Australia's world-first ban blocking under-16s from major social platforms has come into effect. The BBC is live reporting the reactions "both from within Australia and outside it." From the report: I've been speaking to 12-year-old Paloma, who lives in Sydney and says she is "sad" about the ban. She spends between 30 minutes and two hours a day on social media. "I'm upset... because I am part of several communities on Snapchat and TikTok," she tells me. "I've developed good friendships on the apps, with people in the US and New Zealand, who have common interests like gaming, and it makes me feel more connected to the world."

Paloma says she regularly talks about the ups and downs of her life with a boy of the same age in New Jersey, in the US, who she knows through gaming and TikTok. "I feel like I can explore my creativity when I am in a community online with people of similar ages," she says. Everyone Paloma knows is "a bit annoyed" about the ban. By stopping them from using social media, she says "the government is taking away a part of ourselves."

Two 15-year-olds, Noah Jones and Macy Neyland, backed by a rights group, are arguing at Australia's highest court that the legislation robs them of their right to free communication. The Digital Freedom Project (DFP) announced the case had been filed in the High Court late last month. After news of the case broke, Australia's Communications Minister Anika Wells told parliament the government would not be swayed. "We will not be intimidated by threats. We will not be intimidated by legal challenges. We will not be intimidated by big tech. On behalf of Australian parents, we will stand firm," she said.

India's dominant airline IndiGo has cancelled roughly 3,000 flights since last week after new pilot fatigue regulations collided with technical issues and the seasonal schedule shift, stranding more than half a million passengers and forcing aviation authorities to reverse course on the safety rules they had just implemented.

InterGlobe Aviation, IndiGo's parent company, told regulators that stricter requirements for night flying and weekly rest periods created an acute crew shortage. The Airline Pilots Association of India called the regulatory rollback a "dangerous precedent," noting that management had known about the requirements since early last year.

IndiGo controls 65.6% of India's domestic aviation market as of October 2025 and briefly became the world's most valuable airline in April. The crisis arrives as India's second-largest carrier, Air India, remains under investigation following a June crash that killed 241 passengers and crew. Authorities have imposed temporary price caps to prevent gouging.

Researchers and moderators are increasingly concerned that ChatGPT-style language is bleeding into everyday speech and writing. The topic has been explored in the past but "two new, more anecdotal reports, suggest that our chatbot dialect isn't just something that can be found through close analysis of data," reports Gizmodo. "It might be an obvious, every day fact of life now." Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Over on Reddit, according to a new Wired story by Kat Tenbarge, moderators of certain subreddits are complaining about AI posts ruining their online communities. It's not new to observe that AI-armed spammers post low-value engagement bait on social media, but these are spaces like r/AmItheAsshole, r/AmIOverreacting, and r/AmITheDevil, where visitors crave the scintillation or outright titillation of bona fide human misbehavior. If, behind the scenes, there's not really a grieving college student having her tuition cut off for randomly flying off the handle at her stepmom, there's no real fun to be had. The mods in the Wired story explain how they detect AI content, and unfortunately their methods boil down to "It's vibes." But one novel struggle in the war against slop, the mods say, is that not only are human-written posts sometimes rewritten by AI, but mods are concerned that humans are now writing like AI. Humans are becoming flesh and blood AI-text generators, muddying the waters of AI "detection" to the point of total opacity.

As "Cassie" an r/AmItheAsshole moderator who only gave Wired her first name put it, "AI is trained off people, and people copy what they see other people doing." In other words, Cassie said, "People become more like AI, and AI becomes more like people." Meanwhile, essayist Sam Kriss just explored the weird way chatbots "write" for the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine, and he discovered along the way that humans have accidentally taken cues from that weirdness. After parsing chatbots' strange tics and tendencies -- such as overusing the word "delve" most likely because it's in a disproportional number of texts from Nigeria, where that word is popular -- Kriss refers to a previously reported trend from over the summer. Members of the U.K. Parliament were accused of using ChatGPT to write their speeches.

The thinking goes that ChatGPT-written speeches contained the phrase "I rise to speak," an American phrase, used by American legislators. But Kriss notes that it's not just showing up from time to time. It's being used with downright breathtaking frequency. "On a single day this June, it happened 26 times," he notes. While 26 different MPs using ChatGPT to write speeches is not some scientific impossibility, it's more likely an example of chatbots, "smuggling cultural practices into places they don't belong," to quote Kriss again. So when Kriss points out that when Starbucks locations were closing in September, and signs posted on the doors contained tortured sentences like, "It's your coffeehouse, a place woven into your daily rhythm, where memories were made, and where meaningful connections with our partners grew over the years," one can't state with certainty that this is AI-generated text (although let's be honest: it probably is).

Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: Taiwan's government has ordered a one-year block of a popular, mainland Chinese-owned social media app Xiaohongshu, also known as The Little RedNote, citing its failure to cooperate with authorities over fraud-related concerns. Taiwan's Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited Xiaohongshu's, which does not have business presence on the island, refusal to cooperate with authorities as the basis for the ban, claiming that the platform has been linked to more than 1,700 fraud-related cases that resulted in financial losses of 247.7 million Taiwanese dollars ($7.9 million). "Due to the inability to obtain necessary data in accordance with the law, law enforcement authorities have encountered significant obstacles in investigations, creating a de facto legal vacuum," the ministry said in a statement.

Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Taiwan's opposition party, Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun decried the government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu for one year as censorship. "Many people online are already asking 'How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,'" Cheng posted on social media. Meta was facing fines earlier this year for failing to disclose information on individuals who funded advertisements on its social media platforms, marking the second such penalty in Taiwan for violating the anti-fraud act. "Meta failed to fully disclose information regarding who paid for the advertisement and who benefited from it," Depute Minister Lin of Ministry of Digital Affairs said at a news conference on June 18.

If MODA decides to impose the fine, it would mark the second such penalty against Meta in Taiwan, following a NT$1 million ($33,381) fine issued in May for violating the Fraud Crime Hazard Prevention Act by failing to disclose information on individuals who commissioned and funded two Facebook advertisements. Meta's Threads were also included in the regulatory framework following nearly 1,900 fraud-related reports associated with the platform, with 718 confirmed as scams. Xiaohongshu has surged in popularity among young Taiwanese in recent years, amassing 3 million users in the island of 23 million.

IBM is buying Confluent for $11 billion in a major push to own real-time data streaming infrastructure essential for enterprise AI workloads. It marks Big Blue's biggest acquisition since Red Hat in 2019. Bloomberg reports: The AI boom has touched off billions of dollars in deals for businesses that build, train or leverage the technology, propelling the value of an entire ecosystem of data center developers, software makers, generative AI tool developers and data management firms. Mountain View, California-based Confluent sits in the data corner of that world, providing a platform for companies to gather -- or "stream" -- and analyze data in real time as opposed to shipping data in clunkier batches.

Manufacturers such as Michelin, for example, have used Confluent's platform to optimize their inventories of raw and semi-finished materials live. Instacart adopted Confluent to develop real-time fraud detection systems and gain more visibility into the availability of products sold on its grocery delivery platform. Businesses are increasingly tapping AI systems that manage tasks like this in real-time and require live flows of data to do so. IBM, which pioneered mainframe computers, has been trying to reposition its business around AI over the past few years. Under Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna, it's been buying software companies and selling generative AI-related services to enterprise clients. Software now makes up almost half its total revenue and continues to grow at a steady rate.

Lenovo may be preparing to unveil a gaming laptop that uses rollable OLED technology to expand horizontally into an ultrawide 21:9 display, according to a Windows Latest report suggesting the device could appear at CES 2026 in January. The Lenovo Legion Pro Rollable would differ from the company's existing ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, which expands its screen vertically.

The new gaming-focused design would see the left and right edges of the display extend beyond the laptop's base chassis when unrolled. Specific details remain scarce. Windows Latest doesn't know the display resolution, refresh rate, screen dimensions in either state, pricing, or release timing -- though it does mention an Intel Core Ultra processor. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 currently sells for $3,500.

The influencer economy that Goldman Sachs projects will reach nearly half a trillion dollars by 2027 depends on a less-examined population: the influenced, millions of people who find themselves accumulating debt and clutter after years of exposure to what amounts to a 24/7 digital infomercial.

Antoinette Hocbo, a former marketing professional who knows the tricks brands use to chip away at willpower, bought a $199 Pilates program, an iPad, and an arsenal of makeup products after TikTok's algorithm served her a stream of aspirational content. The Pilates gear now sits unused. Elysia Berman accumulated over $50,000 in debt across four credit cards and four buy-now-pay-later services during the pandemic, purchasing items she never wore because influencers recommended them.

A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found 62% of adults on TikTok use the platform to find product reviews and recommendations. Marketing expert Mara Einstein told The Verge that brands now need seven exposures to prompt consumer action, up from three in the pre-social media era. The vastness of the internet has allowed available products to bloat beyond imagination.

Google said it's working to create two different categories of artificial intelligence-powered smart glasses to compete next year with existing models from Meta Platforms: one with screens, and another that's audio focused. From a report: The first AI glasses that Google is collaborating on will arrive sometime in 2026, it said in a blog post Monday. Samsung Electronics, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster are among its early hardware partners, but the companies have yet to show any final designs. Google also outlined several software improvements coming to Samsung's Galaxy XR headset, including a travel mode that will allow the mixed-reality device to be used in cars and on planes.

Tech giants including Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon have all extended the estimated useful lives of their servers and AI equipment over the past five years, sparking a debate among investors about whether these accounting changes are artificially inflating profits. Meta this year increased its depreciation timeline for most servers and network assets to 5.5 years, up from four to five years previously and as little as three years in 2020. The company said the change reduced its depreciation expense by $2.3 billion for the first nine months of 2025. Alphabet and Microsoft now use six-year periods, up from three in 2020. Amazon extended to six years by 2024 but cut back to five years this year for some servers and networking equipment.

Michael Burry, the investor portrayed in "The Big Short," called extending useful lives "one of the more common frauds of the modern era" in an article last month. Meta's total depreciation expense for the nine-month period was almost $13 billion against pretax profit exceeding $60 billion.

What triggered that Airbus emergency software recall? The BBC reports that Airbus's initial investigation into an aircraft's sudden drop in altitude linked it "to a malfunction in one of the aircraft's computers that controls moving parts on the aircraft's wings and tail." But that malfunction "seems to have been triggered by cosmic radiation bombarding the Earth on the day of the flight..."

The BBC believes radiation from space "could become a growing problem as ever more microchips run our lives." What Airbus says occurred on that JetBlue flight from Cancun to New Jersey was a phenomenon called a single-event upset, or bit flip. As the BBC has previously reported, these computer errors occur when high-speed subatomic particles from outer space, such as protons, smash into atoms in our planet's atmosphere. This can cause a cascade of particles to rain down through our atmosphere, like throwing marbles across a table. In rare cases, those fast-moving neutrons can strike computer electronics and disrupt tiny bits of data stored in the computer's memory, switching that bit — often represented as a 0 or 1 — from one state to another. "That can cause your electronics to behave in ways you weren't expecting," says Matthew Owens, professor of space physics at the University of Reading in the UK. Satellites are particularly affected by this phenomenon, he says. "For space hardware we see this quite frequently."

This is because the neutron flux — a measure of neutron radiation — rises the higher up in the atmosphere you go, increasing the chance of a strike hitting sensitive parts of the computer equipment on board. Aircraft are more vulnerable to this problem than computer equipment on the ground, although bit flips do occur at ground level, too. The increasing reliance of computers in fly-by-wire systems in aircraft, which use electronics rather than mechanical systems to control the plane in the air, also mean the risk posed by bit flips when they do occur is higher... Airbus told the BBC that it tested multiple scenarios when attempting to determine what happened to the 30 October 2025 JetBlue flight. In this case also, the company ruled out various possibilities except that of a bit flip. It is hard to attribute the incident to this for sure, however, because careering neutrons leave no trace of their activity behind, says Owens...

[Airbus's software update] works by inducing "rapid refreshing of the corrupted parameter so it has no time to have effect on the flight controls", Airbus says. This is, in essence, a way of continually sanitising computer data on these aircraft to try and ensure that any errors don't end up actually impacting a flight... As computer chips have become smaller, they have also become more vulnerable to bit flips because the energy required to corrupt tiny packets of data has got lower over time. Plus, more and more microchips are being loaded into products and vehicles, potentially increasing the chance that a bit flip could cause havoc. If nothing else, the JetBlue incident will focus minds across many industries on the risk posed to our modern, microchip-dependent lives from cosmic radiation that originates far beyond our planet.
Airbus said their analysis revealed "intense solar radiation" could corrupt data "critical to the functioning of flight control." But that explanation "has left some space weather scientists scratching their heads," adds the BBC.

Space.com explains: Solar radiation levels on Oct. 30 were unremarkable and nowhere near levels that could affect aircraft electronics, Clive Dyer, a space weather and radiation expert at University of Surrey in the U.K., told Space.com. Instead, Dyer, who has studied effects of solar radiation on aircraft electronics for decades, thinks the onboard computer of the affected jet could have been struck by a cosmic ray, a stream of high-energy particles from a distant star explosion that may have travelled millions of years before reaching Earth. "[Cosmic rays] can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit," Dyer said. "They can cause a simple bit flip, like a 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. They can mess up information and make things go wrong. But they can cause hardware failures too, when they induce a current in an electronic device and burn it out."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Autoblog: Imagine walking out to your car, pressing the start button, and getting absolutely nothing. No crank, no lights on the dash, nothing. That's exactly what happened to hundreds of Porsche owners in Russia last week. The issue is with the Vehicle Tracking System, a satellite-based security system that's supposed to protect against theft. Instead, it turned these Porsches into driveway ornaments.

The issue was first reported at the end of November, with owners reporting identical symptoms of their cars refusing to start or shutting down soon after ignition. Russia's largest dealership group, Rolf, confirmed that the problem stems from a complete loss of satellite connectivity to the VTS. When it loses its connection, it interprets the outage as a potential theft attempt and automatically activates the engine immobilizer.

The issue affects all models and engine types, meaning any Porsche equipped with the system could potentially disable itself without warning. The malfunction impacts Porsche models dating back to 2013 that have the factory VTS installed... When the VTS connection drops, the anti-theft protocol kicks in, cutting fuel delivery and locking down the engine completely.

Friday six European Union countries "asked the European Commission to water down an effective ban on the sale of internal combustion engine cars slated for 2035," reports Reuters The countries have asked the EU Commission to allow the sale of hybrid cars or vehicles powered by other, existing or future, technologies "that could contribute to the goal of reducing emissions" beyond 2035, a joint letter seen by Reuters showed on Friday. The letter was signed by the prime ministers of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Slovakia. They also asked for low-carbon and renewable fuels to be included in the plan to reduce the carbon emissions from transportation...

Since they adopted a regulation that all new vehicles from 2035 should have zero emissions in March 2023, EU countries are now having second thoughts. Back then, the outlook for battery electric vehicles was positive, but carmakers' efforts have later collided with the reality of lower-than-expected demand and fierce competition from China.
Car and Drive reports that Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany also "wants to allow exceptions for plug-in hybrids, extended-range EVs, and 'highly efficient' combustion vehicles beyond the current 2035 deadline." They cite a report in Automotive News. The European Commission hasn't made any official changes yet, but mounting pressure suggests that a revised plan could be coming soon.... Apostolos Tzitzikostas, the European Commissioner for Sustainable Transport and Tourism, was cited by the German paper Handelsblatt as saying that the EU "will take all technological advances into account when reassessing fleet emission limits, including combustion engines running on e-fuels and biofuels." And these renewable products will apparently be key pieces of the puzzle. BMW uses a vegetable-oil-derived fuel called HVO 100 in its diesel products throughout Europe. The plant-oil-based fuel reportedly reduces tailpipe emissions by 90 percent compared with traditional diesel. For its part, Porsche has been working on producing synthetic fuel at a plant in Chile since 2022.

The European Commission is set to meet on December 10. At that time, the body is expected to assemble a package of proposals to help out the struggling European automotive industry, though the actual announcement may be pushed to a later date.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE arrived this week, notes this report from The Register, which calls it the latest release "of the Unix world's leading alternative to Linux." As well as numerous bug fixes and upgrades to many of its components, the major changes in this version are reductions in the number of platforms the OS supports, and in how it's built and how its component software is packaged.

FreeBSD 15 has significantly reduced support for 32-bit platforms. Compared to FreeBSD 14 in 2023, there are no longer builds for x86-32, POWER, or ARM-v6. As the release notes put it:

"The venerable 32-bit hardware platforms i386, armv6, and 32-bit powerpc have been retired. 32-bit application support lives on via the 32-bit compatibility mode in their respective 64-bit platforms. The armv7 platform remains as the last supported 32-bit platform. We thank them for their service."

Now FreeBSD supports five CPU architectures — two Tier-1 platforms, x86-64 and AArch64, and three Tier-2 platforms, armv7 and up, powerpc64le, and riscv64.

Arguably, it's time. AMD's first 64-bit chips started shipping 22 years ago. Intel launched the original x86 chip, the 8086 in 1978. These days, 64-bit is nearly as old as the entire Intel 80x86 platform was when the 64-bit versions first appeared. In comparison, a few months ago, Debian 13 also dropped its x86-32 edition — six years after Canonical launched its first x86-64-only distro, Ubuntu 19.10.

Another significant change is that this is the first version built under the new pkgbase system, although it's still experimental and optional for now. If you opt for a pkgbase installation, then the core OS itself is installed from multiple separate software packages, meaning that the whole system can be updated using the package manager. Over in the Linux world, this is the norm, but Linux is a very different beast... The plan is that by FreeBSD 16, scheduled for December 2027, the restructure will be complete, the old distribution sets will be removed, and the current freebsd-update command and its associated infrastructure can be turned off.

Another significant change is reproducible builds, a milestone the project reached in late October. This change is part of a multi-project initiative toward ensuring deterministic compilation: to be able to demonstrate that a certain set of source files and compilation directives is guaranteed to produce identical binaries, as a countermeasure against compromised code. A handy side-effect is that building the whole OS, including installation media images, no longer needs root access.

There are of course other new features. Lots of drivers and subsystems have been updated, and this release has better power management, including suspend and resume. There's improved wireless networking, with support for more Wi-Fi chipsets and faster wireless standards, plus updated graphics drivers... The release announcement calls out the inclusion of OpenZFS 2.4.0-rc4, OpenSSL 3.5.4, and OpenSSH 10.0 p2, and notes the inclusion of some new quantum-resistant encryption systems...

In general, we found FreeBSD 15 easier and less complicated to work with than either of the previous major releases. It should be easier on servers too. The new OCI container support in FreeBSD 14.2, which we wrote about a year ago, is more mature now. FreeBSD has its own version of Podman, and you can run Linux containers on FreeBSD. This means you can use Docker commands and tools, which are familiar to many more developers than FreeBSD's native Jail system.

"FreeBSD has its own place in servers and the public cloud, but it's getting easier to run it as a desktop OS as well," the article concludes. "It can run all the main Linux desktops, including GNOME on Wayland."

"There's no systemd here, and never will be — and no Flatpak or Snap either, for that matter.

Bloomberg reports that Google "must renegotiate any contract to make its search engine or artificial intelligence app the default for smartphones and other devices every year, a federal judge ruled." Judge Amit Mehta in Washington sided with the US Justice Department on the one year limitation in his final ruling on what changes the search giant must make in the wake of a landmark ruling that the company illegally monopolized online search. The yearly renegotiation will give rivals — particularly those in the burgeoning generative AI field — a chance to compete for key placements.

The final judgment will still allow Google to offer its products to Apple Inc. for use in its popular iPhone and pay other electronics makers like Samsung Electronics Co. for default placement. But the judge said those contracts must be renegotiated annually. Mehta noted in his ruling that both Google and the US government said they could work with the one-year limitation on default contracts. As such, "the court holds that a hard-and-fast termination requirement after one year would best carry out the purpose of the injunctive relief."

To build three-wheeled, solar electric vehicles, Aptera has now launched its "validation" vehicle assembly line, reports the San Diego Business Journal.

"The validation line will set a technical foundation for the company's eventual low-volume assembly line, ensuring that manufacturing processes are optimized and refined, particularly for the company's composite body structure." To date, Aptera has produced three validation vehicles, two of which are in use driving around the San Diego region, with plans to build another 10 in the coming weeks as progress continues on the validation manufacturing line. "You learn things when you start to put miles on vehicles, putting 10s of thousands of miles on these validation vehicles and learning a lot from the durometer of the suspension, ride quality, spring rates and braking pressure," Aptera co-founder and co-CEO Chris Anthony said. "We've been able to incorporate a lot of the usability stuff back, but also, just as we've gone through the process of building these, a lot of order-of-operation stuff that's educated us on what's going to make for the best initial assembly lines," he added....

Aptera made its public debut on October 16, with the company's executive team participating in the Nasdaq closing bell ceremony that evening. Shares of SEV have hovered between $6.50 and $8.50 for much of the company's first month on the exchange. The company's equity line of credit also took effect in mid-November... expected to aid in Aptera generating at least a portion of the $65 million the company has said it will need to complete validation manufacturing and begin low-volume production for customers. Aptera previously raised some $135 million from more than 17,000 investors in what the company touts as the most successful crowdfunding effort of all time, but Anthony argued Aptera will soon need to invest larger sums of capital to scale its production needs.

"Publicly listing the company gives us a lot more funding mechanisms to get into production," he said. "So just having access to the public markets, public liquidity and the kind of instruments and tools that banks offer to public companies, it just seemed like now is the right time." Alongside the IPO, Aptera made its formal transition to a Public Benefit Corporation, giving the company a legal obligation to consider its effect on employees, communities and customers in addition to the profit motives of its shareholders.
California's state government also awarded Aptera $21 million "to support its push toward scaled manufacturing," the article points out.

It also notes that Aptera's vehicles "are technically classified as motorcycles rather than standard passenger cars, presenting a potentially cheaper alternative for consumers on the hunt for an electric vehicle."

Linus Torvalds recently defended Windows' infamous Blue Screen of Death during a video with Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips, where the two built a PC together. It's FOSS reports: In that video, Sebastian discussed Torvalds' fondness for ECC (Error Correction Code). I am using their last name because Linus will be confused with Linus. This is where Torvalds says this: "I am convinced that all the jokes about how unstable Windows is and blue screening, I guess it's not a blue screen anymore, a big percentage of those were not actually software bugs. A big percentage of those are hardware being not reliable."

Torvalds further mentioned that gamers who overclock get extra unreliability. Essentially, Torvalds believes that having ECC on the machine makes them more reliable, makes you trust your machine. Without ECC, the memory will go bad, sooner or later. He thinks that more than software bugs, often it is hardware behind Microsoft's blue screen of death. You can watch the video on YouTube (the BSOD comments occur at ~9:37).

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from the BBC: Do you find yourself getting increasingly irate while scrolling through your social media feed? If so, you may be falling victim to rage bait, which Oxford University Press has named its word or phrase of the year. It is a term that describes manipulative tactics used to drive engagement online, with usage of it increasing threefold in the last 12 months, according to the dictionary publisher.

Rage bait beat two other shortlisted terms -- aura farming and biohack -- to win the title. The list of words is intended to reflect some of the moods and conversations that have shaped 2025. "Fundamental problem with social media as a system is that it exploits people's emotional thinking," comments sinij. "Cute cat videos on one end and rage bait on another end of the same spectrum. I suspect future societies will be teaching disassociation techniques in junior school."

Meta has officially confirmed it is shifting investment away from the metaverse and VR toward AI-powered smart glasses, following a Bloomberg report of an up to 30% budget cut for Reality Labs. "Within our overall Reality Labs portfolio we are shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables given the momentum there," a statement from Meta reads. "We aren't planning any broader changes than that." From the report: Following Bloomberg's report, other mainstream news outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider have published their own reports corroborating the general claim, with slightly differing details...

Business Insider's report suggests that the cuts will primarily hit Horizon Worlds, and that employees are facing "uncertainty" about whether this will involve layoffs. One likely cut BI's report mentions is the funding for third-party studios to build Horizon Worlds content. The New York Times report, on the other hand, seems more definitive in stating that these cuts will come via layoffs. The Reality Labs division "has racked up more than $70 billion in losses since 2021," notes Fortune in their reporting, "burning through cash on blocky virtual environments, glitchy avatars, expensive headsets, and a user base of approximately 38 people as of 2022."

sinij shares news of the Trump administration surprising the auto industry by granting approval for "tiny cars" to be built in the United States. Bloomberg reports: President Donald Trump, apparently enamored by the pint-sized Kei cars he saw during his recent trip to Japan, has paved the way for them to be made and sold in the U.S., despite concerns that they're too small and slow to be driven safely on American roads. "They're very small, they're really cute, and I said "How would that do in this country?'" Trump told reporters on Wednesday at the White House, as he outlined plans to relax stringent Biden-era fuel efficiency standards.

"But we're not allowed to make them in this country and I think you're gonna do very well with those cars, so we're gonna approve those cars," he said, adding that he's authorized Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to approve production. [...] In response to Trump's latest order, Duffy said his department has "cleared the deck" for Toyota Motor Corp. and other carmakers to build and sell cars in the U.S. that are "smaller, more fuel-efficient." Trump's seeming embrace of Kei cars is the latest instance of passenger vehicles being used as a geopolitical bargaining chip between the U.S. and Japan. "This makes a lot of sense in urban settings, especially when electrified," comments sinij. "Hopefully these are restricted from the highway system."

The report notes that these Kei cars generally aren't allowed in the U.S. as new vehicles because they don't meet federal crash-safety and performance standards, and many states restrict or ban them due to concerns that they're too small and slow for American roads. However, they can be imported if they're over 25 years old, but then must abide by state rules that often limit them to low speeds or private property use.

Meta is acquiring AI wearable startup Limitless, maker of a pendant that records conversations and generates summaries. "We're excited that Limitless will be joining Meta to help accelerate our work to build AI-enabled wearables," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. CNBC reports: Limitless CEO Dan Siroker revealed the deal on Friday via a corporate blog post but did not disclose the financial terms. "Meta recently announced a new vision to bring personal superintelligence to everyone and a key part of that vision is building incredible AI-enabled wearables," Siroker said in the post and an accompanying video. "We share this vision and we'll be joining Meta to help bring our shared vision to life."