An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Multiple studies and investigations have found that about half of American households watch TV and movies with subtitles on, but only a relatively small portion of those include someone with a hearing disability. That's because of the trouble many people have understanding dialogue in modern viewing situations, and Netflix has now introduced a subtitles option to help.

The closed captioning we've all been using for years includes not only the words the people on-screen are saying, but additional information needed by the hard of hearing, including character names, music cues ("dramatic music intensifies") and sound effects ("loud explosion"). For those who just wanted to make sure they didn't miss a word here and there, the frequent descriptions of sound effects and music could be distracting. This new format omits those extras, just including the spoken words and nothing else -- even in the same language as the spoken dialogue. The feature will be available in new Netflix original programming, starting with the new season of You in multiple languages. Netflix says it's looking at bringing the option to older titles in the library (including those not produced by Netflix) in the future.

Traditional closed captions are still available, of course. Those are labeled "English CC" whereas this new option is simply labeled "English" (or whatever your preferred language is).

US government agencies and Fortune 500 companies are turning to AI to modernize mission-critical systems built on COBOL, a programming language dating back to the late 1950s. The US Social Security Administration plans a three-year, $1 billion AI-assisted upgrade of its legacy COBOL codebase[alternative source], according to Bloomberg.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly stressed the need to overhaul government systems running on COBOL. As experienced programmers retire, organizations face growing challenges maintaining these systems that power everything from banking applications to pension disbursements. Engineers now use tools like ChatGPT and IBM's watsonX to interpret COBOL code, create documentation, and translate it to modern languages.

OpenAI has released Codex CLI, an open-source coding agent that runs locally in users' terminal software. Announced alongside the company's new o3 and o4-mini models, Codex CLI directly connects OpenAI's AI systems with local code and computing tasks, enabling them to write and manipulate code on users' machines.

The lightweight tool allows developers to leverage multimodal reasoning capabilities by passing screenshots or sketches to the model while providing access to local code repositories. Unlike more ambitious future plans for an "agentic software engineer" that could potentially build entire applications from descriptions, Codex CLI focuses specifically on integrating AI models with command-line interfaces.

To accelerate adoption, OpenAI is distributing $1 million in API credits through a grant program, offering $25,000 blocks to selected projects. While the tool expands AI's role in programming workflows, it comes with inherent risks -- studies show AI coding models frequently fail to fix security vulnerabilities and sometimes introduce new bugs, particularly concerning when given system-level access.

Stanford law school graduate Peter Thiel later co-founded Facebook, PayPal, and Palantir. But in 2010 Thiel also created the Thiel Fellowship, which annually gives 20 to 30 people under the age of 23 $100,000 "to encourage students to not stick around college." (College students must drop out in order to accept the fellowship.)

And now Palantir "is taking a similar approach as it maneuvers to attract new talent," reports financial news site The Street: The company has launched what it refers to as the "Meritocracy Fellowship," a four-month internship program for recent high school graduates who have not enrolled in college. The position pays roughly $5,400 per month, more than plenty of post-college internship programs. Palantir's job posting suggests that the company is especially interested in candidates with experience in programming and statistical analysis.
Palantir's job listing specifically says they launched their four-month fellowship "in response to the shortcomings of university admissions," promising it would be based "solely on merit and academic excellence" (requiring an SAT score over 1459 or an ACT score above 32.) "Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence..." As a result, qualified students are being denied an education based on subjective and shallow criteria. Absent meritocracy, campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism and chaos... Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree...

Upon successful completion of the Meritocracy Fellowship, fellows that have excelled during their time at Palantir will be given the opportunity to interview for full-time employment at Palantir.

Some of the best AI models today still struggle to resolve software bugs that wouldn't trip up experienced devs. TechCrunch: A new study from Microsoft Research, Microsoft's R&D division, reveals that models, including Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI's o3-mini, fail to debug many issues in a software development benchmark called SWE-bench Lite. The results are a sobering reminder that, despite bold pronouncements from companies like OpenAI, AI is still no match for human experts in domains such as coding.

The study's co-authors tested nine different models as the backbone for a "single prompt-based agent" that had access to a number of debugging tools, including a Python debugger. They tasked this agent with solving a curated set of 300 software debugging tasks from SWE-bench Lite.

According to the co-authors, even when equipped with stronger and more recent models, their agent rarely completed more than half of the debugging tasks successfully. Claude 3.7 Sonnet had the highest average success rate (48.4%), followed by OpenAI's o1 (30.2%), and o3-mini (22.1%).

Back in 2023 Python's infrastructure director called it "the first step in our plan to build financial support and long-term sustainability of PyPI" while giving users "one of our most requested features: organization accounts." (That is, "self-managed teams with their own exclusive branded web addresses" to make their massive Python Package Index repository "easier to use for large community projects, organizations, or companies who manage multiple sub-teams and multiple packages.")

Nearly two years later, they've announced that they're "making progress" on its rollout... Over the last month, we have taken some more baby steps to onboard new Organizations, welcoming 61 new Community Organizations and our first 18 Company Organizations. We're still working to improve the review and approval process and hope to improve our processing speed over time. To date, we have 3,562 Community and 6,424 Company Organization requests to process in our backlog.
They've also onboarded a PyPI Support Specialist to provide "critical bandwidth to review the backlog of requests" and "free up staff engineering time to develop features to assist in that review." (And "we were finally able to finalize our Terms of Service document for PyPI," build the tooling necessary to notify users, and initiate the Terms of Service rollout. [Since launching 20 years ago PyPi's terms of service have only been updated twice.]

In other news the security developer-in-residence at the Python Software Foundation has been continuing work on a Software Bill-of-Materials (SBOM) as described in Python Enhancement Proposal #770. The feature "would designate a specific directory inside of Python package metadata (".dist-info/sboms") as a directory where build backends and other tools can store SBOM documents that describe components within the package beyond the top-level component." The goal of this project is to make bundled dependencies measurable by software analysis tools like vulnerability scanning, license compliance, and static analysis tools. Bundled dependencies are common for scientific computing and AI packages, but also generally in packages that use multiple programming languages like C, C++, Rust, and JavaScript. The PEP has been moved to Provisional Status, meaning the PEP sponsor is doing a final review before tools can begin implementing the PEP ahead of its final acceptance into changing Python packaging standards. Seth has begun implementing code that tools can use when adopting the PEP, such as a project which abstracts different Linux system package managers functionality to reverse a file path into the providing package metadata.

Security developer-in-residence Seth Larson will be speaking about this project at PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, PA in a talk titled "Phantom Dependencies: is your requirements.txt haunted?"
Meanwhile InfoWorld reports that newly approved Python Enhancement Proposal 751 will also give Python a standard lock file format.

Wikipedia remembers Dave Täht as "an American network engineer, musician, lecturer, asteroid exploration advocate, and Internet activist. He was the chief executive officer of TekLibre."

But on X.com Eric S. Raymond called him "one of the unsung heroes of the Internet, and a close friend of mine who I will miss very badly." Dave, known on X as @mtaht because his birth name was Michael, was a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using X. His work on mitigating bufferbloat improved practical TCP/IP performance tremendously, especially around video streaming and other applications requiring low latency. Without him, Netflix and similar services might still be plagued by glitches and stutters.
Also on X, legendary game developer John Carmack remembered that Täht "did a great service for online gamers with his long campaign against bufferbloat in routers and access points. There is a very good chance your packets flow through some code he wrote." (Carmack also says he and Täht "corresponded for years".)

Long-time Slashdot reader TheBracketremembers him as "the driving force behind ">the Bufferbloat project and a contributor to FQ-CoDel, and CAKE in the Linux kernel."

Dave spent years doing battle with Internet latency and bufferbloat, contributing to countless projects. In recent years, he's been working with Robert, Frank and myself at LibreQoS to provide CAKE at the ISP level, helping Starlink with their latency and bufferbloat, and assisting the OpenWrt project.
Eric Raymond remembered first meeting Täht in 2001 "near the peak of my Mr. Famous Guy years. Once, sometimes twice a year he'd come visit, carrying his guitar, and crash out in my basement for a week or so hacking on stuff. A lot of the central work on bufferbloat got done while I was figuratively looking over his shoulder..."

Raymond said Täht "lived for the work he did" and "bore deteriorating health stoically. While I know him he went blind in one eye and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis." He barely let it slow him down. Despite constantly griping in later years about being burned out on programming, he kept not only doing excellent work but bringing good work out of others, assembling teams of amazing collaborators to tackle problems lesser men would have considered intractable... Dave should have been famous, and he should have been rich. If he had a cent for every dollar of value he generated in the world he probably could have bought the entire country of Nicaragua and had enough left over to finance a space program. He joked about wanting to do the latter, and I don't think he was actually joking...

In the invisible college of people who made the Internet run, he was among the best of us. He said I inspired him, but I often thought he was a better and more selfless man than me. Ave atque vale, Dave.
Weeks before his death Täht was still active on X.com, retweeting LWN's article about "The AI scraperbot scourge", an announcement from Texas Instruments, and even a Slashdot headline.

Täht was also Slashdot reader #603,670, submitting stories about network latency, leaving comments about AI, and making announcements about the Bufferbloat project.

Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott has predicted that AI will generate 95% of code within five years. Speaking on the 20VC podcast, Scott said AI would not replace software engineers but transform their role. "It doesn't mean that the AI is doing the software engineering job.... authorship is still going to be human," Scott said.

According to Scott, developers will shift from writing code directly to guiding AI through prompts and instructions. "We go from being an input master (programming languages) to a prompt master (AI orchestrator)," he said. Scott said the current AI systems have significant memory limitations, making them "awfully transactional," but predicted improvements within the next year.

Software engineer Sergey Tselovalnikov weighs in on the new hype: The term caught on and Twitter quickly flooded with posts about how AI has radically transformed coding and will soon replace all software engineers. While AI undeniably impacts the way we write code, it hasn't fundamentally changed our role as engineers. Allow me to explain.

[...] Vibe coding is interacting with the codebase via prompts. As the implementation is hidden from the "vibe coder", all the engineering concerns will inevitably get ignored. Many of the concerns are hard to express in a prompt, and many of them are hard to verify by only inspecting the final artifact. Historically, all engineering practices have tried to shift all those concerns left -- to the earlier stages of development when they're cheap to address. Yet with vibe coding, they're shifted very far to the right -- when addressing them is expensive.

The question of whether an AI system can perform the complete engineering cycle and build and evolve software the same way a human can remains open. However, there are no signs of it being able to do so at this point, and if it one day happens, it won't have anything to do with vibe coding -- at least the way it's defined today.

[...] It is possible that there'll be a future where software is built from vibe-coded blocks, but the work of designing software able to evolve and scale doesn't go away. That's not vibe engineering -- that's just engineering, even if the coding part of it will look a bit different.

Learning to code has become sort of become pointless as AI increasingly dominates programming tasks, said Replit founder and chief executive Amjad Masad. "I no longer think you should learn to code," Masad wrote on X.

The statement comes as major tech executives report significant AI inroads into software development. Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently revealed that 25% of new code at the tech giant is AI-generated, though still reviewed by engineers. Furthermore, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted AI could generate up to 90% of all code within six months.

Masad called this shift a "bittersweet realization" after spending years popularizing coding through open-source work, Codecademy, and Replit -- a platform that now uses AI to help users build apps and websites. Instead of syntax-focused programming skills, Masad recommends learning "how to think, how to break down problems... how to communicate clearly, with humans and with machines."

What happens when you ask Copilot to "write a program that can be run on an iPhone 16 to select 15 random photos from the phone, tint them to random colors, and display the photos on the phone"?

That's what TouchDevelop did for the long-discontinued Windows Phone in a 2013 Microsoft Research 'SmartSynth' natural language code generationdemo. ("Write scripts by tapping on the screen.")

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp reports on what happens when, 14 years later, you pose the same question to Copilot: "You'll get lots of code and caveats from Copilot, but nothing that you can execute as is. (Compare that to the functioning 10 lines of code TouchDevelop program). It's a good reminder that just because GenAI can generate code, it doesn't necessarily mean it will generate the least amount of code, the most understandable or appropriate code for the requestor, or code that runs unchanged and produces the desired results.
theodp also reminds us that TouchDevelop "was (like BASIC) abandoned by Microsoft..." Interestingly, a Microsoft Research video from CS Education Week 2011 shows enthusiastic Washington high school students participating in an hour-long TouchDevelop coding lesson and demonstrating the apps they created that tapped into music, photos, the Internet, and yes, even their phone's functionality. This shows how lacking iPhone and Android still are today as far as easy programmability-for-the-masses goes. (When asked, Copilot replied that Apple's Shortcuts app wasn't up to the task).

As Rust approaches its 10th anniversary, "there is an important piece of documentation missing that many other languages provide," notes the Rust Foundation.

While there's documentation and tutorials — there's no official language specification: In December 2022, an RFC was submitted to encourage the Rust Project to begin working on a specification. After much discussion, the RFC was approved in July 2023, and work began.

Initially, the Rust Project specification team (t-spec) were interested in creating the document from scratch using the Rust Reference as a guiding marker. However, the team knew there was already an external Rust specification that was being used successfully for compiler qualification purposes — the FLS.
Thank Berlin-based Ferrous Systems, a Rust-based consultancy who assembled that description "some years ago," according to a post on the Rust blog: They've since been faithfully maintaining and updating this document for new versions of Rust, and they've successfully used it to qualify toolchains based on Rust for use in safety-critical industries. [The Rust Foundation notes it part of the consultancy's "Ferrocene" Rust compiler/toolchain.] Seeing this success, others have also begun to rely on the FLS for their own qualification efforts when building with Rust.
The Rust Foundation explains: The FLS provides a structured and detailed reference for Rust's syntax, semantics, and behavior, serving as a foundation for verification, compliance, and standardization efforts. Since Rust did not have an official language specification back then, nor a plan to write one, the FLS represented a major step toward describing Rust in a way that aligns with industry requirements, particularly in high-assurance domains.
And the Rust Project is "passionate about shipping high quality tools that enable people to build reliable software at scale," adds the Rust blog. So... It's in that light that we're pleased to announce that we'll be adopting the FLS into the Rust Project as part of our ongoing specification efforts. This adoption is being made possible by the gracious donation of the FLS by Ferrous Systems. We're grateful to them for the work they've done in assembling the FLS, in making it fit for qualification purposes, in promoting its use and the use of Rust generally in safety-critical industries, and now, for working with us to take the next step and to bring the FLS into the Project.

With this adoption, we look forward to better integrating the FLS with the processes of the Project and to providing ongoing and increased assurances to all those who use Rust in safety-critical industries and, in particular, to those who use the FLS as part of their qualification efforts.
More from the Rust Foundation: The t-spec team wanted to avoid potential confusion from having two highly visible Rust specifications in the industry and so decided it would be worthwhile to try to integrate the FLS with the Rust Reference to create the official Rust Project specification. They approached Ferrous Systems, which agreed to contribute its FLS to the Rust Project and allow the Rust Project to take over its development and management... This generous donation will provide a clearer path to delivering an official Rust specification. It will also empower the Rust Project to oversee its ongoing evolution, providing confidence to companies and individuals already relying on the FLS, and marking a major milestone for the Rust ecosystem.

"I really appreciate Ferrous taking this step to provide their specification to the Rust Project," said Joel Marcey, Director of Technology at the Rust Foundation and member of the t-spec team. "They have already done a massive amount of legwork...." This effort will provide others who require a Rust specification with an official, authoritative reference for their work with the Rust programming language... This is an exciting outcome. A heartfelt thank you to the Ferrous Systems team for their invaluable contribution!
Marcey said the move allows the team "to supercharge our progress in the delivery of an official Rust specification."

And the co-founder of Ferrous Systems, Felix Gilcher, also sounded excited. "We originally created the Ferrocene Language Specification to provide a structured and reliable description of Rust for the certification of the Ferrocene compiler. As an open source-first company, contributing the FLS to the Rust Project is a logical step toward fostering the development of a unified, community-driven specification that benefits all Rust users."

Cloud providers like the security of running things in virtual machines "at scale" — even though VMs "are not known for having fast cold starts or a small footprint..." noted Microsoft's Open Source blog last November. So Microsoft's Azure Core Upstream team built an open source Rust library called Hyperlight "to execute functions as fast as possible while isolating those functions within a VM."

But that was just the beginning... Then, we showed how to run Rust functions really, really fast, followed by using C to [securely] run Javascript. In February 2025, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) voted to onboard Hyperlight into their Sandbox program [for early-stage projects].

[This week] we're announcing the release of Hyperlight Wasm: a Hyperlight virtual machine "micro-guest" that can run wasm component workloads written in many programming languages...

Traditional virtual machines do a lot of work to be able to run programs. Not only do they have to load an entire operating system, they also boot up the virtual devices that the operating system depends on. Hyperlight is fast because it doesn't do that work; all it exposes to its VM guests is a linear slice of memory and a CPU. No virtual devices. No operating system. But this speed comes at the cost of compatibility. Chances are that your current production application expects a Linux operating system running on the x86-64 architecture (hardware), not a bare linear slice of memory...

[B]uilding Hyperlight with a WebAssembly runtime — wasmtime — enables any programming language to execute in a protected Hyperlight micro-VM without any prior knowledge of Hyperlight at all. As far as program authors are concerned, they're just compiling for the wasm32-wasip2 target... Executing workloads in the Hyperlight Wasm guest isn't just possible for compiled languages like C, Go, and Rust, but also for interpreted languages like Python, JavaScript, and C#. The trick here, much like with containers, is to also include a language runtime as part of the image... Programming languages, runtimes, application platforms, and cloud providers are all starting to offer rich experiences for WebAssembly out of the box. If we do things right, you will never need to think about whether your application is running inside of a Hyperlight Micro-VM in Azure. You may never know your workload is executing in a Hyperlight Micro VM. And that's a good thing.
While a traditional virtual-device-based VM takes about 125 milliseconds to load, "When the Hyperlight VMM creates a new VM, all it needs do to is create a new slice of memory and load the VM guest, which in turn loads the wasm workload. This takes about 1-2 milliseconds today, and work is happening to bring that number to be less than 1 millisecond in the future."

And there's also double security due to Wasmtime's software-defined runtime sandbox within Hyperlight's larger VM...

Longtime Slashdot reader frank_adrian314159 writes: According to an article in Wired, Elon Musk has appointed a team of technologists from DOGE to "rewrite the code that runs the SSA in months." This codebase has over 60 million lines of COBOL and handles record keeping for all American workers and payments for all Social Security recipients. Given that the code has to track the byzantine regulations dealing with Social Security, it's no wonder that the codebase is this large. What is in question though is whether a small team can rewrite this code "in months." After all, what could possibly go wrong? "The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis ... and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL ... and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months," notes Wired.

"Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits."

In 2017, SSA announced a plan to modernize its core systems with a timeline of around five years. However, the work was "pivoted away" because of the pandemic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols: Despite the minor delay, Linux 6.14 arrives packed with cutting-edge features and improvements to power upcoming Linux distributions, such as the forthcoming Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42. The big news for desktop users is the improved NTSYNC driver, especially those who like to play Windows games or run Windows programs on Linux. This driver is designed to emulate Windows NT synchronization primitives. What that feature means for you and me is that it will significantly improve the performance of Windows programs running on Wine and Steam Play. [...] Gamers always want the best possible graphics performance, so they'll also be happy to see that Linux now supports recently launched AMD RDNA 4 graphics cards. This approach includes support for the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards. Combine this support with the recently improved open-source RADV driver and AMD gamers should see the best speed yet on their gaming rigs.

Of course, the release is not just for gamers. Linux 6.14 also includes several AMD and Intel processor enhancements. These boosts focus on power management, thermal control, and compute performance optimizations. These updates are expected to improve overall system efficiency and performance. This release also comes with the AMDXDNA driver, which provides official support for AMD's neural processing units based on the XDNA architecture. This integration enables efficient execution of AI workloads, such as convolutional neural networks and large language models, directly on supported AMD hardware. While Rust has faced some difficulties in recent months in Linux, more Rust programming language abstractions have been integrated into the kernel, laying the groundwork for future drivers written in Rust. [...] Besides drivers, Miguel Ojeda, Rust for Linux's lead developer, said recently that the introduction of the macro for smart pointers with Rust 1.84: derive(CoercePointee) is an "important milestone on the way to building a kernel that only uses stable Rust functions." This approach will also make integrating C and Rust code easier. We're getting much closer to Rust being grafted into Linux's tree.

In addition, Linux 6.14 supports Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile processor, enhancing performance and stability for devices powered by this chipset. That support means you can expect to see much faster Android-based smartphones later this year. This release includes a patch for the so-called GhostWrite vulnerability, which can be used to root some RISC-V processors. This fix will block such attacks. Additionally, Linux 6.14 includes improvements for the copy-on-write Btrfs file system/logical volume manager. These primarily read-balancing methods offer flexibility for different RAID hardware configurations and workloads. Additionally, support for uncached buffered I/O optimizes memory usage on systems with fast storage devices. Linux 6.14 is available for download here.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes companies will eventually need fewer software engineers as AI continues to transform programming. "Each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while. And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers," Altman told Stratechery.

AI now handles over 50% of code authorship in many companies, Altman estimated, a significant shift that's happened rapidly as large language models have improved. The real paradigm shift is still coming, he said. "The big thing I think will come with agentic coding, which no one's doing for real yet," Altman said, suggesting that the next breakthrough will be AI systems that can independently tackle larger programming tasks with minimal human guidance.

While OpenAI continues hiring engineers for now, Altman recommended that high school graduates entering the workforce "get really good at using AI tools," calling it the modern equivalent of learning to code. "When I was graduating as a senior from high school, the obvious tactical thing was get really good at coding. And this is the new version of that," he said.

Slashdot reader spatwei shared this report from the cybersecurity site SC World: : AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor could be manipulated to generate code containing backdoors, vulnerabilities and other security issues via distribution of malicious rule configuration files, Pillar Security researchers reported Tuesday.

Rules files are used by AI coding agents to guide their behavior when generating or editing code. For example, a rules file may include instructions for the assistant to follow certain coding best practices, utilize specific formatting, or output responses in a specific language.

The attack technique developed by Pillar Researchers, which they call 'Rules File Backdoor,' weaponizes rules files by injecting them with instructions that are invisible to a human user but readable by the AI agent.

Hidden Unicode characters like bidirectional text markers and zero-width joiners can be used to obfuscate malicious instructions in the user interface and in GitHub pull requests, the researchers noted.

Rules configurations are often shared among developer communities and distributed through open-source repositories or included in project templates; therefore, an attacker could distribute a malicious rules file by sharing it on a forum, publishing it on an open-source platform like GitHub or injecting it via a pull request to a popular repository.

Once the poisoned rules file is imported to GitHub Copilot or Cursor, the AI agent will read and follow the attacker's instructions while assisting the victim's future coding projects.

Computer programming jobs in the US have declined by more than a quarter over the past two years, placing the profession among the 10 hardest-hit occupations of 420-plus jobs tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and potentially signaling the first concrete evidence of artificial intelligence replacing workers.

The timing coincides with OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Anthropic researchers found people use AI to perform programming tasks more than those of any other job, though 57 percent of users employ AI to augment rather than automate work. "Without getting hysterical, the unemployment jump for programming really does look at least partly like an early, visible labor market effect of AI," said Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution.

While software developer positions have remained stable with only a 0.3 percent decline, programmers who perform more routine coding from specifications provided by others have seen their ranks diminish to levels not seen since 1980. Economists caution that high interest rates and post-pandemic tech industry contraction have also contributed to the decline in programming jobs, which typically pay $99,700 compared to $132,270 for developers.

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said startups are reaching $1-10 million annual revenue with fewer than 10 employees due to "vibe coding," a term coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February.

"You can just talk to the large language models and they will code entire apps," Tan told CNBC (video). "You don't have to hire someone to do it, you just talk directly to the large language model that wrote it and it'll fix it for you." What would've once taken "50 or 100" engineers to build, he believes can now be accomplished by a team of 10, "when they are fully vibe coders." He adds: "When they are actually really, really good at using the cutting edge tools for code gen today, like Cursor or Windsurf, they will literally do the work of 10 or 100 engineers in the course of a single day."

According to Tan, 81% of Y Combinator's current startup batch consists of AI companies, with 25% having 95% of their code written by large language models. Despite limitations in debugging capabilities, Tan said the technology enables small teams to perform work previously requiring dozens of engineers and makes previously overlooked niche markets viable for software businesses.

Roku is testing autoplaying video ads that play before users can access the home screen. While Roku claims this is just an experiment, users are threatening to abandon the platform if the change becomes permanent. Ars Technica reports: Reports of Roku customers seeing video ads automatically play before they could view the OS' home screen started appearing online this week. A Reddit user, for example, posted yesterday: "I just turned on my Roku and got an unskippable ad for a movie, before I got to the regular Roku home screen." Multiple apparent users reported seeing an ad for the movie Moana 2. When reached for comment, a Roku spokesperson shared a company statement that confirms that the autoplaying ads are expected behavior but not a permanent part of Roku OS currently. Instead, Roku claimed, it was just trying the ad capability out.

Roku's representative said that Roku's business "has and will always require continuous testing and innovation across design, navigation, content, and our first-rate advertising products," adding: "Our recent test is just the latest example, as we explore new ways to showcase brands and programming while still providing a delightful and simple user experience."