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Submission + - "Software is over" Developer uses AI builds Adobe clones after cancellation fees (techspot.com) 1

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Ars Technica reports, developer Brandon Thomas is taking on seven of Adobe's best-known applications through Artcraft. The project extend beyond Adobe's famous photo editing program to video production, vector graphics, page layouts, and PDF tools.

In his Reddit announcement, Thomas says he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to build the replacements in Rust. Photocraft imitates Photoshop, while Vectorcraft and Filmcraft take on Illustrator and Premiere. Lightcraft, Effectcraft, Designcraft, and Printcraft are the alternatives to Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro, respectively.

The apps are open source and free, with no subscription required. Users can download the source code, modify it, and contribute fixes. Thomas describes himself as a software industry veteran with 15 years of experience, including roughly a decade working with Rust. He also insists the project has team support and will not be abandoned after launch.

"We're going to reach 100% parity within a month," he said, which is an ambitious claim.

For now, the software remains at an early stage, and commenters have reported problems with basic functionality. They might look like Adobe's apps, but it doesn't sound like they're able to replace the long-established programs just yet.

Thomas says Adobe's cancelation fees helped motivate the project, which is understandable.

Thomas believes other developers will follow suit, predicting a future where free, near-identical open-source versions of popular paid apps will be widely available.

"Now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you," Thomas wrote. "We'll replace Google Search, we'll build our own smartphones, we'll build better infra. We'll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world."

"Software is over," he declared, somewhat boldly. And hopefully cancellation fees.

Submission + - Margret Hamilton, Director Working on the Apollo Guidence Computer, Passes Away

Submitted by BrendaEM
BrendaEM writes: From Wikipedia: Margaret Hamilton (née Heafield; August 17, 1936 – September 30, 2026) was an American computer scientist. She directed the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, where she led the development of the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer for the Apollo program. She later founded two software companies, Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

https://arstechnica.com/scienc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Submission + - Canonical facing Distributed Denial of Service Attack against its web infrastruc (phoronix.com)

Submitted by devphaeton
devphaeton writes: Unfortunately, Ubuntu is once again facing a distributed denial of service "DDoS" attack against its web infrastructure. This isn't the first time they have experienced this issue and Canonical's IT team is currently working to mitigate the attack.

Those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources today are finding the site inoperable amid what's now confirmed as an ongoing distributed denial of service attack.

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 + - Audacious space heist aims to bring home bits of mysterious martian moon (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In 1543, Portuguese merchants caught in stormy winds ran aground on Tanegashima, a verdant island enveloped by crystal-blue waters just south of the Japanese mainland. To those living there, these sailors—the first Europeans known to set foot in Japan—were nothing short of aliens from a distant land, bringing with them strange customs, an unfamiliar language, and new technology.

Nearly 5 centuries later, the island is once again serving as a bridge to an alien world. On 20 October, a rocket will blast off from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA’s) Tanegashima Space Center, flinging a spacecraft the size of a car to Mars. When it arrives, it’ll swoop around the planet before landing on a lumpy island floating above it. And that’s when the real drama begins.

We live in an age of space heists. In recent years, the United States and Japan have retrieved material from several asteroids with smash-and-grab spacecraft. After reaching an asteroid this summer, China is set to return samples from it next year, and it recently conducted the first sample return from the far side of the Moon.

But Japan’s $350 million Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is going to do something even more audacious: Fly to Phobos (ancient Greek for “fear”), one of the two small, battered moons of Mars, and land on the roughly Manhattan-size body not once, but twice. Using two novel extractors, MMX will gather several tablespoons’ worth of material and return the treasure to Earth in 2031. “Phobos will be the second best known moon in the Solar System,” says Matija Cúk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute.

Those precious few grams of material could resolve the mystery of Phobos’s origin—and, potentially, that of its diminutive partner, Deimos (“dread”). Scientists are split on whether the moons are captured asteroids or the consolidated remnants of material thrown up by a long-ago martian impact. But regardless of their genesis, MMX researchers say it’s likely they have since picked up a dusting of material blasted off Mars itself. “This is not going to be just a Phobos sample return mission,” says Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built one of MMX’s sample extractors. “It’s going to be Phobos and Mars.”

Submission + - AI slop or the future of development: Adobe Apps "re-implemented" in Rust (github.com) 2

Submitted by jbarr
jbarr writes: Looks like a team has used Claude Opus 5.5 to vibe-code "re-implementations" of several Adobe applications, including...

Photoshop > PhotoCraft
Acrobat > PrintCraft
Premier > FilmCraft
After Effects > EffectsCraft
Lightroom > LightCraft
Illustrator > VectorCraft
InDesign > DesignCraft

They released standalone versions for many platforms as well as web-hosted versions. They install and load extremely fast, and are surprisingly small. Since they have been out for only a few days, they are not 100% feature-complete, but the update rate has been fast.

Some say they will be sued quickly, but allegedly, the developers used Claude to recreate these apps without decompiling or reverse engineering, so that could be an interesting legal challenge to follow.

Submission + - Why can't I use normally the app I created for myself using the Antigravity?

Submitted by Max_W
Max_W writes: I created for myself an app, which I use for my daily work. I do not want neither publish, nor sell this app. I used the Antigravity agent, and it took me about twenty minutes to build this app.
It works perfectly, doing exactly what I need. I could not find anything even remotely so good for years. Still I have to use it on my smartphone in the Developer Mode. And I do not want to keep my smartphone in Developer Mode constantly as it is not safe.
My question is the following. Now when we can easily build an app for ourselves, for our specific needs, with the help of an AI agent, can we expect to have a possibility to use it on our own smartphone normally without going through Apple Store or Play Store hoops?

Comment Re:Stop complaining (Score 1) 47

by JustAnotherOldGuy (#66366842) Attached to: Alexa Can't Control the AUX Input On Amazon Echo Speakers Anymore

Yes, yes, they 'sold' it to you and you did pay real money for it, but don't confuse that with you 'owning' anything.

Think of it as the way you 'own' the faucet in your home. You do own the faucet but you don't own the water, even if you pay for every drop you use.

Alexa, Nest, Homepod, etc.... all these devices are basically empty boxes with an internet connection. What you 'own' is whatever they decide to provide and nothing else. (Although they might make decent paperweights.)

Submission + - First Nuclear Clocks Start Ticking in Vienna and Beijing (phys.org)

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Two groups, one in Vienna and one in Beijing, have successfully demonstrated the world's first nuclear clocks. Standard atomic clocks, like the caesium clocks that define the second, operate by observing the transition of electrons between different orbits about the nucleus. The resulting radiation is usually in the microwave range, and can produce clocks accurate to one second in 100 billion years.

Nuclear clocks go a step further, and probe energy transitions within the nucleus itself. Nuclei can arrange their protons and neutrons into different configurations, called isomers. The isomer with the lowest energy is the one usually found; higher-energy ones are only metastable and decay quickly. Usually it takes serious energy — x-rays and gamma rays — to excite a nucleus into a higher-energy arrangement. It so happens that thorium-229 can be excited using UV light with a wavelength of 148 nm — just within the capabilities of some exotic lasers.

It's still been quite a challenge. For one thing, Th-229 is not found in nature; it must be extracted from the decay chain of uranium-235. The Beijing team used just a microgram mixed in a crystal of calcium fluoride.

Although these prototype nuclear clocks are not yet more accurate than existing atomic clocks (one second in millions, rather than billions, of years), they show the way towards what may be possible. Because the energy transition is in the nucleus, rather than the electron cloud, it is less susceptible to outside disturbances like magnetic fields. And the fundamental frequency is much higher (five orders of magnitude), which should yield more precise timing. This development could lead to smaller and more reliable time standards across the world (and solar system).

Submission + - Google, Unity Launch Platform to Create Video Games From Prompts (straitstimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Alphabet’s Google and gaming tools developer Unity Software announced a new platform that will allow people to create video games from simple text prompts, marking the latest incursion of generative artificial intelligence into artistic and creative industries. The initiative, called Playground, will “put game creation in the hands of millions of new creators, and bring new experiences to billions of players worldwide," the companies said in a statement on Oct 7.

With its debut, Playground will let people 18 and older generate and customize games using natural language prompts, “no coding required." Later in 2026, a new expanded creation experience called Unity Spark, will be integrated with Playground, providing “robust, professional-level” mechanics and high-fidelity 3D capabilities. Creators will be able to build “immersive, superlative experiences” with a simple text prompt, according to the release. Playground builds on Google’s push into world models, a type of AI that generates virtual environments in real time from text prompts, rather than just video.

Submission + - Auctioning IP packet sent via RFC1149 in 2001 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There is an actual RFC-1149 IP packet being auctioned off via Christie's auction house now until October 13, 2026. This is an IP packet you can actually touch, versus just being an abstraction in the ether.

It is one of the four that was sent and eventually received by the team in Norway that implemented the RFC in 2001 (https://blug.linux.no/rfc1149/)

https://onlineonly.christies.c...

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