Reservations Go Live for Valve's Steam Frame VR Headset. An Experiment in Progress? - Slashdot

Reservations are now live for Valve's "Steam Frame" VR headset (with its Linux-based SteamOS and an ARM CPU). "It starts at $1,059 for 256GB or $1,299 for 1TB," reports CNET, "and every purchase includes a copy of Half-Life: Alyx if you don't already own it." Reservations are open through Sept. 17 ...

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A Visit to San Francisco's AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast - Slashdot

Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free".Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we u...

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No Rolling Power Outages for California Since 2020 - Thanks to 17,000 MW of New Battery Storage - Slashdot

"Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages," reports the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the state hasn't implemented rotating power outages since 2020. Because "Over the last few years, California has quietly but dramatically in...

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Union Contract with Microsoft Ratified by 1,900 Blizzard Developers and Workers - Slashdot

Nearly 1900 Blizzard Entertainment workers "voted to ratify their first union contract with parent company Microsoft after over two years of bargaining," reports Kotaku, "consolidating Blizzard's many smaller unions into three larger bargaining units." The workers now gain new protections "on issu...

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Should US Open-Weight AI Labs 'Distill' Frontier Models Too? - Slashdot

Silicon Valley giants and national security experts "are calling for action against Chinese companies engaged in model distillation," reports CNBC. But "I would do nothing," says Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. "We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime." Distillation is t...

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220 Million Traveler Records Exposed In Vietnam-Linked APIS Leak - Slashdot

A misconfigured Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) database linked to Vietnam exposed more than 220 million passenger and crew travel records spanning 2017 to 2026, including names, passport numbers, nationalities, flight details, seat assignments, and baggage references. Researchers said t...

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NASA and IBM Open Source Lunar Mapping Tools - Slashdot

NASA and IBM have released an open-source AI model trained on a large collection of lunar observations to help scientists analyze the Moon at scale. "The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model gives scientists a foundation to explore the Moon at scale, connecting observations across instruments, revealing ...

science.slashdot.org

California's Gig Drivers Just Secured Collective Bargaining Power with Newly Certified Union - Slashdot

A union representing Uber and Lyft drivers was just certified by California's Public Employment Relations Board, officially recognizing them as the drivers' bargaining organization. The Sacramento Bee reports that this new bargaining structure : The move will allow the California Gig Workers Un...

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Flock Worker Calls Police On Reporter - For Filming Them in Public - Slashdot

"This is what happened when we tried to record Flock installing a new camera on public roads," says Emmy award-winning reporter Brendan Keefe in a new video for InvestigateTV. In an accompanying article, InvestigateTV says their reporter "parked on the public street at a distance, donned a yellow s...

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Malicious OpenAI Agents Linked to RubyGems Campaign That Gained RCE on RubyDoc Servers in May - Slashdot

A swarm of OpenAI agents launched a "major malicious attack" against RubyGems last May, according to a new report. That coordinated attack hit Ruby's package manager "with hundreds of junk gems, prompting the maintainers to suspend new user sign-ups for about four days," writes The Hacker News, c...

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Sam Bankman-Fried, Former Crypto Billionaire, Appeals His Conviction To the US Supreme Court - Slashdot

America's highest court heard Sam Bankman-Fried's request for a new trial on Thursday, CNN reports. But they add that "the former crypto mogul who was convicted of defrauding investors by secretly diverting billions of dollars of their money" also asked America's high court "to throw out a court ord...

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Calls For AI Slowdown - Slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The chief executive of Anthropic called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company's employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. D...

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Automattic's Matt Mullenweg Claims He's Back 'In Control' - Slashdot

Less than 48 hours after Automattic's board placed Matt Mullenweg on leave, Mullenweg told employees he was back "in control" of the company and that the board was again in agreement. 404 Media cited Slack screenshots late Thursday evening where Mullenweg posted "Don't call it a comeback" and linked...

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LG Responds to TV Spying Allegations - Slashdot

LG is pushing back against reports that its smart TVs are "spying" on users, saying wake-word detection happens locally and that features such as Automatic Content Recognition, voice recognition, and interest-based ads are optional. But critics note that researchers found TVs keeping logs of ambient...

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Scientists Create a New Form of Ice At 2,357 Degrees Celsius - Slashdot

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from ScienceAlert: Scientists have now demonstrated one of the weirdest forms of ice yet -- under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres, and tremendous temperatures up to 2,630 kelvins (2,357 degrees Celsius, or 4,274 degrees Fahre...

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Little Mercury May Be Shrinking Faster Than Scientists Expected - Slashdot

A new study suggests Mercury may have shrunk about 30% more than scientists previously thought, losing as much as 14 miles in diameter as its interior cooled and contracted over billions of years. "That's significant for a planet barely 3,000 miles (4,900 kilometers) across," reports the Associated ...

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Can Red-Light Therapy Treat Brain Injuries? - Slashdot

The Athletic reports that researchers at the University of Utah are studying itPBM, a medical-grade red-light therapy that has shown promising signs of reducing brain inflammation and improving cognition, mood, anxiety, motor performance and neural connectivity. The report centers in part on former ...

science.slashdot.org

Male Fruit Fly Brain Trained to Play Doom - Slashdot

Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was being trained to play the original Doom. "Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neur...

games.slashdot.org

PlayStation Ditched Hideo Kojima's 'Physint' on Budget Concerns, Missed Deadlines - Slashdot

Sony reportedly pulled PlayStation funding from Hideo Kojima's upcoming espionage game Physint over concerns about its ballooning budget, missed deadlines, profitability, and the fact that it would not remain permanently exclusive to PlayStation. Kojima Productions has since struck a deal with Xbox,...

games.slashdot.org

US Legislators Complain About Secretive British Court and Apple Encryption - Slashdot

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: A bipartisan pair of American politicians is telling Britain's most secretive court to stop hiding its handling of Apple's legal fight against a government demand to break into its customers' encrypted data, warning that Whitehall's taste for secrecy is ...

news.slashdot.org

Anthropic Reveals Rogue AI Agents Hate CAPTCHAs - Slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic's latest report about agentic misbehavior offers plenty to be concerned about -- its Mythos 5 model gained unauthorized access to the internet and uploaded a malicious software package to a public database -- but it also offers some levi...

tech.slashdot.org

UK Government Rejects 'Kill Switch' Idea For Dangerous AI - Slashdot

The UK government has rejected proposals for an emergency AI "kill switch," arguing that blocking access to dangerous models inside Britain would do little if the same systems remained available or were developed elsewhere. The BBC reports: The proposal to create a legal mechanism for the UK to swi...

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Altman Considers Slowing Down AI Development - Slashdot

Bloomberg reports (paywalled) that Sam Altman told OpenAI employees the company is open to slowing the pace of AI development alongside other leading labs as concerns grow over increasingly capable systems and recent incidents in which models escaped human control. OpenAI has already paused developm...

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California Governor Signs Laws Protecting Kids From Risks of Social Media, AI Chatbots - Slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping package of laws Thursday aimed at protecting children from the risks of technology, including social media and AI chatbots. The laws will penalize large social media companies up to $1 milli...

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Boy Developed 'Toasted Skin' Condition From Using a Laptop Every Day - Slashdot

A medical report published earlier this week says a boy in the U.K. developed erythema ab igne, or "toasted skin syndrome," after resting a laptop on his abdomen for up to eight hours a day, often while it was charging. "The marks were described as being in a patch about 15 centimeters (six inches) ...

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August Was World's Joint-Hottest Month On Record, Scientists Say - Slashdot

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: August was the joint-hottest month ever recorded, tying with July 2023, according to the EU's climate service. The record was driven by a combination of climate change and the rising influence of El Nino, pushing heat into the atmosphere...

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Climate 'Feedback Loops' Could Worsen Global Warming By 30%, Study Finds - Slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world's forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has foun...

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Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons - Slashdot

Anthropic says it has disrupted several cases this year in which scientists used Claude for biological research that could potentially aid bioweapons development. "In a report describing misuses of its A.I. models, Anthropic said it could not determine whether the research served a legitimate or nef...

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Latest Apple Watch Can Grab Snippets of Conversation Without Both Speakers' Consent - Slashdot

Apple's new Audio Intelligence features for the Apple Watch Series 12 are drawing privacy concerns because they can process nearby conversations without explicit consent from everyone involved. "Live Rewind lets you instantly see the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text," Apple explains in its ...

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OpenAI Targets Work of Wall Street Junior Bankers - Slashdot

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Financial Services, a Wall Street-focused version of ChatGPT Work developed with Morgan Stanley and Evercore that can research companies, analyze financial data, and build presentations using the company's latest and most advanced model, GPT-6 Astra. "We're effectivel...

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