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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Speaking at the firm’s Data & Analytics Summit in Sydney, Australia, today, Brethenoux said he didn’t have time to read summaries of meetings two or five years ago, before the creation of such documents became a key application of generative AI.

“I don’t have time to do the five actions in the summary,” he added. “I know what I have to do.”

Brethenoux also questioned why AI-generated meeting summaries list action items from a meeting instead of AI just doing the work itself.

“Just go and do it already,” he said, and called for AI to simplify users’ lives by automatically performing tiresome tasks.

He cited a use case at US healthcare company Vizient where the CTO asked employees what tasks bother them on a regular basis – the sort of thing everyone dreads having to do when they arrive at work on Monday morning. Armed with feedback from thousands of employees, the company automated the most-complained-about chores.

The result? “Instant adoption, zero change management problems,” Brethenoux said. Employees then bought in to AI and started to make good suggestions for further AI-enabled automation.

[...] Brethenoux thinks tech buyers must take that vision with a large pinch of salt, for two reasons.

One is that AI agents are not new. He said industrial companies have used them for decades in relatively closed systems. While they now rely on agents for certain tasks, they have seldom found the software can handle very complex tasks.

Yet vendors are suggesting personal AI agents will easily work with many sources of data across an enterprise and do things like automatically decide a worker should attend a meeting, then place that meeting in their Outlook or Google calendar.

“Now you have 50,000 agents running around the enterprise,” he posited. “How do you orchestrate this? How do they negotiate?”

Brethenoux said he’s asked vendors how such automated scheduling would consider competing needs of an employee’s boss, partner, or kids. Their response, he said, is “silence.”

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

A review of the book Strangers and Intimates, which asks Are we killing off the idea of private life?

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned privacy? Nowadays, practically everything about us is known, traded and exploited by social media platforms, even when we aren’t opening the curtains on our inner lives ourselves. Click. There’s the sourdough your smug uncle made this morning. Click. There’s your friend crying about a missed promotion. Click. There’s a stranger inviting you – for a fee, of course – into their bedroom.

You would expect a book called Strangers and Intimates: The rise and fall of private life to have views on all of this – and it does, except that they are less straightforward, more considered and much richer than most others in this area.

As its author, the cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins, puts it: “Many blame this situation on narcissistic individuals who broadcast their lives online or on tech companies that devour personal data, but this overlooks the deeper changes at play.” And hers is a text about those deeper changes.

In Jenkins’s account, these mostly took place in the 20th century – and they were multifarious. Chapters are devoted to everything from the prying capabilities of smaller cameras – “Kodak fiends” were a particular turn-of-the-century nuisance – to the broader implications of Bill Clinton’s trysts with Monica Lewinsky – the private suddenly became fiercely political.

[...] Scientific thinkers aren’t exempted from this narrative. The behaviourist trinity of Paul Lazarsfeld, Edward Bernays and Ernest Dichter receive special attention for their collective work, in the first half of the 20th century, to turn humans into data and data into marketable insights. None of them acted maliciously, but they helped erode the sense that certain parts of life should be off-limits, rather than grist for corporate interests. Much the same could be said of biologist Alfred Kinsey’s famous surveys of people’s sex lives. Is nothing sacred?

We have allowed our two worlds to become compromised and blurred. The private is increasingly public

canopic jug writes:

Digital Music News and Radio Insight are observing that comedian Barret "Dr. Demento" Hansen is hanging up his top hat later in October this year. The last of his regular shows aired the other day and the countdown has begun.

Dr. Demento wraps up with an October countdown of the show's all-time Top 40 songs. In between, there will be bi-weekly historical recaps alternating with flashback shows from the period in question. Check out the show archives here.

The final episode will coincide with the 55^th anniversary of his radio program which launched in 1970. His odd humor gained quite a large following over the years. He started at a local station in Pasadena, California. The show gained more or less its current focus on comedy and novelty records by 1972 and national syndication by 1974. It moved to a subscription-based Internet platform in 2010.

This is definitely one for our North American community. I've never heard of him. But who do you think has made the biggest radio impact over the last few decades in your region? JR

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Astronomers are puzzled by a strong burst of radio waves traced back to a NASA satellite that had been inactive since the 1960s

So Clancy James at Curtin University in Australia and his colleagues were perplexed when, nearly 60 years later, they detected a brief, powerful burst of radio waves coming from the satellite’s apparent location.

James and his team were scanning the sky with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), an array of 36 radio telescopes in Western Australia, for signs of fast radio bursts, mysterious pulses of radiation that come from other galaxies.

On 13 June last year, they saw a signal that seemed to be coming from within our galaxy. “If it’s nearby, we can study it through optical telescopes really easily, so we got all excited, thinking maybe we’d discovered a new pulsar or some other object,” says Clancy.

But on further inspection, the signal appeared to be so close to Earth that ASKAP couldn’t focus all of its telescopes at once – like how a phone camera struggles to focus on nearby objects. This meant it must have come from within 20,000 kilometres of Earth, says Clancy. The researchers also found that the signal was very short lived, lasting less than 30 nanoseconds. “This was an incredibly powerful radio pulse that vastly outshone everything else in the sky for a very short amount of time,” says Clancy.

When they traced the signal to where it came from and compared it with known satellite positions in the sky, they found just one plausible explanation – the Relay 2 satellite. Since the satellite is no longer functional, Clancy and his team think it must have come from an external event, such as an electrostatic discharge – a build-up of electricity that results in a spark-like flash – or a micrometeorite that struck the satellite and produced a cloud of charged plasma.

It would be very difficult to differentiate between those two scenarios, says Karen Aplin at the University of Bristol, UK, as the radio signal produced by both would look similar. However, it could be useful to monitor future electrostatic discharges from satellites, she says. “In a world where there is a lot of space debris and there are more small, low-cost satellites with limited protection from electrostatic discharges, this radio detection may ultimately offer a new technique to evaluate electrostatic discharges in space,” she says.

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upstart writes:

Man's health crashes after getting donated kidney:

About two months after receiving a donated kidney, a 61-year-old man ended up back in the hospital. He was tired, nauseous, and vomiting. He was also excessively thirsty and producing too much urine. Over the next 10 days, things only got worse. The oxygen levels in his blood began to fall. His lungs filled with fluid. He kept vomiting. He couldn't eat. Doctors inserted a feeding tube. His oxygen levels and blood pressure kept falling. He was admitted to the intensive care unit and put on mechanical ventilation. Still, things kept getting worse.

At that point, he was transferred to the ICU of Massachusetts General Hospital, where he had received the transplant. He was in acute respiratory failure and shock.

In a case report in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors at Mass General explained how they determined what was wrong with the man. Their first steps were collecting more information about the man's symptoms from his wife, reviewing his family medical history, and contacting the regional organ-procurement organization that provided the kidney.

The man's condition and laboratory tests suggested he had some sort of infection. But as a transplant recipient who was on a variety of immunosuppressive drugs, the list of infectious possibilities was "extensive."

Dr. Camille Kotton, Clinical Director of the hospital's Transplant and Immunocompromised Host Infectious Diseases division, laid out her thinking. She started with a process of elimination. As an immunosuppressed transplant patient, he was also on several medications to proactively prevent infections. These would rule out herpesviruses and cytomegalovirus. He was also on a combination of antibiotics that would rule out many bacterial infections, as well as the fungal infection Pneumocystis jirovecii that strikes the immunocompromised and the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii.

One feature stood out: The man had developed elevated levels of eosinophils, white blood cells that can increase for various reasons—including parasitic infections. The man also had a reddish-purple rash over his abdomen. Coupled with the severity of his illness, Kotton suspected a widespread parasitic infection.

USA bombs Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan
US President Donald Trump says American forces have conducted "very successful" strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan and that all US planes are now out of Iranian airspace.

Trump's Truth Social
"We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter."

[Updated 22 Jun 1313z - following statements by Secretary of Defence and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--JR]

Operation Midnight Hammer

75 x TLAMs - Precision Guided Weapons (PGW), 14 x MOPs GBU-57 used by 7 B2s, operational feint by sending 6 x B2s westward into the Pacific area, 7 x B2s continued eastwards. The B2s are still airborne and were observed refuelling over the Azores a few hours ago on FlightRadar24 (at least 18 tanker aircraft operating racetracks but the B2s were still radio silent). TLAMs were also fired by USN assets in the southern Persian Gulf. Over 120 aircraft involved in the mission including F16, F22, F35, ISTAR, AAR. Battle damage assessment will take time to collect and analyse.

US forces involved in the attack were not engaged and appear to have achieved total surprise. All assets are accounted for but some are still airborne.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/why-one-man-is-archiving-human-made-content-from-before-the-ai-explosion/

Former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming recently announced that he launched a website, lowbackgroundsteel.ai, that treats pre-AI, human-created content like a precious commodity—a time capsule of organic creative expression from a time before machines joined the conversation. "The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI-generated content," Graham-Cumming wrote on his blog last week. The reason? To preserve what made non-AI media uniquely human.

[...] ChatGPT in particular triggered an avalanche of AI-generated text across the web, forcing at least one research project to shut down entirely.

That casualty was wordfreq, a Python library created by researcher Robyn Speer that tracked word frequency usage across more than 40 languages by analyzing millions of sources, including Wikipedia, movie subtitles, news articles, and social media. The tool was widely used by academics and developers to study how language evolves and to build natural language processing applications. The project announced in September 2024 that it will no longer be updated because "the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing."

[...] The website points to several major archives of pre-AI content, including a Wikipedia dump from August 2022 (before ChatGPT's November 2022 release), Project Gutenberg's collection of public domain books, the Library of Congress photo archive, and GitHub's Arctic Code Vault—a snapshot of open source code buried in a former coal mine near the North Pole in February 2020. The wordfreq project appears on the list as well, flash-frozen from a time before AI contamination made its methodology untenable.

[...] As atmospheric nuclear testing ended and background radiation returned to natural levels, low-background steel eventually became unnecessary for most uses. Whether pre-AI content will follow a similar trajectory remains a question.

Still, it feels reasonable to protect sources of human creativity now, including archival ones, because these repositories may become useful in ways that few appreciate at the moment.

[...] For now, lowbackgroundsteel.ai stands as a modest catalog of human expression from what may someday be seen as the last pre-AI era.

Original Submission

_-iNT13- writes:

Over a week ago iStories published a story alleging Vladimir Vedeneev and Roman Venediktov, who own GlobalNet, allow the FSB access to Telegram messages. GlobalNet assigns IP addresses for Telegram and maintains it's networking equipment, and also has/had contracts with a FSB "research computing center" that helped plan the invasion of Ukraine and developed tools to de-anonymize internet users; and a flagship state-owned nuclear research laboratory.

Telegram responded to the allegations the following day - and in doing so made some glaring contradictions with what they told the court in Miami, USA.

More recently Meduza published a detailed story about both those iStories reports - the highlight being the revelation that "as part of a criminal case opened by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) in the spring of 2022, security agents have been intercepting Telegram messages."

Security researcher Michał "rysiek" Woźniak published a detailed report titled Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot, which provides more information on how Telegram has been compromised.

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Processed by jelizondo

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Gaze into the temporal distance and you might spot the end of the age of silicon looming somewhere out there, as a research team at Penn State University claims to have built the first working CMOS computer entirely from two-dimensional materials.

The team, led by Pennsylvania State University engineering science professor Saptarshi Das, published a paper last week detailing the design and construction of their 2D one instruction set computer (OISC) based on the same complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) design that's a standard part of modern silicon-based computers. OISC is a minimalist abstract machine model that performs all operations using a single, universal instruction.

Does that mean we can expect to live through a post-silicon, 2D computing revolution? It won't be quite like that, Das told us. Rather, 2D CMOS computers will have specialized uses.

"They could become competitive in specialized domains such as edge AI, neuromorphic systems, or flexible electronics," Das told us.

The 2D machine they built is silicon-free, using molybdenum disulfide for n-type and tungsten diselenide for p-type transistors. The material pair "offer complementary electrical characteristics, relatively high mobility, and have demonstrated scalable growth via metal–organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD)," Das told The Register in an email. MOCVD was used to fabricate the team's 2D CMOS platform on sapphire wafers, with transistor channels just one atom thick. 

CMOS systems need both n- and p-type transistors (which move electrons along a circuit by having an excess and deficiency of electrons, respectively) to achieve the goal of CMOS computing - energy efficiency and reusability. That's why the team's 2D CMOS design is such a breakthrough, according to Das.

"We have demonstrated, for the first time, a CMOS computer built entirely from 2D materials," Das said in an announcement on the Penn State website.

[...] "[Scalability] is one of the most critical aspects of our work," Das told us. "While some steps (e.g., layer alignment and transfer) are still manual, most of the process is compatible with industry tools and can be automated."

Also see the Penn State press release

Journal Reference: Ghosh, S., Zheng, Y., Rafiq, M. et al. A complementary two-dimensional material-based one instruction set computer. Nature 642, 327–335 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08963-7

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt.

The more you rely on ChatGPT (and similar) things to do work for you the less work your brain does and eventually it becomes slow and lazy.

A new MIT study suggests that using AI writing assistants like ChatGPT can lead to what researchers call "cognitive debt" - a state where outsourcing mental effort weakens learning and critical thinking. The findings raise important questions about how large language models (LLMs) shape our brains and writing skills, especially in education.

The experiment divided 54 mostly college students from five Boston-area universities into three groups: one used OpenAI's GPT-4o (LLM group), another used traditional search engines (but no AI-generated answers), and a third wrote essays without any outside help (brain-only group)

It's a somewhat small study with only 54 participants. But if the trend is clear then the trend is clear and just finding more participants might not shift things. Also these are people attending universities or colleges so they should already know how to write papers.

The more you use tools to do brain work the weaker the brain got. After all the body is a lazy beast that likes to conserve energy.

Essentially, with AI, the brain worked less deeply and handed off more of the cognitive load to the tool.

One of the sharpest differences came in post-session interviews. After the first session, over 80% of LLM users struggled to accurately recall a quote from their just-written essay - none managed it perfectly.

That isn't hard to understand considering they didn't write it.

https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/

https://the-decoder.com/mit-study-shows-cognitive-debt-through-chatgpt-heres-what-it-means-in-real-world-practice/

paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The long-running battle of Germany's northernmost state, Schleswig-Holstein, to make a complete switch from Microsoft software to open-source alternatives looks close to an end. Many government operatives will permanently wave goodbye to the likes of Teams, Word, Excel, and Outlook in the next three months in a move to ensure independence, sustainability, and security.

Plans to go open-source were drawn up by Schleswig-Holstein as far back as 2017. In 2021, the state found another incentive to make the switch: Windows 11's hardware requirements. A move to LibreOffice and other open-source programs had a deadline of 2026 – there was no date set for ditching Windows at the time.

Last year brought news of a plan by the state to replace Windows with Linux and further expansion of LibreOffice, Open-Xchange, Nextcloud, and the Univention Active Directory (AD).

Now, Digitalisation Minister Dirk Schroedter has announced that "We're done with Teams!"

Question! Why should local governments use taxpayers' money to buy proprietary software from a single vendor? And what happens to citizens' data? A solution is to move to free software like Linux and LibreOffice – which is what Schleswig-Holstein is doing: https://t.co/P7cQJwEP7u pic.twitter.com/OuIHPlSteV

– LibreOffice (@LibreOffice)

Of the state's approximately 60,000 public servants, which includes civil servants, judges, and police officers, around half are transitioning away from Microsoft in this initial phase, with 30,000 more – mostly teachers – doing the same over the next few years.

Schroedter highlighted several reasons for the move. Money is obviously a major factor, with Microsoft's enterprise licensing fees reaching into the millions of euros.

[...] Other public bodies across the world are also moving away from Microsoft's products in favor of open-source or home-grown alternatives, from French police to India's defence ministry, writes France 24. Local governments in Denmark are also looking to ditch the firm.

Munich, the capital of the German state Bavaria, switched from Windows to Linux-based LiMux in 2004, though it switched back in 2017 as part of an IT overhaul. Wanting Microsoft to move its headquarters to Munich likely played a part in the return to Windows, too.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The percentage of women in the semiconductor industry is stubbornly low. According to a report released in April, 51 percent of companies report having less than 20 percent of their technical roles filled by women. At the same time, fewer of these companies were publicly committed to equal opportunity measures in 2024 than the year prior, the same report found.

This lack of support comes at the same time that major workforce shortages are expected, says Andrea Mohamed, COO and co-founder of QuantumBloom, which helps companies attract, retain, and advance early career women in STEM. The company focuses on the transition from higher education to the workforce, a critical point during which many women leave STEM.

[...] I understand the pressures that companies are facing around anything that's related to DEI. We need to change the conversation from DEI to talent management. This is retention and avoiding turnover costs. This is about needing every available brilliant mind in the United States that wants to be in semiconductors. We have offshored this industry for so long. Other countries have existing talent bases. We have to build it.

So there are semantics in all of this, but it's not just relabeling. This is about business. You are not going to be able to compete on a global stage in the United States if you are not finding ways to attract and retain new communities of workers, and women are one of those communities. That means understanding what women need from their employer, because if you do not provide it, they will go somewhere else that does. The concern by companies about, if they run a program like QuantumBloom, does that create a risk? It's the wrong question about risk. Your big risk is that your fab is empty, because you can't find workers and retain them.

In other industries, there are organizations that are very intentional about attracting and retaining their youngest talent. They are dedicating resources to investing in them, which is very rare - most organizations invest more the higher up you go. Really, we need to be thinking about flipping that script and investing more sooner.

upstart writes:

Starship 36 was preparing for 10th test flight from Texas when it underwent 'catastrophic failure' while on stand:

Starship 36 was preparing for 10th test flight from Texas when it underwent 'catastrophic failure' while on stand

[...] SpaceX said the rocket was preparing for the 10th flight test when it "experienced a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase", without elaborating on the nature of the complication.

[...] The Starship explosion occurred during a "routine static fire test", according to the Cameron County authorities.

During a static fire, part of the procedures preceding a launch, the Starship's Super Heavy booster would be anchored to the ground to prevent it from lifting off during the test firing.

[...] At 123 metres high (403ft), Starship is the world's largest and most powerful rocket and central to Musk's long-term vision of colonising Mars.

The Starship is billed as a fully reusable rocket with a payload capacity of up to 150 metric tonnes.

[...] The previous two outings also ended poorly, with the upper stage disintegrating over the Caribbean.

The failures will probably do little to dent Musk's space ambitions.

SpaceX has been betting that its "fail fast, learn fast" ethos, which has helped it dominate commercial spaceflight, will eventually pay off.

The company has caught the Super Heavy booster in the launch tower's giant robotic arms three times – a daring engineering feat it sees as being key to rapid reusability and slashing costs.

Nasa is increasingly relying on SpaceX, whose Dragon spacecraft is used to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The LibreOffice project is preparing to cut some Windows support - and encourages users to switch to Linux.

The Document Foundation, the organization that backs and guides development of LibreOffice since Oracle dropped the ball, has a strong point of view about the future. Some of it is very visible, in a blog post about the looming end of Windows 10, but some is buried in the development notes about the work-in-progress next version, which will be LibreOffice 25.8.

The title of the blog post is self-explanatory. The end of Windows 10 is approaching, so it's time to consider Linux and LibreOffice. They're right. The post also links to the KDE-backed End of 10 campaign, which we covered a month ago. That site's list of places to go for help has been improved with a zoomable world map, but we feel it still badly needs some kind of hierarchical organization.

The blog also links to Distro Chooser, which is a noble idea, but with flawed execution. This site leads you through a set of questions and then recommends what Linux distributions might suit you. We found the presentation of the results overwhelming, though. It seems to be a list of all the candidates, color-coded according to how good a match they are. The Reg FOSS desk generally feels that "Less is more," and here, just distilling the results down to, say, a top three would far be more helpful.

We are sure that some people will dismiss any and all Linux distros as being inferior, just as they do of LibreOffice itself. That's not the point. The point is that it is a free alternative. You get the reward of breaking free of paid-for software you don't own.

Oracle washed its hands of OpenOffice and then dumped it on the Apache Foundation more than a decade ago.

OpenOffice does officially still exist but there hasn't been a new release in a couple of years, and we recommend avoiding it. LibreOffice is a direct in-place upgrade and will open the same files.

PiMuNu writes:

From:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq8zxx9kk0ko

Two breakthrough Alzheimer's drugs have been deemed far too expensive, for too little benefit, to be offered on the NHS. The medicines are the first to slow the disease, which may give people extra time living independently.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) concluded they were a poor use of taxpayers' money and said funding them could lead to other services being cut. Campaigners say it is a disappointment, but other dementia experts have also supported the decision.

The two drugs, donanemab and lecanemab, both help the body clear a gungy protein that builds up in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease.

[...] The official price in the US is £20,000-£25,000 per patient per year. What the NHS would pay is confidential.

Around 70,000 people in England with mild dementia would have been eligible, potentially putting the bill in the region of £1.5bn a year for the drugs alone.

NHS resources, including infusing the drugs every two-to-four weeks and frequent brain scans to manage dangerous side effects, would also massively ramp up the cost.

Original Submission