Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the sign-of-the-times department: "The world has changed," writes Stack Overflow's blog. "Fast. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we build, learn, and solve problems. Software development looks dramatically different than it did even a few years ago — and the pace of change is only accelerating."
And they believe their brand "at times" lost "fidelity and clarity. It's very much been always added to and not been thought of holistically. So, it's time for our brand to evolve too," they write, hoping to articulate a perspective "forged in the fires of community, powered by collaboration, shaped by AI, and driven by people."
The developer news site DevClass notes the change happens "as the number of posts to its site continues a dramatic decline thanks to AI-driven alternatives."
According to a quick query on the official data explorer, the sum of questions and answers posted in April 2025 was down by over 64 percent from the same month in 2024, and plunged more than 90 percent from April 2020, when traffic was near its peak...
Although declining traffic is a sign of Stack Overflow's reduced significance in the developer community, the company's business is not equally affected so far. Stack Exchange is a business owned by investment company Prosus, and the Stack Exchange products include private versions of its site (Stack Overflow for Teams) as well as advertising and recruitment. According to the Prosus financial results, in the six months ended September 2024, Stack Overflow increased its revenue and reduced its losses. The company's search for a new direction though confirms that the fast-disappearing developer engagement with Stack Overflow poses an existential challenge to the organization.
DevClass says Stack Overflow's parent company "is casting about for new ways to provide value (and drive business) in this context..."
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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the in-the-chips department: An anonymous reader shared this report from CRN:
CPU-tracking firm Mercury Research reported on Thursday that Intel's x86 CPU market share grew 0.3 points sequentially to 75.6 percent against AMD's 24.4 percent in the first quarter. However, AMD managed to increase its market share by 3.6 points year over year. These figures only captured the server, laptop and desktop CPU segments. When including IoT and semicustom products, AMD grew its x86 market share sequentially by 1.5 points and year over year by 0.9 points to 27.1 percent against Intel's 72.9 percent... AMD managed to gain ground on Intel in the desktop and server segments sequentially and year over year. But it was in the laptop segment where Intel eked out a sequential share gain, even though rival AMD ended up finishing the first quarter with a higher share of shipments than what it had a year ago...
While AMD mostly came out on top in the first quarter, [Mercury Research President Dean] McCarron said ARM's estimated CPU share against x86 products crossed into the double digits for the first time, growing 2.3 points sequentially to 11.9 percent. This was mainly due to a "surge" of Nvidia's Grace CPUs for servers and a large increase of Arm CPU shipments for Chromebooks.
Meanwhile, PC Gamer reports that ARM's share of the PC processor market "grew to 13.6% in the first quarter of 2025 from 10.8% in the fourth quarter of 2024." And they note the still-only-rumors that an Arm-based chip from AMD will be available as soon next year.
[I]f one of the two big players in x86 does release a mainstream Arm chip for the PC, that will very significant. If it comes at about the same time as Nvidia's rumoured Arm chip for the PC, well, momentum really will be building and questioning x86's dominance will be wholly justified.
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the rise-of-the-machines department: "The altruistic OpenAI is gone, if it ever existed," argues a new article in the Atlantic, based on interviews with more than 90 current and former employees, including executives. It notes that shortly before Altman's ouster (and rehiring) he was "seemingly trying to circumvent safety processes for expediency," with OpenAI co-founder/chief scientist Ilya telling three board members "I don't think Sam is the guy who should have the finger on the button for AGI." (The board had already discovered Altman "had not been forthcoming with them about a range of issues" including a breach in the Deployment Safety Board's protocols.)
Adapted from the upcoming book, Empire of AI, the article first revisits the summer of 2023, when Sutskever ("the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT") met with a group of new researchers:
Sutskever had long believed that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, was inevitable — now, as things accelerated in the generative-AI industry, he believed AGI's arrival was imminent, according to Geoff Hinton, an AI pioneer who was his Ph.D. adviser and mentor, and another person familiar with Sutskever's thinking.... To people around him, Sutskever seemed consumed by thoughts of this impending civilizational transformation. What would the world look like when a supreme AGI emerged and surpassed humanity? And what responsibility did OpenAI have to ensure an end state of extraordinary prosperity, not extraordinary suffering?
By then, Sutskever, who had previously dedicated most of his time to advancing AI capabilities, had started to focus half of his time on AI safety. He appeared to people around him as both boomer and doomer: more excited and afraid than ever before of what was to come. That day, during the meeting with the new researchers, he laid out a plan. "Once we all get into the bunker — " he began, according to a researcher who was present.
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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the nothing-lasts-forever department: "Researchers are seeking a breakthrough in technologies to tackle PFAS contamination," reports the Washington Post — including experiments with ultraviolet light, plasma and sound waves:
"We're in a good spot," said Christopher Higgins, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines who researches PFAS. "There's a lot of things being tested. ... Around the world, everyone is trying to work on this topic...." PFAS destruction technologies are beginning to show potential. Some methods have been licensed by companies that are rolling out the systems in real-world settings. "There's been a lot of research happening over the past few years looking at advanced destruction technologies, and there's been a lot of improvements and advancements, and we're now starting to see some of them actually at scale," said Anna Reade [a senior scientist and director of PFAS advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council].
An approach known as supercritical water oxidation is one of the more developed technologies, Reade and other experts said. It involves heating and pressurizing water to a specific point that creates the ideal conditions to break every carbon fluorine bond, said Amy Dindal [a PFAS expert with Battelle, a science and technology nonprofit that has developed a PFAS destruction technology]. The process used in a patented technology created by Battelle produces carbon dioxide and a form of fluorine that can be quickly neutralized to become a harmless salt. "It's a complete destruction and mineralization technology, because we're actually breaking all of the carbon fluorine bonds," Dindal said, adding that the technology is "PFAS agnostic...."
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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the alternative-spelling department: A Curl contributor replaced an ASCII letter with a Unicode alternative in a pull request, writes Curl lead developer/founder Daniel Stenberg. And not a single human reviewer on the team (or any of their CI jobs) noticed.
The change "looked identical to the ASCII version, so it was not possible to visually spot this..."
The impact of changing one or more letters in a URL can of course be devastating depending on conditions... [W]e have implemented checks to help us poor humans spot things like this. To detect malicious Unicode. We have added a CI job that scans all files and validates every UTF-8 sequence in the git repository.
In the curl git repository most files and most content are plain old ASCII so we can "easily" whitelist a small set of UTF-8 sequences and some specific files, the rest of the files are simply not allowed to use UTF-8 at all as they will then fail the CI job and turn up red. In order to drive this change home, we went through all the test files in the curl repository and made sure that all the UTF-8 occurrences were instead replaced by other kind of escape sequences and similar. Some of them were also used more or less by mistake and could easily be replaced by their ASCII counterparts.
The next time someone tries this stunt on us it could be someone with less good intentions, but now ideally our CI will tell us... We want and strive to be proactive and tighten everything before malicious people exploit some weakness somewhere but security remains this never-ending race where we can only do the best we can and while the other side is working in silence and might at some future point attack us in new creative ways we had not anticipated. That future unknown attack is a tricky thing.
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Posted by from MMO Champion
Mythic Dungeon International 2025 - Group C
The Mythic Dungeon International returns this weekend with Group C! Tune in on
Twitch and
YouTube to watch top teams speedrun dungeons for their share of $30,000 (USD) in prize money and qualify for the Global Finals.
MDI 2025 - Official Viewer's Guide
MDI 2025 - Group C - Day 1
MDI 2025 - Group C - Day 2
MDI 2025 - Group C - Finals
Mythic Dungeon International 2025 - Tournament Info
Tournament Dates:
Group A: May 2-4
Group B: May 9-11
Group C: May 16-18
Global Finals: May 30 - June 1
Broadcast Start Time: 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Groups Format: Each day, four teams push keys simultaneously, with the top two teams advancing to compete in the finals on day 3
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the we-are-the-shadows department: "Shares of Ubisoft sank 18% on Thursday," reports CNBC, "after the French video game firm reported full-year earnings that disappointed investors... The company's shares have lost almost 60% of their value in the past 12 months, as the firm faced financial struggles, development hurdles, and underperformance of some of its key titles."
Ubisoft said its latest Assassin's Creed game "delivered the second-highest Day 1 sales revenue in franchise history and set a new record for Ubisoft's Day 1 performance on the PlayStation digital store," according to Reuters. And AFP notes that according to data from consultancy Circana, that game become the second-best-selling game of the year so far in the U.S. But...
[A] string of disappointing releases undermined this year's performance, with a net loss of 159 million euros ($178 million) on revenues of 1.9 billion — down 17.5 percent year-on-year. Over the past 12 months, Ubisoft's would-be blockbuster "Star Wars Outlaws" fell short of sales expectations on release, while it cancelled multiplayer first-person shooter "XDefiant" for lack of players. "This year has been a challenging one for Ubisoft, with mixed dynamics across our portfolio, amid intense industry competition," chief executive Yves Guillemot said in a statement. But a string of disappointing releases undermined this year's performance, with a net loss of 159 million euros ($178 million) on revenues of 1.9 billion — down 17.5 percent year-on-year.
The group expects the measure to hold steady in the coming 2025-26 financial year, during which it will release a new "Prince of Persia" game, strategy title "Anno 117: Pax Romana" and mobile versions of shooters "Rainbow Six" and "The Division"... Moving to address its business woes, Ubisoft said in late March that it would create a new subsidiary to manage its three top franchises: "Assassin's Creed", "Far Cry" and "Rainbow Six".
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the Mothra-returns department: "With the help of more than five dozen fossils, paleontologists have uncovered a tiny three-eyed predator nicknamed the 'sea moth'," reports CNN, "that swam in Earth's oceans 506 million years ago."
Tiny as in 15 to 61 mm in total body length. (That's 0.60 to 2.4 inches...) But check out the illustration in CNN's article...
Mosura fentoni, as the species is known, belongs to a group called radiodonts, an early offshoot of the arthropod evolutionary tree, according to a new study published Tuesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science. While radiodonts are now extinct, studying their fossilized remains can illuminate how modern arthropods such as insects, spiders and crabs evolved. One of the most diverse animal groups, arthropods are believed to account for more than 80% of living animal species, said lead study author Dr. Joe Moysiuk, curator of paleontology and geology at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg.
Well-preserved specimens of the previously unknown Mosura fentoni also reveal something that's never been seen in any other radiodont: an abdomen-like body region with 16 segments that include gills at its rear. This part of the creature's anatomy is similar to a batch of segments bearing respiratory organs at the rear of the body found in distant modern radiodont relatives like horseshoe crabs, woodlice and insects, Moysiuk said.... No animal living today quite looks like Mosura fentoni, Moysiuk said, although it had jointed claws similar to those of modern insects and crustaceans. But unlike those critters, which can have two or four additional eyes used to help maintain orientation, Mosura had a larger and more conspicuous third eye in the middle of its head.
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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the Rust-never-sleeps department: Thursday was Rust's 10-year anniversary for its first stable release. "To say I'm surprised by its trajectory would be a vast understatement," writes Rust's original creator Graydon Hoare. "I can only thank, congratulate, and celebrate everyone involved... In my view, Rust is a story about a large community of stakeholders coming together to design, build, maintain, and expand shared technical infrastructure."
It's a story with many actors:
- The population of developers the language serves who express their needs and constraints through discussion, debate, testing, and bug reports arising from their experience writing libraries and applications.
- The language designers and implementers who work to satisfy those needs and constraints while wrestling with the unexpected consequences of each decision.
- The authors, educators, speakers, translators, illustrators, and others who work to expand the set of people able to use the infrastructure and work on the infrastructure.
- The institutions investing in the project who provide the long-term funding and support necessary to sustain all this work over decades.
All these actors have a common interest in infrastructure.
Rather than just "systems programming", Hoare sees Rust as a tool for building infrastructure itself, "the robust and reliable necessities that enable us to get our work done" — a wide range that includes everything from embedded and IoT systems to multi-core systems. So the story of "Rust's initial implementation, its sustained investment, and its remarkable resonance and uptake all happened because the world needs robust and reliable infrastructure, and the infrastructure we had was not up to the task."
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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the not-what-you-want department: Australia's first orbital-class rocket launch was delayed after the nose cone of Gilmour Space's Eris rocket unexpectedly detached due to an electrical fault during final preparations. Although no damage occurred and no payload was onboard, the company is postponing the launch to investigate and replace the fairing before attempting another test flight. Ars Technica reports: Gilmour, the Australian startup that developed the Eris rocket, announced the setback in a post to the company's social media accounts Thursday. "During final launch preparations last night, an electrical fault triggered the system that opens the rocket's nose cone (the payload fairing)," Gilmour posted on LinkedIn. "This happened before any fuel was loaded into the vehicle. Most importantly, no one was injured, and early checks show no damage to the rocket or the launch pad."
Gilmour was gearing up for a launch attempt from a privately owned spaceport in the Australian state of Queensland early Friday, local time (Thursday in the United States). The company's Eris rocket, which was poised for its first test flight, stands about 82 feet (25 meters) tall with its payload fairing intact. It's designed to haul a payload of about 670 pounds (305 kilograms) to low-Earth orbit.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the first-of-its-kind department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: U.S. health officials on Friday endorsed the first blood test that can help diagnose Alzheimer's and identify patients who may benefit from drugs that can modestly slow the memory-destroying disease. The test can aid doctors in determining whether a patient's memory problems are due to Alzheimer's or a number of other medical conditions that can cause cognitive difficulties. The Food and Drug Administration cleared it for patients 55 and older who are showing early signs of the disease.
The new test, from Fujirebio Diagnostics, Inc., identifies a sticky brain plaque, known as beta-amyloid, that is a key marker for Alzheimer's. Previously, the only FDA-approved methods for detecting amyloid were invasive tests of spinal fluid or expensive PET scans. The lower costs and convenience of a blood test could also help expand use of two new drugs, Leqembi and Kisunla, which have been shown to slightly slow the progression of Alzheimer's by clearing amyloid from the brain. Doctors are required to test patients for the plaque before prescribing the drugs, which require regular IV infusions. [...]
A number of specialty hospitals and laboratories have already developed their own in-house tests for amyloid in recent years. But those tests aren't reviewed by the FDA and generally aren't covered by insurance. Doctors have also had little data to judge which tests are reliable and accurate, leading to an unregulated marketplace that some have called a "wild west." Several larger diagnostic and drug companies are also developing their own tests for FDA approval, including Roche, Eli Lilly and C2N Diagnostics. The tests can only be ordered by a doctor and aren't intended for people who don't yet have any symptoms.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the fwiw department: Microsoft has released Command Palette, an enhanced version of its PowerToys Run launcher introduced five years ago. The utility, aimed at power users and developers, provides quick access to applications, files, calculations, and system commands through a Spotlight-like interface.
Command Palette integrates the previously separate Window Walker functionality for switching between open windows and supports launching command prompts, executing web searches, and navigating folder structures. Unlike its predecessor, the new launcher offers full customization via extensions, allowing users to implement additional commands beyond default capabilities. Available through the PowerToys application since early April, Command Palette can be triggered using Win+Alt+Space after installation
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the time-is-money department: Walmart is preparing for a future where AI agents shop on behalf of consumers by adapting its systems to serve both humans and autonomous bots. As major players like Visa and PayPal also invest in agentic commerce, Walmart is positioning itself as a leader by developing its own AI agents and supporting broader industry integration. PYMNTS reports: Instead of scrolling through ads or comparing product reviews, future consumers may rely on digital assistants, like OpenAI's Operator, to manage their shopping lists, from replenishing household essentials to selecting the best TV based on personal preferences, according to the report (paywalled). "It will be different," Walmart U.S. Chief Technology Officer Hari Vasudev said, per the report. "Advertising will have to evolve." The emergence of AI-generated summaries in search results has already altered the way consumers gather product information, the report said. However, autonomous shopping agents represent a bigger transformation. These bots could not only find products but also finalize purchases, including payments, without the user ever lifting a finger. [...]
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Posted by from MMO Champion
WoW Hotfixes - May 16, 2025
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Classes
Paladin
Retribution
An issue with Radiant Glory and Avenging Wrath interaction has been resolved.
Hunter
Marksmanship
Fixed an issue where dying while channeling Rapid Fire could keep Hunters in combat upon resurrecting.
Dungeons
Priory of the Sacred Flame
Addressed an issue where Captain Dailcry can sometimes be rooted after Savage Mauling.
Player versus Player
Warrior
Wrecking Throw’s damage increase to shields is now 75% less effective in PvP combat (was 30% less effective).
Shattering Throw’s damage increase to shields is now 75% less effective in PvP combat (was 30%).
Trading Post
Earning reputation with the Flame’s Radiance and The Cartels of Undermine factions now counts for the Trading Post activity "Earn Reputation Throughout Khaz Algar", as intended.
Season of Discovery
Items
Spire of Sacrifice now prevents being healed by Chain Heal or Healing Rain and no longer damages the wielder with Healing Rain ticks.
Mage
The Scarlet Enclave 4-piece healer set bonus will now correctly reduce incoming damage.
Rogue
Carnage will no longer fall off prematurely when Cutthroat's variant of Garrote is used.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the planning-ahead department: In an exclusive interview with the BBC, AWS CEO Matt Garman said the UK must expand nuclear energy to meet the soaring electricity demands of AI-driven data centers. From the report: Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is part of the retail giant Amazon, plans to spend 8 billion pounds on new data centers in the UK over the next four years. Matt Garman, chief executive of AWS, told the BBC nuclear is a "great solution" to data centres' energy needs as "an excellent source of zero carbon, 24/7 power." AWS is the single largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world and has funded more than 40 renewable solar and wind farm projects in the UK.
The UK's 500 data centres currently consume 2.5% of all electricity in the UK, while Ireland's 80 hoover up 21% of the country's total power, with those numbers projected to hit 6% and 30% respectively by 2030. The body that runs the UK's power grid estimates that by 2050 data centers alone will use nearly as much energy as all industrial users consume today.
In an exclusive interview with the BBC, Matt Garman said that future energy needs were central to AWS planning process. "It's something we plan many years out," he said. "We invest ahead. I think the world is going to have to build new technologies. I believe nuclear is a big part of that particularly as we look 10 years out."
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the exciting-results department: A new set of 27 Linux kernel patches introduces a "Swap Tables" mechanism aimed at enhancing virtual memory management. As Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports, "the hope is for lower memory use, higher performance, dynamic swap allocation and growth, greater extensibility, and other improvements over the existing swap code within the Linux kernel." From the report: Engineer Kairui Song with Tencent posted the Swap Table patch series today for implementing the design ideas discussed in recent months by kernel developers. The results are very exciting so let's get straight to it: "With this series, swap subsystem will have a ~20-30% performance gain from basic sequential swap to heavy workloads, for both 4K and mTHP folios. The idle memory usage is already much lower, the average memory consumption is still the same or will also be even lower (with further works). And this enables many more future optimizations, with better defined swap operations." "The patches also clean-up and address various historical issues with the SWAP subsystem," notes Larabel.
Context: In Linux, swap space acts as an overflow for RAM, storing inactive memory pages on disk to free up RAM for active processes. Traditional swap mechanisms are limited in flexibility and performance. The proposed "Swap Tables" aim to address these issues by allowing more efficient and dynamic management of swap space, potentially leading to better system responsiveness and resource utilization.
This week, we share our boots-on-the-ground takeaways about some of the best games we saw at PAX East, bid the great Star Wars Andor a fond farewell, and talk about just how much it’s possible to get attached to a particular type of keyboard, even years after it stops being manufactured.
This week, it was reported that in a strange turn of events, Nintendo may not be sending out Switch 2 units to would-be reviewers before launch, which could result in a dearth of coverage at a time when you’d expect to see impressions and reviews of the console plastered across every gaming site and YouTube channel.…
