Need something new for your reading list? Here are two titles we think are worth checking out. This week, we’ve got Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary and The Thing on the Doorstep, an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation for Image Comics.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/what-to-read-this-weekend-revisiting-project-hail-mary-and-the-thing-on-the-doorstep-190000250.html?src=rss
ReactOS aims to be compatible with programs and drivers developed for Windows Server 2003 and later versions of Microsoft Windows.
And Slashdot reader jeditobe reports that the project has now “announced significant progress in achieving compatibility with proprietary graphics drivers.”
ReactOS now supports roughly 90% of GPU drivers for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, thanks to a series of fixes and the implementation of the KMDF (Kernel-Mode Driver Framework) and WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) subsystems. Prior to these changes, many proprietary drivers either failed to launch or exhibited unstable behavior. In the latest nightly builds of the 0.4.16 branch, drivers from a variety of manufacturers — including Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD — are running reliably.
The project demonstrated ReactOS running on real hardware, including booting with installed drivers for graphics cards such as Intel GMA 945, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX 750 Ti, and AMD Radeon HD 7530G. They also highlighted successful operation on mobile GPUs like the NVIDIA Quadro 1000M, with 2D/3D acceleration, audio, and network connectivity all functioning correctly. Further tests confirmed support on less common or older configurations, including a laptop with a Radeon Xpress 1100, as well as high-performance cards like the NVIDIA GTX Titan X.
A key contribution came from a patch merged into the main branch for the memory management subsystem, which improved driver stability and reduced crashes during graphics adapter initialization.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Swiss runner iamClemi accidentally hit the L button while choosing a starter, but something was off
A legal feud between the co-founders of Lux Optics, the developer behind the Halide camera app, revealed that Apple was close to acquiring the company. As first reported by The Information, Apple held acquisition talks for Lux Optics, which also developed the Kino, Spectre and Orion apps, in the summer of 2025.
According to The Information, the deal eventually fell through in September of that year, but the potential acquisition could’ve provided Apple with the third-party software to improve its own built-in camera app. Apple is already rumored to be introducing variable aperture to its upcoming iPhone 18 Pro models, so it’s not surprising that the iPhone maker was looking for software with advanced features to match its possibly upgraded camera hardware.
Despite Apple’s interest, Lux Optics’ co-founders, Ben Sandofsky and Sebastiaan de With concluded that future updates to Halide could increase the company’s valuation and ended the acquisition talks. According to the lawsuit between the co-founders, Sandofsky started investigating de With for the alleged misuse of company funds shortly after the talks with Apple ended. Afterwards, de With was fired from Lux Optics and later joined Apple’s design team. While Halide may remain third-party software for iPhones and iPads, users can still look forward to some software improvements to the built-in camera app, since that’s reportedly one of Apple’s priorities.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/apple-considered-buying-halide-to-upgrade-its-native-camera-app-175139818.html?src=rss
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: According to the research firm Gartner, 50% of U.S. consumers say they would prefer to do business with brands that avoid using GenAI in consumer facing content such as advertising and promotional messaging.
The survey of 1,539 Americans, conducted in October 2025, also found growing skepticism about the reliability of online information, with 61% saying they frequently question whether information they use for everyday decisions is trustworthy… Gartner found that 68% of consumers often wonder whether the content they see online is real, while fewer people now rely on intuition alone to judge credibility [only 27%]. Instead, more consumers are actively verifying information and checking sources.
Gartner’s senior principal analyst offered suggests discretion for brands trying to use AI. “The brands that win will be the ones that use AI in ways customers can immediately recognize as helpful, while being transparent about when AI is used, what it’s doing, and giving customers a clear choice to opt out.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The best-selling game of all time is moving from the virtual to the physical. Minecraft World, a permanent Greater London theme park based on the game, is scheduled to open in 2027. The announcement came during Minecraft Live 2026.
It will be a new section in Chessington World of Adventures, a theme park with a built-in zoo. The resort is a 35-minute train ride from London’s Waterloo station.
Details are still fairly light on the park. But we know it will include a roller coaster, “interactive adventures” and “epic block-built playscapes.” Torfi Frans Ólafsson, the game franchise’s creative director, said they’re aiming for “an experience that feels immersive, authentic and welcoming.” Naturally, that will include welcoming you to open your wallet in Minecraft-themed retail and dining spots.
The park is a collaboration between Mojang Studios and Merlin Entertainments, the world’s second-largest theme park builder. (A certain rodent-led empire is first.)
If visiting the full theme park in England isn’t your thing, the latest location of the game’s (also real-world) pop-up events will open in May. Minecraft Experience: Moonlight Trail will let visitors in Buenos Aires, Argentina, go on an hour-long outdoor nighttime adventure. As its name suggests, you’ll “walk a moonlit trail” through iconic Minecraft biomes. Along the way, you’ll craft gear, mine diamonds, battle mobs and “help restore an ancient beacon.” The event opens in May.
Not all of Minecraft Live’s announcements were about real-world empire building. Minecraft, the game, is getting some updates, too. Its next big drop, Tiny Takeover, will live up to the billing with a redesigned “cuter” look for baby mobs. The update will also add a golden dandelion, which you can feed to a baby mob to make it stay young forever. (Or, at least until you feed it a second one.) Tiny Takeover arrives on March 24.
Mojang also teased the next drop after that. Later this year, Chaos Cubed will add a sulfur cube that changes properties when absorbing different materials. “There is a lot of variety in what the cube can do,” Mojang promises. “Just like there are balls with different ‘bounciness’ and behavior, the sulfur cube can have different physics.”
Finally, the long-rumored Minecraft Dungeons II game is official. We’re still extremely light on details about the sequel to the 2020 spinoff, aside from the fact that you can wishlist it on March 21.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/a-minecraft-theme-park-will-open-in-london-in-2027-173000917.html?src=rss
Somnium Space has updated its platform with improved player profiles and various quality of life features. I took a look into what’s new on the live service platform.
I remember first hearing about Somnium Space through an XR social group a few years ago.
One of the group members was raving about her experience on the platform. She had built a club and wanted us all to visit and take a look around. That early visit didn’t wow me back then as there was a learning curve I couldn’t get past.
Fast forward to today, and Somnium has released a new update with improved player profiles, faster map loading times, new dance animations, and more. But will the platform leave an impression with me this time? I logged back in to find out.
I begin my journey in Somnium Space by viewing a short tutorial on how to move and use basic features on the platform. Afterwards, I materialize in an office tower that reveals the world below. This place, which looks like a bunch of sleekly-designed structures mixed with player-owned buildings, is what’s known in-game as “Base Reality”.
Base Reality is a quaintly designed town map bisected by rivers and mountains. In its center is a public courtyard surrounded by a mall, a public pavilion, a planetarium, and a prison for misbehaving players. Overhead are several planets that share the sky with a sun and moon. There are day and night cycles as well as thoughtful spatial sound design featuring singing birds and nighttime crickets.
The overworld’s town mall is a bright echo of vaporwave design. Its empty storefronts state they’re currently for rent or will be soon. The planetarium across the street holds an exhibit on space travel and is narrated by an AI voice that sounds like Morgan Freeman. I walk from building to building in the town center while marveling at the architecture.
Riding around on a free hoverbike, I explore more overworld landmarks. There’s a large park called Magic Forest that’s drenched in pink fog and decorated with statues. Beyond the park is a hill hiding a secret cave, leading to an underground series of tunnels. Cross one of the large bridges over the river and the Somnium Racetrack sits in the distance.
In the middle of the raceway and town center are land parcels. Most of them feature old NFT galleries and defunct cryptocurrency businesses. I drive from building to building, park my car, and walk inside to observe the interiors. Video players that no longer function, old photos of celebrities hawking token-based art, and AI-generated image galleries are what await me.
This is where the town begins to contrast. What’s bright, cheery, and welcoming at the center of the map bleeds into aging neighborhoods of abandoned virtual office concepts. They’re fun to race by and load quickly enough to not cause lag, but I can’t help but wonder about the people who once ran businesses here.
0:00
In 2022, Somnium Space Founder and CEO Artur Sychov gave Forbes a tour of the platform. The Forbes article extolled the virtues of parcel ownership and claimed digital land bought on the blockchain couldn’t be taken away once purchased.
That might be a problem for a live service experience looking to grow its numbers in the current day. If there’s going to be parcels people can buy and sell, there should be players actively using them to keep things lively.
Somnium now has worldbuilding with instance technology rather than relying on parcel space, but Sychov insists digital land purchasing isn’t going away at all.
“Parcels remain a fundamental part of Somnium Space,” he wrote to UploadVR. “Users can still purchase them using blockchain or traditional currency, and they can build on them either through our easy-to-use Builder application or via the Unity SDK.”
Somnium Space currently handles purchases through either Stripe for traditional currency or a linked crypto wallet through Somnium’s website. Once payment is linked, players can purchase items on the platform’s marketplace or tip one another with either form of currency.
While I’m not personally wild about web3, Somnium Space’s other features are impressive.
Glimmr is Somnium Space’s in-house social app. You can take a snap of anything and upload it to the social feed right away. Posts can optionally be hidden and unlocked by a monetary donation, or boosted for higher visibility on the general timeline. During a community meeting I was able to pull up the social feed where players were posting snaps of one another in real time.
0:00
One jaw-dropping moment came when Sychov mentioned a video call function that lets you facetime players through in-game video and real-world webcams. I tested this with Sychov as he called me via his game menu. A thin smartphone screen appeared as I answered. After hanging up, a player standing next to me also initiated a call. When I picked up this time, I could see the actual person in real life waving at me. I waved back with my avatar and laughed.
“Communication between people in different VR instances which we introduced is already powerful and first in industry, but we realized that connecting real life directly with VR could be even more impactful,” Sychov explained. “That led to the idea of enabling video calls where someone outside VR can call a person inside Somnium. It’s a very natural step toward blending physical and virtual presence.”
Players can also call from their phones into Somnium Space in order to have a physical-to-virtual-phone conversation. The “physical” user must access Somnium’s website on their phone to initiate the call. Their “virtual” friends will be able to pick up on the other side and speak to them that way. Sychov says Somnium Space plans to expand the feature in the future.
The VR community is sharply divided on issues such as web3. Either Somnium Space will appeal to someone because of its token implementation or it won’t at all. This challenge is to be reasonably expected and faced with honesty.
That aside, Somnium Space’s UI is one of the best I’ve seen in a live service platform. Its overworld map design is done reasonably well but parcel management currently gives an “abandoned” feel. If the platform can overcome its land issues, Somnium can grow to be a nice alternative to other platforms currently on offer.
Sychov is proud of what Somnium Space has accomplished so far. “Our philosophy is very straightforward: build great technology and the users will come.”
“We’re seeing our user base grow steadily, and we’re focused on providing creators with better tools to build experiences and monetize them in a fair and decentralized ecosystem.”
Somnium Space is available on PCVR. It is currently an 18+ platform with age verification implemented through Stripe.
A free built-in VPN is coming to Firefox on Tuesday, Mozilla announced this week:
Free VPNs can sometimes mean sketchy arrangements that end up compromising your privacy, but ours is built from our data principles and commitment to be the world’s most trusted browser. It routes your browser traffic through a proxy to hide your IP address and location while you browse, giving you stronger privacy and protection online with no extra downloads. Users will have 50 gigabytes of data monthly in the U.S., France, Germany and U.K. to start. Available in Firefox 149 starting March 24.
We also recently shared that Firefox is the first browser to ship Sanitizer API, a new web security standard that blocks attacks before they reach you [for untrusted HTML XSS vulnerabilities].
“The roadmap for Firefox this year is the most exciting one we’ve developed in quite a while,” says Firefox head Ajit Varma. “We’re improving the fundamentals like speed and performance. We’re also launching innovative new open standards in Gecko to ensure the future of the web is open, diverse, and not controlled by a single engine.
“At the same time we’re prioritizing features that give users real power, choice and strong privacy protections, built in a way that only Firefox can. And as always, we’ll keep listening, inviting users to help shape what comes next and giving them more reasons to love Firefox.”
Two new features coming next week:
Split View puts two webpages side by side in one window, making it easy to compare, copy and multitask without bouncing between tabs. Rolling out in Firefox 149 on March 24.
Tab Notes let you add notes to any tab, another tool to help with multitasking and picking up where you left off. Available in Firefox Labs 149 starting March 24.
And Firefox also released a video this week introducing their new mascot Kit.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
While other tech companies have been laying off employees year after year, OpenAI is doing the opposite. According to a report from the Financial Times, the AI giant is looking to expand its workforce to 8,000 employees by the end of 2026, nearly doubling staff from its current headcount of 4,500.
The FT reported that the new hires will be across several departments, including product development, engineering, research and sales. OpenAI’s hiring spree will also include “specialists” for “technical ambassadorship,” or employees tasked with helping businesses better utilize its AI tools, according to the report. As the FT noted, OpenAI is likely trying to amp up the competition against Anthropic and its Claude AI chatbot. According to the AI Index from Ramp, a fintech startup that manages corporate expenses, businesses are now 70 percent more likely to go with Anthropic when buying AI services for the first time as opposed to OpenAI.
OpenAI made waves in February when it announced a contract with the Department of Defense to use its AI models, following a public fallout between Anthropic and the federal agency. On top of the government contract, OpenAI is also in “advanced talks” with private equity firms like Brookfield Asset Management to deploy its AI tools across a firms’ portfolio of companies, according to Reuters.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-reportedly-plans-to-double-its-workforce-to-8000-employees-161028377.html?src=rss
The animated series proposal would take place when all the characters are still alive
It doesn’t sound like Crimson Desert, the recently released prequel to Black Desert Online, will support Intel Arc GPUs anytime soon, if at all. On the game’s FAQ page, its developer Pearl Abyss advised players expecting Arc support to apply for a refund. “If you purchased the game expecting Intel Arc support, please refer to the refund policy of the platform where the game was purchased for available options,” the company wrote. Apparently, though, it’s not from lack of guidance from Intel. The chipmaker told Wccftech that it reached out to Pearl Abyss “many times” over the past several years.
The Intel spokesperson said that the company has tried to help the developer “test, validate, and optimize support for Intel graphics” for years. Intel also tried to provide the developer “early hardware, drivers, and engineering resources” across several generations of GPUs, “including Alchemist, Battlemage, Meteor Lake, and Lunar Lake.” The chipmaker said it’s “hugely disappointed that players using Intel graphics hardware” can’t play the game, but that it remains “ready to assist Pearl Abyss” however it can. It also advised players to reach out directly to the developer for “details on the choice not to enable Intel support at launch.”
Pearl Abyss, of course, doesn’t have the obligation to tweak the game so that it runs on PCs with Intel Arc GPUs. The good news is that since the title came out just a few days ago, it will still be easy to get a refund. Steam, where Crimson Desert is now one of the top-selling games, issues refunds within two weeks of purchase.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/intel-says-crimson-desert-devs-ignored-offers-of-help-to-support-arc-gpus-155514896.html?src=rss
Pearl Abyss is “listening closely to your feedback,” and its already working on a patch for those wonky controls
“The systemd project merged a pull request adding a new birthDate field to the JSON user records managed by userdb in response to the age verification laws of California, Colorado, and Brazil,” reports the blog It’s FOSS.
They note that the field “can only be set by administrators, not by users themselves” — it’s the same record that already holds metadata like realName, emailAddress, and location:
Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd, has clarified that this change is “an optional field in the userdb JSON object. It’s not a policy engine, not an API for apps. We just define the field, so that it’s standardized iff people want to store the date there, but it’s entirely optional. ”
In simple words, this is something that adds a new, optional field that can then be used by other open source projects like xdg-desktop-portal to build age verification compliance on top of, without systemd itself doing anything with the data or making it mandatory to provide. A merge request asking for this change to be repealed was struck down by Lennart, who gave the above-mentioned reasoning behind this, and further noted that people were misunderstanding what systemd is trying to do here.
“It enforces zero policy,” Poettering said. “It leaves that up for other parts of the system.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Fedora CoreOS and QA teams are gearing up for Fedora 44, and we need your help! We are organizing a Test Week running from March 23 to March 27, 2026. This event is a nice opportunity for the community to test Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) based on Fedora 44 content before it officially reaches the […]
There’s a reason Mystery Science Theater 3000 instructed fans to “keep circulating the tapes”
Remember when Japan sent a spacecraft to an asteroid 180 million miles away to scoop some dirt off the surface? Six years on from its arrival to Earth, that sample has yielded some insights about what may have seeded life on our planet. Read on to learn more about the latest findings, and other science news we found interesting this week.
In 2020, a capsule from the Japanese space probe Hayabusa2 returned to Earth with samples collected from the surface of asteroid Ryugu, and scientists have spent the subsequent years analyzing those materials for clues about the conditions that existed in the early solar system. This week, researchers from Japan reported an exciting discovery: the Ryugu samples contain the five building blocks of DNA and RNA. The findings, coupled with those from other recent studies, could put us closer to understanding how the ingredients for life first made it to Earth billions of years ago.
The study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, found the nucleobases adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil — all of which were also found in samples gathered from a different asteroid, Bennu, last year, and before that in meteorites dubbed Murchison and Orgueil. This suggests these nucleobases were widespread in the early solar system, and supports the hypothesis that carbonaceous asteroids like Ryugu and Bennu transported them to Earth, the authors explain in the paper. Ammonia was discovered in the samples as well, which may play a role in how these nucleobases formed.
The discovery of these building blocks “does not mean that life existed on Ryugu,” Toshiki Koga, the study’s lead author from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, told AFP. “Instead, their presence indicates that primitive asteroids could produce and preserve molecules that are important for the chemistry related to the origin of life.”
Researchers in Germany have identified a trio of bacteria that can digest a common plastic additive, but only when working together. The study published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology found that a “consortium” of bacterial strains (two from species in the genus Pseudomonas and one from Microbacterium) was able to break down several phthalate esters (PAEs), which are often used to make plastic materials more flexible. These chemicals are increasingly finding their way into the environment as plastic pollution grows, and research suggests they can have harmful effects on human health and that of wildlife.
The team focused on microbes that could be found right at home in their own lab, taking a sample of biofilm that had formed on the polyurethane tubing of a bioreactor. This sample was then incubated in a growth medium containing the PAE diethyl phthalate (DEP) as the main source of carbon and energy. They eventually ended up with a stable culture of bacteria that could break down DEP, as long as the DEP concentration didn’t exceed 888 milligrams per liter, according to a press release. The consortium could gobble up all the DEP in 24 hours at 30 degrees C. It was also able to grow on the PAEs dimethyl phthalate, dipropyl phthalate and dibutyl phthalate.
The researchers identified the bacteria in the consortium through DNA sequencing, but found that they were not individually able to tackle the PAEs, suggesting they break down the chemicals through a “cooperative process” known as cross-feeding. The consortium could make for another tool in the pollution-fighting toolbox, with potential to help break down PAEs in contaminated areas or speed up the degradation of plastics that contain PAEs by making them more brittle. “This approach may also be effective in treating industrial plastic waste streams,” they note.
Newly released images from the Hubble Space Telescope show the unexpected breakup of Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) — Comet K1, for short — as it made its way out of the solar system back in November. A team of researchers that initially set out to observe a different comet ended up switching targets due to technical issues, only to catch Comet K1 right after it started crumbling. Hubble captured three 20-second images between November 8 and November 10 2025, the first of which the team estimates was about eight days after the fragmenting started. During the observation period, one of the comet’s smaller pieces began to break up too. Talk about being in the right place at the right time.
“Never before has Hubble caught a fragmenting comet this close to when it actually fell apart,” said John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University, in a statement. “Most of the time, it’s a few weeks to a month later. And in this case, we were able to see it just days after.” You can read more about the rare sighting here.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/dna-building-blocks-on-asteroid-ryugu-bacteria-that-eat-plastic-waste-and-more-science-news-150000975.html?src=rss
Jeff Bezos “is in early talks to raise $100 billion,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation.”
“The Amazon.com founder is meeting with some of the world’s largest asset managers to raise funding for the project.”
A few months ago, [Bezos] traveled to the Middle East to discuss the new fund with sovereign wealth representatives in the region. More recently, he went to Singapore to raise funding for the effort as well, according to people familiar with the matter. The fund, described in investor documents as a “manufacturing transformation vehicle,” is aiming to buy companies in major industrial sectors such as chipmaking, defense and aerospace…
Bezos was recently appointed co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a new startup that is building artificial-intelligence models that can understand and simulate the physical world. Bezos plans to use the company’s technology to boost the efficiency and profitability of businesses owned by the fund, a playbook that some investment firms are similarly deploying in sectors such as accounting and property management… [Prometheus has also hired employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, the article points out.]
While much of the AI revolution has been focused on large language models, billions of dollars have begun to flow to companies that are seeking to apply spatially focused AI systems toward industries including robotics and manufacturing… Amazon, one of [America’s] largest employers, has closed in on the milestone of having as many robots as humans.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Linux HID driver is being developed for Pulsar branded gaming mice to expose additional information and capabilities…
Twitter is officially 20 years old. In another reality, that might make me kind of nostalgic. I’ve been lurking and scrolling and tweeting for 16 years; most of my adult life. There was a time when Twitter was a place where some internet strangers became my IRL friends, when I was excited to “live-tweet”. When my infinitely more well-adjusted friends would send me memes, I would smugly say “I saw that on Twitter days ago.”
Twitter stopped being that place a long time ago, but I don’t have any nostalgia for it. I don’t really feel anything at all, actually.
Because I can already hear the comments: Yes, I’m still on X. I don’t spend as much time there as I did a decade ago, but it’s still quite a lot of time, an unhealthy amount, if I’m being honest. My job is to report on social media companies, so I keep (doom)scrolling. That’s what I tell myself anyway.
A few of my favorite posters are still around. Dril’s still got it. The memes are still, occasionally, good, even though X’s recommendation algorithm seems to prefer pointing me toward endless AI slop, boring hot takes from thirsty mid-tier tech execs and blatant engagement bait. X’s algorithm — what little we can learn about it, anyway — now relies on Grok’s predictions about what you’ll like.The same Holocaust-loving Grok that has spewed racism and referred to itself as MechaHitler and declared Elon Musk “the single greatest person in modern history.” The same Grok that allegedly generated thousands of images of child abuse material. Hey @grok is that true?
X is not Twitter but it’s also not not-Twitter. Last year, an online marketplace startup bought the 560-pound Twitter bird that once adorned the company’s San Francisco office and blew it up in a Nevada desert surrounded by Tesla CyberTrucks as part of an elaborate publicity stunt. Dumb? Yes. But also a somehow fitting adieu for “Larry.”
just setting up my twttr
— jack (@jack) March 21, 2006
It’s been 20 years since Jack Dorsey sent the first-ever tweet, which was never even a good tweet anyway. It’s been five years, by the way, since he turned that tweet into an NFT (remember NFTs??) and auctioned it for nearly $3 million. It’s now functionally worthless. Another chapter in Dorsey’s confusing, complicated legacy.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/twitter-turned-20-and-i-feel-nothing-140000602.html?src=rss