Long-time Slashdot reader theodp took a good look at the images on a promotional web page for Databricks' "context-aware AI assistant": If there was an AI Demo Hall of Shame, the first inductee would have to be Amazon. Their demo tried to support its CEO's claims that Amazon Q Code Transformation AI saved it 4,500 developer-years and an additional $260 million in "annualized efficiency gains" by automatically and accurately upgrading code to a more current version of Java. But it showcased a program that didn't even spell "Java" correctly. (It was instead called 'Jave')...

Today's nominee for the AI Demo Hall of Shame inductee is analytics platform Databricks for the NYC Taxi Trips Analysis it's been showcasing on its Data Science page since last November. Not only for its choice of a completely trivial case study that requires no 'Data Science' skills — find and display the ten most expensive and longest taxi rides — but also for the horrible AI-generated bar chart used to present the results of the simple ranking that deserves its own spot in the Graph Hall of Shame. In response to a prompt of "Now create a new bar chart with matplotlib for the most expensive trips," the Databricks AI Assistant dutifully complies with the ill-advised request, spewing out Python code to display the ten rides on a nonsensical bar chart whose continuous x-axis hides points sharing the same distance. (One might also question why no annotation is provided to call out or explain the 3 trips with a distance of 0 miles that are among the ten most expensive rides, with fares of $260, $188, and $105).

Looked at with a critical eye, these examples used to sell data scientists, educators, management, investors, and Wall Street on AI would likely raise eyebrows rather than impress their intended audiences.

alternative_right shares a report from France 24: [Sweden's] latest contribution to the war effort is Glimt, an innovative project launched by the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) earlier this year. Glimt is an open platform that relies on the theory of "crowd forecasting": a method of making predictions based on surveying a large and diverse group of people and taking an average. "Glimt" is a Swedish word for "a glimpse" or "a sudden insight." The theory posits that the average of all collected predictions produces correct results with "uncanny accuracy," according to the Glimt website. Such "collective intelligence" is used today for everything from election results to extreme weather events, Glimt said. [...]

Group forecasting allows for a broad collection of information while avoiding the cognitive bias that often characterizes intelligence services. Each forecaster collects and analyses the available information differently to reach the most probable scenario and can add a short comment to explain their reasoning. The platform also encourages discussion between members so they can compare arguments and alter their positions. Available in Swedish, French and English, the platform currently has 20,000 registered users; each question attracts an average of 500 forecasters. Their predictions are later sent to statistical algorithms that cross-reference data, particularly the relevance of the answers they provided. The most reliable users will have a stronger influence on the results; this reinforces the reliability of collective intelligence. "We used this method and research, and we suggested to the Ukrainians that it could improve their understanding of the world and its evolution," said Ivar Ekman, an analyst for the Swedish Defence Research Agency and program director for Glimt. "If you have a large group of people, you can achieve great accuracy in assessing future events. Research has shown that professional analysts don't necessarily have a better capacity in this domain than other people."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Guide: Microsoft Teams is about to deal a heavy blow to those who like to work from home for peace and quiet. In a new feature update rolling out December 2025, the platform will track a worker's location using the office Wi-Fi, to see whether you're actually there or not. From a boss' perspective, this would eliminate any of that confusion as to where your team actually is. But for those people who have found their own sanctuary of peaceful productivity by working from home, consider this a warning that Teams is about to tattle on you. According to the Microsoft 365 roadmap: "When users connect to their organization's Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in." The location of that worker will apparently update automatically upon connecting.

It's set to launch on Windows and macOS, with rollout starting at the end of this year. "This feature will be off by default," notes Microsoft. But "tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in."

Larry Sanger, who helped launch Wikipedia in 2001 before being ousted by co-founder Jimmy Wales a year later, has spent years arguing the online encyclopedia has abandoned its commitment to neutrality. Leading conservatives in the second Trump administration are now amplifying his critique. Elon Musk announced plans to launch an AI-powered alternative called Grokipedia this week, calling Wikipedia "hopelessly biased." Senator Ted Cruz sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation demanding answers about what he termed "ideological bias." House Republicans opened an investigation into possible platform manipulation.

Sanger published "Nine Theses" on reforming Wikipedia and appeared on Tucker Carlson's show. His arguments circulated widely among conservatives, including Trump's AI czar David Sacks. Sanger recently converted to Christianity and voted for Trump in 2024. He is working to recruit hundreds of conservatives to become active Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales maintains that neutrality remains the site's core policy.

Google and Anthropic have finalized a cloud partnership worth tens of billions of dollars, granting Anthropic access to up to one million of Google's Tensor Processing Units and more than a gigawatt of compute power by 2026. CNBC reports: Industry estimates peg the cost of a 1-gigawatt data center at around $50 billion, with roughly $35 billion of that typically allocated to chips. While competitors tout even loftier projections -- OpenAI's 33-gigawatt "Stargate" chief among them -- Anthropic's move is a quiet power play rooted in execution, not spectacle. Founded by former OpenAI researchers, the company has deliberately adopted a slower, steadier ethos, one that is efficient, diversified, and laser-focused on the enterprise market.

A key to Anthropic's infrastructure strategy is its multi-cloud architecture. The company's Claude family of language models runs across Google's TPUs, Amazon's custom Trainium chips, and Nvidia's GPUs, with each platform assigned to specialized workloads like training, inference, and research. Google said the TPUs offer Anthropic "strong price-performance and efficiency." [...] Anthropic's ability to spread workloads across vendors lets it fine-tune for price, performance, and power constraints. According to a person familiar with the company's infrastructure strategy, every dollar of compute stretches further under this model than those locked into single-vendor architectures.

Microsoft is retiring Office Online Server on December 31, 2026, ending support and updates for organizations running browser-based Office apps on-premises. The Register reports: After this, there won't be any more security fixes, updates, or technical support from Microsoft. "This change is part of our ongoing commitment to modernizing productivity experiences and focusing on cloud-first solutions," the company said. Office Online Server provides browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for customers who want to keep things on-prem without having to roll out the full desktop applications. Microsoft's solution is to move to Microsoft 365, its decidedly off-premises version of its applications. The company said it is "focusing its browser-based Office app investments on Office for the Web to deliver secure, collaborative, and feature-rich experiences through Microsoft 365."

Other than migrating to another platform when the vendor pulls the plug, affected customers have few options. The announcement will also hit several customers running SharePoint Server SE or Exchange Server SE. While those products remain supported, Office Online Server integration will go away. The company suggested Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise and Office LTSC 2024 as alternatives for viewing and editing documents hosted on those servers.

Skype for Business customers will also lose some key features related to PowerPoint. Presenter notes and high-fidelity PowerPoint rendering will go away. In-meeting annotations, which allow meeting participants to write directly to slides without altering the original file, will no longer be available, and embedded video playback will run at lower fidelity. Features like whiteboards, polls, and app sharing shouldn't be affected. Microsoft's solution is a move to Teams, which the company says "offers modern meeting experiences."

An anonymous reader shares a report: With gingko "memory-boost tinctures," fennel "tummy-soothing syrups" and "citrus-immune gummies," AI "slop" has come for herbalism, a study published by a leading AI-detection company has found. Originality.ai, which offers its tools to universities and businesses, says it scanned 558 titles published in Amazon's herbal remedies subcategory between January and September this year, and found 82% of the books "were likely written" by AI.

"This is a damning revelation of the sheer scope of unlabelled, unverified, unchecked, likely AI content that has completely invaded [Amazon's] platform," wrote Michael Fraiman, author of the study. "There's a huge amount of herbal research out there right now that's absolutely rubbish," said Sue Sprung, a medical herbalist in Liverpool. "AI won't know how to sift through all the dross, all the rubbish, that's of absolutely no consequence. It would lead people astray."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: This week, a reader wrote to us sharing that the infotainment in their 2020 Audi A4 had been "rebooting every five minutes all year." It looks like the problem was caused by a compatibility issue with a SiriusXM app update. Audi tells us the situation's been rectified, but it illustrates a serious pain point in modern cars -- myriad apps interacting with a diverse population of in-car software systems. Our reader was not the only Audi owner affected. "Randomly restarting" Audi infotainment screens have been discussed on Reddit, the Audiworld forum, and elsewhere, going back many months. Audi's recall notice and related service action only went out this summer.

It looks like this particular problem was caused when the satellite radio app pushed an update that was supposed to work on the latest version of Audi's infotainment software, but not all cars were running that. Then SiriusXM reverted, which, I guess, did not solve the problem for every owner. Audi now states that the problem has been fixed and originated with the SiriusXM app, but really, the automaker bears more than a little blame, too. [...] I dropped our own contacts at Audi a note about how and why this might have happened, and they added this clarification: "At the beginning of the year, SiriusXM did a programming update which was addressed via a software update to the MMI. However, as not all customers had their cars updated and SiriusXM then reverted back to the previous category numbering. Nonetheless, a MMI update is recommended as the two versions do seem to cause the issue."

Google is migrating all its internal workloads to run on both x86 and its custom Axion Arm chips, with major services like YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery already running on both architectures. The Register reports: The search and ads giant documented its move in a preprint paper published last week, titled "Instruction Set Migration at Warehouse Scale," and in a Wednesday post that reveals YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery already run on both x86 and its Axion Arm CPUs -- as do around 30,000 more applications. Both documents explain Google's migration process, which engineering fellow Parthasarathy Ranganathan and developer relations engineer Wolff Dobson said started with an assumption "that we would be spending time on architectural differences such as floating point drift, concurrency, intrinsics such as platform-specific operators, and performance." [...]

The post and paper detail work on 30,000 applications, a collection of code sufficiently large that Google pressed its existing automation tools into service -- and then built a new AI tool called "CogniPort" to do things its other tools could not. [...] Google found the agent succeeded about 30 percent of the time under certain conditions, and did best on test fixes, platform-specific conditionals, and data representation fixes. That's not an enormous success rate, but Google has at least another 70,000 packages to port.

The company's aim is to finish the job so its famed Borg cluster manager -- the basis of Kubernetes -- can allocate internal workloads in ways that efficiently utilize Arm servers. Doing so will likely save money, because Google claims its Axion-powered machines deliver up to 65 percent better price-performance than x86 instances, and can be 60 percent more energy-efficient. Those numbers, and the scale of Google's code migration project, suggest the web giant will need fewer x86 processors in years to come.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants -- already a daily information gateway for millions of people -- routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. The intensive international study of unprecedented scope and scale was launched at the EBU News Assembly, in Naples. Involving 22 public service media (PSM) organizations in 18 countries working in 14 languages, it identified multiple systemic issues across four leading AI tools. Professional journalists from participating PSM evaluated more than 3,000 responses from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity against key criteria, including accuracy, sourcing, distinguishing opinion from fact, and providing context.

Key findings:
- 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
- 31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems - missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
- 20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.
- Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.
- Comparison between the BBC's results earlier this year and this study show some improvements but still high levels of errors. The team has released a News Integrity in AI Assistants Toolkit to help develop solutions to these problems and boost users' media literacy. They're also urging regulators to enforce laws on information integrity and continue independent monitoring of AI assistants.

Samsung has officially launched the Galaxy XR, the first Android headset powered by Google's new Android XR platform. Priced at $1,800 without controllers, the device features dual 4.3K Micro-OLED displays, a Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip, extensive camera tracking, and deep Gemini AI integration. Ars Technica reports: Galaxy XR is a fully enclosed headset with passthrough video. It looks similar to the Apple Vision Pro, right down to the battery pack at the end of a cable. It packs solid hardware, including 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 processor. That's a slightly newer version of the chip powering Meta's Quest 3 headset, featuring six CPU cores and an Adreno GPU that supports up to dual 4.3K displays. The new headset has a pair of 3,552 x 3,840 Micro-OLED displays with a 109-degree field of view. That's marginally more pixels than the Vision Pro and almost three times as many as the Quest 3. The displays can refresh at up to 90Hz, but the default is 72Hz to save power.

Like other XR (extended reality) devices, the Galaxy XR is covered with cameras. There are two 6.5 MP stereoscopic cameras that stream your surroundings to the high-quality screens, allowing the software to add virtual elements on top. There are six more outward-facing cameras for headset positioning and hand tracking. Four more cameras are on the inside for eye-tracking, and they can scan your iris for secure unlocking and password fill (in select apps). Samsung says the Galaxy XR has enough juice for two hours of general use or two and a half hours of video. That's not terribly long, but you may not want to wear the 545 grams (1.2 pounds) headset for even two hours. That's even a little heavier than the Quest 3, which has an integrated battery. However, both pale in comparison to the 800 g (1.7 pounds) second-generation Vision Pro.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Social media platform Reddit sued AI startup Perplexity in New York federal court on Wednesday, accusing it and three other companies of unlawfully scraping its data to train Perplexity's AI-based search engine. Reddit said in the complaint that the data-scraping companies circumvented its data protection measures in order to steal data that Perplexity "desperately needs" to power its "answer engine" system.

Meta removed a deepfake video from Facebook that falsely depicted Catherine Connolly withdrawing from Ireland's presidential election. The video was posted to an account called RTE News AI and viewed almost 30,000 times over 12 hours before the Irish Independent contacted the platform. The fabricated bulletin featured AI-generated versions of RTE newsreader Sharon Ni Bheolain and political correspondent Paul Cunningham announcing that Connolly had ended her campaign and the election scheduled for Friday would be cancelled.

Connolly responded in a statement that she remained a candidate and called the video a disgraceful attempt to mislead voters. Meta confirmed the account violated its community standards against impersonating people and organizations. Ireland's media regulator Coimisiun na Mean contacted Meta about the incident and reminded the platform of its obligations under the EU Digital Services Act. An Irish Times poll published last Thursday found Connolly leading the race with 38% support.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called the company's Tumblr acquisition his biggest failure -- but one he hasn't given up on yet. The comments were made at the recent WordCamp Canada 2025 conference, where Mullenweg went live for a Town Hall session to connect with the open source-focused WordPress community.

The exec noted that Tumblr was still on a different technical stack than WordPress -- something he had intended to correct by migrating the back end to WordPress infrastructure. However, that massive undertaking was put on hold earlier this year, as the cost to move Tumblr's half-billion blogs would be difficult given that the blogging platform wasn't profitable and continues to be sustained by the profits of other Automattic products.

The company has tried to trim costs with layoffs and the reallocation of Tumblr resources to more profitable parts of the business, but those efforts have yet to pay off. Mullenweg acknowledged these concerns at his Town Hall session, saying, "I need to switch [Tumblr] over to WordPress, but it's a big lift. It's over 500 million blogs, actually, and, as a business, it's costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue." As a result, Automattic had to prioritize other projects to make Tumblr sustainable, he said. "It's probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but we're still working on it," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday afternoon, Amazon confirmed that an outage affecting Amazon Web Services' cloud hosting, which had impacted millions across the Internet, had been resolved. Considered the worst outage since last year's CrowdStrike chaos, Amazon's outage caused "global turmoil," Reuters reported. AWS is the world's largest cloud provider and, therefore, the "backbone of much of the Internet," ZDNet noted. Ultimately, more than 28 AWS services were disrupted, causing perhaps billions in damages, one analyst estimated for CNN.

[...] Amazon's problems originated at a US site that is its "oldest and largest for web services" and often "the default region for many AWS services," Reuters noted. The same site has experienced two outages before in 2020 and 2021, but while the tech giant had confirmed that those prior issues had been "fully mitigated," apparently the fixes did not ensure stability into 2025. ZDNet noted that Amazon's first sign of the outage was "increased error rates and latency across numerous key services" tied to its cloud database technology. Although "engineers later identified a Domain Name System (DNS) resolution problem" as the root of these issues and quickly fixed it, "other AWS services began to fail in its wake, leaving the platform still impaired" as more than two dozen AWS services shut down. At the peak of the outage on Monday, Down Detector tracked more than 8 million reports globally from users panicked by the outage, ZDNet reported. Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, told Reuters that "software developers need to build better fault tolerance."

"When people cut costs and cut corners to try to get an application up, and then forget that they skipped that last step and didn't really protect against an outage, those companies are the ones who really ought to be scrutinized later."

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has issued criminal subpoenas to Roblox, calling it a "breeding ground for predators" and accusing the platform of profiting while failing to protect children. NBC News reports: The subpoenas will allow prosecutors to gather more information about the alleged criminal activity on the platform, including evidence related to suspected predators and victims, according to Uthmeier. The concerns prompted Roblox to invest heavily in protecting younger users on its platform by tightening messaging rules for children under 13, intensive content moderation and AI-powered monitoring.

In an emailed statement to Reuters, Roblox said it prohibits sharing images and videos in chat, uses filters designed to block the exchange of personal information, and is working to implement age estimation for all users accessing chat features. "While no system is perfect, our trained teams and automated tools continuously monitor communications to detect and remove harmful content," a Roblox spokesperson said.

AWS experienced a three-hour outage early Monday morning that disrupted thousands of websites and applications across the globe. The cloud computing provider reported DNS problems with DynamoDB in its US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia starting at 12:11 a.m. Pacific time. Over 4 million users reported issues, according to Downdetector. Snapchat saw reports spike from more than 22,000 to around 4,000 as systems recovered. Roblox dropped from over 12,600 complaints to fewer than 500. Reddit and the financial platform Chime remained affected longer. Perplexity, Coinbase and Robinhood attributed their platform disruptions directly to AWS.

Gaming platforms including Fortnite, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans went offline. Signal confirmed the messaging app was down. In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and the HMRC website faced problems. United Airlines reported disrupted access to its app and website overnight. Some internal systems were temporarily affected. Delta experienced a small number of minor flight delays. By 3:35 a.m. Pacific time, AWS said the issue had been fully mitigated. Most service operations were succeeding normally though some requests faced throttling during final resolution. AWS holds roughly one-third of the cloud infrastructure market ahead of Microsoft and Google.

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: GIMP has officially launched its own Snap package for Linux, finally taking over from the community-maintained Snapcrafters project. The move means all future GIMP releases will now be built directly from the team's CI pipeline, ensuring faster, more consistent updates across distributions. The developers also introduced a new "gimp-plugins" interface to support external plugins while maintaining Snap's security confinement, with GMIC and OpenVINO already supported.

This marks another major step in GIMP's cross-platform packaging efforts, joining Flatpak and MSIX distribution options. The first officially maintained version, Version 3.0.6GIMP 3.0.6, is available now on the "latest/stable" Snap channel, with preview builds rolling out for testers.

"Microsoft does everything in its power to keep Windows users under its control," warns the Free Software Foundation in a new blog post this week.

They argue that the lack of freedom that comes with proprietary code "forces users to surrender to decisions made by Microsoft to maximize its profits and further lock users into its product ecosystem" — describing both the problem and one possible solution: [IT management company Lansweeper] found that of the 30 million enterprise systems they manage, over 40% are incompatible with Windows 11. This is due to the hardware requirements like Treacherous Platform Module version 2.0 — a proprietary chip that uses cryptography that users can't influence or audit to restrict their control over the system.

The end of Windows 10 support is the perfect opportunity to break free from this cycle and switch to GNU/Linux operating system (GNU/Linux OS), a system that respects your freedom...

The endless, freedom-restricting cycle of planned obsolescence is not inevitable. Instead of paying Microsoft for continued updates or buying new hardware, Windows users left behind by Microsoft should install GNU/Linux. Free Software Foundation certified GNU/Linux distributions respect the user's freedom to run their computer as they wish, to study and modify its source code, and to redistribute copies. They don't require update contracts, often run faster on older hardware, and, most importantly, put you in control.
"If you're already a GNU/Linux user, you have an important role to play. Help your friends and family make the switch by sharing your knowledge, help them install a free-as-in-freedom OS. Show them what it means to have real control over their computing!"

"Earlier available only to the paying subscribers, the Comet browser now offers its core features to all users at no cost," writes the Times of India. "This includes AI-powered search, contextual recommendations, and integrated tools designed to streamline research and content discovery." They say the move reflects the Chromium-based browser's goal to "compete with incumbents like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge" — but also reflects Perplexity's "broader mission to democratize AI tools."
More details from The Verge: The internet is better on Comet," the company says, promising to remain free forever as it styles the browser as a serious challenger to Google's Chrome...

It's supposed to make surfing the web simpler and help you with tasks like shopping, booking trips, and general life admin. To borrow the company's words again: you "get more done." The AI-powered browser launched in July, though was only available for users who subscribed to the $200 per month Perplexity Max plan... No subscription at all will be needed to use Comet going forward, the company says.
Perplexity has even struck deals with major sites including the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times to offer free access to their sites for one month through the Comet browser. And last week Perplexity also launched an agressive paid referral program, where active Perplexity Pro/Max subscribers get a payout of up to $15 for each friend who downloads and uses Comet through their affiliate link. (The payout size is based on the friend's country, with $15 being the payout amount for a U.S. user, with $10 payouts for users in 19 other countries include Canada, Australia, the U.K., several EU countries, Japan, and South Korea.

In addition, Srinivas has been sharing positive tweets about Comet. (Like "This is unbelievable. Comet automatically hunts down Sora 2 invite codes across the web and signs you up!") But Perplexity is making even bigger claims for its browser: Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas said that the Comet AI browser can improve productivity so that companies won't need to hire more people. "Instead of hiring one more person on your team, you could just use Comet to supplement all the work that you're doing," Srinivas told CNBC's "Squawk Box"... The CEO said the artificial intelligence-powered web browser is a "true personal assistant" that allows users to complete more tasks in the same amount of time and said that the productivity gained could be worth $10,000 per year for a single person...

Other tech companies have also been rolling out their own AI browser assistants. In January, OpenAI introduced its web agent, Operator, and Google released Gemini AI to its Chrome browser in September.
Meanwhile, The Verge adds, The Browser Company (makers of the Arc browser) "is going all in on Dia, and Opera just launched its own AI browser, Neon."

Of course, popularity brings problems, writes the Times of India: iPhone users are being warned by Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas against downloading a fake 'Comet' app on the App Store. He clarified that the official iOS version is not yet released and the current listing is unauthorized spam..
And earlier this month the browser security platform LayerX described a "CometJacking" attack where malicious prompts could be hidden in URLs (as a parameter). Comet is instructed "to look for data in memory and connected services (e.g., Gmail, Calendar), encode the results (e.g., base64), and POST them to an attacker-controlled endpoint... all while appearing to the user as a harmless 'ask the assistant' flow." (And with some trivial encoding it also seems to evade exfiltration checks.)

The Hacker News reported that Perplexity has classified the findings as "no security impact."