Agreguesi i feed

An anonymous reader shares a report: The abrupt closure of El Paso's airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation. The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would be shut down for 10 days, an extraordinary pause that was quickly lifted Wednesday morning at the direction of the White House. Top administration officials quickly claimed that the closure was in response to a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels that required a military response, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declaring in a social media post that "the threat has been neutralized." But that assertion was undercut by multiple people familiar with the situation, who said that the F.A.A.'s extreme move came after immigration officials earlier this week used an anti-drone laser shared by the Pentagon without coordination with the F.A.A. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. C.B.P. officials thought they were firing on a cartel drone, the people said, but it turned out to be a party balloon. Defense Department officials were present during the incident, one person said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company's in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic's Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code in one internal forum thread, and some pointed out the awkwardness of being asked to sell the tool through AWS's Bedrock platform while not being permitted to use it themselves. Kiro runs on Anthropic's Claude models but uses Amazon's own tooling, and the company says roughly 70% of its software engineers used it at least once in January. Amazon says there is no explicit ban on Claude Code but applies stricter requirements for production use.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice -- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini -- will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking "are you sure?," according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains. The behavior, known in the research community as sycophancy, stems from how these models are trained: reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, rewards responses that human evaluators prefer, and humans consistently rate agreeable answers higher than accurate ones. Anthropic published foundational research on this dynamic in 2023. The problem reached a visible breaking point in April 2025 when OpenAI had to roll back a GPT-4o update after users reported the model had become so excessively flattering it was unusable. Research on multi-turn conversations has found that extended interactions amplify sycophantic behavior further -- the longer a user talks to a model, the more it mirrors their perspective.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:next-20260212 (linux-next) Released:2026-02-12

AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to "estimate and cover" consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay for 100% of the infrastructure upgrades required to connect its data centers to the electrical grid. In a statement to NBC News, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said: "building AI responsibly can't stop at the technology -- it has to extend to the infrastructure behind it. We've been clear that the U.S. needs to build AI infrastructure at scale to stay competitive, but the costs of powering our models should fall on Anthropic, not everyday Americans. We look forward to working with communities, local governments, and the Administration to get this right."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:6.12.71 (longterm) Released:2026-02-12 Source:linux-6.12.71.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.71.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.71

Meta Platforms' latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant's auditor, Ernst & Young, raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta's accounting treatment, the firm flagged it as a "critical audit matter." This means it was one of the hardest, riskiest judgments the auditor had to make. Such a warning label is rare for a specific, high-profile transaction at a major audit client. Meta moved the data-center project, called Hyperion, off its books in October into a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital. Meta owns 20% of the venture; funds managed by Blue Owl own the other 80%. A holding company called Beignet Investor, which owns the Blue Owl portion, sold a then-record $27.3 billion of bonds to investors. The joint venture is known in accounting parlance as a variable interest entity, or VIE. Meta said it isn't the "primary beneficiary" of this entity and so didn't have to put the venture's assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet. Meta's assertion that it lacks power over the venture is debatable and has drawn scrutiny from investors and lawmakers. Meta is a hyperscaler and knows how to run data centers for artificial intelligence, while Blue Owl is a financier. Whether the venture succeeds economically will come down to Meta's decisions and know-how. In its report, EY said auditing Meta's decision "was especially challenging due to the significant judgment required in determining the activities that most significantly affect the VIE's economic performance."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris's hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers -- including the Russian government -- could have used them to access "millions of computers and devices around the world." Williams, a 39-year-old Australian national, pleaded guilty in October and admitted to earning more than $1.3 million in cryptocurrency from the sales between 2022 and 2025. In a sentencing memorandum filed Tuesday ahead of his anticipated February 24 sentencing in a Washington, D.C., federal court, the Justice Department asked the judge for nine years in prison, $35 million in restitution, and a maximum fine of $250,000. Prosecutors described the unnamed Russian buyer -- believed to be Operation Zero, which publicly claims to sell only to the Russian government -- as "one of the world's most nefarious exploit brokers." Williams chose it because, by his own admission, "he knew they paid the most." He also oversaw the wrongful firing of a subordinate who was blamed for the theft.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the things that I appreciate in a GUADEC (if available) is a common accommodation. Loads of attendees appreciated the shared accommodation in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain (GUADEC 2006). For GUADEC 2026 Deepesha announced one recommended accommodation, a student’s residence. GUADEC 2026 is at the same place as GUADEC 2012, meaning: A Coruña, Spain. I didn’t go to the 2012 one though I heard it also had a shared accommodation. For those wondering where to stay, suggest the recommended one.

Apple's long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releases, Bloomberg is reporting. The new Siri -- first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 -- struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and sometimes falls back on OpenAI's ChatGPT instead of Apple's own technology, the report said. Apple has instructed engineers to begin testing new Siri capabilities on iOS 26.5 instead, due in May, and internal builds of that update include a settings toggle labeled "preview" for the personal data features. A more ambitious chatbot-style Siri code-named Campo, powered by Google servers and a custom Gemini model, is in development for iOS 27 in September.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An Anthropic safety researcher quit, saying the "world is in peril" in part over AI advances. Mrinank Sharma said the safety team "constantly [faces] pressures to set aside what matters most," citing concerns about bioterrorism and other risks. Anthropic was founded with the explicit goal of creating safe AI; its CEO Dario Amodei said at Davos that AI progress is going too fast and called for regulation to force industry leaders to slow down. Other AI safety researchers have left leading firms, citing concerns about catastrophic risks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ring's Super Bowl ad on Sunday promoted "Search Party," a feature that lets a user post a photo of a missing dog in the Ring app and triggers outdoor Ring cameras across the neighborhood to use AI to scan for a match. 404 Media argues the cheerful premise obscures what the Amazon-owned company has become: a massive, consumer-deployed surveillance network. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who left in 2023 and returned last year, has since moved to re-establish police partnerships and push more AI into Ring cameras. The company has also partnered with Flock, a surveillance firm used by thousands of police departments, and launched a beta feature called "Familiar Faces" that identifies known people at your door. Chris Gilliard, author of the upcoming book Luxury Surveillance, called the ad "a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement." Further reading: No One, Including Our Furry Friends, Will Be Safer in Ring's Surveillance Nightmare, EFF Says

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Mint developers say they are considering adopting a longer development cycle, arguing that the project's current six month cadence plus LMDE releases leaves too little room for deeper work. In a recent update, the team reflected on its incremental philosophy, independence from upstream decisions like Snap, and heavy investment in Cinnamon and XApp. While the release process "works very well" and delivers steady improvements, they admit it consumes significant time in testing, fixing, and shipping, potentially capping ambition. Mint's next release will be based on a new Ubuntu LTS, and the team says it is seriously interested in stretching the development window. The stated goal is to free up resources for more substantial development rather than constant release management. Whether this signals bigger technical changes or simply acknowledges bandwidth limits for a small team remains unclear, but it marks a notable rethink of one of desktop Linux's most consistent release rhythms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I came of age an age ago, in the end of history: the decade of NAFTA, the WTO, the battle of Seattle. My people hated it all, interpreting the global distribution of production as a race to the bottom leaving post-industrial craters in its wake. Our slogans were to buy local, to the extent that participation in capitalism was necessary; to support local businesses, local products, local communities. What were trade barriers to us? One should not need goods from far away in the first place; autarky is the bestarky.

Now, though, the vibe has shifted. If you told me then that most leftists would be aghast at the cancelling of NAFTA and subsequently relieved when it was re-instated as the USMCA, I think I would have used that most 90s of insults: sellouts. It has been a perplexing decade in many ways.

The last shoe to drop for me was when I realized that, given the seriousness of the climate crisis, it is now a moral imperative everywhere to import as many solar panels as cheaply as possible, from wherever they might be made. Solar panels will liberate us from fossil fuel consumption. China makes them cheapest. Neither geopolitical (“please believe China is our enemy”) nor antiglobalist (“home-grown inverters have better vibes”) arguments have any purchase on this reality. In this context, any trade barrier on Chinese solar panels means more misery for our grandchildren, as they suffer under global warming that we caused. Every additional half-kilowatt panel we install is that much less dinosaur that other people will choose to burn.

But if trade can be progressive, then when is it so, and when not? I know that the market faithful among my readers will see the question as nonsense, but that is not my home church. We on the left pride ourselves in our critical capacities, in our ability to challenge common understandings. However, I wonder about the extent to which my part of the left has calcified and become brittle, recycling old thoughts that we thunk about new situations that rhyme with things we remember, in which we spare ourselves the effort of engagement out of confidence in our past conclusions, but in doing so miss the mark. What is the real leftist take on the EU-Mercosur agreement, anyway?

This question has consumed me for some weeks. To help me think through it, I have enlisted four sources: Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists (2018), an intellectual history of neoliberalism, from the first world war to the 1990s; Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica (2024), a history of arguments for free trade “from the left”, from the 1840s to the beginnings of Slobodian’s book; Starhawk’s Webs of power (2002), a moment-in-time, first-person-plural account of the antiglobalization movement between Seattle and 9/11; and finally Florence Reese’s Which side are you on? (1931), as recorded by the Weavers, a haunting refrain that dogs me all through this investigation, reminding me that the question is visceral and not abstract.

stave 1: mechanism

Before diving in though, I should admit that I don’t actually understand the basics, and it is not for a lack of trying.

Let’s work through some thought experiments together. Let’s imagine you are in France and want to buy nails. To produce nails, a capitalist has to purchase machines and buildings and steel, has to pay the workers to operate the machines, then finally the nails have to get boxed and shipped to, you know, me. I could buy French-made nails, apparently there is one clouterie left. Even assuming that Creil is a hotbed of industrial development and that its network of suppliers and machine operators is such that they can produce nails very efficiently, the wage in France is higher than the wage in, say, China, or Vietnam, or Turkey. The cost of the labor that goes into each nail is more.

So if I have 1000€ that I would like to devote to making a thing in France, I might prefer to obtain my nails from Turkey for 50€ rather than from France for 100€, because it leaves me more left over in which I can do my thing.

Perhaps France sees this as a travesty; in response, France imposes a tariff of 100% on imported nails. In that way, it might be the same to me as a consumer whether the nails were from Turkey or France. But this imposes a cost on me; I have less left over with which to do my thing. In exchange, the French clouterie gets to keep on going, along with the workers that work there, their families and the community around the factory, the suppliers of the factory, and so on.

But do I actually care that my nails are made in France? Should the country care that it has a capacity to make nails? When I was 25, I thought so, that it would be better if everything were made locally. Perhaps that was a distortion from having grown up in the US, in which we consider goods originating between either ocean as “ours”; smaller polities cannot afford that conceit. There may or may not be a reason that France might want nails to be made locally; it is a political question, but one that is not without tradeoffs. If we always choose the local option, we will ultimately do worse overall than a country that is happy to import; in the limit case, some goods like coffee would be unobtainable, with a price floor established by the cost to artificially re-create in France the mountain climate of Perú.

Let us accept, however, the argument that free trade improves overall efficiency, yielding productivity gains that ultimately get spread around society, making everyone’s lives better. We on the left are used to being more critical than constructive, but we do ourselves a disservice if we let our distaste of capitalism prevent us from appreciating how it works. Reading Marx’s Capital, for example, one can’t help but appreciate the awe which he has towards the dynamism of capitalism, apart from analysis and critique. In that spirit of dynamic awe, therefore, let us assume that free trade leads to higher productivity. How does it do this?

Here, I think, we must recognize a kind of ruthless cruelty. The one clouterie survives because of local demand; it can’t compete on the global market. It will fold eventually. Its workers will be laid off, its factories vacated, its town... well Creil is on the outskirts of Paris, it will live on, but less as a center in and of itself.

The nail factory will try to hang on for a while, though. It will start by putting downward pressure on wages, and extract other concessions from workers, in the name of economic necessity. Otherwise, the boss says, we move the factory to Tunisia. This operates also on larger levels, with the chamber of commerce (MEDEF) arguing for regulatory “simplifications”, new kinds of contracts with fewer protections, and so on. To the extent that a factory’s product is a commodity – whether the nails are Malaysian or French doesn’t matter – to that extent, free trade is indeed a race to the bottom, allowing mobile capital to play different jurisdictions off each other. The same goes for quality standards, environmental standards, and similar ways in which countries might choose to internalize what are elsewhere externalities.

I am a sentimental dude and have always found this sort of situation to be quite sad. Places that are on the up and up have a yuppie, rootless vibe, while those that are in decline have roots but no branches. Economics washes its hands of vibes, though; if it’s not measurable in euros, it doesn’t exist. What is the value of 19th-century India’s textile industry against the low price of Manchester-milled cloth? Can we put a number on it? We did, of course; zero is a number after all.

Finally, before I close today’s missive, a note on distribution. Most macro-economics is indifferent as regards distribution; gross domestic product is assessed relative to a country, not its parts. But if nails are producible for 50€ in Turkey, shipping included, that doesn’t mean they get sold at that price in France; if they sell for 70€, the capitalist pockets the change. That’s the base of surplus value: the owner pays the input costs, and the input cost of a worker is what the worker needs to make a living (rent, food, etc), but the that cost is less than the value of what the worker produces. That productivity goes up doesn’t necessarily mean that it makes it to the producers; that requires a finer analysis.

to be continued

For me, the fundamental economic argument for free trade is not unambiguously positive. Yes, lower trade barriers should leave us all with more left over with which we can do cool things. But the mechanism is cruel, the benefits accrue unequally, and there is value in producing communities that is not captured in prices.

In my next missive, we go back to the 19th century to see what Marx and Cobden had to say about the topic. Until then, happy trading!

The world is closer than thought to a "point of no return" after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said. From a report: Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish "hothouse Earth" climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed. At just 1.3C of global heating in recent years, extreme weather is already taking lives and destroying livelihoods across the globe. At 3-4C, "the economy and society will cease to function as we know it," scientists said last week, but a hothouse Earth would be even more fiery. The public and politicians were largely unaware of the risk of passing the point of no return, the researchers said. The group said they were issuing their warning because while rapid and immediate cuts to fossil fuel burning were challenging, reversing course was likely to be impossible once on the path to a hothouse Earth, even if emissions were eventually slashed. It was difficult to predict when climate tipping points would be triggered, making precaution vital, said Dr Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates in the US. Wolf is a member of a study team that includes Prof Johan Rockstrom at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The U.S. economy experienced almost zero job growth in 2025, according to revised federal data. On a more encouraging note: hiring has picked up in 2026. Preliminary data had indicated that the U.S. economy added 584,000 jobs last year. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised that number after it received additional state data, and found that the labor market had added 181,000 jobs in all of 2025. This is far fewer than the 1.46 million jobs that were added in 2024. One bright spot was last month, when hiring increased by 130,000 roles. This was significantly more than the 55,000 additions that had been expected by economists. "Job gains occurred in health care, social assistance, and construction, while federal government and financial activities lost jobs," BLS said in a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Electric vehicles accounted for just 1% of new car sales across Africa in 2025, but a study published in Nature Energy by researchers at ETH Zurich finds that EVs paired with solar off-grid charging systems -- solar panels, batteries and an inverter -- could become cheaper to own than gas-powered equivalents across most of the continent by 2040. The analysis considered total cost of ownership including sticker price, financing and fuel or charging costs, but excluded policy-related factors like taxes and subsidies. Electric two-wheelers could reach cost parity even sooner, by the end of the decade, thanks to smaller battery packs. Small cars remain the toughest segment. The biggest obstacle is financing: in some African countries, political instability and economic uncertainty push borrowing costs so high that interest on an EV loan can exceed the vehicle's purchase price. South Africa, Mauritius and Botswana are already near the financing conditions needed for cost parity; countries like Sudan and Ghana would need drastic cuts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK's Ministry of Justice has ordered the deletion of the country's largest court reporting archive [non-paywalled source], a database built by data analysis company Courtsdesk that more than 1,500 journalists across 39 media organizations have used since the lord chancellor approved the project in 2021. Courtsdesk's research found that journalists received no advance notice of 1.6 million criminal hearings, that court case listings were accurate on just 4.2% of sitting days, and that half a million weekend cases were heard without any press notification. In November, HM Courts and Tribunal Service issued a cessation notice citing "unauthorized sharing" of court data based on a test feature. Courtsdesk says it wrote 16 times asking for dialogue and requested a referral to the Information Commissioner's Office; no referral was made. The government issued a final refusal last week, and the archive must now be deleted within days. Chris Philp, the former justice minister who approved the pilot and now shadow home secretary, has written to courts minister Sarah Sackman demanding the decision be reversed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reports of the compact disc's death may have been slightly premature, according to a new analysis from Stat Significant that finds CD sales as a share of U.S. music industry revenue have quietly stabilized after years of steep decline. RIAA data shows CD revenue share fell from 7.15% in 2018 to 3.04% in 2022 but has since flatlined at roughly 3%, coming in at 3.14% in 2023 and 3.06% in 2024. Google search traffic for "CD Player" has ticked upward over the past 16 months after two decades of near-continuous decline, and a May 2023 YouGov poll found 53% of American adults willing to pay for music on CDs -- ahead of vinyl at 44% and online streaming at 50%. Respondents under 45 were more likely to express interest in buying physical formats than older cohorts. But on the supply side, Discogs data shows vinyl remains the dominant format for new physical releases; artists have not meaningfully shifted back toward CD production.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:6.18.10 (stable) Released:2026-02-11 Source:linux-6.18.10.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.10.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.10