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Submission + - Air India Flight AI171 Crash (cnn.com)

Submitted by renuk007
renuk007 writes: On a flight from Ahmedabad to London, the Boeing 787 took off normally but, minutes later, crashed killing 260 people. Flight recorder data shows the fuel cutoff switches were turned off, then on again but too late to prevent the engines stalling. The catch is, the fuel cutoff switches aren't just flip switches — they have to be pulled out hard, moved down, then released, and vice versa on re-enabling. This takes way, way more than five seconds. Could this be another sneaky "improvement" by Boeing, that cuts off fuel if some brilliant computer decides it's the right thing to do? Because rational human beings don't do stuff like that unless it's actually a suicide attempt. Then again, if it's suicide, why didn't the other pilot notice, and why did they call mayday?

Submission + - AI Coding Tools Can Actually Reduce Productivity (secondthoughts.ai)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: The buzz about AI coding tools is unrelenting. To listen to the reports, startups are launching with tiny engineering teams, non-programmers are “vibe-coding” entire apps, and the job market for entry-level programmers is crashing. But according to a METR experiment conducted in the spring of 2025, there’s at least one cohort that AI tools still aren’t serving.

METR performed a rigorous study (blog post, full paper) to measure the productivity gain provided by AI tools for experienced developers working on mature projects. The results are surprising everyone: a 19 percent decrease in productivity. Even the study participants themselves were surprised: they estimated that AI had increased their productivity by 20 percent. If you take away just one thing from this study, it should probably be this: when people report that AI has accelerated their work, they might be wrong!

Submission + - NVIDIA warns your GPU may be vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: NVIDIA just put out a new security notice, and if youâ(TM)re running one of its powerful GPUs, you might want to pay attention. Researchers from the University of Toronto have shown that Rowhammer attacks, which are already known to affect regular DRAM, can now target GDDR6 memory on NVIDIAâ(TM)s high-end GPUs when ECC is not enabled.

They pulled this off using an A6000 card, and it worked because system-level ECC was turned off. Once it was switched on, the attack no longer worked. That tells you everything you need to know. ECC matters.

Rowhammer has been around for years. Itâ(TM)s one of those weird memory bugs where repeatedly accessing one row in RAM can cause bits to flip in another row. Until now, this was mostly a CPU memory problem. But this research shows it can also be a GPU problem, and that should make data center admins and workstation users pause for a second.

NVIDIA is not sounding an alarm so much as reminding everyone that protections are already in place, but only if youâ(TM)re using the hardware properly. The company recommends enabling ECC if your GPU supports it. That includes cards in the Blackwell, Hopper, Ada, and Ampere lines, along with others used in DGX, HGX, and Jetson systems. It also includes popular workstation cards like the RTX A6000.

Thereâ(TM)s also built-in On-Die ECC in certain newer memory types like GDDR7 and HBM3. If youâ(TM)re lucky enough to be using a card that has it, youâ(TM)re automatically protected to some extent, because OD-ECC canâ(TM)t be turned off. Itâ(TM)s always working in the background.

But letâ(TM)s be real. A lot of people skip ECC because it can impact performance or because theyâ(TM)re running a setup that doesnâ(TM)t make it obvious whether ECC is on or off. If youâ(TM)re not sure where you stand, itâ(TM)s time to check. NVIDIA suggests using tools like nvidia-smi or, if youâ(TM)re in a managed enterprise setup, working with your systemâ(TM)s BMC or Redfish APIs to verify settings.

Submission + - Google Nerfs Second Pixel Phone Battery This Year (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For the second time in a year, Google has announced that it will render some of its past phones almost unusable with a software update, and users don't have any choice in the matter. After nerfing the Pixel 4a's battery capacity earlier this year, Google has now confirmed a similar update is rolling out to the Pixel 6a. The new July Android update adds "battery management features" that will make the phone unusable. Given the risks involved, Google had no choice but to act, but it could choose to take better care of its customers and use better components in the first place. Unfortunately, a lot more phones are about to end up in the trash. [...]

Pixel 4a units contained one of two different batteries, and only the one manufactured by a company called Lishen was downgraded. For the Pixel 6a, Google has decreed that the battery limits will be imposed when the cells hit 400 charge cycles. Beyond that, the risk of fire becomes too great—there have been reports of Pixel 6a phones bursting into flames. Clearly, Google had to do something, but the remedies it settled on feel unnecessarily hostile to customers. It had a chance to do better the second time, but the solution for the Pixel 6a is more of the same. [...]

When Google killed the Pixel 4a's battery life, it offered a few options. You could have the battery replaced for free, get $50 cash, or accept a $100 credit in the Google Store. However, claiming the money or free battery was a frustrating experience that was rife with fees and caveats. The store credit is also only good on phones and can't be used with other promotions or discounts. And the battery swap? You'd better hope there's nothing else wrong with the device. If it has any damage, like cracked glass, it may not qualify for a free battery replacement.

Now we have the Pixel 6a Battery Performance Program with all the same problems. Pixel 6a owners can get $100 in cash or $150 in store credit. Alternatively, Google offers a free battery replacement with the same limits on phone condition. This is all particularly galling because the Pixel 6a is still an officially supported phone, with its final guaranteed update coming in 2027. Google also pulled previous software packages for this phone to prevent rollbacks. [...] If you have a Pixel 6a, the battery-killing update is rolling out now. You'll have no choice but to install it if you want to remain on the official software. Google has a support site where you can try to get a free battery swap or some cash.

Submission + - World's first nuclear microreactor test bed launches at Idaho National Lab (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The race to dominate next-gen nuclear power just hit ignition at Idaho’s Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments.

The Department of Energy has conditionally selected Westinghouse and Radiant to conduct the first fueled experiments at the DOME, a new test bed at Idaho National Laboratory.

Slated to launch as early as spring 2026, the experiments mark a global first—offering U.S. developers a high-stakes proving ground to accelerate the commercialization of advanced microreactors.

Submission + - 1.5M sq km of sea ice is missing near Antarctica. All climate models were wrong (joannenova.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Something huge is happening around Antarctica and the experts didn’t see it coming

More than a million square kilometers of ice has gone:

Since 2015, the continent has shed sea ice equivalent to the area of Greenland. Researchers call it the largest environmental shift detected anywhere on Earth in recent decades. –– Earth dot com

Everything about Antarctica has defied the experts. For years Antarctic sea ice expanded when it wasn’t supposed to. Then, suddenly in 2016 the sea ice around Antarctica dramatically started to shrink, and that wasn’t supposed to happen either. Scientists wondered at the time if it was just a temporary blip, but then it got even smaller. Holes in the sea ice “as big as Switzerland” have started to appear for the first time since the mid 1970s.

To explain this mystery (that was rarely mentioned) a new paper suggests the salinity of surface waters has changed. We’re not just talking about a small piece of ocean, this is everything south of 50. For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean was getting less salty — an “expected response to a warming climate” they said that started in about 1980, “however, this trend reversed abruptly after 2015”.

So as news seeps out this week that there is a “dangerous feedback loop” where shrinking ice is warming the ocean, bear in mind that the experts also admit this is “completely unexpected” which is their way of saying “the models were wrong”. Carbon dioxide was not supposed to do this.

Submission + - UK Scientists Achieve First Commercial Tritium Production (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Interesting Engineering is reporting that Astral Systems, a UK-based private commercial fusion company, in collaboration with the University of Bristol, has claimed to have become the first firm to successfully breed tritium, a vital fusion fuel, using its own operational fusion reactor.

The milestone came during a 55-hour Deuterium-Deuterium (DD) fusion irradiation campaign conducted in March. Scientists from Astral Systems and the University of Bristol produced and detected tritium in real-time from an experimental lithium breeder blanket within Astral’s multi-state fusion reactors.

“There’s a global race to find new ways to develop more tritium than what exists in today’s world [currently about 20kg] – a huge barrier is bringing fusion energy to reality,” said Talmon Firestone, CEO and co-founder of Astral Systems.

Astral Systems’ approach uses its Multi-State Fusion (MSF) technology. The company states this will commercialize fusion power with better performance, efficiency, and lower costs than traditional reactors.

A core innovation is lattice confinement fusion (LCF), a concept first discovered by NASA in 2020. This allows Astral’s reactor to achieve solid-state fuel densities 400 million times higher than those in plasma.

The company’s reactors are designed to induce two distinct fusion reactions simultaneously from a single power input, with fusion occurring in both plasma and a solid-state lattice.

The reactor core also features an electron-screened environment. This design reduces the energy needed to overcome the Coulomb barrier between particles, which lowers required fusion temperatures by several million degrees and allows for higher performance in a compact size.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Identity theft on Facebook, but why? 11

Journal by shanen

Why does Facebook support so much identity theft? I had an actual account on Facebook for many years, but it was nuked without explanation back in 2022. After that, someone created a fake Facebook account in its place. The fake account is using one of my old email addresses, and that is causing Facebook to send me increasingly frequent reminders about something--but I cannot see what the scam is because I have no access to Facebook.

Submission + - Germany keeps burning coal for another winter (euractiv.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Amidst a winter marked by scarce gas supplies, the German government has opted to retain its lignite coal power plants on standby for another season. Originally, Germany had planned a phased shutdown of coal plants in exchange for a portion of the government's €40 billion coal phase-out fund. However, last year, disruptions in Russian gas supplies post-Ukraine war prompted an emergency decision to keep coal plants operational. This measure is now extended for the upcoming winter, maintaining 1.9 GWs of lignite capacity alongside the existing 45 GW of coal power plants.

The primary purpose of these lignite plants is to alleviate gas demand during peak times and stabilize prices. Despite the economic benefits, the move raises environmental concerns, given lignite's status as a major climate polluter. The government acknowledges this and plans to assess the additional carbon emissions resulting from keeping coal plants on standby, estimated to be between 2.5 and 5.6 tonnes of CO2.

The German government emphasized the persistence of the goal to ideally complete the coal phase-out by 2030 and meet climate targets. However, skepticism surrounds the likelihood of achieving these objectives. This makes it even more challenging for Germany's message to be heard by Southern countries, particularly South Africa, urging them to shut down their coal power plants.

Submission + - GPT-4 Will Hunt For Trends In Medical Records Thanks To Microsoft and Epic (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Monday, Microsoft and Epic Systems announced that they are bringing OpenAI's GPT-4 AI language model into health care for use in drafting message responses from health care workers to patients and for use in analyzing medical records while looking for trends. Epic Systems is one of America's largest health care software companies. Its electronic health records (EHR) software (such as MyChart) is reportedly used in over 29 percent of acute hospitals in the United States, and over 305 million patients have an electronic record in Epic worldwide. Tangentially, Epic's history of using predictive algorithms in health care has attracted some criticism in the past.

In Monday's announcement, Microsoft mentions two specific ways Epic will use its Azure OpenAI Service, which provides API access to OpenAI's large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3 and GPT-4. In layperson's terms, it means that companies can hire Microsoft to provide generative AI services for them using Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. The first use of GPT-4 comes in the form of allowing doctors and health care workers to automatically draft message responses to patients. The press release quotes Chero Goswami, chief information officer at UW Health in Wisconsin, as saying, "Integrating generative AI into some of our daily workflows will increase productivity for many of our providers, allowing them to focus on the clinical duties that truly require their attention." The second use will bring natural language queries and "data analysis" to SlicerDicer, which is Epic's data-exploration tool that allows searches across large numbers of patients to identify trends that could be useful for making new discoveries or for financial reasons. According to Microsoft, that will help "clinical leaders explore data in a conversational and intuitive way." Imagine talking to a chatbot similar to ChatGPT and asking it questions about trends in patient medical records, and you might get the picture.

Submission + - EU Takes On United States, Asia With Chip Subsidy Plan (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The European Union on Tuesday agreed a 43 billion euro ($47 billion) plan for its semiconductor industry in an attempt to catch up with the United States and Asia and start a green industrial revolution. The EU Chips Act, proposed by the European Commission last year and confirmed by Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, aims to double the bloc's share of global chip output to 20% by 2030 and follows the U.S. CHIPS for America Act.

"We need chips to power digital and green transitions or healthcare systems," Commission Vice-President Margrethe Vestager said in a tweet. Since the announcement of its chips subsidies plan last year, the EU has already attracted more than 100 billion euros in public and private investments, an EU official said. "The critical piece of the equation which the EU will need to get right, as for the U.S., is how much of the supply chains supporting the industry can be moved to the EU and at what cost," said [Paul Triolo, a China and tech expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic & International Studies]. While the Commission had originally proposed funding only cutting-edge chip plants, EU governments and lawmakers have widened the scope to cover the whole value chain, including older chips and research and design facilities.

Submission + - The 4-Year Debate: Do Degree Requirements Still Matter for IT? (cio.com)

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Some companies have moved away from seeking only applicants with a college education, while others still want to see that bachelor's degree on IT worker's resumes. CIO.com's Mary Pratt reports on the debate among tech executives as to the value of a 4-year degree in today's tight talent market. 'Figures from the 2022 study The Emerging Degree Reset from The Burning Glass Institute quantify the trend, reporting that 46% of middle-skill and 31% of high-skill occupations experienced material degree resets between 2017 and 2019. Moreover, researchers calculated that 63% of those changes appear to be “‘structural resets’ representing a measured and potentially permanent shift in hiring practices” that could make an additional 1.4 million jobs open to workers without college degrees over the next five years.'

Submission + - Valve restricts accounts of 2500 users who marked a negative game review useful

Submitted by jth1234567
jth1234567 writes: In late January, a Steam user posted a negative review for the game Warlander, warning potential buyers about the shady anti-cheat system the game was using, the apparent problems being intrusive data collection and difficult removal after the game itself had been uninstalled (the review text is no longer available). This review stayed on top as the most helpful review for nearly three months, which must have been a big thorn in the side for the developer and the publisher.

Until yesterday, when they managed to get a Steam moderator to remove the negative review. In a perfect, consumer-friendly world it should have been another way around, and the game's sales page removed until the claims were investigated by Valve, but this is not a perfect world. However, things didn't end there.

Apparently the Steam moderator categorized the negative review as "attempting to scam users or other violations of Steam's Rules & Guidelines", which meant that all those 2439 people (plus people who have it 437 awards) got their accounts restricted for 30 days, during this time none of them can up- or downvote any Steam reviews at all.

Support tickets from affected users to Steam Support have received a default response saying Support will not help nor adjust the length of vote bans.

The Steam review system was never perfect, but the impact of this kind of behavior from Valve will render the whole system completely pointless, as negative reviews can be culled by the developers/publishers at any time, and people will just stop marking any negative review as useful to avoid these kinds of repercussions.

Submission + - Montana close to becoming 1st state to completely ban TikTok (apnews.com)

Submitted by rmdingler
rmdingler writes:

Montana lawmakers moved one step closer Thursday to passing a bill to ban TikTok from operating in the state, a move that’s bound to face legal challenges but also serve as a testing ground for the TikTok-free America that many national lawmakers have envisioned.

So yeah, it's only a matter of time before a conservative State terminates intrastate use of the nefarious Chinese platform that young Americans cannot stop dancing on. Realistically, with VPN's and other browsing cleverness, how enforceable is such a ban? What will be the penalty to Montana's citizens for interacting with a forbidden site?

Submission + - Stanford University creates ChatGPT-backed NPCs for RPGs (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Baron_Yam
Baron_Yam writes: A group of researchers at Stanford University and Google have created a miniature RPG-style virtual world similar to The Sims, where 25 characters, controlled by ChatGPT and custom code, live out their lives independently with a high degree of realistic behavior. They wrote about their experiment in a preprint academic paper released on Friday.

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