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Submission + - EA Shutting Down Bioware (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by atari_kid
atari_kid writes: According to a recent report by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, EA has reportedly decided to shut down BioWare. While the closure has yet to be officially announced, it appears the studio's future may already have been decided.

Submission + - Microsoft îs temporarily barred from using H1-B Visas (apnews.com)

Submitted by Smonster
Smonster writes: "Mr. Vance said on Thursday that companies like Microsoft have used the H-1B visa program to exploit the Labor Department’s permanent labor certification program, which allows H-1B visa recipients to obtain a green card and potentially stay in the United States indefinitely. He said the system was effectively enabling companies to hire “indentured servants” to replace American workers for a fraction of the cost."

Mr. Vance said that in the last year, the company had laid off 6,000 American workers, while it benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards.

Anthony D’Esposito, the inspector general of the Labor Department, also announced that the agency was launching investigations into several universities for potential abuses of the J-1 visa, a cultural exchange program that allows foreign students to work and study in the United States. Among the nine schools are Harvard, Stanford, Arizona State and M.I.T.

Submission + - The Trump administration has barred Microsoft, Adobe from H-1B (politico.com)

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

The Trump administration has barred Microsoft, Adobe and six IT companies from sponsoring H-1B workers for green cards, Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday. Vance made the comments during a press conference on visa fraud, during which he argued Microsoft is discriminating against Americans by prioritizing foreign workers

Submission + - Vance suspends Microsoft, others from foreign workers applying for green cards, (foxbusiness.com)

Submitted by Kingduck
Kingduck writes: Vice President JD Vance and Labor Department officials announced Thursday that the Trump administration is suspending Microsoft, Adobe and others from a key employment-based, green-card program, accusing major tech firms and outsourcing companies of abusing the visa system at the expense of American workers.

Submission + - Ruby on Rails Creator Abandons Ruby During Keynote Speech (youtube.com) 1

Submitted by Grady Martin
Grady Martin writes: David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, announced during a keynote speech at Rails World 2026 on Wednesday that his current project, HEY, has begun migrating from Ruby to a vibe-coded rewrite in Rust. His speech also touched on human productivity and the importance of optimization, noting that agentic developers can “do whatever the fuck [they] want” to achieve the latter. He closed the hour with a Malcom in the Middle meme and commanded the audience: “Don't be a loser”.

Submission + - The 'Anti-AI' Panic Is Led by...AI Companies (hotair.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: What we are seeing is a massive, pretty obviously coordinated campaign by AI researchers, companies, NGOs, and politicians to strangle competition in an industry and, as I will show, save the financial bacon of the top AI companies that are vastly overextended financially because they have made contractual commitments that they simply have no prospect of paying for.

Comment Re:Are You Sure? (Score 1) 167

I think the first poster in this thread got it essentially right. This "top researcher" is trying to whip up hype for the new startup he'll be spinning, shortly.

There's so much hype coming out of the AI industry right now and it really seems like they're playing the "any publicity is good publicity" card pretty hard. Why wouldn't he?

Meantime, I agree, the poster you're replying to is probably the most logical and well reasoned view in the thread. This is exactly what I've been trying to explain to my wife about all the insane AI stories we're seeing and hearing on the news every morning now.

Submission + - Independent review of NATS failure on Aug 28 2023

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: Independent Review of NATS (En Route) Plc’s Flight Planning System Failure on 28 August 2023

A perfectly legitimate flight plan triggered a previously undiscovered software edge case. Both NATS's primary and backup flight-processing systems hit the same error and shut themselves down.

Once both systems were down, NATS's manual fallback could process only about 60 flight plans/hour, versus roughly 700–900/hour normally. That forced severe traffic restrictions.

What actually crashed? The failed component was FPRSA-R, NATS's flight-plan processing system at Swanwick. The flight was Los Angeles Paris Orly. Its flight plan contained a waypoint abbreviated DVL. DVL can refer to Deauville, France, but also Devil's Lake, North Dakota. Eurocontrol's processing had added additional waypoints to the flight plan.

FPRSA-R was trying to determine where the aircraft would leave UK airspace. It encountered the DVL abbreviation and interpreted the wrong DVL as the exit point. The result was logically impossible: the aircraft appeared to leave UK airspace before it had entered it. The software recognised this as an impossible situation and generated a critical exception. The primary system disconnected from the operational network and entered maintenance mode.

Submission + - Parents Demanding Tech Opt Outs Take Their Fight to Federal Court (edtech.law)

Submitted by Hasaf
Hasaf writes: On August 26, 2026, seven families from Lower Merion School District outside Philadelphia, PA, sued the District, the Superintendent, and certain members of the board, asserting violations of their Constitutional rights.

Plaintiffs allege that District leaders have presided over a digital free-for-all, where students of all ages can and do access online pornography, violent videos, gambling sites, and video games, including one in which the player’s goal is to escape from sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein’s private island. Instead of paying attention in class, students consume an endless stream of short-form videos, browse social media, and shop. They chat with strangers and bully each other. They frequently interact with AI chatbots, which not only help them cheat on their assignments and diminish what they have already learned, but have also sent grown adults into delusional spirals and have coached other young people to take their own lives. Lower Merion students do this and more at all hours of the day: on the bus, in class, at lunch, and during breaks, and also at home, late into the night, when their parents think they are doing homework.

The complaint, with exhibits, can be found there https://edtech.law/wp-content/...

The link to the complaints is also at the bottom of the article

Submission + - Debian Developers Reject AI Ban and Vote for Responsible Use of Generative AI (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Debian developers have rejected proposals that would have banned or strongly discouraged the use of artificial intelligence within the project. Instead, members selected a proposal called Responsible Use of Generative AI, which says Debian neither endorses nor prohibits generative AI for software development, packaging, documentation, and other project work.

Under the new policy, contributors remain responsible for the quality, correctness, maintainability, licensing, and legal compliance of anything they submit, including AI-assisted work. Human review and testing are expected, while disclosure of AI use is encouraged but not required. The ballot included several more restrictive alternatives, including proposals to ban LLM contributions through the Debian Social Contract and to declare that Debian is created by humans.

Submission + - Microsoft Japan's 4-day work week boosted productivity by 40 percent (mashable.com) 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
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."

Submission + - AI and the 4-Day Work Week (bbc.com)

Submitted by hadleyburg
hadleyburg writes: The BBC reports "Tech leaders say AI means less work — their staff say they work up to 90 hours a week".

While a 4-day working week was suggested as one of the benefits of AI, it hasn't yet come to pass — not even in the AI companies themselves.

Submission + - Roseville, CA Study Finds 71% Error Rate for Flock Cameras (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by Cognitive Dissident
Cognitive Dissident writes: According the Business Insider, a study by Roseville, CA has found a 71% error rate in Flock License Plate Reader reports to the city police department. And the errors go far beyond the ALPR.

Business Insider filed public-records requests to obtain email correspondence, data, meeting notes, contracts, and other records that reveal the extensive back-and-forth between Roseville and Flock over repeated errors by Flock's system. The cameras regularly missed vehicles, captured blurry images, misread license plate characters and states, and sent delayed alerts to police about vehicles possibly connected to crimes, the records show.

But this is not a unique situation, as the story goes on to give more examples of very high error rates and the serious consequences of those errors in many other communities across the country.

Submission + - This 'adversarial' pattern can prevent surveillance cameras from detecting you (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by ZipNada
ZipNada writes: Bill Swearingen has spent the past year running largely the same test, over and over again. The goal was to produce a computer-generated pattern that could block the surveillance cameras lining America’s streets from detecting it.

Some 31 million tests later, Swearingen says he can now produce patterns on-demand that, when applied to clothing and objects, prevent some of the most commonly deployed license plate readers and surveillance cameras from detecting whatever the pattern covers, from people to vehicles.

His project, which he calls noRecognition, allows people to escape the automatic detection and algorithmic surveillance used across the U.S. and beyond.

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