Linus Torvalds has pondered his professional mortality in [1]a self-deprecating post to mark the release of the first release candidate for version 7.0 of the Linux kernel. From a report:

> "You all know the drill by now: two weeks have passed, and the kernel merge window is closed," he wrote in the post announcing Linux 7.0 rc1. "We have a new major number purely because I'm easily confused and not good with big numbers." Torvalds pointed out that the numbers he applies to new kernel releases are essentially meaningless.

>

> "We haven't done releases based on features (or on "stable vs unstable") for a long, long time now. So that new major number does *not* mean that we have some big new exciting feature, or that we're somehow leaving old interfaces behind. It's the usual "solid progress" marker, nothing more.â

>

> He then reiterated his plan to end each series of kernels to end at x.19, before the next release becomes y.0 -- a process that takes about 3.5 years -- and then pondered what happens when the next version of Linux reaches a number he finds uncomfortable. "I don't have a solid plan for when the major number itself gets big," he admitted, "by that time, I expect that we'll have somebody more competent in charge who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens. So I'm not going to worry about it."



[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/23/linux_7_0_rc1/

Despite AI's progress in building complex software, the ubiquitous PDF remains something of a grand challenge -- a format Adobe developed in the early 1990s to preserve the precise visual appearance of documents. PDFs consist of character codes, coordinates, and rendering instructions rather than logically ordered text, and even state-of-the-art models asked to extract information from them will [1]summarize instead, confuse footnotes with body text, or outright hallucinate contents , The Verge writes.

Companies like Reducto are now tackling the problem by segmenting pages into components -- headers, tables, charts -- before routing each to specialized parsing models, an approach borrowed from computer vision techniques used in self-driving vehicles. Researchers at Hugging Face recently found roughly 1.3 billion PDFs sitting in Common Crawl alone, and the Allen Institute for AI has noted that PDFs could provide trillions of novel, high-quality training tokens from government reports, textbooks, and academic papers -- the kind of data AI developers are increasingly desperate for.



[1] https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/882891/ai-pdf-parsing-failure

U.S. artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic said three Chinese AI companies set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to [1]help their own systems catch up . From a report:

> The three companies -- DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax -- prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic's system to train and improve their own products, Anthropic said in a blog post Monday.

>

> Earlier this month, an Anthropic rival, OpenAI, sent a memo to House lawmakers accusing DeepSeek of using the same tactic, called distillation, to mimic OpenAI's products. Anthropic said distillation had legitimate uses -- companies use it to build smaller versions of their own products, for example -- but it could also be used to build competitive products "in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost." The scale of the different companies' distillation activity varied. DeepSeek engaged in 150,000 interactions with Claude, whereas Moonshot and MiniMax had more than 3.4 million and 13 million, respectively, Anthropic said.



[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-accuses-chinese-companies-of-siphoning-data-from-claude/ar-AA1WUPz3

The first fiber-optic cable ever laid across an ocean -- TAT-8, a nearly 6,000-kilometer line between the United States, United Kingdom, and France that carried its first traffic on December 14, 1988 -- is [1]now being pulled off the Atlantic seabed after more than two decades of sitting dormant, bound for recycling in South Africa.

Subsea Environmental Services, one of only three companies in the world whose entire business is cable recovery and recycling, began the operation last year using its new diesel-electric vessel, the MV Maasvliet, and had already brought 1,012 kilometers of the cable to the Portuguese port of Leixoes by August.

TAT-8, short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone 8, was built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom, and hit full capacity within just 18 months of going live. A fault too expensive to repair took it out of service in 2002. The recovered cable is being shipped to Mertech Marine in South Africa, where it will be broken down into steel, copper, and two types of polyethylene -- all commercially valuable, especially the high-quality copper at a time when the International Energy Agency projects global shortages within a decade.



[1] https://www.wired.com/story/say-goodbye-to-the-undersea-cable-that-made-the-global-internet-possible/

An anonymous reader shares a report:

> PayPal, the digital payments pioneer, is [1]attracting takeover interest from potential buyers after a stock slide wiped out almost half of its value, according to people familiar with the matter.

>

> The San Jose, California-based company has fielded meetings with banks amid unsolicited interest from suitors, the people said. At least one large rival is looking at the whole company, while some other suitors are only interested in certain PayPal assets, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private.

>

> Buyer interest in PayPal is still at a preliminary stage and may not lead to a transaction, the people cautioned. Founded in the late 1990s, PayPal was an early mover in the world of digital payments. But the company now finds itself in a rut with its customers increasingly turning to alternative ways to pay for things. PayPal's shares have fallen around 46% in New York trading over the last 12 months, giving the company a market value of about $38.4 billion.



[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-23/paypal-attracts-takeover-interest-after-stock-slump

Climate scientists trying to predict how much hotter the planet will get have long grappled with a surprisingly stubborn problem -- clouds, which [1]both reflect sunlight and trap heat , account for more than half the variation between climate predictions and are the main reason warming projections for the next 50 years range from 2 to 6 degrees Celsius.

Two research groups are now racing to close that gap using AI, though they disagree sharply on method. Tapio Schneider at Caltech built CLIMA, a model that uses machine learning to optimize cloud parameters within traditional physics equations; it will be unveiled at a conference in Japan in March. Chris Bretherton at the Allen Institute for AI took a different path -- his ACE2 neural network, released in 2024, learns from 50 years of atmospheric data and largely bypasses physics equations altogether.



[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/climate-physicists-face-the-ghosts-in-their-machines-clouds-20260220/

A [1]study published last week in PNAS found that people who regularly cause problems or make life difficult -- whom the researchers call "hasslers" -- are associated with measurably faster biological aging in those around them, at a rate of roughly 1.5% per additional hassler and about nine months of additional biological age relative to same-age peers.

The research drew on DNA methylation-based epigenetic clocks and ego-centric network data from a state-representative probability sample of 2,345 adults in Indiana, aged 18 to 103. Nearly 29% of respondents reported at least one hassler in their close network. The biological toll varied by relationship type: hasslers who were family members showed the strongest and most consistent associations with accelerated aging, while spouse hasslers showed no significant effect on either epigenetic measure.

The damage also went beyond aging clocks -- each additional hassler was associated with greater depression and anxiety severity, higher BMI, increased inflammation, and higher multimorbidity. When benchmarked against smoking, a major behavioral risk factor for aging, the hassler effect corresponded to roughly 13 to 17% of smoking's estimated impact on the same aging clocks.



[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2515331123

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing back on growing concerns about AI's environmental footprint, dismissing claims about ChatGPT's water consumption as "totally fake" and arguing that the fairer way to measure AI's energy use is to [1]compare it against humans .

In an interview with Indian Express, Altman acknowledged that evaporative cooling in data centers once made water usage a real concern but said that is no longer the case, calling internet claims of 17 gallons of water per query "completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality."

On energy, he conceded it is "fair" to worry about total consumption given how heavily the world now relies on AI, and called for a rapid shift toward nuclear, wind and solar power. He took particular issue with comparisons that pit the cost of training a model against a single human inference, noting it "takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat" before a person gets smart -- and that on a per-query basis, AI has "probably already caught up on an energy efficiency basis."



[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/21/sam-altman-would-like-remind-you-that-humans-use-a-lot-of-energy-too/

The narrative that AI spending has been singlehandedly propping up the U.S. economy -- a claim that captivated Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington over the past year -- is [1]facing serious pushback from economists [ [2]non-paywalled source ] at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, all of whom now calculate that the AI buildup's direct contribution to growth was dramatically overstated and possibly close to zero.

The debate hinges on how GDP accounts for imported components: roughly three-quarters of AI data center costs go toward computer chips and gear largely manufactured in Asia, and that spending gets subtracted from domestic output because it boosts foreign economies. Joseph Politano of the Apricitas Economics newsletter pegs AI's actual contribution at about 0.2 percentage points of the 2.2 percent U.S. growth in 2025, and even Hannah Rubinton at the St. Louis Fed -- whose own analysis attributed 39 percent of growth to AI-related business spending through the first nine months of the year -- acknowledges that figure is probably the ceiling. "It's not like AI is propping up the economy," Rubinton said.



[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/23/ai-economic-growth-gdp-mirage/

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/this-economic-idea-transfixed-wall-street-and-washington-it-may-be-a-mirage/ar-AA1WTiHO

"In August 2025, TypeScript surpassed both Python and JavaScript to become the most-used language on GitHub for the first time ever..." [1]writes GitHub's senior developer advocate .

They point to this as proof that "AI isn't just speeding up coding. It's reshaping which languages, frameworks, and tools developers choose in the first place."

> Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week. Those early exposures reset the baseline for what "easy" means. When AI handles boilerplate and error-prone syntax, the penalty for choosing powerful but complex languages disappears. Developers stop avoiding tools with high overhead and start picking based on utility instead.

>

> The language adoption data shows this behavioral shift:

>

> — TypeScript grew 66% year-over-year

> — JavaScript grew 24%

> — Shell scripting usage in [2]AI-generated projects jumped 206%

>

> That last one matters. We didn't suddenly love Bash. AI absorbed the friction that made shell scripting painful. So now we use the right tool for the job without the usual cost.

"When a task or process goes smoothly, your brain remembers," they point out. "Convenience captures attention. Reduced friction becomes a preference — and preferences at scale can shift ecosystems."

"AI performs better with strongly typed languages. Strongly typed languages give AI much clearer constraints..."

"Standardize before you scale. Document patterns. Publish template repositories. Make your architectural decisions explicit. AI tools will mirror whatever structures they see."

"Test AI-generated code harder, not less."



[1] https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/how-ai-is-reshaping-developer-choice-and-octoverse-data-proves-it/

[2] https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/typescript-python-and-the-ai-feedback-loop-changing-software-development/

"A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules," [1]reports Live Science . "It's not only exceeding the 'speed limit' of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions — two features that are not predicted to coexist..."

"How is this rule-breaking behavior even possible? In a paper published Jan. 21 [2]in The Astrophysical Journal , an international team of researchers observed ID830 in multiple wavelengths to find an answer...."

> As they attract gas and dust, this material accumulates in a swirling accretion disk. Gravity pulls the material from the disk into the black hole, but the infalling material generates radiation pressure that pushes outward and prevents more stuff from falling in. As a result, black holes are muzzled by a self-regulating process called the Eddington limit... Its X-ray brightness suggests that ID830 is accreting mass at about 13 times the Eddington limit, due to [3]a sudden burst of inflowing gas that may have occurred as ID830 shredded and engulfed a celestial body that wandered too close. "For a supermassive black hole (SMBH) as massive as ID830, this would require not a normal (main-sequence) star, but a more massive giant star or a huge gas cloud," study co-author Sakiko Obuchi, an observational astronomer at Waseda University in Tokyo, told Live Science via email. Such super-Eddington phases may be incredibly brief, as "this transitional phase is expected to last for roughly 300 years," Obuchi added.

>

> ID830 also simultaneously displays radio and X-ray emissions. These two features are not expected to coexist, especially because super-Eddington accretion is thought to suppress such emissions. "This unexpected combination hints at physical mechanisms not yet fully captured by current models of extreme accretion and jet launching," the researchers [4]said in a statement . So while ID830 is launching massive radio jets, its X-ray emissions appear to originate from a structure called a corona, produced as intense magnetic fields from the accretion disk create a thin but turbulent billion-degree cloud of turbocharged particles. These particles orbit the black hole at nearly the speed of light, in what [5]NASA calls "one of the most extreme physical environments in the universe." Altogether, ID830's rule-breaking behaviors suggest that it is in a rare transitional phase of excessive consumption — and excretion. This incredible feeding burst has energized both its jets and its corona, making ID830 shine brightly across multiple wavelengths as it spews out excess radiation.

>

> Additionally, based on UV-brightness analysis, quasars like ID830 may be unexpectedly common, the researchers said. Models predict that only around 10% of quasars have spectacular radio jets, but these energetic objects could be significantly more abundant in the early universe than previously suggested. Most importantly, ID830 also shows how SMBHs can regulate galaxy growth in the early universe. As a black hole gobbles matter at the super-Eddington limit, the energy from its resultant emissions can heat and disperse matter throughout the interstellar medium — the gas between stars — to suppress star formation. As a result, ancient SMBHs like ID830 may have grown massive at the expense of their host galaxies.



[1] https://www.livescience.com/space/black-holes/rule-breaking-black-hole-found-growing-at-13-times-the-cosmic-speed-limit-challenging-theories

[2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ae1d6d

[3] https://www.nao.ac.jp/en/news/science/2026/20260122-subaru.html

[4] https://subarutelescope.org/en/results/2026/01/21/3645.html

[5] https://science.nasa.gov/universe/black-holes/anatomy/

When one company asked job applicants to submit a video where they answer a question, most of the 300 responses were "eerily similar," [1]reports the Washington Post (with a company executive saying it was "abundantly clear" they'd used AI.)

> Job seekers are turning to AI to help them land jobs more quickly in a tough labor market.... Employers say that's having an unintended consequence: Many applications are looking and sounding the same...

>

> It's easy to spot when candidates over-rely on AI, some employers said. Oftentimes, executive summaries will look eerily similar to each other, odd phrases that people wouldn't normally use in conversation creep into descriptions, fancy vocabulary appears, and someone with entry-level experience uses language that indicates they are much more senior, they added. It's worse when they use auto-apply AI tools, which will find jobs, fill out applications and submit résumés on the candidate's behalf, some employers said. Those tend to misinterpret some of the application questions and fill in the wrong information in inappropriate spots. If these applications were evaluated alone, employers say they'd have a harder time identifying AI usage. But when hundreds of applications all have the same issue, they said, AI's role in it becomes obvious.

The article acknowledges that some employers could be using AI tools to screen resumes too. One job-seeker in Texas even says he'll stop submitting an AI-written résumé when the recruiter stops using AI to evaluate them. "You're saying, 'You shouldn't be doing this' when I know a good chunk of them do this!"

[2]Obligatory XKCD .



[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/employers-job-seekers-ai-r-123748521.html

[2] https://xkcd.com/2237/

This week Raspberry Pi saw its [1]stock price surge more than 60% above its early-February low (before giving up some gains at the end of the week). [2]Reuters notes the rise started when CEO Eben Upton bought 13,224 pounds worth of shares — but there could be another reason. "The rally in the roughly $800 million company has materialised alongside social-media buzz that demand for its single-board computers could pick up as people buy them to run AI agents such as OpenClaw."

[3]The Register explains :

> The catalyst appears to have been the sudden realization by one X user, "aleabitoreddit," that the agentic AI hand grenade known as OpenClaw could drive demand for Raspberry Pis the way it had for Apple Mac Minis. The viral AI personal assistant, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, has dominated the feeds of AI boosters over the past few weeks for its ability to perform everyday tasks like sending emails, managing calendars, booking appointments, and complaining about their meatbag masters on the purportedly all-agent forum known as MoltBook... In case it needs to be said, no one should be running this thing on their personal devices lest the agent accidentally leak your most personal and sensitive secrets to the web... In this context, a cheap low-power device like a Raspberry Pi makes a certain kind of sense as a safer, saner way to poke the robo-lobster...

The Register argues Raspberry Pis [4]aren't as cheap as they used to be "thanks in part to the global memory crunch. Today, a top-specced Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of memory will set you back more than $200, up from $120 a year ago."

"You know what's cheaper, easier, and more secure than letting OpenClaw loose on your local area network? A virtual private cloud..."



[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RPI.L/

[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/raspberry-pi-soars-40-ceo-buys-stock-ai-chatter-builds-2026-02-17/

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/20/raspberry_pi_meme_stock_disorder/

[4] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/02/raspberry_pi_ram_shortage_price_hike/

Russia's domestic intelligence agency claimed Saturday that Ukraine can obtain sensitive information from troops using the Telegram app on the front line, [1]reports Bloomberg . The fact that the claims were made through Russia's state-operated news outlet RIA Novosti signals "tightening scrutiny over a platform used by millions of Russians," Bloomberg notes, as the Kremlin continues efforts to "push people to use a new state-backed alternative."

> Russia's communications watchdog limited access to Telegram — a popular messaging app owned by Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov — over a week ago for failing to comply with Russian laws requiring personal data to be stored locally. Voice and video calls were blocked via Telegram in August. The pressure is the latest move in a long-running campaign to promote what the Kremlin calls a sovereign internet that's led to blocks on YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp... Foreign intelligence services are able to see Russia's military messages in Telegram too, Russia's Minister for digital development, Maksut Shadaev, said on Wednesday, although he added that Russia will not block access to Telegram for troops for now.

>

> Telegram responded at the time that no breaches of the app's encryption have ever been found. "The Russian government's allegation that our encryption has been compromised is a deliberate fabrication intended to justify outlawing Telegram and forcing citizens onto a state-controlled messaging platform engineered for mass surveillance and censorship," it said in an emailed response.



[1] https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/russia-s-fsb-warns-ukraine-can-access-front-line-data-via-telegram-126022100343_1.html

Fossil fuels produce NO2, which is linked to asthma attacks, bronchitis, and higher risks of heart disease and stroke, [1]according the EV news site Electrek . But the nonprofit news site Grist.org notes a new analysis showing that those emissions [2]decreased by 1.1% for every increase of 200 electric vehicles — across nearly 1,700 ZIP codes.

> "A pretty small addition of cars at the ZIP code level led to a decline in air pollution," said Sandrah Eckel, a public health professor at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "It's remarkable."

The study was done at the University of Southern California's medical school, by researchers using high-resolution satellite data, [3]reports Electrek :

> The [4]study, just published in The Lancet Planetary Health and partly funded by the National Institutes of Health, adds rare real-world evidence to a claim that's often taken for granted — that EVs don't just cut carbon over time, they also improve local air quality right now... The researchers ran multiple checks to make sure the trend wasn't driven by unrelated factors. They accounted for pandemic-era changes by excluding 2020 in some analyses and controlling for gas prices and work-from-home patterns. They also saw the expected counterexample: neighborhoods that added more gas-powered vehicles experienced increases in pollution. The findings were then replicated using updated ground-level air monitoring data dating back to 2012...

>

> Next, the researchers plan to compare EV adoption with asthma-related emergency room visits and hospitalizations. If those trends line up, it could provide some of the clearest evidence yet of what we already know: that electrifying transportation doesn't just clean the air on paper; it improves public health in practice.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader [5]jhoegl for sharing the article.



[1] https://electrek.co/2026/01/26/evs-promised-cleaner-air-satellites-say-its-finally-happening/

[2] https://grist.org/solutions/evs-are-already-making-your-air-cleaner/

[3] https://electrek.co/2026/01/26/evs-promised-cleaner-air-satellites-say-its-finally-happening/

[4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(25)00257-8/fulltext

[5] https://www.slashdot.org/~jhoegl

Long-time Slashdot reader [1]theodp writes:

> Jeopardy time. A. This company spurred CEOs to make huge speculative capital expenditures based on wild unverified claims of future demand, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of workers to reduce the resulting expenses, harming their core businesses. Q. What is OpenAI?

>

> Sorry, the correct response is, [2]"What is WorldCom?" In 2002, [3]WorldCom , the second largest long-distance company in the U.S., entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy after disclosing [4]accounting fraud that eventually totaled $11 billion, the biggest ever at the time. CEO Bernard Ebbers was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison.

>

> CNBC reported that an employee of WorldCom's Internet service provider UUNet set off a frenzy of speculative investment and infrastructure overbuild after he used Excel to create a best-case scenario model for the Internet's growth that suggested in the best of all possible worlds, Internet traffic would double every 100 days, a scenario that would greatly benefit WorldCom, whose lines would carry it. Despite no evidence to support it, WorldCom's lie became an immutable law and businesses around the world made important decisions based on the belief that traffic was doubling every 100 days. "For some period of time I can recall that we were backfilling that expectation with laying cables, something like 2,200 miles of cable an hour," AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong said. "Think of all the companies that went out of business that assumed that that was real."

In 2003, [5]NBC News reported :

> Armstrong and former Sprint CEO Bill Esrey struggled for years to understand how WorldCom could beat them so handily. "We would look at the conduct of WorldCom in terms of their pricing, revenue growth, margins, in terms of their cost structure... and the price leader almost every quarter was WorldCom," Armstrong said. Added Esrey, "We couldn't figure out how they were pricing as aggressively as they were.... How could they be so efficient in their costs and expenses?" AT&T and Sprint began cutting jobs to push down their costs to WorldCom's level. "The market said what a marvelous management job WorldCom was doing and they would look over to AT&T and say, 'these guys aren't keeping up.' So, my shareholders were hurt. We [6]laid off tens of thousands of employees in an accelerated fashion [in a futile effort to match WorldCom's phantom profits] and I think the industry was hurt," Armstrong says. "It just wrecked the whole industry," says Esrey.



[1] https://www.slashdot.org/~theodp

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna3072795

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldCom_scandal

[4] https://slashdot.org/story/02/06/26/005225/worldcom-cfo-accused-of-36-billion-fraud

[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna3072795

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/business/worldcoms-audacious-failure-and-its-toll-on-an-industry.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MlA.vCZF.GPrPlB5P__8x&smid=url-share

Google and Microsoft contributed $5 million to launch Alpha-Omega in 2022 — a Linux Foundation project to help secure the open source supply chain. But its co-founder Michael Winser warns that open source registries are in financial peril, [1]reports The Register , since they're still relying on non-continuous funding from grants and donations.

And it's not just because bandwidth is expensive, he said at this year's FOSDEM. "The problem is they don't have enough money to spend on the very security features that we all desperately need..."

> In a follow-up LinkedIn exchange after this article had posted, Winser estimated it could cost $5 million to $8 million a year to run a major registry the size of Crates.io, which gets about 125 billion downloads a year. And this number wouldn't include any substantial bandwidth and infrastructure donations (Like Fastly's for Crates.io). Adding to that bill is the growing cost of identifying [2]malware , the proliferation of which has been amplified through the use of AI and scripts. These repositories have detected 845,000 malware packages from 2019 to January 2025 (the vast majority of those nasty packages came to npm)...

>

> In some cases benevolent parties can cover [bandwidth] bills: Python's PyPI registry bandwidth needs for shipping copies of its 700,000+ packages (amounting to 747PB annually at a sustained rate of 189 Gbps) are underwritten by Fastly, for instance. Otherwise, the project would have to pony up about $1.8 million a month. Yet the costs Winser was most concerned about are not bandwidth or hosting; they are the security features needed to ensure the integrity of containers and packages. Alpha-Omega underwrites a "distressingly" large amount of security work around registries, he said. It's distressing because if Alpha-Omega itself were to miss a funding round, a lot of registries would be screwed. Alpha-Omega's [3]recipients include the Python Software Foundation, Rust Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, OpenJS Foundation for Node.js and jQuery, and Ruby Central.

>

> Donations and memberships certainly help defray costs. Volunteers do a lot of what otherwise would be very expensive work. And there are grants about...Winser did not offer a solution, though he suggested the key is to convince the corporate bean counters to consider paid registries as "a normal cost of doing business and have it show up in their opex as opposed to their [open source program office] donation budget."

The dilemma was summed up succinctly by the anonymous Slashdot reader who submitted this story.

"Free beer is great. Securing the keg costs money!"



[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/open_source_registries_fund_security/

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/16/npm_under_attack_again

[3] https://alpha-omega.dev/grants/grantrecipients/

Long-time Slashdot reader [1]fahrbot-bot writes:

> Researchers have developed a robotic hand that can not only skitter about on its fingertips, it can also bend its fingers backward, connect and [2]disconnect from a robotic arm , and pick up and carry one or more objects at a time.

This [3]article in Science News includes footage of the robotic arm reattaching itself to the skittering robot hand, which can also hold objects against both sides of its palm simultaneously, and "can even unscrew the cap off a mustard bottle while holding the bottle in place."

> With its unusual agility, it could navigate and retrieve objects in spaces too confined for human hands. When attached to the mechanical arm, the robotic hand could pick up objects much like a human hand. The bot pinched a ball between two fingers, wrapped four fingers around a metal rod and held a flat disc between fingers and palm.

>

> But the bot isn't constrained by human anatomy... When the robot was separated from the arm, it was most stable walking on four or five fingers and using one or two fingers for grabbing and carrying things, the team found. In one set of trials with both bots, the hand detached from the robotic arm and used its fingers as legs to skitter over to a wooden block. Once there, it picked up the block with one finger and carried it back to the arm.

>

> The crawling bot could one day aid in industrial inspections of pipes and equipment too small for a human or larger robot to access, says Xiao Gao, a roboticist now at Wuhan University in China. It might retrieve objects in a warehouse or navigate confined spaces in disaster response efforts.



[1] https://slashdot.org/~fahrbot-bot

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67675-8

[3] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/detached-hand-robot-fingertips-ai

Imagine a 280-unit apartment complex offering no on-site leasing office with a human agent for questions. "Instead, the entire process has been outsourced to AI..." [1]reports SFGate , "from touring to signing the lease to completing management tasks once you actually move in."

Now imagine it's far more than just one apartment complex...

> At two other Jack London Square apartment buildings, my initial interactions were also with a robot. At the Allegro, my fiance and I entered the leasing office for our tour and asked for "Grace P," the leasing agent who had emailed us. "Oh, that's just our AI assistant," the woman at the front desk told us... At Aqua Via, another towering apartment complex across the street, I emailed back and forth with a very helpful and polite "Sofia M." My pal Sofia seemed so human-like in her responses that I did not realize she was AI until I looked a little closer at a text she'd sent me. "Msgs may be AI or human generated...." [S]he continued to text me for weeks after I'd moved on, trying to win me back. When I looked at the fine print, I realized both of these complexes were using EliseAI, a leading AI housing startup that claims to be involved in [2]managing 1 in 6 apartments in the U.S...

>

> [50 corporate landlords have funded a VC named RET Ventures to invest in and deploy rental-automating AI, and SFGate's reporter spoke to partner Christopher Yip.] According to Yip, AI is common in large apartment complexes not just in the tech-centric Bay Area, but across the entire country. It all kicked off at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he said, when contactless, self-guided apartment tours and completely virtual tours where people rented apartments sight unseen became commonplace. Technology's infiltration into the renting process has only grown deeper in the years since, Yip said, mirroring how pervasive AI has become in many other facets of our lives. "From an industry perspective, it's really about meeting the renter where they are," Yip said. He pointed to how many renters now prefer to interact through text and email, and want to tour apartments at their convenience — say, at 7 p.m. after work, when a typical leasing office might be closed.

>

> The latest updates in technology not only allow you to take a self-guided tour with AI unlocking the door for you, but also to ask AI questions by conversing with voice AI as you wander through the kitchen and bedroom at your leisure. And while a human leasing agent might ghost you for days or weeks at a time, AI responds almost instantly — EliseAI typically responds within 30 seconds, [said Fran Loftus, chief experience officer at EliseAI]... [I]n some scenarios, the goal does seem to be to eliminate humans entirely. "We do have long-term plans of building fully autonomous buildings," Loftus said.... "We think there's a time and a place for that, depending on the type of property. But really right now, it's about helping with this crazy turnover in this industry."

The reporter says they missed the human touch, since "The second AI was involved, the interaction felt cold. When a human couldn't even be bothered to show up to give me a tour, my trust evaporated."

But they conclude that in the years ahead, human landlords offering tours "will probably go the way of landlines and VCRs."



[1] https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bay-area-apartment-ai-21332194.php

[2] https://eliseai.com/blog/new-office-announcement

Friday Amazon published a blog post " [1]to address the inaccuracies " in a Financial Times [2]report that the company's own AI tool Kiro caused two outages in an AWS service in December.

Amazon writes that the "brief" and "extremely limited" service interruption "was the result of user error — specifically misconfigured access controls — not AI as the story claims."

And "The Financial Times' claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false."

> The disruption was an extremely limited event last December affecting a single service (AWS Cost Explorer — which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our 39 Geographic Regions around the world. It did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role — the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI powered or not) or manual action.

>

> We did not receive any customer inquiries regarding the interruption. We implemented numerous safeguards to prevent this from happening again — not because the event had a big impact (it didn't), but because we insist on learning from our operational experience to improve our security and resilience. Additional safeguards include mandatory peer review for production access. While operational incidents involving misconfigured access controls can occur with any developer tool — AI-powered or not — we think it is important to learn from these experiences.



[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws-service-outage-ai-bot-kiro

[2] https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/1252243/amazon-service-was-taken-down-by-ai-coding-bot