In just the kind of news I like to hear, this is a video documenting the good work of 12-year old Roman McKonn, who’s helped rehome over 4,800 shelter dogs through transporting, fostering, and making videos with the dogs. Great job, Roman. He’s also very well spoken for a 12-year old. Heck, he’s well spoken for an adult, because most adults I know can only communicate through text. You see them in real life and they’re all elbows when they can’t use emojis. If I could take care of all the dogs I would. I daydream about acres of land and dogs as far as the eye can see living their best lives. Absent from the dream? “Other people.” You’ve dreamt it too!

An anonymous reader shares a report: The US is leading a huge global surge in new gas-fired power generation that will cause a major leap in planet-heating emissions, with this record boom driven by the expansion of energy-hungry datacenters to service AI, according to a new forecast.

This year is set to shatter the annual record for new gas power additions around the world, with projects in development expected to grow existing global gas capacity by nearly 50%, a report by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) found. The US is at the forefront of a global push for gas that is set to escalate over the next five years, after tripling its planned gas-fired capacity in 2025.

Much of this new capacity will be devoted to the vast electricity needs of AI, with a third of the 252 gigawatts of gas power in development set to be situated on site at datacenters. All of this new gas energy is set to come at a significant cost to the climate, amid ongoing warnings from scientists that fossil fuels must be rapidly phased out to avoid disastrous global heating.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Internet Archive has often been a valuable resource for journalists, from it’s finding records of deleted tweets or providing academic texts for background research. However, the advent of AI has created a new tension between the parties. A few major publications have begun blocking the nonprofit digital library’s access to their content based on concerns that AI companies’ bots are using the Internet Archive’s collections to indirectly scrape their articles.

“A lot of these AI businesses are looking for readily available, structured databases of content,” Robert Hahn, head of business affairs and licensing for The Guardian, told Nieman Lab. “The Internet Archive’s API would have been an obvious place to plug their own machines into and suck out the IP.”

The New York Times took a similar step. “We are blocking the Internet Archive’s bot from accessing the Times because the Wayback Machine provides unfettered access to Times content — including by AI companies — without authorization,” a representative from the newspaper confirmed to Nieman Lab. Subscription-focused publication the Financial Times and social forum Reddit have also made moves to selectively block how the Internet Archive catalogs their material.

Many publishers have attempted to sue AI businesses for how they access content used to train large language models. To name a few just from the realm of journalism:

• The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft

• The Center for Investigative Reporting sued OpenAI and Microsoft

• The Wall Street Journal and New York Post sued Perplexity

• A group of publishers including The Atlantic, The Guardian and Politico sued Cohere

• Penske Media sued Google

• The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune sued Perplexity

Other media outlets have sought financial deals before offering up their libraries as training material, although those arrangements seem to provide compensation to the publishing companies rather than the writers. And that’s not even delving into the copyright and piracy issues also being fought against AI tools by other creative fields, from fiction writers to visual artists to musicians. The whole Nieman Lab story is well worth a read for anyone who has been following any of these creative industries’ responses to artificial intelligence.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/publishers-are-blocking-the-internet-archive-for-fear-ai-scrapers-can-use-it-as-a-workaround-204001754.html?src=rss

If you and your friends have the same taste in music, you probably text each other what you’re listening to. I know when I stumble upon a new discovery I love—or even something I think is trash—I fire it off to the group chat to talk about it. Of course, I just forward the song to the group chat in the Messages app, like any other thing I’d want to send to that group. If you have Spotify, however, you have a new group chat option to choose from: Spotify itself.

Spotify heads might already know that the app has had a messaging feature since August. While the point of the feature is to send Spotify content to your friends, it’s a basic messaging service, which means you can send any text you want—including emojis. It’s available to any Spotify user, whether you have Premium or just a free account, so long as you’re 16 or older. None of that is new today.

What is new today is the amount of people you can text at once in Spotify. Since August, chats have been limited to one-on-one interactions. Now, you’re able to add up to nine other people at once to a thread. That means 10-person group chats to talk about new music, podcasts, audiobooks, or, of course, anything at all—assuming you actually want to move your DMs to Spotify.

How to start a group chat on Spotify

To start, open Spotify on mobile (this isn’t supported on desktop at this time) then tap your profile in the top right corner. Look for “Messages” at the bottom of this menu, then choose “New Message.” If this is your first time interacting with people on Spotify, you’ll need to invite others to chat before you can craft a new message. Here, you’ll have the choice to share a link to invite a friend to join your message. You can also find this option from the share menu on any piece of Spotify content, and hitting the “Invite friends” option.

Once you’ve initiated a message, you’ll be able to start crafting new ones—including group chats. Head back to this Messages menu—or hit the share button on a song, podcast, or audiobook—then choose “Create group.” Here, tap any friends from the suggestions you’d like to add, then choose “Create group” again to finalize the chat. Spotify says the people that appear in the list of suggestions are those you have shared content to before, created a playlist or Blend with previously, were in a “recent” Jam together, or are on an active Family or Duo plan. If they don’t appear, you can always choose the invite option to reach out directly.

Whoever creates the group is officially its admin. As the admin, you have the power to add or remove anyone from the group chat. If you’re in the group chat, you’re labeled as a “Participant.” Invited members are labeled “Pending.” The admin as well as any participants are allowed to block any group chat user for any reason.

The issue is, do you really want to dedicate a group chat to Spotify itself? Maybe if this feature rolled out when the app launched way back when, it’d be different. But people are set in their ways: It’s so hard to get people to move chat apps, especially when it’s for one specific purpose. Rather than open yet another thread to keep track of, I think I’d rather just text links to my main group chat—and I’m guessing the other members of the chat would agree.

How to turn off Spotify Messages

If you don’t want to use Spotify’s messaging service at all, you can leave it behind, and save yourself from getting added to all future group and one-on-one chats. To do so, tap your profile, choose “Settings and privacy,” then hit “Privacy and social.” Here, scroll down to “Social features” and turn off “Messages.”

An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. life expectancy rose to a record high of 79 years in 2024, an increase of six months from the previous year, reflecting a sharp decline in deaths from COVID-19 and drug overdoses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday.

According to a report from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy improved for both men and women across races and among Hispanics, surpassing the previous peak set in 2014.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In April 2025, Comcast President Mike Cavanagh bemoaned that the company’s cable broadband division was “not winning in the marketplace” amid increased competition from fiber and fixed wireless Internet service providers.

Cavanagh identified some problems that had been obvious to Comcast customers for many years: Its prices aren’t transparent enough and rise too frequently, and dealing with the company is too difficult. Comcast sought to fix the problems with a five-year price guarantee, one year of free Xfinity Mobile service for home Internet customers, and plans with unlimited data instead of punitive data caps. But the company is still losing broadband customers at a higher-than-expected rate.

In Q4 2025 earnings announced today, Comcast reported a net loss of 181,000 residential and business broadband customers in the US. The loss consists of 178,000 residential Internet customers and 3,000 business customers.

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As fans and media prepare to descend on the Bay Area for Super Bowl LX, what does a high-tech city like San Francisco do? Why, call in the robotaxis, of course. On Thursday, Alphabet’s Waymo began offering fully autonomous rides at San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

There are some limits. For now, SFO access is restricted to “a select number of riders.” However, access will gradually expand over the coming months. The service is also limited to the SFO Rental Car Center (pickups and drop-offs) at launch. Waymo says it will expand to other airport locations, including terminals, “in the future.”

The San Francisco Standard notes that SFO is now the third airport in Waymo’s repertoire. The San Francisco launch follows the company’s service at Phoenix Sky Harbor and San Jose Mineta. As for the Bay Area, Waymo now serves more than 260 square miles in the region.

Unfortunately, this isn’t Waymo’s only appearance in the news this week. On Wednesday, the company said one of its robotaxis struck a child, who sustained minor injuries. The incident took place on January 23 in Santa Monica. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened an investigation.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/waymo-begins-service-at-san-francisco-international-airport-192913050.html?src=rss

Microsoft wants you to know that it knows that Windows 11, now used by a billion users, has been testing your patience and announced that its engineers are being redirected to urgently address the operating system’s performance and reliability problems through an internal process the company calls “swarming.”

“The feedback we’re receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people,” Pavan Davuluri, president of Windows and devices, told The Verge. The company plans to spend the rest of 2026 focusing on pain points including system performance, reliability, and overall user experience.

January has been particularly rough for Windows 11. Microsoft issued an emergency out-of-band update to fix shutdown issues on some machines, then released a second out-of-band fix a week later to address OneDrive and Dropbox crashes. Some business PCs are also failing to boot after the January update because they were left in an “improper state” after December’s monthly update failed to install. Users have also grown frustrated by aggressive Edge and Bing prompts, constant OneDrive upselling nags, and Microsoft’s push to require Microsoft accounts.

The core members of the company’s Windows Insider team recently moved to different roles. “Trust is earned over time and we are committed to building it back with the Windows community,” Davuluri said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Texas fight with a nurse practitioner may eventually push the Supreme Court to settle an intensifying battle between states with strict abortion-ban laws and those with shield laws to protect abortion providers supporting out-of-state patients.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused Debra Lynch, a Delaware-based nurse practitioner, of breaking Texas laws by shipping abortion pills that Lynch once estimated last January facilitated “up to 162 abortions per week” in the state.

“No one, regardless of where they live, will be freely allowed to aid in the murder of unborn children in Texas,” Paxton’s press release said.

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Ice fishing is a longstanding tradition in Nordic countries, with competitions proving especially popular. Those competitions can also tell scientists something about how social cues influence how we make foraging decisions, according to a new paper published in the journal Science.

Humans are natural foragers in even the most extreme habitats, digging up tubers in the tropics, gathering mushrooms, picking berries, hunting seals in the Arctic, and fishing to meet our dietary needs. Human foraging is sufficiently complex that scientists believe that meeting so many diverse challenges helped our species develop memory, navigational abilities, social learning skills, and similar advanced cognitive functions.

Researchers are interested in this question not just because it could help refine existing theories of social decision-making, but also could improve predictions about how different groups of humans might respond and adapt to changes in their environment. Per the authors, prior research in this area has tended to focus on solitary foragers operating in a social vacuum. And even when studying social foraging decisions, it’s typically done using computational modeling and/or in the laboratory.

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Apple has acquired Israel-based startup Q.ai, a move that could provide a much-needed boost to the tech giant’s capabilities in artificial intelligence. Although Apple has not disclosed terms of the deal, sources told Financial Times that the arrangement is reportedly valued at nearly $2 billion. If that figure is accurate, the Q.ai acquisition marks Apple’s second largest acquisition to date, followed by its purchase of Beats for $3 billion back in 2014.

Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, said in a statement that Q.ai “is a remarkable company that is pioneering new and creative ways to use imaging and machine learning.” Apple hasn’t shared any specifics about how it plans to leverage the startup, but its past work indicates the possibility of Apple moving deeper into AI-powered wearables. “Patents filed by Q.ai show its technology being used in headphones or glasses, using ‘facial skin micro movements’ to communicate without talking,” the Times reported. 

The startup’s founding team, including CEO Aviad Maizels, will join Apple as part of the deal. This acquisition marks Maizels’ second sale to Apple; he previously founded a three-dimensional hearing business called PrimeSense that Apple bought back in 2013.

For several months, many tech insiders have speculated that an acquisition might be Apple’s best path forward to catching up in the AI race. In the company’s Q3 earnings call in July 2025, CEO Tim Cook acknowledged that “We’re open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap.” A deal like this one could eventually lead to Apple developing its own fully in-house AI chatbot rather than relying on a competitor like Google to power artificial intelligence in its Siri assistant.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-acquires-qai-for-a-reported-2-billion-190017949.html?src=rss

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When the cold weather arrives, there’s a tendency among homeowners to focus on the interior—namely, our personal comfort and the utility bills. That’s perfectly sensible—no one wants to shiver in their own house, and no one wants to be slammed with an enormous utility bill, either. But the exterior of your house is just as important.

Heavy snow and icy buildup during extended periods of severe cold can really take a toll on your house. Snow and ice combined with melt/freeze cycles during sunny periods can do some serious (and often completely silent) damage to your home in a variety of ways, from water intrusion through your roof to ice-heavy tree branches crashing into the house. If you live somewhere where you can expect to be buried in snow and ice at some point this winter, here are the products you need to protect your house.

Clear snow with a roof rake

Snow is heavy, and your roof is designed to handle only so much of it. The chances that your roof is going to collapse are probably pretty minimal, but that doesn’t mean letting a ton of snow and ice sit on it for weeks at a time is good for your roof or the structure under it. At the same time, climbing up onto your roof to shovel or sweep snow off is not the safest thing to do. Instead, keep a snow rake on hand. Designed to be used from the ground, a snow rake is a simple tool that lets you scrape a lot of snow off your roof safely, easing the snow load and minimizing the chances that water will infiltrate the house. Just keep in mind that if you install roof cable to prevent ice dams (see below), you’ll need to be super careful using a roof rake, as you can easily snag the cable and yank it loose.

Use a sewer skewer to melt snow and ice in vents

One often-overlooked problem caused by cold, snowy weather is ice buildup in roof and furnace vents. Sewer vents on the roof and furnace vents that draw in clean air and expel exhaust from your heating system can get clogged with ice, which can cause your heat to malfunction and pose a severe health hazard if fumes build up inside the home. A sewer skewer is a simple solution. It’s just a hunk of copper, really, but copper is an excellent conductor, so it absorbs heat from the sun (and your home’s own gases as they rise up) and radiates that heat back out, melting any snow and ice that form in the vent. It’s shaped to move the melting water away from the vent so it doesn’t just drip down and re-freeze. It’s incredibly simple to install (be careful on your roof, though) and can save you from disaster.

Install heated roof cables

Ice dams are layers of ice that form at the edge of your roof, preventing proper drainage. Unchecked, ice dams can really do a number on your roof and even the structure of your house. Preventing ice dams can be relatively easy, however—just install some heated roof cables. Attached to the edge of your roof in a zig-zag pattern, roof cables ensure that ice dams can’t form, and melting snow and ice can drain properly into your gutters.

RADIANT SOLUTIONS HeatTapePro – Intelligent Commercial Grade Self-Regulating Heat Cable with GlowCap™ – 10 YR warranty – Ice Dam & Pipe Freeze Protection – 112 ft cable + 10 Ft Cord, 120V, 6 watts/Ft

$428.95
at Amazon

$428.95
at Amazon

Use covers on exterior faucets

A common way ice and freezing temperatures can damage your house is through exterior faucets and spigots. Because they extend outside the insulated interior of the house, they’re very susceptible to freezing, and that ice can make its way into the pipe behind it, leading to a burst pipe and a very expensive problem. The solution, though, is not expensive—for about $11, a faucet cover will keep your exterior faucets ice-free and water safely inside your pipes where it belongs. Affix one to every exposed faucet or spigot around the house and you’ll have one less thing to worry about.

Cut back problem tree branches with a mini chainsaw

If you have trees near your home, heavy ice and snow can snap off branches, which then smack into your roof or walls—and those ice-laden branches will be heavy when they hit your house. Being a little proactive and trimming back branches—especially old, dead ones—is the best way to prevent that from happening. If you don’t want to call a professional to trim back a few branches, pick up a mini-chainsaw to get the job done. If your branches are a little more than a mini can handle, a full-size chainsaw might be needed—but be sure you know how to handle it, especially if you’re going to be climbing a ladder to use it.

Prevent ice clogs with gutter heaters

Like ice dams on your roof, your gutters can become clogged with snow and ice, preventing proper drainage and leading to rot and water intrusion. Gutter heaters are an easy solution that prevents ice and snow buildup, ensuring everything drains away from your roof and your house as intended.

H&G lifestyles 24ft Electric Gutter Heater for Roof,Prevent Ice Dams for Roofs and Gutters, Aluminum Panels with Self-Regulating Heating Cable, Freeze Protection for Gutter Valley,12pcs

$119.99
at Amazon

$119.99
at Amazon

Use a filler sealer on hardscapes

The freeze/melt cycle can be particularly hard on your hardscapes, including driveways and patios. Meltwater gets into small cracks and then freezes, expanding and widening those cracks. After a while, your pavement or asphalt is chewed up and needs replacing. You can do a few things to prevent (or at least slow down) this destruction. Filling cracks in asphalt or concrete as they form with a filler sealer means water can’t get into them in the first place. And sealing your asphalt or concrete surfaces will protect them during those weeks when ice is sitting there, melting and freezing over and over again as temperatures fluctuate.