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What if AI vendors focused on the demand side?

Interview "I think everybody is adopting AI irresponsibly and I think it's going to have a net negative outcome on the socio-economic standing of the world," said Bars Juhasz. "So let's see if we can't pitch more of a win-win future."…

America's unemployment rate for tech jobs rose to 4% in November, and "has been steadily rising since May," reports the Washington Post (citing data from the IT training/certifications company CompTIA). Between October and November, the number of technology workers across different industries fell 134,000, while the number of people working in the tech industry declined by more than 6,800. Tech job postings were also down by more than 31,800, the report found, citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and California-based market intelligence firm Lightcast. "The data is pretty definitive that the tech industry is struggling," said Mark Zandi, Moody's chief economist. "There's a jobs recession in the industry, and it feels like that's going to continue given the slide in postings...." The unemployment rate in the tech industry still sits below the national rate, which in November hit 4.6 percent, the highest since 2021. However, that gap has been narrowing, with tech unemployment rising faster in recent months than is the case nationally.... Employers are largely in "wait and see" mode when it comes to hiring given the current uncertainties surrounding the economy and impact of AI, so they're likely to delay backfilling, Herbert said, citing CompTIA's surveys of chief information officers. But Justin Wolfers, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, said uncertainty is likely to continue in the foreseeable future. "I'm feeling substantially more pessimistic," Wolfers said, recalling that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell recently suggested that federal job numbers may be overstated. "That's pretty grim." Technology companies have announced more than 141,000 job cuts so far this year, representing a 17 percent increase from the same period last year, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. At the same time Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have announced plans to invest up to $375 billion in AI infrastructure this year. "AI is quickly becoming a requirement, with 41 percent of all active job postings representing AI roles or requiring AI skills, according to CompTIA's analysis," the article points out. Economist Zandi tells the Post that "If you have AI skills, there seems to be jobs. But if you don't, I think it's going to feel like you've been hit by a dump truck."

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A rare case of deliberately trying to induce an outage

A staffer at the USA’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to disable backup generators powering some of its Network Time Protocol infrastructure, after a power outage around Boulder, Colorado, led to errors.…

The team authoring the Rust 2025 Vision Doc interviewed Rust developers to find out what they liked about the language — and have now issued three recommendations "to help Rust continue to scale across domains and usage levels." — Enumerate and describe Rust's design goals and integrate them into our processes, helping to ensure they are observed by future language designers and the broader ecosystem. — Double down on extensibility, introducing the ability for crates to influence the develop experience and the compilation pipeline. — Help users to navigate the crates.io ecosystem and enable smoother interop The real "empowering magic" of Rust arises from achieving a number of different attributes all at once — reliability, efficiency, low-level control, supportiveness, and so forth. It would be valuable to have a canonical list of those values that we could collectively refer to as a community and that we could use when evaluating RFCs or other proposed designs... We recommend creating an RFC that defines the goals we are shooting for as we work on Rust... One insight from our research is that we don't need to define which values are "most important". We've seen that for Rust to truly work, it must achieveallthe factors at once... We recommenddoubling down on extensibilityas a core strategy. Rust's extensibility — traits, macros, operator overloading — has been key to its versatility. But that extensibility is currently concentrated in certain areas: the type system and early-stage proc macros. We should expand it to coversupportive interfaces(better diagnostics and guidance from crates) andcompilation workflow(letting crates integrate at more stages of the build process)... Doubling down on extensibility will not only make current Rust easier to use, it will enable and support Rust's use in new domains. Safety Critical applications in particular require a host of custom lints and tooling to support the associated standards. Compiler extensibility allows Rust to support those niche needs in a more general way. We recommend finding ways to help users navigate the crates.io ecosystem... [F]inding which crates to use presents a real obstacle when people are getting started. The Rust org maintains a carefully neutral stance, which is good, but also means that people don't have anywhere to go for advice on a good "starter set" crates... Part of the solution is enabling better interop between libraries.

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