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Submission + - Amid Fears of Killer Robots, Humanoid MMA Fight in China Ends With Decapitation (commondreams.org)

Submitted by pbahra
pbahra writes: A Chinese robotics company hosted an unprecedented combat tournament in which one humanoid robot decapitated another.

The fight was part of the opening night of the Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend (URKL) competition in Shenzhen, organized by the company EngineAI, which developed the humanoid.

Unveiled last year, the humanoid is called T800, a nod to the Terminator franchise. EngineAI’s website features videos of T800 executing various mixed martial arts (MMA) moves, from a combination punch and a roundhouse kick to punch-kick combos.

The tournament’s opening night came on the heels of a series of artificial intelligence events hosted by the United Nations, during which Secretary-General António Guterres said that “if AI is to be powerful, it must be governed,” and “my main concern is with ‘lethal autonomous weapon systems.’”

“Let us call them what they are: killer robots,” Guterres said. “Machines selecting and engaging their target and taking a life—without human control and judgment. That is morally repugnant. It is politically unacceptable. And it must be banned by international law.”

Submission + - A Visual Catalog of Retro Macintosh Software (the icon-ic collection!)

Submitted by marciot
marciot writes: A picture might be worth a thousand words, but scrolling through 75,052 icons is a fun and nostalgic way to explore retro apps! The Visual Catalog of Retro Macintosh Software showcases an (almost) endless wall of icons culled from Macintosh CD-ROMs from the 80s and 90s, from the days before megapixels, when 32x32 pixels were enough for everybody!

Submission + - You gotta fight / For your right / To AI

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Recalling his initial resistance to free and open software, billionaire computer scientist David Siegel argues vigorously in FORTUNE that the stakes are too high to let AI become increasingly closed. "In the 1980s, I had the chance to spend several years arguing about free and open software, what we now call open source, with the founder of the movement, Richard Stallman. My office at the MIT AI Lab was next door to his. Stallman’s position was that the source code to software should be free for everyone to use, learn from, and improve. Software encapsulates knowledge, he argued, and no one should lock something so fundamental away. To hide software inside a company was to hide knowledge itself. At first I took the conventional view of the time. Software would only advance, I insisted, if companies kept proprietary control over their code. We agreed on the bigger picture—that computers would become a central accelerator of human progress—but disagreed sharply on how to get there. What I missed was that software was not just a commercial asset; it was a body of knowledge, and bodies of knowledge grow stronger when they are shared. After about two years of on-and-off debate, Stallman convinced me I was wrong."

"Now the AI fight is the same — only bigger," advises Siegel. "AI is software, and AI is increasingly closed. The frontier models—the most advanced, cutting-edge AI systems— are closed completely and the trend is accelerating. Viable open alternatives are few and far between."

So, what to do? "The path forward is not complicated," Siegel explains, "though it isn’t free. Yes, frontier models keep getting bigger and more expensive — that arms race may well stay with the giants. But open source AI does not have to match their scale to be useful. Much of what the world needs probably does not require the absolute frontier. And where keeping a credible open option does demand serious compute, that is precisely the kind of public good worth paying for. What’s missing is not a path but will. The government, the private sector, and nonprofits should invest heavily in free and open source AI —the way they once invested in open software: public compute grants for open research, corporate and philanthropic support for universities and nonprofits doing the work, and a simple rule that AI built with public money is open by default. We have run this experiment before. We know how it turns out. Let’s not unlearn it."

Comment Re:They're obsolete. (Score 1) 209

by fahrbot-bot (#66245410) Attached to: The 'Death of the Stick Shift' is Almost Here for Americans

Automatics are ... more fuel efficient (have been for at least ten years now),

This is a straight up lie. A lie promulgated by auto manufacturers to meet fuel efficiency standards, as well as to increase their revenues.
The truth: manuals get better mileage, last longer, and are cheaper to buy or replace the transmission.

Which manuals are more efficient than Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive?

I don't know of any hybrid vehicles ever available with a manual transmission, so you're trying to compare the efficiency of ICE vehicles vs. hybrid vehicles not manual vs automatic/CVT transmissions. Engine/motors and transmissions aren't the same things. :-)

Comment Re:I'll die with my standard transaxle (Score 1) 209

by fahrbot-bot (#66245400) Attached to: The 'Death of the Stick Shift' is Almost Here for Americans

You can tell he's aware of the fact that stick driving results in more distractions, otherwise he wouldn't have typed out a whole paragraph with an irrelevant anecdote trying to convince himself otherwise.

Stick driving might make you feel "connected to the car" but it does distract you from the road.

I'm 63 and have always owned vehicles with a manual transmission and have never found it distracting, though perhaps a bit tedious in stop-and-go traffic. In any case, other may not be (more) distracted either. From Manual transmission enhances attention and driving performance of ADHD adolescent males: pilot study

Results: Subjectively, participants report being more attentive while driving in manual transmission mode. Objectively, participants drive safer in the manual transmission mode.

Conclusion: Although in need of replication, this pilot study suggests a behavioral intervention to improve driving performance among ADHD adolescents.

Referencing that study and pre-clinical reports ADHD and the Adolescent Driver: A Guide to Promoting Safety Behind the Wheel (bottom of article):

Teenagers with ADHD receive more moving vehicle violations (in particular, speeding tickets) than their non-ADHD counterparts. ... [but] ...

There are studies demonstrating that driving with a manual transmission is more stimulating than with an automatic transmission. One pilot study involved 10 adolescents with ADHD who drove a virtual-reality driving simulator in both the automatic mode and the 4-speed manual mode at 8 pm and 11 pm.12 These participants reported being more alert when driving in manual mode; objective measures showed they drove more safely than with an automatic transmission.12

The pilot study was preceded by clinical reports of adolescents with ADHD who said they were less able to daydream when driving a manual transmission. For example, an adolescent reported, "If I don't pay attention to what I'm doing, the car will jerk and stall, and, boy, is that embarrassing."

I guess it really just depends on the person/driver...

Google: adhd manual transmission

Comment Honda models w/manual (Score 1) 209

by fahrbot-bot (#66245250) Attached to: The 'Death of the Stick Shift' is Almost Here for Americans

Even Toyota, Honda, and BMW have all reduced the number of cars for the U.S. market with a manual transmission, the article points out — leaving stick shift-loving Americans with a total of about 24 new-vehicle models to choose from.

I checked recently and Honda only has 2 models available with a manual transmission: Civic Type R ($47.400) and Civic Si ($31,500). The rest of their ICE vehicles are now only available with a CVT. Their hybrid vehicles come with their Two-Motor Hybrid-Electric Powertrain - which uses the electric propulsion motor at low-speeds and adds the ICE at highway speeds via a lockup clutch so there isn't really a transmission. The second (generator) motor and also ICE are used for charging the battery.

While I'd probably really enjoy the Civic Type R or Si, if I ever need/want to replace my 2001 Civic Ex (136k miles) or 2002 CR-V Ex (62k miles) - both manuals and in excellent condition - with another Honda, I'd probably get one of the hybrids as a dislike CVTs and their hybrid power-train seems better.

Submission + - Gen Z Is Bringing CDs Back but They're Missing One Important Piece of the Puzzle (vice.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Believe it or not, the CD—yes, that CD— is having a resurgence. In fact, new data reveals that Gen Z seems to be buying up the outdated music format without even having a way to play it.

On a broader note, physical media seems to be having a big moment in 2026. Through the first half of the year, total physical album sales on vinyl, CDs, and cassettes reached 38.2 million units in the United States. This equates to a 7.8 percent increase.

So how did all this come about? Well, it seems that younger music fans have been driving a lot of the retro revival. The report shows that in 2026, 60 percent of Gen Z listeners said they most often listen to music from the 1990s and older. This is a massive increase from the 18 percent marker in 2021.

Comment Re:Context? (Score 2) 131

by dgatwood (#66244236) Attached to: FreeBSD 16 Retires the Last of Its GPL Code

Absolutely. Even companies that try to switch licenses to "protect" their code, like MinIO did, run the risk of people quickly switching to or creating alternatives. Like RustFS was created specifically to deal with the frustration of MinIO's change.

AGPL is a plague. GPL, I tolerate, though I have a strong preference towards v2. But AGPL has no redeeming qualities. The hypothetical world where someone creates a closed-source fork of a web service, convinces everyone to use it, and then holds their data hostage just isn't particularly plausible.

Meanwhile, AGPL precludes any interesting integrations, custom in-house authentication systems, using custom database backends, and all sorts of other stuff that potentially is useful to keep company-proprietary, but that has no impact whatsoever on the hypothetical freedoms that the AGPL is intended to protect.

It's a license that is so toxic that even companies that are strong proponents of open source with large open source offerings have outright bans on letting AGPLed code anywhere on the premises.

As far as I can tell, the main benefit of AGPL is for companies that create code and want to release it to the public as "free software", because by requiring contributor agreements, they can keep their own branch proprietary while forcing everyone else in the world to comply with the AGPL, thus ensuring that the only company that can create their own proprietary features is them.

Comment Re: Context? (Score 1) 131

by dgatwood (#66244208) Attached to: FreeBSD 16 Retires the Last of Its GPL Code

It's definitely an interesting case, but it doesn't fit the original description. The GPL didn't prevent Linksys from strangling the free version of anything. No free WiFi routers ever existed, and Linksys did not destroy demand for the Linux kernel or the GNU C library.

Also, nothing in that case forced Linksys to open anything. They could have switched to a BSD kernel and C library, and they would have been in compliance. They chose to open it because they figured it was an easy way to make the case go away, and it could produce good will in the community. And it ended up being a minor windfall for Linksys.

Submission + - Chinese Scientist Created Room-Temperature Single-Electron Quantum Flash Storage (pandaily.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Fudan University research team led by Professor Zhou Peng and Associate Professor Liu Chunsen at the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Chips and Systems has published a breakthrough in Science : Quantum Flash technology that achieves room-temperature non-volatile single-electron storage. The innovation constructs a coplanar drain-channel-source unified structure called Guiyi, enabling clear observation of single-electron charge storage behavior at 27 degrees Celsius for the first time. The breakthrough builds on the team previous Nature publication from April 2025, where they demonstrated the PoX flash device achieving 400-picosecond non-volatile storage, the fastest semiconductor charge storage technology ever reported. Quantum Flash addresses the fundamental storage density limit by achieving one electron per bit, the smallest physically possible data unit as electrons are indivisible elementary particles. Traditional memory hierarchy separates high-speed cache from slow bulk storage. Quantum Flash technology, combined with the team PoX speed breakthrough and Changying prototype chip that has already demonstrated CMOS-compatible integration, points toward unified memory that is simultaneously fast, dense, and non-volatile. This would fundamentally change AI chip architecture by eliminating the data migration bottleneck between compute and storage. If commercialization, planned within 1 to 3 years, is successful, the technology could enable mobile devices and servers to run larger (e.g. the 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 unveiled on the same day) local AI models with longer context memory while consuming significantly less power.

Submission + - SpaceX stock has cratered nearly 23% since joining the Nasdaq-100 (cnbc.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Friday’s loss of 5.43% marked a sixth-straight losing day and came after Elon Musk’s space and artificial intelligence company aborted a test flight for its Starship rocket.

The aerospace giant was expected to launch its Starship mega rocket within a 90-minute window at 5:45 p.m. in Texas on Thursday, but an engine ignition failure forced SpaceX to scrub the launch.

“Some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort,” billionaire founder Musk said in a post on X. “Now offloading propellant. Next launch attempt hopefully in a few days.”

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