25 May 2026
Hacker News
Jony Ive's Ferrari
25 May 2026 9:00pm GMT
Yoti age checks share facial photos and device fingerprints with third parties
25 May 2026 8:30pm GMT
Japan's New Hypersonic Engine Could Make 2-Hour Flights to the US a Reality
25 May 2026 7:43pm GMT
Linuxiac
KernelScript 0.1 Debuts as a New Language for eBPF Development

KernelScript 0.1 introduces an experimental type-safe DSL for writing eBPF, userspace, and kernelspace code from one codebase.
25 May 2026 6:56pm GMT
Slashdot
SpaceX Launches 29 Starlink Satellites on Memorial Day
"The expansion of SpaceX's Starlink network of internet relay satellites continued Monday with a Memorial Day launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station," reports Spaceflight Now. The mission added another 29 Starlink satellites to more than 10,000 already in low Earth orbit: This was SpaceX's 60th orbital flight of the year, consisting of 59 Falcon 9 rockets and one Falcon Heavy rocket... Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, [Falcon 9 first stage] B1078 landed on the drone ship, 'A Shortfall of Gravitas,' positioned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina. This was the 151st landing for this vessel and the 614th booster landing to date for SpaceX. Meanwhile, the second stage shut down eight minutes and 39 seconds into flight and entered a coast phase, before short second burn at T+52 minutes. The stack of Starlink satellites deployed 61 minutes and 26 seconds after launch. On X.com SpaceX shared footage of the booster rocket landing, and a longer video showing Starship's 12th test flight Friday.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
25 May 2026 5:10pm GMT
Linuxiac
Sway 1.12 Wayland Compositor Released with HDR10 and Window Capture

Sway 1.12 lands with HDR10 support via the Vulkan renderer, individual window capture, wlroots 0.20, and new Wayland protocols.
25 May 2026 5:06pm GMT
AppGrid 1.8 KDE Plasma Launcher Adds Smarter Search

AppGrid 1.8 updates the KDE Plasma 6 launcher with rewritten favorites, drag-and-drop support, smarter search, and deeper Plasma integration.
25 May 2026 4:44pm GMT
Ars Technica
US's big bet on quantum computing may not be entirely legal
Deal also launched the first quantum foundry company, but is there a need for it?
25 May 2026 12:00pm GMT
Slashdot
Will Big Tech Layoffs Bring a Culture Shift to Anxiety and Job Insecurity?
Tech industry layoffs may be worse at large tech companies than the rest of the IT industry. The New York Times argues those layoffs have now shifted the culture at Big Tech companies, after interviewing more than two dozen of their workers. "Cooperation and collegiality are on the wane; chumminess between employees and managers has cooled as mutual suspicion pervades their relationships; and a throbbing economic anxiety infects almost every conversation. "Perhaps no site on the internet reflects this transformation more vividly than Blind, where users can post in private channels restricted to employees of a single company, or public channels visible to anyone..." Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence has loomed over those who remain. This year alone, Amazon has indicated that it is laying off more than 15,000 workers, Block 4,000, Meta 8,000 and Oracle an estimated 30,000... By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before tech companies began major layoffs in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success - topics like how to maximize their salary or win promotions - more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind. Since then, the ratios have lurched in the opposite direction: Meta and Microsoft employees have posted about job insecurity roughly 1.5 times as often as they post about success... The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee said in an interview that some workers on her team now used less vacation time and that, in a break with custom, people frequently checked on their projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about getting a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren't constantly available. The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many of her colleagues frequently checked Blind because it could be comforting to see how many other Meta workers shared their anxieties. Employees at several companies said in interviews that their morale was further undermined by the feeling that the layoffs were abrupt and arbitrary, and executed with little empathy. Several tech workers said it was the scarcity of information about possible layoffs that raised their cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on their jobs. They often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which, in addition to posts by workers, features a "tech layoff tracker" that lists both layoff rumors and those it has confirmed. "I was on Blind five days a week," said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March, after more than four years at the company. Wilkins El, who is part of the Oracle Workers Collective, a group seeking better severance agreements with the company, said navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. (Blind says it has a security team to weed out bad actors, like those who may try to register under fake email addresses.) Still, she found it more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. "I was trying to get prepared mentally," she said. Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers' reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
25 May 2026 11:34am GMT
Ars Technica
I spent years forcing myself to finish The Witcher 3—don't repeat my mistake
Consensus and genre labels aren't reliable predictors of what you'll enjoy.
25 May 2026 11:22am GMT
Slashdot
It's Like the Olympics - But Steroids Are Allowed
"Think Olympics on steroids. Literally," quips the BBC, describing Sunday's controversial Enhanced Games event in Las Vegas featuring dozens of athletes "using performance-enhancing drugs to try and break world records in track, weightlifting and swimming. Some $25m (£18.6m) in prize money is up for grabs - with cash prizes for winners... The drugs they use must be legal, and approved by the Federal Drug Administration. But substances like testosterone and human growth hormone - banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency - are not only celebrated here, they're encouraged and for sale... Health experts warn that anabolic steroids and growth hormones can cause strokes and cardiovascular damage, among other risks. Event organisers claim Enhanced will push the limits of human performance while critics, especially in the Olympic movement, dismiss it as an affront to the spirit and founding principles of competitive sport... Earlier this month, the Enhanced Group - the company behind the competition - began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. And the competition is seemingly being treated as an opportunity for Enhanced to sell performance-enhancing medicine and supplements online. "The project was founded by entrepreneurs Aron D'Souza and Maximilian Martin in 2023," the artidcle points out, "and has attracted backing from prominent investors including billionaire Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr." And NPR adds that "Most of the participating athletes trained for the competition in Abu Dhabi, as part of Enhanced's own study." Enhanced did not break down what specific athletes used which drugs, but they announced on Wednesday in the lead-up to the event that 91% of the athletes competing used testosterone or testosterone esters, 79% used human growth hormone, and 62% used stimulants, such as adderall... The games have been largely panned by outside medical experts and sports governing bodies. Multiple recent studies assess the harm surrounding the Enhanced Games. Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, called the games a "dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle" in a statement. The International Olympic Committee said the games are a "betrayal of everything that we stand for." The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) last year urged U.S. authorities to stop the games. The International Federation of Sports Medicine said in 2024 that they see the medical oversight as "insufficient" to support the athletes.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
25 May 2026 7:34am GMT
24 May 2026
Ars Technica
Whatever the mirror test tells us, beluga whales pass it
The white whales join the short, contested list of animals that see themselves.
24 May 2026 11:15am GMT