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Goldman Sachs Launches AI-Free Index

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 18:20

Goldman Sachs has launched an "S&P ex-AI" index (SPXXAI) that tracks the S&P 500 stocks not related to AI, offering investors a way to "hedge their exposure to the AI trade," reports Axios. From the report: "Excluding 'AI enablers' from the passive benchmark would eliminate the noise introduced by the AI hype," Louis Miller, head of the firm's equity custom basket desk, wrote in a note to clients about the new index. The ex-AI index is a compilation of all the stocks in the S&P 500 that are not related to AI, also referred to as old-economy stocks. It's available exclusively to Goldman customers, created in collaboration with S&P Dow Jones Indices. Taking all the AI out of the S&P doesn't leave much behind, as AI companies make up ~45% of the index, according to the note. Over the last three years, the S&P 500 is up 76%. The ex-AI index is only up 32% in that same time period.

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I replaced my standard Linux coreutils with Rust versions and it’s surprisingly faster - MakeUseOf

Linux News - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 18:01

I replaced my standard Linux coreutils with Rust versions and it’s surprisingly faster MakeUseOf

Categories: Linux

Wikipedia Blacklists Archive.today, Starts Removing 695,000 Archive Links

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 17:40

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog. In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases. "There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it," stated an update today on Wikipedia's Archive.today discussion. "There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users' computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today's operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable." More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site, which is facing an investigation in which the FBI is trying to uncover the identity of its founder, is commonly used to bypass news paywalls. "Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability," said today's Wikipedia update. "However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC [request for comment] and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today."

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Phil Spencer Retiring After 38 Years At Microsoft

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 17:00

Xbox chief and Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is leaving Microsoft after nearly 40 years at the company. "Meanwhile, Xbox President Sarah Bond, "long thought by many both inside and outside of Microsoft to be Spencer's heir apparent, has resigned," reports IGN. From the report: The new CEO of Microsoft Gaming will be Asha Sharma, currently the President of Microsoft's CoreAI product. Finally, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is being promoted to Chief Content Officer and will work closely with Sharma. "I want to thank Phil for his extraordinary leadership and partnership," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an email sent to Microsoft staff. "Over 38 years at Microsoft, including 12 years leading Gaming, Phil helped transform what we do and how we do it." [...] Spencer was named Head of Xbox in March of 2014, when he was tasked with righting a ship that had made a number of product choices and policy decisions that rubbed core gamers the wrong way in the run-up to the launch of the Xbox One in Fall 2013. Long hailed by gamers as being one of their own, Spencer could frequently be found on Xbox Live, playing games regularly with fellow Xbox gamers and racking up a healthy Gamerscore. His first major move when put in charge was decoupling the Kinect 2.0 peripheral from the Xbox One package, thus immediately reducing the new console's price by $100 to $399, matching the day-one price of Sony's PlayStation 4. He spearheaded the much-heralded backwards compatibility movement within Xbox, the Xbox Game Pass service was born under his watch, and accessibility made major advances during his tenure in both hardware and software. Xbox Play Anywhere, which sought to let gamers play their Xbox games on any device, be it a PC, console, or handheld, isn't new but has been a big recent focal point. Spencer's time running Xbox will perhaps be most remembered for Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard-King in 2022, which took almost two years to achieve regulatory approval from various agencies around the world. But Spencer began trying to solve for Xbox's dearth of first-party games in 2018, when the first wave of studio acquisitions occurred. Prior to the Activision deal, Spencer's biggest move came with the $7.5 billion acquisition of ZeniMax, parent company of Bethesda, in 2020. The deal gave Xbox total ownership of Bethesda Game Studios and its Fallout and Elder Scrolls franchises along with id Software and its Doom and Quake IPs, among many others. Questions arose from there about whether or not that meant all of Xbox's new studios would produce games exclusively for Xbox consoles, and while some games were kept off of PlayStation platforms temporarily, many weren't and most now seem to come to PS5 eventually, if not on day one.

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Microsoft Deletes Blog Telling Users To Train AI on Pirated Harry Potter Books

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 16:20

Microsoft pulled a year-old blog post this week after a Hacker News thread flagged that it had encouraged developers to download all seven Harry Potter books from a Kaggle dataset -- incorrectly marked as public domain -- and use them to train AI models on the company's Azure platform. The blog, written in November 2024 by senior product manager Pooja Kamath, walked users through building Q&A systems and generating fan fiction using the copyrighted texts, and even included a Microsoft-branded AI image of Harry Potter. The Kaggle dataset's uploader, data scientist Shubham Maindola, told Ars Technica the public domain label was "a mistake" and deleted the dataset after the outlet reached out.

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You can control your Linux PC from your Android phone - here's how - ZDNET

Linux News - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 16:06

You can control your Linux PC from your Android phone - here's how ZDNET

Categories: Linux

I tried Mint, Kubuntu, and Debian — here’s what actually matters for Windows refugees - MakeUseOf

Linux News - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 16:00

I tried Mint, Kubuntu, and Debian — here’s what actually matters for Windows refugees MakeUseOf

Categories: Linux

OpenAI Has No Moat, No Tech Edge, No Lock-in and No Real Plan, Analyst Warns

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 15:44

OpenAI faces four fundamental strategic problems that no amount of fundraising or capex announcements can paper over, according to analyst Benedict Evans: it has no unique technology, its enormous user base is shallow and fragile, incumbents like Google and Meta are leveraging superior distribution to close the gap, and its product roadmap is dictated by whatever the research labs happen to discover rather than by deliberate product strategy. The company claims 800-900 million weekly active users, but 80% of them sent fewer than 1,000 messages across all of 2025, averaging fewer than three prompts a day, and only 5% pay. OpenAI has acknowledged what it calls a "capability gap" between what models can do and what people use them for -- a framing Evans reads as a polite way to avoid admitting the absence of product-market fit. Gemini and Meta AI are meanwhile gaining share rapidly because the products look nearly indistinguishable to typical users, and Google and Meta already have the distribution to push them. Evans compares ChatGPT to Netscape -- an early leader in a category where the products were hard to tell apart, overtaken by a competitor that used distribution as a crowbar. On capex, Evans argues that Altman's ambitions -- claiming $1.4 trillion and 30 gigawatts of future compute -- amount to an attempt to will OpenAI into a seat at a table where annual infrastructure spending may need to reach hundreds of billions. But a seat at the table is not leverage over it; he compares this to TSMC, which holds a de facto chip monopoly yet captures little value further up the stack. OpenAI's own strategy diagrams from late last year laid out a full-stack platform vision -- chips, models, developer tools, consumer products -- each layer reinforcing the others. Evans argues this borrows the language of Windows and iOS without possessing any of the underlying dynamics: no network effect, no lock-in preventing developers from calling a different model's API, and no reason customers would know or care which foundation model powers the product they are using.

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Several Meta Employees Have Started Calling Themselves 'AI Builders'

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 15:05

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta product managers are rebranding. Some are now calling themselves "AI builders," a signal that AI coding tools are changing who gets to build software inside the company. One of them, Jeremie Guedj, announced the change in a LinkedIn post last week. "I still can't believe I'm writing this: as of today, my full-time job at Meta is AI Builder," he wrote. Guedj has spent more than a decade as a traditional product manager, a role that sets the road map and strategy for products then built by engineering teams. He said that while his title in Meta's internal systems still lists him as a product manager, his actual work is now full-time building with AI on what he calls an "AI-native team." Another Meta product manager also lists "AI Builder" on her LinkedIn profile, while at least two other Meta engineers write the term in their bios, Business Insider found.

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Intel Hiring More Linux Developers - Including For GPU Drivers / Linux Gaming Stack - Phoronix

Linux News - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 13:49

Intel Hiring More Linux Developers - Including For GPU Drivers / Linux Gaming Stack Phoronix

Categories: Linux