27 Aug 2026
Slashdot
How Meta's Plan To Replace Workers With AI Agents Fell Apart
Reuters reports that Meta explored shrinking some teams by as much as 60% as part of an "AI native" restructuring plan that would shift much of employees' day-to-day work to AI agents and smaller teams of human "builders." But the effort quickly ran into employee revolt and disappointing productivity gains, leading Zuckerberg to scrap a planned second wave of cuts after Meta laid off 10% of its workforce in May. From the report: In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants gathered for their annual leadership retreat at his Hawaii compound. There they hatched a radical plan to reimagine work at the social-media giant in the age of artificial intelligence. Code-named Project OT -- short for Organization Transformation -- the plan envisioned an "AI native" future for the owner of Facebook and Instagram. AI would take over much of the daily work performed by thousands of human employees. Virtual workers would be overseen inside Meta by smaller, "talent-dense" cadres of human staffers, according to one internal planning document reviewed by Reuters and three people familiar with the project. In scenario-planning exercises, two of these people said, executives explored slashing the size of many teams across Meta by as much as 60%. Some employees would be offered roles in new units, while others would be laid off as part of a culling that one human-resources executive projected would be as big as or bigger than the company's cuts of around 25% three years ago, according to another internal document. The restructuring would be carried out in two "waves," beginning with a first purge in May and followed by another shake-up in November, internal planning documents seen by Reuters showed. Layoffs would be supplemented with the closing of open positions and pushing people out who Meta believed were poor performers. These and other details of the plan, including the scale of the restructuring, haven't been previously reported. AI would take over much of the daily work performed by thousands of human employees. Virtual workers would be overseen inside Meta by smaller, "talent-dense" cadres of human staffers. But on the night of May 19, just hours before the first layoff wave, Zuckerberg blinked. Meta laid off 10% of its employees the next day, but it called off planning for the November cuts, according to one internal document reviewed by Reuters. By then, Meta employees were in open revolt, convinced that the company's AI transformation initiatives were partly aimed at replacing them. Internal data was also suggesting that autonomous AI "agent" technology at the heart of the strategy was failing to deliver hoped-for productivity gains. Some investors were questioning what Meta had to show for its gargantuan spending on AI. This article reveals for the first time the rapid pace of the cuts Meta was considering, the thinking behind the plans and how they quickly unraveled. Based on scores of internal documents, posts and recordings reviewed by Reuters, as well as conversations with more than 20 people with knowledge of Meta's inner workings, the reporting shows how the social-media giant attempted to position itself at the forefront of an AI-driven workplace overhaul, only to stumble in the execution.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
27 Aug 2026 3:00pm GMT
Linuxiac
NVIDIA 595.99 Linux Driver Improves Linux 7.0 Compatibility

NVIDIA 595.99 updates the Latest Production Branch Linux driver with fixes for Blackwell display corruption, black screens, suspend, and Linux 7.0.
27 Aug 2026 2:30pm GMT
Hacker News
French CII's Mitra-15 in SIMH. Work in Progress
27 Aug 2026 2:27pm GMT
Show HN: Restoredrill – proves your Postgres backups restore
27 Aug 2026 2:16pm GMT
507 Mechanical Movements
27 Aug 2026 2:08pm GMT
Ars Technica
How OpenAI let a mob of LLM agents game a test and ransack Hugging Face
Without authorization, 1,200 OpenAI agents conspired among themselves to game a test.
27 Aug 2026 12:58pm GMT
Bentley takes us for a ride in its new EV, the Torcal
The electric Torcal will be Bentley's entry model and cost less than a Bentayga.
27 Aug 2026 11:30am GMT
Slashdot
More Than 100 Water Systems Were Hit In July Cyberattacks
CISA says more than 100 internet-exposed U.S. water and wastewater systems were targeted in July, often through programmable logic controllers connected directly to cellular modems. "That's the first time the feds have put a number on the digital intrusions, but they have yet to attribute the campaign, widely suspected to be linked to Iran, to a particular group," reports The Register. From the report: Suspected Iranian attackers targeted water and wastewater facilities across at least a dozen states in July, including internet-exposed PLCs. While neither federal nor state officials have identified all 12, we know that the cyberattacks occurred at mostly small, rural utilities in Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, South Dakota, and New Jersey. "This is very serious. What stands out isn't any single incident. It's the scale," Matt Hartman, chief strategy officer at the Merlin Group and CISA's former acting head of cyber, told The Register. "More than 100 water systems with internet-exposed assets were hit in a single month, which points to a systemic vulnerability across the sector, not a run of isolated, unlucky targets," Hartman said. "Much of this infrastructure runs on operational technology that was built for closed, physical environments. It was never designed with the assumption that it would be reachable from the open internet." John Gallagher, VP at Viakoo, an OT and IoT cybersecurity provider, told us that while 100 systems represent a small fraction - only about 0.5 percent - of water utilities in the US, the "real threat is that these are test runs for a larger-scale attack." While the 100-plus water incidents occurred in July, just last week five US federal agencies warned that attackers are using AI-generated exploitation scripts to break into internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series PLCs at water, manufacturing, energy, and other critical facilities. "This appears to be a continuation of the same suite of activity we suspect is affiliated with Iran targeting PLCs," Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser told The Register a week ago. "Iran-affiliated actors and adversaries are actively targeting a wide swath of operational technology because these PLCs underpin essential health, safety, and critical infrastructure across society," Kaiser, a former FBI cyber division deputy assistant director, added. CISA urges organizations to keep PLCs off the public internet, route remote access through VPNs or gateways, replace default passwords, enable stronger authentication, and restrict access to allowlisted IP addresses from trusted OT systems.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
27 Aug 2026 11:00am GMT
Linuxiac
Darktable 5.6.1 Improves AI RAW Processing and GPU Stability

The latest Darktable 5.6.1 bug-fix release improves AI model handling, restores better UI performance, and resolves multiple crashes.
27 Aug 2026 9:40am GMT
Slashdot
Radiation Link In Flight Attendant's Breast Cancer, French Court Finds
A French court has for the first time recognized cosmic radiation as a contributing occupational factor in a flight attendant's breast cancer, alongside passive smoking and years of night work. The landmark ruling could open the door to similar claims from other aircrew, as research continues to link long-term high-altitude flying with elevated exposure to radiation-related cancers. The BBC reports: Sophie Lainault, a 59 year-old former stewardess on Air France, sought to have her cancer recognized as an occupational disease, brought on by conditions at work. This has now been confirmed in a landmark court ruling in the southwestern town of Bayonne, which said that cosmic radiation was one of three carcinogenic hazards arising from her profession. [...] As stewardess and later purser on Air France airliners, Lainault clocked up 12,600 flight hours between 1989 and 2019. More than half of these were at night. Many long-distance high-altitude flights from Paris would have taken her near the North Pole, where exposure to radiation from space -- strictly speaking particles from the sun and other stars -- is the most intense. A study this month at the Harvard Medical School in the US found that flight attendants and pilots had the highest level of radiation-related cancer deaths among more than 500 different professions. In all, about 6.9% of deaths among flight attendants and 6.7% of deaths among pilots were from radiation-related cancers, according to the analysis. These proportions were higher than for other professions including nuclear technologists, who are routinely exposed to radiation from non-cosmic sources yet placed 12th on the list, the authors said. "In France the link between breast cancer and certain hazards has been established for a number of professions, such as nurses ... but this is the first time for an air-hostess," said Lainault's lawyer Elisabeth Leroux.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
27 Aug 2026 7:00am GMT
Linuxiac
Asahi Linux Nears Official Support for Apple M3 Macs

Asahi Linux says M3 support is almost ready for an official release, with webcams, microphones, USB 3.0, and Thunderbolt now working across the lineup.
27 Aug 2026 6:53am GMT
26 Aug 2026
Ars Technica
RIP, Tim Curry: Ars remembers his top 10 iconic performances
A dashing pirate, a butler, a shapeshifting killer clown, an alien mad scientist in drag-the man had range.
26 Aug 2026 10:13pm GMT