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upstart writes:

The first lithography tools were fairly simple, but the technologies that produce today's chips are among humankind's most complex inventions:

When we talk about computing these days, we tend to talk about software and the engineers who write it. But we wouldn't be anywhere without the hardware and the physical sciences that have enabled it to be created—disciplines like optics, materials science, and mechanical engineering. It's thanks to advances in these areas that we can fabricate the chips on which all the 1s and 0s of the digital world reside. Without them, modern computing would have been impossible.

Semiconductor lithography, the manufacturing process responsible for producing computer chips, has 70-year-old roots. Its origin story is as simple as today's process is complex: the technology got its start in the mid-1950s, when a physicist named Jay Lathrop turned the lens in his microscope upside down.

Lathrop, who died last year at age 95, is scarcely remembered today. But the lithography process he and his lab partner patented in 1957 transformed the world. Steady improvement in lithographic methods has produced ever-smaller circuitry and previously unimaginable quantities of computing power, transforming entire industries and our daily lives.

[...] Lathrop named the process photolithography—printing with light—and he and Nall filed for a patent. They delivered a paper on the topic at the annual International Electron Devices Meeting in 1957, and the Army awarded him a $25,000 prize for the invention. Lathrop bought his family a new station wagon with the money.

[...] But the approach wasn't practical as chip features got still smaller. By the late 1970s, scanners began to be replaced with steppers, machines that moved light in discrete steps across a wafer. The challenge with a stepper was to move the light with micron-scale precision, so that each flash was perfectly aligned with the chip. GCA, a Boston-based firm that had its origins in spy balloons, devised the first stepper tool, reportedly on the advice of Texas Instruments executive Morris Chang—later the founder of TSMC, which is today the world's largest chipmaker.

[...] The decline of America's lithography industry coincided with a dramatic leap forward in the field's technological complexity. Visible light—which has a wavelength of several hundred nanometers—was by the 1980s too broad a brush with which to paint the smallest transistors. So the industry shifted to using new chemicals like krypton fluoride and argon fluoride to create deep ultraviolet light, with wavelengths as low as 193 nanometers. By the early 2000s, after this ultraviolet light itself proved too blunt a tool, lithography machines were created that could shoot light through water, creating a sharper angle of refraction and thereby allowing more precision. Then, after this "immersion" lithography proved insufficient for the finest features on a chip, lithographers began using multi-patterning, applying multiple layers of lithography on top of one another to produce yet more precise patterns on silicon.

upstart writes:

Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now:

A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain's neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.

What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference.

"It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof," says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn't the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: "There's been a lot of progress in the field."

Consciousness is everything that a person experiences — what they taste, hear, feel and more. It is what gives meaning and value to our lives, Chalmers says.

Despite a vast effort, researchers still don't understand how our brains produce it, however. "It started off as a very big philosophical mystery," Chalmers adds. "But over the years, it's gradually been transmuting into, if not a 'scientific' mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically."

[...] At the time Koch proposed the bet, certain technological advancements made him optimistic about solving the mystery sooner rather than later. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures small changes in blood flow that occur with brain activity, was taking laboratories by storm. And optogenetics — which allowed scientists to stimulate specific sets of neurons in the brains of animals such as nonhuman primates — had come on the scene. Koch was a young assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena at the time. "I was very taken by all these techniques," he says. "I thought: 25 years from now? No problem."

hubie writes:

Nature can curb smartphone use, but go beyond your local park and find some wild nature:

While a visit to the great outdoors is a common prescription for reducing screen use, a pioneering new study finds that time outdoors doesn't always reduce smartphone screen time.

The new research, which tracked the smartphone activity of 700 study participants for two years, reveals that participants' smartphone activity actually increased during visits to city parks and other urban green spaces.

With smartphone use rising worldwide, the study identifies a powerful way to reduce screen time: participants who visited nature reserves or forests saw significant declines in screen time over the first three hours, compared to visits to urban locations for the same amount of time.

[...] "Green time, or time outdoors, has long been recommended as a way to restore our attention from the demands of daily life, yet before our study, little was known about whether nature provides a way for people to disconnect from the mobile devices that now follow us into the great outdoors," said lead author Kelton Minor at the Data Science Institute, Columbia University. "While past research suggested that short trips to city parks might provide a digital detox, we saw texting and phone calls actually go up. It was really the longer visits to wilder areas, like forests or nature preserves, that helped people get off their screens and wrest back their attention from their smartphones."

[...] Discussing their findings, the researchers theorize that urban greenspace may instead be useful in enhancing remote social ties—hence the increase in texts and phone calls in urban parks—but may interrupt the individual's opportunity to utilize the attention-restoring properties of nature.

Journal Reference:
Minor, K., Glavind, K. L., Schwartz, A. J., et al. (2023). Nature Exposure is Associated With Reduced Smartphone Use. Environment and Behavior, 55(3), 103–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/00139165231167165

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A user submitted a recent Daring Fireball Post discussing Masnick's Impossibility Theorum: Content Moderation at Scale is Impossible to do Well:

While many people like to say that content moderation is difficult, that's misleading. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. Importantly, this is not an argument that we should throw up our hands and do nothing. Nor is it an argument that companies can't do better jobs within their own content moderation efforts. But I do think there's a huge problem in that many people — including many politicians and journalists — seem to expect that these companies not only can, but should, strive for a level of content moderation that is simply impossible to reach.

And thus, throwing humility to the wind, I'd like to propose Masnick's Impossibility Theorem, as a sort of play on Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. More specifically, it will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the "proper" level of moderation of anyone. While I'm not going to go through the process of formalizing the theorem, a la Arrow's, I'll just note a few points on why the argument I'm making is inevitably true.

Ed. Note: Masnick discusses factors such as user discontent with moderation, the subjective nature of moderation, and moderation problems at scale. It's well-known that Soylent-style community moderation is best-in class, but what about corporate-imposed moderation of millions of posts per day, as Masnick discusses? Any solutions?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

To optimize its performance, our brain "builds reality, it doesn't mirror it" [PDF]:

Things are not always as they appear: what we see seems like what we have just seen, a new SISSA study says. For example, compared to the actual size, an object might seem bigger if it is preceded by the presentation of a big object, and smaller if preceded by a small one. This visual perceptual bias is thus associated with early visual-evoked brain activity and is driven by a trace of past information kept by neural populations at the very basic levels of visual analysis in the brain. The result of what we see, in short, is a kind of average that the brain makes between what is happening in front of our eyes and what has already happened.

[...] According to research authors, Michele Fornaciai, Irene Togoli and Domenica Bueti from Scuola internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), this phenomenon is due to the discrepancy between the limited brain computational resources and the plethora of stimuli bombarding our senses. This "bias" reflect the brain's need to find regularities in the external world, making it more predictable and easier to deal with.

[...] What the scientists observed is that the participants' perception was indeed distorted by past images. The research authors confirm: "A group of objects was judged, for instance, larger or more numerous than it was in reality depending on whether the participant previously saw a large or a more numerous sets of items". Importantly, "the EEG signals revealed that neurons in the visual part of the brain – the "occipital" cortex – kept a trace of the past visual images. And the greater this trace in brain activity was, the stronger the perceptual bias measured in participants".

[...] This research also tells us something more about how our brain works. Domenica Bueti, last author of the research, explains: "We often think that our brain works mirroring reality, but this is not true: on the contrary, it "builds" reality, it is a creator of reality. This is because it receives too many inputs from the external world, and it must find a good method of processing them in an effective way. According to our research, the knowledge of the world influences our perception, from which we can also say that perception is partially based on our expectations. What we have already experienced, in some ways, influences the way we will perceive future events. This is a very stimulating issue, not only a scientific perspective, but also from a philosophical point of view.

Journal Reference:
Michele Fornaciai, Irene Togoli and Domenica Bueti, Perceptual History Biases Are Predicted by Early Visual-Evoked Activity [open], J. Neurosci. 24 May 2023, 43 (21) 3860-3875; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1451-22.2023

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Running 24/7, it'll be the Zity that never sleeps:

Lithuania is vying to become one of the major European tech hubs, bolstered by a growing number of so-called "unicorn" startups and governmental efforts to attract a high-profile accelerator to the country. At the same time, a new €100 million private initiative announced today is setting out to create what would be Europe's largest tech campus, situated in the heart of Lithuania's capital Vilnius.

Building on the site of an old Soviet-era sewing factory in the city's New Town, Tech Zity, as the project is called, is touted to open in 2024 with office space for 5,000 workers, auditoriums for meetings and events, and more. In addition, a core selling point will be its focus on hybrid working, with a 24/7 ethos supported by co-living spaces, restaurants and bars for out-of-work socializing.

At 55,000 square metres (592,015 square feet), Tech Zity would be nearly two-thirds bigger than Paris's Station F, which opened back in 2017.

[...] The Tech Zity project's funding hails from several sources. Of the planned €100 million fund required to fulfil the project, some €30 million has been committed so far, with Vinted co-founder and chief operating officer Mantas Mikuckas contributing around 80% of the initial tranche and Tech Zity founder Darius Žakaitis making up the remainder. This "primary" phase has involved buying the land and buildings, and laying the groundwork for the reconstruction required to transform the site. For the next phase, Tech Zity is looking to secure the additional €70million from various sources, including banks and private investors.

upstart writes:

Investigations triggered by the cracking of encrypted phones three years ago have so far led to more than 6,500 arrests worldwide and the seizure of hundreds of tons of drugs:

The announcement underscored the staggering scale of criminality — mainly drugs and arms smuggling and money laundering — that was uncovered as a result of police and prosecutors effectively listening in to criminals using encrypted EncroChat phones.

"It helped to prevent violent attacks, attempted murders, corruption and large-scale drug transports, as well as obtain large-scale information on organised crime," European Union police and judicial cooperation agencies Europol and Eurojust said in a statement.

The French and Dutch investigation gained access to more than 115 million encrypted communications between some 60,000 criminals via servers in the northern French town of Roubaix, prosecutors said at a news conference in the nearby city of Lille.

[...] EncroChat sold phones for around 1,000 euros ($1,094) worldwide and offered subscriptions with global coverage for 1,500 euros ($1,641) per six months. The devices were marketed as offering complete anonymity and were said to be untraceable and easy to erase if a user was arrested.

French law enforcement authorities launched investigations into the company operating EncroChat in 2017. The probe led to a device being installed that was able to evade the phones' encryption and gain access to users' communications.

[...] The FBI and other law enforcement agencies went a step further and created an encrypted service — ANOM — that was marketed to criminals in a global sting that led to the arrest of more than 800 suspects and seizure of more than 32 metric tons (35.2 tons) of drugs, including cocaine, cannabis, amphetamines and methamphetamines.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Aided by station-mounted cameras, fans are breathing new life into America's forgotten railway towns – online and IRL:

The world of railfans and trainspotters is hardly new. Since the advent of the railroad, hobbyists and professionals have taken photos of local trains, traveled to see their favorite railways, and simply passed the time sitting on platforms to enjoy the view.

But the community saw a digital boost during the pandemic, when the act of watching livestreams of trains soared in popularity. Many say they were drawn in by the community around the feeds, the romantic lore and history of rail travel in the US, and the regularity of trains passing through at a time when the world felt chaotic.

"A lot of people said during lockdown the camera really saved their sanity, because it was a way to connect with people they weren't able to see in person at the time," said Robert Scott, a railfan who volunteers as a moderator for a live camera in Chehalis, Washington. "Some people keep the feed on 24 hours a day in the background because they like the familiarity of the regular passing of trains."

Today there are an increasing number of live rail-stream hubs, including RailwayCams, RailStream, and RailServe.com. One of the most popular is Virtual Railfan, founded in 2009 by a lifelong train obsessive named Michael Cyr. Cyr said he was sitting on the platform of a rail station in Folkston, Georgia – a small town with a big local railfan culture – when he realized his hobby could be brought online, allowing more people to engage. The following year, the first Virtual Railfan camera was set up in Folkston and attracted a few dozen viewers, a crowd that eventually grew to several hundred.

The company advertises itself as offering one of the most realistic online trainspotting experiences, featuring live audio and 1080HD cameras – many of which can be moved to see different angles of the incoming locomotives. "We wanted to bring the whole experience," Cyr said. "If you can't be there, we're going to be the next best thing." Virtual Railfan takes in revenue from paid memberships that offer additional features like playbacks of older streams and advertisements from its YouTube channels.

fliptop writes:

A new artificial intelligence-based technique for measuring fluid flow around the brain's blood vessels could have big implications for developing treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's:

The perivascular spaces that surround cerebral blood vessels transport water-like fluids around the brain and help sweep away waste. Alterations in the fluid flow are linked to neurological conditions, including Alzheimer's, small vessel disease, strokes, and traumatic brain injuries but are difficult to measure in vivo.

A multidisciplinary team of mechanical engineers, neuroscientists, and computer scientists led by University of Rochester Associate Professor Douglas Kelley developed novel AI velocimetry measurements to accurately calculate brain fluid flow. The results are outlined in a study published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[...] The work builds upon years of experiments led by study coauthor Maiken Nedergaard, the codirector of Rochester's Center for Translational Neuromedicine. The group has previously been able to conduct two-dimensional studies on the fluid flow in perivascular spaces by injecting tiny particles into the fluid and measuring their position and velocity over time. But scientists needed more complex measurements to understand the full intricacy of the system—and exploring such a vital, fluid system is a challenge.

Journal Reference: Artificial intelligence velocimetry reveals in vivo flow rates, pressure gradients, and shear stresses in murine perivascular flows - https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2217744120

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Related: Single Brain Scan Can Diagnose Alzheimer's Disease Quickly and Accurately

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/wingpt-is-a-windows-3-1-ai-chatbot-for-your-old-ibm-compatible-desktop/

Microsoft is working to integrate ChatGPT-based technology into more and more places in Windows 11, but it isn't doing the same for older versions of Windows. Those of you with an old Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 PC can breathe easy, though, because the same developer who created the Windows 3.1 version of Wordle has returned with a Windows 3.1 ChatGPT client called WinGPT. .

[...]

An even bigger problem with getting any Internet-connected software running on old 16- and 32-bit versions of Windows in 2023 is that most of the modern web is encrypted, and older operating systems don't support modern SSL/TLS protocols. Many Internet-connected retro projects, including browsers and chat clients, rely on some kind of proxy to get around this, using a modern system to talk to the internet and decrypt data, and passing that decrypted data to the old PC on your local network.

To get WinGPT working without a proxy, the Dialup.net developer has also developed a 16-bit port of the WolfSSL library to support TLS 1.2 and 1.3 connections on the ancient operating system. This port is, as the developer says, "not secure, not reliable, and there is no warranty," and it should be used for entertainment purposes only. The port doesn't verify security certificates and uses "a fake random number generator" to function.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Webb Makes First Detection of Crucial Carbon Molecule

A team of international scientists has used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to detect a new carbon compound in space for the first time. Known as methyl cation (pronounced cat-eye-on) (CH₃⁺), the molecule is important because it aids the formation of more complex carbon-based molecules. Methyl cation was detected in a young star system, with a protoplanetary disk, known as d203-506, which is located about 1,350 light-years away in the Orion Nebula.

Carbon compounds form the foundations of all known life, and as such are particularly interesting to scientists working to understand both how life developed on Earth, and how it could potentially develop elsewhere in our universe. The study of interstellar organic (carbon-containing) chemistry, which Webb is opening in new ways, is an area of keen fascination to many astronomers.

Methenium (AKA methylium, carbenium, methyl cation, or protonated methylene).

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Jail terms for sharing or creating explicit images without consent:

People caught sharing or creating explicit images without consent could face time in jail in England and Wales.

Amendments to the Online Safety Bill will introduce a six-month prison term for sharing deepfake and revenge porn. This would rise to two years if intent to cause distress, alarm or humiliation, or to obtain sexual gratification can be proved.

Those who share an image for sexual gratification could also be placed on the sex offenders' register.

"Revenge porn" is sharing an intimate image without consent. "Deepfake porn" involves creating a fake explicit image or video of a person. Revenge porn was criminalised in 2015 but up until now prosecutors had to prove there was an intention to cause humiliation or distress.

[...] The government announced its intention to legislate last year, and the amendments are part of the Online Safety Bill, which is due to be voted on by MPs later this month before it becomes law.

owl writes:

https://www.5volts.ch/posts/mfmreader/

I still have some floppy drives laying around and I always planned to integrated them into my new SBC projects. In the 1990s I had once built a floppy disk controller for an Apple II and also built a SBC around a 65SC816 processor with a floppy disk controller using WD2797 FDC chips. Both worked quite will. FDCs are now obsolete and so I thought about emulating a FDC using a microcontroller. I also could have used new old stock controllers but that was not my intention.

In the internet you find several discussions about this topic and in many cases the conclusion was that it is not possible to read floppies without a controller. However there are also some projects describing a floppy disk emulator using a microcontroller with no or only little hardware support. Also there are several projects that read the raw MFM data and send it to a PC to decode the data. I was really tempted to give it a try.

My goal was to read and write HD floppies without any additional hardware and be able to read and write the content of individual sectors.

Original Submission

MIT brain science researchers took a look at comprehension of (and preference for) the use of legalese (legal language used in contracts and so on) vs. the same thoughts expressed in simple sentences. While lawyers did better at understanding their own dialect, nearly everyone, lawyer or not, preferred ordinary English. https://news.mit.edu/2023/new-study-lawyers-legalese-0529

Parsing legal language

Since at least the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon declared that federal regulations should be written in "layman's terms," efforts have been made to try to simplify legal documents. However, another study by Martínez, Mollica, and Gibson, not yet published, suggests that legal language has changed very little since that time.

The MIT team began studying the structure and comprehensibility of legal language several years ago, when Martínez, who became interested in the topic as a student at Harvard Law School, joined Gibson's lab as a research assistant and then a PhD student.

In a study published last year, Gibson, Martínez, and Mollica used a text analysis tool to compare legal documents to many other types of texts, including newspapers, movie scripts, and academic papers. Among the features identified as more common in legal documents, one stood out as making the texts harder to read: long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences.

Linguists have previously shown that this type of structure, known as center-embedding, makes text much more difficult to understand. When the MIT team tested people on their ability to understand and recall the meaning of a legal text, their performance improved significantly when center-embedded structures were replaced with more straightforward sentences, with terms defined separately.

More detail in TFA along with references to related work.

I've had to read my share of contracts and complex NDA/secrecy agreements, some of which were pretty sneaky, others very easy to follow. In my experience, the long sentence with strings of qualifiers in the middle is common, but once you know that is the structure it is possible to mentally assemble the start and end of the sentence and understand what's being said. Then add back in all the conditions where it applies, or does not apply.

I've been caught out a couple of times to my business and financial embarrassment. Once burned I've learned that, when there is a lot on the line, reading the fine print is often worth the effort. I've also learned that a contract presented to me isn't always cast in stone--reasoned objections are often negotiable and clauses can be struck or modified. While always an option, I resist hiring a lawyer, preferring to work through the language myself.

Full paper here, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2302672120 behind a paywall for me (perhaps the text is available elsewhere?)

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/google/2023/06/rip-to-my-pixel-fold-dead-after-four-days/

A flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long. That was my brief experience with the Pixel Fold, which was a wonderful little device until the display died, along with my hopes and dreams. I barely used it, but it was beautiful.

I didn't do anything to deserve this. The phone sat on my desk while I wrote about it, and I would occasionally stop to poke the screen, take a screenshot, or open and close it. It was never dropped or exposed to a significant amount of grit, nor had it gone through the years of normal wear and tear that phones are expected to survive. This was the lightest possible usage of a phone, and it still broke.

The flexible OLED screen died after four days. The bottom 10 pixels of the Pixel Fold went dead first, forming a white line of 100 percent brightness pixels that blazed across the bottom of the screen.
[...]
Manufacturers keep wanting to brush off the significant durability issues of flexible OLED displays, thinking that if they just shove the devices onto the market, everything will work out. That hasn't been the case, though, and any time you see a foldable phone for sale, you don't have to look far to see reports of dead displays. I'm sure we'll see several reports of broken Pixel Folds once the unit hits the general public. Corning may save us with an exterior foldable glass cover, but until then, buying any foldable feels like a gamble.

Original Submission