Elon Musk has ordered another round of job cuts at xAI after growing frustrated with the poor performance of its coding product, forcing out several more cofounders and parachuting in “fixers” from SpaceX and Tesla to audit the startup.

The latest overhaul of the 2-year-old startup follows the success of Anthropic and OpenAI, whose AI coding tools have shaken up the software industry, multiple people familiar with the decisions said.

Musk has dialled up the pressure after merging SpaceX with xAI in a $1.25 billion deal, as he attempts to meet a June deadline for what could be the biggest stock market listing in history. The world’s richest man has said his goals are to launch AI data centers into space, build factories on the Moon, and colonize Mars.

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Longtime Slashdot reader tsuliga writes: Two new episodes of Doctor Who that were previously lost have been found. The original Doctor Who episodes were wiped or deleted by the BBC because they were not aware of the future use of re-runs of these shows. Ninety-five of the 253 episodes from the program’s first six years are currently missing. How many more episodes are out there waiting to be rediscovered? “The main broadcasters in the UK in the 1960s, 70s, up to the 80s really, junked quite a lot of content,” said Justin Smith, a cinema professor at England’s De Montfort University and film archivist. “In some ways finding missing ‘Doctor Whos’ is the holy grail” of classic TV discoveries, Smith said.

The two episodes were “The Nightmare Begins” and “Devil’s Planet,” both of which aired during the show’s third series in 1965. It features William Hartnell as the Doctor in a story involving archvillains the Daleks — pepperpot-shaped metal aggressors whose favorite word is “Exterminate!” Smith said that for fans of the show, “it’s got it all, it really has. It is intergalactic, it’s got some great performances. It stands up really, really well.”

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A top Senate administrator on Monday gave aides the green light to use three artificial intelligence chatbots for official work, a reflection of how widespread the use of the products has become in workplaces around the globe. The chief information officer for the Senate sergeant-at-arms, who oversees the chamber’s computers as well as security, said in a one-page memo reviewed by The New York Times that aides could use Google’s Gemini chat, OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, which is already integrated into Senate platforms.

Copilot “can help with routine Senate work, including drafting and editing documents, summarizing information, preparing talking points and briefing material, and conducting research and analysis,” the memo said. The document later added that “data shared with Copilot Chat stays within the secure Microsoft 365 Government environment and is protected by the same controls that safeguard other Senate data.” It’s unclear how widely AI is used in the Senate or how widespread it might become, as individual offices and committees set their own rules. The chamber has also not publicly released comprehensive guidance on chatbots, the report notes.

In contrast, the House has clearer policies allowing the general use of AI for limited internal tasks but restricting it from sensitive data or for being used for deepfakes and certain decision-making activities.

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When talking about risk during a press conference on Thursday, the NASA officials in charge of the upcoming Artemis II Moon mission hedged their answers.

Reporters’ questions on the risks were certainly valid and appropriate. In an open society, it is vital to set expectations for any hazardous venture such as spaceflight—most importantly for the astronauts actually making the journey, but also for NASA’s workforce, the White House, lawmakers, and members of the public paying for the endeavor.

What’s more, Artemis II will be the first mission since 1972 to fly humans to the vicinity of the Moon. This is not following the well-trodden yet perilous path that astronauts take to reach the International Space Station, just a few hundred miles above Earth.

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A 58-year-old woman in Greece appears to hold the record for growing a parasitic sheep bot fly in her nose the longest, almost creating a snot rocket that could literally fly.

Usually, when the sheep bot fly accidentally nosedives into a human’s schnoz, the first-stage larvae they deliver don’t actually develop. In contrast, in its normal target—a sheep’s nose—the larvae would move up into the sinuses, feed, grow, and molt into second- and third-stage larvae. From there, the flies (Oestrus ovis) drip from the nose onto the ground, burrow into the soil, pupate, and emerge as adult flies.

For a long time, experts thought that the flies couldn’t complete their development in humans beyond the first larval stage. But a few human cases have been reported in recent decades involving the second- and third-stage larvae. The woman’s case, reported in the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases by a medical entomologist and colleagues, goes the furthest yet, finding pupa and a puparium—the hard casing of a pupa—in the woman’s nose.

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Do you remember the joyful satisfaction you felt when you really started to understand Slay the Spire?

This isn’t a totally rhetorical question. If you’re reading this piece about Slay the Spire 2—published roughly a week into what promises to be a lengthy Early Access period—I have to assume you’ve put in dozens, if not hundreds (or thousands?) of hours with the original Slay the Spire. At this point, the game probably feels less like a game and more like a comfortable old pair of sneakers. You probably have a favorite character, a preferred set of card synergies to focus on building for that character, and a set of alternative strategies to aim for when the vagaries of chance make that preferred strategy impossible. The game’s plentiful randomization makes each run feel a bit different, but the contours of those runs start to feel a little common to anyone who has tinkered with the game for years.

But think back, if you can, to when Slay the Spire was an exciting new challenge. Remember those first few runs, when you were still deep in the trial-and-error phase of your Slay the Spire journey. You still had to read each new card carefully as it appeared, developing potential strategies on the fly and weighing key deckbuilding and power-building decisions for minutes at a time to maximize your chance of survival. Sure, you failed a lot. But you got a little more confident each time and a little farther every few sessions and just a little more knowledgeable about and immersed in the game’s intricate, well-balanced systems.

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