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Steven Spielberg directed his last Jurassic Park movie nearly 30 years ago, notes ScreenRant. But the 79-year-old filmmaker now brings us The Dinosaurs, a four-part documentary on Netflix where he's executive producer: The first few reviews are in, and the results lead to a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. It's worth noting that the rating will likely fluctuate since there are only six reviews. So far, critics all agree that the new Netflix docuseries is a breathtaking visual of history's most majestic creatures, and Morgan Freeman's soothing narration elevates the experience. Most importantly, the reviews note that the story is intimate, making the dinosaurs feel real with their personalities. "Audience" reviewers gave it a lower score of 67%. "There is a sense of drama and emotional weight which permeates through the entire series as it tells the story of the dinosaurs from start to the present day. The ending brought tears to my eyes..." "Wow, what a sleeper! Flat graphics, looks like video game animations. Unrelatable story lines. Don't waste your time. Honestly would you even look twice if Spielberg's name wasn't on it?" "This show was honestly incredible... It was a 10/10 series that I absolutely adored highly recommended to anyone who loves and has an interest of the ancient world." "I'm sorry, but the dinos of Prehistoric Planet are far superior, and were achieved on a much smaller budget. Their dinos look absolutely real, and you are convinced you're watching a documentary with real animals" ScreenRant notes Netflix's debut of The Dinosaurs' "aligns perfectly" with the arrival of all four Jurassic World movies on Netflix, where they're already dominating Netflix's "Top 10" charts for the U.S. "Witness the rise and the fall of nature's greatest empire," narrator Morgan Freeman says in the trailer...

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NASA heralded a new study published Friday documenting a first for humanity — "the first time a human-made object has measurably altered the path of a celestial body around the Sun." It was 2022's DART mission where NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid — and the experiment "could have implications for protecting Earth from future asteroid strikes," writes ScienceNews: A spacecraft slowed the orbit of a pair of asteroids around the sun by more than 10 micrometers per second... Within a month, researchers showed that the impact shortened Dimorphos' 12-hour orbit by 32 minutes. Some of the rocks knocked off of Dimorphos fled the vicinity completely, escaping the gravitational influence of the Dimorphos-Didymos pair, says planetary defense researcher Rahil Makadia of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Those rocky runaways took some momentum away from the duo and changed their joint motion around the sun. To figure out how much that motion was affected, astronomers watched the asteroids pass in front of distant stars, dimming some of the stars' light like a tiny eclipse. These blinks, called stellar occultations, can be visible from anywhere on Earth and are predictable in advance... Calculating how far off occultation timings were from predictions revealed that the asteroids' orbit around the sun was about 150 milliseconds slower than before the DART impact... Didymos and Dimorphos are not a threat to Earth, Makadia says, and weren't before DART. But knowing how a deliberate impact changes one asteroid's orbit can help make defense plans against another, "in case we need to do a kinetic impact for real." The researchers spent nearly two and a half years to collect 22 measurements of the asteroid's post-crash position, relying on amateur astronomers "to go out into the middle of nowhere and observe the necessary stellar occultations," acvcording to their paper. Planetary defense researcher even tells ScienceNews "There was an observer who drove two days each way into the Australian outback to get these measurements."

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Long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 shared this report from Agence France-Presse: Japan has approved ground-breaking stem-cell treatments for Parkinson's and severe heart failure, one of the manufacturers and media reports said Friday, with the therapies expected to reach patients within months. Pharmaceutical company Sumitomo Pharma said it received the green light for the manufacture and sale of Amchepry, its Parkinson's disease treatment that transplants stem cells into a patient's brain. Japan's health ministry also gave the go-ahead to ReHeart, heart muscle sheets developed by medical startup Cuorips that can help form new blood vessels and restore heart function, media reports said. The treatments could be on the market and rolled out to patients as early as this summer, reports said, citing the health ministry, becoming the world's first commercially available medical products using induced pluripotent stem cells... In a statement, Sumitomo Pharma said it had obtained "conditional and time-limited approval" for the manufacture and marketing of Amchepry under a system which is reportedly designed to get these products to patients as quickly as possible. The approval is a kind of "provisional license", the Asahi newspaper said, after the safety and efficacy of the treatment was judged based on data from fewer patients than in ordinary clinical trials for drugs. A trial led by Kyoto University researchers indicated that the company's treatment was safe and successful in improving symptoms. The study involved seven Parkinson's patients aged between 50 and 69, with each receiving a total of either five million or 10 million cells implanted on both sides of the brain... The patients were monitored for two years and no major adverse effects were found, the study said. Four patients showed improvements in symptoms. The article notes that "Worldwide, about 10 million people have the illness, according to the Parkinson's Foundation," while also notes that today's current therapies "improve symptoms without slowing or halting the disease progression..."

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In a tweet that's been viewed 1.3 million times in the last six hours, OpenAI's head of robotics announced their resignation. They said they "care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together," so this "wasn't an easy call," but offered this reason for resigning: AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I'm proud of what we built together. "To be clear, my issue is that the announcement was rushed without the guardrails defined," explains a later tweet. "It's a governance concern first and foremost. These are too important for deals or announcements to be rushed." And when asked how many OpenAI employees had left after OpenAI signed their new Pentagon deal, the roboticist said... "I can't share any internal details." The roboticist previously worked at Meta before leaving to join OpenAI in late 2024, reports Engadget: OpenAI confirmed Kalinowski's resignation and said in a statement to Engadget that the company understands people have "strong views" about these issues and will continue to engage in discussions with relevant parties. The company also explained in the statement that it doesn't support the issues that Kalinowski brought up. "We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a workable path for responsible national security uses of AI while making clear our red lines: no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons," the OpenAI statement read.

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Astronomers have spotted a galaxy they believe is made of 99.9% dark matter, reports CNN — and it's so faint, it's almost invisible: CDG-2, which is about 300 million light-years from Earth, appears to be so rich in dark matter that it could belong to a hypothesized subset of low surface brightness galaxies called "dark galaxies," which are believed to contain few or no stars.... [Post-doctoral astrophysics/statistics fellow Dayi Li at the University of Toronto was lead author on a study about the discovery, and tells CNN] There is no strict definition of dark galaxies... but their existence is predicted by dark matter theories and cosmological simulations. "Where exactly do we draw the line in terms of how many stars they should have is still ambiguous, because not everything in astronomy is as clear-cut as we like," he said. "To be technically correct, CDG-2 is an almost-dark galaxy. But the importance of CDG-2 is that it nudges us much closer to getting to that truly dark regime, while previously we did not think a galaxy this faint could exist." To observe CDG-2, the researchers used data from three telescopes — Hubble, the European Space Agency's Euclid space observatory and the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii — along with a novel approach that involved looking for objects called globular clusters. "These are very tight, spherical groupings of very olds stars, basically the relics of the first generation of star formation," Li said. Globular clusters are bright even if the surrounding galaxy is not, and previous observations have shown a relationship between them and the presence of dark matter in a galaxy, Li added. Because CDG-2 appears to have very few stars, there must be something else providing the mass that the clusters need to hold themselves together. Li and his colleagues assume that the source of the mass is dark matter. The researchers found a set of four globular clusters in the Perseus Cluster, a group of thousands of galaxies immersed in a cloud of gas and one of the most massive objects in the universe. Further observations revealed a glow or halo around the globular clusters, suggesting the presence of a galaxy... Astronomers believe, Li explained, that after the formation of the clusters early in the galaxy's existence, larger surrounding galaxies stripped it of the hydrogen gas required to make more individual stars like our sun. "The material that this galaxy needed to continue to form stars was no longer there, so it was left with basically just a dark matter halo and the four globular clusters." The process, he added, would leave behind a skeleton or ghost of "a galaxy that pretty much just failed." As a result of this formation mechanism, the galaxy only has 0.005% of the brightness of our own galaxy, Li said... Studying potential dark galaxies is important because they provide nearly pristine views of the behavior of dark matter, according to Neal Dalal, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, who was not involved with the study. Robert Minchin, an astronomer at New Mexico's National Radio Astronomy Observatory, told CNN that "it seems likely that other very dark galaxies will be found by this method in the future."

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"It took Anthropic's most advanced artificial-intelligence model about 20 minutes to find its first Firefox browser bug during an internal test of its hacking prowess," reports the Wall Street Journal. The Anthropic team submitted it, and Firefox's developers quickly wrote back: This bug was serious. Could they get on a call? "What else do you have? Send us more," said Brian Grinstead, an engineer with Mozilla, Firefox's parent organization. Anthropic did. Over a two-week period in January, Claude Opus 4.6 found more high-severity bugs in Firefox than the rest of the world typically reports in two months, Mozilla said... In the two weeks it was scanning, Claude discovered more than 100 bugs in total, 14 of which were considered "high severity..." Last year, Firefox patched 73 bugs that it rated as either high severity or critical. A Mozilla blog post calls Firefox "one of the most scrutinized and security-hardened codebases on the web. Open source means our code is visible, reviewable, and continuously stress-tested by a global community." So they're impressed — and also thankful Anthropic provided test cases "that allowed our security team to quickly verify and reproduce each issue." Within hours, our platform engineers began landing fixes, and we kicked off a tight collaboration with Anthropic to apply the same technique across the rest of the browser codebase... . A number of the lower-severity findings were assertion failures, which overlapped with issues traditionally found through fuzzing, an automated testing technique that feeds software huge numbers of unexpected inputs to trigger crashes and bugs. However, the model also identified distinct classes of logic errors that fuzzers had not previously uncovered... We view this as clear evidence that large-scale, AI-assisted analysis is a powerful new addition in security engineers' toolbox. Firefox has undergone some of the most extensive fuzzing, static analysis, and regular security review over decades. Despite this, the model was able to reveal many previously unknown bugs. This is analogous to the early days of fuzzing; there is likely a substantial backlog of now-discoverable bugs across widely deployed software. "In the time it took us to validate and submit this first vulnerability to Firefox, Claude had already discovered fifty more unique crashing inputs" in 6,000 C++ files, Anthropic says in a blog post (which points out they've also used Claude Opus 4.6 to discover vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel). "Anthropic "also rolled out Claude Code Security, an automated code security testing tool, last month," reports Axios, noting the move briefly rattled cybersecurity stocks...

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"Within 24 hours of the first US-Israeli strikes on Iran, ships in the region's waters found their navigation systems had gone haywire," reports CNN, "erroneously indicating that the vessels were at airports, a nuclear power plant and on Iranian land. "The location confusion was a result of widespread jamming and spoofing of signals from global positioning satellite systems." Used by all sides in conflict zones to disrupt the paths of drones and missiles, the process involves militaries and affiliated groups intentionally broadcasting high-intensity radio signals in the same frequency bands used by navigation tools. Jamming results in the disruption of a vehicle's satellite-based positioning while spoofing leads to navigation systems reporting a false location. Though commercial vessels are not the target, the electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani and Iranian waters on February 28, according to a report from Windward, a shipping intelligence firm. Jamming and spoofing also slowed marine traffic moving through the Strait of Hormuz, a congested shipping lane that handles roughly 20% of the world's oil and gas exports and where precise navigation is essential, Windward's data showed.... Daily incidents have more than doubled, rising from 350 when the conflict began to 672 by March 2, the firm reported. As use of this warfare tactic grows, experts worry the impacts could reach far beyond battlespaces.... In June 2025, electronic interference with navigation systems was thought to be a factor in the collision between two oil tankers, Adalynn and Front Eagle, off the coast of the UAE... The number of global positioning system signal loss events affecting aircraft increased by 220% between 2021 and 2024, according to data from the International Air Transport Association. Last year, IATA said that the aviation industry must act to stay ahead of the threat. Cockpits are seeing their navigation displays "literally drift away from reality," said a commercial pilot, who didn't want to be identified because he was not permitted to speak publicly. He said that he and his colleagues have experienced map shifts, where the aircraft location appears to move up to 1 mile away from the actual flight path, false altitude information that leads to phantom "pull up" commands, and systems suggesting an aircraft was on a taxiway, a path that connects runways with various airport facilities, when taking off. These incidents force pilots to rely on manual actions that increase workload, often during the most exhausting points of long-haul flights, he said. "Alternative navigational tools that don't rely on GPS, but instead harness quantum technology, are also in development," the article points out, "but remain a long way off operational use."

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"Seagate says it is now shipping its Mozaic 4+ HAMR-based hard drives at up to 44TB per drive," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, "with production deployments already underway at two hyperscale cloud providers. "The company claims the platform is the only heat-assisted magnetic recording [HAMR] implementation currently operating at scale, and it is targeting a path from today's 4+TB per disk toward 10TB per disk, eventually enabling 100TB-class drives." In a one-exabyte deployment, Seagate estimates Mozaic could improve infrastructure efficiency by roughly 47% compared to standard 30TB drives, cutting both footprint and energy consumption... HAMR uses a tiny laser to heat the disk surface during writes, allowing higher recording density without sacrificing stability. With most major cloud storage providers reportedly qualified on the Mozaic platform, Seagate is positioning spinning disks, not flash, as the long-term answer for cost-effective AI-scale data growth.

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"Reservation holders, it's finally time to get ready," writes long-time Slashdot reader AirHog. The EV news site Electrek reports: Aptera Motors, "the little startup that could," announced another important milestone... completing the first example of its flagship solar EV on its validation assembly line in Southern California... While the validation line at its headquarters remains a low-volume assembly process, its successful operation represents the startup's transition from hand-built validation SEVs to a more structured assembly line process that will be fine-tuned for mass production... With low-volume assembly now being validated, Aptera is starting to publicly utter encouraging terms like "EPA certification" and, better yet, that holy grail of "initial customer deliveries." Before then, however, the Aptera Solar EVs built on this low-volume validation line will be used for testing programs such as thermal validation, brake performance, and "some destructive testing." Aptera shared that its assembly and integration team has grown to become the largest at the startup, "reflecting the beginning of its transition from engineering development to testing and production execution"... As of March 2026, Aptera says it has over 50,000 reservations totaling over $2 billion in sales if all were to solidify following the launch of a deliverable vehicle. Clean Technica notes the vehicles' "generous cargo space that comes out to 60% more storage than a Honda Accord and 20% more storage than a Prius, according to the company." "Built with recyclable materials, this eco-friendly vehicle features a lightweight carbon fiber structure and no-welding assembly for maximum cost and production efficiency," Aptera adds. The emphasis on lightweighting supports the goal of engineering a car that can travel on the electricity provided by its onboard solar panels. The company currently advertises that the vehicle can travel 40 miles on solar power alone, with the battery providing extra juice as needed. Ideally, the car can keep recharging itself with sunlight, further elongating the time between charging sessions... [Its range is up to 1,000 miles with plug-in charging.] The new autocycle could also appeal to drivers who enjoy the challenge of hypermiling, which involves deploying a suite of driving techniques to minimize fuel consumption. Hypermiling can apply to gas-powered cars, but the magic really kicks in with the regenerative braking capability of EVs. Aptera's onboard solar panels add another dimension to the fun.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Independent: A popular predictions market app will not pay out the $54 million some of its users believed they were owed after correctly forecasting the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a report. Kalshi, which allows players to gamble on real-world events, offered customers favorable odds on Khamenei, 86, being "out as Supreme Leader" in response to the announcement of joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Tehran in the early hours of Saturday morning. The company promoted the trade on its homepage and app and tweeted [last] Saturday: "BREAKING: The odds Ali Khamenei is out as Supreme Leader have surged to 68 percent." It continued: "Reminder: Kalshi does not offer markets that settle on death. If Ali Khamenei dies, the market will resolve based on the last traded price prior to confirmed reporting of death." Khamenei was later confirmed dead in the airstrikes and the company clarified in a follow-up post: "Please note: A prior version of this clarification was grammatically ambiguous. As a customer service measure, Kalshi will reimburse lost value due to trades made between these clarifications...." While the company has offered to reimburse any bets, fees or losses from the trade placed prior to its clarification message, it has nevertheless attracted a firestorm of complaints on social media. A Kalshi spokesperson told Reuters they'd reimbursed "net losses" out of pocket "to the tune of millions of dollars". But a class action lawsuit was filed Thursday saying Kalshi had failed to pay $54 million: Kalshi did not invoke a "death carveout" provision until after the Iranian leader was killed to avoid paying customers in Kalshi's "Khamenei Market" what they were owed, the lawsuit said... The language specifying that Khamenei's departure could be due to any cause, including death, was "clear, unambiguous and binary," the lawsuit said, describing Kalshi's actions as "deceptive" and "predatory." "In a notice filed Monday, the company proposed standardizing the terms of all its markets that implicitly depend on a person surviving..." reports Business Insider. "The update comes after Kalshi paid $2.2 million to resolve complaints from users who were confused by the way it divided the $55 million wagered on Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's ouster after his targeted killing by Israel and the US." Their article cites a DePaul University law professor who says "There's now sort of this nascent, but bipartisan movement against prediction markets. I think Kalshi's feeling the heat." For example, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy told the Washington Post, "People shouldn't be rooting for people to die because they placed a bet."

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Indonesia will ban children under 16 from having accounts on major social media platforms as part of a government push to protect minors from harmful content, addiction, and online threats. The rule will roll out starting March 28 and makes Indonesia the first country in Southeast Asia to impose such a restriction. The Guardian reports: Meutya Hafid said in a statement to media said that she signed a government regulation that will mean children under the age of 16 can no longer have accounts on high-risk digital platforms, including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Roblox and Bigo Live, a popular livestreaming site. With a population of about 285 million, the fourth-highest in the world, the south-east Asian nation represents a significant market for social networks. The implementation will start gradually from 28 March, until all platforms fulfill their compliance obligations. "The basis is clear. Our children face increasingly real threats. From exposure to pornography, cyberbullying, online fraud, and most importantly addiction. The government is here so that parents no longer have to fight alone against the giant of algorithms," Hafid said. She added that the government is taking this step as the best effort in the midst of a digital emergency to reclaim sovereignty over children's futures. "We realize that the implementation of this regulation may cause some discomfort at first. Children may complain and parents may be confused about how to respond to their children's complaints," Hafid said.

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The Global Times reports: China's first domestically developed quantum computer operating system, Origin Pilot, has been made available for online download, the Global Times learned from the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center on Wednesday. A Chinese scientist said while several quantum computing operating system efforts are underway worldwide, this is the first developed in China where it is seen as part of China's broad effort to achieve technology independence and to achieve technology advance in quantum computing. The center said the release marks the world's first open-source quantum computer operating system available for public download, which is expected to lower development barriers and support the growth of China's quantum computing ecosystem. Developed by Hefei-based Origin Quantum Computing Technology Co, the company behind China's third-generation superconducting quantum computer, Origin Wukong, Origin Pilot was first launched in 2021 and has gone through multiple rounds of iteration and upgrade. The developer describes it as an integrated quantum-classical-intelligent computing operating system compatible with major hardware approaches, including superconducting qubits, trapped ions and neutral atoms. It is now deployed on the company's Origin Wukong series and is available to external users, the company said. Guo Guoping, chief scientist of Origin Quantum and director at the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center, told the Global Times that a quantum operating system is the "soft heart" of the quantum computing ecosystem. He said the decision to make Origin Pilot available globally marks a shift in China's quantum computing industry from closed-door tech innovation to broader open-source ecosystem development. Dou Menghan, head of the research team, said: "Users can quickly integrate with quantum chips of multiple physical types and, using autonomous programming frameworks such as QPanda, execute quantum computing jobs across different physical quantum chips to support both research and commercialization needs."

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Ancient Slashdot reader alanw shares a report from the European Space Agency (ESA): Last year, an approximately 60 meter near-Earth object captured global attention. For a brief period, asteroid 2024 YR4 became the most dangerous asteroid discovered in the last 20 years. While an Earth impact was soon ruled out, the asteroid faded from view with a lingering 4% chance of striking the Moon on 22 December 2032. Now, that risk has been eliminated. Astronomers have confirmed that 2024 YR4 will not impact the Moon using new observations made by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Instead, it will safely pass the Moon at a distance of more than 20 000 km.

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An anonymous reader The Guardian: Humanity is heating the planet faster than ever before, a study has found. Climate breakdown is occurring more rapidly with the heating rate almost doubling, according to research that excludes the effect of natural factors behind the latest scorching temperatures. It found global heating accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35C per decade over the past 10 years. The rate is higher than scientists have seen since they started systematically taking the Earth's temperature in 1880. "If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5C (2.7F) limit of the Paris agreement before 2030," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the study. [...] The researchers applied a noise-reduction method to filter out the estimated effect of nonhuman factors in five major datasets that scientists have compiled to gauge the Earth's temperature. In each of them, they found an acceleration in global heating emerged in 2013 or 2014. The findings have been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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Good evening. Let’s talk about free trade!

Last time, we discussed Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica, which looks at how the cause of free trade was taken up by a motley crew of anti-imperialists, internationalists, pacifists, marxists, and classical liberals in the nineteenth century. Protectionism was the prerogative of empire—only available to those with a navy—and it so it makes sense that idealists might support “peace through trade”. So how did free trade go from a cause of the “another world is possible” crowd to the halls of the WTO? Did we leftists catch a case of buyer’s remorse, or did the goods delivered simply not correspond to the order?

To make an attempt at an answer, we need more history. From the acknowledgements of Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists:

This book is a long-simmering product of the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. I was part of a generation that came of age after the Cold War's end. We became adolescents in the midst of talk of globalization and the End of History. In the more hyperactive versions of this talk, we were made to think that nations were over and the one indisputable bond uniting humanity was the global economy. Seattle was a moment when we started to make collective sense of what was going on and take back the story line. I did not make the trip north from Portland but many of my friends and acquaintances did, painting giant papier-mâché fists red to strap to backpacks and coming back with takes of zip ties and pepper spray, nights in jail, and encounters with police—tales they spun into war stories and theses. This book is an apology for not being there and an attempt to rediscover in words what the concept was that they went there to fight.

Slobodian’s approach is to pull on the thread that centers around the WTO itself. He ends up identifying what he calls the “Geneva School” of neoliberalism: from Mise’s circle in Vienna, to the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris, to the Hayek-inspired Mont Pèlerin Society, to Petersmann of the WTO precursor GATT organization, Röpke of the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies, and their lesser successors of the 1970s and 1980s.

The thesis that Slobodian ends up drawing is that neoliberalism is not actually a laissez-faire fundamentalism, but rather an ideology that placed the value of free-flowing commerce above everything else: above democracy, above sovereignty, above peace, and that as such it actually requires active instutional design to protect commerce from the dangers of, say, hard-won gains by working people in one country (Austria, 1927), expropriation of foreign-owned plantations in favor of landless peasants (Guatemala, 1952), internal redistribution within countries transitioning out of minority rule (South Africa, 1996), decolonization (1945-1975 or so), or just the election of a moderate socialist at the ballot box (Chile, 1971).

Now, dear reader, I admit to the conceit that if you are reading this, probably you are a leftist also, and if not, at least you are interested in understanding how it is that we think, with what baubles do we populate our mental attics, that sort of thing. Well, friend, you know that by the time we get to Chile and Allende we are stomping and clapping our hands and shouting in an extasy of indignant sectarian righteousness. And that therefore should we invoke the spectre of neoliberalism, it is with the deepest of disgust and disdain: this project and all it stands for is against me and mine. I hate it like I hated Henry Kissinger, which is to say, a lot, viscerally, it hurts now to think of it, rest in piss you bastard.

two theologies

And yet, I’m still left wondering what became of the odd alliance of Marx with Manchester liberalism. Palen’s Pax Economica continues to sketch a thin line through the twentieth century, focusing on showing the continued presence of commercial-peace exponents despite it not turning out to be our century. But the rightward turn of the main contingent of free-trade supporters is not explained. I have an idea about how it is that this happened; it is anything but scholarly, but here we go.

Let us take out our coarsest brush to paint a crude story: the 19th century begins in the wake of the American and French revolutions, making the third estate and the bourgeoisie together the revolutionary actors of history. It was a time in which “we” could imagine organizing society in different ways, the age of the utopian imaginary, but overlaid with the structures of the old, old money, old land ownership, revanchist monarchs, old power, old empire. In this context, Cobden’s Anti-Corn Law League was insurgent, heterodox, asking for a specific political change with the goal of making life on earth better for the masses. Free trade was a means to an end. Not all Cobdenites had the same ends, but Marx and Manchester both did have ends, and they happened to coincide in the means.

Come the close of the Great War in 1918, times have changed. The bourgeoisie have replaced the nobility as the incumbent power, and those erstwhile bourgeois campaigners now have to choose between idealism and their own interest. But how to choose?

Some bourgeois campaigners will choose a kind of humanist notion of progress; this is the thread traced by Palen, through the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Haslemere Group, and others.

Some actors are not part of the hegemonic bourgeoisie at all, and so have other interests. The newly independent nations after decolonization have more motive to upend the system than to preserve it; their approach to free trade has both tactical and ideological components. Tactical, in the sense that they wanted access to first-world markets, but also sometimes some protections for their own industries; ideological, in the sense that they often acted in solidarity with other new nations against the dominant powers. In addition to the new nations, the Soviet bloc had its own semi-imperial project, and its own specific set of external threats; we cannot blame them for being tactical either.

And then you have Ludwig von Mises. Slobodian hints at Mises’ youth in the Austro-Hungarian empire, a vast domain of many languages and peoples but united by trade and the order imposed by monarchy. After the war and the breakup of the empire, I can only imagine—and here I am imagining, this is not a well-evidenced conclusion—I imagine he felt a sense of loss. In the inter-war, he holds court as the doyen of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, trying to put the puzzle pieces back together, to reconstruct the total integration of imperial commerce, but from within Red Vienna. When in 1927, a court decision acquitted a fascist milicia that fired into a crowd, killing a worker and a child, the city went on general strike, and workers burned down the ministry of justice. Police responded violently, killing 89 people and injuring over 1000. Mises was delighted: order was restored.

And now, a parenthesis. I grew up Catholic, in a ordinary kind of way. Then in my early teens, I concluded that if faith meant anything, it has to burn with a kind of fervor; I became an evangelical Catholic, if such is a thing. There were special camps you could go to with intense emotional experiences and people singing together and all of that is God, did you know? Did you know? The feelings attenuated over time but I am a finisher, and so I got confirmed towards the end of high school. I went off to university for physics and stuff and eventually, painfully, agonizingly concluded there was no space for God in the equations.

Losing God was incredibly traumatic for me. Not that I missed, like, the idea of some guy, but as someone who wants things to make sense, to have meaning, to be based on something, anything at all: losing a core value or morality invalidated so many ideas I had about the world and about myself. What is the good life, a life well led? What is true and right in a way that is not contingent on history? I am embarrassed to say that for a while I took the UN declaration of human rights to be axiomatic.

When I think about Mise’s reaction to the 1927 general strike in Vienna, I think about how I scrambled to find something, anything, to replace my faith in God. As the space for God shrank with every advance in science, some chose to identify God with his works, and then to progressively ascribe divine qualities to those works: perhaps commerce is axiomatically Good, and yet ineffable, in the sense that it is Good on its own, and that no mortal act can improve upon it. How else can we interpret Hayek’s relationship with the market except as awe in the presence of the divine?

This is how I have come to understand the neoliberal value system: a monotheism with mammon as godhead. There may be different schools within it, but all of the faithful worship the same when they have to choose between, say, commerce and democracy, commerce and worker’s rights, commerce and environmental regulation, commerce and taxation, commerce and opposition to apartheid. It’s a weird choice of deity. Now that God is dead, one could have chosen anything to take His place, and these guys chose the “global economy”. I would pity them if I still had a proper Christian heart.

means without end

I think that neoliberals made a miscalculation when they concluded that the peace of doux commerce is not predicated on justice. Sure, in the short run, you can do business with Pinochet’s Chile, privatize the national mining companies, and cut unemployment benefits, but not without incurring moral damage; people will see through it, in time, as they did in Seattle in 1999. Slobodian refers to the ratification of the WTO as a Pyrrhic victory; in their triumph, neoliberals painted a target on their backs.

Where does this leave us now? And what about Mercosur? I’m starting to feel the shape of an answer, but I’m not there yet. I think we’ll cover the gap between Seattle and the present day in a future dispatch. Until then, let’s take care of one other; as spoke the prophet Pratchett, there’s no justice, just us.

This post is the latest in my series of GNOME Foundation updates. I’m writing these in my capacity as Foundation President, where I’m busy managing a lot of what’s happening at the organisation at the moment. Each of these posts is a report on what happened over a particular period, and this post covers the current week as well as the previous one (23rd February to 6th March).

Audit time

I’ve mentioned the GNOME Foundation’s audit on numerous occassions previously. This is being conducted as a matter of routine, but it is our first full formal audit, so we have been learning a lot about what’s involved.

This week has been the audit fieldwork itself, which has been quite intense and a lot of work for everyone involved. The audit team consists of 5 people, most of whom are accountants of different grades. Our own finance team has been meeting with them three times a day since Tuesday, answering questions, doing walkthroughs of our systems, and providing additional documents as requested.

A big part of the audit is cross-referencing and checking documentation, and we have been busy responding to requests for information throughout the week. On last count, we have provided 140 documents to the auditors this week alone, on 20 different themes, including statements, receipts, contracts, invoices, sponsorship agreements, finance reports, and so on.

We’re expecting the draft audit report in about three weeks. Initial signs are good!

GUADEC 2026

Planning activity for GUADEC 2026 has continued over the past two weeks. That includes organising catering, audio visual facilities, a photographer, and sponsorship work.

Registration for the event is now open. The Call for Papers is also open and will close on 13 March – just one week away! If you would like to present this year, please submit an abstract!

If you would like travel sponsorship for GUADEC, there are two deadlines to submit a request: 15th March (for those who need to book travel early, such as if they need a visa) and 24th May (for those with less time pressure).

LAS 2026

This year’s Linux App Summit is happening in Berlin, on the 16th and 17th May, and is shaping up to be a great event. As usual we are co-organizing the event with KDE, and the call for proposals has just opened. If you’d like to present, you have until 23rd March to submit a paper.

The Travel Committee will be accepting travel applications for LAS attendees this year, so if you’d like to attend and need travel assistance, please submit a request no later than 13th April.

Infrastructure

On the infrastracture side, GNOME’s single sign on service has been integrated with blogs.gnome.org, which is great for security, as well as meaning that you won’t need to remember an extra password for our WordPress instance. Many thanks to miniOrange for providing us with support for their OAuth plugin for WordPress, which has allowed this to happen!

That’s it for my update this week. In addition to the highlights that I’ve mentioned, there are quite a number of other activities happening at the Foundation right now, particularly around new programs, some of which we’re not quite ready to talk about, but hope to provide updates on soon.

Version:next-20260306 (linux-next) Released:2026-03-06

OpenAI today released GPT-5.4, an upgraded ChatGPT model designed to be faster, cheaper, and more accurate for workplace tasks. The update also introduces tools that let ChatGPT work directly inside Excel and Google Sheets. Axios reports: GPT-5.4 is designed to be less error-prone, more efficient and better at workplace tasks like drafting documents, OpenAI said. The new model can create files in fewer tries with less back-and-forth than prior models, the company said. GPT-5.4 outperformed office workers 83% of the time on GDPval, an OpenAI benchmark measuring performance on real-world tasks across 44 occupations. The model can also solve problems using fewer tokens, OpenAI says -- which can translate to faster responses and lower costs. The company is also debuting OpenAI for Financial Services, a set of new tools that includes the version of ChatGPT that runs inside spreadsheets and new apps and skills within ChatGPT. Partners include FactSet, MSCI, Third Bridge and Moody's.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As part of Epic's settlement with Google over the Play Store, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney agreed to stop criticizing Google's app store practices until 2032 and even publicly support the revised policies. The deal also prohibits Epic from pushing for further changes to Google's platform rules. The Verge reports: On March 3rd, he not only signed away Epic's rights to sue and disparage the company, he signed away his right to advocate for any further changes to Google's app store polices. He can't criticize Google's app store practices. In fact, he has to praise them. The contract states that "Epic believes that the Google and Android platform, with the changes in this term sheet, are procompetitive and a model for app store / platform operations, and will make good faith efforts to advocate for the same." He may even have to appear in other courts around the world to defend this deal with Google, and Google gets to make sure his public statements are supportive of the deal from here on out. And while Epic can still be part of the "Coalition for App Fairness," the organization that Epic quietly and solely funded to be its attack dog against Google and Apple, he can only point that organization at Apple now. "Google is opening up Android all the way with robust support for competing stores, competing payments, and a better deal for all developers. So, we've settled all of our disputes worldwide. THANKS GOOGLE!," Sweeney wrote in a post on X on Wednesday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei is not happy -- perhaps predictably so -- with OpenAI chief Sam Altman. In a memo to staff, reported by The Information, Amodei referred to OpenAI's dealings with the Department of Defense as "safety theater." "The main reason [OpenAI] accepted [the DoD's deal] and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses," Amodei wrote. Last week, Anthropic and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) failed to come to an agreement over the military's request for unrestricted access to the AI company's technology. Anthropic, which already had a $200 million contract with the military, insisted the DoD affirm that it would not use the company's AI to enable domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry. Instead, the DoD -- known under the Trump administration as the Department of War -- struck a deal with OpenAI. Altman stated that his company's new defense contract would include protections against the same red lines that Anthropic had asserted. In a letter to staff, Amodei refers to OpenAI's messaging as "straight up lies," stating that Altman is falsely "presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker." Amodei might not be speaking solely from a position of bitterness, here. Anthropic specifically took issue with the DoD's insistence on the company's AI being available for "any lawful use." [...] "I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI's deal with the DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes (we're #2 in the App Store now!)," Amodei wrote to his staff. "It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn't matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn't work on OpenAI employees."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.