White-collar workers stuck in a cycle of layoffs and stagnant wages might want to look past the traditional tech, finance and media job postings to an unexpected source of opportunity: the blue-collar sector, which faces a labor shortage and is seeing rapid transformation through private-equity investment. These jobs are generally less vulnerable to AI, and the earning trajectory can be steep, the WSJ writes. At Crash Champions, a car-repair chain that has grown from 13 locations in 2019 to about 650 shops…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Over the weekend, Neel Somani, who is a software engineer, former quant researcher, and a startup founder, was testing the math skills of OpenAI's new model when he made an unexpected discovery. After pasting the problem into ChatGPT and letting it think for 15 minutes, he came back to a full solution. He evaluated the proof and formalized it with a tool called Harmonic -- but it all checked out. "I was curious to establish a baseline for when LLMs are e…

Games Workshop, the owner and operator of a number of hugely popular tabletop war games, including Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar, has banned the use of generative AI in its content and design processes. IGN reports: Delivering the UK company's impressive financial results, CEO Kevin Rountree addressed the issue of AI and how Games Workshop is handling it. He said GW staff are barred from using it to actually produce anything, but admitted a "few" senior managers are experimenting with it. Rountree sai…

The UK government has awarded guaranteed electricity prices to offshore wind projects totaling 8.4 GW in a bid to revive wind development, attract nearly $30 billion in private investment, and stabilize energy costs. The New York Times reports: On Wednesday, the British government said that it would provide guaranteed electricity prices for a group of wind farms off England, Scotland and Wales that would, once built, provide power for 12 million homes. The 8.4 gigawatts, a power capacity measure, that won …

An anonymous reader quotes a report from DealBook: Fifteen years ago, Daniel Ek broke into America's digital-content wars with his streaming music start-up, Spotify, which has turned into a publicly traded company with a $110 billion market value. Now he and his business partner, the Swedish entrepreneur Hjalmar Nilsonne, aim to crack a higher-stakes consumer market: American health care. The pair plan to bring Neko Health, the health tech start-up they founded in 2018, to New York this spring, DealBook is…

After nearly two decades of touchscreen dominance, QWERTY smartphones are staging a niche comeback, with Clicks and Unihertz unveiling new physical-keyboard phones at CES 2026. Gizmodo reports: At CES 2026, Clicks, the company behind the Clicks keyboard case and the new Power Keyboard, announced plans to sell the Communicator, a "second phone" with a QWERTY keypad. Clicks pitches the $500 phone, launching later this year, as a device primarily intended for messaging -- sending texts, DMs, Slack messages, w…

Digg is officially back under the ownership of its original founder, Kevin Rose, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. "Similar to Reddit, the new Digg offers a website and mobile app where you can browse feeds featuring posts from across a selection of its communities and join other communities that align with your interests," reports TechCrunch. "There, you can post, comment, and upvote (or 'digg') the site's content." From the report: [T]he rise of AI has presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg,…

Cerebras Systems landed a more than $10 billion deal to supply up to 750 megawatts of compute to OpenAI through 2028, according to a blog post by OpenAI. CNBC reports: The deal will help diversify Cerebras away from the United Arab Emirates' G42, which accounted for 87% of revenue in the first half of 2024. "The way you have three very large customers is start with one very large customer, and you keep them happy, and then you win the second one," Cerebras' co-founder and CEO Andrew Feldman told CNBC in an…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gothamist: City regulators on Tuesday accused Uber and DoorDash of deliberately altering their app interfaces to discourage customers from tipping food delivery workers, a move that has cost the employees more than $550 million over the last two years. A report (PDF) published by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection argues that food delivery app giants retaliated against minimum wage rules for delivery drivers that took effect in December 2023 by impleme…

The U.S. has approved limited sales of Nvidia's H200 AI chips to China, the Department of Commerce said on Tuesday. Exports will be allowed to "approved customers" with security safeguards and a 25% U.S. government cut. The company's most advanced Blackwell chips will remain restricted. The BBC reports: The H200, Nvidia's second-most-advanced semiconductor, had been restricted by Washington over concerns that it would give China's technology industry and military an edge over the U.S. The Commerce Departme…

Bandcamp has announced a ban on music made wholly or substantially by generative AI, aiming to protect human creativity and prohibit AI impersonation of artists. Here's what the music platform had to say: ... Something that always strikes us as we put together a roundup like this is the sheer quantity of human creativity and passion that artists express on Bandcamp every single day. The fact that Bandcamp is home to such a vibrant community of real people making incredible music is something we want to pro…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: According to the government's version of events, 43-year-old Christopher Southerland was working in 2023 as a sysadmin for the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. In his role, Southerland had the authority to order cell phones for committee staffers, of which there are around 80. But during the early months of 2023, Southerland is said to have ordered 240 brand-new phones -- far more than even the total number of staffers -- and to ha…

The UK government has abandoned its controversial plan to require workers to sign up for a mandatory digital ID system to prove their eligibility to work in the country, opting instead to move existing document-based checks -- such as biometric passports -- fully online by 2029. The reversal follows a dramatic collapse in public support; polling showed approval falling from just over half the population in June to less than a third after Prime Minister Keir Starmer's announcement. Nearly 3 million people s…

Dell's chief operating officer Jeff Clarke has informed employees that the company is preparing for what he calls the "biggest transformation in company history," a sweeping systems overhaul scheduled to launch on May 3 that will standardize processes across nearly every major division. The initiative, dubbed One Dell Way, will replace Dell's existing sprawl of applications, servers and databases with a single enterprise platform designed to unify the 42-year-old company's operations. Clarke's memo, sent t…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Global temperatures soared in 2025, but a NASA statement published Wednesday alongside its latest benchmark annual report makes no reference to climate change, in line with President Donald Trump's push to deny the reality of planetary heating as a result of human activities. That marks a sharp break from last year's communications, issued under the administration of Democrat Joe Biden, which stated plainly: "This global warming has been caused by human activities" and …

Verizon said on Wednesday that its wireless service was suffering an outage impacting cellular data and voice services. From a report: The nation's largest wireless carrier said that its "engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly." Verizon's statement came after a swath of social media comments directed at Verizon, with users saying that their mobile devices were showing no bars of service or "SOS," indicating a lack of connection. Verizon, which has more than 146 millio…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese authorities have told domestic companies to stop using cybersecurity software made by roughly a dozen firms from the U.S. and Israel due to national security concerns, two people briefed on the matter said. As trade and diplomatic tensions flare between China and the U.S. and both sides vie for tech supremacy, Beijing has been keen to replace Western-made technology with domestic alternatives. The U.S. companies whose cybersecurity software has been banned inclu…

Coal power generation fell in China and India for the first time since the 1970s last year, in a "historic" moment that could bring a decline in global emissions, according to analysis. From a report: The simultaneous fall in coal-powered electricity in the world's biggest coal-consuming countries had not happened since 1973, according to analysts at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, and was driven by a record roll-out of clean energy projects. The research, commissioned by the climate news …

McKinsey is asking graduate applicants to "collaborate" with an AI tool as part of its recruitment process, as competence with the technology becomes a requirement in competing for top-level jobs. From a report: The blue-chip consultancy is incorporating an "AI interview" into some final-round interviews, according to CaseBasix, a US company that helps candidates apply for posts at leading strategic consulting companies. In an online post, CaseBasix said candidates in "select final rounds" in the US have b…

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once told an audience that he views local PC hardware the same way he views a 100-year-old electric generator he saw in a brewery museum -- as a relic of a pre-grid era, destined to be replaced by centralized utilities that users simply rent rather than own. The anecdote, shared at a talk a few years ago, positioned Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as the inevitable successors to the desktop tower. Bezos argued that users would eventually abandon local computing for cloud-b…

Matthew McConaughey is taking a novel legal approach to combat unauthorized AI fakes: trademarking himself. From a report: Over the past several months, the "Interstellar" and "Magic Mike" star has had eight trademark applications approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office featuring him staring, smiling and talking. His attorneys said the trademarks are meant to stop AI apps or users from simulating McConaughey's voice or likeness without permission -- an increasingly common concern of performers. Th…

The chief constable of one of Britain's largest police forces has admitted that Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant made a mistake in a football (soccer) intelligence report. From a report: The report, which led to Israeli football fans being banned from a match last year, included a nonexistent match between West Ham and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Copilot hallucinated the game and West Midlands Police included the error in its intelligence report without fact checking it. "On Friday afternoon I became aware that the …

After spending years pushing digital payments to combat tax evasion and money laundering, European Union ministers decided in December to ban businesses from refusing cash. The reversal comes as 12% of European businesses flatly refused cash in 2024, up from 4% three years earlier. Over one in three cinemas in the Netherlands no longer accept notes and coins. Cash usage across the euro area dropped from 79% of in-person transactions in 2016 to just 52% in 2024. Sweden leads the digital shift where 90% of p…

The European Union published guidance on December 30 that reclassified nuclear weapons as acceptable investments under its sustainable finance framework, completing a policy change approved in November that narrowed the definition of banned armaments from "controversial" to "prohibited." The shift addresses earlier vagueness that the Commission said hindered efforts to raise $932 billion in defense investments over four years. Under the revised rules, only four weapon categories remain expressly outlawed b…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have discovered a never-before-seen framework that infects Linux machines with a wide assortment of modules that are notable for the range of advanced capabilities they provide to attackers. The framework, referred to as VoidLink by its source code, features more than 30 modules that can be used to customize capabilities to meet attackers' needs for each infected machine. These modules can provide additional stealth and specific tools for r…

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy plan to deploy a nuclear fission reactor on the Moon by 2030 to provide continuous, long-duration power for lunar bases, science missions, and future Mars exploration. space & defense reports: NASA said fission surface power will provide a critical capability for long-duration missions by delivering continuous, reliable electrical power independent of sunlight, lunar night cycles or extreme temperature conditions. Unlike solar-based systems, a nuclear reactor could op…

Thelasko shares a report from Forbes: We have not seen this before. Iran's digital blackout has now deployed military jammers, reportedly supplied by Russia, to shut down access to Starlink Internet. This is a game-changer for the Plan-B connectivity frequently used by protesters and anti-regime activists when ordinary access to the internet is stopped. "Despite reports that tens of thousands of Starlink units are operating inside Iran," says Iran Wire, "the blackout has also reached satellite connections.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns "a bombshell." Studies claiming to have revealed micro and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian. There is no doub…