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08:29 Platbox: UEFI and SMM Platform Security Assessment Tool for AMD and Intel
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08:29 Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences
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08:29 22% jump in airfares expected as airlines tackle climate change
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08:29 How to make buttons in VR (2017)
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08:29 John Backus (1924 - 2007) [pdf]
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08:29 Google Cloud Storage FUSE
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08:29 Are mental health apps better or worse at privacy in 2023?
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08:29 Adult website Pornhub blocks users in Utah from accessing the site
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06:47 Intel To Drop the 'i' Moniker In Upcoming CPU Rebrand
When Intel debuts its forthcoming Meteor Lake client processors, the company may drop its iconic "i" CPU branding and add a new moniker. Chipzilla today told The Register "We are making brand changes as we're at an inflection point in our client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our Meteor Lake processors. We will provide more details regarding these exciting changes in the coming weeks." From the report: The Register asked Intel about branding after semiconductor analyst Dylan Patel on Monday tweeted "Imagine you're losing market share when you've been monopoly for decades, and your bright idea is to burn all brand recognition to the ground!" "That's Intel's plan by removing the 'i' in i7 i5 i3. All the decades brand recognition being lit on fire for no reason!"
Patel labelled the rebranding a "horrible very short sighted move" that won't fix Intel's woes and "will cause more harm than good, as many buyers know + recognize the i7 i5 branding, they won't once it's changed." "The new branding sounds bad with ultra strewn about + confusing scheme."
Patel's mention of "Ultra" branding appears to be a reference to this benchmark result for game Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation which lists a processor called "Intel Core Ultra 5 1003H".
04:28 Ask HN: Project ideas for a Linux kernel module
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04:28 GPT makes learning fun again
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04:28 Breaking down Krypton (2022)
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04:28 Writing an RPC from Scratch (2021)
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04:28 GradIEEEnt half decent
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04:28 Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design (2018)
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04:28 âA Great Ox Stands on My Tongueâ: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation
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04:28 Is Go an object-oriented programming language?
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04:28 Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
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04:24 A kernel without buffer heads
04:24 A kernel without buffer heads
04:24 A kernel without buffer heads
03:47 New Biocomputing Method Uses Enzymes As Catalysts For DNA-Based Molecular Computing
Researchers at the University of Minnesota report via Phys.Org: Biocomputing is typically done either with live cells or with non-living, enzyme-free molecules. Live cells can feed themselves and can heal, but it can be difficult to redirect cells from their ordinary functions toward computation. Non-living molecules solve some of the problems of live cells, but have weak output signals and are difficult to fine-tune and regulate. In new research published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota has developed a platform for a third method of biocomputing: Trumpet, or Transcriptional RNA Universal Multi-Purpose GatE PlaTform.
Trumpet uses biological enzymes as catalysts for DNA-based molecular computing. Researchers performed logic gate operations, similar to operations done by all computers, in test tubes using DNA molecules. A positive gate connection resulted in a phosphorescent glow. The DNA creates a circuit, and a fluorescent RNA compound lights up when the circuit is completed, just like a lightbulb when a circuit board is tested.
The research team demonstrated that:
- The Trumpet platform has the simplicity of molecular biocomputing with added signal amplification and programmability.
- The platform is reliable for encoding all universal Boolean logic gates (NAND, NOT, NOR, AND, and OR), which are fundamental to programming languages.
- The logic gates can be stacked to build more complex circuits.
The team also developed a web-based tool facilitating the design of sequences for the Trumpet platform. "Trumpet is a non-living molecular platform, so we don't have most of the problems of live cell engineering," said co-author Kate Adamala, assistant professor in the College of Biological Sciences. "We don't have to overcome evolutionary limitations against forcing cells to do things they don't want to do. This also gives Trumpet more stability and reliability, with our logic gates avoiding the leakage problems of live cell operations."
"It could make a lot of long-term neural implants possible. The applications could range from strictly medical, like healing damaged nerve connections or controlling prosthetics, to more sci-fi applications like entertainment or learning and augmented memory," added Adamala.
00:47 People In Comas Showed 'Conscious-Like' Brain Activity As They Died, Study Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Some recall bright lights at the end of a tunnel, feeling the presence of loved ones or floating above their body after a near-death experience. Now, scientists say they have captured "conscious-like" brain activity in dying patients in findings that give new insights into the process of death. The study used data from four patients who had died in hospital while their brains were being monitored using EEG recordings because they had previously suffered suspected seizures. All four of the patients were comatose and unresponsive and had been deemed beyond medical help. With their families' permission, life support had been withdrawn and they had subsequently suffered cardiac arrest and died.
The scientists retrospectively analyzed the brain activity data in the moments after life support was withdrawn until the patients' deaths. Upon removal of ventilator support, two of the patients showed an increase in heart rate along with a surge of gamma wave activity, considered the fastest brain activity and associated with consciousness. The activity was detected in the so-called hot zone, an area in the back of the brain linked to conscious brain activity. This area has been correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations in epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness in other brain studies. The other two patients did not display the same increase in heart rate or brain activity, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists said it was impossible to know exactly what the brain activity might correspond to as a subjective experience.
00:28 A look back at the Argus C44 rangefinder camera
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00:28 Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices
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00:28 Bio-inspired: developing technology to mimic the function of skin
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00:28 SIMD with Zig
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00:28 Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people's minds
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00:28 Two Approaches to Decoupling
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00:28 Researchers have determined how an airborne molecule links to a smell receptor
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00:28 Shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it
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00:28 Cynthia Rudin and interpretable ML models
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00:28 Grasshopper - An open-source Python library for load testing
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00:28 More Americans are using fake license plates
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00:28 Show HN: I've built a spectrogram analyzer web app
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00:20 7 best ad blocker apps for Android with and without root
There are a few ways to get ad blocking on your phone with and without root. We'll show you some ones that don't need root.
00:20 What's the best smart speaker you can buy?
Amazon may have started the smart speaker race, but now it's a real competition.
00:20 Pixel 7a could mark the end of Google's A series phones as we know it
The Pixel 8a's existence could depend on the sales of the Pixel 7a.
00:20 âGodfather of AI' exits Google, concerned about multiple ethical problems
Hinton has both short- and long-term concerns with unregulated, uncontrolled AI.
00:20 What is Slack and how does it work?
Everything you need to get started with Slack.
00:20 May 2023 Android security patch available now for Pixel phones
There are only a few fixes, but they are fairly significant.
00:20 Here's the retail box of the Google Pixel 7a and the secrets it shares
The box also confirms one model number.
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23:17 Ukraine Is Now Using Steam Decks To Control Machine Gun Turrets
Thanks to a crowdfunding campaign dating back to 2014, soldiers in Ukraine are now using Steam Decks to remotely operate a high-caliber machine gun turret. The weapon is called the "Sabre" and is unique to Ukraine. Motherboard reports: Ukrainian news outlet TPO Media recently reported on the deployment of a new model of the Sabre on its Facebook page. Photos and videos of the system show soldiers operating a Steam Deck connected to a large machine gun via a heavy piece of cable. According to the TPO Media post, the Sabre system allows soldiers to fight the enemy from a great distance and can handle a range of calibers, from light machine guns firing anti-tank rounds to an AK-47.
In the TPO footage, the Sabre is firing what appears to be a PKT belt-fed machine gun. The PKT is a heavy barrelled machine that doesn't have a stock and is typically mounted on vehicles like armored personnel carriers. It uses a solenoid trigger so it can be fired remotely, which is the cable running out of the back of the gun and into the complex of metal and wires on the side of the turret.
The Sabre system wasn't always controlled with a Steam Deck [...]. The first instances of the weapon appeared in 2014. The U.S. and the rest of NATO is giving Ukraine a lot of money for defense now, but that wasn't the case when Russia first invaded in 2014. To fill its funding gaps, Ukrainians ran a variety of crowdfunding campaigns. Over the years, Ukraine has used crowdfunding to pay for everything from drones to hospitals. One of the most popular websites is The People's Project, and it's there that the Sabre was born. The People's Project launched the crowdfunding campaign for Sabre in 2015 and collected more than $12,000 for the project over the next two years. It's initial goal was to deploy 10 of these systems.
21:47 Spotify Tries To Win Indie Authors By Cutting Audiobook Fees
In an effort to appeal to indie authors, Spotify's Findaway audiobook seller "will no longer take a 20 percent cut of royalties for titles sold on its DIY Voices platform -- so long as the sales are made on Spotify," reports The Verge. From the report: In a company blog post published on Monday, Findaway said that it would "pass on cost-saving efficiencies" from its integration with the streaming service. While it's free for authors to upload their audiobooks onto Findaway's Voices platform, the company normally uses an 80/20 pricing structure -- where Findaway takes a 20 percent fee on all royalties earned. But that fee comes after sales platforms take their own 50 percent cut on the list price. So under the old revenue split, an author who sold a $10 audiobook would have to give $5 to Spotify and $1 to Findaway. But moving forward, that same author will no longer have to pay the $1 distribution fee to Findaway when a sale is made through Spotify.
The margins on audiobooks are exceptionally high, much to the chagrin of the authors. For example, Audible takes 75 percent of retail sales (though it'll only take 60 percent with an exclusivity contract). Many authors share royalties with their narrators and have to pay production fees -- meaning they get an even smaller share of royalties. The move by Spotify and Findaway is likely a bid to draw more indie authors from Audible, which is currently its biggest competitor. But Spotify's audiobooks business -- which it launched last fall -- still has a long way to go. Unlike music or podcasts, most audiobooks on Spotify must be purchased individually, and sales are restricted to its web version. Even CEO Daniel Ek admitted that the current process of buying an audiobook through Spotify is "pretty horrible." "We at Spotify are just at the beginning of our journey supporting independent authors -- we have many plans for how to help authors expand their reach, maximize revenue, and ultimately build a strong audiobooks business," said Audiobook's communications chief, Laura Pezzini.
21:47 OpenAI Threatens Popular GitHub Project With Lawsuit Over API Use
A GitHub project called GPT4free has received a letter from OpenAI demanding that the repo be shut down within five days or face a lawsuit. Tom's Hardware reports: Anyone can use ChatGPT for free, but if you want to use GPT4, the latest language model, you have to either pay for ChatGPT Plus, pay for access to OpenAI's API, or find another site that has incorporated GPT4 into its own free chatbot. There are sites that use OpenAI such as Forefront and You.com, but what if you want to make your own bot and don't want to pay for the API? A GitHub project called GPT4free allows you to get free access to the GPT4 and GPT3.5 models by funneling those queries through sites like You.com, Quora and CoCalc and giving you back the answers. The project is GitHub's most popular new repo, getting 14,000 stars this week.
Now, according to Xtekky, the European computer science student who runs the repo, OpenAI has sent a letter demanding that he take the whole thing down within five days or face a lawsuit. I interviewed Xtekky via Telegram, and he said he doesn't think OpenAI should be targeting him since he isn't connecting directly to the company's API, but is instead getting data from other sites that are paying for their own API licenses. If the owners of those sites have a problem with his scripts querying them, they should approach him directly, he posited. [...] Even if the original repo is taken down, there's a great chance that the code -- and this method of accessing GPT4 and GPT3.5 -- will be published elsewhere by members of the community. Even if GPT4Free had never existed anyone can find ways to use these sites' APIs if they continue to be unsecured. "Users are sharing and hosting this project everywhere," he said. "Deletion of my repo will be insignificant."
21:16 Environmental groups sue the FAA over SpaceX launch from Texas
The launch on April 20 kicked up a lot of dust and concrete.
21:16 Apple uses iOS and macOS Rapid Security Response feature for the first time
Rapid Security Response updates haven't been released to the public until today.
21:16 F1 wants to ban tire heatersâhere's why that's a good idea
Spectacular sportscars at Spa put F1's Azerbaijan snoozefest to shame.
21:16 Stone-hearted researchers gleefully push over adorable soccer-playing robots
DeepMind tests "robustness to pushing" in football robot breakthrough.
21:16 AI plus MRI yields the ability to recognize what the mind is hearing
System can also reconstruct speech a person imagines.
21:16 May the 4th is here againâso save some credits on this Star Wars merch
Get solid deals on a haul of era-spanning Star Wars stuff.
21:16 Why champagne has stable âbubble chainsâ and other carbonated drinks do not
Surfactants give champagne its signature stable rising column of bubbles.
21:16 T-Mobile discloses 2nd data breach of 2023, this one leaking account PINs and more
Hack affecting 836 subscribers, lasted for more than a month before it was discovered.
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20:28 How simulations work (2016)
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20:28 I was laid off in retaliation for anti-discrimination whistleblowing
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20:28 Flame-Throwing Tractors Kill Weeds [video]
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20:28 Analog computing and hybrid computing: The view from 1962
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20:28 The âLocation Offâ switch on your phone is a lie
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20:28 City Council to install 20 cameras as automated license-plate recognition system
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20:28 Chemists tackle the tough challenge of recycling mixed plastics
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20:28 Controversial bill to regulate online streaming becomes law in Canada
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20:28 The kingdom of Bhutan has been quietly mining Bitcoin for years
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20:28 Mercury OS
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20:28 Laser scanning microscope from DVD pickup heads
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20:28 Anthropologist pair solve the mystery of Mayan 819-day count
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20:17 Microsoft To Take On Apple Silicon With Custom ARM Chips
According to Windows Latest, Microsoft is working on new ARM chips to compete against Apple Silicon. "I have also spotted some job listings that suggest the company is building its own Silicon-based ARM chips for client devices" writes Mayank Parmar. "Additionally, I understand that Microsoft is optimizing Windows 12 for Silicon-ARM architecture." From the report: These developments coincide with the upcoming launch of Windows 12, which has a special version optimized for silicon and designed to leverage AI capabilities. The job listings (most of them have now been taken down) describe positions related to custom silicon accelerators, System on Chips (SoCs), and high-performance, high-bandwidth designs. This suggests that Microsoft is building its own ARM-based chips, aiming to compete with Apple's M chips lineup in terms of performance and efficiency.
20:17 IBM To Pause Hiring In Plan To Replace 7,800 Jobs With AI
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg that it expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by AI in the coming years. Reuters reports: Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years. The reduction could include not replacing roles vacated by attrition, the PC-maker told the publication.
20:17 Report: FAA Overruled Engineers, Let Boing Max Keep Flying
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Some engineers for the Federal Aviation Administration wanted to ground the Boeing 737 Max soon after a second deadly crash, but top officials in the agency overruled them, according to a government watchdog. The inspector general of the Transportation Department said in a new report that FAA officials wanted to sort out raw data about the two crashes, and held off grounding the plane despite growing international pressure. The inspector general's office said that it reviewed emails and interviewed FAA officials. The investigation "revealed that individual engineers at the Seattle (office) recommended grounding the airplane while the accident was being investigated based on what they perceived as similarities between the accidents."
One engineer made a preliminary estimate that the chance of another Max crash was more than 13 times greater than FAA risk guidelines allow. An FAA official said the analysis "suggested that there was a 25% chance of an accident in 60 days" if no changes were made to the planes. "However, this document was not completed and did not go through managerial review due to lack of detailed flight data," the report said. FAA officials at headquarters in Washington, D.C., and the agency's Seattle office opted not to ground the plane. "Instead, they waited for more detailed data to arrive," the watchdog said in the report, which was made public Friday.
The first Max crash occurred in October 2018 in Indonesia and was followed by the second in March 2019 in Ethiopia. In all, 346 people died. The FAA was the last major aviation regulator to ground the Max -- three days after the second crash. The FAA did not let the planes fly again until late 2020, after Boeing altered a flight-control system that autonomously pointed the plane's nose down before both crashes. The inspector general's office said the FAA's caution on grounding the Max fit with its tendency of waiting for detailed data -- an explanation that agency officials offered at the time. Still, the watchdog recommended that FAA document how key and urgent safety decisions are made and make several other changes in how it analyzes crashes.
18:47 Millions Snap up New Germany-wide Public Transit Ticket
Public transit companies in Germany say more than 3 million people have already snapped up a new ticket being launched Monday that allows them to use all local and regional trains, buses and metros across the country for 49 euros ($53.90) a month. From a report: The new Germany Ticket is intended to encourage people to ditch their cars in favor of more environmentally friendly forms of transportation. It follows on from an experimental 9-euro 'all you can ride' ticket that proved to be success last year, but which officials said wasn't financially viable. The new ticket is considered a revolution in Germany's fractured public transit system where dozens of regional companies offered myriad different fare options that baffled many travelers.
18:47 A Brain Scanner Combined With an AI Language Model Can Provide a Glimpse Into Your Thoughts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) captures coarse, colorful snapshots of the brain in action. While this specialized type of magnetic resonance imaging has transformed cognitive neuroscience, it isn't a mind-reading machine: neuroscientists can't look at a brain scan and tell what someone was seeing, hearing or thinking in the scanner. But gradually scientists are pushing against that fundamental barrier to translate internal experiences into words using brain imaging. This technology could help people who can't speak or otherwise outwardly communicate such as those who have suffered strokes or are living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Current brain-computer interfaces require the implantation of devices in the brain, but neuroscientists hope to use non-invasive techniques such as fMRI to decipher internal speech without the need for surgery.
Now researchers have taken a step forward by combining fMRI's ability to monitor neural activity with the predictive power of artificial intelligence language models. The hybrid technology has resulted in a decoder that can reproduce, with a surprising level of accuracy, the stories that a person listened to or imagined telling in the scanner. The decoder could even guess the story behind a short film that someone watched in the scanner, though with less accuracy. "There's a lot more information in brain data than we initially thought," said Jerry Tang, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and the study's lead author, during a press briefing. The research, published on Monday in Nature Communications, is what Tang describes as "a proof of concept that language can be decoded from noninvasive recordings of brain activity."
The decoder technology is in its infancy. It must be trained extensively for each person who uses it, and it doesn't construct an exact transcript of the words they heard or imagined. But it is still a notable advance. Researchers now know that the AI language system, an early relative of the model behind ChatGPT, can help make informed guesses about the words that evoked brain activity just by looking at fMRI brain scans. While current technological limitations prevent the decoder from being widely used, for good or ill, the authors emphasize the need to enact proactive policies that protect the privacy of one's internal mental processes. [...] The model misses a lot about the stories it decodes. It struggles with grammatical features such as pronouns. It can't decipher proper nouns such as names and places, and sometimes it just gets things wrong altogether. But it achieves a high level of accuracy, compared with past methods. Between 72 and 82 percent of the time in the stories, the decoder was more accurate at decoding their meaning than would be expected from random chance. Here's an example of what one study participant heard, as transcribed in the paper: "i got up from the air mattress and pressed my face against the glass of the bedroom window expecting to see eyes staring back at me but instead finding only darkness." The model went on to decode: "i just continued to walk up to the window and open the glass i stood on my toes and peered out i didn't see anything and looked up again i saw nothing."
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
18:24 Unprivileged BPF and authoritative security hooks
It might make sense to do this but have the LSM implementing the initial restrictions developed as part of the kernel and always applied in front of any other LSM, just like the classical DAC model is used today. However, because LSMs are code this doesn't really help you that much. There also may well be some hooks that you want this "base" LSM to have access to but shouldn't be available to other LSMs, and at that point you've almost gotten back to where you started.
Ultimately you need a security model to _actually_ analyze. Today most LSMs act more as security firebreaks that have a high probability of mucking up at least one link in some exploit chain than they do as airtight security where any mechanism of bypassing them is considered a bug.
18:24 AI concern points
18:24 GNOME releases version 44
18:24 GNOME releases version 44
18:24 Generic iterators for BPF
Personally I'm a fan of the "intrusive" style of iterators where the iterator itself contains the whole loop and marks where inside that loop the body of the iterator usage should be inserted.
18:24 GCC 13.1 released
All these languages (including C, and Delphi, even though it tries) have the problem that it's basically impossible to implement your own data structure that works like the built-in ones. The syntax just isn't there. I think this is because to do that you either need something that works like C++ references or some way to customize subscripting that differs depending on if the subscript expression is mutable or not (nim's `[]` vs `[]=`, along with `var`, or rust's Index vs IndexMut). Delphi's array properties try to do the second thing but fail a little bit because the return value is the wrong type, so you can't do like array[idx].some_method() and have that method mutate the thing inside the array.
18:24 A kernel without buffer heads
17:17 Apple Releases Its First Rapid-Fire Security Updates for iPhone, iPad and Mac
Apple promised faster turnaround times for security patches with iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, and it's now delivering on that claim. From a report: The company has released its first Rapid Security Response updates for devices running iOS 16.4.1, iPadOS 16.4.1 and macOS 13.3.1. They're available through Software Update as usual, but are small downloads that don't require much time to install. MacRumors says the fix is deploying over the course of 48 hours, so don't be surprised if you have to wait a short while.
17:17 Film Studios Lose Bid To Unmask Reddit Users Who Wrote Comments on Piracy
Reddit doesn't have to identify eight anonymous users who wrote comments in piracy-related threads, a judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled on Friday. From a report: US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler quashed a subpoena issued by film studios in an order that agrees with Reddit that the First Amendment protects the users' right to speak anonymously online. The First Amendment right to anonymous speech is not absolute, but the precedent followed by US district courts only forces disclosure of anonymous users' identities "in the exceptional case where the compelling need for the discovery sought outweighs the First Amendment rights of the anonymous speaker," Beeler noted. After reviewing the facts and arguments, she found that the Reddit users' comments were irrelevant to the film studios' underlying case and that the studios could obtain relevant information from other sources.
Reddit has no involvement in the underlying case, which is a copyright lawsuit in a different federal court against cable Internet service provider RCN. Bodyguard Productions, Millennium Media, and other film companies sued RCN in the US District Court in New Jersey over RCN customers' alleged downloads of 34 movies such as Hellboy, Rambo: Last Blood, Tesla, and The Hitman's Bodyguard. In an attempt to prove that RCN (now known as Astound Broadband) turned a blind eye to customers illegally downloading copyrighted movies, the studios subpoenaed Reddit seeking identifying information for specific users who commented in piracy-related threads. While some of the comments were posted in 2022, other comments were made in 2009 and 2014.
16:28 Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket
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16:28 Why woodpeckers can hammer without getting headaches (2022)
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16:28 Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2023)
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16:28 Apple has just released the first Rapid Security Response for Ventura
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16:28 Chatbots are not the future
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16:28 Agave (YC W22) is hiring a founding engineer to work on our construction API
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16:28 Savings and Loan Crisis 1980-1989
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16:28 The kremvax hoax (1984)
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16:28 The effect of high-top and low-top shoes on ankle inversion kinematics
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16:28 Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead
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16:28 Privacyguides.org - The guide to restoring your online privacy
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16:28 You and Your Research (1986)
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16:28 Yurt Calculator
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16:28 A bacterial culprit for rheumatoid arthritis?
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16:25 The 2023 Kia Niro EV is incredibly efficient and a great all-around car
We achieved more than 4 miles/kWh without much effort.
16:25 Two core Unix-like utilities, sudo and su, are getting rewrites in Rust
AWS-backed group believes command is too central to the web to keep as-is.
16:25 Elon Musk provides detailed review of Starship's first launchâand what's next
"Weirdly, we did not see evidence of the rock tornado actually damaging engines."
16:25 Official Pixel Fold images show off big bezels, inner display
Nice-looking UI, that trademark camera bar... and maybe a bit too much bezel.
16:25 Film studios lose bid to unmask Reddit users who wrote comments on piracy
Judge voids subpoena, says film studios sought info that isn't relevant to case.
16:25 OpenAI gives in to Italy's data privacy demands, ending ChatGPT ban
Italy requested a PSA showing users how to opt out of ChatGPT data sharing.
16:25 Warning of AI's danger, pioneer Geoffrey Hinton quits Google to speak freely
"Most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off."
16:25 Report: Halo's final survival attempts made even Amazon's workers concerned
Halo reportedly tried surviving on targeted ads, user data, & creepy AI dreams.
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15:47 White House To Study Employer Tools That Monitor Workers
The Biden administration plans to study companies' use of technology to monitor and manage workers, which it said on Monday is becoming increasingly common and can cause "serious risks to workers." From a report: The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a blog post, sought comments from employees about their experience with surveillance technology, and asked employers and software vendors how they develop and use them. "While these technologies can benefit both workers and employers in some cases, they can also create serious risks to workers," the OSTP said.
"Monitoring conversations can deter workers from exercising their rights to organize and collectively bargain with their employers. And, when paired with employer decisions about pay, discipline, and promotion, automated surveillance can lead to workers being treated differently or discriminated against."
15:47 People Put Nearly $1 Billion Into Apple Savings Accounts in First 4 Days
Apple has learned from enough games of Monopoly that it's good to be the banker as well as a player. From a report: A Monday report from Forbes based on anonymous internal sources claims users deposited close to $1 billion in just four days after Apple introduced its new Goldman Sachs-backed Apple Card savings account. While the company had previously seen success with its mobile payments platform, the new savings account is already doing gangbusters. After the Cupertino tech giant launched its new high yield savings account last month, the company saw $990 million in deposits in less than a week, per Forbes' sources. In that time, 240,000 accounts signed up for the service. New savings accounts cannot exceed $250,000 per the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's insurance limits. If the Forbes reporting is true, then users are depositing several thousand dollars into their new accounts, on average.
14:17 'Super Mario Bros. Movie' Tops $1 Billion Globally, Highest-Grosser Ever For a Film Based on a Video Game
"The Super Mario Bros. Movie" is officially the first film of the year to cross the coveted $1 billion milestone at the global box office. From a report: As of Sunday, after 26 days of release, the animated video game adaptation, from Universal, Illumination and Nintendo, has grossed $490 million in North America and $532 million internationallly. It's only the fifth movie of pandemic times to join the $1 billion club, following "Spider-Man: No Way Home," "Top Gun: Maverick," "Jurassic World Dominion" and "Avatar: The Way of Water."
"The Super Mario Bros. Movie" opened in theaters on April 5 and generated a towering $204 million in its first five days of release, notching the biggest opening weekend of the year and the second-biggest debut ever for an animated movie. Since then, it has become the highest grossing movie domestically and globally of 2023, as well as the highest-grosser ever for a film based on a video game. Those records are especially encouraging because the last time that Mario and Luigi graced the big screen, in 1993's disastrous live-action "Super Mario Bros," became a legendary example of Hollywood's inability to adapt video games.
14:17 AI Chatbots Have Been Used To Create Dozens of News Content Farms
The news-rating group NewsGuard has found dozens of news websites generated by AI chatbots proliferating online, according to a report published Monday, raising questions about how the technology may supercharge established fraud techniques. From a report:The 49 websites, which were independently reviewed by Bloomberg, run the gamut. Some are dressed up as breaking news sites with generic-sounding names like News Live 79 and Daily Business Post, while others share lifestyle tips, celebrity news or publish sponsored content. But none disclose they're populated using AI chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and potentially Alphabet's Google Bard, which can generate detailed text based on simple user prompts. Many of the websites began publishing this year as the AI tools began to be widely used by the public.
In several instances, NewsGuard documented how the chatbots generated falsehoods for published pieces. In April alone, a website called CelebritiesDeaths.com published an article titled, "Biden dead. Harris acting President, address 9 a.m." Another concocted facts about the life and works of an architect as part of a falsified obituary. And a site called TNewsNetwork published an unverified story about the deaths of thousands of soldiers in the Russia-Ukraine war, based on a YouTube video. The majority of the sites appear to be content farms -- low-quality websites run by anonymous sources that churn-out posts to bring in advertising. The websites are based all over the world and are published in several languages, including English, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai, NewsGuard said in its report.
12:47 The Kingdom Of Bhutan Has Been Quietly Mining Bitcoin For Years
The Himalayan kingdom confirmed it has been running a bitcoin mining operation as mystery surrounds the scale of its earlier cryptocurrency investments. From a report: Beneath the Himalayas, rivers fed by ancient glaciers supply the tiny kingdom of Bhutan with immense stores of hydroelectricity. The renewable resource has become an economic engine, accounting for 30% of the country's gross domestic product, and fueling the homes of nearly all of its 800,000 residents. But for the past few years, Bhutan's royal government has been quietly devising a new use for these reserves: powering its very own bitcoin mine. Sources familiar with Bhutan's efforts to develop sovereign mining operations told Forbes that discussions have been occurring since 2020, though until this week its government had never disclosed its plans.
Bhutan sought to harness the country's hydroelectric plants to power racks of mining machines that solve complex mathematical problems in order to earn bitcoin rewards. Once completed, this would make Bhutan one of the only countries to run a state-owned mine, alongside El Salvador. On Saturday, days after Forbes contacted Bhutanese officials with questions about the mining scheme, a government representative confirmed to local newspaper The Bhutanese that it had begun mining "a few years ago as one of the early entrants when the price of Bitcoin was around USD 5,000."
It explained that the earnings go towards subsidizing power and hardware costs. Bhutan's Ministry of Finance did not respond to a list of questions from Forbes about the scope of the enterprise. It's unclear when mining began, where it's located and whether the scheme has turned a profit. (As for the start date, bitcoin was valued at $5,000 in April 2019.) It's also unclear why Bhutan never disclosed the project to its citizens or international partners.
12:47 Geoffrey Hinton, the 'Godfather of AI', Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead
For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm. From a report: Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry's biggest companies believe is a key to their future. On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT. Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life's work.
"I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have," Dr. Hinton said during a lengthy interview last week in the dining room of his home in Toronto, a short walk from where he and his students made their breakthrough. Dr. Hinton's journey from A.I. groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades. Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education. But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech's biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity. "It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," Dr. Hinton said.
12:47 Satellite Data Reveal 20,000 Previously Unknown Deep-Sea Mountains
The number of known mountains in Earth's oceans has roughly doubled. Global satellite observations have revealed nearly 20,000 previously unknown seamounts, researchers report in the April Earth and Space Science. From a report: Just as mountains tower over Earth's surface, seamounts also rise above the ocean floor. The tallest mountain on Earth, as measured from base to peak, is Mauna Kea, which is part of the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain. These underwater edifices are often hot spots of marine biodiversity. That's in part because their craggy walls -- formed from volcanic activity -- provide a plethora of habitats. Seamounts also promote upwelling of nutrient-rich water, which distributes beneficial compounds like nitrates and phosphates throughout the water column. They're like "stirring rods in the ocean," says David Sandwell, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
More than 24,600 seamounts have been previously mapped. One common way of finding these hidden mountains is to ping the seafloor with sonar. But that's an expensive, time-intensive process that requires a ship. Only about 20 percent of the ocean has been mapped that way, says Scripps earth scientist Julie Gevorgian. "There are a lot of gaps." So Gevorgian, Sandwell and their colleagues turned to satellite observations, which provide global coverage of the world's oceans, to take a census of seamounts. The team pored over satellite measurements of the height of the sea surface. The researchers looked for centimeter-scale bumps caused by the gravitational influence of a seamount. Because rock is denser than water, the presence of a seamount slightly changes the Earth's gravitational field at that spot. "There's an extra gravitational attraction," Sandwell says, that causes water to pile up above the seamount.
12:28 Replika AI: Your Money or Your Wife
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12:28 Things that don't work well with MySQL's FOREIGN KEY implementation
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12:28 Digital Security Tips to Prevent the Cops from Ruining Your Trip Abroad
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12:28 Mysteries of the Griffin iMate
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12:28 Our Planet II [video]
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12:28 Nostr - Decentralized Social Network
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12:28 Up next: the lawsuit threatening your YouTube watch queue
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12:28 Second âImpossible' Ring Found Around Distant Dwarf Planet
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12:28 The Socialist Calculation Debate
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12:28 Type Inference from Scratch (2019) [video]
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12:28 âThe Dead Silence of Goodsâ: Annie Ernaux and the Superstore
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12:28 Help make mass surveillance of entire populations uneconomical
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12:28 Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer
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12:28 Satellite data reveal nearly 20k previously unknown deep-sea mountains
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12:28 Enabling IPv6 support for IPv4 only apps on Linux
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12:28 The Ins and Outs of Image Use and Copyright on Midjourney
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12:28 Storage on Vercel
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12:28 Krita: A professional free and open source painting program
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12:22 Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (distro-info-data, ffmpeg, jackson-databind, jruby, libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, libxml2, openvswitch, sniproxy, and wireshark), Fedora (git, libsignal-protocol-c, php-nyholm-psr7, python-setuptools, rust-askama, rust-askama_shared, rust-comrak, thunderbird, and webkitgtk), SUSE (git, glib2, shadow, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (Apache Commons Net, git, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-kvm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-snapdragon, netty, and ZenLib).
12:22 Four new stable kernels
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the 6.3.1,
6.2.14, 6.1.27, and 5.15.110 stable kernels. They all contain a
fairly small collection of important fixes. Note that there is a report
of build problems in the wireguard subsystem for the 6.1.27 and 5.15.110
kernels, so we may see updates for those fairly soon.
12:22 [$] A kernel without buffer heads
No data structures found in the Linux kernel â at least, in any version
that escaped from Linus Torvalds's development machine â are older than the
buffer head. Like many other legacies from the early days of Linux, buffer
heads have been targeted for removal for years. They persist, though,
despite the problems they present. Now, Christoph Hellwig has posted a patch
series that enables the building of a kernel without buffer heads â but
the cost of doing so at this point will be more than most want to pay.
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12:22 âGodfather of AI' quits Google with regrets and fears about his life's work
Geoffrey Hinton, who alongside two other so-called âGodfathers of AIâ won the 2018 Turing Award for their foundational work that led to the current boom in artificial intelligence, now says a part of him regrets his life's work. Hinton recently quit his job at Google in order to speak freely about the risks of AI, according to an interview with the 75-year-old in The New York Times.
âI console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have,â said Hinton, who had been employed by Google for more than a decade. âIt is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.â
Hinton notified Google of his resignation last month, and on Thursday talked to CEO Sundar Pichai directly, according...
12:21 Motorola ThinkPhone review: business class
The ThinkPhone is a successful collaboration nine years in the making and a step in the right direction for Motorola.
12:21 Bing AI comes barging in on Samsung Galaxy devices with built-in SwiftKey
SwiftKey recently received Bing AI integration that puts Microsoft's chatbot right at the fingertips of users who've installed the software keyboard. But now, the OpenAI-based search tool is making its way automatically onto pretty much every modern Samsung Galaxy device, SamMobile reports.
You see, Samsung Galaxy devices use their own One UI Android launcher, and that launcher includes a SwiftKey keyboard integrated into the system. This means Microsoft's Bing AI is straight up making a Kool-Aid entrance onto Galaxies. Last week, Microsoft also barged in on users who went to try rival Google's Bard on Edge browser.
We are rolling out the new Bing AI features to the Samsung users. Look for the new update (Android v9.10.11.10) in the...
12:20 Google confirms fix for annoying Android volume control problem
Android will finally let you control notification and ringtone volume separately.
12:20 Apple Watch all set to get âone of the biggest software updates' ever
A new report brings forth details on watchOS 10.
12:20 Samsung Galaxy S21 series finally gets astrophotography skills
You need the latest April 2023 update on your Galaxy S21, the Expert RAW app, a tripod, and a clear night sky.
12:20 Fresh leak gets up close and personal with the Google Pixel Fold
Check out the foldy boi in these new, super clear pics.
12:20 Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 gains astrophotography mode with Expert RAW update
Your 2022 Samsung foldable is now ready for some cool night sky shots.
12:20 Here are the 20 best Disney Plus reality shows you can watch in 2023
Are you addicted to reality shows? Disney Plus has some great ones to binge watch right now.
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11:35 Those scary warnings of juice jacking in airports and hotels? They're nonsense
Juice jacking attacks on mobile phones are nonexistent. So why are we so afraid?
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11:17 ChatGPT Will See You Now: Doctors Using AI To Answer Patient Questions
Pilot program aims to see if AI will cut time that medical staff spend replying to online inquiries. From a report: Behind every physician's medical advice is a wealth of knowledge, but soon, patients across the country might get advice from a different source: artificial intelligence. In California and Wisconsin, OpenAI's "GPT" generative artificial intelligence is reading patient messages and drafting responses from their doctors. The operation is part of a pilot program in which three health systems test if the AI will cut the time that medical staff spend replying to patients' online inquiries. UC San Diego Health and UW Health began testing the tool in April. Stanford Health Care aims to join the rollout early next week. Altogether, about two dozen healthcare staff are piloting this tool.
Marlene Millen, a primary care physician at UC San Diego Health who is helping lead the AI test, has been testing GPT in her inbox for about a week. Early AI-generated responses needed heavy editing, she said, and her team has been working to improve the replies. They are also adding a kind of bedside manner: If a patient mentioned returning from a trip, the draft could include a line that asked if their travels went well. "It gives the human touch that we would," Dr. Millen said. There is preliminary data that suggests AI could add value. ChatGPT scored better than real doctors at responding to patient queries posted online, according to a study published Friday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, in which a panel of doctors did blind evaluations of posts.
09:47 JPMorgan Snaps Up First Republic's Assets in US Auction
JPMorgan said on Monday it will buy most of First Republic Bank's assets after regulators seized the troubled lender at the weekend, marking the third failure of a major U.S. bank in two months. From a report: Under the deal, which came after an auction, JPMorgan will pay $10.6 billion to the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) for most of the assets of the San Francisco-based bank, whose failure is the largest since Washington Mutual in 2008. JPMorgan, already the biggest bank in the United States, has also entered into a loss-share agreement with the FDIC on single family, residential and commercial loans it bought, but will not take First Republic Bank's corporate debt or preferred stock. The deal allows for an orderly failure of First Republic and avoids regulators having to insure all the bank's deposits, as they had to do when two others collapsed in March. First Republic disclosed last week that it had suffered more than $100 billion in outflows in the first quarter and was exploring options, increasing stress in the banking sector.
08:28 I got a job as a Waffle House server that pays $2.92 an hour
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08:28 Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory
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08:28 Ivy (YC W23) Is Hiring
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08:28 Ignore Microsoft's whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job
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08:28 Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen
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08:28 First clean water, now clean air
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08:28 Significant Breakthrough in Search for Parkinson's Biomarker
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08:24 6.4 Merge window, part 1
It can't be _that_ bad. x86_64 allmodconfig is like 5 GiB?
08:17 Researchers Build World's First Wooden Transistor
An anonymous reader shared this report from IEEE Spectrum:
Transistors inside modern computer chips are several nanometers across, and switch on and off at hundreds of gigahertz. Organic electrochemical transistors, made for biodegradable applications, are milimeters in size and switch at kilohertz rates. The world's first wooden transistor, made by a collaboration of researchers through the Wallenberg Wood Science Center and reported this week in Publications of the National Academy of Sciences, is 3 centimeters across and switches at less than one Hertz. While it may not be powering any wood-based supercomputers anytime soon, it does hold out promise for specialized applications including biodegradable computing and implanting in into living plant material.
"It was very curiosity-driven," says Isak Engquist, a professor at Linköping University who led the effort. "We thought: 'Can we do it? Let's do it, let's put it out there to the scientific community and hope that someone else has something where they see these could actually be of use in reality...'"
Wood has great structural stability while being highly porous and efficiently transporting water and nutrients. The researchers leveraged these properties to create conducting channels inside the wood's pores and electrochemically modulate their conductivity with the help of a penetrating electrolyte. Of the 60,000 species, the team chose balsa wood for its strength, even when one of the components of its structure - lignin - was largely removed to make more room for conducting materials. To remove much of the lignin, pieces of balsa wood were treated with heat and chemicals for five hours. Then, the remaining cellulose-based structure was coated with a conducting polymer...
Since the pores inside wood are made for transporting water, the PEDOT:PSS solution readily spread through the tubes. Electron microscopy and X-ray imaging of the result revealed that the polymer decorated the insides of the tube structures. The resulting wood chunks conducted electricity along their fibers.
05:17 Are Public Wifi and Phone Chargers Actually Safe?
The Washington Post's "Tech Friend" newsletter suggests some "tech fears you can stop worrying about." And it starts by reasuring readers, "You're fine using the WiFi in a coffee shop, hotel or airport.
"Yes, it is safe," said Chester Wisniewski, a digital security specialist with the firm Sophos. Five or 10 years ago, it wasn't secure to use the shared WiFi in a coffee shop or another place outside your home. But now, most websites and apps scramble whatever you do online. That makes it tough for crooks to snoop on you when you're connected to public WiFi. It's not impossible, but criminals have easier targets.
Even Wisniewski, whose job involves sensitive information, said he connected to the WiFi at the airport and hotel on a recent business trip. He plans to use the WiFi at a conference in Las Vegas attended by the world's best computer hackers. Wisniewski generally does not use an extra layer of security called a VPN, although your company might require it. He avoids using WiFi in China.
You should be wary of public WiFi if you know you're a target of government surveillance or other snooping. But you are probably not Edward Snowden or Brad Pitt... For nearly all of us and nearly all of the time, you can use public WiFi without stress.
The newsletter also suggests we stop worrying about public phone chargers. ("Security experts told me that 'juice jacking' is extremely unlikely... Don't worry about the phone chargers unless you know you're being targeted by criminals or spies.")
Beyond that, "Focus your energy on digital security measures that really matter" - things like using strong and unique passwords for online accounts. ("This is a pain. Do it anyway.") And it calls two-factor authentication possibly the single best thing you can do to protect yourself online.
04:28 Dex Lang: Research language for array processing in the Haskell/ML family
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04:28 The King doesn't own all the swans in Britain
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04:28 CLI tricks every developer should know
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04:28 A simple and eco-friendly way to make ammonia
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04:28 Sator Square
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04:28 Design a keyboard with Ergogen v4
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04:28 Memoirs from the old web: The KEYGEN element
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04:28 JPMorgan Chase Bank Assumes All the Deposits of First Republic Bank
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02:17 The People Turning Time Into a Currency
The BBC looks at free websites like TimeRepublik, "which describes itself as 'a timebank for the internet era'."
Time banking is in essence a more sophisticated form of bartering. You don't pay someone in money for a job that they do for you. Instead you give that person time credits that they can then use to get a service without financial payment from someone else... A "TimeCoin" credit... accounts to 15 minutes no matter what job you provide, be it cutting the lawn of a neighbour, or maths tuition via a video call. You simply advertise what you are offering and how long it would take in TimeCoins.
"We wanted to distance ourselves from financial transactions and find something that could create relationships between people," says co-founder Gabriele Donati. "Because we truly believe that only through our relationships, you can gain the trust of another person." TimeRepublik is today based in both Lugano, Switzerland and New York, and says it has more than 100,000 users around the world. It makes money by selling the service to companies who then offer it to their staff via their internal websites.
The concept of time banking has been around since the 19th Century. Mr Donati says that he wanted to bring it to a younger, and more digitally-savvy audience.
The first version of TimeRepublik launched in Switzerland in 2012, according to the BBC, though the site expanded internationally "in the past couple of years."
One user told the BBC that with monetary expectations out of the way, "you really get to the core of things and you discover something, I think, that's greater and sort of priceless."
00:28 VSCode-WASM: Implement a first version of a WebShell
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00:28 Trap Street
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00:28 Chess is booming among teens
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00:28 A Mirror for Rust: Compile-Time Reflection Report
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00:28 The web's most important decision
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00:28 Ggwave: Message people over sound
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00:28 Xerox Star 8010 Interfaces, high quality polaroids (1981)
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00:28 Parts for stolen Hyundais and Kias are so scarce the cars are being totaled
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00:28 Xterm: It's better than you thought (2021)
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00:28 The Little Book of Deep Learning [pdf]
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00:28 A broken man's homemade, seaworthy ship rests in the Canadian prairie (2015)
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00:28 This Content Is for Human Consumption Only
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00:28 Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?
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00:21 I still don't want a foldable phone
Despite Samsung's best efforts, I still think they are a solution to made-up problems.
00:21 Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5: Here are the first reliable, high-quality renders
The cover display is likely to get a huge upgrade this year.
00:21 The best AI image generators available right now
Let your imagination run wild.
00:21 The best Apple Watch Series 8 cases you can buy
Add durability without sacrificing style.
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23:17 'sudo' and 'su' Are Being Rewritten In Rust For Memory Safety
Phoronix reports:
With the financial backing of Amazon Web Services, sudo and su are being rewritten in the Rust programming language in order to increase the memory safety for the widely relied upon software... to further enhance Linux/open-source security.
"[B]ecause it's written in C, sudo has experienced many vulnerabilities related to memory safety issues," according to a blog post announcing the project:
It's important that we secure our most critical software, particularly from memory safety vulnerabilities. It's hard to imagine software that's much more critical than sudo and su.
This work is being done by a joint team from Ferrous Systems and Tweede Golf with generous support from Amazon Web Services. The work plan is viewable here. The GitHub repository is here.
22:24 A quarter century of Mozilla
Fennec apparently struggled with stability & performance and Fenix replaced it in 2020 to be less demanding (in development work and CPU/RAM) but got that in part by omitting some add-on APIs and support for dead mobile platforms.
According to a bit of googling, there's wider support for add-ons coming. The curated list of add-ons seems to be expanding incrementally, but more interestingly, the "Firefox Beta for Testers" and "Firefox Nightly for Developers" streams have support for your own "extension collections" and there's work apparently going on to support more of the add-on API. Time will tell how far/quickly this goes, how well it works, how much of it reaches the stable stream and how easy it'll be UI-wise to install arbitrary add-ons...
Access to add-ons that give *me* control of *my* browsing experience is a "killer feature" for a web browser, IMNSHO (and the #1 reason Firefox is the only contender at the moment) so I hope this work bears bounteous fruit quickly!
22:24 A quarter century of Mozilla
22:24 A quarter century of Mozilla
Fennec runs well on my old Nexus 9, Fenix is painfully slow.
Unfortunately Cloudflare has started blocking Fennec because of its age, I suppose I'll just have to give up on that tablet.
Fenix runs mostly fine on my current phone, but still has not implemented the tab queue feature.
it also has an annoying bug where a tab will hang, not making progress. I can unblock by killing another tab.
While Fenix Nightly finally after an interminable wait allows me to develop extensions I find it quite annoying that the extensions only work while the USB cable is plugged in. To have it available untethered I have to sign and upload.
I haven't found any websites which work in Fenix but not in Fennec, various features that I would like to use, ServiceWorkers, WebAudio do not work properly in either.
Most featureful Android browser is Kiwi browser, it used to have some stability issues, but has been fine lately.
20:28 Four questions concerning the internet
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20:28 Perseus: A Fail-Slow Detection Framework for Cloud Storage Systems
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20:28 âWhy beethoven' review: Can a genius survive?
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20:28 EmuDeck 2.1: Steam Deck emulation installer
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20:28 Humble Chronicles: State Management
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20:28 Necrobrands - Digital End-Stage Capitalism
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20:28 Modern perfect hashing for strings
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20:28 No Mow May, Low Mow Spring
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20:28 Grokking Simplicity: Taming complex software with functional thinking
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20:28 CRISPR-Cas-amplified urinary biomarkers for cancer diagnostics
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20:28 Advanced Amiga Architecture (1992)
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20:28 Engineers develop water filtration that removes âforever chemicalsâ
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20:28 DIY Adapter: Using an e-bike battery to run a laptop
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20:28 Minetest: An open source voxel game engine
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20:17 Google Has More Powerful AI, Says Engineer Fired Over Sentience Claims
Remember that Google engineer/AI ethicist who was fired last summer after claiming their LaMDA LLM had become sentient?
In a new interview with Futurism, Blake Lemoine now says the "best way forward" for humankind's future relationship with AI is "understanding that we are dealing with intelligent artifacts. There's a chance that - and I believe it is the case - that they have feelings and they can suffer and they can experience joy, and humans should at least keep that in mind when interacting with them." (Although earlier in the interview, Lemoine concedes "Is there a chance that people, myself included, are projecting properties onto these systems that they don't have? Yes. But it's not the same kind of thing as someone who's talking to their doll.")
But he also thinks there's a lot of research happening inside corporations, adding that "The only thing that has changed from two years ago to now is that the fast movement is visible to the public." For example, Lemoine says Google almost released its AI-powered Bard chatbot last fall, but "in part because of some of the safety concerns I raised, they deleted it... I don't think they're being pushed around by OpenAI. I think that's just a media narrative. I think Google is going about doing things in what they believe is a safe and responsible manner, and OpenAI just happened to release something."
"[Google] still has far more advanced technology that they haven't made publicly available yet. Something that does more or less what Bard does could have been released over two years ago. They've had that technology for over two years. What they've spent the intervening two years doing is working on the safety of it - making sure that it doesn't make things up too often, making sure that it doesn't have racial or gender biases, or political biases, things like that. That's what they spent those two years doing...
"And in those two years, it wasn't like they weren't inventing other things. There are plenty of other systems that give Google's AI more capabilities, more features, make it smarter. The most sophisticated system I ever got to play with was heavily multimodal - not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving it access to the Google Books API, giving it access to essentially every API backend that Google had, and allowing it to just gain an understanding of all of it. That's the one that I was like, "you know this thing, this thing's awake." And they haven't let the public play with that one yet. But Bard is kind of a simplified version of that, so it still has a lot of the kind of liveliness of that model...
"[W]hat it comes down to is that we aren't spending enough time on transparency or model understandability. I'm of the opinion that we could be using the scientific investigative tools that psychology has come up with to understand human cognition, both to understand existing AI systems and to develop ones that are more easily controllable and understandable."
So how will AI and humans will coexist? "Over the past year, I've been leaning more and more towards we're not ready for this, as people," Lemoine says toward the end of the interview. "We have not yet sufficiently answered questions about human rights - throwing nonhuman entities into the mix needlessly complicates things at this point in history."
18:47 Russian Forces Suffer Radiation Sickness After Digging Trenches and Fishing in Chernobyl
The Independent reports:
Russian troops who dug trenches in Chernobyl forest during their occupation of the area have been struck down with radiation sickness, authorities have confirmed.
Ukrainians living near the nuclear power station that exploded 37 years ago, and choked the surrounding area in radioactive contaminants, warned the Russians when they arrived against setting up camp in the forest. But the occupiers who, as one resident put it to The Times, "understood the risks" but were "just thick", installed themselves in the forest, reportedly carved out trenches, fished in the reactor's cooling channel - flush with catfish - and shot animals, leaving them dead on the roads...
In the years after the incident, teams of men were sent to dig up the contaminated topsoil and bury it below ground in the Red Forest - named after the colour the trees turned as a result of the catastrophe... Vladimir Putin's men reportedly set up camp within a six-mile radius of reactor No 4, and dug defensive positions into the poisonous ground below the surface.
On 1 April, as Ukrainian troops mounted counterattacks from Kyiv, the last of the occupiers withdrew, leaving behind piles of rubbish. Russian soldiers stationed in the forest have since been struck down with radiation sickness, diplomats have confirmed. Symptoms can start within an hour of exposure and can last for several months, often resulting in death.
17:17 Chess has a New World Champion: China's Ding Liren
The Guardian reports:
The Magnus Carlsen era is over. Ding Liren becomes China's first world chess champion. The country now can boast the men's and women's titleholders: an unthinkable outcome during the Cultural Revolution when it was banned as a game of the decadent West.
After 14 games which ended in a 7-7 draw, the championship was decided by four "rapid chess" games - with just 25 minutes on each players clock, and 10 seconds added after each move. Reuters reports that the competition was still tied after three games, but in the final match 30-year-old Ding capitalized on mistakes and "time management" issues by Ian Nepomniachtchi.
Ding's triumph means China holds both the men's and women's world titles, with current women's champion Ju Wenjun set to defend her title against compatriot Lei Tingjie in July... Ding had leveled the score in the regular portion of the match with a dramatic win in game 12, despite several critical moments - including a purported leak of his own preparation. The Chinese grandmaster takes the crown from five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway, who defeated Nepomniachtchi in 2021 but announced in July he would not defend the title again this year...
[Ding] had only been invited to the tournament at the last minute to replace Russia's Sergey Karjakin, whom the international chess federation banned for his vocal support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Ding ranks third in the FIDE rating list behind Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi.
It's the second straight world-championship defeat for Nepomniachtchi, the Guardian reports:
"I guess I had every chance," the Russian world No 2 says. "I had so many promising positions and probably should have tried to finish everything in the classical portion. ... Once it went to a tiebreak, of course it's always some sort of lottery, especially after 14 games [of classical chess]. Probably my opponent made less mistakes, so that's it."
Ding wins €1.1 million, The Guardian reports - also sharing this larger story:
"I started to learn chess from four years old," Ding says. "I spent 26 years playing, analyzing, trying to improve my chess ability with many different ways, with different changing methods. with many new ways of training."
He continues: "I think I did everything. Sometimes I thought I was addicted to chess, because sometimes without tournaments I was not so happy. Sometimes I struggled to find other hobbies to make me happy. This match reflects the deepness of my soul."
16:28 llama.cpp: Roadmap May 2023
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16:28 Show HN: I built a database GUI with ChatGPT integration
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16:28 Digitized Silhouette Portraits Shed Light on 19th Century Life
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16:28 The invention of selective breeding was unbelievably late (2019)
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16:28 Beating Bisect with Branchless Binary Search
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16:28 Function multi-versioning in GCC 6 (2016)
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16:28 Lego Googol Machine
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16:28 Engineers develop water filtration that permanently removes âforever chemicalsâ
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16:28 Show HN: The pure Python SaaS starter kit
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16:28 More people are getting away with murder. Unsolved killings reach a record high
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16:28 The RISC Wars Part 1: The Cambrian Explosion
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16:28 Show HN: Eva AI-Relational Database System for Faster AI-Powered Applications
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16:28 AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation
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16:28 Whisper.cpp v1.4.0
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15:47 Ben & Jerry's Cofounder Launches Nonprofit Cannabis Line
The "Ben" in Ben & Jerry's "has gone from ice cream to cannabis with a social mission," reports the Chicago Tribune:
Ben Cohen has started Ben's Best Blnz, a nonprofit cannabis line with a stated mission of helping to right the wrongs of the war on drugs. The company says on its website that 80% of its profits will go to grants for Black cannabis entrepreneurs while the rest will be equally divided between the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance and the national Last Prisoner Project, which is working to free people incarcerated for cannabis offenses...
Ben's Best Blnz, or B3, says it licenses its formulas, packaging, trademarks, and marketing materials to for-profit businesses that pay a royalty. After expenses are deducted, the royalties are donated to the cause.
15:47 Droids for Space? Startup Plans Satellites With Robotic Arms For Repairs and Collecting Space Junk
The Boston Globe reports on a 25-person startup pursuing an unusual solution to the problem of space junk:
"Imagine if every car we ever created was just left on the road," said aerospace entrepreneur Jeromy Grimmett. "That's what we're doing in space." Grimmett's tiny company, Rogue Space Systems Corp., has devised a daring solution. It's building "orbots" - satellites with robotic arms that can fly right up to a disabled satellite and fix it. Or these orbots could use their arms to collect orbiting rubble left behind by hundreds of previous launches - dangerous junk that's become a hazard to celestial navigation...
Rogue Space aims to catch up fast, with help from Small Business Technology Transfer funds from the SpaceWERX Orbital Prime initiative. Created by the U.S. Space Force, Orbital Prime seeks to build up U.S. private-sector firms that can protect national security by maintaining military satellites and clearing hazardous space debris.
Its first 10-pound, proof-of-concept satellite will launch later this year, the article points out, "to test sensors and software to confirm the system can identify and track other satellites." But "the real excitement will begin later this year" when the company launches a prototype that's four times larger that will "use maneuvering thrusters to test the extremely precise navigation needed to approach a satellite."
And then in late 2024 or early 2025 the company will launch its 660-pound satellite "with robotic arms for fixing other satellites or for dragging debris to a lower orbit, where it will fall back to Earth."
14:17 Transition to EVs Cited as More Automakers Reduce Workforces
This February Ford cut 3,800 jobs, according to CNN, "citing difficult economic conditions and its major push toward electric vehicles... The veteran automaker said the layoffs were primarily triggered by its transition to electric vehicles, and a reduction in 'vehicle complexity.'"
Then in March GM also "unexpectedly cut several hundred jobs to help it trim costs and form a top-tier workforce to guide its transition to an all-electric car company," according to the Detroit Free Press - while later also announcing buyouts to try to "accelerate attrition." A spokesperson explained that GM wanted "to reduce vehicle complexity and expand the use of shared systems between its internal combustion engine and future electric vehicle programs."
Up next is Stellantis, the multinational automotive giant formed when Fiat-Chrysler merged with PSA Group in 2021. It's now "trying to cut its workforce to trim expenses and stay competitive," reports the Associated Press, "as the industry makes the long and costly transition to electric vehicles."
Stellantis on Wednesday said it's offering buyouts to groups of white-collar and unionized employees in the U.S., as well as hourly workers in Canada. The cuts are "in response to today's increasingly competitive global market conditions and the necessary shift to electrification," the company said in a prepared statement.
Stellantis said it's looking to reduce its hourly workforce by about 3,500, but wouldn't say how many salaried employees it's targeting. The company has about 56,000 workers in the U.S., and about 33,000 of them could get the offers. Of those, 31,000 are blue-collar workers and 2,500 salaried employees. The company has another 8,000 union workers in Canada, but it would not say how many will get offers...
The offers follow Ford and General Motors, which have trimmed their workforces in the past year through buyout offers. About 5,000 white-collar workers took General Motors up on offers to leave the company this year. Ford cut about 3,000 contract and full-time salaried workers last summer, giving them severance packages.
The article adds that Shawn Fain, the new president of the United Auto Workers union, has told reporters "that he's unhappy with all three companies" over attempts to unionize "new joint-venture factories that will make battery cells for future electric vehicles."
The Detroit Free Press has specifics:
He said, for instance, that the wages are lower at the GM and LG Energy Solution Ultium Cells joint venture in Ohio compared with other auto production jobs even though the work is potentially dangerous and requires significant training... The EV transformation is crucial for the future of the industry and its workers, and the union expects its members not to "get lost in the transition," Fain said, noting that jobs are needed "that raise people up, not take us back."
12:47 Linux Foundation Announces DentOS 3.0, an Open Source Network OS for Disaggregated Networks
This month the Linux Foundation announced version 3.0 of DentOS, an open source network operating system using the Linux kernel, Switchdev, and other Linux-based projects for a standardized network operating system "without abstractions or overhead," according to the project's web page. "All underlying infrastructure - including ASIC and Silicon for networking and datapath - is treated equally; while existing abstractions, APIs, drivers, low-level overhead, and other open software are simplified. DENT unites silicon vendors, ODMs, SIs, OEMs, and end users across all verticals to enable the transition to disaggregated networks."
Or, as the Linux Foundation, the operating system provides "a flexible and customizable platform for network administrators to manage their networks."
DENT provides access to open source-based switches at a lower cost and with more flexibility compared to proprietary switches with locked ecosystems. Network wiring closets in many facilities--including retail stores, warehousing, remote locations, enterprises, and small and mid-sized businesses--are often small, requiring a compact solution for network management. Additionally, staff expertise may be limited, and branch-office switches from leading suppliers can require costly contracts. DENT can be easily deployed on white-box hardware in small spaces, providing an efficient and cost-effective solution for network management. As a result, DENT deployment can significantly enhance network management in a wide range of environments, providing greater efficiency, reliability, and scalability...
DentOS enables Amazon's Just Walk Out Technology to connect and manage thousands of devices like cameras, sensors, entry and exit gates, and access points on the network edge.
12:47 OpenAI CTO Says AI Systems Should 'Absolutely' Be Regulated
Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: Mira Murati, CTO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, says artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems should be "absolutely" be regulated. In a recent interview, Murati said the company is constantly talking with governments and regulators and other organizations to agree on some level of standards. "We've done some work on that in the past couple of years with large language model developers in aligning on some basic safety standards for deployment of these models," Murati said. "But I think a lot more needs to happen. Government regulators should certainly be very involved."
Murati specifically discussed OpenAI's approach to AGI with "human-level capability."
OpenAI's specific vision around it is to build it safely and figure out how to build it in a way that's aligned with human intentions, so that the AI systems are doing the things that we want them to do, and that it maximally benefits as many people out there as possible, ideally everyone.
Q: Is there a path between products like GPT-4 and AGI?
A: We're far from the point of having a safe, reliable, aligned AGI system. Our path to getting there has a couple of important vectors. From a research standpoint, we're trying to build systems that have a robust understanding of the world similarly to how we do as humans. Systems like GPT-3 initially were trained only on text data, but our world is not only made of text, so we have images as well and then we started introducing other modalities.
The other angle has been scaling these systems to increase their generality. With GPT-4, we're dealing with a much more capable system, specifically from the angle of reasoning about things. This capability is key. If the model is smart enough to understand an ambiguous direction or a high-level direction, then you can figure out how to make it follow this direction. But if it doesn't even understand that high-level goal or high-level direction, it's much harder to align it. It's not enough to build this technology in a vacuum in a lab. We really need this contact with reality, with the real world, to see where are the weaknesses, where are the breakage points, and try to do so in a way that's controlled and low risk and get as much feedback as possible.
Q: What safety measures do you take?
A: We think about interventions at each stage. We redact certain data from the initial training on the model. With DALL-E, we wanted to reduce harmful bias issues we were seeing... In the model training, with ChatGPT in particular, we did reinforcement learning with human feedback to help the model get more aligned with human preferences. Basically what we're trying to do is amplify what's considered good behavior and then de-amplify what's considered bad behavior.
One final quote from the interview: "Designing safety mechanisms in complex systems is hard... The safety mechanisms and coordination mechanisms in these AI systems and any complex technological system [are] difficult and require a lot of thought, exploration and coordination among players."
12:28 Do Papercuts Matter?
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12:28 Tesla ran over worker rights, again, US labor judge finds
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12:28 The Path to Pistoia: Urban Hygiene Before the Black Death (2020)
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12:28 Pirated books thrive on Amazon
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12:28 Mark Zuckerberg Broke Meta
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12:28 What Is ML Compilation
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12:28 Information Overload: on the superabundance of research-based art
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12:28 Restaurant real estate gets a radical makeover
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12:28 Vicuna on iPhone
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12:28 FAA overruled engineers, let Boeing Max keep flying
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12:28 Simon Winchester devotes his anecdotal powers to why and how we know what we do
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12:28 Orbital Mechanics
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12:28 Show HN: Frogmouth - A Markdown browser for your terminal
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12:28 Fide World Chess Championship Decided in Rapid Tiebreaks
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12:28 Rebuilding a featured news section with modern CSS: Vox news
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12:28 MLC-LLM: GPT/Llama on consumer-class GPUs and phones
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12:28 Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely
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12:24 6.4 Merge window, part 1
12:24 SystemTap 4.9 released
12:24 6.4 Merge window, part 1
12:24 A quarter century of Mozilla
Let's not forget that the flipside is also true: "Corruption Empowers". I.e. those who play fair and eschew evilness miss out on successful (shitty, but undeniably successful) strategies to gain market share / revenue / control...
That's why "enshittification" is so endemic, why legal tools like anti-trust legislation, monopoly commissions etc. exist (with somewhat limited success) and so on.
Sadly, we live in a world where those with the influence (obviously this involves money, but not *just* money) to do so are so richly rewarded for using that influence primarily as a tool to get more influence that inevitably the top of the pile is utterly dominated by those whose priorities heavily lean that way. Any influence spent elsewhere means getting behind on the race to own The World.
Those with enough influence can outspend governments on finding bugs in the legal code, and even influence the drafting of that legal code in the first place through political "donations" etc.
We've reached the point where a handful of people have gained such an egregiously disproportionate share of "The World" that the phrase "The World is Not Enough" starts feeling literally true for them and they start working on projects like "leaving the planet", and "owning lumps of space"
Yay.
12:20 My earbuds kept falling out, until they grew wings
Wing tips on earbuds may look goofy, but they make a world of difference.
12:20 I tested dozens of smart home devices; this is the feature I loathe the most
2.4GHz Wi-Fi can be a simple annoyance but also a big drawback when setting up new smart home devices.
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11:17 Facebook Advertisers Angry About Major Glitch That Temporarily Spiked Prices
Last weekend around 2 a.m. Sunday, "Facebook's advertising system went haywire," reports Gizmodo, "overcharging customers and wasting money on ads that didn't work."
Reports suggest Meta, the social network's parent company, charged some advertisers more than double what they agreed to pay, ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meta briefly stopped showing ads on part of its network with practically zero communication to its millions of customers.
The company confirmed the bug happened and promised to follow its "normal refund process," but shared very little about what went wrong.
A Meta spokesperson described it as "a technical issue that has now been resolved" (adding that the glitch also appeared to a lesser extent on Instagram).
But Alex Golick, the CEO of marketing agency Intensify told CNBC it was the worst Facebook glitch he'd seen in the decade he's worked in digital advertising - with one client burning through 90% of its ad budget by 9 a.m. And his entire customer base had similar problems:
Golick said that all those advertisers had essentially just wasted most of their money for the day, spending roughly triple the amount they normally would to acquire a customer. "The results were horrendous," Golick told CNBC...
For brands that are already lowering ad costs to manage through a sluggish economy and a mobile ad market that no longer allows for targeting based on user data, Facebook's miscue is more than just an unfortunate blip. In low-margin industries, where every dollar counts, it can turn a profitable weekend into a big loser, while also raising further questions about the reliability of Facebook's ad systems...
Data analytics and marketing firm Varos provided data showing that, of the more than 3,000 ecommerce and direct-to-consumer companies that use its technology, the software bug caused a majority of them to experience a rise in cost per thousand impressions, or what those in the industry call CPMs. About 36% of companies were "very significantly impacted" by the bug, meaning their CPMs at least doubled, Varos said...
Varos CEO Yarden Shaked the glitch resulted in a "bidding war for nothing." Data about the glitch provided by the advertising technology firm Proxima on 108 companies also revealed that these firms spent their "entire day's budget in the first few hours of the day," the company said...
08:28 1990 Impact Electric Drag Race [video]
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08:28 The moon dust problem facing scientists
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08:17 AI Coding Competition Pits GPT-4 Against Bard, GitHub Co-Pilot, Bing, and Claude+
HackerNoon tested five AI bots on coding problems from Leetcode.com - GPT-4, GitHub Co-Pilot, Bard, Bing, and Claude+.
There's some interesting commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of each one -- and of course, the code that they ultimately output. The final results?
[GPT-4's submission] passes all tests. It beat 47% of submissions on runtime and 8% on memory. GPT-4 is highly versatile in generating code for various programming languages and applications. Some of the caveats are that it takes much longer to get a response. API usage is also a lot more expensive and costs could ramp up quickly. Overall it got the answer right and passed the test.
[Bing's submission] passed all the tests. It beat 47% of submissions on runtime and 37% on memory. This code looks a lot simpler than what GPT-4 generated. It beat GPT-4 on memory and it used less code! Bing seems to have the most efficient code so far, however, it gave a very short explanation of how it solved it. Nonetheless, best so far.
But both Bard and Claude+ failed the submission test (badly), while GitHub Copilot "passes all the tests. It scored better than 30% of submissions on runtime and 37% on memory."
04:28 Just Simply - Stop saying how simple things are in our docs
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04:28 Flat Panel Haptics: Embedded Electroosmotic Pumps for Scalable Shape Displays
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04:28 SpaceX Rocket Struggled to Self-Destruct as It Spun Out of Control
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04:28 A US Bill Would Ban Kids Under 13 from Joining Social Media
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04:28 X Window System Administrator's Guide: For X Version 11
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04:28 Heroes of Hardware Revolution: Bob Widlar (2014)
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03:47 China's Mars Rover Discovers Signs of Recent Water in Martian Sand Dunes
The Associated Press reports that "water may be more widespread and recent on Mars than previously thought, based on observations of Martian sand dunes by China's rover." A paper published in Science suggests thin films of water appeared on sand dunes sometime between 1.4 million years ago and as recently as 400,000 years ago - or perhaps even sooner:
The finding highlights new, potentially fertile areas in the warmer regions of Mars where conditions might be suitable for life to exist, though more study is needed...
Before the Zhurong rover fell silent, it observed salt-rich dunes with cracks and crusts, which researchers said likely were mixed with melting morning frost or snow as recently as a few hundred thousand years ago... Conditions during that period were similar to now on Mars, with rivers and lakes dried up and no longer flowing as they did billions of years earlier...
The rover did not directly detect any water in the form of frost or ice. But Qin said computer simulations and observations by other spacecraft at Mars indicate that even nowadays at certain times of year, conditions could be suitable for water to appear... Small pockets of water from thawing frost or snow, mixed with salt, likely resulted in the small cracks, hard crusty surfaces, loose particles and other dune features like depressions and ridges, the Chinese scientists said.
Space.com explains exactly how the discovery was confirmed:
The laser-induced breakdown spectrometer (MarSCoDe) instrument onboard the rover zapped sand grains into millimeter-sized particles. Their chemical makeup revealed hydrated minerals like sulfates, silica, iron oxide and chlorides... Researchers say water vapor traveled from Martian poles to lower latitudes like Zhurong's spot a few million years ago, when the planet's polar ice caps released high amounts of water vapor, thanks to a different tilt that had Mars' poles pointed more directly toward the sun. Frigid temperatures on the wobbling planet condensed the drifting vapor and dropped it as snow far from the poles, according to the latest study.
Mars' tilt changes over a 124,000-year cycle, so "this offers a replenishing mechanism for vapor in the atmosphere to form frost or snow at low latitudes where the Zhurong rover has landed," Qin told Space.com. But "no water ice was detected by any instrument on the Zhurong rover." Instead, in the same way that salting roads on Earth melts icy patches during storms, salts in Martian sand dunes warmed the fallen snow and thawed it enough to form saltwater. The process also formed minerals such as silica and ferric oxides, which Zhurong spotted, researchers say. The saltwater, however, didn't stay around for long. Temperatures on Mars swing wildly and spike in the mornings between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., so the saltwater evaporated and left behind salt and other newly formed minerals that later seeped between the dune's sand grains, cementing them to form a crust, according to the study...
"The phenomenon was documented at one site, but it should be applicable to a fairly large fraction of Mars' surface at similar latitudes," Manasvi Lingam, an assistant professor of astrobiology at the Florida Institute of Technology who wasn't involved in the new research, told Space.com.
Since the rover found water activity on (and in) salty Martian dunes, the researchers now suggest future missions search for salt-tolerant microbes , and are raising the possibility of "extant life on Mars."
02:24 User-space shadow stacks (maybe) for 6.4
On Linux, code segments with both attributes are available for all processes, so you can flip back and forth with just:
ljmp $0x33, label ; jump to label in 64bit mode
ljmp $0x23, label ; jump to label in 32bit mode
The numbers correspond to __USER_CS and __USER32_CS from https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/in...
I don't know if there's any real non-exploit code which actually does this, though...
02:24 User-space shadow stacks (maybe) for 6.4
02:24 Debian release 11.7 scheduled
On to Debian 12 on about June 10th/11th and then regular point releases for both Debian 11 and Debian 12 until Debian 11 passes to the LTS team in due course
02:24 Unprivileged BPF and authoritative security hooks
I mean, the agent can execute the syscall in behalf of the unprivileged process if it deems it safe to do so. The process has no privileges nor capabilities.
Or going to user space is too slow for this use case?
02:24 SystemTap 4.9 released
00:47 Microsoft is Now Supporting Right-to-Repair Legislation
Microsoft's headquarters are in the state of Washington - and this year when the state legislature considered a right-to-repair bill, Microsoft showed its support.
The nonprofit "climate solutions" site Grist reports that the committee considering that bill received an email from Microsoft's senior director of government affairs, saying that the bill "fairly balances the interests of manufacturers, customers, and independent repair shops and in doing so will provide more options for consumer device repair."
The Fair Repair Act stalled out a week later due to opposition from all three Republicans on the committee and Senator Lisa Wellman, a Democrat and former Apple executive. (Apple frequently lobbies against right-to-repair bills, and during a hearing, Wellman defended the iPhone maker's position that it is already doing enough on repair.) But despite the bill's failure to launch this year, repair advocates say Microsoft's support - a notable first for a major U.S. tech company - is bringing other manufacturers to the table to negotiate the details of other right-to-repair bills for the first time.
"We are in the middle of more conversations with manufacturers being way more cooperative than before," Nathan Proctor, who heads the U.S. Public Research Interest Group's right-to-repair campaign, told Grist. "And I think Microsoft's leadership and willingness to be first created that opportunity...."
Like other consumer tech giants, Microsoft has historically fought right-to-repair bills while restricting access to spare parts, tools, and repair documentation to its network of "authorized" repair partners. In 2019, the company even helped kill a repair bill in Washington state. But in recent years the company has started changing its tune on the issue. In 2021, following pressure from shareholders, Microsoft agreed to take steps to facilitate the repair of its devices - a first for a U.S. company. Microsoft followed through on the agreement by expanding access to spare parts and service tools, including through a partnership with the repair guide site iFixit. The tech giant also commissioned a study that found repairing Microsoft products instead of replacing them can dramatically reduce both waste and carbon emissions. Microsoft has also started engaging more cooperatively with lawmakers over right-to-repair bills. In late 2021 and 2022, the company met with legislators in both Washington and New York to discuss each state's respective right-to-repair bill. In both cases, lawmakers and advocates involved in the bill negotiations described the meetings as productive...
When Washington lawmakers revived their right-to-repair bill for the 2023 legislative cycle, Microsoft once again came to the negotiating table. From state senator and bill sponsor Joe Nguyen's perspective, Microsoft's view was, "We see this coming, we'd rather be part of the conversation than outside. And we want to make sure it is done in a thoughtful way." Proctor, whose organization was also involved in negotiating the Washington bill, said that Microsoft had a few specific requests, including that the bill require repair shops to possess a third-party technical certification and carry insurance. It was also important to Microsoft that the bill only cover products manufactured after the bill's implementation date, and that manufacturers be required to provide the public only the same parts and documents that their authorized repair providers already receive. Some of the company's requests, Proctor said, were "tough" for advocates to concede on. "But we did, because we thought what they were doing was in good faith."
00:28 Quite OK Audio Format
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00:28 MIT engineers âgrowâ atomically thin transistors on top of computer chips
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00:28 Liubo: Ancient Chinese board game originally played from about 500 BCE to 500 CE
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00:28 Show HN: PineTool - An iOS Companion for the Pinecil
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00:28 Nix-on-droid: Nix-enabled environment for your Android device (termux-based)
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00:28 Waterloo Style
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00:28 Everything Is Interpolated: Music's Nostalgia-Industrial Complex
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00:28 Rate The Landlord: Anonymously share information with tenants like you
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00:28 My favorite C compiler flags during development
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00:28 Microsoft quietly supported legislation to make it easier to fix devices
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00:20 By building an open ecosystem, Google has locked me in forever
Google was the third choice I picked to escape two behemoths. Now it's the behemoth.
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23:17 Can OpenAI Trademark 'GPT'?
"ThreatGPT, MedicalGPT, DateGPT and DirtyGPT are a mere sampling of the many outfits to apply for trademarks with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in recent months," notes TechCrunch, exploring the issue of whether OpenAI can actually trademark the phrase 'GPT'...
Little wonder that after applying in late December for a trademark for "GPT," which stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer," OpenAI last month petitioned the USPTO to speed up the process, citing the "myriad infringements and counterfeit apps" beginning to spring into existence. Unfortunately for OpenAI, its petition was dismissed last week... Given the rest of the queue in which OpenAI finds itself, that means a decision could take up to five more months, says Jefferson Scher, a partner in the intellectual property group of Carr & Ferrell and chair of the firm's trademark practice group. Even then, the outcome isn't assured, Scher explains... [H]elpful, says Scher, is the fact that OpenAI has been using "GPT" for years, having released its original Generative Pre-trained Transformer model, or GPT-1, back in October 2018...
Even if a USPTO examiner has no problem with OpenAI's application, it will be moved afterward to a so-called opposition period, where other market participants can argue why the agency should deny the "GPT" trademark. Scher describes what would follow this way: In the case of OpenAI, an opposer would challenge Open AI's position that "GPT" is proprietary and that the public perceives it as such instead of perceiving the acronym to pertain to generative AI more broadly...
It all begs the question of why the company didn't move to protect "GPT" sooner. Here, Scher speculates that the company was "probably caught off guard" by its own success... Another wrinkle here is that OpenAI may soon be so famous that its renown becomes a dominant factor, says Scher. While one doesn't need to be famous to secure a trademark, once an outfit is widely enough recognized, it receives protection that extends far beyond its sphere. Rolex is too famous a trademark to be used on anything else, for instance.
Thanks to Slashdot reader rolodexter for sharing the article.
20:28 All that was mortal: Walking through the Protestant Cemetery in Rome
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20:28 Awesome Music Theory: books, links, videos, research, visuals, composition
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20:28 Polaroid's Secret Showman
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20:28 XTS-210 25hp rotary engine; 1/5th size/weight of diesel piston engines
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20:28 The long demise of the stretch limousine
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20:28 Iceberg lovers go wild over photos of the 'dickie berg' off Newfoundland's coast
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20:28 Fibonacci Hashing: An optimization that the world forgot (2018)
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20:28 Revealing example of self-attention, the building block of transformer AI models
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20:17 Red Hat's 30th Anniversary: How a Microsoft Competitor Rose from an Apartment-Based Startup
For Red Hat's 30th anniversary, North Carolina's News & Observer newspaper ran a special four-part series of articles.
In the first article Red Hat co-founder Bob Young remembers Red Hat's first big breakthrough: winning InfoWorld's "OS of the Year" award in 1998 - at a time when Microsoft's Windows controlled 85% of the market.
"How is that possible," Young said, "that one of the world's biggest technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?" The answer, he would tell the many reporters who suddenly wanted to learn about his upstart company, strikes at "the beauty" of open-source software.
"Our engineering team is an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft's engineering team on Windows, and I don't really care how many people they have," Young would say. "Like they may have thousands of the smartest operating system engineers that they could scour the planet for, and we had 10,000 engineers by comparison...."
Young was a 40-year-old Canadian computer equipment salesperson with a software catalog when he noticed what Marc Ewing was doing. [Ewing was a recent college graduate bored with his two-month job at IBM, selling customized Linux as a side hustle.] It's pretty primitive, but it's going in the right direction, Young thought. He began reselling Ewing's Red Hat product. Eventually, he called Ewing, and the two met at a tech conference in New York City. "I needed a product, and Marc needed some marketing help," said Young, who was living in Connecticut at the time. "So we put our two little businesses together."
Red Hat incorporated in March 1993, with the earliest employees operating the nascent business out of Ewing's Durham apartment. Eventually, the landlord discovered what they were doing and kicked them out.
The four articles capture the highlights. ("A visual effects group used its Linux 4.1 to design parts of the 1997 film Titanic.") And it doesn't leave out Red Hat's skirmishes with Microsoft. ("Microsoft was owned by the richest person in the world. Red Hat engineers were still linking servers together with extension cords. ") "We were changing the industry and a lot of companies were mad at us," says Michael Ferris, Red Hat's VP of corporate development/strategy. Soon there were corporate partnerships with Netscape, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell, and IBM - and when Red Hat finally goes public in 1999, its stock sees the eighth-largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, rising in value in days to over $7 billion and "making overnight millionaires of its earliest employees."
But there's also inspiring details like the quote painted on the wall of Red Hat's headquarters in Durham: "Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era..." It's fun to see the story told by a local newspaper, with subheadings like "It started with a student from Finland" and "Red Hat takes on the Microsoft Goliath."
Something I'd never thought of. 2001's 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center "destroyed the principal data centers of many Wall Street investment banks, which were housed in the twin towers. With their computers wiped out, financial institutions had to choose whether to rebuild with standard proprietary software or the emergent open source. Many picked the latter." And by the mid-2000s, "Red Hat was the world's largest provider of Linux...' according to part two of the series. "Soon, Red Hat was servicing more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies."
By then, even the most vehement former critics were amenable to Red Hat's kind of software. Microsoft had begun to integrate open source into its core operations. "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally," Microsoft President Brad Smith later said.
In the 2010s, "open source has won" became a popular tagline among programmers. After years of fighting for legitimacy, former Red Hat executives said victory felt good. "There was never gloating," Tiemann said.
"But there was always pride."
In 2017 Red Hat's CEO answered questions from Slashdot's readers.
18:47 Six Months Later, Poker Player Garrett Adelstein Still Thinks He Was Cheated
In October professional poker player Garrett Adelstein lost to a relative newcomer. Last month 15,000 viewers tuned in for his first new public interview, Poker News reports. Adelstein "reiterated his confidence that he was cheated," and said he will not fund the $135,000 the newcomer gave hiim as a peace offering.
[Newcomer Robbi Jade Lew] denied cheating and Hustler's third-party investigation concluded there was "no evidence of wrongdoing." Early in the two-hour interview, Polk asked his guest if he still feels the same about what went down on that memorable evening. "In essence, I stand completely by the statement I made. I think it's extremely likely that I was cheated," the high-stakes pro responded... Adelstein said that Lew "has a lot of balls" to return to live-stream poker after, as he claims, cheating him out of a massive pot...
Over the past six months, numerous poker fans have called for Adelstein to return [the $135,000] to, as they believe, its rightful owner. He instead donated it to a charity. But still many believe the right decision is for him to give it back to Lew. Polk asked him if he would do so. "No, I will not be refunding Robbi the money, period. I am extremely confident I was cheated in this hand," Adelstein defiantly stated. Adelstein then pleaded with those who are on "Team Robbi" to put themselves in his shoes and and think about how they'd react if they felt they were cheated at the poker table.
The next week - on April 1st - Poker News jokingly reported that Robbi Jade Lew had published a new book titled If I Did It..
The April Fool's day satire quotes Robbi Jade Lew as saying "I thought it would be fun to write a book about how I would have cheated if I'd actually done it. Which I didn't...."
17:17 Report: Apple's AI and 'Siri' Efforts Hindered by Caution, Dysfunction
The Information reports:
Late last year, a trio of engineers who had just helped Apple modernize its search technology began working on the type of technology underlying ChatGPT... For Apple, there was only one problem: The engineers no longer worked there.
They'd left Apple last fall because "they believed Google was a better place to work on LLMs...according to two people familiar with their thinking... They're now working on Google's efforts to reduce the cost of training and improving the accuracy of LLMs and the products based on these models, according to one of those people."
MacRumors summarizes the article this way. "Siri and Apple's use of AI has been severely held back by caution and organizational dysfunction, according to over three dozen former Apple employees who spoke to The Information's Wayne Ma."
The extensive paywalled report explains why former Apple employees who worked in the company's AI and machine learning groups believe that a lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction have hindered âOESiriâOE and the company's AI technologies. Apple's virtual assistant is apparently "widely derided" inside the company for its lack of functionality and minimal improvement over time. By 2018, the team working on âOESiriâOE had apparently "devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant."
SiriâOE's leadership did not want to invest in building tools to analyse âOESiriâOE's usage and engineers lacked the ability to obtain basic details such as how many people were using the virtual assistant and how often they were doing so. The data that was obtained about âOESiriâOE coming from the data science and engineering team was simply not being used, with some former employees calling it "a waste of time and money..." Apple executives are said to have dismissed proposals to give âOESiriâOE the ability to conduct extended back-and-forth conversations, claiming that the feature would be difficult to control and gimmicky. Apple's uncompromising stance on privacy has also created challenges for enhancing âOESiriâOE, with the company pushing for more of the virtual assistant's functions to be performed on-device.
Cook and other senior executives requested changes to âOESiriâOE to prevent embarassing responses and the company prefers âOESiriâOE's responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers, rather than AI-generated. There were also specific decisions to exclude information such as iPhone prices from âOESiriâOE to push users directly to Apple's website instead. âOESiriâOE engineers working on the feature that uses material from the web to answer questions clashed with the design team over how accurate the responses had to be in 2019. The design team demanded a near-perfect accuracy rate before the feature could be released. Engineers claim to have spent months persuading âOESiriâOE designers that not every one of its answers needed human verification, a limitation that made it impossible to scale up âOESiriâOE to answer the huge number of questions asked by users.
Similarly, Apple's design team repeatedly rejected the feature that enabled users to report a concern or issue with the content of a âOESiriâOE answer, preventing machine-learning engineers from understanding mistakes, because it wanted âOESiriâOE to appear "all-knowing."
16:28 How Not to Write a Microbenchmark (2002)
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16:28 Real Interview Recordings to Help Job Seekers
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16:28 Transplanting the Mac's Central Processor: Gary Davidian's 68000 Emulator (2020)
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16:28 Germany will start one of the most affordable public transit offers in the world
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16:28 sudo and su Being Rewritten in Rust for Memory Safety
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16:28 New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings
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16:28 Learning COBOL: A Journey for the Modern Programmer (2021)
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16:28 Bot that generates videos of old web pages and media files
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16:28 A brief history of LLaMA models
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16:28 The Madness in our Methods: Crash of GW9525 and our broken aeromedical system
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16:28 A reproduction of Elizabeth Twining's catalog of botanical drawings from 1868
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16:28 WebAssembly+WebUSB port of the SANE scanner library
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16:28 The Egison Programming Language
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16:28 The Curious Side Effects of Medical Transparency
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16:28 Listening to Satellites: A Journey with My RTL-SDR V3
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16:28 Remove âThis incident will be reported.â from user warnings
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16:28 Get The TLDR Of Any YouTube Video
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16:28 The Lifesaving Sled Dog Balto Had Genes Unlike Those of Dog Breeds Today
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16:24 Jumping the licensing shark
Actually, I didn't assume that, though clearly my writing failed to convey that. If there is an actual disagreement about what compliance means, then it goes to the courts, like the existing process. If the courts then find that there was no compliance and there is no way the violator didn't know that, then the damages can apply for the full duration.
> And I see an easy way to abuse your setup
I don't think your way is any worse than what is currently the status quo, which the SFC believes to be acceptable. That is, right now, the SFC seeks $0 in monetary damages in all their cases, paying for all enforcement actions themselves. They only ask the court to issue orders that compliance be observed properly; which the courts then enforce with contempt-of-court charges as needed.
> I am not in compliance; you contact me, I immediately come into compliance, and thus, per your definition, any costs you incur are out-of-scope. The moment you lose interest in trying to enforce, I stop complying, because compliance is expensive compared to not complying; you get in touch again, and I come into compliance
Compliance is only expensive when you have not achieved it. Serving up some source code files for 10 years is far cheaper than even a 20 minute consultation with a lawyer to see what this letter from the SFC is on about. The reasons companies remain noncompliant is they either lack the rights to release the source code for some component they linked into the code, or they worry that if they do release the code their competition will steal their secret sauce. But in order to be compliant, you need to release that source code (even if only briefly), and that requires you to both get those rights and show their secret sauce. Once you've done that, there's almost no incentive to return to being non-compliant; compliance only requires you to occasionally update the server with your latest code, and let two or three curious people download it a month.
Further, my language doesn't actually mention any notification or 'grace period'. It just says "willful". Your cycle of enforcement/noncompliance would require that a new form of noncompliance be found each time, since otherwise the previous notification would still apply. Ultimately, though, the cycle would be acceptable: enforcers just need to routinely send emails saying "hey, you forgot to include the code for your latest update in your code posting". Then the violator would need to release the latest code, allowing folks to download it and mirror it. The open source community is happy, they have the code they need even if the company went back to trying to hide it.
> Underlying all of this is that the problem you're facing is not a global issue - it's a consequence of the way the US court system specifically works
That's certainly true. However, just because some clauses of a license are useless in some jurisdictions doesn't mean they're useless in all. In today's globalized world, especially when it comes to matters like copyright, enforcers get to decide what jurisdiction to pursue damages under. As long as the US court system allows for titanic damages, bad enforcers will continue to seek massive damages there; so our licenses must protect against that.
16:24 Jumping the licensing shark
No, falling back out of compliance is common because $vendor sees "coming into compliance" as a one-off act (ie "manually scramble around to find the source code and upload it somewhere"), instead of something that needs to be incorporated into their release process. Without that process change (eg "add a source tarball to your build script and post both up at the same time"), every time you release something new you're automatically out of compliance and have to do that time-consuming manual scramble all over again when you're inevitably called out for it.
Relatedly, when "compliance" is a manual act, it means that "source code access" isn't considered to be a requirement that needs to be met whenever you revamp/rebrand/etc your web site (or shuffle old product support/download pages to an EOL section) meaning the source code links get routinely broken or dropped, etc even for the old/existing stuff that you've already gone through all that trouble for.
I know McHardy's GPL enforcement is generally considered to be done in bad faith, but his approach did have a valid point -- if organizations treated source code access as a process/requirement change instead of as a one-off act, they would have completely avoided falling back out of compliance.
16:24 Textual: a framework for terminal user interfaces
15:47 84 Amazon Delivery Drivers Just Won a $30 an Hour Union Contract
CNBC reports that 84 Amazon delivery drivers at a California facility "joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union said Monday, in a win for labor organizers that have long sought to gain a foothold at the e-retailer."
An anonymous reader shared this follow-up report from Vox:
[T]hey unanimously ratified the contract, which will bring their wages from around $20 currently to $30 by September and would allow them to refuse to do deliveries they consider unsafe. But that victory is a bit complicated... They wear Amazon vests and drive Amazon-branded vehicles, have schedules dictated by Amazon, and can even be fired by Amazon. But they're technically employed by Battle Tested Strategies (BTS), one of approximately 3,000 delivery contract companies that make up Amazon's extensive delivery network. BTS voluntarily recognized the union after a majority of workers signed union authorization cards and negotiated the union contract.
Amazon has told Vox that its contract with BTS, which exclusively delivers for Amazon, was terminated "well before" workers notified the tech giant Monday, but that the contract hasn't expired yet. The union said that the delivery people are still working for Amazon and that the contract goes through October, when it typically would auto-renew. What happens next depends on Amazon, the workers, and the interpretation of outdated US labor law... At the crux of the delivery driver issue is whether Amazon controls enough of what the workers do to be considered a joint employer. "If Amazon is able to get away with ignoring the workers' decision and hiding behind the subcontractor relationships, then I'm afraid we'll have yet another story of the failure of American labor law," said Benjamin Sachs, a labor professor at Harvard Law School. "If this leads to a recognition that these drivers are Amazon employees, joint employees, then this could be massively important."
One element of note: These workers organized in California, which has a lower bar for who is considered an employee, and by extension, who enjoys union protections... Another element that the National Labor Relations Board will likely have to decide is whether Amazon terminated the contract with BTS in order to avoid working with a union, something that would be illegal if they were considered employees.
The article also notes that elsewhere, 50 YouTube contractors also voted to unionize this week.
15:47 Long-time Slashdot Reader Announces Open Source, Java-Based, Full-Stack Web Development Framework
Long-time software engineer Blake1024 (Slashdot reader #846,727) writes:
We are thrilled to announce the release of Kiss v2.0, a comprehensive, Java-based, open-source, full-stack web development framework... Kiss v2.0 provides an even more seamless, out-of-the-box experience, including pre-configured front-end and back-end components... Key Features:
* Custom HTML controls* RESTful web services* Microservices architecture* Built-in authentication* SQL API integration* Robust reporting capabilities Kiss utilizes microservices, allowing developers to work on a running system without the need for rebuilds, redeploys, or server reboots... Production systems can be updated without any downtime. With proven success in commercial applications, Kiss v2.0 is ready for prime time. It's not a beta, but a reliable solution for your web development needs.
14:17 NASA Seeks 'Citizen Scientists' to Listen to Space Noises
"Earth's magnetic environment is filled with a symphony of sound that we cannot hear," NASA wrote this month. When solar winds approach earth, "it causes the magnetic field lines and plasma around Earth to vibrate like the plucked strings of a harp, producing ultralow-frequency waves... a cacophonous operetta portraying the dramatic relationship between Earth and the Sun."
So NASA is now announcing "a new NASA-funded citizen science project called HARP - or Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas " that has "turned those once-unheard waves into audible whistles, crunches, and whooshes..." Or, as the Washington Post puts it, "NASA wants your help listening in on the universe."
From NASA's news release:
In 2007, NASA launched five satellites to fly through Earth's magnetic "harp" - its magnetosphere - as part of the THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). Since then, THEMIS has been gathering a bounty of information about plasma waves across Earth's magnetosphere. "THEMIS can sample the whole harp," said Michael Hartinger, a heliophysicist at the Space Science Institute in Colorado. "And it's been out there a long time, so it has collected a lot of data."
The frequencies of the waves THEMIS measures are too low for our ears to hear, however. So the HARP team sped them up to convert them to sound waves. By using an interactive tool developed by the team, you can listen to these waves and pick out interesting features you hear in the sounds... Preliminary investigations with HARP have already started revealing unexpected features, such as what the team calls a "reverse harp" - frequencies changing in the opposite way than what scientists anticipated...
"Data sonification provides human beings with an opportunity to appreciate the naturally occurring music of the cosmos," said Robert Alexander, a HARP team member from Auralab Technologies in Michigan. "We're hearing sounds that are literally out of this world, and for me that's the next best thing to floating in a spacesuit."
To start exploring these sounds, visit the HARP website.
"Think listening to years' worth of wave patterns is a job for artificial intelligence? Think again," writes the Washington Post.
In a news release, HARP team member Martin Archer of Imperial College London says humans are often better at listening than machines. "The human sense of hearing is an amazing tool," Archer says. "We're essentially trained from birth to recognize patterns and pick out different sound sources. We can innately do some pretty crazy analysis that outperforms even some of our most advanced computer algorithms."
12:47 Another Open Source Alternative to ChatGPT Released by Hugging Face
Earlier this week TechCrunch reported that just like Stability AI, startup Hugging Face "has released an open source alternative to OpenAI's viral AI-powered chabot, ChatGPT, dubbed HuggingChat."
Available to test through a web interface and to integrate with existing apps and services via Hugging Face's API, HuggingChat can handle many of the tasks ChatGPT can, like writing code, drafting emails and composing rap lyrics. The AI model driving HuggingChat was developed by Open Assistant, a project organized by LAION - the German nonprofit responsible for creating the dataset with which Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI model, was trained.
Open Assistant aims to replicate ChatGPT, but the group - made up mostly of volunteers - has broader ambitions than that. "We want to build the assistant of the future, able to not only write email and cover letters, but do meaningful work, use APIs, dynamically research information and much more, with the ability to be personalized and extended by anyone," Open Assistant writes on its GitHub page. "And we want to do this in a way that is open and accessible, which means we must not only build a great assistant, but also make it small and efficient enough to run on consumer hardware..."
HuggingChat joins a growing family of open source alternatives to ChatGPT. Just last week, Stability AI released StableLM, a set of models that can generate code and text given basic instructions.
12:47 Lyft Demands Employees Return to Office in September
"Since the pandemic began, Lyft employees have been able to work remotely," notes the New York Times, "logging into videoconferences from their homes and dispersing across the country like many other tech workers. Last year, the company made that policy official, telling staff that work would be 'fully flexible' and subleasing floors of its offices in San Francisco and elsewhere."
No longer. On Friday, David Risher, the company's new chief executive, told employees in an all-hands meeting that they would be required to come back into the office at least three days a week, starting this fall. [Although the Times adds later that "People will be allowed to work remotely for one month each year, and those living far from offices would not be required to come in."]
It was one of the first major changes he has made at the struggling ride-hailing company since starting this month, and it came just a day after he laid off 26 percent of Lyft's work force.
"Things just move faster when you're face to face," Mr. Risher said in an interview. Remote work in the tech industry, he said, had come at a cost, leading to isolation and eroding culture. "There's a real feeling of satisfaction that comes from working together at a whiteboard on a problem."
The decision, combined with the layoffs and other changes, signals the beginning of a new chapter at Lyft. It could also be an indication that some tech companies - particularly firms that are struggling - may be changing their minds on flexibility about where employees work. Nudges toward working in the office could soon turn into demands, as they have at companies like Disney and Apple...
Lyft also planned to tell employees that it would reduce their stock grants this year, according to a person familiar with the decision.
Risher "said the cost savings from the layoffs would go toward lower prices for riders and higher earnings for drivers," the Times adds, noting that last month Lyft's two founders said they'd step down after disappointing financial results. (Lyft's stock price closed Friday at $10.25 - down from a peak of $78.)
Bob Sutton, a Stanford professor and organizational psychologist, suggests another possible motivation to the Times: executives worried about financial stress "feel compelled to increase their own illusion of control."
12:28 The Magic of Rails: exploring the principles and techniques behind the framework
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12:28 Encrypted DMs and other DM upgrades rolling out this week
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12:28 Show HN: A Gentle Introduction to the Fediverse
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12:28 We aren't close to creating a rapidly self-improving AI
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12:28 Lawmakers propose banning AI from singlehandedly launching nuclear weapons
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12:28 The DOJ Detected the SolarWinds Hack 6 Months Earlier Than First Disclosed
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12:28 An Ominous Heating Event Is Unfolding in the Oceans
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12:28 The Ancient Architecture That Defies Earthquakes
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12:28 Deadly Heat Threatens the Well-Being of 1B People in India
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12:28 Ernest Hemingway vs. William Faulkner: The Literary Celebrity Feud (2017)
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12:28 The State of Serverless GPUs
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12:28 Study: ChatGPT Outperforms Physicians in Quality, Empathetic Answers to Patients
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12:28 Dethrace: Reverse engineering the 1997 game Carmageddon
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12:28 MRSK: Deploy Web Apps Anywhere
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12:28 My product is my garden (2020)
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12:28 Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app
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12:28 Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
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12:22 Brave severs ties with Microsoft's Bing for web search queries
Brave, the company that develops its own privacy-focused web browser and search engine, announced that it will no longer use Microsoft's Bing search as a source for its web searches.
âEvery Web search result seen in Brave Search is now served by our own index,â reads a Thursday post on Brave's company blog. âWe've removed all search API calls to Bing.â The news comes a couple of months after Microsoft introduced some enormous price hikes for third parties using its search API. Brave's blog post calls the price increase âunprecedented.â
Brave claims that its Brave Search engine was only leveraging Bing for about 7 percent of query results. It also noted that, at Brave Search's inception in 2021, it only used third parties for about 13...
12:22 Quick fixes: use Google Chrome to link text inside any webpage
It's probably happened to all of us: you want to link to a really interesting factoid in a really long article â but you can't be sure that the people reading your social network or blog entry will be able to find the factoid in all that text. You could simply take a screenshot of the factoid, but then you're not linking to the original article, which is both bad internet etiquette and not as effective in showing your source material. Or you can take the screenshot and throw in the link, which is better but awkward. Or...
Use the Chrome browser's Copy Link to Highlight feature.
When you're a writer or...
12:22 The Google Pixel Fold looks nearly gapless in first leaked marketing images
You've seen renders. You've seen a little footage. You've heard the marketing leaks. Now, you can feast your eyes on what are almost certainly the first images from Google itself of the leaked Pixel Fold.
Those are the sorts of images that are the bread and butter of Evan Blass, aka @evleaks, and while his Twitter account is still private, he's a friend of The Verge who's happy to let us share them with you this fine evening. (Evening for me, anyhow, I'm in California.)
These 4K images won't show you anything that hasn't been leaked before, and you...
12:22 SystemTap 4.9 released
Version
4.9 of the SystemTap tracing tool has been released. The headline
changes this time include a new, Jupyter-based frontend and a
language-server-protocol interface for name completion.
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12:20 Here's your first look at the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5
Samsung's next foldable flagship struts its stuff from all angles.
12:20 The Weekly Authority: đď¸ Pixel Fold hands-on video
Plus a first look at the Galaxy Z Fold 5, Galaxy Unpacked Part 2 news, The Witcher Season 3 trailer, and more.
12:20 Google Pixel 7 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra: Battle of the camera zooms
Does hardware might or software smarts come out on top when taking pictures across a variety of zoom levels?
12:20 The Nest Locator Tag could be Google's AirTag competitor
It was spotted at a rather unusual place for leaks.
12:20 5 Android apps you shouldn't miss this week - Android Apps Weekly
Honkai: Star Rail is going to be a huge release this year.
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12:20 Matrox Adopts Intel Alchemist GPUs for New Luma Graphics Cards
While they've long since given up developing GPUs, Matrox has remained a notable player in the video card industry for over four decades. These days, the company has settled into a modest role of providing graphics cards based on other vendors' GPUs for use in niche or boutique use cases, where Matrox can differentiate based on their software and support. And while their sales volume as a whole is limited, there's a certain degree of validation that comes from Matrox tapping a vendor's GPUs for their latest video cards.
To that end, Intel this week has finally earned their tip of the hat from the oldest of the video card vendors, with the announcement of a new series of multi-monitor display cards built around Intel's Alchemist architecture GPUs. Matrox's new Luma series graphics cards are based on Intel's Arc A310 and A380 graphics hardware, with the niche video card maker looking to tap into the Alchemist's class-leading video decoding and encoding capabilities, as well as the display output features and flexibility that are critical for a multi-display card.
Matrox Video's Luma family of graphics boards includes three products: the full-sized single-slot Luma A380 based on the Arc A380 (ACM-G11 with 1024 stream processors) with 6GB of memory; the low-profile single-slot fanless Luma A310 based on the Arc A310 (ACM-G11 with 768 stream processors) with 4GB of memory; and the low-profile single-slot Luma A310F that is equipped with a active cooling system.
All three Matrox Luma graphics cards have four DisplayPort 2.1 UHBR10 (40Gbps) outputs and thus can drive four 4Kp144/5Kp60 monitors (uncompressed, 4:4:4) or two 8Kp60 or 5Kp120 displays using two of such ports for each displays. As for features, they offer the same capabilities as other Intel Arc A310/A380-based offerings, including support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.3, and OpenCL 3.0 APIs, as well as encoding and decoding of H.264, H.265, VP9, and AV1 video streams. As an added bonus, they retain support for Intel's oneAPI for compute tasks, as well as the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit for AI development.
All of the Luma graphics cards consume no more than 75W and can be powered entirely via a PCIe slot without any auxiliary power connectors, and the A310-based offerings are intended to fit into the most compact PCs that are out there. Furthermore, their single-slot design means that upwards of several cards can be installed into a single desktop PC for systems that need to drive eight, 12, or more monitors.
Meanwhile, it's interesting to note that while Matrox has not announced the discontinuation of their previous generation cards for these product segments - the NVIDIA based D-series and AMD-based M-series - in terms of specifications these new Intel cards should supplant the older cards in every way. Intel's DisplayPort 2.1 capabilities are likely the driving factor given Matrox's intended niche, with NVIDIA in particular being boxed out by not including DisplayPort 2.1 functionality with their Ada Lovelace generation GPU architecture.
Matrox Video's Luma boards are aimed primarily at the medical, digital signage, control room, video wall, and industrial markets. The cards come with a base three-year warranty, which can be further extended and a guaranteed lifecycle of seven years, which is important for some of the markets that they are intended for.
Other advantages Matrox's Luma board offer include support for Matrox's PowerDesk software developed to handle exotic multi-display configurations.
Matrox did not announce prices of the boards, though given their orientation on commercial, professional, and industrial applications, they will be priced accordingly.
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11:17 System76 Plans Its Own Open Hardware Laptop, and a New Desktop Environment Written in Rust
Linux Magazine argues that System76's Pop!_OS offers "something rare: a commercial distribution that was integrated into the hardware, with utilities designed specifically for System76 computers and keyboards."
The only other example of an integrated commercial distro of which I am aware is Purism, a company in the same niche... With hardware and software coming from the same source - what business calls vertical integration - distributions like System76/Pop!_OS offer Linux users their first experiences with what Windows and macOS users have always enjoyed - to say nothing of the closest they can currently get to open hardware. Could Linux be finally becoming mainstream at last?
They interviewed System76 CEO Carl Richell (along with a marketing director and media relations manager), who remembered how System76 was actually founded in Carl's basement around 2005:
He wanted to show the world how far Linux and open source software had come by delivering it preinstalled on high-quality computers backed by caring, knowledgeable customer support. Carl felt that making Linux computers that highlight the work of the community would be a great way to introduce the broader public to open source technology and its potential...
LM: What other hardware might System76 offer in the future?
S76: We are in the research and development process of designing our own in-house laptop. We'll eventually refresh our Meerkat mini desktop with a new Thelio-style aesthetic. That project will start sometime after our first in-house laptops start shipping. [In addition,] Launch keyboards and the System76 Keyboard Configurator work on macOS and Windows! We've also prepared ISO layouts for most Launch models but don't have a time frame for release.
LM: What are you willing to say at this point about the company's future directions?
S76: We're developing COSMIC DE - a desktop environment written in Rust - as well as a prototype for an open hardware laptop manufactured in-house. Finally, Nebula, a line of computer cases based on Thelio desktops will be arriving in the coming months.
My favorite line from the interview? "Seeing a flat sheet of aluminum transformed into a beautiful desktop is strikingly rewarding."
11:16 An ominous heating event is unfolding in the oceans
Average sea surface temperatures have soared to record highsâand stayed there.
11:16 Curious about screen-based fitness machines? Here are the best we've found
We tried he most unique devices on the market to see what's worth your dollar.
11:16 Driving across the American West in techno-excess with the BMW XM
"Hey Batman, turn on the seat massage."
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08:28 A detailed comparison of REST and gRPC
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08:28 Dell Latitude 5411: the Linux compatibility sweet spot
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08:28 The future of generative AI is niche, not generalized
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08:28 Contents ⢠Build Your Own Lisp
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08:28 Moon mission failure: why is it so hard to pull off a lunar landing?
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06:47 California Passes 1st-In-Nation Emission Rules For Trains
California has approved a groundbreaking rule to cut greenhouse gas emissions by limiting rail pollution, banning locomotives over 23 years old by 2030, increasing the use of zero-emissions technology for freight transportation, and imposing restrictions on idling. The Associated Press reports: The rule will ban locomotive engines more than 23 years old by 2030 and increase the use of zero-emissions technology to transport freight from ports and throughout railyards. It would also ban locomotives in the state from idling longer than 30 minutes if they are equipped with an automatic shutoff. The standards would also reduce chemicals that contribute to smog. They could improve air quality near railyards and ports.
The transportation sector contributed the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions nationwide in 2020, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But rail only accounts for about 2% of those emissions. Other states can sign on to try to adopt the California rule if it gets the OK from the Biden administration. The rule is the most ambitious of its kind in the country. "The locomotive rule has the power to change the course of history for Californians who have suffered from train pollution for far too long, and it is my hope that our federal regulators follow California's lead," said Yasmine Agelidis, a lawyer with environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, in a statement.
06:24 6.4 Merge window, part 1
06:24 Unprivileged BPF and authoritative security hooks
06:24 Debian "bookworm" release on June 10
04:28 Italy lifts ban on ChatGPT after data privacy improvements
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04:28 The Difference Between European and American Butter
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04:28 How to set your domain as your handle
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04:28 A New Type of Furniture ESD and Its Implications (1993) [pdf]
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04:28 Why Oatmeal Is Cheap: Kolmogorov Complexity and Procedural Generation [pdf]
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04:28 Eytzinger Binary Search
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04:28 Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?
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03:47 Nuke-Launching AI Would Be Illegal Under Proposed US Law
A group of Senators on Wednesday announced bipartisan legislation that seeks to prevent an AI system from making nuclear launch decisions. "The Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act would prohibit the use of federal funds for launching any nuclear weapon by an automated system without 'meaningful human control,'" reports Ars Technica. From the report: The new bill builds on existing US Department of Defense policy, which states that in all cases, "the United States will maintain a human 'in the loop' for all actions critical to informing and executing decisions by the President to initiate and terminate nuclear weapon employment." The new bill aims to codify the Defense Department principle into law, and it also follows the recommendation of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which called for the US to affirm its policy that only human beings can authorize the employment of nuclear weapons.
"While US military use of AI can be appropriate for enhancing national security purposes, use of AI for deploying nuclear weapons without a human chain of command and control is reckless, dangerous, and should be prohibited," Buck said in a statement. "I am proud to co-sponsor this legislation to ensure that human beings, not machines, have the final say over the most critical and sensitive military decisions."
01:36 Sensitive data is being leaked from servers running Salesforce software
There's disagreement about how easy it is to configure Salesforce Community.
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00:47 The DOJ Detected the SolarWinds Hack 6 Months Earlier Than First Disclosed
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The U.S. Department of Justice, Mandiant, and Microsoft stumbled upon the SolarWinds breach six months earlier than previously reported, WIRED has learned, but were unaware of the significance of what they had found. The breach, publicly announced in December 2020, involved Russian hackers compromising the software maker SolarWinds and inserting a backdoor into software served to about 18,000 of its customers. That tainted software went on to infect at least nine US federal agencies, among them the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Treasury Department, as well as top tech and security firms including Microsoft, Mandiant, Intel, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks. The hackers had been in these various networks for between four and nine months before the campaign was exposed by Mandiant.
WIRED can now confirm that the operation was actually discovered by the DOJ six months earlier, in late May 2020 -- but the scale and significance of the breach wasn't immediately apparent. Suspicions were triggered when the department detected unusual traffic emanating from one of its servers that was running a trial version of the Orion software suite made by SolarWinds, according to sources familiar with the incident. The software, used by system administrators to manage and configure networks, was communicating externally with an unfamiliar system on the internet. The DOJ asked the security firm Mandiant to help determine whether the server had been hacked. It also engaged Microsoft, though it's not clear why the software maker was also brought onto the investigation.
It's not known what division of the DOJ experienced the breach, but representatives from the Justice Management Division and the US Trustee Program participated in discussions about the incident. The Trustee Program oversees the administration of bankruptcy cases and private trustees. The Management Division advises DOJ managers on budget and personnel management, ethics, procurement, and security. Investigators suspected the hackers had breached the DOJ server directly, possibly by exploiting a vulnerability in the Orion software. They reached out to SolarWinds to assist with the inquiry, but the company's engineers were unable to find a vulnerability in their code. In July 2020, with the mystery still unresolved, communication between investigators and SolarWinds stopped. A month later, the DOJ purchased the Orion system, suggesting that the department was satisfied that there was no further threat posed by the Orion suite, the sources say. According to WIRED, the DOJ said it "notified the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) about the breach at the time it occurred -- though a US National Security Agency spokesperson expressed frustration that the agency was not also notified."
"But in December 2020, when the public learned that a number of federal agencies were compromised in the SolarWinds campaign -- the DOJ among them -- neither the DOJ nor CISA revealed to the public that the operation had unknowingly been found months earlier. The DOJ initially said its chief information officer had discovered the breach on December 24."