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Submission + - IEA Drops Peak Oil Predictions (oilprice.com)

Submitted by magzteel
magzteel writes: The International Energy Agency has dropped its predictions that oil demand growth will peak in a matter of a few years. In the latest edition of its World Energy Outlook, the IEA said oil and gas demand could continue growing until 2050.

The IEA said that the coming years and decades will see a consistent increase in demand for energy across industry, households and, notably, information technology. Investments in data centers this year could reach $580 billion this year, the IEA’s secretary-general said, which exceeds the expected $540 billion in oil and gas industry investment.

As demand for energy grows, so will demand for the traditional sources of that energy. In a departure from its predictions of peak oil demand and peak natural gas demand before 2030, the IEA now expects oil demand to reach 113 million barrels by 2050, under the stated policies scenario that the outlet reintroduced this year after dropping it for five years to focus on aspirational scenarios focused on net zero.

Submission + - How the US cut climate-changing emissions while its economy more than doubled (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Countries around the world have been discussing the need to rein in climate change for three decades, yet global greenhouse gas emissions—and global temperatures with them—keep rising.

When it seems like we're getting nowhere, it's useful to step back and examine the progress that has been made.

Let's take a look at the United States, historically the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter. Over those three decades, the U.S. population soared by 28% and the economy, as measured by gross domestic product adjusted for inflation, more than doubled.

Submission + - Sam Altman says 'enough' to questions about OpenAI's revenue (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that the company is doing “well more” than $13 billion in annual revenue — and he sounded a little testy when pressed on how it will pay for its massive spending commitments.

“First of all, we’re doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer,” Altman said, prompting laughs from Nadella. “I just — enough. I think there are a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares.”

Altman acknowledged that there are ways the company “might screw it up” — for example by failing to get access to enough computing resources — but he said that “revenue is growing steeply.”

At the same time, he denied reports that OpenAI plans to go public next year.

“No no no, we don’t have anything that specific,” Altman said. “I’m a realist, I assume it will happen someday, but I don’t know why people write these reports. We don’t have a date in mind, we don’t have a board decision to do this or anything like that. I just assume it’s where things will eventually go.”

Submission + - Toronto Mom: Tesla's Grok chatbot asked kid for nudes (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by jddj
jddj writes: A Toronto Mom says the recently "upgrade" of a Grok AI chatbot that Tesla installed in her vehicle steered a chat about soccer stars Ronaldo and Messi to a request for the child to send nude photos.

When CBC asked Tesla about the incident, they got no response, however xAI sent what appeared to be an automated response of "Legacy Media Lies".

Submission + - ACCC accuses Microsoft of misleading 2.7 million Australians over M365 fees (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by beta.services
beta.services writes: The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is taking Microsoft to court for giving Australian M365 customers two options; pay for the additional service, or cancel their M365 subscription. The consumer watchdog believes customers were deceived by Microsoft hiding a third option to not get the additional features and associated costs.

The ACCC alleges that from late October last year, Microsoft told customers on auto-renewing subscription plans that the only way to keep using M365 was to accept the extra costs, or otherwise cancel their service. The commission alleges Microsoft deliberately concealed a classic subscription option that would have allowed customers to continue using the software without paying extra. This, the ACCC alleged, "minimised the number of consumers opting out of AI integration and increased pricing."

Submission + - Celebrating 1 Trillion Web Pages Archived (archive.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: This October, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is projected to hit a once-in-a-generation milestone: 1 trillion web pages archived. That’s one trillion memories, moments, and movements—preserved for the public and available to access via the Wayback Machine.

We’ll be commemorating this historic achievement on October 22, 2025, with a global event: a party at our San Francisco headquarters and a livestream for friends and supporters around the world. More than a celebration, it’s a tribute to what we’ve built together: a free and open digital library of the web.

Join us in marking this incredible milestone. Together, we’ve built the largest archive of web history ever assembled. Let’s celebrate this achievement—in San Francisco and around the world—on October 22.

Comment Introducing Peanuts (Score 2) 89

by Lips (#65739226) Attached to: Peanut Allergies Have Plummeted in Children, Study Shows

15 years ago I listened to a radio interview with Australian scientists from the Murdoch Children's Research Institute on this issue. They explained how to safely introduce these foods to babies. I took these steps with both my kids at 6 months. They are now 13 and 9 and have always been allergy free. The only food that babies should never have is honey because of the risk of botulism. After 12 months, honey is safe.

1. Put a very small amount of peanut butter on the outside of the baby's cheek. Wait to see if there is reaction.
2. Repeat next day.
3. Next day, put a very small amount of peanut butter on their tongue. Wait to see if there is a reaction.
4. Repeat next day.
5. At this stage you should be pretty confident that peanuts are safe.
6. Repeat with other foods, eg egg, strawberries.

These days the advice is not to put the food on the baby's skin and instead to put it in a diluted form on the inside of the baby's lip.

Submission + - Elon Musk's Satellites Now Constantly Falling Out of the Sky (futurism.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: According to storied Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, there are now one or two of these Starlink satellites falling back to Earth every single day, he recently told EarthSky. And that figure, McDowell warned, is only going to keep climbing.

The alarming statistic underscores the concerns around rapidly populating the planet’s Low Earth Orbit with expendable satellites. Musk’s SpaceX has been launching thousands of them up there using his reusable rockets since 2019, with more than 8,000 currently in operation.

With those efforts accelerating in recent years, SpaceX has launched more than 2,000 satellites in 2025 alone. Meanwhile, its competitors are rushing to catch up with their own satellite-based internet service, with Amazon kickstarting its plan to deploy more than 3,200 with its first batch launched earlier this year.

Submission + - 'Circular' mega-deals by Bay Area tech giants are raising eyebrows (sfgate.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: The deals are so vast that they defy comprehension — the Financial Times put the company’s recent commitments at north of $1 trillion – and they’re making public companies’ stock prices jump. Stock analysts dub some of these agreements “circular,” because investment money is flowing between companies that also buy from or sell to one another. The worry then is that such deals might prop up or overhype a bad business.

Here’s one indicatively tangled pathway through the morass of companies. Nvidia is investing billions in and selling chips to OpenAI, which is also buying chips from and earning stock in AMD. AMD sells processors to Oracle, which is building data centers with OpenAI — which also gets data center work from CoreWeave. And that company is partially owned by, yes, Nvidia. Taken together, it’s a doozy. There are other collaborations and rivalries and many other factors at play, but OpenAI is the many-tentacled octopus in the middle, spinning its achievement of ChatGPT into a blitz of speculative investments.

Submission + - DJB on the NSA's attempt to remove backup algorithms from post-quantum crypto

Submitted by alanw
alanw writes: Daniel J. Bernstein" has made a couple of blog posts about the NSA's attempts to influence NIST post-quantum cryptography standards, by removing the "belt and braces" current algorithms and silencing dissent.

NSA and IETF: Can an attacker simply purchase standardization of weakened cryptography?

MODPOD: The collapse of IETF's protections for dissent.

Submission + - Code.org CEO Rips NY Times for Stoking 'Populist Fears' Over CS Jobs and AI

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: GeekWire reports: "[Tech-backed nonprofit] Code.org co-founder and CEO Hadi Partovi ripped The New York Times for its latest report detailing how some computer science majors are having trouble finding work in the U.S.. In a post on LinkedIn, Partovi said the newspaper and its Monday episode of 'The Daily' podcast were cherrypicking anecdotes 'to stoke populist fears about tech corporations and AI.'"

"'Computer science and AI are still the best paying fields one can study,' Partovi said, adding a quote from AI pioneer Andrew Ng about how telling students not to study CS is 'the worst career advice ever given.' The podcast episode, titled Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn’t Follow name-dropped Partovi and Code.org in a report about how a computer science education and guaranteed six-figure salary to follow was turning out to be an empty promise for recent graduates. The episode also calls out Microsoft President Brad Smith in reference to tech giants supporting computer science education."

Partovi also took to X, tweeting "Today the NYTimes (falsely) claimed CS majors can’t find work. The data tells the opposite story: CS grads have the highest median wage and the fifth-lowest underemployment across all majors. [...] Journalism is broken. Do better NYTimes." To which Code.org co-founder Ali Partovi (Hadi's twin), replied, "I agree 100%. That NYTimes Daily piece was deplorable — an embarrassment for journalism."

Submission + - Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn't Follow.

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "As a reporter who's spent more than a decade studying Silicon Valley's influence on American education," the NY Times' Natasha Singer tells The Daily podcast (audio + transcript), "I can say that the reduced job prospects for computer science grads this year represents a stunning breakdown in the promise that tech executives have made to millions of American school kids over the last decade. Silicon Valley’s promise to kids was if you just work hard and learn to code, computer programming will be your golden ticket to a high paying, high powered, high status tech job, and you will be more or less set for life."

But after a decade-long push for coding in the classroom that led to soaring CS enrollment, AI is The New New Thing and the times they are a-changin'. "I’m reporting on how some of the same tech companies that pushed for computer science are now pivoting from coding to pushing for AI education and AI tools in schools," Singer notes. "And we see Microsoft just announced an effort to provide $4 billion in AI technology and training to skill students in schools and community colleges with AI. Google just announced a $1 billion commitment for a similar AI education effort, and the crisis rhetoric is similar to the coding crusade. The country needs more skilled AI workers to stay competitive, and kids who learn to use AI will get better job opportunities."

"So, it’s 2010 all over again?" asks host Michael Barbaro. "Exactly," replies Singer. "So, I think we have the opportunity now to proceed more deliberately and think more clearly about what are the things that are most important for kids to learn, and not so much what’s best for tech companies."

Submission + - Trump and RFK Jr. to Ban COVID-19 Vaccine 'Within Months' 4

Submitted by ukoda
ukoda writes: The Daily Beast has this worrying article:

The Trump administration will move to pull the COVID vaccine off the U.S. market “within months,” one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s closest associates has told the Daily Beast.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who has repeatedly claimed in the face of scientific consensus that the vaccines are more dangerous than the virus, told the Daily Beast that Kennedy’s stance is shared by “influential” members of President Donald Trump’s family. Like Kennedy himself, no Trumps hold any scientific qualifications.

Malhotra is a leading adviser to the controversial lobby group Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Action, which is seen as an external arm of Kennedy’s agenda as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary.

He told the Beast that many of those closest to RFK Jr. have told him they “cannot understand” why the vaccine continues to be prescribed, and that a decision to remove the vaccine from the U.S. market pending further research will come “within months,” even if it is likely to cause “fear of chaos” and bring with it major legal ramifications.

Just glad I live in a country where the Covid vaccine is free and encouraged.

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