Shameless Plug

China's New AI Model Halts New Subscriptions As Demand Swamps Capacity Published on 2026-07-20T21:00:00Z Moonshot AI has temporarily paused new subscriptions for its Kimi K3 model after demand surged beyond the company's current capacity within days of the launch. The open-source Chinese AI model, described as one of the largest of its kind at 2.8 trillion parameters, has rattled U.S. rivals by beating Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in front-end coding tests. The Associated Press reports: "Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected," Moonshot AI, which is Beijing-based, wrote in a X post late on Sunday. "Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity." Moonshot said that it's prioritizing existing subscribers and would be temporarily pausing new ones. "We're adding capacity as fast as we can and will reopen new subscription spots in batches," it added. The AI startup al...

Zilog Z80 8-Bit CPU Turns 50, Open-source Replacement Heads To Drop-in DIP40 Silicon Published on 2026-07-20T00:50:00Z An anonymous reader shared this report from Tom's Hardware: The Zilog Z80 has just turned 50 years old. This iconic 8-bit processor first went on sale in July 1976 and stayed in production for 48 years until Zilog, now a Littelfuse subsidiary, stopped accepting orders in June 2024. However, there's an open-source replacement closer than ever to shipping in the chip's original 40-pin DIP package thanks to community-funded fabrication... The chip powered the ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, MSX machines, Nintendo's Game Boy, Sega's Master System, the Pac-Man arcade cabinet, and Texas Instruments' graphing calculators, then shipped in industrial controllers for decades after home computing moved on to more powerful successors. Zilog's end-of-life notice, dated April 15, 2024, told customers its wafer foundry was discontinuing support for the Z84C00 f...

Dozens of Robotaxi Riders Are Falling Asleep, Sparking Frantic Calls For Emergency Services Published on 2026-07-19T23:09:00Z "If tired or wasted passengers fall asleep in a traditional taxi or rideshare, the driver can shout or shake them awake," reports Bloomberg. "Not so in a robotaxi..." Ditto Kasendar remembers soft music drifting from the robotaxi's speakers as he rode home late at night from a friend's birthday party in 2025. The next moment, Los Angeles firefighters were opening the door and asking if he was OK. His six-minute trip had ended nearly an hour before. A remote Waymo assistant, dialling in through the car's speakers, repeatedly tried to rouse him and finally called 911 when he wouldn't stir... Kasendar's robocab nap was, unfortunately, not an isolated incident. As companies like Alphabet and Tesla bring self-driving taxis to more cities, the messier aspects of serving unpredictable humans are becoming harder to ignore. Pa...

California's 'Truth in Recycling' Law Blocked by Judge Published on 2026-07-19T21:04:00Z An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times: A federal judge has halted California's groundbreaking "Truth in Recycling" law, which aims to reduce consumer confusion about which packaging can be recycled. [Originally planned to take effect October 4th], California's recyclable packaging law prohibits manufacturers from using a "chasing arrows" recycling symbol on products or materials unless they are actually being recycled in a meaningful way, which the law quantifies... A coalition of farming, forestry, restaurant and packaging organizations sued the state in March, arguing the law violates their right to free speech. They argued that Senate Bill 343 operates as "government-imposed censorship." Judge William Hayes agreed that their challenge has merit, and on Tuesday ordered California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, the defendant...

James Webb Space Telescope Discovers How Black Holes Feed Themselves Published on 2026-07-19T19:05:00Z "Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have been given a glimpse of the mechanisms that supermassive black holes use to feed themselves," reports Space.com: The powerful cosmic titans get really puzzling when astronomers using the JWST spot them before the universe was even 1 billion years old. That's because the mechanisms by which black holes devour matter to grow and then merge to create even more massive black holes should take at least 1 billion years to achieve supermassive status. This is even more confusing because theories also say the most ravenously feeding black holes (and thus the fastest growing) should also push the matter they use for this growth away, in effect putting themselves on a diet. So, with all this in mind, how did supermassive black holes grow so rapidly in the early universe? One explanation suggests supermassive black hol...

How Microsoft's 'Little Workaround' Created a Major Threat to America's Defense Department Published on 2026-07-18T23:17:00Z This week Slashdot reader joshuark found the story of exactly how in 2025 ProPublica reporter Renee Dudley confirmed Microsoft was running tech support for the U.S. Defense Department through China, America's biggest cybersecurity adversary — and how that investigation ultimately changed U.S. government policy. The reporter first found an ad offering $18 to $28 to hire Americans as "digital escorts" for China-based tech support, then just searched LinkedIn for people who apparently had answered the ad. They discovered that at the time "Behind the scenes, unseen by the users at the U.S. government, it's not just one person who responds," explains ProPublica's podcast. "It's two people... The China-based engineer is the one who knows how to fix the problem. On their end, they produce a block of code to so...

Next UK Prime Minister Drops Digital ID Scheme Published on 2026-07-18T22:17:00Z Reuters reports: Incoming British prime minister Andy Burnham will scrap the government's troubled plans for a digital ID scheme when he enters office on Monday, a spokesperson for the new Labour Party leader said. Resources devoted to the scheme, deemed a "fiasco" by a cross-party committee of lawmakers, will be redirected to Burnham's priorities, the spokesperson said... "All the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it's most needed, such as helping with the cost of living," Burnham's spokesperson said. In November, the Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog estimated the cost of the digital ID scheme at around £1.8 billion ($2.4 billion) between financial years 2026/27 and 2028/29. Read more of this story at Slashdot.