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Chipmaker touts high-core, low-power Altra processors as the future of 5G and AI inferencing

Ampere Computing is looking to target the telecoms market with its Arm-based server chips, hoping to take a slice of the growing compute needs of 5G and edge processing, which it believes Intel is no longer best served to meet.…

The number of babies born in Japan last year fell to the lowest level since records began 125 years ago as the country's demographic crisis deepens and government efforts to reverse the decline continue to fail. Financial Times [non-paywalled source]: Japan recorded 720,988 births in 2024, according to preliminary government figures published on Thursday. The number has declined for nine straight years and appears to be largely unaffected by financial and other government incentives for married couples to produce more children.

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Yet growth in its AI agent biz not enough to improve numbers

Salesforce will not hire any more engineers this year after investment in AI coding tools provided a 30 percent productivity boost, its CEO claimed as he sought to charm investors.…

The JavaScript package world is heating up as startups attempt to challenge npm's long-standing dominance. While npm remains the backbone of JavaScript dependency management, Deno's JSR and vlt's vsr have entered the scene with impressive backing and even more impressive leadership -- JSR comes from Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, while npm's own creator Isaac Schlueter is behind vsr. Neither aims to completely replace npm, instead building compatible layers that promise better developer experiences. Many developers feel GitHub has left npm to stagnate since its 2020 acquisition, doing just enough to keep it running while neglecting innovations. Security problems and package spam have only intensified these frustrations. Yet these newcomers face the same harsh reality that pushed npm into GitHub's arms: running a package registry costs serious money -- not just for servers, but for lawyers handling trademark fights and content moderation.

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The Australian government has banned all Kaspersky Lab products and web services from its systems and devices following an analysis that claims the company poses a significant security risk to the country. From a report: "After considering threat and risk analysis, I have determined that the use of Kaspersky Lab, Inc. products and web services by Australian Government entities poses an unacceptable security risk to Australian Government, networks and data, arising from threats of foreign interference, espionage and sabotage," justified Stephanie Foster, Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs. "I have also considered the important need for a strong policy signal to critical infrastructure and other Australian governments regarding the unacceptable security risk associated with the use of Kaspersky Lab, Inc. products and web services."

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It looks like you have died. Would you like help?

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the nod to the Loss of Pulse Detection feature of the Pixel Watch 3.…

Microsoft is pushing the Trump administration to loosen and simplify a new system that would restrict the sales of cutting-edge U.S. artificial-intelligence chips to much of the world. From a report: In a blog post that is scheduled to be released Thursday, Microsoft will call for Trump's team to ease the limits on chips that can be used in data centers for training AI models so they no longer apply to a group of U.S. allies including India, Switzerland and Israel [non-paywalled source], company officials said. Those countries are in the second tier of a three-tier system that underpins the export controls. Microsoft says the unintended consequence of that proposed system would be that allies facing limited U.S. chip supply would turn to China to get the tech infrastructure they need. China is using the proposed rule to argue to other countries that it would be a better long-term partner for AI infrastructure than the U.S., Microsoft President Brad Smith said in an interview. "Their message is these countries can't rely on the U.S., but China is willing to provide what they need," he said. "That is not good for American business or American foreign policy."

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Some businesses sticking with Windows 10, AI boxes not reviving demand

President Trump's tariffs on goods imported from China, in addition to faltering consumer purchases, are forecast to result in slower-than-expected global shipments of personal computers, according to IDC.…

Sophisticated electronic devices used by criminals to steal cars are set to be banned under new laws in England and Wales. From a report: More than 700,000 vehicles were broken into last year -- often with the help of high-tech electronic devices, including so-called signal jammers, which are thought to play a part in four out of 10 vehicle thefts nationwide. Until now, police could only bring a prosecution if they could prove a device had been used to commit a specific offence, but under new laws in the Crime and Policing Bill the onus will be on someone in possession of a device to show they had it for a legitimate purpose. Making or selling a signal jammer could lead to up to five years in prison or an unlimited fine.

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Bit barn developer says your real estate can't take the heat, and forget nuking it to change that

APRICOT 2025 Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but if you own real estate and think you can cash in by using it to host an AI datacenter, you're probably wrong.…

Thousands of order lines not picked, causing delays to hospital deliveries

A state-owned company that handles £4.5 billion ($5.7 billion) annual spending on behalf of the NHS has suffered 35 high-priority computer system alerts in 2024, leading to delays in shipping thousands of products to UK hospitals.…

Amazon has introduced its first-ever quantum processor, dubbed Ocelot, designed specifically to reduce quantum error correction costs by up to 90% compared to existing approaches. The prototype chip uses "cat qubits" -- named after Schrodinger's cat thought experiment -- which intrinsically suppress certain types of quantum errors. Unlike conventional approaches that add error correction after designing the architecture, AWS built Ocelot with quantum error correction as the primary requirement. The chip consists of two stacked 1cm2 silicon microchips containing 14 core components: five data qubits, five buffer circuits for stabilization, and four qubits dedicated to error detection. Quantum computers are notoriously sensitive to environmental noise -- including vibrations, heat, and electromagnetic interference -- which disturbs qubits and generates computational errors. These errors multiply as quantum systems scale up, creating a significant barrier to practical quantum computing. Ocelot's high-quality oscillators, made from a thin film of superconducting Tantalum processed using specialized techniques developed by AWS material scientists, generate the repetitive electrical signals that maintain quantum states. "We're just getting started and we believe we have several more stages of scaling to go through," said Oskar Painter, AWS director of Quantum Hardware, whose team published their findings in Nature. Industry analyst Heather West of IDC was more measured, categorizing Ocelot as "much more of an advancement and less of a breakthrough," noting that superconducting qubits designed to resist certain error types aren't completely novel.

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With a generation of networking engineers set to retire, is this how to give their successors a faster start?

APRICOT 2025 The networking industry should address its perennial staff shortage by giving early-career techies the kind of hands-on training delivered during apprenticeships for trainee carpenters or electricians.…

In an interview with CNBC's Jon Fortt on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said next-gen AI will need 100 times more compute than older models as a result of new reasoning approaches that think "about how best to answer" questions step by step. From a report: "The amount of computation necessary to do that reasoning process is 100 times more than what we used to do," Huang told CNBC's Jon Fortt in an interview on Wednesday following the chipmaker's fourth-quarter earnings report. He cited models including DeepSeek's R1, OpenAI's GPT-4 and xAI's Grok 3 as models that use a reasoning process. Huang pushed back on that idea in the interview on Wednesday, saying DeepSeek popularized reasoning models that will need more chips. "DeepSeek was fantastic," Huang said. "It was fantastic because it open sourced a reasoning model that's absolutely world class." Huang said that company's percentage of revenue in China has fallen by about half due to the export restrictions, adding that there are other competitive pressures in the country, including from Huawei. Developers will likely search for ways around export controls through software, whether it be for a supercomputer, a personal computer, a phone or a game console, Huang said. "Ultimately, software finds a way," he said. "You ultimately make that software work on whatever system that you're targeting, and you create great software." Huang said that Nvidia's GB200, which is sold in the United States, can generate AI content 60 times faster than the versions of the company's chips that it sells to China under export controls.

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Missing assessments, hidden caveats, and overoptimism all contributed to fateful decision, auditors find

"Huge. There could be major problems transacting leading to late payment or collection of debt. The accounts could be wrong."…

Defense of FOSS licensing rests on the shoulders of a guy in Virginia

At some point in the months ahead, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will consider an effort to reverse a California federal district court's decision in Neo4j v. PureThink.…

Model was fine-tuned to write vulnerable software – then suggested enslaving humanity

Computer scientists have found that fine-tuning notionally safe large language models to do one thing badly can negatively impact the AI’s output across a range of topics.…

A German nuclear fusion startup called Proxima Fusion has unveiled its "Stellaris" fusion power plant designed to operate reliably and continuously without the instabilities of tokamaks. It's backed by $65 million in funding, with plans to build a fully operational fusion reactor by 2031. TechCrunch reports: Tokamaks and stellarators are types of fusion reactors that use electromagnets to contain fusion plasma. Tokamaks rely on external magnets and an induced plasma current but are known for instability. Stellarators, by contrast, use only external magnets, which, in theory, enable better stability and continuous operation. However, according to Dr. Francesco Sciortino, co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, Proxima's "Stellaris" design is the first peer-reviewed fusion power plant concept that demonstrates it can operate reliably and continuously, without the instabilities and disruptions seen in tokamaks and other approaches. Proxima published its findings in Fusion Engineering and Design, choosing to share this information publicly to support open-source science. "Our American friends can see it. Our Chinese friends can see it. Our claim is that we can execute on this faster than anyone else, and we do that by creating a framework for integrated physics, engineering, and economics. So we're not a science project anymore," Sciortino told TechCrunch over a call. "We started out as a group of founders saying it's going to take us two years to get to the Stellaris design ... We actually finished after one year. So we've accelerated by a year," he added.

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May we all have problems like annual revenue growth dropping from 126 to 114 percent

Nvidia's astounding recent growth leveled off in the fourth quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, the 12 months to January 26, but the GPU titan is still producing enviable numbers.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Starting in April, the Tokyo Metropolitan government, one of the country's largest employers, is set to allow its employees to work only four days a week. It is also adding a new "childcare partial leave" policy, which will allow some employees to work two fewer hours per day. The goal is to help employees who are parents balance childcare and work, said Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike. "We will continue to review work styles flexibly to ensure that women do not have to sacrifice their careers due to life events such as childbirth or child-rearing," Koike said in a speech during the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly's regular session, the Japan Times reported. Moving to a four-day workweek could help address some of the core issues associated with Japan's heavy work culture, which can especially weigh on working women. The gap between men and women when it comes to housework is one of the largest among OECD countries, with women in Japan engaging in five times more unpaid work, such as childcare and elder care, than men, according to the International Monetary Fund. More than half of women who had fewer children than they would have preferred said they had fewer children because of the increased housework that another child would bring, according to the IMF. In some cases, moving to a four-day workweek has been shown to improve housework equity. Men reported spending 22% more time on childcare and 23% more time on housework during a four-day workweek trial conducted across six countries by 4 Day Week Global, which advocates for the issue. It would take a major societal change for the four-day workweek to catch on more broadly, but years of experiments have shown that working one day less a week improves employee productivity and well-being, said Peter Miscovich, the global future of work leader at real estate services company JLL. "The upside from all of that has been less stress, less burnout, better rest, better sleep, less cost to the employee, higher levels of focus and concentration during the working hours, and in some cases, greater commitment to the organization as a result," Miscovich told Fortune.

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