Moon

Firefly's Moon-Orbiting 'Blue Ghost' Lunar Lander Tracked Earth-Orbiting GPS-Type Satellites (behindtheblack.com) 38

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this observation from space/science news blogger Robert Zimmerman: Having now reached lunar orbit in preparation for its landing on March 2, 2025, an engineering test instrument on Firefly's Blue Ghost lunar lander has now proven that even from that distance spacecraft can use the multiple GPS-type satellites in Earth orbit to track their position.

[From NASA.gov]: The Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) acquired and tracked Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals for the first time in lunar orbit – a new record! This achievement, peaking at 246,000 miles, suggests that Earth-based Global Navigation Satellite System constellations can be used for navigation in transit to, around, and potentially on the Moon. It also demonstrates the power of using multiple GNSS constellations together, such as GPS and Galileo, to perform navigation.

After lunar landing, LuGRE will operate for 14 days and attempt to break another record – first reception of GNSS signals on the lunar surface.


This test is a very big deal. It tells us that operations on the Moon, at least those on the near side, will likely not require a GPS-type infrastructure in lunar orbit, thus allowing a lot of difficult missions to proceed sooner while saving a lot of money and time.

Power

Is the AI Boom Leading to More Natural Gas-Powered Utilities? (msn.com) 41

New power plants burning natural gas are being built all across America, reports the Washington Post, calling it a gas boom "driven in large part by AI."

They blame tech companies like Microsoft and Meta — which "looked to gas amid a shortage of adequate new clean energy" — while noting that those companies "say they plan to offset their development of natural gas capacity with equal investments in clean energy like solar and wind." [E]ven coal is making a comeback. But the biggest push is for gas, with more than 220 plants in various stages of development nationwide. They are often pitched as a bridge until more clean power is available, sometimes with promises the plants will eventually be equipped with nascent technology that traps greenhouse gas emissions. But the timeline for installing such "carbon capture" is vague. "These companies are building these massive new gas plants that are going to be there for 30 to 50 years," said Bill Weihl, a former director of sustainability at Facebook and founder of the nonprofit ClimateVoice. "That's not a bridge. It is a giant bomb in our carbon budget...."

Public filings from some of the big tech companies driving this development show their greenhouse gas emissions are soaring... "The last few years have revealed that a global energy transition is more complex and less linear than anticipated," Microsoft's board wrote in urging rejection of a December shareholder resolution demanding the company confront the climate risks of AI. "While urgency builds for decarbonization, so does the demand for energy."

Shareholders rejected the resolution. Microsoft is battling with environmental groups over its plans to build a multibillion-dollar data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, powered with electricity from natural gas. Their petition warns Microsoft's project "will push our state's climate goals out of reach, locking us into 30 more years of fossil fuels." The company said in a statement that it remains committed to erasing its emissions by adding substantial clean power to regional power grids. "By the end of 2025 we expect to meet our goal of adding new sources of carbon-free electricity to the grid equal to 100 percent of the electricity used by our datacenters," the statement said.

Meta says it is doing the same in Louisiana [where it's building a new 4-million-square-foot data center] and is "committed to matching our electricity use with 100 percent clean and renewable energy."

The article includes two revealing quotes:
  • "It is like everyone just gave up," said Aaron Zubaty, CEO of Eolian, a large clean energy developer that works with data centers.
  • American Petroleum Institute President Mike Sommers (who represents the oil and gas industry in Washington), said "The words that have replaced 'energy transition' are 'AI' and 'data centers'. We're transitioning from the energy transition to the energy reality ... We're going to need a lot more oil and gas."

Power

Lithium Batteries Reignited Tuesday at the Moss Landing Power Plant Fire Site (sfgate.com) 34

Remember that battery plant fire last month in Moss Landing, California? Tuesday night local firefighters "determined that a group of lithium batteries in an area that had previously burned during the January 16 fire had smoldered and reignited," reports SFGate.

Fire Chief Joel Mendoza said the flames burned at varying intensities throughout Tuesday night before the fire burned itself out at about 8 a.m. on Wednesday. Additional flare-ups at the site are expected due to weather exposure and damage to the remaining batteries. "Rekindling is very, very likely — almost a certainty," said EPA onsite coordinator Eric Sandusky, adding that rain and humidity can interact with the damaged batteries, leading to short circuits and reignition. To further reduce fire risk, Sandusky said the EPA is working with Vistra to begin "de-linking the batteries," a process that disconnects them to lower the risk of propagation and prevent a large-scale fire...
"Vistra said that since the January 16 fire, they have brought in a private fire crew that is on-site at all times to monitor the Moss 300 building," according to a local news site.

Fire Chief Joel Mendoza shared more details with the digital newspaper Lookout Santa Cruz. "We've been saying all along that batteries exposed to heat that didn't burn can ignite. We were hoping that it wouldn't happen, but it did."
Power

New EV Batteries are Making Electric Cars Cheaper and Safer (msn.com) 92

The Washington Post looks at a new kind of battery that "could make American EVs cheaper and safer, experts say." If you bought an EV with a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery, you could expect lower car payments, less fire risk and more years of use out of your car — but you wouldn't be able to go as far on a single charge as you could with the nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) batteries commonly found in American and European electric cars. That trade-off has made LFP batteries the go-to choice for standard-range EVs in China, helping to make electric cars more affordable and limit pollution. Now, American companies are starting to build their own LFP batteries to catch up to their Chinese rivals... But there are plenty of barriers for U.S. companies that want to adopt a technology dominated by Chinese firms. Tariffs and tax credit restrictions have made it too expensive for most American automakers to import LFP batteries from China, and national security concerns have made it hard for American companies to partner with Chinese battery makers to build factories in the United States...

Although American scientists invented LFP batteries in 1997, U.S. automakers didn't invest in the technology. Instead, they bet on NMC batteries because they have longer range, a big concern for American EV buyers. "Everyone in the West thought LFP was a nonstarter five or six years ago," said Adrian Yao, who founded STEER, a technology research group within Stanford University. "We really did have a myopic focus on" range, he added. That left the door open for Chinese companies to perfect LFP batteries, which have a few advantages. Instead of pricey nickel and cobalt, they use iron, which makes them 20 percent cheaper than NMC batteries, according to the International Energy Agency. While NMC batteries can be recharged up to about 1,000 times before they go kaput — which is enough to put 200,000 miles on most EVs — LFP batteries can last two or three times as long, according to Moura. Plus, LFP batteries' chemistry makes them less likely to catch fire and easier to extinguish. An NMC battery, on the other hand, is so flammable that "you could put it underwater or in space, and it'll keep burning because the oxygen it needs to keep the flame going is embedded within itself," Moura said.

That safety advantage is key, because Chinese firms figured out they could pack LFP cells closer together inside a battery pack without risking a fire. That meant they could cram more energy into LFP batteries and nearly catch up to the range of NMC batteries. Last year, the Chinese battery giant CATL made the first LFP battery with more than 600 miles of range. Since LFP batteries are made from common materials and last longer, they also have a smaller environmental footprint than NMC batteries.

Ford used LFP batteries in its Mach-E sedan (2023) and F-150 Lightning pickup trucks (2024), according to the article, "while Rivian began using them in the basic trims of its R1S SUV and R1T pickup truck this year... American LFP factories are slated to open this year in St. Louis and next year in Arizona." And an environmental engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley predicts LFP battery factories in the U.S. will "grow quite rapidly over the next five to 10 years."
AI

The Protesters Who Want To Ban AGI Before It Even Exists (theregister.com) 72

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: On Saturday at the Silverstone Cafe in San Francisco, a smattering of activists gathered to discuss plans to stop the further advancement of artificial intelligence. The name of their non-violent civil resistance group, STOP AI, makes its mission clear. The organization wants to ban something that, by most accounts, doesn't yet exist -- artificial general intelligence, or AGI, defined by OpenAI as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work."

STOP AI outlines a broader set of goals on its website. For example, "We want governments to force AI companies to shut down everything related to the creation of general-purpose AI models, destroy any existing general-purpose AI model, and permanently ban their development." In answer to the question "Does STOP AI want to ban all AI?", the group's answer is, "Not necessarily, just whatever is necessary to keep humanity alive."
The group, which has held protests outside OpenAI's office and plans another outside the company's San Francisco HQ on February 22, has bold goal: rally support from 3.5 percent of the U.S. population, or 11 million people. That's the so-called "tipping point" needed for societal change, based on research by political scientist Erica Chenoweth.

"The implications of artificial general intelligence are so immense and dangerous that we just don't want that to come about ever," said Finn van der Velde, an AI safety advocate and activist with a technical background in computer science and AI specifically. "So what that will practically mean is that we will probably need an international treaty where the governments across the board agree that we don't build AGI. And so that means disbanding companies like OpenAI that specifically have the goal to build AGI." It also means regulating compute power so that no one will be able to train an AGI model.
Power

The GSA Is Shutting Down Its EV Chargers (theverge.com) 205

The General Services Administration (GSA) is shutting down its nationwide electric vehicle (EV) chargers, deeming them "not mission critical." The U.S. government agency also plans to offload newly purchased EVs, reversing initiatives from the Biden administration aimed at transitioning the federal vehicle fleet to electric. The Verge reports: The GSA currently operates several hundred EV chargers across the country, with approximately 8,000 plugs that are available for government-owned EVs as well as federal employees' personally owned vehicles.

The official guidance instructing federal workers to begin the process of shutting down the chargers will be announced internally next week, according to a source with knowledge of the plans. Some regional offices have been told to start taking their chargers offline, according to an email viewed by The Verge. "As GSA has worked to align with the current administration, we have received direction that all GSA owned charging stations are not mission critical," the email reads.

The GSA is working on the timing of canceling current network contracts that keep the EV chargers operational. Once those contracts are canceled, the stations will be taken out of service and "turned off at the breaker," the email reads. Other chargers will be turned off starting next week. "Neither Government Owned Vehicles nor Privately Owned Vehicles will be able to charge at these charging stations once they're out of service," it concludes.

Businesses

OpenAI Plans To Shift Compute Needs From Microsoft To SoftBank (techcrunch.com) 9

According to The Information (paywalled), OpenAI plans to shift most of its computing power from Microsoft to SoftBank-backed Stargate by 2030. TechCrunch reports: That represents a major shift away from Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest shareholder, who fulfills most of the startup's power needs today. The change won't happen overnight. OpenAI still plans to increase its spending on Microsoft-owned data centers in the next few years.

During that time, OpenAI's overall costs are set to grow dramatically. The Information reports that OpenAI projects to burn $20 billion in cash during 2027, far more than the $5 billion it reportedly burned through in 2024. By 2030, OpenAI reportedly forecasts that its costs around running AI models, also known as inference, will outpace what the startup spends on training AI models.

IT

Dark Mode Might Be Burning More Juice Than You Think (theregister.com) 82

Using apps and websites in dark mode can actually use more energy than standard mode, according to researchers, as it causes people to crank up the brightness. From a report: This counterintuitive finding is claimed by BBC Research & Development (R&D), which says that despite the popular energy saving recommendation to cut electricity consumption by switching to dark mode, doing so might actually make things worse. "Dark mode is a popular dark-theme colour content scheme and research has found that, for some devices, switching to dark mode can reduce device power consumption. Energy conscious internet users are therefore encouraged to browse in dark mode," say the authors of a BBC R&D blog post.

"The catch is that the advertised energy savings haven't been tested in the wild, where user behavior can cause unexpected consequences." So the BBC's R&D engineers put participants in front of the BBC Sounds home page and asked them to adjust the device brightness until they were comfortable with it, repeating this for both light and dark mode versions of the page.

AI

Malaysia is Betting on Data Centers To Boost Its Economy (apnews.com) 11

Malaysia is aggressively expanding its data center capacity, positioning itself as Southeast Asia's fastest-growing market with planned investments exceeding $31 billion in the first 10 months of 2024, triple the amount from 2023.

The country's southern Johor province is set to host at least 1.6 gigawatts of data center capacity, up from nearly zero in 2019. Twenty-two mostly foreign data centers already occupy 21 hectares, with more under construction. The push comes as neighboring Singapore paused new data center construction in 2019 due to resource constraints.

Some experts are warning the expansion could strain Malaysia's power and water resources, with data center power demand potentially reaching 5 gigawatts by 2035 - more than half the country's current renewable capacity. The facilities, operated by companies including Microsoft, Equinix and China's GDS Holdings, primarily service East Asia, China and Europe rather than domestic users.
United States

Palantir CEO Calls for Tech Patriotism, Warns of AI Warfare (bloomberg.com) 116

Palantir CEO Alex Karp warns of "coming swarms of autonomous robots" and urges Silicon Valley to support U.S. defense capabilities. In his book, "The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West," Karp argues that America risks losing its military edge to geopolitical rivals who better harness commercial technology.

He calls for the "engineering elite of Silicon Valley" to work with the government on national defense. The message comes as Palantir's stock has surged more than 1,800% since early 2023, pushing its market value above $292 billion -- exceeding traditional defense contractors Lockheed Martin and RTX combined. The company has expanded its military AI work since 2018, when it took over a Pentagon contract after Google employees protested their company's defense work.
Robotics

China's Electric-Vehicle-To-Humanoid-Robot Pivot (technologyreview.com) 37

"[O]ur intrepid China reporter, Caiwei Chen, has identified a new trend unfolding within China's tech scene: Companies that were dominant in electric vehicles are betting big on translating that success into developing humanoid robots," writes MIT Technology Review's James O'Donnell. "I spoke with her about what she found out and what it might mean for Trump's policies and the rest of the globe..." An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the report: Your story looks at electric-vehicle makers in China that are starting to work on humanoid robots, but I want to ask about a crazy stat. In China, 53% of vehicles sold are either electric or hybrid, compared with 8% in the US. What explains that?

Price is a huge factor -- there are countless EV brands competing at different price points, making them both affordable and high-quality. Government incentives also play a big role. In Beijing, for example, trading in an old car for an EV gets you 10,000 RMB (about $1,500), and that subsidy was recently doubled. Plus, finding public charging and battery-swapping infrastructure is much less of a hassle than in the US.

You open your story noting that China's recent New Year Gala, watched by billions of people, featured a cast of humanoid robots, dancing and twirling handkerchiefs. We've covered how sometimes humanoid videos can be misleading. What did you think?

I would say I was relatively impressed -- the robots showed good agility and synchronization with the music, though their movements were simpler than human dancers'. The one trick that is supposed to impress the most is the part where they twirl the handkerchief with one finger, toss it into the air, and then catch it perfectly. This is the signature of the Yangko dance, and having performed it once as a child, I can attest to how difficult the trick is even for a human! There was some skepticism on the Chinese internet about how this was achieved and whether they used additional reinforcement like a magnet or a string to secure the handkerchief, and after watching the clip too many times, I tend to agree.

President Trump has already imposed tariffs on China and is planning even more. What could the implications be for China's humanoid sector?

Unitree's H1 and G1 models are already available for purchase and were showcased at CES this year. Large-scale US deployment isn't happening yet, but China's lower production costs make these robots highly competitive. Given that 65% of the humanoid supply chain is in China, I wouldn't be surprised if robotics becomes the next target in the US-China tech war.

In the US, humanoid robots are getting lots of investment, but there are plenty of skeptics who say they're too clunky, finicky, and expensive to serve much use in factory settings. Are attitudes different in China?

Skepticism exists in China too, but I think there's more confidence in deployment, especially in factories. With an aging population and a labor shortage on the horizon, there's also growing interest in medical and caregiving applications for humanoid robots.

DeepSeek revived the conversation about chips and the way the US seeks to control where the best chips end up. How do the chip wars affect humanoid-robot development in China?

Training humanoid robots currently doesn't demand as much computing power as training large language models, since there isn't enough physical movement data to feed into models at scale. But as robots improve, they'll need high-performance chips, and US sanctions will be a limiting factor. Chinese chipmakers are trying to catch up, but it's a challenge.

AI

Microsoft Shows Progress Toward Real-Time AI-Generated Game Worlds (arstechnica.com) 23

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For a while now, many AI researchers have been working to integrate a so-called "world model" into their systems. Ideally, these models could infer a simulated understanding of how in-game objects and characters should behave based on video footage alone, then create fully interactive video that instantly simulates new playable worlds based on that understanding. Microsoft Research's new World and Human Action Model (WHAM), revealed today in a paper published in the journal Nature, shows how quickly those models have advanced in a short time. But it also shows how much further we have to go before the dream of AI crafting complete, playable gameplay footage from just some basic prompts and sample video footage becomes a reality.

Much like Google's Genie model before it, WHAM starts by training on "ground truth" gameplay video and input data provided by actual players. In this case, that data comes from Bleeding Edge, a four-on-four online brawler released in 2020 by Microsoft subsidiary Ninja Theory. By collecting actual player footage since launch (as allowed under the game's user agreement), Microsoft gathered the equivalent of seven player-years' worth of gameplay video paired with real player inputs. Early in that training process, Microsoft Research's Katja Hoffman said the model would get easily confused, generating inconsistent clips that would "deteriorate [into] these blocks of color." After 1 million training updates, though, the WHAM model started showing basic understanding of complex gameplay interactions, such as a power cell item exploding after three hits from the player or the movements of a specific character's flight abilities. The results continued to improve as the researchers threw more computing resources and larger models at the problem, according to the Nature paper.

To see just how well the WHAM model generated new gameplay sequences, Microsoft tested the model by giving it up to one second's worth of real gameplay footage and asking it to generate what subsequent frames would look like based on new simulated inputs. To test the model's consistency, Microsoft used actual human input strings to generate up to two minutes of new AI-generated footage, which was then compared to actual gameplay results using the Frechet Video Distance metric. Microsoft boasts that WHAM's outputs can stay broadly consistent for up to two minutes without falling apart, with simulated footage lining up well with actual footage even as items and environments come in and out of view. That's an improvement over even the "long horizon memory" of Google's Genie 2 model, which topped out at a minute of consistent footage. Microsoft also tested WHAM's ability to respond to a diverse set of randomized inputs not found in its training data. These tests showed broadly appropriate responses to many different input sequences based on human annotations of the resulting footage, even as the best models fell a bit short of the "human-to-human baseline."

The most interesting result of Microsoft's WHAM tests, though, might be in the persistence of in-game objects. Microsoft provided examples of developers inserting images of new in-game objects or characters into pre-existing gameplay footage. The WHAM model could then incorporate that new image into its subsequent generated frames, with appropriate responses to player input or camera movements. With just five edited frames, the new object "persisted" appropriately in subsequent frames anywhere from 85 to 98 percent of the time, according to the Nature paper.

Science

France Runs Fusion Reactor For Record 22 Minutes (newatlas.com) 182

France has upped the ante in the quest for fusion power by maintaining a plasma reaction for over 22 minutes -- a new record. From a report: The milestone was reached on February 12 at the Commissariat a lenergie atomique et aux energies alternatives (CEA) WEST Tokamak reactor.

Achieving the dream of commercial fusion power is the Holy Grail of engineering and has been for 80 years. With a single gram of hydrogen isotopes yielding the energy equivalent of 11 tonnes of coal, a practical fusion reactor would hold the promise of unlimited, clean energy for humanity until the end of time.

Small wonder that billions have been invested by both government and industry in the quest to make fusion power a reality. However, while fusion is relatively easy to achieve in the heart of the sun or in a hydrogen bomb, creating a practical reactor that produces more energy than is put into it is another matter entirely.

United States

Groups Ask US Court To Reconsider Ruling Blocking Net Neutrality Rules (reuters.com) 69

Public interest groups on Tuesday asked the full 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a ruling that the Federal Communications Commission lacked legal authority to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules. From a report: The decision by a three-judge panel blocked the FCC under then President Joe Biden that had sought to reinstate the open internet rules implemented in 2015 but later repealed by the agency under President Donald Trump. The groups -- Free Press, Public Knowledge, Open Technology Institute and the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society -- argue the appeals court decision conflicts with an earlier decision by another court.

The groups said the case centers on the FCC's decades-long effort to prevent broadband internet providers "from abusing their gatekeeping power, in furtherance of the providers' economic or political interests, to constrain their users' access to third-party websites."

Science

Scientists Develop 'Injection' To Make Smartphone and EV Batteries Last Longer (scmp.com) 27

SCMP: Chinese scientists have developed a revolutionary repair technology that could make lithium-ion batteries last over six times longer. Announcing their discovery in the journal Nature on Wednesday, the researchers said this low-cost, eco-friendly technology could soon be ready to enter the market.

The batteries are key for many modern technologies, from smartphones to electric vehicles. However, as these batteries age, they often become less efficient -- a process that cold weather accelerates. The researchers said they could counter this problem with the "injection" of a special solution to rejuvenate "sick" batteries. At present, lithium-ion batteries rely on sophisticated materials used to generate lithium ions -- whose movement through electrolyte is key to their performance -- and then protect them to ensure a decent lifespan.

Typically these lithium ions move from the positive terminal to the negative when the battery is charging, a process which is then reversed when it is generating power. The battery is considered to have expired when the supply of lithium ions runs low -- for example some electric car batteries have a lifespan of around 1,500 charge cycles -- but other components in the battery still remain in good working order after this happens. This insight prompted the two lead researchers, Gao Yue and Peng Huisheng from Fudan University's macromolecular science department, to see if they could revive a battery by replenishing the supply of active lithium ions.

AI

xAI Releases Its Latest Flagship Model, Grok 3 (x.com) 140

xAI has launched Grok 3, the latest iteration of its large language model, alongside new capabilities for its iOS and web applications. The model has been trained on approximately 200,000 GPUs in a Memphis data center, representing what CEO Elon Musk claims is a tenfold increase in computing power compared to its predecessor.

The new release introduces two specialized variants: Grok 3 Reasoning and Grok 3 mini Reasoning, designed to methodically analyze problems similar to OpenAI's o3-mini and DeepSeek's R1 models. According to xAI's benchmarks, Grok 3 outperforms GPT-4o on several technical evaluations, including AIME for mathematical reasoning and GPQA for PhD-level science problems.

A notable addition is the DeepSearch feature, which combs through web content and X posts to generate research summaries. The platform will be available through X's Premium+ subscription and a new SuperGrok tier ($30/month or $300/year), with the latter offering enhanced reasoning capabilities and unlimited image generation. To prevent knowledge extraction through model distillation -- a technique recently attributed to DeepSeek's alleged copying of OpenAI's models -- xAI has implemented measures to obscure the reasoning models' thought processes in the Grok app. The company plans to release the Grok 2 model as open source once Grok 3 achieves stability.
Data Storage

Sandisk Puts Petabyte SSDs On the Roadmap (tomshardware.com) 28

SanDisk aims to produce petabyte-scale SSDs through its new UltraQLC platform, though the company has not specified a release timeline. The technology, it said, combines SanDisk's BICS 8 QLC 3D NAND with a proprietary 64-channel controller featuring hardware accelerators that offload storage functions from firmware to reduce latency and improve reliability.

The initial UltraQLC drives will use 2Tb NAND chips to reach 128TB capacities, with future iterations targeting 256TB, 512TB, and eventually 1PB as higher-density NAND becomes available. The controller dynamically adjusts power based on workload and employs an advanced bus multiplexer to handle increased data loads from high-density QLC stacks, the company said.
Privacy

Nearly 10 Years After Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier Says: Privacy's Still Screwed (theregister.com) 57

Ten years after publishing his influential book on data privacy, security expert Bruce Schneier warns that surveillance has only intensified, with both government agencies and corporations collecting more personal information than ever before. "Nothing has changed since 2015," Schneier told The Register in an interview. "The NSA and their counterparts around the world are still engaging in bulk surveillance to the extent of their abilities."

The widespread adoption of cloud services, Internet-of-Things devices, and smartphones has made it nearly impossible for individuals to protect their privacy, said Schneier. Even Apple, which markets itself as privacy-focused, faces limitations when its Chinese business interests are at stake. While some regulation has emerged, including Europe's General Data Protection Regulation and various U.S. state laws, Schneier argues these measures fail to address the core issue of surveillance capitalism's entrenchment as a business model.

The rise of AI poses new challenges, potentially undermining recent privacy gains like end-to-end encryption. As AI assistants require cloud computing power to process personal data, users may have to surrender more information to tech companies. Despite the grim short-term outlook, Schneier remains cautiously optimistic about privacy's long-term future, predicting that current surveillance practices will eventually be viewed as unethical as sweatshops are today. However, he acknowledges this transformation could take 50 years or more.
Transportation

California Considers Taking Over Some Oil Refineries (yahoo.com) 163

California is "considering state ownership of one or more oil refineries," reports the Los Angeles Times.

They call the idea "one item on a list of options presented by the California Energy Commission to ensure steady gas supplies as oil companies pull back from the refinery business in the state." "The state recognizes that they're on a pathway to more refinery closures," said Skip York, chief energy strategist at energy consultant Turner Mason & Co. The risk to consumers and the state's economy, he said, is gasoline supply disappearing faster than consumer demand, resulting in fuel shortages, higher prices and severe logistical challenges.

Gasoline demand is falling in California, albeit slowly, for two reasons: more efficient gasoline engines, and the increasing number of electric vehicles on the road. Gasoline consumption in California peaked in 2005 and fell 15% through 2023, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Electric vehicles, including plug-in hybrids, now represent about 25% of annual new car sales... The drop in demand is causing fundamental strategic shifts among the state's major oil refiners: Chevron, Marathon, Phillips 66, PBF Energy and Valero.

Already, two California refineries have ceased producing gasoline to make biodiesel fuel for use in heavy-duty trucks, a cleaner-fuel alternative that enjoys rich state subsidies. More worrisome, the Phillips 66 refinery complex in Wilmington, just outside Los Angeles, plans to close down permanently by year's end. That leaves eight major refineries in California capable of producing gasoline. The closure of any one would create serious gasoline supply issues, industry analysts say. But both Chevron and Valero are contemplating permanent refinery closures. The implications? "Demand will decline gradually," York said, "but supply will fall out in chunks." What's unknown is how many refineries will close, and how soon, and how that will affect supply and demand...

A state refinery takeover seems like a radical idea, but the fact that it's being considered demonstrates the seriousness of the supply issue. It's one of several option laid out by the California Energy Commission, which is fulfilling a legislative order to find ways to ensure "a reliable supply of affordable and safe transportation fuels in California." The options list is disparate: Ship in more gasoline from Asia; regulate refineries on the order of electric utilities; cap profit margins; and many more.

92% of California's gas is produced in refineries, the Times reports. But the special gasoline blends required to reduce air pollution "also drive up gasoline prices and raise the risk of shortages, because little such gasoline is produced outside California."
Graphics

Why A Maintainer of the Linux Graphics Driver Nouveau Stepped Down (phoronix.com) 239

For over a decade Karol Herbst has been a developer on the open-source Nouveau driver, a reverse-engineered NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux. "He went on to become employed by Red Hat," notes Phoronix. "While he's known more these days for his work on the Mesa 3D Graphics Library and the Rusticl OpenCL driver for it, he's still remained a maintainer of the Nouveau kernel driver."

But Saturday Herbst stepped down as a nouveau kernel maintainer, in a mailing list message that begins "I was pondering with myself for a while if I should just make it official that I'm not really involved in the kernel community anymore, neither as a reviewer, nor as a maintainer." (Another message begins "I often thought about at least contributing some patches again once I find the time, but...")

Their resignation message hints at some long-running unhappiness. "I got burned out enough by myself caring about the bits I maintained, but eventually I had to realize my limits. The obligation I felt was eating me from inside. It stopped being fun at some point and I reached a point where I simply couldn't continue the work I was so motivated doing as I've did in the early days." And they point to one specific discussion on the kernel mailing list February 8th as "The moment I made up my mind."

It happened in a thread about whether Rust would create difficulty for maintainers. (Someone had posted that "The all powerful sub-system maintainer model works well if the big technology companies can employ omniscient individuals in these roles, but those types are a bit hard to come by.") In response, someone else had posted "I'll let you in a secret. The maintainers are not 'all-powerful'. We are the 'thin blue line' that is trying to keep the code to be maintainable and high quality. Like most leaders of volunteer organization, whether it is the Internet Engineerint Task Force (the standards body for the Internet), we actually have very little power. We can not *command* people to work on retiring technical debt, or to improve testing infrastructure, or work on some particular feature that we'd very like for our users. All we can do is stop things from being accepted..."

Saturday Herbst wrote: The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:

"we are the thin blue line"

This isn't okay. This isn't creating an inclusive environment. This isn't okay with the current political situation especially in the US. A maintainer speaking those words can't be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn. Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people. Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.

I can't in good faith remain to be part of a project and its community where those words are tolerated. Those words are not technical, they are a political statement. Even if unintentionally, such words carry power, they carry meanings one needs to be aware of. They do cause an immense amount of harm.

The phrase thin blue line "typically refers to the concept of the police as the line between law-and-order and chaos," according to Wikipedia, but more recently became associated with a"countermovement" to the Black Lives Matter movement and "a number of far-right movements in the U.S."

Phoronix writes: Lyude Paul and Danilo Krummrich both of Red Hat remain Nouveau kernel maintainers. Red Hat developers are also working on developing NOVA as the new Rust-based open-source NVIDIA kernel driver leveraging the GSP interface for Turing GPUs and newer.

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