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Reçu — 19 février 2026 ⏭

Ça sent le boudin pour Den of Wolves : 10 Chambers licencie une grande partie de ses fondateurs et de ses développeurs

✇NoFrag
Par : Estyaah
19 février 2026 à 19:43

C’est par le biais d’un article de nos confrères de Game Developer que l’on a appris qu’une partie de l’équipe de 10 Chambers, qui développe Den of Wolves, avait été licenciée. Le studio suédois, créé en 2015, est à l’origine de l’un des meilleurs jeux coopératifs de ces dernières années sous les traits de GTFO, mais les fondateurs avaient auparavant conçu PAYDAY: The Heist et PAYDAY 2 lorsqu’ils travaillaient encore pour Starbreeze. Avec Den of Wolves, ils annonçaient un retour à leurs premières amours, puisqu’on nous promettait de revenir aux braquages, mais dans un univers dystopique.

Il faut croire que malgré un concept plutôt maîtrisé, les ambitions ont été un peu sous-évaluées, puisque le jeu n’est pas terminé, et le studio a décidé de se séparer d’un « grand nombre » de sa centaine d’employés. D’autre part, les développeurs ne sont pas les seuls touchés : d’après les déclarations du studio, on pourrait même supposer qu’il ne reste plus que deux des huit confondateurs initiaux, Ulf Andersson and Simon Viklund. Une situation qui ne semble pas idéale pour la poursuite du développement du jeu. D’ailleurs, les termes utilisés dans la communication ne sont pas très rassurants :

we’re taking a hard look at how we work and how the studio is set up, so Den of Wolves can become the game it deserves to be.

Dans la langue de JuL, ça donne quelque chose comme « nous examinons attentivement notre façon de travailler et l’organisation du studio afin que Den of Wolves puisse devenir le jeu qu’il mérite d’être ».

Eh bien, on leur souhaite une bonne vue, et surtout bon courage aux salariés restants. Den of Wolves n’a toujours pas de fenêtre de sortie, mais vous pouvez l’ajouter à votre liste de souhaits sur Steam. En revanche, si vous avez quelques minutes à perdre, on vous encourage à vous rendre sur le site officiel, puis à scroller vers le bas. La réalisation est assez incroyable.

Den of Wolves website

New Study Tracks How Businesses Quietly Replaced Freelancers With AI Tools

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
19 février 2026 à 17:35
A new study [PDF] from Ramp's economics lab has found that businesses are steadily replacing freelance workers hired through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr with AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the substitution is happening at a fraction of the cost. The paper, authored by Ryan Stevens, Ramp's Director of Applied Sciences, tracked firm-level spending data from Q3 2021 to Q3 2025 across thousands of companies on Ramp's expense management platform. The share of total business spend going to online labor marketplaces fell from 0.66% in Q4 2021 to 0.14% in Q3 2025, while AI model provider spending rose from zero to 2.85% over the same period. More than half the businesses that used freelance marketplaces in Q2 2022 had stopped entirely by Q2 2025. The cost dynamics are particularly notable. Firms most exposed to AI -- those that historically spent the most on freelancers -- substituted at a rate of roughly $1 in reduced freelance spend for every $0.03 in AI spend. A middle-exposure group showed a ratio of $1 to $0.30. The study uses a difference-in-differences design built around the launch of ChatGPT in October 2022 as a natural experiment. Stevens notes that micro-level substitution does not imply aggregate job loss, as demand for workers who build and maintain AI systems could grow faster than displacement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Accenture Links Staff Promotions To Use of AI Tools

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
19 février 2026 à 16:45
Accenture has reportedly started tracking staff use of its AI tools and will take this into consideration when deciding on top promotions, as the consulting company tries to increase uptake of the technology by its workforce. From a report: The company told senior managers and associate directors that being promoted to leadership roles would require "regular adoption" of artificial intelligence, according to an internal email seen by the Financial Times. The consultancy has also begun collecting data on weekly log-ins to its AI tools by some senior staff members, the FT reports. Accenture has previously said it has trained 550,000 of its 780,000-strong workforce in generative AI, up from only 30 people in 2022, and has announced it is rolling out training to all of its employees as part of its annual $1bn annual spend on learning. Among the tools whose use will reportedly be monitored is Accenture's AI Refinery. The chief executive, Julie Sweet, has previously said this will "create opportunities for companies to reimagine their processes and operations, discover new ways of working, and scale AI solutions across the enterprise to help drive continuous change and create value."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HR Teams Are Drowning in Slop Grievances

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
19 février 2026 à 16:05
Workplace grievances that once fit in a single email are now ballooning into 30-page documents stuffed with irrelevant historical detail, made-up legal precedents, and citations to laws from the wrong country -- and UK employment lawyers say generative AI is the likely culprit. Anna Bond, legal director at Lewis Silkin, says the complaints she now sees sometimes cite Canadian legislation or fabricated case law. Sinead Casey, employment partner at Linklaters, calls such filings "confidently incompetent" -- superficially persuasive even to lawyers. The flood of bloated claims is compounding pressure on an already stretched tribunal system: Ministry of Justice figures show new employment cases rose 33% in the three months to September, even as concluded cases fell 10% year over year. Investor Marc Andreessen, quipping on X: Overheard in Silicon Valley: "Marginal cost of arguing is going to zero."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon Dethrones Walmart as World's Biggest Company by Sales

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
19 février 2026 à 15:08
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has officially dethroned Walmart as the biggest global company by revenue, a milestone attesting to the massive scale the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant has achieved since its humble beginnings in 1994 as an online bookseller in Jeff Bezos' Seattle-area garage. Walmart, which had been the largest company by revenue for more than a decade, on Thursday reported sales of $713.2 billion for the 12 months ending Jan. 31. Amazon, which operates on a fiscal year ending in December, earlier this month reported 2025 sales of $717 billion. Bezos carefully studied Walmart founder Sam Walton, embracing many of his business strategies while building his company. Over the past decade, Amazon's revenue has increased at almost 10 times the pace of Walmart's, fueled by a shift in consumer spending from stores to websites and its rapidly growing cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
19 février 2026 à 10:20
India's digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it's a cheap plastic speaker that sits on a shopkeeper's counter and reads out incoming payments aloud. The roughly 23 million soundboxes deployed across India earn about $220 million a year in rental fees, more than every explicitly UPI-linked revenue line in the ecosystem combined, according to estimates from Bernstein. Each device costs $7-12 to manufacture and earns its platform $7-10 a year in rent. A story adds: PhonePe processes about 48% of all UPI transactions in India. Its net payment processing revenue in H1 FY26 was about $83 million. Its device revenue was about $34 million. Running nearly half of India's real-time payment infrastructure earns PhonePe only 2.4 times what it makes from renting speakers to shopkeepers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reçu — 18 février 2026 ⏭

Study of 12,000 EU Firms Finds AI's Productivity Gains Are Real

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
18 février 2026 à 20:43
A study of more than 12,000 European firms found that AI adoption causally increases labour productivity by 4% on average across the EU, and that it does so without reducing employment in the short run. Researchers from the Bank for International Settlements and the European Investment Bank used an instrumental variable strategy that matched EU firms to comparable US firms by sector, size, investment intensity and other characteristics, then used the AI adoption rates of those US counterparts as a proxy for exogenous AI exposure among European firms. The productivity gains, however, skewed heavily toward medium and large companies. Among large firms, 45% had deployed AI, compared to just 24% of small firms. The study also found that complementary investments mattered enormously: an extra percentage point of spending on workforce training amplified AI's productivity effect by 5.9%, and an extra point on software and data infrastructure added 2.4%.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reçu — 17 février 2026 ⏭

Valve's Steam Deck OLED Will Be 'Intermittently' Out of Stock Because of the RAM Crisis

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
17 février 2026 à 14:00
Valve has updated the Steam Deck website to say that the Steam Deck OLED may be out of stock "intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages." From a report: The PC gaming handheld has been out of stock in the US and other parts of the world for a few days, and thanks to this update, we now know why. The update comes shortly after Valve delayed the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller from a planned shipping window of early 2026 because of the memory and storage crunch. "We have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change," Valve said in a post about that announcement from earlier this month. Its goal is to launch that new hardware sometime in the first half of 2026, and the company is working to finalize its plans "as soon as possible."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sans surprise, la majorité des devs de Highguard ont été licenciés

✇NoFrag
Par : Estyaah
16 février 2026 à 14:37

La semaine dernière, le studio Wildlight Entertainment a annoncé sur X le licenciement d’un nombre non déterminé de membres de l’équipe derrière son tout premier jeu, Highguard. Dans le cas où vous auriez déjà oublié ce que c’est, il s’agit d’un hero shooter en 3v3 avec une notion de loot et de la défense de base. La direction artistique absolument insipide n’avait pas spécialement attiré les foules. Malgré un démarrage correct avoisinant les 100 000 joueurs simultanés, le jeu, pourtant free-to-play, a rapidement sombré vers des chiffres difficilement soutenables pour Wildlight Entertainment. En effet, il fallait bien payer les développeurs et maintenir les serveurs. Mais avec des courbes qui dépassent de moins en moins les 5 000 joueurs sur les deux dernières semaines malgré l’ajout d’un mode 5v5, le studio a dû prendre une décision drastique.

Highguard

Ils assurent cependant conserver un groupe de développeurs pour continuer à maintenir et faire évoluer le jeu. La communication officielle n’est pas très loquace sur le nombre de départs, mais l’un des level designer mis à la porte a indiqué sur LinkedIn que « la plupart des membres de l’équipe de Wildlight » avait été licenciés.

Highguard 2

Il semble que personne ne soit très étonné : dès l’annonce lors des Game Awards, les joueurs avaient raillé le projet, qui semblait très décevant au regard des précédents projets des différents membres du studio (notamment Apex Legends et Titanfall 2). À la sortie, la tentative de hype lancée par certains influenceurs n’a pas suffi pour masquer les problèmes de performance, de rythme, ou la direction artistique sans âme. Cependant, tout n’était pas à jeter, et on avait trouvé ça beaucoup moins pourri que ne le laissait entendre les catastrophiques avis sur Steam. On avait passé une bonne soirée, mais on n’avait pas eu envie de relancer ensuite – chose que s’est dite la majorité des joueurs, au final. Ce sont tout autant de personnes qui n’achèteront pas de skins ou autres battle pass, pourtant absolument nécessaires à la survie du studio. On se rend compte du manque de discernement des dirigeants, qui n’avaient d’autre issue que de rencontrer un énorme succès s’ils ne voulaient pas s’écraser comme une bouse tiède sur le mur de la réalité. Peut-être auraient-ils dû consulter quelques professionnels du métier avant de faire un all-in. Si certains nous lisent, la prochaine fois, n’hésitez pas, on n’est pas cher !

Dans tous les cas, les serveurs sont toujours en fonctionnement. Et comme le jeu est free-to-play, si vous souhaitez tester, vous pouvez le récupérer en vous rendant sur sa page Steam. Mais ne tardez pas trop : le nombre joueurs continue de chuter, et le studio pourrait débrancher la prise dans les prochaines semaines.

Reçu — 16 février 2026 ⏭

Ireland Launches World's First Permanent Basic Income Scheme For Artists, Paying $385 a Week

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
16 février 2026 à 17:00
Ireland has announced what it says is the world's first permanent basic income program for artists, a scheme that will pay 2,000 selected artists $385 per week for three years, funded by an $21.66 million allocation from Budget 2026. The program follows a 2022 pilot -- the Irish government's first large-scale randomized control trial -- that found participants had greater professional autonomy, less anxiety, and higher life satisfaction. An external cost-benefit analysis of the pilot calculated a return of $1.65 to society for every $1.2 invested. The new scheme will operate in three-year cycles, and artists who receive the payment in one cycle cannot reapply until the cycle after next. A three-month tapering-off period will follow each cycle. The government plans to publish eligibility guidelines in April and open applications in May, and payments to selected artists are expected to begin before the end of 2026.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reçu — 14 février 2026 ⏭

Israeli Soldiers Accused of Using Polymarket To Bet on Strikes

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
14 février 2026 à 12:00
An anonymous reader shares a report: Israel has arrested several people, including army reservists, for allegedly using classified information to place bets on Israeli military operations on Polymarket. Shin Bet, the country's internal security agency, said Thursday the suspects used information they had come across during their military service to inform their bets. One of the reservists and a civilian were indicted on a charge of committing serious security offenses, bribery and obstruction of justice, Shin Bet said, without naming the people who were arrested. Polymarket is what is called a prediction market that lets people place bets to forecast the direction of events. Users wager on everything from the size of any interest-rate cut by the Federal Reserve in March to the winner of League of Legends videogame tournaments to the number of times Elon Musk will tweet in the third week of February. The arrests followed reports in Israeli media that Shin Bet was investigating a series of Polymarket bets last year related to when Israel would launch an attack on Iran, including which day or month the attack would take place and when Israel would declare the operation over. Last year, a user who went by the name ricosuave666 correctly predicted the timeline around the 12-day war between Israel and Iran. The bets drew attention from other traders who suspected the account holder had access to nonpublic information. The account in question raked in more than $150,000 in winnings before going dormant for six months. It resumed trading last month, betting on when Israel would strike Iran, Polymarket data shows.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reçu — 12 février 2026 ⏭

Pourquoi Elon Musk et Emmanuel Macron se disputent sur les réseaux sociaux

✇Numerama.com - Magazine
Par : Nicolas Lellouche
12 février 2026 à 10:59

Lors d'un discours à Anvers, Emmanuel Macron a encouragé l'Europe à mieux financer ses pépites et à préférer les solutions européennes. Son exemple : Elon Musk, « un gars sursubventionné par les agences fédérales aux États-Unis ». Le milliardaire réfute cette déclaration : selon lui, c'est l'Europe qui sursubventionne les concurrents de ses entreprises.

Reçu — 10 février 2026 ⏭

The Big Money in Today's Economy Is Going To Capital, Not Labor

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
10 février 2026 à 15:00
The American economy's most valuable companies are now worth trillions of dollars more than their predecessors were a generation ago, yet they employ a fraction of the workers -- and a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal argues that this widening gap between capital and labor is the defining economic story of our time. Labor received 58% of gross domestic income in 1980; by the third quarter of 2025, that figure had fallen to 51.4%. Corporate profits' share rose from 7% to 11.7% over the same period. Nvidia, the most valuable US company in 2026, is nearly 20 times as valuable as IBM was in 1985 in inflation-adjusted terms and employs roughly a tenth as many people. Since the end of 2019, real average hourly wages have risen 3% while corporate profits have climbed 43%. Household stock wealth now equals almost 300% of annual disposable income, up from 200% in 2019. Yale economist Pascual Restrepo predicted that AI integration will shrink labor's share of revenue further, just as factory automation did for blue-collar workers in decades past.

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5 séries à voir après Les Lionnes sur Netflix

✇Numerama.com - Magazine
Par : Salammbô Marie
10 février 2026 à 12:45

La dernière série française de Netflix s'invite actuellement dans le top 10 de la plateforme de streaming. Si vous avez déjà englouti les 8 épisodes des Lionnes, voici 5 séries similaires qui devraient vous plaire.

Reçu — 9 février 2026 ⏭

AI Gold Rush is Resurrecting China's Infamous 72-hour Work Week - in US

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
9 février 2026 à 15:14
The AI boom has revived a workplace philosophy that China's own regulators cracked down on years ago: the 72-hour work week, known as 996 for its 9am-to-9pm, six-days-a-week cadence. US startups flush with venture capital are now openly advertising it as a feature, not a bug. Rilla, a New York-based AI company that monitors sales reps in the field, warns applicants on its careers page to expect roughly 70-hour weeks. Browser-Use, a seven-person startup building tools for AI-to-browser interaction, operates out of a shared "hacker house" where the line between living and working barely exists. In a market where dozens of startups are racing to ship similar AI products, founders believe longer hours buy them a competitive edge. But the research disagrees. A WHO and ILO analysis tied 55-plus-hour weeks to 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease globally in 2016 alone. Michigan State University found that an employee working 70 hours produces nearly the same output as one working 50.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Age Bias is Still the Default at Work But the Data is Turning

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
9 février 2026 à 14:12
A mounting body of research is making it harder for companies to justify what most of them still do -- push experienced workers out the door just as they're hitting their professional peak. A 2025 study published in the journal Intelligence analyzed 16 cognitive, emotional and personality dimensions and found that while processing speed declines after early adulthood, other capabilities -- including the ability to avoid distractions and accumulated knowledge -- continue to improve, putting peak overall functioning between ages 55 and 60. AARP and OECD data back this up at the firm level: a 10-percentage-point increase in workers above 50 correlates with roughly 1.1% higher productivity. A 2022 Boston Consulting Group study found cross-generational teams outperform homogeneous ones. UK retailer B&Q staffed a store largely with older workers in 1989 and saw profits rise 18%. BMW implemented 70 ergonomic changes at a German plant in 2007 and recorded a 7% productivity gain. Yet an Urban Institute analysis of U.S. data from 1992 to 2016 found more than half of workers above 50 were pushed out of long-held jobs before they chose to retire.

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Reçu — 8 février 2026 ⏭

Souveraineté technologique : le retour des blocs à l’ère de l’IA

✇Numerama.com - Magazine
Par : Sridhar Vembu
8 février 2026 à 17:03

Sridhar Vembu, entrepreneur et ingénieur indien, cofondateur de Zoho, nous livre dans cette tribune exclusive sa vision de la géopolitique de la technologie en 2026. Alors qu'elle reposait sur un équilibre mondial relativement durable, la confiance s'effrite et les blocs renaissent. Pour le pire ? Pas forcément.

Reçu — 7 février 2026 ⏭

Amazon's Tax Bill Plunges 87% After Tax Cuts

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
7 février 2026 à 00:01
An anonymous reader shares a report: Republicans' tax cuts shaved billions off Amazon's tax bill, new government filings show. The company says it ran a $1.2 billion tax bill last year, down from $9 billion the previous year, and even as its profits jumped by 45% to nearly $90 billion. That's largely because of the generous new depreciation breaks GOP lawmakers included in their One Big Beautiful Bill, something that's particularly important to Amazon which -- in addition to maintaining a vast infrastructure for its ubiquitous delivery business -- has been spending billions to build out artificial intelligence data centers. Also helping, though less important: The law's expanded breaks for businesses research and development expenses. The company has long been criticized by Democrats for paying little in tax, and it appeared to be bracing for criticism in the wake of the report to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reçu — 5 février 2026 ⏭

Kalshi Claims 'Extortion,' Then Recants in Feud Over User Losses

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
5 février 2026 à 12:30
Kalshi, the largest U.S. prediction market, accused a small data startup called Juice Reel of "extortion" after a stock analyst used the company's transaction-level data to argue that prediction market users lose money faster than gamblers on traditional betting apps -- then walked the allegation back hours later. The equity research analyst Jordan Bender at Citizens found that the bottom quarter of prediction market users lost about 28 cents of every dollar wagered in their first three months, compared to roughly 11 cents per dollar on sites like FanDuel and DraftKings. Kalshi's head of communications told Bloomberg the report was "flat-out wrong" and called the data an extortion attempt. Juice Reel CEO Ricky Gold said Kalshi had actually pressured him to tell Bloomberg the data was inaccurate. Kalshi later issued an updated statement saying it continued to dispute the findings but "after further review, we don't believe the intention was extortion." The company did not provide any data to counter the analysis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reçu — 4 février 2026 ⏭

Pinterest Sacks Workers For Creating Tool To Track Layoffs

✇Slashdot
Par : msmash
4 février 2026 à 15:01
Pinterest has sacked two engineers for tracking which workers lost their jobs in a recent round of layoffs. BBC: The company recently announced job cuts, with chief executive Bill Ready stating in an email he was "doubling down on an AI-forward approach," according to an employee who posted some of the memo on LinkedIn. Pinterest told investors the move would impact about 15% of the workforce, or roughly 700 roles, without saying which teams or workers were affected. But then "two engineers wrote custom scripts improperly accessing confidential company information to identify the locations and names of all dismissed employees and then shared it more broadly," a company spokesperson told the BBC. "This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues' privacy," the spokesperson added. The script written by the Pinterest engineers was aimed at internal tools used at the company for employees to communicate, according to a person familiar with the firings who asked not to be identified. The person said the script created an alert for which employee names within a tool like the team communication platform Slack were being removed or deactivated, giving some insight into who at the company was impacted by the layoffs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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