Major TV networks were notified on Friday that the department was examining whether they violated antitrust laws when they suspended pool coverage of President Trump.

“I always laugh at the IT industry’s terms,” says Ryan Sheehan, a senior vice president at $16 billion global solutions integrator SHI. And right now the jargon that gets him giggling is “forward-deployed engineer” (FDE) because, as he told The Register at VMware's September Explore conference, “We have been doing FDE for a long time.” “Doing FDE” involves sending top consultants to a client, without tying them to a project. Instead they get a mission to build something valuable using new technology, and carte blanche to make that happen in a hurry. Sheehan has company in believing FDEs aren’t fundamentally new. Cloud monitoring vendor DoIT told The Register it has used FDEs since 2011, but only started using the term in the last quarter of 2025, when it changed the name of its “Customer Reliability Engineering” practice to FDE. That decision came as services companies adopted the term FDE to describe the work needed to build AI proofs of concept. The name has its origins at Palantir, whose chief technology officer Shyam Sankar claims he coined it in 2007 after a conversation in which his CEO Alex Karp asked him why French restaurants are so good. Karp apparently answered his own question by saying, “The wait staff is actually part of the kitchen staff. They intimately understand the food, the methodology, and the technique. They are not merely carrying the food from the kitchen to the table, but are instead part of a subtle and complex system that affects kitchen operations.” Sankar says Karp asked him “to build that, but for engineering” so he did and called it “forward deployed engineering.” “FDEs embed alongside our customers and work to ensure our software solves their problem and not some proxy for their problem,” Sankar wrote on his personal Substack. “They’re crazy enough to get on a last-minute plane to Iraq, they’re smart enough to ship quality, same-day code, and their EQ is still high enough to talk to users (and maybe even enjoy it).” Sankar says Palantir’s investors thought FDEs were a bad idea because the costs they incurred ate into margins, but says they’re worth it because they ensure customers understand the company’s products and how to get value from them. “We didn’t believe in throwing our software over the wall in the hopes the customer would divine the correct meaning from it,” Shankar wrote. “This approach built an engineering organization with unmatched creativity, responsiveness, and focus on the primacy of winning.” AWS likes winning, too, and in June announced a dedicated AWS FDE organization, and $1 billion to fund it. In July Microsoft trumped that with a $2.5 billion so-called “Frontier Company” it claims “goes beyond” FDEs. Both companies see FDEs as a way to get their consultants into customers to help them build AI apps. They argue FDEs’ time has come because, as Palantir found when users struggled to put its software to work, organizations often struggle to turn AI experiments into production applications. Stop us if you've heard this one before But vendors also admit that FDEs aren’t entirely new. Indeed, AWS told The Register it has offered customers something very similar to an FDE for years. “We started this journey all the way back in 2017 when the focus was machine learning (ML),” said Taimur Rashid, the cloud giant’s managing director for go to market, Frontier AI Engineering & Services. “We created a team called the ML Solutions Lab. The idea was that the tech is new, customers need to navigate it. So we said ‘Why don’t we loan them a data scientist?’ They can build a PoC, and the customer can build on our platform.” Rashid says AWS sometimes called this sort of arrangement a “secondment,” a “resident architect” or a “resident scientist.” Whatever you call it, Rashid said the approach worked well so AWS decided to evolve it when generative AI burst onto the scene – this time using an applied scientist and a strategist, and an evolved approach. “We forward-deploy them – they will help to identify the art of the possible and develop the solution for you or with you,” Rashid explained. “They will be part of your business and operational workflows, and effectively be yours for a defined time,” he said. That’s different to conventional services engagements, he argues, because there’s no scope of work, no hourly charge for consultants’ services. “What is different about FDE is you are saying the customer wants to build. The path is not determined.” Carlos Pereira, a Fellow and Chief Architect in Cisco’s Customer Experience team, also admited FDEs aren’t entirely new, but argued AI makes them more valuable than conventional consultants. "The idea of an expert being embedded on-site to help a customer adopt new technology and solutions isn't new,” he told The Register by email. “Our Customer Success organization has been doing this for years.” “The evolution is that AI is now a key part of that equation,” he added. “It introduces new variables like non-deterministic AI models, evaluations, faster-moving requirements, and specialized skills that not every customer team has in-house.” Analyst firms Gartner and Forrester agree that FDEs can be useful, and that this form of IT services differs due to greater intimacy between client and consultant. “They often have full-stack access to the customer’s environment and the vendor’s codebase, allowing them to build and iterate in real time,” Gartner’s Arun Chandrasekaran and Robert Thanaraj wrote in March guidance titled “An AI Leader’s Guide to Forward Deployed Engineering to Scale AI.” A June best practice report from five Forrester analysts, titled “Forward-Deployed Engineers: Use provider-embedded builders to improve outcomes,” praises the model for helping to “accelerate adoption and turn complex platforms into production-ready outcomes.” Yet both analyst firms also warn that using FDEs may see clients develop a dependency on the vendor that provides them. “The allure of delivering outcomes at speed can induce blind spots and is fraught with risks,” according to Forrester. “Without the appropriate guardrails on tech architecture and stack choices, teams can fall into a bespoke trap, where highly tailored solutions deepen vendor dependence and make future change costly.” Debt and dependency Gartner urges would-be hirers of FDEs to “beware of ill-conceived FDE engagements that can lead to a high degree of vendor dependency, security/data risk exposure, technical debt, and talent atrophy.” The latter happens when organizations hire FDEs but don’t train their own teams on new tech. “Your internal team may become operators of a black box rather than architects, making it difficult to innovate without the vendor,” Gartner warns. Gartner also worries FDEs can be a fast-track to technical debt. “A major concern with the FDE model is that it relies heavily on manually designed structures and hard-coded domain knowledge. Such human-engineered components tend to deliver short-term gains but are repeatedly superseded as more general, scalable learning systems improve.” “As large language models continue to advance, much of this manually encoded logic is likely to be rendered obsolete, requiring costly rework or full redesign, and creating a long-term technical and organizational burden.” FDEs themselves may soon be obsolete, because they’re not vendors’ only bet on improving AI consultancy skills, according to Omdia chief analyst Jay McBain. “At the same time as investing in FDEs, the big players have been investing big into partner enablement,” he told The Register. “They are playing both ends.” The tech services channel doesn’t mind that, because according to Omdia data 82 percent of partners report they “aren’t ready” to quickly grow their AI services. The vendors promoting FDEs, meanwhile, don’t want to use this form of consultancy for long. “None of these companies’ investors want to dilute a low-value services business into the overall revenue,” McBain wrote. “We are predicting all of this FDE investment will fall back into the channel by 2031 when this matures.” Which rather suggests that in a few years we’ll all be laughing at how Palantir re-heated an old form of tech services under a new name, and the rest of the industry decided to follow the same recipe. ®

Archaeologists conducting a new series of excavations at the ancient Turkish city of Smyrna have uncovered three previously hidden rooms and a 1500-year-old Late Antiquity theater that earlier efforts had missed.

The new excavations, which took place in Izmir’s historic center, also uncovered a series of ancient paintings that had remained hidden for over a millennium, along with a Roman-era water channel that, unlike similar structures, seems to stop before reaching any nearby natural springs.

1,500-Year-Old Hidden Rooms, Ancient Paintings, and a Lost Theater

According to a statement from the Izmir Metropolitan Municipality, the work, which was  “conducted on behalf of Izmir Katip Celebi University with permission from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism,” expanded on previous excavations at the same site. However, the new excavation effort uncovered several previously unknown finds.

First, the archaeology team came across three new hidden rooms, or “spaces,” in an area where previous efforts had uncovered an ancient mosaic floor. According to the excavation team, two of the new spaces also contained mosaic floors. However, the third newly discovered space featured a marble floor.

Second, the research team uncovered what they described as a “theater area.” Researchers had not identified the theater during previous excavations.

Third, the Izmir authorities described a series of ancient wall paintings as the most visually striking component. According to the Metropolitan Ministry’s statement, the previously undiscovered wall paintings were placed around the Agora and the theater.

“This is the first time we have found wall paintings in these spaces,” explained Prof. Dr. Akin Ersoy, faculty member of the Turkish-Islamic Archaeology Department at Izmir Katip Celebi University and the head of the latest excavations.

“We Had Never Come Across Anything Like This in the Agora of Smyrna”

When dating the site, Prof. Dr. Ersoy said cities in the region underwent significant structural changes after the division of the Roman Empire at the end of the 4^th century A.D. These changes allowed the excavation team to date the site to sometime between the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. This ancient date makes the site over 1,500 years old, placing it in the period historians call Late Antiquity.

When discussing the architectural style of the new excavations, the team leader said they share some features with the Terrace Houses found at the ancient city of Ephesus. The research said the similarities suggest that the newly discovered structures may have served a public function. Still, he noted, these discoveries were unexpected.

“Until now, we had never come across anything like this in the Agora of Smyrna or around the theater.”

Given the likely historical period of the site’s construction and use, the research team also noted that the newly uncovered hidden room spaces and ancient paintings will offer previously unavailable insights into Smyrna’s transformation away from Roman influence.

150 Yards of Roman-Era Water Channel Also Unearthed

During the excavations, the team also traced a section of an ancient Roman-era water channel. The researchers suggested that the ancient channel carried water for roughly 2,000 years.

Although Roman-era water channels were typically connected to natural springs, Ersoy said the team has traced roughly 150 yards of channel and has yet to find its source. The team leader suggested a spring may lie just south of the site, near the Namazgah Bath and Kursunlu Mosque.

Future excavations are hoped to uncover more evidence of the ancient spring and perhaps even more hidden rooms and artworks left behind in the 1500-year-old city. 

Christopher Plain has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Reporter at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his novels at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.

The mayor of New York City has assembled a crew of Silicon Valley and United States Digital Service veterans to overhaul city services with better software.

Once united in support of President Trump, right-wing influencers are embroiled in feuds and losing viewers, creating a problem for Republicans in the midterm elections.

Viral tales of good triumphing over evil are racking up millions of views. They’re almost entirely AI-generated clickbait.

The AI “startups” worth billions of dollars are raising alarm bells about Chinese AI. The smaller players have a totally different take.

The AI “startups” worth billions of dollars are raising alarm bells about Chinese AI. The smaller players have a totally different take.

David Risher insists that Lyft has lowered its prices and that customers who only check his competitor’s app are “leaving money on the table.”

David Risher insists that Lyft has lowered its prices and that customers who only check his competitor’s app are “leaving money on the table.”

People who pay for a subscription to livestream The Weather Channel via its dedicated smart TV app are seeing a 66.7 percent price hike.

The TV app, available via Android TV, Fire TV, Roku, and Samsung TVs, used to cost $3 per month, or $30 per year. According to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, those prices were valid as recently as April 2026. Now, a subscription to the streaming app is $5 per month, or $50 per year, as first reported today by Cord Cutters News.

In addition to livestreaming The Weather Channel’s broadcast network, The Weather Channel TV app also offers on-demand shows, local forecasts, maps, radars, and news. The app launched in May 2022, allowing people to access The Weather Channel’s reporting without a cable or satellite TV subscription.

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The rich are getting richer. Here’s what wealth advisers are telling their tech clients right now.

The rich are getting richer. Here’s what wealth advisers are telling their tech clients right now.

They swear they haven’t peeked at the closely guarded secret and that they’ll keep the cryptographic competition going.