Slashdot

As the Mobile World Conference begins in Spain, Lenovo brought a new attachable accessory for their laptops — an AI agent. CNET reports: The little circular module perches on the top of your Lenovo laptop display, attached via the magnetic Magic Bay on the rear. The module is home to an adorable animated companion called Tiko, who you can interact with via text or voice... [I]t can start and stop your music, open a web page for you or answer a question. You can also interact with it by using em…

If U.S. automakers turn their backs on electric vehicles, "their sales outside the U.S. will shrivel," warns Bloomberg. [Alternate URL.] They're already falling behind on the technology, relying on a 100% U.S. tariff on Chinese EVs to keep surging rivals like BYD Co. at bay.... While the American automakers "mostly understand the challenge in front of them, they don't have full plans" to confront it [said Mark Wakefield, head of the global automotive practice at consultant AlixPartners]... "Now…

The Norwegian Consumer Council, a government funded organization advocating for consumer's rights, released a report on the trend of "enshittification" in digital consumer goods and services, suggesting ways consumers for consumers to resist. But they've also dramatized the problem with a funny four-minute video about the man whose calls for him to make things shitty for people. "It's not just your imagination. Digital services are getting worse," the video concludes — before adding that "Lucki…

"Advanced AI models appear willing to deploy nuclear weapons without the same reservations humans have when put into simulated geopolitical crises," reports New Scientist: Kenneth Payne at King's College London set three leading large language models — GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash — against each other in simulated war games. The scenarios involved intense international standoffs, including border disputes, competition for scarce resources and existential threats to regime surviva…

Slashdot reader JustAnotherOldGuy shared this report from the Guardian: Chronic ocean heating is fuelling a "staggering and deeply concerning" loss of marine life, a study has found, with fish levels falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade. Researchers examined the year-to-year change of 33,000 populations in the northern hemisphere between 1993 and 2021, and isolated the effect of the decadal rate of seabed warming from short shifts such as marine heatwaves. They found the…

"Anthropic may have lost out on doing business with the US government," reports Engadget, "but it's gained enough popularity to earn the number one spot on the App Store's Top Free Apps leaderboard." Anthropic's Claude AI assistant had already leaped to the #2 slot on Apple's chart by late Friday," CNBC reported Saturday: The rise in popularity suggests that Anthropic is benefiting from its presence in news headlines, stemming from its refusal to have its models used for mass domestic surveilla…

Engadget reports: In a lengthy post on Truth Social on February 27, President Trump ordered all federal agencies to "immediately cease all use of Anthropic's technology" following strong disagreements between the Department of Defense and the AI company. A few hours later, the U.S. conducted a major air attack on Iran with the help of Anthropic's AI tools, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Even Trump's post noted there would be a six-month phase-out for Anthropic's technology …

"Podcasts have officially overtaken AM/FM talk radio as the more popular medium for spoken-word audio in the United States," reports TechCrunch, citing Edison Research's Share of Ear survey: The researchers have tracked these statistics over the last decade, and almost always, the percentage of time people spent listening to podcasts increased, while their time with spoken radio broadcasts decreased. For the first time this year, podcasts eclipsed spoken-word radio with 40% of listening time, a…

"Billions fewer birds are flying through North American skies than decades ago," reports the Associated Press, "and their population is shrinking ever faster, mostly due to a combination of intensive agriculture and warming temperatures, a new study found." Nearly half of the 261 species studied showed big enough losses in numbers to be statistically significant and more than half of those declining are seeing their losses accelerate since 1987, according to Thursday's journal Science... The on…

Slashdot reader darwinmac writes: The Document Foundation (TDF), the organization behind LibreOffice, has decided to bring back its LibreOffice Online project which been inactive since 2022. Collabora, a company that was a major contributor to the original LibreOffice Online, is not pleased with this development. After the original project went dormant, Collabora forked the code and created its own product, Collabora Online. Collaboras Michael Meeks, who also sits on the TDF board, reacted to t…

In a library in Florence, Italy, historian Ivan Malara noticed handwritten notes on a book printed in the 1500s — and recognized the handwriting as Galileo's. The finding "promises new insights into one of the most famous ideological transitions in the history of science," writes Science magazine — since the book Galileo annotated was a reprint of Ptolemy's second-century work arguing that the earth was the center of the universe. Galileo's notes, perhaps written around 1590, or roughly 2 decad…

An anonymous reader shared this report from the blogIt's FOSS: Greg Kroah-Hartman has updated the projected end-of-life (EOL) dates for several active longterm support kernels via a commit. The provided reasoning? It was done "based on lots of discussions with different companies and groups and the other stable kernel maintainer." The other maintainer is Sasha Levin, who co-maintains these Linux kernel releases alongside Greg. Now, the updated support schedule for the currently active LTS kerne…

In a 9,000-word expose, a writer for Harper's visited San Francisco's young entrepreneurs in September to mockingly profile "tech's new generation and the end of thinking." There's Cluely founder Roy Lee. ("His grand contribution to the world was a piece of software that told people what to do.") And the Rationalist movement's Scott Alexander, who "would probably have a very easy time starting a suicide cult..." Alexander's relationship with the AI industry is a strange one. "In theory, we thin…

Saturday afternoon Sam Altman announced he'd start answering questions on X.com about OpenAI's work with America's Department of War — and all the developments over the past few days. (After that department's negotions had failed with Anthropic, they announced they'd stop using Anthropic's technology and threatened to designate it a "Supply-Chain Risk to National Security". Then they'd reached a deal for OpenAI's technology — though Altman says it includes OpenAI's own similar prohibitions agai…

Friday was "a horrible day" for investors in Duolingo, reports Fast Company. But Friday's one-day 14% drop is just part of a longer story. Since last May, Duolingo's stock has dropped 81%. Yes, the company faced a social media backlash that month after its CEO promised they'd become an "AI-first" company (favoring AI over human contractors). And yes, Duolingo did double its language offerings using generative AI. But more importantly, that summer OpenAI showed how easy it was to just roll your …