Author: Carter

When NASA launched the Artemis II space vehicle in early April, a 25-year-old software framework was quietly powering many of its critical systems. But don’t mistake this for some outdated relic that the space agency simply forgot to replace. On the contrary, Artemis II leaned on the core Flight System (cFS) to manage everything from telescope operations and avionics to command and control — because software engineers have been steadily refining and improving cFS since the early 2000s. NASA develops and sustains cFS through an open source platform and counts on the wider space community to keep the architecture, tools…

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeaways The permissions you grant smartphone apps can quietly compromise your privacy.Periodically reviewing app permissions helps safeguard your personal data from unnecessary exposure.Start by auditing the most sensitive permissions, then make it a habit to revisit them on a regular basis.Your smartphone, regardless of whether you prefer Android, iOS, or some other niche mobile operating system, can leave digital trails that anyone with the know-how can follow.Every app I install demands certain permissions to function. If you want food delivered, the app may need GPS access to locate…

Nous Research has added a Blank Slate setup mode to its open-source Hermes Agent. It inverts the usual onboarding. Instead of a fully loaded default, you start with almost nothing. Hermes Agent is the self-improving agent framework from Nous Research. It runs on your own machine. The team announced the new mode on X. Blank Slate now joins two existing options: Quick Setup and Full Setup. TL;DR Blank Slate boots an agent with everything off except provider & model, File Operations, and Terminal. Web, browser, code execution, vision, memory, delegation, cron, skills, plugins, and MCP stay disabled. It writes an…

def make_rag_chunks(rows, max_chars=700): chunks = [] for row in rows: text = ( row.get(“text_preview”) or row.get(“rendered_text”) or row.get(“description”) or “” ) text = normalize_text(text) if not text: continue sentences = re.split(r”(?<=[.!?])s+”, text) current = “” for sentence in sentences: if len(current) + len(sentence) + 1 <= max_chars: current = (current + ” ” + sentence).strip() else: if current: chunks.append( { “chunk_id”: hashlib.sha1( (row.get(“url”, “”) + current).encode() ).hexdigest()[:12], “url”: row.get(“url”), “source”: row.get(“source”), “page_type”: row.get(“page_type”), “title”: row.get(“title”) or row.get(“name”), “text”: current, } ) current = sentence if current: chunks.append( { “chunk_id”: hashlib.sha1( (row.get(“url”, “”) + current).encode() ).hexdigest()[:12], “url”: row.get(“url”), “source”: row.get(“source”), “page_type”:…

Artificial intelligence, automation, and digital transformation are reshaping the skills employees need at a pace that many organisations struggle to match. Job roles are shifting, workflows are growing more technical, and teams are under pressure to master new tools, systems, and customer demands faster than ever before. Workforce development can no longer be treated as a periodic HR checkbox.Ongoing learning has become a hallmark of a workforce prepared for the future. Companies need people who can pick up new skills, put existing knowledge into practice quickly, and adapt with confidence as business needs change. For this reason, investing in training…

In brief Publicly traded companies are now accumulating Solana alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum. The leading firms have collectively gathered over $1 billion worth of SOL. The frontrunner, Forward Industries, holds more than 7 million SOL on its own. Michael Saylor pioneered the digital asset treasury concept when his company Strategy started purchasing Bitcoin in 2020, accumulating over $53 billion worth of BTC over the years—and sparking a trend among other companies.Today, publicly traded companies are venturing further along the risk spectrum and diversifying their balance sheets with various crypto tokens, including Ethereum and XRP.This shift includes building treasury strategies focused…

Innovators Spotlight: Converting OT Cyber Risk Into Financial Terms With Centrii If you’re overwhelmed by dashboards flashing red alerts constantly, this article is for you. Over the past ten years, the OT and energy industries have been layering on cybersecurity tools as if decorating a race car with stickers. Each new vendor promises greater visibility, more alerts, and deeper context. The outcome is entirely predictable: more noise than useful signals, more alarms than actual actions, and a collection of costly technology that still fails to answer the one question that truly matters to your board: How much money could we…

ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura Edition pros and cons Pros Remarkably lightweight.Modular “Space Frame” design enhances repairability.Outstanding display quality.The definitive premium ThinkPad experience. Cons RAM is soldered to the motherboard.Battery life is just average.Upgrades can get expensive quickly. Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.Lenovo unveiled the 14th-generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon at CES 2026 to significant excitement, snagging the Best Laptop of CES award thanks to its innovative modular architecture and strong focus on repairability. It also earned a stellar 9/10 score from the repairability experts at iFixit.It’s unmistakably a ThinkPad, packed with the high-end features…

For a long time, building a medallion architecture in Microsoft Fabric meant connecting a range of separate components: notebooks to handle transformations, pipelines to orchestrate workflows, schedules to manage refreshes, custom code for data-quality checks, and the Monitor Hub to verify that everything ran successfully. Each layer functioned well enough, but when one failed, you had to identify which layer broke, understand why, and determine which downstream layers were impacted. If you’ve ever troubleshot a silver layer that didn’t update because the bronze notebook had failed hours earlier, you know the frustration firsthand. Then, at FabCon Atlanta in March 2026,…

 The National Endowment for the Arts is preparing to roll out a brand-new grants platform in the year ahead. What sets this initiative apart isn’t simply that it will take over from a decade-old system the agency had pieced together over time. What truly distinguishes this new platform is that a single NEA engineer built it with the help of an artificial intelligence agent — and finished the job in just one week. Jim Tunnessen, who serves as both chief information officer and chief artificial intelligence officer at NEA, explained that within days the engineer produced a fully functional…