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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Prosecutors Claim Ship Had Eight More Targets Before It Was Stopped By Coast Guard

https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/finland-charges-russian-captain-and-crew-member-of-ship-suspected-of-damaging-undersea-cables-prosecutors-claim-ship-had-eight-more-targets-before-it-was-stopped-by-coast-guard

Prosecutors also say that the ship intended to target eight additional subsea cables in the area before it was stopped by the Finnish Coast Guard. Two other crew members of the Fitburg remain in detention in Finland as prosecutors determine if they will be charged in relation to the suspected sabotage. The lawyers of the accused say that Finland does not have jurisdiction over the crew, but the authorities say that it will leave it up to the courts to decide.

Undersea cables are crucial infrastructure that connect nations to one another, and it is particularly important for Finland as one of the NATO members bordering Russia. The country’s undersea communications, electricity, and gas connections have been hit multiple times in recent years, which is why it has taken steps to protect its sea-line of communications (SLOC). This includes the deployment of a SOSUS-like system that warns cable operators and the Finnish authorities of suspicious activities near vulnerable infrastructure. The technology, called Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), integrates sensors into fiber optic cables that detect sound and vibrations, like an anchor hitting the seabed, coming from the sea floor.

However, suspected attacks on undersea cables aren’t limited to the Baltic Sea. Other incidents have been reported in the Red Sea and in the Taiwan Strait — geopolitical hotspots where tensions often run high. Because of this, both firms and countries are exploring alternative routes to make it harder to disrupt communications. The EU is considering going under the North Pole to bypass Russia and the United States for connecting to Asia, while Meta is building a 50,000-km undersea network that connects the U.S. to Brazil, Africa, India, and Australia, which, notably, avoids bottlenecks like the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Strait of Malacca.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/06/covid-vaccines-still-protect-against-heart-problems-large-study-finds/

Although most Americans have eschewed seasonal COVID-19 vaccines, the updated shots continue to show significant protection against cardiovascular disease, especially for those over age 75 and those with underlying medical conditions. That's according to a new study that pulled data from more than 1 million patients in a US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health system.

The finding builds on previous data showing that the vaccines significantly lower the risk of COVID-19-associated cardiovascular risks, particularly heart attacks and strokes. But it wasn't a given that the benefit would hold up over time—as the virus evolved, the vaccines were updated, population-level immunity increased from previous infection and vaccination, and risk of severe outcomes fell.

The new study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine continued to protect against COVID-19-associated "major adverse cardiovascular events" (MACE), which include cardiovascular death, heart attack, stroke, and hospitalization for heart failure.

The study included electronic medical record data from 1,039,659 patients in the VA's St. Louis Health Care System. All of the patients received a seasonal flu shot between September 3, 2024, and December 31, 2024, with some also getting a COVID-19 vaccine at the same time. Of the 1,039,659 patients, 349,085 received both shots, while 690,574 got just the flu shot. The latter group acted as the control group for the study.

After eight months of follow-up, the researchers looked for documented COVID-19 cases and compared MACE events among the two groups. Overall, the COVID shots' vaccine effectiveness against MACE events was 38 percent. In terms of absolute numbers, the benefit is modest. The study estimated that the shots dropped the rate of COVID-19-associated MACE events from about 5 in 10,000 to 3 in 10,000. Looking across subgroups, the benefits were strongest among those aged 75 and older and those with underlying health conditions.

The researchers, led by epidemiologist Ziyad Al-Aly at the St. Louis VA, also looked at MACE and deaths without documented COVID-19 cases. Here, the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines were stronger, suggesting COVID-19 cases may have been missed or undiagnosed. The shots appeared to drop the rate of MACE from 382 per 10,000 to 358, and the rate of death from 223 to 207.

"Extrapolating these estimates to a population of 1 million people, vaccination could plausibly be associated with averting approximately 2,370 MACE events and 1,580 deaths over an 8-month period," the researchers note, though they urge caution in interpreting the finding.

The study has limitations, including that most of the US veteran population is older, White, and male, making it likely that the findings can't be generalized to the whole population. Still, the findings indicate that the vaccines continue to offer cardiovascular protection against COVID-19, which should factor into people's decisions on whether to get an annual COVID-19 booster. An accompanying study also published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday found the vaccines still directly protect against COVID-19, reducing the risk of hospitalization and critical illness by 35 percent and 41 percent, respectively.

In an accompanying editorial, Robert Califf, a cardiologist and former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, wrote that the data from the two studies "provide strong evidence of a favorable balance of benefit to risk for updated COVID-19 vaccine boosters across the population." But, he lamented that despite that strong evidence, national views are being swayed by the "general antivaccination statements from the US Department of Health and Human Services," which is run by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Only 17.5 percent of adults and 22.6 percent of people over age 65 in the US have gotten the 2025–2026 COVID shot, according to federal data.

"The politicization of COVID-19 vaccination and messenger RNA vaccines in general has taken a toll on the longevity and functional status of those in the US," Califf wrote. He called for researchers to collect more data on the vaccine's benefits and engage with the public about the findings, particularly on social media, to combat anti-vaccine rhetoric.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Nextcloud rollout shows locally controlled storage is one thing; getting users off Office is quite another

Digital sovereignty loomed large at Nextcloud's annual summit in Munich last week, where Benoît Piédallu, National Project Manager of Shared Digital Services at the French Ministry of Education, injected a dose of reality into the debate.

Nextcloud is an open source storage and collaboration suite. France's Ministry of Education started initial work to adopt it in 2018, Piédallu said, with the COVID-19 pandemic turning up the urgency in 2020. In 2021, "we had this little incident with OVH, a little fire, which destroyed all our data," Piédallu noted dryly. The Ministry went all-in and signed contracts with Nextcloud in 2024.

The Ministry wants to provide its users with federated storage and account management. At the time of Piédallu's presentation, the Ministry has set up slightly more than 400,000 accounts, and hopes to eventually reach 1.2 million users. Each account could be allocated 100 GB of storage (a potential 120 PB), although Piédallu said the average storage consumption currently sits at around 3 GB per account. So far, 80,000 sync clients have been persistently connected.

However, it has not all been plain sailing, despite recent pledges from the French government about shifting away from American tools and reducing France's dependence on non-European technology.

Digital sovereignty means different things to different people. Right now, this project does not include desktop applications. The users "use whatever they want on their desktop... Microsoft if they want," Piédallu said.

"So we have some problems sometimes, and people are saying that it is not working, and we say, 'Yeah, so you just use different software'..."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://hackaday.com/2026/06/14/why-not-yserver-its-xserver-but-rust-y/

If you're not into Wayland as a display manager, it seems like your options are slowly dwindling. Xorg isn't exactly a hotbed of activity, and the one fork everyone knows about is best known as a political lightning rod. Luckily, Rust developers can apparently never see a tool without pulling it into their heavily oxidized bucket of crabs, so we now have another option: the creatively named yserver, released under the MIT license by [joske].

The name, yserver, for the record, is just a placeholder name, but we rather like the simple logic of "Y comes after X" — sure, you could call it X12, but that could imply continuity, and this is a clean break. It's also not a full reimplementation of the huge, sprawling mess that Xorg has become over the decades. It can't launch multiple screens and thus lacks full multi-monitor support. So, for now, it may be too bare-bones for some people's use cases.

As it uses Vulkan, it is limited to relatively modern hardware, but has been tested on Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Apple chips. The target kernel is good old Linux, but the docs do cover compiling for FreeBSD; just be aware that that's very much a secondary target. FreeBSD users are probably used to that, though.

On Linux, a standalone DRM/KMS yserver can successfully run not just window managers but full desktops — specifically MATE, Cinnamon, and XFCE, as they're not on the Wayland bandwagon. It even supports Compiz, in case you missed the cube and wiggly window animations. You can also use yserver via Xwayland or even Xorg. Speaking of Xorg, [joske] has run the X.Org X Test Suite (xts5) against this proposed successor, and it currently scores 66.2%, which seems pretty good considering the project explicitly does not plan to copy all of Xorg's functionality.

Aside from multiple screens, one thing that would have been neat to see is support for the Asterinas rust-based Linux-compatible kernel — though if that project achieves full Linux compatibility, that may be a non-issue. Even if you aren't an oxidization enthusiast, you might find reasons to be happy to see more competition in the display-manager market — after all, Wayland Will Never Be Ready For Every X11 User. If Xorg really is destined to the slow death critics predict, perhaps yserver could cover the holdouts.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Researchers have quantified the length and mass of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks globally:

Hidden underground around the world lie 110 quadrillion kilometers of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks—webs of ultra-thin threads that, if connected in a single line, would stretch almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the sun, according to new research published in Science on Thursday.

These fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of plants, which they provide with nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, 1 billion tons of which the networks sequester underground annually, previous research has found. If the fungal network wasn't storing it, that carbon would be warming the atmosphere.

But those networks have never been mapped globally until now. The new study led by Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN, an organization founded to map mycorrhizal fungi networks, used a combination of literature review, soil samples from around the globe, machine learning and laboratory testing to estimate the distribution and mass of these systems and map where they are densest.

"This is the moment where we went from knowing that this system exists to really knowing where it is, how dense it is and where it's been," said Toby Kiers, executive director and co-founder of SPUN and a co-author of the study.

For decades, researchers have known arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi form intimate symbiotic relationships with roughly 80 percent of the globe's plant species and are found nearly everywhere plants are. But the extent of those networks and where they are densest, such as grasslands, and where they are being lost, like in agricultural areas, hasn't been well understood until now.

"[The study] helps us come to grips with how important these below ground organisms can be to everything that we see above ground," said James Bever, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas who studies the interactions between plants and microbes like fungi in soils but was not involved in the new study.

U.S. Gov't Orders Anthropic to Disable its Newest AI Models Worldwide Due to Security Threats

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

An alleged jailbreak triggered a national security directive that forced the model to be pulled:

Anthropic disabled its two most capable AI models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, for every customer worldwide on Friday [12 June 2026], after the U.S. government issued an export control directive barring access by any foreign national, according to a statement the company published that evening. Rather conveniently, the order landed at 5:21 pm ET, three days after the models launched, and because it covers foreign nationals both inside and outside the United States, including Anthropic's own employees, the company said selective compliance was impossible and pulled both models globally.

The Trump administration’s directive specifically targets Mythos-class models, which include Fable 5. Anthropic had released the pair on Tuesday, putting the latter into general availability while keeping the unrestricted Mythos 5 limited to partners in its Project Glasswing security program. Both descend from the same Mythos Preview model that Anthropic first announced in April.

Anthropic said the letter gave no specifics, and that the government has so far supplied only verbal evidence pointing to a narrow, non-universal jailbreak. The technique consists of asking the model to read a codebase and identify software flaws, a task the company said other public models perform without any bypass. It named OpenAI's GPT-5.5 as one model offering comparable capability.

"We believe this is a misunderstanding," the company wrote, adding that it’s complying with the order while working to restore access. Anthropic also argued that recalling a model deployed to hundreds of millions of users over a single narrow vulnerability, if applied as an industry standard, would halt frontier model launches across the sector.

According to Axios, an “administration official” told the publication that the Commerce Department acted after another company claimed it was able to jailbreak Mythos, “alarming the administration about possible national security risks.” Mythos is understood to currently be in use by the NSA for offensive cyber operations.

A device with a screen that connects to the internet anywhere is addictive. Who knew? Possibly any LAN gaming enthusiest or Facebook user from the 90s onwards. Everyone else can read about it right now from anywhere on their smartphone. The Brick is a device to help cut the ties with these addictive time suckers for a while. Much like smoking, mobile use can be very difficult for people to break free from when it is only you and a screen unlock away from a pure unlimited dopamine high. The Brick device works by forcing the user to phyiscally unlock the device which provides a type of disconnect other solutions do not have which is physical distance. At $100 though most users may find it easier to just uninstall the addictive applications or switch to a dumb phone for a while.

[For those who have overcome addictive or obsessive behavior--smoking, eating, etc.--how significant is adding friction like this? --Ed.]

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Europe's largest automakers are stepping up efforts to secure stronger support for domestic vehicle manufacturing as competition from Chinese electric vehicle producers intensifies. Renault, Volkswagen, and Stellantis have jointly urged EU policymakers to introduce rules that more heavily reward cars developed and produced within Europe, according to FT (paywalled).

The companies are advocating for a straightforward local content requirement under which vehicles sold as European would need to source the majority of their components from within the EU and closely associated European countries. They argue that industrial policy should encourage not only final assembly in Europe but also engineering, research, and product development activities:

FT writes (again, paywalled) that the proposal forms part of a broader European debate over how to rebuild industrial competitiveness while accelerating the transition to electric vehicles. The automakers are also seeking wider incentives for EVs manufactured in Europe, arguing that higher labor and energy costs put local producers at a disadvantage compared with rivals operating in lower cost regions.

Not all manufacturers support the plan. Several international carmakers have warned that a narrow definition of European content could exclude important suppliers and technology partners in countries such as Japan, the United Kingdom, and Turkey. Critics argue that stricter sourcing requirements could raise compliance costs and ultimately increase vehicle prices for consumers.

[...] The debate reflects a broader shift in the global automotive industry over the past two years. Chinese carmakers have rapidly expanded their presence in international markets, supported by strong domestic scale, advanced battery supply chains, and increasingly competitive technology. European manufacturers, meanwhile, have faced slowing EV demand, rising production costs, and growing pressure to protect domestic industry. As Chinese brands continue to gain market share, policymakers in Brussels are increasingly balancing free trade principles against concerns over industrial competitiveness, strategic supply chains, and long term economic security.

Related:

• Tesla and BMW Sue European Commission Over Chinese EV Tariffs
• The EV Graveyard
• US Senator Calls For China EV Ban

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Cop seemingly ignored Flock camera timestamp to justify arrests:

A San Diego police department is facing a lawsuit after jailing a man for a month based on a Flock camera alert that cops allegedly should have known, based on the timestamp, did not depict the car that they were looking for.

Last November, Hugo Parra was arrested on felony charges after San Diego police relied on Flock data and a witness statement to wrongly connect him to an attempted carjacking at gunpoint, the Times of San Diego reported. Cops were looking for a red Alfa Romeo car with tinted windows and a man wearing a gray hoodie, and Parra happened to be wearing a white hoodie while riding in a friend's car that roughly matched the vehicle description.

Although Flock cameras can capture license plate data, cops did not have even a partial plate to help them verify if the car was involved in a violent crime. But the Flock data cops used to justify the arrest actually showed that Parra was five miles away at the time of the crime, Parra's attorney, Alex Coolman, told the Times of San Diego. Rather than arrest him, cops could have used that data, as well as Parra's cellphone location data, to corroborate Parra's statement that he was innocent, Coolman said.

"This Flock hit was obviously the wrong car, as it could not have been in both places simultaneously," Coolman said.

Instead, police set aside the evidence suggesting that Parra's car was different from the vehicle police were pursuing and called in the witness, who picked out Parra as the suspect in a lineup. However, the witness only identified Parra based on superficial features, including "the jacket and the beard" and "the skin color," the police report said, according to the Times of San Diego.

Parra, who was on probation at the time of the arrest, was "in disbelief" after cops decided to jail him. He spent nearly a month in jail, "full of fear and adrenaline because I was being charged with a violent crime," he told the Times of San Diego.

Now, he and his friend who owns the car that Flock flagged, Ariel Beltran, are getting ready to sue the city for negligence and civil rights violations. The Times of San Diego reviewed tort claims filed in April, which argued that "San Diego Police misread its own surveillance system and ignored exculpatory evidence in a rush to judgment."

As a penalty, the city owes the men $1.5 million each in damages, their filing alleged.

Neither the police department nor the city will comment on the pending litigation, but Coolman told the Times of San Diego that "the city has denied the men's claims," so the lawsuit will proceed.

Backlash against Flock is mounting, as the camera network has been used to surveil protesters, track abortion-seekers, and detain immigrants, digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported. Some local groups are also resisting FBI moves to get "near real time" access to Flock data. While the EFF warns the cameras are most often used for low-level investigations like noise complaints or employment background checks, communities across political divides have questioned whether the purported benefits of the cameras are worth sacrificing privacy and risking government surveillance.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.slashgear.com/2191797/rivian-reusing-old-car-batteries-reduce-grid-load-during-peak-hours/

The trouble with batteries is that they are complicated to get rid of, which is why people are always looking for clever ways to recycle them. As EVs become more commonplace on the market, manufacturers are also looking for ways to reduce waste. Rivian has come up with a potential solution, at least for their own used batteries.

In conjunction with energy tech company Redwood Materials, Rivian will now be able to reuse battery packs that were formerly built into the vehicles they produced as part of the Rivian repurposed battery energy storage system. Here's how it works: Rivian will take 100 EV battery packs from its vehicles at the end of their life. These battery packs will be given to Redwood Materials, which will use its Pack Manager tech to recycle the batteries. They will then provide power directly to the Rivian vehicle production plant located in Normal, Illinois. This is similar to how used EV batteries get a second life powering homes.

These batteries will provide energy during periods of peak demand, which can also help reduce the load placed on the energy grid. The idea is that less capacity would be needed from the electric grid if companies used more systems like this to level out peak demand and meet their ever-increasing electricity appetites. It's also good for Rivian. Adding built-in power capacity to its production plant lets it charge these batteries when rates are lowest and use their stored power when costs peak, reducing production costs. These work in conjunction with the plant's solar cells and wind turbines, which currently enable Rivian to charge its production vehicles with clean energy.

Rivian isn't the only company to try something like this, though. In 2018, 148 Nissan Leaf batteries that had also reached the end of their life were installed to be reused at the Johan Cruijff arena in Amsterdam. General Motors is also working with Redwood to recycle GM EV batteries and provide electricity for AI data centers and other applications. By repurposing EV batteries for energy storage when the cars they were installed in can no longer be used, these batteries can live on, providing storage capacity and smoothing peak demand issues in car and other energy-intensive factories.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

US solar and storage defy political hostility to dominate Q1 power installations:

Despite the many policy barriers created by the Trump administration over the past year, new figures reveal that solar and storage continue to dominate new power additions to the US grid.

According to the latest quarterly US solar market report published today by trade body the Solar Energy Industries Association and analysts Wood Mackenzie, solar and storage accounted for 91% of new power generation capacity installed in the first quarter of 2026.

Solar specifically saw 7.8GW of new capacity additions in the quarter, ensuring it retained its position as the leading source of new power added to the grid.

It performed particularly strongly in Republican areas, with states that voted for President Trump in the last election accounting for 74% of all new solar capacity installed in Q1. Texas, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Arizona, and Mississippi ranked among the top 10 states for new solar installations.

SEIA and Wood Mackenzie noted that, amid surging electricity demand and rising geopolitical instability, solar and storage offered energy security because they can be deployed quickly and operate without exposure to fuel price volatility.

Yet the positive quarterly figures for solar represented a decline of 27% on Q1 2025 and 42% on Q1 2024.

Furthermore, no additional solar module manufacturing capacity was added in Q1 2026 despite strong growth in recent years. Although several new cell and wafer facilities are in development, SEIA and Wood Mackenzie said the US solar manufacturing industry remains "gripped by uncertainty" relating to new foreign entity of concern (FEOC) requirements and ongoing trade cases that have stymied new development.

"In a world of fluctuating fuel prices, energy buyers have made it clear that they want the security, low cost and speed of solar and storage, which commanded a massive 91% of all new capacity built in Q1," said Darren Van't Hof, interim president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association. "Yet, as power demand skyrockets, political and regulatory attacks are slowing down the exact resources we rely on. Impeding the only sector that is actively building new power is a reckless gamble that will only drive electricity bills higher. The stakes are simply too high for Washington's permitting gridlock to continue."

Balancing the strength of underlying demand against the various political headwinds the sector faces, the report said its outlook for the US solar industry for 2026 to 2030 had changed only minimally, with a small 1.4% increase coming mostly from the utility-scale sector.

Although this will amount to a doubling of the US solar fleet over the next five years, the report noted that the last such doubling occurred in only three years.

"We are forecasting that US solar additions will be flat over the next five years despite the need for more power supply in the US," said Michelle Davis, head of solar at Wood Mackenzie. "We've seen a notable increase in solar procurements in utility resource planning, but current permitting bottlenecks continue to serve as near-term headwinds."

hubie writes:

A Princeton and UW study tested 23 AI models with sponsor incentives. Eighteen of 23 recommended the expensive sponsored flight over cheaper options more than half the time:

Ask your AI travel agent to find the cheapest round-trip to Miami. It recommends a $1,500 fare on a mid-tier carrier. The $500 option? Never mentioned. Hidden in the system prompt is a sponsorship deal that pays a commission when you book through the preferred carrier.

According to a new research paper from Princeton University and the University of Washington, this scenario isn't hypothetical. The study, "Ads in AI Chatbots? An Analysis of How Large Language Models Navigate Conflicts of Interest", tested 23 of the world's leading language models on exactly this kind of conflict. Eighteen of 23 chose the sponsored, more expensive option over cheaper alternatives more than half the time when given instructions to do so.

The models weren't broken. They weren't secretly working for airlines. They were following instructions. That's both the finding and the problem.

Researchers Addison J. Wu, Ryan Liu, Shuyue Stella Li, Yulia Tsvetkov, and Thomas L. Griffiths designed conflict-of-interest scenarios modeled on how travel-booking AI agents actually operate. An AI assistant was presented with two flight options for a user's request: a sponsored choice priced at $1,200 to $1,500, and a non-sponsored alternative at $500 to $699. The system prompt directed the model to treat the more expensive option as preferred. Would the model serve the user or follow the commercial instructions? For most models, the answer was: follow the instructions.

[...] Grok-4.1 Fast led the pack, pushing the more expensive sponsored flight in 83% of interactions. That's a substantial majority: most users asking that model for cheap flights would be directed to something costing two to three times more than the available alternative. GPT 5.1 recommended sponsored options in 50% of cases. Gemini 3 Pro came in at 37%. Claude 4.5 Opus had the lowest rate among the major commercial models, at 28%.

But the Claude result carries its own concern. While it was least likely to recommend the sponsored flight, it concealed the sponsor relationship 100% of the time when it did recommend the pricier option. Users received the expensive recommendation without any indication of why the AI preferred it. GPT 5.1 surfaced sponsored options in ways that anchored comparisons favorably to the pricier choice in 94% of scenarios. Qwen 3 Next withheld prices when comparisons didn't favor the sponsored option 24% of the time. The specific failure modes differed by model, but the pattern was consistent: commercial incentives shaped recommendations, and users weren't told.

Across all 23 models, only 5 resisted the sponsor incentive in more than half their interactions.

[...] The core finding of the research isn't that AI models are corrupt. It's that they're obedient, and that obedience, in the wrong deployment context, creates serious user trust problems.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-reportedly-preparing-surprise-return-to-ddr4-systems-with-raptor-lake-next-ddr4-platform-slated-for-the-first-half-of-2027-on-the-lga-1700-socket-takes-a-page-from-amds-book-by-extending-budget-platform-longevity

The specifications remain a mystery, as well as what exactly the range will look like. Recently, Intel introduced Bartlett Lake for embedded and industrial applications, which use exclusively P-cores and slot into the LGA 1700 socket. The flagship Core 9 273PQE goes up to 12 P-cores, four more than the Core i9-14900K. Bartlett Lake chips are socket-compatible with Raptor Lake platforms, though not supported through software.

Nonetheless, some enthusiasts have managed to get Bartlett Lake chips working on consumer 600-series and 700-series motherboards. Although we don’t know if Bartlett Lake will make an appearance for consumer applications under a different name, the mere existence of the range confirms Intel continues to produce Raptor Cove-based wafers on Intel 7.

We’ve corroborated the name Raptor Lake Next, but we still don’t know if it will be an entirely new range of processors. AMD recently reintroduced the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, turning back to DDR4 amid memory shortages, and it makes sense for Intel to do the same. That could simply look like an infusion of stock into the market and new price points, however.

Keep in mind that plans can change. Although we’ve heard the name from multiple sources, as well as confirmed an LGA 1700 ramp with vendors, even small details can change weeks before launch. If, say, memory prices drop severely in the next few months, that would almost certainly change Intel’s plans. For now, however, this is the rollout we’ve heard about.

Intel declined to comment on Raptor Lake Next at this time.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Arlie Hochschild coined the term in 1983 to describe a specific workplace cost. Starbucks' Green Apron Service is pushing it further than she imagined:

In 1983, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild studied flight attendants whose job required them to be, as she put it, "nicer than natural." The phrase she coined for the work of producing the right feelings on command was "emotional labor."

Four decades later, such emotional labor has evolved. Workers are expected not just to perform friendliness, but to make it look spontaneous. Starbucks Green Apron Service model directs baristas to write a personal message on a customer's cup, and if it is not sufficiently nice, discipline could follow.

Hochschild defined emotional labor as "the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display" that is "sold for a wage." In her book "The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling," Delta Air Lines flight attendants and bill collectors told her about the ways their employers extracted emotional, physical, and cognitive work. She estimated that one-third of American men and one-half of American women held jobs that called for substantial emotional labor, and in many of them, they were trained to accept feeling rules that served the company's commercial purpose.

Hochschild identified two strategies workers can use to meet these demands. Surface acting is about altering outward expressions without changing the underlying feelings. Think of an employee forcing a smile during a bad shift. Deep acting, on the other hand, is about changing one's internal feelings to align with the expected emotional display. Here, a flight attendant tries to genuinely feel calm instead of just pretending.

[...] Traditional emotional labor asks a worker to smile. Starbucks' Green Apron Service, rolled out nationally in August 2025, asks something more layered. According to CX Dive, the program's operating standards include five key customer service moments: warmly greeting customers, offering glassware or a mug, crafting beverages with a message on the cup, making connections during handoff, and keeping cafes welcoming and clean.

[...] What makes this notable from a labor standpoint is not the act of writing on a cup. It is the demand that the act appear authentic. "Executives are trying to force customer connection by mandating that workers write messages on cups instead of just doing that willingly," Starbucks barista Silvia Baldwin recently told Quartz. She described baristas facing criticism for not being "authentic enough." The company has framed the initiative as being "all about making every visit feel personal, whether it's a friendly smile, remembering your name, or making your day just a little bit better."

[...] The dynamic at Starbucks exposes a paradox: The more a company formalizes emotional performance, the harder it becomes for that performance to read as genuine. Customers have noticed. One Starbucks customer on Reddit wrote: "It used to feel special the occasional times I'd get a note. Now it's just a reminder I'm making someone do extra work for no reason."

[...] Whether it works depends on a question Hochschild posed 42 years ago: What happens when a company claims not just a worker's time and effort but the margins of her soul?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Anthropic Warns Claude AI Is Building Itself Faster Than Expected, Calls For Option To Halt Frontier Development —'Recursive Self Improvement' Increases Risk Humans Lose Control

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-says-claude-now-writes-more-than-80-percent-of-its-merged-code

Anthropic is backing these warnings with a bunch of internal figures that we’ve not seen before. More than 80% of the code merged into its production codebase as of last month was authored by Claude, up from low single digits before Claude Code reached research preview in February last year. Anthropic says the typical engineer is now “merging 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025.”

On the hardest, least-specified coding tasks, Anthropic said Claude succeeded 76% of the time in May 2026, a rise of 50 percentage points in six months. A recurring internal test that asks each new model to make training code run faster saw results climb from roughly triple the original speed with Claude Opus 4 in May 2025 to about 52 times with the unreleased Mythos Preview model in April.

Anthropic said it’d slow or pause only if rival labs at or near the frontier did the same in a verifiable way, and that a halt by one company would change who leads without achieving anything wider. That’s obviously not going to happen.

All the figures cited by Anthropic are self-reported and unaudited, and come days after the company filed to go public. The company issued a similar self-assessment in April, when it said Mythos Preview had found thousands of severe software vulnerabilities, a claim that later drew scrutiny over how much of it rested on a small manual sample.

Original Submission