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"The Doctor is dead. Long live the Doctor!" writes Space.com. (Spoilers ahead...) "The era of Ncuti Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor came to a surprise end on Saturday night, as the Time Lord regenerated at the end of "Doctor Who" season 2 finale... [T]he Doctor gradually realises that not everything is back to normal. Poppy, his daughter with Belinda Chandra in the "Wish World" fantasy, has been erased from history, so the Time Lord decides to sacrifice himself by firing a ton of regeneration energy into the time Vortex to "jolt it one degree" — and hopefully bring her back. It goes without saying that his madcap scheme saves Poppy, as we learn that, in this rewritten timeline, the little girl was always the reason Belinda had been desperate to get back home. But arguably the biggest talking point of the episode — and, indeed, the season — is saved until last, as the Doctor regenerates into a very familiar face... Hint: They played the Doctor's companion, Rose Tyler, "alongside Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor and David Tennant's Tenth Doctor during the phenomenally successful first two seasons of the show's 2005 reboot." Showrunner Russell T Davies called it "an honour and a hoot" to welcome back Billie Piper to the TARDIS, "but quite how and why and who is a story yet to be told. After 62 years, the Doctor's adventures are only just beginning!" Although the show's post-regeneration credits have traditionally featured the line "And introducing [insert name] as the Doctor", here it simply says "And introducing Billie Piper". The omission of "as the Doctor" is unlikely to be accidental, suggesting that Davies is playing a very elaborate game with "Who" fandom... Another mystery! The BBC and Disney+ are yet to confirm if and when "Doctor Who" will return for a third season of its current iteration. "There's no decision until after season two..." Davies told Radio Times in April (as spotted by the Independent). "That's when the decision is — and the decision won't even be made by the people we work with at Disney Plus, it'll be made by someone in a big office somewhere. So literally nothing happening, no decision." "For a new series to be ready for 2026, production would need to get under way relatively soon," writes the BBC. "So at the moment a new series or a special starring Billie Piper before 2027 looks unlikely." The Guardian adds: Concerns have been raised about falling viewing figures, which have struggled to rally since Russell T Davies' return in 2023. Two episodes during this series, which aired in May, got less than 3 million viewers — the lowest since the modern era began airing in 2005. The Independent has this statement from Piper: "It's no secret how much I love this show, and I have always said I would love to return to the Whoniverse as I have some of my best memories there, so to be given the opportunity to step back on that Tardis one more time was just something I couldn't refuse, but who, how, why and when, you'll just have to wait and see."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Space.com: Three world travelers, two Space Camp alums and an aerospace executive whose last name aptly matched their shared adventure traveled into space and back Saturday, becoming the latest six people to fly with Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos. Mark Rocket joined Jaime Alemán, Jesse Williams, Paul Jeris, Gretchen Green and Amy Medina Jorge on board the RSS First Step — Blue Origin's first of two human-rated New Shepard capsules — for a trip above the Kármán Line, the 62-mile-high (100-kilometer) internationally recognized boundary between Earth and space... Mark Rocket became the first New Zealander to reach space on the mission. His connection to aerospace goes beyond his apt name and today's flight; he's currently the CEO of Kea Aerospace and previously helped lead Rocket Lab, a competing space launch company to Blue Origin that sends most of its rockets up from New Zealand. Alemán, Williams and Jeris each traveled the world extensively before briefly leaving the planet today. An attorney from Panama, Alemán is now the first person to have visited all 193 countries recognized by the United Nations, traveled to the North and South Poles, and now, have been into space. For Williams, an entrepreneur from Canada, Saturday's flight continued his record of achieving high altitudes; he has summitted Mt. Everest and five of the other six other highest mountains across the globe. "For about three minutes, the six NS-32 crewmates experienced weightlessness," the article points out, "and had an astronaut's-eye view of the planet..." On social media Blue Origin notes it's their 12th human spaceflight, "and the 32nd flight of the New Shepard program."

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Stack Overflow remains in the midst of big changes to counter an AI-fueled drop in engagement. So "We're wondering what kind of online communities Stack Overflow users continue to support in the age of AI," writes their senior analyst, "and whether AI is becoming a closer companion than ever before." For their 15th year of their annual reader survey, this means "we're not just collecting data; we're reflecting on the last year of questions, answers, hallucinations, job changes, tech stacks, memory allocations, models, systems and agents — together..." Is it an AI agent revolution yet? Are you building or utilizing AI agents? We want to know how these intelligent assistants are changing your daily workflow and if developers are really using them as much as these keynote speeches assume. We're asking if you are using these tools and where humans are still needed for common developer tasks. Career shifts: We're keen to understand if you've considered a career change or transitioned roles and if AI is impacting your approach to learning or using existing tools. Did we make up the difference in salaries globally for tech workers...? They're also re-visiting "a key finding from recent surveys highlighted a significant statistic: 80% of developers reported being unhappy or complacent in their jobs." This raised questions about changing office (and return-to-office) culture and the pressures of the industry, along with whether there were any insights into what could help developers feel more satisfied at work. Prior research confirmed that flexibility at work used to contribute more than salary to job satisfaction, but 2024's results show us that remote work is not more impactful than salary when it comes to overall satisfaction... [For some positions job satisfaction stayed consistent regardless of salary, though it increased with salary for other positions. And embedded developers said their happiness increased when they worked with top-quality hardware, while desktop developers cited "contributing to open source" and engineering managers were happier when "driving strategy".] In 2024, our data showed that many developers experienced a pay cut in various roles and programming specialties. In an industry often seen as highly lucrative, this was a notable shift of around 7% lower salaries across the top ten reporting countries for the same roles. This year, we're interested in whether this trend has continued, reversed, or stabilized. Salary dynamics is an indicator for job satisfaction in recent surveys of Stack Overflow users and understanding trends for these roles can perhaps improve the process for finding the most useful factors contributing to role satisfaction outside of salary. And of course they're asking about AI — while noting last year's survey uncovered this paradox. "While AI usage is growing (70% in 2023 vs. 76% in 2024 planning to or currently using AI tools), developer sentiment isn't necessarily following suit, as 77% in of all respondents in 2023 are favorable or very favorable of AI tools for development compared to 72% of all respondents in 2024." Concerns about accuracy and misinformation were prevalent among some key groups. More developers learning to code are using or are interested in using AI tools than professional developers (84% vs. 77%)... Developers with 10 — 19 years experience were most likely (84%) to name "increase in productivity" as a benefit of AI tools, higher than developers with less experience (<80%)... Is it an AI agent revolution yet? Are you building or utilizing AI agents? We want to know how these intelligent assistants are changing your daily workflow and if developers are really using them as much as these keynote speeches assume. We're asking if you are using these tools and where humans are still needed for common developer tasks.

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"This month, millions of young people will graduate from college," reports the New York Times, "and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence." That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives and young job seekers, many of whom pointed to an emerging crisis for entry-level workers that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in AI capabilities. You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had "deteriorated noticeably." Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains. "There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates," the firm wrote in a recent report. But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work and that AI companies are racing to build "virtual workers" that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too — some firms have encouraged managers to become "AI-first," testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by AI coding tools. Another told me that his startup now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company... "This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't good enough...

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