"A future with flying cars is no longer science fiction," writes the Los Angeles Times. "All you need to order your own is about $200,000 and some hope and patience." The Palo Alto-based company Pivotal has been developing the technology since 2009 and is nearly ready to bring it to market... [Company founder Marcus] Leng engineered an ultralight, electric-powered vertical takeoff and landing aircraft known as an eVTOL. Other VTOL aircraft, such as helicopters, had existed for decades, but Leng's invention was fixed-wing and didn't rely on gas. The Canadian engineer dubbed his creation BlackFly and spent years working on it in secret. The company moved to the Bay Area in 2014 and by 2018 had developed a second version of BlackFly that laid the groundwork for Helix, the aircraft Pivotal now offers for sale... Those who are curious — and wealthy — can reserve a Helix today with a $50,000 deposit. The aircraft starts at $190,000 with the option of purchasing a transport trailer for $21,000 and a charger for $1,100. A customer who makes their reservation today could receive their aircraft in nine to 12 months, [Pivotal Chief Executive Ken] Karklin said. It takes less than two weeks to learn how to fly it. In order to complete Pivotal's flight certification training, a customer has to pass the FAA knowledge test and complete ground school. Training, which takes place at the company's Palo Alto headquarters and at the Monterey Bay Academy Airport, teaches customers how to control and maintain the aircraft, as well as how to transport and assemble it... It is uncertain how fast the company and others like it can ramp up production and how communities will react. Not everyone is on board. Darlene Yaplee, president of the Aviation-Impacted Communities Alliance, said there are concerns about having different types of aircraft in limited airspace. Pivotal has around six early-access customers who already own a version of the BlackFly and are flying it for fun... Helix will have an electric range of about 30 minutes and a cruise speed of 62 mph, the company said. It takes 75 minutes to charge it using a 240 volt charger. The noise produced by the aircraft during takeoff and landing is equivalent to a couple of leaf blowers, Karklin said. When flying it is overhead, someone on the ground might not be able to hear it. Karklin said the simplicity of the aircraft comes with lower cost, lower weight and higher safety. The aircraft, which has only 18 moving parts, is full of redundancy to prevent system failures. In short, the article describes it as "a single-person aircraft for recreational use and short-haul travel that also has the potential to support emergency response and military operations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Apple has gone for a choose-your-own-adventure when shopping for a new Mac," writes long-time Slashdot reader esarjeant. Macworld explains: Apple has shifted from selling pre-configured Mac models to a fully customizable build-to-order system on its website, allowing customers to select display size, chip, memory, and storage options... This change emphasizes building a machine within budget rather than choosing from set configurations, potentially preparing for future CPU/GPU core selection with M5 chips. Third-party retailers like Amazon and Best Buy are expected to continue offering standard configurations for customers preferring traditional purchasing methods... Apple is rumored to offer the ability to customize CPU and GPU cores with the upcoming launch of the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models, so this new system could pave the way for more build-to-order options. It could also be a way to âoehideâ smaller price increases as memory and other component costs rise throughout 2026.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shotcut 26.1 is now available as the latest feature update to this open-source and cross-platform video editing solution. Shotcut 26.1 is finally defaulting to GPU hardware accelerated video decoding by default for all platforms sans NVIDIA GPUs on Linux...

Cette semaine, deux grandes vidéos à la ferme du hardware. Nous avons d'abord découvert le très gros boitier Cooler Master COSMOS ALPHA, un modèle résolument haut de gamme. Ensuite, nous avons découvert un petit laptop par ACER, la Aspire 16 AI qui exploite une plateforme Qualcomm Snapdragon. […]

Lire la suite

C'est parti pour les super prix des cartes graphiques en cette semaine 5 de l'année 2026. Et cette semaine, autant le dire tout de suite, nous avons pas mal de prix qui sont à la hausse, et principalement chez les verts. On commence donc avec les rouges, mouarf. Chez AMD, ce n'est pas pire, disons, nous avons même des prix à la baisse. Ainsi, la RX 7600 XY augmente de 33 euros, désolé, ce n'est pas le meilleur exemple, par contre, la RX 9060 XT baisse de 11 euros. Ensuite, nous avons la 9070 qui augmente de 13 euros et enfin, bonne surprise, la RX 9070 XT fait - 40 euros. Pas de changement chez Intel pour la Arc B580. […]

Lire la suite

Saturday Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said they still planned a "huge" investment in OpenAI, according to CNBC. Friday the Wall Street Journal had reported that Nvidia's plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI "has stalled after some inside the chip giant expressed doubts about the deal, people familiar with the matter said..." [T]he talks haven't progressed beyond the early stages, some of the people said. Now, the two sides are rethinking the future of their partnership, some of the people said. The latest discussions, they said, include an equity investment of tens of billions of dollars as part of OpenAI's current funding round. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has privately emphasized to industry associates in recent months that the original $100 billion agreement was nonbinding and not finalized, people familiar with the matter said. He has also privately criticized what he has described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI's business approach and expressed concern about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic, some of the people said... OpenAI is laying the foundation to go public by the end of 2026, and has spent much of the past year racing to secure large amounts of computing capacity to help power OpenAI's future products and growth. The stalled Nvidia pact is a blow to this effort and shows how Chief Executive Sam Altman's penchant for announcing flashy big-ticket deals carries the potential to backfire if the terms have yet to be finalized. In a joint announcement unveiling the September deal with Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Huang called the deal "the largest computing project in history...." OpenAI went on to sign a string of other agreements with chip and cloud companies that helped fuel a global stock market rally. But investors have since grown jittery about the startup's ability to pay for these deals, leading to a sell-off in some tech stocks tied to OpenAI. Altman has said that the deals put the startup on the hook for $1.4 trillion in computing commitments — more than 100 times the revenue it was on pace to generate last year. OpenAI executives say the total commitments are lower when you account for overlap in some of the deals, and that the agreements will take place over a long period of time.... Huang has indicated to associates that he still believes it's crucially important to provide OpenAI with financial support in one form or another, in part because OpenAI is one of the chip designer's largest customers, people familiar with the matter said. If OpenAI were to fall behind other AI developers, it could dent Nvidia's sales. "Speaking to reporters in Taipei, Huang said it was 'nonsense' to say he was unhappy with OpenAI," CNBC reported Saturday: "We are going to make a huge investment in OpenAI. I believe in OpenAI, the work that they do is incredible, they are one of the most consequential companies of our time and I really love working with Sam," he said, referring to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. "Sam is closing the round (of investment) and we will absolutely be involved," Huang added. "We will invest a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we've ever made." Asked whether it would be over $100 billion, he said: "No, no, nothing like that." Elsewhere the Journal has reported that Amazon is in talks to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI. Thanks to Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras presented today at FOSDEM on the latest work around Phosh, the mobile phone user interface / Wayland shell project for mobile Linux environments. Phosh has been making steady progress and has more features out on the horizon...

TechCrunch reports: Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin is pausing its space tourism flights for "no less than two years" in order to focus all of its resources on upcoming missions to the moon, the company announced Friday. The decision puts a temporary halt on a program that Blue Origin has been using to fly humans past the Kármán line, the recognized boundary of space, for the last five years. Blue Origin made the announcement just a few weeks ahead of the expected third launch of its New Glenn mega-rocket, which is slated for late February... The company said Friday that New Shepard has flown 38 times and carried 98 humans to space, along with more than 200 scientific and research payloads. "The move is a clear sign that Blue Origin is going all in on its moon program as the company races with rival SpaceX," reports the Business Standard, "to be the first private company to land humans on the lunar surface for Nasa's Artemis program." Blue Origin holds a $3.4 billion contract with Nasa to develop its Blue Moon lander, designed to shuttle astronauts to and from the moon, with a landing originally targeted for 2029... The company is targeting the launch and landing of a cargo version of its lander as soon as this year, as a test ahead of eventually landing humans. Blue Origin has also presented an accelerated plan to Nasa for developing a lander that may be ready for carrying astronauts ahead of Starship, the large new rocket from Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following the Budgie 10.10 release from earlier this month, Budgie 10.10.1 is now here for closing out January...

"There's one big bright spot in the fight against climate change that most people never think about," reports the Washington Post. "It could prevent nearly half a degree of global warming this century, a huge margin for a planet that has warmed almost 1.5 degrees Celsius and is struggling to keep that number below 2 degrees..." [M]ore than 170 countries — including the U.S. — have agreed to act on this one solution. That solution: phasing out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a group of gases used in refrigerators, air conditioners and other cooling systems that heat the atmosphere more than almost any other pollutant on Earth. Pound for pound, HFCs are hundreds or even thousands of times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Companies are replacing HFCs with new gases that trap much less heat. If you buy a new fridge or AC unit in the United States today, it'll probably use one of these new refrigerants — and you're unlikely to notice the difference, according to Francis Dietz, a spokesperson for the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, a trade group representing U.S. HVAC manufacturers... But that invisible transition is one of the most important short-term tactics to keep Earth's climate from going catastrophically off-kilter this century. HFCs are powerful super-pollutants, but the most common ones break down in the atmosphere within about 15 years. That means stopping emissions from HFCs — and other short-lived super-pollutants such as methane — is like pulling an emergency brake on climate change. "It's really the fastest, easiest and, some would say, the only way to slow the rate of warming between now and 2050," said Kiff Gallagher, executive director of the Global Heat Reduction Initiative, a business that advises companies and cities on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The only other solution that comes close to the speed and scale of slashing HFCs would be dimming the sun, a much more controversial and potentially dangerous option... [P]hasing out HFCs now "would buy us a little bit of time to develop other solutions that maybe take longer to implement," said Sarah Gleeson, a climate solutions research manager at Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that models how much different strategies would slow climate change. It could also keep the planet from crossing dangerous climate tipping points this century.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Presented today at FOSDEM in Brussels was the state of gaming on FreeBSD by Thibault Payet. Besides various open-source games able to be compiled natively for FreeBSD, this BSD can get in on the Steam Play gaming scene thanks to the "linuxulator-steam-utils" project as a set of workarounds for the Steam Linux client on FreeBSD 14 and newer. Linuxulator-steam-utils builds off FreeBSD's Linuxulator support for running Linux binaries to enjoy the likes of Steam and even Steam Play (Proton) Windows games running on this translation layer for Linux and in turn running on FreeBSD...

Slashdot reader alternative_right writes: Quantum computers need extreme cold to work, but the very systems that keep them cold also create noise that can destroy fragile quantum information. Scientists in Sweden have now flipped that problem on its head by building a tiny quantum refrigerator that actually uses noise to drive cooling instead of fighting it. By carefully steering heat at unimaginably small scales, the device can act as a refrigerator, heat engine, or energy amplifier inside quantum circuits.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several security experts have "questioned the lack of technical detail" in that lawsuit alleging WhatsApp has no end-to-end encryption, reports the Washington Post: "It's pretty long on accusations and thin on any sort of evidence," Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, said over Signal. "WhatsApp has been very consistent about using end-to-end encryption. This lawsuit seems to be a nothingburger." Nicholas Weaver, a security researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, criticized the lawsuit in a post on Bluesky for lacking detail needed to back up its claims. "They don't even do a citation to the actual whistleblowers," he wrote, calling the suit "ludicrous." And Meta has done more than just deny the allegations: On Wednesday, WhatsApp sent a letter to [law firm] Quinn Emanuel threatening to seek sanctions against the firm's lawyers in court if they do not withdraw the suit, according to a copy reviewed by The Washington Post. "We're pursuing sanctions against Quinn Emanuel for filing a meritless lawsuit that was designed purely to grab headlines," Woog said by WhatsApp message. Woog also suggested the suit against WhatsApp was related to Quinn Emanuel's work on a separate case, between the social network giant and the spyware company NSO Group. The surveillance vendor is appealing a $167 million judgment entered against it in federal court last May, after a jury found that NSO's Pegasus tool exploited a weakness in the WhatsApp app to take over control of the phones of more than 1,000 users. An attorney from Quinn Emanuel joined NSO's legal team on that case on Jan. 22, according to legal filings, and different attorneys from that firm filed the case against WhatsApp on Jan. 23. "We believe a lawsuit like this is an attempt to launder false claims and divert attention from their dangerous spyware," Woog said. "It's very suspicious timing that this is happening as that appeal is happening," Maria Villegas Bravo, counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the site Decrypt, "as NSO Group is trying to lobby to get delisted from sanctions in the U.S. government." EPIC's counsel also told the site that the complaint appears light on factual detail about WhatsApp's software: "I'm not seeing any factual allegations or any information about the actual software itself," Villegas Bravo said. "I have a lot of questions that I would want answered before I would want this lawsuit to proceed.... I don't think there's any merit in this lawsuit," Villegas Bravo said. Meta has forcefully rejected the allegations. In a statement shared with Decrypt, a company spokesperson called the claims "categorically false and absurd... WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade," the spokesperson said. "This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction, and we will pursue sanctions against plaintiffs' counsel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Daily Beast: "Salacious claims from Jeffrey Epstein that Bill Gates contracted an STD following 'sex with Russian girls,' and colluded with the disgraced financier on a plot to secretly slip his wife antibiotics, were revealed in the latest Epstein files release." The New York Times. (Alternate URL) "A representative of the Gates Foundation said, 'These claims — from a proven, disgruntled liar — are absolutely absurd and completely false. The only thing these documents demonstrate is Epstein's frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates and the lengths he would go to entrap and defame.'" And Yahoo News points out the error of social media posts about the news: None paid attention to who actually wrote the email. The email was from Epstein — to Epstein... Both the "From" and "To" fields list Epstein's personal Gmail address. The message appears to be a draft, written during a period when Epstein's relationship with Gates had deteriorated. In it, Epstein alleges that Gates asked him to delete messages related to an STD. But the document does not show Gates making that request, nor does it provide independent confirmation that any of the claims are true. It reads like Epstein venting. It is not Gates confessing. "In a 2021 interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Gates called his relationship with the disgraced financier 'a huge mistake'," notes the New York Times. "He also sought to downplay his interactions with Epstein, saying he had several dinners with Epstein, with the hope of getting him to generate donations to the Gates Foundation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: About a decade ago, many media outlets -- including WIRED -- zeroed in on a weird trend at the intersection of mental health, drug science, and Silicon Valley biohacking: microdosing, or the practice of taking a small amount of a psychedelic drug seeking not full-blown hallucinatory revels but gentler, more stable effects. Typically using psilocybin mushrooms or LSD, the archetypal microdoser sought less melting walls and open-eye kaleidoscopic visuals than boosts in mood and energy, like a gentle spring breeze blowing through the mind. Anecdotal reports pitched microdosing as a kind of psychedelic Swiss Army knife, providing everything from increased focus to a spiked libido and (perhaps most promisingly) lowered reported levels of depression. It was a miracle for many. Others remained wary. Could 5 percent of a dose of acid really do all that? A new, wide-ranging study by an Australian biopharma company suggests that microdosing's benefits may indeed be drastically overstated -- at least when it comes to addressing symptoms of clinical depression. A Phase 2B trial of 89 adult patients conducted by Melbourne-based MindBio Therapeutics, investigating the effects of microdosing LSD in the treatment of major depressive disorder, found that the psychedelic was actually outperformed by a placebo. Across an eight-week period, symptoms were gauged using the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), a widely recognized tool for the clinical evaluation of depression. The study has not yet been published. But MindBio's CEO Justin Hanka recently released the top-line results on his LinkedIn, eager to show that his company was "in front of the curve in microdosing research." He called it "the most vigorous placebo controlled trial ever performed in microdosing." It found that patients dosed with a small amount of LSD (ranging from 4 to 20g, or micrograms, well below the threshold of a mind-blowing hallucinogenic dose) showed observable upticks in feelings of well-being, but worse MADRS scores, compared to patients given a placebo in the form of a caffeine pill. (Because patients in psychedelic trials typically expect some kind of mind-altering effect, studies are often blinded using so-called "active placebos," like caffeine or methylphenidate, which have their own observable psychoactive properties.) This means, essentially, that a medium-strength cup of coffee may prove more beneficial in treating major depressive disorder than a tiny dose of acid. Good news for habitual caffeine users, perhaps, but less so for researchers (and biopharma startups) counting on the efficacy of psychedelic microdosing. "It's probably a nail in the coffin of using microdosing to treat clinical depression," Hanka says. "It probably improves the way depressed people feel -- just not enough to be clinically significant or statistically meaningful."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Children of the damned

Bon, oubliez les femmes, on n’a plus le temps, essayons de sauver les kids, au moins. Mais les sauver de quoi ? Des réseaux sociaux toxiques, des approximations artificielles, de l’antéchrist personnifié, des balles perdues, ou pire encore, de France Travail ? Sauvons les de tout ça, à minima, ils méritent mieux que ça. Bon weekend !