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15 Mar 2026 10:47am GMT

While AI CEOs worry governments might nationalize AI, others are advocating for something similar. Canadian security professional Bruce Schneier and Harvard data scientist Nathan Sanders published this call to action in Canada's most widely-read newspaper (with a readership over 6 million): "Canada Needs Nationalized, Public AI." While there are Canadian AI companies, they remain for-profit enterprises, their interests not necessarily aligned with our collective good. The only real alternative is to be bold and invest in a wholly Canadian public AI: an AI model built and funded by Canada for Canadians, as public infrastructure. This would give Canadians access to the myriad of benefits from AI without having to depend on the U.S. or other countries. It would mean Canadian universities and public agencies building and operating AI models optimized not for global scale and corporate profit, but for practical use by Canadians... We are already on our way to having AI become an inextricable part of society. To ensure stability and prosperity for this country, Canadian users and developers must be able to turn to AI models built, controlled, and operated publicly in Canada instead of building on corporate platforms, American or otherwise... [Switzerland's funding of a public AI model, Apertus] represents precisely the paradigm shift Canada should embrace: AI as public infrastructure, like systems for transportation, water, or electricity, rather than private commodity... Public AI systems can incorporate mechanisms for genuine public input and democratic oversight on critical ethical questions: how to handle copyrighted works in training data, how to mitigate bias, how to distribute access when demand outstrips capacity, and how to license use for sensitive applications like policing or medicine... Canada already has many of the building blocks for public AI. The country has world-class AI research institutions, including the Vector Institute, Mila, and CIFAR, which pioneered much of the deep learning revolution. Canada's $2-billion Sovereign AI Compute Strategy provides substantial funding. What's needed now is a reorientation away from viewing this as an opportunity to attract private capital, and toward a fully open public AI model. Long-time Slashdot reader sinij has a different opinion. "To me, this sounds dystopian, because I can also imagine AI declining your permits, renewal of license, or medication due to misalignment or 'greater good' reasons." But the Schneier/Sanders essays argues this creates "an alternative ownership structure for AI technology" that is allocating decision-making authority and value "to national public institutions rather than foreign corporations."

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15 Mar 2026 10:34am GMT

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15 Mar 2026 10:15am GMT

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15 Mar 2026 9:06am GMT

Wikipedia describes Freenet as "a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication," released in the year 2000. "Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke," Wikipedia adds. (And in 2000 Clarke answered questions from Slashdot's readers...) And now Ian Clarke (aka Sanity - Slashdot reader #1,431) returns to share this announcement: Freenet's new generation peer-to-peer network is now operational, along with the first application built on the network: a decentralized group chat system called River. The new version is a complete redesign of the original project, focusing on real-time decentralized applications rather than static content distribution. Applications run as WebAssembly-based contracts across a small-world peer network, allowing software to operate directly on the network without centralized infrastructure. An introductory video demonstrating the system is available on YouTube. "While the original Freenet was like a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a full decentralized computer," Clarke wrote in 2023, "allowing the creation of entirely decentralized services like messaging, group chat, search, social networking, among others... designed for efficiency, flexibility, and transparency to the end user." "Freenet 2023 can be used seamlessly through your web browser, providing an experience that feels just like using the traditional web,"

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15 Mar 2026 7:34am GMT

Long-time tech journalist Clive Thompson interviewed over 70 software developers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and start-ups for a new article on AI-assisted programming. It's title? "Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It." Published in the prestigious New York Times Magazine, the article even cites long-time programming guru Kent Beck saying LLMs got him going again and he's now finishing more projects than ever, calling AI's unpredictability "addictive, in a slot-machine way." In fact, the article concludes "many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they're doing is deeply, deeply weird..." Brennan-Burke chimed in: "You remember seeing the research that showed the more rude you were to models, the better they performed?" They chuckled. Computer programming has been through many changes in its 80-year history. But this may be the strangest one yet: It is now becoming a conversation, a back-and-forth talk fest between software developers and their bots... For decades, being a software developer meant mastering coding languages, but now a language technology itself is upending the very nature of the job... A coder is now more like an architect than a construction worker... Several programmers told me they felt a bit like Steve Jobs, who famously had his staffers churn out prototypes so he could handle lots of them and settle on what felt right. The work of a developer is now more judging than creating... If you want to put a number on how much more productive A.I. is making the programmers at mature tech firms like Google, it's 10 percent, Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, has said. That's the bump that Google has seen in "engineering velocity" - how much faster its more than 100,000 software developers are able to work. And that 10 percent is the average inside the company, Ryan Salva, a senior director of product at the company, told me. Some work, like writing a simple test, is now tens of times faster. Major changes are slower. At the start-ups whose founders I spoke to, closer to 100 percent of their code is being written by A.I., but at Google it is not quite 50 percent. The article cites a senior principal engineer at Amazon who says "Things I've always wanted to do now only take a six-minute conversation and a 'Go do that." Another programmer described their army of Claude agents as "an alien intelligence that we're learning to work with." Although "A.I. being A.I., things occasionally go haywire," the article acknowledges - and after relying on AI, "Some new developers told me they can feel their skills weakening." Still, "I was surprised by how many software developers told me they were happy to no longer write code by hand. Most said they still feel the jolt of success, even with A.I. writing the lines... " A few programmers did say that they lamented the demise of hand-crafting their work. "I believe that it can be fun and fulfilling and engaging, and having the computer do it for you strips you of that," one Apple engineer told me. (He asked to remain unnamed so he wouldn't get in trouble for criticizing Apple's embrace of A.I.) He went on: "I didn't do it to make a lot of money and to excel in the career ladder. I did it because it's my passion. I don't want to outsource that passion"... But only a few people at Apple openly share his dimmer views, he said. The coders who still actively avoid A.I. may be in the minority, but their opposition is intense. Some dislike how much energy it takes to train and deploy the models, and others object to how they were trained by tech firms pillaging copyrighted works. There is suspicion that the sheer speed of A.I.'s output means firms will wind up with mountains of flabbily written code that won't perform well. The tech bosses might use agents as a cudgel: Don't get uppity at work - we could replace you with a bot. And critics think it is a terrible idea for developers to become reliant on A.I. produced by a small coterie of tech giants. Thomas Ptacek, a Chicago-based developer and a co-founder of the tech firm Fly.io... thinks the refuseniks are deluding themselves when they claim that A.I. doesn't work well and that it can't work well... The holdouts are in the minority, and "you can watch the five stages of grief playing out." "How things will shake out for professional coders themselves isn't yet clear," the article concludes. "But their mix of exhilaration and anxiety may be a preview for workers in other fields... Abstraction may be coming for us all."

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15 Mar 2026 3:34am GMT

GIMP 3.2 is now available, featuring non-destructive layers, vector layer support, new brushes, enhanced text editing, and broader file format compatibility.

14 Mar 2026 6:46pm GMT

OpenRazer 3.12 adds support for several new Razer devices on Linux, including BlackWidow V4 TKL HyperSpeed, Huntsman V3 Pro Mini, and more.

14 Mar 2026 3:17pm GMT

Debian 13 "Trixie" receives its fourth refresh (13.4), featuring 111 bug fixes and 67 security updates. Here's more on that.

14 Mar 2026 2:38pm GMT

Staff complain that the constant upheaval is destroying morale.

14 Mar 2026 7:14am GMT

"This ought to make for some good reading," NASA's mission management team chair said.

14 Mar 2026 12:17am GMT

She made a full recovery, despite the maggots.

13 Mar 2026 10:38pm GMT