"Copilot Actions on Windows 11" is currently available in Insider builds (version 26220.7262) as part of Copilot Labs, according to a recent report, "and is off by default, requiring admin access to set it up."

But maybe it's off for a good reason...besides the fact that it can access any apps installed on your system: In a support document, Microsoft admits that features like Copilot Actions introduce "\novel security risks ." They warn about cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content in documents or UI elements can override the AI's instructions. The result? " Unintended actions like data exfiltration or malware installation ."

Yeah, you read that right. Microsoft is shipping a feature that could be tricked into installing malware on your system. Microsoft's own warning hits hard: "We recommend that you only enable this feature if you understand the security implications." When you try to enable these experimental features, Windows shows you a warning dialog that you have to acknowledge. ["This feature is still being tested and may impact the performance or security of your device."]

Even with these warnings, the level of access Copilot Actions demands is concerning. When you enable the feature, it gets read and write access to your Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Pictures, Videos, and Music folders... Microsoft says they are implementing safeguards. All actions are logged, users must approve data access requests, the feature operates in isolated workspaces, and the system uses audit logs to track activity.

But you are still giving an AI system that can "hallucinate and produce unexpected outputs" (Microsoft's words, not mine) full access to your personal files.
To address this, Ars Technica notes, Microsoft added this helpful warning to its support document this week. "As these capabilities are introduced, AI models still face functional limitations in terms of how they behave and occasionally may hallucinate and produce unexpected outputs."

But Microsoft didn't describe "what actions they should take to prevent their devices from being compromised. I asked Microsoft to provide these details, and the company declined..."

Google's AI infrastructure chief told employees the company must double its AI serving capacity every six months in order to meet demand. In a presentation earlier this month, Amin Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, gave a presentation titled "AI Infrastructure." It included a slide on "AI compute demand" that said: "Now we must double every 6 months.... the next 1000x in 4-5 years." CNBC reports: The presentation was delivered a week after Alphabet reported better-than-expected third-quarter results and raised its capital expenditures forecast for the second time this year, to a range of $91 billion to $93 billion, followed by a "significant increase" in 2026. Hyperscaler peers Microsoft, Amazon and Meta also boosted their capex guidance, and the four companies now expect to collectively spend more than $380 billion this year.

Google's "job is of course to build this infrastructure but it's not to outspend the competition, necessarily," Vahdat said. "We're going to spend a lot," he said, adding that the real goal is to provide infrastructure that is far "more reliable, more performant and more scalable than what's available anywhere else." In addition to infrastructure build-outs, Vahdat said Google bolsters capacity with more efficient models and through its custom silicon. Last week, Google announced the public launch of its seventh generation Tensor Processing Unit called Ironwood, which the company says is nearly 30 times more power efficient than its first Cloud TPU from 2018.

Vahdat said the company has a big advantage with DeepMind, which has research on what AI models can look like in future years. Google needs to "be able to deliver 1,000 times more capability, compute, storage networking for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level," Vahdat said. "It won't be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we're going to get there."

Microsoft has acknowledged in a support article that major Windows 11 core features including the Start Menu, Taskbar, File Explorer and System Settings break after applying monthly cumulative updates released on or after July 2025.

The problems stem from XAML component issues that affect updates beginning with July's Patch Tuesday release (KB5062553). The failures occur during first-time user logins after cumulative updates are applied and on non-persistent OS installations like virtual desktop infrastructure setups. Microsoft lists Explorer.exe crashes, shellhost.exe crashes, StartMenuExperienceHost failures and System Settings that silently refuse to launch among the symptoms. The company provided PowerShell commands and batch scripts as temporary workarounds that re-register the affected packages. Both Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2 share the same codebase and are affected. Microsoft said it is working on a fix but did not provide a timeline.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's meme-friendly Nano Banana image-generation model is getting an upgrade. The new Nano Banana Pro is rolling out with improved reasoning and instruction following, giving users the ability to create more accurate images with legible text and make precise edits to existing images. It's available to everyone in the Gemini app, but free users will find themselves up against the usage limits pretty quickly. Nano Banana Pro is part of the newly launched Gemini 3 Pro -- it's actually called Gemini 3 Pro Image in the same way the original is Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, but Google is sticking with the meme-y name. You can access it by selecting Gemini 3 Pro and then turning on the "Create images" option.

Google says the new model can follow complex prompts to create more accurate images. The model is apparently so capable that it can generate an entire usable infographic in a single shot with no weird AI squiggles in place of words. Nano Banana Pro is also better at maintaining consistency in images. You can blend up to 14 images with this tool, and it can maintain the appearance of up to five people in outputs. Google also promises better editing. You can refine your AI images or provide Nano Banana Pro with a photo and make localized edits without as many AI glitches. It can even change core elements of the image like camera angles, color grading, and lighting without altering other elements. Google is pushing the professional use angle with its new model, which has much-improved resolution options. Your creations in Nano Banana Pro can be rendered at up to 4K.

A Tokyo court ruled that Cloudflare is liable for aiding manga piracy after failing to act on infringement notices and continuing to cache and serve content for major piracy sites, awarding about $3.2 million in damages. TorrentFreak says the decision sets a significant precedent in Japan, suggesting CDN providers can face direct liability when they don't verify customers or respond adequately to large-scale copyright abuse. From the report: After a wait of more than three and a half years, the Tokyo District Court rendered its decision this morning. In a statement provided to TorrentFreak by the publishers, they declare "Victory Against Cloudflare" after the Court determined that Cloudflare is indeed liable for the pirate sites' activities. In a statement provided to TorrentFreak, the publishers explain that they alerted Cloudflare to the massive scale of the infringement, involving over 4,000 works and 300 million monthly visits, but their requests to stop distribution were ignored.

"We requested that the company take measures such as stopping the distribution of pirated content from servers under its management. However, Cloudflare continued to provide services to the manga piracy sites even after receiving notices from the plaintiffs," the group says. The publishers add that Cloudflare continued to provide services even after receiving information disclosure orders from U.S. courts, leaving them with "no choice but to file this lawsuit."

"The judgment recognized that Cloudflare's failure to take timely and appropriate action despite receiving infringement notices from the plaintiffs, and its negligent continuation of pirated content distribution, constituted aiding and abetting copyright infringement, and that Cloudflare bears liability for damages to the plaintiffs," they write. "The judgment, in that regard, attached importance to the fact that Cloudflare, without conducting any identity verification procedures, had enabled a massive manga piracy site to operate "under circumstances where strong anonymity was secured,' as a basis for recognizing the company's liability."

The publishers believe that the judgment clarifies the conditions under which a company such as Cloudflare incurs liability for copyright infringement. Failure to carry out identity verification appears at the top of the publishers' list, followed by a lack of timely and appropriate action in response to infringement notices sent by rightsholders. "We believe this is an important decision given the current situation where piracy site operators often hide their identities and repeatedly conduct large-scale distribution using CDN services from overseas. We hope that this judgment will be a step toward ensuring proper use of CDN services. We will continue our efforts to protect the rights of works, creators, and related parties, while aiming for further expansion of legitimate content," the publishers conclude. Cloudflare plans to appeal the verdict.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The Trump administration will provide Constellation Energy with a $1 billion loan to restart the Crane Clean Energy Center nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, Department of Energy officials said Tuesday. Previously known as Three Mile Island Unit 1, the plant is expected to start generating power again in 2027. Constellation unveiled plans to rename and restart the reactor in Sept. 2024 through a power purchase agreement with Microsoft to support the tech company's data center demand in the region.

Three Mile Island Unit 1 ceased operations in 2019, one of a dozen reactors that closed in recent years as nuclear struggled to compete against cheap natural gas. It sits on the same site as Three Mile Island Unit 2, the reactor that partially melted down in 1979 in the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. The loan would cover the majority to the project's estimated cost of $1.6 billion. The first advance to Constellation is expected in the first quarter of 2026, said Greg Beard, senior advisor to the Energy Department's Loan Programs Office, in a call with reporters. The loan comes with a guarantee from Constellation that it will protect taxpayer money, Beard said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America, actively monitoring individual insects on journeys from as far away as Ontario all the way to their overwintering colonies in central Mexico. This long-sought achievement could provide crucial insights into the poorly understood life cycles of hundreds of species of butterflies, bees and other flying insects at a time when many are in steep decline.

The breakthrough is the result of a tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200. Researchers have tagged more than 400 monarchs this year and are now following their journeys on a cellphone app created by the New Jersey-based company that makes the tags, Cellular Tracking Technologies. Most monarchs weigh 500 to 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrator making the transcontinental journey is, by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice.

Researchers are tracking more than 400 tagged monarch butterflies as they fly toward winter colonies in central Mexico. The maps [in the article] follow six butterflies. [...] Tracking the world's most famous insect migration may also have a big social impact, with monarch lovers able to follow the progress of individual butterflies on the free app, called Project Monarch Science. Many of the butterflies are flying over cities and suburbs where pollinator gardens are increasingly popular. Some tracks could even lead to the discovery of new winter hideaways. "There's nothing that's not amazing about this," said Cheryl Schultz, a butterfly scientist at Washington State University and the senior author of a recent study documenting a 22 percent drop in butterfly abundance in North America over a recent 20-year period. "Now we will have answers that could help us turn the tide for these bugs."

"Windows is evolving into an agentic OS," Microsoft's president of Windows Pavan Davuluri posted on X.com, "connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere."

But former Uber software engineer and engineering manager Gergely Orosz was unimpressed. "Can't see any reason for software engineers to choose Windows with this weird direction they are doubling down on. So odd because Microsoft has building dev tools in their DNA... their OS doesn't look like anything a builder who wants OS control could choose. Mac or Linux it is for devs."

Davuluri "has since disabled replies on his original post..." notes the blog Windows Central, "which some people viewed as an attempt to shut out negative feedback." But he also replied to that comment... Davuluri says "we care deeply about developers. We know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences. When we meet as a team, we discuss these pain points and others in detail, because we want developers to choose Windows..." The good news is Davuluri has confirmed that Microsoft is listening, and is aware of the backlash it's receiving over the company's obsession with AI in Windows 11. That doesn't mean the company is going to stop with adding AI to Windows, but it does mean we can also expect Microsoft to focus on the other things that matter too, such as stability and power user enhancements.
Elsewhere on X.com, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared his own thoughts on "the net benefit of the AI platform wave ." The Times of India reports: Nadella said tech companies should focus on building AI systems that create more value for the people and businesses using them, not just for the companies that make the technology. He cited Bill Gates to emphasize the same: "A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it."Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to Nadella's post with a facepalm emoji.

Nadella said this idea matters even more during the current AI boom, where many firms risk giving away too much of their own value to big tech platforms. "The real question is how to empower every company out there to build their own AI-native capabilities," he wrote. Nadella says Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI is an example of zero-sum mindset industry... [He also cited Microsoft's "work to bring AMD into the fleet."]
More from Satya Nadella's post: Thanks to AI, the [coding] category itself has expanded and may ultimately become one of the largest software categories. I don't ever recall any analyst ever asking me about how much revenue Visual Studio makes! But now everyone is excited about AI coding tools. This is another aspect of positive sum, when the category itself is redefined and the pie becomes 10x what it was! With GitHub Copilot we compete for our share and with GitHub and Agent HQ we also provide a platform for others.

Of course, the real test of this era won't be when another tech company breaks a valuation record. It will be when the overall economy and society themselves reach new heights. When a pharma company uses AI in silico to bring a new therapy to market in one year instead of twelve. When a manufacturer uses AI to redesign a supply chain overnight. When a teacher personalizes lessons for every student. When a farmer predicts and prevents crop failure.That's when we'll know the system is working.

Let us move beyond zero-sum thinking and the winner-take-all hype and focus instead on building broad capabilities that harness the power of this technology to achieve local success in each firm, which then leads to broad economic growth and societal benefits. And every firm needs to make sure they have control of their own destiny and sovereignty vs just a press release with a Tech/AI company or worse leak all their value through what may seem like a partnership, except it's extractive in terms of value exchange in the long run.

A new "cold war" between America and China is "pushing leaders to sideline concerns about the dangers of powerful AI models," reports the Wall Street Journal, "including the spread of disinformation and other harmful content, and the development of superintelligent AI systems misaligned with human values..."

"Both countries are driven as much by fear as by hope of progress. " In Washington and Silicon Valley, warnings abound that China's "authoritarian AI," left unchecked, will erode American tech supremacy. Beijing is gripped by the conviction that a failure to keep pace in AI will make it easier for the U.S. to cut short China's resurgence as a global power. Both countries believe market share for their companies across the world is up for grabs — and with it, the potential to influence large swaths of the global population.

The U.S. still has a clear lead, producing the most powerful AI models. China can't match it in advanced chips and has no answer for the financial firepower of private American investors, who funded AI startups to the tune of $104 billion in the first half of 2025, and are gearing up for more. But it has a massive population of capable engineers, lower costs and a state-led development model that often moves faster than the U.S., all of which Beijing is working to harness to tip the contest in its direction. A new "whole of society" campaign looks to accelerate the construction of computing clusters in areas like Inner Mongolia, where vast solar and wind farms provide plentiful cheap energy, and connect hundreds of data centers to create a shared compute pool — some describe it as a "national cloud" — by 2028. China is also funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into its power grid to support AI training and adoption...

"Our lead is probably in the 'months but not years' realm," said Chris McGuire, who helped design U.S. export controls on AI chips while serving on the National Security Council under the Biden administration. Chinese AI models currently rank at or near the top in every task from coding to video generation, with the exception of search, according to Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced ranking platform. China's manufacturing sector, meanwhile, is rocketing past the U.S. in bringing AI into the physical world through robotaxis, autonomous drones and humanoid robots. Given China's progress, McGuire said, the U.S. is "very lucky" to have its advantage in chips...

If AI surpasses human intelligence and acquires the ability to improve itself, it could confer unshakable scientific, economic and military superiority on the country that controls it. Short of that, AI's ability to automate tedious tasks and process vast amounts of data quickly promises to supercharge everything from cancer diagnoses to missile defense. With so much at stake, hacking and cyber espionage are likely to get worse, as AI gives hackers more powerful tools, while increasing incentives for state-backed groups to try to steal AI-related intellectual property. As distrust grows, Washington and Beijing will also find it hard, if not impossible, to cooperate in areas like preventing extremist groups from using AI in destructive ways, such as building bioweapons. "The costs of the AI Cold War are already high and will go much higher," said Paul Triolo, a former U.S. government analyst and current technology policy lead at business consulting firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group. "A U.S.-China AI arms race becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with neither side able to trust that the other would observe any restrictions on advanced AI capability development...."
The article includes an interesting observation from Helen Toner, director of strategy for Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member. Toner points out "We don't actually know" if boosting computing power with better chips will continue producing more-powerful AI models.

So "If performance plateaus," the Journal writes, "despite all the spending by OpenAI and others — a growing concern in Silicon Valley — China has a chance to compete."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Executives are turning to a novel structure to fund crypto accumulation vehicles as investor appetite thins. They're called in-kind contributions, and they now account for a growing share of digital-asset treasury, or DAT, deals. Instead of raising cash to buy tokens in the open market, DAT sponsors contribute large slugs of their own crypto, often unlisted and hard to value.

Digital-asset treasuries are a new breed of public company built to hold concentrated crypto positions. The structure surged in 2025 as small-cap firms, especially in biotech and mining, reinvented themselves as digital-asset proxies. Sponsors provide tokens or raise money to buy them, and the stock then trades as a kind of listed bet on crypto. For insiders, it's a shortcut to liquidity. For investors, a wager on upside. But not all DATs carry the same level of risk. Earlier deals raised money to buy tokens through regular markets, which offered at least some independent price check. In-kind contributions skip that step -- letting insiders decide what their tokens are worth, sometimes before the token even trades publicly. That shift means pricing and trading risks land more squarely on shareholders, many of them retail investors.

Investor faith is already wobbling. Many DATs that once traded above the value of their holdings now trade below it. As insiders supply the tokens and set their price, it's becoming harder for investors to tell what these deals are really worth, or when to get out. The in-kind structure was on full display in a recent $545 million private placement by Tharimmune Inc., a biotech firm-turned-crypto proxy, to set up a buyer of Canton Coins. About 80% of the raise came in the form of unlisted Canton tokens, priced at 20 cents each, according to an investor presentation seen by Bloomberg News. The token began trading on exchanges Nov. 10 and is now around 11 cents, CoinGecko data show.

More deals are following the same template. In these placements, insiders contribute tokens -- sometimes illiquid or unlisted -- to form a treasury, lock in valuations and seed the perception of market demand. But when tokens list below deal price, public shareholders absorb the difference. [...] Then there's Flora Growth Corp., a Nasdaq-listed company that announced a $401 million deal to start acquiring Zero Gravity tokens in September. On closer inspection, the firm had raised just $35 million in cash to pair with a $366 million in-kind contribution of then-unlisted 0G tokens. Those tokens were priced at around $3 a piece; they subsequently listed, and are now trading at about $1.20.

Apple is cutting its App Store fee from 30% to 15% for developers who join a new Mini Apps Partner Program, which requires using more of Apple's built-in technology to power lightweight "mini apps." "This includes using Apple software to register a user's purchase history, verify user ages and to process in-app purchases," reports CNBC. From the report: A "mini app" is a lightweight piece of software inside a third-party app store, like that of Discord's. These apps uses are built using web technology like HTML or Javascript. [...] Apple has argued that both developers and users are better off when using its technology and rules, instead of eschewing them to try to avoid fees. "This program is designed to help developers who host mini apps grow their business and further the availability of mini apps on the App Store -- all while providing a great customer experience," the company said in its announcement. [...] Participants in the new program will still have to provide Apple with information for each specific mini-app experience they offer.

For the first time, astronomers captured the shockwave of a supernova bursting through the surface of a dying red supergiant star, revealing a surprisingly symmetrical, grape-shaped explosion. Space.com reports: Seeing this moment in detail has previously been elusive because it's rare for a supernova to be spotted early enough and for telescopes to be trained on it -- and when they have been, the exploding star has been too far away. So, when supernova 2024ggi went boom on April 10, 2024 in the relatively nearby spiral galaxy NGC 3621, which is 22 million light-years away in the constellation of Hydra, the Water Snake, astronomer Yi Yang of Tsinghua University in Beijing knew he had to act.

Although the supernova itself couldn't be resolved as anything put a point of light, the polarization of that light held the clues as to the geometry of the breakout. "The geometry of a supernova explosion provides fundamental information on stellar evolution and the physical processes leading to these cosmic fireworks," said Yang. "Spectropolarimetry delivers information about the geometry of the explosion that other types of observation cannot provide because the angular scales are too tiny," said another team-member, Lifan Wang of Texas A&M University.

The measurement showed that the shape of the breakout explosion was flattened, like an olive or grape. Crucially, though, the explosion propagated symmetrically, and continued to do so even when it collided with a ring of circumstellar material. "These findings suggest a common physical mechanism that drives the explosion of many massive stars, which manifests a well-defined axial symmetry and acts on large scales," said Yang. The findings will allow astronomers to rule out some models and strengthen others that describe what drives the shockwave in a supernova explosion. The findings have been described in a paper on the ESO website.

Valve is ready to rejoin the VR hardware race with the Steam Frame, a lightweight standalone SteamOS headset that can run games locally or stream wirelessly from a PC using new "foveated streaming" tech. It's set to launch in early 2026. Ars Technica reports: Powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor with 16 GB of RAM, the Steam Frame sports a 2160 x 2160 resolution display per eye at an "up to 110 degrees" field-of-view and up to 144 Hz. That's all roughly in line with 2023's Meta Quest 3, which runs on the slightly less performant Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor. Valve's new headset will be available in models sporting 256GB and 1TB or internal storage, both with the option for expansion via a microSD card slot. Pricing details have not yet been revealed publicly.

The Steam Frame's inside-out tracking cameras mean you won't have to set up the awkward external base stations that were necessary for previous SteamVR headsets (including the Index). But that also means old SteamVR controllers won't work with the new hardware. Instead, included Steam Frame controllers will track your hand movements, provide haptic feedback, and offer "input parity with a traditional game pad" through the usual buttons and control sticks.

For those who want to bring desktop GPU power to their VR experience, the Steam Frame will be able to connect wirelessly to a PC using an included 6 GHz Wi-Fi 6E adapter. That streaming will be enhanced by what Valve is calling "foveated rendering" technology, which sends the highest-resolution video stream to where your eyes are directly focused (as tracked by two internal cameras). That will help Steam Frame streaming establish a "fast, direct, low-latency link" to the machine, Valve said, though the company has yet to respond to questions about just how much additional wireless latency users can expect. Further reading: Valve Enters the Console Wars

The furious push by AI hyperscalers to build out data centers will need about $1.5 trillion of investment-grade bonds over the next five years and extensive funding from every other corner of the market, according to an analysis by JPMorgan. From a report: "The question is not 'which market will finance the AI-boom?' Rather, the question is 'how will financings be structured to access every capital market?'" according to strategists led by Tarek Hamid.

Leveraged finance is primed to provide around $150 billion over the next half decade, they said. Even with funding from the investment-grade and high-yield bond markets, as well as up to $40 billion per year in data-center securitizations, it will still be insufficient to meet demand, the strategists added. Private credit and governments could help cover a remaining $1.4 trillion funding gap, the report estimates. The bank calculates an at least $5 trillion tab that could climb as high as $7 trillion, singlehandedly driving a reacceleration in growth in the bond and syndicated loan markets, the strategists wrote in a report Monday. The analysts project $300 billion in high-grade bonds going toward AI data centers next year. That could account for nearly one fifth of total issuance in that market, which a report from Barclays estimates will grow to $1.6 trillion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: It appears that Neom -- Saudi Arabia's hugely expensive, architecturally bizarre urban development project -- is floundering and close to collapse. A new report from the Financial Times cites high-level sources within the project to paint a picture of dysfunction and failure at the heart of the quixotic effort. Neom was envisioned as a vast series of fantastical urban developments spread across the coast of the Red Sea. At the center of the project is The Line -- a proposed 105-mile-long city which developers had initially projected could house as many as 9 million people by the year 2030.

The Line is defined by bizarre architectural flourishes that, as the story notes, have seemed impossible even to the execs tasked with making them a reality. One such addition is an upside-down building, dubbed "the chandelier," that is supposed to hang over a "gateway" marina to the city: "As architects worked through the plans, the chandelier began to seem implausible. One recalled warning Tarek Qaddumi, The Line's executive director, of the difficulty of suspending a 30-story building upside down from a bridge hundreds of metres in the air. 'You do realize the earth is spinning? And that tall towers sway?' he said. The chandelier, the architect explained, could 'start to move like a pendulum,' then 'pick up speed,' and eventually 'break off,' crashing into the marina below."

Yes, that doesn't sound great. Now, according to those sources the FT talked to, the project is looking more and more like a hugely expensive pipe dream that will never come to pass: "Today, with at least $50 billion spent, the desert is pock-marked with piling, and deep trenches stretch across the landscape. But Prince Mohammed, who chairs Neom, has dramatically scaled back the first phase of the plans. Neom told the FT that The Line remained 'a strategic priority' that would ultimately 'provide a new blueprint for humanity by changing the way people live.' But they described it as a 'multi-generational development of unprecedented scale and complexity.'"

The outlet interviewed workers on the project who seem to feel that it's only a matter of time before the project is declared DOA: "While Neom employees say that much of The Line might still be technically buildable, they are not convinced anyone is ready to pay for it. Construction work across Neom has slowed, with the desert ski resort Trojena, the intended venue for the 2029 Asian Winter Games, one of the few sites still moving ahead at pace ... one former employee has said that everyone knows the project won't work; it is now just a matter of letting MBS down gently."

Chief among the project's problems is the fact that, as Neom's bizarre developments have failed to materialize, it has become increasingly difficult to encourage investors to put up money for the absurdly expensive project. FT notes: "Senior executives were constantly asking for more money, but The Line was competing with other Neom projects. Some wealthy Saudi families put modest sums into the project, but the large investments Riyadh hoped to lure from foreign backers never materialized." The lack of adequate funding coming in has led a senior construction manager to tell FT that he feels the Line will never be built.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft, eager to boost downloads of its Copilot chatbot, has recruited some of the most popular influencers in America to push a message to young consumers that might be summed up as: Our AI assistant is as cool as ChatGPT. Microsoft could use the help. The company recently said its family of Copilot assistants attracts 150 million active users each month. But OpenAI's ChatGPT claims 800 million weekly active users, and Google's Gemini boasts 650 million a month. Microsoft has an edge with corporate customers, thanks to a long history of selling them software and cloud services. But it has struggled to crack the consumer market -- especially people under 30.

"We're a challenger brand in this area, and we're kind of up and coming," Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi said in an interview. Mehdi hopes to persuade key influencers to make Copilot their chatbot of choice and then use their popularity to market the assistant to their millions of followers. He says Microsoft is already getting more bang for the buck with influencers than with traditional media, but didn't provide any metrics.

[...] Using non-techies as spokespeople is meant to reinforce Microsoft's campaign to sell its chatbot as a life coach for everyone. Or as Consumer AI chief Mustafa Suleyman wrote in a recent essay, an AI companion that "helps you think, plan and dream."

Should we leave space exploration to robots — or prioritize human spaceflight, making us a multiplanetary species?

Harvard professor Robin Wordsworth, who's researched the evolution and habitability of terrestrial-type planets, shares his thoughts: In space, as on Earth, industrial structures degrade with time, and a truly sustainable life support system must have the capability to rebuild and recycle them. We've only partially solved this problem on Earth, which is why industrial civilization is currently causing serious environmental damage. There are no inherent physical limitations to life in the solar system beyond Earth — both elemental building blocks and energy from the sun are abundant — but technological society, which developed as an outgrowth of the biosphere, cannot yet exist independently of it. The challenge of building and maintaining robust life-support systems for humans beyond Earth is a key reason why a machine-dominated approach to space exploration is so appealing...

However, it's notable that machines in space have not yet accomplished a basic task that biology performs continuously on Earth: acquiring raw materials and utilizing them for self-repair and growth. To many, this critical distinction is what separates living from non-living systems... The most advanced designs for self-assembling robots today begin with small subcomponents that must be manufactured separately beforehand. Overall, industrial technology remains Earth-centric in many important ways. Supply chains for electronic components are long and complex, and many raw materials are hard to source off-world... If we view the future expansion of life into space in a similar way as the emergence of complex life on land in the Paleozoic era, we can predict that new forms will emerge, shaped by their changed environment, while many historical characteristics will be preserved. For machine technology in the near term, evolution in a more life-like direction seems likely, with greater focus on regenerative parts and recycling, as well as increasingly sophisticated self-assembly capabilities. The inherent cost of transporting material out of Earth's gravity well will provide a particularly strong incentive for this to happen.

If building space habitats is hard and machine technology is gradually developing more life-like capabilities, does this mean we humans might as well remain Earth-bound forever? This feels hard to accept because exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit... To me, the eventual extension of the entire biosphere beyond Earth, rather than either just robots or humans surrounded by mechanical life-support systems, seems like the most interesting and inspiring future possibility. Initially, this could take the form of enclosed habitats capable of supporting closed-loop ecosystems, on the moon, Mars or water-rich asteroids, in the mold of Biosphere 2. Habitats would be manufactured industrially or grown organically from locally available materials. Over time, technological advances and adaptation, whether natural or guided, would allow the spread of life to an increasingly wide range of locations in the solar system.
The article ponders the benefits (and the history) of both approaches — with some fasincating insights along the way.

"If genuine alien life is out there somewhere, we'll have a much better chance of comprehending it once we have direct experience of sustaining life beyond our home planet."

The Rust Foundation has a responsibility to "shed light on the impact of supporting the often unseen work" that keeps the Rust Project running. So this week they announced a new initiative "to provide consistent, transparent, and long term support for the developers who make the Rust programming language possible."

It's the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund, "an initiative we'll shape in close collaboration with the Rust Project Leadership Council and Project Directors to ensure funding decisions are made openly and with accountability." In the months ahead, we'll define the fund's structure, secure contributions, and work with the Rust Project and community to bring it to life. This work will build on lessons from earlier iterations of our grants and fellowships to create a lasting framework for supporting Rust's maintainers... Over the past several months, through ongoing board discussions and input from the Leadership Council, this initiative has taken shape as a way to help maintainers continue their vital development and review work, and plan for the future...

This initiative reflects our commitment to Rust being shaped by its people, guided by open collaboration, and backed by a global network of contributors and partners. The Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund will operate within the governance framework shared between the Rust Project and the Rust Foundation, ensuring alignment and oversight at every level... The Rust Foundation's approach to this initiative will be guided by our structure: as a 501( C)(6) nonprofit, we operate under a mandate for transparency and accountability to the Rust Project, language community, and our members. That means we must develop this fund in coordination with the Rust Project's priorities, ensuring shared governance and long-term viability...

Our goal is simple: to help the people building Rust continue their essential work with the support they deserve. That means creating the conditions for long term maintainer roles and ensuring continuity for those whose efforts keep the language stable and evolving. Through the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund, we aim to address these needs directly.
"The more companies using Rust can contribute to the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund, the more we can keep the language and tooling evolving for the benefit of everyone," says Rust Foundation project director Carol Nichols.

"For months, extremely personal and sensitive ChatGPT conversations have been leaking into an unexpected destination," reports Ars Technica: the search-traffic tool for webmasters , Google Search Console.

Though it normally shows the short phrases or keywords typed into Google which led someone to their site, "starting this September, odd queries, sometimes more than 300 characters long, could also be found" in Google Search Console. And the chats "appeared to be from unwitting people prompting a chatbot to help solve relationship or business problems, who likely expected those conversations would remain private." Jason Packer, owner of analytics consulting firm Quantable, flagged the issue in a detailed blog post last month, telling Ars Technica he'd seen 200 odd queries — including "some pretty crazy ones." (Web optimization consultant Slobodan ManiÄ helped Packer investigate...) Packer points out "nobody clicked share" or were given an option to prevent their chats from being exposed. Packer suspected that these queries were connected to reporting from The Information in August that cited sources claiming OpenAI was scraping Google search results to power ChatGPT responses. Sources claimed that OpenAI was leaning on Google to answer prompts to ChatGPT seeking information about current events, like news or sports... "Did OpenAI go so fast that they didn't consider the privacy implications of this, or did they just not care?" Packer posited in his blog... Clearly some of those searches relied on Google, Packer's blog said, mistakenly sending to GSC "whatever" the user says in the prompt box... This means "that OpenAI is sharing any prompt that requires a Google Search with both Google and whoever is doing their scraping," Packer alleged. "And then also with whoever's site shows up in the search results! Yikes."

To Packer, it appeared that "ALL ChatGPT prompts" that used Google Search risked being leaked during the past two months. OpenAI claimed only a small number of queries were leaked but declined to provide a more precise estimate. So, it remains unclear how many of the 700 million people who use ChatGPT each week had prompts routed to Google Search Console.
"Perhaps most troubling to some users — whose identities are not linked in chats unless their prompts perhaps share identifying information — there does not seem to be any way to remove the leaked chats from Google Search Console.."

The new series from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, Pluribus, was emphatically made by humans, not AI, reports TechCrunch: If you watched all the way to the end of the new Apple TV show "Pluribus," you may have noticed an unusual disclaimer in the credits: "This show was made by humans." That terse message — placed right below a note that "animal wranglers were on set to ensure animal safety" — could potentially provide a model for other filmmakers seeking to highlight that their work was made without the use of generative AI.
In fact, yesterday the former X-Files writer told Variety "I hate AI. AI is the world's most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine...." He goes on, about how AI-generated content is "like a cow chewing its cud — an endlessly regurgitated loop of nonsense," and how the U.S. will fail to regulate the technology because of an arms race with China. He works himself up until he's laughing again, proclaiming: "Thank you, Silicon Valley! Yet again, you've fucked up the world."
He also says "there's a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit," according to the article. "It's basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world's first trillionaires. I think they're selling a bag of vapor."

And earlier this week he told Polygon that he hasn't used ChatGPT "because, as of yet, no one has held a shotgun to my head and made me do it." (Adding "I will never use it.")

Time magazine called Thursday's two-episode premiere "bonkers." Though ironically, that premiere hit its own dystopian glitch. "After months of buildup and an omnipresent advertising campaign, Apple's much-anticipated new show Pluribus made its debut..." reports Macworld. "And the service promptly suffered a major outage across the U.S. and Canada." As reported by Bloomberg and others, users started to report that the service had crashed at around 10:30 p.m. ET, shortly after Apple made the first two episodes of the show available to stream. There were almost 13,000 reports on Downdetector before Apple acknowledged the problem on its System Status page. Reports say the outage was brief, lasting less than an hour...

[T]here remains a Resolved Outage note on Apple TV (simply saying "Some users were affected; users experienced a problem with Apple TV" between 10:29 and 11.38 p.m.), as well as on Apple Music and Apple Arcade, which also went down at the same time. Social media reports indicated that the outage was widespread.