Brain rot — the inability to think deeply after too much scrolling on a phone — afflicts "plenty of people," writes the New York Times' lead consumer technology writer. [Alternate URL here.] He's suffering from it too — "These days, it's tough to even finish a book."

But is the answer just avoiding distractions with a stripped-down $600 phone "that barely does anything"? For a week he tested the Light Phone III... The newest version, which began shipping in March and is set for a broader release in July, can place calls, send texts, take photos, show map directions, play music and podcasts and not do much else. There is no web browser. There is also no app store, meaning there's no Uber to hail a ride, no Slack and no social media. There isn't even email... There were moments I enjoyed it. While waiting for a train, resting at the gym or eating alone, I was not tempted to stare at the phone screen, and I felt more mindful of my surroundings. Phone calls sounded nice and clear. The maps app did a fine job navigating me around town.

It reminded me of simpler times when we used phones primarily to converse before putting them away to focus on other tasks. But over the week, the downsides of a dumber phone chipped away at my enjoyment, and overall I felt more stressed and less capable. I suddenly found myself unable to get into a train station, look up the name of a new restaurant or control my garage door. Some of that has less to do with the Light Phone itself, which is a so-so product, and more to do with how society as a whole has become dependent on advanced smartphone features.
For example, his old smartphone supported virtual phone-based passes for mass transit and speedy access to his gym. (And his friends made phone of the Light Phone's photos.) But at least never felt tempted to check his email when out to dinner.

"While I admire the goal of the Light Phone, my experience demonstrates there's nothing we can realistically do or buy to bring us back to simpler times. So many aspects of our lives, including getting around town, working, paying for things and controlling home appliances, revolve around our highly capable smartphones.

"This Light Phone experiment reminded me of glamping: paying a lot to have an artificially crummier experience."

This year's "State of Rust" survey was completed by 7,310 Rust developers. DevClass note some key findings: When asked about their biggest worries for Rust's future, 45.5 percent cited "not enough usage in the tech industry," up from 42.5 percent last year, just ahead of the 45.2 percent who cited complexity as a concern... Only 18.6 percent declared themselves "not worried," though this is a slight improvement on 17.8 percent in 2023...

Another question asks whether respondents are using Rust at work. 38.2 percent claimed to use it for most of their coding [up from 34% in 2023], and 13.4 percent a few times a week, accounting for just over half of responses. At the organization level there is a similar pattern. 45.5 percent of organizations represented by respondents make "non-trivial use of Rust," up from 38.7 percent last year.
More details from I Programmer: On the up are "Using Rust helps us achieve or goals", now 82% compared to 72% in 2022; "We're likely to use Rust again in the future", up 3% to 78%; and "Using Rust has been worth the cost of Adoption". Going down are "Adopting Rust has been challenging", now 34.5% compared to 38.5% in 2022; and "Overall adopting Rust has slowed down our team" down by over 2% to 7%.
"According to the survey, organizations primarily choose Rust for building correct and bug-free software (87.1%), performance characteristics (84.5%), security and safety properties (74.8%), and development enjoyment (71.2%)," writes The New Stack: Rust seems to be especially popular for creating server backends (53.4%), web and networking services, cloud technologies and WebAssembly, the report said. It also seems to be gaining more traction for embedded use cases... Regarding the preferred development environment, Linux remains the dominant development platform (73.7%).

However, although VS Code remains the leading editor, its usage dropped five percentage points, from 61.7% to 56.7%, but the Zed editor gained notable traction, from 0.7% to 8.9%. Also, "nine out of 10 Rust developers use the current stable version, suggesting strong confidence in the language's stability," the report said...

Overall, 82% of respondents report that Rust helped their company achieve its goals, and daily Rust usage increased to 53% (up four percentage points from 2023). When asked why they use Rust at work, 47% of respondents cited a need for precise control over their software, which is up from 37% when the question was asked two years ago.

You asked questions, we've got the answers!

Christine Peterson is a long-time futurist who co-founded the nanotech advocacy group the Foresight Institute in 1986. One of her favorite tasks has been contacting the winners of the institute's annual Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, but she also coined the term "Open Source software" for that famous promotion strategy meeting in 1998.

Christine took some time to answer questions from Slashdot readers.

You asked, he answered!

Perl creator Larry Wall has responded to questions submitted by Slashdot readers. Read on for his answers...

An anonymous reader writes with this news from Government Attic: "The FAA has released a set of cease and desist letters sent in 2012 and 2013 to people operating drone vehicles for a variety of purposes including: tornado research, inspecting gas well stacks, aerial photography, journalism education, and other purposes. Drone cease and desist letters sent during 2014 are available from the FAA upon request." The text of the letters (bureaucratically polite, but bureaucratically firm) often starts with notes indicating to the UAV operators to whom they were sent that the FAA became interested in them because it "became aware of" their web sites, or even because someone tipped them off about an article in a community newsletter. The letters go on to outline the conditions under which the FAA allows the operation of unmanned aircraft, and specifically notes: Those who use UAS only for recreational enjoyment, operate in accordance with Advisory circular 91-57. This generally applies to operations in remotely populated areas away from airports, persons and buildings, below 400 feet Above Ground Level, and within visual line of sight. On February 6, 2007 the FAA published UAS guidance in the Federal Register, 14 CPR Part 91 / Docket No. FAA-2006-25714 I Unmanned Aircraft Operations in the National Airspace System. Toward the end of the docket it says, ''The FAA recognizes that people and companies other than modelers might be flying UAS with the mistaken understanding that they are legally operating under the authority of AC 91-57. AC 91-57 only applies to modelers, and thus specifically excludes Its use by persons or companies for business purposes." Update: 09/07 02:16 GMT by T : Pray forgive the OCR that turned "persons" into "pecions" and "circular" into "arcular"; updated to fix those. Update: 09/08 11:07 GMT by T : Correction: Carl Malamud is not affiliated with Government Attic as this story originally described: sorry for the error.

stoolpigeon writes "How would humanity fare in a universe filled with other sentient races and the technology for all of them to interact? If human history is any indication there would be conflict. That conflict would be between many groups that saw themselves as people and the rest as monsters. What that universe and those interactions would look like is a key theme in John Scalzi's Old Man's War series. The latest offering, The Human Division continues to dig deeply into a wide range of questions about what makes someone a person and how people treat one another at their best and worst." Keep reading for the rest of stoolpigeon's review.

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times writes about Justin McMurry of Keller, TX, who spends up to 20 unpaid hours per week helping Verizon customers with high-speed fiber optic Internet, television and telephone service. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies, and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service. Such enthusiasts are known as lead users, or super-users, and their role in contributing innovations to product development and improvement — often selflessly — has been closely researched in recent years. These unpaid contributors, it seems, are motivated mainly by a payoff in enjoyment and respect among their peers. 'You have to make an environment that attracts the Justin McMurrys of the world, because that's where the magic happens,' says Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon. The mentality of super-users in online customer-service communities is similar to that of devout gamers, according to Lyle Fong, co-founder of Lithium Technologies whose web site advertises that a vibrant community can easily save a company millions of dollars per year in deflected support calls' and whose current roster of 125 clients includes AT&T, BT, iRobot, Linksys, Best Buy, and Nintendo. Lithium's customer service sites for companies offer elaborate rating systems for contributors, with ranks, badges and kudos counts. 'That alone is addictive,' says Fong. 'They are revered by their peers.' Meanwhile McMurry, who is 68 and a retired software engineer, continues supplying answers by the bushel, all at no pay. 'People seem to like most of what I say online, and I like doing it.'"

mjasay writes "Remember 'the long tail?' That was the idea that there was gobs of money to be made in the more obscure tastes of any given market, enabled by the web. In recent research highlighted in the Harvard Business Review, however, the long tail theory comes under withering criticism. Not only is a hits-based business more profitable for vendors according to the new research, but the research suggests that consumers also derive more enjoyment from the hits, rather than the tail. In short, the researchers find that 'the tail is long and flat, and therefore that content providers will find it hard to profit much from it.'" Long Tail advocate Chris Anderson defends his theory, and it seems that most of the debate centers around how you define "head" and "tail."

Gamespot is reporting that Konami has delayed Metal Gear Solid 4 until Q2 2008. Just the latest in the long lineup of huge title delays, Konami delayed the game for the same reason all the others were: polish. "According to Japanese and English language press releases on the Konami Web site, the game will now be coming to Japan in the first quarter of 2008, and other regions in the second quarter. The game had been due for a simultaneous worldwide pre-Christmas release exclusively for Sony's PlayStation 3 console. A statement from Konami gives the reasoning behind this decision, 'Konami has decided to delay the title's release in order to make further improvements to the quality of the game and provide even greater enjoyment for more customers worldwide.' It added that it would continue to work on the game to make sure it will 'meet everyone's expectations.'"

Last week we asked you for questions to pass on to the folks behind the Gamers2Gamers RMT service. The response, from reading the comments, was mixed. The thinking seemed to mostly be that this was a marketing stunt, aimed at getting people to check out their website. There were several good questions, though, and we passed on the hardest ones to Sparter CEO Dan Kelly and CTO Boris Putanec. The response from these executives should lay to rest for you the issue of whether this was a marketing ploy or not. Moreover, some of their answers give insight into the company's grasp of the RMT market as a whole, and their chances of success in the competitive MMOG genre. I encourage you to read on to see how they've responded to our queries. Thanks to the Sparter execs for their timely response.

Spider-Man 2 was one of the best movie tie-ins to come along in quite some time when it was released in late Summer 2004. Free-swinging travel through the streets of New York and an entertaining retelling of the movie plot made for a fun, if mindless, title. On that framework Treyarch has spun another tale about the life of Peter Parker. Unlike Spider-Man 2, Ultimate Spider-Man comes directly from the pages of the Marvel comic of the same name, giving players the chance to control both your friendly neighborhood web-head and the fan favorite Venom. There's fun to be had here, and a high quality story to tell. Read on for my impression of Ultimate Spider-Man.

Undaar asks: "I work as a developer for a web development company. We were pretty hard hit (as were many companies that do what we do) by the "economic down-turn". The company went from over 500 people to under 200 in under two years. It's more stable now, but people are consistently laid-off. Consequently people feel like they always have to look over their shoulder to avoid getting fired. Most lunches are spent complaining about lack of enjoyment/challenge from the job and the fact that upper-management seems not to understand what we do. Employers: what have you done to improve employee morale in your company? As an employee, what can I do to improve the morale in the people I work with? How can I make my work environment more enjoyable? What kind of constructive suggestions can I take to management so that they can help improve the situation?"

Your intrepid reporter took a jaunt down to the H2K2 conference this past weekend, held in the lovely Hotel Pennsylvania. The conference had much more floor space than they had two years ago, and it seemed like more attendance as well. Wireless networks were available, though overcrowded, and if you didn't encrypt your communications, well, you've probably already paid the price. My notes on the conference and the sessions I attended are below, followed by a couple of reader submissions.

If you need to escape Hype Sunday, or even if you don't, go see Shadow Of The Vampire.The odd and the slightly twisted will go nuts over this film by E. Elias Merhige. William Dafoe is astounding as the vampire Count Orlock, and John Malkovich is his wonderful icky and obsessive self as the director whose only moral value is getting his film made at any cost. Spoilage warning: plot is discussed, no endings. A brief and useful Nosferatu primer is included, free of charge.

The ongoing debate between KDE and GNOME has calmed down a lot in the last year as each system became stable and usable. Recent announcements regarding the Gnome Foundation has caused some tension (ranging from words to DNS hijaacking). Kurt Granroth, a KDE Core Team Member, and the KDE US Press Rep has submitted his opinions on the subject, are in some cases very good points, and in other cases extremely inflammatory, but in both cases, worth reading.

Quick - how many brand names or logos are visible on the outside of your clothing? Your computer equipment? Have you ever noticed a Red Hat bumper sticker? Warren A. Layton sent us an interesting review of No Logo which will have you examining your surroundings for just such signs. Depending on your bent, you may also be reminded of the character Francisco d'Anconia in Atlas Shrugged when he declares "The coats-of-arms of our day are to be found on billboards and in the ads of popular magazines."

Note: This is the second in a two-part series.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a frontal assault on the open source ethic, both technological and social. The underlying political issue is both clear and significant: Must we depend on the creative choices and products of a handful of ferociously greedy and monopolistic corporations who have increasingly come to dominate media, culture and entertainment? Or can we define our own cultural experiences? (Read more below.)

Okay, here they are: Brian Paul's answers to your questions. Even if you've never heard of Brian or Mesa, his comments give insight into how an "essential but unsung" Open Source project runs, and why Brian has devoted endless time to Mesa. (More below.)

Thanks to Janice Wright for returning with a review of O'Reilly's PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide (2nd Edition). It's the 2nd edition, written by David Pogue and Jeff Hawkins - click below to learn how to make the most of your PalmPilot.