reproducibility

Generative AI assistants such as Microsoft Copilot can accelerate data analysis — but only when the person using them understands the code they produce, checks the results, and controls the data fed into the system; used blindly, they’re a fast path to plausible-looking but flawed numbers...

Microsoft is quietly testing a small but notable convenience feature in Windows 11: a one‑click internet speed test shortcut embedded directly in the network flyout and taskbar context menu — a shortcut that, for now, simply launches Bing’s online speed‑test widget rather than running a native...

A joint Aston University–University of Leeds partnership has secured a £3.4 million Research England Development Fund award to build the Artificial Intelligence Researcher Development Network Plus (AI.RDN+), a four‑year programme that will map how publicly available AI tools (from ChatGPT to...

Microsoft says its August Windows 11 security update (KB5063878) is not behind the recent wave of reports alleging SSDs and HDDs have been rendered inaccessible or corrupted, but the episode has exposed gaps in forensic clarity and left many users mistrustful of a conclusion drawn without a...

Microsoft's new in‑grid COPILOT function for Excel promises to eliminate tedious text work inside spreadsheets, yet Microsoft itself explicitly warns that the feature is not suitable for any task that requires accuracy, reproducibility, or regulatory compliance — a tension that will shape...

Microsoft’s latest public update on the mid‑August patch storm is straightforward: after investigation, the company says the August 2025 cumulative rollup did not cause a widespread failure mode that “breaks” SSDs, but the episode still exposes fragile cross‑stack dependencies and persistent...

Microsoft’s latest service alert closes one chapter in a nervous week for Windows users: after partner-assisted lab validation and an internal probe, Microsoft says it found no evidence that the August 2025 Windows 11 security update caused a platform‑wide SSD failure mode — and Phison, the...

Less than two weeks after Microsoft pushed the August 12, 2025 cumulative update for Windows 11 (commonly tracked as KB5063878 for 24H2), a narrow but alarming failure profile began to circulate among hobbyist test benches and end users: during sustained large file transfers (commonly around 50...

Elon Musk’s Macrohard gambit reframes a long-running joke into a formal strategic test: can a coordinated swarm of AI agents, fed by massive model families and hyperscale compute, actually simulate and replace the work of a modern software giant like Microsoft? Musk’s xAI recently surfaced a...

Windows 11’s August servicing wave briefly looked like a potential storage disaster: users and hobbyist labs reported NVMe SSDs vanishing during large, sustained writes after installing the 24H2 cumulative update tracked as KB5063878 (and the related preview KB5062660), but Phison — the largest...

Phison’s terse lab update — that its engineers “could not reproduce” the NVMe disappearances reported after a recent Windows 11 cumulative update — has shifted an alarmed headlines cycle into a cautious, technical debate about reproducibility, telemetry, and how the modern storage stack fails...

A wave of community test results and vendor confirmations this week has put the latest Windows 11 cumulative update under a harsh spotlight: several SSDs can disappear from Windows during sustained, large write operations after installing the August 12, 2025 update (KB5063878), with a...

Microsoft has quietly folded generative AI into Excel’s calculation engine with a native worksheet function — =COPILOT(...) — that accepts plain‑language prompts, reads cell ranges as context, and returns live, spillable outputs directly into the spreadsheet grid. Early previews show it can...

I had been ignoring Power Query for years, treating Excel like a calculator with a few handy formulas—until a messy, cross‑vendor CSV pile forced me to learn the tool everyone always brags about. What started as a tedious weekend of copy‑pasting and find‑and‑replace turned into a few well‑chosen...

Microsoft has quietly changed the Microsoft Store’s update behavior so that, for many consumer devices, the long‑standing, user-facing option to permanently turn off automatic app updates no longer persists; instead the Store now offers only time‑limited pause windows (commonly one to five...

NixOS 25.05 "Warbler" has been officially released, marking a significant milestone for this unique Linux distribution. With its declarative configuration model and emphasis on reproducibility, NixOS offers a compelling alternative to traditional operating systems. This latest release introduces...

The world of scientific research is in the midst of a revolution—a transformation driven not just by breakthroughs at the laboratory bench, but by the unprecedented power of cloud computing, AI, and data analytics. At the heart of this revolution stands Microsoft Azure Discovery, unveiled with...

Here is a summary of the key content from the referenced Nature article "Microsoft quantum computing ‘breakthrough’ faces fresh challenge" (Dan Garisto, Nature, March 7, 2025): The article discusses skepticism and scientific critique regarding Microsoft's 2023 claim to have created the first...