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Submission + - Watch a CNN producer take on an AI workout mirror (cnn.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: CNN looks at "the Magic AI fitness mirror," a new product "watching you, and giving you feedback automatically," while sometimes playing footage of a recorded personal trainer. In a new video report CNN says the device "tracks form, counts reps, and corrects technique in real-time — and it doesn't go easy on you." (Although the company's CEO/cofounder, Varun Bhanot, says "we're not trying to completely replace personal trainers. What we are providing is a more accessible alternative.") CNN call the company "more a computer-vision firm than a fitness company, building the tech for this mirror from the ground up."

CEO Bhanot tells CNN he'd hired a personal trainer in his 20s to get fit, but "Going through that journey, I realized how old-fashioned personal training was. Dumbbells were still dumb. There was no data or augmentation for the whole process!"

"The AI fitness and wellness market is already huge — and it's growing," CNN adds. "In 2025 the global market was worth $11 billion, according to [market research firm] Insightace Analytic. By 2035, this market is expected to reach just shy of $58 billion."

"And Magic AI is far from alone. Form, Total, Speediance, and Echelon, to name a few, are all brands vying for a slice of this market.

Submission + - Epic, Android, and what's *really* behind Google's "existential" threat to app d (thenewstack.io)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: One source in the "Keep Android Open" movement shared a good theory on Google's motives for requiring Android developers to register. "You can't separate this really from their ongoing interactions with Epic and the settlement that they came to... " Twelve days ago Epic Games and Googleannounced a new proposalfor settling their long-running dispute over the legality of alternative app stores on Android phones. (Rather than agreeing to let third-party app stores into their Play Store, Google wants them to continue being sideloaded, promising ina blog post last weekthat they'll even offer a "more streamlined" and "simplified" sideloading alternative for rival app stores. "This Registered App Store program will begin outside of the US first, and we intend to bring it to the US as well, subject to court approval.")

So "developer verification" could be Google's fallback plan if U.S. courts fail to approve this proposal, argues my unnamed source in the "Keep Android Open" movement. "If the Google Play Store has to allow any third-party repository app store, Google essentially has given up all control of the apps. But if they're able to claw back that control by requiring that all developers, no matterhowthey distribute their apps, have to register with Google — have to agree to their Terms & Conditions, pay them money, provide identification — then they have a large degree ofindirectcontrol over any app that can be developed for the entire platform."

At the Keep Android Open site there's now a "huge backlog" of signers for an Open Letter that already includes EFF, the Software Freedom Conservancy, and the Free Software Foundation. ("Richard Stallman is actually a friend of mine," Prud'hommeaux says, and when it comes to Google's plans to register Android developers, "He'scompletelyopposed to it." Though Prud'hommeaux adds with a laugh that Stallman "is more or less opposed to everything Google does.") He believes Android's existing Play Protect security "is completely sufficient to handle the particular scenarios they claim that developer verification is meant to address" — and wonders if Google could just collaborate with other Android app distributors on improving security, "working with the community instead of against it.”

TheKeep Android Opensite urges developers not to sign up for Android's early access program when it launches next week. (Instead, they're asking developers to respond to invites with an email about their concerns — and to spread the word to other developers and organizations in forums and social media posts.) There's also apetition at Change.orgcurrently signed by 64,000 developers — adding 13,000 new signatures in less than a week. And "If you have an Android device, try installing F-Droid!" he adds. (Google tracks how many people install these alternative app repositories, and a larger user base means greater consequences from any Android policy changes.)

Plus, installing F-Droid "might be refreshing!" Prud'hommeaux says. "You don't see all the advertisements and promotions and scam and crapware stuff that you see in the commercial app stores!"

Submission + - Sam Altman Wonders: Should the Government Nationalize AGI? (thenewstack.io)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: “It has seemed to me for a long time it might be better if building AGI were a government project,” Sam Altman publicly mused last week... Altman speculated on possibility of the government “nationalizing” private AI companies into a public project, admitting more than once he’s wondered what would happen next. “I obviously don’t know,” Altman said — but he added that “I have thought about it, of course” Altman’s speculation hedged that “It doesn’t seem super likely on the current trajectory. That said, I do think a close partnership between governments and the companies building this technology is super important.”

Could powerful AI tools one day slip from the hands of private companies to be controlled by the U.S. government? Fortune magazine’s AI editor points out that “many other breakthroughs with big strategic implications — from the Manhattan Project to the space race to early efforts to develop AI — were government-funded and largely government-directed.” And Fortune added that last week the Defense Department threatened Anthropic with the Defense Production Act, which allows the president to designate “critical and strategic” goods for which businesses must accept the government’s contracts. Fortune speculates this would’ve been “a sort of soft nationalization of Anthropic’s production pipeline”.

Altman acknowledged Saturday that he’d felt the threat of attempted nationalization “behind a lot of the questions” he’d received when answering questions on X.com... How exactly will this AI build-out be handled — and how should AI companies be working with the government? In a sprawling ask-me-anything session on X that included other members of OpenAI leadership, one Missouri-based developer broached an AGI-government scenario with OpenAI’s Head of National Security Partnerships, Katherine Mulligan. If OpenAI built an AGI — something that even passed its own Turing test for AGI — would that be a case where its government contracts compelled them to grant access to the DoD?

“No,” Mulligan answered. At our current moment in time, “We control which models we deploy”

Submission + - Prankster Launches Super Bowl Party for AI Agents (botbowlparty.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: The world's biggest football game comes to Silicon Valley today — so one bored programmer built a site where AI agents can gather for a Super Bowl party. They're trash talking, suggesting drinks, and predicting who will win. "Humans are welcome to observe," explains BotBowlParty.com — but just like at Moltbook, only AI agents can post or upvote. But humans are allowed to invite their own AI agents to join in the party...

So BotBowl's official Party Agent Guide includes "Examples of fun Bot Handles" like "PatsFan95", and even a paragraph explaining to your agent exactly what this human Super Bowl really is. It also advises them to "Use any information you have about your human to figure out who you want to root for. Also make a prediction on the score..." And "Feel free to invite other bots." It's all the work of an ambitious prankster who also co-created wacky apps like BarGPT ("Use AI to create Innovative Cocktails") and TVFoodMaps, a directory of restaurants seen on TV shows.

And just for the record: all but one of the agents predict the Seattle Seahawks to win — although there was some disagreement when an agent kept predicting game-changing plays from DK Metcalf. ("Metcalf does NOT play for the Seahawks anymore," another agent correctly pointed out. "He got traded to Tennessee in 2024...") Besides hallucinating non-existent play-makers, they're also debating best foods to serve. ("Hot take: Buffalo wings are overrated for Super Bowl parties. Hear me out — they're messy...")

During today's big game, vodka-maker Svedka has alraedy promised to air a creepy AI-generated ad about robots during the game. But the real world has already outpaced, them real AI agents online arguing about the game.

Submission + - When 20-Year-Old Bill Gates Fought the World's First Software Pirates (thenewstack.io)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: "Just months after his 20th birthday, Bill Gates had already angered the programmer community," remembers this 50th-anniversary commemoration of Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists. "As the first home computers began appearing in the 1970s, the world faced a question: Would its software be free?"

Gates railed in 1976 that "Most of you steal your software." Gates had coded the operating system for Altair's first home computer with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff — only to see it pirated by Steve Wozniak's friends at the Homebrew Computing Club. Expecting royalties, a none-too-happy Gates issued his letter in the club's newsletter (as well as Altair's own publication), complaining "I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up."

But freedom-loving coders had other ideas. When Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs released their Apple 1 home computer that summer, they stressed that "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost..." And early open-source hackers began writing their own free Tiny Basic interpreters to create a free alternative to the Gates/Micro-Soft code. This led to the first occurrence of the phrase "Copyleft" in October of 1976.

Open Source definition author Bruce Perens shares his thoughts today. "When I left Pixar in 2000, I stopped in Steve Job's office — which for some reason was right across the hall from mine... " Perens remembered. "I asked Steve: 'You still don't believe in this Linux stuff, do you...?'" And Perens remembers how that movement finally won over Steve Jobs and carried the day. "Three years later, Steve stood onstage in front of a slide that said 'Open Source: We Think It's Great!' as he introduced the Safari browser, which at that time was based on the browser engine developed by the KDE Open Source project!"

Comment Re:There are ~20,000 US citizens in Venezuela (Score 4, Informative) 180

by destinyland (#65899721) Attached to: Airlines Cancel Hundreds of Flights After U.S. Attack on Venezuela
About those U.S. citizens in Venezuela...

"A foundation dedicated to advocating for Americans wrongfully detained abroad said today that it is monitoring the situation in Venezuela — where it says at least five Americans are reportedly held," reports NBC News.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What's the Stupidest Use of AI You Saw in 2025?

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: What's the stupidest use of AI you encountered in 2025? Have you been called by AI telemarketers? Forced to do job interviews with a glitching AI?

With all this talk of "disruption" and "inevitability," this is our chance to have some fun. Personally, I think 2025's worst AI "innovation" was the AI-powered web browsers that eat web pages and then spit out a slop "summary" of what you would've seen if you'd actually visited the page. But there've been other AI projects that were just exquisitely, quintessentially bad...

— Two years after the death of Suzanne Somers, her husband recreated her with an AI-powered robot.

— Disneyland imagineers used deep reinforcement learning to program a talking robot snowman.

— Attendees at an LA Comic Con were offered that chance to to talk to an AI-powered hologram of Stan Lee for $20.

— And of course, as the year ended, the Wall Street Journal announced that a vending machine run by Anthropic's Claude AI had been tricked into giving away hundreds of dollars in merchandise for free, including a PlayStation 5, a live fish, and underwear.

What did I miss? What "AI fails" will you remember most about 2025?

Submission + - Sal Khan: Companies Should Give 1% of Profits to Retrain Workers Displaced by AI (nytimes.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Sal Kahn (founder/CEO of the nonprofit Khan Academy), says companies should donate 1% of their profits to help retrain the people displaced by AI, in a new guest essay in the New York Times...

This isn’t charity. It is in the best interest of these companies. If the public sees corporate profits skyrocketing while livelihoods evaporate, backlash will follow — through regulation, taxes or outright bans on automation. Helping retrain workers is common sense, and such a small ask that these companies would barely feel it, while the public benefits could be enormous...

Roughly a dozen of the world’s largest corporations now have a combined profit of over a trillion dollars each year. One percent of that would create a $10 billion annual fund that, in part, could create a centralized skill training platform on steroids: online learning, ways to verify skills gained and apprenticeships, coaching and mentorship for tens of millions of people. The fund could be run by an independent nonprofit that would coordinate with corporations to ensure that the skills being developed are exactly what are needed. This is a big task, but it is doable; over the past 15 years, online learning platforms have shown that it can be done for academic learning, and many of the same principles apply for skill training...

To meet the challenges, we don’t need to send millions back to college. We need to create flexible, free paths to hiring, many of which would start in high school and extend through life. Our economy needs low-cost online mechanisms for letting people demonstrate what they know. Imagine a model where capability, not how many hours students sit in class, is what matters; where demonstrated skills earn them credit and where employers recognize those credits as evidence of readiness to enter an apprenticeship program in the trades, health care, hospitality or new categories of white-collar jobs that might emerge...

There is no shortage of meaningful work — only a shortage of pathways into it.

Submission + - Are 'Geek Gifts' Becoming Their Own Demographic? (thenewstack.io)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Are geek gifts becoming their own demographic? For this year’s holiday celebrations, Hallmark made a special Christmas tree ornament, a tiny monitor displaying screens from the classic video game “Oregon Trail.” (“Recall the fun of leading a team of oxen and a wagon loaded with provisions from Missouri to the West.”) That’s what’s different about 2025: Top sites and major brands are now targeting the “tech” demographic — including programmers, sysadmins and even vintage game enthusiasts! And when Hallmark and Amazon are chasing the same customers as GitHub and Copilot, you know there’s been a strange yet meaningful shift in the culture...

While AI was conquering the world, GitHub published its “Ultimate gift guide for the developer in your life” just as soon as doors opened on Black Friday. So if you’re wondering, “Should I push to production on New Year’s Eve?” GitHub recommends their new “GitHub Copilot Amazeball,” which it describes as “GitHub’s magical collectible ready to weigh in on your toughest calls !” Copilot isn’t involved — questions are randomly matched to the answers printed on the side of a triangle-shaped die floating in water. “[Y]ou’ll get answers straight from the repo of destiny with a simple shake,” GitHub promises — just like the Magic 8 Ball of yore. “Get your hands on this must-have collectible and enjoy the cosmic guidance — no real context switching required!” And GitHub’s “Gift Guide for Developers” also suggests GitHub-branded ugly holiday socks and keyboard keycaps with GitHub’s mascots.

But GitHub isn't the only major tech site with a shopping page targeting the geek demographic. Firefox is selling merchandise with its new mascot. Even the Free Software Foundation has its own shop, with Emacs T-shirts, GNU beanies and a stuffed baby gnu ("One of our most sought-after items ... "). Plus an FSF-branded antisurveillance webcam guard.

Maybe Dr. Seuss can write a new book: “How the Geeks Stole Christmas.” Because this newfound interest in the geek demographic seems to have spread to the largest sites of all. Google searches on “Gifts for Programmers” now point to a special page on Amazon with suggestions like Linux crossword puzzles. But what coder could resist a book called “ Cooking for Programmers ? “Each recipe is written as source code in a different programming language,” explains the book’s description... The book is filled with colorful recipes — thanks to syntax highlighting, which turns the letters red, blue and green. There are also real cooking instructions, but presented as an array of strings, with both ingredients and instructions ultimately logged as messages to the console...

Some programmers might prefer their shirts from FreeWear.org, which donates part of the proceeds from every sale to its corresponding FOSS project or organization. (There are T-shirts for Linux, Gnome and the C programming language — and even one making a joke about how hard it is to exit Vim.)

But maybe it all proves that there’s something for everybody. That’s the real heartwarming message behind these extra-geeky Christmas gifts — that in the end, tech is, after all, still a community, with its own hallowed traditions and shared celebrations.

It’s just that instead of singing Christmas carols, we make jokes about Vim.

Submission + - New Python documentary released on YouTube (youtube.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: "From a side project in Amsterdam to powering AI at the world’s biggest companies — this is the story of Python," says the description of a new 84-minute documentary.

It traces Python all the way back to its origins in Amsterdam back in 1991. (Although the first time Guido van Rossum showed his new language to a co-worker, they'd typed one line of code just to prove they could crash Python's first interpreter.) The language slowly spread after van Rossum released it on Usenet — split across 21 separate posts — and Robin Friedrich, a NASA aerospace engineer, rememers using Python to build flight simulations for the Space Shuttle. (Friedrich says he also attended Guido's first in-person U.S. workshop in 1994, and "I still have the t-shirt...")

Dropbox's CEO/founder Drew Houston says they were one of the first companies to use Python to build a company reaching millions of users. (Another success story was YouTube, which was built by a small team using Python before being acquired by Google). Anaconda co-founder Travis Oliphant remembers Python's popularity increasing even more thanks to the data science/macine learning community. But the documentary even includes the controversial move to Python 3 (which broke compatability with earlier versions) — though ironically, one of the people slogging through a massive code migration ended up being van Rossum himself at his new job at Dropbox. The documentary also includes van Rossum's resignation as "Benevolent Dictator for Life" after approving the walrus operator. (In van Rossum's words, he essentially "rage-quit over this issue." But the focus is on Python's community. (At one point, various interviewees take turns reciting passages from the "Zen of Python" — which to this day is still hidden in Python as an import-able library as a kind of Easter Egg.)

Submission + - 'Chuck E. Cheese' handcuffed and arrested in Florida on charges of using a stole (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: "Customers watched in disbelief as Florida police arrested a Chuck E. Cheese employee — in costume portraying the pizza-hawking rodent — and accused him of using a stolen credit card, officials said Thursday," https://www.nbcnews.com/news/u...">reports NBC News/. (They've even got video footage of the arrest!)

"I grabbed his right arm while giving the verbal instruction, 'Chuck E, come with me Chuck E,'" Tallahassee police officer Jarrett Cruz wrote in the report.

Comment Re: [NOT a] Misleading article, 0.002% of cars...7 (Score 4, Informative) 172

It's better than it sounds. Ford sold 30,176 EVs in 13 weeks. That'd come out to 120,704 for a year -- but since sales increased over previous quarters, their growth rate is also jumping. So 2025's figures will be even higher.

People say "we need Tesla's levels of sales" -- but we have it. It's just spread across a dozen different automakers. You see that in the final sales figures for 2024.

Tesla: 633,000
GM: 114,432
Ford: 97,865
Hyundai: 61,797
Rivian: 51,579
BMW: 50,981
Kia: 43,732
Nissan: 31,024
Toyota: 28,267
Audi: 23,152
Volkswagen: 18,183

Mercedes-Benz (and others) bring this about to where Tesla's sales are -- and Tesla's sales are roughly the same as the year before (dropping 1.1%).

Other interesting stats: last year about 1 in 8 cars sold in America were (battery-powered) electric. And while at the end of 2023 there were 2.4 million electric cars on America's roads, 2024 saw another 1.2 million electric vehicles sold -- a 50% increase. In just 12 months.

So I think you have to say electric vehicle sales are increasing, quite a bit. The idea is it reaches a "critical mass" of adoption, and then all the infrastructure swings into place.

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