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AI-nxiety is real, and it's causing some bizarre behavior

ai-pocalypse If you're one of those people who pretend to use AI at work, then worry not: there are likely another 15 of you per hundred employees in your company. That's the finding of a survey from nearshoring tech recruitment company Howdy.com.…

A six-month international study found that a four-day workweek with no reduction in pay significantly improved employee well-being, job satisfaction, and sleep quality, with burnout dropping most among those who reduced their hours by eight or more. "The results indicate that income-preserving four-day workweeks are an effective organizational intervention for enhancing workers' well-being," the researchers said. The Register reports: The study, reported in Nature Human Behaviour, was designed to test the effects of the four-day workweek with no reduction in pay. It relied on a six-month trial involving 2,896 employees in 141 organizations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, and the US. The researchers compared work and health-related indicators -- including burnout, job satisfaction, and mental and physical health -- before and after the intervention using survey data. A further 285 employees at 12 companies did not participate in the trial and acted as a control. The researchers noted that the study was limited in that companies volunteered to participate, and the sample consisted of smaller companies from English-speaking countries. More extensive government-sponsored trials might help provide a clearer picture, they said. While several factors may explain the effect, one possibility is "increased intrinsic motivation at work," the study said. "Unfortunately, [we] cannot assess [this] due to data limitations." "Despite its limitations, this study has important implications for understanding the future of work, with 4-day workweeks probably being a key component. Scientific advances from this work will inform the development of interventions promoting better organization of paid work and worker well-being. This task has become increasingly important with the rapid expansion of new digital, automation, and artificial general intelligence technologies."

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Apple is expected to avoid hefty daily fines from the EU by modifying its App Store policies -- allowing developers to direct users to external payment options and adjusting its fee structure. Reuters reports: The company last month said developers will pay a 20% processing fee for purchases made via the App Store, though the fees could go as low as 13% for Apple's small-business program. Developers who send customers outside the App Store for payment will pay a fee between 5% and 15%. They will also be able to use as many links as they wish to send users to outside forms of payment. Apple made the changes after the EU antitrust enforcer handed it a 500 million euro ($586.7 million) fine in April, saying its technical and commercial restrictions prevented app developers from steering users to cheaper deals outside the App Store in breach of the Digital Markets Act. The company was given 60 days to scrap the restraints to comply with the DMA aimed at reining in Big Tech and giving rivals more room to compete. The European Commission is expected to approve the changes in the coming weeks, although the timing could still change, the people said. "All options remain on the table. We are still assessing Apple's proposed changes," the EU watchdog said.

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No more consideration of affordability or 1 Gbps speed goal if Chairman Carr gets his way

The next edition of the Federal Communications Commission's broadband expansion progress report is going to paint a rosier reality than usual, if a proposal being put to a vote at next month's meeting gets a pass. …

CyberSentry work grinds to a halt

Government funding for a program that hunts for threats on America's critical infrastructure networks expired on Sunday, preventing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from analyzing activity that could indicate a cyberattack, the program director told Congress on Tuesday.…

Summarizing online content is good for the search giant, not so much for publishers

ai-pocalypse Google Search users are less likely to click on search result links when those pages have AI Overviews, according to the Pew Research Center.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A California lawmaker halted an effort to pass a law that would force Internet service providers to offer $15 monthly plans to people with low incomes. Assemblymember Tasha Boerner proposed the state law a few months ago, modeling the bill on a law enforced by New York. It seemed that other states were free to impose cheap-broadband mandates because the Supreme Court rejected broadband industry challenges to the New York law twice. Boerner, a Democrat who is chair of the Communications and Conveyance Committee, faced pressure from Internet service providers to change or drop the bill. She made some changes, for example lowering the $15 plan's required download speeds from 100Mbps to 50Mbps and the required upload speeds from 20Mbps to 10Mbps. But the bill was still working its way through the legislature when, according to Boerner, Trump administration officials told her office that California could lose access to $1.86 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funds if it forces ISPs to offer low-cost service to people with low incomes. That amount is California's share of a $42.45 billion fund created by Congress to expand access to broadband service. The Trump administration has overhauled program rules, delaying the grants. One change is that states can't tell ISPs what to charge for a low-cost plan. The US law that created BEAD requires Internet providers receiving federal funds to offer at least one "low-cost broadband service option for eligible subscribers." But in new guidance from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the agency said it prohibits states "from explicitly or implicitly setting the LCSO [low-cost service option] rate a subgrantee must offer." "All they would have to do to get exempted from AB 353 [the $15 broadband bill] would be to apply to the BEAD program," said Boerner. "Doesn't matter if their application was valid, appropriate, granted, or they got public money at the end of the day and built the projects -- the mere application for the BEAD program would exempt them from 353, if it didn't jeopardize from $1.86 billion to begin with. And that was a tradeoff I was unwilling to make." Another California bill in the Senate would encourage, not require, ISPs to offer cheap broadband by making them eligible for Lifeline subsidies if they sell 100/20Mbps service for $30 or less.

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Sotheby's also flogs off dinosaur skeleton for $26M

Videos The largest chunk of Mars yet discovered on Earth, a 54-pound (25kg) chunk of the Red Planet, has been purchased at auction for $5.3 million by an unknown bidder.…

Turn that Copilot or Scroll Lock key into a media control or extended character.

In the era of laptops and tenkeyless keyboards, many of us are living with fewer keys than we had years ago. But even on a small keyboard, you'll find keys that you just don't need. …

Surge CEO Edwin Chen says AI is creating "100x engineers" who can outperform traditional software developers by orders of magnitude. Chen argued that AI coding tools multiply the productivity gains already seen in Silicon Valley's "10x engineers," who can produce ten times the work of their colleagues through faster coding, harder work, and fewer distractions. Chen said AI efficiencies compound these factors to reach 100x productivity levels. The CEO, whose company reached $1 billion in revenue without venture capital funding, believes this could enable billion-dollar single-person companies, extending beyond the $10 million single-person startups that already exist.

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Testing shows RNGD chips up to 2.25x higher performance per watt than.... five-year-old Nvidia silicon

South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI scored a major customer win this week after LG's AI Research division tapped its AI accelerators to power servers running its Exaone family of large language models.…

The diner is now open in West Hollywood, and Musk wants to start a chain

video Facing declining sales and a tarnished reputation, EV manufacturer Tesla is looking to a new industry to generate some revenue: Fast-casual food service.…

The distro's greatest asset is arguably also its greatest weakness

If you installed the Firefox, LibreWolf, or Zen web browsers from the Arch User Repository (AUR) in the last few days, delete them immediately and install fresh copies.…

Microsoft has recruited more than 20 AI employees from Google's DeepMind research division, the newest front in a talent war being waged by Silicon Valley's tech giants as they jostle to gain an edge in the nascent technology. From a report: Amar Subramanya, the former head of engineering for Google's Gemini chatbot, is the latest to move to Microsoft from its rival, according to a post on his LinkedIn profile on Tuesday. "The culture here is refreshingly low ego yet bursting with ambition," he wrote, confirming his appointment as corporate vice-president of AI. Subramanya will join other DeepMind staff including engineering lead Sonal Gupta, software engineer Adam Sadovsky and product manager Tim Frank, according to people familiar with Microsoft's recruiting. The Seattle-based company has persuaded at least 24 staff to join in the past six months, they added.

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Fans say low usage no surprise when obscure but beloved feature disabled by default

GitHub has "paused" the removal of the command palette, which enables keyboard control of the GitHub web application, following developer protests.…

With more to come, no doubt

At least three Chinese groups are attacking on-premises SharePoint servers via a couple of recently disclosed Microsoft bugs, according to Redmond.…

Google users click on fewer website links when the search engine displays AI-generated summaries at the top of results pages, according to new research from the Pew Research Center. The study analyzed browsing data from 900 U.S. adults and found users clicked on traditional search result links during 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared to 15% of visits without summaries. Users also rarely clicked on sources cited within the AI summaries themselves, doing so in just 1% of visits. The research found that 58% of respondents conducted at least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI summary, and users were more likely to end their browsing session entirely after encountering pages with AI summaries compared to traditional search results.

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Used stolen info to pitch for Chinese tech talent program

A Silicon Valley engineer has pleaded guilty to stealing thousands of trade secrets worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including crucial military technology.…