Toyota's Woven City, a $10 billion "living laboratory" on the site of a former car factory, is set to welcome its first 100 residents in fall 2025. The first residents will be Toyota employees and affiliates, but the city aims to expand to include "external inventors and their families." The Verge reports: Toyota said it completed "phase 1" of the construction, with the official launch planned for 2025. "Woven City is more than just a place to live, work, and play," Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda said during today's press conference at CES. "Woven City is a place where people can invent and develop all kinds of new products and ideas. It's a living laboratory where the residents are willing participants, giving inventors the opportunity to freely test their ideas in a secure, real-life setting." [...] In fall 2025, Toyota said it will welcome the first 100 residents to Woven City, all of whom will be employees of Toyota or its subsidiary, Woven by Toyota. The community will gradually expand to include "external inventors and their families" who will be invited to relocate to the new city. In total, the first phase of the city will eventually house 360 residents, Toyota says.

Toyota dubs these first residents "Weavers," adding that they are people who "share a passion for the 'expansion of mobility' and a commitment to building a more flourishing society. Through their participation in co-creation activities, Weavers will contribute to realizing the full potential of Woven City." That said, the first "inventors" confirmed for Woven City are mostly in the food services business, including a vending machine company and a startup that wants to explore "the potential value of coffee through futuristic cafe experiences." Toyoda mentioned several other ideas during his press conference, including high-powered motorized wheelchairs for people with disabilities who want to experience the thrill of racing. He also pitched the idea of a personal drone that follows joggers for added security, and "pet robots" for elderly people.

The Woven City site, which is located at the base of Mount Fuji, includes buildings that are designed by famed Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. The goal, through phase 2 and subsequent phases, is to build enough housing and facilities for up to 2,000 people to live year-around, with utilities powered by the company's hydrogen fuel cell technology. The site is private for now, though Toyota says it plans on inviting the general public to see it in 2026. The name "Woven City" is a reference to weaving together three different types of streets or pathways, each for a specific type of user. One street would be for faster vehicles only. The second would be a mix of lower-speed personal mobility vehicles, like bikes and scooters, as well as pedestrians. And the third would be a park-like promenade for pedestrians only. Japan first announced the "prototype city of the future" at CES 2020.

"In many instances, there's a catch: flexible work but at lower pay..." writes Fortune.

"Remote workers are accepting lower salaries in order to achieve remote status. Some are taking as much as 5% to 15% less pay to do so, while other employers are reversing the strategy to entice workers to come to the office at higher salaries..." Today, nearly half of managers anticipate challenges in meeting candidates' compensation expectations. And when the gap between salary expectation and an offer is too great, many employers are negotiating remote and hybrid work to get candidates to sign on the dotted line, according to Robert Half's recently published 2025 U.S. Hiring Outlook. Some candidates accept 5% to 15% less pay in exchange for getting to work from home, Theresa L. Fesinstine, founder of human resources advisory peoplepower.ai, told Fortune. "There's this unspoken exchange rate between flexibility and comp, and for some candidates, it's worth a significant trade-off," said Fesinstine, who has more than two decades of leadership experience in HR. This is especially true "for those who value work-life balance or are saving on commute costs."

There are inherent risks in offering job candidates lower salaries, even if it means getting the chance to work from home. Amy Spurling, founder and CEO of employee benefits reimbursement platform Compt, told Fortune she expects to see a second Great Resignation this year after hiring freezes, benefits cuts, and forced RTO policies in 2023 and 2024. "If you're trying to lowball remote workers, you're about to face a harsh reality," Spurling said. "2025 is going to be a 'find out' year for companies that thought they could use remote work or other 'perks' to replace competitive compensation and genuine employee support." To wit, a 2024 report by PwC forecasts another resignation period with a 28% increase in the number of people who plan to change jobs, compared to 19% during the Great Resignation of 2022...

What's more, Fesinstine argues, remote work "isn't a perk anymore, but rather a standard operating model." So attempting to describe remote work as a benefit doesn't sit well with job candidates...
On the other hand, Michael Steinitz, senior executive director of professional talent solutions at Robert Half, told Fortune their research shows 76% of job candidates are willing to work fully in-office — in exchange for a higher salary.

"Among those employees, the average raise they would request is about 23%, he said."

"I still can't quite believe that I'm using an Arm-powered Windows laptop every day," writes a senior editor at the Verge: After more than a decade of trying to make Windows on Arm a reality, Microsoft and Qualcomm finally nailed it this year with Copilot Plus PCs. These new laptops have excellent battery life and great performance — and the app compatibility issues that have plagued Windows on Arm are mostly a thing of the past (as long as you're not a gamer). Microsoft wanted 2024 to be "the year of the AI PC," but I think it was very much the year of Windows on Arm...

The key to Windows on Arm's revival this year was Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processors, which were announced in April. They've provided the type of performance and power efficiency only previously available with Apple's MacBooks and challenged Intel and AMD to do better in the x86 space. After much debate over Microsoft's MacBook Air-beating benchmarks, the reviews rolled in and showed that Windows on Arm was indeed capable of matching and beating Apple's MacBook Air. Qualcomm even hired the "I'm a Mac" guy to promote Windows on Arm PCs, showing how confident it was in challenging Apple's laptop dominance.

Microsoft and Qualcomm also worked closely with developers to make key apps compatible, and it's now very rare to run into an app compatibility issue that can't be solved by a native Arm64 version or Microsoft's improved emulator. Even Google, which previously shunned Windows Phone, has created Arm64 versions of Chrome and Google Drive to support Microsoft's efforts. With developers continually providing native versions of their apps, it makes it a lot easier to switch to a Windows on Arm laptop. The only big exception is gaming, where x86 still reigns supreme for compatibility and performance...

It's hard not to see 2025 as the year that Windows on Arm continues to eat into the laptop space. A Dell leak revealed Qualcomm is preparing new chips for 2025, and the chip maker has also been rolling out cheaper Arm-based chips to bring laptop prices down.
The article acknowledges that both AMD and Intel "have the key advantage of game compatibility that Windows on Arm is definitely not ready for..." But "Given the Windows on Arm gaming situation, a new generation of Nvidia's GPUs could help generate fresh excitement around x86 laptops throughout 2025." And "Nvidia might also be planning to help the Windows on Arm effort. The chip maker has long been rumored to be planning to launch Arm PC chips as soon as 2025... Whatever happens to laptops in 2025, you can guarantee that there's going to be fierce competition between Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm."

But the author still complains about the dedicated Copilot key on his new WIndows-on-Arm laptop. "While the Copilot experience on Windows has gone through several confusing revisions, it's still a key I accidentally press and then get frustrated when a Copilot window appears."

There's been an explosion of interest among senior executives -- including C-suite leaders -- in going gig, or "fractional." From a report: "People don't want to go back to pre-COVID -- [they] want control, more work-life-balance, and a say over who they work with and how they work," Karina Mikhli, founder of Fractionals United, a 13,000-member community group, tells Axios in an email.

A fractional leader is someone with lengthy experience who works part-time and long-term to help run and represent a company, according to Mikhli. They are "on the org chart and have a seat at the leadership table," she says. Consultants, on the other hand, sit outside of organizations and work on a project basis.

Khadijah Robinson, a fractional COO for young companies, started committing to the role at the start of 2023 after being burnt out from "a nonstop decade of go, go, go," she tells Axios. "I also wanted to be able to work on multiple things," she says.

This month Bill Gates recommended four books about making sense of the world, including The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman. Gates calls it "the book I recommend more than any other on AI — to heads of state, business leaders, and anyone else who asks — because it offers something rare: a clear-eyed view of both the extraordinary opportunities and genuine risks ahead." After helping build DeepMind from a small startup into one of the most important AI companies of the past decade, [Suleyman] went on to found Inflection AI and now leads Microsoft's AI division. But what makes this book special isn't just Mustafa's firsthand experience — it's his deep understanding of scientific history and how technological revolutions unfold. He's a serious intellectual who can draw meaningful parallels across centuries of scientific advancement. Most of the coverage of The Coming Wave has focused on what it has to say about artificial intelligence — which makes sense, given that it's one of the most important books on AI ever written. And there is probably no one as qualified as Mustafa to write it...

But what sets his book apart from others is Mustafa's insight that AI is only one part of an unprecedented convergence of scientific breakthroughs. Gene editing, DNA synthesis, and other advances in biotechnology are racing forward in parallel. As the title suggests, these changes are building like a wave far out at sea — invisible to many but gathering force. Each would be game-changing on its own; together, they're poised to reshape every aspect of society... [P]rogress is already accelerating as costs plummet and computing power grows. Then there are the incentives for profit and power that are driving development. Countries compete with countries, companies compete with companies, and individuals compete for glory and leadership. These forces make technological advancement essentially unstoppable — and they also make it harder to control...

How do we limit the dangers of these technologies while harnessing their benefits? This is the question at the heart of The Coming Wave, because containment is foundational to everything else. Without it, the risks of AI and biotechnology become even more acute. By solving for it first, we create the stability and trust needed to tackle everything else... [Suleyman] lays out an agenda that's appropriately ambitious for the scale of the challenge — ranging from technical solutions (like building an emergency off switch for AI systems) to sweeping institutional changes, including new global treaties, modernized regulatory frameworks, and historic cooperation among governments, companies, and scientists...
In an accompanying Christmas-themed video, Gates adds that "Of all the books on AI, that's the one I recommend the most."

Gates also recommends The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, saying it "made me reflect on how much of my younger years — which were often spent running around outside without parental supervision, sometimes getting into trouble — helped shape who I am today. Haidt explains how the shift from play-based childhoods to phone-based childhoods is transforming how kids develop and process emotions." (In the video Gates describes it as "kind of a scary book, but very convincing. [Haidt] writes about the rise of mental illness, and anxiety in children. He, unlike some books, actually has some prescriptions, like kids not using phones until much later, parenting style differences. I think it's a super-important book.")

Gates goes into the book's thesis in a longer blog post: that "we're actually facing two distinct crises: digital under-parenting (giving kids unlimited and unsupervised access to devices and social media) and real-world over-parenting (protecting kids from every possible harm in the real world). The result is young people who are suffering from addiction-like behaviors — and suffering, period — while struggling to handle challenges and setbacks that are part of everyday life." [Haidt] makes a strong case for better age verification on social media platforms and delaying smartphone access until kids are older. Literally and figuratively, he argues, we also need to rebuild the infrastructure of childhood itself — from creating more engaging playgrounds that encourage reasonable risk-taking, to establishing phone-free zones in schools, to helping young people rediscover the joy of in-person interaction.
Gates also recommends Engineering in Plain Sight, by Grady Hillhouse, a book which he says "encourages curiosity." ("Hillhouse takes all of the mysterious structures we see every day, from cable boxes to transformers to cell phone towers, and explains what they are and how they work. It's the kind of read that will reward your curiosity and answer questions you didn't even know you had.")

And finally, Gates recommends an autobiography by 81-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning historian/biographer/former sports journalist Doris Kearns Goodwin, who assesses the impact of President Lyndon Johnson's policies in a surprising "personal history of the 1960s."

"In a tiny handful of places..." Wired wrote last month, "you can find yourself flanked by taxis with no one in the drivers' seats." But they added that "Granted, practically everyone has been numbed by the hype cycle."

Wired's response? "[P]ile a few of us into an old-fashioned, human-piloted hired car, then follow a single Waymo robotaxi wherever it goes for a whole workday" to "study its movements, its relationship to life on the streets, its whole self-driving gestalt. We'll interview as many of its passengers as will speak to us, and observe it through the eyes of the kind of human driver it's designed to replace."

This week Wired senior editor John Gravios discussed the experience on the business-news radio show Marketplace (with Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal): Ryssdal: What kinds of reactions did you get from people once you track them down, what did they say about their experience in this driverless car?

Gravios:It was pretty uniform and impressive how much people just love it. They just like the experience of the drive, I guess it's a little bit less herky-jerky than a human driver, but I think a lot of it just comes down to people are just kind of relieved not to have to talk to somebody else, as as sad as that is...

Ryssdal: Tell me about Gabe, your Uber driver, and his thoughts on this whole thing, because that was super interesting.

Gravios: So Gabe, this is a guy whose labor is directly at stake. You know, he's a guy whose labor is going to be replaced by a Waymo. He's had 30 years of experience as a professional driver, first as a taxi driver. He even organized a taxi driver strike in the days before Uber. His first, I think his prejudice with Waymo is having shared the road with them sort of sporadically, he thought of them as kind of dopey, rule-following, frustrating vehicles to share the road with. But over the course of the day, he started to recognize that the Waymo was driving a lot like a taxi driver. The Waymo was doing things that were aggressive, that are exactly the kinds of things that a taxi driver is trained to be aggressive with and doing things that were cautious that are exactly the kinds of things that taxi drivers are trained to be cautious with.

Ryssdal: Can we talk unit economics here? According to the math from a study you guys' cite, Waymo is not making a whole lot of money per vehicle, right? And eventually they're going to scale, and it's going to work out, but for the moment, even though they've gotten 11 billion-something-dollars, they're not turning a whole lot of profit here.

Gravios: Yeah, that's a big question, and the math is, even that study, based on a lot of guesswork. It's really hard to say what the unit economics are. What we can say is that the ridership rates are going up so fast that that study is already well out of date. When we were doing our chase, I think the monthly ridership for Waymo was 100,000 rides a month. By October, it was already 150,000 rides a month. So, the economics are just shifting under our feet a lot.

The Washington Post reports: Years before the internet was created and the first smartphones buzzed to life, an educational platform called PLATO offered a glimpse of the digital world to come. Launched in 1960 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [UIUC], it was the first generalized, computer-based instructional system, and grew into a home for early message boards, emails, chatrooms, instant messaging and multiplayer video games.

The platform's developer, Donald Bitzer, was a handball-playing, magic-loving electrical engineer who opened his computer lab to practically everyone, welcoming contributions from Illinois undergrads as well as teenagers who were still in high school. Dr. Bitzer, who died Dec. 10 at age 90, spent more than two decades working on PLATO, managing its growth and development while also pioneering digital technologies that included the plasma display panel, a forerunner of the ultrathin screens used on today's TVs and tablets. "All of the features you see kids using now, like discussion boards or forums and blogs, started with PLATO," he said during a 2014 return to Illinois, his alma mater. "All of the social networking we take for granted actually started as an educational tool."
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp found another remembrance online. "Ray Ozzie, whose LinkedIn profile dedicates more space to describing his work as a PLATO developer as a UIUC undergrad than it does to his later successes as a creator of Lotus Notes and as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, offers his own heartfelt mini-obit." Ozzie writes: It's difficult to adequately convey how much impact he had on so many, and I implore you to take a few minutes to honor him by reading a bit about him and his contributions. Links below. As an insecure young CS student at UIUC in 1974, Paul Tenczar, working for/with Don, graciously gave me a chance as a jr. systems programmer on the mind-bogglingly forward thinking system known as PLATO. A global, interactive system for learning, collaboration, and community like no other at the time. We were young and in awe of how Don led, inspired, and managed to keep the project alive. I was introverted; shaking; stage fright. Yeah I could code. But how could such a deeply technical engineer assemble such a strong team to execute on such a totally novel and inspirational vision, secure government funding, and yet also demo the product on the Phil Donahue show?

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules." You touched so many of us and shaped who we became and the risks we would take, having an impact well beyond that which you created. You made us think and you made us laugh. I hope we made you proud."

The Verge is applauding Hyundai's electric SUV, the IONIQ 5 for "Fake shifting, real fun." And others agree. "The Ioniq 5 N is also special for how it simulates the 'feel' of gear shifting," writes the blog Inside EVs, "including the jolt and brief interruption in power that happens and the mechanical resistance that's normal upon downshifting.

"The Ioniq 5 N also simulates engine sounds through the speakers, will let you rev the 'engine' while parked and has a 'redline' you'll hit before you need to shift again. It's all great fun." [E]very single person who drives the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, whether they're a die-hard EV person or the most hardcore electro-skeptic, absolutely loves it. And they love the fake shifting most of all... Shut up and embrace the fake EV shifting, you nerds. Find some joy in your life for once.

And joy will definitely be on order with the new 2025 Kia EV6 GT. The U.S.-spec version of Kia's updated crossover made its debut [November 21] at the L.A. Auto Show. And while there's still a lot we don't know about it, we have power specs and one key detail: the EV6 GT now gets a simulated gear shift feature. "The GT's new Virtual Gear Shift feature enhances driving immersion by simulating gear shifts with visuals, engine sound effects, and a tactile sensation through motor torque adjustments," Kia officials said in a news release.
The Verge points out that Hyundai's Ioniq 5 N even uses speakers — both inside the car and outside — to broadcast the sounds of ignition, a boosted EV sound, and a third sound which "sounds like a robotic version of a fighter jet." Paired with the seemingly endless power and torque offered by the electric motors, I couldn't stop grinning. It's just like a little kid making car noises as they push a Hot Wheels car around a track, but combined with the driving experience in the Ioniq 5 N, it just taps into a pure enthusiast joy. Even kids around my neighborhood stopped and looked when I started the Ioniq 5 N up with the sound management turned on. They'd pull out their phones to take photos and videos as I drove off, happily faking the internal combustion engine experience and knowing I wasn't adding a drop of carbon to the atmosphere.

The Ioniq 5 N just might be the performance EV that will change self-described "auto enthusiast" minds about the electric transition. It's that good.

Chances of intelligent life emerging in our Universe "and in any hypothetical ones beyond it" can be estimated by a new theoretical model, reports the Royal Astronomical Society.

Since stars are a precondition for the emergence of life, the new research predicts that a typical observer [i.e., intelligent life] should experience a substantially larger density of dark energy than is seen in our own Universe... The approach presented in the paper involves calculating the fraction of ordinary matter converted into stars over the entire history of the Universe, for different dark energy densities. The model predicts this fraction would be approximately 27% in a universe that is most efficient at forming stars, compared to 23% in our own Universe. Dark energy makes the Universe expand faster, balancing gravity's pull and creating a universe where both expansion and structure formation are possible. However, for life to develop, there would need to be regions where matter can clump together to form stars and planets, and it would need to remain stable for billions of years to allow life to evolve.

Crucially, the research suggests that the astrophysics of star formation and the evolution of the large-scale structure of the Universe combine in a subtle way to determine the optimal value of the dark energy density needed for the generation of intelligent life. Professor Lucas Lombriser, Université de Genève and co-author of the study, added: "It will be exciting to employ the model to explore the emergence of life across different universes and see whether some fundamental questions we ask ourselves about our own Universe must be reinterpreted."
The study was funded by the EU's European Research Council, and published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Ubuntu 24.10 'Oracular Oriole', the latest version of the popular Linux distro, introduces several enhancements including a revamped GNOME Initial Setup for ARM64 devices, updated file management features, and a more seamless experience with dialog boxes that adjust to aspect ratios. Celebrating Ubuntu's 20th anniversary, this release also "offers a few touches for those who want to go down memory lane," reports Tom's Hardware. "When the system boots up, you'll see the 20 Years Ubuntu logo right at the bottom of the screen. You can also set the desktop background to the original Ubuntu 4.10 wallpaper, and a Warty Brown accent color is an available option if you want to complete the feel. To round out the experience, Ubuntu 24.10 uses the original startup sound from 4.10, which plays every time you log in." From the report: The most significant change, as OMG! Ubuntu notes that ARM64 devices now use GNOME Initial Setup, which offers a cleaner, slicker way of setting up the operating system after the first install. When I set up Ubuntu 24.10 in a virtual machine in my MacBook Air, it felt easier to install and use than my MacBook and Windows laptops. We also get updated dialog boxes that adjust based on the Windows aspect ratio, making it useful for portrait devices like smartphones and tablets.

Several other quality-of-life updates in Ubuntu 24.10, like new File Manager features, make navigating your bookmarks and internal drives easier on the sidebar. Apps also now use the default File Manager when browsing your hard drive, providing a more seamless experience. And, if you run a search on non-indexed folders, you'll find an info button that will explain why your search query is taking longer than usual.

The rapid increases in life expectancy seen in the 20th century have slowed significantly, according to a new analysis published in the journal Nature. The Guardian reports: According to the study, children born recently in regions with the oldest people are far from likely to become centenarians. At best, the researchers predict 15% of females and 5% of males in the oldest-living areas will reach 100 this century. "If you're planning for retirement, it's probably not a good idea to assume you're going to make it to 100," said Jay Olshansky, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "You'd probably have to work for at least 10 years longer than you'd think. And you want to enjoy the last phase of your life, you don't necessarily want to spend it working to save for time you're not going to experience."

Advances in public health and medicine sparked a longevity revolution in the 20th century. In the previous 2,000 years, life expectancy crept up, on average, one year every century or two. In the 20th century, average life expectancy rocketed, with people gaining an extra three years every decade. For the latest study, Olshansky delved into national statistics from the US and nine regions with the highest life expectancies, focusing on 1990 to 2019, before the Covid pandemic struck. The data from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain showed that rises in life expectancy had slowed dramatically. In the US, life expectancy fell [T]he researchers describe how on average, life expectancy in the longest-living regions rose only 6.5 years between 1990 and 2019. They predict that girls born recently in the regions have only a 5.3% chance of reaching 100 years old, while boys have a 1.8% chance.

"In the modern era we have, through public health and medicine, manufactured decades of life that otherwise would not exist," Olshansky said. "These gains must slow down. The longevity game we're playing today is different to the longevity game we played a century ago when we were saving infants and children and women of child-bearing age and the gains in life expectancy were large. Now the gains are small because we're saving people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s." Olshansky said it would take radical new treatments that slow ageing, the greatest risk factor for many diseases, to achieve another longevity revolution. Research in the field is afoot with a dozen or so drugs shown to increase the lifespan of mice.

More details on that report about NASA from the Washington Post: NASA is 66 years old and feeling its age. Brilliant engineers are retiring. Others have fled to higher-paying jobs in the private space industry. The buildings are old, their maintenance deferred. The Apollo era, with its huge taxpayer investment, is a distant memory. The agency now pursues complex missions on inadequate budgets. This may be an unsustainable path for NASA, one that imperils long-term success. That is the conclusion of a sweeping report, titled "NASA at a Crossroads," written by a committee of aerospace experts and published Tuesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The report suggests that NASA prioritizes near-term missions and fails to think strategically. In other words, the space agency isn't sufficiently focused on the future.

NASA's intense focus on current missions is understandable, considering the unforgiving nature of space operations, but "one tends to neglect the probably less glamorous thing that will determine the success in the future," the report's lead author, Norman Augustine, a retired Lockheed Martin chief executive, said Tuesday. He said one solution for NASA's problems is more funding from Congress. But that may be hard to come by, in which case, he said, the agency needs to consider canceling or delaying costly missions to invest in more mundane but strategically important institutional needs, such as technology development and workforce training. Augustine said he is concerned that NASA could lose in-house expertise if it relies too heavily on the private industry for newly emerging technologies. "It will have trouble hiring innovative, creative engineers. Innovative, creative engineers don't want to have a job that consists of overseeing other people's work," he said...

The report is hardly a blistering screed. The tone is parental. It praises the agency — with a budget of about $25 billion — for its triumphs while urging more prudent decision-making and long-term strategizing.

NASA pursues spectacular missions. It has sent swarms of robotic probes across the solar system and even into interstellar space. Astronauts have continuously been in orbit for more than two decades. The most ambitious program, Artemis, aims to put astronauts back on the moon in a few short years. And long-term, NASA hopes to put astronauts on Mars. But a truism in the industry is that space is hard. The new report contends that NASA has a mismatch between its ambitions and its budget, and needs to pay attention to fundamentals such as fixing its aging infrastructure and retaining in-house talent. NASA's overall physical infrastructure is already well beyond its design life, and this fraction continues to grow," the report states.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the report "aligns with our current efforts to ensure we have the infrastructure, workforce, and technology that NASA needs for the decades ahead," according to the article.

Nelson added that the agency "will continue to work diligently to address the committee's recommendations."

Wired published some thoughts from Hans Peter Brondmo, the former head of "Google's seven-year mission to give AI a robot body".

An anonymous reader shared this report from Axios: Building AI-powered robots that can flexibly operate in the real world is going to take much longer than Silicon Valley believes and promises, according to the former head of Google's robotics moonshot project, writing in Wired...

Everyday Robotics spent seven years and a small Google fortune developing a one-armed robot on a wheeled platform. By the time Google pulled the plug on the project in February 2023, the robots were helping clean up researchers' desks and sorting trash during the daytime; in the evening, they were improvising dances. [Google hired a professional dancer as an artist-in-residence who teamed with "a few other engineers" to build an AI algorithm trained on the dancer's choreography preferences...]

Google founder Larry Page — favored moving directly to "end to end" (e2e) learning, where you'd hand robots a general task and they'd be able to figure out how to execute it. That, Page felt, was a goal worthy of a moonshot. But it also turned out to be out of reach. "I have come to believe," Brondmo writes, "it will take many, many thousands, maybe even millions of robots doing stuff in the real world to collect enough data to train e2e models that make the robots do anything other than fairly narrow, well-defined tasks...." ["Building robots that perform useful services — like cleaning up and wiping all the tables in a restaurant, or making the beds in a hotel — will require both AI and traditional programming for a long time to come. In other words, don't expect robots to go running off outside our control, doing something they weren't programmed to do, anytime soon."]

The bottom line: So far, robot hype is outpacing robot reality. Boston Dynamics' back-flipping humanoid and quadruped bots have wowed YouTube viewers — but you wouldn't want to let them anywhere near your office or home.
It's an interesting look back. "My job: help figure out what to do with the employees and technology left over from nine robot companies that Google had acquired," Brondmo writes: Andy "the father of Android" Rubin, who had previously been in charge, had suddenly left. Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept trying to offer guidance and direction during occasional flybys in their "spare time...." I knew from firsthand experience how hard it was to build a company that, in Steve Jobs' famous words, could put a dent in the universe, and I believed that Google was the right place to make certain big bets. AI-powered robots, the ones that will live and work alongside us one day, was one such audacious bet.

Eight and a half years later — and 18 months after Google decided to discontinue its largest bet in robotics and AI — it seems as if a new robotics startup pops up every week. I am more convinced than ever that the robots need to come. Yet I have concerns that Silicon Valley, with its focus on "minimum viable products" and VCs' general aversion to investing in hardware, will be patient enough to win the global race to give AI a robot body. And much of the money that is being invested is focusing on the wrong things...

When I arrived, the lab had already hatched Waymo, Google Glass, and other science-fiction-sounding projects like flying energy windmills and stratospheric balloons that would provide internet access to the underserved... [But] in January 2023, two months after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, Google shut down Everyday Robots, citing overall cost concerns. The robots and a small number of people eventually landed at Google DeepMind to conduct research. In spite of the high cost and the long timeline, everyone involved was shocked.
They'd tackled the problem with earnestness. ("[S]even robots working for months to learn how to pick up a rubber duckling? That wasn't going to cut it... So we built a cloud-based simulator and, in 2021, created more than 240 million robot instances in the sim.ma")

Brondmo adds this his mother had advanced Parkinson's disease, and hoped that one day robots could support her. "Our frequent conversations toward the end of her life convinced me more than ever that a future version of what we started at Everyday Robots will be coming. In fact, it can't come soon enough.

"So the question we are left to ponder becomes: How does this kind of change and future happen? I remain curious, and concerned."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since its introduction in the 1970s, Dungeons & Dragons has become one of the most influential tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) in popular culture, featuring heavily in Stranger Things, for example, and spawning a blockbuster movie released last year. Over the last decade or so, researchers have turned their focus more heavily to the ways in which D&D and other TRPGs can help people with autism form healthy social connections, in part because the gaming environment offers clear rules around social interactions. According to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Autism, D&D helped boost players' confidence with autism, giving them a strong sense of kinship or belonging, among other benefits.

"There are many myths and misconceptions about autism, with some of the biggest suggesting that those with it aren't socially motivated, or don't have any imagination," said co-author Gray Atherton, a psychologist at the University of Plymouth. "Dungeons & Dragons goes against all that, centering around working together in a team, all of which takes place in a completely imaginary environment. Those taking part in our study saw the game as a breath of fresh air, a chance to take on a different persona and share experiences outside of an often challenging reality. That sense of escapism made them feel incredibly comfortable, and many of them said they were now trying to apply aspects of it in their daily lives." [...] For this latest study. Atherton et al. wanted to specifically investigate how autistic players experience D&D when playing in groups with other autistic players. It's essentially a case study with a small sample size -- just eight participants -- and qualitative in nature, since the post-play analysis focused on semistructured interviews with each player after the conclusion of the online campaign, the better to highlight their individual voices.

The players were recruited through social media advertisements within the D&D, Reddit and Discord online communities; all had received an autism diagnosis by a medical professional. They were split into two groups of four players, with one of the researchers (who's been playing D&D for years) acting as the dungeon master. The online sessions featured in the study was the Waterdeep: Dragonheist campaign. The campaign ran for six weeks, with sessions lasting between two and four hours (including breaks). Participants spoke repeatedly about the positive benefits they received from playing D&D, providing a friendly environment that helped them relax about social pressures. "When you're interacting with people over D&D, you're more likely to understand what's going on," one participant said in their study interview. "That's because the method you'll use to interact is written out. You can see what you're meant to do. There's an actual sort of reference sheet for some social interactions." That, in turn, helped foster a sense of belonging and kinship with their fellow players.

Participants also reported feeling emotionally invested and close to their characters, with some preferring to separate themselves from their character in order to explore other aspects of their personality or even an entirely new persona, thus broadening their perspectives. "I can make a character quite different from how I interact with people in real-life interactions," one participant said. "It helps you put yourself in the other person's perspective because you are technically entering a persona that is your character. You can then try to see how it feels to be in that interaction or in that scenario through another lens." And some participants said they were able to "rewrite" their own personal stories outside the game by adopting some of their characters' traits -- a psychological phenomenon known as "bleed."

More than 25,000 Python developers from nearly 200 countries took the 7th annual Python Developers Survey between November 2023 and February 2024, with 85% saying Python was their main language.

Some interesting findings:

• Though Python 2 reached "end-of-life" status in April of 2020, last year's survey found 7% of respondents were still using Python 2. This year's survey found that number has finally dropped... to 6%.
  
  "Almost half of Python 2 holdouts are under 21 years old," the survey results point out, "and a third are students. Perhaps courses are still using Python 2?"

• Meanwhile, 73% are using one of the last three versions of Python (3.10, 3.11, or 3.12)

• "The share of developers using Linux as their development environment has decreased through the years: compared with 2021, it's dropped by 8 percentage points." [The graphic is a little confusing, showing 55% using Linux, 55% using Windows, 29% on MacOS, 2% on BSD, and 1% on "Other."]

• Visual Studio Code is the most popular IDE (22%), followed by Jupyter Notebook (20%) and Vim (17%). The next-most popular IDEs were PyCharm Community Edition (13%), JupyterLab (12%), NotePad++ (11%) and Sublime Text (9%). Interestingly, just 23% of the 25,000 respondents said they only used one IDE, with 38% saying they used two, 21% using three, and 19% using four or more. [The annual survey is a collaboration between the Python Software Foundation and JetBrains.]

• 37% said they'd contributed to open-source projects within the last year. (77% of those contributed code, while 38% contributed documentation, 35% contributed governance/leadership/maintainer duties, and 33% contributed tests...)

• For "age range," nearly one-third (32%) said 21-29 (with another 8% choosing 18-20). Another 33% said 30-39, while 16% said 40-49, 7% said 50-59, and 3% chose "60 or older."
  
  49% of respondents said they had less than two years of programming experience, with 33% saying "less than 1 year" and 16% saying "1-2 years." (34% of developers also said they practiced collaborative development.)

And here's how the 25,000 developers answered the question: how long have you been programming in Python?

• Less than 1 year: 25%
• 1-2 years: 16%
• 3-5 years: 26%
• 6-10 years: 19%
• 11+ years: 13%

So what are they doing with Python? Among those who'd said Python was their main language:

• Data analysis: 44%
• Web development: 44%
• Machine learning: 34%
• Data engineering: 28%
• Academic research: 26%
• DevOps / Systems administration / Writing automation scripts 26%
• Programming of web parsers / scrapers / crawlers: 25%

62% were "fully employed by a company," while the next-largest category was "student" (12%) with another 5% in "working student". There were also categories for "self-employed" (6%), "freelancer" (another 6%), and "partially employed by a company" (4%). Another 4% said they were unemployed.

In other news, the Python Software Foundation board has also "decided to invest more in connecting and serving the global Python community" by hosting monthly "office hours" on their Discord channel.

Uber and General Motors' Cruise have partnered to offer driverless rides to Uber users as early as soon as next year. CNBC reports: Both Cruise CEO Marc Whitten and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi hailed the partnership in a press release, stressing that the companies believe autonomous vehicles can be deployed safely. "Cruise is on a mission to leverage driverless technology to create safer streets and redefine urban life," Whitten said in the release. "We are excited to partner with Uber to bring the benefits of safe, reliable, autonomous driving to even more people, unlocking a new era of urban mobility." Khosrowshahi said in the release that Uber is "thrilled to partner with Cruise and look forward to launching next year."

On Uber's most recent earnings call, analysts asked the company how the emergence of robotaxis would likely impact the ridehailing giant's business long-term. Khosrowshahi said on the call that "AV players" experience much higher utilization with Uber than they do "without a network on a first-party basis." He also predicted there will be a "pretty long hybrid period as autonomous is developing and regulators are trying to figure out exactly how to regulate it." He added, "We don't think this will be a winner-take-all market."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: For the first time in 40 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has taken emergency action to stop the use of a pesticide (source may be paywalled; alternative source) linked to serious health risks for unborn babies. Tuesday's emergency order applies to dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate, also known as DCPA, a weedkiller used on crops such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage and onions. When pregnant farmworkers and others are exposed to the pesticide, their babies can experience changes to fetal thyroid hormone levels, which are linked to low birth weight, impaired brain development, decreased IQ and impaired motor skills later in life.

"DCPA is so dangerous that it needs to be removed from the market immediately," Michal Freedhoff, assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said in a statement. "It's EPA's job to protect people from exposure to dangerous chemicals. In this case, pregnant women who may never even know they were exposed could give birth to babies that experience irreversible lifelong health problems." The European Union banned DCPA in 2009. But the EPA has been slower to act, frustrating some environmental and public health advocates.

In an interview, Freedhoff said that EPA scientists have tried for years to get more information on health risks from the sole manufacturer of the pesticide, AMVAC Chemical. But she said the company refused to turn over the data, including a study on the effects of DCPA on thyroid development and function, until November 2023. "We did make some good-faith efforts to work with the company," Freedhoff said. "But in the end, we didn't think any of the measures proposed by the company would be implementable, enforceable or effective." "DCPA has been used in the United States since the late 1950s," notes the report. "After the pesticide is applied, it can linger in the soil, contaminating crops later grown in those fields, including broccoli, cilantro, green onions, kale and mustard greens."

"The emergency order Tuesday temporarily suspends all registrations of the pesticide under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. The agency plans to permanently suspend these registrations within the next 90 days."

More than a dozen new Immersive Videos are coming to Vision Pro, with the first, titled Boundless, launching last night. "The announcement follows a long, slow period for new Vision Pro-specific video content from Apple," writes Ars Technica's Samuel Axon. "The headset launched in early February with a handful of Immersive Video episodes ranging from five to 15 minutes each. Since then, only three new videos have been added." From the report: Tonight's Boundless episode will allow viewers to see what it's like to ride in a hot air balloon over sweeping vistas. Another episode titled "Arctic Surfing" will arrive this fall, Apple says. Sometime next month, Apple will publish the second episode of its real wildlife documentary, simply titled Wild Life. The episode will focus on elephants in Kenya's Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Another episode is in the works, too. "Later this year," Apple writes in its newsroom post, "viewers will brave the deep with a bold group of divers in the Bahamas, who come face-to-face with apex predators and discover creatures much more complex than often portrayed."

In September, we'll see the debut of a new Immersive Video series titled Elevated. Apple describes it as an "aerial travel series" in which viewers will fly over places of interest. The first episode will take viewers to Hawaii, while another planned for later this year will go to New England. Apple is additionally partnering with Red Bull for a look at surfing called Red Bull: Big-Wave Surfing. In addition to those documentary episodes, there will be three short films by year's end. One will be a musical experience featuring The Weeknd, and another will take basketball fans inside the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend. There will also be Submerged, the first narrative fictional Immersive Video on the platform. It's an action short film depicting struggles on a submarine during World War II.

They lived 378 days in a "mock Mars habitat" in Houston, reports Engadget. But today the four volunteers for NASA's yearlong simulation will finally emerge from their 1,700-square-foot habitat at the Johnson Space Center that was 3D-printed from materials that could be created with Martian soil.

And you can watch the "welcome home" ceremony's livestream starting at 5 p.m. EST on NASA TV (also embedded in Engadget's story). More det ails from NASA: For more than a year, the crew simulated Mars mission operations, including "Marswalks," grew and harvested several vegetables to supplement their shelf-stable food, maintained their equipment and habitat, and operated under additional stressors a Mars crew will experience, including communication delays with Earth, resource limitations, and isolation.
One of the mission's crew members told the Houston Chronicle they were "very excited to go back to 'Earth,' but of course there is a bittersweet aspect to it just like any time you reach the completion of something that has dominated one's life for several years."

Various crew members left behind their children or long-term partner for this once-in-a-lifetime experience, according to an earlier article, which also notes that NASA is paying the participants $10 per hour "for all waking hours, up to 16 hours per day. That's as much as $60,480 for the 378-day mission."

Engadget points out there are already plans for two more one-year "missions" — with the second one expected to begin next spring...

I'm curious. Would any Slashdot readers be willing to spend a year in a mock Mars habitat?

This week the Rust Foundation jointly announced "the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium" with industry partners including Arm, AdaCore, Lynx Software Technologies, and Toyota's mobility tech subsidiary Woven. Its goal is supporting "responsible use" of Rust "in safety-critical software — systems whose failure can impact human life or cause severe environmental or property harm."

"This is exciting," said Rust creator Graydon Hoare in a statement. "I am truly pleased to see the Rust Foundation and anyone in the safety-critical space coming together on this topic."

From the announcement: "Safety is our foremost priority in vehicle software development. Traditionally, achieving the highest levels of safety has been a complex and lengthy endeavor, requiring the use of specialized tools and processes beyond the programming language," said JF Bastien, Distinguished Engineer at Woven by Toyota. "We are therefore pleased to collaborate with leading experts in the safety industry to integrate new tools such as Rust into our safety-critical systems...." Industries that are particularly concerned with functional safety include transportation (such as automotive, aviation, space), energy, life sciences, and more. Because of their potential impacts, these industries are often regulated, have liability considerations, and are guided by standards... These industries have decades of experience delivering products, learning from iterating based on real-world feedback, and improving processes. An ecosystem of tools and tool vendors have evolved, and best practices have been learned to create a safety culture around tooling.

Rust offers particular advantages in terms of developer ergonomics, productivity and software quality; however, it lacks a deep and established well of safety-processes and collective industry knowledge of safety-critical systems. Without closing this gap, a developer must primarily rely on best practices and normative precautions, which can limit innovation. Rust developers who stray from the well-trod path can find themselves facing an inquiry were an accident to occur. In these circumstances, anything that seems unusual will be investigated for fault.

This risk creates a disincentive to widespread Rust adoption, leaving developers unable to reap all its advantages while potentially facing financial, reputational and moral costs. The gap in safety-critical resources within the Rust programming language ecosystem is also an exciting opportunity. By rapidly incorporating lessons learned from years of careful development and past mistakes in the wider open source ecosystem, Rust can become a valuable component of a safety toolkit adaptable to various safety-critical industries and severity levels.
"Work under the consortium will begin with the creation of a public charter and goals," according to the announcement, with a scope possibly including "the development of guidelines, linters, libraries, static analysis tools, formal methods and language subsets to meet industrial and legal requirements. The group may further shepherd Rust Foundation-funded implementation work, including grants to existing academic teams or FOSS projects... The group will further attempt to coordinate with and expand on existing safety-critical projects and standards including SAE JA1020.
The group will maintain communication with the larger Rust Project, and "The Consortium's deliverables will be developed and licensed in a manner compatible with other Rust Project endeavors."