Sunday, 28 December
17:00 EST
Did Tim Cook Post AI Slop in His Christmas Message Promoting 'Pluribus'? [Slashdot]
Artist Keith Thomson is a modern (and whimsical) Edward Hopper. And Apple TV says he created the "festive artwork" shared on X by Apple CEO Tim Cook on Christmas Eve, "made on MacBook Pro." Its intentionally-off picture of milk and cookies was meant to tease the season finale of Pluribus. ("Merry Christmas Eve, Carol..." Cook had posted.) But others were convinced that the weird image was AI-generated. Tech blogger John Gruber was blunt. "Tim Cook posts AI Slop in Christmas message on Twitter/X, ostensibly to promote 'Pluribus'." As for sloppy details, the carton is labeled both "Whole Milk" and "Lowfat Milk", and the "Cow Fun Puzzle" maze is just goofily wrong. (I can't recall ever seeing a puzzle of any kind on a milk carton, because they're waxy and hard to write on. It's like a conflation of milk cartons and cereal boxes.) Tech author Ben Kamens — who just days earlier had blogged about generating mazes with AI — said the image showed the "specific quirks" of generative AI mazes (including the way the maze couldn't be solved, expect by going around the maze altogether). Former Google Ventures partner M.G. Siegler even wondered if AI use intentionally echoed the themes of Pluribus — e.g., the creepiness of a collective intelligence — since otherwise "this seems far too obvious to be a mistake/blunder on Apple's part." (Someone on Reddit pointed out that in Pluribus's dystopian world, milk plays a key role — and the open spout of the "natural" milk's carton does touch a suspiciously-shining light on the Christmas tree...) Slashdot contacted artist Keith Thomson to try to ascertain what happened...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
16:00 EST
Texas Father Rescues Kidnapped 15-Year-Old Daughter After Tracking Her Phone's Location [Slashdot]
An anonymous reader shared this report from The Guardian: A Texas father used the parental controls on his teenage daughter's cell phone to find and help rescue her after she was kidnapped at knifepoint while walking her dog on Christmas, authorities allege... Her father subsequently located her phone through the device's parental controls, the agency's statement said. The phone was about 2 miles (3.2km) away from him in a secluded, partly wooded area in neighboring Harris county... She then managed to escape with a hand from her father, who called law enforcement officials, said the statement from the Montgomery sheriff's office. The suspect has since been arrested and charged.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
'Bomb cyclone' forecasted to bring heavy snow, blizzard conditions and dangerous travel [NPR Topics: News]
A 'bomb cyclone' is intensifying severe winter weather for millions of people across the U.S. The system is expected to knock out power and disrupt holiday travel.
(Image credit: Spencer Platt)
15:00 EST
Up Next for Arduino After Qualcomm Acquisition: High-Performance Computing [Slashdot]
Even after its acquisition by Qualcomm, the EFF believes Arduino "isn't imposing any new bans on tinkering with or reverse engineering Arduino boards," (according to Mitch Stoltz, EFF director for competition and IP litigation). While Adafruit's managing editor Phillip Torrone had claimed to 36,000+ followers on LinkedIn that Arduino users were now "explicitly forbidden from reverse engineering," Arduino corrected him in a blog post, noting that clause in their Terms & Conditions was only for Arduino's Software-as-a-Service cloud applications. "Anything that was open, stays open." And this week EE Times spoke to Guneet Bedi, SVP of Arduino, "who was unequivocal in saying that Arduino's governance structure had remained intact even after the acquisition." "As a business unit within Qualcomm, Arduino continues to make independent decisions on its product portfolio, with no direction imposed on where it should or should not go," Bedi said. "Everything that Arduino builds will remain open and openly available to developers, with design engineers, students and makers continuing to be the primary focus.... Developers who had mastered basic embedded workflows were now asking how to run large language models at the edge and work with artificial intelligence for vision and voice, with an open source mindset," he said. According to Bedi, this was where Qualcomm's technology became relevant. "Qualcomm's chipsets are high performance while also being very low power, which comes from their mobile and Android phone heritage. Despite being great technology, it is not easily accessible to design engineers because of cost and complexity. That made this a strong fit," he said. The most visible outcome of this acquisition is Uno Q, which Bedi described as being comparable to a mid-tier Android phone in capability, starting at a price of $44. For Arduino, this marked a shift beyond microcontrollers without abandoning them. "At the end of the day, we have not gone away from our legacy," Bedi said. "You still have a real-time microcontroller, and you still write code the way Arduino developers are used to. What we added is compute, without forcing people to change how they work." Uno Q combines a Linux-based compute system with a real-time microcontroller from the STM32 family. "You do not need two different development environments or two different hardware platforms," Bedi added... Rather than introducing a customized operating system, Arduino chose standard Debian upstream. "We are not locking developers into anything," Bedi said. "It is standard Debian, completely open...." Pre-built models covering tasks like object detection and voice recognition run locally on the board.... While the first reference design uses Qualcomm silicon, Bedi was careful to stress that this does not define the roadmap. "There is zero dependency on Qualcomm silicon," he said. "The architecture is portable. Tomorrow, we can run this on something else." That distinction matters, particularly for developers wary of vendor lock-in following the acquisition. Uno Q does compete directly with platforms like Raspberry Pi and Nvidia Jetson, but Bedi framed the difference less in terms of raw performance and more in flexibility. "When you build on those platforms, you are locked to the board," he said. "Here, you can build a prototype, and if you like it, you can also get access to the chip and design your own hardware." With built-in storage removing the need for external components, Uno Q positions itself less as a faster board and more as a way to simplify what had become an increasingly messy development stack... Looking a year ahead, Bedi believes developers should experience continuity rather than disruption. The familiar Arduino approach to embedded and real-time systems remains unchanged, while extending naturally into more compute-intensive applications... Taken together, Bedi's comments suggest that Arduino's post-acquisition direction is less about changing what Arduino is, and more about expanding what it can realistically be used for, without abandoning the simplicity that made it relevant in the first place. "We want to redefine prototyping in the age of physical artificial intelligence," Bedi said...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Farage needs to go away, apologies would be redundant [Pharyngula]
You’re not convincing me that I should get out of my American bubble, UK. What’s this I hear? You might end up making Nigel Farage your prime minister? Haven’t you noticed how the US is self-destructing after electing a flaming buffoon to the presidency? Don’t repeat our mistake.
The latest revelation is that Farage’s behavior as a schoolboy. He was a goose-stepping bully singing Hitler youth songs!
When he was 17, a teacher wrote a letter protesting the prospect of Farage being appointed prefect at his school. She was in disbelief that he was even considered for the role.
She wrote: “You will recall that at the recent and lengthy meeting about the selection of prefects, the remark by a colleague that Farage was a ‘fascist but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect’ invoked considerable reaction from members of the [staff] common room.
“Another colleague, who teaches the boy, described his publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views, and he cited a particular incident in which Farage was so offensive to a boy in his set that he had to be removed from his lesson …
“Yet another colleague described how, at a [combined cadet force] camp organised by the college, Farage and others had marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler Youth songs; and when it was suggested by a master that boys who expressed such views ‘don’t really mean them’, the college chaplain himself commented that, on the contrary, in his experience views of that kind expressed by boys of that age are deep-seated and are meant.”
The letter concluded: “You will appreciate that I regard this as a very serious matter. I have often heard you tell our senior boys that they are the nation’s future leaders. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that these leaders are enlightened and compassionate.”
He was, of course, appointed to the position anyway.
We should all learn from this: don’t let young people with fascist impulses get away with it. They don’t get better, except in the sense of getting better at concealing it for a time, but give them a little bit of power and the viciousness reemerges. Nigel Farage is the UK’s Stephen Miller wearing clown paint.
The letter expresses dismay that Farage hasn’t even apologized. I don’t give a damn whether he can put up a facade of regret — his actual identity as a racist and anti-semite was exposed, and no amount of “I’m sowwy” would make up for it.
Some UK citizens are retaining a sense of humor about it all, though.
“APPARENTLY it costs the NHS over
E300,000 a year to remove foreign objects from people’s
rectums. Why aren’t we removing British objects instead? was
Brexit all for nothing?
– Gerry Paton, London”
Humor seems to be all we have left, unfortunately. This is the era when entire countries turn themselves into a joke.
It’s blizzard time! [Pharyngula]
We woke up this morning to the moaning of the wind, and I decided to just stay in bed a bit longer. We’ve got a long day ahead of us in which we won’t be stepping outside our door today.
A developing potent winter storm over the Central Plains this morning will become much stronger as it moves toward the Great Lakes through Monday morning. Snow will develop over western Minnesota near sunrise, with a rain/snow mix developing farther east. The rain/snow mix across eastern Minnesota and Wisconsin will quickly turn to snow later this morning as temperatures drop during the daylight hours. Steady snow will continue through early Monday morning. Accumulations of 6 to 10 inches are forecast across eastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin, with amounts tapering off to a few inches across far western Minnesota. In addition, strong northwest winds gusting to 45 to 55 mph are expected by this evening, leading to blizzard conditions in open areas of central and southern Minnesota through early Monday morning.
A Blizzard Warning is in effect in a corridor from Morris and Long Prairie, south to Granite Falls and the far southwestern Twin Cities metro, to the Mankato and Albert Lea areas. A Winter Storm Warning is in effect for the rest of eastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin.
Travel conditions will become dangerous later today through early Monday morning. Alternative travel plans should be considered.
I did look out the window — haze, swirling snowflakes, trees trembling in the wind — and closed the blinds again. Yesterday I saw rabbits hopping about nibbling on the food my wife left out for them; no rabbits today. Fat little fluffy birds are made of sterner stuff and are fighting over bird seed.
14:00 EST
Every public school should register as a Somali day care in order to receive federal funds? [Philip Greenspun’s Weblog]
The Somali immigrants who built Boston (“cannot talk about any achievement that the city of Boston has had in safety, jobs, and economic development, in education, without talking about the Somali community,” said Mayor Michelle Wu) have also been featured on X lately (not in the New York Times or CNN, though?) for harvesting federal taxpayer money via registering fictitious day cares. Example with more than 75 million views:
Public schools are always hungry for more money, e.g., to spend in administration, pensions, employee health care, etc. (occasionally on classroom instruction as well) What if every public school in the U.S. registered with Minnesota officials as a Somali day care? Just leave off the state from the address and include the ZIP code so that checks get through the mail. Minnesota politicians and state workers never noticed that the day cares they were paying were nonexistent. Why would they notice that a ZIP code to which they were mailing checks (drawn on the US Treasury) wasn’t part of Minnesota? In the unthinkably rare event that a Welfare-Industrial Complex worker comes to inspect there will almost always be children on site.
Loosely related…
The post Every public school should register as a Somali day care in order to receive federal funds? appeared first on Philip Greenspun’s Weblog.
Stocks for the long run and money illusion [Philip Greenspun’s Weblog]
“Bank of America Shares Finally Recover From 2008 Financial Crisis” (Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2025):
Bank of America notched a symbolic win Friday when its stock traded higher than $55.08, a level not seen for America’s second biggest bank since before the 2008 financial crisis.
Like other banks that were damaged during the crisis, Bank of America has struggled to get its stock price back to the highs seen when George W. Bush was still president. Citigroup shares also haven’t recovered to their past high of around $530 in 2007.
Bank of America’s previous closing high was $54.90 on Nov. 20, 2006.
Perhaps a cautionary tale for those who are buying into the AI bubble!
Nowhere in the article: any inflation adjustment. It thus becomes a good example of money illusion. The WSJ is supposed to be by and for people who are sophisticated about money. That a stock today trades higher in nominal dollars than it did in 2006 is meaningless given the reduction in value of the dollar. $54.90 in November 2006, adjusted for official CPI, is equivalent to $88.49 today. An investor who bought BofA stock in 2006, in other words, has lost nearly 40 percent of his/her/zir/their money.
(Adding insult to injury, if the stock keeps going up and the investor sells at only a 20 percent loss then the IRS will be there to collect 23.8 percent of an illusory “gain” (an increase in the nominal price) and a state such as California will collect an additional 13.3 percent (9 percent in Maskachusetts).)
Reporter biography: “Alexander Saeedy … is a graduate of Yale University, where he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in History.”
Also in journalism, the New York Times displays a sampling of what it says are photos from Emmanuel Goldstein’s laptop (“Democrats Release Photos Showing Epstein Ties to Powerful Men”: “The 92 photos, selected by Democrats on the Oversight Committee from a trove of 95,000 images in Mr. Epstein’s email account and on one of his laptops”):
Three-fourths of the sample images include Donald Trump so a reasonable reader would infer that 75 percent of the images released (or maybe 75 percent of the 95,000 total?) included Donald Trump. Buried lower in the article: “The series of photos does include three images of Mr. Trump”. In other words, the representative 4-image sample of the 92 images chosen by the NYT contains 3 out of 3 Trump-related images.
The post Stocks for the long run and money illusion appeared first on Philip Greenspun’s Weblog.
13:00 EST
Google's 'AI Overview' Wrongly Accused a Musician of Being a Sex Offender [Slashdot]
An anonymous reader shared this report from the CBC: Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac says he may have been defamed by Google after it recently produced an AI-generated summary falsely identifying him as a sex offender. The Juno Award-winning musician said he learned of the online misinformation last week after a First Nation north of Halifax confronted him with the summary and cancelled a concert planned for Dec. 19. "You are being put into a less secure situation because of a media company — that's what defamation is," MacIsaac said in a telephone interview with The Canadian Press, adding he was worried about what might have happened had the erroneous content surfaced while he was trying to cross an international border... The 50-year-old virtuoso fiddler said he later learned the inaccurate claims were taken from online articles regarding a man in Atlantic Canada with the same last name... [W]hen CBC News reached him by phone on Christmas Eve, he said he'd already received queries from law firms across the country interested in taking it on pro bono.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Russia sends 3 Iranian satellites into orbit, report says [NPR Topics: News]
The report said that a Russian rocket sent the satellites on Sunday from a launchpad in eastern Russia.
(Image credit: Ivan Timoshenko)
12:00 EST
How Will Rising RAM Prices Affect Laptop Companies? [Slashdot]
Laptop makers are facing record-setting memory prices next year. The site Notebookcheck catalogs how different companies are responding: Sources told [Korean business newspaper] Chosun Biz that some manufacturers have signed preliminary contracts with Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. Even so, it won't prevent DDR5 RAM prices from soaring 45% higher by the end of 2026.... Before the memory shortage, PC sales had been on the upswing in part because of forced Windows 11 upgrades. That trend will likely reverse in 2026, as buyers avoid Lenovo laptops and alternatives from its rivals. Realizing a slowdown in purchases is inevitable, postponed launches are one potential outcome. Other manufacturers, including Dell and Framework have already announced impending price hikes... [The article also cites reports that one laptop manufacturer "plans to raise the prices of high-end models by as much as 30%."] U.S.-based Maingear now encourages customers to mail in their own modules to complete custom builds. Yet, without recycling parts from older systems, that won't result in significant savings for consumers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
11:00 EST
Challenges Face European Governments Pursuing 'Digital Sovereignty' [Slashdot]
The Register reports on challenges facing Europe's pursuit of "digital sovereignty": The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)... Furthermore, these warrants often come with a gag order, legally prohibiting the provider from informing their customer that their data has been accessed. This renders any contractual clauses requiring transparency or notification effectively meaningless. While technical measures like encryption are often proposed as a solution, their effectiveness depends entirely on who controls the encryption keys. If the US provider manages the keys, as is common in many standard cloud services, they can be forced to decrypt the data for authorities, making such safeguards moot.... American hyperscalers have recognized the market demand for sovereignty and now aggressively market 'sovereign cloud' solutions, typically by placing datacenters on European soil or partnering with local operators. Critics call this 'sovereignty washing'... [Cristina Caffarra, a competition economistand driving force behind the Eurostack initiative] warns that this does not resolve the fundamental problem. "A company subject to the extraterritorial laws of the United States cannot be considered sovereign for Europe," she says. "That simply doesn't work." Because, as long as the parent company is American, it remains subject to the CLOUD Act... Even when organizations make deliberate choices in favour of European providers, those decisions can be undone by market forces. A recent acquisition in the Netherlands illustrates this risk. In November 2025, the American IT services giant Kyndryl announced its intention to acquire Solvinity, a Dutch managed cloud provider. This came as an "unpleasant surprise" to several of its government clients, including the municipality of Amsterdam and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. These bodies had specifically chosen Solvinity to reduce their dependence on American firms and mitigate CLOUD Act risks. Still, The Register provides several examples of government systems that are "taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT." Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism now has 1,200 employees on the European open-source collaboration platform Nextcloud, leading several other Austrian ministries to also implement Nextcloud. (The Ministry's CISO tells the Register "We can see our input in Nextcloud releases. That is a feeling we never had with Microsoft.") France's Ministry of Economics and Finance recently completed NUBO (which the Register describes as "an OpenStack-based private cloud initiative designed to handle sensitive data and services.") In November the International Criminal Court in The Hague announced it was replacing its Microsoft office software with a European alternative. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is replacing Microsoft products with open-source alternatives for 30,000 civil servants Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
10:00 EST
Viral global TikToks: A twist on soccer, Tanzania's Charlie Chaplin, hope in Gaza [NPR Topics: News]
. Hamada
Shaqoura, a Palestinian food influencer, cooks Egyptian-style
shrimp fries. Arthur Marques plays soccer for a living, but it's
soccer with a twist. Valerie Keter, dressed in a traditional beaded
collar from the Maasai people in southern Kenya, discusses the
history of the ancient tribe.' />
TikToks are everywhere (well, except countries like Australia and India, where they've been banned.) We talk to the creators of some of the year's most popular reels from the Global South.
(Image credit: From left: @zerobrainer0, @hamadashoo,
@arthurzinnv and
@valerie_keter; screengrabs by NPR
)
08:00 EST
Is Dark Energy Weakening? [Slashdot]
An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC: There is growing controversy over recent evidence suggesting that a mysterious force known as dark energy might be changing in a way that challenges our current understanding of time and space. An analysis by a South Korean team has hinted that, rather than the Universe continuing to expand, galaxies could be pulled back together by gravity, ending in what astronomers call a "Big Crunch". The scientists involved believe that they may be on the verge of one of the biggest discoveries in astronomy for a generation. Other astronomers have questioned these findings, but these critics have not been able to completely dismiss the South Korean team's assertions... The controversy began in March with unexpected results from an instrument on a telescope in the Arizona desert called the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (Desi)... The data hinted that acceleration of the galaxies had changed over time, something not in line with the standard picture, according to Prof Ofer Lehav of University College London, who is involved with the Desi project. "Now with this changing dark energy going up and then down, again, we need a new mechanism. And this could be a shake up for the whole of physics," he says. Then in November the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) published research from a South Korean team that seems to back the view that the weirdness of dark energy is weirder still. Prof Young Wook Lee of Yonsei University in Seoul and his team went back to the kind of supernova data that first revealed dark energy 27 years ago. Instead of treating these stellar explosions as having one standard brightness, they adjusted for the ages of the galaxies they came from and worked out how bright the supernovas really were. This adjustment showed that not only had dark energy changed over time, but, shockingly, that the acceleration was slowing down... If, as Prof Lee's results suggest, the force that is pushing galaxies away from each other — dark energy — is weakening, then one possibility is that it becomes so weak that gravity begins to pull the galaxies back together.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
07:00 EST
Memory loss: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise [NPR Topics: News]
Demand for memory chips currently exceeds supply and there's very little chance of that changing any time soon. More chips for AI means less available for other products such as computers and phones and that could drive up those prices too.
(Image credit: Charlie Litchfield/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Brigitte Bardot, sex goddess of cinema, has died [NPR Topics: News]
Legendary screen siren and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has died at age 91. The alluring former model starred in numerous movies, often playing the highly sexualized love interest.
(Image credit: Keystone Features)
For Ukrainians, a nuclear missile museum is a bitter reminder of what the country gave up [NPR Topics: News]
The Museum of Strategic Missile Forces tells the story of how Ukraine dismantled its nuclear weapons arsenal after independence in 1991. Today many Ukrainians believe that decision to give up nukes was a mistake.
(Image credit: Anton Shtuka for NPR)
05:00 EST
Trump welcomes Zelenskyy for talks, asserts Russia and Ukraine both want peace, however elusive [NPR Topics: News]
President Donald Trump welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to his Florida resort Sunday after speaking with Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone.
(Image credit: Alex Brandon)
04:00 EST
Sal Khan: Companies Should Give 1% of Profits To Retrain Workers Displaced By AI [Slashdot]
"I believe artificial intelligence will displace workers at a scale many people don't yet realize," says Sal Kahn (founder/CEO of the nonprofit Khan Academy). But in an op-ed in the New York Times he also proposes a solution that "could change the trajectory of the lives of millions who will be displaced..." "I believe that every company benefiting from automation — which is most American companies — should... dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being displaced." 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. "The problem isn't that people can't work," Khan writes in the essay. "It's that we haven't built systems to help them continue learning and connect them to new opportunities as the world changes rapidly." 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. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.