FaunaDB, a serverless database combining relational and document features, will shut down by the end of May due to unsustainable capital demands. The company plans to open source its core technology, including its FQL query language, in hopes of continuing its legacy within the developer community. The Register reports: The startup pocketed $27 million in VC funding in 2020 and boasted that 25,000 developers worldwide were using its serverless database. However, last week, FaunaDB announced that it would sunset its database services. FaunaDB said it plans to release an open-source version of its core database technology. The system stores data in JSON documents but retains relational features like consistency, support for joins and foreign keys, and full schema enforcement. Fauna's query language, FQL, will also be made available to the open-source community. "Driving broad based adoption of a new operational database that runs as a service globally is very capital intensive. In the current market environment, our board and investors have determined that it is not possible to raise the capital needed to achieve that goal independently," the leadership team said.

"While we will no longer be accepting new customers, existing Fauna customers will experience no immediate change. We will gradually transition customers off Fauna and are committed to ensuring a smooth process over the next several months," it added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Sunday, leaving the fate of millions of people's genetic information up in the air as the company deals with the legal and financial fallout of not properly protecting that genetic information in the first place. The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA directly to a large, for-profit commercial genetic database; 23andMe is now looking for a buyer to pull it out of bankruptcy. 23andMe said in court documents viewed by 404 Media that since hackers obtained personal data about seven million of its customers in October 2023, including, in some cases "health-related information based upon the user's genetics," it has faced "over 50 class action and state court lawsuits," and that "approximately 35,000 claimants have initiated, filed, or threatened to commence arbitration claims against the company." It is seeking bankruptcy protection in part to simplify the fallout of these legal cases, and because it believes it may not have money to pay for the potential damages associated with these cases.

CEO and cofounder Anne Wojcicki announced she is leaving the company as part of this process. The company has the genetic data of more than 15 million customers. According to its Chapter 11 filing, 23andMe owes money to a host of pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, artificial intelligence companies (including a company called Aganitha AI and Coreweave), as well as health insurance companies and marketing companies. Shortly before the filing, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued an "urgent" alert to 23andMe customers: "Given 23andMe's reported financial distress, I remind Californians to consider invoking their rights and directing 23andMe to delete their data and destroy any samples of genetic material held by the company."

In a letter to customers Sunday, 23andMe said: "Your data remains protected. The Chapter 11 filing does not change how we store, manage, or protect customer data. Our users' privacy and data are important considerations in any transaction, and we remain committed to our users' privacy and to being transparent with our customers about how their data is managed." It added that any buyer will have to "comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data."

404 Media's Jason Koebler notes that "there's no way of knowing who is going to buy it, why they will be interested, and what will become of its millions of customers' DNA sequences. 23andMe has claimed over the years that it strongly resists law enforcement requests for information and that it takes customer security seriously. But the company has in recent years changed its terms of service, partnered with big pharmaceutical companies, and, of course, was hacked."

Slashdot reader spatwei shared this report from the cybersecurity site SC World: : AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor could be manipulated to generate code containing backdoors, vulnerabilities and other security issues via distribution of malicious rule configuration files, Pillar Security researchers reported Tuesday.

Rules files are used by AI coding agents to guide their behavior when generating or editing code. For example, a rules file may include instructions for the assistant to follow certain coding best practices, utilize specific formatting, or output responses in a specific language.

The attack technique developed by Pillar Researchers, which they call 'Rules File Backdoor,' weaponizes rules files by injecting them with instructions that are invisible to a human user but readable by the AI agent.

Hidden Unicode characters like bidirectional text markers and zero-width joiners can be used to obfuscate malicious instructions in the user interface and in GitHub pull requests, the researchers noted.

Rules configurations are often shared among developer communities and distributed through open-source repositories or included in project templates; therefore, an attacker could distribute a malicious rules file by sharing it on a forum, publishing it on an open-source platform like GitHub or injecting it via a pull request to a popular repository.

Once the poisoned rules file is imported to GitHub Copilot or Cursor, the AI agent will read and follow the attacker's instructions while assisting the victim's future coding projects.

For weeks Signal has been one of the three most-downloaded apps in the Netherlands, according to a local news site. And now "Higher education institutions in the Netherlands have been looking for an alternative," according to DUB (an independent news site for the Utrecht University community): Employees of the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences (HU) were recently advised to switch to Signal. Avans University of Applied Sciences has also been discussing a switch...The National Student Union is concerned about privacy. The subject was raised at last week's general meeting, as reported by chair Abdelkader Karbache, who said: "Our local unions want to switch to Signal or other open-source software."
Besides being open source, Signal is a non-commercial nonprofit, the article points out — though its proponents suggest there's another big difference. "HU argues that Signal keeps users' data private, unlike WhatsApp." Cybernews.com explains the concern: In an interview with the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, Meredith Whittaker [president of the Signal Foundation] discussed the pitfalls of WhatsApp. "WhatsApp collects metadata: who you send messages to, when, and how often. That's incredibly sensitive information," she says.... The only information [Signal] collects is the date an account was registered, the time when an account was last active, and hashed phone numbers... Information like profile name and the people a user communicates with is all encrypted... Metadata might sound harmless, but it couldn't be further from the truth. According to Whittaker, metadata is deadly. "As a former CIA director once said: 'We kill people based on metadata'."
WhatsApp's metadata also includes IP addresses, TechRadar noted last May: Other identifiable data such as your network details, the browser you use, ISP, and other identifiers linked to other Meta products (like Instagram and Facebook) associated with the same device or account are also collected... [Y]our IP can be used to track down your location. As the company explained, even if you keep the location-related features off, IP addresses and other collected information like phone number area codes can be used to estimate your "general location."

WhatsApp is required by law to share this information with authorities during an investigation...

[U]nder scrutiny is how Meta itself uses these precious details for commercial purposes. Again, this is clearly stated in WhatsApp's privacy policy and terms of use. "We may use the information we receive from [other Meta companies], and they may use the information we share with them, to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services and their offerings," reads the policy. This means that yes, your messages are always private, but WhatsApp is actively collecting your metadata to build your digital persona across other Meta platforms...
The article suggests using a VPN with WhatsApp and turning on its "advanced privacy feature" (which hides your IP address during calls) and managing the app's permissions for data collection. "While these steps can help reduce the amount of metadata collected, it's crucial to bear in mind that it's impossible to completely avoid metadata collection on the Meta-owned app... For extra privacy and security, I suggest switching to the more secure messaging app Signal."

The article also includes a cautionary anecdote. "It was exactly a piece of metadata — a Proton Mail recovery email — that led to the arrest of a Catalan activist."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader united_notions for sharing the article.

"There's no shortage of videos showing Steam running on expensive ARM single-board computers with discrete GPUs," writes Slashdot reader VennStone. "So I thought it would be worthwhile to make a guide for doing it on (relatively) inexpensive RK3588-powered single-board computers, using Box86/64 and Armbian." The guides I came across were out of date, had a bunch of extra steps thrown in, or were outright incorrect... Up first, we need to add the Box86 and Box64 ARM repositories [along with dependencies, ARMHF architecture, and the Mesa graphics driver]...
The guide closes with a multi-line script and advice to "Just close your eyes and run this. It's not pretty, but it will download the Steam Debian package, extract the needed bits, and set up a launch script." (And then the final step is sudo reboot now.)

"At this point, all you have to do is open a terminal, type 'steam', and tap Enter. You'll have about five minutes to wait... Check out the video to see how some of the tested games perform." At 720p, performance is all over the place, but the games I tested typically managed to stay above 30 FPS. This is better than I was expecting from a four-year-old SOC emulating x86 titles under ARM.

Is this a practical way to play your Steam games? Nope, not even a little bit. For now, this is merely an exercise in ludicrous neatness. Things might get a wee bit better, considering Collabora is working on upstream support for RK3588 and Valve is up to something ARM-related, but ya know, "Valve Time"...
"You might be tempted to enable Steam Play for your Windows games, but don't waste your time. I mean, you can try, but it ain't gonna work."

Today long-time open source advocate/journalist Doc Searls revealed that years of work by consumer privacy groups has culminated in a proposed standard "that can vastly expand our agency in the digital world" — especially in a future world where agents surf the web on our behalf: Meet IEEE P7012 , which "identifies/addresses the manner in which personal privacy terms are proffered and how they can be read and agreed to by machines." It has been in the works since 2017, and should be ready later this year. (I say this as chair of the standard's working group.) The nickname for P7012 is MyTerms (much as the nickname for the IEEE's 802.11 standard is Wi-Fi).

The idea behind MyTerms is that the sites and services of the world should agree to your terms, rather than the other way around.
Basically your web browser proffers whatever agreement you've chosen (from a canonical list hosted at Customer Commons) to the web sites and other online services that you're visiting.

"Browser makers can build something into their product, or any developer can make a browser add-on or extension..." Searls writes. "On the site's side — the second-party side — CMS makers can build something in, or any developer can make a plug-in (WordPress) or a module (Drupal). Mobile app toolmakers can also come up with something (or many things)..." MyTerms creates a new regime for privacy: one based on contract. With each MyTerm you are the first party. Not the website, the service, or the app maker. They are the second party. And terms can be friendly. For example, a prototype term called NoStalking says "Just show me ads not based on tracking me." This is good for you, because you don't get tracked, and good for the site because it leaves open the advertising option. NoStalking lives at Customer Commons, much as personal copyrights live at Creative Commons. (Yes, the former is modeled on the latter.)
"[L]et's make this happen and show the world what agency really means," Searls concludes.

Another way to say it is they've created "a draft standard for machine-readable personal privacy terms." But Searl's article used a grander metaphor to explain its significance: When Archimedes said 'Give me a place to stand and I can move the world,' he was talking about agency. You have no agency on the Web if you are always the second party, agreeing to terms and policies set by websites.

You are Archimedes if you are the first party, setting your own terms and policies. The scale you get with those is One 2 World. The place you stand is on the Web itself — and the Internet below it.

Both were designed to make each of us an Archimedes.

Two "groundbreaking research reports" on open source security were announced this week by the Linux Foundation in partnership with the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and Linux Foundation Europe. The reports specifically address the EU's Cyber Resilience Act (or CRA) and "highlight knowledge gaps and best practices for CRA compliance."

"Unaware and Uncertain: The Stark Realities of CRA-Readiness in Open Source" includes a survey which found that when it comes to CRA requirements, 62% of respondents were either "not familiar at all" (36%) or "slightly familiar" (26%) — while 51% weren't sure about its deadlines. ("Only 28% correctly identified 2027 as the target year for full compliance," according to one infographic, which adds that CRA "is expected to drive a 6% average price increase, though 53% of manufacturers are still assessing pricing impacts.") Manufacturers, who bear primary responsibility, lack readiness — many [46%] passively rely on upstream security fixes, and only a small portion produce Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs). The report recommends that manufacturers take a more active role in open source security, that more funding and legal support is needed to support security practices, and that clear regulatory guidance is essential to prevent unintended negative impacts on open source development.
The research also provides "an in-depth analysis of how open collaboration can strengthen software security and innovation across global markets," with another report that "examines how three Linux Foundation projects are meeting the CRA's minimum compliance requirements" and "provides insight on the elements needed to ensure leadership in cybersecurity best practices." (It also includes CRA-related resources.)

"These two reports offer actionable conclusions for open source stakeholders to ready themselves for 2027, when the CRA comes into force," according to a Linux Foundation reserach executive cited in the announcement. "We hope that these reports catalyze higher levels of collaboration across the open source community."

A new AI system called Aardvark could deliver weather forecasts as accurate as those from advanced public weather services but run on desktop computers, according to a project unveiled Thursday and published in Nature. Developed by the UK's Alan Turing Institute with partners including Cambridge University, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and Microsoft, Aardvark aims to make sophisticated forecasting accessible to countries with fewer resources, particularly in Africa.

The system has already outperformed the US Global Forecast System on many variables in testing. Project leader Richard Turner noted the system is "completely open source" and not planned for commercialization by Microsoft.

EU antitrust regulators ordered Apple on Wednesday to open its closed ecosystem to competitors, detailing how the company must comply with the bloc's Digital Markets Act or face potential fines. The European Commission's decision comes six months after initiating proceedings against the tech giant.

The first order requires Apple to grant rival smartphone, headphone and VR headset manufacturers access to its technology for seamless connectivity with Apple devices. A second order establishes specific processes for responding to app developers' interoperability requests. Apple criticized the decision, saying: "Today's decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple's ability to innovate for users in Europe." EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera countered: "We are simply implementing the law." Non-compliance could trigger investigations resulting in fines up to 10% of Apple's global annual sales.

SourceHut, an open-source-friendly git-hosting service, says web crawlers for AI companies are slowing down services through their excessive demands for data. From a report: "SourceHut continues to face disruptions due to aggressive LLM crawlers," the biz reported Monday on its status page. "We are continuously working to deploy mitigations. We have deployed a number of mitigations which are keeping the problem contained for now. However, some of our mitigations may impact end-users."

SourceHut said it had deployed Nepenthes, a tar pit to catch web crawlers that scrape data primarily for training large language models, and noted that doing so might degrade access to some web pages for users. "We have unilaterally blocked several cloud providers, including GCP [Google Cloud] and [Microsoft] Azure, for the high volumes of bot traffic originating from their networks," the biz said, advising administrators of services that integrate with SourceHut to get in touch to arrange an exception to the blocking.

During the company's GTC 2025 keynote today, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced Isaac GR00T N1 -- the company's first open-source, pre-trained yet customizable foundation model designed to accelerate the development and capabilities of humanoid robots. "The age of generalist robotics is here," said Huang. "With Nvidia Isaac GR00T N1 and new data-generation and robot-learning frameworks, robotics developers everywhere will open the next frontier in the age of AI." The Verge reports: Huang demonstrated 1X's NEO Gamma humanoid robot performing autonomous tidying jobs using a post-trained policy built on the GR00T N1 model. [...] Other companies developing humanoid robots who have had early access to the GR00T N1 model include Boston Dynamics, the creators of Atlas; Agility Robotics; Mentee Robotics; and Neura Robotics. Originally announced as Project GR00T a year ago, the GR00T N1 foundation model utilizes a dual-system architecture inspired by human cognition.

System 1, as Nvidia calls it, is described as a "fast-thinking action model" that behaves similarly to human reflexes and intuition. It was trained on data collected through human demonstrations and synthetic data generated by Nvidia's Omniverse platform. System 2, which is powered by a vision language model, is a "slow-thinking model" that "reasons about its environment and the instructions it has received to plan actions." Those plans are passed along to System 1, which translates them into "precise, continuous robot movements" that include grasping, moving objects with one or two arms, as well as more complex multistep tasks that involve combinations of basic skills.

While the GR00T N1 foundation model is pretrained with generalized humanoid reasoning and skills, developers can customize its behavior and capabilities for specific needs by post-training it with data gathered from human demonstrations or simulations. Nvidia has made GR00T N1 training data and task evaluation scenarios available for download through Hugging Face and GitHub.

Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble, will release two new smartwatches running the newly open-sourced Pebble operating system through his company Core Devices. The Core 2 Duo, priced at $149 and shipping in July, utilizes unused Pebble 2 frames with the same black-and-white E Ink display.

The device features a 30-day battery life -- quadruple its predecessor's -- and incorporates a speaker for AI assistant interaction. Approximately 10,000 units will be available. The Core Time 2, arriving in December at $225, adds touchscreen functionality to the classic Pebble design while maintaining physical buttons and month-long battery life.

Both devices face iPhone integration challenges. Migicovsky cautioned potential tariff increases would be passed to consumers, stating, "We're going to charge more if it costs more." "I'm not building a company to sell millions of these," Migicovsky said. "The goal is to make something I really want."

Meta's open AI model family Llama has reached 1 billion downloads, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday, marking a 53% increase from the 650 million reported in early December. Llama, which powers Meta's AI assistant across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, operates under a proprietary license that some developers consider commercially restrictive despite its free availability. Major corporations including Spotify, AT&T and DoorDash currently deploy Llama models in production environments.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, urging the administration to not roll back copyright protections at the behest of AI companies. The filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and others -- which included Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Erivo, Cate Blanchett, Cord Jefferson, Paul McCartney, Ron Howard and Taika Waititi -- were submitting comments for the Trump administration's U.S. AI Action Plan. The letter specifically was penned in response to recent submissions to the Office of Science and Technology Policy from OpenAI and Google, which asserted that U.S. copyright law allows (or should allow) allow AI companies to train their system on copyrighted works without obtaining permission from (or compensating) rights holders.

"We firmly believe that America's global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries," the letter says in part. The letter claims that "AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music and voices used to train AI models at the core of multibillion-dollar corporate valuations." [...] The letter says Google and OpenAI "are arguing for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit America's creative and knowledge industries, despite their substantial revenues and available funds. There is no reason to weaken or eliminate the copyright protections that have helped America flourish." You can read the full statement and list of signatories here.

The letter was issued in response to recent submissions from OpenAI (PDF) and Google (PDF) claiming that U.S. law allows, or should allow, AI companies to train their programs on copyrighted works under the fair use legal doctrine.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Xbox 360 modders have discovered a new way to get homebrew apps and games running on the console. A new software-only exploit known as BadUpdate allows you to use a USB key to hack past Microsoft's Hypervisor protections and run unsigned code and games.

Modern Vintage Gamer has tested BadUpdate and found that you don't even have to open up your Xbox 360 console to get it running. Unlike the RGH or JTAG exploits for the Xbox 360, this BadUpdate method just requires a USB key. If you have the time and patience to get this running successfully, you'll be able to run the Xbox 360 homebrew store which includes games, apps, emulators, utilities, and even custom dashboards.

"The number of discrete GPU developers from the U.S. and Western Europe shrank to three companies in 2025," notes Tom's Hardware, "from around 10 in 2000." (Nvidia, AMD, and Intel...) No company in the recent years — at least outside of China — was bold enough to engage into competition against these three contenders, so the very emergence of Bolt Graphics seems like a breakthrough. However, the major focuses of Bolt's Zeus are high-quality rendering for movie and scientific industries as well as high-performance supercomputer simulations. If Zeus delivers on its promises, it could establish itself as a serious alternative for scientific computing, path tracing, and offline rendering. But without strong software support, it risks struggling against dominant market leaders.
This week the Sunnyvale, California-based startup introduced its Zeus GPU platform designed for gaming, rendering, and supercomputer simulations, according to the article. "The company says that its Zeus GPU not only supports features like upgradeable memory and built-in Ethernet interfaces, but it can also beat Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 by around 10 times in path tracing workloads, according to slide published by technology news site ServeTheHome." There is one catch: Zeus can only beat the RTX 5090 GPU in path tracing and FP64 compute workloads. It's not clear how well it will handle traditional rendering techniques, as that was less of a focus. In speaking with Bolt Graphics, the card does support rasterization, but there was less emphasis on that aspect of the GPU, and it may struggle to compete with the best graphics cards when it comes to gaming. And when it comes to data center options like Nvidia's Blackwell B200, it's an entirely different matter.

Unlike GPUs from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia that rely on proprietary instruction set architectures, Bolt's Zeus relies on the open-source RISC-V ISA, according to the published slides. The Zeus core relies on an open-source out-of-order general-purpose RVA23 scalar core mated with FP64 ALUs and the RVV 1.0 (RISC-V Vector Extension Version 1.0) that can handle 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit data types as well as Bolt's additional proprietary extensions designed for acceleration of scientific workloads... Like many processors these days, Zeus relies on a multi-chiplet design... Unlike high-end GPUs that prioritize bandwidth, Bolt is evidently focusing on greater memory size to handle larger datasets for rendering and simulations. Also, built-in 400GbE and 800GbE ports to enable faster data transfer across networked GPUs indicates the data center focus of Zeus.

High-quality rendering, real-time path tracing, and compute are key focus areas for Zeus. As a result, even the entry-level Zeus 1c26-32 offers significantly higher FP64 compute performance than Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 — up to 5 TFLOPS vs. 1.6 TFLOPS — and considerably higher path tracing performance: 77 Gigarays vs. 32 Gigarays. Zeus also features a larger on-chip cache than Nvidia's flagship — up to 128MB vs. 96MB — and lower power consumption of 120W vs. 575W, making it more efficient for simulations, path tracing, and offline rendering. However, the RTX 5090 dominates in AI workloads with its 105 FP16 TFLOPS and 1,637 INT8 TFLOPS compared to the 10 FP16 TFLOPS and 614 INT8 TFLOPS offered by a single-chiplet Zeus...
The article emphasizes that Zeus "is only running in simulation right now... Bolt Graphics says that the first developer kits will be available in late 2025, with full production set for late 2026."

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

Slashdot reader rikfarrow summarizes an article they wrote for Usenix.org about the Open Source Python compiler Codon: In 2023 I tried out Codon. At the time I had difficulty compiling the scripts I most commonly used, but was excited by the prospect. Python is essentially single threaded and checks the shape (type) of each variable as it interprets scripts. Codon fixes types and compiles Python into compact, executable binaries that execute much faster.

Several things have changed with their latest release: I have successful compiles, the committers have added a compiled version of NumPy (high performance math algorithms), and changed their open source license to Apache 2.
"The other big news is that Exaloop, the company that is behind Codon, has changed their license to Apache 2..." according to the article, so "commercial use and derivations of Codon are now permitted without licensing."

"Why can't we each have our own AI software that runs locally," asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM — and that doesn't steal the work of others.

Imagine a powerful-but-locally-hosted LLM that "doesn't spy... and no one else owns it." We download it, from souce-code if you like, install it, if we want. And it assists: us... No one gate-keeps it. It's not out to get us...

And this is important: because no one owns it, the AI software is ours and leaks no data anywhere — to no one, no company, for no political nor financial purpose. No one profits — but you!
Their longer original submission also asks a series of related questions — like why can't we have software without AI? (Along with "Why is AMD stamping AI on local-processors?" and "Should AI be crowned the ultimate hype?") But this question seems to be at the heart of their concern. "What future will anyone have if anything they really wanted to do — could be mimicked and sold by the ill-gotten work of others...?"

"Could local, open-source, AI software be the only answer to dishearten billionaire companies from taking and selling back to their customers — everything we have done? Could we not...instead — steal their dream?!"

Share your own thoughts and answers in the comments. Where are the open-source, local-only AI solutions?

Tuesday Microsoft "surprised everyone," writes Neowin, "by announcing a new change that will radically improve TypeScript performance" — porting TypeScript to Go.

InfoWorld writes that "The initiative promises dramatic improvements in editor startup speed, build times, and memory usage, making it easier to scale TypeScript to large code bases, Microsoft said." Microsoft's TypeScript team expects to be able to preview command-line type-checking in Go-based tsc by mid-2025, and to deliver a feature-complete Go implementation of TypeScript by the end of the year. [You can build and run the Go code now from Microsoft's new working repository.] Developers who use Go-based TypeScript in the Visual Studio Code editor will feel the increased speed in the editor, Microsoft said. The company promises an 8x improvement in project load times, instant comprehensive error listings across entire projects, and greater responsiveness for all language service operations including completion lists, quick information, go to definition, and find all references. The new TypeScript will also support more advanced refactoring and deeper insights that were previously too expensive to compute, the company said.
Microsoft believes native Go implementations reduce build times by up to 10x, notes Neowin. But "Developers can expect TypeScript 6.0 to have some deprecations and breaking changes to support the upcoming Go-based version." Later this year, Microsoft will be releasing this new native Go implementation as TypeScript 7.0. The current JS-based TypeScript codebase will continue development into the 6.x series until TypeScript 7+ reaches sufficient maturity and adoption, since some projects may depend on certain API features, legacy configurations, or other things that are not supported by TypeScript 7+.
TypeScript's original creator Anders Hejlsberg recorded an announcement video — and also shared his thoughts in a GitHub discussion titled simply... "Why Go?" The TypeScript compiler's move to Go was influenced by specific technical requirements, such as the need for structural compatibility with the existing JavaScript-based codebase, ease of memory management, and the ability to handle complex graph processing efficiently. After evaluating numerous languages and making multiple prototypes — including in C# — Go emerged as the optimal choice...

Let's be real. Microsoft using Go to write a compiler for TypeScript wouldn't have been possible or conceivable in years past. However, over the last few decades, we've seen Microsoft's strong and ongoing commitment to open-source software, prioritizing developer productivity and community collaboration above all. Our goal is to empower developers with the best tools available, unencumbered by internal politics or narrow constraints. This freedom to choose the right tool for each specific job ultimately benefits the entire developer community, driving innovation, efficiency, and improved outcomes. And you can't argue with a 10x outcome!
Hejlsberg also addressed their choice of Go in an online interview with the Michigan TypeScript meetup.

Yale University has suspended a law scholar and pro-Palestinian activist after an AI-generated article from Jewish Onliner falsely linked her to a terrorist group. Gizmodo reports: Helyeh Doutaghi, the scholar at Yale Law School, told the New York Times that she is a "loud and proud" supporter of Palestinian rights. "I am not a member of any organization that would constitute a violation of U.S. law." The article that led to her suspension was published in Jewish Onliner, a Substack that says it is "empowered by A.I. capabilities." The website does not publish the names of its authors out of fear of harassment. Ironically, Doutaghi and Yale were reportedly the subject of intense harassment after Jewish Onliner published the article linking Doutaghi to terrorism by citing appearances she made at events sponsored by Samidoun, a pro-Palestinian group. [...]

Jewish Onliner is vague about how it uses AI to produce its articles, but the technology is known for making lots of mistakes and hallucinating information that is not true. It is quite possible that Jewish Onliner relied on AI to source information it used to write the article. That could open it up to liability if it did not perform fact-checking and due diligence on its writing. Besides the fact that Doutaghi says she is not a member of Samidoun, she attended events it sponsored that support Palestinian causes, Yale Law School said the allegations against her reflect "potential unlawful conduct."