Longtime Slashdot reader slack_justyb writes: The Fast Light Toolkit released version 1.4.0 of the venerable, though sometimes looking a bit dated, toolkit from the '90s. New in this version are better CMake support, HiDPI support, and initial support for Wayland on Linux and Wayland on FreeBSD. Programs compiled and linked to this library launch using Wayland if it is available at runtime and fall back to X11 if not. FLTK 1.4.0 can be downloaded here. Documentation is also available.

The Tiobe index tries to track the popularity of programming languages by counting the number of search results for the language's name followed by the word "programming" (on 25 different search engines). And this month there were some surprises...

By TIOBE's reckoning, compared to a year ago PHP has now fallen from #7 to #12, while Delphi/Object Pascal shot up five spots from #16 to #11. In that same year, Fortran jumped from #12 to #8 — while both Visual Basic and SQL dropped down a single rank. Toward the top of the list, C actually fell from the #2 spot over the last 12 months to the #4 spot.

And Go just reached the #7 rank on the TIOBE's ranking of programming language popularity — "an all time high for Go," according to TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen. In this month's note, he explains what he thinks is unusual about this — starting by saying that Go programs are both fast, and easy in many ways — easy to deploy, easy to learn, and easy to understand. Python for instance is easy to learn but not fast, and deployment for larger Python programs is fragile due to dependencies on all kind of versioned libraries in the environment.

If compared to Rust for instance (another contender for a top position), Go is a tiny bit slower, but the Go programs are much easier to understand. The next hurdle for Go in the TIOBE index is JavaScript at position #6. That will be a tough one to pass. JavaScript is ubiquitous in software development, although for larger JavaScript systems we see a shift to TypeScript nowadays.
"If annual trends continue this way, Go will bypass JavaScript within 3 years," TIOBE's CEO predicts. (Adding "Let's see what the future has in store for Go...") Although the Go team actually has specific plans for the future, according to a blog post this week celebrating Go's 15th anniversary: We're working on making Go better for AI — and AI better for Go — by enhancing Go's capabilities in AI infrastructure, applications, and developer assistance. Go is a great language for building production systems, and we want it to be a great language for building production AI systems, too... For AI applications, we will continue building out first-class support for Go in popular AI SDKs, including LangChainGo and Genkit. And from its very beginning, Go aimed to improve the end-to-end software engineering process, so naturally we're looking at bringing the latest tools and techniques from AI to bear on reducing developer toil, leaving more time for the fun stuff — like actually programming!
TIOBE's top 10 programming language rankings for the month of November:

1. Python
2. C++
3. Java
4. C
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. Go
8. Fortran
9. Visual Basic
10. SQL

Chegg, the online education company, is laying off 319 workers as it struggles to compete against modern AI chatbots. SFGATE reports: Chegg announced the new layoff round, which will hit 21% of its workforce, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. The company delivered the news alongside another brutal quarterly financial report; Chegg lost more than $212 million from July through September. CEO Nathan Schultz, in prepared remarks accompanying the report, expressed some optimism but called it a "trying time" for his company. Chegg provides grammar and plagiarism checkers, plus course-by-course study help, along with much-used textbook solution guides.

"Technology shifts have created headwinds for our industry and Chegg's business specifically," Schultz said. "Recent advancements in the AI search experience and the adoption of free and paid generative AI services by students, have resulted in challenges for Chegg. These factors are adversely affecting our business outlook and are requiring us to refocus and adjust the size of our business." He specifically called out Google's AI overviews, a recent change to search results that pulls information from news outlets and sites like Chegg and summarizes above the classic blue links. Schultz said that his team believes Google is "shifting from being a search origination point to the destination" in an attempt to keep market share.

Schultz also blamed generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, saying that students see the tool and others like it as "strong alternatives" to Chegg. Web traffic has dropped sharply as a result, Schultz wrote. A Wall Street Journal story published Saturday said Chegg "is trying to avoid becoming [ChatGPT's] first major victim" and that the company had lost more than 500,000 subscribers, some who paid almost $20 a month, since the chatbot's 2022 launch. Despite the negative business impact, it seems Chegg is experimenting with new tech. Schultz said in the remarks that the company had formed an "arena" to evaluate AI models and aims to "integrate AI into the full learning journey."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: If you've recently been laid off and have started the arduous process of looking for a new job, you've probably seen them on networking platforms like LinkedIn: postings for roles that are 30 days old, maybe more, with suspiciously wide salary ranges. They usually have hundreds, or even thousands, of hopeful applicants vying for the same position, but if you do a quick cross-check and notice that the role isn't posted on the company's actual website -- or any of their social media pages -- you should probably stop drafting that cover letter, because it's possible they're not hiring at all. "Ghost jobs," or ads for positions that aren't actually open, are a common phenomenon in the tech industry, which has been plagued by layoffs and budget cuts over recent years. As unemployed workers struggle to regain their footing, recruiters and career coaches who spoke with SFGATE warned that these fake jobs posted by real companies serve multiple, sometimes insidious purposes.

According to a 2024 survey from MyPerfectResume, 81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled. While some respondents said employers did it to maintain a presence on job boards and build a talent pool, it's also used to commit psychological warfare: 25% said ghost jobs helped companies gauge how replaceable their employees were, while 23% said it helped make the company appear more stable during a hiring freeze. Another damning 2024 report from Resume Builder said that 62% companies posted them specifically to make their employees feel replaceable. They also made ads to "trick overworked employees" into believing that more people would be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workload.

After interviewing 1,641 hiring managers, Resume Builder researchers found that 40% of employers posted fake job listings in 2024, and that three in 10 currently had ghost jobs listed. The idea to post them mostly trickled down from HR, followed by senior management and executives, their June 2024 article continued. Though the listings were posted on multiple hiring platforms, the majority of them appeared on LinkedIn and the companies' websites. Evidence suggests this trend is taking hold throughout the Bay Area, too. A collaborative document circulating online reveals a growing list of employers accused of posting ghost jobs. Many of them, it turns out, are tech companies with offices based in California.

SFGate spills the secrets of Disneyland's "Enchanted Tiki Room" and its lifelike animatronic singing birds — Jose, Fritz, Michael and Pierre — "whose movements were perfectly synced with the audio track." "Beneath the room, the heartbeat of the attraction is a $1 million installation of electronics equipment, operated by a roll of 14-channel magnetic tape," the Orange County Register wrote upon its opening. "It is the same system which programs the U.S. military's polaris missile." That system also ran very hot. To keep guests from overheating, air conditioning was installed throughout the building, making the Tiki Room Disneyland's first attraction to be fully air conditioned...
Or, as another article puts it, "While Disney did not delve into the speculative science of cryogenics to preserve his life, he did borrow the mechanical brain of a nuclear missile to simulate life, creating a new type of entertainment in the process."

The article remembers how Wernher Von Braun became a technical advisor (and on-camera presenter) for three Disney-produced TV episodes about space travel — at the same time Von Braun was working as technical director for the U.S. Army rocket program that produced the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile, plus the first submarine-launched ballistic missile with its ground-breaking launch control mechanism: An important aspect of the Polaris launch system hinged on the fact that the conditions under which the missiles might be launched were constantly changing. Different underwater currents, temperatures, and flexing of the metal hull all contributed to the difficulty of a successful launch. In order to minimize human errors and to automate the sequence as much as possible, scientists developed an audio control system. A magnetic audio tape with a series of prerecorded cues precisely timed to account for the submarine's movement, controlled the launch machinery.

This new technology, invented to deliver nuclear destruction, proved exactly what Disney needed for his wonderland developed for children.
The article concludes that Disneyland engineering "transformed Von Braun's military technology" to the point today where "what was once controlled by the artificial brain of a nuclear missile is now run by the equivalent of a MacBook."

SFGate delves deeper into the attraction's strange origins — and how it all came full circle 63 years later... At the intersection of Main Street and Adventureland, a restaurant called the Pavillion — now the Jolly Holiday — bridged the gap. Under one roof, it served food to Main Street guests on one side and Adventureland diners on the other. The inelegant transition created an eyesore that Walt despised... The need for the Tiki Cafe "appeared to be less about food and more about aesthetics," Ken Bruce writes in Before the Birds Sang Words , a comprehensive history of the attraction.

In 1961, Walt gathered with park designers about the concept. The sketch made by legendary theme park designer John Hench was remarkably thorough, with much of its design incorporated into the final product... When Walt saw a plethora of birds in the sketch, he famously exclaimed, "We can't have birds in there ... because they'll poop in the food." Hench hurriedly ad-libbed that the birds would be mechanical, a concept that Walt adored...

Although its powerful air conditioning may be its biggest draw today, many attractions you love owe their existence to the flock of singing birds. Disney engineers' work on the talking flora and fauna laid the foundation for much more complex Audio-Animatronics (a word that Walt Disney coined). Without Jose, Fritz, Michael and Pierre, there would be no Haunted Mansion, no Pirates of the Caribbean, no Rise of the Resistance. Next year, in celebration of Disneyland's 70th anniversary, the park will unveil one of its most sophisticated animatronics yet: Walt Disney himself. It will be the first time Walt appears in a Disney attraction anywhere in the world, completing a journey that started with a mechanical bird and ends with an immortal homage.
Their article also reveals that a year after the Tiki Room opened, one of the birds was programmed to say "Come, there's an island there for you in Hawaii. Soaring birds of United Airlines fly there too!" Because Disneyland had signed a sponsorship deal with United Airlines...

"We passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform," says U.C. Berkeley chemistry professor Omar Yaghi, "and it was beautiful.

"It cleaned the air entirely of CO2," Yaghi says in an announcement from the university. "Everything."

SFGate calls it "a discovery that could help potentially mitigate the effects of climate change..." Yaghi's lab has worked on carbon capture since the 1990s and began work on these crystalline structures in 2005. The innovative substance has lots of tiny holes, making it "great for storing gases or liquids, much like a sponge holds water," Yaghi said... While it could take one to two years for the powder to be usable in large-scale applications, Yaghi co-founded Atoco, an Irvine company, to commercialize his research and expand it beyond just carbon capture and storage.
"Capturing carbon from the air just got easier," says the headline on the anouncement from the university, which explains why this technology is crucial: [T]oday's carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases. Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO2 levels, which have reached 426 parts per million, 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won't reach humanity's goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degreesC (2.7 degreesF) above preexisting global averages.

A new type of absorbing material developed by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, could help get the world to negative emissions... According to Yaghi, the new material could be substituted easily into carbon capture systems already deployed or being piloted to remove CO2 from refinery emissions and capture atmospheric CO2 for storage underground. UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou, the paper's first author, said that a mere 200 grams of the material, a bit less than half a pound, can take up as much CO2 in a year — 20 kilograms (44 pounds) — as a tree.
Their research was published this week in the journal Nature.

And it's also interesting that they're using AI, according to the university's announcement: Yaghi is optimistic that artificial intelligence can help speed up the design of even better COFs and MOFs for carbon capture or other purposes, specifically by identifying the chemical conditions required to synthesize their crystalline structures. He is scientific director of a research center at UC Berkeley, the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP), which employs AI to develop cost-efficient, easily deployable versions of MOFs and COFs to help limit and address the impacts of climate change. "We're very, very excited about blending AI with the chemistry that we've been doing," he said.
Another potential use could be for harvesting water from desert air for drinking water, Yaghi told SFGate. But he seems very focused specifically on carbon capture.

"Another thing is that we need a strong determination among officials and industries to make carbon capture a high priority. Things have to change, but I believe that direct carbon capture from air is very doable."

San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Agency approved a $212 million contract with Hitachi Rail to modernize the Muni Metro system's outdated train control system, which currently uses floppy disks and wire loops. Government Technology reports: The software that runs the system is stored on floppy disks that are loaded each morning and an outdated type of communication using wire loops that are easily disrupted. It was expected to last for 20 to 25 years, according to Muni officials. It moves data more slowly than a wireless modem, they said. By late 2027 and into 2028, a new communications-based system, which employs Wi-Fi and cell signals to precisely track the locations of trains, will be installed by Hitachi, which will provide support services for 20 years under the agreement.

While the current train control system operates only on the Market Street subway and Central Subway, the new system will control Metro light rail trains on the system's surface lines as well. The Hitachi system is said to be five generations ahead of the current system, said Muni Director of Transit Julie Kirschbaum, who described it as the best train control system on the market.

"Some prominent privacy advocates are encouraging customers to pull their data" from 23andMe, reports SFGate.

But can you actually do that? 23andMe makes it easy to feel like you've protected your genetic footprint. In their account settings, customers can download versions of their data to a computer and choose to delete the data attached to their 23andMe profile. An email then arrives with a big pink button: "Permanently Delete All Records." Doing so, it promises, will "terminate your relationship with 23andMe and irreversibly delete your account and Personal Information."

But there's another clause in the email that conflicts with that "terminate" promise. It says 23andMe and whichever contracted genotyping laboratory worked on a customer's samples will still hold on to the customer's sex, date of birth and genetic information, even after they're "deleted." The reason? The company cites "legal obligations," including federal laboratory regulations and California lab rules. The federal program, which sets quality standards for laboratories, requires that labs hold on to patient test records for at least two years; the California rule, part of the state's Business and Professions Code, requires three. When SFGATE asked 23andMe vice president of communications Katie Watson about the retention mandates, she said 23andMe does delete the genetic data after the three-year period, where applicable...

Before it's finally deleted, the data remains 23andMe property and is held under the same rules as the company's privacy policy, Watson added. If that policy changes, customers are supposed to be informed and asked for their consent. In the meantime, a hack is unfortunately always possible. Another 23andMe spokesperson, Andy Kill, told SFGATE that [CEO Anne] Wojcicki is "committed to customers' privacy and pledges to retain the current privacy policy in force for the foreseeable future, including after the acquisition she is currently pursuing."
An Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy lawyer tells SFGate there's no information more personal than your DNA. "It is like a Social Security number, it can't be changed. But it's not just a piece of paper, it's kind of you."

He urged 23andMe to leave customers' data out of any acquisition deals, and promise customers they'd avoid takeover attempts from companies with bad security — or with ties to law enforcement.

Last month C dropped from 3rd to 4th in TIOBE's ranking of programming language popularity (which tries to calculate each language's share of search engine results). Java moved up into the #3 position in September, reports TechRepublic, which notes that by comparison October "saw relatively little change" — though percentages of search results increased slightly. "At number one, Python jumped from 20.17% in September to 21.9% in October. In second place, C++ rose from 10.75% in September to 11.6%. In third, Java ascended from 9.45% to 10.51%..."

Is there a larger trend? TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen writes that the need to harvest more data increases demand for fast data manipulation languages. But they also need to be easy to learn ("because the resource pool of skilled software engineers is drying up") and secure ("because of continuous cyber threats.") King of all, Python, is easy to learn and secure, but not fast. Hence, engineers are frantically looking for fast alternatives for Python. C++ is an obvious candidate, but it is considered "not secure" because of its explicit memory management. Rust is another candidate, although not easy to learn. Rust is, thanks to its emphasis on security and speed, making its way to the TIOBE index top 10 now. [It's #13 — up from #20 a year ago]

The cry for fast, data crunching languages is also visible elsewhere in the TIOBE index. The language Mojo [a faster superset of Python designed for accelerated hardware like GPUs]... enters the top 50 for the first time. The fact that this language is only 1 year old and already showing up, makes it a very promising language.
In the last 12 months three languages also fell from the top ten:

• PHP (dropping from #8 to #15)

• SQL (dropping from #9 to #11)

• Assembly language (dropping from #10 to #16)

An anonymous reader shared this story from SFGate: A boy who was kidnapped from an Oakland playground in 1951 has been found alive on the East Coast, a remarkable resolution to a mystery that has haunted his family for over half a century.

On February 21, 1951, 6-year-old Luis Armando Albino was playing with his older brother Roger at Jefferson Square Park. The boys had recently immigrated with their mother and four other siblings from Puerto Rico... That afternoon, Luis and 10-year-old Roger walked down the block from their home at 730 Brush Street to play in the park. They were approached by a woman in her 30s, wearing a green bandana over her hair, who began chatting with Luis in Spanish. She promised she would buy him candy if he came along with her, and little Luis agreed to join her. Wary, Roger trailed the pair for a while before returning home to alert an adult to the strange encounter. Oakland police were called by frantic family members and a search was immediately launched...

Antonia [the boy's mother] was convinced her son was alive. "She came once a week, then once a month, then at least once a year, to see the shake of the head, to have the answer 'no' translated for her although she could read it in the officers' faces," the Oakland Tribune wrote in 1966...

Decades passed.

In 2020, Luis' niece, Alida Alequin, took a DNA test on a whim, the Mercury News reported. The service returned several possible family members to the Oakland woman. One of them was a man who Alequin had never met. After some internet sleuthing, she began to suspect this man might be the missing uncle she'd heard so much about. She reached out to the man but didn't hear back.

Earlier this year, Alequin tried again. Armed with photos, she took her evidence to the Oakland Police Department's missing persons unit. In short order, the FBI and California Department of Justice were also investigating Alequin's lead. They discovered the man was living on the East Coast, had worked as a firefighter and served two tours in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. This week, the Mercury News first reported that a DNA test confirmed what Alequin suspected: This was Luis Albino.

In June, Luis flew to California to reunite with his family, among them his devoted brother Roger... For over 70 years, he lived on the East Coast believing he was the son of another couple....

When Luis met Alequin for the first time this summer, he held her in an embrace. "Thank you," he said, "for finding me."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Scharon Harding: TCL has come under scrutiny this month after testing that claimed to examine three TCL TVs marketed as quantum dot TVs reportedly showed no trace of quantum dots. [...] Earlier this month, South Korean IT news publication ETNews published a report on testing that seemingly showed three TCL quantum dot TVs, marketed as QD TVs, as not having quantum dots present. Hansol Chemical, a Seoul-headquartered chemicals company, commissioned the testing. SGS, a Geneva-headquartered testing and certification company, and Intertek, a London-headquartered testing and certification company, performed the tests. The models examined were TCL's C755, said to be a quantum dot Mini LED TV, the C655, a purported quantum dot LED (QLED) TV, and the C655 Pro, another QLED. None of those models are sold in the US, but TCL sells various Mini LED and LED TVs in the US that claim to use quantum dots. According to a Google translation, ETNews reported: "According to industry sources on the 5th, the results of tests commissioned by Hansol Chemical to global testing and certification agencies SGS and Intertek showed that indium... and cadmium... were not detected in three TCL QD TV models. Indium and cadmium are essential materials that cannot be omitted in QD implementation." The testing was supposed to detect cadmium if present at a minimum concentration of 0.5 mg per 1 kg, while indium was tested at a minimum detection standard of 2 mg/kg or 5 mg/kg, depending on the testing lab. [...]

In response to the results from SGS and Intertek, a TCL representative told ETNews and The Korea Times that TCL is "manufacturing TV sets with QD films supplied by three companies" and that "the amount of quantum dots... in the film may vary depending on the supplier, but it is certain that cadmium is included." TCL also published testing results on May 10 commissioned by Guangdong Region Advanced Materials, one of TCL's quantum dot film suppliers. Interestingly, SGS, one of the companies that found that TCL's TVs lacked quantum dots, performed the tests. This time, SGS detected the presence of cadmium in the TV films at a concentration of 4 mg/kg (an image of the results can be seen via ETNews here). TCL also said that it "confirmed the fluorescent characteristics of QD," per Google's translation, and provided a spectrogram purportedly depicting the presence of quantum dots in its TVs' quantum dot films. [...]

TCL obviously has reason to try to push results that show the presence of cadmium. However, some analysts and publications have pointed out that Hansol could have reason to push results claiming the opposite. As mentioned above, Hansol is in the chemical manufacturing and distribution business. It notably does not sell to TCL but does have a customer in TCL rival Samsung. Taking a step back further, Hansol is headquartered in Seoul and is considered a chaebol. TV giants Samsung and LG are also chaebols, and the South Korean government has reported interest in Samsung and LG continuing to be the world's biggest TV companies—titles that are increasingly challenged by Chinese brands. It has previously been reported that the South Korean government urged Samsung and LG to meet with each other to help ensure their leadership. The talks resulted in a partnership between the two companies reportedly centered on counteracting high prices that Samsung was facing for TV components sold by Chinese companies. With this background in mind, Hansol could be viewed as a biased party when it sought testing for TCL quantum dot TVs. "I'm really puzzled by Hansol's results," said Eric Virey, principal displays analyst at Yole Intelligence. "I have a very hard time believing that TCL would go through the troubles of making ... 'fake' QD films without QDs: this would cost almost as much as making a real QD films but without the performance benefits."

Ars Technica concludes: "As previously stated, it's possible that TCL is indeed using quantum dots but is using them in a small amount alongside phosphor. If true, the performance may not be as high as it would be with other designs, but it would also mean that TCL's quantum dot TVs aren't bogus. As it stands, the situation could benefit from more, preferably third-party, testing..."

"For 75 years Cosm built planetariums," reports a Texas news station, "and then a few years ago realized this technology could take you from the night sky to anywhere under the sun."

So now Los Angeles and Dallas have massive 9,600-square-foot, 8K-resolution screens that one reviewer for SFGate calls "an absolute game-changer" for sports fans. "At its best, Cosm's floor-to-ceiling screen gives anyone with a seat the opportunity to embrace a face full of on-the-field action at such high quality that it can be staggering, almost overwhelming at times — so just be sure to hold on tight, to the handrails and to your wallets."

There's also a bar with a 150-foot band of screens and a rooftop area with mounted TV, but they're "not why anyone has come," SFGate points out. Even the Dome has three distinct floors, though it's the second floor "where full visual immersion happens." The action feels so close, I can almost smell it, and all the focus is pulled to the center of the giant screen. Patrons truly do feel at the absolute heart of the action, with better seats than perhaps they could even pay for at Manchester's Old Trafford stadium. From a sports-viewing standpoint, I can't imagine it gets much better than this... Over the course of just a few minutes, the viewing angle flips from corner looks to right up against the goalkeeper's net, and then it widens out to dead center to catch crisp passes. Some angles put me right in the stands, cheering along with the loyalists at a stadium half a world away...

To be clear, the premium ticket costs are good for recouping Cosm's substantial investment in this gorgeous technological product, which has been in the works for years. The price tag is also likely to be little issue for any Los Angeles fan with money to spend, but the cost really does lay bare the growing division between the haves and have-nots in American sports society... If you paid $20 for a general admission entry that mostly just grants access to the fringes of the action, well ... good luck getting the most out of the Dome... The edges of the massive screen are stretched to comic effect, making the fisheye perspective more disorienting than fun. At the center of the room, it feels like you're absolutely in the meat of the action; at the fringes, you're left to pick at a few digital bones...

[F]or the rest of us, the normal sports fans who like to sway with strangers during the seventh-inning stretch, the ones who want to be able to take their kids to a game without feeling quite so financially wrung out, Cosm is yet another troubling sign of big, expensive things to come. Being a fan of a sports franchise in 2024 is an increasingly costly proposition. Watching your favorite NFL team now requires cable access, as well as multiple streaming services like Amazon Prime... There is no question that Cosm is a unique experience and that it will absolutely have a hand in transforming the modern digital sports-watching landscape, especially for those who want a digital re-creation of the best seat in the house over the camaraderie of a shared, in-person sports experience. The place will be able to charge incredible sums for the Super Bowl or World Series games, and — when at its best, with a prime seat in the middle of the action — the cost will be justifiable for many.

But for the folks at the financial fringes, the ones with the most spirit and often the least to spend, Cosm undoubtedly feels like a widening of the economic chasm that is pulling fans and their favorite teams further apart.
Besides sports events, Cosm's Dome also offers other immersive experiences like Circque du Soleil's "O" and Planetary Collective's "Orbital".

Another Cosm location is planned for Phoenix in 2025.

Redmonk's latest programming language ranking (attempting to gauge "potential future adoption trends") has found evidence of "a landscape resistant to change." Outside of CSS moving down a spot and C++ moving up one, the Top 10 was unchanged. And even in the back half of the rankings, where languages tend to be less entrenched and movement is more common, only three languages moved at all... There are a few signs of languages following in TypeScript's footsteps and working their way up the path, both in the Top 20 and at the back end of the Top 100 as we'll discuss shortly, but they're the exception that proves the rule.

It's possible that we'll see more fluid usage of languages, and increased usage of code assistants would theoretically make that much more likely, but at this point it's a fairly static status quo. With that, some results of note:

- TypeScript (#6): technically TypeScript didn't move, as it was ranked sixth in our last run, but this is the first quarter in which is has been the sole occupant of that spot. CSS, in this case, dropped one place to seven leaving TypeScript just outside the Top 5. It will be interesting to see whether or not it has more momentum to expend or whether it's topped out for the time being.

- Kotlin (#14) / Scala (#14): both of these JVM-based languages jumped up a couple of spots — two spots in Scala's case and three for Kotlin. Scala's rise is notable because it had been on something of a downward trajectory from a one time high of 12th, and Kotlin's placement is a mild surprise because it had spent three consecutive runs not budging from 17, only to make the jump now. The tie here, meanwhile, is interesting because Scala's long history gives it an accretive advantage over Kotlin's more recent development, but in any case the combination is evidence of the continued staying power of the JVM.

- Objective C (#17): speaking of downward trajectories and the 17th placement on this list, Objective C's slide that began in mid-2018 continued and left the language with its lowest placement in these rankings to date at #17. That's still an enormously impressive achievement, of course, and there are dozens of languages that would trade their usage for Objective C's, but the direction of travel seems clear.

- Dart (#19) / Rust (#19): while once grouped with Kotlin as up and coming languages driven by differing incentives and trends, Dart and Rust have not been able to match the ascent of their counterpart with five straight quarters of no movement. That's not necessarily a negative; as with Objective C, these are still highly popular languages and communities, but it's worth questioning whether new momentum will arrive and from where, particularly because the communities are experiencing some friction in growing their usage.
It's important to remember Redmonk's methodology. "We extract language rankings from GitHub and Stack Overflow, and combine them for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction. The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends."

Having said that, here's the current top ten in Redmonk's ranking:

1. JavaScript
2. Python
3. Java
4. PHP
5. C#
6. TypeScript
7. CSS
8. C++
9. Ruby
10. C

Their announcement also notes that at the other end of the list, the programming language Bicep "jumped eight spots to #78 and Zig 10 to #87. That progress pales next to Ballerina, however, which jumped from #80 to #61 this quarter. The general purpose language from WS02, thus, is added to the list of potential up and comers we're keeping an eye on."

Long-time FOSS-watcher Bruce Byfield writes that while people "still dream of a completely free alternative, increasingly the emphasis in FOSS seems to be on accepting coexistence with proprietary software." Many, too, have always preferred the permissive BSD licenses, which permits combining FOSS and proprietary software. From some perspectives, Debian's newest [non-free firmware] repository or Nobara's popularity [a Fedora-based distro but with proprietary drivers and gaming applications] is simply an admission of the true state of affairs...

On the other hand, the FOSS philosophy may be weakened because it no longer has a strong advocate. Sixteen years ago, the FSF reached a peak of authority in the discussions of 2006-2007 about the structure of GPLv3 — then immediately lost that authority by not reaching a consensus. That was followed by the cancellation of Richard Stallman in 2017, which, deserved or not, had the side effect of silencing free software's most influential representative. Today the FSF that Stallman led continues to function, with Stallman returned to the board of directors, but its actions go unreported, and it seems to speak to a much smaller group of loyalists. The Linux Foundation, with its corporate emphasis, is not an adequate substitution. In these circumstances, there is reason to wonder whether FOSS has lost its way.

While the issue has yet to reach the mainstream, Bruce Perens, one of the coiners of the term "open source" in 1998, is already trying to describe what he calls the Post-Open Source era. Not only does Perens believe that FOSS licenses no longer fulfill their original purpose, but they no longer inform or benefit the average user. According to Perens,

"Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. For the most part, if they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company's systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary. The common person doesn't know about Open Source, they don't know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest. Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them."

As a remedy, Perens proposes that licenses should be replaced by contracts. He envisions that companies pay for the benefits they receive from using FOSS. Compliance for each contract would be checked, renewed, and paid for yearly, and the payments would go towards funding FOSS development. Individuals and nonprofits would continue to use FOSS for free. In March 2024, Perens posted a draft Post-Open license. The draft includes a description of the contract-related files to be shipped with FOSS software, a description of the status of derivative works, how revenue is collected, and conditions of termination. The draft has yet to be reviewed by a lawyer, but what is immediately noticeable is how it draws on both contract language and FOSS licenses to produce something different.
Byfield concludes that "free licenses are straining to respond to loopholes, and a discussion needs to be had about whether they are adequate to modern pressures."

Daniel Mthimkhulu, former chief "engineer" at South Africa's Passenger Rail Agency (Prasa), was sentenced to 15 years in prison for claiming false engineering degrees and a doctorate. His fraudulent credentials allowed him to rise rapidly within Prasa, contributing to significant financial losses and corruption within the agency. The BBC reports: Once hailed for his successful career, Daniel Mthimkhulu was head of engineering at the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) for five years -- earning an annual salary of about [$156,000]. On his CV, the 49-year-old claimed to have had several mechanical engineering qualifications, including a degree from South Africa's respected Witwatersrand University as well as a doctorate from a German university. However, the court in Johannesburg heard that he had only completed his high-school education.

Mthimkhulu was arrested in July 2015 shortly after his web of lies began to unravel. He had started working at Prasa 15 years earlier, shooting up the ranks to become chief engineer, thanks to his fake qualifications. The court also heard how he had forged a job offer letter from a German company, which encouraged Prasa to increase his salary so the agency would not lose him. He was also at the forefront of a 600m rand deal to buy dozens of new trains from Spain, but they could not be used in South Africa as they were too high. [...] In an interview from 2019 with local broadcaster eNCA, Mthimkhulu admitted that he did not have a PhD. "I failed to correct the perception that I have it. I just became comfortable with the title. I did not foresee any damages as a result of this," he said.

Pundits aggregate results from multiple pollsters to minimize biases. So ZDNet tried the same approach, but aggregating rankings for the popularity of 19 top programming languages. Senior contributing editor David Gewirtz combined results from nine popularity rankings, including PYPL, the Tiobe index, GitHub's Usage 2023 summary report, and several rankings from Stack Overflow and from IEEE Spectrum.

The results? The top cluster contains Python, JavaScript, and Java. These are all very representative in the world of AI coding...

The next cluster contains the classic C-based languages [C++, C#, C], plus TypeScript (which is a more robust JavaScript variant) and SQL.

Below that are languages that were dominant a while ago, the web languages used to build and operate websites [HTML/CSS, PHP, Shell], followed by a range of other languages that are either growing in popularity (R, Dart) or dropping in popularity (Ruby). [Just above Ruby are Go, Rust, Kotlin, and Lua.]

Finally, at the bottom is Swift, Apple's language of choice. Objective-C, the previous language of Apple programming, has all but dropped off the list since Apple launched Swift. But while Apple boasts many developers, Swift is clearly not a standout in programmer interest... [T]here aren't a huge number of companies hiring Apple app developers, at least primarily. That's why Swift is relatively far down the chart. Objective-C is being replaced by Swift, and we can see it dropping right before our eyes.
"With the exception of Java, the C-family of languages still dominates," the article concludes, before adding that if you're only going to learn one language, "I'd recommend Python, Java, and JavaScript instead." But it also advises aspiring programmers to learn "multiple languages and multiple frameworks. Build things in the languages. Programming is not just an intellectual exercise. You have to actually make stuff....

"[L]earning how to learn languages is as important as learning a language — and the best way to do that is to learn more than one."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Ars Technica: On Saturday NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some strange noises emanating from a speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft.

"I've got a question about Starliner," Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "There's a strange noise coming through the speaker ... I don't know what's making it." [Ars Technica embeded a clip of the conversation including the rhythmic, sonar-like noise which was shared online by a Michigan-based meteorologist.] Wilmore said he was not sure if there was some oddity in the connection between the station and the spacecraft causing the noise, or something else. He asked the flight controllers in Houston to see if they could listen to the audio inside the spacecraft. A few minutes later, Mission Control radioed back that they were linked via "hardline" to listen to audio inside Starliner, which has now been docked to the International Space Station for nearly three months.

Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, then put his microphone up to the speaker inside Starliner. Shortly thereafter, there was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. "Alright Butch, that one came through," Mission control radioed up to Wilmore. "It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping."

"I'll do it one more time, and I'll let y'all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what's going on," Wilmore replied. The odd, sonar-like audio then repeated itself. "Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out."

"The Big Bang may not have been the beginning of the universe," writes LiveScience, citing "a theory of cosmology that suggests the universe can 'bounce' between phases of contraction and expansion."

The recent study suggests that dark matter could be composed of black holes formed before the Big Bang, during a transition from the universe's last contraction to the current expansion phase... In the new study, researchers explored a scenario where dark matter consists of primordial black holes formed from density fluctuations that occurred during the universe's last contraction phase, not long before the period of expansion that we observe now. They published their findings in June in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics ... In this "bouncing" cosmology, the universe contracted to a size about 50 orders of magnitude smaller than it is today. After the rebound, photons and other particles were born, marking the Big Bang. Near the rebound, the matter density was so high that small black holes formed from quantum fluctuations in the matter's density, making them viable candidates for dark matter.

"Small primordial black holes can be produced during the very early stages of the universe, and if they are not too small, their decay due to Hawking radiation [a hypothetical phenomenon of black holes emitting particles due to quantum effects] will not be efficient enough to get rid of them, so they would still be around now," Patrick Peter, director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "Weighing more or less the mass of an asteroid, they could contribute to dark matter, or even solve this issue altogether."

The scientists' calculations show that this universe mode's properties, such as the curvature of space and the microwave background, match current observations, supporting their hypothesis.
"If this hypothesis holds, the gravitational waves generated during the black hole formation process might be detectable by future gravitational wave observatories, providing a way to confirm this dark matter generation scenario..."

Apple has laid off about 100 employees in its services group (source may be paywalled; alternative source), primarily affecting roles associated with the Apple Books app and Apple Bookstore. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: The impacted employees at the Cupertino-based tech giant were informed of the cuts on Tuesday, Bloomberg reported (paywalled). The layoffs spanned various teams under Senior Vice President Eddy Cue. The job cuts include roles primarily associated with the Apple Books app and Apple Bookstore, with the company shifting its focus to other divisions. Additionally, other services teams, such as the one managing Apple News, also experienced layoffs.

While Apple has largely avoided mass layoffs even as other major tech companies have downsized, it did lay off 614 employees in Santa Clara earlier this year. Those cuts marked Apple's first significant job reductions since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and coincided with the cancellation of its decade-long electric car project.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Ars Technica, written by John Timmer: While solar power is growing at an extremely rapid clip, in absolute terms, the use of natural gas for electricity production has continued to outpace renewables. But that looks set to change in 2024, as the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) has run the numbers on the first half of the year and found that wind, solar, and batteries were each installed at a pace that dwarfs new natural gas generators. And the gap is expected to get dramatically larger before the year is over.

According to the EIA's numbers, about 20 GW of new capacity was added in the first half of this year, and solar accounts for 60 percent of it. Over a third of the solar additions occurred in just two states, Texas and Florida. There were two projects that went live that were rated at over 600 MW of capacity, one in Texas, the other in Nevada. Next up is batteries: The US saw 4.2 additional gigawatts of battery capacity during this period, meaning over 20 percent of the total new capacity. (Batteries are treated as the equivalent of a generating source by the EIA since they can dispatch electricity to the grid on demand, even if they can't do so continuously.) Texas and California alone accounted for over 60 percent of these additions; throw in Arizona and Nevada, and you're at 93 percent of the installed capacity.

The clear pattern here is that batteries are going where the solar is, allowing the power generated during the peak of the day to be used to meet demand after the sun sets. This will help existing solar plants avoid curtailing power production during the lower-demand periods in the spring and fall. In turn, this will improve the economic case for installing additional solar in states where its production can already regularly exceed demand. Wind power, by contrast, is running at a more sedate pace, with only 2.5 GW of new capacity during the first six months of 2024. And for likely the last time this decade, additional nuclear power was placed on the grid, at the fourth 1.1 GW reactor (and second recent build) at the Vogtle site in Georgia. The only other additions came from natural gas-powered facilities, but these totaled just 400 MW, or just 2 percent of the total of new capacity.

The EIA expects a bit over 60 GW of new capacity to be installed by the end of the year, with 37 GW of that coming in the form of solar power. Battery growth continues at a torrid pace, with 15 GW expected, or roughly a quarter of the total capacity additions for the year. Wind will account for 7.1 GW of new capacity, and natural gas 2.6 GW. Throw in the contribution from nuclear, and 96 percent of the capacity additions of 2024 are expected to operate without any carbon emissions. Even if you choose to ignore the battery additions, the fraction of carbon-emitting capacity added remains extremely small, at only 6 percent."