Meta is shutting down its VR social platform Horizon Worlds, which was once a key piece of the pivot to the metaverse. The company said the app will be taken off the Quest store at the end of March, and fully removed from Quest headsets by June 15. After that date, it will shift to a standalone "mobile-only experience." CNBC reports: The shift for Horizon Worlds, which was once a central part of the company's push into virtual reality, comes weeks after Meta cut over 1,000 employees from Reality Labs, the unit responsible for the metaverse. [...] The social platform has never drawn more than a couple hundred thousand active users a month, CNBC previously reported.

The virtual 3D social network where avatars could interact and play games with other users officially launched in late 2021. It operated exclusively on the Quest VR platform until Meta launched a mobile app version in September 2023. The mobile version of Horizon Worlds was built to provide an entry point for users without VR headsets, functioning similarly to Roblox.

Longtime Slashdot reader internet-redstar writes: Nearly a trillion dollars has been wiped from software stocks in 2026, with hedge funds making billions shorting Salesforce, HubSpot, and Atlassian. At FOSDEM 2026, cURL maintainer Daniel Stenberg shut down his bug bounty program after AI-generated slop overwhelmed his team. A new article on HackerNoon argues that most commercial SaaS could inevitably become OpenSource, not out of ideology but economics. The author points to Proxmox replacing VMware at enterprise scale and startups like Holosign replicating DocuSign at $19/month flat as evidence. The catch, the article claims, is that maintainers who refuse to embrace AI tools risk being forked, or simply replicated from scratch, by those who do.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Musi, a free music streaming app that had tens of millions of iPhone downloads and garnered plenty of controversy over its method of acquiring music, has lost an attempt to get back on Apple's App Store. A federal judge dismissed Musi's lawsuit against Apple with prejudice and sanctioned Musi's lawyers for "mak[ing] up facts to fill the perceived gaps in Musi's case."

Musi built a streaming service without striking its own deals with copyright holders. It did so by playing music from YouTube, writing in its 2024 lawsuit against Apple that "the Musi app plays or displays content based on the user's own interactions with YouTube and enhances the user experience via Musi's proprietary technology." Musi's app displayed its own ads but let users remove them for a one-time fee of $5.99. Musi claimed it complied with YouTube's terms, but Apple removed it from the App Store in September 2024. Musi does not offer an Android app. Musi alleged that Apple delisted its app based on "unsubstantiated" intellectual property claims from YouTube and that Apple violated its own Developer Program License Agreement (DPLA) by delisting the app.

Musi was handed a resounding defeat yesterday in two rulings from US District Judge Eumi Lee in the Northern District of California. Lee found that Apple can remove apps "with or without cause," as stipulated in the developer agreement. Lee wrote (PDF): "The plain language of the DPLA governs because it is clear and explicit: Apple may 'cease marketing, offering, and allowing download by end-users of the [Musi app] at any time, with or without cause, by providing notice of termination.' Based on this language, Apple had the right to cease offering the Musi app without cause if Apple provided notice to Musi. The complaint alleges, and Musi does not dispute, that Apple gave Musi the required notice. Therefore, Apple's decision to remove the Musi app from the App Store did not breach the DPLA."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: Over the last few months, various academics and AI companies have attempted to predict how artificial intelligence is going to impact the labor market. These studies, including a high-profile paper published by Anthropic earlier this month, largely try to take the things AI is good at, or could be good at, and match them to existing job categories and job tasks. But the papers ignore some of the most impactful and most common uses of AI today: AI porn and AI slop.

Anthropic's paper, called "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence," essentially attempts to find 1:1 correlations between tasks that people do today at their jobs and things people are using Claude for. The researchers also try to predict if a job's tasks "are theoretically possible with AI," which resulted in this chart, which has gone somewhat viral and was included in a newsletter by MSNOW's Phillip Bump and threaded about by tech journalist Christopher Mims. (Because everything is terrible, the research is now also feeding into a gambling website where you can see the apparent odds of having your job replaced by AI.) In his thread, Mims makes the case that the "theoretical capability" of AI to do different jobs in different sectors is totally made up, and that this chart basically means nothing. Mims makes a good and fair observation: The nature of the many, many studies that attempt to predict which people are going to lose their jobs to AI are all flawed because the inputs must be guessed, to some degree.

But I believe most of these studies are flawed in a deeper way: They do not take into account how people are actually using AI, though Anthropic claims that that is exactly what it is doing. "We introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily," the researchers write. This is based in part on the "Anthropic Economic Index," which was introduced in an extremely long paper published in January that tries to catalog all the high-minded uses of AI in specific work-related contexts. These uses include "Complete humanities and social science academic assignments across multiple disciplines," "Draft and revise professional workplace correspondence and business communications," and "Build, debug, and customize web applications and websites." Not included in any of Anthropic's research are extremely popular uses of AI such as "create AI porn" and "create AI slop and spam." These uses are destroying discoverability on the internet, cause cascading societal and economic harms. "Anthropic's research continues a time-honored tradition by AI companies who want to highlight the 'good' uses of AI that show up in their marketing materials while ignoring the world-destroying applications that people actually use it for," argues Koebler. "Meanwhile, as we have repeatedly shown, huge parts of social media websites and Google search results have been overtaken by AI slop. Chatbots themselves have killed traffic to lots of websites that were once able to rely on ad revenue to employ people, so on and so forth..."

"This is all to say that these studies about the economic impacts of AI are ignoring a hugely important piece of context: AI is eating and breaking the internet and social media," writes Koebler, in closing. "We are moving from a many-to-many publishing environment that created untold millions of jobs and businesses towards a system where AI tools can easily overwhelm human-created websites, businesses, art, writing, videos, and human activity on the internet. What's happening may be too chaotic, messy, and unpleasant for AI companies to want to reckon with, but to ignore it entirely is malpractice."

Kyle Orland writes via Ars Technica: Since deep-learning super-sampling (DLSS) launched on 2018's RTX 2080 cards, gamers have been generally bullish on the technology as a way to effectively use machine-learning upscaling techniques to increase resolutions or juice frame rates in games. With yesterday's tease of the upcoming DLSS 5, though, Nvidia has crossed a line from mere upscaling into complete lighting and texture overhauls influenced by "generative AI." The result is a bland, uncanny gloss that has received an instant and overwhelmingly negative reaction from large swaths of gamers and the industry at large.

While previous DLSS releases rendered upscaled frames or created entirely new ones to smooth out gaps, Nvidia calls DLSS 5 -- which it plans to launch in Autumn -- "a real-time neural rendering model" that can "deliver a new level of photoreal computer graphics previously only achieved in Hollywood visual effects." Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said explicitly that the technology melds "generative AI" with "handcrafted rendering" for "a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression."

Unlike existing generative video models, which Nvidia notes are "difficult to precisely control and often lack predictability," DLSS 5 uses a game's internal color and motion vectors "to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame." That underlying game data helps the system "understand complex scene semantics such as characters, hair, fabric and translucent skin, along with environmental lighting conditions like front-lit, back-lit or overcast," the company says. Nvidia's announcement video and detailed Digital Foundry breakdown can be found at their respective links.

"Reactions have compared the effect to air-brushed pornography, 'yassified, looks-maxed freaks,' or those uncanny, unavoidable Evony ads," writes Orland. "Others have noted how DLSS 5 seems to mangle the intended art direction by dampening shadows in favor of a homogenized look."

Thomas Was Alone developer Mike Bithell said the technology seems designed "for when you absolutely, positively, don't want any art direction in your gaming experience."

Gunfire Games Senior Concept Artist Jeff Talbot added that "in every shot the art direction was taken away for the senseless addition of 'details.' Each DLSS 5 shot looked worse and had less character than the original. This is just a garbage AI Filter."

DLSS 5's "AI dogshit is actually depressing," said New Blood Interactive founder and CEO Dave Oshry, adding that future generations "won't even know this looks 'bad' or 'wrong' because to them it'll be normal."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: A battle of insults and threats has broken out between the tech world and Wall Street. What's got everyone so worked up? The same thing that starts most fights: business software. A series of social-media posts went viral in recent days with claims that AI has created a worthy -- and way cheaper -- alternative to the Bloomberg terminal, a computer system that is like oxygen to professional investors. Now "Bloomberg is cooked," some posters argued as they heralded the arrival of a newly released AI tool from startup Perplexity. [...]

The finance bros who worship at the altar of Bloomberg have declared war on the tech evangelists who have put all their faith in AI. To suggest that the terminal is replaceable is "laughable," said Jason Lemire, who jumped into the conversation on LinkedIn. (Ironically or not, his post also included an AI-generated image of churchgoers praying to the Bloomberg terminal). "It seems quite obvious to me that those propagating that post are either just looking for easy engagement and/or have never worked in a serious financial institution," he wrote. [...] Morgan Linton, the co-founder and CTO of AI startup Bold Metrics and an avid Perplexity Computer user, said it's rare for a single AI prompt to generate anything close to what Bloomberg does. That said, he added that tools like this can lay "a really good foundation for a financial application. And that really has not been possible before."

Others aren't so sure. Michael Terry, an institutional investment manager who used the terminal for more than 30 years, said he used a prompt circulating online to try to vibe code a Bloomberg replica on Anthropic's Claude. "It was laughable at best, horrific at worst," he said. Shevelenko acknowledged there are some aspects of the terminal that can't be replicated with vibe coding, including some of Bloomberg's proprietary data inputs. The live chat network, which includes 350,000 financial professionals in 184 countries, would also be hard to re-create, as well as the terminal's data security, reliability and robust support system. "I love Bloomberg. And I know most people that use Bloomberg are very, very loyal and extremely happy," said Lemire. His message to the techies? "There's nothing that you can vibe code in a weekend or even like over the course of a year that's going to come anywhere close."

Samsung is reportedly ending sales of the Galaxy Z TriFold just months after launch, likely due to "high production costs" and limited supply. 9to5Google reports: The Galaxy Z TriFold launched in South Korea barely four months ago, arriving in Samsung's home market ahead of a larger debut in the U.S. and other markets in January. The $2,899 smartphone brought an entirely new form factor to the foldable market, but it's apparently very short-lived.

Korean media reports (via SamMobile) that Samsung is planning to end sales of the Galaxy Z TriFold in Korea, with one more restock coming in the country this week. In the United States, the report mentions that the TriFold will be available until "the current production volume is sold out," which sounds like we might only get another restock or two here as well.

More than 30 billion images captured by Pokemon Go players have helped train a visual mapping system developed by Niantic. The technology is now being used to guide delivery robots from Coco Robotics through city streets where GPS often struggles. Popular Science reports: This week, Niantic Spatial, part of the team behind Pokemon Go, announced a partnership with Coco Robotics, a company that makes short-distance delivery robots for food and groceries. Soon, those robot couriers will scoot around sidewalks using Niantic's Visual Positioning System (VPS)-- a navigation tool that can reportedly pinpoint location down to a few centimeters just by looking at nearby buildings and landmarks. Niantic trained that VPS model on more than 30 billion images captured by Pokemon Go users, and claims it will help robots operate in areas where GPS falls short. [...]

Instead of helping users navigate the way that GPS does, VPS determines where someone is based on their surroundings. That makes Pokemon Go particularly useful as a data source, because players had to physically travel to specific locations and point their phones at various angles. That mapping effort got a significant boost in 2020, when the app added what it called "Field Research," a feature prompting players to scan real-world statues and landmarks with their cameras in exchange for in-game rewards. A portion of the data also reportedly came from areas known as "Pokemon battle arenas." Whether players knew it or not, those scans were creating 3D models of the real world that would eventually power the Niantic model. More data means better accuracy, and because Niantic was collecting images of the same locations from many different users, it could capture the same spots across varying weather conditions, lighting, angles, and heights. [...]

The idea is that Coco's robots can use VPS and four cameras mounted around the machine to get a far more precise read on their surroundings. In turn, the well-equipped robot will deliver food on time. On a broader level, Niantic says its partnership with Coco Robotics is part of a longer-term effort to build a "living map" of the world that updates as new data becomes available. Once VPS-equipped delivery robots hit the streets, they will collect even more info that can be fed back into the model to bolster its accuracy further. This kind of continuous, real-world data collection is already central to how self-driving vehicle companies like Waymo and Tesla operate, and is a large part of why that technology has improved so significantly in recent years.

AI infrastructure company Nebius signed a deal to provide up to $27 billion in AI computing capacity to Meta over the next five years, including a guaranteed $12 billion purchase by 2027. Reuters reports: Under the agreement, Meta will also buy an additional $15 billion worth of capacity planned by Nebius over the coming five years if it is not sold to other customers, giving the contract a total value of up to $27 billion, Nebius said. The deal is the latest example of U.S. tech giants' efforts to supplement their own AI data-centre build-outs by locking in scarce GPU and power capacity from "neocloud" providers like Nebius. Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh said the latest Meta deal would help "accelerate the build-out and growth of our core AI cloud business." Further reading: Data Centers Overtake Offices In US Construction-Spending Shift

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Spending on data center projects in the U.S. has exploded, surpassing offices for the first time at the end of last year. It's a trend Matt Kunz saw early on when Meta built a computing hub outside Columbus, Ohio. Other tech companies soon swarmed into the area, drawn by its stable economy, university talent pipeline and ample power, water and land, said Kunz, vice president and general manager at Turner Construction Co., the firm that led Meta's build-out. Since Meta broke ground in 2017, it's expanded its data center campus, and Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Microsoft Corp. made plans to join it nearby.

"When one shows up, almost all the other ones tend to follow," Kunz said. For Turner, a construction giant responsible for supertall office skyscrapers, sports stadiums and cultural venues around the globe, data centers are commanding more of its bandwidth. The company completed $9.4 billion of the projects last year, more than five times its 2020 total. Last month, Turner announced it was chosen as one of the contractors on a $10 billion data center for Meta in Indiana. Tech companies' needs for AI processing facilities have made data centers the latest darling of the real estate industry. The properties are figuring heavily into portfolios of major investors such as Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management and KKR, on a bet that long-term demand for computing power will continue to grow. At the same time, office development has slowed as cities across the U.S. contend with vacancies that have piled up since the Covid lockdowns.

Construction spending for data centers has climbed steadily in recent years, while outlays for general office projects headed downward, U.S. Census data show. The two crossed paths in December, with roughly $3.57 billion spent on data centers that month, compared with $3.49 billion for offices, according to preliminary estimates. The shift is likely to continue and "may perpetuate itself even further as AI is utilized for automating day-to-day jobs," said Andy Cvengros, co-lead of U.S. data center markets for the brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. "It's going to directly impact the amount of office space people need." According to Christopher McFadden, senior vice president at Turner, more than a third of the company's backlog is now tied to data centers.

"We're going to be building these at this scale for years to come," McFadden said. "There's a lot of wind in the sail."

Starting in September, even Android developers not in Google's Play Store will still be required to register with Google to distribute their apps in Brazil, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, with Google continuing "to roll out these requirements globally" four months later. Even developers distributing Android apps on the web for sideloading will be required to register, pay Google a $25 fee, and provide a government ID.

But there's a new theory on what's secretly been motivating Google from an unnamed source in the "Keep Android Open" movement, writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland: "You can't separate this really from their ongoing interactions with Epic and the settlement that they came to," they argue. Twelve days ago Epic Games and Google announced a new proposal for settling their long-running dispute over the legality of alternative app stores on Android phones. (Rather than agreeing to let third-party app stores into their Play Store, Google wants them to continue being sideloaded, promising in a blog post last week that they'll even offer a "more streamlined" and "simplified" sideloading alternative for rival app stores. "This Registered App Store program will begin outside of the US first, and we intend to bring it to the US as well, subject to court approval.")

So "developer verification" could be Google's fallback plan if U.S. courts fail to approve this. "If the Google Play Store has to allow any third-party repository app store, Google essentially has given up all control of the apps. But if they're able to claw back that control by requiring that all developers, no matter how they distribute their apps, have to register with Google — have to agree to their Terms & Conditions, pay them money, provide identification — then they have a large degree of indirect control over any app that can be developed for the entire platform."
But that plan threatens millions of people using the alternative F/OSS app distributor F-Droid, since Google also wants to have only one signature attached to Android apps. Marc Prud'hommeaux, a member of F-Droid's board of directors, says that "all of a sudden breaks all those versions of the application distributed through F-Droid or any other app store!"

Prud'hommeaux says they've told Google's Android team "You know perfectly well that you're killing F-Droid!" creating an "existential" threat to an app distributor "that has existed happily for over 10 years." But good things started happening when he created the website Keep Android Open: There's now a "huge backlog" of signers for an Open Letter that already includes EFF, the Software Freedom Conservancy, and the Free Software Foundation. He believes Android's existing Play Protect security "is completely sufficient to handle the particular scenarios they claim that developer verification is meant to address"...

The Keep Android Open site urges developers not to sign up for Android's early access program when it launches next week. (Instead, they're asking developers to respond to invites with an email about their concerns — and to spread the word to other developers and organizations in forums and social media posts.) There's also a petition at Change.org currently signed by 64,000 developers — adding 20,000 new signatures in the last 10 days. And "If you have an Android device, try installing F-Droid!" he adds. Google tracks how many people install these alternative app repositories, and a larger user base means greater consequences from any Android policy changes.

Plus, installing F-Droid "might be refreshing!" Prud'hommeaux says. "You don't see all the advertisements and promotions and scam and crapware stuff that you see in the commercial app stores!"

Europe's EV sales for January and February spiked 21% from last year, according to new data from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Electrek reports that just in those two months over 600,000 EVs were sold in Europe.

And figures for "rest of world" (which excludes Europe, North America, and China) are up a whopping 84% — with 370,000 EVs sold in January and February. (EVs now represent more than 30% of the vehicles sold in South Korea.)

But for the same period China's sales are down 26% from last year, with 1.1 million vehicles sold. And North America showed an even larger drop of 36% from the January/February figures in 2025, now selling just 170,000 electric vehicles, while Canada's EV sales were down 23%. EV sales seem heavily influenced by government incentives, with Germany and France leading Europe's growth: EV sales in Germany are up 26% so far this year, following the country's introduction of a new subsidy program at the start of 2026. France's market is up 30%, supported by its existing incentive program.

Italy is also seeing rapid growth. EV sales there jumped 23% month-over-month in February, making it the country's strongest month ever for EV sales. The Italian market is now up 98% year to date. That surge follows the Italian government's October 2025 launch of a new subsidy program, funded by the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility, to increase EV adoption. Households can receive up to €11,000 ($12,700) in incentives, while smaller businesses can get up to €20,000 ($23,200)...

[T]he global EV transition isn't slowing, but it's becoming much more uneven depending on policy, incentives, and trade rules.

Wikipedia describes Freenet as "a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication," released in the year 2000. "Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke," Wikipedia adds. (And in 2000 Clarke answered questions from Slashdot's readers...)

And now Ian Clarke (aka Sanity — Slashdot reader #1,431) returns to share this announcement: Freenet's new generation peer-to-peer network is now operational, along with the first application built on the network: a decentralized group chat system called River.

The new version is a complete redesign of the original project, focusing on real-time decentralized applications rather than static content distribution. Applications run as WebAssembly-based contracts across a small-world peer network, allowing software to operate directly on the network without centralized infrastructure.

An introductory video demonstrating the system is available on YouTube.
"While the original Freenet was like a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a full decentralized computer," Clarke wrote in 2023, "allowing the creation of entirely decentralized services like messaging, group chat, search, social networking, among others... designed for efficiency, flexibility, and transparency to the end user."

"Freenet 2023 can be used seamlessly through your web browser, providing an experience that feels just like using the traditional web,"

The deal to take control of TikTok's U.S. business came with an unusual condition, according to people familiar with the matter. The investors — which include Oracle, Abu Dhabi investor MGX, and private-equity firm Silver Lake — "paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January," reports the Wall Street Journal, "and are set to make several additional payments until hitting the $10 billion total." The $10 billion payment would be nearly unprecedented for a government helping arrange a transaction, historians have said... Investment bankers advising on a typical deal receive fees of less than 1% of the transaction value, and the percentage generally gets smaller as the deal size increases. Bank of America is in line to make some $130 million for advising railroad operator Norfolk Southern on its $71.5 billion sale to Union Pacific, one of the largest fees on record for a single bank on a deal. Administration officials have said the fee is justified given Trump's role in saving TikTok in the U.S. and navigating negotiations with China to get the deal done while addressing the security concerns of lawmakers...

The TikTok fee extracted from private-sector investors is the administration's latest transaction involving the nation's largest businesses. Trump took a nearly 10% stake in semiconductor company Intel and has agreed to take a chunk of chip sales to China from Nvidia in exchange for granting export licenses. The administration has also taken equity stakes in other companies and has a say in the operations of U.S. Steel following a "golden share" agreement with Japan's Nippon Steel in its takeover.
Reuters notes earlier this month, a lawsuit was filed by investors in two of TikTok's social media rivals, seeking to reverse the approval of the deal.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers. No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said. Top executives have recently signaled the plans to other senior leaders at Meta and told them to begin planning how to pare back, two of the people said. If Meta settles on the 20% figure, the layoffs will be the company's most significant since a restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023 that it dubbed the "year of efficiency." It employed nearly 79,000 people as of December 31, according to its latest filing. The speculation follows a recent report from The New York Times claiming that Meta has delayed the release of its next major AI model after falling behind competing systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Meta plans to remove end-to-end encryption (E2EE) from Instagram direct messages by May 8, 2026. "Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we're removing this option from Instagram in the coming months," says Meta. "Anyone who wants to keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do that on WhatsApp." The Hacker News reports: The American company first began testing E2EE for Instagram direct messages in 2021 as part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "privacy-focused vision for social networking." The feature is currently "only available in some areas" and is not enabled by default. Weeks into the Russo-Ukrainian war in February 2022, the company made encrypted direct messaging available to all adult users in both countries. Last week, TikTok said it would not introduce E2EE, arguing it makes users less safe by preventing police and safety teams from being able to read direct messages if needed.

Iranian drone strikes shut down a major helium facility in Qatar, removing about 30% of global helium supply and raising concerns for the semiconductor industry, which relies on the gas for chip fabrication. "QatarEnergy declared force majeure on existing contracts on March 4, freeing it from supply obligations to customers," reports Tom's Hardware. The industry outlet Gasworld reports that no imminent restart is planned. From the report: Helium consultant Phil Kornbluth, speaking at a Gasworld webinar on March 4, said that if the outage extends beyond roughly two weeks, industrial gas distributors could be forced to relocate cryogenic equipment and revalidate supplier relationships, a process that could stretch over months regardless of when Qatari output resumes.

South Korea is among the most exposed countries, which, according to the Korea International Trade Association, imported 64.7% of its helium from Qatar in 2025. The country relies heavily on helium imports to cool silicon wafers during fabrication and is understood to have no viable substitute.

The country's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources has reportedly launched an investigation into supply and demand for 14 semiconductor materials and equipment types with high dependence on Middle Eastern sources, Nikkei reported on Wednesday. Bromine, which is used in circuit formation, is another big concern, with South Korea sourcing 90% of its imports from Israel, also party to the ongoing conflict in Iran.

sdinfoserv writes: After running a Reddit clone for a couple of months, the Digg beta shut down again. The website is a splash memo from CEO Justin Mezzell, blaming the latest "Hard Reset" on bots. "Building on the internet in 2026 is different," writes Mezzell. "We learned that the hard way. Today we're sharing difficult news: we've made the decision to significantly downsize the Digg team..."

The decision was made after struggling to gain traction and an overwhelming influx of AI-driven bots and spam. "When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority," says Mezzell. "Within hours, we got a taste of what we'd only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn't appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they'd find us."

"We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on."

Despite the setback, Digg plans to rebuild with a smaller team, with founder Kevin Rose returning to work full-time on a new direction for the platform. "Starting the first week of April, Kevin will be putting his focus back on the company he built twenty+ years ago," writes Mezzell. "He'll continue as an advisor to True Ventures, but Digg will be his primary focus."

Slashback: The Rise of Digg.com

Meta has delayed the release of its next major AI model after internal tests showed it lagging behind competing systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The New York Times reports: The model, code-named Avocado, outperformed Meta's previous A.I. model and did better than Google's Gemini 2.5 model from March, two of the people said. But it has not performed as strongly as Gemini 3.0 from November, they said. As a result, Meta has delayed Avocado's release to at least May from this month, the people said. They added that the leaders of Meta's A.I. division had instead discussed temporarily licensing Gemini to power the company's A.I. products, though no decisions have been reached.

[...] It takes time to improve A.I. models, and Meta can still catch up to rivals, A.I. experts said. But a longer timeline has set in at the company, with Mr. Zuckerberg tempering expectations for Avocado in the past few months. "I expect our first models will be good, but more importantly will show the rapid trajectory we're on," he said on a call with investors in January. A Meta spokesperson said in a statement: "As we've said publicly, our next model will be good but, more importantly, show the rapid trajectory we're on, and then we'll steadily push the frontier over the course of the year as we continue to release new models. We're excited for people to see what we've been cooking very soon."

sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: Honda is making a monumental shift in its business plans. The automaker is canceling the development and launch of the 0 Series SUV, the 0 Series saloon, and the Acura RSX, and as a result, expects to take a significant financial hit in 2026 [of up to $15.8 billion]. The automaker was blunt in its announcement of the changing plans, citing American tariff policies and the unpredictable nature surrounding American EV incentives and fossil fuel regulations. In its release marking the announcement, Honda made it clear that it expected to incur further financial losses over the long term if it went through with launching the cars.

Honda also called out changing customer values in China, with buyers focusing more on software features and less on things like fuel efficiency and cabin space. In its release regarding the changing product plans, Honda was shockingly blunt about its situation, saying that it was simply unable to deliver products that offer a better value than that of newer Chinese manufacturers.