Tighter ties with the mainland have not always helped.

If you listen to the AI industry, coders' days are numbered. Despite these concerns, software developers, at least those with experience, appear to be doing just fine at growing companies. Hiring biz Levels.fyi recently looked at how US compensation for software engineers (SWEs) is related to changes in headcount and found that salary level tends to be correlated with growth. "Generally, the companies paying the most are also the ones still hiring the most," observed Hakeem Shibly, content marketing manager for Levels.fyi, in a LinkedIn post. As an example, he pointed to companies like Anthropic and OpenAI where senior SWE offers are said to be around $810,000 and $605,000 annually. Several large companies with major investments in AI infrastructure occupy a different statistical space – they're still paying well and generating healthy profits, but they're also cutting staff. "Meta, Amazon, Google, and Coinbase all pay near the top of the market, and all four have cut staff in the last two years," said Shibly. In the least desirable quadrant, where eroding headcount meets lower relative compensation, we find companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce, where AI expenditures and AI liabilities appear to be taking a toll on hiring and compensation. "At certain companies like Block, for example, they did announce in their layoffs that it was specifically because they're increasing their investment in AI and they're cutting people from their organization," Shibly told The Register. "But, at other companies, it's a little bit more ambiguous. They're not necessarily saying that in their layoff announcements. But there has been some correlation – companies that have been spending more money on their AI compute, their AI investment, have been cutting heads as well, even though they're increasing in revenue." As this applies to SWEs, Shibly said, "There's been a bifurcation in the market where the people who are getting paid the most are getting paid much more than they used to be. And the people who are below some certain threshold … they're getting cut and it's harder for them than ever to find jobs." That hasn't been the case in Australia, where technology services firm Adaca last month said that demand for software developers has been growing. The biz reported that there are now 216,000 software and application programmers working in Australia, up from 189,000 in 2025. "We are seeing devs displaced, not replaced," said Adaca founder Lambros Photios in a statement. "They are leaving big tech and finding work anywhere and everywhere else." Looking beyond just SWEs, recent data from Ramp and Revelio suggests AI leads companies to hire more people over time. "If I were a software engineer in this market," said Shibly, "I would prioritize looking for a job at a company that is growing, even if it might not be paying as much, because at least for me personally, I want to be guaranteed that job [will still exist] a couple years down the line. And that's kind of what the data shows." ®

If you can't afford a graphics card these days, here's an alternative solution. Just order thousands of microcontrollers, design your own boards, and build your own cluster over the course of six months after dealing with a healthy dose of setbacks. At the end of it, you might even have something able to light up the equivalent of a QVGA display with a whopping resolution of 320x200 for your efforts and, as electrical engineering and software development YouTuber bitluni said of his creation, nearly the loss of your sanity. Describing his homebrewed GPU cluster as his “nemesis,” bitluni didn’t even intend to build the device, which was designed around 8,192 $0.13 CH570 RISC-V MCUs connected to custom-designed PCBs and controlled by another 256 larger cores with FPUs. The six-month saga actually began after bitluni published a video last year detailing his original homemade GPU, which led to PCB design software firm Altium reaching out about partnering for a project. “The clusters I made before were already challenging my sanity,” bitluni explained in the cluster video he published over the weekend. “I thought I was done with the topic, but the budget and these tools would allow for a cluster of a different magnitude, and the magnitude I had in mind was just insane.” Each one of the CH570 chips bitluni acquired for the project (which he had to go directly to the manufacturer to get) runs at 100 MHz with 12 KB of SRAM, and his six-layer PCB design incorporates 32 rows of 32 chips - at least at first. When he tried to order his “blades” from his PCB manufacturer, the company’s website simply couldn’t process the request because they were so ridiculously complicated. That meant having to split each blade into two pieces, and it also meant that the full design hasn’t been realized yet - according to the video, the next version (which bitluni said he already has the parts for) will have a whopping 32,000 MCUs on it instead of the measly 8,192 version one boasts. Before he got to the completion point, there was troubleshooting to handle, though. When he received the first test blade, several of the MCUs wouldn’t work, or would only function intermittently, requiring a complete redesign, relocating traces in order to avoid interference - and several weeks of waiting to get the replacements. When the replacement test boards arrived, he had another problem: level 0 wouldn’t communicate with level 1 because he crossed his MOSI and MISO lines in the design, sending input into the output channel, and vice versa. “No matter how hard you try, you will get rx and tx wrong on the first try,” bitluni said in the video. He bypassed the error on the few sample boards he received, but the rest were correctly built. At the end of the day, the whole thing worked, including all of the individually connected RGB LEDs associated with each individually programmable MCU that serves as its QVGA equivalent. As for what v1 is capable of, bitluni said he’s planning to share that in his next video on the project, which is when he’ll also release all the design files for the project for anyone insane enough to attempt this themselves. We reached out to bitluni for additional information about his DIY GPU cluster, but didn’t hear back. ®

We try to teach our children to follow the rules. Now an American president has chosen the opposite tack

I’m rooting for the US as we take on Belgium today in Seattle for a place in the World Cup quarterfinals.

But the game isn’t what it was – before Trump asked the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, to review the suspension of the US’s top scorer, striker Folarin Balogun, who got a red card in a match against Bosnia and Herzegovina and would otherwise have been suspended from Monday’s match.

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• Briton beats fellow wildcard 7-5, 3-6, 4-6, 6-4, 7-6 (7)

• Fery will play No 9 seed Flavio Cobolli in quarter-finals

Nearly four hours into the most significant occasion of his career, deep into a fifth‑set tie-break against a storied opponent he has spent his lifetime watching, what did Arthur Fery have left for both himself and the home crowd on his Centre Court debut? Plenty. At six points all, after a change of ends that provided him with so much time to overthink everything, he stepped up to the baseline and fired an ace down the T.

It took courage for Fery to go toe‑to‑toe with one of the top players for most of the past decade, a former world No 3, and emerge with a victory that will define his career for years to come. After twice trailing by a break in the fourth set, and appearing en route to certain defeat, Fery recovered to close out an astonishing 7-5, 3-6, 4-6, 6-4, 7-6 (7) win against Grigor Dimitrov in the battle of two wildcards to catapult him into the quarter-finals of a grand slam tournament for the first time, where he will face the No 9 seed, Flavio Cobolli.

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Andrea Shaw and husband appeared on RFK Jr-linked podcast after deaths in May last year of 18-month-olds

An Idaho mother who said her 18-month-old twins died last year after receiving three vaccines has been charged with murder in their deaths, officials said last week.

Andrea Shaw, 23, was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her toddlers, Tyson and Dallas, who were found dead in a shared bed on 1 May last year.

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Nintendo will stop selling the original Switch in Europe in mid-February 2027, nearly 10 years after the console's launch. In its place, the company will release updated versions of the Switch 2 and several controllers with user-replaceable batteries to comply with new EU regulations. The Verge reports: The news comes as Nintendo is making a bunch of changes to the rest of its lineup due to EU regulations requiring user-replaceable batteries. Starting this summer, the company says it will start introducing updated versions of various devices on "a rolling basis," ahead of the regulations coming into effect on February 18th, 2027. "There is no difference in functionality between current products and revised products containing user-replaceable batteries," Nintendo says.

The Switch 2 is the most notable product being updated -- the new version is expected to start rolling out in the fall -- but there will also be versions of the Joy-Con controllers, Joy-Con 2, Switch 2 Pro Controller, and N64 and GameCube Switch controllers with user-replaceable batteries. "Due to a variety of factors, revised products may not become available in all European countries simultaneously," Nintendo notes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CARACAS (ANP/AFP) - Het dodental van de recente aardbevingen in Venezuela is opgelopen tot 3535, aldus de autoriteiten. Op 24 juni werd het noorden van het Zuid-Amerikaanse land getroffen door twee bevingen vlak na elkaar met een kracht van 7.2 en 7.5. Vooral de noordelijke kustregio La Guaira werd zwaar getroffen.

Er zijn 16.740 gewonden gevallen. De autoriteiten zeggen niets over het aantal nog steeds vermiste mensen. Dat zijn er volgens waarnemers vele duizenden en zou in de tienduizenden kunnen lopen.

Officieel zijn er 856 panden volledig verwoest. Meer dan 17.000 mensen zijn dakloos geworden.

Christine_S. has added a photo to the pool:

*carl zeiss ultron 50mm f1.8*