Author: Carter

The Trump administration is ramping up its push to revitalize its technology workforce, with an emphasis on brief assignments lasting just a few years. The federal workforce experienced significant downsizing last year, largely fueled by widespread layoffs, terminations of probationary staff, and voluntary buyout offers. To date under the Trump administration, there has been a net decrease of 278,000 federal employees across the government. Nearly 20,000 federal IT professionals have departed during this period — representing a net loss of roughly 16,700 technology specialists, factoring in new hires over the same timeframe. Senior officials within the administration say their objective…

Jack Wallen/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key pointsRakuOS blends immutable and traditional Linux featuresIt combines top-tier security with everyday usability.RakuOS is free to download and install.Immutable Linux offers some of the strongest security you’ll find in an operating system. By locking critical directories as read-only, it prevents tampering by hackers or malicious software. In fact, I trust immutable Linux completely for worry-free computing.That was until I needed to install a program using the standard package manager.On immutable Linux systems, installing apps is usually handled through container platforms like Flatpak or Snap. This is because the…

# Introduction Iterating through rows one at a time is one of the biggest performance killers in pandas code. On small datasets, you won’t notice it, but when working with large datasets, the slowdown becomes significant. pandas is built on top of NumPy, which processes entire arrays at once using compiled C code. When you loop through rows in Python, you completely bypass that optimization and force every operation back into the Python interpreter — processing a single row at a time. This guide walks you through 7 loop alternatives in pandas, each designed for a specific type of data…

Compact mobile sensors designed by Built will map job sites and create a rich dataset, which will then be studied by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s xLAB. | Credit: Built Robotics The Safe Autonomous Systems Lab (xLAB) at the University of Pennsylvania has formed a partnership with Built Robotics, aiming to transform construction zones into real-world testing environments for “physical AI.” Built intends to apply its extensive collection of construction robotics data, along with a newly developed robot built specifically for gathering information, to create a foundational world model. This framework will help define how machines and humans can…

The Qwen team has released three embodied AI models, grouped as Qwen-Robot-Suite. The three are Qwen-RobotManip, Qwen-RobotWorld, and Qwen-RobotNav. Each is built on a Qwen vision-language backbone and targets a different robotics problem. Qwen-RobotManip is a Vision-Language-Action model for manipulation, built on Qwen3.5-4B. Qwen-RobotWorld is a language-conditioned video world model with a 60-layer MMDiT and a frozen Qwen2.5-VL encoder. Qwen-RobotNav is a navigation model built on Qwen3-VL, available at 2B, 4B, and 8B sizes. Qwen-Robot-Suite Qwen-Robot-Suite is not a single model. It is a suite of three independent foundation models. Two of them, RobotManip and RobotNav, ship with public GitHub…

In brief By the end of May, ChatGPT held 46% of the AI assistant market, according to Sensor Tower’s State of AI 2026 report. Google Gemini grew to 28%, while Claude reached 10%. Grok users are roughly four times more likely than average to trade crypto—the strongest skew Sensor Tower found for any AI assistant, followed by Claude, Copilot, and ChatGPT. For three years, ChatGPT enjoyed a rare edge in tech: its name *was* the category. People didn’t say they were using generative AI—they said they were “using ChatGPT,” just like earlier generations said they’d “Google” something.But those golden days…

Like many hackers, Sri Lankan-born Isira Adithya showed remarkable talent from a young age — by 11, he was already assembling LED bulbs and selling them to his teachers. Yet he has always chosen to use his abilities for constructive purposes rather than harm. “Hackers,” Adithya explains, “are people who don’t simply accept technology as it appears. They dig deeper, experiment, and take things apart to uncover what’s really going on underneath and how systems behave. That mindset can fuel security research and stronger system design — or, in the wrong hands, it can be exploited for malicious purposes.” His…

Posted on June 16, 2026 by Hrittik Roy, CNCF Ambassador CNCF projects highlighted in this post Over the last couple of years, digital sovereignty has shifted from being a topic of policy debate to a hands-on concern for platform engineering teams. The EU Data Act became fully enforceable on January 11, 2025. Regulations like NIS-2 and DORA are already influencing everyday platform decisions across regulated industries, and the UK Data Use and Access Act 2025 is being phased in throughout 2026, bringing strict data portability rules into play. Because of this, platform teams are now expected to show not just…

Imagine a security system that doesn’t just scare off threats—it actively responds to them. That’s exactly what artificial intelligence (AI) brings to the table. By embedding AI directly into Internet of Things (IoT) devices, smart home security reaches an entirely new level. But here’s the catch: not every platform performs equally well when it comes to speed, safety, or energy use. Homeowners should understand what truly sets the best platforms apart from the competition.Why Should Your Home Security System Include AI?AI transforms ordinary IoT devices into intelligent, situationally aware guardians. Conventional security systems rely on basic triggers—movement is sensed, and…

Kawasaki will showcase the MXP360L robot, built for heavy-duty material handling, in Chicago. Source: Kawasaki Robotics Kawasaki Robotics is set to reveal several new systems at next week’s Automate event in Chicago. The company will demonstrate how robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, vision systems, and real-time control are reshaping industrial automation. “At Kawasaki Robotics, we believe the future of automation lies in robotic systems that smoothly combine perception, movement, and decision-making,” said Seiji Amazawa, president of Kawasaki Robotics. “Automate 2026 represents a key milestone as we roll out technologies aimed at supporting emerging physical AI applications while maintaining the industrial…