185096496
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Fires at recycling centres caused by wrongly discarded lithium batteries such as those found in vapes are occurring at the rate of more than 10 a week, according to new figures.
Experts say the sheer volume of battery fires now occurring at waste facilities has reached a crisis that is putting lives at risk, costing £1bn a year and frustrating fire chiefs.
In figures shared with the Guardian, the Environment Services Association (ESA), the trade body for waste management companies, said its members had reported 1,518 fires in the year to March 2026. At least 541 of these fires were directly attributed to lithium ion batteries, the survey found. There were a further 216 battery fires in bin lorries.
185080576
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Elon Musk’s talk about maintaining a million-strong AI data center satellite megaconstellation may not exactly be practical or economical, but it might be unique. It’s about the closest we’ve come to confronting a scheme that would export a considerable amount of valuable materials into space. Humans aren’t doing a great job of material sustainability, but normally we’re talking about stuff escaping a recycling pipeline rather than escaping Earth’s gravitational pull.
Given the roughly five-year expected lifetime for data center GPUs, about 200,000 of the 1 million proposed SpaceX AI1 satellites would be decommissioned each year. Based on their May 29 FCC filing, about 40,000 would definitely deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere. (Those materials would largely be dispersed throughout the atmosphere, turning a resource into a diffuse contaminant that slowly settles over the globe. One related issue: the aluminum would cause an unknown amount of ozone depletion over a period of decades.) Some or all of the remaining 160,000 satellites would be moved outward into a distant “disposal” orbit, instead. Either way, they’re lost from a “material life cycle” point of view.
185048632
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Children’s lungs grew bigger and stronger after the most polluting vehicles were restricted from entering London, a study has found. Examinations of London schoolchildren before and after the introduction of the city’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) found a restoration of lung capacity that had been stunted by exposure to pollution. The researchers said the findings were a vindication of the low-emission zone policy, which had been criticized as a burden on motorists.
Air pollution from traffic has stunted the development of children’s lungs in London for decades. Previous research found that by the age of eight or nine, children from the most polluted areas had 5-10% less lung capacity than their peers elsewhere. That impairment, which scientists said was the result of exposure to nitrogen dioxide, put them at increased risk as adults of developing respiratory diseases, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and premature death.
184982304
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
DiCello Levitt LLP today filed a human rights lawsuit against Ubiquiti Inc., alleging the New York-based technology company helped power the battlefield communications network Russia uses to hunt, target, and kill Ukrainian civilians with drones.
Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit is brought by Ukrainian civilians and family members of civilians killed or injured in Russian drone and drone-assisted attacks. It alleges that Ubiquiti's long-range wireless radio bridge antennas and airMAX technology became critical infrastructure in Russia's command-and-control network — connecting drone pilots, reconnaissance feeds, commanders, and attack units in real time across a roughly 100-kilometer "kill zone" that Russian operators have turned into a "human safari."
184974815
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Microsoft Japan has announced the results of its 4-day work week trial, and it will shock no-one to know the experiment was hugely popular with the company's employees. What may surprise people is that the shortened week increased productivity by almost 40 percent — thanks in part to shorter, more efficient meetings.
This August, Microsoft Japan trialed a 4-day work week for its entire workforce, calling the project the "Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019". Approximately 2300 employees were given 5 Fridays off, with no reduction in salary and no days taken out of their annual leave.
Further, The Mainichi reported that Microsoft Japan also planned to subsidise employees' family vacations or further education by up to ¥100,000.
"Work a short time, rest well and learn a lot. It's necessary to have an environment that allows you to feel your purpose in life and make a greater impact at work," said Microsoft Japan president and CEO Takuya Hirano. "I want employees to think about and experience how they can achieve the same results with 20 percent less working time."
184971585
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) has identified an Nvidia Jetson Orin computer module inside Russia’s new S-71 Monochrome air-launched cruise missile, potentially indicating the use of artificial intelligence technology in the weapon, the agency said Wednesday, Aug. 12.
The finding was published in the “Components in Weapons” section of the HUR’s War&Sanctions portal, which documents foreign electronic components found in Russian weapons used against Ukraine.
The latest research identified 35 electronic components in Russian weapons, according to the HUR.
HUR specialists identified the Nvidia Jetson Orin module in the S-71 Monochrome, a new Russian air-launched cruise missile.
The agency said the use of the computer module may indicate the integration of artificial intelligence technologies into the missile.
The HUR did not provide further details on the specific functions performed by the Nvidia module in the weapon.
184890786
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have successfully freed up power on Voyager 2, extending how long the spacecraft can continue to do science.
Nicknamed the “Big Bang,” the effort involved simultaneously turning off certain powered devices and substituting them with lower-power alternatives while ensuring the spacecraft remains warm enough to operate.
The Voyagers get their power from radioisotope thermoelectric generators, devices that convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. Due to the plutonium supply continually depleting, both probes lose about 4 watts of power each year. After almost a half-century since launch, the spacecraft power margins have grown razor thin, requiring the team to conserve energy by shutting off non-essential devices and systems.
The mission team plans to perform the same swap on Voyager 1, which is farther from Earth than Voyager 2, and to complete the effort in the coming months.
184870136
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can’t take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that “weak sensing” hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance. He never said the word Tesla. But camera-only is Tesla’s entire bet, and this was a direct shot at it.
“Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there’s that proof of existence,” he said. “If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that’s a very reasonable way to go.” Then the catch. If you’re targeting full autonomy and strongly superhuman performance, he said, “you find that weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early.”
184829946
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Bra-Maxxing might be the latest illicit aero workaround of the women’s peloton. Wielerflits reported Sunday night that several teams at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift have voiced concern over riders wearing over-sized bras stuffed with padding in the quest for free watts. An artificially inflated chest can create an “aero fairing.” This confers a small but significant aerodynamic advantage to riders hunched low on the bike, particularly in the TT position.
Belgian aero expert Blocken has produced many studies on the subject, including a paper in 2024 that found that a large, optimally-placed chest fairing could give a 3.6 percent drag reduction and at least 0.78 seconds per kilometre.
184720294
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Community-led open source project hosting site Codeberg has formally announced that projects whose code is largely or fully machine-generated through LLMs and other ‘AI’ tools will no longer be welcome. This follows on the heels of a similar ban on cryptocurrency-related projects.
The community vote was on two issues, the first being the notion that scraping of project code for the use in LLMs should be forbidden, which was a motion that easily passed. The second motion was on disallowing projects whose code was substantially generated by LLMs like Claude, OpenAI Codex, and similar. This motion passed with 358 in favor versus 144 against.
In the earlier linked blog post the reasoning behind especially this second issue is expanded upon, covering not only ‘license whitewashing’, but also the direct and indirect hardware costs, with the expanding ‘AI’ datacenter hyperscaling having massively increased hardware costs for Codeberg over the past years, as the costs have been largely externalized.
184246024
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
New PlayStation games will no longer be released on discs from January 2028, the gaming giant has announced. Sony said in a blog post new games would still be able to be bought in shops, but they would come with a digital code. It comes just days after Rockstar announced the hotly-anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI would similarly launch without a physical disc. It marks a significant moment for the gaming industry, which has in recent years begun to rely more and more on digital distribution. Sony said the move came "as consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital". "This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs," it added. But it has been met with some pushback online, with gaming journalist Vikki Blake calling it a "body blow to consumer rights".
184064616
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AmiMoJo writes:
The short version is that because many of the tablet drivers have Wacom in the name (e.g. libwacom), they don't want to be associated with it.
183750786
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Every few years, Linux Tech Tips has some staff try out Linux as their main OS. In previous years, it hasn't gone so well, but in 2026, of the three users who switched, two are staying on Linux and one says they will try de-bloating Windows and then decide which to use.
This time around, progress made with the Proton compatibility layer for games had a huge impact. Hardware compatibility was good, sometimes even better than Windows. The most interesting shift, IMHO, was that LLMs (AI) made fixing issues a lot less painful. In previous challenges, the hostile responses that were often received in response to questions were cited as being very off-putting. LLMs simply don't do that, and instead do much of the hard work of finding up to date solutions, which is a consistent problem in the fast moving world of Linux.
183665516
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
We’ll often see headlines quoting how many gigawatts of new solar farms or coal plants China is building. But it’s hard to get a meaningful sense of scale for how electricity generation in China is changing.
The chart puts it in perspective.
In 2025 alone, China’s electricity generation increased by almost 500 terawatt-hours (TWh). This is compared here to the total amount of electricity that whole countries generate each year.
Germany generates almost exactly that amount. That means China effectively added a Germany-sized grid to its electricity system in just one year.
What’s also quite staggering is that almost all of this new generation came from solar and wind. China generated 340 TWh more electricity from solar than the year before.
181738064
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Windows has limited FAT32 partitions to a maximum of 32GB for decades now. When memory cards and USB drives exceeded 32GB in size, the only options were exFAT or NTFS. Neither option was well supported on other platforms at first, although exFAT support is fairly widespread now.
In their latest blog post, Microsoft announced that the limit for FAT32 partitions is being increased to 2TB. Of course, that doesn't mean that every device that supports FAT32 will work flawlessly with a 2TB partition size, but at least there is a decent chance that older devices with don't support exFAT will now be usable with memory cards over 32GB.
