"The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development," argues Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and business school ethics professor, saying that since the early 2010s, "something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents."

The Atlantic recently published an excerpt from his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.: By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data... I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online — particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity — all were affected...

There's an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world. My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now...

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting "safe spaces" and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to "microaggressions" and sometimes claimed that words were "violence." These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.
The article argues educational scores also began dropping around 2012, while citing estimates that America's average teenager spends seven to nine hours a day on screen-based activities. "Everything else in an adolescent's day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed... The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else." (For example, there's "the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face.")

The article warns of fragmented attention, disrupted learning, social withdrawal, and "the decay of wisdom and the loss of meaning." ("This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life.") Its proposed solution?

• No smartphones before high school
• No social media before 16
• Phoneâfree schools
• More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

"We didn't know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It's time to end the phone-based childhood."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 and sinij for sharing the article.

"Pornhub has disabled its site in Texas," reports the Hill, "to object to a state law that requires the company to verify the age of users to prevent minors from accessing the site." Texas residents who visit the site are met with a message from the company that criticizes the state's elected officials who are requiring them to track the age of users. The company said the newly passed law impinges on "the rights of adults to access protected speech" and fails to pass strict scrutiny by "employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas's stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors." Pornhub said safety and compliance are "at the forefront" of the company's mission, but having users provide identification every time they want to access the site is "not an effective solution for protecting users online... Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving thousands of platforms open and accessible," the message said, adding that "very few sites are able to compare the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place."
The article adds that the state's attorney general is suing the owners of Pornhub for $1.6 million failing to enact age verification, plus an additional $10,000 a day.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker for sharing the news.

Newsweek points out that a Chinese government post arguing the bill is "on the wrong side of fair competition" was flagged by users on X. "TikTok is banned in the People's Republic of China," the X community note read. (The BBC reports that "Instead, Chinese users use a similar app, Douyin, which is only available in China and subject to monitoring and censorship by the government.")

Newsweek adds that China "has also blocked access to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google services. X itself is also banned — though Chinese diplomats use the microblogging app to deliver Beijing's messaging to the wider world."

From the Wall Street Journal: Among the top concerns for [U.S.] intelligence leaders is that they wouldn't even necessarily be able to detect a Chinese influence operation if one were taking place [on TikTok] due to the opacity of the platform and how its algorithm surfaces content to users. Such operations, FBI director Christopher Wray said this week in congressional testimony, "are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national-security concerns represented by TikTok so significant...."

Critics of the bill include libertarian-leaning lawmakers, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who have decried it as a form of government censorship. "The Constitution says that you have a First Amendment right to express yourself," Paul told reporters Thursday. TikTok's users "express themselves through dancing or whatever else they do on TikTok. You can't just tell them they can't do that." In the House, a bloc of 50 Democrats voted against the bill, citing concerns about curtailing free speech and the impact on people who earn income on the app. Some Senate Democrats have raised similar worries, as well as an interest in looking at a range of social-media issues at rival companies such as Meta Platforms.

"The basic idea should be to put curbs on all social media, not just one," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said Thursday. "If there's a problem with privacy, with how our children are treated, then we need to curb that behavior wherever it occurs."
Some context from the Columbia Journalism Review: Roughly one-third of Americans aged 18-29 regularly get their news from TikTok, the Pew Research Center found in a late 2023 survey. Nearly half of all TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app, a higher percentage than for any other social media platform aside from Twitter.

Almost 40 percent of young adults were using TikTok and Instagram for their primary Web search instead of the traditional search engines, a Google senior vice president said in mid-2022 — a number that's almost certainly grown since then. Overall, TikTok claims 150 million American users, almost half the US population; two-thirds of Americans aged 18-29 use the app.
Some U.S. politicians believe TikTok "radicalized" some of their supporters "with disinformation or biased reporting," according to the article.

Meanwhile in the Guardian, a Duke University law professor argues "this saga demands a broader conversation about safeguarding democracy in the digital age." The European Union's newly enacted AI act provides a blueprint for a more holistic approach, using an evidence- and risk-based system that could be used to classify platforms like TikTok as high-risk AI systems subject to more stringent regulatory oversight, with measures that demand transparency, accountability and defensive measures against misuse.
Open source advocate Evan Prodromou argues that the TikTok controversy raises a larger issue: If algorithmic curation is so powerful, "who's making the decisions on how they're used?" And he also proposes a solution.

"If there is concern about algorithms being manipulated by foreign governments, using Fediverse-enabled domestic software prevents the problem."

A Boeing 737-800 "was discovered to be missing an external panel" on the bottom of its fuselage, reports CNN, "after it landed in Medford, Oregon, Friday afternoon after taking off from San Francisco."

They stress that it's not a 737 Max, but the previous generation of Boeing aircraft. The plane carrying 145 passengers and crew landed safely and was parked at the gate at Rogue Valley International Medford Airport when a person on the ground first noticed the panel was missing, United Airlines said in a statement. The crew of Flight 433 did not declare an emergency and there was no indication of the damage during the flight, the airline said...

United said the missing panel did not affect the flying characteristics of the airplane...

Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport Director Amber Judd indicated to the Rogue Valley Times the aircraft is not in condition to fly and "will be here for a while." Judd added it is unclear where the missing panel is.

"They don't know where they lost it," Judd told the RV Times.
"The Federal Aviation Administration said it will investigate the incident."

Yahoo Finance notes that shares of Boeing "have declined over 30% in 2024."

When it comes to TikTok, "The Chinese government is signaling that it won't allow a forced sale..." reported the Wall Street Journal Friday, "limiting options for the app's owners as buyers begin lining up to bid for its U.S. operations..."

"They have also sent signals to TikTok's owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, that company executives have interpreted as meaning the government would rather the app be banned in the U.S. than be sold, according to people familiar with the matter."

But that's not always how it plays out. McClatchy notes that in 2019 the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. ordered Grindr's Chinese owners to relinquish control of Grindr. "A year later, the Chinese owners voluntarily complied and sold the company to San Vicente Acquisition, incorporated in Delaware, for around $608 million, according to Forbes."

And CNN reminds us that the world's most-populous country already banned TikTok more than three years ago: In June 2020, after a violent clash on the India-China border that left at least 20 Indian soldiers dead, the government in New Delhi suddenly banned TikTok and several other well-known Chinese apps. "It's important to remember that when India banned TikTok and multiple Chinese apps, the US was the first to praise the decision," said Nikhil Pahwa, the Delhi-based founder of tech website MediaNama. "[Former] US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had welcomed the ban, saying it 'will boost India's sovereignty.'"

While India's abrupt decision shocked the country's 200 million TikTok users, in the four years since, many have found other suitable alternatives. "The ban on Tiktok led to the creation of a multibillion dollar opportunity ... A 200 million user base needed somewhere to go," said Pahwa, adding that it was ultimately American tech companies that seized the moment with their new offerings... Within a week of the ban, Meta-owned Instagram cashed in by launching its TikTok copycat, Instagram Reels, in India. Google introduced its own short video offering, YouTube Shorts. Homegrown alternatives such as MX Taka Tak and Moj also began seeing a rise in popularity and an infux in funding. Those local startups soon fizzled out, however, unable to match the reach and financial firepower of the American firms, which are flourishing.
In fact, at the time India "announced a ban on more than 50 Chinese apps," remembers the Washington Post, adding that Nepal also announced a ban on TikTok late last year.

Their article points out that TikTok has also been banned by top EU policymaking bodies, while "Government staff in some of the bloc's 27 member states, including Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands, have also been told not to use TikTok on their work phones." Canada banned TikTok from all government-issued phones in February 2023, after similar steps in the United States and the European Union.... Britain announced a TikTok ban on government ministers' and civil servants' devices last year, with officials citing the security of state information. Australia banned TikTok from all federal government-owned devices last year after seeking advice from intelligence and security agencies.
A new EFF web page warns that America's new proposed ban on TikTok could also apply to apps like WeChat...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: When Romeo Chicco tried to get auto insurance in December, seven different companies rejected him. When he eventually obtained insurance, it was nearly double the rate he was previously paying. According to a federal complaint filed this week seeking class-action status, it was because his 2021 Cadillac XT6 had been spying on him. Modern cars have been called "smartphones with wheels," because they are connected to the internet and packed with sensors and cameras. According to the complaint, an agent at Liberty Mutual told Mr. Chicco that he had been rejected because of information in his "LexisNexis report." LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a data broker, has traditionally kept tabs for insurers on drivers' moving violations, prior insurance coverage and accidents.

When Mr. Chicco requested his LexisNexis file, it contained details about 258 trips he had taken in his Cadillac over the past six months. His file included the distance he had driven, when the trips started and ended, and an accounting of any speeding and hard braking or accelerating. The data had been provided by General Motors -- the manufacturer of his Cadillac. In a complaint against General Motors and LexisNexis Risk Solutions filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Mr. Chicco accused the companies of violation of privacy and consumer protection laws. The lawsuit follows a report by The New York Times that, unknown to consumers, automakers have been sharing information on their driving behavior with the insurance industry, resulting in increased insurance rates for some drivers.

Alex Koller reports via CNBC: Since the start of the year, more than 50,000 workers have been laid off from over 200 tech companies, according to tracking website Layoffs.fyi. It's a continuation of the predominant theme of 2023, when more than 260,000 workers across nearly 1,200 tech companies lost their jobs. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have all taken part in the downsizing this year, along with eBay, Unity Software, SAP and Cisco. Wall Street has largely cheered on the cost-cutting, sending many tech stocks to record highs on optimism that spending discipline coupled with efficiency gains from artificial intelligence will lead to rising profits. PayPal announced in January that it was eliminating 9% of its workforce, or about 2,500 jobs.

All told, 2023 was the second-biggest year of cuts on record in the technology sector, behind only the dot-com crash in 2001, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Not since the spectacular flameouts of Pets.com, eToys and Webvan have so many tech workers lost their jobs in such a short period of time. Last month's job cut count was the highest of any February since 2009, when the financial crisis forced companies into cash preservation mode.

CNBC spoke to a dozen people who have been laid off from tech jobs in the past year or so about their experiences navigating the labor market. Some spoke on the condition that CNBC not use their names or write about the details of their situation. Taken together, they paint a picture of an increasingly competitive market with job listings that include exacting requirements for qualification and come with lower pay than their prior gigs. It's a particularly confounding situation for software developers and data scientists, who just a couple of years ago had some of the most marketable and highly valued skills on the planet, and are now considering whether they need to exit the industry to find employment.

Days before Reddit's upcoming initial public offering (IPO), the company announced that the FTC has launched an inquiry into the company's licensing of user data to AI companies. Reddit says that it's "not surprised" by the FTC's inquiry, given the novel nature of these agreements. Axios reports: Reddit says it received a letter on Thursday, March 14, in which the FTC said it's "conducting a non-public inquiry focused on our sale, licensing, or sharing of user-generated content with third parties to train AI models." The FTC also is expected to request a meeting with Reddit, plus various documents and information. Reddit isn't the only company receiving these so-called "hold letters," according to a former FTC official who spoke with Axios on background.

The city council of Minneapolis on Thursday voted 10-3 to allow rideshare drivers to be paid the local minimum wage of $15.57 an hour, overriding the mayor's veto of the bill. As a result, Lyft and Uber said they will cease operations in the city. From a report: Lyft said in a statement the bill was "deeply flawed" and that the ordinance makes its "operations unsustainable." "We support a minimum earning standard for drivers, but it should be done in an honest way that keeps the service affordable for riders," said a Lyft spokesperson. Uber said in a statement obtained by CNN that it's "disappointed the council chose to ignore the data and kick Uber out of the Twin Cities, putting 10,000 people out of work and leaving many stranded."

The ordinance mandates rideshare drivers make at least $1.40 per mile and $0.51 per minute within Minneapolis. However, the analysis Frey referred to showed lower numbers -- $0.89 per mile and $0.49 per minute -- to make minimum wage. The mayor is imploring local politicians to come up with a solution before May 1. The rideshare services say that user prices would double if they stayed in the city.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a legal complaint against two companies based in Cyprus on Wednesday that it claims are behind a wave of malicious pop-ups that trick people into downloading a fake piece of antivirus software that generated tens of millions of dollars for its operators, according to court records. From a report: The scam also involved misrepresenting results on malware repository VirusTotal as infections on the user's own computer. (Update: after the publication of this piece the FTC announced that Restoro and Reimage will pay $26 million to settle the FTC's charges.)

The move is the latest from the FTC in a series of actions in the privacy and cybersecurity space. In January, the FTC banned a data broker called X-Mode from selling sensitive location data after I revealed it was harvesting location data from Muslim prayer and dating apps. In this case, the FTC says it went "undercover" against the two related companies, called Restoro and Reimage, to buy the deceiving software and have phone calls with company representatives. "Since at least January 2018, Defendants have operated a tech support scheme that has bilked tens of millions of dollars from consumers, particularly older consumers," the FTC's complaint reads. The complaint is seeking a permanent injunction against the two companies as well as monetary relief.

The Supreme Court clarified when public officials can block critical constituents from their personal profiles without violating their constitutional protections in a unanimous decision Friday. From a report: After hearing appeals of two conflicting rulings -- one filed against school board members in Southern California and another filed against the city manager of Port Huron, Mich. -- the justices provided no definitive resolution to the disputes and instead sent both cases back to lower courts to apply the new legal test. In a unanimous decision authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court said state officials cannot block constituents on their personal pages when they have "actual authority to speak on behalf of the State on a particular matter" and "purported to exercise that authority in the relevant posts."

"For social-media activity to constitute state action, an official must not only have state authority -- he must also purport to use it," Barrett wrote. The case marked the latest battle over public officials' social media presence when they mesh their official and personal roles. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard the Michigan case, sided with the city manager, James Freed, who deleted comments on his Facebook page left by a resident and blocked several of the resident's profiles. The resident, Kevin Lindke, had criticized Freed over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, court filings indicate.

The FCC passed new rules that will require cable and satellite providers to clearly disclose the "all in" price of subscriptions in promotional materials. From a report: "The advertised price for a service should be the price you pay when your bill arrives," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said. "It shouldn't include a bunch of unexpected junk fees that are separate from the top-line price you were told when you signed up."

Rosenworcel cited fees like "broadcast subscription" and "regional sports assessments." "It is not just annoying," she said. "It makes it hard for consumers to compare service in a market that is evolving and has so many new ways to watch." The new rules passed 3-2. Commissioners Brendan Carr and Nathan Simington voted against it. Rosenworcel has also proposed other measures aimed at "junk fees," while the White House has focused on the elimination or limitation of things like surcharges and late fees in areas like concert ticketing, airline reservations and banking.

Google enjoys a competitive edge in generative AI due to its trove of data and AI-optimised chips, Microsoft has told EU antitrust regulators, underscoring the rivalry between the two tech giants. From a report: The comments by Microsoft were in response to a consultation launched by the European Commission in January on the level of competition in generative AI. The growing popularity of generative AI, which can generate human-like responses to written prompts and is exemplified by Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's chatbot Gemini, has triggered concerns about misinformation and fake news.

"Today, only one company - Google - is vertically integrated in a manner that provides it with strength and independence at every AI layer from chips to a thriving mobile app store. Everyone else must rely on partnerships to innovate and compete," Microsoft said in its report to the Commission. It said Google's self-supply AI semiconductors would give it a competitive advantage for the years to come, while its large sets of proprietary data from Google Search Index and YouTube enabled it to train its large language model Gemini. "YouTube provides an unparalleled set of video content; it hosts an estimated 14 billion videos. Google has access to such content; but other AI developers do not," Microsoft said.

India will lower import taxes on certain electric vehicles for companies committing to invest at least $500 million and setting up a local manufacturing facility within three years, a policy shift that could potentially bolster Tesla's plans to enter the South Asian market. From a report: Companies must invest a minimum of $500 million in the country and will have three years to establish local manufacturing for EVs with at least 25% of components sourced domestically, according to a government press release on Friday. Firms meeting these requirements will be allowed to import 8,000 EVs a year at a reduced import duty of 15% on cars costing $35,000 and above. India currently levies a tax of 70% to 100% on imported cars depending on their value.

The policy change is likely going to pave the way for Tesla to enter India, as the Elon Musk-led company has been in talks with the government to lower import duties on its electric cars for years. The move also aligns with India's goal to boost the adoption of EVs and reduce its dependence on oil imports, with the country setting a target of achieving 30% electric car sales by 2030.

The Federal Communications Commission has voted to raise its Internet speed benchmark for the first time since January 2015, concluding that modern broadband service should provide at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds. From a report: An FCC press release after today's 3-2 vote said the 100Mbps/20Mbps benchmark "is based on the standards now used in multiple federal and state programs," such as those used to distribute funding to expand networks. The new benchmark also reflects "consumer usage patterns, and what is actually available from and marketed by Internet service providers," the FCC said.

The previous standard of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream lasted through the entire Trump era and most of President Biden's term. There has been a clear partisan divide on the speed standard, with Democrats pushing for a higher benchmark and Republicans arguing that it shouldn't be raised. The standard is partly symbolic but can indirectly impact potential FCC regulations. The FCC is required under US law to regularly evaluate whether "advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion" and to "take immediate action to accelerate deployment" and promote competition if current deployment is not "reasonable and timely."

Refund fraud groups are exploiting lenient refund policies, resulting in significant losses for retailers like Amazon and prompting civil lawsuits and arrests. The scheme has become so pervasive that groups now market their services on Reddit, TikTok and Telegram. CNBC reports: Fraud groups are taking advantage of retailers' lenient return policies, experts told CNBC, which often include unlimited free returns and sometimes even a preference that customers keep the items. It's ballooned into a massive problem for retailers, costing them more than $101 billion last year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail. The figure includes multiple forms of fraud, such as sending back clothing after it's been worn, known as "wardrobing," and returning shoplifted merchandise, the survey said.

In December, Amazon filed a lawsuit against Page and 47 other people across the globe with alleged ties to Rekk, accusing them of conspiring to steal millions of dollars worth of products in a refund fraud operation. Amazon described these services as "illegitimate 'businesses'" that look to "exploit the refund process for their own financial gain to the detriment of honest consumers and retailers who must bear the brunt of increased costs, decreased inventory, and service disruption that impacts genuine customers." An Amazon spokesperson said the company is addressing the issue "head on" through specialized teams and machine learning tools that detect and prevent refund fraud.

Here's how it works: A shopper buys a product online and sends the order information to a group such as Rekk, which then poses as the customer in requesting a refund. Amazon refunds the money to the customer, who then pays the fraud group usually between 15% and 30% of the refund amount, often via PayPal or with bitcoin. That means the customer ends up buying the product for what amounts to a huge discount. The fraud group then pays the conspiring employee at the retailer, typically a certain amount for a batch of packages the employee scans as returned.

Google announced a major change to its Safe Browsing feature in Chrome today that will make the service work in real time by checking against a server-side list -- all without sharing your browsing habits with Google. From a report: Previously, Chrome downloaded a list of known sites that harbor malware, unwanted software and phishing scams once or twice per hour. Now, Chrome will move to a system that will send the URLs you are visiting to its servers and check against a rapidly updated list there. The advantage of this is that it doesn't take up to an hour to get an updated list because, as Google notes, the average malicious site doesn't exist for more than 10 minutes.

The company claims that this new server-side system can catch up to 25 percent more phishing attacks than using local lists. These local lists have also grown in size, putting more of a strain on low-end machines and low-bandwidth connections. Google is rolling out this new system to desktop and iOS users now, with Android support coming later this month.

Damage to at least three subsea cables off the west coast of Africa is disrupting internet services across the continent. From a report: The West Africa Cable System, MainOne and ACE sea cables -- arteries for telecommunications data -- were all affected on Thursday, triggering outages and connectivity issues for mobile operators and internet service providers, according to data from internet analysis firms including NetBlocks, Kentik and Cloudflare. The cause of the cable faults has not yet been determined.

Data show a major disruption to connectivity in eight West African countries, with Ivory Coast, Liberia and Benin being the most affected, NetBlocks, an internet watchdog, said in a post on X. Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon are among other countries impacted. Several companies have also reported service disruptions in South Africa. "This is a devastating blow to internet connectivity along the west coast of Africa, which will be operating in a degraded state for weeks to come," said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis firm Kentik. The cable faults off the Ivory Coast come less than a month after three telecommunications cables were severed in the Red Sea, highlighting the vulnerability of critical communications infrastructure.

Longtime Slashdot reader ahbond shares a report from VentureBeat: Today, Cognition, a recently formed AI startup backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and tech industry leaders including former Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu, announced a fully autonomous AI software engineer called "Devin." While there are multiple coding assistants out there, including the famous Github Copilot, Devin is said to stand out from the crowd with its ability to handle entire development projects end-to-end, right from writing the code and fixing the bugs associated with it to final execution. This is the first offering of this kind and even capable of handling projects on Upwork, the startup has demonstrated. [...]

In a blog post today on Cognition's website, Scott Wu, the founder and CEO of Cognition and an award-winning sports coder, explained Devin can access common developer tools, including its own shell, code editor and browser, within a sandboxed compute environment to plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions. The human user simply types a natural language prompt into Devin's chatbot style interface, and the AI software engineer takes it from there, developing a detailed, step-by-step plan to tackle the problem. It then begins the project using its developer tools, just like how a human would use them, writing its own code, fixing issues, testing and reporting on its progress in real-time, allowing the user to keep an eye on everything as it works. [...]

According to demos shared by Wu, Devin is capable of handling a range of tasks in its current form. This includes common engineering projects like deploying and improving apps/websites end-to-end and finding and fixing bugs in codebases to more complex things like setting up fine-tuning for a large language model using the link to a research repository on GitHub or learning how to use unfamiliar technologies. In one case, it learned from a blog post how to run the code to produce images with concealed messages. Meanwhile, in another, it handled an Upwork project to run a computer vision model by writing and debugging the code for it. In the SWE-bench test, which challenges AI assistants with GitHub issues from real-world open-source projects, the AI software engineer was able to correctly resolve 13.86% of the cases end-to-end -- without any assistance from humans. In comparison, Claude 2 could resolve just 4.80% while SWE-Llama-13b and GPT-4 could handle 3.97% and 1.74% of the issues, respectively. All these models even required assistance, where they were told which file had to be fixed. Currently, Devin is available only to a select few customers. Bloomberg journalist Ashlee Vance wrote a piece about his experience using it here.

"The Doom of Man is at hand," captions Slashdot reader ahbond. "It will start with the low-hanging Jira tickets, and in a year or two, able to handle 99% of them. In the short term, software engineers may become like bot farmers, herding 10-1000 bots writing code, etc. Welcome to the future."

Last month, the only known surviving copy of 32-bit OS/2 from Microsoft was purchased for $650. "Now, two of the internet's experts in getting early PC operating systems running today have managed to fire it up, and you can see the results," reports The Register. From the report: Why such interest in this nearly third-of-a-century old, unreleased OS? Because this is the way the PC industry very nearly went. This SDK came out in June 1990, just one month after Windows 3.0. If 32-bit OS/2 had launched as planned, Windows 3 would have been the last version before it was absorbed into OS/2 and disappeared. There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone, no fondleslabs. Twenty-first century computers would be unimaginably different. The surprise here is that we can see a glimpse of this world that never happened. The discovery of this pre-release OS shows how very nearly ready it was in 1990. IBM didn't release its solo version until April 1992, the same month as Windows 3.1 -- but now, we can see it was nearly ready two years earlier.

That's why Michal Necasek of the OS/2 Museum called his look The Future That Never Was. He uncovered a couple of significant bugs, but more impressively, he found workarounds for both, and got both features working fine. OS/2 2 could run multiple DOS VMs at once, but in the preview, they wouldn't open -- due to use of an undocumented instruction which Intel did implement in the Pentium MMX and later processors. Secondly, the bundled network client wouldn't install -- but removing a single file got that working fine. That alone is a significant difference between Microsoft's OS/2 2.0 and IBM's version: Big Blue didn't include networking until Warp Connect 3 in 1995.

His verdict: "The 6.78 build of OS/2 2.0 feels surprisingly stable and complete. The cover letter that came with the SDK stressed that Microsoft developers had been using the OS/2 pre-release for day-to-day work." Over at Virtually Fun, Neozeed also took an actual look at Microsoft OS/2 2.0, carefully recreating that screenshot from PC Magazine in May 1990. He even managed to get some Windows 2 programs running, although this preview release did not yet have a Windows subsystem. On his Internet Archive page, he has disk images and downloadable virtual machines so that you can run this yourself under VMware or 86Box.