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Artificial intelligence data centers generate enough heat to raise temperatures in surrounding areas, according to new research examining how these facilities influence land surface temperatures over time. Scientists found that land near AI data centers can warm by an average of 2°C (3.6°F) within months after operations begin, with extreme increases reaching 9.1°C (16.4°F). The warming effect can extend as far as 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from the facilities and may already affect more than 340 million people who live within that distance. The research was led by Andrea Marinoni of the Earth Observation group at the University of Cambridge… [Continue Reading]
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Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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Pennsylvania, USA
Oracle is laying off 491 employees in Washington state, according to a filing Tuesday from the state Employment Security Department.
The cuts impact workers at two Seattle offices as well as remote employees and take effect June 1. The cloud and database giant stated in its WARN letter that the offices will not be closing.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg and others reported that Oracle was planning to cut thousands of jobs across the company as it tries to fund the high-cost deployment of new data centers. The reductions are also the result of AI-driven efficiencies within the organization, according to comments by Mike Sicilia, Oracle’s co-chief executive, in an earnings call March 10.
“The use of AI coding tools inside Oracle is enabling smaller engineering teams to deliver more complete solutions to our customers more quickly,” Sicilia said, according to the publication CIO.
GeekWire has reached out to Oracle for comment on the layoffs.
The Washington layoffs affect more than 230 software developers across multiple seniority levels and an additional 48 employees with the title of software development. The cuts include workers in senior director and vice president roles, as well as managers, product developers, product managers, program managers, site reliability developers, technical analysts, user experience developers and others.
The layoffs are the latest in a series of Oracle reductions. In August the company laid off 161 workers, followed by 101 employees in October. By last fall, Oracle had approximately 3,800 employees in the Seattle area, according to LinkedIn.
Oracle has grown its presence in the region over the past decade, tapping into the area’s engineering talent pool as it battled Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud. In recent years, the company has established partnerships with both Seattle-area giants.
Now all three, plus other tech companies, have been undergoing multiple rounds of job reductions, with recent Meta cuts impacting 168 Washington workers and T-Mobile confirming new layoffs last Friday.
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Pennsylvania, USA
Agents League brought together developers from around the world to build AI agents using Microsoft's developer tools. With 100+ submissions across three tracks, choosing winners was genuinely difficult. Today, we're proud to announce the category champions.
🎨 Creative Apps Winner: CodeSonify
CodeSonify turns source code into music. As a genuinely thoughtful system, its functions become ascending melodies, loops create rhythmic patterns, conditionals trigger chord changes, and bugs produce dissonant sounds. It supports 7 programming languages and 5 musical styles, with each language mapped to its own key signature and code complexity directly driving the tempo.
What makes CodeSonify stand out is the depth of execution. CodeSonify team delivered three integrated experiences: a web app with real-time visualization and one-click MIDI export, an MCP server exposing 5 tools inside GitHub Copilot in VS Code Agent Mode, and a diff sonification engine that lets you hear a code review. A clean refactor sounds harmonious. A messy one sounds chaotic. The team even built the MIDI generator from scratch in pure TypeScript with zero external dependencies. Built entirely with GitHub Copilot assistance, this is one of those projects that makes you think about code differently.
🧠 Reasoning Agents Winner: CertPrep Multi-Agent System
CertPrep Multi-Agent System team built a production-grade 8-agent system for personalized Microsoft certification exam preparation, supporting 9 exam families including AI-102, AZ-204, AZ-305, and more. Each agent has a distinct responsibility: profiling the learner, generating a week-by-week study schedule, curating learning paths, tracking readiness, running mock assessments, and issuing a GO / CONDITIONAL GO / NOT YET booking recommendation.
The engineering behind the scene here is impressive. A 3-tier LLM fallback chain ensures the system runs reliably even without Azure credentials, with the full pipeline completing in under 1 second in mock mode. A 17-rule guardrail pipeline validates every agent boundary. Study time allocation uses the Largest Remainder algorithm to guarantee no domain is silently zeroed out. 342 automated tests back it all up. This is what thoughtful multi-agent architecture looks like in practice.
💼 Enterprise Agents Winner: Whatever AI Assistant (WAIA)
WAIA is a production-ready multi-agent system for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and Microsoft Teams. A workflow agent routes queries to specialized HR, IT, or Fallback agents, transparently to the user, handling both RAG-pattern Q&A and action automation — including IT ticket submission via a SharePoint list.
Technically, it's a showcase of what serious enterprise agent development looks like: a custom MCP server secured with OAuth Identity Passthrough, streaming responses via the OpenAI Responses API, Adaptive Cards for human-in-the-loop approval flows, a debug mode accessible directly from Teams or Copilot, and full OpenTelemetry integration visible in the Foundry portal. Franck also shipped end-to-end automated Bicep deployment so the solution can land in any Azure environment. It's polished, thoroughly documented, and built to be replicated.
Thank you
To every developer who submitted and shipped projects during Agents League: thank you 💜 Your creativity and innovation brought Agents League to life!
Pennsylvania, USA
YouTrack 2026.1 introduces Whiteboards, a new way for teams to plan, brainstorm, and collaborate. Connect your current projects to get a better overview and organize work, or add notes and turn them into tasks and articles when you’re ready. This allows project managers and teams to plan from scratch, collaborate on ongoing projects, and ensure every activity is linked to your work in YouTrack.
We’ve also streamlined project access management for administrators and improved the notification center experience for all users. For teams that rely on AI tools in everyday workflows, there are new ways to use YouTrack within your existing stack, including an n8n integration and new remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server actions for the Knowledge Base.
The YouTrack app ecosystem continues to grow, with 50 apps now available on JetBrains Marketplace. We’ve highlighted some of the latest apps for project managers, QA and support teams, and more.
Turn planning into action with Whiteboards
We’re excited to introduce Whiteboards – a new, flexible space where you can visualize your projects as you work on them. Whiteboards extend YouTrack’s built-in functionality and are available to every user and agent.
Whether you’re a project manager structuring a plan, a team brainstorming together, or an individual organizing your own work, Whiteboards support your approach. You can restructure existing projects, plan what comes next, and capture everything along the way – all in one place.
How Whiteboards work in a nutshell
Turn ideas into tasks and articles
Work on Whiteboards on your own or together with your team, using cards and text blocks to shape your ideas and turning them into tasks or documentation with a single click.
You can also connect any notes with links, so that linked cards reflect real relationships between tasks in your projects.
Import and work on ongoing projects
When you need to reorganize your current work, you can bring existing tasks, tickets, and articles onto your Whiteboard and update them directly as your plans evolve. Every change you make is instantly reflected across your projects – for both imported items and those created on the Whiteboard. Task dependencies are synced automatically as well.
Navigate and track your progress
You can return to any Whiteboard at any point to see how your plans have evolved. Zoom in to focus on specific areas, switch to full-screen mode for a bird’s-eye view, or use search to quickly find and navigate to relevant content.
You can also control who can view or edit your work, with visibility on shared Whiteboards following your YouTrack project permissions.
Adapt Whiteboards to your work
Since Whiteboards start from a blank canvas, you can shape them to fit any work scenario – from creating a cross-project overview to focusing on specific topics in detail. Here are a few ways you can use them.
Plan projects
Planning often starts with ideas rather than structured tasks. Project managers can outline team roadmaps, restructure ongoing work, or visualize new projects. As cards are converted into YouTrack tasks and articles, your team can continue working in projects without interruption.
Brainstorm with the team
Any team member can add and update cards, text blocks, and their connections in real time or asynchronously. Whether you’re running a retrospective, building a mind map, or sketching out ideas together, Whiteboards adapt to your team’s distinct workflows. For example, product teams can shape new features, while support teams can map customer journeys.
Share knowledge with your users
Administrators can create shared Whiteboards to explain workflows, processes, and project structures to users or guests. By combining guidance notes with direct links to relevant tasks and articles, you make it easier to access everything in one place.
Organize personal work
Individual users can also use Whiteboards for their own planning – capturing ideas, organizing a week, or taking notes that are visible only to them. When you’re ready, you can invite others to collaborate and turn your private whiteboard into shared work.
Design enhancements for administrators and teams
Streamlined access management for projects
We’ve added further YouTrack design updates to make working on your projects easier. The new People tab on the project overview page simplifies how administrators manage project teams. Administrators can add or remove users and groups, assign roles, and filter team members by roles and permissions – all without having to jump between pages. The previous Team and Access tabs are now combined into a single, streamlined view. You can learn more about all changes in our documentation.
Here’s how it works in practice. When new team members join, you can add them to the project and assign their role right away. To manage existing project members, you can filter users and groups, then update or revoke their roles as needed. The People tab also lets you control access for people outside the project team, giving you a clearer overview of who can access your project.
Full-page notification center
Every user can now expand the notification center to a full-page view and reply to comments directly from there. This makes it easier to quickly respond to feedback or discussions without switching contexts.
Use YouTrack inside your existing stack with AI-powered integrations
For many teams, AI tools are already part of their everyday workflows. In addition to our built-in free AI assistance, we’re introducing new AI-powered integrations so you can use YouTrack from the tools you already rely on.
n8n integration
n8n is a workflow automation platform that connects your tools and services without code. YouTrack now has a dedicated node in n8n, so you can automate workflows and connect YouTrack with hundreds of apps – sync data, trigger issue updates, execute YouTrack commands, and build cross-platform workflows with ease.
You can build your own workflows or use existing templates. For example, you can configure workflows to collect data from third-party systems into YouTrack, update tasks based on actions from your AI agents, share YouTrack content with other systems, and much more. This means YouTrack can be integrated into every step of your automation.
New remote MCP server actions for the Knowledge Base
For teams working from their existing LLM, IDE, or agent platform, we’ve expanded the number of predefined actions available via YouTrack’s remote MCP server. You can now use AI-powered tools to find, create, and update Knowledge Base articles and create tasks with pre-configured visibility.
If you want to set up the remote MCP server for your coding agents, such as Claude Code or Cursor, or for integration platforms like Zapier and Make or other automation tools, you can find detailed instructions in our documentation.
YouTrack Helpdesk experience for standard users and agents
We’ve enhanced the experience for standard users and agents participating as internal reporters in helpdesk projects, making it easier for them to submit and track their own requests. They can now seamlessly access reporter functionality while submitting tickets and receive reporter email notifications.
When the product team needs to join the conversation, standard users now have a similar experience to agents when replying to reporters via public comments or email CC.
New apps on JetBrains Marketplace
Check out some recent apps from our certified consulting partners and third-party providers, now available to enhance your YouTrack experience.
Apps for project managers and teams
Planning Widget by CARL von CHIARI helps managers plan team activities in a calendar view. Review the tasks and tickets your team members work on each day, track time spent, and filter the view by employee.
Risk Manager by Rixter AB helps project managers assess project risk levels by building risk-matrix widgets based on the probability and impact of specific outcomes for selected tasks.
Article Approval by twenty20 is a paid app that allows teams to manage approval workflows directly in the Knowledge Base. You can invite approvers and acknowledgers for each article, set due dates, and track approval statuses.
Apps for QA and DevOps teams
Test Case Generator by Depa Panjie Purnama helps users create test cases or generate them using AI models while working on other development tasks.
TestOps Plugin by bodm helps DevOps teams to stay on top of testing while developing features. It brings recent test cases from Allure TestOps directly into related tasks.
Bug Report Constructor by Evgenii Venediktov allows QA teams to collect bug reports using a single template and enables users to quickly create task drafts with pre-saved blocks.
Gerrit Integration by Phoenix Systems helps developers display related Gerrit Code Review changes directly in tasks, including status, approvals, and links.
Apps for support teams
Custom Ticket Views by Appfero is a paid app created to help support teams enhance reporters’ experience when working in YouTrack Helpdesk. It adds a new menu section that shows a reporter their submitted tickets in a customizable view.
Customer Satisfaction by Appfero is another paid app that enables teams to collect feedback on task execution through automated customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT). Configure your custom survey flow and review response analytics directly in YouTrack.
Apps for working with task, ticket, and article content
Clever Checklists by TEKDynamics lets everyone manage daily work with to-do lists by adding a custom checklist to every task in a selected project.
Ticket Templates by Marcus Christensson automatically updates tasks and article content using your saved templates, which can be created based on ticket fields, tags, and various other conditions.
Article Templates by Maksim Fedorov makes it easier to draft articles based on existing Knowledge Base content. You can turn articles into templates and manage them all from a handy Article templates dashboard widget.
Text Replacer by Marcus Christensson allows you to update content across your project on either a one-time or a recurring basis. You can use it for tasks and articles to turn external system IDs into links, replace text with ready-made content, and more.
Copy link and context as Markdown by Maksim Fedorov makes working with content easier by copying selected tasks or article contexts, and their links, as Markdown.
App for administrators
Admin Tools by msp AG is created for administrators and adds a separate page that lets you add custom fields to multiple projects at once, get a clear overview of all projects, and view license information for your YouTrack.
Other enhancements
Knowledge Base articles now rank more accurately in search results thanks to AI enhancements, helping you find the right information faster. We’ve also introduced other small design updates to further improve your overall experience.
Check out the release notes for the full technical details and a comprehensive list of this release’s bug fixes and improvements. For more details on configuring the latest features, see the documentation.
If you use YouTrack Cloud, you’ll automatically be upgraded to YouTrack 2026.1 in accordance with our Maintenance Calendar.
If you have an active YouTrack Server subscription, you can upgrade to YouTrack 2026.1 today.
If you don’t have an active YouTrack subscription, you can use the free YouTrack for up to 10 users to test out the new version before you commit to buying!
For more information about the licensing options available for YouTrack, please visit our Buy page.
Your YouTrack team
Pennsylvania, USA
As many of you are aware, the price of memory continues to rise, with a seven-fold increase over the last year in the price of the LPDDR4 DRAM used on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5. Providing low-cost general-purpose computing remains a non-negotiable priority for us at Raspberry Pi, so while we can’t avoid passing on a portion of these increased costs, we’re also doing engineering work to expand the range of memory-density options available to our customers: we want to make sure you don’t pay for more memory than you need.
Today we are implementing further price increases across parts of our product range, and are also introducing a new 3GB Raspberry Pi 4, priced at $83.75. Notwithstanding today’s date, our new computer is as real as the rest of our products, and you can order it now from Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers around the world.
The products affected by today’s price rises are Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 variants with 4GB or more of memory; Raspberry Pi 500 and 500+; all variants of Compute Module 4, Compute Module 4S, and Compute Module 5; the Development Kit for Compute Module 5; and Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2.
| Product | Density | Price increase |
| Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 | 4GB | $25 |
| Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 | 8GB | $50 |
| Raspberry Pi 5 | 16GB | $100 |
| Raspberry Pi 500 (unit only and kit) | $50 | |
| Raspberry Pi 500+ unit only | $150 | |
| Raspberry Pi 500+ kit | $150 | |
| Compute Module 4 and 4S | 1GB | $11.25 |
| Compute Module 4, 4S, 5 | 2GB | $12.50 |
| Compute Module 4, 4S, 5 | 4GB | $25 |
| Compute Module 4, 4S, 5 | 8GB | $50 |
| Compute Module 5 | 16GB | $100 |
| Development Kit for Compute Module 5 | $25 | |
| Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 | $50 |
Right-size your memory
As painful as these price rises are, there are some brighter spots in the picture. We’ve been able to hold the price of Raspberry Pi 400 with 4GB of memory at $60, and the 1GB and 2GB variants of Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 at between $35 and $65. These are capable and versatile modern Raspberry Pi computers at affordable price points.
And, as we’ve said before, we don’t anticipate any price rises for our classic products, including Raspberry Pi Zero, Zero W and Zero 2 W; Raspberry Pi 1, 3, 3B+, and 3A+; and Compute Module 1 and 3+. These products use older LPDDR2 DRAM, of which we currently hold substantial inventory. Our commitment to long product manufacturing lifetimes means that these products are still in production, still supported by software updates, and still used by customers all over the world.
In this environment, it’s well worth right-sizing both your memory and your overall compute, rather than going for something with more headroom than your application actually needs. Consider whether these models, or lower-density variants of newer models, will get the job done.
A challenging but temporary situation
We’ve said a number of times now that memory prices won’t remain at their current very high level indefinitely; the circumstances in which we find ourselves are challenging, but in the future they will abate. When they do, we will reverse our price increases, and until they do, we will continue to work hard to limit their impact in every way we can.
The post A new 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 for $83.75, and more memory-driven price increases appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Pennsylvania, USA
Today, Copilot Cowork—designed for long-running, multi-step work in Microsoft 365—is available via the Frontier program.
The post Copilot Cowork: Now available in Frontier appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
Pennsylvania, USA
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