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• Mexico aims to manufacture its first electric vehicles with almost entirely local components.
• Mexico’s EV market is expected to grow 25%–30% annually over the next five years.
• Budget cuts, limited charging infrastructure, and difficulty sourcing lithium could delay Olinia’s rollout.

Named Olinia, or “to move” in the Nahuatl Indigenous language, they will be the first EVs to be fully engineered and assembled in Mexico. They will be “safe, efficient, sustainable, and within reach for millions of Mexicans,” Roberto Capuano, the director of the project, said during the presentation. The first model will be ready by the time the 2026 World Cup kicks off in Mexico City, and be available to the general public by 2030, he said.

Slated to make EVs with almost entirely Mexican components, the Olinia project is touted as the answer both to the government’s ambitious goal of generating 45% clean electricity by 2030, and the influx of imported Chinese EVs, including BYD and Chery, which now account for nearly a tenth of new cars sold in Mexico.

But Olinia faces a number of challenges, including an inadequate budget, an undeveloped lithium industry that is essential for battery manufacture, and an unreasonable timeline, experts said.

The last thing a metal worker from Liège is expected to do is found a new religion. Yet that is just what Louis-Joseph Antoine did, in Jameppe-sur-Meuse, Belgium, in 1910. Antoinism, his namesake religion, is not nearly as popular today as it was in its early years — but to its latest followers, it remains as current as ever.

Bernard (not his real name) is an Antoinist healer, a sort of parish priest for the movement. He is elegant, slightly balding and quick to smile. His pseudonym is not intended to protect his identity, but to preserve the discretion about Antoinism required by his Council. Other Antoinists declined interviews, citing an unwillingness to proselytize. “Recruitment is not part of our statutes, writings, or belief system,” Bernard explained to me. “We do not wish to conquer the world or to tell people how to do better than they already are.” Antoine himself is said to have destroyed 8,000 booklets he had created to spread his word.

This attitude has helped to maintain an aura of mystery around Antoinism. But it may also have stymied its future. The insistence that the secrets and benefits of Antoinism can’t be explained, but must be experienced, does not have the same appeal today as it did at the religion’s inception. At the height of its popularity, Antoinism had 31 temples; today, only 10 are still functioning. For Bernard, the question has become: How to keep alive a faith that speaks to only a few?

In the first month of congestion pricing, the MTA reported over 1 million fewer vehicle entries into the toll zone than would be expected without the program​, driving the significant traffic reduction seen above. It’s also worth noting that the above chart shows reduction in travel times rather than congestion—in many cases, congestion has completely disappeared, and the new travel times represent a congestion-free trip. This reduction reverses a years-long trend of rising traffic into Manhattan​ - congestion pricing took a worsening gridlock problem and solved a significant portion of it overnight. Additionally, while there were fears that congestion pricing would just re-route traffic to other boroughs, the data from the first months of congestion pricing suggests that traffic has not increased elsewhere in the city.

Transit ridership has seen a notable spike since the implementation of congestion pricing as travelers into Manhattan are switching from driving to transit.

The MTA as a whole is averaging 448K more public transit riders per day this year. To put this into perspective, the second-highest ridership subway in the US is the DC Metro, which averaged 304K riders per day in January this year. The MTA ridership growth since congestion pricing went into effect is almost 50% larger than the total ridership of America’s next-largest subway system.

Unsurprisingly, bus ridership has seen the greatest relative growth, likely due to the fact that it most immediately benefits from congestion pricing thanks to faster travel times.

By now, it should be pretty clear that this is no coincidence. AI scrapers are getting more and more aggressive, and - since FOSS software relies on public collaboration, whereas private companies don't have that requirement - this is putting some extra burden on Open Source communities.

So let's try to get more details – going back to Drew's blogpost. According to Drew, LLM crawlers don't respect robots.txt requirements and include expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in your repository. They do so using random User-Agents from tens of thousands of IP addresses, each one making no more than one HTTP request, trying to blend in with user traffic.

Due to this, it's hard to come off with a good set of mitigations. Drew says that several high-priority tasks have been delayed for weeks or months due to these interruptions, users have been occasionally affected (because it's hard to distinguish bots and humans), and - of course - this causes occasional outages of SourceHut.

Drew here does not distinguish between which AI companies are more or less respectful of robots.txt files, or more accurate in their user agent reporting; we'll be able to look more into that later.

Finally, Drew points out that this is not some isolated issue. He says,

All of my sysadmin friends are dealing with the same problems, [and] every time I sit down for beers or dinner to socialize with sysadmin friends it's not long before we're complaining about the bots. [...] The desperation in these conversations is palpable.

Among nature's great engineers, beavers and their inventions have long been championed by environmentalists for their ability to protect against flooding, improve water quality and boost wildlife.

Officials had hoped to build a barrier to shield the Klabava River and its population of critically endangered crayfish from sediment and acidic water spilling over from two nearby ponds.

As a bonus it would turn a part of this protected area south of the capital Prague into a nature-rich wetland.

First drafted in 2018, the project had a building permit but was delayed by negotiations over the land, long used by the military as training grounds.

Yet before the excavators got the green light to begin digging, the herbivorous rodents set to work building a dam of their own.

There’s now an industry-wide union for video game workers in the US and Canada. The United Videogame Workers-CWA (UVW-CWA) has a mission to bring together "artists, writers, designers, QA testers, programmers, freelancers and beyond to build worker power irrespective of studio and current job status."

The union makes its official debut at the "Video Game Labor at a Crossroads: New Pathways to Industry-Wide Organizing" panel at GDC. Workers will be sharing a petition at the event to gain support for the union and to shine a light on the recent glut of industry layoffs. As a matter of fact, the first major issue the union seeks to address is layoffs, given that one in ten developers were shown the door in 2024.

Workers will also be passing around a zine that includes the organization’s mission statement, FAQs and an op-ed. This is a direct-join union, meaning that workers can sign up on their own. This allows folks to bypass traditional unionization processes like elections and employer consent.

The composer John Cage told us to “not discriminate against sounds.”

He challenged us to become interested in what we usually perceive as noise and incorporated it into his compositions. Actually he said that the main difference between experimental and non-experimental music is the inclusion of noise.

Cage didn’t own a smartphone. He didn’t constantly stream music.

In the age of WiFi and Bluetooth speakers, we seem to believe that every activity in life needs an idealized, artificial soundtrack, whether it’s working or unwinding, running or relaxing.

Tech corporations have instilled and nurtured that belief in us. Their aim is to “maximize engagement”. The longer we listen, the more indispensable they become – and the more profit they make.

Late last year, China broke its own record for the world’s fastest train, clocking in at 281 miles per hour. But in Japan, testing is underway for another type of train — one that levitates and can top 300 miles per hour, showing that the race for the fastest train isn’t just a competition. It could revolutionize the future of travel.

What if, while playing a competitive shooter, you could force your opponents to fire their weapon every five seconds, even when they're trying to camp in a corner? What if you could instantly teleport them back to their spawn when they take damage? What if you could toss aside a weapon to turn it into a mini-turret?

Every match Fragpunk tosses out half a dozen gimmicks that could anchor entire videogames with its incredible Shard Card system: The more than 150 cards in the game offer a variety of buffs, debuffs, and outlandish abilities with the game-breaking power of old-school cheat codes. It’s an adrenaline shot for a genre often obsessed with creating a balanced experience. Instead, Fragpunk is all about letting players break the rules to swing matches in their favor.

While Fragpunk takes the basic formula of Counter-Strike and Valorant, with each 5v5 Shard Clash match consisting of defenders protecting a bomb site and attackers trying to plant the bomb, matches are much shorter. Quick play is the first to four round wins, and ranked is the first to six. This gives each match an urgency that pairs well with the unpredictable cards and slightly faster pace: You don’t reach a point where you're seeing the same card combinations or rounds grow to be samey, like everyone saving money to slow-push into a bomb site with Vandal rifles in Valorant or snipe down the central path in Dust2 in CS:GO.

A survey of more than 24,000 people across 30 countries revealed 57% of Gen Z men felt their nation had "gone so far in promoting women's equality that we are discriminating against men."

Six in 10 Gen Z men also said they were being asked to do too much to support women, with 28% adding that a father who stayed home to look after his children is less of a man than those who went to work.

Across the board, Gen Z had more extreme views on their role in creating an equal society than any other generation. For example, only 12% of baby boomers agreed with the statement that fathers staying home meant they were less of a man.

Overall, however, 62% of men across countries including the U.S., Australia, Great Britain, Canada, and Japan said that achieving gender equality is of personal importance to them."Despite the divisive headlines, our survey highlights that most people—including men—still agree that achieving gender equality…is important to them personally. Many problems we face are shared, and all genders can and should come together to address the challenges we face as a society, as only by uniting our efforts can we meet them."​

Former Activision boss Bobby Kotick has filed a defamation suit against G/O Media over a pair of 2024 articles.

A record of a March 11 defamation filing titled “Robert Kotick v G/O Media Inc” can be viewed in Delaware court records, but the complaint itself is not currently publicly available. Courthouse News, which first reported on the suit, writes that Kotick is “seek[ing] damages to be determined at trial” regarding articles on former G/O Media site Gizmodo and current G/O Media site Kotaku about Kotick’s reported interest in buying TikTok.

As context into Kotick, the articles both discussed a California Civil Rights Department investigation into Activision Blizzard that was settled in 2023. The final California settlement makes note that “No court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations” and that the “[d]efendants deny all allegations of wrongdoing, liability, and damages.”

archive.is link

After more than two and half centuries of slavery, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment, Black people in America were no longer bound by the violent constraints of slavery — legally. Nonetheless, the transition from enslavement to life post-emancipation was not going to be easy. In an attempt to support this transition, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established.

This year marks 160 years since that bureau's creation, which makes this a great time to recognize its legacy, its unfulfilled promises, and what we can learn from it all. Although this agency was short-lived — lasting from 1865 until 1872 — its impact was huge, including the pivotal role it played for Black Americans transitioning from slavery to life as freedpeople and the stories it continues to illuminate about generations of Black folks and American history.