An anonymous reader shares a report:

> Microsoft's library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft's digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are [1]disappearing in a shift described inside Microsoft as an "AI-powered learning experience."

>

> Microsoft started cutting back on its employee subscriptions to news and reports services in November, with some publishers receiving an automated email cancellation of a contract. [...] Strategic News Service (SNS), which has provided global reports to Microsoft's roughly 220,000 employees and executives for more than 20 years, is no longer part of Microsoft's subscription list.



[1] https://www.theverge.com/tech/862531/microsoft-library-closure-transition-changes-notepad

Many people who stop using weight loss drugs will [1]return to their previous weight within two years , a new review of existing research has found. CNN adds:

> This rate of weight regain is significantly faster than that seen in those who have lost weight by changing other lifestyle factors, such as diet and exercise, rather than relying on GLP-1 medications, researchers from the University of Oxford report in [2]a paper published Wednesday in The BMJ journal.

>

> GLP-1, which stands for glucagon-like peptide-1, is a hormone naturally made by the body that helps signal to the brain and the gut that it's full and doesn't need to eat any more. Weight loss drugs mimic the action of this hormone by increasing the secretion of insulin to lower blood sugar. They also slow the movement of food through the digestive tract, which helps people feel full more quickly and for longer, and they work in the brain to reduce appetite.



[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/08/health/weight-loss-drugs-regain-scli-intl-wellness

[2] https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj-2025-085304

Amazon wants a federal judge to [1]reject Saks Global's bankruptcy financing plan , writing in court papers the beleaguered department store "burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in less than a year" and failed to hold up their agreement. From a report:

> When Saks acquired Neiman Marcus for $2.7 billion in December 2024, Amazon invested $475 million into the venture on the grounds the retailer would start selling its products on Amazon's website and the tech company would offer technology and logistics expertise.

>

> "That equity investment is now presumptively worthless," Amazon's attorneys wrote in a Wednesday filing, hours after Saks filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. "Saks continuously failed to meet its budgets, burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in less than a year, and ran up additional hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid invoices owed to its retail partners."

>

> As part of the deal, Saks launched a branded "Saks at Amazon" storefront on the e-commerce company's website featuring a range of luxury fashion and beauty items. It also agreed to pay a referral fee for Saks-branded goods sold on the platform, guaranteeing at least $900 million in payments to Amazon over eight years.



[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/15/amazon-says-saks-investment-is-worthless-after-bankruptcy.html

American buses in cities like New York and San Francisco crawl along at about eight miles per hour -- barely faster than a brisk walk -- and one surprisingly simple fix could make them faster without requiring new infrastructure or controversial policy changes. The issue, according to a Works in Progress analysis, is that US bus stops [1]sit far too close together .

Mean spacing in American cities is roughly 313 meters, about five stops per mile, while older cities like Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco pack stops even tighter at 214, 223 and 248 meters respectively. European cities typically space stops at 300 to 450 meters.

Each stop costs time: passengers boarding and exiting, acceleration and deceleration, buses kneeling for wheelchairs, missed traffic light cycles. Buses spend about 20% of their operating time just stopping and starting, and since labor accounts for the majority of transit operating costs, slower buses translate directly to higher expenses.

Cities that have tried spacing stops further apart have seen results. San Francisco recorded a 4.4 to 14% increase in travel speeds by reducing from six stops per mile to two and a half. Vancouver's pilot removed a quarter of stops and cut average trip times by five minutes while saving about $500,000 annually on a single route. A McGill study found that even substantial stop consolidation reduced overall system coverage by just 1%.



[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-united-states-needs-fewer-bus-stops/

Apple, which spent years as TSMC's undisputed top customer and helped the Taiwanese foundry become the semiconductor industry's most important manufacturer, is [1]now fighting for production capacity as Nvidia's AI chip orders consume an ever-larger share of the company's leading-edge wafer supply.

TSMC CEO CC Wei visited Cupertino last August to deliver unwelcome news: Apple would face the largest price increase in years and the iPhone maker would no longer have guaranteed access to production capacity across TSMC's nearly two dozen fabs.

According to Culpium analysis and its supply chain sources, Nvidia likely overtook Apple as TSMC's largest customer in at least one or two quarters of 2025. TSMC's revenue climbed 36% last year to $122 billion, the company reported Thursday.



[1] https://www.culpium.com/p/exclusiveapple-is-fighting-for-tsmc

Wikipedia turns 25 today, and the online encyclopedia is celebrating that with an announcement that it has [1]signed new licensing deals with a slate of major AI companies -- Amazon, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Perplexity and Mistral AI. The deals allow these companies to access Wikipedia content "at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs." The Wikimedia Foundation did not disclose financial terms.

Google had already signed on as one of the first enterprise customers back in 2022. The agreements follow the Wikimedia Foundation's push last year for AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform. The foundation said human traffic had fallen 8% while bot visits -- sometimes disguised to evade detection -- were heavily taxing its servers.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes AI training on the site's human-curated content but that companies "should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you're putting on us." The site remains the ninth most visited on the internet, hosting more than 65 million articles in 300 languages maintained by some 250,000 volunteer editors.



[1] https://apnews.com/article/wikipedia-internet-jimmy-wales-50e796d70152d79a2e0708846f84f6d7

Anthropic's [1]fourth installment of its Economic Index , drawing on an anonymized sample of two million Claude conversations from November 2025, finds that AI is changing how people work rather than whether they work at all. The study tracked usage across the company's consumer-facing Claude.ai platform and its API, categorizing interactions as either automation (where AI completes tasks entirely) or augmentation (where humans and AI collaborate). The split came out to 52% augmentation and 45% automation on Claude.ai, a slight shift from January 2025 when augmentation led 55% to 41%.

The share of jobs using AI for at least a quarter of their tasks has risen from 36% in January to 49% across pooled data from multiple reports. Anthropic's researchers also found that AI delivers its largest productivity gains on complex work requiring college-level education, speeding up those tasks by a factor of 12 compared to 9 for high-school-level work.

Claude completes college-degree tasks successfully 66% of the time versus 70% for simpler work. Computer and mathematical tasks continue to dominate usage, accounting for roughly a third of Claude.ai conversations and nearly half of API traffic.



[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/anthropic-economic-index-january-2026-report

White-collar workers stuck in a cycle of layoffs and stagnant wages might want to look past the traditional tech, finance and media job postings to an unexpected source of opportunity: [1]the blue-collar sector , which faces a labor shortage and is seeing rapid transformation through private-equity investment. These jobs are generally less vulnerable to AI, and the earning trajectory can be steep, the WSJ writes.

At Crash Champions, a car-repair chain that has grown from 13 locations in 2019 to about 650 shops across 38 states, service advisers start at roughly $60,000 after a six-month apprenticeship and can double that within 18 months, according to CEO Matt Ebert. Directors overseeing multiple locations earn more than $200,000. Power Home Remodeling, a PE-backed construction company, says tech sales professionals earning $85,000 to $100,000 could make lateral moves after a 10-week training program.

The share of workers in their early 20s employed in blue-collar roles rose from 16.3% in 2019 to 18.4% in 2024, according to ADP -- five times the increase among 35- to 39-year-olds.



[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/white-collar-workers-shouldn-t-dismiss-a-blue-collar-career-change/ar-AA1UeBlC

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch:

> Over the weekend, Neel Somani, who is a software engineer, former quant researcher, and a startup founder, was testing the math skills of OpenAI's new model when he made an unexpected discovery. After pasting the problem into ChatGPT and letting it think for 15 minutes, he came back to a full solution. He evaluated the proof and formalized it with a tool called Harmonic -- but it all checked out. "I was curious to establish a baseline for when LLMs are effectively able to solve open math problems compared to where they struggle," Somani said. The surprise was that, using the latest model, [1]the frontier started to push forward a bit .

>

> ChatGPT's [2]chain of thought is even more impressive, rattling off mathematical axioms like [3]Legendre's formula , [4]Bertrand's postulate , and the [5]Star of David theorum . Eventually, the model found a [6]Math Overflow post from 2013, where Harvard mathematician Noam Elkies had given an elegant solution to a similar problem. But ChatGPT's final proof differed from Elkies' work in important ways, and gave a more complete solution to a version of the problem posed by legendary mathematician Paul Erdos, whose vast collection of unsolved problems has become a proving ground for AI.

>

> For anyone skeptical of machine intelligence, it's a surprising result -- and it's not the only one. AI tools have become ubiquitous in mathematics, from formalization-oriented LLMs like Harmonic's Aristotle to literature review tools like OpenAI's deep research. But since the release of GPT 5.2 -- which Somani describes as "anecdotally more skilled at mathematical reasoning than previous iterations" -- the sheer volume of solved problems has become difficult to ignore, raising new questions about large language models' ability to push the frontiers of human knowledge.

Somani examined the [7]online archive of more than 1,000 Erdos conjectures. Since Christmas, 15 Erdos problems have shifted from "open" to "solved," with 11 solutions explicitly crediting AI involvement.

On GitHub, mathematician Terence Tao [8]identifies eight Erdos problems where AI made meaningful autonomous progress and six more where it advanced work by finding and extending prior research, noting [9]on Mastodon that AI's scalability makes it well suited to tackling the long tail of obscure, often straightforward Erdos problems.

Progress is also being accelerated by a push toward formalization, supported by tools like the open-source "proof assistant" Lean and newer AI systems such as Harmonic's Aristotle.



[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/ai-models-are-starting-to-crack-high-level-math-problems/

[2] https://chatgpt.com/share/69630fa9-02d4-8012-8ef2-84c443c04922

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legendre's_formula

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand's_postulate

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_of_David_theorem

[6] https://mathoverflow.net/questions/138209/product-of-central-binomial-coefficients

[7] https://www.erdosproblems.com/

[8] https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contributions-to-Erd%C5%91s-problems

[9] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115891257393270694

Meta [1]plans to cut roughly 10% of staff in its Reality Labs division , with layoffs hitting metaverse-focused teams hardest. Reuters reports:

> The cuts to Reality Labs, which has roughly 15,000 employees, could be announced as soon as Tuesday and are set to disproportionately affect those in the metaverse unit who work on virtual reality headsets and virtual social networks, the report said. [...] Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who oversees Reality Labs, has called a meeting on Wednesday and has urged staff to attend in person, the NYT reported, citing a memo. [...]

>

> The metaverse had been a massive project spearheaded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who prioritized and spent heavily on the venture, only for the business to [2]burn more than $60 billion since 2020. [...] The report comes as the Facebook-parent scrambles to stay relevant in Silicon Valley's artificial intelligence race after its Llama 4 model met with a poor reception.



[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-plans-cut-around-10-employees-reality-labs-division-nyt-reports-2026-01-12/

[2] https://meta.slashdot.org/story/25/05/01/206224/metas-reality-labs-has-now-lost-over-60-billion-since-2020

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:

> The Supreme Court will hear a case that [1]could invalidate the Federal Communications Commission's authority to issue fines against companies regulated by the FCC . AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile challenged the FCC's ability to punish them after the commission fined the carriers for selling customer location data without their users' consent. AT&T convinced the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to [2]overturn its fine (PDF), while [3]Verizon lost in the 2nd Circuit and [4]T-Mobile lost in the District of Columbia Circuit. Verizon [5]petitioned (PDF) the Supreme Court to reverse its loss, while the FCC and Justice Department [6]petitioned (PDF) the court to overturn AT&T's victory in the 5th Circuit. The Supreme Court granted both petitions to hear the challenges and consolidated the cases in a [7]list of orders (PDF) released Friday. Oral arguments will be held.

>

> In 2024, the FCC [8]fined the big three carriers a total of $196 million for location data sales revealed in 2018, saying the companies were punished "for illegally sharing access to customers' location information without consent and without taking reasonable measures to protect that information against unauthorized disclosure." Carriers challenged in three appeals courts, arguing that the fines violated their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. [...] While the Supreme Court is only taking up the AT&T and Verizon cases, the T-Mobile case would be affected by whatever ruling the Supreme Court issues. T-Mobile is seeking a rehearing in the District of Columbia Circuit, an effort that could be boosted or rendered moot by whatever the Supreme Court decides.



[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/supreme-court-takes-case-that-could-strip-fcc-of-authority-to-issue-fines/

[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.3faa6ebe-fa32-ef11-a296-001dd804fa85/gov.uscourts.ca2.3faa6ebe-fa32-ef11-a296-001dd804fa85.96.0.pdf?ref=broadbandbreakfast.com

[3] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/09/11/2021243/court-rejects-verizon-claim-that-selling-location-data-without-consent-is-legal

[4] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/08/21/160246/t-mobile-claimed-selling-location-data-without-consent-is-legal---judges-disagree

[5] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25/25-567/383709/20251106103552667_Verizon%20-%20Cert%20Petition%20and%20Appendix%20-%20To%20E-file.pdf

[6] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25/25-406/378534/20251002153212156_FCC%20v%20ATT%20Petition.pdf

[7] https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/010926zr_g2bh.pdf

[8] https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/04/29/1946256/fcc-fines-wireless-carriers-200-million-for-sharing-customer-data

22 years ago, developer and columnist John Gruber released [1]Markdown , a simple plain-text formatting system designed to spare writers the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags. As technologist Anil Dash writes in a long piece, Markdown has since [2]embedded itself into nearly every corner of modern computing .

Aaron Swartz, then seventeen years old, served as the beta tester before its quiet March 2004 debut. Google eventually added Markdown support to Docs after more than a decade of user requests; Microsoft put it in Notepad; Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, and Apple Notes all support it now. Dash writes:

> The part about not doing this stuff solely for money matters, because even the most advanced LLM systems today, what the big AI companies call their "frontier" models, require complex orchestration that's carefully scripted by people who've tuned their prompts for these systems through countless rounds of trial and error. They've iterated and tested and watched for the results as these systems hallucinated or failed or ran amok, chewing up countless resources along the way. And sometimes, they generated genuinely astonishing outputs, things that are truly amazing to consider that modern technology can achieve. The rate of progress and evolution, even factoring in the mind-boggling amounts of investment that are going into these systems, is rivaled only by the initial development of the personal computer or the Internet, or the early space race.

>

> And all of it -- all of it -- is controlled through Markdown files. When you see the brilliant work shown off from somebody who's bragging about what they made ChatGPT generate for them, or someone is understandably proud about the code that they got Claude to create, all of the most advanced work has been prompted in Markdown. Though where the logic of Markdown was originally a very simple version of "use human language to tell the machine what to do", the implications have gotten far more dire when they use a format designed to help expresss "make this **bold**" to tell the computer itself "make this imaginary girlfriend more compliant".



[1] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

[2] https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/

Microsoft has [1]abruptly retired the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, a free platform that IT administrators have relied on to deploy Windows operating systems and applications for more than two decades. The retirement, reports the Register, came with "immediate" notice, meaning no more fixes, support, security patches, or updates, and the download packages may be removed from official distribution channels.



[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/12/microsoft_deployment_platform/

Norway has released its December and full year 2025 automotive sales numbers and the world's leading EV haven has [1]broken records once again . The country had previously targeted an end to fossil car sales in 2025, and it basically got there. From a report:

> In 2017, Norway set a formal non-binding target to end fossil car sales in the country by 2025 -- a target earlier than any other country in the world by several years. Norway was already well ahead of the world in EV adoption, with about a third of new cars being electric at the time -- but it wanted to schedule the final blow for just 8 years later, fairly short as far as automotive timelines go.

>

> At the time, many (though not us at Electrek) considered this to be an optimistic goal, and figured that it might get pushed back. But Norway did not budge in its target (unlike more cowardly nations). And it turns out, when you set a realistic goal, craft policy around it, and don't act all wishy-washy or change your mind every few years, you can actually get things done. (In fact, Europe currently has around the same EV sales level as Norway did 10 years ahead of its 100% goal -- which means Europe's former 100% 2035 goal is still eminently achievable)



[1] https://electrek.co/2026/01/02/norway-reaches-97-ev-sales-as-evs-now-outnumber-diesels-on-its-roads/

An anonymous reader shares a report:

> Deserts are hard to reclaim because plants cannot survive on shifting sand, but scientists in northwest China are changing that -- by [1]dropping vast amounts of blue-green algae onto the dry terrain . These specially selected strains of cyanobacteria can survive extreme heat and drought for long periods, according to China Science Daily on Thursday. When rain finally comes, they spring to life, spreading rapidly and forming a tough, biomass-rich crust over the sand. This living layer stabilises the dunes and creates the perfect foundation for future plant growth.

>

> This is the first time in human history that microbes are being used on a massive scale to reshape natural landscapes. As the "Great Green Wall" -- China's massive multi-decade initiative to plant trees and fight desertification -- expands to include efforts in Africa and Mongolia, the unprecedented geoengineering technology could one day transform the face of our planet. This artificial "crusting" technique was developed by scientists at a research station in Ningxia Hui autonomous region, located in northwest China on the edge of the Tengger Desert, according to China Science Daily.



[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3338326/great-green-wall-20-china-geoengineering-deserts-blue-green-algae

60 years ago today, ABC [1]aired the first episode of its [2]live-action Batman television series , introducing Adam West as the deadpan Caped Crusader in what became a pop culture phenomenon blending high-camp humor and cliffhanger thrills. The mid-season replacement ran for 120 episodes over three seasons before ending in March 1968.



[1] https://cordcuttersnews.com/60-years-ago-today-the-1966-batman-tv-series-first-premiered/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(TV_series)

Doctors say they have achieved the previously impossible -- [1]restoring sight and preventing blindness in people with a rare but dangerous eye conditon called hypotony. From a report:

> Moorfields hospital in London is the world's first dedicated clinic for the disorder and seven out of eight patients given the pioneering treatment have responded to the therapy, a pilot study shows. One of them -- the first-ever -- is Nicki Guy, 47, who is sharing her story exclusively with the BBC.

>

> She says the results are incredible: "It's life-changing. It's given me everything back. I can see my child grow up. "I've gone from counting fingers and everything being really blurry to being able to see." Currently, she can see and read most lines of letters on an eye test chart. She is one line away from what is legally required for driving - a massive change from being partially sighted, using a magnifying glass for anything close up and having to navigate around the house and outside largely using memory.

>

> "If my vision stays like this for the rest of my life it would be absolutely brilliant. I may not ever be able to drive again but I'll take that!" she says. With hypotony, pressure within the eyeball becomes dangerously low, leading it to cave in on itself.



[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89qyv98lzdo

The dramatically larger corner radius Apple introduced in macOS 26 Tahoe has pushed the invisible resize hit target for windows [1]mostly outside the window itself -- roughly 75% of the 19Ã--19 pixel clickable area now lies [2]beyond the visible boundary . In previous macOS versions, about 62% of that resize target would fall inside the window corner.

Apple removed the visible resize grippy-strip from window corners in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in July 2011. The visual indicator had served two purposes: showing users where to click and signaling whether a window could be resized at all. Users since then have relied on muscle memory and the reasonable assumption that clicking near the inside corner would initiate a resize. DaringFireball's John Gruber advice: don't upgrade to macOS 26, or downgrade if you already have. he wrote Monday: "Why suffer willingly with a user interface that presents you with absurdities like window resizing affordances that are 75 percent outside the window?"



[1] https://daringfireball.net/2026/01/resizing_windows_macos_26

[2] https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-windows-on-macos-tahoe/

A major [1]new review by the Cochrane collaboration -- an independent network of researchers -- evaluated 73 randomized controlled trials involving about 5,000 people with depression and found that exercise [2]matched the effectiveness of both pharmacological treatments and psychological therapies.

The biological mechanisms overlap considerably with antidepressants. "Exercise can help improve neurotransmitter function, like serotonin as well as dopamine and endorphins," said Dr. Stephen Mateka, medical director of psychiatry at Inspira Health. Dr. Nicholas Fabiano of the University of Ottawa added that exercise triggers the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which he calls "Miracle-Gro for the brain."

Exercise has been adopted as a first-line treatment in depression guidelines globally, though Fabiano noted it remains underutilized. The meta-analysis found that combining aerobic exercise and resistance training appeared more effective than aerobic exercise alone, and that 13 to 36 workouts led to improvements in depressive symptoms. Light to moderate exercise proved as beneficial as vigorous workouts, at least initially.



[1] https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004366.pub7/full?__cf_chl_tk=wsEY5wr6h6zoJNVYzTbOznlMMsBoPJVttqYC_FVzpyM-1768235749-1.0.1.1-h9fV5MOU._YczfCTrxhM2KAwrnGAnvc8YsD28qUM2Ec

[2] https://www.npr.org/2026/01/12/nx-s1-5667599/exercise-is-as-effective-as-medication-in-treating-depression-study-finds

Apple has struck a multi-year partnership with Google to [1]power a more capable version of Siri using Gemini AI models, ending months of speculation about which company would help the iPhone maker catch up in the generative AI race. In a statement, Apple said it had determined after "careful evaluation" that "Google's technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models."

The deal comes after Apple delayed its planned Siri AI upgrade last March, acknowledging that the project was taking "longer than we thought." Bloomberg had reported in August that Apple was in early talks with Google about using a custom Gemini model. Apple also explored potential partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, and CEO Tim Cook has said the company plans to integrate with more AI companies over time. The upgraded Siri is expected to perform actions on users' behalf and understand personal context.



[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/860521/apple-siri-google-gemini-ai-personalization