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upstart writes:

The AI Act vote passed with an overwhelming majority, but the final version is likely to look a bit different:

The AI Act vote passed with an overwhelming majority, and has been heralded as one of the world's most important developments in AI regulation. The European Parliament's president, Roberta Metsola, described it as "legislation that will no doubt be setting the global standard for years to come."

Don't hold your breath for any immediate clarity, though. The European system is a bit complicated. Next, members of the European Parliament will have to thrash out details with the Council of the European Union and the EU's executive arm, the European Commission, before the draft rules become legislation. The final legislation will be a compromise between three different drafts from the three institutions, which vary a lot. It will likely take around two years before the laws are actually implemented.

[...] Here are some of the major implications:

upstart writes:

The 12-qubit device will go out to a few academic research labs:

Intel does a lot of things, but it's mostly noted for making and shipping a lot of processors, many of which have been named after bodies of water. So, saying that the company is set to start sending out a processor called Tunnel Falls would seem unsurprising if it weren't for some key details. Among them: The processor's functional units are qubits, and you shouldn't expect to be able to pick one up on New Egg. Ever.

Tunnel Falls appears to be named after a waterfall near Intel's Oregon facility, where the company's quantum research team does much of its work. It's a 12-qubit chip, which places it well behind the qubit count of many of Intel's competitors—all of which are making processors available via cloud services. But Jim Clarke, who heads Intel's quantum efforts, said these differences were due to the company's distinct approach to developing quantum computers.

[...] Intel, in contrast, is attempting to build silicon-based qubits that can benefit from the developments that most of the rest of the company is working on. The company hopes to "ride the coattails of what the CMOS industry has been doing for years," Clarke said in a call with the press and analysts. The goal, according to Clarke, is to make sure the answer to "what do we have to change from our silicon chip in order to make it?" is "as little as possible."

The qubits are based on quantum dots, structures that are smaller than the wavelength of an electron in the material. Quantum dots can be used to trap individual electrons, and the properties of the electron can then be addressed to store quantum information. Intel uses its fabrication expertise to craft the quantum dot and create all the neighboring features needed to set and read its state and perform manipulations.

upstart writes:

ASUS urges customers to patch critical router vulnerabilities:

ASUS has released new firmware with cumulative security updates that address vulnerabilities in multiple router models, warning customers to immediately update their devices or restrict WAN access until they're secured.

As the company explains, the newly released firmware contains fixes for nine security flaws, including high and critical ones.

The most severe of them are tracked as CVE-2022-26376 and CVE-2018-1160. The first is a critical memory corruption weakness in the Asuswrt firmware for Asus routers that could let attackers trigger denial-of-services states or gain code execution.

The other critical patch is for an almost five-year-old CVE-2018-1160 bug caused by an out-of-bounds write Netatalk weakness that can also be exploited to gain arbitrary code execution on unpatched devices.

"Please note, if you choose not to install this new firmware version, we strongly recommend disabling services accessible from the WAN side to avoid potential unwanted intrusions. These services include remote access from WAN, port forwarding, DDNS, VPN server, DMZ, port trigger," ASUS warned in a security advisory published today.

"We strongly encourage you to periodically audit both your equipment and your security procedures, as this will ensure that you will be better protected."

The list of impacted devices includes the following models: GT6, GT-AXE16000, GT-AX11000 PRO, GT-AX6000, GT-AX11000, GS-AX5400, GS-AX3000, XT9, XT8, XT8 V2, RT-AX86U PRO, RT-AX86U, RT-AX86S, RT-AX82U, RT-AX58U, RT-AX3000, TUF-AX6000, and TUF-AX5400.

ASUS warned users of impacted routers to update them to the latest firmware as soon as possible, available via the support website, each product's page, or via links provided in today's advisory.

The company also recommends creating distinct passwords for the wireless network and router administration pages of at least eight characters (combining uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols) and avoiding using the same password for multiple devices or services.

Original Submission

mcgrew writes:

Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13
(published in paperback as Apollo 13)
Hardcover, 378 pages

Houghton Mifflin, October 1994)
ISBN 0-395-67029-2

Apollo 13 lifted off a week or so after my eighteenth birthday. Of course, it had my attention, although not as much as when Apollo 11 landed. Nobody else was much interested by then. At least, until everybody thought all the astronauts onboard were on their way to death.

When I saw the movie Apollo 13, it seemed realistic. Nothing in the movie contradicted anything I remembered seeing in the newspaper or that Walter Cronkite said. I looked for this book in every library I had access to, unsuccessfully. Then I got the movie out again and decided to just buy the book a few weeks ago. I found a used hardcover copy on Amazon only a buck or two more expensive than the e-book.

I didn't have to read far to realize that the movie wasn't nonfiction. It was "based on a true story" and its makers dishonestly advertised it as nonfiction. Much of the movie was made up out of whole cloth.

It was co-written by Jeffrey Kluger, a journalist, and Apollo 13 Mission Commander Jim Lovell. Wikipedia informs me that the book was Kluger's idea, and pitched it to the two surviving Apollo 13 astronauts; Jack Swigert had died of cancer in 1982. "Fredo," as Lovell called Fred Haise, wasn't interested in the idea.

The prologue starts off with the debunking of an urban myth that said that astronauts had poison pills they could take if they were ever stranded in space.

This is a serious book about a serious incident in history. Chapter one starts "Jim Lovell was having dinner at the White House when his friend Ed White burned to death" about the Apollo 8 fire, although later it was found that the smoke poisoned them. It goes on describing how Lovell was a nerd who loved rockets as a teenager, and spoke of test piloting and early space flights before it gets around to the Apollo 13 launch.

It's an excellent book, very well written. I found it enjoyable and informative. Any high school teacher who thinks about showing the class the fictional movie based on this fine book would be wise to read the book first.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/submarine-deaths-missing-titanic-oceangate-b2362578.html

See Previous Story: Search and Rescue Operation Underway for Submarine Visiting the Titanic Wreck

OceanGate Expeditions have confirmed that all five crew members on board the missing submersible Titan have died.

The remotely operated vehicle (ROV) found the tail cone of the Titan on the sea floor about 1,600 feet away from the bow of the Titanic and other debris nearby, according to Rear Adm. John Mauger, the First Coast Guard District commander.

Debris found on the sea floor was "consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber," the US Coast Guard said in a press briefing on Thursday.

"We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost," a spokesperson told The Indepenent on Thursday.

"These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world's oceans.

"Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A database of 2,467 languages helps researchers better understand the stakes when languages die off:

Languages, like animal species, can go extinct. More than half of the world's approximately 7,000 signed and spoken languages are currently endangered. And without intervention they are likely to become extinct, meaning nobody will speak or sign them any longer.

While language loss is happening across the world, the costs vary strikingly in different places, according to a new study co-authored by Yale linguist Claire Bowern. Regions where all Indigenous language are endangered — including parts of South America and the United States — face the greatest consequences.

The study, recently published in the journal Science Advances, is the first to use Grambank — the world's largest and most comprehensive database of language structure — to better understand global linguistic diversity and the threat that language loss poses to humanity's collective knowledge of history, culture, and cognition.

[...] The novel database currently covers 2,467 language varieties spanning 215 different language families and 101 isolated languages from all inhabited continents and geographic areas. It captures 195 language properties — including word order, verbal tense, and whether a language features gendered pronouns — allowing researchers to draw comparisons between and across the languages.

The current release version of the Grambank data can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7740139

Journal Reference:
Hedvig Skirgård et al., Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss, Sci. Adv., Vol 9, Issue 16, 2023. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adg6175

Original Submission

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.