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upstart writes:

Farmers need a right to repair:

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has called upon farm equipment maker John Deere to comply with its obligations under the General Public License (GPL), which requires users of such software to share source code.

In a blog post published on Thursday, SFC director of compliance Denver Gingerich argues that farmers' ability to repair their tools is now in jeopardy because the makers of those tools have used GPL-covered software and have failed to live up to licensing commitments.

"Sadly, farm equipment manufacturers, who benefit immensely from the readily-available software that they can provide as part of the farming tools (tractors, combines, etc.) they sell to farmers, are not complying with the right to repair licenses of the software they have chosen to use in these farming tools," said Gingerich.

"As a result, farmers are cut off from their livelihood if the farm equipment manufacturer does not wish to repair their farming tools when they inevitably fail, even when the farmer could easily perform the repairs on their own, or with the help of someone else they know."

Gingerich singled out Moline, Illinois-based John Deere as a particularly egregious offender. He said that for years the SFC has attempted to work with John Deere to resolve the company's non-compliance, but the agricultural equipment maker has failed to cooperate.

"When Deere does reply (we have heard from others that their legitimate requests for source code have been met with silence), they have always failed to include the 'scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable,' per GPLv2," Gingerich told The Register.

upstart writes:

How much fuel is left in this 20-year-old Mars orbiter?:

Designing, building, and launching a spacecraft is hugely expensive. That's why NASA missions to Mars are designed with the hope that they'll last as long as possible — like the famous Opportunity rover which was supposed to last for 90 days and managed to keep going for 15 years. The longer a mission can keep running, the more data it can collect, and the more we can learn from it.

That's true for the orbiters which travel around Mars as well as the rovers which explore its surface, like the Mars Odyssey spacecraft which was launched in 2001 and has been in orbit around Mars for more than 20 years. But the orbiter can't keep going forever as it will eventually run out of fuel, so figuring out exactly how much fuel is left is important — but it also turned out to be more complicated than the NASA engineers were expecting.

Odyssey started out with nearly 500 pounds of hydrazine fuel, though last year it looked as if the spacecraft was running much lower on fuel than had been predicted.

mhajicek writes:

I just bought my second Haas CNC mill. I use them primarily to make parts for implantable medical devices, but they could just as easily make parts for small arms, guided missiles, or aircraft. Most big names in CNC machine tools are Eastern; Japanese, Taiwanese, or Chinese, with a few European. Haas, the biggest and most well known Western manufacturer of CNC machine tools, stands accused of continuing to supply Russian companies involved in military manufacturing, long after the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

https://www.sportskeeda.com/f1/news-haas-automation-face-legal-action-accused-violating-russian-sanctions

Documents filed with the U.S. Treasury and Department of Commerce indicate that RATEP is one of many Russian enterprises that Haas Automation has serviced with direct shipments of goods in that period.

Per the aforementioned PBS Newshour report, the American company allegedly approved as many as 18 shipments to Russia between March and October of 2022 to the tune of $2.8 million.

Video here:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/american-company-accused-of-violating-sanctions-doing-business-with-russian-arms-industry

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Swear words across different languages may tend to lack certain sounds such as l, r, and w:

Swear words across different languages may tend to lack certain sounds such as l, r, and w, suggests research published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. This common pattern in profanity indicates that these sounds, called approximants, may appear less offensive to listeners.

Swear words are thought to have sounds that help facilitate the expression of emotion and attitude, but no study to date has investigated if there is a universal pattern in the sound of swearing across different languages.

[...] The authors asked 215 participants (from across six different languages) to rate pairs of pseudo-words (imaginary words created by the authors), one of which included an approximant. For example, in Albanian, the authors took the word "zog", meaning "bird", and changed this to "yog" to include an approximant and "tsog" without an approximant. The authors found that participants were significantly less likely to judge that words with approximants were swear words and selected words without approximants as swear words 63% of the time.

In a following study, the authors also looked at minced oaths – which are variations of swear words deemed less offensive, for example "darn" instead of "damn". The authors found that approximants were significantly more frequent in minced oaths than swear words. The authors propose that this introduction of approximants is part of what makes minced oaths less offensive than swear words.

The authors conclude that their work suggests a potential universal pattern to swear words across different languages, with the lack of approximants a common feature when perceiving swear words.

Journal Reference:
Lev-Ari, S., McKay, R. The sound of swearing: Are there universal patterns in profanity? Psychon Bull Rev (2022). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02202-0

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://hackaday.com/2023/03/14/pcie-for-hackers-the-diffpair-prelude/

PCIe, also known as PCI-Express, is a highly powerful interface. So let's see what it takes to hack on something that powerful. PCIe is be a bit intimidating at first, however it is reasonably simple to start building PCIe stuff, and the interface is quite resilient for hobbyist-level technology. There will come a time when we want to use a PCIe chip in our designs, or perhaps, make use of the PCIe connection available on a certain Compute Module, and it's good to make sure that we're ready for that.

PCIe is everywhere now. Every modern computer has a bunch of PCIe devices performing crucial functions, and even iPhones use PCIe internally to connect the CPU with the flash and WiFi chips. You can get all kinds of PCIe devices: Ethernet controllers, high-throughput WiFi cards, graphics, and all the cheap NVMe drives that gladly provide you with heaps of storage when connected over PCIe. If you're hacking on a laptop or a single-board computer and you'd like to add a PCIe device, you can get some PCIe from one of the PCIe-carrying sockets, or just tap into an existing PCIe link if there's no socket to connect to. It's been two decades since we've started getting PCIe devices – now, PCIe is on its 5.0 revision, and it's clear that it's here to stay.

PCIe is a point-to-point bus that connect two devices together – as opposed to PCI, an older bus, that could connect a chain of devices on your mainboard. One side of a PCIe link is a device, and another is a host. For instance, in a laptop, your CPU will have multiple PCIe ports – some used to connect the GPU, some used to connect a WiFi card, some used for Ethernet, and some used for a NVMe drive.

Each PCIe link consists of at least three differential pairs – one is a 100 MHz clock, REFCLK, that is (almost) always required for a link, and two pairs that form a PCIe lane – one for transmit and another for receive. This is an x link – you can also have 2x, 4x, 8x and 16x links, with four, eight sixteen and thirty-two differential pairs respectively, plus, again, REFCLK. The wider the link, the higher its throughput!

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Organizations must educate themselves and their users on how to detect, disrupt, and defend against the increasing volume of online disinformation:

More and more, nation-states are leveraging sophisticated cyber influence campaigns and digital propaganda to sway public opinion. Their goal? To decrease trust, increase polarization, and undermine democracies around the world.

In particular, synthetic media is becoming more commonplace thanks to an increase in tools that easily create and disseminate realistic artificial images, videos, and audio. This technology is advancing so quickly that soon anyone will be able to create a synthetic video of anyone saying or doing anything the creator wants. According to Sentinel, there was a 900% year-over-year increase in the proliferation of deepfakes in 2020.

It's up to organizations to protect against these cyber influence operations. But strategies are available for organizations to detect, disrupt, deter, and defend against online propaganda. Read on to learn more.

[...] As technology advances, tools that have traditionally been used in cyberattacks are now being applied to cyber influence operations. Nation-states have also begun collaborating to amplify each other's fake content.

These trends point to a need for greater consumer education on how to accurately identify foreign influence operations and avoid engaging with them. We believe the best way to promote this education is to increase collaboration between the federal government, the private sector, and end users in business and personal contexts.

fliptop writes:

Human-shaped robots with dexterous hands will be staffing warehouses and retail stores, tending to the elderly and performing household chores within a decade or so, according to a Silicon Valley startup working toward that vision:

Demographic trends — such as a persistent labor shortage and the growing elder care crisis — make fully-functioning, AI-driven humanoid robots look tantalizingly appealing.

Companies such as Amazon are reportedly worried about running out of warehouse workers, whose jobs are physically and mentally demanding with high attrition.

A heavy-hitting startup called Figure, which just emerged from stealth mode, is building a prototype of a humanoid robot that the company says will eventually be able to walk, climb stairs, open doors, use tools and lift boxes — perhaps even make dinner.

[...] It will take decades for humanoid robots to be able to replicate the sophisticated things our bodies can do, but visionaries are hard at work trying to make it happen.

Previously: Elon Musk Reveals Plans to Unleash a Humanoid Tesla Bot

Original Submission

guest reader writes:

Extracting information from databases requires skill and knowledge of query languages like SQL (Structured Query Language).
Natural language querying (NLQ) which is also called Text-to-SQL allows formation of information retrieval questions without knowledge of database-specific languages. ChatGPT is the next level in this area.

Data analyst Marie Truong challenged ChatGPT to write better SQL in January. She is comparing valid SQL syntax, query structure, correct results, and runtime. The result? ChatGPT got 50% of it wrong.

One of many new articles about this topic tries to convert database schemas into natural language as part of chatgpt prompts to provide more precise outcomes:

There has been an expectation that ChatGPT could assist in creating database queries, just as it can assist in creating computer programs. However, creating database queries requires an understanding of the database itself, and there is no conventional way to represent database semantics.

We present a solution to this problem by developing a set of syntax that can represent database semantics, such as table structure and relationships, in natural language. This allows for the creation of semantic representations of databases that can be understood by ChatGPT and enable it to perform database management tasks.

Experiment 2:
A SQL query needs to properly join four tables: careplans, providers, patients, and encounters. The encounters table plays a critical role here as it connects the patients table with the careplans table. This information is typically contained in an Entity Relationship schema.

ChatGPT has successfully generated the query that results in a correct view.

There has been a research about generating SQL queries from natural language since 2016.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researchers seek to develop advanced propulsion systems that can transform long-distance space exploration:

If you want a spacecraft that can explore beyond the solar system—and you don't want to wait decades for it to get there—you need one that can really move. Today's chemical rockets and solar-powered probes are downright poky on interstellar scales. Artur Davoyan has a completely different idea for how to accelerate a spacecraft to extreme speeds: pellet-beam propulsion.

Here's the gist of how it would work: First, you actually need two spacecraft. A probe blasts off on a one-way trip to deep space, while a second vehicle remains locked in an Earth orbit and fires thousands of tiny metallic pellets at its partner every second. The orbiting craft also either fires a 10-megawatt laser beam at the retreating probe, or aligns a laser fired from the ground at it. The laser hits the pellets, heats them, and ablates them, so that part of their material melts and becomes plasma—a hot cloud of ionized particles. That plasma accelerates the pellet remnants, and this pellet beam provides thrust to the spacecraft.

Alternatively, Davoyan thinks the probe could get thrust from the pellet beam if the craft were to deploy an on-board magnetic field-generating device to deflect the pellets. In this case, that magnetic action would push the craft forward.

Such a system could boost a 1-ton probe to speeds up to 300,000 miles per hour. That's slow compared to the speed of light, but more than 10 times faster than conventional propulsion systems.

It's a theoretical concept, but realistic enough that NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program has given Davoyan's group $175,000 to show that the technology is feasible. "There's rich physics in there," says Davoyan, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at UCLA. To create propulsion, he continues, "you either throw the fuel out of the rocket or you throw the fuel at the rocket." From a physics perspective, they work the same: Both impart momentum to a moving object.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Free trade not quite as dead, 'but it's in danger' says Morris Chang:

Globalization is over, at least for the chip industry, and this will mean higher chip prices, according to semiconductor contract manufacturer giant TSMC. Despite this, the company's founder said he supports US actions to slow the development of China's chip technology.

The Taiwanese chip company is caught up in the ongoing semiconductor battle between the superpowers, where the US is trying to prevent China from getting access to cutting edge technology that might be used by its burgeoning military. At least, that is the reason given.

At an event hosted by Taiwan's CommonWealth Magazine in Taipei, retired TSMC founder Morris Chang said that efforts to contain China were leading to a split in the global supply chain that would likely increase prices and could have an effect on chip availability.

"There's no question in my mind that, in the chip sector, globalization is dead. Free trade is not quite that dead, but it's in danger," Chang said.

[...] It has already been noted that US efforts to isolate China are leading to an undoing of the distributed global supply chain infrastructure that has built up over the past few decades.

Richard Gordon, practice vice president for semiconductors and electronics at Gartner, told us earlier this year the outcome may be a world divided into China-centric and US-Europe-centric networks of supply chains and a greater self-reliance within those blocks.

Meanwhile, TSMC is also discussing subsidies with officials for the German state of Saxony about a new fabrication plant the chip giant is aiming to build there, despite publicly stating in December that it had no plans to site any facilities in Europe.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Intel's new HEDT CPU leaves behind Skylake-X in terms of power consumption:

Intel's recently introduced Xeon W9-3495X processor packs 56 cores begging you to overclock them, as the CPU also features an unlocked multiplier. When cooled down using liquid nitrogen, the 56-core processor can indeed be pushed to a formidable 5.50 GHz frequency, but at such high clocks it alone consumes almost 1,900 watts, more than beefy high-end gaming PCs, reports HardwareLuxx.

Elmor, a professional overclocker who collaborates with Asus, recently tried to push a Xeon W9-3495X 'Sapphire Rapids-SP' CPU on an Asus Pro WS W790E Sage SE motherboard to its limits with liquid nitrogen cooling. When frozen to -92.8 degrees Celsius/-135 degrees Fahrenheit, the CPU can work at 5.50 GHz and hit 132,220 points in Cinebench R23, which is just a little bit lower than the absolute record of 132,484 points set by another heavily overclocked Xeon W9-3495X. But the result comes at a cost.

The heavily overclocked Intel Xeon W9-3495X processor not only demonstrates phenomenal performance in Cinebench R23, but it also sets record in terms of power consumption. The CPU draws as much as 1,881W power when operating at 5.50 GHz and requires two 1,600W PSUs to feed it.

[...] Without any doubts, hitting 5.50 GHz with a 56-core Xeon W9-3495X processor cooled down using liquid nitrogen is a monumental achievement. Yet, it remains to be seen what makers of boutique factory-overclocked extreme workstations manage to squeeze out of this CPU with a production-grade cooling system and guaranteed long-term stability.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Sony wants to help low-vision users enjoy photography by shining lasers in their eyes:

Giant frickin' laser beams get all the buzz and sci-fi love, but it's our little laser bros that are putting in the work: taking measurements, entertaining our cats, and now, in the case of a Sony camera, helping people with vision problems see clearly through an electronic viewfinder and take pictures.

Sony is working with fellow Japanese company QD Laser to release the HX99 RNV Retina Projection Camera kit, a compact camera with an add-on retinal laser housing for projecting the camera's focused live view image into the user's eye. The low-power laser projection is designed to effectively bypass the focusing of the eye, helping users with visual impairments like shortsightedness, farsightedness, or astigmatism see a clear image.

It uses Sony's existing DSC-HX99 compact camera, which is a somewhat middling model from 2018 with an 18-megapixel sensor and equivalent zoom lens of 24-720mm (30x magnification), combined with QD Laser's Retissa Neoviewer projector. According to QD Laser's specs, the Retissa Neoviewer uses an RGB semiconductor laser to display an image with an equivalent of 720p resolution and 8-bit color depth. This beamed image has an approximate 60-degree horizontal field of view with 60Hz refresh, and the housing's battery has an estimated four hours of battery life. Tragically, it charges via Micro USB instead of USB-C.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/03/20-years-later-second-life-is-launching-on-mobile/

Remember Second Life? The virtual world launched on the desktop web back in 2003 with 3D avatars and spaces for various social activities. Believe it or not, it has been running continually this entire time—and now it's coming to mobile for the first time.

In fact, this will be the first time that Second Life has expanded beyond the PC (across Windows, macOS, and Linux) in any form.

In a post to the virtual world's community web forum, a community manager for Second Life developer Linden Lab shared a video with some details about the mobile version's development, and announced that a beta version of the mobile app will launch sometime this year.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Simple robots wander NYC asking for trash and recycling, and it's adorable:

My favorite approach to human-robot interaction is minimalism. I've met a lot of robots, and some of the ones that have most effectively captured my heart are those that express themselves through their fundamental simplicity and purity of purpose. What's great about simple, purpose-driven robots is that they encourage humans to project needs and wants and personality onto them, letting us do a lot of the human-robot-interaction (HRI) heavy lifting.

In terms of simple, purpose-driven robots, you can't do much better than a robotic trash barrel (or bin or can or what have you). And in a paper presented at HRI 2023 this week, researchers from Cornell explored what happened when random strangers interacted with a pair of autonomous trash barrels in NYC, with intermittently delightful results.

What's especially cool about this, is how much HRI takes place around these robots that have essentially no explicit HRI features, since they're literally just trash barrels on wheels. They don't even have googly eyes! However, as the video notes, they're controlled remotely by humans, so a lot of the movement-based expression they demonstrate likely comes from a human source—whether or not that's intentional. [...]

upstart writes:

Chances its Arm that maker community is looking for a fresh SBC:

Asus has unveiled a RISC-V model in its range of Tinker Board single board computer (SBC) systems, which up until now have all been Arm-based. However, it seems users should not expect too much in the way of performance from this first device.

The Tinker Board has been around since 2017 as Asus' answer to the Raspberry Pi, even keeping the same form factor and GPIO pinout in some models. Like the Pi, they have been based on various Arm-based system-on-chip (SoC) hardware.

Announced this week, the Tinker V is powered by a 64-bit RISC-V chip and aimed at embedded and IoT applications, but like other Tinker Boards and the Raspberry PI, is likely to find its way into the hands of makers and enthusiasts as well.

According to Asus, Tinker V "provides impressive power, comprehensive functionality and rich connectivity, making it the perfect choice for a diverse range of industrial IoT applications".

However, it is based on a 1GHz Renesas RZ/Five chip, which has just a single CPU core, the AX45MP designed by Andes Technology, whereas most rival products sport multiple processor cores.