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Submission + - Trump on Iran war's cost: "I don't think about American financial situation." (the-independent.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the plight of Americans finding it harder and harder to make ends meet and rising gas and consumer prices simply aren’t on his mind as the months-long Iran war and impasse over the Strait of Hormuz continue to fuel surging inflation in the United States.

Trump made the stunning brush-off statement as he departed the White House for Beijing, where he will be feted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a state visit, including a lavish Thursday night banquet at the Great Hall of the People.

Submission + - There's an Unhinged New Video Game About Trump and the Iran War (wired.com) 1

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: A new video game about President Donald Trump’s war in Iran features fights with the pope and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. It’s impossible to win, and that’s the point.

The game, Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell, was developed by Secret Handshake, an anonymous group of artists behind a handful of satirical works mocking the Trump administration. The game is available to play online, but three fully functional arcade cabinets are currently installed at the Washington, DC, War Memorial. The games will remain there for the next few days.

In the game, Trump is the playable character, on a quest to collect barrels of oil and ideas for Truth Social posts, to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and win the war. During the game, Trump’s social media posts do little to move the needle, creating an endless cycle of tasks and threats that ultimately lead nowhere. Even if the game is unwinnable, players can lose, and do so abruptly.

Submission + - How is it that Youtube's auto-generated subtitles are so appallingly bad?

Submitted by Anne Thwacks
Anne Thwacks writes: I frequently use the subtitles on YouTube — either not to disturb others in the room, or because my hearing is not very good.
The subtitling is terrible! Almost every sentence has a huge error. Proper names are more often wrong than right. Non-English place names are almost always mangled to barely recognizable, and no effort whatever is made to use context to figure out whether a place name is Russian or Arabic, and often complete garbage is used in place of a common French, Spanish or Italian name.
If AI actually works (I have my doubts about this), surely it would be possible to figure out language contexts: it it is about an event in Italy, then expect a lot of Italian names. If it is about the Russia-Ukraine war, then expect places in Russia or Ukraine to be more plausible than mindless gobbledegook!
Does YouTube not know that there are places in the world that are not in America?
However, plenty of names of people and places famous in America are also regularly screwed up.
I am sure that the vast majority of the foul-ups could be fixed by the use of a dictionary — available from a very popular book retailer who would be happy to have some free publicity. (But they will get nothing free from me).
However, the situation seems to be getting worse!
Do Americans sue people for spelling their names right?
Is there another reason for this appalling stupidity?
Enquiring minds want to know!

Comment Re:ah yes, evil China (Score 1) 73

No moral standing? What countries have higher moral standing than the US (not saying we're top of the heap)?

That list is easy to compile. And long.

Start with the Scandinavians. Add all of the Baltics. Continue in Oceania and then East Asia with Japan and South Korea.

Admittedly, now we move to an area of the world with candidates which will feature at the opposite end of that list.

Submission + - An Amateur just Solved a 60-year-old Math Problem—by Asking AI (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Scientific American reports that a ChatGPT AI has proved a conjecture with a method no human had developed. A 23 year old student Liam Price just cracked a 60-year-old problem that world-class mathematicians have tried and failed to solve.

The new solution that Price got in response to a single prompt to GPT-5.4 Pro and posted on www.erdosproblems.com, a website devoted to the Erds problems.

The question Price solved—or prompted ChatGPT to solve—concerns special sets of whole numbers, where no number in the set can be evenly divided by any other. Erds called these “primitive sets” because of their connection to similarly indivisible prime numbers.Price wasn’t aware of this history when he entered the problem into ChatGPT.

Price sent it to his occasional collaborator Kevin Barreto, a second-year undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Cambridge. The duo had jump-started the AI-for-Erds craze late last year by prompting a free version of ChatGPT with open problems chosen at random from the Erds problems website. Reviewing Price’s message, Barreto realized what they had was special, and experts whom he notified quickly took notice.

Submission + - Europe Demolishes Russian Soyuz Launch Pad in French Guiana (united24media.com)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Up until 2022, the Russians had an agreement with the European Space Agency to launch their Soyuz rockets from the Kourou launch site in French Guiana. The 15-year cooperation program between ESA and Roscosmos conducted 26 successful launches before being suspended after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Kourou launch site's near-equatorial location is advantageous for commercial launches due to the additional velocity rockets gain from Earth’s rotation. The demolition of the Russian launch pad at Kourou included a controlled explosion of a 52-meter mobile service tower. The remaining infrastructure at the site—including the assembly and testing complex, railway lines, liquid oxygen storage facilities, and fueling systems—will be transferred to MaiaSpace, a French startup affiliated with Arianespace. The company plans to reuse up to 80% of the existing infrastructure for its own launch vehicle program.

Submission + - Mozilla Thunderbolt is an open-source AI client focused on control and self-host (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Mozillaâ(TM)s email subsidiary MZLA Technologies just introduced Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client aimed at organizations that want to run AI on their own infrastructure instead of relying entirely on cloud services. The idea is to give companies full control over their data, models, and workflows while still offering things like chat, research tools, automation, and integration with enterprise systems through the Haystack AI framework. Native apps are planned for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Personally, I like the self-hosted concept, but the name âoeThunderboltâ feels like a miss since there are already a ton of unrelated tech products using that name.

Submission + - CIA claims new quantum magnetometry tech identifies sound from miles away (nypost.com) 1

Submitted by sosume
sosume writes: The New York Post reports that the CIA used a previously classified tool called 'Ghost Murmur' (from Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works) for the first time in combat. The system allegedly uses long-range quantum magnetometry and AI to detect the unique electromagnetic signature of a human heartbeat from up to 40 miles away, helping locate the weapons systems officer from a downed F-15E in southern Iran's mountains after he evaded capture for ~48 hours.

Submission + - A coalition in the EU is building Euro-Office as an alternative to MS Office

Submitted by thephydes
thephydes writes: It will be interesting to see how this progresses.

https://tech.eu/2026/03/27/eur...

"Across Europe, public administrations, enterprises and educational institutions are reassessing their dependence on non-European productivity platforms. While office software remains mission-critical infrastructure, there is currently no solution that combines full Microsoft format compatibility, a familiar user experience and genuine digital sovereignty under European stewardship."

Submission + - Russia and Ukraine wage high-tech war in the 'death zone' (dw.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Traditional shelters and trenches no longer offer protection in this war, he said: "The entire infantry — both Ukrainian and enemy soldiers — are digging into underground tunnels to remain out of reach of attack of the drones."

To spot traces of the enemy, he said, the brigade members carefully "read signs on the ground from the sky." They hunt for subtle clues: trash left on the streets of abandoned villages, freshly churned earth in gardens, a small pile of wood in the middle of a yard.

As soon as his brigade discovers a Russian hideout, combat drones are sent there. "Russia does the same thing," Thunder said. "Whoever has the best hideouts and the upper hand with drones dominates."

Submission + - LLM Window FOMO vs. Credit Consumption

Submitted by DaPhil
DaPhil writes: Say you're an indie dev with a great idea. You work on that in your own time, and you've got yourself a costly subscription to any of the current LLM/Coding Assistant providers. You get a lot of stuff done, but then its "hit your limit" and you are forced to buy groceries. And then you wake up in the middle of the night thinking "hey my 5 hour window is up, I need to input some more stuff to maximize my investment". Needless to say, your wife and kids do not approve. So you go for one of the credit-based providers. You buy some credits and realize quickly that no matter what query you send — and how long it takes — it'll use the same amount of credits. Even "Thank you" consumes credits.That doesn't make sense either. You might want to buy a local board to do "your own stuff", but that is going to cost you 4-to-5 figures money and you're dependent on OSS models being good enough, which is very probably not the case since you are not writing the 300th instance of a shopping app. So now you're in that weird situation where you are very happy that LLMs exist, but you are very unhappy about the way you can only interact with them through, lets say, "problematic" monetary plans. What do you do?

Submission + - Has Slashdot Become More Ads Than "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters"? 2

Submitted by FictionPimp
FictionPimp writes: Load Slashdot's front page today without an ad blocker and count what you see before scrolling.

Above the fold, there are 6 distinct ad placements: a full-width Retool banner just below the navigation, a MongoDB Atlas inline banner styled to look like a site notice sitting directly above the first story, two sidebar ad units (one for a game dev course bundle, one for business software comparison), a "Sponsored Content" slot beginning to appear at the bottom edge, and a sticky MongoDB footer bar fixed to the bottom of the screen. MongoDB alone holds two simultaneous placements on the same page load. The ratio is 6 ads to 2 stories before you even scroll.

Slashdot has carried the tagline "News for nerds, stuff that matters" since Rob Malda was running the site out of a college dorm in 1997. It is now owned by Slashdot Media, the same parent as SourceForge, and the nav bar includes a "Thought Leadership" section, which is industry parlance for paid editorial content.

None of this is unique to Slashdot. Display advertising is how independent tech publications survive. But there is a meaningful difference between ads that share a page with content and ads that outnumber and surround the content, with some of them actively designed to look like part of the editorial feed.

The question for the Slashdot community: at what point does the original promise of the site, a curated community-moderated signal in a noisy web, get buried under the noise it was supposed to filter? Should the site be rebranded: "Ads for Nerds, News if we can fit it in"?

Submission + - How Jeffrey Epstein Ingratiated Himself With Top Microsoft Execs

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In How Jeffrey Epstein Ingratiated Himself With Top Microsoft Executives, the NY Times begins, "For more than two decades, the convicted sex offender developed a network at the tech giant, making him privy to [CEO] succession discussions and other business. [...] The files from the Justice Department show that he spent more than a decade developing a network of Microsoft executives, including Mr. Gates; Nathan Myhrvold, a former technology chief; Steven Sinofsky, who ran Microsoft’s Windows division; Linda Stone, a former technology research executive; Reid Hoffman, a Microsoft board member; and employees of Mr. Gates’s personal investment and charity funds. [...] Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s communications chief, said the company was disappointed to read emails between Mr. Epstein and “former Microsoft employees acting in their personal capacities.” Without mentioning a name, Mr. Shaw acknowledged the emails showed that a former executive — who was Mr. [Steven] Sinofsky — had shared confidential company business with Mr. Epstein."

Email released by the DOJ related to Microsoft included: 1. Epstein being tipped off to the announcement of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's planned resignation announcement in Aug. 2013 by a forwarded email from the President of bgC3 [aka Gates Ventures], a personal service company for Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, on a day that saw Microsoft stock soar 7%., 2. Epstein being given a heads up by a redacted sender about a rumored 2011 Bill Gates return to Microsoft that never panned out, 3. Epstein being told in a 2013 Steven Sinofsky email about Ballmer's desire to buy a phone company that included some other juicy insider tidbits (when Microsoft's Nokia purchase was announced the following year, Microsoft stock sank 6%). In other correspondence, Sinofsky — who headed Microsoft's Windows Division — thanked Epstein for his advice in negotiating a $14 million exit package from Microsoft and later forwarded Epstein old internal email from top execs discussing the poor sales of the Microsoft Surface tablet.

In one Microsoft-related Epstein email, former Harvard President Larry Summers — who recently announced he's giving up his Harvard teaching appointments — sent Epstein a terse two-word email dissing Melinda Gates' Women in Tech initiative. "I'm gagging," Summers wrote, attaching an article about Gates' efforts (a search didn't find any reply from Epstein). Summers came under fire in 2005 when he said that women lack natural ability in math in science. Summers earlier resigned his OpenAI Board seat amid fallout over his Epstein ties that came to light following the DOJ's release of documents last November, which included the revelation that Summers and his wife were invited to dine with Bill and Melinda Gates at Epstein's NYC mansion in 2013 , Melinda's one and only Epstein encounter. Interestingly, Microsoft President Brad Smith — who coincidentally helped negotiate Microsoft's $14M exit package for Epstein-advised Sinofsky — cautioned OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about naming Summers to the OpenAI Board in November 2023. “Your future would be decided by Larry [Summers],” Smith texted. “He’s smart but so mercurial [...] too risky.” The advice went unheeded, with Altman saying the choice of Summers was non-negotiable.

Submission + - Workers who love 'synergizing paradigms' might be bad at their jobs (phys.org) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like "synergistic leadership," or "growth-hacking paradigms" may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals. Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, research by cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell introduces the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric.

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