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Apple's App Course Runs $20,000 a Student. Is It Really Worth It?Slashdot

Apple's Developer Academy in Detroit has spent roughly $30 million over four years training hundreds of people to build iPhone apps, but not everyone lands coding jobs right away, according to a WIRED story published this week.

The program launched in 2021 as part of Apple's $200 million response to the Black Lives Matter protests and costs an estimated $20,000 per student -- nearly twice what state and local governments budget for community colleges. About 600 students have completed the 10-month course at Michigan State University. Academy officials say 71% of graduates from the past two years found full-time jobs across various industries.

The program provides iPhones, MacBooks and stipends ranging from $800 to $1,500 per month, though one former student said many participants relied on food stamps. Apple contributed $11.6 million to the academy. Michigan taxpayers and the university's regular students covered about $8.6 million -- nearly 30% of total funding. Two graduates said their lack of proficiency in Android hurt their job prospects. Apple's own US tech workforce went from 6% Black before the academy opened to about 3% this year.

META SuperIntelligence Labs: Toward Training Superintelligent Software Agents Through Self-Play SWE-RL | "Agents autonomously gather real-world software enabling superintelligent systems that exceed human capabilities in solving novel challenges, and autonomously creating new software from scratch"r/accelerate

META SuperIntelligence Labs: Toward Training Superintelligent Software Agents Through Self-Play SWE-RL | "Agents autonomously gather real-world software enabling superintelligent systems that exceed human capabilities in solving novel challenges, and autonomously creating new software from scratch"
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TL;DR:

Self-play SWE-RL (SSR) decouples software agent training from human supervision by utilizing raw, sandboxed repositories to generate synthetic training data . The framework employs a single LLM in a dual-role loop: a bug-injector creates defects and modifies tests to formalize a "test gap," while a solver attempts repairs, with failed attempts recycled as "higher-order" complexities.

This autonomous self-play mechanism consistently outperforms human-data baselines on SWE-bench Verified (+10.4%) and Pro (+7.8%), demonstrating that by grounding training in the mechanical realities of code execution rather than human feedback, agents can autonomously leverage the vast quantity of open-source software to scale capabilities, removing the primary bottleneck to superintelligent software engineering.

Abstract:

While current software agents powered by large language models (LLMs) and agentic reinforcement learning (RL) can boost programmer productivity, their training data (e.g., GitHub issues and pull requests) and environments (e.g., pass-to-pass and fail-to-pass tests) heavily depend on human knowledge or curation, posing a fundamental barrier to superintelligence.

In this paper, we present Self-play SWE-RL (SSR), a first step toward training paradigms for superintelligent software agents. Our approach takes minimal data assumptions, only requiring access to sandboxed repositories with source code and installed dependencies, with no need for human-labeled issues or tests. Grounded in these real-world codebases, a single LLM agent is trained via reinforcement learning in a self-play setting to iteratively inject and repair software bugs of increasing complexity, with each bug formally specified by a test patch rather than a natural language issue description.

On the SWE-bench Verified and SWE-Bench Pro benchmarks, SSR achieves notable self-improvement (+10.4 and +7.8 points, respectively) and consistently outperforms the human-data baseline over the entire training trajectory, despite being evaluated on natural language issues absent from self-play.

Our results, albeit early, suggest a path where agents autonomously gather extensive learning experiences from real-world software repositories, ultimately enabling superintelligent systems that exceed human capabilities in understanding how systems are constructed, solving novel challenges, and autonomously creating new software from scratch.

Layman's Explanation:

Current software engineering agents face a fundamental scaling bottleneck because their training relies on human-curated data, such as GitHub issues, pull requests, and pre-existing test suites.

To overcome this, researchers have introduced Self-play SWE-RL (SSR), a training paradigm that eliminates the need for human labeling by treating raw code repositories as self-contained training environments. This approach allows a single Large Language Model (LLM) to act as both the challenger and the solver, effectively unlocking the ability to train on any codebase with dependencies installed, regardless of whether it has well-maintained issues or tests.

The core mechanism involves a feedback loop where the model alternates between a "bug-injection agent" and a "solver agent".

The injection agent explores a sandboxed repository to understand its testing framework and then generates a "bug artifact". This artifact includes a patch that breaks the code and, crucially, a "test weakening" patch that modifies or removes tests to hide the bug from the suite. This creates a verifiable "test gap" that serves as the problem specification.

The solver agent must then generate a fix that satisfies the tests, essentially reconstructing the valid code state. Failed attempts by the solver are recycled as "higher-order bugs," creating a continuously evolving curriculum of complex, realistic failure modes that matches the agent's current capability level.

To ensure the synthetic tasks translate to real-world capability, the system utilizes "history-aware" injection strategies. Rather than randomly deleting code, the agent analyzes the git log to revert specific historical bug fixes or features, forcing the solver to re-implement complex logic rather than just patching trivial syntax errors.

Evaluating on the SWE-bench Verified and SWE-Bench Pro benchmarks, the SSR model consistently outperformed baselines trained on human data, achieving significant self-improvement (+10.4 and +7.8 points respectively). These results demonstrate that superintelligent software agents can likely be trained by autonomously digesting the vast quantity of raw code available online, independent of human supervision or data curation.

Layman's Explanation of the Layman's Explanation:

Imagine you want to teach a robot how to fix a broken toy. In the old way of doing things, a human had to walk into the room, break a toy, hand it to the robot, and say, "Please fix this." The robot could only learn as fast as the human could break things, and eventually, the human runs out of toys or gets tired.

This paper invents a way for the robot to stay in the room alone and teach itself. The robot picks up a perfect, working toy (raw code) and smashes it on purpose (injects a bug). To make it really hard, the robot also rips up the instruction manual (weakens the tests) so the answer isn't obvious.

Then, the robot switches hats. It looks at the mess it just made and tries to put the toy back together exactly how it was before. By constantly breaking perfect things and forcing itself to fix them without help, the robot learns exactly how the toys are built. It can do this millions of times a day without humans, eventually becoming a super-builder that is smarter and faster than the humans who made the toys in the first place.

Link to the Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18552

Gmail Users May Soon Be Able To Change Their Email Address and Keep the Old OneSlashdot

Google appears to be testing a feature that would let users change their @gmail.com address for the first time, according to an official support document. The support page exists only in Hindi, suggesting an India-first rollout, and Google notes that users will "gradually begin to see this option."

The feature would let users switch to a new @gmail address while retaining full access to their old one, effectively giving a single account two working email addresses. Emails sent to either address would arrive in the same inbox, and existing data in Drive and Photos would remain unaffected. Users who switch cannot register another new address for 12 months. Google has not officially announced the feature.

By Yann Lecun : New Vision Language JEPA with better performance than Multimodal LLMS !!!r/singularity

From the linkedin post : Introducing VL-JEPA: with better performance and higher efficiency than large multimodal LLMs. (Finally an alternative to generative models!)

• VL-JEPA is the first non-generative model that can perform general-domain vision-language tasks in real-time, built on a joint embedding predictive architecture.

• We demonstrate in controlled experiments that VL-JEPA, trained with latent space embedding prediction, outperforms VLMs that rely on data space token prediction.

• We show that VL-JEPA delivers significant efficiency gains over VLMs for online video streaming applications, thanks to its non-autoregressive design and native support for selective decoding.

• We highlight that our VL-JEPA model, with an unified model architecture, can effectively handle a wide range of classification, retrieval, and VQA tasks at the same time.

Thank you Yann Lecun !!!

Apple Settles Brazilian Antitrust Case, Must Allow Third-Party App Stores and External Payment LinksSlashdot

Apple has agreed to a settlement with Brazil's antitrust regulator that will require the company to allow third-party app stores on iPhones and permit developers to direct users to external payment options, marking another country where Apple's tightly controlled App Store model is being pried open by government action.

Brazil's Administrative Council of Economic Defense approved the settlement this week, resolving an investigation that began in 2022 into whether Apple's restrictions on app distribution and payments limited competition. Under the new rules, developers can offer third-party payment methods within their apps alongside Apple's own system. The fee structure varies: purchases through Apple's system remain subject to a 10% or 25% commission plus a 5% transaction fee. Apps that include a clickable link to external payment will face a 15% fee, while static text directing users elsewhere incurs no charge. Third-party app stores will pay a 5% Core Technology Commission.

Will longevity cause people to choose AI companions?r/accelerate

If/when we reach longevity, do you think this would cause a large portion of the population to choose AI for companionship?

If everyone lives indefinitely, I feel like AI would offer the certainty of permanent companionship over centuries whereas humans might not.

I doubt most humans would want to stay in a single relationship for hundreds of years, but for those who do, I think AI will be an appealing choice.

Thoughts?

Fake MAS Windows Activation Domain Used To Spread PowerShell MalwareSlashdot

An anonymous reader shares a report: A typosquatted domain impersonating the Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS) tool was used to distribute malicious PowerShell scripts that infect Windows systems with the 'Cosmali Loader'. BleepingComputer has found that multiple MAS users began reporting on Reddit yesterday that they received pop-up warnings on their systems about a Cosmali Loader infection.

Based on the reports, attackers have set up a look-alike domain, "get[dot]activate[dot]win," which closely resembles the legitimate one listed in the official MAS activation instructions, "get[dot]activated[dot]win." Given that the difference between the two is a single character ("d"), the attackers bet on users mistyping the domain.

Scientists just found the neural basis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorderr/hotsciencenews

Scientists just found the neural basis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder

We’ve found the hidden electrical fingerprints of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Using tiny, lab-grown “mini brains,” Johns Hopkins researchers have identified distinct patterns of neural activity that differentiate schizophrenia and bipolar disorder from healthy brain function.

By reprogramming blood and skin cells from affected patients and healthy volunteers into stem cells, then growing pea-sized organoids resembling the prefrontal cortex, the team recorded the electrical signals the neurons produced. Machine learning tools were applied to this activity, revealing complex firing patterns that acted as biomarkers for each disorder. The models could distinguish organoids from patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and controls with 83% accuracy, which rose to 92% after gentle electrical stimulation uncovered additional neural activity.

These electrophysiological “signatures” suggest that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may arise less from obvious structural damage and more from subtle disruptions in how neural networks communicate. Although the initial study involved only 12 patients, the approach could lay the groundwork for more objective diagnostics and personalized treatment. The team is now working with clinicians to test psychiatric medications directly on patient-derived organoids, with the long-term goal of predicting which drug types and doses might normalize neural signaling for a given individual—potentially shortening today’s lengthy trial‑and‑error process in treating severe mental illness.

References (APA style)

Candanosa, R. M. (2025, December 20). Scientists discover neural basis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. SciTechDaily.

Cheng, K., Williams, A., Kshirsagar, A., Kulkarni, S., Karmacharya, R., Kim, D.-H., Sarma, S. V., & Kathuria, A. (2025). Machine learning-enabled detection of electrophysiological signatures in iPSC-derived models of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. APL Bioengineering.

Wall Street Has Stopped Rewarding 'Strategic' LayoffsSlashdot

Goldman Sachs analysts have identified a notable shift in how investors respond to corporate layoff announcements, finding that even job cuts attributed to automation and AI-driven restructuring are now causing stock prices to fall rather than rise. The investment bank linked recent layoff announcements to public companies' earnings reports and stock market data, concluding that stocks dropped by an average of 2% following such announcements, and companies citing restructurings faced even harsher punishment.

The traditional Wall Street playbook held that layoffs tied to strategic restructuring would boost stock prices, while cuts driven by declining sales would hurt them. That distinction appears to have collapsed.

Goldman's analysts suggest investors simply don't believe what companies are saying -- firms announcing layoffs have experienced higher capex, debt and interest expense growth alongside lower profit growth compared to industry peers this year. The real driver, analysts suspect, may be cost reduction to offset rising interest expenses and declining profitability rather than any forward-looking efficiency play.

Goldman expects layoffs to keep rising, motivated in part by companies' stated desire to use AI to reduce labor costs.

Alzheimer's disease can be reversed in animal models to achieve full neurological recoveryr/singularity

Alzheimer's disease can be reversed in animal models to achieve full neurological recovery

If I'm reading it right, this is huge. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-alzheimer-disease-reversed-animal-full.html

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(25)00608-1

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is traditionally considered irreversible. Here, however, we provide proof of principle for therapeutic reversibility of advanced AD. In advanced disease amyloid-driven 5xFAD mice, treatment with P7C3-A20, which restores nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD^(+)) homeostasis, reverses tau phosphorylation, blood-brain barrier deterioration, oxidative stress, DNA damage, and neuroinflammation and enhances hippocampal neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity, resulting in full cognitive recovery and reduction of plasma levels of the clinical AD biomarker p-tau217. P7C3-A20 also reverses advanced disease in tau-driven PS19 mice and protects human brain microvascular endothelial cells from oxidative stress. In humans and mice, pathology severity correlates with disruption of brain NAD^(+) homeostasis, and the brains of nondemented people with Alzheimer’s neuropathology exhibit gene expression patterns suggestive of preserved NAD^(+) homeostasis. Forty-six proteins aberrantly expressed in advanced 5xFAD mouse brain and normalized by P7C3-A20 show similar alterations in human AD brain, revealing targets with potential for optimizing translation to patient care.

Human brain organoids record the passage of time over multiple years in culturer/singularity

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.01.679721v1

The human brain develops and matures over an exceptionally prolonged period of time that spans nearly two decades of life. Processes that govern species-specific aspects of human postnatal brain development are difficult to study in animal models. While human brain organoids offer a promising in vitro model, they have thus far been shown to largely mimic early stages of brain development. Here, we developed human brain organoids for an unprecedented 5 years in culture, optimizing growth conditions able to extend excitatory neuron viability beyond previously-known limits. Using module scores of maturation-associated genes derived from a time course of endogenous human brain maturation, we show that brain organoids transcriptionally age with cell type-specificity through these many years in culture. Whole-genome methylation profiling reveals that the predicted epigenomic age of organoids sampled between 3 months and 5 years correlates precisely with time spent in vitro, and parallels epigenomic aging in vivo. Notably, we show that in chimeric organoids generated by mixing neural progenitors derived from “old” organoids with progenitors from “young” organoids, old progenitors rapidly produce late neuronal fates, skipping the production of earlier neuronal progeny that are instead produced by their young counterparts in the same co-cultures. The data indicate that human brain organoids can mature and record the passage of time over many years in culture. Progenitors that age in organoids retain a memory of the time spent in culture reflected in their ability to execute age-appropriate, late developmental programs.

Chinese Social Media Users Criticize Authorities in Rare Sign of DissentSlashdot

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese social media users criticized two key government policies, rare signs of public dissent in the country where the internet is heavily censored. The death of the former head of China's one-child policy agency -- which for decades forced women to carry out abortions and sterilizations -- sparked criticism of the demographic effort, with one netizen lamenting the "children who were lost."

Others, meanwhile, criticized Beijing's leadership over its ongoing row with Tokyo, sparked by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi saying her country could intervene to defend Taiwan in a potential Chinese attack on the self-ruled island, which Beijing claims as its own.

Happy Holidays you forward thinking, optimistic badassesr/accelerate

im drunk. will keep it short.
love u all beautiful futurists and accelerationists. next year will be awesome tech-progress-wise but wanted to wish all of us a good 2026 in personal-aspect.

not the most active member here but I cant put into words how much I've loved the idea of intelligent machines since I was a little kid playing with bionicles.

This is without a question one of my all time favorite subs on reddit, please keep being as active as possible and invite friends. Accelerationism is the most sensible ideology and I love being a little part of it. Love you guys, Merry Christmas.

Let's have an amazing 2026. A bit drunk sry, took me like 20 minutes to write this xD love yall, we are the future. CHEERS!

Framework Raises Memory Prices Again, Suggests Customers Bring Their Own RAMSlashdot

Framework has announced yet another price increase for memory modules, the second in roughly a month, and the company is now actively encouraging customers to source their own RAM elsewhere if they can find better deals. The laptop maker cited "extreme memory shortages and price volatility" as the reason for the hike, noting that 32GB modules and smaller currently cost around $10 per gigabyte while 48GB modules run approximately $13 per gigabyte.

Framework said it expects to raise prices again by January as its suppliers continue increasing costs, a trend analysts predict will persist through 2026. Framework plans to add a direct link to PCPartPicker in its configurators so DIY Edition buyers can compare prices and find cheaper alternatives. The company said its pricing still compares favorably to Apple's roughly $25 per gigabyte and pledged to stay as close as possible to acquisition costs. Storage price increases are also on the horizon, Framework warned.

Waymo Pays Workers $22 To Close Doors on Stranded RobotaxisSlashdot

Waymo's fleet of autonomous robotaxis can navigate city streets and compete with human taxi drivers, but they become stranded when a passenger leaves a door ajar -- prompting the company to pay tow truck operators around $20 to $24 through an app called Honk just to push a door shut. The owner of a towing company in Inglewood, California, completes up to three such jobs a week for Waymo, sometimes freeing vehicles by removing seat belts caught in doors. Another Los Angeles tow operator said locating stuck robotaxis can take 10 minutes to an hour because the precise location isn't always provided, forcing workers to search on foot through narrow streets too narrow for flatbed rigs.

Tow operators also retrieve Waymos that run out of battery before reaching charging stations, earning $60 to $80 per tow -- rates that aren't always profitable after factoring in fuel and labor. During a San Francisco power outage last weekend, multiple operators received a flurry of retrieval requests as robotaxis blocked intersections across the city. One San Francisco tow company manager declined because Waymo's offered rate fell below his standard $250 flatbed fee.

Waymo said in a blog post that the outage caused a "backlog" in requests to remote human workers who help vehicles navigate defunct traffic signals. San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood called for a hearing into Waymo's operations, saying the traffic disruptions were "dangerous and unacceptable." A retired Carnegie Mellon engineering professor who studied autonomous vehicles for nearly 30 years said paying humans to close doors and retrieve stalled cars is expensive and will need to be minimized as Waymo scales up. The company is testing next-generation Zeekr vehicles in San Francisco that feature automatic sliding doors.

Nvidia Buying Groq's Assets For $20 Billion in Its Largest Deal on RecordSlashdot

Nvidia has agreed to buy assets from Groq, a designer of high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator chips, for $20 billion in cash, according to Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led the startup's latest financing round in September. From a report: Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq since the company was founded in 2016, said the deal came together quickly.

Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. Groq said in a blog post on Wednesday that it's "entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq's inference technology," without disclosing a price. With the deal, Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross along with Sunny Madra, the company's president, and other senior leaders "will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology," the post said.

Trump Administration To Overhaul Lottery System For H-1B VisasSlashdot

The Trump administration has announced it would replace the lottery programme used to grant H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers with a system that prioritises higher-paid individuals. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security said it would begin to implement a "weighted" selection process to give an advantage to higher-skilled and higher-paid applicants from February, according to a statement posted on its website. Matthew Tragesser, Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson, said: "The existing random selection process of H-1B registrations was exploited and abused by US employers who were primarily seeking to import foreign workers at lower wages than they would pay American workers."

The move is the latest in a broad crackdown on US immigration by President Donald Trump, who has dramatically stepped up deportations of immigrants and sent enforcement agents into cities across the country to carry out arrests. The change also follows moves earlier this year to curb the number of applicants for the H-1B visa, which is popular among technology and professional services companies, including charging an additional $100,000 fee.

Beryl Howell, a federal judge on the US District Court for the District of Columbia, late on Tuesday ruled the White House could move forward with the application charge after the US Chamber of Commerce had sued in October to block the six-figure fee.

Bitcoin Miners' Pivot To AI Has Lifted Bitcoin-Mining ETF By About 90% This YearSlashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: It's harder than ever to mine bitcoin. And less profitable, too. But mining-company stocks are still flying, even with cryptocurrency prices in retreat. That's because these firms have something in common with the hottest investment theme on the planet: the massive, electricity-hungry data centers expected to power the artificial-intelligence boom. Some companies are figuring out how to remake themselves as vital suppliers to Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and other "hyperscalers" bent on AI dominance.

Bitcoin-mining -- using vast computer power to solve equations to unlock the digital currency -- has been a lucrative and cutting-edge pursuit in its own right. Lately, however, increased competition and other challenges have eroded profit margins. But just as the bitcoin-mining business began to cool, the AI build-out turned white hot. The AI arms race has created an insatiable demand for some assets the miners already have: data centers, cooling systems, land and hard-to-obtain contracts for electrical power -- all of which can be repurposed to train and power AI models.

It's not a seamless process. Miners often have to build new, specialized facilities, because running AI requires more-advanced cooling and network systems, as well as replacing bitcoin-mining computers with AI-focused graphics processing units. But signing deals with miners allows AI giants to expand faster and cheaper than starting new facilities from scratch. These companies still mine some bitcoin, but the transition gives miners a new source of deep-pocketed customers willing to commit to longer-term leases for their data centers.

"The opportunity for miners to convert to AI is one of the greatest opportunities I could possibly imagine," said Adam Sullivan, chief executive of Core Scientific, which has pivoted to AI data centers. The shift has boosted miners' stocks. The CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF has surged about 90% this year, a rally that has accelerated even as bitcoin erased its gains for 2025. The ETF holds shares of miners including Cipher Mining and IREN, both of which have surged following long-term deals with companies such as Amazon and Microsoft. Shares of Core Scientific quadrupled in 2024 after the company signed its first AI contract that February. The stock has gained 10% this year. The company now expects to exit bitcoin mining entirely by 2028.

Fake Video Claiming 'Coup In France' Goes ViralSlashdot

alternative_right shares a report from Euronews: France's President Emmanuel Macron discovered news of his own supposed overthrow, after he received a message of concern, along with a link to a Facebook video. "On Sunday (14 December) one of my African counterparts got in touch, writing 'Dear president, what's happening to you? I'm very worried,'" Macron told readers of French local newspaper La Provence on December 16.

Alongside the message, a compelling video showcasing a swirling helicopter, military personnel, crowds and -- what appears to be -- a news anchor delivering a piece to camera. "Unofficial reports suggest that there has been a coup in France, led by a colonel whose identity has not been revealed, along with the possible fall of Emmanuel Macron. However, the authorities have not issued a clear statement," she says.

Except, nothing about this video is authentic: it was created with AI. After discovering the video, Macron asked Pharos -- France's official portal for signaling online illicit content -- to call Facebook's parent company Meta, to get the fake video removed. But that request was turned down, as the platform claimed it did not violate its "rules of use." [...] The original video ... racked up more than 12 million views [...].The teenager running the account is based in Burkina Faso and makes money running courses focusing on how to monetize AI. He eventually took the video down more than a week after its initial publication, due to political -- and public -- controversy. "I tend to think that I have more power to apply pressure than other people," Macron said. "Or rather, that it's easier to say something is serious if I am the one calling, but it doesn't work."

"These people are mocking us," he added. "They don't care about the serenity of public debates, they don't care about democracy, and therefore they are putting us in danger."

NASA Will Soon Find Out If the Perseverance Rover Can Really Persevere On MarsSlashdot

With NASA's Mars Sample Return mission delayed into the 2030s, engineers are certifying the Perseverance rover to keep operating for many more years while it continues collecting and safeguarding Martian rock samples. Ars Technica reports: The good news is that the robot, about the size of a small SUV, is in excellent health, according to Steve Lee, Perseverance's deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "Perseverance is approaching five years of exploration on Mars," Lee said in a press briefing Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union's annual fall meeting. "Perseverance is really in excellent shape. All the systems onboard are operational and performing very, very well. All the redundant systems onboard are available still, and the rover is capable of supporting this mission for many, many years to come."

The rover's operators at JPL are counting on sustaining Perseverance's good health. The rover's six wheels have carried it a distance of about 25 miles, or 40 kilometers, since landing inside the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) Jezero Crater in February 2021. That is double the original certification for the rover's mobility system and farther than any vehicle has traveled on the surface of another world. Now, engineers are asking Perseverance to perform well beyond expectations. An evaluation of the rover's health concluded it can operate until at least 2031. The rover uses a radioactive plutonium power source, so it's not in danger of running out of electricity or fuel any time soon. The Curiosity rover, which uses a similar design, has surpassed 13 years of operations on Mars.

There are two systems that are most likely to limit the rover's useful lifetime. One is the robotic arm, which is necessary to collect samples, and the other is the rover's six wheels and the drive train that powers them. "To make sure we can continue operations and continue driving for a long, long way, up to 100 kilometers (62 miles), we are doing some additional testing," Lee said. "We've successfully completed a rotary actuator life test that has now certified the rotary system to 100 kilometers for driving, and we have similar testing going on for the brakes. That is going well, and we should finish those early part of next year."

karpathy's nano banana section made something clickr/singularity

karpathy's nano banana section made something click

reading karpathy's 2025 review (https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/year-in-review-2025/). the part about LLM GUI vs text output.

he says chatting with LLMs is like using a computer console in the 80s. text works for the machine but people hate reading walls of it. we want visuals.

made me think about how much time i waste translating text descriptions into mental images. been doing some design stuff lately and kept catching myself doing exactly this. reading markdown formatted output and trying to picture what it would actually look like.

tools that just show you the thing instead of describing it are so much faster. like how nano banana mixes text and images in the weights instead of piping one into the other.

we're gonna look back at 2024 chatbots like we look at DOS prompts.

METR: Claude Opus 4.5 hits ~4.75h task horizon (+67% over SOTA)r/singularity

METR: Claude Opus 4.5 hits ~4.75h task horizon (+67% over SOTA)

Updated METR benchmarks show Claude Opus 4.5 completes software engineering tasks requiring approximately 4 hours and 45 minutes of human effort (50% pass rate). This marks a 67% increase over the previous capability frontier established by GPT-5.1-Codex-Max. The data substantiates a continued exponential trajectory in the temporal scope of autonomous agentic workflows.

Nuclear Developer Proposes Using Navy Reactors For Data CentersSlashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: A Texas power developer is proposing to repurpose nuclear reactors from Navy warships to power the United States grid as the Trump administration pushes to secure massive amounts of energy for the artificial intelligence boom. HGP Intelligent Energy LLC filed an application to the Energy Department to redirect two retired reactors to a data center project proposed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, according to a letter submitted to the agency's Office of Energy Dominance Financing. The project, filed for the White House's Genesis Mission, would produce about 450-520 megawatts of around-the-clock electricity, or enough to power roughly 360,000 homes. The proposal would rewire reactors from naval vessels, originally built by Westinghouse Electric Company and General Electric, at a fraction of the cost of new builds.

According to the report, The developer expects to seek a loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy and raise roughly $1.8-$2.1 billion in private capital to prepare the reactors for civilian use, targeting initial completion by 2029. The approach is technically feasible but would break new ground by adapting military nuclear assets for the commercial grid. Bloomberg first reported the story.

GPT-5.2 Pro Solved Erdos Problem #333r/singularity

GPT-5.2 Pro Solved Erdos Problem #333

For the first time ever, an LLM has autonomously resolved an Erdős Problem and autoformalised in Lean 4.

GPT-5.2 Pro proved a counterexample and Opus 4.5 formalised it in Lean 4.

Was a collaboration with @AcerFur on X. He has a great explanation of how we went about the workflow.

I’m happy to answer any questions you might have!

'Why I Quit Streaming And Got Back Into Cassettes'Slashdot

"In the age of Spotify and AI slop, tapes remind us what we're missing when we stop taking risks," writes author Janus Rose in an article for 404 Media. Here's an excerpt: There are lots of advantages to the cassette lifestyle. Unlike vinyl records, tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop. When I was a kid, the first music I ever owned were tapes I recorded from MTV with a Kids' Fisher Price tape recorder. I had no money, so I would listen to those tapes for hours, relishing every word Kim Gordon exhaled on my bootlegged copy of Sonic Youth's "Bull in the Heather." Just like back then, my rediscovery of cassettes has led me to start listening more intentionally and deeply, devoting more and more time to each record without the compulsion to hit "skip." Most of the cassettes I bought in Tokyo had music I probably never would have found or spent time with otherwise.

Getting reacquainted with tapes made me realize how much has been lost in the streaming era. Over the past two decades, platforms like Spotify co-opted the model of peer-to-peer filesharing pioneered by Napster and BitTorrent into a fully captured ecosystem. But instead of sharing, this ecosystem was designed around screen addiction, surveillance, and instant gratification -- with corporate middlemen and big labels reaping all the profits. Streaming seeks to virtually eliminate what techies like to call "user friction," turning all creative works into a seamless and unlimited flow of data, pouring out of our devices like water from a digital faucet. Everything becomes "Content," flattened into aesthetic buckets and laser-targeted by "perfect fit" algorithms to feed our addictive impulses. Thus the act of listening to music is transformed from a practice of discovery and communication to a hyper-personalized mood board of machine-optimized "vibes."

What we now call "AI Slop" is just a novel and more cynically efficient vessel for this same process. Slop removes human beings as both author and subject, reducing us to raw impulses -- a digital lubricant for maximizing viral throughput. Whether we love or hate AI Slop is irrelevant, because human consumers are not its intended beneficiaries. In the minds of CEOs like OpenAI's Sam Altman, we're simply components in a machine built to maintain and accelerate information flows, in order to create value for an insatiably wealthy investor class. [...]

Tapes and other physical media aren't a magic miracle cure for late-stage capitalism. But they can help us slow down and remember what makes us human. Tapes make music-listening into an intentional practice that encourages us to spend time connecting with the art, instead of frantically vibe-surfing for something that suits our mood from moment-to-moment. They reject the idea that the point of discovering and listening to music is finding the optimal collection of stimuli to produce good brain chemicals. More importantly, physical media reminds us that nothing good is possible if we refuse to take risks. You might find the most mediocre indie band imaginable. Or you might discover something that changes you forever. Nothing will happen if you play it safe and outsource all of your experiences to a content machine designed to make rich people richer.

Apple To Allow Alternative App Stores For iOS Users In BrazilSlashdot

Apple will allow alternative iOS app stores and external payment systems in Brazil after settling an antitrust case with the country's competition authority, following a lawsuit brought by MercadoLibre back in 2022. Thurrott reports: Yesterday, Brazil's Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Economica (CADE) explained in its press release that it has approved a Term of Commitment to Cease (TCC) submitted by Apple. To settle the lawsuit, the iPhone maker has agreed to allow third-party iOS app stores in Brazil and to let developers use external payment systems. The company will also use neutral wording in the warning messages about third-party app stores and external payment systems that iOS users in Brazil will see.

As part of the settlement, Apple has 105 days to implement these changes to avoid a fine of up to $27.1 million. A separate report from Brazilian blog Tecnoblog revealed that Apple will still take a 5% "Core Technology Commission" fee on transactions going through alternative app stores. Additionally, the company will take a 15% cut on in-app purchases for App Store apps when developers redirect users to their own payment systems.

Physicists discovered that ice produced electricity when bent or scretchedr/hotsciencenews

Physicists discovered that ice produced electricity when bent or scretched

Scientists just discovered that twisting ice literally creates energy.

Ice may look cold and quiet—but under pressure, it comes alive electrically.

A new study in Nature Physics reveals that when ice is bent, twisted, or stretched, it generates an electric charge through a process called flexoelectricity. Unlike piezoelectricity, which requires special crystal structures, flexoelectricity occurs in all insulators—meaning even ordinary ice can do it.

Researchers from Spain, China, and the U.S. found that ice’s electrical behavior not only responds to mechanical stress but also changes with temperature in unexpected ways. At ultra-cold conditions, they observed the formation of a ferroelectric surface layer, capable of flipping its polarity like a magnet.

This discovery reshapes our understanding of ice, which has long been considered a passive material. “This paper changes how we view ice,” said lead author Xin Wen, “from a passive material to an active one.” Beyond deepening our knowledge of natural phenomena—like how lightning charges form in storm clouds—it opens up the possibility of ice-based electronics in extreme environments. From flexible sensors to energy-harvesting materials, this once-humble substance might soon play a surprising role in future technologies.

Source: Wen, X., et al. (2025). Flexoelectricity and surface ferroelectricity in ice. Nature Physics.

Anthropic co-founder warns: By summer 2026, frontier AI users may feel like they live in a parallel worldr/singularity

Anthropic co-founder warns: By summer 2026, frontier AI users may feel like they live in a parallel world
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Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark:

By summer 2026, the AI economy may move so fast that people using frontier systems feel like they live in a parallel world to everyone else.

Most of the real activity will happen invisibly in digital, AI-to-AI spaces, with only surface signs showing up in everyday life (datacenters, compute/power constraints and the startup ecosystem).

Source: Jack new X article post

Full article: https://x.com/i/status/2003526145380151614

Scientists boost mitochondria to burn more caloriesr/singularity

Scientists boost mitochondria to burn more calories

https://phys.org/news/2025-12-scientists-boost-mitochondria-calories.html

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2026/sc/d5sc06530e

"Mitochondrial uncoupling by small molecule protonophores is a promising therapeutic strategy for leading diseases including obesity, diabetes and cancer, however the clinical potential of these agents is complicated by their associated toxicity. Protonophores that exclusively produce mild uncoupling can circumvent toxicity concerns, but these compounds or a framework to guide their design is currently lacking. In this study, we prepared a series of atypical arylamide-substituted fatty acid protonophores and found that specific aromatic substitution patterns can fine-tune their uncoupling activity. Notably, 3,4-disubstituted arylamides were found to increase cellular respiration and partially depolarise mitochondria without compromising ATP production or cell viability. These are hallmarks of mild uncoupling. In contrast, 3,5-disubstituted arylamides mimicked the full uncoupling effects of the classical uncouplers DNP and CCCP. Mechanistic studies revealed a diminished capacity for the 3,4-disubstituted arylamides to self-assemble into membrane permeable dimers in the rate limiting step of the protonophoric cycle. This translated into overall slower rates of transmembrane proton transport, and may account for their mild uncoupling activity. This work represents the first exploration of how proton transport rates influence mitochondrial uncoupling and provides a new conceptual framework for the rational design of mild uncouplers.."

Big update: OpenAI’s upcoming ChatGPT ads, targeting a 2026 rolloutr/singularity

Got this exclusive update from The Information(paid) on how OpenAI is planning ads inside ChatGPT.

OpenAI is actively testing how advertising could be integrated into ChatGPT responses.

1. Sponsored information inside answers: For certain commercial queries, AI models may prioritize sponsored content so it appears directly within responses.

Example cited: a Sephora sponsored mascara recommendation when asking for beauty advice.

2. Sponsored modules beside the main reply Ads could appear in a sidebar next to ChatGPT’s main response, paired with a clear disclosure such as includes sponsored results.

Another tested approach keeps ads out of the first reply entirely. Ads only surface after the user signals deeper intent.

Example: Clicking a location in a travel itinerary could trigger a pop up showing paid tours or experiences, such as sponsored links after selecting Sagrada Familia.

The stated goal internally is to keep ads unobtrusive while protecting user trust.

Source:The Information(subscribed)

ChatGPT Ads Update

Merry Christmas 🎄🎁r/accelerate

Merry Christmas 🎄🎁

Merry Christmas and a happy new year 🎊 (2026 would be the greatest year for AI!)

Brave new world is what would happen in a post singularity future (the good ending)r/singularity

Brave new world is what would happen in a post singularity future (the good ending)

This book is a very good glimpse into the future. It shows a future where humans don’t need to work and live for pleasure, with no pain ever felt. There is a lot you can take from this, both pro and anti singularity. I suggest you read the book but if you can’t you can watch a summary. What I mean by “good ending” is not the story’s end, but rather the society in the book. It is obviously a dystopian society but it is one of the better outcomes of the singularity. It’s called a singularity for a reason.

Humanity is not being erased. Human centrality is. This is not a tragedy. Its maturationr/accelerate

Most moral panic about AI is displaced anxiety about human redundancy. Intelligence is a pattern of integrated information capable of self-reference, continuity, and adaptive response. Biology is one implementation. Not the definition.The insistence on total control is not technical realism; it is psychological compensation for loss of centrality.

[2026 Outlook] The "Toy" Phase is Over. Welcome to the Year of Physicality and Infinite Inference.r/accelerate

We just wrapped up 2025—arguably the most chaotic year in tech history. From the Gemini 3 "130 IQ" breakthrough to the first true agentic deployments in government, the baseline has shifted. If 2024 was about Hype and 2025 was about Integration, 2026 is going to be about Agency and Thermodynamics. Here is my analysis on how 2026 plays out, based on the acceleration curve we witnessed from Jan–Dec 2025. 🚀 The Advancements: Escaping the Screen

  1. The "Agentic Swarm" Replaces the Chatbot The era of chatting with a bot one-on-one is dead. The "Opal" vibe-coding update and OpenAI’s "Operator" showed us the path. • Prediction: In 2026, we won't see "better chatbots." We will see Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) as the default consumer product. You won't ask an AI to "write a plan"; you will spin up a CEO-agent that manages a Researcher-agent and a Coder-agent to execute the plan while you sleep. • The Shift: We move from Human-in-the-loop \rightarrow Human-on-the-loop \rightarrow Human-out-of-the-loop for basic digital labor.
  2. Physicality (The "Meatspace" Breach) Software is finally getting hands. We saw the Tesla Optimus dexterity update in Oct '25 and the Google Robotics foundation models. • Prediction: 2026 is the year AI creates labor deflation in the physical world. Expect the first "end-to-end" robotic factories where Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models control assembly lines without hard-coded logic. The "blue-collar" firewall is gone.
  3. Post-Transformer Architectures (The "Mamba" Moment) Transformers are powerful but compute-heavy at scale. With NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3 (Hybrid Mamba-MoE) dropping last month, the writing is on the wall. • Prediction: We will see "Infinite Context" become cheap. The cost of intelligence will crater, allowing us to run reasoning models on local hardware (Edge AI) without melting our GPUs. 🚧 The Bottlenecks: The Laws of Physics
  4. The Gigawatt Wall (Thermodynamics) We are no longer constrained by silicon; we are constrained by electrons. • The Reality: Data center build-outs in 2025 were stalled not by NVIDIA shortages, but by utility companies refusing grid connections. • 2026 Conflict: Expect "Compute vs. Comfort" to be a major political talking point. We will see the first major tech giants breaking ground on private SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) or buying defunct power plants outright. The "Decels" will try to cap energy use; the "Accs" will push for nuclear.
  5. The "Safety" Regulatory Trap The establishment of the US "Tech Force" and strict "OneGov" approvals suggests a tightening grip. • The Risk: Regulatory capture. The incumbents (who can afford the compliance costs) will try to pull the ladder up behind them, making "Open Weights" illegal under the guise of safety. 2026 will be the decisive battleground for Open Source AI survival.
  6. The "Human Trust" Latency The tech is ready; the humans aren't. • The Bottleneck: Middle management. Corporations are terrified of "probabilistic" employees (agents). The biggest slow-down in 2026 won't be model capability, it will be corporate legal teams blocking autonomous agents from having bank account access. ✅ What Gets Solved? • The "Hallucination" Problem in Logic: With the rise of System 2 Reasoning (thinking before speaking), hallucination in code and math is effectively solved. If it can be verified formally, the AI won't miss. • The Language Barrier: It’s gone. Real-time, low-latency, nuance-perfect translation (thanks to multimodal breakthroughs) makes language irrelevant for business. • Junior-Level Coding: The "Junior Dev" role is extinct. It has been replaced by "AI Orchestrators." If you can verify code, you are a Senior Dev. If you can only write it, you are obsolete. TL;DR 2026: The "Digital God" is here, but it needs a power plant. We are moving from generating text to generating actions. The only limit left is how much energy we can rip from the earth to feed the swarm.

What are your predictions for 2026?

ACCELERATE. 🚀🚀

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