wow64 build. This change removes the dependency on the multilib repository for wine and wine-staging. The main reason for this is to align with upstream Wine development, which simplifies packaging and the dependency chain. Potential Issues:

• OpenGL Performance: A known limitation of the new WoW64 mode is reduced performance for 32-bit applications that use OpenGL directly
• Breaking Changes: Existing 32-bit prefixes needs to be recreated

If you are facing issues with 32 bit prefixes, please recreate these and reinstall the application.

16 Jun 2025 12:00am GMT