The Free Software Foundation turns forty on October 4, 2025 "and we will end our thirties on a high note!" they announced this week: We wish we were celebrating the achievement of software freedom for all computer users, but we're not there yet. Until our mission becomes reality and we can retire, instead, we are celebrating forty years of activism, and all that we have achieved.

Since our founding in 1985, we laid out many stepping stones on the road to software freedom, and we're eager to continue building the road ahead. We will celebrate our fortieth in the spirit of bringing the international free software community together, discussing what we can do next to make the world freer, and celebrating how far we've come. We're aiming for a libre planet! Sounds familiar? Instead of hosting one LibrePlanet conference in 2025, we're planning a jam-packed anniversary year, filled with several new and exciting activities!

We'll begin the anniversary year with an unprecedented memorabilia auction, starting as a silent auction on March 17, and culminating in a virtual live auction on March 23. By moving out of the FSF office, we got to sort through all the fun and historically important memorabilia and selected the best ones. This is your chance to get your very own personal souvenir of the FSF, from original GNU art to a famous katana and the very same VT220 that was standing on the FSF's front desk, and which people used to display ASCII art or to play free software games.

Let's claim the month of May as libre planet (or libre local) month! We're inviting free software supporters like you anywhere in the world, to organize an in-person community meetup in your area to bring people together. We're setting up a small fund for these local gatherings, can send stickers, flyers, ideas and tips, and you can invite an FSF staff member to give a talk or workshop during your event and of course, we'll help promote it...

Then, on the actual birthday of the FSF on October 4, 2025, there will be a big celebration in Boston, MA, and the entire free software community is invited... These are just some of the big ticket items we have worked out, but there is more! Keep an eye out on the FSF's pages, we'll be posting exact information on everything upcoming.
They're looking for volunteers — and they also suggest organizing a community meetup in your area. Plus, there's also an FSF Anniversary Logo Contest. "We would like to source the fortieth anniversary logo design directly from a free software supporter. Everyone is welcome to submit a design (or even multiple designs) no matter your previous experience in design."

The winning design "will be chosen by the community and ultimately immortalized in the history of the FSF," according to the announcement — displayed on the FSF homepage, printed on all celebration materials, "and possibly even stamped on some merchandise." But of course, the contest's requirements include respecting everyone's freedoms: - The logo must be produced using exclusively free software editing tools, such as GIMP, Krita, or Inkscape;

- Any fonts used in the design must be under the SIL Open Font license or another free license...
"The final logo will be released under CC BY, attributed to the FSF."

Nathan Sobo "joined GitHub in late 2011 to build the Atom text editor," according to an online biography, "and he led the Atom team until 2018." Max Brunsfeld joined the Atom team in 2013, and "While driving Atom towards its 1.0 launch during the day, Max spent nights and weekends building Tree-sitter, a blazing-fast and expressive incremental parsing framework that currently powers all code analysis at GitHub."

Last year they teamed up with Antonio Scandurra (another Atom alumnus) to launch a new startup called Zed (which in 2023 raised $10 million, according to TechCrunch). And today the open source blog It's FOSS checks in on their open-source code editor — "Zed Editor". Mainly written in Rust, it supports running in CLI, diagnosing project-wide errors, split panes, and markdown previews: By default, any added content is treated as plain text. I used the language switcher to change it to Rust so that I would get proper syntax highlighting, indentation, error detection, and other useful language-specific functions. The switch highlighted all the Rust elements correctly, and I then focused on Zed Editor's user interface. The overall feel of the editor was minimal, with all the important options being laid out nicely.

[Its status bar] had some interesting panels. The first one I checked was the Terminal Panel, which, as the name suggests, lets you run commands, scripts, and facilitates interaction with system files or processes directly from within the editor. I then moved to the Assistant Panel, which is home to various large language models that can be integrated into Zed Editor. There are options like Anthropic, GitHub Copilot Chat, Ollama, OpenAI, and Google AI... The Zed Editor team has also recently introduced Zed AI in collaboration with Anthropic for assisting with coding, allowing for code generation, advanced context-powered interactions, and more...

The real-time collaboration features on Zed Editor are quite appealing too. To check them out, I had to log in with my GitHub account. After logging in, the Collab Panel opened up, and I could see many channels from the official Zed community. I could chat with others, add collaborators to existing projects, join a call with the option to share my screen and track other collaborators' cursors, add new contacts, and carry out many other collaborative tasks.

One can also use extensions and themes to extend what Zed Editor can do. There are some nice pre-installed themes as well.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has weighed in on the debate over the relative values of political expression and workplace coexistence by ordering employees to leave their political opinions at home. A day after firing 28 workers for participating in a sit-in protest of the tech giant's cloud contract with Israel, Pichai warned staff that the office is not a place "to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics" in a company blog post.

Although Pichai didn't specifically mention the protests or the Israel-Hamas war, he concluded that the $1.92 trillion company "is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform." "We have a duty to be an objective and trusted provider of information that serves all of our users globally," Pichai continued. "When we come to work, our goal is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That supersedes everything else and I expect us to act with a focus that reflects that." The sit-in protest was staged against Google's involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with the Israeli government. During the nearly 10-hour protest, employees wore "Googler against genocide" T-shirts and occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

The report notes how tech companies, "previously famed for their progressive culture where nap pods and abortion benefits were welcome," are increasingly restricting political discussions to avoid internal conflict. Pichai notes in his memo that Google has previously enjoyed "a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action."

Last December, Hyperloop One, the futuristic transportation company pursuing Elon Musk's dream of tube-based, airplane-speed travel, announced its shutdown. However, the concept itself has found a new lease on life in a scaled-down version overseas. According to The Verge's Andrew J. Hawkins, "The hyperloop, in fact, lives on -- as a 1/12th scale model in Switzerland." From the report: Sure, this isn't exactly the full realization of Musk's 2013 white paper, in which he theorized that aerodynamic aluminum capsules filled with passengers or cargo could be propelled through a nearly airless tube at speeds of up to 760mph. These tubes, either raised on pylons or sunk beneath the earth, could be built either within or between cities. Musk called it a "fifth mode of transportation" and argued it could help change the way we live, work, trade, and travel. The idea is being put to the test in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a 120-meter circular test track is being operated by a team that includes the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD), and Swisspod Technologies. This week, the group announced that it had conducted "the longest" hyperloop test of its kind: traveling 11.8 km (7.3 miles) at a speed of 40.7km/h (25.3mph).

The circular test track has a circumference of 125.6 meters (412 feet) and a diameter of 40 centimeters (15.7 inches). It sounds modest, but the group claims that in a full-scale system, their test "directly translates" to a journey of 141.6 km (88 miles), which is about the distance between Geneva and Bern, or San Francisco to Sacramento, and speeds of up to 488.2 km/h (303.4mph). The project is called LIMITLESS, which stands for Linear Induction Motor Drive for Traction and Levitation in Sustainable Hyperloop Systems. During the test, the team "monitored the performance of vital subsystems," including propulsion, communication infrastructure, power electronics, and thermal management. They assessed "energy consumption, thrust variations, [linear induction motor] response, and control during acceleration, cruising, coasting, and braking scenarios."

Of course, a 1/12th-scale circular test track is hardly a sign that the hyperloop is alive and well. Most of the startups and companies pursuing a full-scale hyperloop have shut down, victims of financial mismanagement, as well as infrastructure and regulatory hurdles. Critics said that while the hyperloop may be technically feasible, it still only amounts to vaporware. It's been called a "utopian vision" that would be financially impossible to achieve. But the Swiss team is undeterred, promising to conduct a battery of future tests to further validate the system. Swisspod CEO Denis Tudor said the group plans to test its first freight product soon, and is currently building a larger test track in the US. "This is a key step toward making hyperloop for passengers a reality and changing how we connect, work, and live," he said.

SpaceX has launched the world's first wood-paneled satellite into space "to test the suitability of timber as a renewable building material in future exploration of destinations like the Moon and Mars," reports the BBC. From the report: Made by researchers in Japan, the tiny satellite weighing just 900g is heading for the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission. It will then be released into orbit above the Earth. Named LignoSat, after the Latin word for wood, its panels have been built from a type of magnolia tree, using a traditional technique without screws or glue. Researchers at Kyoto University who developed it hope it may be possible in the future to replace some metals used in space exploration with wood.

"Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there's no water or oxygen that would rot or inflame it," Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata told Reuters news agency. "Early 1900s airplanes were made of wood," Prof Murata said. "A wooden satellite should be feasible, too." If trees could one day be planted on the Moon or Mars, wood might also provide material for colonies in space in the future, the researchers hope. Along with its wood panels, LignoSat also incorporates traditional aluminium structures and electronic components. It has sensors on board to monitor how its wood reacts to the extreme environment of space during the six months it will orbit the Earth. You can watch the launch on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The CEO of AI search company Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, has offered to cross picket lines and provide services to mitigate the effect of a strike by New York Times tech workers. The NYT Tech Guild announced its strike Monday, after setting November 4 as its deadline months earlier. The workers represented provide software support and data analysis for the Times, on the business side of the outlet. They have been asking for an annual 2.5% wage increase and to cement a current two days per week in-office expectation, among other things. [...] Picketers demonstrated in front of the NYT building in New York as negotiations continued. Meanwhile, on X, formerly known as Twitter, Perplexity's CEO offered to step in for the striking workers.

Replying to Semafor media editor Max Tani quoting the publisher, Srinivas wrote: "Hey AG Sulzberger @nytimes sorry to see this. Perplexity is on standby to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. DM me anytime here." Many on X immediately castigated Srinivas for acting as a scab -- a derogatory term for people willing to perform the jobs of striking workers. It is widely considered a disreputable behavior in matters of labor and equity. By undercutting collective action, scabs limit the ability of workers to bargain with those in positions of power. Srinivas may simply be trying to make sure people have the information they need on election day. The company has lately unveiled its own elections info hub and map. But to offer its services explicitly as a replacement for striking workers was bound to be an unpopular move.

Though TechCrunch asked Perplexity for comment, Srinivas responded to TechCrunch's post on X saying that "the offer was *not* to 'replace' journalists or engineers with AI but to provide technical infra support on a high-traffic day." The striking workers in question, however, are the ones who provide that service to the NYT. It's not really clear what services other than AI tools Perplexity could offer, or why they would not amount to replacing the workers in question.

The Washington Post reports that a former Etsy CEO remodeled their home into what's known as a passive house. It's "designed to be as energy efficient as possible, typically with top-notch insulation and a perfect seal that prevents outside air from penetrating the home; air flows in and out through filtration and exhaust systems only."

Their benefits include protection from pollution and pollen, noise insulation and a stable indoor temperature that minimizes energy needs. That translates to long-term savings on heating and cooling.

While the concept has been around for about 50 years, experts say that the United States is on the cusp of a passive house boom, driven by lowered costs, state-level energy code changes and a general greater awareness of — and desire for — more sustainable housing... Massachusetts — which alongside New York and Pennsylvania is one of the leading states in passive house adoption — has 272 passive house projects underway thanks to an incentive program, says Zack Semke [the director of the Passive House Accelerator, a group of industry professionals who aim to spread lessons in passive house building]. Consumer demand for passive houses is also increasing, says Michael Ingui, an architect in New York City and the founder of the Passive House Accelerator... The need to lower our energy footprint is so much more top-of-mind today than it was 10 years ago, Ingui says, and covid taught us about the importance of good ventilation and filtered fresh air. "People are searching for the healthiest house," he says, "and that's a passive house...."

These days, new passive houses are usually large, multifamily apartment buildings or high-end single-family homes. But that leaves out a large swath of homeowners in the middle. To widen passive house accessibility to include all types of people and their housing needs, we need better energy codes and even more policies and incentives, says In Cho, a sustainability architect, educator and a co-founder of the nonprofit Passive House for Everyone! Passive houses "can and should serve folks from all socioeconomic backgrounds," she says. Using a one-two punch of mandates for energy efficient buildings and greater awareness to the public, that increased demand for passive houses will lead to more supply, Cho says. And we're already seeing those changes in the market.

Take triple-pane windows, for example, which are higher performing and more insulating than their double-pane counterparts. Even just 10 to 20 years ago, the difference in price between the two was high enough to make triple-pane windows cost-prohibitive for a lot of people, Cho says. Over the years, as the benefits of higher performing windows became more well-known, and as cities and states changed their energy codes, more companies began producing better windows. Now they're basically at price parity, she says. If we keep pushing for greater awareness and further policy changes, it's possible that all of the components of passive house buildings could follow that trend.
"For large multifamily projects, we're already seeing price parity in some cases, Semke says...

"But as it stands, single-family passive houses are still likely to cost a margin more than non-passive houses, he says. This is because price parity is easier to achieve when working at larger scales, but also because many of the housing policies and incentives encouraging passive house buildings are geared toward these larger projects."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the European Space Agency: White dots arranged in five clusters against a black background (PNG). This is the simulated extraterrestrial signal transmitted from Mars and deciphered by a father and a daughter on Earth after a year-long decoding effort. On June 7, 2024, media artist Daniela de Paulis received this simple, retro-looking image depicting five amino acids in her inbox. It was the solution to a cosmic puzzle beamed from ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in May 2023, when the European spacecraft played alien as part of the multidisciplinary art project 'A Sign in Space.' After three radio astronomy observatories on Earth intercepted the signal, the challenge was first to extract the message from the raw data of the radio signal, and secondly to decode it. In just 10 days, a community of 5000 citizen scientists gathered online and managed to extract the signal. The second task took longer and required some visionary minds.

US citizens Ken and Keli Chaffin cracked the code following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end. The father and daughter team discovered that the message contained movement, suggesting some sort of cellular formation and life forms. Amino acids and proteins are the building blocks of life. Now that the cryptic signal has been deciphered, the quest for meaning begins. The interpretation of the message, like any art piece, remains open. Daniela crafted the message with a small group of astronomers and computer scientists, with support from ESA, the SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory. The artist and collaborators behind the project are now taking a step back and witnessing how citizen scientists are shaping the challenge on their own.

SFGate spills the secrets of Disneyland's "Enchanted Tiki Room" and its lifelike animatronic singing birds — Jose, Fritz, Michael and Pierre — "whose movements were perfectly synced with the audio track." "Beneath the room, the heartbeat of the attraction is a $1 million installation of electronics equipment, operated by a roll of 14-channel magnetic tape," the Orange County Register wrote upon its opening. "It is the same system which programs the U.S. military's polaris missile." That system also ran very hot. To keep guests from overheating, air conditioning was installed throughout the building, making the Tiki Room Disneyland's first attraction to be fully air conditioned...
Or, as another article puts it, "While Disney did not delve into the speculative science of cryogenics to preserve his life, he did borrow the mechanical brain of a nuclear missile to simulate life, creating a new type of entertainment in the process."

The article remembers how Wernher Von Braun became a technical advisor (and on-camera presenter) for three Disney-produced TV episodes about space travel — at the same time Von Braun was working as technical director for the U.S. Army rocket program that produced the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile, plus the first submarine-launched ballistic missile with its ground-breaking launch control mechanism: An important aspect of the Polaris launch system hinged on the fact that the conditions under which the missiles might be launched were constantly changing. Different underwater currents, temperatures, and flexing of the metal hull all contributed to the difficulty of a successful launch. In order to minimize human errors and to automate the sequence as much as possible, scientists developed an audio control system. A magnetic audio tape with a series of prerecorded cues precisely timed to account for the submarine's movement, controlled the launch machinery.

This new technology, invented to deliver nuclear destruction, proved exactly what Disney needed for his wonderland developed for children.
The article concludes that Disneyland engineering "transformed Von Braun's military technology" to the point today where "what was once controlled by the artificial brain of a nuclear missile is now run by the equivalent of a MacBook."

SFGate delves deeper into the attraction's strange origins — and how it all came full circle 63 years later... At the intersection of Main Street and Adventureland, a restaurant called the Pavillion — now the Jolly Holiday — bridged the gap. Under one roof, it served food to Main Street guests on one side and Adventureland diners on the other. The inelegant transition created an eyesore that Walt despised... The need for the Tiki Cafe "appeared to be less about food and more about aesthetics," Ken Bruce writes in Before the Birds Sang Words , a comprehensive history of the attraction.

In 1961, Walt gathered with park designers about the concept. The sketch made by legendary theme park designer John Hench was remarkably thorough, with much of its design incorporated into the final product... When Walt saw a plethora of birds in the sketch, he famously exclaimed, "We can't have birds in there ... because they'll poop in the food." Hench hurriedly ad-libbed that the birds would be mechanical, a concept that Walt adored...

Although its powerful air conditioning may be its biggest draw today, many attractions you love owe their existence to the flock of singing birds. Disney engineers' work on the talking flora and fauna laid the foundation for much more complex Audio-Animatronics (a word that Walt Disney coined). Without Jose, Fritz, Michael and Pierre, there would be no Haunted Mansion, no Pirates of the Caribbean, no Rise of the Resistance. Next year, in celebration of Disneyland's 70th anniversary, the park will unveil one of its most sophisticated animatronics yet: Walt Disney himself. It will be the first time Walt appears in a Disney attraction anywhere in the world, completing a journey that started with a mechanical bird and ends with an immortal homage.
Their article also reveals that a year after the Tiki Room opened, one of the birds was programmed to say "Come, there's an island there for you in Hawaii. Soaring birds of United Airlines fly there too!" Because Disneyland had signed a sponsorship deal with United Airlines...

"Nvidia dethroned Apple as the world's most valuable company on Friday..." reports Reuters, "powered by insatiable demand for its specialized artificial intelligence chips." Nvidia's stock market value briefly touched $3.53 trillion, slightly above Apple's $3.52 trillion, LSEG data showed... In June, Nvidia briefly became the world's most valuable company before it was overtaken by Microsoft and Apple. The tech trio's market capitalizations have been neck-and-neck for several months. [Friday] Microsoft's market value stood at $3.18 trillion, with its stock up 0.8%...

Nvidia's shares hit a record high on Tuesday, building on a rally from last week when TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, posted a forecast-beating 54% jump in quarterly profit driven by soaring demand for chips used in AI.
The article points out that by the end of the day Friday, Nvidia's valuation had dropped to $3.47 trillion, while Apple had risen to $3.52 trillion...

NoWayNoShapeNoForm writes: OpenVault believes that data caps on broadband are not a problem because most people do not exceed their existing data caps. OpenVault contends that people that do exceed their broadband data caps are simply being forgetful — leaving a streaming device on 24x7, or deploying unsecure WiFi access points, or reselling their service within an apartment building.

Yes, there may be some ISPs that have older networks that they have not upgraded. Or maybe they are unable to increase network capacity in "the middle mile" of their networks, but the Covid pandemic certainly encouraged many ISPs to upgrade their networks and capacity while many ISPs that had broadband data caps ended that feature.

Perhaps the biggest problem, according to OpenVault, is that most broadband users do not really have any idea how much bandwidth they "consume" every month. If Internet access is a service that people want to treat as a "utility", then you have to ask, Would they keep the water running after finishing their shower?
In the article Ookla's VP of Smart Communities adds that "Scrolling through social media feeds for hours can 'push' hundreds of videos to the user, many of which may be of no interest — they just start running." So the main driver for usage-based billing wasn't to increase revenue, OpenVault CEO Mark Trudeau tells the site, but to "balance the network a little more..." (Though he then also adds that sometimes a subscriber could also be reselling broadband service in their apartment building, "And that's not even legal.")

"If one or two customers on a given node is causing issues for 300 others, where those 300 are not getting the service that they paid for, then that's a problem right?" he said.

Having said that, the article also points out that "Many major fiber providers, like AT&T, Frontier, Google Fiber and Verizon Fios, don't have data caps at all."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Delta Air Lines on Friday sued cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in a Georgia state court after a global outage in July caused mass flight cancellations, disrupted travel plans of 1.3 million customers and cost the carrier more than $500 million. Delta's lawsuit filed in Fulton County Superior Court called the faulty software update from CrowdStrike "catastrophic" and said the firm "forced untested and faulty updates to its customers, causing more than 8.5 million Microsoft Windows-based computers around the world to crash." [...]

Delta, which has purchased CrowdStrike products since 2022, said the outage forced it to cancel 7,000 flights, impacting 1.3 million passengers over five days. "If CrowdStrike had tested the faulty update on even one computer before deployment, the computer would have crashed," Delta's lawsuit says. "Because the faulty update could not be removed remotely, CrowdStrike crippled Delta's business and created immense delays for Delta customers." Delta said that as part of its IT-planning and infrastructure, it has invested billions of dollars "in licensing and building some of the best technology solutions in the airline industry."

The Browser Company is developing a new, much simpler browser distinct from Arc, which has proven too complex for mainstream adoption despite a strong following among power users. The Verge's David Pierce reports: Arc is not dying, [says CEO Josh Miller]. He says that over and over, in fact, even after I tell him the YouTube video the company just released sounds like the thing companies say right before they kill a product. It's just that Arc won't change much anymore. It'll get stability updates and bug fixes, and there's a team at The Browser Company dedicated to those. "In that sense," Miller says, "it feels like a complete-ish product." Most of the team's energy and time will now be dedicated to starting from scratch. "Arc was basically this front-end, tab management innovation," Miller says. "People loved it. It grew like a weed. Then it started getting slow and started crashing a lot, and we felt bad, and we had to learn how to make it fast. And we kind of lost sight, in some ways, of the fact that we've got to do the operating system part."

The plan this time is to build not just a different interface for a browser, but a different kind of browser entirely -- one that is much more proactive, more powerful, more AI-centric, more in line with that original vision. Call it the iPhone of web browsers, or the "internet computer," or whatever other metaphor you like. The idea is to turn the browser into an app platform. Miller still wants to do it, and he wants to do it for everyone. What does that look like? Miller is a bit vague on the details. The new browser, which Miller intimates could launch as soon as the beginning of next year, is designed to come with no switching costs, which means among other things that it will have horizontal tabs and fewer ideas about organization. The idea is to "make the first 90 seconds effortless" in order to get more people to switch. And then, slowly, to reveal what this new browser can do.

The Librarian of Congress has granted a DMCA exemption allowing independent repair of soft-serve machines, addressing the persistent issue of restricted repairs on McDonald's frequently malfunctioning machines. ExtremeTech reports: Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass a digital lock protecting copyrighted work. That can be the DRM on a video file you download from iTunes, the carrier locks that prevent you from using a phone on other networks, or even the software running a McDonald's soft serve machine that refuses to accept third-party repairs. By locking down a product with DRM, companies can dictate when and how items are repaired under threat of legal consequences. This is an ongoing issue for people who want to fix all those busted ice cream machines.

Earlier this year, iFixit and Public Knowledge submitted their request for an exemption that would have covered a wide swath of industrial equipment. The request included everything from building management software to the aforementioned ice cream machines. Unfortunately, the Copyright Office was unconvinced on some of these points. However, the Librarian of Congress must be just as sick as the rest of us to hear the ice cream machine is broken. The office granted an exception for "retail-level food preparation equipment."

That means restaurant owners and independent repair professionals will be able to bypass the software locks that keep kitchen machinery offline until the "right" repair services get involved. This should lower prices and speed up repairs in such situations. Public Knowledge and iFixit express disappointment that the wider expansion was not granted, but they're still celebrating with some delicious puns (and probably ice cream). "There's nothing vanilla about this victory; an exemption for retail-level commercial food preparation equipment will spark a flurry of third-party repair activity and enable businesses to better serve their customers," said Meredith Rose, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge.

An anonymous reader shares a post: EVs are still winning. But they haven't won yet; only 4% of the global passenger car fleet, 23% of the bus fleet, and less than 1% of delivery trucks are electrified.

But at this point I think the writing is on the wall. The phenomenon of a superior technology displacing an older, inferior technology is not uncommon, and it generally looks like the EV transition is looking now. When a new technology passes a 5% adoption rate, it almost never turns out to be inferior to what came before; with EVs, that threshold has now been reached in dozens of countries.

In fact, we don't have to rely on trend-based forecasting to understand why EVs are just going to win. There are a number of fundamental factors that make EVs simply better than combustion vehicles. The longer time goes on, the more these inherent advantages will make themselves felt in the market.

The first of these is price. Currently, EVs often require government subsidies in order to be price-competitive with combustion cars. But batteries are getting cheaper and cheaper as we get better and better at building them. The cheaper batteries get, the smaller the subsidies required to get people to switch to EVs. Goldman Sachs reports that this crucial tipping point will be reached in about two years:

[...] Once batteries cross that tipping point, the EV revolution will take on its own momentum. It will simply be cheaper to buy an EV than a combustion car. People will gravitate toward the cheaper option, especially if it comes with other advantages. And in this case it does.

EVs' second advantage is convenience. Most EV owners will almost never have to fill their cars up at a station. This is because they will charge their cars at night, in their own home garages or driveway.

Though Sam Altman once called OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft "the best bromance in tech," now "ties between the companies have started to fray" reports the New York Times — citing interviews with 19 people "familiar with the relationship". [Alternate URL here.]

Among other things, Satya Nadella "has said privately that Altman's firing in November shocked and concerned him, according to five people with knowledge of his comments. Since then, Microsoft has started to hedge its bet on OpenAI," and reconsidered new investments beyond its initial $13 billion — even as OpenAI expects to lose $5 billion this year That tension demonstrates a key challenge for AI startups: They are dependent on the world's tech giants for money and computing power because those big companies control the massive cloud computing systems the small outfits need to develop AI... Over the past year, OpenAI has been trying to renegotiate the deal to help it secure more computing power and reduce crushing expenses while Microsoft executives have grown concerned that their AI work is too dependent on OpenAI... [I]n March, Microsoft paid at least $650 million to hire most of the staff from Inflection, an OpenAI competitor...

In June, Microsoft agreed to an exception in [OpenAI's] contract, six people with knowledge of the change said. That allowed OpenAI to sign a roughly $10 billion computing deal with Oracle for additional computing resources, according to two people familiar with the deal. Oracle is providing computers packed with chips suited to building AI, while Microsoft provides the software that drives the hardware... While it was looking for computer power alternatives, OpenAI also raced to broaden its investors, according to two people familiar with the company's plan. Part of the plan was to secure strategic investments from organizations that could bolster OpenAI's prospects in ways beyond throwing around money. Those organizations included Apple, chipmaker Nvidia, and MGX, a tech investment firm controlled by the United Arab Emirates... Earlier this month, OpenAI closed a $6.6 billion funding round led by Thrive Capital, with additional participation from Nvidia, MGX and others. Apple did not invest, but Microsoft also participated in the funding round.

OpenAI expected to spend at least $5.4 billion in computing costs through the end of 2024, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. That amount was expected to skyrocket over the next five years as OpenAI expanded, soaring to an estimated $37.5 billion in annual computing costs by 2029, the documents showed... Still, OpenAI employees complain that Microsoft is not providing enough computing power, according to three people familiar with the relationship. And some have complained that if another company beat it to the creation of AI that matches the human brain, Microsoft will be to blame because it hasn't given OpenAI the computing power it needs, according to two people familiar with the complaints.

Oddly, that could be the key to getting out from under its contract with Microsoft. The contract contains a clause that says that if OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence, or AGI — roughly speaking, a machine that matches the power of the human brain — Microsoft loses access to OpenAI's technologies.

MIT engineers have built a solar-powered desalination system that "ramps up its desalting process and automatically adjusts to any sudden variation in sunlight, for example by dialing down in response to a passing cloud or revving up as the skies clear."

While traditional reverse osmosis systems typically require steady power levels, "the MIT system requires no extra batteries for energy storage, nor a supplemental power supply, such as from the grid." And their results were pretty impressive: The engineers tested a community-scale prototype on groundwater wells in New Mexico over six months, working in variable weather conditions and water types. The system harnessed on average over 94 percent of the electrical energy generated from the system's solar panels to produce up to 5,000 liters of water per day despite large swings in weather and available sunlight... "Being able to make drinking water with renewables, without requiring battery storage, is a massive grand challenge," says Amos Winter, the Germeshausen Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research Center at MIT. "And we've done it."

The system is geared toward desalinating brackish groundwater — a salty source of water that is found in underground reservoirs and is more prevalent than fresh groundwater resources. The researchers see brackish groundwater as a huge untapped source of potential drinking water, particularly as reserves of fresh water are stressed in parts of the world. They envision that the new renewable, battery-free system could provide much-needed drinking water at low costs, especially for inland communities where access to seawater and grid power are limited...

The researchers' report details the new system in a paper appearing in Nature Water. The study's co-authors are Bessette, Winter, and staff engineer Shane Pratt... "Our focus now is on testing, maximizing reliability, and building out a product line that can provide desalinated water using renewables to multiple markets around the world," Pratt adds. The team will be launching a company based on their technology in the coming months.

This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, the Julia Burke Foundation, and the MIT Morningside Academy of Design. This work was additionally supported in-kind by Veolia Water Technologies and Solutions and Xylem Goulds.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

The University of Toronto is constructing a 14-story building using mass timber, one of the largest and most recent projects to employ this innovative building technology. "Mass timber is an appealing alternative to energy-intensive concrete and steel, which together account for almost 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions," reports Knowable Magazine. "Though experts are still debating mass timber's role in fighting climate change, many are betting it's better for the environment than current approaches to construction. It relies on wood, after all, a renewable resource." From the report: Today, the tallest mass timber building is the 25-story Ascent skyscraper in Milwaukee, completed in 2022. As of that year, there were 84 mass timber buildings eight stories or higher either built or under construction worldwide, with another 55 proposed. Seventy percent of the existing and future buildings were in Europe, about 20 percent in North America and the rest in Australia and Asia, according to a report (PDF) from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. When you include smaller buildings, at least 1,700 mass timber buildings had been constructed in the United States alone as of 2023. [...]

In principle, mass timber is like plywood but on a much larger scale: The smaller pieces are layered and glued together under pressure in large specialized presses. Today, beams up to 50 meters long, usually made of what's called glue-laminated timber, or glulam, can replace steel elements. Panels up to 50 centimeters thick, typically cross-laminated timber, or CLT, replace concrete for walls and floors. These wood composites can be surprisingly strong -- stronger than steel by weight. But a mass timber element must be bulkier to achieve that same strength. As a building gets higher, the wooden supports must get thicker; at some point, they simply take up too much space. So for taller mass timber buildings, including the Ascent skyscraper, architects often turn to a combination of wood, steel and concrete.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today. Friends and associates remember Christensen as humble and unassuming, a quiet innovator who never sought the spotlight for his groundbreaking work. Despite creating one of the foundational technologies of the digital age, Christensen maintained a low profile throughout his life, content with his long-standing career at IBM and showing no bitterness or sense of missed opportunity as the Internet age dawned.

"Ward was the quietest, pleasantest, gentlest dude," said BBS: The Documentary creator Jason Scott in a conversation with Ars Technica. Scott documented Christensen's work extensively in a 2002 interview for that project. "He was exactly like he looks in his pictures," he said, "like a groundskeeper who quietly tends the yard." Tech veteran Lauren Weinstein initially announced news of Christensen's passing on Sunday, and a close friend of Christensen's confirmed to Ars that Christensen died peacefully in his home. The cause of death has not yet been announced.

Pior to creating the first BBS, Christensen invented XMODEM, a 1977 file transfer protocol that made much of the later BBS world possible by breaking binary files into packets and ensuring that each packet was safely delivered over sometimes unstable and noisy analog telephone lines. It inspired other file transfer protocols that allowed ad-hoc online file sharing to flourish.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Adobe (ADBE.O), opens new tab on Monday said it has started publicly distributing an AI model that can generate video from text prompts, joining the growing field of companies trying to upend film and television production using generative artificial intelligence. The Firefly Video Model, as the technology is called, will compete with OpenAI's Sora, which was introduced earlier this year, while TikTok owner ByteDance and Meta Platforms have also announced their video tools in recent months.

Facing much larger rivals, Adobe has staked its future on building models trained on data that it has rights to use, ensuring the output can be legally used in commercial work. San Jose, California-based Adobe will start opening up the tool to people who have signed up for its waiting list but did not give a general release date. While Adobe has not yet announced any customers using its video tools, it said on Monday that PepsiCo-owned Gatorade will use its image generation model for a site where customers can order custom-made bottles, and Mattel has been using Adobe tools to help design packaging for its Barbie line of dolls.

For its video tools, Adobe has aimed at making them practical for everyday use by video creators and editors, with a special focus on making the footage blend in with conventional footage, said Ely Greenfield, Adobe's chief technology officer for digital media. "We really focus on fine-grain control, teaching the model the concepts that video editors and videographers use -- things like camera position, camera angle, camera motion," Greenfield told Reuters in an interview.