ICT news

• Nintendo Wants To Keep 'Traditional Approach' To Development as Costs Skyrocket

  07-07-2025 23:30 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Nintendo plans to maintain its "traditional approach" to game development while managing rising costs during the Switch 2 transition, company president Shuntaro Furukawa said during a recent shareholders meeting.
  "Recent game software development has become larger in scale and longer in duration, resulting in higher development costs," he said, adding that "rising development costs are increasing that risk" in what has always been "a high-risk business."
  Nintendo's development teams are "current
  
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• New Delhi Forced To Withdraw Plan To Scrap Old Cars After Public Backlash

  07-07-2025 22:55 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Delhi's government has been forced to reverse a controversial plan to effectively ban older vehicles from city roads after public backlash and concerns over how the policy would be implemented.
  The plan would have seen "end of life vehicles" -- petrol cars over 15 years old and diesel vehicles over 10 -- denied fuel at petrol stations using automatic number plate recognition cameras, or ANPR, and, potentially, impounded on the spot.
  The policy was set to come
  
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• BRICS Demand Wealthy Nations Fund Global Climate Transition

  07-07-2025 22:15 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Leaders of the BRICS group of developing nations addressed the shared challenges of global warming on Monday, the final day of their summit in Rio de Janeiro, demanding that wealthy nations fund mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in poorer nations. From a report: In his opening remarks, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who will host the United Nations climate summit in November, also blasted denialism of the climate emergency, indirectly criticizing U.S. President Donald Trump'
  
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• The Downside of a Digital Yes-Man

  07-07-2025 21:35 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  alternative_right writes: A study by Anthropic researchers on how human feedback can encourage sycophantic behavior showed that AI assistants will sometimes modify accurate answers when questioned by the user -- and ultimately give an inaccurate response.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Apple Links Directly To Web in Full-Screen TV App Ad, Ignoring Rules for Other Developers

  07-07-2025 20:59 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple displayed a full-screen ad for "F1 The Movie" in its TV app that linked directly to a web browser for ticket purchases without showing warning screens that the company requires other developers to include when directing users outside their apps.
  The "Buy Tickets" button sent users to the F1 movie website in their default browser without confirmation dialogs or interstitial warnings. Apple mandates that third-party developers show scare sheets when linking out of apps to sell digital conten
  
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• Netflix Says 50% of Global Users Now Watch Anime

  07-07-2025 20:15 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Netflix doubled down on its global anime strategy over the weekend, unveiling a slate of new titles and fresh footage during its showcase at Anime Expo in Los Angeles.
  The company also shared updated viewership data highlighting just how far Japanese anime has come in expanding from its former niche into a powerhouse global content category. According to Netflix, more than 50 percent of its members -- amounting to over 150 million households, or an estimated
  
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• OpenAI Says It Has No Plan To Use Google's In-house Chip

  07-07-2025 19:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI said it has no active plans to use Google's in-house chip to power its products, two days after Reuters and other news outlets reported on the AI lab's move to turn to its competitor's artificial intelligence chips to meet growing demand.
  A spokesperson for OpenAI said on Sunday that while the AI lab is in early testing with some of Google's tensor processing units (TPUs), it has no plans to deploy them at scale right now.Read more of this story at Sla
  
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• EU Holds Back on Signing Climate Action Pledge With China

  07-07-2025 18:49 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The European Union is holding back on signing a joint climate action pledge with China at a summit this month to mark a half-century of diplomatic ties, a top climate official told the Financial Times in remarks published on Monday. Reuters: The EU's climate targets are among the world's most ambitious, but they have been based entirely on domestic emissions cuts. Now the bloc faces a mid-September deadline to submit a new 2035 climate target to the United Nations.
  Brussels has refused Beijing's
  
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• America Has Two Labor Markets Now

  07-07-2025 18:01 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Americans live in separate economic realities: Those with a job are likely to stay employed, but those without one are likely to stay unemployed. From a report: Welcome to the low-hire, low-fire labor market. Private-sector layoffs are at historic lows, but that masks a dreadful outlook for unemployed workers or those unhappy with their current positions.
  [...] "We're in a complex jobs market -- it's not falling apart but the lack of dynamism, the lack of churn and the lack of hiring has been pu
  
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• Poland's Clean Energy Usage Overtakes Coal For First Time

  07-07-2025 17:23 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Poland generated more electricity from renewables than coal for the first time in June, marking a key moment in the country's efforts to cut its reliance on the most polluting fossil fuel. From a report: The shift comes as Prime Minister Donald Tusk's government accelerates efforts to diversify energy production in Poland, which despite recent progress remains a major producer of coal and the most coal-dependent country in the EU, with about 60 per cent of its electricity coming from the fossil
  
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• Springer Nature Book on Machine Learning is Full of Made-Up Citations

  07-07-2025 16:40 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Springer Nature published a $169 machine learning textbook in April containing citations that appear to be largely fabricated, according to an investigation by Retraction Watch. The site checked 18 of the 46 citations in "Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced" by Govindakumar Madhavan and found two-thirds either did not exist or contained substantial errors.
  Three researchers contacted by Retraction Watch confirmed their supposedly authored works were fake or incorrectly cited. Yeh
  
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• India's Battery Ambitions Run On Borrowed Volts

  07-07-2025 16:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: India is set to begin mass-producing electric-vehicle batteries within 18 months, a step hailed as a leap towards industrial self-reliance. Yet the structure of this new industry looks troublingly familiar, echoing a pattern of dependence that has long marked India's economy.
  Nowhere is this dependence clearer than in the heft of intellectual property. The portfolios of India's largest battery-makers, Amara Raja and Exide, contain just seven patents combined.
  
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• The Startup-Filled Coder 'Village' at the Heart of China's AI Frenzy

  07-07-2025 13:34 via slashdot.org
  
  China "is pouring money into building an AI supply chain with as little reliance on the U.S. as possible," the Wall Street Journal noted this weekend.
  But what does that look like? The New York Times visits Liangzhu, "the coder 'village' at the heart of China's AI frenzy... a quiet suburb of the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou... As China faces off with the United States over tech primacy, Hangzhou has become the centre of China's AI frenzy," with its proximity to tech companies like Alibaba a
  
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• Citizen Scientists Just Helped Discover Nearly 8,000 New Eclipsing Binary Stars

  07-07-2025 09:36 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "Citizen scientists have successfully located thousands of previously unknown pairs of 'eclipsing binary' stars," reports the Washington Post, citing a recent announcement from NASA.
  The ongoing initiative helps space researchers hunt for "eclipsing binary" stars, a rare phenomenon in which two stars orbit one another, periodically blocking each other's light. These star pairs offer important data to astrophysicists, who consider the many measurable properties of eclipsing binaries — and t
  
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• Google DeepMind's Spinoff Company 'Very Close' to Human Trials for Its AI-Designed Drugs

  07-07-2025 06:36 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Google DeepMind's chief business officer says Alphabet's drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs "is preparing to launch human trials of AI-designed drugs," according to a report in Fortune, "pairing cutting-edge AI with pharma veterans to design medicines faster, cheaper, and more accurately."
  "There are people sitting in our office in King's Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer," said Colin Murdoch [DeepMind's chief business officer and president of Isomo
  
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