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Submission + - Microsoft CEO Touts His Own DIY AI Project to Wall Street and His 20M Followers

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: During Microsoft's 2026Q4 earnings call, CEO Microsoft Satya Nadella took time to tout a dashboard he personally created using AI from a Morgan Stanley analyst's PDF research report which suggested a rosy payback for the so-called MAG7's ('Magnificent 7' companies) massive capital expenditures on AI (to which Nadella later added a 'not financial advice' disclaimer)

"It would be fun for you, Adam. I think one of your colleagues put out an ROIC [Return on Invested Capital] document. I took that document to Copilot, which is a PDF, and I said, 'Build me a new Power BI dashboard, essentially.' But here is the thing. It built a rich semantic model that went into my Fabric with OneLake that brought all the data in from the external sources. In fact, it was current with all the SEC filings of all the MAG7. And then on top of that, the repo itself is in GitHub, but the artifact is sitting in my Copilot as a site. That, to me, is a classic example of an enterprise-wide workflow. I, as a knowledge worker, could go create a dashboard. The data engineer can go to Fabric and find the artifact. The professional developer can go to the repo and find it in GitHub. And by the way, it’s all registered with Agent 365. That’s a little bit of what Amy is describing as the coming together of a new way to work, even while at the same time, bringing IT, security and manageability of it."

After Nadella's show-and-tell drew an underwhelming response during the call ("That’s very helpful. Thank you." said the Morgan Stanley analyst whose team's work Nadella scraped with AI), Nadella turned to social media with posts on LinkedIn (12M followers) and Twitter/X (8M followers) to make the case for why his DIY project was such a brilliant demonstration of how AI enables governance, controls, security, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, data analysis/modeling, visualization, usability, and value.

"Some more detail on the ROIC Intelligence App I built yesterday and mentioned on today's earnings call," Nadella wrote on LinkedIn. "I took the PDF that Brian Nowak at Morgan Stanley put together for Hyperscale ROIC this week and used Copilot code (coming in our new superapp) with a single prompt + skill (/drill-me) to create the plan, then used autopilot in auto to create the full app (with history, lookups, scenarios, what-ifs, etc). And /rubber-duck to test. And the best part is that all the artifacts are in my enterprise environment. My app is in Copilot, my code is in GitHub Enterprise; all my data pipelines/lake/semantic models are in Fabric. And everything is under Agent 365 IT/Sec/FinOps control! So this is not about Tokenmaxxing or vibe coding. Every step of the way the rails are engineered to create value, making everything a long-term reusable asset, with governance/security, and cost controls. This is the full system to drive business value. Disclosures: This is all pulled from public sources, and for illustrative purposes only...not financial advice! :) Here is the app and architecture..."

Not unexpectedly, the accompanying screenshot of a splash page for the BI app and a buzzword-laden complicated architecture diagram drew universal praise from LinkedIn fans, but also a few barbs from less-than-impressed commenters on Nadella's Twitter/X post, some of whom suggested Nadella's project might even represent a jump-the-shark moment for AI mania. "That he doesnt see whats wrong with saying 'My app is in Copilot, my code is in GitHub Enterprise; all my data pipelines/lake/semantic models are in Fabric' is exactly why MS is failing at AI'," replied @PassingPixels on X/Twitter. "Dude is having to run 5 different systems to emulate babies first vibe code." @zigmund_ignatov added, "Why do we call glorified slide show an app?" @Mathupiriyan quipped, "Looks like Copilot just turned a PDF into a profit crystal ball." Unimpressed, @Markusndnb remarked, "So you created a web page using tons of proprietary MS tools." And @FishyAccounting called on Nadella to show-his-work, saying "Post the prompt or it didn’t happen." (btw, Microsoft President Brad Smith similarly declined to provide the prompt for his own self-described amazing AI DIY reporting project that he touted at Microsoft's Shareholder Meeting last December).

So, does Nadella's self-promoted AI reworking of someone else's PDF research report strike you as an amazing example of everything that's good about AI, or does it conjure up memories of The Emperor's New Clothes?

Submission + - Massive Debian 13 Linux Kernel Security Update Patches 68 Vulnerabilities (9to5linux.com)

Submitted by prisoninmate
prisoninmate writes: Linux blog 9to5Linux reports: "The new Debian 13 Linux kernel security update is a massive one, and it patches no less than 68 security vulnerabilities in the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel. Most of these security vulnerabilities are smaller, individually scoped fixes, ranging from use-after-free and out-of-bounds access to NULL-pointer bugs across networking, storage, and filesystem drivers. Nonetheless, these may lead to a privilege escalation, denial of service, or information leaks.

The most severe vulnerabilities patched in the new Debian 13 “Trixie” kernel security update are CVE-2026-64530, a use-after-free in the traffic-control subsystem leading to remote denial-of-service with potential for remote code execution, and CVE-2026-64531 (a.k.a. OVSwrap), a local-root vulnerability in the Open vSwitch datapath leading to local privilege escalation to root.

CVE-2026-64532 and CVE-2026-64533 are a pair of NTFS3 bugs that could lead to denial-of-service with potential memory corruption or information leak triggered by mounting a crafted NTFS filesystem, and CVE-2026-64534 and CVE-2026-64535 are two flaws in the NVMe-over-TCP target that may lead to denial-of-service."

Submission + - China wants physical buttons on cars instead of touchscreens (autobuzz.my)

Submitted by cantle2000
cantle2000 writes: The Chinese Government has mandated physical buttons on Chinese built cars instead of using touchscreens, from July 1st 2027. Essential functions such as the demister, defogger, power windows, lighting,and gear shifting will be button controlled instead of touchscreen controlled.

Submission + - How Many AI Tech Companies Does it Take to Write a Threatening Letter? Fifty! 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "You’ve got a nice little healthy AI economy here. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it." That's the gist of Open Weights and American AI Leadership, a don't-mess-with-AI-if-you-know-what's-good-for-you letter crafted and distributed on Friday by fifty leading AI tech organizations and circulated on social media by their CEOs.

"Open-weight models are essential to a healthy AI ecosystem," argued Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on X/Twitter and LinkedIn. "Together with others across our industry, we are outlining a path for open-weight models to strengthen American competitiveness and expand economic opportunity, while protecting national security." Echoing Nadella's messaging, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang tweeted: "For my first post, I’m sharing a letter signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models." Retweeting Nadella's message, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg added: "Open source is a positive and important force for both empowering people and preventing centralization. Proud to support this."

The 50 signatories to the letter — hey, so much for AI enabling everyone to be a writer! — were: AI21, AMD, American Innovators Network, AMP, Andreessen Horowitz, Arcee AI, Arena, Baseten, Black Forest Labs, Block, Box, Cisco, Cloudflare, Cohere, CrowdStrike, Dell Technologies, DoorDash, Emergence Capital, Fireworks AI, Genspark, GitHub, Google, Hugging Face, IBM, Inferact, Interconnects AI, The Linux Foundation, Mariana Minerals, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Morph, Mozilla, Nebius, Nous Research, NVIDIA, Ollama, OpenAI, OpenClaw, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Periodic Labs, Perplexity, Prime Intellect, Reflection, Replit, ServiceNow, Telnyx, Trajectory, Y Combinator (conspicuous by their absence are Anthropic and Amazon/AWS).

Interestingly, when asked to compare the 7/24 letter signed by the 50 AI companies to a 7/3 FORTUNE op-ed penned by David Siegel, ChatGPT had this to say: "They are remarkably similar in their core narrative, to the point that they appear to be drawing from the same intellectual and policy framework. The July 24 open-weight letter can almost be read as a shorter, more policy-oriented version of the argument David Siegel made three weeks earlier. [...] Siegel is actually more demanding than the July 24 coalition. A major section of his essay argues that many so-called 'open' AI models are not really open because they release only model weights while withholding training data and training code. He wants visibility into how systems were built, not merely the ability to run them. By contrast, the Microsoft-led letter specifically defends open-weight models, which are a narrower concept. Open-weight models allow access to model parameters but typically do not release training datasets or complete training pipelines. In that sense, Siegel's position is arguably more radical and more aligned with traditional free-software principles than the coalition's."

Submission + - WSJ: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Companies across the country are coming around to a radical idea with the potential to upend the industry powering the global economy," reports the WSJ. "They don’t have to blow their budgets on AI. Fed up with ballooning costs, companies big and small are starting to use lower-priced models, including some built in China. In many cases, they are adding the new, cheaper models alongside OpenAI and Anthropic’s products, shopping a la carte for their artificial intelligence."

"Being economical—or tokenomical—is a dramatic reversal in mindset. Just a few months ago, it was a badge of honor to be using AI so much that you spent a lot on tokens. Companies rewarded employees for tokenmaxxing, flashing leaderboards that showed who had spent the most. Now they are thrift-maxxing."

"Strategies to lower AI costs include limiting access to top models for new hires and using the most advanced AI systems to plan how tasks will be completed before turning to cheaper models for the execution, Cursor’s [Mike] Saeks says. Cursor recently ran an experiment to evaluate the cost of building a web browser from scratch. Doing the entire task on OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 cost a little more than $10,000. Using Cursor’s Composer coding model in combination with Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, cost $1,339."

Correction: The costs cited by the WSJ were evidently to recreate SQLite functionality, not to build a web browser from scratch, an earlier experiment that Cursor explained involved running coding agents autonomously for weeks and burning trillions of tokens to build software that Cursor's CEO boasted "*kind of* works", prompting The Register to credit Cursor for "proving AI can write shoddy code at scale".

Submission + - A Parasite Makes Ants Live 10x Longer And Tricks Others Into Worshipping Them (sciencealert.com) 2

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: When ant larvae of this species are fed woodpecker droppings, they can become infected with the tapeworm Anomotaenia brevis â" and so begins an insidious cycle.

Infected ants start to change color, becoming pale yellow rather than their usual darker brown. They tend not to grow as big as their nest mates, and even start to smell different â" in fact, they seem to emit pheromones that other ants interpret as being from a queen.

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