| New EU Rules To Stop the Destruction of Unsold Clothes and Shoes Feb 16th 2026, 16:06 by msmash The European Commission has adopted new measures under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) to prevent the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear. From a report: The rules will help cut waste, reduce environmental damage and create a level playing field for companies embracing sustainable business models, allowing them to reap the benefits of a more circular economy. Every year in Europe, an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions -- almost equal to Sweden's total net emissions in 2021. To help reduce this wasteful practice, the ESPR requires companies to disclose information on the unsold consumer products they discard as waste. It also introduces a ban on the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing accessories and footwear. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Pentagon Threatens Anthropic Punishment Feb 16th 2026, 15:01 by msmash An anonymous reader shares a report: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is "close" to cutting business ties with Anthropic and designating the AI company a "supply chain risk" -- meaning anyone who wants to do business with the U.S. military has to cut ties with the company, a senior Pentagon official told Axios. The senior official said: "It will be an enormous pain in the ass to disentangle, and we are going to make sure they pay a price for forcing our hand like this." That kind of penalty is usually reserved for foreign adversaries. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told Axios: "The Department of War's relationship with Anthropic is being reviewed. Our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight. Ultimately, this is about our troops and the safety of the American people." Anthropic's Claude is the only AI model currently available in the military's classified systems, and is the world leader for many business applications. Pentagon officials heartily praise Claude's capabilities.   Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Sony May Push Next PlayStation To 2028 or 2029 as AI-fueled Memory Chip Shortage Upends Plans Feb 16th 2026, 14:06 by msmash Sony is considering delaying the debut of its next PlayStation console to 2028 or even 2029 as a global shortage of memory chips -- driven by the AI industry's rapidly growing appetite for the same DRAM that goes into gaming hardware, smartphones, and laptops -- squeezes supply and sends prices surging, Bloomberg News reported Monday. A delay of that magnitude would upend Sony's carefully orchestrated strategy to sustain user engagement between hardware generations. The shortage traces back to Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron diverting the bulk of their manufacturing toward high-bandwidth memory for Nvidia's AI accelerators, leaving less capacity for conventional DRAM. The cost of one type of DRAM jumped 75% between December and January alone. Nintendo is also contemplating raising the price of its Switch 2 console in 2026. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Where's The Evidence That AI Increases Productivity? Feb 16th 2026, 12:34 by EditorDavid IT productivity researcher Erik Brynjolfsson writes in the Financial Times that he's finally found evidence AI is impacting America's economy. This week America's Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a 403,000 drop in 2025's payroll growth — while real GDP "remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter." This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth. My own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of roughly 2.7% for 2025. This is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4% annual average that characterised the past decade... The updated 2025 US data suggests we are now transitioning out of this investment phase into a harvest phase where those earlier efforts begin to manifest as measurable output. Micro-level evidence further supports this structural shift. In our work on the employment effects of AI last year, Bharat Chandar, Ruyu Chen and I identified a cooling in entry-level hiring within AI-exposed sectors, where recruitment for junior roles declined by roughly 16% while those who used AI to augment skills saw growing employment. This suggests companies are beginning to use AI for some codified, entry-level tasks. Or, AI "isn't really stealing jobs yet," according to employment policy analyst Will Raderman (from the American think tank called the Niskanen Center). He argues in Barron's that "there is no clear link yet between higher AI use and worse outcomes for young workers." Recent graduates' unemployment rates have been drifting in the wrong direction since the 2010s, long before generative AI models hit the market. And many occupations with moderate to high exposure to AI disruptions are actually faring better over the past few years. According to recent data for young workers, there has been employment growth in roles typically filled by those with college degrees related to computer systems, accounting and auditing, and market research. AI-intensive sectors like finance and insurance have also seen rising employment of new graduates in recent years. Since ChatGPT's release, sectors in which more than 10% of firms report using AI and sectors in which fewer than 10% reporting using AI are hiring relatively the same number of recent grads. Even Brynjolfsson's article in the Financial Times concedes that "While the trends are suggestive, a degree of caution is warranted. Productivity metrics are famously volatile, and it will take several more periods of sustained growth to confirm a new long-term trend." And he's not the only one wanting evidence for AI's impact. The same weekend Fortune wrote that growth from AI "has yet to manifest itself clearly in macro data, according to Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok." [D]ata on employment, productivity and inflation are still not showing signs of the new technology. Profit margins and earnings forecasts for S&P 500 companies outside of the "Magnificent 7" also lack evidence of AI at work... "After three years with ChatGPT and still no signs of AI in the incoming data, it looks like AI will likely be labor enhancing in some sectors rather than labor replacing in all sectors," Slok said. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | 'I Tried Running Linux On an Apple Silicon Mac and Regretted It' Feb 16th 2026, 08:34 by EditorDavid Installing Linux on a MacBook Air "turned out to be a very underwhelming experience," according to the tech news site MakeUseOf: The thing about Apple silicon Macs is that it's not as simple as downloading an AArch64 ISO of your favorite distro and installing it. Yes, the M-series chips are ARM-based, but that doesn't automatically make the whole system compatible in the same way most traditional x86 PCs are. Pretty much everything in modern MacBooks is custom. The boot process isn't standard UEFI like on most PCs. Apple has its own boot chain called iBoot. The same goes for other things, like the GPU, power management, USB controllers, and pretty much every other hardware component. It is as proprietary as it gets. This is exactly what the team behind Asahi Linux has been working toward. Their entire goal has been to make Linux properly usable on M-series Macs by building the missing pieces from the ground up. I first tried it back in 2023, when the project was still tied to Arch Linux and decided to give it a try again in 2026. These days, though, the main release is called Fedora Asahi Remix, which, as the name suggests, is built on Fedora rather than Arch... For Linux on Apple Silicon, the article lists three major disappointments: "External monitors don't work unless your MacBook has a built-in HDMI port." "Linux just doesn't feel fully ready for ARM yet. A lot of applications still aren't compiled for ARM, so software support ends up being very hit or miss." (And even most of the apps tested with FEX "either didn't run properly or weren't stable enough to rely on.") Asahi "refused to connect to my phone's hotspot," they write (adding "No, it wasn't an iPhone"). Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Will Tech Giants Just Use AI Interactions to Create More Effective Ads? Feb 16th 2026, 05:34 by EditorDavid Google never asked its users before adding AI Overviews to its search results and AI-generated email summaries to Gmail, notes the New York Times. And Meta didn't ask before making "Meta AI" an unremovable part of its tool in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. "The insistence on AI everywhere — with little or no option to turn it off — raises an important question about what's in it for the internet companies..." Behind the scenes, the companies are laying the groundwork for a digital advertising economy that could drive the future of the internet. The underlying technology that enables chatbots to write essays and generate pictures for consumers is being used by advertisers to find people to target and automatically tailor ads and discounts to them.... Last month, OpenAI said it would begin showing ads in the free version of ChatGPT based on what people were asking the chatbot and what they had looked for in the past. In response, a Google executive mocked OpenAI, adding that Google had no plans to show ads inside its Gemini chatbot. What he didn't mention, however, was that Google, whose profits are largely derived from online ads, shows advertising on Google.com based on user interactions with the AI chatbot built into its search engine. For the past six years, as regulators have cracked down on data privacy, the tech giants and online ad industry have moved away from tracking people's activities across mobile apps and websites to determine what ads to show them. Companies including Meta and Google had to come up with methods to target people with relevant ads without sharing users' personal data with third-party marketers. When ChatGPT and other AI chatbots emerged about four years ago, the companies saw an opportunity: The conversational interface of a chatty companion encouraged users to voluntarily share data about themselves, such as their hobbies, health conditions and products they were shopping for. The strategy already appears to be working. Web search queries are up industrywide, including for Google and Bing, which have been incorporating AI chatbots into their search tools. That's in large part because people prod chatbot-powered search engines with more questions and follow-up requests, revealing their intentions and interests much more explicitly than when they typed a few keywords for a traditional internet search. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | |
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