Apple and Intel have reportedly reached a preliminary agreement (paywalled; alternative source) for Intel to manufacture some chips used in Apple devices, after more than a year of talks and pressure from the Trump administration. It's still unclear which Apple products would use Intel-made chips, but the deal would mark a major potential win for Intel's foundry ambitions and give Apple another manufacturing option beyond TSMC.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Skyrocketing hard drive and storage costs caused by the AI data center boom are making it more expensive and more difficult for digital archivists, academics, Wikipedia, and hobby data hoarders to save data and archive the internet. Specific drives favored by some high profile organizations like the Internet Archive have become far more expensive or are difficult to find at all, archivists said. Over the last several months, prices for both consumer level and enterprise solid state drives, hard drives, and other types of storage have skyrocketed. As an example, a 2TB external Samsung SSD I purchased last fall for $159 now costs $575. PC Part Picker, a website that tracks the average price of different types of drives, shows a universal increase in storage prices starting in about October of last year. Prices of many of the drives it tracks have doubled or increased by more than 150 percent, and at some stores SSDs and hard drives are simply sold out. There is now even a secondary market for some SSDs, with people scalping them on eBay and elsewhere.

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, the most important archiving projects in the history of the internet, told 404 Media that the skyrocketing costs of storage is "a very real issue costing us time and money." "We have found that the preferred 28-30TB drives are just not available or at very high price," Kahle said. "We gather over 100 terabytes of new materials each day, and we have over 210 Petabytes of materials already archived on machines that need continuous upgrades and maintenance, so we need to constantly get new hard drives."
"We are fortunate to have an active community that donates to the Archive, and we are also looking for help from hard drive manufacturers in these difficult times. We are always looking for more help," he added. "So far we have ways to work around these shortages, but it is a very real issue causing us time and money."

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and various other projects, including Wikimedia Commons, an open repository of royalty free media, told 404 Media that the cost of storage has become a concern for the foundation's projects as well. "With over 65 million articles on Wikipedia alone, access to server and storage capacity is vital to us. We've certainly seen price increases since the end of 2025. These price increases are of concern to us, as with every other player in the industry. We see the primary impact in the purchase of memory and hard drives but also in terms of lead times on server deliveries and our capacity to place future orders," a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told us. "The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit, and as such how we allocate budget is very carefully considered. We maintain our own data centers to serve our users from all over the world. We're putting workarounds in place where we can, mainly involving being smart with how we prioritize investment in hardware, building in flexibility as well as extending the life of existing hardware where possible."

Western Digital, one of the largest manufacturers of hard drives and other storage systems, said that it has essentially sold out of its 2026 inventory to enterprise clients, many of which run data centers. Micron, which made RAM and SSDs under the brand name Crucial, has exited the consumer market altogether because "AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader couchslug shares a report from That Privacy Guy's Alexander Hanff: Two weeks ago I wrote about Anthropic silently registering a Native Messaging bridge in seven Chromium-based browsers on every machine where Claude Desktop was installed. The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration into the user's installs of products B, C, D, E, F, G, H without asking. Reach across vendor trust boundaries. No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually, every time Claude Desktop is launched. This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google.

Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it. The legal analysis is the same one I gave for the Anthropic case. The environmental analysis is new. At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tons of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push. That is the environmental cost of one company unilaterally deciding that two billion peoples' default browser will mass-distribute a 4GB binary they did not request.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s the Royal Albert Hall birthday party for Britain’s most beloved broadcaster. Which big names will do the speeches? What will the orchestra play? And will it all be overshadowed by the great man’s TV clips? Follow along here

While we wait for the show to begin, allow me to offer you some links to some of our recent David Attenborough coverage.

Here’s our tribute to the man’s birthday, hilariously including the insinuation that he probably would have just preferred to stay at home today

Continue reading...

US president says on Truth Social the ceasefire will include suspension of all ‘kinetic activity’ and prisoner swap

Donald Trump has announced on social media that there will be a three-day ceasefire in the war between Russia and Ukraine from 9 to 11 May.

The US president said the ceasefire would include a suspension of all “kinetic activity” and a swap of 1,000 prisoners from each country.

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In tegenstelling tot wat eerder op de dag werd gedacht, is er toch geen wolf gezien in Barendrecht. Dat meldt BIJ12, de organisatie die namens de provincies de wolvenpopulatie in de gaten houdt. Er is een vergissing gemaakt. De melder komt namelijk uit Barendrecht.

Een imam van een moskee in Maassluis is vrijdagavond lichtgewond geraakt bij een steekincident aan de Van Beethovenlaan. Dat bevestigt de politie. Het slachtoffer is voor controle naar het ziekenhuis gebracht.

ROME (ANP) - Tennisser Tallon Griekspoor heeft zich bij het masterstoernooi van Rome niet geplaatst voor de derde ronde. De Belg Alexander Blockx, de nummer 36 van de wereldranglijst, was in drie sets te sterk voor de Nederlander: 6-7 (5) 6-3 6-4.

Griekspoor, zelf de nummer 31 van de wereld, won de eerste set in een tiebreak, maar moest daarna zijn meerdere erkennen in de Belg die in vorm is. Op het masterstoernooi van Madrid bereikte Blockx de halve finale door te winnen van onder meer titelverdediger Casper Ruud en top 10-speler Felix Auger-Aliassime.

Eerder op vrijdag slaagde Botic van de Zandschulp er wel in om zich te plaatsen voor de derde ronde. Hij versloeg de Amerikaanse lucky loser Aleksandar Kovacevic en treft Karen Khachanov in de derde ronde.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De Nederlandse opvarenden van het cruiseschip Hondius gaan nadat zij gerepatrieerd zijn zes weken in thuisquarantaine. Dat meldt minister Sophie Hermans (Volksgezondheid, VVD) in een brief aan de Tweede Kamer. Onder de circa 150 bemanningsleden en passagiers van het schip, dat nu op weg is naar de Canarische Eilanden, zijn op dit moment geen mensen met symptomen van het hantavirus. Dat virus heeft al aan drie opvarenden het leven gekost.

De quarantainemaatregel wordt genomen op advies van gezondheidsinstituut RIVM. Om dat mogelijk te maken wordt de zogenoemde andesvariant van het hantavirus toegevoegd aan de groep A2 van infectieziekten, waarvoor een meldplicht bij de GGD geldt. Voor een A1-aanwijzing - zoals bij het coronavirus - komt de ziekte niet in aanmerking, omdat het volgens het RIVM onwaarschijnlijk is dat die tot een pandemie leidt.

Reden om dit andesvirus in een hogere categorie in te schalen, is het ernstige verloop van de ziekte. Tussen de 20 en 35 procent van de patiënten komt te overlijden.

Omdat de Hondius onder Nederlandse vlag vaart, is het mogelijk dat ook opvarenden met andere nationaliteiten tijdelijk in Nederland worden opgevangen. Ook deze mensen gaan zes weken in quarantaine. "Het RIVM geeft aan dat een dergelijke opvang te realiseren is", schrijft Hermans.

Someone in a private forum I belong to mentioned fountain pens and thus I became acquainted with the role of a nibmeister, a person who can remake the nib of your pen more to your liking (different angle, better flow, etc).

Sepultura neemt, een paar jaar lang, uitgebreid de tijd voor hun afscheidstournee genaamd ‘Celebrating Life Through Death’. Tussen het spelen door, en om hun nieuwe drummer Greyson Nekrutman de kans te geven wat nieuwe muziek met de band te maken, heeft de band een E.P.-tje gemaakt: The Cloud of Unknowing. En jajaja, ik snap heus wel de logica van ‘op je hoogtepunt stoppen’* enzo, maar na het fantastische Quadra, en nu dit, vraag je je toch af hoeveel mooie muziek er nog in het vat had gezeten als ze nog een paar jaar door waren gegaan.

 

*Los van de vraag wanneer dat precies was, want dat kan bij deze band nogal wat discussie oproepen.

Exporting Apple Health data results in massive, messy XML files that are difficult to process. By using a "streaming" parser to filter specific LOINC codes and extracting GPS kinematics from GPX files, I converted 300MB of raw records into clean CSVs. This structured data is now ready to be fed into a custom machine learning model to reverse-engineer VO2 Max.

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SergioQ79 - Osanpo Photographer - has added a photo to the pool:

Nagoya, sera e pioggia.
Un izakaya anonimo, una bicicletta parcheggiata davanti, una lanterna rossa e tende consumate dall’umidità.
Niente invita davvero a entrare, e forse è proprio questo il punto.
Un posto normale, fatto per mangiare qualcosa, bere una birra e tornare a casa senza fare rumore.

雨の名古屋。
目立たない居酒屋、止まった自転車、赤い提灯、湿気で少し疲れた暖簾。
特別な店ではない。でもそこがいい。
何かを食べて、ビールを飲んで、静かに帰るための普通の場所。

Nagoya, rainy evening.
An anonymous izakaya, a bicycle parked outside, a red lantern and curtains worn down by humidity.
Nothing really tries to pull you in, and maybe that’s the point.
Just a normal place to eat something, drink a beer and quietly head home.

SergioQ79 - Osanpo Photographer - posted a photo:

Nagoya, sera e pioggia.
Un izakaya anonimo, una bicicletta parcheggiata davanti, una lanterna rossa e tende consumate dall’umidità.
Niente invita davvero a entrare, e forse è proprio questo il punto.
Un posto normale, fatto per mangiare qualcosa, bere una birra e tornare a casa senza fare rumore.

雨の名古屋。
目立たない居酒屋、止まった自転車、赤い提灯、湿気で少し疲れた暖簾。
特別な店ではない。でもそこがいい。
何かを食べて、ビールを飲んで、静かに帰るための普通の場所。

Nagoya, rainy evening.
An anonymous izakaya, a bicycle parked outside, a red lantern and curtains worn down by humidity.
Nothing really tries to pull you in, and maybe that’s the point.
Just a normal place to eat something, drink a beer and quietly head home.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

The deal, which Trump first announced on Truth Social, will pause fighting from May 9 through May 11 and include a prisoner swap.

Pete ‘Bono’ Bonnington, Kimi Antonelli’s race engineer at Mercedes, has received praise from team boss Toto Wolff for how he has handled working with the youngster.