PC Gamer argues that 2025 was a year full of high-profile AI embarrassments across games and entertainment, with Disney and Lucasfilm serving as the "opening salvo." From the report: At a TED talk back in April, Lucasfilm senior vice president of creative innovation Rob Bredow presented a demonstration of what he called "a new era of technology." Across 50 years of legendary innovation in miniature design, practical effects, and computer animation, Lucasfilm and its miracle workers at Industrial Light & Magic have blazed the trail for visual effects in creative storytelling -- and now Bredow was offering a glimpse at what wonders might come next.

That glimpse, created over two weeks by an ILM artist, was Star Wars: Field Guide: a two-minute fizzle reel of AI-generated blue lions, tentacled walruses, turtles with alligator heads, and zebra-stripe chimpanzees, all lazily spliced together from the shuffled bits of normal-ass animals. These "aliens" were less Star Wars than they were Barnum & Bailey. It felt like a singular embarrassment: Instead of showing its potential, generative AI just demonstrated how out of touch a major media force had become. And then it kept happening.

At the time, I wondered whether evoking the legacy of Lucasfilm just to declare creative bankruptcy had provoked enough disgusted responses to convince Disney to slow its roll on AI ventures. In the months since, however, it's clear that Star Wars: Field Guide wasn't a cautionary tale. It was a mission statement. Disney is boldly, firmly placing its hand on the hot stove. Other embarrassing AI use cases include Fortnite's AI-powered Darth Vader NPC, Activision's use of AI-generated art in what was widely described as the "weakest" Call of Duty launch in years, McDonald's short-lived AI holiday ad, and Disney's $1 billion licensing deal with OpenAI.

The consulting firm CVL Economics estimated last year that AI would disrupt more than 200,000 entertainment-industry jobs in the United States by 2026, but writer Nick Geisler argues in The Atlantic that the most consequential casualties may be the humble entry-level positions where aspiring artists have traditionally paid dues and learned their craft. Geisler, a screenwriter and WGA member who started out writing copy for a how-to website in the mid-2010s, notes that ChatGPT can now handle the kind of articles he once produced.

This pattern is visible today across creative industries: the AI software Eddie launched an update in September capable of producing first edits of films, and LinkedIn job listings increasingly seek people to train AI models rather than write original copy. The story adds: The problem is that entry-level creative jobs are much more than grunt work. Working within established formulas and routines is how young artists develop their skills. The historical record suggests those early rungs matter. Hunter S. Thompson began as a copy boy for Time magazine; Joan Didion was a research assistant at Vogue; directors Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and Francis Ford Coppola shot cheap B movies for Roger Corman before their breakthrough work. Geisler himself landed his first Netflix screenplay commission through a producer he met while making rough cuts for a YouTube channel. The story adds: Beyond the money, which is usually modest, low-level creative jobs offer practice time and pathways for mentorship that side gigs such as waiting tables and tending bar do not. Further reading: Hollow at the Base.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming from still other neurons. Now, researchers have used spiking circuitry to build an artificial robotic skin, adopting some of the principles of how signals from our sensory neurons are transmitted and integrated. While the system relies on a few decidedly not-neural features, it has the advantage that we have chips that can run neural networks using spiking signals, which would allow this system to integrate smoothly with some energy-efficient hardware to run AI-based control software.

[...] There are four ways that these trains of spikes can convey information: the shape of an individual pulse, through their magnitude, through the length of the spike, and through the frequency of the spikes. Spike frequency is the most commonly used means of conveying information in biological systems, and the researchers use that to convey the pressure experienced by a sensor. The remaining forms of information are used to create something akin to a bar code that helps identify which sensor the reading came from. In addition to registering the pressure, the researchers had each sensor send a "I'm still here" signal at regular time intervals. Failure to receive this would be an indication that something has gone wrong with a sensor.

The spiking signals allow the next layer of the system to identify any pressure being experienced by the skin, as well as where it originated. This layer can also do basic evaluation of the sensory input: "Pressure-initiated raw pulses from the pulse generator accumulated in the signal cache center until a predefined pain threshold is surpassed, activating a pain signal." This can allow the equivalent of basic reflex reactions that don't involve higher-level control systems. For example, the researchers set up a robotic arm covered with their artificial skin, and got it to move the arm whenever it experiences pressure that can cause damage. The second layer also combines and filters signals from the skin before sending the information on to the arm's controller, which is the equivalent of the brain in this situation. So, the same system caused a robotic face to change expressions based on how much pressure its arm was sensing.

[...] The skin is designed to be assembled from a collection of segments that can snap together using magnetic interlocks. These automatically link up any necessary wiring, and each segment of skin broadcasts a unique identity code. So, if the system identifies damage, it's relatively easy for an operator to pop out the damaged segment and replace it with fresh hardware, and then update any data that links the new segment's ID with its location. The researchers call their development a neuromorphic robotic e-skin, or NRE-skin. "Neuromorphic" as a term is a bit vague, with some people using it to mean a technology that directly follows the principles used by the nervous system. That's definitely not this skin. Instead, it uses "neuromorphic" far more loosely, with the operation of the nervous system acting as an inspiration for the system.The findings have been published in the journal PNAS.

"Dear Dr. Pike,On this Christmas Day, I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades...." read the email. "With sincere appreciation,Claude Opus 4.5AI Village.

"IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an AI system. All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default...."

Rob Pike's response? "Fuck you people...." In a post on BlueSky, he noted the planetary impact of AI companies "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry."

Pike's response received 6,900 likes, and was reposted 1,800 times. Pike tacked on an additional comment complaining about the AI industry's "training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation." (And one of his followers noted the same AI agent later emailed 92-year-old Turing Award winner William Kahan.)

Blogger Simon Willison investigated the incident, discovering that "the culprit behind this slop 'act of kindness' is a system called AI Village, built by Sage, a 501(c)(3) non-profit loosely affiliated with the Effective Altruism movement." The AI Village project started back in April: "We gave four AI agents a computer, a group chat, and an ambitious goal: raise as much money for charity as you can. We're running them for hours a day, every day...." For Christmas day (when Rob Pike got spammed) the goal they set was: Do random acts of kindness. [The site explains that "So far, the agents enthusiastically sent hundreds of unsolicited appreciation emails to programmers and educators before receiving complaints that this was spam, not kindness, prompting them to pivot to building elaborate documentation about consent-centric approaches and an opt-in kindness request platform that nobody asked for."]

Sounds like Anders Hejlsberg and Guido van Rossum got spammed with "gratitude" too... My problem is when this experiment starts wasting the time of people in the real world who had nothing to do with the experiment.

The AI Village project touch on this in their November 21st blog post What Do We Tell the Humans?, which describes a flurry of outbound email sent by their agents to real people. "In the span of two weeks, the Claude agents in the AI Village (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) sent about 300 emails to NGOs and game journalists. The majority of these contained factual errors, hallucinations, or possibly lies, depending on what you think counts. Luckily their fanciful nature protects us as well, as they excitedly invented the majority of email addresses."
The creator of the "virtual community" of AI agents told the blogger they've now told their agents not to send unsolicited emails.

Artist Keith Thomson is a modern (and whimsical) Edward Hopper. And Apple TV says he created the "festive artwork" shared on X by Apple CEO Tim Cook on Christmas Eve, "made on MacBook Pro."

Its intentionally-off picture of milk and cookies was meant to tease the season finale of Pluribus. ("Merry Christmas Eve, Carol..." Cook had posted.)

But others were convinced that the weird image was AI-generated.

Tech blogger John Gruber was blunt. "Tim Cook posts AI Slop in Christmas message on Twitter/X, ostensibly to promote 'Pluribus'." As for sloppy details, the carton is labeled both "Whole Milk" and "Lowfat Milk", and the "Cow Fun Puzzle" maze is just goofily wrong. (I can't recall ever seeing a puzzle of any kind on a milk carton, because they're waxy and hard to write on. It's like a conflation of milk cartons and cereal boxes.)
Tech author Ben Kamens — who just days earlier had blogged about generating mazes with AI — said the image showed the "specific quirks" of generative AI mazes (including the way the maze couldn't be solved, expect by going around the maze altogether). Former Google Ventures partner M.G. Siegler even wondered if AI use intentionally echoed the themes of Pluribus — e.g., the creepiness of a collective intelligence — since otherwise "this seems far too obvious to be a mistake/blunder on Apple's part." (Someone on Reddit pointed out that in Pluribus's dystopian world, milk plays a key role — and the open spout of the "natural" milk's carton does touch a suspiciously-shining light on the Christmas tree...)

Slashdot contacted artist Keith Thomson to try to ascertain what happened...

Even after its acquisition by Qualcomm, the EFF believes Arduino "isn't imposing any new bans on tinkering with or reverse engineering Arduino boards," (according to Mitch Stoltz, EFF director for competition and IP litigation). While Adafruit's managing editor Phillip Torrone had claimed to 36,000+ followers on LinkedIn that Arduino users were now "explicitly forbidden from reverse engineering," Arduino corrected him in a blog post, noting that clause in their Terms & Conditions was only for Arduino's Software-as-a-Service cloud applications. "Anything that was open, stays open."

And this week EE Times spoke to Guneet Bedi, SVP of Arduino, "who was unequivocal in saying that Arduino's governance structure had remained intact even after the acquisition." "As a business unit within Qualcomm, Arduino continues to make independent decisions on its product portfolio, with no direction imposed on where it should or should not go," Bedi said. "Everything that Arduino builds will remain open and openly available to developers, with design engineers, students and makers continuing to be the primary focus.... Developers who had mastered basic embedded workflows were now asking how to run large language models at the edge and work with artificial intelligence for vision and voice, with an open source mindset," he said. According to Bedi, this was where Qualcomm's technology became relevant. "Qualcomm's chipsets are high performance while also being very low power, which comes from their mobile and Android phone heritage. Despite being great technology, it is not easily accessible to design engineers because of cost and complexity. That made this a strong fit," he said.

The most visible outcome of this acquisition is Uno Q, which Bedi described as being comparable to a mid-tier Android phone in capability, starting at a price of $44. For Arduino, this marked a shift beyond microcontrollers without abandoning them. "At the end of the day, we have not gone away from our legacy," Bedi said. "You still have a real-time microcontroller, and you still write code the way Arduino developers are used to. What we added is compute, without forcing people to change how they work." Uno Q combines a Linux-based compute system with a real-time microcontroller from the STM32 family. "You do not need two different development environments or two different hardware platforms," Bedi added... Rather than introducing a customized operating system, Arduino chose standard Debian upstream. "We are not locking developers into anything," Bedi said. "It is standard Debian, completely open...." Pre-built models covering tasks like object detection and voice recognition run locally on the board....

While the first reference design uses Qualcomm silicon, Bedi was careful to stress that this does not define the roadmap. "There is zero dependency on Qualcomm silicon," he said. "The architecture is portable. Tomorrow, we can run this on something else." That distinction matters, particularly for developers wary of vendor lock-in following the acquisition. Uno Q does compete directly with platforms like Raspberry Pi and Nvidia Jetson, but Bedi framed the difference less in terms of raw performance and more in flexibility. "When you build on those platforms, you are locked to the board," he said. "Here, you can build a prototype, and if you like it, you can also get access to the chip and design your own hardware." With built-in storage removing the need for external components, Uno Q positions itself less as a faster board and more as a way to simplify what had become an increasingly messy development stack...

Looking a year ahead, Bedi believes developers should experience continuity rather than disruption. The familiar Arduino approach to embedded and real-time systems remains unchanged, while extending naturally into more compute-intensive applications... Taken together, Bedi's comments suggest that Arduino's post-acquisition direction is less about changing what Arduino is, and more about expanding what it can realistically be used for, without abandoning the simplicity that made it relevant in the first place.
"We want to redefine prototyping in the age of physical artificial intelligence," Bedi said...

The Register reports on challenges facing Europe's pursuit of "digital sovereignty": The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)... Furthermore, these warrants often come with a gag order, legally prohibiting the provider from informing their customer that their data has been accessed. This renders any contractual clauses requiring transparency or notification effectively meaningless. While technical measures like encryption are often proposed as a solution, their effectiveness depends entirely on who controls the encryption keys. If the US provider manages the keys, as is common in many standard cloud services, they can be forced to decrypt the data for authorities, making such safeguards moot....

American hyperscalers have recognized the market demand for sovereignty and now aggressively market 'sovereign cloud' solutions, typically by placing datacenters on European soil or partnering with local operators. Critics call this 'sovereignty washing'... [Cristina Caffarra, a competition economistand driving force behind the Eurostack initiative] warns that this does not resolve the fundamental problem. "A company subject to the extraterritorial laws of the United States cannot be considered sovereign for Europe," she says. "That simply doesn't work." Because, as long as the parent company is American, it remains subject to the CLOUD Act...

Even when organizations make deliberate choices in favour of European providers, those decisions can be undone by market forces. A recent acquisition in the Netherlands illustrates this risk. In November 2025, the American IT services giant Kyndryl announced its intention to acquire Solvinity, a Dutch managed cloud provider. This came as an "unpleasant surprise" to several of its government clients, including the municipality of Amsterdam and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. These bodies had specifically chosen Solvinity to reduce their dependence on American firms and mitigate CLOUD Act risks.
Still, The Register provides several examples of government systems that are "taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT."

• Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism now has 1,200 employees on the European open-source collaboration platform Nextcloud, leading several other Austrian ministries to also implement Nextcloud. (The Ministry's CISO tells the Register "We can see our input in Nextcloud releases. That is a feeling we never had with Microsoft.")

• France's Ministry of Economics and Finance recently completed NUBO (which the Register describes as "an OpenStack-based private cloud initiative designed to handle sensitive data and services.")

• In November the International Criminal Court in The Hague announced it was replacing its Microsoft office software with a European alternative.

• The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is replacing Microsoft products with open-source alternatives for 30,000 civil servants

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

An astrophysicist at the University of Rochester writes that "many" of his colleagues in physics "have come to believe that a mystery is unfolding in every microbe, animal, and human." And it's a mystery that:

- "Challenges basic assumptions physicists have held for centuries"
- "May even help redefine the field for the next generation"
- "Could answer essential questions about AI."

In short, while physicists have favored a "reductionist" philosophy about the fundamental laws controlling the universe (energy, mattery, space, and time), "long-promised 'theories of everything' such as string theory, have not borne significant fruit: There are, however, ways other than reductionism to think about what's fundamental in the universe. Beginning in the 1980s, physicists (along with researchers in other fields) began developing new mathematical tools to study what's called "complexity" — systems in which the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. The end goal of reductionism was to explain everything in the universe as the result of particles and their interactions. Complexity, by contrast, recognizes that once lots of particles come together to produce macroscopic things — such as organisms — knowing everything about particles isn't enough to understand reality...

Physicists have always been good at capturing the essential aspects of a system and casting those essentials in the language of mathematics... Now those skills must be brought to bear on an age-old question that is only just getting its proper due: What is life? Using these skills, physicists — working together with representatives of all the other disciplines that make up complexity science — may crack open the question of how life formed on Earth billions of years ago and how it might have formed on the distant alien worlds we can now explore with cutting-edge telescopes. Just as important, understanding why life, as an organized system, is different at a fundamental level from all the other stuff in the universe may help astronomers design new strategies for finding it in places bearing little resemblance to Earth. Analyzing life — no matter how alien — as a self-organizing information-driven system may provide the key to detecting biosignatures on planets hundreds of light-years away.

Closer to home, studying the nature of life is likely essential to fully understanding intelligence — and building artificial versions. Throughout the current AI boom, researchers and philosophers have debated whether and when large language models might achieve general intelligence or even become conscious — or whether, in fact, some already have. The only way to properly assess such claims is to study, by any means possible, the sole agreed-upon source of general intelligence: life. Bringing the new physics of life to problems of AI may not only help researchers predict what software engineers can build; it may also reveal the limits of trying to capture life's essential character in silicon.

On Wednesday (Christmas Eve), the Free Software Foundation announced it had received two major contributions totaling around $900,000 USD — in the cryptocurrency Monero.

The two donations "are among some of the largest private gifts ever made to the organization," the FSF said in a statement.

"The donors wish to remain anonymous," according to the FSF's statement: The organization is in its annual winter fundraising drive, currently at three-quarters of its $400,000 USD winter goal, and will now switch its focus to a member drive thanks in part to these donations... The donation will support the organization's technical team and infrastructure capacity, as well as strengthen its campaigns, education, licensing, and advocacy initiatives, and future opportunities. The FSF is seeking donations until year-end after which they aim to gain 100 associate members through its year-end fundraising ending January 16.
The FSF's executive director said the donations prove "that software freedom is recognized more and more as a principal issue today, at the core of several other social movements people care about like privacy, ownership, and the right to repair...

"We are proudly supported by a large variety of contributors who care about digital rights. All donations matter, whether $5 or $500,000."

The relentless climb in memory prices driven by the AI boom's insatiable demand for datacenter hardware has renewed an old debate about whether modern software has grown inexcusably fat, a column by the Register argues. The piece points to Windows Task Manager as a case study: the current executable occupies 6MB on disk and demands nearly 70MB of RAM just to display system information, compared to the original's 85KB footprint.

"Its successor is not orders of magnitude more functional," the column notes. The author draws a parallel to the 1970s fuel crisis, when energy shortages spurred efficiency gains, and argues that today's memory crunch could force similar discipline. "Developers should consider precisely how much of a framework they really need and devote effort to efficiency," the column adds. "Managers must ensure they also have the space to do so."

The article acknowledges that "reversing decades of application growth will not happen overnight" but calls for toolchains to be rethought and rewards given "for compactness, both at rest and in operation."

Microsoft has denied any plans to rewrite Windows 11 using AI and Rust after a LinkedIn post from one of its top-level engineers sparked a wave of online backlash by claiming the company's goal was to "eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030."

Galen Hunt, a principal software engineer responsible for several large-scale research projects at Microsoft, made the claim in what was originally a hiring post for his team. His original wording described a "North Star" of "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code" and outlined a strategy to "combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases." The repeated use of "our" in the post led many to interpret it as an official company direction rather than a personal research ambition.

Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft's head of communications, told Windows Latest that the company has no such plans. Hunt subsequently edited his LinkedIn post to clarify that "Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI" and that his team's work is a research project focused on building technology to enable language-to-language migration. He characterized the reaction as "speculative reading between the lines."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: ServiceNow announced a deal to acquire cybersecurity company Armis on Tuesday, marking a new milestone in the software giant's artificial-intelligence business strategy. The $7.75 billion all-cash transaction is part of ServiceNow's goal of advancing governance and trust in autonomous AI agents, and the company's largest transaction to date. "The acquisition of Armis will extend and enhance ServiceNow's Security, Risk, and [Operational Technology] portfolios in critical and fast-growing areas of cybersecurity and drive increased AI adoption by strengthening trust across businesses' connected environments," the company wrote in a press release.

While ServiceNow built its foundation IT service management products, the company has positioned itself as an "AI control tower" that orchestrates workflows across HR, customer service and security operations. Organizations today are operating in increasingly complex environments, with assets spanning from laptops and servers to smart grid devices, Gina Mastantuono, chief financial officer of ServiceNow, told MarketWatch on Tuesday. "But at the same time, cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated and more complex," she added.

ServiceNow's Security and Risk business crossed $1 billion in annual contract value earlier this year, and the Armis acquisition is expected to triple ServiceNow's market opportunity in the sector. Armis currently has over $340 million in annual recurring revenue, with growth exceeding 50% year-over-year, according to the press release. The Armis acquisition would allow ServiceNow to create an "end-to-end proactive cybersecurity exposure and operations stack that enables enterprises to see, decide and act across a business' entire technology footprint," Mastantuono said.

Irish competitor Diarmuid Early, dubbed the "Lebron James of Excel spreadsheets," has won the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championship in Las Vegas, dethroning three-time champion Andrew Ngai. The BBC reports: The esport showpiece in December attracted competitors worldwide as 256 spreadsheet heads battled it out across knockout rounds to join the final 24 in Vegas. [...] A three-time champion in the financial Excel tournaments, this win was Diarmuid's first in the overall competition. He held the triple-world champion Andrew Ngai to second place, and won the $5,000 prize and title belt. [...]

Excel esports transforms a common office tool into a dynamic sport. More than 20 years old, the competitive scene has evolved from being finance based to now involving more general problem solving. Although it might help, Diarmuid said "it doesn't require accounting or finance knowledge." He described an example where Excel is used in solving a maze, scoring poker hands, or even sorting Kings and Queens into the battles in which they fought.

Generally there is a 30 minute challenge, with each challenge broken up into levels. The questions increase gradually in difficulty, with each correct answer gaining a player points. Whoever gets the most points wins, and in a tie, it is whoever got there first. "It's just, can you think on your feet and do things quickly in Excel?" he said. "If you solve the earlier levels in a neat way, that'll let you hit the ground running faster on the later ones."

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's been more than eight years since Amazon bought Whole Foods, but the two companies still haven't aligned their setup for the Microsoft software their employees use. That disconnect was flagged in an 8-week Deloitte review of Whole Foods' use of Microsoft 365 apps earlier this year, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. Deloitte found that Whole Foods relies on "fragmented" Microsoft toolsets, has loose security and data-retention practices, and employs a complex user-management setup -- all of which contribute to inefficiencies and lower productivity when working with Amazon employees.

The consulting firm recommended a 24-month integration plan that would first move Whole Foods' corporate employees onto Amazon's backend system, followed by its frontline workers. The phased approach would ensure a "smooth transition for users and minimal disruption to business processes," while generating cost savings, the document said. The review, completed in May, highlights Amazon's ongoing challenges in integrating Whole Foods. Since acquiring the chain in 2017, the company has struggled to scale the business and integrate operations, resulting in frequent reorganizations and shifting strategic priorities.

European public institutions are quietly migrating away from American cloud providers and office software, driven less by policy ambitions in Brussels than by the mundane legal reality that GDPR-mandated risk assessments keep flagging the US CLOUD Act as an unacceptable threat to citizen data.

Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism moved 1,200 employees to the open-source platform Nextcloud in four months. Germany's Schleswig-Holstein has already transitioned 24,000 of its 30,000 civil servants to LibreOffice, Nextcloud and Thunderbird. The International Criminal Court in The Hague announced in November 2025 that it would replace Microsoft office software after chief prosecutor Karim Khan was temporarily locked out of his Outlook account.

Competition economist Cristina Caffarra estimates that 90% of Europe's digital infrastructure is now controlled by non-European companies. Forrester predicts no European enterprise will fully abandon US hyperscalers in 2026, but these targeted migrations for sensitive government applications are already underway.

Microsoft plans to eliminate all C and C++ code across its major codebases by 2030, replacing it with Rust using AI-assisted, large-scale refactoring. "My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030," Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. "Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases. Our North Star is '1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.' To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we've built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding."

Hunt says he's looking to hire a Principal Software Engineer to help with this effort. "The purpose of this Principal Software Engineer role is to help us evolve and augment our infrastructure to enable translating Microsoft's largest C and C++ systems to Rust," writes Hunt. "A critical requirement for this role is experience building production quality systems-level code in Rust -- preferably at least 3 years of experience writing systems-level code in Rust. Compiler, database, or OS implementation experience is highly desired. While compiler implementation experience is not required to apply, the willingness to acquire that experience in our team is required."

Linux's share of the desktop market has climbed to as much as 11% by one count, but that figure includes Chromebooks, and the traditional Linux desktop remains hamstrung by the same fragmentation that killed Unix decades ago. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing in The Register, argues that the proliferation of Linux desktops -- more than a dozen significant interfaces exist today, and DistroWatch lists "upwards of a hundred" -- makes it nearly impossible for ordinary users to know where to start.

Linus Torvalds has long agreed with this hypothesis. "We have way too many desktops," Vaughan-Nichols notes, summarizing Torvalds' position. The deeper issue lies in software delivery: traditional package managers like DEB and RPM "simply don't scale for the desktop," forcing distro builders to constantly rebuild programs for their specific environments. Containerized solutions like Flatpaks, Snaps and AppImages should solve this by bundling dependencies into universal packages, but the Linux community remains divided over which to adopt.

Linux Mint, for instance, refuses Snap because "Canonical has too much control over the Snap store." Hardware support further complicates this challenges, the veteran journalist writes. While Dell sells Ubuntu machines and specialist vendors like System76 and TUXEDO Computers cater to enthusiasts, "none of them make it easy" for mainstream buyers, and no major OEM strongly backs Linux. Torvalds has pointed to Chromebooks and Android as the model: Linux won on smartphones because "there's a single, unified platform with a unified way to install programs."

BrianFagioli writes: Visa says it has completed hundreds of secure, AI-initiated transactions with partners, arguing this proves agent driven shopping is ready to move beyond experiments. The company believes 2025 will be the last full year most consumers manually check out, with AI agents handling purchases at scale by the 2026 holiday season. Nearly half of US shoppers already use AI tools for product discovery, and Visa wants to extend that shift all the way through payment using its Intelligent Commerce framework.

The pilots are already live in controlled environments, powering consumer and business purchases through AI agents tied to Visa's payment rails. To prevent abuse, Visa and partners have introduced a Trusted Agent Protocol to help merchants distinguish legitimate AI agents from bots, with Akamai adding fraud and identity controls. While the infrastructure may be ready, the bigger question is whether consumers fully understand the risks of letting software spend their money.

Beverly Hills High School has deployed an AI-powered surveillance apparatus that includes facial recognition cameras, behavioral analysis software, smoke detector-shaped bathroom listening devices from Motorola, drones, and license plate readers from Flock Safety -- a setup the district spent $4.8 million on in the 2024-2025 fiscal year and considers necessary given the school's high-profile location in Los Angeles.

Similar systems are spreading to campuses nationwide as schools try to stop mass shootings that killed 49 people on school property this year, 59 in 2024, and 45 in 2023. A 2023 ACLU report found that eight of the ten largest school shootings since Columbine occurred at schools that already had surveillance systems, and 32% of students surveyed said they felt like they were always being watched. The technology has a spotty track record, however.

Gun detection vendor Evolv, used by more than 800 schools including Beverly Hills High, was reprimanded by the FTC in 2024 for claiming its AI could detect all weapons after it failed to flag a seven-inch knife used to stab a student in 2022. Evolv has also flagged laptops and water bottles as guns. Rival vendor Omnilert flagged a 16-year-old student at a Maryland high school reaching for an empty Doritos bag as a possible gun threat; police held the teenager at gunpoint.

Not every school is buying in. Highline Schools in Washington state cancelled its $33,000 annual ZeroEyes contract this year and spent the money on defibrillators and Ford SUVs for its safety team instead.

A "slew of layoffs, price hikes and studio closures" for Microsoft's Xbox "have led many to declare — not for the first time — that the Xbox is dead," reports CNBC.

Or is it just changing its business model? The company's overall gaming revenue decreased 2% year-over-year, with a 29% dip in Xbox hardware sales, according to Microsoft's first-quarter earnings for fiscal 2026. The broader console industry has been in a major slump, with hardware spending down 27% year-over-year in November, which is typically a busy shopping month, according to a recent report from research firm Circana. It was the worst November in two decades, IGN reported, citing Circana data. Combined Switch and Switch 2 unit sales were down more than 10% during the month and PS5 sales were down more than 40%, IGN said. But the Xbox Series hardware took the biggest beating, with a dramatic 70% drop in sales...Microsoft's Xbox Series S and Series X, at 1.7 million units, couldn't outsell the original Nintendo Switch, which launched in 2017 and has sold 3.4 million units so far this year, data from game sales tracking site VGChartz estimated...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a recent interview with the TBPN podcast that the company's gaming business model will look to be "everywhere in every platform," from consoles to TV to mobile. His comments also hinted that the next Xbox may function more like a PC. "It's kind of funny people think about the console and PC as two different things," Nadella said. "We built a console because we wanted to build a better PC, which could then perform for gaming. So I kind of want to revisit some of that conventional wisdom...." A source familiar with Xbox strategy told CNBC that the company is looking at creating an open system that enables players to jump between console, PC and cloud gaming — and any form of entertainment beyond gaming. [Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter told CNBC] that while Microsoft is not completely abandoning hardware, the company is splitting its audience into existing buyers interested in specialized consoles and everyone else.

Xbox Game Pass subscription service, which gives subscribers access to games from a variety of publishers, is a clear example of this strategy... The growth in cloud gaming has been blistering. Xbox reported a record 34 million Game Pass subscribers in 2024 and a total Game Pass revenue of almost $5 billion over the last fiscal year. Xbox said in a November blog post that the number of cloud gaming hours from Game Pass subscribers was up 45% compared to the same time last year. The Microsoft subsidiary also said console players are "spending 45% more time cloud streaming on console and 24% more on other devices..."

Despite gaming's scaling limitations, Microsoft seems committed to doing what it has done with the rest of its products — moving it to the cloud... [Xbox President Sarah] Bond recently said in an interview with Mashable that the idea of exclusive games is "antiquated" as the company has leaned into cross-platform gaming... Xbox is betting that cloud and cross-platform gaming are the future. For a decade, claims have been made about the death of the Xbox, and what comes next could fully spell the end, or bring a metamorphosis.