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Idiosyncratic use of punctuation - which of these annoys you the most?

  • Declarations and assignments that end with }; (C, C++, Javascript, etc.)
  • (Parenthesis (pile-ups (at (the (end (of (Lisp (code))))))))
  • Syntactically-significant whitespace (Python, Ruby, Haskell...)
  • Perl sigils: @array, $array[index], %hash, $hash{key}
  • Unnecessary sigils, like $variable in PHP
  • macro!() in Rust
  • Do you have any idea how much I spent on this Space Cadet keyboard, you insensitive clod?!
  • Something even worse...

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:31 | Votes:65

posted by hubie on Tuesday October 15, @05:53PM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Nvidia's latest Blackwell GPUs are experiencing unprecedented demand, with the company reporting that it has sold out of these next-gen processors. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed the news during an investors meeting hosted by Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley Analyst Joe Moore notes that Nvidia executives disclosed that their Blackwell GPU products have a 12-month backlog, echoing a similar situation with Hopper GPUs several quarters ago.

The overwhelming demand for Blackwell GPUs comes from Nvidia's traditional customers, including major tech giants like AWS, CoreWeave, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle. These companies have purchased every Blackwell GPU Nvidia and its manufacturing partner TSMC can produce for the next four quarters. The extreme demand indicates that Nvidia's already considerable footprint in the AI processor market should continue to grow next year, even as competition from rivals such as AMD, Intel, and various cloud service providers grab their share.

"Our view continues to be that Nvidia is likely to gain share of AI processors in 2025, as the biggest users of custom silicon are seeing very steep ramps with Nvidia solutions next year," Moore said in a client note.

Nvidia unveiled the Blackwell GPU platform in March. It includes the B200 GPU and GB200 Grace "super chip." These processors can handle the demanding workloads of large language model (LLM) inference while significantly reducing energy consumption, a growing concern in the industry.

[...] In August, Nvidia acknowledged that its Blackwell-based products were experiencing low yields, necessitating a re-spin of some layers of the B200 processor to improve production efficiency. Despite these challenges, Nvidia remains confident in its ability to ramp up Blackwell production in Q4 2024. It expects to ship several billion dollars worth of Blackwell GPUs in the last quarter of this year.


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Tuesday October 15, @01:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the amateur-cartographers-unite dept.

Software developer and former computer science student Amit Patel has written a post about generating curved text for maps and other purposes.

Over the last few posts I wrote about things I did to improve font quality, such as antialiasing and combining distance fields to merge outlines and halos. But I want to "pop up the stack" a bit and talk about one of the bigger goals for this project. I want to render text in styles that I've seen in maps, both online and offline, both fantasy and real. In particular, I want to apply spacing, rotation, and curvature to the labels.

[...] These are common in cartography, not only in fantasy maps like Tolkein's but also in real-world maps. Eduard Imhof's classic 1975 paper, Positioning Names on Maps[1] has a ton of great advice on how to position labels, and not only recommends curving text, but also sketches out examples:

In some ways, that desktop computing has moved beyond monospace type comes down to the long term impact of a course in calligraphy and typography which took place decades ago. Now even your GUIs on GNU/Linux or the BSDs provide a variety of typefaces — in straight lines. Text along curved paths is another step forward.

Previously:
(2020) Fonts for Programmers and Developers


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Tuesday October 15, @08:24AM   Printer-friendly

The new text is timed to a new California law against false advertising:

There comes a point in most experienced Steam shoppers' lives where they wonder what would happen if their account was cancelled or stolen, or perhaps they just stopped breathing. It's scary to think about how many games in your backlog will never get played; scarier, still, to think about how you don't, in most real senses of the word, own any of them.

Now Valve, seemingly working to comply with a new California law targeting "false advertising" of "digital goods," has added language to its checkout page to confirm that thinking. "A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam," the Steam cart now tells its customers, with a link to the Steam Subscriber Agreement further below.

California's AB2426 law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom Sept. 26, excludes subscription-only services, free games, and digital goods that offer "permanent offline download to an external storage source to be used without a connection to the internet." Otherwise, sellers of digital goods cannot use the terms "buy, purchase," or related terms that would "confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good." And they must explain, conspicuously, in plain language, that "the digital good is a license" and link to terms and conditions.

[...] Online-only content licenses have always existed in a precarious state, but recent corporate maneuvers have seen them teetering especially hard. Ubisoft deleted The Crew,its online-only racing game, from its servers on April 1, and thereby cut off access for those who bought it. Warner Bros. Discovery spent months in early 2024 moving toward a wipe-out of all Adult Swim Games titles listed on Steam and elsewhere, only to do something far more sensible at the last moment. Sony tried in late 2023 to delete more than 1,000 Discovery video titles from PlayStation owners' libraries, then walked that back. And then a couple months later, it jumped back into the online ire mix by nixing a wealth of Funimation anime offerings that had once been promised to be available "forever."

So long as Steam lasts forever, however, this new language should not be that alarming.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Tuesday October 15, @05:42AM   Printer-friendly

Ward Christensen, inventer of XMODEM and co-inventer of the BBS, has died

Not much I can say, .Story here"

On Friday, Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today.

RIP, man who's code I used a lot back in the day.

Ward Christensen, BBS Inventor and Architect of Our Online Age, Dies at Age 78

Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at age 78:

On Friday, Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today.

Friends and associates remember Christensen as humble and unassuming, a quiet innovator who never sought the spotlight for his groundbreaking work. Despite creating one of the foundational technologies of the digital age, Christensen maintained a low profile throughout his life, content with his long-standing career at IBM and showing no bitterness or sense of missed opportunity as the Internet age dawned.

"Ward was the quietest, pleasantest, gentlest dude," said BBS: The Documentary creator Jason Scott in a conversation with Ars Technica. Scott documented Christensen's work extensively in a 2002 interview for that project. "He was exactly like he looks in his pictures," he said, "like a groundskeeper who quietly tends the yard."

Tech veteran Lauren Weinstein initially announced news of Christensen's passing on Sunday, and a close friend of Christensen's confirmed to Ars that Christensen died peacefully in his home. The cause of death has not yet been announced.

Prior to creating the first BBS, Christensen invented XMODEM, a 1977 file transfer protocol that made much of the later BBS world possible by breaking binary files into packets and ensuring that each packet was safely delivered over sometimes unstable and noisy analog telephone lines. It inspired other file transfer protocols that allowed ad-hoc online file sharing to flourish.

Dawn of the BBS

Christensen and Suess came up with the idea for the first computer bulletin board system during the Great Blizzard of 1978 when they wanted to keep up with their computer club, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange (CACHE), when physical travel was difficult. Beginning in January of that year, Suess assembled the hardware, and Christensen wrote the software, called CBBS.

"They finished the bulletin board in two weeks but they called it four because they didn't want people to feel that it was rushed and that it was made up," Scott told Ars. They canonically "finished" the project on February 16, 1978, and later wrote about their achievement in a November 1978 issue of Byte magazine.

Their new system allowed personal computer owners with modems to dial up a dedicated machine and leave messages that others would see later. The BBS concept represented a digital version of a push-pin bulletin board that might flank a grocery store entrance, town hall, or college dorm hallway.

Christensen and Suess openly shared the concept of the BBS, and others began writing their own BBS software. As these programs grew in complexity over time, the often hobbyist-run BBS systems that resulted allowed callers to transfer computer files and play games as well as leave messages.

BBSes introduced many home computer users to multiplayer online gaming, message boards, and online community building in an era before the Internet became widely available to people outside of science and academia. It also gave rise to the shareware gaming scene that led to companies like Epic Games today.

[...] "It would be like a person who was in a high school band saying, 'Eh, never really got into touring, never really had the urge to record albums or become a rock star,'" Scott said.  "And then later people come and go, 'Oh, you made the first [whatever] in your high school band,' but that sense of being at that locus of history and the fact that his immediate urge was to share all the code everywhere—that's to me what I think people should remember about this guy."


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

posted by janrinok on Tuesday October 15, @03:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the aren't-standards-meant-to-be-standard? dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

UK government has kicked off a consultation on whether the country should have a common standard for charging electrical devices, and if this needs to be the same as the USB-C connector the EU adopted.

In a call for evidence this month, the Office for Product Safety and Standards within the Department for Business and Trade said it wants to hear from manufacturers, importers, distributors, and trade associations.

The EU has already outlined USB-C as its standard for charging personal devices across all of its 27 member states, as has India – the world's second-largest smartphone market. The standard is also being mooted for possible adoption by the US as well. Even Apple has reluctantly accepted USB-C.

In The Register's estimation, the chances are pretty small that device makers will be prepared to build special versions of their products to cater specifically to the UK consumer, should the government elect to go its own way.

The call for evidence points out that recent developments in wired charging technologies and evolving international standards provide an opportunity to reduce electronic waste and benefit consumers by specifying a standardized charger for smartphones and similar gadgets.

"We consider that it would potentially help businesses and deliver consumer and environmental benefits if we were to introduce standardized requirements for chargers for certain portable electrical/electronic devices across the whole UK," the Office for Product Safety and Standards stated. "We are seeking views from manufacturers, importers, distributors, and trade associations as to whether it would be helpful to do so and, if so, whether this should be based on USB-C – as adopted by the EU."

The aim of the exercise is to help the office understand the potential impact of introducing the measures. It wants feedback of the potential issues and practicalities of having a common charger based on USB-C.

However, the agency notes that having USB-C as a common charging port should mean that one charger will work for multiple devices. It may also allow manufacturers to "unbundle" the sale of a charger, meaning that consumers have the option to purchase new devices without a charger.

The Office for Product Safety and Standards conceded that "manufacturers are likely to adopt a similar approach to the EU Common Charger Directive for the whole of the UK on a voluntary basis in order to avoid supply chain complexity," and concluded: "As a result, the USB-C charging port is likely to become the industry default."

[...] The call for evidence runs for eight weeks, from October 9 to midnight on December 4. Anyone interested in responding should do so via this survey page


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Monday October 14, @11:06PM   Printer-friendly

Boeing Slashes 10% Of Workforce, CEO Warns "Hard To Overstate The Challenges We Face":

In what some have called a panic/desperation negotiating tactic, Boeing has announced (late on a Friday afternoon) that it will slash its workforce by 10% as the pummeled planemaker struggles with a cash-crunch amid a drawn-out strike and ongoing quality control (to put it nicely) issues.

"Our business is in a difficult position, and it is hard to overstate the challenges we face together."

Boeing ended 2023 with 171,000 employees.

The company said it expects to report third quarter revenue of $17.8 billion, and a loss per share of $9.97, according to preliminary figures.

The company unveiled the measures and the earnings figures as it seeks to get its negotiations with labor unions back on track.

Boeing has made two offers for higher wages, both of which were turned down by workers.

About 33,000 employees at its main Seattle-area facilities have been on strike for a month now, devastating production and draining Boeing's reserves.

The latest talks collapsed earlier this week, with no clear path when and how they might resume.

Boeing shares tumbled after hours, erasing the day's gains...

Ortberg also said the company has notified customers that the first deliveries of the 777X are now expected in 2026, citing the ongoing work stoppage and flight test pause.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Monday October 14, @06:17PM   Printer-friendly

[Source]: Time.com

If uncontrolled artificial general intelligence—or "God-like" AI—is looming on the horizon, we are now about halfway there. Every day, the clock ticks closer to a potential doomsday scenario.

That's why I introduced the AI Safety Clock last month. My goal is simple: I want to make clear that the dangers of uncontrolled AGI are real and present. The Clock's current reading—29 minutes to midnight—is a measure of just how close we are to the critical tipping point where uncontrolled AGI could bring about existential risks. While no catastrophic harm has happened yet, the breakneck speed of AI development and the complexities of regulation mean that all stakeholders must stay alert and engaged.

This is not alarmism; it's based on hard data. The AI Safety Clock tracks three essential factors: the growing sophistication of AI technologies, their increasing autonomy, and their integration with physical systems.

We are seeing remarkable strides across these three factors. The biggest are happening in machine learning and neural networks, with AI now outperforming humans in specific areas like image and speech recognition, mastering complex games like Go, and even passing tests such as business school exams and Amazon coding interviews.

... There's no denying the risks are real. We are on the brink of sharing our planet with machines that could match or even surpass human intelligence—whether that happens in one year or ten. But we are not helpless. The opportunity to guide AI development in the right direction is still very much within our grasp. We can secure a future where AI is a force for good.

But the clock is ticking.

This is similar to Doomsday Clock, what effect do you think this AI Safety Clock will have ? Will this serve as a warning to those involved ?


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Monday October 14, @01:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the some-kinds-of-geo-enginnering-are-actually-good dept.

Darpa Thinks Walls of Oysters Could Protect Shores Against Hurricanes:

2018, Tyndall Air Force Base on the Gulf of Mexico—a pillar of American air superiority—found itself under aerial attack. Hurricane Michael, first spotted as a Category 2 storm off the Florida coast, unexpectedly hulked up to a Category 5. Sustained winds of 155 miles per hour whipped into the base, flinging power poles, flipping F-22s, and totaling more than 200 buildings. The sole saving grace: Despite sitting on a peninsula, Tyndall avoided flood damage. Michael's 9-to-14-foot storm surge swamped other parts of Florida. Tyndall's main defense was luck.

That $5 billion disaster at Tyndall was just one of a mounting number of extreme-weather events that convinced the US Department of Defense that it needed new ideas to protect the 1,700 coastal bases it's responsible for globally. As hurricanes Helene and Milton have just shown, beachfront residents face compounding threats from climate change, and the Pentagon is no exception. Rising oceans are chewing away the shore. Stronger storms are more capable of flooding land.

In response, Tyndall will later this month test a new way to protect shorelines from intensified waves and storm surges: a prototype artificial reef, designed by a team led by Rutgers University scientists. The 50-meter-wide array, made up of three chevron-shaped structures each weighing about 46,000 pounds, can take 70 percent of the oomph out of waves, according to tests. But this isn't your grandaddy's seawall. It's specifically designed to be colonized by oysters, some of nature's most effective wave-killers.

If researchers can optimize these creatures to work in tandem with new artificial structures placed at sea, they believe the resulting barriers can take 90 percent of the energy out of waves. David Bushek, who directs the Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory at Rutgers, swears he's not hoping for a megastorm to come and show what his team's unit is made of. But he's not not hoping for one. "Models are always imperfect. They're always a replica of something," he says. "They're not the real thing."

The project is one of three being developed under a $67.6 million program launched by the US government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. Cheekily called Reefense, the initiative is the Pentagon's effort to test if "hybrid" reefs, combining manmade structures with oysters or corals, can perform as well as a good ol' seawall. Darpa chose three research teams, all led by US universities, in 2022. After two years of intensive research and development, their prototypes are starting to go into the water, with Rutgers' first up.

[...] Oysters are effective wave-killers because of how they grow. The bivalves pile onto each other in large, sturdy mounds. The resulting structure, unlike a smooth seawall, is replete with nooks, crannies, and convolutions. When a wave strikes, its energy gets diffused into these gaps, and further spent on the jagged, complex surfaces of the oysters. Also unlike a seawall, an oyster wall can grow. Oysters have been shown to be capable of building vertically at a rate that matches sea-level rise—which suggests they'll retain some protective value against higher tides and stronger storms.

[...] The Rutgers team has built its prototype out of 788 interlocked concrete modules, each 2 feet wide and ranging in height from 1 to 2 feet tall. They have a scalloped appearance, with shelves jutting in all directions. Internally, all these shelves are connected by holes.

What this means is that when a wave strikes this structure, it smashes into the internal geometry, swirls around, and exits with less energy. This effect alone weakens the wave by 70 percent, according to the US Army Corps of Engineers, which tested a scale model in a wave simulator in Mississippi. But the effect should only improve as oysters colonize the structure. Bushek and his team have tried to design the shelves with the right hardness, texture, and shading to entice them.

[...] Oysters may suit the DoD's needs in temperate waters, but for bases in tropical climates, it's coral that builds the best seawalls. Hawaii, for instance, enjoys the protection of "fringing" coral reefs that extend offshore for hundreds of yards in a gentle slope along the seabed. The colossal, complex, and porous character of this surface exhausts wave energy over long distances, says Ben Jones, an oceanographer for the Applied Research Laboratory at the University of Hawaii—and head of the university's Reefense project. He said it's not unusual to see ocean swells of 6 to 8 feet way offshore, while the water at the seashore laps gently.

Inspired by this effect, Jones and a team of researchers are designing an array that they'll deploy near a US Marine Corps base in Oahu whose shoreline is rapidly receding. While the final design isn't set yet, the broad strokes are: It will feature two 50-meter-wide barriers laid in rows, backed by 20 pyramid-like obstacles. All of these are hollow, thin-walled structures with sloping profiles and lots of big holes. Waves that crash into them will lose energy by crawling up the sides, but two design aspects of the structure—the width of the holes and the thinness of the walls—will generate turbulence in the water, causing it to spin off more energy as heat.

In the team's full vision, the units are bolstered by about a thousand small coral colonies. Jones' group plans to cover the structures with concrete modules that are about 20 inches in diameter. These have grooves and crevices that offer perfect shelters for coral larvae. The team will initially implant them with lab-bred coral. But they're also experimenting with enticements, like light and sound, that help attract coral larvae from the wild—the better to build a wall that nature, not the Pentagon, will tend.

A third Reefense team, led by scientists at the University of Miami, takes its inspiration from a different sort of coral. Its design has a three-tiered structure. The foundation is made of long, hexagonal logs punctured with large holes; atop it is a dense layer with smaller holes—"imagine a sponge made of concrete," says Andrew Baker, director of the university's Coral Reef Futures Lab and the Reefense team lead.

The team thinks these artificial components will soak up plenty of wave energy—but it's a crest of elkhorn coral at the top that will finish the job. Native to Florida, the Bahamas, and the Caribbean, elkhorn like to build dense reefs in shallow-water areas with high-intensity waves. They don't mind getting whacked by water because it helps them harvest food; this whacking keeps wave energy from getting to shore.

Disease has ravaged Florida's elkhorn populations in recent decades, and now ocean heat waves are dealing further damage. But their critical condition has also motivated policymakers to pursue options to save this iconic state species—including Baker's, which is to develop an elkhorn more rugged against disease, higher temperatures, and nastier waves. Under Reefense, Baker says, his lab has developed elkhorn with 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius more heat tolerance than their ancestors. They also claim to have boosted the heat thresholds of symbiotic algae—an existentially important occupant of any healthy reef—and cross-bred local elkhorn with those from Honduras, where reefs have mysteriously withstood scorching waters.

[...] Although their client has the largest military budget in the world, the three Reefense teams have been asked to keep an eye on the economics. Darpa has asked that project costs "not greatly exceed" those of conventional solutions, and tasked government monitors with checking the teams' math. Catherine Campbell, Reefense's program manager at Darpa, says affordability doesn't just make it more likely the Pentagon will employ the technology—but that civilians can, too.

"This isn't something bespoke for the military ... we need to be in line with those kinds of cost metrics [in the civilian sector]," Campbell said in an email. "And that gives it potential for commercialization."


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Monday October 14, @08:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-still-Hertz-when-it-hitz-you dept.

Computer consultant J B Crawford, author of the Computers Are Bad newsletter, has posted an overview of commercial HF radio with a bit of background into the technology and some of its advantages and disadvantages:

According to a traditional system of classification, "high frequency" or HF refers to the radio spectrum between 3 and 30 MHz. The label now seems anachronistic, as HF is among the lowest ranges of radio frequencies that see regular use. This setting of the goalposts in the early days of radio technology means that modern communications standards like 5G are pushing major applications into the EHF or "extremely high frequency" band. The frontiers of basic radio technology now lie in the terahertz range, where the demarcation between radio waves and light is blurred and the known techniques for both only partially apply. HF, by contrast, is ancient technology. HF emissions can be generated by simple, brute-force means. Ironically, this makes HF a bit difficult: the incredible miniaturization and energy efficiency of modern electronics makes HF radio hard to receive and transmit in a reasonable footprint, one of several reasons that HF radio sees little consumer use.

HF still has a variety of interesting uses, including some new, surprising ones. The signals go beyond the horizon and around the curvature of the Earth due to their interaction with parts of the atmosphere.

Previously:
(2021) The $50 Ham: a Cheap Antenna for the HF Bands
(2020) ARRL Requests Expanded HF Privileges for Technician Licensees


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Monday October 14, @04:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the meet-my-avatar-better-than-me dept.

For only $12 a month your Zoom AI avatar can take your place in all kinds of online meetings. It will use prompt suggestions and generate answers, it can recap and expand on conversations. What could possibly go wrong ...

Is this when your AI avatar replaces you? After all $12 is a lot cheaper/lower then your monthly salary.

I do wonder what happens at the meeting when everyone sends their AI avatar. Will there be a singularity recursion event?

https://news.zoom.us/zoom-introduces-ai-companion-2-0/
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/9/24266007/zoom-ai-avatars-clips-talk-for-you


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Sunday October 13, @11:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the never-reuse-passwords dept.

31 million records containing email addresses and password hashes exposed:

Archive.org, possibly one of the only entities to preserve the entire history of the Internet, was recently compromised in a hack that revealed data of roughly 31 million users.

A little after 2 PM California time, social media blew up with screenshots showing what the archive.org homepage displayed.

It read:

archive.org

Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!

HIBP is short for Have I been Pwned, the authoritative site for breach notifications that help people protect their accounts after they've been compromised.

The message didn't last long. Soon after it appeared, archive.org, when it loaded at all, displayed a message saying the site was temporarily down. Later, the site returned. Archive.org's Brewster Kahle said on on a social media site that the archive had come under a DDoS attack.

Now, Have I Been Pwnd is reporting that archive.org was hacked. HIBP said the compromise occurred last month and exposed 31 million records containing email addresses, screen names, and bcrypt-hashed passwords.

See also: Internet Archive Breach Exposes 31 Million Users


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Sunday October 13, @06:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the why-does-your-charger-need-a-cloud-app? dept.

There are open source projects and companies looking to help:

Earlier this month, the Italian energy company Enel X announced an abrupt withdrawal from the North American market. For its residential customers—owners of the popular Juicebox level 2 home chargers—the physical hardware will continue to work, but from tomorrow Enel X will have ended all software support, including updates and its apps. But Enel X also had commercial clients, and they're even more out of luck—from tomorrow those stations "will lose functionality in the absence of software continuity," Enel X says.

For Juicebox customers, the loss of Enel X's servers and apps isn't great—they will lose the ability to remotely manage the charger, or schedule charging sessions from it. But most electric vehicles—both battery EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs—have their own built-in software to schedule charging sessions, and to hear some owners tell it, Enel X's software was a poor substitute for the original Juicebox software written by eMotorworks, which was bought by Enel X in 2017.

[...] Meanwhile, a number of companies and open source projects are working on offering third-party support for Juiceboxes. Unfortunately, only newer Juiceboxes support the open charge point protocol; older devices may need to be physically modified, perhaps with open source hardware.

As might be expected, lots of charging solution providers are interested in helping Enel X's stranded commercial customers become their newest happy, smiling customers. But it's going to be up to those stranded by Enel X to find a new company and platform to work with.

In some cases that might mean migrating existing hardware over, but as SAE notes, Enel X has done little to make that migration simple. And many businesses may find what were functioning level 2 chargers today are just beige-colored bricks tomorrow. For example, with Enel X gone, there are no contracts in place for the SIM cards embedded in each charger that provide the connectivity those devices expect.

"When that goes dead, the only way you can really get those chargers going again is you physically send someone out there, or you ask the person on the property to take out the SIM card, replace it," said Joseph Schottland, CEO of EV+ Charging. "It's a big ask, because they've got to get the screwdriver out, take the back of the charger off... They've got to know where to look."


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Sunday October 13, @01:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-is-all-mine dept.

Who holds the copyright? Man, Machine or Software? Appeal in progress. Allen claim is that it took him over 100h of prompt-engineering to get the image just right.

Jason Allen—a synthetic media artist whose Midjourney-generated work "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" went viral and incited backlash after winning a state fair art competition—is not giving up his fight with the US Copyright Office.

Last fall, the Copyright Office refused to register Allen's work, claiming that almost the entire work was AI-generated and insisting that copyright registration requires more human authorship than simply plugging a prompt into Midjourney.

Allen is now appealing that decision, asking for judicial review and alleging that "the negative media attention surrounding the Work may have influenced the Copyright Office Examiner's perception and judgment." He claims that the Examiner was biased and considered "improper factors" such as the public backlash when concluding that he had "no control over how the artificial intelligence tool analyzed, interpreted, or responded to these prompts."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/artist-appeals-copyright-denial-for-prize-winning-ai-generated-work/


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Sunday October 13, @08:59AM   Printer-friendly

https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/05/lego_ideas_turing_machine/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_content=article

https://ideas.lego.com/projects/10a3239f-4562-4d23-ba8e-f4fc94eef5c7

A working Turing Machine was submitted to Lego Ideas, consisting of approximately 2,900 parts and a bucketload of extreme cleverness. The Lego builder first came across the concept a few years ago and, despite it being an abstract model, decided to attempt making one out of the plastic components of Lego Technic.

Talking to El Reg, the submitter "The Bananaman" stated: "My first few ideas [on] how to do this would be very big and inefficient if they were ever [to be] built, but I usually stopped developing them very early. The first one that could possibly work was three years ago and I built a part of the tape with the symbol reader and a very bad unfinished prototype of the 'truth table' that would use a 32-speed gearbox instead of the 'searching' mechanism. Later I realized that the 'truth table' can be made way more easily (it was my fourth idea on how to build the table and it still had a dozen revisions later on), and I came up with using the registers which made everything easier. I started building the prototype last vacation, then took a break and I've finished it this vacation."

There was also the challenge of fitting into the limits imposed by Lego Ideas. At the time of submission, this was 3,000 parts, and The Bananaman's contraption finally managed to come in at around 2,900. The limit has since been raised to 5,000 parts. Should it get to 10,000 supporters on the Lego Ideas site, it will go into Expert Review, where Lego's professionals will decide if it should be approved for production. The evaluation will depend on a range of criteria, including feasibility and strength of idea.


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Sunday October 13, @04:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the now-do-one-for-the-rest-of-our-data dept.

A new California law extends consumer privacy protection to brainwave data gathered by implants or wearable devices:

Governor Gavin Newsom over the weekend signed into law a bill amending the California Consumer Privacy Act, the state's spin on the GDPR in Europe, to classify "neural data" as protected personal information along the lines of precise geolocation, genetics and biometrics.

Neurorights Foundation medical director Sean Pauzauskie called the Califoria law "an enormous victory" for patients suffering from mental health disorders as well as for consumers simply looking to enhance their lives with new technologies.

The NGO co-sponsored the bill with a state senator.

"The essential privacy guardrails it ensures should only boost confidence in all varieties of these revolutionary neurotechnologies, the great majority which are based in California," Pauzauskie said in a release.

California is the second state to extend data protections to brainwaves, on the heels of Colorado putting in place a law requiring privacy safeguards along the lines of what is done for fingerprints.

The California law sends "a clear signal to the fast-growing neurotechnology industry" to protect people's mental privacy, NeuroRights Foundation general counsel Jared Genser said in a release.

Protections under the California law include the right to know what brain data is being collected, limit its disclosure, and to be able to opt-out or have it deleted.

The law applies to devices capable of recording or altering nervous system activity, whether they be implanted or worn, the NGO said.

The potential for devices to tap into how people feel or think has raised concerns they could be used to manipulate feelings or thoughts.

"In the coming years, the sensitivity of neural data will increase alongside surging investments...resulting in increased resolution of brain scans and larger datasets of brain data being collected," the NGO predicted.

"Meanwhile generative artificial intelligence will continue accelerating the ability to accurately decode these scans."


Original Submission