Amazon’s AWS Labs has created LLRT an experimental, lightweight JavaScript runtime designed to address the growing demand for fast and efficient serverless applications.

Slashdot reader BitterEpic wants to know what you think of it:

Traditional JavaScript runtimes like Node.js rely on garbage collection, which can introduce unpredictable pauses and slow down performance, especially during cold starts in serverless environments like AWS Lambda. LLRT’s manual memory management, courtesy of Rust, eliminates this issue, leading to smoother, more predictable performance. LLRT also has a runtime under 2MB, a huge reduction compared to the 100MB+ typically required by Node.js. This lightweight design means lower memory usage, better scalability, and reduced operational costs. Without the overhead of garbage collection, LLRT has faster cold start times and can initialize in milliseconds—perfect for latency-sensitive applications where every millisecond counts. For JavaScript developers, LLRT offers the best of both worlds: rapid development with JavaScript’s flexibility, combined with Rust’s performance. This means faster, more scalable applications without the usual memory bloat and cold start issues. Still in beta, LLRT promises to be a major step forward for serverless JavaScript applications. By combining Rust’s performance with JavaScript’s flexibility, it opens new possibilities for building high-performance, low-latency applications. If it continues to evolve, LLRT could become a core offering in AWS Lambda, potentially changing how we approach serverless JavaScript development. Would you consider Javascript as the core of your future workflow? Or maybe you would prefer to go lower level with quckjs?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Ars Technica:

Nextcloud, a host-your-own cloud platform that wants to help you “regain control over your data,” has had to tell its Android-using customers for months now that they cannot upload files from their phone to their own servers. Months of emails and explanations to Google’s Play Store representatives have yielded no changes, Nextcloud .

That blog post — and media coverage of it — seem to have moved the needle. In an update to the post, Nextcloud wrote that as of May 15, Google has offered to restore full file access permissions. “We are preparing a test release first (expected tonight) and a final update with all functionality restored. If no issues occur, the update will hopefully be out early next week,” the Nextcloud team wrote….

[Nextcloud] told The Register that it had more than 800,000 Android users. The company’s blog post goes further than pinpointing technical and support hurdles. “It is a clear example of Big Tech gatekeeping smaller software vendors, making the products of their competitors worse or unable to provide the same services as the giants themselves sell,” Nextcloud’s post states. “Big Tech is scared that small players like Nextcloud will disrupt them, like they once disrupted other companies. So they try to shut the door.” Nextcloud is one of the leaders of an antitrust-minded movement against Microsoft’s various integrated apps and services, having filed a complaint against the firm in 2021.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“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…”

The company has already experimented with various new services, via its Labs research department, including an AI Answer Assistant and Question Assistant, as well as a revamped jobs site in association with recruitment site Indeed, Discussions for technical debate, and extensions for GitHub Copilot, Slack, and Visual Studio Code.

From the official announcement on Stack Overflow’s blog:

This rebrand isn’t just a fresh coat of paint. It’s a realignment with our purpose: to support the builders of the future in an AI world — with clarity, speed, and humanity. It’s about showing up in a way that reflects who we are today, and where we’re headed tomorrow.

“We have appointed an internal steering group and we have engaged with an external expert partner in this area to help bring about the required change,” notes a post in Stack Exchange’s “meta” area.

This isn’t just about a visual update or marketing exercise — it’s going to bring about a shift in how we present ourselves to the world which you will feel everywhere from the design to the copywriting, so that we can better achieve our goals and shared mission. As the emergence of AI has called into question the role of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network, one of the desired outputs of the rebrand process is to clarify our place in the world.

We’ve done work toward this already — our recent community AMA is an example of this — but we want to ensure that this comes across in our brand and identity as well. We want the community to be involved and have a strong voice in the process of renewing and refreshing our brand. Remember, Stack Overflow started with a public discussion about what to name it!

And another another post two months ago

Stack Exchange is exploring early ideas for expanding beyond the “single lane” Q&A highway. Our goal right now is to better understand the problems, opportunities, and needs before deciding on any specific changes…
The vision is to potentially enable:

– A slower lane, with high-quality durable knowledge that takes time to create and curate, like questions and answers.

– A medium lane, for more flexible engagement, with features like Discussions or more flexible Stack Exchanges, where users can explore ideas or share opinions.

– A fast lane for quick, real-time interaction, with features like Chat that can bring the community together to discuss topics instantly.

With this in mind, we’re seeking your feedback on the current state of Chat, what’s most important to you, and how you see Chat fitting into the future.

In a post in Stack Exchange’s “meta” area, brand design director David Longworth says the “tension mentioned between Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange” is probably the most relevant to the rebranding.

But he posted later that “There’s a lot of people behind the scenes on this who care deeply about getting this right! Thank you on behalf of myself and the team.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You’ll soon be able to get into your favorite games even faster with the updated Xbox home screen. According to Microsoft, Xbox Insiders are due to get three new customization options later this week that will make their dashboard feel a little more personal. As detailed in Xbox Wire, certain Xbox players will have options to reduce clutter and allow them to pull their favorite games to the front of the list.

The first major change lets you pin up to three of your favorite games or apps to the recently-played list. Pinning these means that they’ll stay near the front of your list even when you launch other apps occasionally. Beyond that, your Xbox will get the option to “Hide System Apps” which should reduce the clutter and tuck those less important shortcuts away. To further streamline your home screen, Xbox will introduce the “Reduce Tile Count” feature that lets you set how many visible tiles are in the recently opened games and apps list. With more control thanks to these new features, Xbox players should get a cleaner homepage that lets their dynamic backgrounds shine more.

“We’ve heard from many of you that Home should feel more like your space,” Eden Marie, principal software engineering lead of Xbox Experiences, wrote on Xbox’s blog. “Whether it’s surfacing your favorite games, hiding what you don’t use, or simply making Home feel less crowded, this update is a direct response to that feedback.”

According to Microsoft, these features will arrive on Alpha Skip-Ahead and Alpha users’ consoles first. However, the company is still tweaking the Reduce Tile Count feature, adding that it “will be coming soon.” Now, if only there were a way to hide those ads on the homescreen.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/xbox-will-let-you-pin-up-to-three-favorite-games-to-your-homescreen-200051956.html?src=rss

These are some recently released titles we think are worth adding to your reading list. This week, we read Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, a compelling new history book by science journalist Lizzie Wade, and Behemoth, a riveting mini-series for Dark Horse that explores the classic idea of a kaiju attack from a horrifying… inside perspective.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/what-to-read-this-weekend-a-brief-history-of-humankinds-many-apocalypses-203451036.html?src=rss

“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.

“I’m sorry,” the researcher interrupted, “the bunker?”

“We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI,” Sutskever replied. Such a powerful technology would surely become an object of intense desire for governments globally. The core scientists working on the technology would need to be protected. “Of course,” he added, “it’s going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker.” Two other sources I spoke with confirmed that Sutskever commonly mentioned such a bunker. “There is a group of people — Ilya being one of them — who believe that building AGI will bring about a rapture,” the researcher told me. “Literally, a rapture….”

But by the middle of 2023 — around the time he began speaking more regularly about the idea of a bunker — Sutskever was no longer just preoccupied by the possible cataclysmic shifts of AGI and superintelligence, according to sources familiar with his thinking. He was consumed by another anxiety: the erosion of his faith that OpenAI could even keep up its technical advancements to reach AGI, or bear that responsibility with Altman as its leader. Sutskever felt Altman’s pattern of behavior was undermining the two pillars of OpenAI’s mission, the sources said: It was slowing down research progress and eroding any chance at making sound AI-safety decisions.

“For a brief moment, OpenAI’s future was an open question. It might have taken a path away from aggressive commercialization and Altman. But this is not what happened,” the article concludes. Instead there was “a lack of clarity from the board about their reasons for firing Altman.” There was fear about a failure to realize their potential (and some employees feared losing a chance to sell millions of dollars’ worth of their equity).

“Faced with the possibility of OpenAI falling apart, Sutskever’s resolve immediately started to crack… He began to plead with his fellow board members to reconsider their position on Altman.” And in the end “Altman would come back; there was no other way to save OpenAI.”

To me, the drama highlighted one of the most urgent questions of our generation: How do we govern artificial intelligence? With AI on track to rewire a great many other crucial functions in society, that question is really asking: How do we ensure that we’ll make our future better, not worse? The events of November 2023 illustrated in the clearest terms just how much a power struggle among a tiny handful of Silicon Valley elites is currently shaping the future of this technology. And the scorecard of this centralized approach to AI development is deeply troubling. OpenAI today has become everything that it said it would not be….

The author believes OpenAI “has grown ever more secretive, not only cutting off access to its own research but shifting norms across the industry to no longer share meaningful technical details about AI models…”

“At the same time, more and more doubts have risen about the true economic value of generative AI, including a growing body of studies that have shown that the technology is not translating into productivity gains for most workers, while it’s also eroding their critical thinking.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from The Hill:

A new study indicates the debilitating “brain fog” suffered by millions of long COVID patients is linked to changes in the brain, including inflammation and an impaired ability to rewire itself following COVID-19 infection. United Press International reported this week that the small-scale study, conducted by researchers at Corewell Health in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Michigan State University, shows that altered levels of a pair of key brain chemicals could be the culprit.

The study marks the first time doctors have been able to provide scientific proof that validates the experiences of the approximately 12 million COVID “long-haulers” in the U.S. who have reported neurological symptoms. Researchers looked at biomarkers in study participants and found that those complaining of brain fog had higher levels of an anti-inflammatory protein that is crucial to regulating a person’s immune system, UPI reported. They also showed lower serum levels of nerve growth factor, a protein vital to the brain’s plasticity…

One of the biggest issues involving long COVID has been doctors’ inability to find physical proof of the symptoms described by patients. The study has changed that, according to co-author Dr. Bengt Arnetz.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spoilers for “The Interstellar Song Contest.”

No, really, spoilers from here on out.

Much like Eurovision itself, that was a lot, wasn’t it?

And much like every other episode this season, “The Interstellar Song Contest” was overstuffed, excessive and brutally short. It was also a lot of fun, even if the sheer volume of plot that I wish we’d had more time to explore remains frustrating. Unfortunately, it looks like the great qualities of this episode will be overshadowed by all of the dramatic lore reveals. As usual, head to Mrs. Flood Corner for the analysis, but let’s talk about the rest first.

Eurovision?

James Pardon/BBC Studios/Bad Wolf

If you’re in the US, you may not be familiar with the Eurovision Song Contest, even if Netflix did make a movie about it. It’s an annual music competition that began in the post-war years that saw the major nations of Europe select an act and a song to compete. Judges from each nation would then rank each performance, with the winning act’s nation going on to host the event the next year. Despite the name, participation isn’t limited to Europe, with entries from Oceania, Africa and the Middle East. And the event, to use a technical term, is Extremely Gay, playing up its camp excesses and offering a space for queer performers.

“Did you just fly through space on a glitter cannon?”

Lara Cornell/BBC Studios/Disney/Bad Wolf

The Doctor and Belinda arrive in a VIP box in the Harmony Arena, a large open-air (given it’s in space, should that be an open-space?) venue. They’re just in time to see the start of the 803rd Interstellar Song Contest, presented by (actual British TV presenter) Rylan Clark, who has just emerged from a cryogenic chamber. The Doctor takes the Vindicator reading, and has enough data to force the TARDIS back to Earth on May 24, 2025 — but the pair decide to stay and enjoy the show. Watching from afar, Mrs. Flood delights that the Vindicator is now primed and ready, but will stay around to watch the show as well.

It’s a popular event, with three trillion viewers from around the universe watching the show, as it’s broadcast much like a TV show. Unfortunately, the production gallery is stormed by Kid, a terrorist who has hijacked the arena’s security drones with help from Wynn, someone from the production crew. Kid and Wynn are both Hellions, a race of beings with prominent devil horns that are reviled across the galaxy for how they look. People assume they are evil, engage in cannibalism and witchcraft, and it’s hard for them to get jobs. The show’s director even says that they were advised against hiring Wynn because she’s a Hellion.

Kid switches the broadcast to the rehearsal feed, which didn’t feature Rylan, which piques the Doctor’s interest as there’s a TV in their VIP box. He pulls out his sonic screwdriver and starts fiddling with the equipment, but as he’s doing so, Kid opens the air bubble separating the arena from the void. And instantly, almost 100,000 people in the audience are blown into space, including the Doctor and the TARDIS, while Belinda is saved by the canopy’s roof closing. Wynn closes the canopies to protect the life of Cora, the odds-on favorite to win and the show’s star act. The director notices that the people may be frozen, but they’re trapped within the station’s mavity bubble and could therefore be rescued.

The Doctor, knocked out and frozen, floating in the void of space, is awoken with a vision of Susan (!) in the TARDIS telling him to “find me.” He opens his eyes, spots a glitter cannon floating nearby, and propels himself toward the station’s airlock, Wall-E style. It’s there he meets Mike and Gary, the couple whose VIP box he inadvertently stole. They were thankfully safe in the corridor outside when the roof was opened. The Doctor, aided by his new friends, starts working out what the next part of Kid’s plan is — to push a delta wave via the broadcast to all three trillion of its viewers. The wave was powerful enough to knock the Doctor to the floor and give them a nosebleed, and will likely kill every single viewer.

Kid and Wynn are doing this because their home planet, Hellia, was bought by the corporation that sponsors the song contest. It was the home of a poppy that could make honey flavoring, and when the corporation bought the planet, it took the poppy and burned the rest, including its people. The Hellions were scattered, victims of a genocide, looked down upon by the rest of so-called respectable society. Wiping out both the audience and the viewers at home at an event sponsored by the corporation will, Kid hopes, balance the books.

James Pardon/BBC Studios/Bad Wolf

Belinda winds up with Cora, the show’s star act (and her partner). The trio hack the system to work out what is going on. Belinda, believing the Doctor is dead, is full of remorse at having never told him how wonderful she thinks he is. Thankfully, they’re able to access the station’s video calling software to see the Doctor and Kid meet via an intra-station call, where the Doctor is giving Kid a glimpse of how furious the Time Lord can get, much to Belinda’s surprise. Cora has skin in the game here, too, revealing after the call that she is also a Hellion, but cut her horns off in order to fit in with the rest of polite society, becoming a star in the process.

The Doctor is able to use the station’s holographic technology to project himself into the production gallery. Kid shoots the hologram, giving the real Doctor enough time to walk in, casually destroying Kid’s gun and the delta wave box. The Doctor then starts channeling the station’s power through his hologram body to shock Kid. The Doctor said that Kid had put “ice in his heart,” and now he would pay back the attempted murder of three trillion people by giving him three trillion shocks. Beinda walks in, to see the Doctor essentially torturing Kid, and even the Doctor himself is plagued by visions of Susan telling him to stop.

With Kid and Wynn locked away, the Doctor works out another way to use the holograms — as a tractor beam. We see a montage of people being pulled in from the void and reactivated, first using Rylan’s cryogenic chamber, then on a larger scale in a VIP booth. It’s not long before the whole crowd is returned, and with it, Cora takes to the stage. She tells them her story and sings a song from Hellia, and while the audience is initially hostile, she wins them over by the end. To the applause, the Doctor and Belinda head back to the TARDIS, but not before a holographic Graham Norton — talk show host and the BBC’s face of Eurovision — tells them the Earth was destroyed in mysterious circumstances on May 24th, 2025.

The Doctor and Belinda sprint back, determined to push the TARDIS to that date and solve whatever issue is coming. But even with the Vindicator plugged in, the TARDIS refuses to co-operate, ringing the Cloister Bell and switching to the all red lighting scheme. There’s a sinister noise from outside the doors that the Doctor identifies as the “sound of May 24th,” before the TARDIS doors explode. And the credits roll… 

… only to be interrupted after the first crew card to cut back to Mike and Gary on Harmony Arena as they revive the last person blown into space. It’s Mrs Flood, who reveals her double brainstem froze while out in space, “lethal for a Time Lady, but I’ve got my own knack for survival.” Breaking the fourth wall, she says “let battle begin,” and then bi-generates, splitting herself into Mrs. Flood and The Rani (Archie Panjabi), with Mrs. Flood becoming the subordinate to her newer self. As the pair walk off, the Rani says she will bring “absolute terror” to the Doctor, telling Mrs. Flood to shut up when she points out she’s already done that. 

“I’ll do anything for you, Doctor”

James Pardon/BBC Studios/Bad Wolf

Honestly, Doctor Who can sometimes be a bit like a teddy bear with a razor blade hidden under its palm. Sure, it may look lightweight and cuddly, disarming you with its charm, but then it’ll cut you so deep you won’t even realize. “The Interstellar Song Contest” is, without a doubt, one of the most affecting episodes in the run. This episode comes less than a decade after the Manchester Arena bombing that killed 22 people and injured more than a thousand. The visual of the 100,000 people being blown into space was staggering in its brutality. Juno Dawson’s already written for Doctor Who’s wider world, but her debut script for the TV series goes hard.

But even if it’s a harrowing watch at times, it’s also filled with enough moments of levity. The Doctor’s flirting with married couple Mike and Gary at various points in the episode is delightful as they’re both increasingly smitten with him. The music is delightful, and Cora’s final song was designed to melt people’s hearts, plus there’s a few background gags for the more novelty act songs that appear every year.

Once again, I’m compelled to say the 45-minute format does nothing for Doctor Who when it’s treading this high a wire. The themes of this episode include indifference to evil, pinkwashing, passing privilege, cultural identity, commodification, the inhumanity of replacing customer service with computers, the perpetuation of abuse and the value of revenge. Given Eurovision presents itself as an explicitly queer event, I’m sure better-qualified writers can speak more authoritatively on the episode’s deeper subtext and political themes. And possibly explain in better detail where its sympathies lie.

Every episode this season feels like it had enough material to fill three half-hour episodes of late ‘80s Who. Much like last week reminded me of 1989’s “Ghost Light,” this episode put me in mind of 1988’s “The Happiness Patrol.” That episode is, on its surface, about a planet where you’ll be killed on the spot if you show any signs of visible unhappiness. Of course, it’s really about the UK under Margaret Thatcher, Operation Condor and the gay rights movement. If you’re curious, read Elizabeth Sandifer’s essay on the episode.

Hopefully, too, you’ll notice the thematic parallels that are running through many of these episodes. Conrad in “Lucky Day,” The Barber in “The Story and the Engine” and Kid here are all presented as characters looking for revenge. But while the middle member of that trio has been ostensibly redeemed, the other two crossed the Doctor and made him angry. If his speech to Conrad was full of vitriol, then Kid is the first time we’ve seen Gatwa’s Doctor in full vindictive mode. This has been a recurring theme for most of the post-2005 series, that the Doctor needs to hold themselves back from unleashing their full power and fury.

Mrs. Flood Corner

Dan Fearon/BBC Studios/Disney/Bad Wolf

Doctor Who was born before the home media age, where episodes were broadcast on a more or less one-and-done basis. If you were a fan looking to revisit an old episode, you had to read the novelizations that started coming out when the show became a hit. But Doctor Who wasn’t originally built to support a six decades-long global multimedia franchise, and that’s an issue. When it started, the Doctor was joined on his adventures by his granddaughter, Susan (Carole Ann Ford), and two of her teachers who followed her home one night. Long before any talk of Time Lords or Gallifrey, Susan was just the kid who needed to be rescued every third or fourth week.

Carole Ann Ford wasn’t happy with how poorly served her character was, and so opted to leave in 1964, a year after the show started. During “The Dalek Invasion of Earth,” the Doctor exiles his own granddaughter to 22nd century Earth because she wants to kiss a boy. He doesn’t even grant her a real goodbye, locking the doors of the TARDIS and giving a speech that only shorn of its context sounds noble. But Susan’s mistreatment isn’t just about the casual way she was dumped off the show, but how her existence does (or does not) fit with the show’s lore. If she is a Time Lord, a quasi-immortal shape shifter, then dumping her in one time and place because she fancies a boy is quite the outrageous act.

Susan’s existence also raises questions about the Doctor’s other familial relationships that have never been directly addressed on screen. The show’s unspoken modus operandi was summed up by producer John Nathan-Turner as “No hanky-panky in the TARDIS.” But if he has a granddaughter, does that mean the Doctor also has a partner/s or children waiting for them to return to Gallifrey for thousands of years? As much as the character, especially in recent years, has implied they’re happy to screw around the cosmos, they’re not looking to settle down. And aside from one small appearance in a 1983 anniversary special, and a picture in the Doctor’s study in “The Pilot,” Susan’s existence has more or less been swept under the rug.

That was, until an actress called Susan Twist was cast in “Wild Blue Yonder” and then again in “The Church on Ruby Road.” Twist would go on to appear in every episode of Ncuti Gatwa’s first season in a series of cameos that the characters became increasingly aware of. “The Devil’s Chord” even ends on a fourth-wall breaking musical number called “There’s Always a Twist at the End.” The show was very loudly hinting Twist was playing a regenerated version of Susan, who was explicitly discussed at the start of that same episode. By last season’s finale, however, Twist’s inclusion was a double bluff — part of Sutekh’s plan to trap the Doctor.

Now, it appears that showrunner Russell T. Davies has been playing the longest of long games with the fans. The season-long and highly-visible fakeout means I was actually surprised when Carole Ann Ford’s face appeared on screen. She appears twice, the first time when the Doctor is at death’s door, with her urging him to “find me” (harkening back to what Reginald Pye’s ghost wife told him before he blew up the film canisters in “Lux.”) The second time, she admonishes him for torturing Kid for his would-be genocide.

Who is Mrs. Flood?

In many ways, Susan’s appearance completely overshadows the reveal that Mrs. Flood is none other than the Rani. That’s the (classic) series’ far less well-known Time Lord foe, who appeared in only two official stories during its original run. But the Rani gained an outsize reputation among fans as she was played by Kate O’Mara (perhaps best known in the US for her role in Dynasty) who imbued the character with high camp excess. Which maybe blunted the idea that she was a sort of Time Lord Mengele, carelessly using people as fodder for her grisly experiments. Unfortunately, the Rani was created so late in the original series run that she only returned once in an episode most people would prefer to forget.

It appears that Russell T. Davies’ hidden mission for the streaming era was to rehabilitate some of the concepts that didn’t work back in the ‘80s. After bringing Mel back as a UNIT employee last year, now he’s doing the same for the Rani. Interestingly, both of those were created by Pip and Jane Baker — writers who are as emblematic of the series’ wider decline before its dramatic revival under Andrew Cartmel. It’s also notable, perhaps, that the name Rani is a Sanskrit word that broadly translates to “Queen,” but Panjabi is the first actress of South Asian descent to play the character.

I’ll be honest, if nothing else, I’m relieved that Mrs. Flood has turned out to be the Rani if only to stop people going on about that character. It’s not that she’s a bad character per-se, but when the series already has the Master, a renegade Time Lord who concocts elaborate traps for the Doctor, it’s hard to see the Rani as anything other than a “will this do?” alternative. Hopefully the finale can establish a real distinction between the Rani of the classic series and the new one beyond breaking the fourth wall.

… and the rest

Now, I have to apologize last week for not clocking the child Belinda saw in the alleyway was Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps) from “Space Babies.” Obviously, some fan theories have suggested it was a sign that the stories from “The Story and the Engine” were leaking out of the pocket dimension. But at Comic Con Cardiff at the end of last year, Anita Dobson (Mrs. Flood) said that the second season would tie into “Space Babies,” which was another episode with a similarly fairytale premise.

If that is the case, and everything that has unfolded in the last two years is all part of some grand plan then it must have started at “Wild Blue Yonder.” It’s the second of the three 60th anniversary specials, and the episode that saw David Tennant’s Doctor disrupt Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity. It’s been a running joke ever since that the force is known as “Mavity,” and that episode is also the one that allowed the pantheon of gods to enter this universe. Given Susan Twist was playing Isaac Newton’s maid, perhaps the series shifted into the Twistverse at that point. Or, you know, the prevailing fan theory that this era takes place in the Land of Fiction, a pocket fantasy universe depicted in 1968’s “The Mind Robber.”

One subtle running thread this season has been the Doctor’s almost insistent urging that Belinda enjoys their travels. He’s made more than a few references to Belinda getting the hang of traveling with him in the TARDIS and starting to loosen up and enjoy things. If the only reason he met her in the first place was because of Conrad, then perhaps he’s unwittingly building his own bootstrap paradox. Which would be, you know, a bad thing.

Finally, it does appear that every episode of this season is going to share thematic parallels with its equivalent from last year. “Dot and Bubble” and “The Story and the Engine” both explicitly engage with ideas around how the Doctor’s changed racial identity affects his life. “Rogue” and “The Interstellar Song Contest” both deal with queer themes through the lens of a pop culture phenomenon. If true, then “Wish World” will likely be an episode where the story gets picked apart and the tension rises to another grand cliffhanger, followed by “The Reality War,” which can’t possibly hope to live up to the promise of its first half. You know, just like last year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/doctor-who-the-interstellar-song-contest-review-camp-190032125.html?src=rss

“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….”

Another promising approach using heat and pressure was developed by researchers at the Colorado School of Mines [and already licensed by a company in Washington]. Known as hydrothermal alkaline treatment, or HALT, it involves adding a low-cost chemical reagent such as sodium hydroxide to superheated liquid water…. A destruction method that harnesses ultraviolet light has also emerged as a contender [has licensed by a company in Michigan]. When UV light oxidizes an electron-generating compound, it produces a powerful electron that’s very reactive and strong enough to break carbon fluorine bonds… Other technologies are experimenting with the use of plasma, which can generate reactive electrons to break down PFAS but tends to require a large amount of energy. Researchers are also experimenting with a process that uses sound waves. High-intensity sound waves create small bubbles in a water system or liquid waste stream, Higgins said. As those bubbles collapse, they can generate the high temperatures and pressure needed to degrade PFAS.
But “At the end of the day, not using these chemicals unless it’s absolutely necessary is the actually most effective tool in our toolbox,” Reade said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Access to Amazon’s new AI-enhanced voice assistant, Alexa+, is expanding. The company has started notifying users who signed up for the Early Access program that they can now activate Alexa+. It’s been a few months since Amazon first demoed the smarter version of Alexa, saying at the time that it would begin rolling out to the first batch of users in March before coming to more people in waves over the subsequent months, prioritizing Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 owners.

According to an Amazon spokesperson, “hundreds of thousands” of customers have tried out Alexa+ so far. For those who got Alexa+ in the initial Early Access phase, though, the assistant arrived without many of the features the company touted during its February announcement. The Washington Post, citing internal company documents, reported that this is because those tools didn’t “yet meet Amazon’s standards for public release.” In a footnote on its Early Access signup page, Amazon notes that some of the features shown are still in development.

Per Amazon’s email on Friday to the latest wave of users, you’ll only need to activate and set up Alexa + on one device. From there, any other compatible devices you own will automatically be upgraded. Alexa+ is said to be more conversational and capable of handling more complex tasks than the original assistant.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/amazon-rolls-out-alexa-to-more-early-access-users-183017242.html?src=rss

When the world needed him most, he got delayed once again. Paramount Pictures announced the second delay for The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender, the upcoming movie that follows the journey of Aang and Team Avatar after the events of the beloved animated series that was released in 2005. Instead of January 30, 2026, the new film will make its way to movie theaters on October 9, 2026, as first reported by Variety.

Paramount Pictures didn’t provide a reason for the delay, but this setback follows a previous postponing that bumped it from its original release date on October 10, 2025. However, there are no changes to the already-announced cast and crew, which includes Dave Bautista, Steven Yuen and Eric Nam, with Lauren Montgomery and William Mata as co-directors.

This delay could be good news, though. Paramount Pictures also revealed that it’s pushing back the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem 2 sequel from its October 9, 2026 opening date to September 17, 2027. This move frees up the slot for The Legend of Aang to make a fall release, which could attract more attention than being premiered in January.

To keep us from breaking out the pitchforks, the film studio at least revealed the new logo for the film on its Instagram. If you’re itching for Avatar content, Netflix renewed its live-action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender for two more seasons, the next of which is expected to release in early 2026. If you’re only interested in new material, the next avatar is expected to make her debut in 2027 in a series titled Avatar: Seven Havens.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/the-legend-of-aang-the-last-airbender-gets-hit-with-its-second-delay-175913128.html?src=rss

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.

In the original blog post Stenberg complained he got “barely no responses” from GitHub (joking “perhaps they are all just too busy implementing the next AI feature we don’t want.”) But hours later he posted an update.

“GitHub has told me they have raised this as a security issue internally and they are working on a fix.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.