"Can editing code feel more tactile, like painting with Photoshop brushes?"

Researchers at GitHub Next asked that question this week — and then supplied the answer. "We added a toolbox of brushes to our Copilot Labs Visual Studio Code extension that can modify your code.... Just select a few lines, choose your brush, and see your code update."

The tool's web page includes interactive before-and-after examples demonstrating:

• Add Types brush
• Fix Bugs brush
• Add Debugging Statements brush
• Make More Readable brush

And last month Microsoft's principle program manager for browser tools shared an animated GIF showing all the brushes in action.

"In the future, we're interested in adding more useful brushes, as well as letting developers store their own custom brushes," adds this week's announcement. "As we explore enhancing developers' workflows with Machine Learning, we're focused on how to empower developers, instead of automating them. This was one of many explorations we have in the works along those lines."

It's ultimately grafting an incredibly easy interface onto "ML-powered code modification", writes Visual Studio Magazine, noting that "The bug-fixing brush, for example can fix a simple typo, changing a variable name from the incorrect 'low' to the correct 'lo'....

"All of the above brushes and a few others have been added to the Copilot Labs brushes toolbox, which is available for anyone with a GitHub Copilot license, costing $10 per month or $100 per year.... At the time of this writing, the extension has been installed 131,369 times, earning a perfect 5.0 rating from six reviewers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After a week of silence amid intense backlash, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has finally addressed its community's concerns about changes to the open gaming license. The open gaming license (OGL) has existed since 2000 and has made it possible for a diverse ecosystem of third-party creators to publish virtual tabletop software, expansion books and more. Many of these creators can make a living thanks to the OGL. But over the last week, a new version of the OGL leaked after WoTC sent it to some top creators. More than 66,000 Dungeons & Dragons fans signed an open letter under the name #OpenDnD ahead of an expected announcement, and waves of users deleted their subscriptions to D&D Beyond, WoTC's online platform. Now, WoTC admitted that "it's clear from the reaction that we rolled a 1." Or, in non-Dungeons and Dragons speak, they screwed up.

"We wanted to ensure that the OGL is for the content creator, the homebrewer, the aspiring designer, our players, and the community -- not major corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purpose," the company wrote in a statement. But fans have critiqued this language, since WoTC -- a subsidiary of Hasbro -- is a "major corporation" in itself. Hasbro earned $1.68 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2022. TechCrunch spoke to content creators who had received the unpublished OGL update from WoTC. The terms of this updated OGL would force any creator making more than $50,000 to report earnings to WoTC. Creators earning over $750,000 in gross revenue would have to pay a 25% royalty. The latter creators are the closest thing that third-party Dungeons & Dragons content has to "major corporations" -- but gross revenue is not a reflection of profit, so to refer to these companies in that way is a misnomer. [...] The fan community also worried about whether WoTC would be allowed to publish and profit off of third-party work without credit to the original creator. Noah Downs, a partner at Premack Rogers and a Dungeons & Dragons livestreamer, told TechCrunch that there was a clause in the document that granted WoTC a perpetual, royalty-free sublicense to all third-party content created under the OGL.

Now, WoTC appears to be walking back both the royalty clause and the perpetual license. "What [the next OGL] will not contain is any royalty structure. It also will not include the license back provision that some people were afraid was a means for us to steal work. That thought never crossed our minds," WoTC wrote in a statement. "Under any new OGL, you will own the content you create. We won't." WoTC claims that it included this language in the leaked version of the OGL to prevent creators from being able to "incorrectly allege" that WoTC stole their work. Throughout the document, WoTC refers to the document that certain creators received as a draft -- however, creators who received the document told TechCrunch that it was sent to them with the intention of getting them to sign off on it. The backlash against these terms was so severe that other tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) publishers took action. Paizo is the publisher of Pathfinder, a popular game covered under WoTC's original OGL. Paizo's owner and presidents were leaders at Wizards of the Coast at the time that the OGL was originally published in 2000, and wrote in a statement yesterday that the company was prepared to go to court over the idea that WoTC could suddenly revoke the OGL license from existing projects. Along with other publishers like Kobold Press, Chaosium and Legendary Games, Paizo announced it would release its own Open RPG Creative License (ORC). "Ultimately, the collective action of the signatures on the open letter and unsubscribing from D&D Beyond made a difference. We have seen that all they care about is profit, and we are hitting their bottom line," said Eric Silver, game master of Dungeons & Dragons podcast Join the Party. He told TechCrunch that WoTC's response on Friday is "just a PR statement."

"Until we see what they release in clear language, we can't let our foot off the gas pedal," Silver said. "The corporate playbook is wait it out until the people get bored; we can't and we won't."

Nvidia's streaming software now has an option to make it appear like you're making eye contact with the camera, even if you're looking somewhere else in real life. From a report: Using AI, the "Eye Contact" feature added to Nvidia Broadcast 1.4 will replace your eyes with "simulated" ones that are aligned with your camera -- an effect that worked really well when we tested it ourselves, except for all the times it didn't. In an announcement post, the company writes the feature is meant for "content creators seeking to record themselves while reading their notes or a script" without having to look directly at a camera.

Pitching it as something you'd use during a public performance, instead of something you'd use socially, does kind of sidestep the dilemmas that come with this sort of tech. Is it rude to use AI to trick my mom into thinking I'm engaged in our video call when I'm actually looking at my phone? Or, to make my boss think I'm not writing an article on my other monitor during a meeting? Nvidia suggests that Eye Contact will try to make your simulated eyes match the color of your real ones, and there's "even a disconnect feature in case you look too far away."

The US Federal Communications Commission is continuing its battle against illegal robocalls. In its latest move, the agency on Wednesday issued cease-and-desist warnings to two more companies. From a report: The warning letters indicate that voice service providers SIPphony and Vultik must "end their apparent support of illegal robocall traffic or face serious consequences," according to an FCC announcement. The FCC says its investigations show that Vultik and SIPphony have allowed illegal robocalls to originate from their networks. Each provider must take immediate action and inform the FCC of the active steps it's taking to mitigate illegal robocalls. If either fails to comply with steps and rules outlined in the letters, its call traffic may be permanently blocked.

OpenAI this week signaled it'll soon begin charging for ChatGPT, its viral AI-powered chatbot that can write essays, emails, poems and even computer code. From a report: In an announcement on the company's official Discord server, OpenAI said that it's "starting to think about how to monetize ChatGPT" as one of the ways to "ensure [the tool's] long-term viability." The monetized version of ChatGPT will be called ChatGPT Professional, apparently. That's according to a waitlist link OpenAI posted in the Discord server, which asks a range of questions about payment preferences including "At what price (per month) would you consider ChatGPT to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it?"

The waitlist also outlines ChatGPT Professional's benefits, which include no "blackout" (i.e. unavailability) windows, no throttling and an unlimited number of message with ChatGPT -- "at least 2x the regular daily limit." OpenAI says that those who fill out the waitlist form may be selected to pilot ChatGPT Professional, but that the program is in the experimental stages and won't be made widely available "at this time."

"The Tiobe index gauges language popularity using a formula that assesses searches on programming languages in Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and other search engines," writes InfoWorld. And they add that this year the "vaunted" C++ programming language was the index's biggest gainer in 2022.

TIOBE's announcement includes their calculation that C++ rose 4.62% in popularity in 2022: Runners up are C (+3.82%) and Python (+2.78%). Interestingly, C++ surpassed Java to become the number 3 of the TIOBE index in November 2022. The reason for C++'s popularity is its excellent performance while being a high level object-oriented language. Because of this, it is possible to develop fast and vast software systems (over millions of lines of code) in C++ without necessarily ending up in a maintenance nightmare.
So which programming languages are most popular now? For what it's worth, here's TIOBE's latest ranking:


- Python
- C
- C++
- Java
- C#
- Visual Basic
- JavaScript
- SQL
- Assembly Language
- PHP


InfoWorld adds that "Helping C++ popularity was the publication of new language standards with interesting features, such as C++ 11 and C++ 20."

More from TIOBE: What else happened in 2022? Performance seemed to be important. C++ competitor Rust entered the top 20 again (being at position #26 one year ago), but this time it seems to be for real. Lua, which is known for its easy interfacing with C, jumped from position #30 to #24. F# is another language that made an interesting move: from position #74 to position #33 in one years' time. Promising languages such as Kotlin (from #29 to #25), Julia (from #28 to #29) and Dart (from #37 to #38) still have a long way to go before they reach the top 20. Let's see what happens in 2023.

OS News cheers the first official release of Vanilla OS, calling it "an immutable desktop Linux distribution that brings some interesting new technologies to the table, such as the Apx package manager."

From the official release announcement: "By default, Apx provides a container based on your Linux distribution (Ubuntu 22.10 for Vanilla OS 22.10) and wraps all commands from the distribution's package manager (apt for Ubuntu). Nevertheless, you can install packages from other package distributions.... Using the --dnf flag with apx will create a new container based on Fedora Linux. Here, apx will manage packages from Fedora's DNF repository, tightly integrating them with the host system.
ZDNet calls Vanilla OS "a new take on Linux that is equal parts heightened security and user-friendly." Among other things, "the developers opted to switch to ABRoot, which allows for fully atomic transactions between 2 root partitions." The official release announcement explains: ABRoot will check which partition is the present root partition (i.e A), then it will mount an overlay on top of it and perform the transaction. If the transaction succeeds, the overlay will be merged with the future root partition (i.e B). On your next boot, the system will automatically switch to the new root partition (B). In case of failure, the overlay will be discarded and the system will boot normally, without any changes to either partition.
But ZDNet explains why this comes in handy: Another really fascinating feature is called Smart Updates, which is enabled in the Vanilla OS Control Center, and ensures the system will not update if it's either under a heavy load or the battery is low. To enable this, open the Vanilla OS Control Center, click on the Updates tab, and then click the ON/OFF slider for SmartUpdate. Once enabled, updates will go through ABRoot transitions and aren't applied until the next reboot. Not only does this allow the updates to happen fully in the background, but it also makes them atomic, so they only proceed when it's guaranteed they will succeed.

The only caveat to this system is that you are limited to either weekly or monthly updates, as there is no daily option for scheduling. However, if you're doing weekly updates, you should be good to go.... Setting aside that which makes Vanilla OS special, the distribution is as stock a GNOME experience as you'll find and does a great job serving as your desktop operating system. It's easy to use, reliable, and performs really well...especially considering this is the first official release.
"Every wallpaper has a light and a dark version," adds the release announcement, "so you can choose the one that best suits your needs."

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) will now automatically encrypt all new objects added on buckets on the server side, using AES-256 by default. BleepingComputer reports: While the server-side encryption system has been available on AWS for over a decade, the tech giant has enabled it by default to bolster security. Administrators will not have to take any actions for the new encryption system to affect their buckets, and Amazon promises it won't have any negative performance impact. Administrators may leave the system to encrypt at the default 256-bit AES or choose one of the alternative methods, namely SSE-C or SSE-KMS.

The first option (SSE-C) gives bucket owners control of the keys, while the second (SSE-KMS) lets Amazon do the key management. However, bucket owners can set different permissions for each KMS key to maintain more granular control over the asset access system. To confirm that the changes have been applied to your buckets, admins can configure CloudTrail to log data events at no extra cost. Then perform a test object upload, and look in the event logs for the "SSEApplied": "Default_SSE_S3." field in the log for the uploaded file. To retroactively encrypt objects already in S3 buckets, follow this official guide. "This change puts another security best practice into effect automatically -- with no impact on performance and no action required on your side," reads Amazon's announcement.

"S3 buckets that do not use default encryption will now automatically apply SSE-S3 as the default setting. Existing buckets currently using S3 default encryption will not change."

Salesforce division Tableau was hit harder than other units in the company's largest-ever round of jobs cuts this week, adding to a major reorganization that signals the $15.7 billion acquisition hasn't lived up to expectations. Bloomberg reports: Chief Executive Officer Mark Nelson was ousted from the data analytics division in late December and more senior staff were axed Wednesday as part of Salesforce's announcement that it would eliminate 10% of its workforce. Job reductions at Tableau were greater, proportionally, than the company at large thus far. After a half-decade of fast hiring and large acquisitions, Salesforce is trying to cut costs and better integrate the companies it has purchased. The software maker, which lost almost half of its value in 2022, has been pressured by investors to improve profit. The job cuts made public Wednesday -- about 8,000 workers -- are less than half of the number of employees hired in the pandemic and followed the announced exit in December of co-CEO Bret Taylor and the elimination of hundreds of sales positions in November.

Acquisitions fueled the company's headcount growth. Tableau, then Salesforce's most expensive deal when it was bought in 2019, came with 4,200 employees while Slack, purchased in 2021, and Mulesoft, acquired in 2018, together brought another 3,700, according to company filings. The three deals combined cost almost $50 billion with the estimated $27.7 billion for Slack leading the way. Workers across these acquired divisions were pummeled by the job reductions, particularly in recruiting and customer success roles, according to company employees. Tableau is increasingly being treated as a visualization tool for data contained in Salesforce's other services rather than a standalone program -- co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff highlighted the new integrations in a December keynote speech. The division has trailed the rest of the company in sales growth since the acquisition.

Salesforce also plans to pare back its office footprint. The company currently has four offices in the Seattle area, more than any other city, according to the company website. Three were inherited in the Tableau deal. Salesforce declined to comment on whether it would be reducing space in the Seattle area. Asked about the effect of Wednesday's job cuts on Tableau, a Salesforce spokesperson said the unit "is a vital part of our product strategy." Tableau contributes to a product that "processes over 100 billion customer records, and helps our customers understand and act on their data," the spokesperson said.

At CES this week, AMD announced a suite of new chips for notebooks and desktop computers, with one notable announcement being the company's new AMD Ryzen 7040 series of processors for ultrathin notebooks that will compete with Apple's M1 Pro and M2 chips. MacRumors reports: The AMD Ryzen 7040 series of chips are "ultrathin" processors based on the 4nm process, and the highest-end chip part of the family is the Ryzen 9 7940HS. The Ryzen 9 7940HS has eight cores, 16 threads, and 5.2GHz boost speeds. Announcing the new chip, AMD CEO Lisa Su made bold claims about its performance, saying it's up to 30% faster than Apple's M1 Pro chip. In specific tasks, AMD claims the chip is 34% faster in multiprocessing workloads than the M1 Pro and 20% faster than the M2 in AI tasks.

One cornerstone of Apple silicon is energy efficiency, and in that area, AMD claims the new AMD Ryzen 7040 series will offer 30+ hours of video playback in ultrathin notebooks. Built directly into the series of chips is Ryzen AI, a dedicated AI engine embedded in the processor. AMD chips configured with Ryzen AI are 20% faster in AI tasks than Apple's M2 chip while being 50% more energy efficient, according to the company.

To showcase the new chip's performance, AMD compared the performance of a high-end Intel chip, the M1 Pro, and its new Ryzen 9 7940HS processor rendering an object in the popular application Blender. In the time-lapsed video shown on stage, the M1 Pro lags behind the Ryzen 9 7940HS in rendering the object. AMD says it made its performance claims against a MacBook Pro with M1 Pro, 32GB of unified memory, and 1TB of SSD storage running macOS Monterey. The M1 Pro is not Apple's highest-end and most powerful chip for laptops, which is the M1 Max, and AMD did not compare its chip to the M1 Max. After roasting the M1 Pro, Ian Zelbo from FrontPageTech noticed AMD running their CES keynote on multiple 14-inch MacBook Pros. "Obviously these are contracted employees, and it means nothing," he tweeted. "I just always find stuff like this hilarious."

We do too... It's akin to the "Twitter for iPhone" line on tweets that have gotten Android promoters in hot water multiple times over the past several years.

The WPC announced during CES 2023 that the next generation of the Qi standard, named "Qi2," was built with Apple's help. 9to5Mac reports: The new standard aims to improve the efficiency and interoperability of the technology, which is why it will have a "Magnetic Power Profile" at its core. As explained by WPC, this Magnetic Power Profile essentially works like Apple's MagSafe. As a result, Qi2 accessories will be perfectly aligned with the devices, thus improving energy efficiency and fast charging. And of course, since it was developed in partnership with Apple, the Qi2 standard will also work with MagSafe by default.

Currently, MagSafe is a proprietary standard from Apple, and even accessory manufacturers have to pay to use such a standard. While Apple can still technically limit some features to MagSafe certified accessories, the announcement of the Qi2 standard is good news to ensure that this type of accessory is compatible with different phones. The new Qi2 standard will replace its Qi predecessor once it becomes available. WPC says that one billion Qi devices are expected to be sold globally by 2023. The first Qi2 certified devices and accessories are expected to be introduced by the end of the year.

Nvidia unveiled the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card using its latest graphics processing unit (GPU) chip. It also showed off laptops with a whole family of 40 Series GPUs. From a report: The 4070 desktop GPU will sell for $800 and will be available on January 5 for custom add-on boards. The Santa Clara, California-based company said the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is faster than the predecessor GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, at nearly half the power, thanks to its new Nvidia Ada Lovelace architecture innovations and Nvidia DLSS 3 (deep learning super sampling) technology. The GPUs are part of the 40 Series family that the company began introducing last fall, and they will compete against the latest offerings from Advanced Micro Devices' Radeon GPU family. Nvidia made the announcement at an online event ahead of the CES 2023 tech trade show in Las Vegas.

Nvidia said that the GPUs will be built into more than 170 laptop models. The laptops use the new 4070, 4060 and 4050 GPUs from Nvidia. And 4090- and 4080-based laptops will start shipping for $2,000 on February 8. Other 40 Series RTX laptops (4050/60/70 starting at $1,000) will start shipping on February 22. Nvidia said the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti will max out a 1440p monitor, delivering over 120 FPS in modern games like A Plague Tale: Requiem, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, and F1 22. Nvidia showed off a bunch of games that will take advantage of the hardware. Other titles that will use RTX's ray tracing include Cyberpunk 2077, Portal with RTX, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and many more.

Apple is raising the price of getting a new battery installed in most iPhones, iPads, and Macs, starting on March 1st. The company made the announcement on the devices' repair pages, in small text under its price estimators. From a report: How much the price hike is depends on what device you have. For iPhones, it's simple -- Apple's site says "the out-of-warranty battery service fee will be increased by $20 for all iPhone models prior to iPhone 14." For phones with a home button, that means the price will be going from $49 to $69, and for Face ID phones that means it'll be going from $69 to $89. Those prices, by the way, were put in place in 2019, after Apple ran a year-long promotion where you could get a new battery for $29, to make up for its battery throttling controversy. For "all MacBook Air models" the price increase will be $30, bringing the price from $129 to $159.

If humankind detects a message from an advanced civilisation, "It would be a transformative event for humankind," writes the Guardian, "one the world's nations are surely prepared for.

"Or are they?" "Look at the mess we made when Covid hit. We'd be like headless chickens," says Dr John Elliott, a computational linguist at the University of St Andrews. "We cannot afford to be ill-prepared, scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless, for an event that could happen at any time and which we cannot afford to mismanage."

This frank assessment of Earth's unreadiness for contact with life elsewhere underpins the creation of the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) post-detection hub at St Andrews. Over the next month or two, Elliott aims to bring together a core team of international researchers and affiliates. They will take on the job of getting ready: to analyse mysterious signals, or even artefacts, and work out every aspect of how we should respond.... "After the initial announcement, we'd be looking at societal impact, information dissemination, the media, the impact on religions and belief systems, the potential for disinformation, what analytical capabilities we'll need, and much more: having strategies in place, being transparent with everything we've discovered — what we know and what we do not know," says Elliott....

Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist and professor of science communication at the University of Westminster, said the new hub at St Andrews is "an important step in raising awareness at how ill-prepared we currently are" for detecting a signal from an alien civilisation. But he added that any intelligent aliens were likely to be hundreds if not thousands of light years away, meaning communication time would be on the scale of many centuries. "Even if we were to receive a signal tomorrow, we would have plenty of breathing space to assemble an international team of diverse experts to attempt to decipher the meaning of the message, and carefully consider how the Earth should respond, and even if we should.

"The bigger concern is to establish some form of international agreement to prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently — before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say as one planet," he said.

Friday America's Federal Trade Commission issued an announcement on what it called "illegal business tactics that Mastercard has been using to force merchants to route debit card payments through its payment network," saying the FTC is now requiring Mastercard "to stop blocking the use of competing debit payment networks." The popularity of debit cards has been growing especially quickly for purchases consumers make using their personal devices equipped with ewallet applications such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Wallet. Payment card networks play a critical role in those debit card transactions....

Payment card networks compete for the business of banks that issue cards and for the business of merchants that accept card payments. Mastercard, along with Visa, is one of the two leading payment card networks in the United States. The processing fees charged by networks total billions of dollars every year, affecting every purchase made with a debit card, according to the FTC. Most of these fees are paid by the merchants to the card-issuing banks and the payment card networks....

Mastercard was flouting the law by setting policies to block merchants from routing ecommerce transactions using Mastercard-branded debit cards saved in ewallets to alternative payment card networks, including networks that may charge lower fees than Mastercard, the FTC alleged. Specifically, Mastercard used its control over a process called "tokenization" to block the use of competing payment card networks, the agency alleged. Transactions commonly are "tokenized" by replacing the cardholder's primary account number with a different number to protect the account number during some stages of a debit transaction. Tokens are stored in ewallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Wallet and serve as a substitute credential to provide additional protection for a cardholder's account number....

According to the FTC, Mastercard refuses to provide conversion services to competing networks for remote ewallet debit transactions...thereby making it impossible for merchants to route their ewallet transactions on a network other than Mastercard.

Neal Stephenson coined the phrase "metaverse" in his 1992 book Snow Crash. 30 years later, Stephenson is part of a blockchain startup "optimized for the Open Metaverse" called Lamina1. This week they announced their "first-of-its-kind fund" for investing in early stage Layer 1 blockchain projects ("largely focused" on the Open Metaverse). .

The goal is "to provide broad economic access to global accredited investors looking to support the next era of the internet," according to the announcement — and to also provide Web3 builders "a vehicle for raising capital for their Open Metaverse ventures." The fund will be led by Lamina1's co-founder Peter Vessenes (who, among other things, was the first Chairman of the Bitcoin foundation), "offering investors a chance to join him at the forefront of the emerging Open Metaverse economy..."

"Investors and builders can both apply to participate immediately." The fund launch will be closely followed by the much-anticipated launch of Lamina1's testnet.... The L1EF fund works by allowing accredited investors to access and co-invest in companies and entrepreneurs through quarterly subscriptions.

Investments will be largely focused on the technology and experiences users can access in the Open Metaverse, ranging from immersive computing to open AI at scale. To support the rapid advancement and expansion of the Open Metaverse, L1EF is simultaneously focused on investing in builders and creators who will foster the quality tech and infrastructure necessary to support the protocol, and create immersive experiences that bring Lamina1's vision of an Open Metaverse to life. Some of these early stage projects include layer 2 protocols, DeFi, GameFi, marketplaces, bridges, and many more.

"We're thrilled to introduce L1EF to serve both creators and investors who are actively promoting the development of an Open Metaverse," said Rebecca Barkin, President of Lamina1. "Peter has a deep understanding and demonstrated success of growing economies around a chain, and his approach to grant builders early access to capital — right as we're preparing to place testnet in their hands — is in perfect alignment with our mission to build the open infrastructure that brings together the most powerful creative community on the planet...."

In addition to capital, projects that are part of L1EF will receive early access and support for Lamina1 developer tooling through the forthcoming Lamina1 Early Access Program.
"The team has a front row seat to all happening in the ecosystem," Vessenes said this week, "and essentially gets a 'first look' at what many of the most compelling creators and storytellers of our time are doing, building, making, and producing around the world.

"We want to share that front row seat with as many people as possible."


In 2004 Neal Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

For three years Stockholm-based games studio Embark has been working on the Rust-gpu project to make Rust "a first class language and ecosystem for GPU programming." The project's latest announcement? rust-gpu now supports ray-tracing.

Their original announcement explained the rationale for this years-long dvelopment effort: Historically in games GPU programming has been done through writing either HLSL, or to a lesser extent GLSL. These are simple programming languages that have evolved along with rendering APIs over the years. However, as game engines have evolved, these languages have failed to provide mechanisms for dealing with large codebases, and have generally stayed behind the curve compared to other programming languages.

In part this is because it's a niche language for a niche market, and in part this has been because the industry as a whole has sunk quite a lot of time and effort into the status quo. While over-all better alternatives to both languages exist, none of them are in a place to replace HLSL or GLSL. Either because they are vendor locked, or because they don't support the traditional graphics pipeline. Examples of this include CUDA and OpenCL. And while attempts have been made to create language in this space, none of them have gained any notable traction in the gamedev community.

Our hope with this project is that we push the industry forward by bringing an existing, low-level, safe, and high performance language to the GPU; namely Rust. And with it come some additional benefits that can't be overlooked: a package/module system that's one of the industry's best, built in safety against race-conditions or out of bounds memory access, a wide range of tools and utilities to improve programmer workflows, and many others!
Along with ray-tracing, this week they announced plans to keep rust-gpu on the same schedule as the stable Rust release, "so you can use your favorite new language features as new stable versions of Rust are being released, by just updating your rust-gpu version."

Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the news!

The FBI is recommending the use of ad blockers, warning in an alert this week that cybercriminals are using online ads in search results to steal or extort money from victims. TechCrunch reports: In a pre-holiday public service announcement, the FBI said that cybercriminals are buying ads to impersonate legitimate brands, like cryptocurrency exchanges. Ads are often placed at the top of search results but with "minimum distinction" between the ads and the search results, the feds say, which can look identical to the brands that the cybercriminals are impersonating. Malicious ads are also used to trick victims into installing malware disguised as genuine apps, which can steal passwords and deploy file-encrypting ransomware. One of the FBI's recommendations for consumers is to install an ad blocker.

As the name suggests, ad blockers are web browser extensions that broadly block online ads from loading in your browser, including in search results. By blocking ads, would-be victims are not shown any ads at all, making it easier to find and access the websites of legitimate brands. Ad blockers don't just remove the enormous bloat from websites, like auto-playing video and splashy ads that take up half the page, which make your computer fans run like jet engines. Ad blockers are also good for privacy, because they prevent the tracking code within ads from loading. That means the ad companies, like Google and Facebook, cannot track you as you browse the web, or learn which websites you visit, or infer what things you might be interested in based on your web history. "Of course, you can switch your ad blocker off any time you want, and even allow or deny ads for entire websites," adds the report.

"Ads are still an important part of what keeps the internet largely free and accessible, including TechCrunch (and Slashdot!), even as subscriptions and paywalls are increasingly becoming the norm."

Japan adopted a plan on Thursday to extend the lifespan of nuclear reactors, replace the old and even build new ones, a major shift in a country scarred by the Fukushima disaster that once planned to phase out atomic power. From a report: In the face of global fuel shortages, rising prices and pressure to reduce carbon emissions, Japan's leaders have begun to turn back toward nuclear energy, but the announcement was their clearest commitment yet after keeping mum on delicate topics like the possibility of building new reactors.

Under the new policy, Japan will maximize the use of existing reactors by restarting as many of them as possible and prolonging the operating life of aging ones beyond a 60-year limit. The government also pledged to develop next-generation reactors. In 2011, a powerful earthquake and the ensuing tsunami caused multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant -- a disaster that supercharged anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan and at one point led the government to promise to phase out the energy by around 2030. But since then, the government has recommitted to the technology, including setting a target for nuclear to make up 20-22% of the country's energy mix by the end of the decade.

The creators of "South Park" have secured a $20 million investment for their AI entertainment startup Deep Voodoo. Variety reports: The funding was led by Connect Ventures, an investment partnership between CAA and venture-capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA). It's the first outside capital raised by Deep Voodoo, which previously was funded entirely by Parker and Stone's independent entertainment company, Park County. Stone and Parker plan to use the new funding to "accelerate Deep Voodoo's development of its leading deepfake technology, cost-effective visual effects services and original synthetic media projects," according to the announcement.

Stone and Parker's Deep Voodoo began building their proprietary deepfake technology in early 2020, and the duo assembled a team of artists for a feature film about Donald Trump they had developed. In October of that year, they released "Sassy Justice," a 14-minute comedy short featuring a deepfaked Trump (voiced by Peter Serafinowicz), which went viral. But they suspended the movie project due to the COVID pandemic, and pivoted Deep Voodoo to be a provider of deepfake tools to the industry. With Connect Ventures' investment, Deep Voodoo has begun offering its "unrivaled face-swapping visual effects" to artists, producers and creators across the industry, per the announcement.