fidzu : nerd

The Washington Post describes a mid-tier executive at Meta as one of Silicon Valley's "winners" whose financial security suddenly "evaporated" as their workforce "pushed headlong into AI and heavy job cuts," creating a transformed job market. "Her ex-husband, a designer at Meta who was laid off in 2020, eventually gave up looking for jobs in his profession. He now lifts boxes at a warehouse." Layoffs.fyi, which tracks announced job cuts, counts more than 800,000 tech workers laid off since 2022, including large staff reductions in recent months at Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon... "There's this whole tranche of people who've been quite used to being among the most upwardly mobile in society who are all of a sudden saying, 'Now I'm the guy on the streetâs'" said Oliver Raskin, who founded Silicon Valley market research consultancy Signalcraft Insights and has surveyed attitudes in the tech labor force... "The rise of AI, especially, is bound to change the workplace radically," [said Georgetown University historian Joseph McCartin]. "But the way it's going to happen is similar to how technology transformed the auto industry." Ruth Milkman, a labor sociologist at the City University of New York, said that technology workers are getting a dose of what workers in other industries have long complained about: jobs that feel unsteady or rob them of autonomy. "Low-wage workers are used to it," she said... Many layoffs at technology companies are probably a hangover effect from over-hiring in prior years, experts say. And they don't account for a spotty recent increase in hiring in the information industry, which includes employment of software developers and jobs in media and entertainment. Digging deeper, though, some economists say there are signs that Silicon Valley and other technology-reliant parts of the American economy have reached a turning point where they are growing without needing as many people. The notion was encapsulated in a recent talk that ricocheted through group chats across the tech industry: In it, a partner at the start-up incubator Y Combinator heralded a new generation of AI-first companies that will only need human labor for "novel situations," "ethical considerations" and "high-stakes moments." Gad Levanon, chief economist at the labor research nonprofit Burning Glass Institute, said that the number of hours worked in the information sector has dipped since 2022, while the sector's economic output has increased by about 8 percent a year - more than three times the overall growth rate of the U.S. economy. He says the data reveals a sea change in industries, including technology and finance, toward doing more work with the same or fewer people - one that is spreading to other professional classes. "That's the new reality for white-collar and tech-exposed work: output up, headcount flat or down," Levanon said... Raskin, who has worked in the tech world since the late '90s, said that even though the current moment feels unsettling to many, he's hopeful that it's an early chapter in an evolving story. "It's happened many times before," he said, "that something implodes and all these people lose jobs, but then that talent gets cycled into whatever the next thing is - into a new wave of prosperity." In the article tech entrepreneur Anil Dash quips that Silicon Valley techies are "are guinea pigs for what tech dudes want to do to everyone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

20 Jul 2026 2:15am GMT

An anonymous reader shared this report from Tom's Hardware: The Zilog Z80 has just turned 50 years old. This iconic 8-bit processor first went on sale in July 1976 and stayed in production for 48 years until Zilog, now a Littelfuse subsidiary, stopped accepting orders in June 2024. However, there's an open-source replacement closer than ever to shipping in the chip's original 40-pin DIP package thanks to community-funded fabrication... The chip powered the ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, MSX machines, Nintendo's Game Boy, Sega's Master System, the Pac-Man arcade cabinet, and Texas Instruments' graphing calculators, then shipped in industrial controllers for decades after home computing moved on to more powerful successors. Zilog's end-of-life notice, dated April 15, 2024, told customers its wafer foundry was discontinuing support for the Z84C00 family, and last-time-buy orders closed that June. However, Renaldas Zioma's FOSS Z80 project, launched shortly after the end-of-life notice, now has working silicon. The first version, fabbed on SkyWater's 130nm node through Tiny Tapeout 7 on a die of just 0.064mm(2), has been confirmed as functional via the project's GitHub repository. A QFN64 version with all 40 pins exposed followed on the Efabless CI2406 shuttle, two further runs then went through IHP's 130nm process, and the current run targets the classic DIP40 form factor using chip-on-board assembly on GlobalFoundries' 180nm GF180MCU node via Wafer.Space. The end goal here is to fab a drop-in replacement for machines like the ZX Spectrum and RC2014 kits... Zilog is trimming the Z80's official successor line as well. A product change notification from last October put the eZ80L92, along with several Z8F-series microcontrollers, on end-of-life, citing "little to no demand..." [T]he pipelined eZ80 architecture, introduced in 2001 and still inside TI's current TI-84 Plus CE calculators, otherwise remains in Zilog's catalog. In 1999 Slashdot was calling Zilog's updated eZ80 "one of the fastest 8-bit CPUs available today, executing code 4 times faster than a standard Z80 operating at the same clock speed." Slashdot headline from 2001: Zilog To File For Chapter 11.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

20 Jul 2026 12:50am GMT

Comments

20 Jul 2026 12:16am GMT

"If tired or wasted passengers fall asleep in a traditional taxi or rideshare, the driver can shout or shake them awake," reports Bloomberg. "Not so in a robotaxi..." Ditto Kasendar remembers soft music drifting from the robotaxi's speakers as he rode home late at night from a friend's birthday party in 2025. The next moment, Los Angeles firefighters were opening the door and asking if he was OK. His six-minute trip had ended nearly an hour before. A remote Waymo assistant, dialling in through the car's speakers, repeatedly tried to rouse him and finally called 911 when he wouldn't stir... Kasendar's robocab nap was, unfortunately, not an isolated incident. As companies like Alphabet and Tesla bring self-driving taxis to more cities, the messier aspects of serving unpredictable humans are becoming harder to ignore. Passengers are falling asleep, spilling drinks, dropping food, vomiting, experiencing medical emergencies and, in at least two instances, giving birth in the cars. They stumble out of the vehicles and forget to close the doors, forcing the operators to pay nearby gig workers to do it. These seemingly minor nuisances are becoming a drain on municipal resources and complicating the roll-out of robotaxi service. So many robotaxi customers have nodded off in the midst of a ride that Austin police and firefighters even have a name for the incidents: "sleepers". The Texas capital recorded 99 such calls in Waymo's first nine months of service there, said Roger Patterson, a commander with Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services... Remote assistants monitoring the cars try talking through the speakers and checking on passengers with interior cameras. But if they get no response, company protocols often require them to call 911. And first responders have to assume the worst. Austin dispatchers treat an incident as a potential heart attack if the remote assistant can't tell whether the passenger is breathing, Patterson said. In the end, only about 3% of such calls require transporting the passenger to a hospital, he said. But the incidents tie up personnel who might be needed elsewhere.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

19 Jul 2026 11:09pm GMT

Catch up on the latest Linux news: Clonezilla Live 3.3.3, COSMIC 1.3, Plasma 6.7.3, Blender 5.2 LTS, Kitty 0.48, Microsoft gives Visual Studio Code a modern UI preview, and more.

19 Jul 2026 10:19pm GMT

"On the first attempt, reaching orbit, I never thought it was possible."

19 Jul 2026 10:11pm GMT

Comments

19 Jul 2026 10:03pm GMT

Comments

19 Jul 2026 9:42pm GMT

GNOME Calendar developer has revived a months-old dispute with Linux Mint over outdated packages, support links, and branding.

19 Jul 2026 4:20pm GMT

Monitoring is expensive and labor intensive. But it helps public health officials stop outbreaks.

19 Jul 2026 11:19am GMT

Gitea 1.27 arrives with first-class reusable workflow jobs, Markdown job summaries, Jupyter Notebook rendering, and an extensive collection of security fixes.

19 Jul 2026 5:54am GMT

The government is piloting a program that uses AI for insurance-coverage decisions.

18 Jul 2026 11:18am GMT