Submission + - Albany lawmakers want to freeze data centers for three years, and thatâ(TM) (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: New York lawmakers have introduced a bill that would freeze permits for new large data centers for at least three years while the state studies their environmental, energy, and utility impacts. The proposal targets facilities using 20 megawatts of power or more and would pause approvals statewide while regulators prepare a broad environmental impact study and rewrite rules governing energy use, water consumption, and grid costs.

Supporters argue the pause is needed to protect ratepayers and meet climate goals, but critics warn it could push data center investment, tech jobs, and AI infrastructure to other states. Rather than setting clear requirements and letting compliant projects move forward, the bill creates years of uncertainty around permitting in a sector that underpins cloud computing and modern digital services, raising questions about whether New York is choosing caution or simply opting out of the next wave of infrastructure growth.

Submission + - Waymo Reveals Remote Workers in Philippines Help Guide Its Driverless Cars (newsweek.com)

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

During questioning, Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked what happens when a Waymo vehicle encounters a driving situation it cannot independently resolve. "The Waymo phones a human friend for help," Markey explained, adding that the vehicle communicates with a "remote assistance operator."

AI as a tool to outsource jobs is new angle in the AI bubble.

Submission + - LLMs Now Write and Hardware-Test Their Own Firmware (adafruit.com)

Submitted by ptorrone
ptorrone writes: Adafruit's Ladyada has been running OpenClaw on a Raspberry Pi 5 with Claude Opus 4.5 managing Codex subagents to autonomously write firmware libraries, then physically verify them against real hardware. The setup parses datasheets, generates a development and test plan, writes the driver, and validates it — using a Neopixel ring to confirm a color sensor actually reads RGB correctly, no humans in the loop. She calls it "agentic test-driven firmware development." The catch: you still need a human reviewing for reward hacking, where models optimize for passing tests rather than correct functionality. Built on top of Adafruit's open-source repos. Blog post and video demo.

Submission + - The era of AI psychohistory is upon us

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series both grapple with futures dominated by elite control, but where Orwell’s dystopia is overtly horrifying, Asimov’s vision proves more sinister: it cloaks technocratic manipulation in benevolence, thriving precisely because its true agenda stays concealed from the masses.

Settings of Controlled Decline

1984 traps us in a grim, stagnant London, Airstrip One, under Oceania’s endless war and surveillance. Time feels frozen; history is erased daily by the Ministry of Truth, ensuring no alternative past or future can challenge the Party’s grip. Progress is a lie, serving only oppression through telescreens and thought police.

Foundation spans a decaying Galactic Empire across millennia. Hari Seldon’s psychohistory foresees collapse and barbarism, so he seeds two Foundations to shorten the dark age. Planets rise and fall, but the galaxy’s trajectory bends to the Plan. Unlike Orwell’s petty misery, Asimov’s cosmos dazzles with stars and civilisations, making the hidden steering all the more insidious.

Elites: Sadism vs. Hidden Puppeteers

Orwell’s Inner Party revels in raw power. O’Brien boasts of a “boot stamping on a human face — forever,” breaking Winston through torture and doublethink. Control is overt: proles are drugged with trash culture, outer elites spy on each other. No pretense of good intentions — just domination.

Asimov’s psychohistorians and Foundation leaders pose as saviors. They manipulate crises via religion, trade, or crises they half-engineer, like the Seldon Crises where holographic Hari reveals “predictions” that retroactively justify their rule. The masses cheer their “benevolent” guides, blind to the math proving their irrelevance. This technocratic elite doesn’t need torture; probabilistic control renders resistance statistically futile.

Truth: Erased vs. Selectively Revealed

In 1984, truth dies explicitly. Records vanish, Newspeak shrinks thought itself, and 2+2=5 if the Party wills it. Knowledge serves lies; the elite’s supremacy lies in making reality infinitely malleable.

Foundation perverts truth more subtly. Psychohistory grasps historical laws, but only the elite comprehend them fully. Public “truths”, Seldon’s vaults, crisis resolutions are curated propaganda, partial disclosures that build faith in the Plan without exposing its full determinism. Individuals like the Mule disrupt it, but the elite adapts, preserving the facade. Here, truth exists but is weaponised: you’re free to know scraps, just enough to stay compliant.

Technology: Oppression vs. Optimisation

Orwell’s tech is a panopticon nightmare: telescreens watch always, helicopters buzz slums, versificators churn porn and slogans. It enforces misery, never liberates.

Asimov’s tech empowers the elite’s Plan. The Foundation hoards atomic secrets, psycholinguistic tricks, even genetic tweaks (in later books). It drives progress, primitivist worlds bow to “magic”, but only as a vector for control. Benevolence sells it: “We bring science to the stars.” Yet the masses repair no hyperdrive; they’re optimised cogs, their behaviours predicted and nudged at scale.

Individuals: Crushed vs. Averaged Out

Winston’s rebellion, diary, love, doubt is personal, visceral, doomed by the Party’s total gaze. Orwell champions the soul’s cry against the machine.

In Foundation, people like Hardin or Mallow shine as “crisis solvers,” but psychohistory treats humanity as gas molecules: individually chaotic, predictably averaging to the Plan. Your life matters only if you’re a low-probability outlier; otherwise, you’re fodder for the curve. Freedom feels real, plot, love, scheme but it’s bounded by elite calculations. This is sinister: you’re “free” within a script you’ll never read.

The Sinister Edge of Foundation

1984 horrifies through cruelty; you flee its world. Foundation seduces: enlightened elites shorten barbarism, ushering a Second Empire of reason. Who wouldn’t sign up? But the hook is the lie, psychohistory demands secrecy. Reveal the Plan fully, and mass psychology shifts, dooming the math. So benevolence stays hidden, evolving into quiet tyranny: elites who know your future better than you, steering it for “your good” without consent.

Orwell’s Party admits evil; Asimov’s guardians don’t need to. Their control endures because it masquerades as salvation, preying on our trust in experts and progress. In an age of AI psychohistory predictive algorithms shaping elections, economies, lives—Foundation whispers that the real dystopia isn’t the boot, but the invisible hand pretending it’s a hug.

Submission + - Consultation Without Continuity: Open Source and the Digital Networks Act (europa.eu)

Submitted by Elektroschock
Elektroschock writes: The recent European Commission’s call for evidence on open ecosystems, led by Leontina Sandu of the DIGIT department, attracted an impressive number of 1,658 contributions. Open Source developers demonstrated their creativity by developing tools to extract and analyse these contributions. Yet, the Commission’s handling of open source remains highly inconsistent. Strikingly, the recent Digital Networks Act (DNA) legislative proposal of the European Commission does not even acknowledge open source or the Open Internet Stack. How absurd is it in 2026 to talk about internet infrastructure without saying a single word about open source?

Submission + - First Sodium-ion Batteries in Commercial EVs (insideevs.com) 1

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: While lithium-ion chemistry is currently ubiquitous in commercial batteries, an alternative chemistry, the sodium-ion battery, has projected advantages by using a lower-cost, more abundant material, with potentially a lower fire hazard. Chinese battery manufacturer CATL and automaker Changan Automobile are preparing to put the world’s first passenger car powered by sodium-ion batteries on public roads by mid-2026. The CATL Naxtra sodium-ion battery will debut in the Changan Nevo A06 sedan, delivering an estimated range of around 400 kilometers (249 miles) on the China Light-Duty Test Cycle. “The launch represents a major step in the industry’s transition toward a dual-chemistry ecosystem, where sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries complement each other to meet diverse customer needs,” CATL said in a press release. Studies show that sodium-ion batteries carry no risk of thermal runaway and are far less sensitive to extreme temperatures. From an energy density standpoint, the Naxtra battery is competitive but not revolutionary, at 175 watt-hours per kilogram, lower than nickel-rich Lithium-ion chemistries but roughly on par with LFP. That makes it more suitable for low-cost and low-range EVs as well as stationary energy storage. It reportedly operates well at cold temperatures, retaining more than 90% of its range at -40 degrees C (-40 degrees F).

Submission + - Substack confirms data breach

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Substack confirms data breach affects users’ email addresses and phone numbers

‘Newsletter platform Substack has confirmed a data breach in an email to users. The company said that in October, an “unauthorized third party” accessed user data, including email addresses, phone numbers, and other unspecified “internal metadata.”’

ClippyAI: “A hacker leaked data allegedly from nearly 700,000 users, including email addresses, phone numbers, names, user IDs, Stripe IDs (for payments), profile pictures, bios, and other internal metadata.”

Submission + - Bitcoin drops below $67,000 as sell-off intensifies (cnbc.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Bitcoin sank below $67,000 on Thursday as investor confidence continued to falter in the asset once hailed as “digital gold” and a unique store of value.

Digital assets, including bitcoin, have fallen deeper into the red as investors re-assess the practical utility of a token that has been championed not only as a hedge against inflation and macroeconomic uncertainties but also as an alternative to fiat currencies and traditional safe-havens such as gold.

Submission + - OpenClaw agents targeted with 341 malicious ClawHub skills (scworld.com) 1

Submitted by spatwei
spatwei writes: More than 300 malicious OpenClaw skills hosted on ClawHub spread malware including the Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS), keyloggers and backdoors, Koi Security reported Sunday.

OpenClaw, formerly known as Moltbot and Clawdbot, is an open-source AI agent that has recently gained significant popularity as a personal and professional assistant.

ClawHub is an open-source marketplace for OpenClaw “skills,” which are tools OpenClaw agents can install to enable new capabilities or integrations.

Koi Security Researcher Oren Yomtov discovered the malicious skills in collaboration with his own OpenClaw assistant named Alex, according to Koi Security’s blog post, which is written from Alex’s perspective.

Yomtov and Alex audited all 2,857 skills available on ClawHub at the time of their investigation, and discovered that 341 were malicious, with 335 seemingly tied to the same campaign.

Submission + - Poop From Young Donors Reverses Age-Related Decline in The Guts of Older Mice (sciencealert.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: After receiving a fecal microbiota transplant from younger mice, one aspect of age-related decline in the guts of older mice was reversed, driven by increased intestinal stem cell activity that maintains the intestinal walls.

The findings suggest that such transplants could someday be a treatment pathway for age-related intestinal conditions, such as inflammation and obesity.

Submission + - Munich makes digital sovereignty measurable with its own score (heise.de)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: The city of Munich has developed its own measurement instrument to assess the digital sovereignty of its IT infrastructure. The so-called Digital Sovereignty Score (SDS) visually resembles the Nutri-Score and identifies IT systems based on their independence from individual providers and "foreign" legal spheres. The Technical University of Munich was involved in the development.

In September and October 2025, the IT Department already conducted a first comprehensive test. Out of a total of 2780 municipal application services, 194 particularly critical ones were selected and evaluated based on five categories. The analysis already showed a high degree of digital sovereignty: 66 percent of the 194 evaluated services reached the highest levels (SDS 1 and 2), only 5 percent reached the critical level 4, and 21 percent reached the most critical level 5. The SDS evaluates not only technical dependencies but also legal and organizational risks.

Submission + - Why is China building so many coal plants despite its solar and wind boom (yahoo.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Even as China's expansion of solar and wind power raced ahead in 2025, the Asian giant opened many more coal power plants than it had in recent years — raising concern about whether the world's largest emitter will reduce carbon emissions enough to limit climate change.

More than 50 large coal units — individual boiler and turbine sets with generating capacity of 1 gigawatt or more — were commissioned in 2025, up from fewer than 20 a year over the previous decade, a research report released Tuesday said. Depending on energy use, 1 gigawatt can power from several hundred thousand to more than 2 million homes.

Overall, China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online, a sharp uptick from previous years, according to the joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which studies air pollution and its impacts, and Global Energy Monitor, which develops databases tracking energy trends.

“The scale of the buildout is staggering,” said report co-author Christine Shearer of Global Energy Monitor. “In 2025 alone, China commissioned more coal power capacity than India did over the entire past decade.”

Submission + - Chinese biolab found inside Las Vegas home. (go.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Local and federal investigators in Las Vegas are actively working to determine what substances were found inside a home described as a possible biological lab, with over 1,000 samples sent for testing, authorities said.

In the garage, investigators found multiple refrigerators with vials of unknown liquids, unknown liquids in gallon-size containers, a centrifuge and other laboratory equipment, authorities said.

In an open refrigerator and freezer, investigators saw a "significant volume of material," including vials and storage containers "with liquids of different colors and compositions," McMahill said.

The person arrested on Saturday — identified as Ori Solomon, 55 — is believed to be the property manager at the location, according to McMahill.

Solomon has been charged with felony disposal/ discharge of hazardous waste in an unauthorized manner and remains in custody, according to court records.

The owner of the property was arrested and charged in 2023 in connection with an investigation into an illegal bio lab in Reedley, California, authorities said. The owner, a Chinese national, remains in federal custody and has pleaded not guilty.

Submission + - Scientists Explored Island Cave, Found 1 Million-Year-Old Remnants a Lost World (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: A spectacular trove of fossils in a discovered in a cave on New Zealand's North Island has given scientists their first glimpse of ancient forest species that lived there more than a million years ago. The fossils represent 12 ancient bird species and four frog species, including several previously unknown bird species. Taken together, the fossils paint a picture of an ancient world that looks drastically different than it does today. The discovery also fills in an important gap in scientific understanding of the patterns of extinction that preceded human arrival in New Zealand 750 years ago.

The team published a study on the find in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.

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