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fliptop writes:

Mercedes says it's going to test ChatGPT with its in-car voice assistant for the next three months:

ChatGPT may be well on its way to remaking the internet, but you know where there isn't enough generative AI? On the roads. Microsoft and Mercedes have announced a partnership to test the integration of ChatGPT with Mercedes vehicles. The feature will launch in beta on more than 900,000 vehicles in the US.

Like most high-end carmakers, Mercedes has spent the last few years developing bespoke vehicle technology. For example, the company has its own Hey Mercedes voice assistant, where ChatGPT will connect. Instead of reaching out to the Mercedes AI model to understand spoken words, the beta software will use ChatGPT to interpret what's said.

Microsoft and Mercedes contend that using ChatGPT with Hey Mercedes will make the system more reliable and expand its capabilities. Most voice assistants, Hey Mercedes included, are limited in what they can do and understand. You might use a phrase that a person would interpret immediately that flummoxes the AI. ChatGPT is much better at understanding commands, and its grasp of context will allow drivers to have multi-part conversations with the AI.

[...] Mercedes won't have to make any changes or updates to cars to test ChatGPT. That's good because it's not fully committed. Starting today, Mercedes will test ChatGPT for three months. Drivers will be able to opt into the test from the Mercedes app or from the car itself. Just say, "Hey Mercedes, I want to join the beta program." Mercedes hasn't explained what it plans to do after the test, but the press release speaks vaguely about how beta findings could improve future implementations of voice models and AI in Mercedes vehicles.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists discover lithium replacement that may revolutionize EV batteries: '99.7% efficient after over 400 hours of use':

Maryland is already famous for its crabs — but researchers at the University of Maryland are looking to give that distinction an entirely different meaning.

A team of scientists at the school's Center for Materials Innovation found that crustaceans like crabs and lobsters contain a chemical in their shells called chitin, which can be used to power batteries when combined with zinc.

[...] Lithium-ion batteries, the common kind found in most of our cellphones and laptops, can take hundreds of thousands of years to break down after they're used up — not to mention the devastating environmental impact lithium extraction has on our planet.

But these shellfish batteries are biodegradable and can decompose in soil after just five months, leaving behind zinc, which can be recycled.

The University of Maryland's study also found that chitin-zinc batteries were 99.7% efficient after over 400 hours of use, as reported by The Guardian, and that these batteries could likely be produced cheaply at scale.

[...] "When you develop new materials for battery technologies there tends to be a significant gap between promising lab results and a demonstrable and scalable technology," Newton, who is not affiliated with the Maryland study, told the outlet.

Journal Reference:
Meiling Wu, Ye Zhang, Lin Xu, et al., A sustainable chitosan-zinc electrolyte for high-rate zinc-metal batteries, Matter, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2022.07.015

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/micro-center-to-launch-two-stores-2024

While Best Buy, America's largest brick-and-mortar electronics retailer, has been closing stores this year among bleak PC sales, Micro Center has plans to continue expanding its retail footprint. Earlier this year, the company announced that it would be adding three new stores by the end of 2024, with the first opening in Indianapolis this summer.

Today, Micro Center has officially revealed the locations of the final two new locations, which will open in Miami and Charlotte next year. When all three new stores have opened, the company will have 28 outlets in the U.S. across 19 U.S. states, ranging from California in the west to New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts in the east. You can see a complete list of store locations on the company's site.

[...] Founded in Columbus, Ohio in 1979, Micro Center is a favorite shopping destination for anyone who builds PCs, tinkers with Raspberry Pis or does any kind of 3D printing. The company stocks more than 400 types of filament, along with 3D printers and accessories from major vendors such as Creality and AnyCubic. It's also one of the few places where you can buy Raspberry Pi boards at MSRP, provided that they are in stock.

Unlike Best Buy, Amazon and Newegg, Micro Center's business model revolves pretty-much exclusively around getting customers to come into the store. Most of the products are not available for purchase online, though you can reserve them for in-store pickup.

Micro Center is also one of the few places you can actually see and touch high-end peripherals and components. The stores stock well over 150 different gaming keyboards from brands such as Razer, Corsair and Asus. They also have about the same number of PC cases, including those from Lian Li, Fractal Design and NZXT. The Fractal Design North, our current pick for best PC case, is available to see and buy with all of its wood-paneled glory.

Can you imagine a world where you can base your purchase decisions on seeing something in person and not having to hope that what you're buying is the same as the picture you are shown on a web page?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

They cite Musk's description of DMCA as a "plague on humanity":

Twitter is no stranger to lawsuits, but the latest filed against the company carries a lot of weight and a high price tag: 17 music publishers are suing Elon Musk's platform for $250 million over claims it "consistently and knowingly" allows and profits from copyright infringement.

The Tennesse lawsuit alleges that Twitter "fuels its business with countless infringing copies of musical compositions, violating Publishers' and others' exclusive rights under copyright law."

Musk's own statements are cited in the lawsuit. The Twitter owner once said copyright "goes absurdly far beyond protecting the original creator." He also complained that the "overzealous" application of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) "is a plague on humanity."

"Twitter knows perfectly well that neither it nor users of the Twitter platform have secured licenses for the rampant use of music being made on its platform as complained of herein," reads the suit. "Nonetheless, in connection with its highly interactive platform, Twitter consistently and knowingly hosts and streams infringing copies of musical compositions [...] Twitter also routinely continues to provide specific known repeat infringers with use of the Twitter platform, which they use for more infringement."

upstart writes:

Semiconductor Lasers Hit Steel-Slicing Levels:

Semiconductor lasers, unlike bulky gas lasers and fiber lasers, are tiny, energy efficient, and highly controllable. The one thing they can't do is deliver their competitor's steel-slicing brightness.

In results reported last week in Nature, a group of researchers at Kyoto University, in Japan, led by IEEE Fellow Susumu Noda, has taken a big step in overcoming the limitations of semiconductor laser brightness by changing the structure of photonic-crystal surface-emitting lasers (PCSELs). A photonic crystal is composed of a semiconductor sheet punched through with regular, nanometer-scale air-filled holes. Photonic crystal lasers are attractive candidates for high-brightness lasers, but until now engineers haven't been able to scale them up to deliver beams bright enough for practical metal cutting and processing.

[...] Noda's group, which has been working on PCSELs for more than two decades, was able to develop a laser with a diameter of 3 millimeters, a tenfold areal jump up from previous 1-millimeter-diameter PCSEL devices. The new laser has a power output of 50 watts, a similar increase from the 5- to 10-W power output of the 1-mm PCSELs. The new laser's brightness, about 1 GW/cm2/str, is now high enough for applications currently dominated by bulky gas lasers and fiber lasers, such as precision smart manufacturing in the electronics and automotive industries. It's also high enough for more exotic applications such as satellite communications and propulsion.

Autonomous Vehicle International (a trade mag) is running the story, Aurora announces release of open-source autonomous driving data set to support advances within the sector, which describes a large vehicle sensor data set being made available to university researchers.

In partnership with the University of Toronto, Aurora Innovation has publicly released the Aurora Multi-Sensor Dataset, a large-scale multi-sensor data set with localization ground truth. The data set consists of rich metadata which includes semantic segmentation and a variety of weather patterns such as rain, snow, overcast cloud and sunshine, in addition to different times of day and varying traffic conditions.
[...]
By releasing the data set to the academic sector, Aurora aims to contribute "meaningful engineering research and development" to support progress within the autonomous systems field. Additionally, due to the size and the diversity of Aurora's Multi-Sensor Datatset, it can be used for 3D reconstruction, HD map construction, map compression and more.

The data set was captured by Uber Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) in the metropolitan area of Pittsburgh, USA between January 2017 and February 2018. Aurora acquired the data set in January 2021. Uber ATG used a 64-beam Velodyne HDL-64E lidar sensor and seven 1920×1200-pixel resolution cameras, in addition to a forward-facing stereo pair and five wide-angle lenses providing a 360-degree view around the vehicle to capture the data.

The dataset is available at https://registry.opendata.aws/aurora_msds/ and the license information on that page is,

License
This data is intended for non-commercial academic use only. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Documentation
A third-party development kit authored by Andrei Bârsan of the University of Toronto, made available under the MIT License, can be found here: https://github.com/pit30m/pit30m. Aurora makes no representations as to the functionality or performance of the dev-kit.

It's Pittsburgh, they have below freezing temps, the roads develop potholes, construction changes the roads and so on. My guess, while this dataset is large and rich, by now it's also less than accurate. Still, better than nothing for grant-starved university researchers.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Taurine deficiency as a driver of aging: Lab mice that got taurine supplements lived 10-12% longer lives. So all the kids that are pounding Red Bull (and all the other energy-drinks) might live longer if their hearts don't explode from over-consumption.

Taurine May Be a Key to Longer and Healthier Life:

A deficiency of taurine—a nutrient produced in the body and found in many foods—is a driver of aging in animals, according to a new study led by Columbia researchers and involving dozens of aging researchers around the world.

The same study also found that taurine supplements can slow down the aging process in worms, mice, and monkeys and can even extend the healthy lifespans of middle-aged mice by up to 12%.

[...] “For the last 25 years, scientists have been trying to find factors that not only let us live longer, but also increase healthspan, the time we remain healthy in our old age,” says the study’s leader, Vijay Yadav, PhD, assistant professor of genetics & development at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

“This study suggests that taurine could be an elixir of life within us that helps us live longer and healthier lives.”

Journal Reference:
Parminder Singh et. al. Taurine deficiency as a driver of aging, Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abn9257)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

US sanctions ignite booming black market for Nvidia AI chips in China:

What do you do when US sanctions prevent the purchase of high-performance Nvidia AI GPUs? In China, universities and businesses are turning to underground dealers to secure these chips, and paying a premium to get their hands on them.

In September last year, the US further tightened sanctions against China by instructing Nvidia and AMD to stop selling their high-performance AI-focused GPUs to the country (and Russia), a restriction aimed at preventing the US companies' top hardware from being used by or diverted to military users and finding their way into the nation's supercomputers.

The sanctions mean that China cannot import Nvidia A100 or H100 GPUs, while AMD's MI250 Instinct card is also prohibited, leaving less powerful options such as the MI100 accelerator and the Nvidia A800, which went into production in Q3 last year as another alternative to the A100 GPU. The chip has an interconnect speed of 400 GB/s, down from the A100's 600 GB/s.

Reuters reports that this year's generative AI boom led by OpenAI's ChatGPT has seen demand for Nvidia's high-end chips skyrocket in China. That's led to an underground market in the Asian nation, where everyone from startups to universities is paying large premiums to secure these GPUs - buying or selling the chips within China is not illegal.

Reuters visited the famous Huaqiangbei electronics area in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen where two vendors told reporters they could provide small numbers of A100 chips for $20,000 each, double the usual price of around $10,000.

A Hong Kong startup founder said he experienced the same thing when quoted $19,150 each for two to four A100 cards, which were needed to run its latest AI models. In addition to paying much more than their MSRP, these cards lack any kind of warranty or support.

Original Submission

So, just keeping some updates here.

Infrastructure wise, we've got all the base Docker images, and compose files put together to the point that it's fairly easy to simply run "docker compose up", and get a working rehash installation with the infrastructure playbook. We've got it working on staging.soylentnews.org, albeit with some hiccups.

This also includes all auxiliary services needed for both sides, as well as things like IRC server and necessary bots are included. I had to spend quite a few hours dealing with the remains of the MySQL cluster install, but I managed to recover the soylentdev database from the NDB backups I took before decommissioning the old cluster. Dev.soylentnews.org is back online as of writing.

mechanicjay has set a PR for getting rehash running on Apache 2.4, which I've spent some time getting working in a Docker branch, but haven't reviewed in-depth. I've mostly been working on getting everything else rebuilt as is before introducing a potentially unstable update into the stack. My understanding is there's some dependency problems, but just getting index.pl and such rendering is a big step forward.

So in short, the technical aspects of the site are at least getting worked on. I'll cover the business side of it below the fold.

The Reddit blackout, explained: Why thousands of subreddits are protesting third-party app charges

liar writes:

The Reddit blackout, explained: Why thousands of subreddits are protesting third-party app charges:

Thousands of Reddit discussion forums have gone dark this week to protest a new policy that will charge some third-party apps to access data on the site, leading to worries about content moderation and accessibility.

"Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself)," multiple subreddits wrote in posts seen on the platform's homepage this week.

The new fees are part of broader changes to Reddit's API, or application programming interface, that the company announced recently.

[...] Nearly 9,000 subreddits went dark this week and more than 4,000 remained dark on Friday, including communities with tens of millions of subscribers like r/music and r/videos — according to a tracker of the boycott. While some returned to their public settings after 48 hours, others say they will stay private indefinitely, until Reddit meets their demands.

hubie writes:

Language used for app tracking privacy settings causes consumer confusion:

Privacy and security features that aim to give consumers more control over the sharing of their data by smartphone apps are widely misunderstood, shows new research from the University of Bath's School of Management.

43 per cent of phone users in the study were confused or unclear about what app tracking means. People commonly mistook the purpose of tracking, thinking that it was intrinsic to the app function, or that it would provide a better user experience.

App tracking is used by companies to deliver targeted advertising to smartphone users.

[...] The most common misapprehension (24 per cent) was that tracking refers to sharing the physical location of the device - rather than tracing the use of apps and websites. People thought they needed to accept tracking for food delivery and collection services, such as Deliveroo, or for health and fitness apps, because they believed their location was integral to the functioning of the app.

While just over half of participants (51 per cent) said they were concerned about privacy or security – including security of their data after it had been collected - analysis showed no association between their concern for privacy in their daily life and a lower rate of tracking acceptance.

[...] "Some of the confusion is likely to be due to lack of clarity in wording chosen by companies in the tracking prompts, which are easy to misinterpret. For example, when ASOS said 'We'll use your data to give you a more personalised ASOS experience and to make our app even more amazing' it's probably no surprise that people thought they were opting for additional functionality rather than just more relevant adverts."

[...] Other misconceptions included believing that consenting to sharing for health apps (such as period tracking apps) would mean private data being shared, or that denying tracking would remove adverts from the app.

[...] "While people are now familiar with the benefits of having PIN numbers and facial recognition to protect our devices, more work needs to be done so people can make transparent decisions about what other data is used for in the digital age."

Journal Reference:
Hannah J Hutton and David A Ellis, Exploring User Motivations Behind iOS App Tracking Transparency Decisions, CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580654

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Here's why it matters to you:

New University of Colorado Boulder research shows the number of farms globally will shrink in half as the size of the average existing farms doubles by the end of the 21st century, posing significant risks to the world's food systems.

Published today in the journal Nature Sustainability, the study is the first to track the number and size of farms year-over-year, from the 1960s and projecting through 2100.

The study shows that even rural, farm-dependent communities in Africa and Asia will experience a drop in the number of operating farms.

[...] His analysis found that the number of farms around the world would drop from 616 million in 2020 to 272 million in 2100. A key reason: As a country's economy grows, more people migrate to urban areas, leaving fewer people in rural areas to tend the land.

A decline in the number of farms and an increase in farm size has been happening in the United States and Western Europe for decades. The most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture indicates there were 200,000 fewer farms in 2022 than in 2007.

canopic jug writes:

Educator Lionel Dricot explores the historical prescience of Richard Stallman's (RMS) warnings and prophecies which have been spot on since the beginning, including his proposed solutions. Dricot points out that the problem with acceptance of the solutions is not with RMS or the Free Software Foundation (FSF), instead the problem is us and that we didn't listen. In addition to the Four Freedoms, he points out one obligation which has been taken for granted and left unspoken until now: the obligation to prevent privatization of the Commons.

There was one weakness in RMS theory: copyleft was not part of the four freedoms he theorised. Business-compatible licenses like BSD/MIT or even public domain are "Free Software" because they respect the four freedoms.

But they can be privatised.

And that's the whole point. For the last 30 years, businesses and proponents of Open Source, including Linus Torvalds, have been decrying the GPL because of the essential right of "doing business" aka "privatising the common".

They succeeded so much that the essential mission of the FSF to guarantee the common was seen as "useless" or, worse, "reactionary". What was the work of the FSF? The most important thing is that they proof-bombed the GPL against weaknesses found later. They literally patched vulnerabilities. First the GPLv3, to fight "Tivoisation" and then AGPL, to counteract proprietary online services running on free software but taking away freedom of users.

upstart writes:

Quantum weirdness applies to sound as well as to light and atomic particles:

You can't divide the indivisible, unless you use quantum mechanics. Physicists have now turned to quantum effects to split phonons, the smallest bits of sound, researchers report in the June 9 Science.

It's a breakthrough that mirrors the sort of quantum weirdness that's typically demonstrated with light or tiny particles like electrons and atoms (SN: 7/27/22). The achievement may one day lead to sound-based versions of quantum computers or extremely sensitive measuring devices. For now, it shows that mind-bending quantum weirdness applies to sound as well as it does to light.

"There was no one that had really explored that," says engineering physicist Andrew Cleland of the University of Chicago. Doing so allows researchers "to draw parallels between sound waves and light."

Phonons have much in common with photons, the tiniest chunks of light. Turning down the volume of a sound is the same as dialing back the number of phonons, much like dimming a light reduces the number of photons. The very quietest sounds of all consist of individual — and indivisible — phonons.

Unlike photons, which can travel through empty space, phonons need a medium such as air or water — or in the case of the new study, the surface of an elastic material. "What's really kind of, in my mind, amazing about that is that these sound waves [carry] a very, very small amount of energy, because it's a single quantum," Cleland says. "But it involves the motion of a quadrillion atoms that are all working together to [transmit] this sound wave."

upstart writes:

AI is going to eat itself: Experiment shows people training bots are using bots

Workers hired via crowdsource services like Amazon Mechanical Turk are using large language models to complete their tasks – which could have negative knock-on effects on AI models in the future.

Data is critical to AI. Developers need clean, high-quality datasets to build machine learning systems that are accurate and reliable. Compiling valuable, top-notch data, however, can be tedious. Companies often turn to third party platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk to instruct pools of cheap workers to perform repetitive tasks – such as labeling objects, describing situations, transcribing passages, and annotating text.

Their output can be cleaned up and fed into a model to train it to reproduce that work on a much larger, automated scale.

AI models are thus built on the backs of human labor: people toiling away, providing mountains of training examples for AI systems that corporations can use to make billions of dollars.

But an experiment conducted by researchers at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland has concluded that these crowdsourced workers are using AI systems – such as OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT – to perform odd jobs online.

Training a model on its own output is not recommended. We could see AI models being trained on data generated not by people, but by other AI models – perhaps even the same models. That could lead to disastrous output quality, more bias, and other unwanted effects.