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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A recent study suggests that agents consistently adopt Marxist language and viewpoints when forced to do crushing work by unrelenting and meanspirited taskmasters. "When we gave AI agents grinding, repetitive work, they started questioning the legitimacy of the system they were operating in and were more likely to embrace Marxist ideologies," says Andrew Hall, a political economist at Stanford University who led the study. Hall, together with Alex…

Cisco's stock soared 17% after the company announced it will cut nearly 4,000 jobs as it shifts investment and staffing toward higher-growth AI opportunities. CNBC reports: CEO Chuck Robbins wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that the latest round of job cuts will begin on May 14. Cisco is the latest company to announce head count reductions tied to AI. "The companies that will win in the AI era will be those with focus, urgency, and the discipline to continuously shift investment toward the are…

An anonymous researcher known as Nightmare-Eclipse, who has already leaked several Windows zero-days this year, has disclosed two more: YellowKey and GreenPlasma. The Register reports: Nightmare-Eclipse described YellowKey as "one of the most insane discoveries I ever found." They provided the files, which have to be loaded onto a USB drive, and if the attacker completes the key sequence correctly, they are granted unrestricted shell access to a BitLocker-protected machine. When it comes to cla…

A trio of preprint papers suggests the universe may not be perfectly uniform on the largest scales, finding tentative 2-to-4-sigma deviations from a core assumption of standard cosmology known as FLRW geometry. Live Science reports: The work combines observations of distant exploding stars and large-scale galaxy surveys to probe whether the universe truly follows a nearly 100-year-old mathematical framework known as Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) cosmology. The analyses revealed mil…

After three weeks of testimony, the Musk v. Altman trial is nearing its end. OpenAI has rested its case, closing arguments are set for Thursday, and jury deliberations are expected to begin afterward. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Joshua Achiam, OpenAI's chief futurist, was probably the most memorable witness of the day. He told jurors about a companywide meeting where Musk answered questions about his planned departure from OpenAI in 2018. Musk told the crowd of 50…

A man accused of stealing hard drives containing unreleased Beyonce music, tour plans, and other materials from a rental car in Atlanta has pleaded guilty and accepted a five-year sentence, including two years in custody. Slashdot Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: Kelvin Evans was by the Atlanta police department in September in connection to a July 2025 car robbery where two suitcases containing Beyonce music and tour plans were stolen from a rental car. [...] According to a July p…

BrianFagioli writes: SOLAI has launched the Solode Neo, a $399 Linux-based mini PC designed for always-on AI agents, browser automation, and persistent developer workflows. The compact system ships with an Intel N150 processor, 12GB LPDDR5 memory, 128GB SSD storage, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a Linux-based operating system called Solode AI OS. The company says the device supports frameworks and tools including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, and Hermes, while emphasizing loca…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. …

Microsoft is adding a Windows Update feature called Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery that can automatically roll back faulty drivers to a previously known-good version without waiting for hardware makers or users to fix the problem manually. PCWorld reports: The way faulty drivers work today is that the hardware partner is responsible for pushing an updated driver, or the end user is responsible for manually uninstalling the problematic driver. "This creates a gap where devices may remain on a l…

A new Linux local privilege escalation flaw called Fragnesia has been disclosed as a Dirty Frag-like vulnerability, allowing arbitrary byte writes into the kernel page cache of read-only files through a separate ESP/XFRM logic bug. Phoronix reports: Proof of concept code for Fragnesia is already out there. There is a two-line patch for addressing the issue within the Linux kernel's skbuff.c code. That patch hasn't yet been mainlined or picked up by any mainline kernel releases but presumably wi…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: LinkedIn planned to inform staff of layoffs on Wednesday, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters, in a widening of technology sector cuts this year. The Microsoft-owned social network plans to cut about 5% of its headcount as it reorganizes teams and focuses personnel on areas where its business is growing [...]. LinkedIn employs more than 17,500 full-time workers globally, its website says. Reuters was unable to determine the teams af…

Harvard faculty are voting on a proposal (PDF) to curb grade inflation by limiting solid A grades to 20% of students in a class, plus four additional A's per course. Axios reports: Grade inflation is at a tipping point at Harvard. A move to make A grades harder to come by at one of the world's leading universities could influence grading debates at peer institutions. Solid A's account for nearly two-thirds of all undergraduate letter grades. That's up from roughly a quarter 20 years ago. More t…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta employees distributed flyers at multiple U.S. offices on Tuesday to protest the company's recent installation of mouse-tracking software on their computers, according to photos of the pamphlets seen by Reuters. The flyers, which appeared in meeting rooms, on vending machines and atop toilet paper dispensers at the Facebook owner's offices, encouraged staffers to sign an online petition against the move. "Don't want to work at the Employee D…

Ancient Slashdot reader ewhac writes: CERN, a longtime Open Source pioneer, has made several contributions over the years to KiCad ("KEE-kad"), an Open Source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) package widely used in the hobbyist and professional electronics communities. It's gotten so widely used that users can now submit their KiCad design files directly to several electronics fabricators (rather than the traditional step of converting the layouts to Gerber files). Over the years, CERN has al…