Sales of blue book exam booklets have surged dramatically across the nation as professors turn to analog solutions to prevent ChatGPT cheating. The University of California, Berkeley reported an 80% increase in blue book sales over the past two academic years, while Texas A&M saw 30% growth and the University of Florida recorded nearly 50% increases this school year. The surge comes as students who were freshmen when ChatGPT launched in 2022 approach senior year, having had access to AI throughout their college careers.

A former Minnesota waitress unknowingly helped North Korean workers steal $17.1 million in wages from over 300 American companies through an elaborate remote work scheme, federal prosecutors said this week. Christina Chapman operated a "laptop farm" from her home, managing dozens of computers that allowed North Koreans using stolen U.S. identities to work as legitimate tech employees.

The FBI estimates this broader infiltration involves thousands of North Korean workers generating hundreds of millions annually for the sanctions-hit regime. Chapman, recruited via LinkedIn in 2020 to serve as "the U.S. face" for overseas IT workers, handled logistics including receiving company laptops, installing remote access software, and processing falsified employment documents.

The North Korean workers accessed the devices daily from overseas, with some maintaining jobs for months or years at major American corporations. Chapman earned just under $177,000 before the FBI raided her Arizona operation in October 2023, seizing over 90 computers. She pleaded guilty in February to wire fraud, identity theft, and money laundering charges, facing up to nine years in prison at her July sentencing.

California's population grew 0.6% in 2024, adding nearly 250,000 residents to reach 39.43 million, according to Census Bureau estimates. The growth came entirely from a rebound in international immigration, which surged to over 300,000 people after plunging to 44,000 during the pandemic's worst year.

Without immigration, the state would have shrunk significantly as domestic migration remained negative. The H-1B visa program alone brought nearly 79,000 skilled workers to California in 2024. Since 2010, California has added 2.7 million immigrants, with half coming from Asia and slightly more than a third from Latin America. The immigration-dependent growth model puts California at particular risk from potential federal policy changes, as more than a quarter of its population is foreign-born -- the highest share nationwide.

Whether General Motors survives "depends in part on whether its bets on battery technology pay off," writes the Wall Street Journal.

At $33,600 the company's Chevy Equinox is one of the cheapest EVs in America (only $5,000 more than the gas-powered model). "But it also recently announced a novel type of battery that promises to be significantly cheaper, while still providing long range, due to be rolled out in 2028..." Like many of its competitors, GM has made huge investments in EV battery factories, and in production lines for the vehicles themselves, and it faces challenges in generating a return on investment in the short term... In the long run, however, GM's focus on creating a North American supply chain for batteries could prove savvy, says David Whiston, U.S. auto equities analyst at Morningstar. The company is investing $625 million to mine lithium in Nevada. It is working on sourcing every material and every part in its batteries domestically, down to the copper and aluminum foils that go into its cells, says [battery and sustainability lead Kurt] Kelty...

GM recently unveiled a new type of battery the company has been working on for a decade called lithium manganese-rich batteries, or LMR. These batteries combine the low cost of LFP batteries with the longer range of conventional, expensive lithium-ion batteries. What makes LMR batteries more affordable is that they use far less nickel, cobalt and other minerals that have become increasingly expensive. Instead, they use more manganese, a common element... The company's next initiative, says Kelty, is to further drive down the cost of its batteries by putting more of another common element, silicon, into them.
"If GM can continue to grow demand for its EVs, in a few years the rollout of its latest tech could give it a price and performance advantage..." the article points out. While the EV transition is happening more slowly than projected in the U.S., GM hiring Kelty is a bet that the country's current EV struggles are temporary, and that technologists like Kelty will help GM get past them. "When we reach cost parity with [internal combustion engine] vehicles, I think that's one big milestone," says Kelty. "When you get there, then you're really going to see the transition happen very quickly — and we're not that far away from it."

Besides pressure on Apple to make iPhones in the U.S., CEO Tim Cook "is facing off against two U.S. judges, European and worldwide regulators, state and federal lawmakers, and even a creator of the iPhone," writes the Wall Street Journal, "to say nothing of the cast of rivals outrunning Apple in artificial intelligence." Each is a threat to Apple's hefty profit margins, long the company's trademark and the reason investors drove its valuation above $3 trillion before any other company. Shareholders are still Cook's most important constituency. The stock's 25% fall from its peak shows their concern about whether he — or anyone — can navigate the choppy 2025 waters.

What can be said for Apple is that the company is patient, and that has often paid off in the past.
They also note OpenAI's purchase of Jony Ive's company, with Sam Altman saying internally they hope to make 100 million AI "companion" devices: It is hard to gauge the potential for a brand-new computing device from a company that has never made one. Yet the fact that it is coming from the man who led design of the iPhone and other hit Apple products means it can't be dismissed. Apple sees the threat coming: "You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now, as crazy as that sounds," an Apple executive, Eddy Cue, testified in a court case this month...

The company might not need to be first in AI. It didn't make the first music player, smartphone or tablet. It waited, and then conquered each market with the best. A question is whether a strategy that has been successful in devices will work for AI.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

"In the 1970s, the USSR used nuclear devices to try to send water from Siberia's rivers flowing south, instead of its natural route north..." remembers the BBC. [T]he Soviet Union simultaneously fired three nuclear devices buried 127m (417ft) underground. The yield of each device was 15 kilotonnes (about the same as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945). The experiment, codenamed "Taiga", was part of a two-decade long Soviet programme of carrying out peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs).

In this case, the blasts were supposed to help excavate a massive canal to connect the basin of the Pechora River with that of the Kama, a tributary of the Volga. Such a link would have allowed Soviet scientists to siphon off some of the water destined for the Pechora, and send it southward through the Volga. It would have diverted a significant flow of water destined for the Arctic Ocean to go instead to the hot, heavily populated regions of Central Asia and southern Russia. This was just one of a planned series of gargantuan "river reversals" that were designed to alter the direction of Russia's great Eurasian waterways...

Years later, Leonid Volkov, a scientist involved in preparing the Taiga explosions, recalled the moment of detonation. "The final countdown began: ...3, 2, 1, 0... then fountains of soil and water shot upward," he wrote. "It was an impressive sight." Despite Soviet efforts to minimise the fallout by using a low-fission explosive, which produce fewer atomic fragments, the blasts were detected as far away as the United States and Sweden, whose governments lodged formal complaints, accusing Moscow of violating the Limited Test Ban Treaty...

Ultimately, the nuclear explosions that created Nuclear Lake, one of the few physical traces left of river reversal, were deemed a failure because the crater was not big enough. Although similar PNE canal excavation tests were planned, they were never carried out. In 2024, the leader of a scientific expedition to the lake announced radiation levels were normal.
"Perhaps the final nail in the coffin was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, which not only consumed a huge amount of money, but pushed environmental concerns up the political agenda," the article notes.

"Four months after the Number Four Reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev cancelled the river reversal project."

And a Russian blogger who travelled to Nuclear Lake in the summer of 2024 told the BBC that nearly 50 years later, there were some places where the radiation was still significantly elevated.

Kraken is launching tokenized versions of U.S. equities for 24/7 trading outside the U.S., giving global investors blockchain-based access to major companies like Apple and Tesla. Reuters reports: Tokenization refers to the process of issuing digital representations of publicly-traded securities. Instead of holding the securities directly, investors hold tokens that represent ownership of the securities. The tokens' launch outside the U.S. comes amid growing interest in blending traditional finance with blockchain infrastructure. While tokenized securities have yet to gain widespread adoption, proponents say they hold the potential to significantly reshape how people access and invest in financial markets.

In a January opinion piece for the Washington Post, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said tokenization could also allow retail investors to access private companies' stocks. Kraken's tokens, called xStocks, will be available in select markets outside the United States, it said, without naming the markets. The move was earlier reported by the Wall Street Journal. The offering is currently not available for U.S. customers.

Europe has created just 14 companies worth more than $10 billion over the past 50 years compared to 241 in the United States, underscoring the continent's struggle to compete in the global technology race despite having a larger population and similar education levels.

The productivity gap has widened dramatically since the digital revolution began. European workers produced 95% of what their American counterparts made per hour in the late 1990s, but that figure has dropped to less than 80% today. Only four of the world's top 50 technology companies are European, and none of the top 10 quantum computing investors operate from Europe.

Several high-profile European entrepreneurs have relocated to Silicon Valley, including Thomas Odenwald, who quit German AI startup Aleph Alpha after two months, citing slow decision-making and lack of stock options for employees. "If I look at how quickly things change in Silicon Valley...it's happening so fast that I don't think Europe can keep up with that speed," Odenwald said.

The challenges extend beyond individual companies. European businesses spend 40% of their IT budgets on regulatory compliance, according to Amazon surveys, while complex labor laws create three-month notice periods and lengthy noncompete clauses.

Nvidia is facing backlash for allegedly manipulating the review process of its GeForce RTX 5060 GPU by withholding drivers, selectively granting early access to favorable reviewers, and pressuring media to present the card in a positive light. As The Verge's Sean Hollister writes, the debacle "should be a wake-up call for gamers and reviewers." Here's an excerpt from the report: Nvidia has gone too far. This week, the company reportedly attempted to delay, derail, and manipulate reviews of its $299 GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card, which would normally be its bestselling GPU of the generation. Nvidia has repeatedly and publicly said the budget 60-series cards are its most popular, and this year it reportedly tried to ensure it by withholding access and pressuring reviewers to paint them in the best light possible.

Nvidia might have wanted to prevent a repeat of 2022, when it launched this card's predecessor. Those reviews were harsh. The 4060 was called a "slap in the face to gamers" and a "wet fart of a GPU." I had guessed the 5060 was headed for the same fate after seeing how reviewers handled the 5080, which similarly showcased how little Nvidia's hardware has improved year over year and relies on software to make up the gaps. But Nvidia had other plans. Here are the tactics that Nvidia reportedly just used to throw us off the 5060's true scent, as individually described by GamersNexus, VideoCardz, Hardware Unboxed, GameStar.de, Digital Foundry, and more:

- Nvidia decided to launch its RTX 5060 on May 19th, when most reviewers would be at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, rather than at their test beds at home.
- Even if reviewers already had a GPU in hand before then, Nvidia cut off most reviewers' ability to test the RTX 5060 before May 19th by refusing to provide drivers until the card went on sale. (Gaming GPUs don't really work without them.)
- And yet Nvidia allowed specific, cherry-picked reviewers to have early drivers anyhow if they agreed to a borderline unethical deal: they could only test five specific games, at 1080p resolution, with fixed graphics settings, against two weaker GPUs (the 3060 and 2060 Super) where the new card would be sure to win.
- In some cases, Nvidia threatened to withhold future access unless reviewers published apples-to-oranges benchmark charts showing how the RTX 5060's "fake frames" MFG tech can produce more frames than earlier GPUs without it.

Some reviewers apparently took Nvidia up on that proposition, leading to day-one "previews" where the charts looked positively stacked in the 5060's favor [...]. But the reality, according to reviews that have since hit the web, is that the RTX 5060 often fails to beat a four-year-old RTX 3060 Ti, frequently fails to beat a four-year-old 3070, and can sometimes get upstaged by Intel's cheaper $250 B580. And yet, the 5060's lackluster improvements are overshadowed by a juicier story: inexplicably, Nvidia decided to threaten GamersNexus' future access over its GPU coverage. Yes, the same GamersNexus that's developed a staunch reputation for defending consumers from predatory behavior, and just last month published a report on "GPU shrinkflation" that accused Nvidia of misleading marketing. Bad move! [...]

Nvidia is within its rights to withhold access, of course. Nvidia doesn't have to send out graphics cards or grant interviews. It'll only do it if it's good for business. But the unspoken covenant of product reviews is that the press, as a whole, gets a chance to warn the public if a movie, video game, or GPU is not worth their money. It works both ways: the media also gets the chance to warn that a product is so good you might want to line up in advance. That unspoken rule is what Nvidia is trampling here.

China has achieved substantial technological advances across robotics, AI, and semiconductor manufacturing as part of a seven-year self-reliance campaign that has tripled the country's research and development spending to $500 billion annually.

Chinese robot manufacturers captured nearly half of their domestic market by 2023, up from a quarter of installations just years earlier, while AI startups now rival OpenAI and Google in capabilities. The progress extends to semiconductors, where Huawei released a high-end smartphone powered by what industry analysts believe was a locally-produced advanced processor, despite U.S. export controls targeting China's chip access.

Morgan Stanley projects China's self-sufficiency in graphics processing units will jump from 11% in 2021 to 82% by 2027. Chinese companies have been purchasing as many industrial robots as the rest of the world combined, enabling highly automated factories that can operate in darkness. In space technology, Chinese firms won five of 11 gold medals when U.S. think tanks ranked the world's best commercial satellite systems last year, compared to four for American companies.

An anonymous reader writes: The US Treasury is phasing out production of the penny and will stop putting new one-cent coins into circulation. The US Treasury has made its final order of penny blanks this month, and the mint will continue to manufacture pennies as long as its supply of penny blanks exist.

President Donald Trump stated that production of pennies are wasteful, as the coins cost more to produce than their one-cent value.

The U.S. trade deficit persists due to fundamental macroeconomic imbalances rather than just export shortfalls, according to Federal Reserve Bank of New York economist Thomas Klitgaard. His analysis shows the deficit reflects a persistent gap between domestic saving and investment spending, with the U.S. borrowing from foreign sources to fund domestic investment when savings fall short.

This macroeconomic reality means targeting specific trade categories won't resolve the overall imbalance -- even when the petroleum deficit disappeared by 2019 due to increased domestic production, the total trade deficit grew to $441 billion, consistent with a widening saving gap.

Bureau of Economic Analysis data reveals household saving has remained below pre-pandemic levels as consumers spend down accumulated savings from 2020-21, while business saving has remained relatively stable. Reducing the deficit would require significant macroeconomic adjustments, including higher domestic saving or reduced investment spending, which studies indicate would likely cause economic pain as demonstrated during the 2008 recession.

America's regional state universities are experiencing steep enrollment declines, triggering economic crises in the towns that depend on them, while flagship universities continue to thrive.

At Western Illinois University in Macomb, enrollment has plummeted 47% since 2010, driving the city's population down 23% to 14,765. Empty dorms have been repurposed or demolished, while local businesses struggle to survive. "It's almost like you're watching the town die," Kalib McGruder, a 28-year veteran of the campus police department, told WSJ.

An analysis of 748 public four-year institutions reveals enrollment at prestigious state universities increased 9% between 2015 and 2023, while regional state schools saw a 2% decline. The University of Tennessee Knoxville's enrollment jumped 30% as the state's regional colleges collectively fell 3%. With high school graduate numbers expected to decline starting next year after reaching a record high in 2024, the outlook for struggling college towns appears bleak.

The US tech sector shed 214,000 jobs in April amid continuing economic uncertainty, according to CompTIA analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Companies are extending hiring timelines to two or three times longer than last year while significantly raising skill requirements, particularly for AI competencies.

"It's the great hesitation," said George Denlinger of Robert Half, noting employers now demand 10-12 skills instead of 6-7 previously. Entry-level programming positions are disappearing as AI assumes those functions, with Janco Associates CEO Victor Janulaitis observing that "a job that has been eliminated from almost all IT departments is an entry-level IT programmer."

Klarna's net loss more than doubled in the first quarter [non-paywalled link] as more consumers failed to repay loans from the Swedish "buy now, pay later" lender as concerns rose about the financial health of US consumers. Financial Times: The fintech, which offers interest-free consumer loans to allow customers to make retail purchases, on Monday reported a net loss of $99 million for the three months to March, up from $47 million a year earlier.

The company, which makes money by charging fees to merchants and to consumers who fail to repay on time, said its customer credit losses had risen to $136 million, a 17% year-on-year increase. The increased failure to repay comes on the back of gloomy economic sentiment in the US, where a closely watched measure of consumers' confidence last week fell to its second-lowest level on record. US President Donald Trump's trade war has driven expectations of higher inflation. Further reading: The Klarna Hype Machine.

OpenAI CEO and Sam Altman believe Artificial General Intelligence could arrive within the next few years. But the speculations of some technologists "are getting ahead of reality," writes the New York Times, adding that many scientists "say no one will reach AGI without a new idea — something beyond the powerful neural networks that merely find patterns in data. That new idea could arrive tomorrow. But even then, the industry would need years to develop it." "The technology we're building today is not sufficient to get there," said Nick Frosst, a founder of the AI startup Cohere who previously worked as a researcher at Google and studied under the most revered AI researcher of the last 50 years. "What we are building now are things that take in words and predict the next most likely word, or they take in pixels and predict the next most likely pixel. That's very different from what you and I do." In a recent survey of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society that includes some of the most respected researchers in the field, more than three-quarters of respondents said the methods used to build today's technology were unlikely to lead to AGI.

Opinions differ in part because scientists cannot even agree on a way of defining human intelligence, arguing endlessly over the merits and flaws of IQ tests and other benchmarks. Comparing our own brains to machines is even more subjective. This means that identifying AGI is essentially a matter of opinion.... And scientists have no hard evidence that today's technologies are capable of performing even some of the simpler things the brain can do, like recognizing irony or feeling empathy. Claims of AGI's imminent arrival are based on statistical extrapolations — and wishful thinking. According to various benchmark tests, today's technologies are improving at a consistent rate in some notable areas, like math and computer programming. But these tests describe only a small part of what people can do.

Humans know how to deal with a chaotic and constantly changing world. Machines struggle to master the unexpected — the challenges, small and large, that do not look like what has happened in the past. Humans can dream up ideas that the world has never seen. Machines typically repeat or enhance what they have seen before. That is why Frosst and other sceptics say pushing machines to human-level intelligence will require at least one big idea that the world's technologists have not yet dreamed up. There is no way of knowing how long that will take. "A system that's better than humans in one way will not necessarily be better in other ways," Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker said. "There's just no such thing as an automatic, omniscient, omnipotent solver of every problem, including ones we haven't even thought of yet. There's a temptation to engage in a kind of magical thinking. But these systems are not miracles. They are very impressive gadgets."
While Google's AlphaGo could be humans in a game with "a small, limited set of rules," the article points out that the real world "is bounded only by the laws of physics. Modelling the entirety of the real world is well beyond today's machines, so how can anyone be sure that AGI — let alone superintelligence — is just around the corner?" And they offer this alternative perspective from Matteo Pasquinelli, a professor of the philosophy of science at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, Italy.

"AI needs us: living beings, producing constantly, feeding the machine. It needs the originality of our ideas and our lives."

The BBC visits "the strange, stubborn world of obsolete Windows machines." Even if you're a diehard Apple user, you're probably interacting with Windows systems on a regular basis. When you're pulling cash out, for example, chances are you're using a computer that's downright geriatric by technology standards. (Microsoft declined to comment for this article.) "Many ATMs still operate on legacy Windows systems, including Windows XP and even Windows NT," which launched in 1993, says Elvis Montiero, an ATM field technician based in Newark, New Jersey in the US. "The challenge with upgrading these machines lies in the high costs associated with hardware compatibility, regulatory compliance and the need to rewrite proprietary ATM software," he says. Microsoft ended official support for Windows XP in 2014, but Montiero says many ATMs still rely on these primordial systems thanks to their reliability, stability and integration with banking infrastructure.
And a job listing for an IT systems administrator for Germany's railway service "were expected to have expertise with Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS — systems released 32 and 44 years ago, respectively. In certain parts of Germany, commuting depends on operating systems that are older than many passengers." It's not just German transit, either. The trains in San Francisco's Muni Metro light railway, for example, won't start up in the morning until someone sticks a floppy disk into the computer that loads DOS software on the railway's Automatic Train Control System (ATCS). Last year, the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) announced its plans to retire this system over the coming decade, but today the floppy disks live on.
Apple is "really aggressive about deprecating old products," M. Scott Ford, a software developer who specialises in updating legacy systems, tells the BBC. "But Microsoft took the approach of letting organisations leverage the hardware they already have and chasing them for software licenses instead. They also tend to have a really long window for supporting that software."

And so you get things like two enormous LightJet printers in San Diego powered by servers running Windows 2000, says photographic printer John Watts: Long out of production, the few remaining LightJets rely on the Windows operating systems that were around when these printers were sold. "A while back we looked into upgrading one of the computers to Windows Vista. By the time we added up the money it would take to buy new licenses for all the software it was going to cost $50,000 or $60,000 [£38,000 to £45,000]," Watts says. "I can't stand Windows machines," he says, "but I'm stuck with them...."

In some cases, however, old computers are a labour of love. In the US, Dene Grigar, director of the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University, Vancouver, spends her days in a room full of vintage (and fully functional) computers dating back to 1977... She's not just interested in early, experimental e-books. Her laboratory collects everything from video games to Instagram zines.... Grigar's Electronic Literature Lab maintains 61 computers to showcase the hundreds of electronic works and thousands of files in the collection, which she keeps in pristine condition.
Grigar says they're still looking for a PC that reads five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks.

IBM laid off "a couple hundred" HR workers and replaced them with AI agents. "It's becoming a huge thing," says Mike Peditto, a Chicago-area consultant with 15 years of experience advising companies on hiring practices. He tells Slate "I do think we're heading to where this will be pretty commonplace." Although A.I. job interviews have been happening since at least 2023, the trend has received a surge of attention in recent weeks thanks to several viral TikTok videos in which users share videos of their A.I. bots glitching. Although some of the videos were fakes posted by a creator whose bio warns that his content is "all satire," some are authentic — like that of Kendiana Colin, a 20-year-old student at Ohio State University who had to interact with an A.I. bot after she applied for a summer job at a stretching studio outside Columbus. In a clip she posted online earlier this month, Colin can be seen conducting a video interview with a smiling white brunette named Alex, who can't seem to stop saying the phrase "vertical-bar Pilates" in an endless loop...

Representatives at Apriora, the startup company founded in 2023 whose software Colin was forced to engage with, did not respond to a request for comment. But founder Aaron Wang told Forbes last year that the software allowed companies to screen more talent for less money... (Apriora's website claims that the technology can help companies "hire 87 percent faster" and "interview 93 percent cheaper," but it's not clear where those stats come from or what they actually mean.)
Colin (first interviewed by 404 Media) calls the experience dehumanizing — wondering why they were told dress professionally, since "They had me going the extra mile just to talk to a robot." And after the interview, the robot — and the company — then ghosted them with no future contact. "It was very disrespectful and a waste of time."

Houston resident Leo Humphries also "donned a suit and tie in anticipation for an interview" in which the virtual recruiter immediately got stuck repeating the same phrase. Although Humphries tried in vain to alert the bot that it was broken, the interview ended only when the A.I. program thanked him for "answering the questions" and offering "great information" — despite his not being able to provide a single response. In a subsequent video, Humphries said that within an hour he had received an email, addressed to someone else, that thanked him for sharing his "wonderful energy and personality" but let him know that the company would be moving forward with other candidates.

A new YouTube tool will let advertisers use Google's Gemini AI model to target ads to viewers when they're most engaged, reports CNBC: Peak Points has the potential to enable more impressions and a higher click-through rate on YouTube, a primary metric that determines how creators earn money on the video platform... Peak Points is currently in a pilot program and will be rolling out over the rest of the year.
The product "aims to benefit advertisers by using a tactic that aims to grab users' attention right when they're most invested in the content," reports TechCrunch: This approach appears to be similar to a strategy called emotion-based targeting, where advertisers place ads that align with the emotions evoked by the video. It's believed that when viewers experience heightened emotional states, it leads to better recall of the ads. However, viewers may find these interruptions frustrating, especially when they're deeply engaged in the emotional arc of a video and want the ad to be over quickly to resume watching.

In related news, YouTube announced another ad format that may be more appealing to users. The platform debuted a shoppable product feed where users can browse and purchase items during an ad.

Thursday was Rust's 10-year anniversary for its first stable release. "To say I'm surprised by its trajectory would be a vast understatement," writes Rust's original creator Graydon Hoare. "I can only thank, congratulate, and celebrate everyone involved... In my view, Rust is a story about a large community of stakeholders coming together to design, build, maintain, and expand shared technical infrastructure." It's a story with many actors:

- The population of developers the language serves who express their needs and constraints through discussion, debate, testing, and bug reports arising from their experience writing libraries and applications.

- The language designers and implementers who work to satisfy those needs and constraints while wrestling with the unexpected consequences of each decision.

- The authors, educators, speakers, translators, illustrators, and others who work to expand the set of people able to use the infrastructure and work on the infrastructure.

- The institutions investing in the project who provide the long-term funding and support necessary to sustain all this work over decades.

All these actors have a common interest in infrastructure.
Rather than just "systems programming", Hoare sees Rust as a tool for building infrastructure itself, "the robust and reliable necessities that enable us to get our work done" — a wide range that includes everything from embedded and IoT systems to multi-core systems. So the story of "Rust's initial implementation, its sustained investment, and its remarkable resonance and uptake all happened because the world needs robust and reliable infrastructure, and the infrastructure we had was not up to the task." Put simply: it failed too often, in spectacular and expensive ways. Crashes and downtime in the best cases, and security vulnerabilities in the worst. Efficient "infrastructure-building" languages existed but they were very hard to use, and nearly impossible to use safely, especially when writing concurrent code. This produced an infrastructure deficit many people felt, if not everyone could name, and it was growing worse by the year as we placed ever-greater demands on computers to work in ever more challenging environments...

We were stuck with the tools we had because building better tools like Rust was going to require an extraordinary investment of time, effort, and money. The bootstrap Rust compiler I initially wrote was just a few tens of thousands of lines of code; that was nearing the limits of what an unfunded solo hobby project can typically accomplish. Mozilla's decision to invest in Rust in 2009 immediately quadrupled the size of the team — it created a team in the first place — and then doubled it again, and again in subsequent years. Mozilla sustained this very unusual, very improbable investment in Rust from 2009-2020, as well as funding an entire browser engine written in Rust — Servo — from 2012 onwards, which served as a crucial testbed for Rust language features.
Rust and Servo had multiple contributors at Samsung, Hoare acknowledges, and Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, and others "hired key developers and contributed hardware and management resources to its ongoing development." Rust itself "sits atop LLVM" (developed by researchers at UIUC and later funded by Apple, Qualcomm, Google, ARM, Huawei, and many other organizations), while Rust's safe memory model "derives directly from decades of research in academia, as well as academic-industrial projects like Cyclone, built by AT&T Bell Labs and Cornell."

And there were contributions from "interns, researchers, and professors at top academic research programming-language departments, including CMU, NEU, IU, MPI-SWS, and many others." JetBrains and the Rust-Analyzer OpenCollective essentially paid for two additional interactive-incremental reimplementations of the Rust frontend to provide language services to IDEs — critical tools for productive, day-to-day programming. Hundreds of companies and other institutions contributed time and money to evaluate Rust for production, write Rust programs, test them, file bugs related to them, and pay their staff to fix or improve any shortcomings they found. Last but very much not least: Rust has had thousands and thousands of volunteers donating years of their labor to the project. While it might seem tempting to think this is all "free", it's being paid for! Just less visibly than if it were part of a corporate budget.

All this investment, despite the long time horizon, paid off. We're all better for it.
He looks ahead with hope for a future with new contributors, "steady and diversified streams of support," and continued reliability and compatability (including "investment in ever-greater reliability technology, including the many emerging formal methods projects built on Rust.")

And he closes by saying Rust's "sustained, controlled, and frankly astonishing throughput of work" has "set a new standard for what good tools, good processes, and reliable infrastructure software should be like.

"Everyone involved should be proud of what they've built."