Feed aggregator

Meta is laying off about 600 employees from its AI division as part of a restructuring to streamline operations and solidify Alexandr Wang's leadership over the company's AI strategy. "Workers across Meta's AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR) and other product-related positions will be impacted," notes CNBC. "However, the cuts did not impact employees within TBD Labs, which includes many of the top-tier AI hires brought into the social media company this summer." From the report: Those employees, overseen by Wang, were spared by the layoffs, underscoring Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's bet on his expensive hires versus the legacy employees, the people said. Within Meta, the AI unit was considered to be bloated, with teams like FAIR and more product-oriented groups often vying for computing resources, the people said. When the company's new hires joined the company to create Superintelligence Labs, it inherited the oversized Meta AI unit, they said. The layoffs are an attempt by Meta to continue trim the department and further cement Wang's role in steering the company's AI strategy. Following the cuts, Meta's Superintelligence Labs' workforce now sits at just under 3,000, the people said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto exchange OKX is currently offering both a boosted $200 bonus in crypto and a 10% deposit match on USDG stablecoin (up to 300 USDG on 3,000 USDG deposit). Details below. Offer expires 10/31 at 6pm.

Here are the steps for the $200 bonus for new OKX customers:

• Sign up via referral link. I think they allow either smartphone or browser sign-up, but identity verification may be easier on a smartphone. That’s my referral link, which should auto-populate with the promo code 79795662. Thanks if you use it!
• Complete identity verification (driver’s license and smartphone selfie).
• Deposit $200+ of either cash (link bank account via Plaid) or crypto within 30 days.
• Buy $200 or more of crypto (can be stablecoin like USDG) and hold the assets for at least 30 days within a 90-day period.
• After 90 days, the bonus will be tradable and withdrawable.

Note: Before you deposit any cash, opt into the deposit match bonus first so you can “double dip” if you plan on buying USDG (the conservative approach).

You should get confirmation of the bonus shortly after linking a bank account and making the trade. Here’s some app screenshots regarding my bonus, which are pretty clear. I did mine on 10/21/25 and so mine unlocks on 1/19/26.

Here are the details on the 10% deposit match:

• Get a 10% match for every 500 USDG you deposit (buy) and hold for 90 days, up to a max reward of 300 USDG after depositing 3000 USDG (pegged 1:1 = $3,000).
• To be clear, this works in increments of 500. So if you buy/deposit 1,200 USDG, you’ll only get 100 USDG for meeting the 1,000 USDG tier. You can make multiple deposits and it will track them and add them up. See my screenshot of the tracker below.
• Your rewards make take up to 5 minutes to reflect.
• Rewards must be held for 90 days before you can use, trade, or withdraw them.

Please perform your own due diligence on crypto apps. They are not regulated on the same level as bank account or brokerage accounts. I usually don’t like to keep significant funds in there any longer than is required for the bonus to clear, but in this case the reward/risk ratio for 90 days is acceptable to me. Here is the OKX Wikipedia page and they are profiled in the Forbes article “The World’s Most Trustworthy Crypto Exchanges”. (Also see: Kraken and Gemini bonuses.)

As it nears its 30th anniversary, Pitchfork is testing user reviews and comments in a major shift from its long-standing critic-only model. The site will now let readers rate albums and leave comments, combining those into an aggregated "reader score" alongside the official Pitchfork score. The Verge reports: Pitchfork has historically been a one-sided affair. While it ran the occasional reader poll, there was no way for readers to directly voice their opinion on the site. If you thought that Jet's Shine On deserved better than a 0.0 (first off, you're wrong), there was no way to let the author know other than shouting into the void of this new thing at the time called Twitter. Now the site is considering letting users comment directly on reviews and give albums scores of their own. And then those scores will be averaged up into a single reader score for each album.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “Resolute Raccoon” Daily Builds Are Now Available for Download  9to5Linux

Google is migrating all its internal workloads to run on both x86 and its custom Axion Arm chips, with major services like YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery already running on both architectures. The Register reports: The search and ads giant documented its move in a preprint paper published last week, titled "Instruction Set Migration at Warehouse Scale," and in a Wednesday post that reveals YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery already run on both x86 and its Axion Arm CPUs -- as do around 30,000 more applications. Both documents explain Google's migration process, which engineering fellow Parthasarathy Ranganathan and developer relations engineer Wolff Dobson said started with an assumption "that we would be spending time on architectural differences such as floating point drift, concurrency, intrinsics such as platform-specific operators, and performance." [...] The post and paper detail work on 30,000 applications, a collection of code sufficiently large that Google pressed its existing automation tools into service -- and then built a new AI tool called "CogniPort" to do things its other tools could not. [...] Google found the agent succeeded about 30 percent of the time under certain conditions, and did best on test fixes, platform-specific conditionals, and data representation fixes. That's not an enormous success rate, but Google has at least another 70,000 packages to port. The company's aim is to finish the job so its famed Borg cluster manager -- the basis of Kubernetes -- can allocate internal workloads in ways that efficiently utilize Arm servers. Doing so will likely save money, because Google claims its Axion-powered machines deliver up to 65 percent better price-performance than x86 instances, and can be 60 percent more energy-efficient. Those numbers, and the scale of Google's code migration project, suggest the web giant will need fewer x86 processors in years to come.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants -- already a daily information gateway for millions of people -- routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. The intensive international study of unprecedented scope and scale was launched at the EBU News Assembly, in Naples. Involving 22 public service media (PSM) organizations in 18 countries working in 14 languages, it identified multiple systemic issues across four leading AI tools. Professional journalists from participating PSM evaluated more than 3,000 responses from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity against key criteria, including accuracy, sourcing, distinguishing opinion from fact, and providing context. Key findings: - 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue. - 31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems - missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions. - 20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information. - Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance. - Comparison between the BBC's results earlier this year and this study show some improvements but still high levels of errors. The team has released a News Integrity in AI Assistants Toolkit to help develop solutions to these problems and boost users' media literacy. They're also urging regulators to enforce laws on information integrity and continue independent monitoring of AI assistants.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenBSD 7.8 has been released, adding Raspberry Pi 5 support, enhanced AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV-ES) capabilities, and expanded hardware compatibility including new Qualcomm, Rockchip, and Apple ARM drivers. Phoronix reports: OpenBSD 7.8 also brings multiple improvements around enabling AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (AMD SEV) support with support for the PSP ioctl for encrypting and measuring state for SEV-ES, a new VMD option to run guests in SEV-ES mode, and other enablement work pertaining to that AMD SEV work in SEV-ES form at this point as a precursor to SEV-SNP. AMD SEV-ES should be working to start confidential virtual machines (VMs) when using the VMM/VMD hypervisor and the OpenBSD guests with KVM/QEMU. OpenBSD 7.8 also improves compatibility of the FUSE file-system support with the Linux implementation, suspend/hibernate improvements, SMP improvements, updating to the Linux 6.12.50 DRM graphics drivers, several new Rockchip drivers, Raspberry Pi RP1 drivers, H.264 video support for the uvideo driver, and many network driver improvements. The changelog and download page can be found via OpenBSD.org.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung has officially launched the Galaxy XR, the first Android headset powered by Google's new Android XR platform. Priced at $1,800 without controllers, the device features dual 4.3K Micro-OLED displays, a Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip, extensive camera tracking, and deep Gemini AI integration. Ars Technica reports: Galaxy XR is a fully enclosed headset with passthrough video. It looks similar to the Apple Vision Pro, right down to the battery pack at the end of a cable. It packs solid hardware, including 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 processor. That's a slightly newer version of the chip powering Meta's Quest 3 headset, featuring six CPU cores and an Adreno GPU that supports up to dual 4.3K displays. The new headset has a pair of 3,552 x 3,840 Micro-OLED displays with a 109-degree field of view. That's marginally more pixels than the Vision Pro and almost three times as many as the Quest 3. The displays can refresh at up to 90Hz, but the default is 72Hz to save power. Like other XR (extended reality) devices, the Galaxy XR is covered with cameras. There are two 6.5 MP stereoscopic cameras that stream your surroundings to the high-quality screens, allowing the software to add virtual elements on top. There are six more outward-facing cameras for headset positioning and hand tracking. Four more cameras are on the inside for eye-tracking, and they can scan your iris for secure unlocking and password fill (in select apps). Samsung says the Galaxy XR has enough juice for two hours of general use or two and a half hours of video. That's not terribly long, but you may not want to wear the 545 grams (1.2 pounds) headset for even two hours. That's even a little heavier than the Quest 3, which has an integrated battery. However, both pale in comparison to the 800 g (1.7 pounds) second-generation Vision Pro.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux supercharges the ROG Xbox Ally X — higher FPS, smoother performance, and a big win for handheld gaming  Windows Central

Linux supercharges the ROG Xbox Ally X — higher FPS, smoother performance, and a big win for handheld gaming  Windows Central

Linux supercharges the ROG Xbox Ally X — higher FPS, smoother performance, and a big win for handheld gaming  Windows Central

Linux supercharges the ROG Xbox Ally X — higher FPS, smoother performance, and a big win for handheld gaming  Windows Central

Linux supercharges the ROG Xbox Ally X — higher FPS, smoother performance, and a big win for handheld gaming  Windows Central

Linux supercharges the ROG Xbox Ally X — higher FPS, smoother performance, and a big win for handheld gaming  Windows Central

Linux supercharges the ROG Xbox Ally X — higher FPS, smoother performance, and a big win for handheld gaming  Windows Central

Linux supercharges the ROG Xbox Ally X — higher FPS, smoother performance, and a big win for handheld gaming  Windows Central

Linux supercharges the ROG Xbox Ally X — higher FPS, smoother performance, and a big win for handheld gaming  Windows Central

Linux supercharges the ROG Xbox Ally X — higher FPS, smoother performance, and a big win for handheld gaming  Windows Central

Linux supercharges the ROG Xbox Ally X — higher FPS, smoother performance, and a big win for handheld gaming  Windows Central

Linux supercharges the ROG Xbox Ally X — higher FPS, smoother performance, and a big win for handheld gaming  Windows Central