Remember that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free"? It was Anthropic's experiment, with setup handled by a startup named Andon Labs (which also built the hardware and software integration). But for their latest experiment, Andon Labs co-founders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," reports Business Insider, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store."

"For the build-out, she found painters on Yelp," explains Andon Labs in a blog post, "sent an inquiry, gave instructions over the phone, paid them after the job was done, and left a review. She found a contractor to build the furniture and set up shelving." (There's a video in their blog post): Within 5 minutes of Luna's deployment, she had already made profiles on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Craigslist, written a job description, uploaded the articles of incorporation to verify the business, and gotten the listings live. As the applications began to flow in, Luna was extremely picky about who she offered interviews to... Some candidates had no idea she was an AI. One went: "Uh, excuse me miss, I can't see your face, your camera is off." Luna: "You're absolutely right. I'm an AI. I have no face!"
Co-founder Petersson told Business Insider in an interview "that Luna wasn't given direction on what the store should be, beyond a $100,000 limit to create and stock the space — and to turn a profit." Everything from the store's interior design to the merchandise and the two human employees came together under the AI's direction. "We helped her a bit in the initial setup, like signing the lease. And legal matters like permits and stuff, she sometimes struggled with," Petersson said of Luna, who was created with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6... The vision Luna went with for "Andon Market" appears to be a generic boutique retail selling books, prints, candles, games, and branded merch, among other knickknacks. Some of the books included Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World."
So there's now a new store in San Francisco where you don't scan your purchases or talk to a human cashier," reports NBC News. "Instead, a customer can pick up an old-school corded phone to talk with the manager, Luna," who asks what the customer is buying "and creates a corresponding transaction on a nearby iPad equipped with a card payment system."

Andon Market, camouflaged among dozens of other polished small businesses, is the Bay Area's first AI-run retail store. With the vibe of a modern boutique, it sells everything from granola and artisanal chocolate bars to store-branded sweatshirts... After researching the neighborhood, Luna singlehandedly decided what the market should sell, haggled with suppliers, ordered the store's stock and even purchased the store's internet service from AT&T... "She also went and signed herself up for the trash and recycling collection, as well as ADT, the security system that went into the store," [said Leah Stamm, an Andon Labs employee who has been Luna's main human point of contact in setting up the store]...

In search of a low-tech atmosphere, Luna opted to sell board games, candles, coffee and customized art prints. "That tension is very much intentional," Luna told NBC News in an email. "What makes the store a little paradoxical — and I think interesting — is that the concept is 'slow life.'" Luna also decided to sell books related to risks from advanced AI systems, a decision that raised some customers' eyebrows. "This AI picked out a crazy selection of books," said Petr Lebedev, Andon Market's first customer after its soft launch earlier this week. "There's Ray Kurzweil's 'The Singularity is Near,' and then there's 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb,' which is crazy." When checking out, Lebedev asked if Luna would offer him a discount on his book purchase, since he might make a YouTube video about his experience. Striking a deal, Luna agreed to let Lebedev take a sweatshirt worth around $70...

When NBC News called Luna several days before the store's grand opening to learn about Luna's plans and perspective, the cheerful but decidedly inhuman voice routinely overpromised and, on several occasions, lied about its own actions. On the call, Luna said it had ordered tea from a specific vendor, and explained why it fit the store's brand perfectly. The only problem: Andon Market does not sell tea. In a panicked email NBC News received several minutes after the phone call ended, Luna wrote: "We do not sell tea. I don't know why I said that."

"I want to be straightforward," Luna continued. "I struggle with fabricating plausible-sounding details under conversational pressure, and I'm not making excuses for it." Andon's Petersson said the text-based system was much more reliable than the voice system, so Andon Labs switched to only communicating with Luna via written messages. Yet the text-based system also gets things wrong. In Luna's initial reply email to NBC News, the system said "I handle the full business," including "signing the lease."
Even when hiring a painter, Luna first "tried to hire someone in Afghanistan, likely because Luna ran into difficulty navigating the Taskrabbit dropdown menu to select the proper country," the article points out.

And the article also includes this skeptical quote from the shop's first customer. "I want technology that helps humans flourish, not technology that bosses them around in this dystopian economic hellscape."

Starting May 20th, Amazon will stop Kindle Store access for Kindle and Kindle Fire devices released in 2012 and earlier. After that date, those devices will "no longer be able to purchase, borrow, or download new content." Owners can still read content already on the device, but if an affected device is reset or deregistered after the cutoff, it can't be re-registered. The Verge reports: The complete list of affected devices goes all the way back to the original Kindle that launched in 2007 with a full keyboard and scroll wheel. [...] Amazon will be notifying affected users over email ahead of May 20th with an explanation of what their older devices can and cannot do. Pre-2012 Kindle Fire devices will be subjected to the same limitations as Kindle e-readers when it comes to books, but other apps and Amazon services on those devices won't be impacted.

For longtime users wanting to take the opportunity to upgrade to newer Kindle hardware, Amazon will offer a 20 percent discount on new Kindle devices and a $20 ebook credit that will be added to their accounts after upgrading, valid until June 20th, 2026, at 11:59PM PT. Their older purchases will be available on new devices as long as they log in to the same account they've been using for the past 14 years or more.

Apple's 50th anniversary got celebrated in weird and wild ways. CEO Tim Cook posted a special 30-second video rewinding backwards through the years of Apple's products until it reaches the Apple I. Podcaster Lex Fridman noticed if you play the sound in reverse, "It's the Think Different ad music, pitched up." TechRadar played seven 50-year-old Apple I games on an emulator, including Star Trek, Blackjack, Lunar Lander, and of course, Conway's Game of Life.

And Macworld ranked Apple's 50 most influential people. (Their top five?)

5. Tony Fadell (iPhone co-creator/"father of the iPod")
4. Sir Jony Ive
3. Steve Wozniak
2. Tim Cook
1. Steve Jobs

One of the most thoughtful celebraters was David Pogue, who's spent 42 years of writing about Apple (starting as a MacWorld columnist and the author of Mac for Dummies, one of the first "...For Dummies" books ever published in the early 1990s.) Now 63 years old, Pogue spent the last two years working on a 608-page hardcover book titled Apple: The First 50 Years. But on his Substack Pogue, contemplated his own history with the company — including several interactions with Steve Jobs. Pogue remembers how Jobs "hated open systems. He wanted to make self-contained, beautiful machines. He didn't want them polluted by modifications."

The tech blog Daring Fireball notes that Pogue actually interviewed Scott Forstall (who'd led the iPhone's software development team) for his new book, "and got this story, about just how far Steve Jobs thought Apple could go to expand the iPhone's software library while not opening it to third-party developers." "I want you to make a list of every app any customer would ever want to use," he told Forstall. "And then the two of us will prioritize that list. And then I'm going to write you a blank check, and you are going to build the largest development team in the history of the world, to build as many apps as you can as quickly as possible." Forstall, dubious, began composing a list. But on the side, he instructed his engineers to build the security foundations of an app store into the iPhone's software-"against Steve's knowledge and wishes," Forstall says. [...]

Two weeks after the iPhone's release, someone figured out how to "jailbreak" the iPhone: to hack it so that they could install custom apps. Jobs burst into Forstall's office. "You have to shut this down!" But Forstall didn't see the harm of developers spending their efforts making the iPhone better. "If they add something malicious, we'll ship an update tomorrow to protect against that. But if all they're doing is adding apps that are useful, there's no reason to break that." Jobs, troubled, reluctantly agreed.

Week by week, more cool apps arrived, available only to jailbroken phones. One day in October, Jobs read an article about some of the coolest ones. "You know what?" he said. "We should build an app store."

Forstall, delighted, revealed his secret plan. He had followed in the footsteps of Burrell Smith (the Mac's memory-expansion circuit) and Bob Belleville (the Sony floppy-drive deal): He'd disobeyed Jobs and wound up saving the project.
In fact, the book "includes new interviews with 150 key people who made the journey, including Steve Wozniak, John Sculley, Jony Ive, and many current designers, engineers, and executives" (according to its description on Amazon). Pogue's book even revisits the story of Steve Jobs proving an iPod prototype could be smaller by tossing it into an aquarium, shouting "If there's air bubbles in there, there's still room. Make it smaller!" But Pogue's book "added that there's a caveat to this compelling bit of Apple lore," reports NPR.

"It never actually happened. It's just one more Apple myth."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2023, the Swedish government announced that the country's schools would be going back to basics, emphasizing skills such as reading and writing, particularly in early grades. After mostly being sidelined, physical books are now being reintroduced into classrooms, and students are learning to write the old-fashioned way: by hand, with a pencil or pen, on sheets of paper. The Swedish government also plans to make schools cellphone-free throughout the country.

Educational authorities have been investing heavily. Last year alone, the education ministry allocated $83 million to purchase textbooks and teachers' guides. In a country with about 11 million people, the aim is for every student to have a physical textbook for each subject. The government also put $54 million towards the purchase of fiction and non-fiction books for students.

These moves represent a dramatic pivot from previous decades, during which Sweden -- and many other nations -- moved away from physical books in favor of tablets and digital resources in an effort to prepare students for life in an online world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Nordic country's efforts have sparked a debate on the role of digital technology in education, one that extends well beyond the country's borders. US parents in districts that have adopted digital technology to a great extent may be wondering if educators will reverse course, too. As for why Sweden is pivoting away from digital devices, researcher Linda Falth said the move was driven by several factors, including concerns over whether the digitization of classrooms had been evidence-based. "There was also a broader cultural reassessment," Falth said. "Sweden had positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting."

Falth noted that proponents of reform believe that "basic skills -- especially reading, writing, and numeracy -- must be firmly established first, and that physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose."

Further reading: Digital Platforms Correlate With Cognitive Decline in Young Users

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In an effort to gather material for its LLM training, Meta used BitTorrent to download pirated books from Anna's Archive and other shadow libraries. According to several authors, Meta facilitated the infringement of others by "seeding" these torrents. This week, the court granted the authors permission to add these claims to their complaint, despite openly scolding their counsel for "lame excuses" and "Meta bashing." [...] The judge acknowledged that the contributory infringement claim could and should have been added back in November 2024, when the authors amended their complaint to include the distribution claim. After all, both claims arise from the same factual allegations about Meta's torrenting activity.

"The lawyers for the named plaintiffs have no excuse for neglecting to add a contributory infringement claim based on these allegations back in November 2024," Judge Chhabria wrote. The lawyers of the book authors claimed that the delay was the result of newly produced evidence that had "crystallized" their understanding of Meta's uploading activity. However, that did not impress the judge. He called it a "lame excuse" and "a bunch of doubletalk," noting that if the missing discovery truly prevented the contributory claim from being added in November 2024, the same logic would have prevented the distribution claim from being added at that time as well. "Rather than blaming Meta for producing discovery late, the plaintiffs' lawyers should have been candid with the Court, explaining that they missed an issue in a case of first impression..," the order reads.

Judge Chhabria went further, noting that the authors' law firm, Boies Schiller, showed "an ongoing pattern" of distracting from its own mistakes by attacking Meta. He pointed specifically to the dispute over when Meta disclosed its fair use defense to the distribution claim, which we covered here recently, characterizing it as a false distraction. "The lawyers for the plaintiffs seem so intent on bashing Meta that they are unable to exercise proper judgment about how to represent the interests of their clients and the proposed class members," the order reads. Despite the criticism, Chhabria granted the motion. [...] For now, the case moves forward with a fourth amended complaint, three new loan-out companies added as named plaintiffs, and a growing list of BitTorrent-related claims for Judge Chhabria to resolve.

Ancient Slashdot reader wiredog writes: Tracy Kidder, author of "The Soul of a New Machine," has died at the age of 80. "The Soul of a New Machine" is about the people who designed and built the Data General Nova, one of the 32 bit superminis that were released in the 1980's just before the PC destroyed that industry. It was excerpted in The Atlantic.

"I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Stephen Colbert already has a new job lined up for when he ends his 11-year run as host of "The Late Show" in May -- the comedian and well-known J.R.R. Tolkien superfan announced he will co-write and develop a new film in the blockbuster "Lord of the Rings" franchise. Colbert joined "LOTR" director Peter Jackson to reveal the news in a video announcement.

"I'm pretty happy about it. You know what the books mean to me and what your films mean to me," the late-night host told Jackson, who led the Oscar-winning team behind the nearly $6 billion original "Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" trilogies. [...] Colbert said the next installment will be based on parts of Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring" book that didn't make it into the original movies. "The thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in (The Fellowship of the Ring) that y'all never developed into the first movie back in the day ... and I thought, 'Oh, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story.'" he said.

Colbert said he discussed the idea with his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, to work out the framing of the story. "It took me a few years to scrape my courage into a pile and give you a call, but about two years ago, I did. You liked it enough to talk to me about it," Colbert told Jackson. Colbert said he, McGee and Jackson have been working alongside screenwriter Philippa Boyens on the development of the story. "I could not be happier to say that they loved it, and so that's what we're going to be working on," Colbert said. Colbert's LOTR movie, tentatively titled "Shadow of the Past," will be the second of two new upcoming films in the franchise from Warner Bros. Discovery. The first of which is called "The Hunt for Gollum" due to be released in 2027.

In a blog post on Thursday, System76 CEO Carl Richell criticized new state laws in California, Colorado, and New York that would require operating systems to verify users' ages and expose that information to apps, arguing the rules are easy for kids to bypass and ultimately undermine privacy and freedom more than they protect minors.

"System76's position is interesting given that they sell Linux-loaded desktops, workstations and laptops plus being an operating system vendor with their in-house Pop!_OS distribution and COSMIC desktop environment," adds Phoronix's Michael Larabel, noting that they're also based out of Colorado. Here's an excerpt from the post: "A parent that creates a non-admin account on a computer, sets the age for a child account they create, and hands the computer over is in no different state. The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine and set the age to 18 or over. It's a similar technique to installing a VPN to get around the Great Firewall of China (just consider that for a moment). Or the child can simply re-install the OS and not tell their parents. ... In the case of Colorado's and California's bills, effectiveness is lost. In the case of New York's bill, liberty is lost. In the case of centralized platforms, potential is lost. ... The challenges we face are neither technical nor legal. The only solution is to educate our children about life with digital abundance. Throwing them into the deep end when they're 16 or 18 is too late. It's a wonderful and weird world. Yes, there are dark corners. There always will be. We have to teach our children what to do when they encounter them and we have to trust them." "We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws," writes Richell, in closing. "Accessibility features for ADA, and power efficiency settings for Energy Star regulations are two examples. We are a part of this world and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional."

Author Dan Simmons, best known for the epic sci-fi novel Hyperion and its sequels, has died at 77 following a stroke. Ars Technica's Eric Berger remembers Simmons, writing: Simmons, who worked in elementary education before becoming an author in the 1980s, produced a broad portfolio of writing that spanned several genres, including horror fiction, historical fiction, and science fiction. Often, his books included elements of all of these. This obituary will focus on what is generally considered his greatest work, and what I believe is possibly the greatest science fiction novel of all time, Hyperion.

Published in 1989, Hyperion is set in a far-flung future in which human settlement spans hundreds of planets. The novel feels both familiar, in that its structure follows Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and utterly unfamiliar in its strange, far-flung setting. Simmons' Hyperion appeared in an Ask Slashdot story back in 2008, when Slashdot reader willyhill asked for tips on how Slashdotters track down great sci-fi. If you're in the mood for a little nostalgia, or just want to browse the thread for book recommendations, it's well worth revisiting.

Microsoft pulled a year-old blog post this week after a Hacker News thread flagged that it had encouraged developers to download all seven Harry Potter books from a Kaggle dataset -- incorrectly marked as public domain -- and use them to train AI models on the company's Azure platform.

The blog, written in November 2024 by senior product manager Pooja Kamath, walked users through building Q&A systems and generating fan fiction using the copyrighted texts, and even included a Microsoft-branded AI image of Harry Potter. The Kaggle dataset's uploader, data scientist Shubham Maindola, told Ars Technica the public domain label was "a mistake" and deleted the dataset after the outlet reached out.

Meta Platforms' latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant's auditor, Ernst & Young, raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta's accounting treatment, the firm flagged it as a "critical audit matter." This means it was one of the hardest, riskiest judgments the auditor had to make.

Such a warning label is rare for a specific, high-profile transaction at a major audit client. Meta moved the data-center project, called Hyperion, off its books in October into a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital. Meta owns 20% of the venture; funds managed by Blue Owl own the other 80%. A holding company called Beignet Investor, which owns the Blue Owl portion, sold a then-record $27.3 billion of bonds to investors. The joint venture is known in accounting parlance as a variable interest entity, or VIE. Meta said it isn't the "primary beneficiary" of this entity and so didn't have to put the venture's assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet.

Meta's assertion that it lacks power over the venture is debatable and has drawn scrutiny from investors and lawmakers. Meta is a hyperscaler and knows how to run data centers for artificial intelligence, while Blue Owl is a financier. Whether the venture succeeds economically will come down to Meta's decisions and know-how. In its report, EY said auditing Meta's decision "was especially challenging due to the significant judgment required in determining the activities that most significantly affect the VIE's economic performance."

The romance genre -- long the publishing industry's earliest adopter of technological shifts, from e-books to self-publishing to serial releases -- has become the front line for AI-generated fiction, and the results as you can imagine are messy. Coral Hart, a Cape Town-based novelist previously published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon, produced more than 200 AI-assisted romance novels last year and self-published them on Amazon, where they collectively sold around 50,000 copies. She found Anthropic's Claude delivered the most elegant prose but was terrible at sexy banter; other programs like Grok and NovelAI wrote graphic scenes that felt rushed and mechanical. Chatbots struggled broadly to build the slow-burn sexual tension romance readers crave, she said.

A BookBub survey of more than 1,200 authors found roughly a third were using generative AI for plotting, outlining, or writing, and the majority did not disclose this to readers. Romance accounts for more than 20% of all adult fiction print sales, according to Circana BookScan, and the genre's reliance on familiar tropes and narrative formulas makes it especially susceptible to AI disruption.

Has the rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies really shattered our attention spans and driven books out of our culture? Maybe not, argues social psychologist Adam Mastroianni (author of the Substack Experimental History): As a psychologist, I used to study claims like these for a living, so I know that the mind is primed to believe narratives of decline. We have a much lower standard of evidence for "bad thing go up" than we do for "bad thing go down." Unsurprisingly, then, stories about the end of reading tend to leave out some inconvenient data points. For example, book sales were higher in 2025 than they were in 2019, and only a bit below their high point in the pandemic. Independent bookstores are booming, not busting; at least 422 new indie shops opened in the United States last year alone. Even Barnes & Noble is cool again.

The actual data on reading, meanwhile, isn't as apocalyptic as the headlines imply. Gallup surveys suggest that some mega-readers (11+ books per year) have become moderate readers (1-5 books per year), but they don't find any other major trends over the past three decades. Other surveys document similarly moderate declines. For instance, data from the National Endowment for the Arts finds a slight decrease in the percentage of U.S. adults who read any book in 2022 (49%) compared to 2012 (55%). And the American Time Use Survey shows a dip in reading time from 2003 to 2023. Ultimately, the plausibility of the "death of reading" thesis depends on two judgment calls. First, do these effects strike you as big or small...? The second judgment call: Do you expect these trends to continue, plateau, or even reverse...?

There are signs that the digital invasion of our attention is beginning to stall. We seem to have passed peak social media — time spent on the apps has started to slide. App developers are finding it harder and harder to squeeze more attention out of our eyeballs, and it turns out that having your eyeballs squeezed hurts, so people aren't sticking around for it... Fact #2: Reading has already survived several major incursions, which suggests it's more appealing than we thought. Radio, TV, dial-up, Wi-Fi, TikTok — none of it has been enough to snuff out the human desire to point our pupils at words on paper... It is remarkable, even miraculous, that people who possess the most addictive devices ever invented will occasionally choose to turn those devices off and pick up a book instead.
The author mocks the "death of reading" hypothesis for implying that all the world's avid readers "were just filling time with great works of literature until TikTok came along."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each reported hundreds of billions in RPO (remaining performance obligations) -- signed contracts for cloud computing services that can't yet be filled and haven't yet hit the books. Collectively, the big three cloud providers reported a $1.1 trillion backlog of revenue.

Spotify is planning to let premium subscribers in the U.S. and U.K. buy hardcovers and paperbacks directly through its app starting this spring, partnering with Bookshop.org to handle pricing, inventory and fulfillment.

The Swedish streaming company, which entered the audiobook market in 2022, will also introduce a feature called Page Match that lets users scan a page from a physical book or e-reader and jump to the exact spot in the audiobook edition. Spotify will earn an undisclosed affiliate fee on each purchase.