Last month, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn "shared on LinkedIn an email he had sent to all staff announcing Duolingo was going 'AI-first'," remembers the Financial Times.

"I did not expect the amount of blowback," he admits.... He attributes this anger to a general "anxiety" about technology replacing jobs. "I should have been more clear to the external world," he reflects on a video call from his office in Pittsburgh. "Every tech company is doing similar things [but] we were open about it...."

Since the furore, von Ahn has reassured customers that AI is not going to replace the company's workforce. There will be a "very small number of hourly contractors who are doing repetitive tasks that we no longer need", he says. "Many of these people are probably going to be offered contractor jobs for other stuff." Duolingo is still recruiting if it is satisfied the role cannot be automated. Graduates who make up half the people it hires every year "come with a different mindset" because they are using AI at university.

The thrust of the AI-first strategy, the 46-year-old says, is overhauling work processes... He wants staff to explore whether their tasks "can be entirely done by AI or with the help of AI. It's just a mind shift that people first try AI. It may be that AI doesn't actually solve the problem you're trying to solve.....that's fine." The aim is to automate repetitive tasks to free up time for more creative or strategic work.

Examples where it is making a difference include technology and illustration. Engineers will spend less time writing code. "Some of it they'll need to but we want it to be mediated by AI," von Ahn says... Similarly, designers will have more of a supervisory role, with AI helping to create artwork that fits Duolingo's "very specific style". "You no longer do the details and are more of a creative director. For the vast majority of jobs, this is what's going to happen...." [S]ocietal implications for AI, such as the ethics of stealing creators' copyright, are "a real concern". "A lot of times you don't even know how [the large language model] was trained. We should be careful." When it comes to artwork, he says Duolingo is "ensuring that the entirety of the model is trained just with our own illustrations".

It's no longer a hypothetical question, writes the Washington Post. "In recent years, scientists have devised powerful genetic tools that may be able to eradicate mosquitoes and other pests once and for all."

But along with the ability to fight malaria, dengue, West Nile virus and other serious diseases, "the development of this technology also raises a profound ethical question: When, if ever, is it okay to intentionally drive a species out of existence...?" When so many wildlife conservationists are trying to save plants and animals from disappearing, the mosquito is one of the few creatures that people argue is actually worthy of extinction. Forget about tigers or bears; it's the tiny mosquito that is the deadliest animal on Earth. The human misery caused by malaria is undeniable. Nearly 600,000 people died of the disease in 2023, according to the World Health Organization, with the majority of cases in Africa... But recently, the Hastings Center for Bioethics, a research institute in New York, and Arizona State University brought together a group of bioethicists to discuss the potential pitfalls of intentionally trying to drive a species to extinction. In a policy paper published in the journal Science last month, the group concluded that "deliberate full extinction might occasionally be acceptable, but only extremely rarely..."

It's unclear how important malaria-carrying mosquitoes are to broader ecosystems. Little research has been done to figure out whether frogs or other animals that eat the insects would be able to find their meals elsewhere. Scientists are hotly debating whether a broader "insect apocalypse" is underway in many parts of the world, which may imperil other creatures that depend on them for food and pollination... Instead, the authors said, geneticists should be able to use gene editing, vaccines and other tools to target not the mosquito itself, but the single-celled Plasmodium parasite that is responsible for malaria. That invisible microorganism — which a mosquito transfers from its saliva to a person's blood when it bites — is the real culprit.
A nonprofit research consortium called Target Malaria has genetically modified mosquitoes in their labs (which get core funding from the Gates Foundation and from Open Philanthropy, backed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife). ), and hopes to deploy them in the wild within five years...

Is copyrighted material a requirement for training AI? asks the Washington Post. That's what top AI companies are arguing, and "Few AI developers have tried the more ethical route — until now.

"A group of more than two dozen AI researchers have found that they could build a massive eight-terabyte dataset using only text that was openly licensed or in public domain. They tested the dataset quality by using it to train a 7 billion parameter language model, which performed about as well as comparable industry efforts, such as Llama 2-7B, which Meta released in 2023." A paper published Thursday detailing their effort also reveals that the process was painstaking, arduous and impossible to fully automate. The group built an AI model that is significantly smaller than the latest offered by OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, but their findings appear to represent the biggest, most transparent and rigorous effort yet to demonstrate a different way of building popular AI tools....

As it turns out, the task involves a lot of humans. That's because of the technical challenges of data not being formatted in a way that's machine readable, as well as the legal challenges of figuring out what license applies to which website, a daunting prospect when the industry is rife with improperly licensed data. "This isn't a thing where you can just scale up the resources that you have available" like access to more computer chips and a fancy web scraper, said Stella Biderman [executive director of the nonprofit research institute Eleuther AI]. "We use automated tools, but all of our stuff was manually annotated at the end of the day and checked by people. And that's just really hard."

Still, the group managed to unearth new datasets that can be used ethically. Those include a set of 130,000 English language books in the Library of Congress, which is nearly double the size of the popular-books dataset Project Gutenberg. The group's initiative also builds on recent efforts to develop more ethical, but still useful, datasets, such as FineWeb from Hugging Face, the open-source repository for machine learning... Still, Biderman remained skeptical that this approach could find enough content online to match the size of today's state-of-the-art models... Biderman said she didn't expect companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to start adopting the same laborious process, but she hoped it would encourage them to at least rewind back to 2021 or 2022, when AI companies still shared a few sentences of information about what their models were trained on.

"Even partial transparency has a huge amount of social value and a moderate amount of scientific value," she said.

MIT comp-sci professor Ryan Williams suspected that a small amount of memory "would be as helpful as a lot of time in all conceivable computations..." writes Quanta magazine.

"In February, he finally posted his proof online, to widespread acclaim..." Every algorithm takes some time to run, and requires some space to store data while it's running. Until now, the only known algorithms for accomplishing certain tasks required an amount of space roughly proportional to their runtime, and researchers had long assumed there's no way to do better. Williams' proof established a mathematical procedure for transforming any algorithm — no matter what it does — into a form that uses much less space.

What's more, this result — a statement about what you can compute given a certain amount of space — also implies a second result, about what you cannot compute in a certain amount of time. This second result isn't surprising in itself: Researchers expected it to be true, but they had no idea how to prove it. Williams' solution, based on his sweeping first result, feels almost cartoonishly excessive, akin to proving a suspected murderer guilty by establishing an ironclad alibi for everyone else on the planet. It could also offer a new way to attack one of the oldest open problems in computer science.

"It's a pretty stunning result, and a massive advance," said Paul Beame, a computer scientist at the University of Washington.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

Apple has urged Australia not to follow the European Union in mandating iPhone app sideloading, warning that such policies pose serious privacy and security risks. "This communication comes as the Australian federal government considers new rules that could force Apple to open up its iOS ecosystem, much like what happened in Europe with recent legislation," notes Neowin. Apple claims that allowing alternative app stores has led to increased exposure to malware, scams, and harmful content. From the report: Apple, in its response to this Australian paper (PDF), stated that Australia should not use the EU's Digital Markets Act "as a blueprint". The company's core argument is that the changes mandated by the EU's DMA, which came into full effect in March 2024, introduce serious security and privacy risks for users. Apple claims that allowing sideloading and alternative app stores effectively opens the door for malware, fraud, scams, and other harmful content. The tech company also highlighted specific concerns from its European experience, alleging that its compliance there has led to users being able to install pornography apps and apps that facilitate copyright infringement, things its curated App Store aims to prevent. Apple maintains that its current review process is vital for user protection, and that its often criticized 30% commission applies mainly to the highest earning apps, with most developers paying a lower 15% rate or nothing.

The Register's Thomas Claburn reports: The Linux Foundation on Friday introduced a new method to distribute WordPress updates and plugins that's not controlled by any one party, in a bid to "stabilize the WordPress ecosystem" after months of infighting. The FAIR Package Manager project is a response to the legal brawl that erupted last year, pitting WordPress co-creator Matthew Mullenweg, his for-profit hosting firm Automattic, and the WordPress Foundation that he controls, against WP Engine, a rival commercial WordPress hosting firm. [...]

The Linux Foundation says the FAIR Package Manager, a mechanism for distributing open-source WordPress plugins, "eliminates reliance on any single source for core updates, plugins, themes, and more, unites a fragmented ecosystem by bringing together plugins from any source, and builds security into the supply chain." In other words, it can't be weaponized against the WordPress community because it won't be controlled by any one entity. "The FAIR Package Manager project paves the way for the stability and growth of open source content management, giving contributors and businesses additional options governed by a neutral community," said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, in a canned press statement. "We look forward to the growth in community and contributions this important project attracts."

The FAIR Package Manager repo explains the software's purpose more succinctly. The software "is a decentralized alternative to the central WordPress.org plugin and theme ecosystem, designed to return control to WordPress hosts and developers. It operates as a drop-in WordPress plugin, seamlessly replacing existing centralized services with a federated, open-source infrastructure." In addition to providing some measure of stability, the Linux Foundation sees the FAIR Package Manager as advancing WordPress' alignment with Europe's General Data Protection Regulation by reducing automatic browser data transmission and telemetry sent to commercial entities, while also supporting modern security practices and strengthening the open source software supply chain.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from OregonLive: Together, the four founders of Beaverton startup AheadComputing spent nearly a century at Intel. They were among Intel's top chip architects, working years in advance to develop new generations of microprocessors to power the computers of the future. Now they're on their own, flying without a net, building a new class of microprocessor on an entirely different architecture from Intel's. Founded a year ago, AheadComputing is trying to prove there's a better way to design computer chips.

"AheadComputing is doing the biggest, baddest CPU in the world," said Debbie Marr, the company's CEO. [...] AheadComputing is betting on an open architecture called RISC-V -- RISC stands for "reduced instruction set computer." The idea is to craft a streamlined microprocessor that works more efficiently by doing fewer things, and doing them better than conventional processors. For AheadComputing's founders and 80 employees, many of them also Intel alumni, it's a major break from the kind of work they've been doing all their careers. They've left a company with more than 100,000 workers to start a business with fewer than 100.

"Every person in this room," Marr said, looking across a conference table at her colleagues, "we could have stayed at Intel. We could have continued to do very exciting things at Intel." They decided they had a better chance at leading a revolution in semiconductor technology at a startup than at a big, established company like Intel. And AheadComputing could be at the forefront of renewal in Oregon's semiconductor ecosystem. "We see this opportunity, this light," Marr said. "We took our chances." It'll be years before AheadComputing's designs are on the market, but the company "envisions its chips will someday power PCs, laptops and data centers," reports OregonLive. "Possible clients could include Google, Amazon, Samsung or other large computing companies."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The FBI is warning that the BADBOX 2.0 malware campaign has infected over 1 million home Internet-connected devices, converting consumer electronics into residential proxies that are used for malicious activity. The BADBOX botnet is commonly found on Chinese Android-based smart TVs, streaming boxes, projectors, tablets, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices. "The BADBOX 2.0 botnet consists of millions of infected devices and maintains numerous backdoors to proxy services that cyber criminal actors exploit by either selling or providing free access to compromised home networks to be used for various criminal activity," warns the FBI.

These devices come preloaded with the BADBOX 2.0 malware botnet or become infected after installing firmware updates and through malicious Android applications that sneak onto Google Play and third-party app stores. "Cyber criminals gain unauthorized access to home networks by either configuring the product with malicious software prior to the users purchase or infecting the device as it downloads required applications that contain backdoors, usually during the set-up process," explains the FBI. "Once these compromised IoT devices are connected to home networks, the infected devices are susceptible to becoming part of the BADBOX 2.0 botnet and residential proxy services4 known to be used for malicious activity."

Once infected, the devices connect to the attacker's command and control (C2) servers, where they receive commands to execute on the compromised devices, such as [routing malicious traffic through residential IPs to obscure cybercriminal activity, performing background ad fraud to generate revenue, and launching credential-stuffing attacks using stolen login data]. Over the years, the malware botnet continued expanding until 2024, when Germany's cybersecurity agency disrupted the botnet in the country by sinkholing the communication between infected devices and the attacker's infrastructure, effectively rendering the malware useless. However, that did not stop the threat actors, with researchers saying they found the malware installed on 192,000 devices a week later. Even more concerning, the malware was found on more mainstream brands, like Yandex TVs and Hisense smartphones. Unfortunately, despite the previous disruption, the botnet continued to grow, with HUMAN's Satori Threat Intelligence stating that over 1 million consumer devices had become infected by March 2025. This new larger botnet is now being called BADBOX 2.0 to indicate a new tracking of the malware campaign. "This scheme impacted more than 1 million consumer devices. Devices connected to the BADBOX 2.0 operation included lower-price-point, 'off brand,' uncertified tablets, connected TV (CTV) boxes, digital projectors, and more," explains HUMAN.

"The infected devices are Android Open Source Project devices, not Android TV OS devices or Play Protect certified Android devices. All of these devices are manufactured in mainland China and shipped globally; indeed, HUMAN observed BADBOX 2.0-associated traffic from 222 countries and territories worldwide."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit's lobbyists and Donald Trump's megabill. Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the "future of tax filing" in the private sector.

Direct File is a piece of software created by developers at the US Digital Service and 18F, the former of which became DOGE and is now unrecognizable, and the latter of which was killed by DOGE. Direct File has been called a "free, easy, and trustworthy" piece of software that made tax filing "more efficient." About 300,000 people used it last year as part of a limited pilot program, and those who did gave it incredibly positive reviews, according to reporting by Federal News Network.

But because it is free and because it is an example of government working, Direct File and the IRS's Free File program more broadly have been the subject of years of lobbying efforts by financial technology giants like Intuit, which makes TurboTax. DOGE sought to kill Direct File, and currently, there is language in Trump's massive budget reconciliation bill that would kill Direct File. Experts say that "ending [the] Direct File program is a gift to the tax-prep industry that will cost taxpayers time and money."

"It appears as though Meta (aka: Facebook's parent company) and Yandex have found a way to sidestep the Android Sandbox," writes Slashdot reader TheWho79. Researchers disclose the novel tracking method in a report: We found that native Android apps -- including Facebook, Instagram, and several Yandex apps including Maps and Browser -- silently listen on fixed local ports for tracking purposes.

These native Android apps receive browsers' metadata, cookies and commands from the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts embedded on thousands of web sites. These JavaScripts load on users' mobile browsers and silently connect with native apps running on the same device through localhost sockets. As native apps access programmatically device identifiers like the Android Advertising ID (AAID) or handle user identities as in the case of Meta apps, this method effectively allows these organizations to link mobile browsing sessions and web cookies to user identities, hence de-anonymizing users' visiting sites embedding their scripts.

This web-to-app ID sharing method bypasses typical privacy protections such as clearing cookies, Incognito Mode and Android's permission controls. Worse, it opens the door for potentially malicious apps eavesdropping on users' web activity.

While there are subtle differences in the way Meta and Yandex bridge web and mobile contexts and identifiers, both of them essentially misuse the unvetted access to localhost sockets. The Android OS allows any installed app with the INTERNET permission to open a listening socket on the loopback interface (127.0.0.1). Browsers running on the same device also access this interface without user consent or platform mediation. This allows JavaScript embedded on web pages to communicate with native Android apps and share identifiers and browsing habits, bridging ephemeral web identifiers to long-lived mobile app IDs using standard Web APIs. This technique circumvents privacy protections like Incognito Mode, cookie deletion, and Android's permission model, with Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts silently communicating with apps across over 6 million websites combined.

Following public disclosure, Meta ceased using this method on June 3, 2025. Browser vendors like Chrome, Brave, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo have implemented or are developing mitigations, but a full resolution may require OS-level changes and stricter enforcement of platform policies to prevent further abuse.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Open source software used by hobbyist drones powered an attack that wiped out a third of Russia's strategic long range bombers on Sunday afternoon, in one of the most daring and technically coordinated attacks in the war. In broad daylight on Sunday, explosions rocked air bases in Belaya, Olenya, and Ivanovo in Russia, which are hundreds of miles from Ukraine. The Security Services of Ukraine's (SBU) Operation Spider Web was a coordinated assault on Russian targets it claimed was more than a year in the making, which was carried out using a nearly 20-year-old piece of open source drone autopilot software called ArduPilot.

ArduPilot's original creators were in awe of the attack. "That's ArduPilot, launched from my basement 18 years ago. Crazy," Chris Anderson said in a comment on LinkedIn below footage of the attack. On X, he tagged his the co-creators Jordi Munoz and Jason Short in a post about the attack. "Not in a million years would I have predicted this outcome. I just wanted to make flying robots," Short said in a reply to Anderson. "Ardupilot powered drones just took out half the Russian strategic bomber fleet."

ArduPilot is an open source software system that takes its name from the Arduino hardware systems it was originally designed to work with. It began in 2007 when Anderson launched the website DIYdrones.com and cobbled together a UAV autopilot system out of a Lego Mindstorms set.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People born more recently are less likely to have dementia at any given age than earlier generations, research suggests, with the trend more pronounced in women. According to the World Health Organization, in 2021 there were 57 million people worldwide living with dementia, with women disproportionately affected. However, while the risk of dementia increases with age, experts have long stressed it is not not an inevitability of getting older. "Younger generations are less likely to develop dementia at the same age as their parents or grandparents, and that's a hopeful sign," said Dr Sabrina Lenzen, a co-author of the study from the University of Queensland's Centre for the Business and Economics of Health. But she added: "The overall burden of dementia will still grow as populations age, and significant inequalities remain -- especially by gender, education and geography."

Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, researchers in Australia report how they analyzed data from 62,437 people aged 70 and over, collected from three long-running surveys covering the US, England and parts of Europe. The team used an algorithm that took into account participants' responses to a host of different metrics, from the difficulties they had with everyday activities to their scores on cognitive tests, to determine whether they were likely to have dementia. They then split the participants into eight different cohorts, representing different generations. Participants were also split into six age groups. As expected, the researchers found the prevalence of dementia increased by age among all birth cohorts, and in each of the three regions: UK, US and Europe. However, at a given age, people in more recent generations were less likely to have dementia compared with those in earlier generations.

"For example, in the US, among people aged 81 to 85, 25.1% of those born between 1890-1913 had dementia, compared to 15.5% of those born between 1939-1943," said Lenzen, adding similar trends were seen in Europe and England, although less pronounced in the latter. The team said the trend was more pronounced in women, especially in Europe and England, noting that one reason may be increased access to education for women in the mid-20th century. However, taking into account changes in GDP, a metric that reflects broader economic shifts, did not substantially alter the findings. A number of factors could be contributing to the decline. "This is likely due to interventions such as compulsory education, smoking bans, and improvements in medical treatments for conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and hearing loss, which are associated with dementia risk," said Prof Tara Spires-Jones, the director of the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's changes in response to the Digital Markets Act already included allowing Windows machines in the regions it covers to uninstall Edge and remove Bing results from Windows search, but now the list is growing in some meaningful ways. New features announced Monday for Microsoft Windows users in the European Economic Area (the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway) include the option to uninstall the Microsoft Store and avoid extra nags or prompts asking them to set Microsoft Edge as the default browser unless they choose to open it.

Additionally, setting a different browser, like Chrome, Firefox, Brave, or something else, will pin it to the taskbar unless the user chooses not to. While setting a different browser default already attaches it to a few link and file types like https and .html, now users in the EEA will see it apply to more types like "read," ftp, and .svg. The default browser changes are live for some users in the beta channel and are set to roll out widely on Windows 10 and Windows 11 in July.

Automated web-scraping bots seeking training data for AI models are flooding scientific databases and academic journals with traffic volumes that render many sites unusable. The online image repository DiscoverLife, which contains nearly 3 million species photographs, started receiving millions of daily hits in February this year that slowed the site to the point that it no longer loaded, Nature reported Monday.

The surge has intensified since the release of DeepSeek, a Chinese large language model that demonstrated effective AI could be built with fewer computational resources than previously thought. This revelation triggered what industry observers describe as an "explosion of bots seeking to scrape the data needed to train this type of model." The Confederation of Open Access Repositories reported that more than 90% of 66 surveyed members experienced AI bot scraping, with roughly two-thirds suffering service disruptions. Medical journal publisher BMJ has seen bot traffic surpass legitimate user activity, overloading servers and interrupting customer services.

Apple has filed an appeal with the European Union's General Court in Luxembourg challenging the bloc's order requiring greater iOS interoperability with rival companies' products under the Digital Markets Act. The EU executive in March directed Apple to make its mobile operating system more compatible with competitors' apps, headphones, and virtual reality headsets by granting developers and device makers access to system components typically reserved for Apple's own products.

Apple contends the requirements threaten its seamless user experience while creating security risks, noting that companies have already requested access to sensitive user data including notification content and complete WiFi network histories. The company faces potential fines of up to 10% of its worldwide annual revenue if found in violation of the DMA's interoperability rules designed to curb Big Tech market power.

"If the adoption of AI feels different from any tech revolution you may have experienced before — mobile, social, cloud computing — it actually is," writes TechCrunch. They cite a new 340-page report from venture capitalist Mary Meeker that details how AI adoption has outpaced any other tech in human history — and uses the word "unprecedented" on 51 pages: ChatGPT reaching 800 million users in 17 months: unprecedented. The number of companies and the rate at which so many others are hitting high annual recurring revenue rates: also unprecedented. The speed at which costs of usage are dropping: unprecedented. While the costs of training a model (also unprecedented) is up to $1 billion, inference costs — for example, those paying to use the tech — has already dropped 99% over two years, when calculating cost per 1 million tokens, she writes, citing research from Stanford. The pace at which competitors are matching each other's features, at a fraction of the cost, including open source options, particularly Chinese models: unprecedented...

Meanwhile, chips from Google, like its TPU (tensor processing unit), and Amazon's Trainium, are being developed at scale for their clouds — that's moving quickly, too. "These aren't side projects — they're foundational bets," she writes.
"The one area where AI hasn't outpaced every other tech revolution is in financial returns..." the article points out.

"[T]he jury is still out over which of the current crop of companies will become long-term, profitable, next-generation tech giants."

Adam Riess won a Nobel Prize in Physics for helping discover that the universe's acceleration is expanding, remembers The Atlantic. But then theorists "proposed the existence of dark energy: a faint, repulsive force that pervades all of empty space... the final piece to what has since come to be called the 'standard model of cosmology.'"

Riess thinks instead we should just replace the standard model: When I visited Riess, back in January, he mentioned he was looking forward to a data release from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, a new observatory on Kitt Peak, in Arizona's portion of the Sonoran Desert. DESI has 5,000 robotically controlled optic fibers. Every 20 minutes, each of them locks onto a different galaxy in the deep sky. This process is scheduled to continue for a total of five years, until millions of galaxies have been observed, enough to map cosmic expansion across time... DESI's first release, last year, gave some preliminary hints that dark energy was stronger in the early universe, and that its power then began to fade ever so slightly. On March 19, the team followed up with the larger set of data that Riess was awaiting. It was based on three years of observations, and the signal that it gave was stronger: Dark energy appeared to lose its kick several billion years ago.

This finding is not settled science, not even close. But if it holds up, a "wholesale revision" of the standard model would be required [says Colin Hill, a cosmologist at Columbia University. "The textbooks that I use in my class would need to be rewritten." And not only the textbooks — the idea that our universe will end in heat death has escaped the dull, technical world of academic textbooks. It has become one of our dominant secular eschatologies, and perhaps the best-known end-times story for the cosmos. And yet it could be badly wrong. If dark energy weakens all the way to zero, the universe may, at some point, stop expanding. It could come to rest in some static configuration of galaxies. Life, especially intelligent life, could go on for a much longer time than previously expected.

If dark energy continues to fade, as the DESI results suggest is happening, it may indeed go all the way to zero, and then turn negative. Instead of repelling galaxies, a negative dark energy would bring them together into a hot, dense singularity, much like the one that existed during the Big Bang. This could perhaps be part of some larger eternal cycle of creation and re-creation. Or maybe not. The point is that the deep future of the universe is wide open...
"Many new observations will come, not just from DESI, but also from the new Vera Rubin Observatory in the Atacama Desert, and other new telescopes in space. On data-release days for years to come, the standard model's champions and detractors will be feverishly refreshing their inboxes..." And Riess tells The Atlantic he's disappointed when complacent theorists just tell him "Yeah, that's a really hard problem."

He adds, "Sometimes, I feel like I am providing clues and killing time while we wait for the next Einstein to come along."

Stack Overflow remains in the midst of big changes to counter an AI-fueled drop in engagement. So "We're wondering what kind of online communities Stack Overflow users continue to support in the age of AI," writes their senior analyst, "and whether AI is becoming a closer companion than ever before."

For their 15th year of their annual reader survey, this means "we're not just collecting data; we're reflecting on the last year of questions, answers, hallucinations, job changes, tech stacks, memory allocations, models, systems and agents — together..." Is it an AI agent revolution yet? Are you building or utilizing AI agents? We want to know how these intelligent assistants are changing your daily workflow and if developers are really using them as much as these keynote speeches assume. We're asking if you are using these tools and where humans are still needed for common developer tasks.

Career shifts: We're keen to understand if you've considered a career change or transitioned roles and if AI is impacting your approach to learning or using existing tools. Did we make up the difference in salaries globally for tech workers...?
They're also re-visiting "a key finding from recent surveys highlighted a significant statistic: 80% of developers reported being unhappy or complacent in their jobs." This raised questions about changing office (and return-to-office) culture and the pressures of the industry, along with whether there were any insights into what could help developers feel more satisfied at work. Prior research confirmed that flexibility at work used to contribute more than salary to job satisfaction, but 2024's results show us that remote work is not more impactful than salary when it comes to overall satisfaction... [For some positions job satisfaction stayed consistent regardless of salary, though it increased with salary for other positions. And embedded developers said their happiness increased when they worked with top-quality hardware, while desktop developers cited "contributing to open source" and engineering managers were happier when "driving strategy".]

In 2024, our data showed that many developers experienced a pay cut in various roles and programming specialties. In an industry often seen as highly lucrative, this was a notable shift of around 7% lower salaries across the top ten reporting countries for the same roles. This year, we're interested in whether this trend has continued, reversed, or stabilized. Salary dynamics is an indicator for job satisfaction in recent surveys of Stack Overflow users and understanding trends for these roles can perhaps improve the process for finding the most useful factors contributing to role satisfaction outside of salary.
And of course they're asking about AI — while noting last year's survey uncovered this paradox. "While AI usage is growing (70% in 2023 vs. 76% in 2024 planning to or currently using AI tools), developer sentiment isn't necessarily following suit, as 77% in of all respondents in 2023 are favorable or very favorable of AI tools for development compared to 72% of all respondents in 2024." Concerns about accuracy and misinformation were prevalent among some key groups. More developers learning to code are using or are interested in using AI tools than professional developers (84% vs. 77%)... Developers with 10 — 19 years experience were most likely (84%) to name "increase in productivity" as a benefit of AI tools, higher than developers with less experience (<80%)...

Is it an AI agent revolution yet? Are you building or utilizing AI agents? We want to know how these intelligent assistants are changing your daily workflow and if developers are really using them as much as these keynote speeches assume. We're asking if you are using these tools and where humans are still needed for common developer tasks.

The Ladybird browser project is now officially tax-exempt as a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

Started two years ago (by the original creator of SerenityOS), Ladybird will be "an independent, fast and secure browser that respects user privacy and fosters an open web." They're targeting Summer 2026 for the first Alpha version on Linux and macOS, and in May enjoyed "a pleasantly productive month" with 261 merged PRs from 53 contributors — and seven new sponsors (including coding livestreamer "ThePrimeagen").

And they're now recognized as a public charity: This is retroactive to March 2024, so donations made since then may be eligible for tax exemption (depending on country-specific rules). You can find all the relevant information on our new Organization page. ["Our mission is to create an independent, fast and secure browser that respects user privacy and fosters an open web. We are tax-exempt and rely on donations and sponsorships to fund our development efforts."]
Other announcements for May:

• "We've been making solid progress on Web Platform Tests... This month, we added 15,961 new passing tests for a total of 1,815,223."

• "We've also done a fair bit of performance work this month, targeting Speedometer and various websites that are slower than we'd like." [The optimizations led to a 10% speed-up on Speedometer 2.1.]

A U.S. federal judge has decided that free-speech protections in the First Amendment "don't shield an AI company from a lawsuit," reports Legal Newsline.

The suit is against Character.AI (a company reportedly valued at $1 billion with 20 million users) Judge Anne C. Conway of the Middle District of Florida denied several motions by defendants Character Technologies and founders Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the mother of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III. Setzer killed himself with a gun in February of last year after interacting for months with Character.AI chatbots imitating fictitious characters from the Game of Thrones franchise, according to the lawsuit filed by Sewell's mother, Megan Garcia.

"... Defendants fail to articulate why words strung together by (Large Language Models, or LLMs, trained in engaging in open dialog with online users) are speech," Conway said in her May 21 opinion. "... The court is not prepared to hold that Character.AI's output is speech."
Character.AI's spokesperson told Legal Newsline they've now launched safety features (including an under-18 LLM, filter Characters, time-spent notifications and "updated prominent disclaimers" (as well as a "parental insights" feature). "The company also said it has put in place protections to detect and prevent dialog about self-harm. That may include a pop-up message directing users to the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, according to Character.AI."

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