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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession's future skills base. The paper, Redefining the Engineering Profession for AI, is based on several assumptions, the first of which is that agentic coding assistants "give senior engineers an AI boost... while imposing an AI drag on early-in-career (EiC) developers to steer, verify and integrate AI output." In an earlier podcast on the subject, Russinovich said this basic premise -- that AI is increasing productivity only for senior developers while reducing it for juniors -- is a "hot topic in all our customer engagements... they all say they see it at their companies." [...] The logical outcome is that "if organizations focus only on short-term efficiency -- hiring those who can already direct AI -- they risk hollowing out the next generation of technical leaders," Russinovich and Hanselman state in the paper.

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FreeBSD's friendliest desktop distro bets on the controversial fork

GhostBSD plans to move to the XLibre X11 server to better support its flagship MATE desktop – as well as Xfce and the new Gershwin.…

When a one-line fix triggers thousands of PRs, something's off

A Go library maintainer has urged developers to turn off GitHub's Dependabot, arguing that false positives from the dependency-scanning tool "reduce security by causing alert fatigue."…

The House of Zen signed a nearly identical deal with OpenAI last fall

AMD just signed a mega chip deal with Meta that appears almost identical to the one it signed with OpenAI last fall. And just like all cross-industry agreements between AI and chip makers of late, this one comes with some circular financing, too. …

Microsoft has spent more than $76 billion acquiring game studios and publishers over the past few years in an attempt to turn Xbox into a Netflix-like subscription platform, and the result is that nobody -- possibly not even Microsoft -- can clearly articulate what Xbox actually is anymore, The Verge writes. The brand started as a powerful video game console, but Game Pass and cloud gaming pushed it toward a hazier identity: the "This is an Xbox" ad campaign tried to redefine it as any device that could play Xbox games, whether a PC, a smart TV, a phone, or a Windows handheld. Microsoft then went further and started publishing its biggest franchises on PlayStation, making it one of the largest third-party publishers on a rival's platform. Phil Spencer, who led the division for over a decade and drove the subscription pivot, announced his retirement last week, and incoming CEO Asha Sharma has pledged "the return of Xbox" -- though her memo also talks about expanding across PC, mobile, and cloud, which sounds a lot like the status quo.

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With Server 2016 and other OSes for the chop, security fixes can continue to flow for a price

Microsoft is giving Windows customers the "gift of time" but expects compensation for its generosity.…

Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. From a report: In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord's head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company "ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previously launched and that test has since concluded." After Discord announced plans to implement age verification globally starting next month, users across social media accused Discord of "lying" about how it plans on handling face scans and ID uploads. Much of the criticism was directed toward Discord's partnership with Persona, an age verification provider also used by Reddit and Roblox.

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No, customers aren't laughing either as pressure from memory shortages bites

Hosting biz Hetzner, one of Europe's largest datacenter operators, is warning customers that prices are scheduled to jump by as much as 50 percent from April 1.…

Russia has opened an investigation into Telegram founder Pavel Durov for "abetting terrorist activities," [non-paywalled source] in the latest sign that his uneasy relationship with the Kremlin has broken down. From a report: Two Russian newspapers, including the state-run Rossiiskaya Gazeta and Kremlin-friendly tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, alleged on Tuesday that the messaging app had become a tool of western and Ukrainian intelligence services. The articles, credited to materials from Russia's FSB security service, accused Telegram of enabling attacks in Russia and said that Durov's "actions ... are under criminal investigation." Russia has restricted Telegram's functions, accusing it of flouting the law and is seeking to divert users towards Max, a state-run rival messenger. The steps escalate pressure on a platform that remains deeply embedded in Russian public life.

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Social media giant retorts it doesn't want to collect 'private' data, and plans to appeal

The UK's data protection regulator has fined social media giant Reddit £14.47 million ($19.5 million) over its use of children's data.…

Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global "AI kill switch" that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser's AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, key points in link previews, and AI chatbot providers in the sidebar. Firefox 148 also brings Firefox for Android, support for the Trusted Types API, CSS shape() function support, Sanitizer API support, WebGPU enhancements, and a variety of other changes. Developer chances can be found at developer.mozilla.org. Binaries are available from ftp.mozilla.org.

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BSD support improves, FreeBSD eyes a desktop option, and the init wars refuse to die

The latest KDE desktop environment is out. Among other things, it comes with a pledge that it won't require systemd, and this version has improved OpenBSD support. FreeBSD 15.1's installer offers KDE too.…

Public prosecutor mulls sentencing following investigations into two separate attacks

Two South Korean teenagers were this week charged with breaching Seoul's public bike service, Ttareungyi.…

Parliament committee finds AI BS helped shape a real-world decision

UK Parliament has delivered the official postmortem on West Midlands Police's Copilot saga, and it reads like a case study in how not to mix generative AI with public order decision-making.…

Upstart's 5th-gen RDU aims to undercut Nvidia's B200 on speed and cost

AI infrastructure company SambaNova has raised $350 million to advance its dataflow architecture, which it pitches as an alternative to GPU-based AI systems.…

Visa applications down, executives emigrating, and AI blamed for the rest

The number of international workers applying for a visa to work in the UK's tech sector dropped 11 percent between Q2 and Q3 2025, and was down 6 percent year-on-year, according to consultancy RSM UK.…

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task -- known as complement sampling -- dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, establishes a provable and verifiable quantum advantage in sample complexity: the number of samples required to solve a problem. "We stumbled upon the core result of this work by chance while working on a different project," Harry Buhrman, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. "We had a set of items and two quantum states: one formed from half of the items, the other formed from the remaining half. Even though the two states are fundamentally distinct, we showed that a quantum computer may find it hard to tell which one it is given. Surprisingly, however, we then realized that transforming one state into the other is always easy, because a simple operation can swap between them."

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We like our surface-to-air weapons affordable

Britain has joined a handful of European allies in a program to develop low-cost air defense systems, including autonomous drones or missiles, with project delivery of the first elements scheduled for as early as 2027.…

Redmond also offers to take the OneDrive name out of your OneDrive

Microsoft has teased a significant upgrade to its SharePoint collaborationware package.…

U.S. battery storage installations hit a record 57.6 GWh in 2025, and Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nationâ(TM)s largest storage market in 2026. Electrek reports: According to the US Energy Storage Market Outlook Q1 2026 from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, installations are now four times higher than totals from just three years ago. The US had a total of 137 GWh of utility-scale storage installed as of 2025, plus 19 GWh of commercial and industrial systems and 9 GWh of residential storage. Analysts expect the growth streak to continue. More than 600 GWh of energy storage is projected to be deployed nationwide by 2030, even as the Trump administration targets clean energy industries. Two-thirds of utility-scale storage installed in 2025 was built in red states, including nine of the top 15 states for new installations. Texas is projected to surpass California as the countryâ(TM)s largest battery storage market in 2026. Standalone battery projects accounted for nearly 30 GWh of new capacity in 2025, while solar-plus-storage installations made up about 20 GWh. Residential storage deployments reached 3.1 GWh last year, a 51% increase year-over-year. Analysts say virtual power plant programs in states such as Massachusetts, Texas, Arizona, and Illinois are helping drive adoption by reducing costs and easing strain during peak demand periods. The supply chain is shifting to support the boom. In 2025, some battery cell manufacturers pivoted production from EV batteries to dedicated stationary storage cells, converting existing lines and adjusting future plans. Lithium-ion cell manufacturing for stationary storage reached more than 21 GWh in 2025, enough to power Houston overnight, according to SEIAâ(TM)s Solar and Storage Supply Chain Dashboard. Meanwhile, US factories now have the capacity to manufacture 69.4 GWh of battery energy storage systems annually.

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