tThe internet is full of people claiming to uncover conspiracies in politics and business…” reports the Wall Street Journal.

“Now an unlikely new villain has been added to the list: theoretical physicists,” they write, saygin resentment of scientific authority figures “is the major attraction of what might be called ‘conspiracy physics’.”

In recent years, a group of YouTubers and podcasters have attracted millions of viewers by proclaiming that physics is in crisis. The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory… Most fringe theories are too arcane for listeners to understand, but anyone can grasp the idea that academic physics is just one more corrupt and self-serving establishment… In this corner of the internet, the scientist Scott Aaronson has written, “Anyone perceived as the ‘mainstream establishment’ faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as ‘renegade’ wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding…

As with other kinds of authorities, there are reasonable criticisms to be made of academic physics. By some metrics, scientific productivity has slowed since the 1970s. String theory has not fulfilled physicists’ early dreams that it would become the ultimate explanation of all forces and matter in our universe. The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, has delivered fewer breakthroughs than scientists expected when it turned on in 2010. But even reasonable points become hard to recognize when expressed in the ways YouTube incentivizes. Conspiracy physics videos with titles like “They Just Keep Lying” are full of sour sarcasm, outraged facial expressions and spooky music…

Leonard Susskind, director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, says physicists need to be both more sober and more forceful when addressing the public. The limits of string theory should be acknowledged, he says, but the idea that progress has slowed isn’t right. In the last few decades, he and other physicists have figured out how to make progress on the vast project of integrating general relativity and quantum mechanics, the century-old pillars of physics, into a single explanation of the universe.

The bitter attacks on leading physicists get a succinct summary in the article from Chris Williamson, a “Love Island” contestant turned podcast host. “This is like ‘The Kardashians’ for physicists — I love it.”

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“Swiss voters have backed plans for electronic identity cards by a wafer-thin margin,” reports the Guardian, “in the second nationwide vote on the issue.”
In a referendum on Sunday, 50.4% of voters supported an electronic ID card, while 49.6% were against, confounding pollsters who had forecast stronger support for the “yes” vote. Turnout was 49.55%, higher than expected… [V]oters rejected an earlier version of the e-ID in 2021, largely over objections to the role of private companies in the system. In response to these concerns, the Swiss state will now provide the e-ID, which will be optional and free of charge… To ensure security the e-ID is linked to a single smartphone, users will have to get a new e-ID if they change their device… An ID card containing biometric data — fingerprints — will be available from the end of next year.

Critics of the e-ID scheme raised data protection concerns and said it opened the door to mass surveillance. They also fear the voluntary scheme will become mandatory and disadvantage people without smartphones. The referendum was called after a coalition of rightwing and data-privacy parties collected more than 50,000 signatures against e-ID cards, triggering the vote.

“To further ease privacy concerns, a particular authority seeking information on a person — such as proof of age or nationality, for example — will only be able to check for those specific details,” notes the BBC:

Supporters of the Swiss system say it will make life much easier for everyone, allowing a range of bureaucratic procedures — from getting a telephone contract to proving you are old enough to buy a bottle of wine — to happen quickly online. Opponents of digital ID cards, who gathered enough signatures to force another referendum on the issue, argue that the measure could still undermine individual privacy. They also fear that, despite the new restrictions on how data is collected and stored, it could still be used to track people and for marketing purposes.
The BBC adds that the UK government also announced plans earlier this week to introduce its own digital ID, “which would be mandatory for employment. The proposed British digital ID would have fewer intended uses than the Swiss version, but has still raised concerns about privacy and data security.”

The Guardian reports:
The referendum came soon after the UK government announced plans for a digital ID card, which would sit in the digital wallets of smartphones, using state-of-the-art encryption. More than 1.6 million people have signed a petition opposing e-ID cards, which would be mandatory for people working in the UK by 2029.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Snap is imposing a new storage limit on Snapchat‘s Memories feature, which has racked up impressive numbers since its introduction in 2016. According to Snap, users have saved more than one trillion Memories across its platform, and it’s now introducing “Memories Storage Plans” for users who exceed 5GB of Memories.

In a press release, Snap detailed that the introductory storage plan allows up to 100GB of storage for Memories for $1.99 a month. Snapchat+ subscribers, who pay $3.99 a month, will get up to 250GB of storage, while Snapchat’s highest-tier Platinum subscribers will get 5TB included with their $15.99 monthly cost.

Snap said that a “vast majority” of its Snapchat users won’t notice any changes since they’re far from hitting the 5GB limit. For users who hold onto thousands of Snaps, the company is now rolling out these storage plans. To ease the transition from unlimited storage to paid options, Snap will give anyone exceeding 5GB of Memories a year of temporary storage. These new storage subscriptions follow Snap’s latest paid option for its Lens+ subscription, which costs $9 a month.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/snapchat-introduces-a-paid-storage-option-for-all-the-memories-hoarders-out-there-203013294.html?src=rss

Tim Berners-Lee writes in a new article in the Guardian that “Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0, we took the wrong path

Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers’ mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising…

We have the technical capability to give that power back to the individual. Solid is an open-source interoperable standard that I and my team developed at MIT more than a decade ago. Apps running on Solid don’t implicitly own your data — they have to request it from you and you choose whether to agree, or not. Rather than being in countless separate places on the internet in the hands of whomever it had been resold to, your data is in one place, controlled by you. Sharing your information in a smart way can also liberate it. Why is your smartwatch writing your biological data to one silo in one format? Why is your credit card writing your financial data to a second silo in a different format? Why are your YouTube comments, Reddit posts, Facebook updates and tweets all stored in different places? Why is the default expectation that you aren’t supposed to be able to look at any of this stuff? You generate all this data — your actions, your choices, your body, your preferences, your decisions. You should own it. You should be empowered by it…

We’re now at a new crossroads, one where we must decide if AI will be used for the betterment or to the detriment of society. How can we learn from the mistakes of the past? First of all, we must ensure policymakers do not end up playing the same decade-long game of catchup they have done over social media. The time to decide the governance model for AI was yesterday, so we must act with urgency. In 2017, I wrote a thought experiment about an AI that works for you. I called it Charlie. Charlie works for you like your doctor or your lawyer, bound by law, regulation and codes of conduct. Why can’t the same frameworks be adopted for AI? We have learned from social media that power rests with the monopolies who control and harvest personal data. We can’t let the same thing happen with AI.
Berners-Lee also says “we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research,” arguing that if we muster the political willpower, “we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders.

“We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It’s not too late.”

Berners-Lee has also written a new book titled This is For Everyone.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Business Insider has obtained the guidelines that Meta contractors are reportedly now using to train its AI chatbots, showing how it’s attempting to more effectively address potential child sexual exploitation and prevent kids from engaging in age-inappropriate conversations. The company said in August that it was updating the guardrails for its AIs after Reuters reported that its policies allowed the chatbots to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” which Meta said at the time was “erroneous and inconsistent” with its policies and removed that language. 

The document, which Business Insider has shared an excerpt from, outlines what kinds of content are “acceptable” and “unacceptable” for its AI chatbots. It explicitly bars content that “enables, encourages, or endorses” child sexual abuse, romantic roleplay if the user is a minor or if the AI is asked to roleplay as a minor, advice about potentially romantic or intimate physical contact if the user is a minor, and more. The chatbots can discuss topics such as abuse, but cannot engage in conversations that could enable or encourage it. 

The company’s AI chatbots have been the subject of numerous reports in recent months that have raised concerns about their potential harms to children. The FTC in August launched a formal inquiry into companion AI chatbots not just from Meta, but other companies as well, including Alphabet, Snap, OpenAI and X.AI.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-has-introduced-revised-guardrails-for-its-ai-chatbots-to-prevent-inappropriate-conversations-with-children-200444230.html?src=rss

“Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is launching paid subscriptions for users who do not want to see adverts in the UK,” reports the BBC:

The company said it would start notifying users in the coming weeks to let them choose whether to subscribe to its platforms if they wish to use them without seeing ads. EU users of its platforms can already pay a fee starting from €5.99 (£5) a month to see no ads — but subscriptions will start from £2.99 a month for UK users.

“It will give people in the UK a clear choice about whether their data is used for personalised advertising, while preserving the free access and value that the ads-supported internet creates for people, businesses and platforms,” Meta said. But UK users will not have an option to not pay and see “less personalised” adverts — a feature Meta added for EU users after regulators raised concerns…

Meta said its own model would see its subscription for no ads cost £2.99 a month on the web or £3.99 a month on iOS and Android apps — with the higher fee to offset cuts taken from transactions by Apple and Google… [Meta] reiterated its critical stance on the EU on Friday, saying its regulations were creating a worse experience for users and businesses unlike the UK’s “more pro-growth and pro-innovation regulatory environment”.

“Meta said its own model would see its subscription for no ads cost £2.99 a month on the web or £3.99 a month on iOS and Android apps,” according to the BBC, “with the higher fee to offset cuts taken from transactions by Apple and Google.”

Even users not paying for an ad-free experience have “tools and settings that empower people to control their ads experience,” according to Meta’s announcement. The include Ad Preferences which influences data used to inform ads including Activity Information from Ad Partners. “We also have tools in our products that explain ‘Why am I seeing this ad?’ and how people can manage their ad experience. We do not sell personal data to advertisers.”

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IEEE Spectrum ranks the popularity of programming languages — but is there a problem? Programmers “are turning away from many of these public expressions of interest. Rather than page through a book or search a website like Stack Exchange for answers to their questions, they’ll chat with an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT in a private conversation.”

And with an AI assistant like Cursor helping to write code, the need to pose questions in the first place is significantly decreased. For example, across the total set of languages evaluated in the Top Programming Languages, the number of questions we saw posted per week on Stack Exchange in 2025 was just 22% of what it was in 2024…

However, an even more fundamental problem is looming in the wings… In the same way most developers today don’t pay much attention to the instruction sets and other hardware idiosyncrasies of the CPUs that their code runs on, which language a program is vibe coded in ultimately becomes a minor detail… [T]he popularity of different computer languages could become as obscure a topic as the relative popularity of railway track gauges… But if an AI is soothing our irritations with today’s languages, will any new ones ever reach the kind of critical mass needed to make an impact? Will the popularity of today’s languages remain frozen in time?

That’s ultimately the larger question. “how much abstraction and anti-foot-shooting structure will a sufficiently-advanced coding AI really need…?”

[C]ould we get our AIs to go straight from prompt to an intermediate language that could be fed into the interpreter or compiler of our choice? Do we need high-level languages at all in that future? True, this would turn programs into inscrutable black boxes, but they could still be divided into modular testable units for sanity and quality checks. And instead of trying to read or maintain source code, programmers would just tweak their prompts and generate software afresh.

What’s the role of the programmer in a future without source code? Architecture design and algorithm selection would remain vital skills… How should a piece of software be interfaced with a larger system? How should new hardware be exploited? In this scenario, computer science degrees, with their emphasis on fundamentals over the details of programming languages, rise in value over coding boot camps.

Will there be a Top Programming Language in 2026? Right now, programming is going through the biggest transformation since compilers broke onto the scene in the early 1950s. Even if the predictions that much of AI is a bubble about to burst come true, the thing about tech bubbles is that there’s always some residual technology that survives. It’s likely that using LLMs to write and assist with code is something that’s going to stick. So we’re going to be spending the next 12 months figuring out what popularity means in this new age, and what metrics might be useful to measure.
Having said that, IEEE Spectrum still ranks programming language popularity three ways — based on use among working programmers, demand from employers, and “trending” in the zeitgeist — using seven different metrics.

Their results? Among programmers, “we see that once again Python has the top spot, with the biggest change in the top five being JavaScript’s drop from third place last year to sixth place this year. As JavaScript is often used to create web pages, and vibe coding is often used to create websites, this drop in the apparent popularity may be due to the effects of AI… In the ‘Jobs’ ranking, which looks exclusively at what skills employers are looking for, we see that Python has also taken 1st place, up from second place last year, though SQL expertise remains an incredibly valuable skill to have on your resume.”

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Martin Shkreli, better known as Pharma Bro for his price-gouging antics with AIDS medication Daraprim, is going to have to defend against claims of misappropriating trade secrets with the unique Wu-Tang Clan album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Earlier this week, US District Court Judge Pamela Chen wrote in a decision that Shkreli has to face a lawsuit that accuses him of improperly saving copies and playing the one-of-a-kind album for followers, which reduced its value and exclusivity.

The lawsuit was filed by PleasrDAO — which, according to its own website, is a collective of people involved with cryptocurrency, NFTs and digital art. Once Upon a Time in Shaolin has a strange ownership history, starting with Shkreli purchasing the one-of-one studio album in 2015 for $2 million. After a fraud conviction, Shkreli had to forfeit his assets, including the album, leading to PleasrDAO acquiring it in a government auction for $4 million.

On top of the album’s highly exclusive nature, it has a condition where it can’t be “commercially exploited for 88 years” by any subsequent owners. The collective’s argument stems from claims that Shkreli admitted in livestreams that he made copies of the album and played it for his followers, even allegedly posting “LOL i have the mp3s you moron” in response to a member of PleasrDAO posting a photo of the album. If PleasrDAO wins the case, Shkreli will have to give up any copies of the album, as well as provide info on all copies, who they were distributed to and what profits he made from it.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/martin-shkreli-has-to-face-claims-of-copying-one-of-a-kind-wu-tang-clan-album-174730388.html?src=rss

“Today’s AIs are book smart,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Everything they know they learned from available language, images and videos. To evolve further, they have to get street smart.”
And that requires “world models,” which are “gaining momentum in frontier research and could allow technology to take on new roles in our lives.”
The key is enabling AI to learn from their environments and faithfully represent an abstract version of them in their “heads,” the way humans and animals do. To do it, developers need to train AIs by using simulations of the world. Think of it like learning to drive by playing “Gran Turismo” or learning to fly from “Microsoft Flight Simulator.” These world models include all the things required to plan, take actions and make predictions about the future, including physics and time… There’s an almost unanimous belief among AI pioneers that world models are crucial to creating next-generation AI. And many say they will be critical to someday creating better-than-human “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI. Stanford University professor and AI “godmother” Fei-Fei Li has raised $230 million to launch world-model startup World Labs…

Google DeepMind researchers set out to create a system that could generate real-world simulations with an unprecedented level of fidelity. The result, Genie 3 — which is still in research preview and not publicly available — can generate photo-realistic, open-world virtual landscapes from nothing more than a text prompt. You can think of Genie 3 as a way to quickly generate what’s essentially an open-world videogame that can be as faithful to the real world as you like. It’s a virtual space in which a baby AI can endlessly play, make mistakes and learn what it needs to do to achieve its goals, just as a baby animal or human does in the real world. That experimentation process is called reinforcement learning. Genie 3 is part of a system that could help train the AI that someday pilots robots, self-driving cars and other “embodied” AIs, says project co-lead Jack Parker-Holder. And the environments could be filled with people and obstacles: An AI could learn how to interact with humans by observing them moving around in that virtual space, he adds.

“It isn’t clear whether all these bets will lead to the superintelligence that corporate leaders predict,” the article concedes.

“But in the short term, world models could make AIs better at tasks at which they currently falter, especially in spatial reasoning.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The latest Apple silicon is about to hit the assembly lines, according to Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman. In the latest Power On newsletter, Gurman said that Apple “is nearing mass production of its next MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs and two new Mac monitors.” Gurman added that these upgraded products are scheduled for release sometime between the end of this year and the first quarter of next year.

Earlier this year, Gurman noted that Apple was expected to start production on the M5 MacBook Pro during the second half of 2025. All signs seem to point toward Apple following its typical release schedule, where the latest MacBook Pro makes its fall debut, followed by the reveal of the upgraded MacBook Air in the spring. However, Gurman previously mentioned in a July edition of his newsletter that “Apple is now internally targeting a launch early next year” for the MacBook Pro instead.

Beyond the upcoming MacBooks, we’re expecting one of the two Mac monitors to be the upgraded Studio Display. First released in March 2022, Apple’s Studio Display could use a refresh, which some rumors say will include a mini-LED display, along with overall improvements to brightness and color quality.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/apple-is-reportedly-nearing-production-for-its-latest-m5-powered-macbooks-154148070.html?src=rss

The BBC reports that a million-year-old human skull found in China suggests that the human species “began to emerge at least half a million years earlier than we thought, researchers are claiming in a new study.”

It also shows that we co-existed with other sister species, including Neanderthals, for much longer than we’ve come to believe, they say.

The scientists claim their analysis “totally changes” our understanding of human evolution and, if correct, it would certainly rewrite a key early chapter in our history. But other experts in a field where disagreement over our emergence on the planet is rife, say that the new study’s conclusions are plausible but far from certain.

The discovery, published in the leading scientific journal Science, shocked the research team, which included scientists from a university in China and the UK’s Natural History Museum. “From the very beginning, when we got the result, we thought it was unbelievable. How could that be so deep into the past?” said Prof Xijun Ni of Fudan University, who co-led the analysis. “But we tested it again and again to test all the models, use all the methods, and we are now confident about the result, and we’re actually very excited.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.