SoylentNews

"Fnord666" writes:

Automakers Could Stop Selling Cars In California Rather Than Comply With Tracking Laws:

1st Gear: Automakers would rather lose California sales than give drivers more control over their location data

Back in 2024, California made a new law about drivers' location data. Specifically, the law states that people with a restraining order shouldn't have to share data with folks they have those restraining orders against, including removing the latter from car data sharing. Automakers, despite having nearly two years to comply with this, have yet to actually do so. Now, they might just abandon California. From Reuters :

A group representing major automakers warned on Tuesday that car companies may be forced to halt sales of both ​new and used vehicles in California on July 1 unless the state ‌delays vehicle technology rules that aim to prevent perpetrators of domestic violence from tracking survivors.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai and most other automakers, said unless ​a legislative proposal is signed into law by July 1 "there is substantial ​risk that auto sales in California will be suspended."

The group said ⁠automakers are implementing the domestic violence victim protections required under the 2024 law "but ​compliance with some elements of the law is impossible this year."

California is the single ​largest U.S. auto market, accounting for about 10% of sales.

The 2024 California law requires automakers to set up a clear process for drivers to submit a copy of a restraining order or ​other documentation and request termination of another driver's remote access within two business days. ​It also mandated that carmakers enable drivers to easily turn off location access from inside the ‌vehicle.

This sounds like the automakers playing hardball, trying to get California to back down on the law. Hopefully the state doesn't, and the automakers have to face the potential of actually losing all that profit.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

From academic toss-aside to cloud substrate:

Today Postgres is one of the most widely used database systems, but its launch and subsequent development were inauspicious to say the least.

If it weren't for a league of exceptionally devoted open source contributors, it probably would be another forgotten also-ran just like Ingres, the database system on which it was based ("Postgres" was shorthand for "Post-Ingres").

The creator of both systems, Michael Stonebraker, is perhaps the preeminent database pioneer in the field. Earlier this month, he spoke at PGDay, a conference in Boston hosted by the U.S. PostgreSQL Association, where he detailed the complicated history of the open source database system, which actually existed long before the term "open source" was even uttered.  

In a sense, "Postgres is the epitome of open source software, because it doesn't belong to anybody. It was picked up by this team of programmers without any specific affiliation," Stonebraker said.   

Stonebraker essentially abandoned Postgres in the mid-1990s. But instead of fading into obscurity, the codebase was salvaged by a fiercely-dedicated volunteer community that bolted on standard SQL while preserving Stonebraker's revolutionary extensible architecture. 

Three decades later, this stubbornly-independent database has become the bedrock of modern cloud infrastructure.

When it comes to relational database systems, British computer scientist and then-IBM employee Ted Codd got the ball rolling in 1970. A database is where you store your data so it can be queried in a predictable way. A database system is the software that manages the database (don't confuse the two). 

That year, Codd decreed that all data should be stored in tables and accessed using a high-level query language. IBM implemented Codd's idea in System R, and created SQL as the query language. The results were eventually rolled into IBM's DB2. 

Stonebraker, then an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, also implemented Codd's ideas. Stonebraker and his team of grad students created not only a working prototype, but a full-scale implementation – he later cofounded a startup, Relational Technology, to sell Ingres commercially. Ingres did not use SQL, but instead employed another query language, QUEL (Query Language), although the fundamentals were similar.  

A relatively primitive version of Ingres was even released gratis for academic research. But by the early 1980s, Stonebraker had "pushed the code off a cliff" and started building something new. 

Thus, Postgres was born. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Taiwan's drone spending plans for defense could also boost business overseas:

Taiwan's existence as a self-governing democracy may depend heavily on having enough military drones to discourage any attempted invasion by China's military. As the Taiwanese government aims to boost domestic production of military drones and Taiwanese citizens sign up for drone flight training, Taiwanese companies are forming international partnerships to sell more drones to the US military and other overseas buyers.

Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense proposed a special budget that would spend $6.6 billion over six years on buying drones made in Taiwan, according to the Central News Agency that represents the national news service of Taiwan. Presented on June 18, the budget proposal would allow the government to buy more than 208,000 coastal attack drones, along with more than 1,400 coastal reconnaissance drones and 1,320 uncrewed surface vessels, between 2026 and 2031.

That would be a significant boost to the Taiwanese military arsenal that currently includes just 5,000 US-made attack drones and domestically produced drones, according to Resilience Media. During military exercises in early June, Taiwanese soldiers fired Altius-600 loitering munition drones—made by a subsidiary of the US military technology company Anduril Industries—from towed flatbed launchers to strike offshore targets, according to USNI News. In another exercise earlier this year, Taiwanese Marines used Taiwan-made drones to similarly strike targets at sea.

Beyond bolstering Taiwan's national defense, Taiwanese government spending on domestically produced drones could provide a critical boost to Taiwanese drone manufacturers. Some Taiwanese companies, notably Thunder Tiger, have pitched their drone technology and components to the US military and European buyers as alternatives to drones made in China, while also establishing international technology and manufacturing partnerships to pave the way for more exports.

Taiwan has already exported $115 million of fully assembled drones between January and March 2026, exceeding the $93 million in total drone exports for the entire year of 2025, according to Taiwan Premier Cho Jung-tai in an announcement on April 30. The premier is an appointed principal advisor to Taiwan's president and leads the executive branch of the Taiwanese government.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Apple has released a security update to patch a Beats Studio Buds flaw that let nearby hackers listen to conversations through the microphone

Apple has fixed a flaw in its Beats Studio Buds wireless headphones that allowed hackers to use the built-in microphone to listen to your private conversations without your knowledge.

According to Apple's official advisory, the issue is tracked as CVE-2025-20701, and was identified by researchers Dennis Heinze and Frieder Steinmetz from ERNW GmbH security firm.

Heinze and Steinmetz discovered that the bug exists in the open-source code of a system called the Airoha Bluetooth audio SDK. For your information, this system helps run the earbuds, and the issue happens when the headphones are turned on but aren't connected to a phone or computer.

What happens in this scenario is that the earbuds look for a new connection. That's when any hacker in proximity can strike. All they have to do is link to the device, and this doesn't even need the user's permission. The software cannot check or verify who is connecting, so the hacker can easily eavesdrop on your conversations.

However, this trick requires some prerequisites, such as the hacker must be within a standard Bluetooth range of about 10 metres. During the testing phase, researchers chained this bug with two other flaws.

The first issue, CVE-2025-20700, allows an unauthenticated attacker to connect to the earbuds using Bluetooth Low Energy, whereas the second issue, CVE-2025-20702, helps them evade security and access internal management settings.

Combining them allowed researchers to use the Bluetooth Hands-Free Profile feature and look at call histories or contact lists, and dial numbers. However, real attacks are very hard to carry out, research reveals, because they require expert skills and physical closeness to the person.

Apple fixed the bug on 16 June by releasing Beats Firmware Update 1B211. You don't need to click anything to install this fix as the earbuds update by themselves when they are in their charging case, plugged into power, and placed near an iPhone, iPad, or Mac with Bluetooth turned on. Android users need to get the patch through the official Beats app.

You can also confirm if your earbuds are updated. Just open the Bluetooth settings and check the version number. Consider the patch as active if the version is 1B211. However, it is still a good idea to turn off Bluetooth when not in use to keep your devices safe.

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

NASA's Perseverance rover has made its most robust discovery yet by detecting complex macromolecular organic carbon sitting directly on the natural rock surfaces of Mars. According to a newly published study in Science Advances, the rover's SHERLOC ultraviolet laser spectrometer mapped hundreds of organic signatures within 3.5-billion-year-old mudstones at the "Bright Angel" outcrop inside Jezero crater.

Reporters at Space.com note that this marks the first time intact macromolecular carbon has been found completely exposed on an unprepared martian rock surface, suggesting these compounds are either surprisingly resistant to radiation or were very recently uncovered by wind erosion. While scientists emphasize that these organic molecules can form through both biological and geological processes, Science News reports that the find significantly expands our understanding of martian habitability.

Crucially, as highlighted by The Guardian, this discovery means rovers have now found organic-bearing mudstones more than 2,000 miles apart on the planet, adding to the Curiosity rover's earlier findings at Gale crater. Experts writing for Eos.org state that the widespread nature of these ingredients indicates ancient Mars may have routinely possessed the conditions necessary for microbial life.

As covered by Interesting Engineering, the discovery includes data from the infamous "Cheyava Falls" rock, which previously made headlines for its intriguing "leopard spots." Ultimately, confirming whether these structures are biological or purely geochemical will require analyzing the cached samples in highly sensitive laboratories back on Earth, making a compelling case for a future Mars Sample Return mission.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Jacobin has an interview with Cory Doctorow about the pending implosion of the AI bubble:

Worrying about whether AI can do your job is a blind alley, Cory Doctorow argues. The real danger is AI's bubble: a speculative fantasy built on convincing bosses to replace workers with systems that can't actually do what their salesmen promise.

As artificial intelligence continues its inexorable march through human institutions, its popularity appears to be reaching an early nadir. So far, the sector's behavior almost seems tailor-made to provoke a negative response. In San Francisco, billboards and bus stop ads exhort employers to STOP HIRING HUMANS. Workers across the country brace for layoffs blamed on AI, and AI companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars on environmentally destructive data centers. You can't talk to a customer service rep anymore, only a chatbot that tells you lies. AI slop is filling up social media feeds, Spotify playlists, and even academic journals and newspapers.

One additional factor is that tech workers failed to unionize while they had the upper hand in the early decades of the WWW. Now those chickens are coming home to roost.

Previously:
(2026) Anthropic Eyes an IPO as Big Tech's AI Cash Crunch Comes for Wall Street
(2026) OpenAI Secures Record $110 Billion Funding Round Backed By Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank
(2025) AI Coding is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds
(2024) US Stock Plunge: Could The AI Bubble Burst?
... and many more.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2020/05/die-analysis-of-8087-math-coprocessors.html

Floating-point numbers are very useful for scientific programming, but early microprocessors only supported integers directly.1 Although floating-point was common in mainframes back in the 1950s and 1960s, it wasn't until 1980 that Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point coprocessor for microcomputers.2 Adding this chip to a microcomputer such as the IBM PC made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This was a huge benefit for applications such as AutoCAD, spreadsheets, or flight simulators.3 The downside was the 8087 chip cost hundreds of dollars.4

It's hard to implement floating-point operations so they are computed quickly and accurately. Problems can arise from overflow, rounding, transcendental operations, and numerous edge cases. Prior to the 8087, each manufacturer had their own incompatible ad hoc implementation of floating point. Intel, however, enlisted numerical analysis expert William Kahan to design accurate floating point based on rigorous principles.5 The result was the floating-point architecture of the 8087. This became the IEEE 754 standard used in almost all modern computers, so I consider the 8087 one of the most influential chips ever designed.

To explore how the 8087 works, I opened up an 8087 chip and took photos of the silicon die with a microscope. Containing 40,000 transistors, the 8087 pushed chip manufacturing to the limit; in comparison, the companion 8086 microprocessor only had 29,000 transistors. To make the chip possible, Intel developed new techniques. In this article, I focus on the high-speed binary shifter. The shifter takes up a large fraction of the chip's area, so minimizing its area was vital to making the 8087 possible.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Nvidia's New AI Racks Run on 45°C Liquid Cooling Without Traditional Chillers. Nvidia has unveiled a liquid-cooled AI data centre design that it says can bring water use close to zero. The company says higher operating temperatures and closed-loop cooling could cut power demand, even as Amazon's figures show how water-intensive current data centres remain. Amazon recently reported that its global data centres used about 2.5 billion gallons , or about 9.46 billion litres, of water in a single year.

Nvidia announced at CES 2026 that its next-generation Rubin AI GPU racks can operate using 45°C liquid cooling without requiring conventional water chillers, sparking significant stock declines among major data-center cooling equipment manufacturers.

At CES 2026, Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang revealed that the company's new Rubin-generation Vera Rubin NVL72 GPU platform operates on 45-degree-Celsius liquid-loop cooling, eliminating the need for large-scale water chillers. Huang described this innovation as "basically cooling this supercomputer with hot water," positioning Rubin as the successor to Blackwell architecture.

[Source]: Aigazine

[Covered By]: INDIA TODAY

[Chip Details]: nVIDIA

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Brave Origin is a minimalist Brave edition that costs $59.99 on other platforms but is free for Linux users.

Recently, Brave introduced Brave Origin, a minimalist version of its browser whose main appeal lies in what it removes rather than what it adds. The new edition strips out many optional Brave services, including AI, crypto, VPN, Rewards, Tor, and several telemetry mechanisms, while remaining free for Linux users.

According to Brave, Origin is designed for users who want the browser's core privacy and security protections without the wider set of features included in the standard Brave browser. It keeps Brave Shields, ad and tracker blocking, frequent software updates, Chromium security patches, and ongoing security and privacy improvements.

The difference is that Brave Origin removes or disables a long list of extras. These include Leo AI, Brave News, Playlist, Rewards and browser-based Brave Ads, Speedreader, Talk, Tor, VPN, Wallet and Web3 domains, Wayback Machine, Web Discovery Project, email aliases, daily usage ping, crash logs, and privacy-preserving product analytics, known as P3A.

That makes Origin an unusual browser release. Brave frames it as a premium experience, but its main value is a smaller feature set. But what's even more interesting is that on Windows and macOS, Brave Origin is a one-time purchase priced at $59.99. On Linux, users can access Origin for free.

The browser is available in two forms. The first is a standalone desktop browser, available through a separate download. The second is an upgrade mode for the existing Brave browser on desktop and mobile devices.

There is an important technical distinction between the two. In the standalone Brave Origin app, the affected features are compiled out of the build. In upgrade mode, the features appear in a new Settings panel and are off by default.

According to Brave, future features outside the core Brave Shields experience will also be disabled by default in Origin.

For Linux users, Origin can be used as a standalone browser or as an upgrade to an existing Brave installation. The upgrade option requires Brave 1.91 or later. Linux users installing the standalone version can skip the purchase process during setup, while those upgrading an existing installation can proceed from the Brave Origin section in the browser's settings.

The regular Brave browser remains unchanged. Brave says the existing browser will continue to be free and fully supported for users who want the full feature set or do not want to use Origin. The company also notes that users can already hide or disable many Brave features manually, although doing so does not remove those components from the browser executable.

And finally, the idea behind all of this. Brave says Origin was created in response to users who wanted a more minimal browser while still supporting Brave's privacy and ad-blocking work. The company also says Origin uses a blind token protocol based on Privacy Pass to verify purchases without linking payment identity to browser use.

You can find instructions here on how Linux users can install it for free, depending on their distribution.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In 2024, Dana A. Goward, founder of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, received a call from an anonymous British researcher, He said that interference from space was more than a possibility — he had observed it. Examining data from terrestrial reference stations operated by the International Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Service, he had noticed instances in which GPS signal strength had decreased markedly. In each case it was for less than ten seconds, but the events had been recorded by stations across a very broad section of northern Europe. The researcher consented to the Foundation sharing these findings.

Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas at Austin and his student Zach Clements analyzed ground station data spanning from January 2019 to April 2026; they identified 75 days with at least one widespread GNSS interference event. The paper mentioned (PDF, HTML, abstract), "The interference peak is centered at 1577.5 MHz, about 2 MHz above the GPS L1 center frequency of 1575.42 MHz. In addition to tracked GPS L1 C/A signals, tracked Galileo E1 and BeiDou B1C/B1A signals also exhibited a concurrent drop in CNR during interference events." Humphreys and his colleagues calculated that the source had to be at least 1,200 kilometers above the Earth, But they couldn't go further.

Later, Humphreys received an email stating that radio stations in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Trondheim, Norway, had captured raw interference signal data on February 11, 2026. By examining the difference in timing when that signal arrived at the two different stations, Humphreys and Clements calculated a "quasi-hyperboloid surface", stretching tens of thousands of kilometers into space where the interference satellite must have been located. The margin of error represented by the thickness of that surface was only five meters.

A comparison of suspect satellite orbits with the quasi-hyperboloid surface showed that only one satellite's orbit aligned perfectly—the Russian satellite Cosmos 2546, which are designed to provide early warnings when they detect ballistic missile launches. This discovery has raised concerns regarding Russian electronic warfare capabilities. An EU spokesperson told The New York Times that the EU has launched an investigation into these incidents but that the results remain classified, while The press office for the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. said they don't have a comment on that.

[...] Perhaps most damning, Humphreys' team has found that the same Russian constellation has been impacting signals from China's BeiDou satellite navigation system in an almost identical way since June 2020.

It is clear that one of this Russian constellation's primary capabilities is disruption and denial of America's GPS and China's BeiDou navigation systems, should the Kremlin decide to do so. A slight change in frequency and an increase in transmitted power is all that is needed to prevent reception of one or both systems across continental size areas.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.iflscience.com/its-official-voyager-1-will-cross-the-1-light-day-threshold-on-november-18-2026-82733

Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object we have ever sent into space, and in just a few months, it will cross a pretty incredible threshold: it will be 1 light-day away from Earth, the first human-made spacecraft to reach this distance. Now, the Voyager mission team has just confirmed to IFLScience the exact date it will meet this milestone. Voyager 1 will be a record-breaking 1 light-day away on November 18, 2026.

Voyager 1 and 2 are the only human-made spacecraft that have reached interstellar space, which means beyond the heliosphere at the edge of the Solar System. One light-day away means it will take the spacecraft 24 hours or more to send a signal to Earth.

NASA did note that due to the motions of both the spacecraft and our planet, the exact moment when the signals between us and Voyager 1 will take 24 hours might be slightly different, but currently, it looks like the precise time will be 2:16:07 am PST (10:16:07 am UTC) on Wednesday, November 18, 2026.

I won't pretend that the Voyagers are not among our favorite missions. They have been in space for all my life. It is simply extraordinary that we got to see a human-made object cross the threshold of 1 light-day, an incredibly cosmic record.

The Voyager probes were launched in 1977, and after just shy of 50 years in space, they continue to give us a glimpse into the cosmos. On their way to the outer Solar System, Voyager 1 visited Jupiter and Saturn, while its twin took a deviation and got the only close-up look we have ever had of Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 was also the first human-made object to enter interstellar space in 2012, followed by Voyager 2 in December 2018.

Everything about these two spacecraft is truly unbelievable, particularly that they continue to send data back to Earth, providing insights into an unexplored region of space. However, most of their instruments had to be turned off to save battery, cameras included. The last-ever image taken by Voyager 1 was the Pale Blue Dot, snapped 36 years ago on Valentine's Day, 1990.

Soon, Voyager 1 will be more than 1 light-day away. This enormous distance makes it challenging to communicate with the spacecraft. There have been several problems with the Voyager probes, and yet, the mission team has been nothing short of incredible, troubleshooting and fixing a half-century-old machine in interstellar space.

On November 15, Voyager 1 will reach 25.9 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) away from Earth, a distance that takes light more than 24 hours to cover. The spacecraft has been beyond the influence of the Sun for a while, but it will take a very long time for it to be close to a star other than our own.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/microsoft-spots-new-self-propagating-malware-for-stealing-cryptocurrency/

Microsoft says it has detected new self-propagating malware that spreads through USB drives in search of cryptocurrency credentials, which it then sends to attacker-controlled servers.

The company named the worm Crypto Clipper because it monitors the contents of device clipboards for patterns consistent with wallet addresses or seed phrases. When found, the malware also takes five screenshots over a 10-second period. Both the credentials and the screenshots are then sent to the attacker through Tor, a network protocol that provides anonymous routing by sending traffic through redundant nodes so logs can't capture both the sending and receiving IP addresses. Crypto Clipper establishes the Tor connection by using a SOCKS5 proxy, a network protocol that sends traffic through a proxy server, which then forwards it to its final destination.

A lightweight backdoor

"The execution of this clipper is notable because it does not depend on a traditional installer or exposed IP-based C2 infrastructure," Microsoft said Thursday. "Instead, it deploys a portable Tor client, routes traffic through a local SOCKS5 proxy, and blends data theft with remote code execution, turning a financially motivated stealer into a lightweight backdoor."

Microsoft said it observed Crypto Clipper spreading through .lnk file on a USB drive. These files store executable code. When an infected USB drive is plugged into a device, the code checks whether it is already installed on the machine. If it isn't, the malware downloads it through the Tor proxy. To better conceal evidence of the worm, the malware scans the infected USB drive and names the .lnk files with similar names.

Crypto Clipper monitors clipboard contents for patterns that are consistent with standardized 12- or 24-word seed phrases. When found, it uploads them, along with the screenshots, to the attacker's server. The stealer also replaces addresses it finds with ones belonging to attacker-controlled wallets. This allows the malware to divert payments to the attacker's pockets. Microsoft believes the purpose of the screenshots is to provide context that may be useful.

"This malware family shows how lightweight, script-based stealers can deliver outsized impact when paired with anonymized communications and runtime tasking," Microsoft said. "The combination of Tor-routed C2, clipboard targeting, screenshot capture, and remote code execution gives attackers both immediate monetization paths and continued control over compromised devices."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-and-amds-new-ace-cpu-extensions-bring-an-efficient-ai-oriented-instruction-set-to-x86-a-new-design-makes-matrix-multiplication-more-power-and-density-efficient

ACE comes in by offering a technical standard [.PDF] that leverages the existing AVX10 registers but adds silicon dedicated to matrix multiplication. This brings multiple benefits, but the key advantages are better power efficiency, easier development and optimization, and leveraging AVX's 512-bit inputs. The latter makes for easy integration with existing designs by eschewing the need for ACE-specific inputs.

For the same number of input vectors, ACE can perform 16x as many operations, compared to AVX10. Note this doesn't necessarily mean a 16x speedup, as that will depend on each individual implementation, but it's reasonable to expect that Intel and AMD will dedicate more silicon to this task in future designs to improve performance. Plus, as each ACE instruction performs more work than its equivalent AVX10 loop, there's less CPU instruction overhead and potentially better RAM bandwidth usage right off the bat.

The benefits go far beyond just using fewer instructions for the same thing. ACE is intended to be implementation-agnostic, meaning that ML frameworks and their underlying libraries (PyTorch, TensorFlow) can just write one code path instead of having multiple variations depending on the underlying hardware and its degree of AVX support.

ACE native supports most every data type used in ML operations (including but not limited to INT8, INT32, FP8, FP16, FP32, BF16), but it also can use Open Compute Project's MX block-scaled formats natively, something that AVX10 does not provide. Developers will also be able to move some NPU-specific workloads back to CPU when they need something done now and fast. In those situations, not having to deal with the fact that each NPU is different is a huge boon, too, as ACE offers a consistent target across x86 hardware.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

General Motors has delivered a stark lesson in modern American manufacturing: when government-pushed electric vehicle mandates meet market reality, it is the American worker who pays the price:

General Motors is facing renewed scrutiny over automation at its flagship EV assembly plant after adding dozens of robots to the production line months after cutting more than 1,000 jobs. The changes at Factory Zero in Detroit highlight the growing tension between automakers seeking greater efficiency and workers concerned about the future of manufacturing employment.

Factory Zero has played a central role in GM's electric vehicle strategy, producing models such as the GMC Hummer EV and Chevrolet Silverado EV. The facility was once promoted as a symbol of the company's transition toward an electric future and a source of new manufacturing jobs.

Instead, the plant has experienced a series of production adjustments, temporary shutdowns, and workforce reductions as EV demand has fluctuated. Those challenges have now been accompanied by a larger investment in automation technology.

From AutoBlog.com:

The UAW (United Auto Workers) Local 22 president, who represents workers at the plant, confirmed they are Fanuc-made machines and says his members are "disgusted." In an interview with Crain's Detroit Business, he said, "It's always a concern when you see a robot coming to a plant, especially after they have laid off over a thousand people. They say it's the wave of the future, and if that's so, they're taking away jobs from people." The union has filed grievances. GM has said the cobots improve safety and ergonomics. Both things can be true, and probably are.

To be fair, GM was never subtle about the direction of travel. At its GM Forward event in late 2025, Barra and her senior team spent considerable time outlining how AI and automation would shape manufacturing going forward. Earlier that year, when announcing a tie-up with NVIDIA to develop factory robotics, Barra said: "AI not only optimizes manufacturing processes and accelerates virtual testing but also helps us build smarter vehicles while empowering our workforce to focus on craftsmanship. By merging technology with human ingenuity, we unlock new levels of innovation in vehicle manufacturing and beyond."

Also at MSN and The New York Post.

Previously: General Motors Lays Off Hundreds Of US Workers

Original Submission

jelizondo writes:

..... but Many Celebrated Figures did Their Best Thinking in Just Four or Five Hours a Day — and That Deliberate Rest May Have Been Key

Silicon Canals has a very interesting opinion piece about working hours:

Sit down to do real work, the kind that asks something of your brain, and notice how long you can actually hold it. Charles Dickens wrote from roughly nine to two. Henri Poincaré, the mathematician, worked just enough to get his mind around a problem, about four hours a day. G.H. Hardy thought four hours was the ceiling for a mathematician, full stop. The Fields Medalist June Huh, according to Quanta Magazine, manages about three hours of focused work on a good day.

That is a strange pattern to sit with, given that most of us have built our days around eight hours, as if the brain runs on the same fuel gauge as a factory shift. For me it is a couple of hours before the words start coming out as mud, and I suspect I am not unusual. The figures we still talk about for their thinking seem, quietly, to have agreed.

The standard working week is a relatively recent idea, the product of decades of labor activism and given legal force in the US by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which capped the maximum workweek.

Charles Darwin is the case that sticks with me. As author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang tells it in a Nautilus essay, Darwin did a couple of focused stretches in the morning, and by around noon he would announce that "I've done a good day's work". The rest of the day went to walking, naps, letters, reading. He produced a body of work that reshaped how we understand life on earth, and he did the heavy lifting in roughly four hours.

The mathematician G.H. Hardy seems to have thought four hours was simply the ceiling. As Pang recounts, Hardy told his friend C.P. Snow that "Four hours creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician." One mathematician's opinion is not a universal law. But hearing it from someone of his stature makes me feel a little less guilty about my own fading after lunch.

The argument Pang builds in his book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less is that the walking and the naps were not time off from the thinking. They were part of it. As he puts it in the essay drawn from the book, figures like Darwin and his neighbor John Lubbock "weren't accomplished despite their leisure; they were accomplished because of it." I think he is right. The busiest weeks of my own working life have rarely been the ones where I made anything I was proud of, and I have stopped pretending that is a coincidence.

The obvious objection is that Darwin had a private income and no inbox. Most of us cannot tell our boss we have done a good day's work and wander off to walk the dog at noon. Fair enough. I am not suggesting you try.

What I take from it is gentler than that. The interesting figures here did not do nothing for the rest of the day. They did the shallow, mundane work, the correspondence and the admin, in the lower-energy hours, and they protected a small window for the work that actually mattered. That is the lesson worth stealing.

So here is where I land. The eight-hour day, applied to work that asks anything real of your brain, is a mistake. It was designed for assembly lines and we kept it out of habit. If three or four hours is the genuine ceiling for the people doing the deepest thinking we have on record, then the rest of an eight-hour day is theatre — answering email, sitting in meetings, performing busyness for whoever is watching.

So, what is your experience with long working hours? Are you more productive or simply accumulating sitting-on-a-chair hours?

Original Submission