SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Uber has not branded the cuts as "layoffs":

Uber is reportedly pursuing an unorthodox approach to performance reviews at the ride-share company. While Uber says it has no plans for broad layoffs, so to speak, it does have plans for upcoming performance reviews to include potential cuts to the company's workforce.

As detailed by Insider, the cuts are not layoffs, and Uber is echoing CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's comments at Davos 2023 where he claimed that the company had no plans for layoffs. An Uber spokesperson told Gizmodo that those comments are still true, as upcoming cuts to Uber's workforce will be a part of performance reviews, and that the company plans to backfill any positions that are left empty after the reviews.

"This year, we've taken an even more rigorous approach to our performance review process to ensure our talent bar remains very high," an Uber spokesperson said to Gizmodo in an email. "We plan to backfill these positions and will continue to invest in attracting and retaining top talent at Uber."

Original Submission

NY Times reports on long delays when solar or wind energy projects apply to connect to the grid. While they look at only a few of the US regional grids, several year delays appear common. The permitting process for grid tie-in was scaled to deal with a few big natural gas (etc) power stations every year and is overloaded by the requests of thousands of smaller, distributed energy sources.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/climate/renewable-energy-us-electrical-grid.html
or https://archive.is/AngvN

Plans to install 3,000 acres of solar panels in Kentucky and Virginia are delayed for years. Wind farms in Minnesota and North Dakota have been abruptly canceled. And programs to encourage Massachusetts and Maine residents to adopt solar power are faltering.

The energy transition poised for takeoff in the United States amid record investment in wind, solar and other low-carbon technologies is facing a serious obstacle: The volume of projects has overwhelmed the nation's antiquated systems to connect new sources of electricity to homes and businesses.
So many projects are trying to squeeze through the approval process that delays can drag on for years, leaving some developers to throw up their hands and walk away.

More than 8,100 energy projects — the vast majority of them wind, solar and batteries — were waiting for permission to connect to electric grids at the end of 2021, up from 5,600 the year before, jamming the system known as interconnection.

Much more detail and additional problems described in tfl. For example, as currently arranged, if you want to tie in a big solar farm, you may need to pay for grid upgrades...which are then available for free (if I read correctly) to additional solar projects. Thus, many projects will wait to see who jumps first. And these upgrades may not even be in your local area, the grid upgrade may be needed elsewhere.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists Engineer Wood to Become Stronger, Capture CO2:

When it comes to battling climate change, carbon dioxide is the biggest enemy of all. A widespread desire to mitigate carbon emissions has pushed scientists, students, and startups alike to build technologies that capture this greenhouse gas, like a carbon-trapping car and an ocean-assisted carbon removal plant. But what if one such technology could capture carbon and improve new infrastructure by strengthening buildings and making them more sustainable to produce?

Scientists at Rice University have developed a method of engineering wood that makes the material stronger and enables it to absorb carbon dioxide. The engineered wood rivals conventionally tougher building materials in strength but emits far less carbon during production. It also traps carbon from its environment, making it an attractive and affordable material for new buildings.

[...] Rahman and his colleagues argue that this engineered wood presents a viable alternative to materials that emit many greenhouse gasses during production, like steel and cement. Not only does the team's process emit far less carbon, but wood is biodegradable, making it a more sustainable material throughout a building's lifetime. Passively capturing carbon throughout the construction process is another bonus. Before the engineered wood can be used in the real world, however, the team will need to test the material for long-term performance and study its commercial viability.

Journal Reference:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrp.2023.101269

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/twitter-telegrams/

Telegrams were the first instant messages, allowing people to send short notes rapidly over long distances. Telegraphy was developed in the 19th century and tweets were created about 150 years later, but despite the vast time difference, they were received and critiqued in strikingly similar ways.

Some early reactions to telegrams included one 1858 commentary in The New York Times calling them "superficial, sudden, unsifted" and likely to "render the popular mind too fast for the truth." The exact same criticisms have been leveled at social media today. In both cases, the short, character-constrained nature of the messages was seen as a problem, leading to a lack of depth and context.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Bows and arrows were used in Europe much earlier than we thought:

Metz is part of a team that has been excavating a rock shelter called Grotte Mandrin in southern France. This shelter was used first by Neanderthals more than 80,000 years ago, and then by modern humans from about 45,000 years ago – around the time that modern humans displaced Neanderthals all across Europe.

But, last year, the team reported that, for a 40-year period around 54,000 years ago, Grotte Mandrin was used as a hunting camp by a small group of modern humans. The clinching evidence came from a baby tooth that isn't Neanderthal.

[...] Before now, the earliest unambiguous evidence for bows and arrows in Europe came from finds in Stellmoor, Germany, dating to around 10,000 years ago, says Metz. However, it was considered likely that the modern humans who displaced Neanderthals around 45,000 years ago had bows and arrows.

[...] Bows and arrows were first developed in Africa at least 70,000 years ago. Lombard and others have found stone and bone arrowheads at several sites in southern Africa dating back as far as this. The modern humans who moved out of Africa may have spread the technology around the world.

Despite presumably seeing bows in action, Neanderthals never developed them, says Metz. They kept using large, stone-tipped spears that were either thrust directly or thrown by hand, and so required close contact with their prey.

Journal Reference:
Laure Metz, Jason E. Lewi, and Ludovic Slimak, Bow-and-arrow, technology of the first modern humans in Europe 54,000 years ago at Mandrin, France, Sci Adv, 9, 2023. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add4675)

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

DOTA is Defence of the Ancients for any non-gamers (like me!) in our community. It is often used as a word.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/02/valve-used-secret-memory-access-honeypot-to-detect-40k-dota-2-cheaters/

The cat-and-mouse battle between game makers and cheat makers has seen plenty of inventive twists and turns over the years. Even amid that backdrop, though, Dota 2 stands out for a recently revealed "honeypot" trap hidden inside the game's memory buffer.

In a blog post this week, Valve revealed the existence of this trap, which was released as part of an earlier update to the game. Valve says that update included "a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay." But that memory could be read by third-party cheat tools that used exploits to sniff out (and share) internal data normally invisible to players.

To activate its honeypot trap, all Valve had to do was watch for any accounts that tried to read from that "secret" memory area, an event that would lead to "extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved," according to Valve.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Soylent acquired by Starco Brands as nutrition company shifts into its 'natural next stage'

Soylent Nutrition is joining public company Starco Brands as part of an acquisition that will keep the plant-based food technology company operating as a separate unit under its current CEO Demir Vangelov.

As part of the transaction, Vangelov told TechCrunch that he will join Starco's board and is getting shares in the new company, while himself and Soylent's shareholders will become the largest single voting block in Starco. Other financial details were not disclosed.

Bloomberg first reported last May that Soylent was exploring a possible sale, which isn't unusual, but financially speaking, the company was doing well: Vangelov said Soylent was profitable and had been growing over the past few years, including nearly achieving its projected goal of $100 million in run rate for 2022. Getting to profitability, however, was a complicated journey.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Meanwhile, an astronaut and two cosmonauts wait for a return ride to Earth:

[...] The disposal follows a depressurization alert onboard the spacecraft on Feb. 11, making it the second Russian spacecraft to spring a leak at the space station over the past two months. A Soyuz capsule for carrying humans also suffered a similar coolant leak in December 2022, leaving three crew members without a lifeboat.

Following Roscosmos' in-space inspection of the cargo ship and before it broke up over the ocean, the agency said external damage — not a manufacturing defect — caused the leak. The Russian space agency plans to launch a new empty passenger spaceship Thursday, Feb. 24, giving the three marooned crew a fresh return ride home. The new Soyuz MS-23 is expected to dock at the space station this weekend. But because of the shuffle in spacecraft, the astronaut and two cosmonauts won't come home until September, extending their time in space by six months. NASA officials said they are reviewing photos and data related to the leaks "in parallel" with their Russian counterparts.

After an investigation into the first leak, Russian and U.S. space officials believed a micrometeoroid smaller than a sharpened pencil tip had caused the puncture. The coolant seeping into space then, caught on live video, was intended to keep the cabin at a comfortable temperature.

upstart writes:

US Supreme Court declines to hear NSA spying complaint:

America's Supreme Court has declined to hear Wikimedia Foundation's challenge of the NSA's "upstream" surveillance program, effectively exempting the agency's data collection from review as a state secret.

In 2015, two years after Edward Snowden's public disclosures about the NSA's network surveillance, Wikimedia Foundation, with eight other organizations and the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the NSA and the US Justice Department alleging the bulk gathering of internet traffic violated Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

The NSA program is alleged to involve capturing all data entering and leaving the US via internet backbones. Captured packets get reassembled into transactions that get filtered for the presence of "selectors" (e.g., email addresses) associated with surveillance targets and those transactions then get ingested into a system for review.

The Wikimedia Foundation et al. argued that the NSA's warrantless surveillance program, which the government contends is authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is unlawful because it permits surveillance of US persons' international communications without a warrant or the approval of a public court, provided targeted individuals are located outside the US, but the kicker is that they can backtrace calls to associates who may have committed no crime.

Shortly after reports based on Snowden's leaked documents revived interest in network data security, the US Director of National Intelligence published a letter [PDF] that asserts NSA surveillance operates lawfully. "Collection of intelligence information under Section 702 is subject to an extensive oversight regime, incorporating reviews by the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches," the DNI letter said.

US courts, however, have declined to hear challenges to that claim.

Amazon Employees Ask Boss Not to Make Them Come Back to the Office

upstart writes:

Amazon Employees Ask Boss not to Make Them Come Back to the Office:

A draft of a petition by workers stated that employees' trust in Amazon's leaders had been "shattered" by the mandate to come in.

Amazon employees are petitioning CEO Andy Jassy to cancel his return-to-office (RTO) mandate and calling out his about-face on remote work. In a petition to Jassy sent late Tuesday, Amazon workers decried that their trust in the company's leaders had been "shattered."

After Jassy told workers in a memo last Friday that workers would be expected to return to the office for at least three days a week beginning May 1, employees began to mobilize in an effort to get him to change his mind. Since October 2021, Amazon had allowed managers to determine how often employees needed to be in the office. [...]

"Many employees trusted these statements and planned for a life where their employer wouldn't force them to return to the office," the employees wrote in the draft, which was obtained by Insider. "The RTO mandate shattered their trust in Amazon's leaders."

A draft of the petition asks Jassy and Amazon's executive team to cancel the company's return-to-office plans and institute a new policy "that allows employees to work remotely or more flexibly, if they choose to do so, as their team and job role permits."

Snotnose writes:

It may sound like an insensitive statement, but the cold hard truth is that there are a lot of stupid people in the world, and their stupidity presents a constant danger to others. Some of these people are in positions of power, and some of them have been elected to run our country. A far greater number of them do not have positions of power, but they still have the power to vote, and the power to spread their ideas. We may have heard of "collective intelligence," but there is also "collective stupidity," and it is a force with equal influence on the world. It would not be a stretch to say that at this point in time, stupidity presents an existential threat to America because, in some circles, it is being celebrated.

Although the term "stupidity" may seem derogatory or insulting, it is actually a scientific concept that refers to a specific type of cognitive failure. It is important to realize that stupidity is not simply a lack of intelligence or knowledge, but rather a failure to use one's cognitive abilities effectively. This means that you can be "smart" while having a low IQ, or no expertise in anything. It is often said that "you can't fix stupid," but that is not exactly true. By becoming aware of the limitations of our natural intelligence or our ignorance, we can adjust our reasoning, behavior, and decision-making to account for our intellectual shortcomings.

To demonstrate that stupidity does not mean having a low IQ, consider the case of Richard Branson, the billionaire CEO of Virgin Airlines, who is one of the world's most successful businessmen. Branson has said that he was seen as the dumbest person in school, and has admitted to having dyslexia, a learning disability that affects one's ability to read and correctly interpret written language. But it wasn't just reading comprehension that was the problem — "Math just didn't make sense to me," Branson has said. "I would certainly have failed an IQ test."

[...] We are all victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect to some degree. An inability to accurately assess our own competency and wisdom is something we see in both liberals and conservatives. While being more educated typically decreases our Dunning-Kruger tendencies, it does not eliminate them entirely. That takes constant cognitive effort in the form of self-awareness, continual curiosity, and a healthy amount of skepticism. By cultivating this type of awareness in ourselves, and making an effort to spread it to others, we can fight back against the stupidity crisis that threatens our nation.

Interesting stuff from cognitive neuroscientist

Original Submission

owl writes:

http://www.righto.com/2023/02/8086-interrupt.html

Interrupts have been an important part of computers since the mid-1950s,1 providing a mechanism to interrupt a program's execution. Interrupts allows the computer to handle time-critical tasks such as I/O device operations. In this blog post, I look at the interrupt features in the Intel 8086 (1978) and how they are implemented in silicon, a combination of interesting circuitry and microcode.

[...] The idea behind an interrupt is to stop the current flow of execution, run an interrupt handler to perform a task, and then continue execution where it left off. An interrupt is like a subroutine call in some ways; it pushes the current segment register and program counter on the stack and continues at a new address. However, there are a few important differences. First, the address of the interrupt handler is obtained indirectly, through an interrupt vector table. Interrupts are numbered 0 through 255, and each interrupt has an entry in the vector table that gives the address of the code to handle the interrupt. Second, an interrupt pushes the processor flags to the stack, so they can be restored after the interrupt. Finally, an interrupt clears the interrupt and trap flags, blocking more interrupts while handling the interrupt.

The 8086 provides several types of interrupts, some generated by hardware and some generated by software. For hardware interrupts, the INTR pin on the chip generates a maskable interrupt when activated, while the NMI pin on the chip generates a higher-priority non-maskable interrupt.2 Typically, most interrupts use the INTR pin, signaling things such as a timer, keyboard request, real-time clock, or a disk needing service. The NMI interrupt is designed for things such as parity error or an impending power failure, which are so critical they can't be delayed. The 8086 also has a RESET pin that resets the CPU. Although not technically an interrupt, the RESET action has many features in common with interrupts, so I'll discuss it here.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Get more exercise. Eat right. Make new friends.

Funded by the American Cancer Society, the first-ever, randomized, controlled trial of community gardening found that those who started gardening ate more fiber and got more physical activity—two known ways to reduce risk of cancer and chronic diseases. They also saw their levels of stress and anxiety significantly decrease.

[...] "These findings provide concrete evidence that community gardening could play an important role in preventing cancer, chronic diseases and mental health disorders," said senior author Jill Litt, a professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at CU Boulder.

[...] "No matter where you go, people say there's just something about gardening that makes them feel better," said Litt, who is also a researcher with the Barcelona Institute for Global Health.

But solid science on its benefits is hard to come by. Without evidence, it's hard to get support for new programs, she said.

Intel Reportedly Delays TSMC 3nm Orders for 15th Gen Arrow Lake CPUs

upstart writes:

Intel Reportedly Delays TSMC 3nm Orders for 15th Gen Arrow Lake CPUs:

In late January, we reported that Intel secured a leading "cloud, edge, and data center solutions provider" that will use its Intel 3 node. Intel is bolstering its efforts to sign lucrative contracts for its Intel Foundry Services arm, a lynchpin in CEO Pat Gelsinger's efforts to increase revenue.

But while Intel produces most of its chips (and produces chips for other vendors), it also has contracts with competitors like Taiwan Semiconductor Corporation (TSMC) to produce chips for its Arc discrete GPU family. To that end, DigiTimes reports that Intel's collaboration with TSMC on products using the latter's 3nm node has hit a slight snag.

Previous reports indicated that Intel's 15th generation disaggregated multi-tile/multi-chiplet Arrow Lake processors, which will purportedly use TSMC 3nm for the GPU tile, would launch in Q3 2024. Now, it's reported that Intel is delaying orders with TSMC until Q4 2024. So if this report is accurate, the first Arrow Lake processor will trickle in late Q4 2024 into Q1 2025.

However, Arrow Lake is roughly two years away, so we're quibbling about a couple of months for a product two generations out. Leading up to Arrow Lake, Intel will allegedly launch Raptor Lake-S desktop processors later this year with enhanced performance for enthusiasts and workstation markets. Raptor Lake-S will be followed by the 14th generation Meteor Lake family later this year. "On Intel 4, we are ready today for manufacturing and we look forward to the MTL (Meteor Lake) ramp in the second half of the year," said Gelsinger during Intel's Q4 2022 earnings call.

upstart writes:

Webb uses galactic megacluster as enormous magnifying lens:

Modern space telescopes are tremendously powerful instruments, able to look deep into space without being limited by the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere. But even this is not enough to allow them to see the most distant galaxies, which are so far away that looking at them is like looking back in time to the early stages of the universe.

To look even further out, astronomers take advantage of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. This happens when an object like a galaxy or a galaxy cluster has so much mass that it bends space-time, acting like a magnifying glass and brightening the extremely distant objects behind it.

This is how the James Webb Space Telescope was recently able to see thousands of extremely distant objects by looking at a region of space called Pandora's Cluster, or Abell 2744.

[...] If you look closely at the image, you'll see that many of the galaxies appear to be stretched out or elongated. That's because of the lensing effect, as the gravity of the megacluster warps the light coming from them. But even with this distortion, astronomers can learn a lot about these galaxies from images like this one.

[...] "Pandora's Cluster, as imaged by Webb, shows us a stronger, wider, deeper, better lens than we have ever seen before," said another of the researchers, Ivo Labbe. "My first reaction to the image was that it was so beautiful, it looked like a galaxy formation simulation. We had to remind ourselves that this was real data, and we are working in a new era of astronomy now."

JWST's Pandora's Cluster image

Original Submission