Longtime Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, isn't just about shiny new gadgets. As AP reports, this year brought back the fifth annual Worst in Show anti-awards, calling out the most harmful, wasteful, invasive, and unfixable tech at the Las Vegas show. The coalition behind the awards -- including Repair.org, iFixit, EFF, PIRG, Secure Repairs, and others -- put the spotlight on products that miss the point of innovation and make life worse for users.

2026 Worst in Show winners include:

Overall (and Repairability): Samsung's AI-packed Family Hub Fridge -- over-engineered, hard to fix, and trying to do everything but keep food cold.
Privacy: Amazon Ring AI -- expanding surveillance with features like facial recognition and mobile towers.
Security: Merach UltraTread treadmill -- an AI fitness coach that also hoovers up sensitive data with weak security guarantees, including a privacy policy that declares the company "cannot guarantee the security of your personal information" (!!).
Environmental Impact: Lollipop Star -- a single-use, music-playing electronic lollipop that epitomizes needless e-waste.
Enshittification: Bosch eBike Flow App -- pushing lock-in and digital restrictions that make gear worse over time.
"Who Asked For This?": Bosch Personal AI Barista -- a voice-assistant coffee maker that nobody really wanted.
People's Choice: Lepro Ami AI Companion -- an overhyped "soulmate" cam that creeps more than it comforts.

The message? Not all tech is progress. Some products add needless complexity, threaten privacy, or throw sustainability out the window -- and the industry's watchdogs are calling them out.

Linus Torvalds has weighed in on an ongoing debate within the Linux kernel development community about whether documentation should explicitly address AI-generated code contributions, and his position is characteristically blunt: stop making it an issue. The Linux creator was responding to Oracle-affiliated kernel developer Lorenzo Stoakes, who had argued that treating LLMs as "just another tool" ignores the threat they pose to kernel quality. "Thinking LLMs are 'just another tool' is to say effectively that the kernel is immune from this," Stoakes wrote.

Torvalds disagreed sharply. "There is zero point in talking about AI slop," he wrote. "Because the AI slop people aren't going to document their patches as such." He called such discussions "pointless posturing" and said that kernel documentation is "for good actors." The exchange comes as a team led by Intel's Dave Hansen works on guidelines for tool-generated contributions. Stoakes had pushed for language letting maintainers reject suspected AI slop outright, arguing the current draft "tries very hard to say 'NOP.'" Torvalds made clear he doesn't want kernel documentation to become a political statement on AI. "I strongly want this to be that 'just a tool' statement," he wrote.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk persuaded a judge on Wednesday to allow a jury trial on his allegations that ChatGPT maker OpenAI violated its founding mission in its high-profile restructuring to a for-profit entity. Musk was a cofounder of OpenAI in 2015 but left in 2018 and now runs an AI company that competes with it.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, said at a hearing that there was "plenty of evidence" suggesting OpenAI's leaders made assurances that its original nonprofit structure was going to be maintained. The judge said there were enough disputed facts to let a jury consider the claims at a trial scheduled for March, rather than decide the issues herself. She said she would issue a written order after the hearing that addresses OpenAI's bid to throw out the case.

[...] Musk contends he contributed about $38 million, roughly 60% of OpenAI's early funding, along with strategic guidance and credibility, based on assurances that the organization would remain a nonprofit dedicated to the public benefit. The lawsuit accuses OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of plotting a for-profit switch to enrich themselves, culminating in multibillion-dollar deals with Microsoft and a recent restructuring. OpenAI, Altman and Brockman have denied the claims, and they called Musk "a frustrated commercial competitor seeking to slow down a mission-driven market leader."

Microsoft is also a defendant and has urged the judge to toss Musk's lawsuit. A lawyer for Microsoft said there was no evidence that the company "aided and abetted" OpenAI.

OpenAI in a statement after the hearing said: "Mr Musk's lawsuit continues to be baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment, and we look forward to demonstrating this at trial."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Google is putting even more generative AI tools into Gmail as part of its goal to further personalize user inboxes and streamline searches. On Thursday, the company announced a new "AI Inbox" tab, currently in a beta testing phase, that reads every message in a user's Gmail and suggests a list of to-dos and key topics, based on what it summarizes. In Google's example of what this AI Inbox could look like in Gmail, the new tab takes context from a user's messages and suggests they reschedule their dentist appointment, reply to a request from their child's sports coach, and pay an upcoming fee before the deadline. Also under the AI Inbox tab is a list of important topics worth browsing, nestled beneath the action items at the top. Each suggested to-do and topic links back to the original email for more context and for verification.

[...] For users who are concerned about their privacy, the information Google gleans by skimming through inboxes will not be used to improve the company's foundational AI models. "We didn't just bolt AI onto Gmail," says Blake Barnes, who leads the project for Google. "We built a secure privacy architecture, specifically for this moment." He emphasizes that users can turn off Gmail's new AI tools if they don't want them. At the same time Google announced its AI Inbox, the company made free for all Gmail users multiple Gemini features that were previously available only to paying subscribers. This includes the Help Me Write tool, which generates emails from a user prompt, as well as AI Overviews for email threads, which essentially posts a TL;DR summary at the top of long message threads. Subscribers to Google's Ultra and Pro plans, which start at $20 a month, get two additional new features in their Gmail inbox. First, an AI proofreading tool that suggests more polished grammar and sentence structures. And second, an AI Overviews tool that can search your whole inbox and create relevant summaries on a topic, rather than just summarizing a single email thread.

Microsoft is embedding full e-commerce checkout directly into Copilot chats, letting users buy products without ever visiting a retailer's website. "If checkout happens inside AI conversations, retailers risk losing direct customer relationships -- while platforms like Microsoft gain leverage," reports Axios. From the report: Microsoft unveiled new agentic AI tools for retailers at the NRF 2026 retail conference, including Copilot Checkout, which lets shoppers complete purchases inside Copilot without being redirected to a retailer's website. The checkout feature is live in the U.S. with Shopify, PayPal, Stripe and Etsy integrations.

Copilot apps have more than 100 million monthly active users, spanning consumer and commercial audiences, according to the company. More than 800 million monthly active users interact with AI features across Microsoft products more broadly. Shopping journeys involving Copilot are 33% shorter than traditional search paths and see a 53% increase in purchases within 30 minutes of interaction, Microsoft says. When shopping intent is present, journeys involving Copilot are 194% more likely to result in a purchase than those without it.

The promise of AI-powered workplace tools that sort emails, take meeting notes, and file expense reports is finally delivering meaningful productivity gains -- one software startup reported a 20% boost around mid-2025 -- but companies are discovering an unexpected tradeoff: employees are burning out from the relentless pace of high-level cognitive work.

Roger Kirkness, CEO of 14-person software startup Convictional, noticed that after AI took the scut work off his team's plates, their days became consumed by intensive thinking, and they were mentally exhausted and unproductive by Friday. The company transitioned to a four-day workweek; the same amount of work gets done, Kirkness says.

The underlying problem, according to Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, is that businesses tend to simply reallocate the time AI saves. Workers who once mentally downshifted for tasks like data entry are now expected to maintain intense focus through longer stretches of data analysis. "If you just make people work at a high-intensity pace with no breaks, you risk crowding out creativity," Schor says.

TV manufacturers at CES 2026 in Las Vegas this week unveiled a wave of AI features that frequently consume significant screen space and take considerable time to deliver results -- all while global TV shipments declined 0.6% year over year in Q3, according to Omdia. Google demonstrated Veo generating video from a photo on a television, a process that took about two minutes to produce eight seconds of footage, The Verge writes in a column. Samsung presented a future where viewers ask their sets for sports predictions and recipes to share with kitchen displays. Hisense showed an AI agent that displays real-time stats for every soccer player on screen, a feature requiring so much space the company built a prototype 21:9 aspect ratio display to accommodate it.

Demos repeatedly showed video shrinking to make room for sports scores and information when viewers asked questions -- noticeable on 70-inch displays and likely worse on anything 50 inches or smaller. Amazon's Alexa Plus can jump to Prime Video scenes based on verbal descriptions. LG's sets switch homescreen recommendations based on voice recognition of individual family members.

Adam Wathan, the creator of the popular CSS framework Tailwind CSS, has let go of 75% of his engineering team -- reducing it from four people to one -- because AI-generated search answers have decimated traffic to the project's documentation pages.

Traffic to Tailwind's documentation has fallen roughly 40% since early 2023 despite the framework being more popular than ever, Wathan wrote in a post. The documentation is the primary channel through which developers discover Tailwind's commercial products, and without that traffic the business has struggled to sustain itself; revenue has dropped close to 80%.

The reduced team also means Wathan cannot currently prioritize implementing LLMS.txt, a proposed feature that would make documentation more accessible to large language models. "Tailwind is growing faster than it ever has and is bigger than it ever has been, and our revenue is down close to 80%," he wrote in the forum post.

Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are projected to raise server memory prices by up to 70% in early 2026, according to Korea Economic Daily. "Combined with 50 percent increases in 2025, this could nearly double prices by mid-2026," reports the Register. From the report: The two Korean giants, alongside US-based Micron, dominate global memory production. All three are reallocating advanced manufacturing capacity to high-margin server DRAM and HBM chips for AI infrastructure, squeezing supply for PCs and smartphones. Financial analysts have raised their earnings forecasts for the firms in response, as they look to benefit from the AI infrastructure boom that is driving up prices for everyone else. Taiwan-based market watcher TrendForce reports that conventional DRAM prices already jumped 55-60 percent in a single quarter.

Yet despite the focus on server chips, supply of these components continues to be strained too, with supplier inventories falling and shipment growth reliant on wafer output increases, according to TrendForce. As a result, it forecasts that server DRAM prices will jump by more than 60 percent in the first quarter of 2026. Prior to Christmas, analyst IDC noted the "unprecedented" memory chip shortage and warned this would have knock-on effects for both hardware makers and end users that may persist well into 2027.

Google and Character.AI have agreed to settle multiple lawsuits from families alleging the chatbot encouraged self-harm and suicide among teens. "The settlements would mark the first resolutions in the wave of lawsuits against tech companies whose AI chatbots encouraged teens to hurt or kill themselves," notes Axios. From the report: Families allege that Character.AI's chatbot encouraged their children to cut their arms, suggested murdering their parents, wrote sexually explicit messages and did not discourage suicide, per lawsuits and congressional testimony. "Parties have agreed to a mediated settlement in principle to resolve all claims between them in the above-referenced matter," one document filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida reads.

The documents do not contain any specific monetary amounts for the settlements. Pricy settlements could deter companies from continuing to offer chatbot products to kids. But without new laws on the books, don't expect major changes across the industry. Last October, Character.AI said it would bar people under 18 from using its chatbots, in a sweeping move to address concerns over child safety.

OpenAI has unveiled ChatGPT Health, a sandboxed health-focused mode that lets users connect medical records and wellness apps for more personalized guidance. The company makes sure to note that ChatGPT Health is "not intended for diagnosis or treatment." The Verge reports: The company is encouraging users to connect their personal medical records and wellness apps, such as Apple Health, Peloton, MyFitnessPal,Weight Watchers, and Function, "to get more personalized, grounded responses to their questions." It suggests connecting medical records so that ChatGPT can analyze lab results, visit summaries, and clinical history; MyFitnessPal and Weight Watchers for food guidance; Apple Health for health and fitness data, including movement, sleep, and activity patterns"; and Function for insights into lab tests.

On the medical records front, OpenAI says it's partnered with b.well, which will provide back-end integration for users to upload their medical records, since the company works with about 2.2 million providers. For now, ChatGPT Health requires users to sign up for a waitlist to request access, as it's starting with a beta group of early users, but the product will roll out gradually to all users regardless of subscription tier. [...]

In a blog post, OpenAI wrote that based on its "de-identified analysis of conversations," more than 230 million people around the world already ask ChatGPT questions related to health and wellness each week. OpenAI also said that over the past two years, it's worked with more than 260 physicians to provide feedback on model outputs more than 600,000 times over 30 areas of focus, to help shape the product's responses. "ChatGPT can help you understand recent test results, prepare for appointments with your doctor, get advice on how to approach your diet and workout routine, or understand the tradeoffs of different insurance options based on your healthcare patterns," OpenAI claims in the blog post.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Senator Steve Padilla (D-CA) introduced a bill [dubbed SB 867] on Monday that would place a four-year ban on the sale and manufacture of toys with AI chatbot capabilities for kids under 18. The goal is to give safety regulators time to develop regulations to protect children from "dangerous AI interactions."

"Chatbots and other AI tools may become integral parts of our lives in the future, but the dangers they pose now require us to take bold action to protect our children," Senator Padilla said in a statement. "Our safety regulations around this kind of technology are in their infancy and will need to grow as exponentially as the capabilities of this technology do. Pausing the sale of these chatbot-integrated toys allows us time to craft the appropriate safety guidelines and framework for these toys to follow." [...] "Our children cannot be used as lab rats for Big Tech to experiment on," Padilla said.

Samsung Electronics has once again sidelined Ballie, a long-anticipated robot that was first announced six years ago but never released. Bloomberg News: The device -- designed to roll and roam throughout the home -- is completely absent from this week's CES, the biggest electronics trade show. And though Samsung said last year that Ballie was nearly ready for a retail release, the product is now unlikely to resurface soon.

In an emailed statement, Samsung referred to Ballie as an "active innovation platform" within the company, rather than a forthcoming consumer device. "After multiple years of real-world testing, it continues to inform how Samsung designs spatially aware, context-driven experiences, particularly in areas like smart home intelligence, ambient AI and privacy-by-design," a Samsung spokesperson said in the statement.

Several years after Samsung introduced the Frame TV in 2017 -- a television designed to display fine art and resemble a framed painting when switched off -- competitors are finally catching up in meaningful numbers. Amazon announced the Ember Artline TV at CES 2026 this week, a $899 model that can display one of 2,000 works of art for free and includes an Alexa AI tool to recommend pieces suited to your room. Hisense unveiled its CanvasTV late last year, TCL has the NXTvision model, and LG has announced the Gallery TV for later this year.

The surge in art-focused televisions comes down to two factors: smaller living spaces in cities where younger buyers lack dedicated rooms for large screens, and advances in matte screen technology that enable displays to absorb light like a canvas rather than reflect it like a window. Local dimming and improved backlighting processing allow these newer models to maintain their slim profiles for flush wall-mounting while delivering more realistic art reproduction than earlier edge-lit designs.

Dell's CES 2026 product briefing, PC Gamer writes, stood out from the relentless AI-focused presentations that have dominated tech events for years, as the company explicitly chose to downplay its AI messaging when announcing a refreshed XPS laptop lineup, new ultraslim and entry-level Alienware laptops, Area-51 desktop refreshes and several monitors.

"One thing you'll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first," Dell head of product Kevin Terwilliger said during the presentation. "A bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC." The shift stems from Dell's observation that consumers simply aren't making purchasing decisions based on AI capabilities. "We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device -- in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it -- but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger said. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."

National Weather Service pulled an AI-generated forecast graphic after it hallucinated fake town names in Idaho. "The blunder -- not the first of its kind to be posted by the NWS in the past year -- comes as the agency experiments with a wide range of AI uses, from advanced forecasting to graphic design," reports the Washington Post. "Experts worry that without properly trained officials, mistakes could erode trust in the agency and the technology." From the report: At first glance, there was nothing out of the ordinary about Saturday's wind forecast for Camas Prairie, Idaho. "Hold onto your hats!" said a social media post from the local weather office in Missoula, Montana. "Orangeotild" had a 10 percent chance of high winds, while just south, "Whata Bod" would be spared larger gusts. The problem? Neither of those places exist. Nor do a handful of the other spots marked on the National Weather Service's forecast graphic, riddled with spelling and geographical errors that the agency confirmed were linked to the use of generative AI.

NWS said AI is not commonly used for public-facing content, nor is its use prohibited. The agency said it is exploring ways to employ AI to inform the public and acknowledged mistakes have been made. "Recently, a local office used AI to create a base map to display forecast information, however the map inadvertently displayed illegible city names," said NWS spokeswoman Erica Grow Cei. "The map was quickly corrected and updated social media posts were distributed."

A post with the inaccurate map was deleted Monday, the same day The Washington Post contacted officials with questions about the image. Cei added that "NWS is exploring strategic ways to continue optimizing our service delivery for Americans, including the implementation of AI where it makes sense. NWS will continue to carefully evaluate results in cases where AI is implemented to ensure accuracy and efficiency, and will discontinue use in scenarios where AI is not effective." A Nov. 25 tweet out of the Rapid City, South Dakota, office also had misspelled locations and the Google Gemini logo in its forecast. NWS did not confirm whether the Rapid City image was made with generative AI.

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, revealed a deceptively simple workflow that uses parallel AI agents, verification loops, and shared memory to let one developer operate with the output of an entire engineering team. "I run 5 Claudes in parallel in my terminal," Cherny wrote. "I number my tabs 1-5, and use system notifications to know when a Claude needs input." He also runs "5-10 Claudes on claude.ai" in his browser, using a "teleport" command to hand off work between the web and his local machine. This validates the "do more with less" strategy Anthropic's President Daniela Amodei recently pitched during an interview with CNBC. VentureBeat reports: For the past week, the engineering community has been dissecting a thread on X from Boris Cherny, the creator and head of Claude Code at Anthropic. What began as a casual sharing of his personal terminal setup has spiraled into a viral manifesto on the future of software development, with industry insiders calling it a watershed moment for the startup.

"If you're not reading the Claude Code best practices straight from its creator, you're behind as a programmer," wrote Jeff Tang, a prominent voice in the developer community. Kyle McNease, another industry observer, went further, declaring that with Cherny's "game-changing updates," Anthropic is "on fire," potentially facing "their ChatGPT moment."

The excitement stems from a paradox: Cherny's workflow is surprisingly simple, yet it allows a single human to operate with the output capacity of a small engineering department. As one user noted on X after implementing Cherny's setup, the experience "feels more like Starcraft" than traditional coding -- a shift from typing syntax to commanding autonomous units.

sinij shares a news release from the Utah Department of Commerce: The state of Utah, through the Utah Department of Commerce's Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy, today announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with Doctronic, the AI-native health platform, to give patients with chronic conditions a faster, automated way to renew medications. This agreement marks the first state-approved program in the country that allows an AI system to legally participate in medical decision-making for prescription renewals, an emerging model that could reshape access to care and ultimately improve care outcomes. Politico provides additional context in its reporting: In data shared with Utah regulators, Doctronic compared its AI system with human clinicians across 500 urgent care cases. The results showed the AI's treatment plan matched the physicians' 99.2 percent of the time, according to the company. "The AI is actually better than doctors at doing this," said Dr. Adam Oskowitz, Doctronic co-founder and an associate professor of surgery at the University of California San Francisco. "When you go see a doctor, it's not going to do all the checks that the AI is doing."

Oskowitz said the AI is designed to err on the side of safety, automatically escalating cases to a physician if there's any uncertainty. Human doctors will also review the first 250 prescriptions issued in each medication class to validate the AI's performance. Once that threshold is met, subsequent renewals in that class will be handled autonomously. The company has also secured a one-of-a-kind malpractice insurance policy covering an AI system, which means the system is insured and held to the same level of responsibility as a doctor would be.

Doctronic also runs a nationwide telehealth practice that directs patients to doctors after an AI consultation. In Utah, patients who use the system will visit a webpage that verifies they are physically in the state. Then the system will pull the patient's prescription history and offer a list of medications eligible for renewal. The AI walks the patient through the same clinical questions a physician would ask to determine whether a refill is appropriate. If the system clears the renewal, the prescription is sent directly to a pharmacy. The program is limited to 190 commonly prescribed medications. Some medications -- including pain management and ADHD drugs as well as injectables -- are excluded for safety reasons.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: On Monday, [Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip-making giant Nvidia] said the company would begin shipping a new A.I. chip later this year, one that can do more computing with less power than previous generations of chips could. Known as the Vera Rubin, the chip has been in development for three years and is designed to fulfill A.I. requests more quickly and cheaply than its predecessors. Mr. Huang, who spoke during CES, an annual tech conference in Las Vegas, also discussed Nvidia's surprisingly ambitious work around autonomous vehicles. This year, Mercedes-Benz will begin shipping cars equipped with Nvidia self-driving technology comparable to Tesla's Autopilot.

Nvidia's new Rubin chips are being manufactured and will be shipped to customers, including Microsoft and Amazon, in the second half of the year, fulfilling a promise Mr. Huang made last March when he first described the chip at the company's annual conference in San Jose, Calif. Companies will be able to train A.I. models with one-quarter as many Rubin chips as its predecessor, the Blackwell. It can provide information for chatbots and other A.I. products for one-tenth of the cost. They will also be able to install the chips in data centers more quickly, courtesy of redesigned supercomputers that feature fewer cables. If the new chips live up to their promise, they could allow companies to develop A.I. at a lower cost and at least begin to respond to the soaring electrical demands of data centers being built around the world.

[...] On Monday, he said Nvidia had developed new A.I. software that would allow customers like Uber and Lucid to develop cars that navigate roads autonomously. It will share the system, called Alpamayo, to spread its influence and the appeal of Nvidia's chip technology. Since 2020, Nvidia has been working with Mercedes to develop a class of self-driving cars. They will begin shipping an early example of their collaboration when Mercedes CLA cars become available in the first half of the year in Europe and the United States. Mr. Huang said the company started working on self-driving technology eight years ago. It has more than a thousand people working on the project. "Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous," Mr. Huang said. The Rubin chips are named for the astronomer Vera Rubin, a pioneering astronomer who helped find powerful evidence of dark matter.

The Lego Group today unveiled Smart Bricks, a tiny computer that fits entirely inside a classic 2x4 brick and which the company is calling the most significant evolution in its building system since the introduction of the minifigure in 1978. The Smart Brick contains a custom ASIC smaller than a single Lego stud and includes light and sound output, light sensors, inertial sensors for detecting movement and tilt, and a microphone that functions as a virtual button rather than a recording device.

The bricks detect NFC-equipped smart tags embedded in new tiles and minifigures, and they form a Bluetooth mesh network to sense each other's position and orientation. They charge wirelessly on a pad that can handle multiple bricks simultaneously. The first Smart Brick sets ship March 1 and are all Star Wars themed, ranging from a $70 Darth Vader's TIE Fighter at 473 pieces to a $160 Darth Vader's Throne Room Duel at 962 pieces.

Lego confirmed there is no AI or camera in the product. The company quietly piloted the technology in a 2024 Lego City set and says Smart Play will continue to expand through new updates and launches.