“Perhaps no group of fans, industry workers, and consumers is more intense about AI use than gamers….” writes New York magazine’s “Intelligencer” column:
Just this month, the latest Postal game was axed by its publisher, which was “overwhelmed with negative responses”
from the “concerned Postal community” after fans spotted
AI-generated material in the game’s trailer. The developers of Arc
Raiders were accused
of using AI instead of voice actors, leading to calls for boycotts,
while the developers of the Call of Duty franchise were
called out for AI-generated assets that players found strewn across
Black Ops 7.Games that weren’t developed with
generative AI are getting caught
up in accusations anyway, while workers at Electronic Arts are
going
to the press to describe pressure from bosses to adopt AI tools.
Nintendo has sworn off using generative AI, as has the company behind
the Cyberpunk series. Valve, the company that operates
Steam, now requires AI disclosures on listed games and surveys
all submitters. Perhaps sensing the emergence of a new
constituency, California congressman Ro Khanna responded in November
to the Call of Duty backlash:”We need
regulations that prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs to
extract greater profits,” he posted
on X….
AI is often seen as a tool for managers to extract more productivity and justify
layoffs. Among players, it can foster a sense that gamers are being
tricked or ripped off, while also dovetailing with more general
objections to generative AI. It can sometimes be hard to tell whether
gamer backlash is a bellwether or an outlier, an early signal from our youngest major creative industry or a localized and unique fit of rage. The sheer number of
incidents here suggests the former, which foretells bitter, messy,
and confusing fights to come in entertainment beyond gaming — where,
notably, technologies referred to as “AI” have previously been
embraced with open arms.
And now “the price of the sort of memory PC gamers most want to buy has skyrocketed” (per Tom’s Hardware). “The rush to build data centers is making it much more expensive to game. Nobody’s going to be happy about that.”
Insider Gaming shares another example of anti-AI sentiment in the gaming industry:
The Indie Game Awards took place on December 18, and, as many could assume, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took home the awards for Game of the Year and Debut Game. However, things have changed and The Indie Game Awards are making a big decision to strip the Clair Obscur and developer Sandfall Interactive of their awards over the use of gen AI in the game.
In an announcement made on Saturday afternoon, Six One Indie, the creators of the show, said that it’s removal comes after the discovery after voting was done, and the show was recorded. “The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself,” the statement reads. “When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Polygon notes the award-stripping is “due to inclusion of generative AI assets at launch that were quickly patched out.”
Quotes from earlier in the year from Sandfall Interactive’s FranÃois Meurisse made the rounds on social media last week amid a news cycle caught up in the use of generative AI in games… In June, the Spanish outlet El País published a story including an interview conducted around Clair Obscur’s launch, in which Meurisse admitted that Sandfall used a minimal amount generative AI in some form during the game’s development… Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launched with what some suspected to be AI-generated textures that, as it clarified to El País, were then replaced with custom assets in a swift patch five days after release.
“Perhaps no group of fans, industry workers, and consumers is more intense about AI use than gamers….” writes New York magazine’s “Intelligencer” column:
Just this month, the latest Postal game was axed by its publisher, which was “overwhelmed with negative responses”
from the “concerned Postal community” after fans spotted
AI-generated material in the game’s trailer. The developers of Arc
Raiders were accused
of using AI instead of voice actors, leading to calls for boycotts,
while the developers of the Call of Duty franchise were
called out for AI-generated assets that players found strewn across
Black Ops 7.Games that weren’t developed with
generative AI are getting caught
up in accusations anyway, while workers at Electronic Arts are
going
to the press to describe pressure from bosses to adopt AI tools.
Nintendo has sworn off using generative AI, as has the company behind
the Cyberpunk series. Valve, the company that operates
Steam, now requires AI disclosures on listed games and surveys
all submitters. Perhaps sensing the emergence of a new
constituency, California congressman Ro Khanna responded in November
to the Call of Duty backlash:”We need
regulations that prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs to
extract greater profits,” he posted
on X….
AI is often seen as a tool for managers to extract more productivity and justify
layoffs. Among players, it can foster a sense that gamers are being
tricked or ripped off, while also dovetailing with more general
objections to generative AI. It can sometimes be hard to tell whether
gamer backlash is a bellwether or an outlier, an early signal from our youngest major creative industry or a localized and unique fit of rage. The sheer number of
incidents here suggests the former, which foretells bitter, messy,
and confusing fights to come in entertainment beyond gaming — where,
notably, technologies referred to as “AI” have previously been
embraced with open arms.
And now “the price of the sort of memory PC gamers most want to buy has skyrocketed” (per Tom’s Hardware). “The rush to build data centers is making it much more expensive to game. Nobody’s going to be happy about that.”
Insider Gaming shares another example of anti-AI sentiment in the gaming industry:
The Indie Game Awards took place on December 18, and, as many could assume, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took home the awards for Game of the Year and Debut Game. However, things have changed and The Indie Game Awards are making a big decision to strip the Clair Obscur and developer Sandfall Interactive of their awards over the use of gen AI in the game.
In an announcement made on Saturday afternoon, Six One Indie, the creators of the show, said that it’s removal comes after the discovery after voting was done, and the show was recorded. “The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself,” the statement reads. “When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Polygon notes the award-stripping is “due to inclusion of generative AI assets at launch that were quickly patched out.”
Quotes from earlier in the year from Sandfall Interactive’s FranÃois Meurisse made the rounds on social media last week amid a news cycle caught up in the use of generative AI in games… In June, the Spanish outlet El País published a story including an interview conducted around Clair Obscur’s launch, in which Meurisse admitted that Sandfall used a minimal amount generative AI in some form during the game’s development… Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launched with what some suspected to be AI-generated textures that, as it clarified to El País, were then replaced with custom assets in a swift patch five days after release.
“If I get to do another Avatar film, it’ll be because the business model still works,” James Cameron tells CNN in a video interview — adding “That I can’t guarantee, as I sit here today. That’ll play out over the next month, really.” He says theatre is a “sacred space,” and while it will never go away, “I think that it could fall below a threshhold where the kinds of movies that I like to make and that I like to see… won’t be sustainable, they won’t be economically viable. And that can happen. We’re very close to that right now.”
The Wrap notes he filmed his new movie at the same time as its predecessor, The Way of Water.”
“We did all the performance capture in an 18-month period for both films. Then we did a lot of the virtual camera work to figure out exactly how we were going to do the live-action,” Cameron explained. “Then we did all live-action together for both films. Then we split it and said, All right, now we just got to finish [movie] two…..” While Cameron has been iffy about whether the previously announced fourth and fifth films will actually happen, he has already shot some of the fourth movie. “We’re in a fluid scenario. Theatrical’s contracting, streaming is expanding. People’s habit patterns are changing. The teen demo consumes media differently than what we grew up with. And how much is it changing? Does theatrical contract to a point where it just stops right and doesn’t get any smaller because we still value that, or does it continue to wither away?” Cameron said.
It’s a theme he continued in his interview with The Hollywood Reporter”
“This can be the last one. There’s only one [unanswered question] in the story. We may find that the release of Avatar 3 proves how diminished the cinematic experience is these days, or we may find it proves the case that it’s as strong as it ever was — but only for certain types of films. It’s a coin toss right now. We won’t know until the middle of January.”
I ask something that might sound odd: What do you want to happen? But Cameron gets the implication. “That’s an interesting question,” he says. “I feel I’m at a bit of a crossroads. Do I want it to be a wild success — which almost compels me to continue and make two more Avatar movies? Or do I want it to fail just enough that I can justify doing somethingelse…?”
“What won’t happen is, I won’t go down the rabbit hole of exclusively making only Avatar for multiple years. I’m going to figure out another way that involves more collaboration. I’m not saying I’m going to step away as a director, but I’m going to pull back from being as hands-on with every tiny aspect of the process…” Cameron won’t reveal his next project — and he might even be unsure himself — but will give intriguing hints. In addition to co-directing Billie Eilish’s upcoming 3D concert documentary, Hit Me Hard and Soft, Cameron has another globe-trotting documentary adventure in the works, the details of which are under wraps. His next narrative film probably won’t be Ghosts of Hiroshima, which has generated considerable press after Cameron acquired the rights to Charles Pellegrino’s book chronicling the true story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who in 1945 survived the nuclear blasts at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cameron promised Yamaguchi on his deathbed in 2010 that he’d makethefilm. “The postapocalypse is not going to be the fun that it is in science fiction,” he says. “It’s not going to have mutants and monsters and all sorts of cool stuff. It’s hell….”
Cameron first portrayed the apocalypse in his 1984 debut, The Terminator, a franchise he’s quietly working on revisiting. “Once the dust clears on Avatar in a couple of months, I’m going to really plunge into that,” he says. “There are a lot of narrative problems to solve. The biggest is how do I stay enough ahead of what’s really happening to make it science fiction?” Asked whether he’s cracked the premise, Cameron replies, “I’m working on it,” but his sly smile suggests that he has…. There needs to be a broader interpretation of Terminator and the idea of a time war and super intelligence. I want to do new stuff that people aren’t imagining.”
Maybe Cameron’s best response was what he told USA Today:
“Let’s do another interview in a year and then I’ll tell you what my plans are,” Cameron, 71, says with a grin. For now, he’s still catching his breath.
America’s unemployment rate for tech jobs rose to 4% in November, and “has been steadily rising since May,” reports the Washington Post (citing data from the IT training/certifications company CompTIA).
Between October and November, the number of technology workers across different industries fell 134,000, while the number of people working in the tech industry declined by more than 6,800. Tech job postings were also down by more than 31,800, the report found, citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and California-based market intelligence firm Lightcast. “The data is pretty definitive that the tech industry is struggling,” said Mark Zandi, Moody’s chief economist. “There’s a jobs recession in the industry, and it feels like that’s going to continue given the slide in postings….”
The unemployment rate in the tech industry still sits below the national rate, which in November hit 4.6 percent, the highest since 2021. However, that gap has been narrowing, with tech unemployment rising faster in recent months than is the case nationally…. Employers are largely in “wait and see” mode when it comes to hiring given the current uncertainties surrounding the economy and impact of AI, so they’re likely to delay backfilling, Herbert said, citing CompTIA’s surveys of chief information officers. But Justin Wolfers, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, said uncertainty is likely to continue in the foreseeable future. “I’m feeling substantially more pessimistic,” Wolfers said, recalling that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell recently suggested that federal job numbers may be overstated. “That’s pretty grim.”
Technology companies have announced more than 141,000 job cuts so far this year, representing a 17 percent increase from the same period last year, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. At the same time Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have announced plans to invest up to $375 billion in AI infrastructure this year.
“AI is quickly becoming a requirement, with 41 percent of all active job postings representing AI roles or requiring AI skills, according to CompTIA’s analysis,” the article points out.
Economist Zandi tells the Post that “If you have AI skills, there seems to be jobs. But if you don’t, I think it’s going to feel like you’ve been hit by a dump truck.”
The team authoring the Rust 2025 Vision Doc interviewed Rust developers to find out what they liked about the language — and have now issued three recommendations “to help Rust continue to scale across domains and usage levels.”
— Enumerate and describe Rust’s design goals and integrate them into our processes, helping to ensure they are observed by future language designers and the broader ecosystem.
— Double down on extensibility, introducing the ability for crates to influence the develop experience and the compilation pipeline.
— Help users to navigate the crates.io ecosystem and enable smoother interop
The real “empowering magic” of Rust arises from achieving a number of different attributes all at once — reliability, efficiency, low-level control, supportiveness, and so forth. It would be valuable to have a canonical list of those values that we could collectively refer to as a community and that we could use when evaluating RFCs or other proposed designs… We recommend creating an RFC that defines the goals we are shooting for as we work on Rust… One insight from our research is that we don’t need to define which values are “most important”. We’ve seen that for Rust to truly work, it must achieveallthe factors at once…
We recommenddoubling down on extensibilityas a core strategy. Rust’s extensibility — traits, macros, operator overloading — has been key to its versatility. But that extensibility is currently concentrated in certain areas: the type system and early-stage proc macros. We should expand it to coversupportive interfaces(better diagnostics and guidance from crates) andcompilation workflow(letting crates integrate at more stages of the build process)… Doubling down on extensibility will not only make current Rust easier to use, it will enable and support Rust’s use in new domains. Safety Critical applications in particular require a host of custom lints and tooling to support the associated standards. Compiler extensibility allows Rust to support those niche needs in a more general way.
We recommend finding ways to help users navigate the crates.io ecosystem… [F]inding which crates to use presents a real obstacle when people are getting started. The Rust org maintains a carefully neutral stance, which is good, but also means that people don’t have anywhere to go for advice on a good “starter set” crates… Part of the solution is enabling better interop between libraries.
MPV 0.41 is out today as the newest feature release for this MPlayer/mplayer2-derived open-source video player. With MPV 0.41 there is a big focus on improving Wayland support as well as now preferring Vulkan Video acceleration over alternative video decode APIs…
An anonymous reader shared this report from the site It’s FOSS:
Linux gives you plenty of ways to install software: native distro packages, Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, source builds, even curl-piped installers. The catch is that each one solves a different problem, yet none of them fully eliminates the “works here, breaks there” reality across all distros. Package Forge (PkgForge) is a new project with a narrower mission: deliver truly distro-independent portable applications that run the same way across systems….
It’s not a new packaging format in and of itself, nor is it trying to replace AppImages. Instead, it’s an ecosystem that publishes portable packages and static binaries in curated repositories, paired with a package manager designed to install and manage them. One of the ways PkgForge stands out from some portable app efforts on Linux is its focus on accessible documentation and a security-minded distribution model. The project primarily delivers prebuilt binary packages, keeps transparent build logs, and relies on checksum verification. This helps reduce the spread of ad-hoc install scripts and the need for local compilation, which has long been a common pattern when downloading Linux software directly (and still is for many projects today).
To make life easier for the end-user, the project maintains its own frontend, called Soar… which you can use like an additional package manager, and let it handle installation, updates, and system integration. It also allows you to search for apps and utilities without having to dig through the repos online. Alternatively, you can search the PkgForge repos manually, and download and manage individual portable packages on your own. This is preferable if you’re building a portable toolkit on a USB drive, testing a single app temporarily, or simply want full control over where files live…
Even if it doesn’t replace Flatpak, Snap, or AppImage, it helps give definition to what a more flexible, truly distro-independent future for portable Linux apps could look like.
There may not be any reports of stick drift with the ROG Xbox Ally yet, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be. If you’d rather not end up with joysticks that have a mind of their own, GuliKit revealed its latest TMR Electromagnet Joystick Modules made specifically for your Xbox handheld.
GuliKit said it worked directly with Asus to develop these joystick upgrades, which match the exact dimensions of the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X’s stock sticks. The aftermarket accessories company previously designed a Hall effect joystick upgrade kit for the ROG Ally X, but GuliKit said this mod features electromagnetic joysticks that not only address stick drift but are also more precise, durable, and power-efficient. GuliKit even made the joystick upgrades easy to install since there’s no soldering required, and you can fine-tune the calibration in the handheld’s system settings.
It may feel excessive to spend more money on a gaming handheld that can cost up to $1,000, but neither the ROG Xbox Ally nor Ally X comes with Hall effect or electromagnetic joysticks. GuliKit’s joystick upgrade is already available to US customers on its Amazon storefront for $19.99.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/gulikits-20-mod-makes-the-rog-xbox-allys-joysticks-drift-free-190521030.html?src=rss
The ICORE-3576Q38 is a compact 38 mm × 38 mm system-on-module developed by T-Firefly and built around the Rockchip RK3576 application processor. The module targets embedded and industrial designs that require multi-core processing, local AI acceleration, and broad multimedia and I/O support within a small footprint. The ICORE-3576Q38 family is available in three variants. The […]
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Last September, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org pledged to engage 25 million K-12 schoolchildren in an “Hour of AI” this school year. Preliminary numbers released this week by the Code.org Advocacy Coalition showed that [halfway through the five-day event Computer Science Education Week] 13.1 million users had participated in the inaugural Hour of AI, attaining 52.4% of its goal of 25 million participants.
In a pivot from coding to AI literacy, the Hour of AI replaced Code.org’s hugely-popular Hour of Code this December as the flagship event of Computer Science Education Week (December 8-14). According to Code.org’s 2024-25 Impact Report, “in 2024–25 alone, students logged over 100 million Hours of Code, including more than 43 million in the four months leading up to and including CS Education Week.”
Minecraft participated with their own Hour of AI lessons. (“Program an AI Agent to craft tools and build shelter before dusk falls in this iconic challenge!”) And Google contributed AI Quests, “a gamified, in-class learning experience” allowing students to “step into the shoes of Google researchers using AI to solve real-world challenges.” Other participating organizations included the Scratch Foundation, Lego Education, Adobe, and Roblox.
And Microsoft contributed two — including one with their block-based programming environment Microsoft MakeCode Arcade, with students urged to “code and train your own super-smart bug using AI algorithms and challenge other AI bugs in an epic Tower battle for ultimate Bug Arena glory!”
One of the features that sadly didn’t make it into the recent Linux 6.19 merge window was the long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver for supporting the web camera found with the high-end HP ZBook Ultra G1a and also expected to be used by future flagship AMD Ryzen laptops…
What is the future of work? The Wall Street Journal asked five workplace experts and practitioners.
So while AI “is already doing tasks once relegated to newly minted college graduates in many professions,” the Journal predicts that in the next 20 years AI “will have an impact on the role of managers, how organizations measure business outcomes and accelerate tasks that once took months.”
A senior partner at the consulting firm Mercer predicts AI (plus advances in quantum computing) will enable entrepreneurs to reshape industries with a fraction of the resources traditionally required.
Some other predictions:
Alan Guarino, vice chairman and CEO of board services at the global consulting firm Korn Ferry: In 25 years, the workplace will likely be unrecognizable, with employees and AI operating as one. Yes, there will be tasks and entire jobs taken over by AI, but we will all be elevated to a whole new superpower to make critical and creative decisions. The idea that work was once done strictly by people will seem quaint to some. Tasks that took entire teams, and months to complete, will be crunched down to a few minutes, with success measured on metrics we can’t imagine today.
The middle layers of management — so central to today’s corporate structure — could be a vestige of the past. The role of the leader too will change, as they directly oversee a collaboration of people and intelligent systems. The attitude toward in-person collaboration is growing and 25 years from now, counterintuitively, I believe face-to-face connection won’t just be indispensable, but invaluable. Emotional intelligence will still set leaders apart. Those who blend empathy with tech savvy will be the ones shaping the future.
Peter Fasolo, a former executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Johnson & Johnson, and director of the Human Resource Policy Institute at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business: There will be fewer available workers in Europe, Japan and the U.S. over this time frame and the demographic shift will be profound. In addition, there will be even fewer young adults available for colleges in the U.S., even if they decide the investment is worth it.
The implications of this shift will be the need for more investments in vocational and trade schools, and the need to invest in skill-based, not pedigree-based training. There will also be more on-the-job specific training. Companies will become classrooms. Companies that want a more sustainable relationship with employees will need an investment model versus a transactional one: We will invest in your skills so you can be a competitive professional in your domain.
Several of Waymo’s autonomous vehicles were seen stuck in the middle of San Francisco streets following a significant power outage that took out the city’s traffic lights. Waymo responded to the power outage by suspending its ride-hailing services in the city, but images and videos on social media showed the self-driving taxis stopped at intersections with hazard lights on.
“We have temporarily suspended our ride-hailing services in the San Francisco Bay Area due to the widespread power outage,” Suzanne Philion, a spokesperson for Waymo, told Engadget in an email. “Our teams are working diligently and in close coordination with city officials, and we are hopeful to bring our services back online soon.”
The power outage was attributed to a fire at one of Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E)’s substations. The incident began sometime on Saturday morning, which PG&E said affected approximately 130,000 customers. As of Sunday morning, the Californian power company said its crews have restored power to about 110,000 of those customers, while working on the remaining 21,000 customers in “the Presidio, Richmond District, Golden Gate Park and small areas of downtown San Francisco.”
Waymo hasn’t provided an explanation as to why the power outage left its autonomous cars stranded in San Francisco streets, but this episode may have revealed a notable fault with the Waymo Driver system. Waymo indicates on its website that its autonomous driving system “responds to signs and signals, like traffic light colors and temporary stop signs,” which could indicate that the self-driving cars struggled with the out-of-order street lights. Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, also saw an opportunity to chime in on X, posting that “Tesla Robotaxis were unaffected by the SF power outage.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/a-san-francisco-power-outage-left-waymos-self-driving-cars-stranded-at-intersections-172316970.html?src=rss
2025 was an eventful year for indie and AAA gaming alike, but what were the most-played new releases of 2025 per actual data? Sales and Steam charts can only tell so much of the story, but Alinea Analytics have published a report with a clear estimate on the top games in 2025 across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox platforms including the MS Store
“In the lead up to its Switch 2 console release, Nintendo updated its user agreement,” writes the Free Software Foundation, warning that Nintendo now claims “broad authority to make consoles owned by its customers permanently unusable.”
“Under Nintendo’s most aggressive digital restrictions management (DRM) update to date, game console owners are now required to give Nintendo the unilateral right to revoke access to games, security updates, and the Internet, at its sole discretion.”
The new agreement states: “You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with [Nintendo’s restrictions], Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part….”
There are probably other reasons that Nintendo has and will justify bricking game consoles, but here are some that we have seen reported:
— “Tampering” with hardware or software in pretty much any way;
— Attempting to play a back-up game;
— Playing a “used” game; or
— Use of a third-party game or accessory…
Nintendo’s promise to block a user from using their game console isn’t just an empty threat: it has already been wielded against many users. For example, within a month of the Switch 2’s release, one user unknowingly purchased an open-box return that had been bricked, and despite functional hardware, it was unusable for many games. In another case, a user installing updates for game cartridges purchased via a digital marketplace had their console disabled. Though it’s unclear exactly why they were banned, it’s possible that the cartridge’s previous owner made a copy and an online DRM check determined that the current and previous owner’s use were both “fraudulent.” The user only had their console released through appealing to Nintendo directly and providing evidence of their purchase, a laborious process.
Nintendo’s new console banning spree is just one instance of the threat that nonfree software and DRM pose to users. DRM is but one injustice posed by nonfree software, and the target of the FSF’s Defective by Design campaign. Like with all software, users ought to be able to freely copy, study, and modify the programs running on their devices. Proprietary software developers actively oppose and antagonize their users. In the case of Nintendo, this means punishing legitimate users and burdening them with proving that their use is “acceptable.” Console users shouldn’t have to tread so carefully with a console that they own, and should they misstep, beg Nintendo to allow them to use their consoles again.
Ventoy 1.1.10 open-source bootable USB solution has been released today as a maintenance and feature update that supports new distro releases and improves support for existing distributions.
The Trump administration on Monday unveiled a new initiative dubbed the “U.S. Tech Force,” comprising about 1,000 engineers and other specialists who will work on artificial intelligence infrastructure and other technology projects throughout the federal government.
Participants will commit to a two-year employment program working with teams that report directly to agency leaders in “collaboration with leading technology companies,” according to an official government website. [“…and work closely with senior managers from companies partnering with the Tech Force.”] Those “private sector partners” include Amazon Web Services, Apple, Google Public Sector, Dell Technologies, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, Salesforce and numerous others [including AMD, IBM, Coinbase, Robinhood, Uber, xAI, and Zoom], the website says.
The Tech Force shows the Trump administration increasing its focus on developing America’s AI infrastructure as it competes with China for dominance in the rapidly growing industry… The engineering corps will be working on “high-impact technology initiatives including AI implementation, application development, data modernization, and digital service delivery across federal agencies,” the site says.
“Answer the call,” says the new web site at TechForce.gov.
“Upon completing the program, engineers can seek employment with the partnering private-sector companies for potential full-time roles — demonstrating the value of combining civil service with technical expertise.” [And those private sector companies can also nominate employees to participate.] “Annual salaries are expected to be in the approximate range of $150,000 to $200,000.”
The 2025 election for members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory
Board has
concluded; the winners are Greg Kroah-Hartman, Steven Rostedt, Julia
Lawall, David Hildenbrand, and Ted Ts’o.
Anyone who has really pushed their limits on a bike during an event will have experienced burning thighs, screaming lungs, a pounding heart and oceans of sweat.
But have you ever wondered what is happening to your body when you pedal? And how you can energise it to ensure you arrive at the finish line in the most efficient way?
We lift the lid on the physiology and psychology involved so you can leave the competition wheezing in your wake.
Riders wait nervously on the start line of the 2025 L’Etape du Tour. A.S.O./Bastien Séon
You’re lined up on the start line. The nerves are cranked up, meaning your kidneys’ adrenal medulla is stimulated into action and secreting adrenaline.
It’s the hormonal cause of that ‘flight or flight’ mechanism and results in a cascade of cardio repercussions before you’ve even set off.
“These include an increase in heart rate and cardiac output,” says cardiologist Andre La Gerche. “It also leads to a rise in blood pressure and metabolism.”
Further adrenaline-fuelled physiological changes include the relaxation of the smooth muscle in the wall of the bronchioles, which leads to a better supply of air to the alveoli; an increase in respiration rate; and dilation of coronary blood vessels and those of skeletal muscle, thus providing increased blood supply to those areas.
So, your body’s started to prepare for the physical challenge ahead. But it’s still a shock to the system when you pedal, especially if your ride opens with a high mountain pass.
This is where ‘oxygen uptake kinetics’ comes into play. Essentially, this is the speed at which your body can deliver oxygen to working muscles from a state of rest and so click swiftly into a steady state.
Not surprisingly, the fitter you are, the more proficient your system is at flicking the switch from one to the other, with distance runner Paula Radcliffe reportedly having the fastest VO2 kinetics of all time at 8-9 seconds.
You can train your body to better combat immediate aerobic stress. A.S.O./Bastien Séon
However, one study showed that recreational endurance athletes improved theirs by 30% after only six weeks of training. For this brief period, you’re leaning heavily on the anaerobic system to generate energy without oxygen.
When the oxygen supply meets demand, your aerobic system can sustainably power the effort at a constant rate (up to around 70% of your maximum heart rate).
“The speed at which your heart beats is no different between elites and recreational riders,” says La Gerche.
“No matter how hard you train, you can’t change that. But you can change its size. In general terms, the fitter you get, the bigger your heart is. A normal heart is around 300g – the size of a fist – while a Tour de France rider’s is up to a kilogram.”
Consistent training thickens the heart walls and increases chamber size. This is important during your sportive adventure due to stroke volume, which is the volume of blood pumped from the heart with each beat.
“During exercise your heart has about a 70% efficiency rate at pumping out blood. A 400g heart can accommodate around 200ml of blood, which means you’re pumping out around 140ml of blood with every beat,” says La Gerche.
“Professional cyclists’ chambers fill with around 400ml of blood. Apply that 70% figure and that’s 280ml of blood with every beat.”
Its importance becomes clear when you apply it to cardiac output, which is the amount of blood pumped out each minute.
If both our recreational and elite examples are riding at 135bpm, the former’s sending out 27l of blood each minute, while the latter’s pumping out 54l.
And as blood carries the oxygen and nutrients to serve your working muscles, you can see how a bigger, stronger heart can boost cycling performance.
This benefits higher-intensity efforts, too, because that greater blood flow also means swifter recovery between efforts, such as when the ascent undulates.
Which begs the question: during a tough ride, does your heart fatigue? “After five or six hours of intense exercise, we can put an ultrasound on the heart and see that the heart is fatigued,” says La Gerche.
“It’s easy to squeeze your leg muscles and see that they’re sore. But the effect on your heart is underestimated because it’s a silent partner. Just respect the challenge.”
Your heart can fatigue during a long, difficult ride. A.S.O./Jennifer Lindini
As the day rolls on, your muscular system also suffers, especially if you push it well beyond what you manage in training.
This is down partly to increasing the production of reactive oxygen species, or ROS, that results in oxidative stress in the blood and skeletal muscle itself.
Essentially, it’s down to the huge number of muscular contractions required to send you sky-rocketing over the next mountain and has been associated with accelerating muscle fatigue.
It’s also mooted to be one of the reasons behind delayed onset muscle soreness (aka DOMS). If you haven’t trained as much as you’d hoped, a well-balanced post-event diet, including antioxidant-rich fruit and veg, will help.
Power carbs
Porridge is a shrewd choice on the morning of a big ride. Getty Images
Why did our early ancestors eat each other? Because they saw each other as a nutritious snack, according to a 2017 study by James Cole, an archaeologist at Brighton University.
According to Cole’s calculations, the average human body contained 125,822cals. Much of that figure is down to fat’s high calorie content, with 1g furnishing 9cals. Even a WorldTour rider, who weighs only 60kg and has 7% body fat, has more than 37,000 stored fat calories.
So why do we bonk in a sportive? Well, that’s down to exercise intensity and the fact that you’re burning predominantly carbohydrates to avoid being swept up by the broom wagon.
“Your most readily accessed carbohydrate store is muscle glycogen, which is mooted at around 500g or 2,000cals,” says Tim Podlogar, nutritionist at Tudor Pro Cycling. “Riding at a high intensity, you can burn through this in two-and-a-half hours.”
This is why Podlogar recommends filling up your glycogen stores the day before. “That means multiple meals that are high in carbohydrate and low in fibre,” he says, “easy-to-digest foods such as white rice, white pasta and even Haribos.”
Also, avoid a gentle ride late on the eve of your big day because that’ll eat into your glycogen levels.
When it comes to race day, a high-carb breakfast further boosts glycogen stocks. Porridge, a buttered bagel or white toast and jam are popular.
And then it’s riding time. Many of you will already consume gels, bars and energy drinks in search of glucose replenishment, following a traditional 60-to-90g-an-hour strategy. You might be capable of more, however, especially if you’re one of the fitter cyclists out there.
“Our research shows that many amateur riders can handle 120g carbohydrate an hour,” he says, which goes some way to compensating for the 6,000cals-plus burned during a long day in the saddle. “At an elite level, we had many riders at last year’s Giro d’Italia who were consuming way more than that.”
Feeding should start from your first pedal stroke and, according to Podlogar, comprise sugar from solids only, keeping fluids to water because separating makes it easier to monitor how much sugar and fluid you’re consuming. You can go for an electrolyte drink, albeit Podlogar says you can tick this off from most gels.
But when should you feed to optimise the sugar hit? “I recommend to my riders that they fuel well downhill.
“You’re not pedalling so it’s easier to digest; the bloodflow to the intestines increases and so absorption improves.”
Three energy hits per hour – one bar and two gels, for instance – will boost your muscle glycogen levels. Not only should this prevent a sugar low, it could prevent muscle degradation, too.
“We know that your muscle is damaged if there’s insufficient glycogen around it; it’ll break down protein to a higher degree from the muscle itself in search of energy.”
There can be little opportunity to cool down during a ride such as L’Etape du Tour. A.S.O./Bastien Séon
Should your event be one of the big Alpine challenges, you could well be enduring temperatures over 30°C.
That means you’ll heat up like a nuclear reactor, which isn’t great because a swathe of biochemical reactions and nerve conductivity are optimised at around the 37°C mark.
But you can’t argue with science or, more precisely, the body’s inefficiency. “It’s around 20% efficient at generating energy,” says Chris Jones of body-temperature sensor outfit Core.
“That means for every 5cals of energy you burn, only 1cal is used for mechanical work. The remaining 4cals are released as heat energy.”
This means you’re almost combustible on steep ascents. Take WorldTour rider Simon Clarke, who Core monitored on stage 14 of the 2021 Tour de France, specifically a 100km stretch that included the ascent of the Col de Montségur: 4.2km at an average gradient of 8.7%.
“This section and the following ascent up the Col de la Croix de Morts saw the fastest increase in Clarke’s core body temperature, where it hit 39.2°C,” says Jones.
“The steeper the ascent, the faster the increase in core body temperature. This is because of the increased physical intensity and because there is less cooling from the wind at slower speeds.”
On the flipside, the rapid descent of Col de Montségur saw Clarke’s core drop to 38.1°C, which was below what it was when he started the climb.
This highlights that pacing is even more integral to reaching your goals when it’s hot, although your body will try its best to lose heat via the same way it gains it, namely radiation, convection and conduction.
Sweating is key to maintaining balance in the body. Around 580cals per litre of heat energy is needed to turn water from liquid to gas so it can evaporate from your skin (or your breath).
So, whenever water leaves your body via evaporation, a corresponding amount of heat also leaves your body into the surrounding air, helping you cool down. So, it’s great for cooling but clearly not wonderful for your water stores.
You can sweat over 1.5l an hour on a sweltering Alpine sportive. Covering those losses is difficult on two fronts: the practical side of drinking from a water bottle and the physical side of absorbing so much fluid.
It might be manageable for an hour, but the deeper a rider digs into a ride, the more uncomfortable the gut becomes. If you can manage 750ml an hour, that’s a good start.
Again, training will help cool your engine because low aerobic fitness makes you more susceptible to heat illness.
There’s a strong correlation between an individual’s aerobic capacity and their ability to offload heat. Studies show that if someone’s working at half their aerobic capacity, their core temperature reaches around 38°C.
If you and I do the same amount of work and you’re twice as fit as me, your core temperature will be lower and you’ll suffer less.
Beyond training, acclimatise from home by having a 15-minute hot bath after a ride. Doing this five or six times in the final two or three weeks before your event will really help.
“Dressing lightly will also help,” says Jones. “And keep it old-school by pouring water over your body and head. That can change your perception of the pain.”
Mental maths
Mental fatigue can harm physical performance. A.S.O./Jennifer Lindini
It’s not just your body that suffers during a sportive – your mind does, too, and you can be on the back foot from the start, according to a 2017 study, The Effects of Mental Fatigue on Physical Performance: A Systematic Review.
The authors showed that seven of eight key studies “reported that endurance performance was negatively affected by mental fatigue, which was evidenced by a decrease in time to exhaustion”. In short, don’t cause yourself unnecessary pre-race stress or you’ll be drained before the off.
Of course, even the most diligent planner can see motivation drop when they’re halfway up a mountain, miles from the finish line.
This, according to round-the-world record-holder Mark Beaumont, is to be expected and he calls it the ‘psychological arc’.
“You start fresh, dig deep at the end and finish strongly but there’s that bit in the middle where you’re far from starting and, in your head, far from finishing,” he told us. This is true whether you’re riding 50 miles or 500 miles.
To ride the arc rather than sink in, try some psychological games. Chunking is one of the most common and involves breaking the event down into smaller, more mentally manageable chunks.
If your next ascent features 10 hairpins, for example, tick off each hairpin. Many events supply a route sticker to smooth onto your top tube that can show natural chunks.
Ultimately, the biggest driver of your mental state is motivation. Take a 2008 study by Professor Samuele Marcora that involved 10 rugby players cycling at a fixed power output based on 90% of their VO2 max.
When they could no longer maintain that wattage, he had them ride as hard as they could for five extra seconds.
From an average power output of 242 watts in the test, despite apparent fatigue, they generated 731 watts.
The results convinced Marcora that fatigue is no physical phenomenon – if it was, how could the cyclists generate such power when they’d slowed down?
Instead, Marcora says your decision to slow or quit stems from two key areas – motivation and perception – and lays the foundations for his psychobiological model of fatigue.
When effort is perceived as maximal or when effort required eclipses the amount of effort you’re willing to exert, then you stop. In essence, fatigue is an increase in time of perception of effort.
Whether you agree with Marcora or not, one thing’s clear: despite your body’s suffering, it’s the mind that’ll often decide whether you reach the finish line or not.
