09 Feb 2026
Slashdot
OpenAI Starts Running Ads in ChatGPT
OpenAI has started testing ads inside ChatGPT for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers in the United States, the company said. The Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education tiers remain ad-free. Ads are matched to users based on conversation topics, past chats, and prior ad interactions, and appear clearly labeled as "sponsored" and visually separated from ChatGPT's organic responses. OpenAI says the ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers, and advertisers receive only aggregate performance data like view and click counts rather than access to individual conversations. Users under 18 do not see ads, and ads are excluded from sensitive topics such as health, mental health, and politics. Free-tier users can opt out of ads in exchange for fewer daily messages. Further reading: Anthropic Pledges To Keep Claude Ad-free, Calls AI Conversations a 'Space To Think'.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
09 Feb 2026 9:00pm GMT
Hacker News
America has a tungsten problem
09 Feb 2026 8:49pm GMT
Super Bowl Ad for Ring Cameras Touted AI Surveillance Network
09 Feb 2026 8:41pm GMT
Ars Technica
Google locks YouTube Music lyrics behind paywall
After a lengthy test, YouTube Music is making lyrics a premium feature.
09 Feb 2026 8:40pm GMT
Hacker News
Upcoming changes to Let's Encrypt and how they affect XMPP server operators
09 Feb 2026 8:31pm GMT
Ars Technica
Trump FCC investigates The View, reportedly says "fake news" will be punished
FCC recently issued equal-time warning to late-night and daytime talk shows.
09 Feb 2026 8:27pm GMT
Slashdot
Sixteen AI Agents Built a C Compiler From Scratch
Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini set 16 instances of Claude Opus 4.6 loose on a shared codebase over two weeks to build a C compiler from scratch, and the AI agents produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM and RISC-V architectures. The project ran through nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and cost about $20,000 in API fees. Each instance operated inside its own Docker container, independently claiming tasks via lock files and pushing completed code to a shared Git repository. No orchestration agent directed traffic. The compiler achieved a 99% pass rate on the GCC torture test suite and can compile major open source projects including PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, FFmpeg and Doom. But it lacks a 16-bit x86 backend and calls out to GCC for that step, its assembler and linker remain buggy, and it produces less efficient code than GCC running with all optimizations disabled. Carlini also invested significant effort building test harnesses and feedback systems to keep the agents productive, and the model hit a practical ceiling at around 100,000 lines as bug fixes and new features frequently broke existing functionality.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
09 Feb 2026 8:00pm GMT
Ars Technica
Discord faces backlash over age checks after data breach exposed 70,000 IDs
Discord to block adult content unless users verify ages with selfies or IDs.
09 Feb 2026 7:39pm GMT
Slashdot
Romance Publishing Has an AI Problem and Most Readers Don't Know It Yet
The romance genre -- long the publishing industry's earliest adopter of technological shifts, from e-books to self-publishing to serial releases -- has become the front line for AI-generated fiction, and the results as you can imagine are messy. Coral Hart, a Cape Town-based novelist previously published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon, produced more than 200 AI-assisted romance novels last year and self-published them on Amazon, where they collectively sold around 50,000 copies. She found Anthropic's Claude delivered the most elegant prose but was terrible at sexy banter; other programs like Grok and NovelAI wrote graphic scenes that felt rushed and mechanical. Chatbots struggled broadly to build the slow-burn sexual tension romance readers crave, she said. A BookBub survey of more than 1,200 authors found roughly a third were using generative AI for plotting, outlining, or writing, and the majority did not disclose this to readers. Romance accounts for more than 20% of all adult fiction print sales, according to Circana BookScan, and the genre's reliance on familiar tropes and narrative formulas makes it especially susceptible to AI disruption.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
09 Feb 2026 7:01pm GMT
Linuxiac
Decman Is a Declarative Package and Configuration Manager for Arch Linux

Decman provides a declarative way to manage Arch Linux systems, ensuring installed packages and configuration match a defined state.
09 Feb 2026 4:30pm GMT
GNU Binutils 2.46 Released With AMD Zen 6 and Arm v9.7 Support

GNU Binutils 2.46 adds support for AMD Zen 6 processors and Arm v9.7, expanding toolchain readiness for upcoming CPU architectures.
09 Feb 2026 2:34pm GMT
Kdenlive 25.12.2 Delivers Monitor Fixes and Dragging Refactor

Kdenlive 25.12.2 open-source video editor, is now available with new stability fixes, better monitor performance, and workflow improvements.
09 Feb 2026 1:34pm GMT