An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The unsustainable production of food and fossil fuels causes $5 billion of environmental damage per hour, according to a major UN report. Ending this harm was a key part of the global transformation of governance, economics and finance required "before collapse becomes inevitable," the experts said. The Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report, which is produced by 200 researchers for the UN Environment Program, said the climate crisis, destruction of nature and pollution could no longer be seen as simply environmental crises. "They are all undermining our economy, food security, water security, human health and they are also [national] security issues, leading to conflict in many parts of the world," said Prof Robert Watson, the co-chair of the assessment. [...]

The GEO report is comprehensive -- 1,100 pages this year -- and is usually accompanied by a summary for policymakers, which is agreed by all the world's countries. However, strong objections by countries including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Turkey and Argentina to references to fossil fuels, plastics, reduced meat in diets and other issues meant no agreement was reached this time. [...] The GEO report emphasized that the costs of action were much less than the costs of inaction in the long term, and estimated the benefits from climate action alone would be worth $20 trillion a year by 2070 and $100 trillion by 2100. "We need visionary countries and private sector [companies] to recognize they will make more profit by addressing these issues rather than ignoring them," Watson said. [...]

One of the biggest issues was the $45 trillion a year in environmental damage caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas, and the pollution and destruction of nature caused by industrial agriculture, the report said. The food system carried the largest costs, at $20 trillion, with transport at $13 trillion and fossil-fuel powered electricity at $12 trillion. These costs -- called externalities by economists -- must be priced into energy and food to reflect their real price and shift consumers towards greener choices, Watson said: "So we need social safety nets. We need to make sure that the poorest in society are not harmed by an increase in costs." The report suggests measures such as a universal basic income, taxes on meat and subsidies for healthy, plant-based foods.

There were also about $1.5 trillion in environmentally harmful subsidies to fossil fuels, food and mining, the report said. These needed to be removed or repurposed, it added. Watson noted that wind and solar energy was cheaper in many places but held back by vested interests in fossil fuel. The climate crisis may be even worse than thought, he said: "We are likely to be underestimating the magnitude of climate change," with global heating probably at the high end of the projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Removing fossil fuel subsidies could cut emissions by a third, the report said.

OpenAI, alongside Anthropic and Block, have launched the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, describing it as a neutral home for standards as agentic systems move into real production. It may sound well-meaning, but Slashdot reader and NERDS.xyz founder BrianFagioli isn't buying the narrative. In a report for NERDS.xyz, Fagioli writes: Instead of opening models, training data, or anything that would meaningfully shift power toward the community, the companies involved are donating lightweight artifacts like AGENTS.md, MCP, and goose. They're useful, but they're also the safest, least threatening pieces of their ecosystem to "open." From where I sit, it looks like a strategic attempt to lock in influence over emerging standards before truly open projects get a chance to define the space. I see the entire move as smoke and mirrors.

With regulators paying closer attention and developer trust slipping, creating a Linux Foundation directed fund gives these companies convenient cover to say they're being transparent and collaborative. But nothing about this structure forces them to share anything substantial, and nothing about it changes the closed nature of their core technology. To me, it looks like Big Tech trying to set the rules of the game early, using the language of openness without actually embracing it. Slashdot readers have seen this pattern before, and this one feels no different.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: More and more people are turning to GoFundMe for help covering the cost of housing, food, and other basic needs. The for-profit crowdfunding platform's annual "Year in Help" report, released Tuesday, underscored ongoing concerns around affordability. The number of fundraisers started to help cover essential expenses such as rent, utilities, and groceries jumped 20%, according to the company's 2025 review, after already quadrupling last year. "Monthly bills" were the second fastest-growing category behind individual support for nonprofits.

The number of "essentials" fundraisers has increased over the last three years in all of the company's major English-speaking markets, according to GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan. That includes the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. In the United States, the self-published report comes at the end of a year that has seen weakened wage growth for lower-income workers, sluggish hiring, a rise in the unemployment rate and low consumer confidence in the economy. [...] Among campaigns aimed at addressing broader community needs, food banks were the most common recipient on GoFundMe this year. The platform experienced a nearly sixfold spike in food-related fundraisers between the end of October and first weeks of November, according to Cadogan, as many Americans' monthly SNAP benefits got suddenly cut off during the government shutdown.

Congress quietly removed provisions that would have let the U.S. military fix its own equipment without relying on contractors, despite bipartisan and Pentagon support. The Register reports: The House and Senate versions of the NDAA passed earlier both included provisions that would have extended common right-to-repair rules to US military branches, requiring defense contractors to provide access to technical data, information, and components that enabled military customers to quickly repair essential equipment. Both of those provisions were stripped from the final joint-chamber reconciled version of the bill, published Monday, right-to-repair advocates at the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) pointed out in a press release. [...]

According to PIRG's press release on the matter, elected officials have been targeted by an "intensive lobbying push" in recent weeks against the provisions. House Armed Services Committee chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) and ranking Democrat Adam Smith (D-WA), responsible for much of the final version of the bill, have received significant contributions from defense contractors in recent years, and while correlation doesn't equal causation, it sure looks fishy. [Isaac Bowers, PIRG's federal legislative director] did tell us that he was glad that the defense sector's preferred solution to the military right to repair fight -- a "data as a service" solution -- was also excluded, so the 2026 NDAA isn't a total loss for the repairability fight. "That provision would have mandated the Pentagon access repair data through separate vendor contracts rather than receiving it upfront at the time of procurement, maintaining the defense industry's near monopoly over essential repair information and keeping troops waiting for repairs they could do quicker and cheaper themselves," Bowers said in an email.

An aide to the Democratic side of the Committee told The Register the House and Senate committees did negotiate a degree of right-to-repair permissions in the NDAA. According to the aide and a review of the final version of the bill, measures were included that require the Defense Department to identify any instances where a lack of technical data hinders operation or maintenance of weapon systems, as well as aviation systems. The bill also includes a provision that would establish a "technical data system" that would "track, manage, and enable the assessment" of data related to system maintenance and repair. Unfortunately, the technical data system portion of the NDAA mentions "authorized repair contractors" as the parties carrying out repair work, and there's also no mention of parts availability or other repairability provisions in the sections the staffer flagged -- just access to technical data. That means the provisions are unlikely to move the armed forces toward a new repairability paradigm.

This year is set to be the world's second or third-warmest on record, potentially surpassed only by 2024'S record-breaking heat, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Tuesday. From a report: The data is the latest from C3S following last month's COP30 climate summit, where governments failed to agree to substantial new measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reflecting strained geopolitics as the U.S. rolls back its efforts, and some countries seek to weaken CO2-cutting measures.

This year will also likely round out the first three-year period in which the average global temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, C3S said in a monthly bulletin. "These milestones are not abstract -- they reflect the accelerating pace of climate change," said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at C3S.

Michael Saylor's software company Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, built a financial model that some observers called an "infinite-money machine" by stockpiling hundreds of thousands of bitcoins and issuing stock and debt to buy more, but that machine appears to be breaking down. The company's stock peaked above $450 in mid-July and ended November at $177.18, a 60% decline. Bitcoin fell only 25% over the same period. The gap between Strategy's market cap and the value of its bitcoin holdings has nearly vanished.

At one point last week, the company's market value dipped below the value of its bitcoins after accounting for debt. Strategy announced it had built a $1.4 billion dollar reserve by selling more stock to cover required dividend payments to preferred shareholders over the next twelve months. The company also disclosed it might sell some of its coins if its value continues to fall, a reversal from Saylor's February tweet declaring "Never sell your Bitcoin." Professional short seller Jim Chanos, who had questioned the strategy's sustainability, told Sherwood he made money by shorting the stock and buying bitcoins.

A tenured USC professor is arguing that universities need to fundamentally rethink their value proposition as AI rapidly closes the gap on human instruction and a loneliness epidemic grips the generation most likely to be sitting in their lecture halls. Eric Anicich, an associate professor at USC's Marshall School of Business, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that nearly three-quarters of 16- to 24-year-olds now report feeling lonely, young adults spend 70% less time with friends in person compared to two decades ago, and a growing majority of Gen Z college graduates say their degree was a "waste of money."

Anicich points to a recent Harvard study finding that students using an AI tutor learned more than twice as much as those in traditional active-learning classes, and did so in less time. The implication is stark: if instruction becomes abundant and cheap, colleges must sell what remains scarce -- genuine human community. He notes that his doctoral training included zero coursework on teaching, a norm he says persists across academia. His proposal: fund student life as seriously as research labs, hire professional "experience designers," and treat rituals and collaborative projects as core curriculum rather than amenities.

The Trump administration will allow Nvidia to resume selling H200 chips to China, but only if the U.S. government takes a 25% cut. Axios reports: Trump said on Truth Social that he'll allow Nvidia to sell H200 chips -- the generation of chips before its current, more-advanced Blackwell lineup -- to China, with the U.S. government pocketing a quarter of the revenue. He said he would apply "the same approach to AMD, Intel, and other GREAT American Companies."

American defense hawks fear that China could use Nvidia chips to advance its military ambitions. Trump said Monday that the sales will be subject to "conditions that allow for continued strong National Security." The blockade remains in place for Nvidia's current generation of Blackwell chips, which will be replaced in the second half of 2026 by even more advanced Rubin chips. Huang said recently he was unsure if China would want the older chips. "We applaud President Trump's decision to allow America's chip industry to compete to support high paying jobs and manufacturing in America," Nvidia said in a statement. "Offering H200 to approved commercial customers, vetted by the Department of Commerce, strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the U.S., the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis. The green groups, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Food & Water Watch and dozens of local organizations, have urged members of Congress to halt the proliferation of energy-hungry datacenters, accusing them of causing planet-heating emissions, sucking up vast amounts of water and exacerbating electricity bill increases that have hit Americans this year.

"The rapid, largely unregulated rise of datacenters to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans' economic, environmental, climate and water security," the letter states, adding that approval of new data centers should be paused until new regulations are put in place. The push comes amid a growing revolt against moves by companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into new datacenters, primarily to meet the huge computing demands of AI. At least 16 datacenter projects, worth a combined $64 billion, have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition to rising electricity costs. The facilities' need for huge amounts of water to cool down equipment has also proved controversial, particularly in drier areas where supplies are scarce. [...]

At the current rate of growth, datacenters could add up to 44m tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, equivalent to putting an extra 10m cars on to the road and exacerbating a climate crisis that is already spurring extreme weather disasters and ripping apart the fabric of the American insurance market. But it is the impact upon power bills, rather than the climate crisis, that is causing anguish for most voters, acknowledged Emily Wurth, managing director of organizing at Food & Water Watch, the group behind the letter to lawmakers. "I've been amazed by the groundswell of grassroots, bipartisan opposition to this, in all types of communities across the US," said Wurth. "Everyone is affected by this, the opposition has been across the political spectrum. A lot of people don't see the benefits coming from AI and feel they will be paying for it with their energy bills and water."

"It's an important talking point. We've seen outrageous utility price rises across the country and we are going to lean into this. Prices are going up across the board and this is something Americans really do care about."

Firefox 146 has been released with native fractional scaling support on Wayland -- finally giving Linux users crisp UI rendering. Other new additions include GPU process improvements on macOS, developer-focused CSS features, and broader access to Firefox Labs. Phoronix reports: Firefox 146 also now makes Firefox Labs available to all users, Firefox on macOS now has a dedicated GPU process by default, dropping Direct2D support on Windows, support for compressed elliptic curve points in WebCrypto, and updated the bundled Skia graphics library. Firefox 146 also has some fun developer enhancements like support for the CSS text-decoration-inset property, the @scope rule now being supported, CSS contrast-color() function being available, and several new experimental web features. The release notes and developer changes can be found at their respective links. Release binaries are available at Mozilla.org.

Denmark's postal service, established by King Christian IV four centuries ago as one of Europe's first modern mail systems, will stop delivering letters on December 30, ending a tradition that once saw riders given a maximum of 45 minutes to cover each 10-kilometer stretch of routes running from Hamburg to Norway.

PostNord, the postal service Denmark has shared with Sweden since 2009, started removing its 1,500 remaining red post boxes in June; a handful will go to museums. Letter volumes collapsed from nearly 1.5 billion in 2000 to 110 million last year. A standard stamp now costs 29 Danish kroner ($4.52). A private logistics firm called DAO will take over letter delivery. PostNord will continue handling parcels. The decision has rattled postal services elsewhere in Europe. Deutsche Post in Germany, still delivering 61 million letters daily, has warned it faces the same trends.

An investigation has revealed how stablecoins -- cryptocurrencies pegged to the US dollar that exist largely beyond traditional financial oversight -- have become a practical tool for criminals and sanctioned individuals to move funds across borders almost instantly and convert them back into spendable money, often without detection.

A Chainalysis report from February estimated that up to $25 billion in illicit transactions involved stablecoins last year. A New York Times reporter tested the system by converting $40 cash at a crypto ATM in Weehawken, New Jersey, into stablecoins and then using a Telegram bot to generate a Visa payment card without any identity verification. The card-issuing service, WantToPay, is incorporated in Hong Kong and led by a Russian entrepreneur in Thailand; it advertises to Russians blocked by US sanctions. Britain last month arrested members of a billion-dollar money laundering network that had purchased a bank in Kyrgyzstan to convert proceeds from drug trafficking and human trafficking into Tether, the most popular stablecoin.

Further reading: China's Central Bank Flags Money Laundering and Fraud Concerns With Stablecoins.

America's Energy Department runs a research lab in Idaho — and this week announced successful results from a ground-breaking experiment. "This is the first time in history that chloride-based molten salt fuel has been produced for a fast reactor," says Bill Phillips, the lab's technical lead for salt synthesis. He calls it "a major milestone for American innovation and a clear signal of our national commitment to advanced nuclear energy." Unlike traditional reactors that use solid fuel rods and water as a coolant, most molten salt reactors rely on liquid fuel — a mixture of salts containing fissile material. This design allows for higher operating temperatures, better fuel efficiency, and enhanced safety. It also opens the door to new applications, including compact nuclear systems for ships and remote installations.

"The Molten Chloride Fast Reactor represents a paradigm shift in the nuclear fuel cycle, and the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment (MCRE) will directly inform the commercialization of that reactor," said Jeff Latkowski, senior vice president of TerraPower and program director for the Molten Chloride Fast Reactor. "Working with world-leading organizations such as INL to successfully synthesize this unique new fuel demonstrates how real progress in Gen IV nuclear is being made together."

"The implications for the maritime industry are significant," said Don Wood, senior technical advisor for MCRE. "Molten salt reactors could provide ships with highly efficient, low-maintenance nuclear power, reducing emissions and enabling long-range, uninterrupted travel. The technology could spark the rise of a new nuclear sector — one that is mobile, scalable and globally transformative.
More details from America's Energy Department: MCRE will require a total of 72 to 75 batches of fuel salt to go critical, making it the largest fuel production effort at INL since the operations of Experimental Breeder Reactor-II more than 30 years ago. The full-scale demonstration of the new fuel salt synthesis line for MCRE was made possible by a breakthrough in 2024. After years of testing, the team found the right recipe to convert 95 percent of uranium metal feedstock into 18 kilograms of uranium chloride fuel salt in only a few hours — a process that previously took more than a week to complete...

After delivering the first batch of fuel salt this fall, the team anticipates delivering four additional batches by March of 2026. MCRE is anticipated to run in 2028 for approximately six months at INL in the Laboratory for Operation and Testing (LOTUS) in the United States test bed.
"With the first batch of fuel salt successfully created at INL, researchers will now conduct testing to better understand the physics of the process, with a goal of moving the process to a commercial scale over the next decade," says Cowboy State Daily.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

AI is the second-largest major at M.I.T. after computer science, reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here and here.) Though that includes students interested in applying AI in biology and health care — it's just the beginning: This semester, more than 3,000 students enrolled in a new college of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity at the University of South Florida in Tampa. At the University of California, San Diego, 150 first-year students signed up for a new A.I. major. And the State University of New York at Buffalo created a stand-alone "department of A.I. and society," which is offering new interdisciplinary degrees in fields like "A.I. and policy analysis...."

[I]nterest in understanding, using and learning how to build A.I. technologies is soaring, and schools are racing to meet rising student and industry demand. Over the last two years, dozens of U.S. universities and colleges have announced new A.I. departments, majors, minors, courses, interdisciplinary concentrations and other programs.
"This is so cool to me to have the opportunity to be at the forefront of this," one 18-year-old told the New York Times. Their article points out 62% of America's computing programs reported drops in undergraduate enrollment this fall, according to a report in October from the Computing Research Association.

"One reason for the dip: student employment concerns."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

It runs locally, a free/open source home automation platform connecting all your devices together, regardless of brand. And GitHub's senior developer calls it "one of the most active, culturally important, and technically demanding open source ecosystems on the planet," with tens of thousands of contributors and millions of installations.

That's confirmed by this year's "Octoverse" developer survey... Home Assistant was one of the fastest-growing open source projects by contributors, ranking alongside AI infrastructure giants like vLLM, Ollama, and Transformers. It also appeared in the top projects attracting first-time contributors, sitting beside massive developer platforms such as VS Code... Home Assistant is now running in more than 2 million households, orchestrating everything from thermostats and door locks to motion sensors and lighting. All on users' own hardware, not the cloud. The contributor base behind that growth is just as remarkable: 21,000 contributors in a single year...

At its core, Home Assistant's problem is combinatorial explosion. The platform supports "hundreds, thousands of devices... over 3,000 brands," as [maintainer Franck Nijhof] notes. Each one behaves differently, and the only way to normalize them is to build a general-purpose abstraction layer that can survive vendor churn, bad APIs, and inconsistent firmware. Instead of treating devices as isolated objects behind cloud accounts, everything is represented locally as entities with states and events. A garage door is not just a vendor-specific API; it's a structured device that exposes capabilities to the automation engine. A thermostat is not a cloud endpoint; it's a sensor/actuator pair with metadata that can be reasoned about.

That consistency is why people can build wildly advanced automations. Frenck describes one particularly inventive example: "Some people install weight sensors into their couches so they actually know if you're sitting down or standing up again. You're watching a movie, you stand up, and it will pause and then turn on the lights a bit brighter so you can actually see when you get your drink. You get back, sit down, the lights dim, and the movie continues." A system that can orchestrate these interactions is fundamentally a distributed event-driven runtime for physical spaces. Home Assistant may look like a dashboard, but under the hood it behaves more like a real-time OS for the home...

The local-first architecture means Home Assistant can run on hardware as small as a Raspberry Pi but must handle workloads that commercial systems offload to the cloud: device discovery, event dispatch, state persistence, automation scheduling, voice pipeline inference (if local), real-time sensor reading, integration updates, and security constraints. This architecture forces optimizations few consumer systems attempt.
"If any of this were offloaded to a vendor cloud, the system would be easier to build," the article points out. "But Home Assistant's philosophy reverses the paradigm: the home is the data center..."

As Nijhof says of other vendor solutions, "It's crazy that we need the internet nowadays to change your thermostat."