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New Uptime survey flags cost, power, outages

Being able to forecast future capacity requirements is a growing concern for datacenter operators as they face conflicting factors such as rising costs, power constraints, and meeting the demands of AI workloads.…

"Digital storefront Itch.io is reindexing its free adult games," reports Engadget, "and is talking to its partnered payment processors about plans to gradually reintroduce paid NSFW content..." In a statement included in the Itch.io update, Stripe said it hasn't closed the door on the possibility of being able to support adult content again in the future. In the meantime, Itch.io says it is talking to its other payment partners about accepting the card payments Stripe is currently no longer able to process. Itch's founder told the gaming news site Aftermath that it was a notice from Visa that led to the sudden deindexing of so many games. But Aftermath notes that Visa and Mastercard have now "both released statements effectively washing their hands of the situation but also, paradoxically, justifying any actions they might have taken." - Visa: "When a legally operating merchant faces an elevated risk of illegal activity, we require enhanced safeguards for the banks supporting those merchants..." - Mastercard: "Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content." Aftermath's take? The part where the two companies act as though their hands have been tied by the long arm of the law is, frankly, bullshit. None of the games removed from Steam or Itch were illegal. They depict actions that are perfectly legal in other mediums. To re-quote Mike Stabile, director of policy at the Free Speech Coalition: "The stuff [companies] are talking about is entirely legal. It's legal to have in a book, it's legal to have in a game. They are making decisions based on their brand, based on public pressure from anti-porn groups, and that can be reversed." Meanwhile, gamers are still pushing back: It's difficult to say just how many people have spent the past several days tying up the lines of card companies and payment processors, but the movement has made itself visible enough to gain support from larger industry bodies like the Communications Workers of America [the largest communications/media labor union in America] and the International Game Developers Association.

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Established in 1943 to coordinate America's building of the first atomic bomb, the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico is still "one of the world's largest and most advanced scientific institutions" notes Wikipedia. And it now has a "National Security AI Office," where senior director Jason Pruet is working to help "prepare for a future in which AI will reshape the landscape of science and security," according to the lab's science and technology magazine 1663. "This year, the Lab invested more in AI-related work than at any point in history..." Pruet: AI is starting to feel like the next great foundation for scientific progress. Big companies are spending billions on large machines, but the buy-in costs of working at the frontiers of AI are so high that no university has the exascale-class machines needed to run the latest AI models. We're at a place now where we, meaning the government, can revitalize that pact by investing in the infrastructure to study AI for the public good... Part of what we're doing with the Lab's machines, like Venado — which has 2500 GPUs — is giving universities access to that scale of computing. The scale is just completely different. A typical university might have 50 or 100 GPUs. Right now, for example, we have partnerships with the University of California, the University of Michigan, and many other universities where researchers can tap into this infrastructure. That's something we want to expand on. Having university collaboration will be critical if the Department of Energy is going to have a comprehensive AI program at scale that is focused on national security and energy dominance... There was a time when I wouldn't have advocated for government investment in AI at the scale we're seeing now. But the weight of the evidence has become overwhelming. Large models — "frontier models" — have shown such extraordinary capabilities with recent advances in areas as diverse as hypothesis generation, mathematics, biological design, and complex multiphysics simulations. The potential for transformative impact is too significant to ignore. "He no longer views the technology as just a tool, but as a fundamental shift in how scientists approach problems and make discoveries," the article concludes. "The global race humanity is now in... is about how to harness the technology's potential while mitigating its harms." Thanks to Slashdot reader rabbitface25 — also a Los Alamo Lab science writer — for sharing his article.

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It's a cultural milestone. Fiverr just released an ad mocking vibe coding. The video features what its description calls a "clueless entrepreneur" building an app to tell if an avocado is ripe — who soon ends up blissfully singing with an avocado to the tune of the cheesy 1987 song "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." The avocado sings joyously of "a new app on the rise in a no-code world that's too good to be true" (rhyming that with "So close. Just not tested through...") "Let them say we're crazy. I don't care about bugs!" the entrepreneur sings back. "Built you in a minute, now I'm so high off this buzz..." But despite her singing to the overripe avocado that "I don't need a backend if I've got the spark!" and that they can "build this app together, vibe-coding forever. Nothing's going to stop us now!" — the build suddenly fails. (And it turns out that avocado really was overripe...) Fiverr then suggests viewers instead hire one of their experts for building their apps... The art/design site Creative Bloq acknowledges Fiverr "flip-flopping between scepticism and pro-AI marketing." (They point out a Fiverr ad last November had ended with the tagline "Nobody cares that you use AI! They care about the results — for the best ones higher Fiverr experts who've mastered every digital skill including AI.") But the site calls this new ad "a step in the right direction towards mindful AI usage." Just like an avocado that looks perfect on the outside, once you inspect the insides, AI-generated code can be deceptively unripe. Fiverr might be feeling the impact of vibecoding themselves. The freelancing web site saw the company's share price fall over 14% this week, with one Yahoo! Finance site saying this week's quarterly results revealed Fiverr's active buyers dropped 10.9% compared to last year — a decrease of 3.4 million buyers which "overshadowed a 9.8% increase in spending per buyer." Even when issuing a buy recommendation, Seeking Alpha called it "a short-term rebound play, as the company faces longer-term risks from AI and active buyer churn."

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Remember, it's all synthesized "anthropomorphizing". But with that caveat, Science News reports: In populations of simple software agents (like characters in "The Sims" but much, much simpler), having "guilt" can be a stable strategy that benefits them and increases cooperation, researchers report July 30 in Journal of the Royal Society Interface... When we harm someone, we often feel compelled to pay a penance, perhaps as a signal to others that we won't offend again. This drive for self-punishment can be called guilt, and it's how the researchers programmed it into their agents. The question was whether those that had it would be outcompeted by those that didn't, say Theodor Cimpeanu, a computer scientist at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and colleagues. Science News spoke to a game-theory lecturer from Australia who points out it's hard to map simulations to real-world situations — and that they end up embodying many assumptions. Here researchers were simulating The Prisoner's Dilemma, programming one AI agent that "felt guilt (lost points) only if it received information that its partner was also paying a guilt price after defecting." And that turned out to be the most successful strategy. One of the paper's authors then raises the possibility that an evolving population of AIs "could comprehend the cold logic to human warmth." Thanks to Slashdot reader silverjacket for sharing the article.

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The women-only app Tea now "faces two class action lawsuits filed in California" in response to a recent breach," reports NPR — even as the company is now boasting it has more than 6.2 million users. A spokesperson for Tea told the CBC it's "working to identify any users whose personal information was involved" in a breach of 72,000 images (including 13,000 verification photos and images of government IDs) and a later breach of 1.1 million private messages. Tea said they will be offering those users "free identity protection services." The company said it removed the ID requirement in 2023, but data that was stored before February 2024, when Tea migrated to a more secure system, was accessed in the breach... [Several sites have pointed out Tea's current privacy policy is telling users selfies are "deleted immediately."] Tea was reportedly intended to launch in Canada on Friday, according to information previously posted on the App Store, but as of this week the launch date is now in February 2026. Tea didn't respond to CBC's questions about the apparent delay. Yet even amid the current turmoil, Tea's waitlist has ballooned to 1.5 million women, all eager to join, the company posted on Wednesday. A day later, Tea posted in its Instagram stories that it had approved "well over" 800,000 women into the app that day alone. So, why is it so popular, despite the drama and risks? Tea tapped into a perceived weakness of ther dating apps, according to an associate health studies professor at Ontario's Western University interviewed by the CBC, who thinks users should avoid Tea, at least until its security is restored. Tech blogger John Gruber called the incident "yet another data point for the argument that any 'private messaging' feature that doesn't use E2EE isn't actually private at all." (And later Gruber notes Tea's apparent absence at the top of the charts in Google's Play Store. "I strongly suspect that, although Google hasn't removed Tea from the Play Store, they've delisted it from discovery other than by searching for it by name or following a direct link to its listing.") Besides anonymous discussions about specific men, Tea also allows its users to perform background and criminal record checks, according to NPR, as well as reverse image searches. But the recent breach, besides threatening the safety of its users, also "laid bare the anonymous, one-sided accusations against the men in their dating pools." The CBC points out there's a men's rights group on Reddit now urging civil lawsuits against tea as part of a plan to get the app shut down. And "Cleveland lawyer Aaron Minc, who specializes in cases involving online defamation and harassment, told The Associated Press that his firm has received hundreds of calls from people upset about what's been posted about them on Tea." Yet in response to Tea's latest Instagram post, "The comments were almost entirely from people asking Tea to approve them, so they could join the app."

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