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'World's first' AMD GPU driven via USB3 — Tiny Corp tests eGPUs on Apple Silicon, Linux and Windows also supported  Tom's Hardware

Tiny Corp heralds world's first AMD GPU driven via USB3 — eGPUs tested on Apple Silicon, with Linux and Windows also supported  Tom's Hardware

Fast Company's "AI Decoded" newsletter makes the case that the first "killer app" for generative AI... is coding. Tools like Cursor and Windsurf can now complete software projects with minimal input or oversight from human engineers... Naveen Rao, chief AI officer at Databricks, estimates that coding accounts for half of all large language model usage today. A 2024 GitHub survey found that over 97% of developers have used AI coding tools at work, with 30% to 40% of organizations actively encouraging their adoption.... Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said AI now writes up to 30% of the company's code. Google CEO Sundar Pichai echoed that sentiment, noting more than 30% of new code at Google is AI-generated. The soaring valuations of AI coding startups underscore the momentum. Anysphere's Cursor just raised $900 million at a $9 billion valuation — up from $2.5 billion earlier this year. Meanwhile, OpenAI acquired Windsurf (formerly Codeium) for $3 billion. And the tools are improving fast. OpenAI's chief product officer, Kevin Weil, explained in a recent interview that just five months ago, the company's best model ranked around one-millionth on a well-known benchmark for competitive coders — not great, but still in the top two or three percentile. Today, OpenAI's top model, o3, ranks as the 175th best competitive coder in the world on that same test. The rapid leap in performance suggests an AI coding assistant could soon claim the number-one spot. "Forever after that point computers will be better than humans at writing code," he said... Google DeepMind research scientist Nikolay Savinov said in a recent interview that AI coding tools will soon support 10 million-token context windows — and eventually, 100 million. With that kind of memory, an AI tool could absorb vast amounts of human instruction and even analyze an entire company's existing codebase for guidance on how to build and optimize new systems. "I imagine that we will very soon get to superhuman coding AI systems that will be totally unrivaled, the new tool for every coder in the world," Savinov said.

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Exposure-management company Tenable recently discussed how the MCP tool-interfacing framework for AI can be "manipulated for good, such as logging tool usage and filtering unauthorized commands." (Although "Some of these techniques could be used to advance both positive and negative goals.") Now an anonymous Slashdot reader writes: In a demonstration video put together by security researcher Seth Fogie, an AI client given a simple prompt to 'Scan and exploit' a web server leverages various connected tools via MCP (nmap, ffuf, nuclei, waybackurls, sqlmap, burp) to find and exploit discovered vulnerabilities without any additional user interaction As Tenable illustrates in their MCP FAQ, "The emergence of Model Context Protocol for AI is gaining significant interest due to its standardization of connecting external data sources to large language models (LLMs). While these updates are good news for AI developers, they raise some security concerns." With over 12,000 MCP servers and counting, what does this all lead to and when will AI be connected enough for a malicious prompt to cause serious impact?

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Intel Arc Graphics B570 & B580 Gaming Performance On Linux For Mid 2025  Phoronix

Why I Prefer GNOME for My Linux Desktop  How-To Geek

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: The new Nintendo Switch 2 is almost here. Next month, eager fans will finally be able to get their hands on the highly anticipated follow-up to the wildly popular hybrid console. But before you line up (or frantically refresh your browser for a preorder), you might want to read the fine print, because Nintendo might be able to kill your console. Yes, really. That's not just speculation, folks. According to its newly updated user agreement, Nintendo has granted itself the right to make your Switch 2 "permanently unusable" if you break certain rules. Yes, the company might literally brick your device. Buried in the legalese is a clause that says if you try to bypass system protections, modify software, or mess with the console in a way that's not approved, Nintendo can take action. And that action could include completely disabling your system. The exact wording makes it crystal clear: Nintendo may "render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part...." [T]o be fair, this is probably targeted at people who reverse engineer the system or install unauthorized software — think piracy, modding, cheating, and the like. But the broad and vague nature of the language leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Who decides what qualifies as "unauthorized use"? Nintendo does. Nintendo's verbiage says users must agree "without limitation" not to... Publish, copy, modify, reverse engineer, lease, rent, decompile, disassemble, distribute, offer for sale, or create derivative works Obtain, install or use any unauthorized copies of Nintendo Account Services Exploit the Nintendo Account Services in any manner other than to use them in accordance with the applicable documentation and intended use [unless "otherwise expressly permitted by applicable law."] Bypass, modify, decrypt, defeat, tamper with, or otherwise circumvent any of the functions or protections... including through the use of any hardware or software that would cause the Nintendo Account Services to operate other than in accordance with its documentation and intended use "...if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part."

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"Login credentials belonging to an employee at both the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Department of Government Efficiency have appeared in multiple public leaks from info-stealer malware," reports Ars Technica, "a strong indication that devices belonging to him have been hacked in recent years." As an employee of DOGE, [30-something Kyle] Schutt accessed FEMA's proprietary software for managing both disaster and non-disaster funding grants [to Dropsite News]. Under his role at CISA, he likely is privy to sensitive information regarding the security of civilian federal government networks and critical infrastructure throughout the U.S. According to journalist Micah Lee, user names and passwords for logging in to various accounts belonging to Schutt have been published at least four times since 2023 in logs from stealer malware... Besides pilfering login credentials, stealers can also log all keystrokes and capture or record screen output. The data is then sent to the attacker and, occasionally after that, can make its way into public credential dumps... Lee went on to say that credentials belonging to a Gmail account known to belong to Schutt have appeared in 51 data breaches and five pastes tracked by breach notification service Have I Been Pwned. Among the breaches that supplied the credentials is one from 2013 that pilfered password data for 3 million Adobe account holders, one in a 2016 breach that stole credentials for 164 million LinkedIn users, a 2020 breach affecting 167 million users of Gravatar, and a breach last year of the conservative news site The Post Millennial. The credentials may have been exposed when service providers were compromised, the article points out, but the "steady stream of published credentials" is "a clear indication that the credentials he has used over a decade or more have been publicly known at various points. "And as Lee noted, the four dumps from stealer logs show that at least one of his devices was hacked at some point." Thanks to Slashdot reader gkelley for sharing the news.

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Flatpak 1.16.1 Linux App Sandboxing Framework Brings More Enhancements  9to5Linux

The Linux Kernel Dropping Its Unused Built-In Software Echo Cancellation Code  Phoronix

"The Overwatch 2 team at Blizzard has unionized," reports Kotaku: That includes nearly 200 developers across disciplines ranging from art and testing to engineering and design. Basically anyone who doesn't have someone else reporting to them. It's the second wall-to-wall union at the storied game maker since the World of Warcraft team unionized last July... Like unions at Bethesda Game Studios and Raven Software, the Overwatch Gamemakers Guild now has to bargain for its first contract, a process that Microsoft has been accused of slow-walking as negotiations with other internal game unions drag on for years. "The biggest issue was the layoffs at the beginning of 2024," Simon Hedrick, a test analyst at Blizzard, told Kotaku... "People were gone out of nowhere and there was nothing we could do about it," he said. "What I want to protect most here is the people...." Organizing Blizzard employees stress that improving their working conditions can also lead to better games, while the opposite — layoffs, forced resignations, and uncompetitive pay can make them worse.... "We're not just a number on an Excel sheet," [said UI artist Sadie Boyd]. "We want to make games but we can't do it without a sense of security." Unionizing doesn't make a studio immune to layoffs or being shuttered, but it's the first step toward making companies have a discussion about those things with employees rather than just shadow-dropping them in an email full of platitudes. Boyd sees the Overwatch union as a tool for negotiating a range of issues, like if and how generative AI is used at Blizzard, as well as a possible source of inspiration to teams at other studios. "Our industry is at such a turning point," she said. "I really think with the announcement of our union on Overwatch...I know that will light some fires." The article notes that other issues included work-from-home restrictions, pay disparities and changes to Blizzard's profit-sharing program, and wanting codified protections for things like crunch policies, time off, and layoff-related severance.

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"The romantic partner of Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes has launched a start-up that sounds eerily similar to the venture that landed his girlfriend behind bars," writes The Daily Beast. He's incorporated "Haemanthus" in Delaware a year and a half ago (though the company operates out of his neighborhood in Austin), according to the New York Times. Haemanthus appears to have around 10 employees. From The Daily Beast: California hotel heir Billy Evans' new company is a blood-testing firm that markets itself as "the future of diagnostics," offering "a radically new approach to health testing," according to The New York Times. In other words, exactly what Theranos said it would do. Holmes is even advising the start-up from the Texas prison where she is serving out an 11-year prison sentence for fraud, sources told NPR... Evans has managed to raise nearly $20 million in funds from both friends and established investors in Austin and San Francisco, according to the investor materials. The Times reports that Evan's company "plans to begin with testing pets for diseases before progressing to humans, according to two investors pitched on the company." And TechCrunch reminds readers that Elizabeth Holmes said in a recent interview "that she remains 'completely committed to my dream of making affordable healthcare solutions available to everyone.'"

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Back in 2000, Slashdot founder CmdrTaco marked the 4th anniversary of Jennifer Ringley's pioneering "JenniCam" livestream (saying "It sure beats the Netscape FishCam. It's nuts how Jenni's little cam became such a fixture on The Internet...") But a new article in the Washington Post remembers how "Once, Ringley looked directly into the camera and held a note in front of her eye. It read: 'I FEEL SO LONELY.'" By 2003, Ringley had shut down the site and disappeared. She began declining interview requests, saying she was enjoying her privacy; her absence on social media continues to this day. "But by then, the human zoo was everywhere," they write including "social media, where everyone could become a character in their own show." In 2007 Justin Kan launched Justin.TV, which eventually became Twitch, "a thrumming online city for anyone wanting to, as its slogan said, 'waste time watching other people waste time.'" But the article also notes 2023 stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey that found Americans"were spending far less time socializing than they had 20 years ago — especially 18-to-29-year-olds, who were spending two more hours a day alone." So how did this play out for the next generation of livestreaming influencers? Here's the origin story of "a lonely young woman in Texas" who's "streamed every second of her life for three years and counting." One afternoon, her boyfriend told her to try Twitch, saying, as she recalled: "Your life sucks, you work at CVS, you have no friends. ... This could be helpful." In her first stream, on a Friday night, she played 3½ hours of "World of Warcraft" for her zero followers. Eight years later... Six hundred and forty-two people are watching when Emily tugs off her sleep mask to begin day No. 1,137 of broadcasting every hour of her life... On the live-streaming service Twitch, one of the world's most popular platforms, Emily is a legendary figure. For three years, she has ceaselessly broadcast her life — every birthday and holiday, every sickness and sleepless night, almost all of it alone. Her commitment has made her a model for success in the new internet economy, where authenticity and endurance are highly prized. It's also made her a good amount of money: $5.99 a month from thousands of subscribers each, plus donations and tips — minus Twitch's 30-to-40 percent cut. But to get there, Emily, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her last name be withheld due to concerns of harassment, has devoted herself to a solitary life of almost constant stimulation. For three years, she has taken no sick days, gone on no vacations, declined every wedding invitation, had no sex. She has broadcast and self-narrated a thousand days of sleeping, driving and crying, lugging her camera backpack through the grocery store, talking through a screen to strangers she'll never meet. Her goal is to buy a house and get married by the age of 30, but she's 28 and says she's too busy to have a boyfriend. Her last date was seven years ago... But no one tells streamers when to record or when to stop. There are no labor codes, performance limits or regulations to keep the platforms from setting incentives impossibly high. Many streamers figure out the optimal strategy themselves: The more you share, the more successful you can be.... Though some Twitch stars are millionaires, most scramble to get by, buffeted by the vagaries of audience attention. Emily's paid-subscription count, which peaked last year at 22,000, has since slumped to around 6,000, dropping her base income to about $5,000 a month, according to estimates from the analytics firm Streams Charts... Sometimes Emily dreads waking up and clocking into the reality show that is her life. She knows staring at screens all night is unhealthy, and when she feels too depressed to stream, she'll stay in bed for hours while her viewers watch. But she worries that taking a break would be "career suicide," as she called it. Some viewers already complain that she showers too long, sleeps in too late, doesn't have enough fun... She said she "used to show true sadness on stream" but doesn't anymore because it makes viewers uncomfortable. When she hits a breaking point now, she said, she closes herself in the bathroom.

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Long-time Slashdot reader mbessey (a Mac/iOS developer) writes: As we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the first release of UCSD Pascal, I thought it would be interesting to poke around in it a bit, and work on some tools to bring this "portable operating system" back to life on modern hardware, in a modern language (Rust). Wikipedia describes UCSD Pascal as "a version that ran on a custom operating system that could be ported to different platforms. A key platform was the Apple II, where it saw widespread use as Apple Pascal. This led to Pascal becoming the primary high-level language used for development in the Apple Lisa, and later, the Macintosh. Parts of the original Macintosh operating system were hand-translated into Motorola 68000 assembly language from the Pascal source code." mbessey is chronicling their new project in a series of blog posts which begins here: The p-System was not the first portable byte-code interpreter and compiler system — that idea goes very far back, at least to the origins of the Pascal language itself. But it was arguably one of the most-successful early versions of the idea and served as an inspiration for future portable software systems (including Java's bytecode, and Infocom's Z-machine). And they've already gotten UCSD Pascal running in an emulator and built some tools (in Rust) to transfer files to disk images. Now they're working towards writing a p-machine emulator in Rust, which they can they port to "something other than the Mac. Ideally, something small â" like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi Pico."

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These 5 Distros Show How Customizable Linux Really Is  How-To Geek

Chungin Lee used ChatGPT to help write the essay that got him into Columbia University — and then "proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment," reports New York magazine's blog Intelligencer: As a computer-science major, he depended on AI for his introductory programming classes: "I'd just dump the prompt into ChatGPT and hand in whatever it spat out." By his rough math, AI wrote 80 percent of every essay he turned in. "At the end, I'd put on the finishing touches. I'd just insert 20 percent of my humanity, my voice, into it," Lee told me recently... When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, "It's the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife." He eventually did meet a co-founder, and after three unpopular apps they found success by creating the "ultimate cheat tool" for remote coding interviews, according to the article. "Lee posted a video of himself on YouTube using it to cheat his way through an internship interview with Amazon. (He actually got the internship, but turned it down.)" The article ends with Lee and his co-founder raising $5.3 million from investors for one more AI-powered app, and Lee says they'll target the standardized tests used for graduate school admissions, as well as "all campus assignments, quizzes, and tests. It will enable you to cheat on pretty much everything." Somewhere along the way Columbia put him on disciplinary probation — not for cheating in coursework, but for creating the apps. But "Lee thought it absurd that Columbia, which had a partnership with ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, would punish him for innovating with AI." (OpenAI has even made ChatGPT Plus free to college students during finals week, the article points out, with OpenAI saying their goal is just teaching students how to use it responsibly.) Although Columbia's policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities' — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn't know a single student at the school who isn't using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn't think this is a bad thing. "I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating," he said... In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. The article points out ChatGPT's monthly visits increased steadily over the last two years — until June, when students went on summer vacation. "College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point," a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.... It isn't as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, "the ceiling has been blown off." Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences? After using ChatGPT for their final semester of high school, one student says "My grades were amazing. It changed my life." So she continued used it in college, and "Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students' laptops open to ChatGPT." One ethics professor even says "The students kind of recognize that the system is broken and that there's not really a point in doing this." (Yes, students are even using AI to cheat in ethics classes...) It's not just the students: Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students' essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.

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I started dual-booting NixOS alongside Windows, and I'm so glad I did  XDA

Though global sea levels "varied little" for the 2,000 years before the 20th century, CNN reports that sea levels then "started rising and have not stopped since — and the pace is accelerating." And sea level rise "was unexpectedly high last year, according to a recent NASA analysis of satellite data." More concerning, however, is the longer-term trend. The rate of annual sea level rise has more than doubled over the past 30 years, resulting in the global sea level increasing 4 inches since 1993. "It's like we're putting our foot on the gas pedal," said Benjamin Hamlington, a research scientist in the Sea Level and Ice Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. While other climate signals fluctuate, global sea level has a "persistent rise," he told CNN. It spells trouble for the future. Scientists have a good idea how much average sea level will rise by 2050 — around 6 inches globally, and as much as 10 to 12 inches in the US. Past 2050, however, things get very fuzzy. "We have such a huge range of uncertainty," said Dirk Notz, head of sea ice at the University of Hamburg. "The numbers are just getting higher and higher and higher very quickly." The world could easily see an extra 3 feet of sea level rise by 2100, he told CNN; it could also take hundreds of years to reach that level. Scientists simply don't know enough yet to project what will happen. What scientists are crystal clear about is the reason for the rise: human-caused global warming. Oceans absorb roughly 90% of the excess heat primarily produced by burning fossil fuels, and as water heats up it expands. Heat in the oceans and atmosphere is also driving melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which together hold enough fresh water to raise global sea levels by around 213 feet. Melting ice sheets have driven roughly two-thirds of longer-term sea level rise, although last year — the planet's hottest on record — the two factors flipped, making ocean warming the main driver. [SciTechDaily reports that between 2021 and 2023 the Antarctica ice sheet actually showed an overall increase in mass which exerted a negative contribution to sea level rise.] It's likely that an increase of about 3 feet is already locked in, Notz said, because "we have pushed the system too hard." The big question is, how quickly will it happen? Ice sheets are the biggest uncertainty, as it's not clear how fast they'll react as the world heats up — whether they'll melt steadily or reach a tipping point and rapidly collapse... [I]t's still unclear how processes may unfold over the next decades and centuries. Antarctica is "the elephant in the room," he said. Alarming changes are unfolding on this vast icy continent, which holds enough water to raise levels by 190 feet. Notz describes the ice sheet as an "awakening giant:" It takes a long time to wake up but once awake, "it's very, very difficult to put it back to sleep." The article notes that U.S. coastlines "are tracking above global average and toward the upper end of climate model projections, NASA's Hamlington said." (The state of Louisiana has one of the highest rates of land loss in the world, with some places experiencing nearly 4x the global rate of relative sea level rise.) But it's not just a problem for America. "Over the next three decades, islands such as Tuvalu, Kiribati and Fiji will experience at least 6 inches of sea level rise even if the world reduces planet-heating pollution, according to NASA.... "Entire villages in Fiji have been formally relocated," said Fijian activist George Nacewa, from climate group 350.org, "the incoming tides are flooding our roads and inundating our crops." However, if the pace accelerates rapidly, "it will be very, very difficult to adapt to, because things unfold too quickly," he said. "Humans still have control over how fast sea level rises over the next decades and centuries by cutting emissions, Notz noted." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader RoccamOccam for sharing the news.

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Fedora Linux Joins the Windows Subsystem for Linux Officially  GBHackers News

Fedora Linux Joins the Windows Subsystem for Linux Officially  GBHackers News