"Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages," reports the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the state hasn't implemented rotating power outages since 2020.

Because "Over the last few years, California has quietly but dramatically increased the resiliency of its electrical grid through a significant expansion in battery energy storage." These batteries hold onto solar energy captured during the day, so it can be sent to the grid as demand peaks in the evening and morning, when most people are at home running air conditioners and other appliances.

During the August heat wave of 2020, the California Independent System Operator, which manages the flow of electricity for most of the state, declared a Stage 3 Emergency and hundreds of thousands of households lost power in rolling outages. At the time, the system had less than 100 megawatts of battery storage available, according to system spokesperson Jayme Ackemann. Today, it has more than 17,000 megawatts available....

According to Ackemann, the system seeks to add 20,000 to 25,000 megawatts of battery storage capacity by 2045 — the same year it has set a goal of achieving carbon neutrality. That means the state would remove as many carbon emissions from the atmosphere as it emits.

In recent years, California has steadily grown the share of electrical power generated by renewable sources — such as solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower — which bolstered the resiliency of the grid by increasing the overall amount of energy available. An uptick in people installing rooftop solar panels has provided an additional power boost, Ackemann said. In May, California became the first known large-scale power system in the world to have relied on more than 50% solar power for an entire month.... California's grid is also now integrated with electrical systems across much of the Western United States. This means that if there is an extreme heat event in Southern California, energy from a cooler area such as the Pacific Northwest can be imported to help meet regional demand. All of this has collectively helped the state's electrical system weather this year's long-lasting heat.
"Southern California continued to break temperature records this week when Long Beach and Anaheim reached a blistering 107 degrees and Escondido hit 112 degrees..."

Silicon Valley giants and national security experts "are calling for action against Chinese companies engaged in model distillation," reports CNBC. But "I would do nothing," says Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. "We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime." Distillation is the process of using the outputs of a more capable AI model to train a smaller or less capable one, sometimes illicitly... Anthropic has accused Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and MiniMax of the practice, while OpenAI believes DeepSeek's V3 and R1 model architectures were distilled from its own GPT-4 and GPT-4o models. In the midst of this, the U.S.'s National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Federal Bureau of Investigation released an official cyber security advisory warning on the topic on Tuesday...

But Tan believes regulators should focus less on curbing distillation and more on creating an equilibrium between open weight models and frontier models — as long as frontier models retain a price premium that allows their business model to remain feasible. "This is actually the ideal case. You want open weight models to give people freedom and access," he explained. "If I were a regulator, that's what I would go after." Tan acknowledged that this is a hard balance to strike, calling it "a tightrope." Nevertheless, he says it's a balance worth pursuing — saying it "could result in the best possible outcome."
Tan later told TechCrunch he'd like to see America with more open-weight options that aren't Chinese, built by smaller U.S. open-weight AI labs using those same training techniques on products from America's frontier AI labs: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had previously publicly called on U.S. regulators to crack down on distillation. It's notable that the commander of Silicon Valley's prestigious and prolific startup accelerator doesn't agree.

To be clear, Tan isn't advocating for American AI labs to use stolen credentials to distill. He wants them to be free to come in the front door. In fact, his argument is twofold. He feels it's an overreach for AI labs to dictate what their customers can do with the information their models share with them. He also notes that the proprietary AI labs didn't ask permission when they vacuumed up as much human knowledge as they could to train their models. They famously ingested plenty of copyrighted material without the permission of those intellectual property holders. "Controlling what users and customers do with API calls to closed weight models feels constraining, and there's a role government can play here to normalize the fact that access to intelligence that was trained on broad public access data should itself also be more a form of a public good than something locked away behind restrictive terms of service," he told TechCrunch when asked why American labs should be free to distill, too...

To him, the true AI doomer scenario is for all the immense power of frontier AI to wind up in the hands of a single powerful, proprietary provider. "The nightmare scenario, the doomer scenario for AI is that there's just one company," he said. "It has the best access to capital. It has the best AI researchers. It runs away with it and suddenly there's one company that's monolithic. And that would be bad."

NASA and IBM have released an open-source AI model trained on a large collection of lunar observations to help scientists analyze the Moon at scale. "The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model gives scientists a foundation to explore the Moon at scale, connecting observations across instruments, revealing patterns that are difficult to see in isolation, and providing an open platform the global research community can build on," said IBM director of research for Europe, Juan Bernabe-Moreno. The Register reports: It is claimed as the first AI model to integrate observations captured in a range of modalities (data formats), and at different viewing angles and spatial scales. Instead of sifting through maps and images by hand or using low resolution machine learning models, scientists can use this to analyze geographic features, the pair say. In particular, NASA and IBM hope researchers will be able to discover previously unidentified lunar ice deposits, analyze volcanic features called Irregular Mare Patches, and identify and classify craters.

Lunar ice indicates the presence of water and oxygen, which may be useful for future manned missions. It is found in permanently shadowed regions, which are among the most difficult areas to observe. The NASA-IBM model combines multimodal and multi-resolution observations to better predict where ice may be present on the lunar surface. Alongside the model, IBM and NASA scientists compiled an open-source lunar dataset from over 30 spatially-aligned layers, using data from nine instruments across four missions. It combines tens of thousands of images and maps showing various geophysical properties of the lunar surface.

America's highest court heard Sam Bankman-Fried's request for a new trial on Thursday, CNN reports. But they add that "the former crypto mogul who was convicted of defrauding investors by secretly diverting billions of dollars of their money" also asked America's high court "to throw out a court order requiring him to pay $11 billion as part of his sentence." Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024 after prosecutors said he directed billions of dollars from the crypto exchange FTX to a hedge fund he controlled called Alameda Research, where the funds were used for risky investments, political donations and his own personal benefit. The Supreme Court appeal, which was reviewed by CNN, raises a technical question about evidence that was submitted at his trial, and whether Bankman-Fried should have been permitted to demonstrate that his investments were ultimately sound and would have covered any losses by FTX customers.

He also argues that the $11 billion forfeiture violates the 8th Amendment's prohibition on excessive fines. "Where the government pursues a theory of fraud under which it doesn't matter whether any victims lost money, introducing evidence suggesting that people actually lost money is distracting and prejudicial," veteran Supreme Court attorney Jeffrey Fisher told CNN. "All the more so where the truth is the victims did not lose money, and the defendant is unable to make that clear."

The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the arguments earlier this year.

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: A bipartisan pair of American politicians is telling Britain's most secretive court to stop hiding its handling of Apple's legal fight against a government demand to break into its customers' encrypted data, warning that Whitehall's taste for secrecy is 'needlessly' straining relations between the two allies. The letter (PDF), shared with the Guardian ahead of being sent to the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) on Friday, is signed by the Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and the Republican congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio.

The row dates back to January 2025, when the Home Office served Apple with a technical capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act, which requires companies to assist law enforcement in providing evidence. The UK government demanded that Apple provide a mechanism to access encrypted iCloud backups worldwide, a call the company met by withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection encryption feature from UK users the following month. Apple's challenge to that order at the IPT was later thrown out after the Home Office withdrew the original notice and issued a narrower one targeting only British users' data. "It is wholly inappropriate for a foreign executive body to attempt to dictate the distribution of powers within the US government, nor should it be permitted to use secrecy directives under the Investigatory Powers Act to frustrate Article I powers under the US Constitution," the pair wrote.

Wyden and Davidson write that Congress "is not only a co-equal branch of government, it is the First Branch," and argue that no government can be allowed to place "its demands beyond the reach of legislative inquiry."

"The UK government," they write, "cannot champion legislative oversight at home while using administrative gag orders to kneecap the constitutional authority of the US Congress."

The UK government has rejected proposals for an emergency AI "kill switch," arguing that blocking access to dangerous models inside Britain would do little if the same systems remained available or were developed elsewhere. The BBC reports: The proposal to create a legal mechanism for the UK to switch off an AI model in an emergency has been brought to Parliament by lords and MPs in recent weeks as fears grow about the threat the tech poses. But the Cabinet Office - the part of government which leads on AI safety - said the UK "cannot simply turn AI off".

"Blocking access to models in the UK would not prevent them being developed or misused elsewhere," a spokesperson told BBC News. The government's opposition to the legislation does not prevent it from progressing through parliament, but makes it unlikely it will become law. "Switching off access to an AI model in an emergency will do little to protect you," said former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajilo. "You're still going to be steamrolled by the super intelligences created in the US."

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: August was the joint-hottest month ever recorded, tying with July 2023, according to the EU's climate service. The record was driven by a combination of climate change and the rising influence of El Nino, pushing heat into the atmosphere across the Pacific. Temperatures for the month were 1.65C above pre-industrial levels -- surpassing the critical 1.5C threshold agreed by countries to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. While a single month above 1.5C does not mean it has been permanently crossed, it shows a trend towards breaching that limit. The month also capped western Europe's warmest summer, with high temperatures pushing the season past the deadly heat of 2003.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world's forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has found. As the world heats up, permafrost in the high latitudes is thawing, fiercer wildfires are burning in drying forests and wetlands and lakes are warming. All of these changes are themselves causing the release of planet-heating methane and carbon dioxide locked in trees and soils, therefore worsening the climate crisis, the paper states.

While scientists have long known of these "feedback loops" that amplify the impact of direct pollution from burning coal, oil and gas, the emissions from natural sources are largely unaccounted for in climate projections. This additional heating is however significant, researchers found, with emissions from natural sources set to amplify global heating by 20% to 30% by the end of this century. This would add an estimated 0.2C to 0.4C to the global average temperature by this time, depending on the overall action taken by countries to combat the climate crisis.

[...] This latest paper makes clear that action by countries to cut fossil fuel pollution will still lessen the amount of additional emissions that come from landscapes. Under the most optimistic climate scenario where emissions are cut quickly, natural sources will add 0.2C of warming, the paper found. Under a worse case higher emissions scenario, 0.4C will likely be added. Current policies put in place by governments are likely to see the global temperature rise to 2.6C above pre-industrial times, according to Climate Action Tracker. This will likely cause severe disruption and hardship to billions of people through sea level rise, crop losses and other consequences. "This hidden multiplier is missing from the models guiding climate policy, so those models are likely underestimating how much warming is coming -- and overestimating how much carbon we can still afford to emit," said Sam Abernethy, a scientist at Spark Climate Solutions who led the research, published in Environmental Research Letters.

The disruption of the worldâ(TM)s carbon cycles is now being seen in "real time," said Rob Jackson, a Stanford University scientist and study co-author. "The results are a wake-up call, and itâ(TM)s imperative that they be included in the next generation of climate policies," he added. "Failure to do so will make meeting the worldâ(TM)s climate goals less and less likely."

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Financial Services, a Wall Street-focused version of ChatGPT Work developed with Morgan Stanley and Evercore that can research companies, analyze financial data, and build presentations using the company's latest and most advanced model, GPT-6 Astra. "We're effectively teaching ChatGPT to research like an analyst and back up its conclusions like an analyst as well," said OpenAI's Vice President of Product, Nick Turley. CNBC reports: The rollout puts OpenAI deeper into territory traditionally occupied by Wall Street's entry-level bankers, the recent college graduates called analysts and associates that the industry has employed for decades to research deals and create pitchbooks. It also showcases the company's continued push into enterprise offerings as it gears up for what is widely expected to be a blockbuster IPO.

In a live demonstration of the new offering, Turley showed the platform analyzing a potential M&A target, pulling financial figures from industry-standard data sources and creating a formatted PowerPoint deck based on a bank's pre-formatted style guide. "It's very easy to make slides that look good, but it's much harder to make slides [that] actually make sense," Turley said. "To get here, ChatGPT had to choose the relevant peers. It had to pull the prices into a spreadsheet. It had to check the chart against the data, and it had to explain the selloff and the rebound."

The U.S. Department of Energy has approved a $1.9 billion loan to NextEra Energy to restart Iowa's shuttered Duane Arnold nuclear plant, which Google has backed as a power source for its growing AI infrastructure. "The sizable loan is the second of its kind, suggesting that the Trump administration views revived nuclear power as a key source of electricity for tech companies seeking to power their AI data centers," notes TechCrunch. From the report: James Danly, Deputy Secretary of Energy, said that the Iowa power plant's restart in 2029 will "drive down electricity costs," though he did not explain how. Just 50 megawatts will be set aside for the local power cooperative, NextEra CEO John Ketchum said during an earnings call (PDF) last year. That capacity would cover 18% of Iowa's demand growth since 2021, the year before ChatGPT was released.

Google is reportedly looking to build up to six data centers near the Duane Arnold Energy Center, which hasn't operated since 2020 when an intense rainstorm damaged the power plant. Rather than repair it, NextEra decided to mothball it. At the time, cheap natural gas was flooding the market, making nuclear power economically unappealing. A lot has changed in the last six years, though. After decades of little growth in demand, the sudden rise of AI coupled with broader electrification of the economy meant that utilities and power providers were suddenly scrambling to find new generating sources of electricity. New data centers are expected to nearly triple the sector's electricity demand by 2035.

Teen reading, math, and science scores have fallen to their lowest levels since international PISA testing began in 2000, with 15-year-olds now reading at roughly the level previously expected of students a year younger. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) linked weaker results to more screen time, less reading for pleasure, and digital distraction. It also found that students who regularly used AI chatbots for tasks like drafting essays and summarizing text scored about 20 points lower in science, roughly equivalent to a year of learning. Reuters reports: A 2012 reading high of 501 on PISA's index had declined to a score of 466 last year. The test is widely regarded as the world's leading gauge of educational performance and its results are closely scrutinized by governments and educators. "In reading, more screen time and less reading for pleasure have gone hand in hand with weaker results," OECD head Mathias Cormann told a press conference. "We're also seeing more hasty reading, students rushing through a text and giving a quick wrong answer."

Reading scores fell more sharply in students from better-off backgrounds, the study added. Hindered by falling reading standards, average teenage science and maths skills were also at their lowest this century. Science fell from a 2009 high of 506 on the index to 486, while maths was down from 502 to 469 in the same period. East Asia was the best-performing region. Chinese cities that participated in the test, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan had the best educational systems with Britain and Estonia the only countries outside the region that made it into the top 10 in reading, mathematics and science.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans' financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime, but which the government thinks may be worth searching, 404 Media has found. The units, the name of which 404 Media is revealing here for the first time, are called Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT). In one case, a PITT analyzed the financial activity of a man who was driving across Montana, and local authorities stopped him under the pretense of an obstructed license plate and charged him with a DUI.

404 Media identified one PITT in the Spokane Sector, Washington, which polices the U.S. border with Canada, and another in the Laredo Sector, Texas, which polices the border with Mexico. The findings add to an Associated Press investigation from last year which found Border Patrol was using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) as part of the same wide-spanning predictive policing program. "The bottom line is genuine probable cause cannot be synthetically generated," Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center For Democracy & Technology, told 404 Media in an email. Here Border Patrol seems to be "using parallel construction to cloak the reason behind its car stops in secrecy. If we can't meaningfully review and evaluate these systems, we can't trust them," he added.

[...] The DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows that Border Patrol is analyzing the financial activity of Americans to find people to pull over. The Associated Press's investigation found the predictive policing program is also heavily using ALPRs to track potential targets' movements. It is not clear how exactly Border Patrol is monitoring Americans' financial activity. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) declined to answer what financial activity the agency was monitoring, and whether it obtained a warrant or not. A CBP spokesperson told 404 Media in an email: "U.S. Border Patrol uses intelligence-informed analysis and planning to support national security operations, allocate resources, and help identify potential threats and bad actors to public safety. These efforts are conducted consistent with applicable law, policy, privacy protections, and oversight requirements."

The statement continued: "For operational security reasons, we do not discuss specific analytical methods, data sources, targeting criteria, investigative techniques, system capabilities, or deployment details. Public disclosure of such information could compromise law enforcement operations and investigations as well as creating safety risks for agents and the public."

Rob Frommer, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, told 404 Media: "The government's increasing use of mass surveillance -- whether that surveillance comes via ALPRs, financial records, or the like -- coupled with predictive policing is a recipe for tyranny. We fought a revolution for the idea that we are citizens, not subjects. Yet schemes like CBP's Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team treat all Americans as if they are potential suspects. This is not just wrong, it's unconstitutional, and IJ will keep pushing courts and Congress to end this attack on Americans' security."

The Brave web browser published a new round of benchmarks claiming its desktop browser uses less system resources than Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox — and also loads pages faster. The blog Linuxiac reports: According to Brave's testing, the browser used 44% less CPU, 28% less memory, and 10% less energy on average compared with the three competing browsers. It also completed page loads 20% faster while transferring 26% less inbound data and 39% less outbound data...

- Brave averaged about 33% CPU usage, while Chrome used 47%, Edge 53%, and Firefox 78%.

- For memory, Brave used about 1.2 GB, compared to 1.75 GB for Chrome, 1.62 GB for Edge, and 1.65 GB for Firefox.

By stopping ads, analytics scripts, tracking pixels, and other third-party requests from loading, the browser has less network traffic and less work to do. In page-loading tests, Brave took about 4.4 seconds to fully load a page. Chrome took 5.1 seconds, Firefox 5.3 seconds, and Edge 6 seconds. However, when measuring Largest Contentful Paint, which is when the main content appears, Brave and Chrome both averaged about 2.4 seconds, with Edge and Firefox just behind at 2.5 seconds. This means Brave's main advantage comes after the main content is visible, since there are fewer background ads, trackers, analytics requests, and delayed scripts to process.

Switzerland has a population of 9,154,242. And its federal government just launched a pilot program to test open source alternatives to Microsoft 365 on 3,000 workstations, reports the blog It's FOSS. "That's about 7% of the federal workforce." The target is to complete the migration by end of 2027... On September 3, 2026, the Federal Council published results of "PoC BOSS", a feasibility proof-of-concept involving 172 federal employees who tested the openDesk suite, a German open-source collaboration platform. During the proof-of-concept phase, core office tasks like document processing and email received positive assessments, while large-scale video conferencing still showed technical limitations. Based on the 'success' of the PoC phase with 172 employees, the pilot is now launched for 3,000 employees...

According to Matthias Stürmer, professor at the Bern University of Applied Sciences, Microsoft's supremacy in public institutions poses three problems that are driving this migration. First is the risk of foreign access. US cloud legislation could expose Swiss government data to foreign authorities. Second is the risk to service continuity, as dependency on a single foreign vendor creates operational risk. The third risk is the escalating costs as proprietary licensing fees are rising with no Swiss leverage.

Switzerland's military cybersecurity unit, Cyber Command, is not waiting for the civilian pilot. It is already poised to replace Microsoft 365 entirely with openDesk by October 2026. It is pretty much the same reason. Military doesn't want foreign governments accessing sensitive Swiss data.
The article notes that during the pilot phase, the new system runs in parallel with Microsoft 365 rather than replacing it. But the article's author speculates that "If the pilot is successful, we might expect the migration to continue on all the 54,000 workstations owned by the federal administrations."

Last year the writing program at the University of Baltimore used an app that tracks students while they're writing in Google Docs, offering teachers a video playing back revisions "with a scoreboard of all the edits, pastes and minutes spent on it," writes the Washington Post. "Is it surveillance? Yes, I think obviously," says the program's director.

But was there a better way? She is one of a dozen educators around the country who told The Post that they're experimenting with a different approach to student use of generative artificial intelligence this school year. Teachers and professors are throwing out old assignments, installing new policies and protocols, and incorporating AI built for the classroom, rather than feeling forced to choose between returning to pencil and paper or acting like the AI police.

Her new lesson plan even incorporates generative AI in a controlled way to let her evaluate students' critical thinking skills. She created chatbots using BoodleBox, the university's AI vendor, that allow instructors to see both sides of the conversation. For an assignment testing students' ability to make evidence-based arguments, they participate in a simulated school board meeting about banning books. It involves debating chatbots designed by Zeleny with names like the Confrontational Parent. Writing students usually turn in business proposals and research papers. This semester, instructors are starting to ask instead for transcripts of conversations a student had with a chatbot, a handwritten outline of their composition, and a video reflection of how they felt about the work. "In a lot of ways, we have made these assignments harder, but writing should have always had more detailed checkpoints along the way," she said.