Tom Lane deleted `array_nulls` in PostgreSQL 20, but `pg_dump` never set it, so restores into databases with it disabled silently corrupt text arrays. (I consult on PostgreSQL through PGX Inc..)
A new electrochemical process developed by researchers at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, could...
MIT researchers have developed a soft sensor that recreates its own three-dimensional shape as it...
The United States is soon to get a new facility, which will support the B-21...
A new electric vehicle battery design could extend battery lifespan by more than 20 percent...
The United States is soon to get a new generation of missile-tracking ships. For this,...
Anthropic will prohibit users from repeatedly abusing its Claude models without a meaningful purpose under...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Trump administration is suspending Microsoft, Adobe, and several other technology companies from a program that helps skilled foreign workers obtain permanent residency in the United States, accusing the companies of fraud. "Our message to Microsoft is: You're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers," U.S. Vice President JD Vance said in a news conference on Thursday, Reuters reported. The other firms being suspended from the program include Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata, and Wipro. Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling said the government would not accept any new or pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies. H-1B visas are designed for highly skilled positions that employers may struggle to fill with qualified U.S. workers. Tech companies are among the largest users of the program, with nearly three-quarters of approved visas going to workers from India, according to The Associated Press. Vance also said during the news conference that the administration would investigate nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, over allegations they're abusing a program that allows international students to come to the U.S. and were using the program to undermine wages for American workers. "We believe in the strength and talent of the American workforce," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "That is why the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans. We look forward to providing the Administration with additional information. For example, of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% percent were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees." "These were not to hire new people. The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
UK researchers are developing a new method to extract lithium for batteries using engineered proteins...
Flathub reverses its ban on AI-generated apps, introducing mandatory disclosure requirements while keeping restrictions on automated submissions.
BAE Systems has won a $230.1 million contract from the U.S. Marine Corps to produce...
In 1996, the Blondin family drove all around the US, blogging about it all before “blog” was even a word. “We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.”
Swiss weather technology company Meteomatics has unveiled a multicopter drone that it says reached an...
Yay, “That time of the year”™ again soon 🎉 This time maybe with a bit more fuzz / excitement / anxiety as usual - due to various obstacles surrounding the release as detailed in a few recent posts by various people. Not going into the “Is AI to blame or...
President Donald Trump awarded Elon Musk the National Medal of Science on Thursday, praising the...
The OpenID Foundation has submitted comments to EMVCo on the EMV® Agentic Payments – Framework for Specifications v1.0 DRAFT. As AI agents increasingly act on behalf of consumers, every payment raises an identity question: who is the agent, and what has the consumer authorized it to do? The line between payments and identity is beginning […] The post OIDF responds to EMVCo Agentic Payments framework draft first appeared on OpenID Foundation.
Agustín Ferrando Trenchi became a little obsessed with the moon as a kid. As an adult, he’s taken tons of photos and hundreds of hours of footage of the moon. After seeing an airplane fly close to the moon while he filmed, Trenchi began a quest to capture a plane flying across the face of the moon. Over the course of 10 years, he took photos and videos of birds and statues silhouetted by the moon, but planes eluded him. I realized if I wanted to film this, I was going to have to try a different approach. It wasn’t just going to happen by accident. So in February of this year, taking advantage of being in London, I decided to go near one of the busiest airports in the world to maximize my odds as much as possible.But while we were on our way, I had second thoughts. I felt like it took the fun out of it. It didn’t make sense to force it that much either. So we got off. I’m not going to spoil the video, but the whole thing is just so lovely — a meditation on obsessions, journeys, and finding meaning in your life. (via virginia) Tags: Agustín Ferrando Trenchi · Moon · photography · video
PhotoPrism's October 2026 update improves AI image recognition, adds NVIDIA GPU acceleration, and enhances face detection and photo management.
Amazon Prime Video will become the exclusive global home of the Emmy Awards under a six-year deal beginning in 2027, the Television Academy announced on Tuesday. The Emmys will stream live for free to viewers in more than 240 countries and territories without requiring a Prime subscription. From the report: In the release, Prime Video was named as the "permanent home" for the Emmys, in contrast to the rotating agreement in place years prior. The switch ends the traditional "wheel-deal" setup to broadcast the awards, where ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox took turns hosting the Emmys each year. The system has been in place since at least 1994, with the most recent eight-year contract expiring this year. "Television has never been more global, and the Emmys should be a celebration that the world can share," Television Academy chair Cris Abrego said in a statement. "Having a dedicated home with Prime Video allows us to build on that legacy with unprecedented global reach and a broader commitment to the Television Academy and our mission throughout the year." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Trump administration has suspended major tech firms, including Microsoft, Adobe and Cognizant, from a...
Abolish Frat Culture. “This is going to be uncomfortable for anyone with a kid in a fraternity to hear: If your son finds himself in a group that would send a ‘free pussy’ text, it’s too late. The group is the disease, the text is the symptom.”
Chinese researchers have recently come up with a new bamboo-reinforced plastic that is 81 percent...
Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.12 improves image writing reliability, fixes WPA3 Wi-Fi configuration, and addresses Linux AppImage issues.
Any Human Ever randomly picks an average person from some point in human history and tells you about what their life was like. Mine was a woman born in 1547: “Of all the sounds of her life, the loudest were thunder and the church bells.”
The US has reportedly launched its first new lithium mining plant in the last five...
COSMIC Desktop 1.10 enables wGPU rendering in its launcher and introduces compositor improvements alongside updated desktop applications.
Scientists have figured out how to make a cheap, water-based device that turns low-grade waste...
GStreamer 1.28.8 brings security fixes, resolves HLS and DASH playback regressions, and improves FLAC seeking, video encoding, and stability.
One of the most powerful aircraft carrier strike group of the United States launched more...
Engineers in Siberia have installed two 95-ton steam separators at the BREST-OD-300 nuclear reactor. The...
On September 30, AWS announced that Aurora PostgreSQL can now query Apache Iceberg and Parquet data directly. That brings the number of things a vendor might mean by “Postgres reads Iceberg” to at least four, and they have about as much in common as the four things a vendor might mean by “serverl… (I consult on PostgreSQL through PGX Inc..)
Mamdani’s “Richard Scarry Socialism” Can Make City Life Simple Again. “It is an astonishing indictment of our times that the cities of our picture books can seem like a radical utopia.”
Ancient Slashdot reader williamyf writes: If you thought the gender pay gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again: A recent study from the University of Limerick found that, in a VR office setting, AI agents -- not even humanoid robots -- that presented themselves as "male" were paid more per task and perceived as more "human-like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail, and harness). The pay gap was approximately 10%. The study was conducted with 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for thought. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The maiden flight of the first Gripen E fighter aircraft produced in Brazil has been...
French defense startup Harmattan AI has unveiled IRIFI, an autonomous long-range strike system designed to...
Home energy storage is being revamped. The 48 V residential energy storage system (RESS) developed...
Keeping an electric car warm draws on the same battery that powers its wheels. Researchers...
Late in his life, the prominent English mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was subject to an attempt in the early 1960s by Oswald Mosley to provoke him into a debate about the merits of fascism. Before WWII, Mosley had founded the British Union of Fascists. BUF had a corps of paramilitary personnel, nicknamed “Blackshirts” for their uniform color, at its disposal and Mosley “publicly espoused antisemitism and sought alliances with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler”.1 After the war and having left Britain in disgrace, he was an early Holocaust denier. From Wikipedia: Mosley was a pioneer in the emergence of Holocaust-denial. While not denying the existence of Nazi concentration camps, he claimed that they were a necessity to hold “a considerable disaffected population”, where problems were caused by lack of supplies due to “incessant bombing” by the Allies, with bodies burned in gas chambers due to typhus outbreaks, rather than being created by the Nazis to exterminate people. He sought to discredit pictures taken in places like Buchenwald and Belsen. He also claimed that the Holocaust was to be blamed on the Jews and that Adolf Hitler knew nothing about it. With all that as context, Russell wrote a letter to Oswald in January 1962 emphatically declining his invitation to engage in discourse about fascism: Dear Sir Oswald,Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.Yours sincerely,Bertrand Russell That’s how it’s done. Fascists and authoritarians are often personally shitty as well. “During his marriage to Cynthia, Mosley engaged in an extended affair with his wife’s younger sister, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, while also carrying on a separate affair with their stepmother Grace, who had been a widow since her husband’s death in 1925.” During his marriages, Mosley apparently also slept with the wives of friends, another of his first wife’s sisters, and several other women. ↩ Tags: Bertrand Russell · fascism · Oswald Mosley · politics
A Youtuber has built a 27-foot-long experimental blimp that uses hot air instead of helium...
General Dynamics Mission Systems (GDMS) and the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Aviation...
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has added Atom Computing, Diraq, IonQ, and IBM...
David Duong started his business 34 years ago with eight used collection trucks that he...
The Global Rise of Electoral Dictatorships. Is the U.S. Next? “Electoral dictators — who identify as presidents and prime ministers — hold uncompetitive and unfair elections after aggressively suppressing political opponents.”
A uranium storage hall completed in 2014 has now officially entered service at Urenco’s enrichment...
The world’s largest penguin colony has shrunk by two-thirds since 2011, with climate change the...
Microsoft releases LiteBox 0.1, an open-source Library OS written in Rust, designed to isolate applications and reduce security risks.
The OpenID Foundation membership has approved the following specification as an OpenID Final Specification: OpenID Connect Ephemeral Subject Identifier 1.0: https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-ephemeral-subject-identifier-1_0-final.html A Final Specification provides intellectual property protections to implementers of the specification and is not subject to further revision. This specification is a product of the OpenID Connect Working group. The voting results were: […] The post OpenID Connect Ephemeral Subject Identifier 1.0 Final Specification Approved first appeared on OpenID Foundation.
Elon Musks Firma beschafft sich 40 Milliarden Dollar, um Nvidia-Chips zu kaufen. Der Grund: Gewinne macht SpaceX keine.
The numeric type has existed in Postgres for more than 25 years. Over that time, it has undergone many optimisations and refinements. And yet operations on this type - aggregation in particular - still look rather inefficient.Since the PostgreSQL community always fixes problems with more or less simple and obvious solutions, let's find out whether numeric has structural limitations that prevent the DBMS operators for this type from working faster.To make the investigation more visual, let's also trace how DuckDB solves the same tasks - luckily, AI agents have made source-code analysis and testing much easier.One thing to keep in mind here: DuckDB is built exclusively for OLAP queries. That means, as I noted earlier, it places weaker demands on the exactness of operations - and, as you will see below, the DuckDB developer team actively uses this to make query execution more efficient.ContentsThe teaserFour decisions Postgres pays forHow an exact decimal type is built insideThe numeric implementation in PostgreSQLThe DECIMAL implementation in DuckDBPass by value or by referenceTuple deformingThe scale of an intermediate resultManaging the precision of intermediate results in numericManaging the precision of intermediate results in decimalThe cost of being decimalWhere we are goingThe TeaserTo avoid making empty claims, let me draw your attention to the two EXPLAINs below. The first one groups the rows of a table by a set of 12 numeric columns.The second is exactly the same query, but the columns have type double precision - for the sake of the test, we have neglected exactness.Almost a threefold speedup! Note that the double-precision variant had to scan more disk pages (125 thousand versus 111 thousand). However, aggregation over numeric data requires 9 times as much memory. What is the reason for such a negative effect on performance after 25+ years of optimising this type? Can it be reduced somehow, or removed altogether? Let's dig into the fundamentals and try to understand what is going on.It would seem the question is about decimal arithmetic. However, three independent attempts to make a fast decimal type as an extension - pgDecimal by Pavel Stehule, pgdecimal2 by Feng Tian, and fixeddecimal by 2ndQuadrant - have stalled, although each of them did speed up the arithmetic. So it is not only about arithmetic, and the situation is a bit more complicated.Four Dec
A short (too short?) video from Little White Lies on designer Saul Bass and his influence on the art of movie title design. They also did videos on Pablo Ferro and Kyle Cooper.
Google has released Chrome 155 with support for decoding JPEG XL images, a format that offers 30-50% better compression than JPEG along with lossless compression, JPEG transcoding, HDR, animation, and progressive decoding. From a blog post: We expect that JPEG XL is most helpful for high-fidelity or lossless compression, especially of photographic images or in cases in which fine-grained progressive decoding is preferred. In this post, we share why we brought JPEG XL to Chrome, how we used Rust to ensure memory safety first, the extensive performance work that makes it fast, and what the journey tells us about developer feedback and the web standards ecosystem. [...] With JPEG XL officially landing in Chrome, the web becomes faster, richer, and safer. We encourage developers, content creators, and platform owners to start using .jxl images and animations in their pipelines. Try it out, file bugs, and help us continue building a faster and safer web for everyone. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Engineers at EPFL in Switzerland have built a flexible motor that looks like a thread...
We are no longer accepting new security reports for the Django project through HackerOne. Existing reports submitted through HackerOne will remain open and continue to be handled by the Django Security Team. If you discover a security issue in Django, please follow the reporting process described in the Django security policies. Security issues should be reported by emailing security@djangoproject.com
Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a soft underwater robot inspired by feather...
KDE Gear 26.08.2 brings bug fixes to Kdenlive, NeoChat, Dolphin, Okular, and other KDE applications, along with updated translations.