Microsoft is laying off about 4,800 employees, including 1,600 from Xbox, as it restructures around AI investments and tries to reset its struggling gaming business. "Our business is changing because the world around it is changing. The way technology is built, deployed, and used is transforming faster than at any point in my time here," said Amy Coleman, EVP and chief people officer at Microsoft. "Our customers' needs are shifting, the business models that serve them are shifting, and that means the work itself -- what we do, where we focus, and how we're organized -- has to transform too." She continued: "Companies don't get to choose whether their industry changes; they only get to choose whether they change with it. That means we will need to adjust resources and roles and shift how we operate so we can have the greatest impact for our customers." TechCrunch reports: Coleman stressed that the roles being eliminated today "are not being replaced by AI," but noted, "what is true is that AI is changing how work gets done." "Some of the tasks we do every day can now be automated, and that means we all need to keep learning, keep building new skills, and keep adapting as the work evolves," Coleman wrote. [...] Speaking about the Xbox layoffs, Coleman said little: "We are restructuring to position the business for long-term success. Engineering teams across the company will also evolve their structure and priorities to meet customer needs and innovate for the future."

Of today's 4,800 layoffs at Microsoft, 1,600 will hit Xbox, with about 3,200 cuts in total expected through fiscal year 2027, according to Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox. In an email she sent to employees on Monday, Sharma called this "the most significant restructure in Xbox history." "Our business today is not healthy," Sharma wrote. "We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses." She added that Xbox made bets like its monthly subscription service Game Pass, alongside moves to grow its portfolio of content and invest in multi-platform, among other attempts to breathe life into the business. None of those strategies grew at the expected pace, leading to the core business weakening even as Xbox added more teams and investment. "And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history," Sharma said. "We must reset Xbox."

As part of the shift, Microsoft will transition four of its gaming studios to operate under new management, ensuring preservation of intellectual property and ongoing projects. Specifically Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions will return to independent studios, according to Sharma. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs are coming under new ownership with funding to complete and grow some of their more popular games. According to Sharma's memo, Xbox is also flattening management hard, cutting the current 14 management layers to no more than five, but ideally three. As part of this major organization redesign, Xbox is making longtime executive Helen Chiang chief operating officer with end-to-end profit and loss authority across content, hardware, platform, and services. Xbox's restructuring plan centers around narrowing focus by dropping sprawling creative bets that don't produce platform-scale returns, and instead homing in on core strategic pillars like Mojang and King, the businesses behind Minecraft and Candy Crush.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Democratic candidate for Senate, who has faced series of scandals, denies allegation reported by Politico

A woman has accused Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for US Senate in Maine, of sexual assault, according to an exclusive report by Politico.

Jenny Racicot, 41, dated the oyster farmer former marine veteran and alleges he forced her to have sex despite repeated objections.

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Despite ‘a setback that will hurt for eternity’, the co-hosts exit with heads held high after bringing pride, passion and soul

On Monday music pulsated from some of the bars on Calle Genova, a narrow thoroughfare in Mexico City’s heart that rarely lives in silence. The clock was yet to strike 11am, but, spilling out on to the street, a healthy crowd of patrons were picking up where they had left off. Perhaps they had never stopped at all. National team shirts were on full display and, had anyone lived under a news blackout for 15 hours, they may have drawn a wildly different conclusion about the previous night’s events.

The truth was more evident to anyone who, upon returning from Estadio Azteca, made a beeline for Paseo de la Reforma. Long after Mexico’s last-16 victory over Ecuador this vast boulevard had been teeming, an affirmative national moment bringing 1.4 million people on to the streets. But it was virtually empty three and a half hours after England had shattered the dreams of El Tri, the clean-up operation from the evening’s mass screening already in full swing and remaining revellers confined to the sidestreets.

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MeFi's own Maciej Cegłowski (Pinboard, Idle Words) has a new Substack newsletter, Mars For The Rest of Us, where he investigates "the prospects and practicalities of exploring Mars in our lifetime." He's a Mars skeptic in a field full of (rocket) boosters, digging into the human physiology and life support problems that need to be solved before humans can make the years-long journey to Mars. This includes serious investigation about space toilets, Italy's quest to make a decent espresso in space, and how antiperspirant fumes nearly triggered an ISS evacuation.

(Many of the posts are partially behind a newsletter paywall, but there's lots of great free space nerd content.)

m01229 has added a photo to the pool:

Tokyo, Japan - April 14, 2026: Store advertising second-hand kimonos for sale in Kannon-dori shopping street in Tokyo Asakusa district

m01229 has added a photo to the pool:

Tokyo, Japan - April 14, 2026: Tourist women dressed in kimonos play gachapon machines in Asakusa district

Just dropped a couple of days ago: Lane 8’s Summer 2026 Mixtape (4 hours long). Also available on Soundcloud.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Fusion energy has presented a tantalizing alternative to fossil fuels for the better part of a century, but creating the equivalent of a human-made sun is easier said than done. However, new research from the boffins at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Cleveland Clinic, and IBM in support of the Department of Energy’s (DoE) Genesis Mission suggests quantum computers and perhaps a sprinkle of AI could be what the world needs to get fusion power running at scale. Specifically, researchers are looking to quantum processing units (QPUs), like those built by IBM, to find optimal materials to extract the tritium fuel required by some of the most promising reactor designs. On Earth, tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope with one proton and two neutrons, is fleetingly rare. Before we can harness fusion to produce energy at scale, we need to figure out a way to mass produce the stuff. According to researchers, molten salts containing a mixture of fluorine, lithium, and beryllium (FLiBe), are one of the more promising candidates for extracting tritium for use in fusion reactors. The idea is that these molten salts, which have historically been used in experimental fission reactors as a coolant, function as a breeder environment for tritium. The trick, as you might expect, is predicting the electronic ground-state energies of FLiBe molecular clusters to better understand how they bind tritium. This is no easy task. These calculations are extremely computationally expensive and prone to error. But as it happens, one of the applications quantum computers have shown the most promise with is optimization and computational chemistry problems. Developing the quantum algorithms necessary to do this isn't easy, but researchers won't stop trying to solve it. As it turns out, the same techniques used by the Cleveland Clinic to simulate 12,635-atom proteins can be applied to FLiBe sims. The process involves using QPUs as an accelerator, similar to how GPUs are used in supercomputers and AI clusters today to perform calculations not easily performed on conventional hardware. In a blog post, IBM explains that parts of the problem are broken down into quantum circuits which can be solved by the QPU. “This allowed the team to more precisely determine the electronic structure of the material and how its atoms behave, particularly how strongly they bind tritium at the fundamental molecular level.” By combining CPUs, GPUs, and QPUs, the researchers say they were able to identify nine potential cluster configurations for producing the tritium fuel needed by fusion reactor designs. “These results add to mounting evidence that quantum-centric supercomputing is now a practical scientific tool for problems that have long challenged chemists, engineers, and materials scientists,” Jerry Chow, CTO of quantum-centric supercomputing at IBM, said in a statement. While quantum computing may show promise, this isn’t a silver bullet to realizing the potential of fusion power. Despite the progress made in recent years toward the development of a self-sustaining fusion reactor, it seems we’ve still got a ways to go. ®