Author Dan Simmons, best known for the epic sci-fi novel Hyperion and its sequels, has died at 77 following a stroke. Ars Technica's Eric Berger remembers Simmons, writing: Simmons, who worked in elementary education before becoming an author in the 1980s, produced a broad portfolio of writing that spanned several genres, including horror fiction, historical fiction, and science fiction. Often, his books included elements of all of these. This obituary will focus on what is generally considered his greatest work, and what I believe is possibly the greatest science fiction novel of all time, Hyperion.

Published in 1989, Hyperion is set in a far-flung future in which human settlement spans hundreds of planets. The novel feels both familiar, in that its structure follows Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and utterly unfamiliar in its strange, far-flung setting. Simmons' Hyperion appeared in an Ask Slashdot story back in 2008, when Slashdot reader willyhill asked for tips on how Slashdotters track down great sci-fi. If you're in the mood for a little nostalgia, or just want to browse the thread for book recommendations, it's well worth revisiting.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Weeks after the U.S. Congress rejected unprecedented cuts to science budgets that the administration of US President Donald Trump had sought for 2026, funding to several agencies that award research grants is still not freely flowing.

One reason is that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has been slow to authorize its release. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has so far not received approval to spend any of the research funding allocated in a budget bill signed into law on 3 February. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) was authorized to spend its funding just last week. And NASA has had its full funding authorized for release, but with an unusual restriction that limits spending on ten specific programmes -- many of which the Trump team had tried to cancel last year.

theodp writes: On Tuesday, Microsoft GM of Education and Workforce Policy (and former Code.org Chief Academic Officer) Pat Yongpradit posted an obituary of sorts for coders. "Computer programmers and software developers are codified differently in the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] data," Yongpradit wrote. "The modern AI-infused world needs less computer programmers (coders) and more software developers (more holistic and higher level). So when folks say that there is less hiring of computer programmers, they are right. But there will be more hiring of software developers, especially those who have adopted an AI-forward mindset and skillset. [...] The number of just pure computer programming roles has already been declining due to reasons like outsourcing, AI will just accelerate the decline."

On Wednesday, Yongpradit's colleague Allyson Knox, Senior Director of Education and Workforce Policy at Microsoft, put another AI nail in the coder coffin, testifying before the House Committee on Education -- the Workforce Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education on Building an AI-ready America: Teaching in the Age of AI. "Thank you to Chairman Tim Walberg, Ranking Member Bobby Scott, Chair Kevin Kiley, Ranking Member Suzanne Bonamici and members of the Subcommittee for the opportunity to share Microsoft perspective and that of the educators and parents we hear from every day across the country," Knox wrote in a LinkedIn post.

"Three themes continue to emerge throughout these discussions: 1. Educators want support to build AI literacy and critical thinking skills. 2. Schools need guidance and guardrails to ensure student data is protected and adults remain in control. 3. Teachers want classroom-ready tools, and a voice in shaping them. If we focus on these priorities, we can help ensure AI expands opportunity for every student across the United States."

Yongpradit and Knox report up to Microsoft President Brad Smith, who last July told Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi it was time for the tech-backed nonprofit to "switch hats" from coding to AI as Microsoft announced a new $4 billion initiative to advance AI education. Smith's thoughts on the extraordinary promise of AI in education were cited by Knox in her 2026 Congressional testimony. Interestingly, Knox argued for the importance of computer programming literacy in her 2013 Congressional testimony at a hearing on Our Nation of Builders: Training the Builders of the Future. "Congress needs to come up with fresh ideas on how we can continue to train the next generation of builders, programmers, manufacturers, technicians and entrepreneurs," said Rep. Lee Terry said to open the discussion.

So, are reports of computer programming's imminent death greatly exaggerated?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year -- and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones. Analyst biz Gartner is projecting a drop in PC shipments of more than 10 percent during 2026, and a decline of around 8 percent for smartphones, all due to the AI-driven memory shortage. Some types of memory have doubled or quadrupled in price since last year, and Gartner believes DRAM and NAND flash used in PCs and phones is set for a further 130 percent rise by the end of 2026.

The upshot of this is that the budget PC will disappear, simply because vendors won't be able to build them at a price that will satisfy cost-conscious buyers, according to Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal. "Because the price of memory is increasing so much, vendors lose the ability to provide entry-level PCs -- those below about $500," he told The Register. PC makers could just raise the price of their cheap and cheerful boxes to above that level to compensate for the memory hike, however, price-sensitive buyers simply won't bite, he added.

Another factor expected to add to declining fortunes of the PC industry this year is AI devices -- systems equipped with special hardware for accelerating AI tasks, typically via a neural processing unit (NPU) embedded in the CPU. These systems were predicted to take the market by storm, but they require more memory to support AI processing and vendors like to mark them up to a premium price. "Historically, downgrading specifications was the way to go when prices were being squeezed, but that's difficult here," Atwal said. "The thinking was that the average price [of AI PCs] would fall this year, and lead to more adoption," said Atwal, "but that's not happening." The lack of killer applications isn't helping either.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: There's a new agentic AI called Einstein that will, according to its developers, live the life of a student for them. Einstein's website claims that the AI will attend lectures for you, write your papers, and even log into EdTech platforms like Canvas to take tests and participate in discussions. Educators told me that Einstein is just one of many AI tools that can do homework for students, but should be seen as a warning to schools that are increasingly seen by students as a place to gain a diploma and status as opposed to the value of education itself.

If an AI can go to school for you what's the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn't one. "I think about horses," he said. "They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I'd argue horses became a lot more free," he said. "They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said 'no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.'" But humans aren't horses. "This is much bigger than Einstein," Matthew Kirschenbaum told 404 Media. "Einstein is symptomatic. I doubt we'll be talking about Einstein, as such, in a year. But it's symptomatic of what's about to descend on higher ed and secondary ed as well."

[...] The attractiveness of agentic AIs is a symptom of a decades-long trend in higher education. "Universitiesby and large adopted a transactive model of education," Kirschenbaum said. "Students see their diploma as a credential. They pay tuition and at the end of four years, sometimes five years, they receive the credential and, in theory at least, that is then the springboard to economic stability and prosperity." Paliwal seems to agree. He told 404 Media that he attempted to change the university from the inside while working as a TA, but felt stymied by politics. "The only way to force these institutions to evolve is to bring reality to their face. And usually the loudest critics are the ones who can't do their own job well and live in fear of automation," he said. "I think we really need to question what learning even is and whether traditional educational institutions are actually helping or harming us," said Paliwal. "We're seeing a rise in unemployment across degree holders because of AI, and that makes me question whether this is really what humans are born to do. We've been brainwashed as a society into valuing ourselves by the output of our productive work, and I think humanity is a lot more beautiful than that. Is it really education if we're just memorizing things to perform a task well?"

Kirschenbaum added: "What we're finding is that if forms of education can be transacted then we've just about arrived at the point where autonomous software AI agents are capable of performing the transaction on your behalf," he said. "And so the whole educational paradigm has come back to essentially bite itself in the ass."

Mozilla has released Firefox 148 for Windows, macOS and Linux, bringing a new AI Settings section that lets users disable all of the browser's AI-powered features in one click and then selectively re-enable the ones they actually want, such as the local translation tool that works locally rather than in the cloud.

The update also patches more than 50 security vulnerabilities -- none known to be under active exploitation -- over half of which Mozilla classifies as high risk, including five sandbox escape flaws and eight use-after-free bugs in the JavaScript engine that could allow code execution.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It might look like something from the early days of the internet, with its aggressively grey color scheme and rectangles nested inside rectangles, but FPDS.gov is one of the most important resources for keeping tabs on what powerful spying tools U.S. government agencies are buying. It includes everything from phone hacking technology, to masses of location data, to more Palantir installations.

Or rather, it was an incredible tool and the basis for countless of my own investigations and others. Because on Wednesday, the government shut it down. Its replacement, another site called SAM.gov with Uncle Sam branding, frankly sucks, and makes it demonstrably harder to reliably find out what agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are spending tax payers dollars on.

"FPDS may have been a little clunky, but its simple, old-school interface made it extremely functional and robust. Every facet of government operations touches on contracting at one point, and this was the first tool that many investigative journalists and researchers would reach for to quickly find out what the government is buying and who is selling it, and how these contracts all fit together," Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration? Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn't definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus -- negative net migration -- as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America's own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe.

Since the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. hasn't collected comprehensive statistics on the number of citizens leaving. Yet data on residence permits, foreign home purchases, student enrollments and other metrics from more than 50 countries show that Americans are voting with their feet to an unprecedented degree. A millions-strong diaspora is studying, telecommuting and retiring overseas. The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there.

In the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon, so many Americans are snapping up apartments that the newest arrivals complain they mostly hear their own language -- not Portuguese. One of every 15 residents in Dublin's trendy Grand Canal Dock district was born in the U.S., according to realtors, higher than the percentage of Americans born in Ireland during the 19th-century influx following the Potato Famine. In Bali, Colombia and Thailand, the strains of housing American remote workers paid in dollars have inspired locals to mount protests against a wave of gentrification. More than 100,000 young students are enrolled abroad for a more affordable university degree. In nursing homes mushrooming across the Mexican border, elderly Americans are turning up for low-cost care.

[...] The U.S. experienced net negative migration -- an estimated loss of some 150,000 people -- in 2025, and the outflow will likely increase in 2026, according to calculations by the Brookings Institution, a public-policy think tank. The number could be larger or smaller because official U.S. data doesn't yet fully capture the number of people leaving, Brookings analysts noted. The total in-migration was between around 2.6 and 2.7 million in 2025, down from a peak of almost 6 million in 2023. The U.S. saw 675,000 deportations and 2.2 million "self-deportations" last year, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. A Wall Street Journal analysis of 15 countries providing full or partial 2025 data showed that at least 180,000 Americans joined them -- a number likely to be far higher when other countries report full statistics.

The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand.

The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a "surge in demand" for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts.

Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government's clean energy targets by the end of the decade. Ofgem said the work required to connect surging numbers of datacentres could mean delays for other projects that are "critical for decarbonisation and economic growth." Datacentres are the central nervous system of AI tools such as chatbots and image generators, playing a vital role in training and operating products such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

More than two decades after Maine became the first state to hand laptops to middle schoolers -- distributing 17,000 Apple machines across 243 schools in 2002 -- neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the one before it.

The U.S. spent more than $30 billion in 2024 alone putting laptops and tablets in classrooms, and Horvath cited PISA data from 15-year-olds worldwide showing a stark correlation between time on school computers and worse scores. A 2014 study of 3,000 university students found they were off-task on their machines nearly two-thirds of the time. Fortune reported back in 2017 that Maine's own test scores hadn't budged in the 15 years since the program launched, and then-governor Paul LePage called it a "massive failure." Horvath framed the generation's eroding capabilities not as a personal failure but a policy one, calling them victims of a failed pedagogical experiment.

Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global "AI kill switch" that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser's AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, key points in link previews, and AI chatbot providers in the sidebar. Firefox 148 also brings Firefox for Android, support for the Trusted Types API, CSS shape() function support, Sanitizer API support, WebGPU enhancements, and a variety of other changes. Developer chances can be found at developer.mozilla.org. Binaries are available from ftp.mozilla.org.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston's door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries. According to Huddleston, the men's client, an unnamed "Fortune 100 company," sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement. More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer (PDF) had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity. The unknown company was building a datacenter. "You don't have enough to buy me out. I'm not for sale. Leave me alone, I'm satisfied," Huddleston, 82, later told the men.

As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston's land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development -- are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use. Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land's recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston's neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price.

In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he'd worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre -- prices unimaginable just a few years ago. The rebuffs are a jarring reminder of AI's physical bounds, and limits of the dollars behind the technology. [...] As AI promises to transcend corporeal fallibility, these standoffs reveal its very physical constraints -- and Wall Street's miscalculation of what some people value most. In the rolling hills of Mason county and farmland across America, that gap is measured not in dollars but in something harder to price: identity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Officials working with Donald Trump's "Board of Peace" are exploring setting up a stablecoin for Gaza as part of efforts to reshape the devastated Palestinian enclave's economy, according to five people familiar with the discussions. The talks around introducing a stablecoin -- a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a mainstream currency, such as the US dollar -- are at a preliminary stage, and many details of how one could be introduced in Gaza remain to be determined.

But officials have discussed the idea as part of their plan for the future of the enclave, where economic activity collapsed during Israel's two-year war with Hamas and the traditional banking and payments system has been severely impaired. A person familiar with the project said the stablecoin was expected to be tied to the US dollar, with the hope that Gulf Arab and Palestinian companies with expertise in the field of digital currencies will help spearhead the effort. "This will not be a 'Gaza Coin' or a new Palestinian currency, but a means to allow Gazans to transact digitally," the person said.

Work on the idea is being led by Liran Tancman, an Israeli tech entrepreneur and former reservist who is now working as an unpaid adviser to Trump's "Board of Peace," the US-led body tasked with rebuilding Gaza, according to two people familiar with the matter. [...] According to the person familiar with the project, the "Board of Peace" and NCAG will decide on the stablecoin's regulatory framework and access, although "nothing definitive" has yet been finalized. Speaking at a meeting of the "Board of Peace" in Washington last week, Tancman said the NCAG was working on building "a secure digital backbone, an open platform enabling e-payments, financial services, e-learning, and healthcare with user control over data", but did not elaborate.

Climate scientists trying to predict how much hotter the planet will get have long grappled with a surprisingly stubborn problem -- clouds, which both reflect sunlight and trap heat, account for more than half the variation between climate predictions and are the main reason warming projections for the next 50 years range from 2 to 6 degrees Celsius.

Two research groups are now racing to close that gap using AI, though they disagree sharply on method. Tapio Schneider at Caltech built CLIMA, a model that uses machine learning to optimize cloud parameters within traditional physics equations; it will be unveiled at a conference in Japan in March. Chris Bretherton at the Allen Institute for AI took a different path -- his ACE2 neural network, released in 2024, learns from 50 years of atmospheric data and largely bypasses physics equations altogether.

The narrative that AI spending has been singlehandedly propping up the U.S. economy -- a claim that captivated Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington over the past year -- is facing serious pushback from economists [non-paywalled source] at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, all of whom now calculate that the AI buildup's direct contribution to growth was dramatically overstated and possibly close to zero.

The debate hinges on how GDP accounts for imported components: roughly three-quarters of AI data center costs go toward computer chips and gear largely manufactured in Asia, and that spending gets subtracted from domestic output because it boosts foreign economies. Joseph Politano of the Apricitas Economics newsletter pegs AI's actual contribution at about 0.2 percentage points of the 2.2 percent U.S. growth in 2025, and even Hannah Rubinton at the St. Louis Fed -- whose own analysis attributed 39 percent of growth to AI-related business spending through the first nine months of the year -- acknowledges that figure is probably the ceiling. "It's not like AI is propping up the economy," Rubinton said.