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hubie writes:

GCC Adopts A Code of Conduct:

While a few years late compared to many other open-source projects adopting a Code of Conduct, the GCC Steering Committee has now adopted a Code of Conduct "CoC" for this open-source compiler project.

Passionate compiler developers and other GCC stakeholders are encouraged to remind themselves to be civil in their discussions and follow other recommendations to foster their community. Jason Merrill of the GCC Steering Committee wrote in their announcement of this CoC:

"The vast majority of the time, the GCC community is a very civil, cooperative space. On the rare occasions that it isn't, it's helpful to have something to point to to remind people of our expectations. It's also good for newcomers to have something to refer to, for both how they are expected to conduct themselves and how they can expect to be treated.

  More importantly, if there is offensive behavior that isn't corrected immediately, it's important for there to be a way to report that to the project leadership so that we can intervene.

  At this time the CoC is preliminary: the code itself should be considered active, but the CoC committee (and so the reporting and response procedures) are not yet in place."

The draft GCC CoC can be viewed here.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Wildfires in Canada have broken records for area burned, evacuations and cost, official says:

Wildfires raging across Canada have already broken records for total area burned, the number of people forced to evacuate their homes and the cost of fighting the blazes, and the fire season is only halfway finished, officials said Thursday.

"It's no understatement to say that the 2023 fire season is and will continue to be record breaking in a number of ways," Michael Norton, director general, Northern Forestry Centre, Canadian Forest Service, said Thursday during a briefing.

[...] The fires have burned 8.8 million hectares (27.7 million acres) an area about the size of the state of Virginia. This already exceeds the record of 7.6 million hectares (18.7 million acres) set in 1989 and is 11 times the 10-year average experienced by this date.

"The final area burned for this season may yet be significantly higher," said Norton. "What we can say with certainty right now is that 2023 is a record-breaking year since at least since 1986 when accurate records started to be kept."

Allen said the fine particles found in fire smoke not only have the ability to penetrate deep into airways, they also can travel long distances meaning they could drift far into the U.S.

There have been reports that fires in Eastern Canada and Quebec are affecting air quality in Europe.

[...] There are about 3,790 provincial firefighters battling the blazes across the country being assisted by Canadian Armed Forces personnel. Another 3,258 firefighters from Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, the U.S., Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, South Korea and the European Union have travelled to Canada to fight fires.

Norton said the cost of fighting wildfires has steadily grown and is approaching about CDN$1 billion (US$750 million) a year.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NHTSA reminds Tesla to cough up data for Autopilot probe:

An investigation by America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) into the safety of Tesla Autopilot has led to a threat of fines if Elon Musk's electric car company doesn't hand over the data requested.

If Tesla doesn't comply with the order in the NHTSA's July 3 letter [PDF], the agency said it could issue fines and penalties that could reach as high as $26,315 per violation per day – capping out at $131.5 million.

That's not to suggest that Tesla has been avoiding giving US highway regulators the data they've asked for. Documents from the investigation indicate Tesla has turned over information several times already. The NHTSA told The Register that fine warnings are a standard part of such letters no matter which manufacturer is getting them.

Among the data requested by the NHTSA is a full rundown of information on vehicles included in the investigation, which is a lot: "All Tesla vehicles, model years 2014–2023, equipped with [Autopilot] at any time."

The NHTSA wants to know the software, firmware and hardware versions of each and every Tesla that falls into its investigative purview, whether the vehicles have a cabin camera installed, when the vehicle was admitted into Tesla's full-self-driving beta, and dates of the most recent software/firmware/hardware updates.

upstart writes:

On a shoestring budget, Chandrayaan-3 aims to observe Luna, Earth, even exoplanets:

India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will next week launch Chandrayaan-3, a mission that aims to land on the moon and deploy a rover.

ISRO yesterday announced that Chandrayaan-3 had been tucked into its capsule and mated with the (LVM-3) launcher that will take it into space. Liftoff from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre has been scheduled for July 14 at 2:35pm IST (09:05 Friday UTC).

The ridiculously economical $74.5 million mission aims to land near Luna's south pole in August. From a ramped compartment, the lander will deploy a 26 kilogram rover outfitted with instruments including an Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS).

The lander contains an accelerometer, Ka-band and laser altimeters, Doppler velocimeter, star sensors, inclinometer, touchdown sensor, and cameras for hazard avoidance and positional knowledge.

The lander also boasts several instruments including Chandra's Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE) to measure surface thermal properties, Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA) to measure tremors around the landing site, Radio Anatomy of Moon Bound Hypersensitive ionosphere and Atmosphere (RAMBHA) to study the gas and plasma environment, and a NASA-provided passive Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) for lunar ranging studies.

A propulsion module that carries the rover and lander will stay in a 100km lunar orbit, where it will act as a communication relay satellite, complete with a payload – known as the Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) – that studies spectral and polarimetric measurements of Earth from roughly 362,000 to 405,000 kilometers away.

[...] Only three countries - the USA, Russia, and China, have successfully landed missions on the Moon. Good luck, Chandrayaan-3!

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Magic: The Gathering's most coveted collectible The One Ring Card has been found. There is only one copy and version of this card, making it highly collectable. The owner wishes to remain anonymous, and multiple resellers are already offering millions to buy it.

The One Ring, a singular, serialized, one-of-a-kind card for Magic: The Gathering, has been found. Proof comes via the grading company PSA, which posted an image of the card Friday morning.

Magic's latest set of cards, titled The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, was created in coordination with Middle-earth Enterprises (MEE) to celebrate the original novels by J.R.R. Tolkien. The set includes many copies of The One Ring, including perforated versions meant to be torn apart at the table. But publisher Wizards of the Coast also created a singular copy, covered in gold foil and etched with the original Elvish Black Speech inscription.

If this is up your alley then the owner is accepting serious offers via their attorney through an email address hello@thenotablegroup.com, noting that no offers above one million dollars have currently been tabled and accepted.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

There are 12,000 types of PFAS, the USGS tested for 32 types across the country:

The U.S. ecosystem is riddled with PFAS. And a new study released this week by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) revealed that these toxic chemicals are in almost half of the country's tap water.

This is the first time a government agency has tested for and compared PFAS found in private and public water supplies throughout the country. 45% of the locations tested positive for PFAS chemicals. This stands for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances. They're also commonly known as 'forever chemicals' because they don't break down over time in nature or in the human body. It is also used to describe over 12,000 different chemicals that can be found in everyday items like packaging and cosmetics. The use of these chemicals has been linked to various public health concerns, including cancer and birth defects.

[...] There are some steps that individual households can take to improve the quality of their tap water. Research from Duke University has found that at-home filters can remove some PFAS from drinking water, but they don't completely remove all of the chemicals from the water. And personal filters don't address the larger problem, which is the fact that companies are allowed to use PFAS in the first place, years after the public has known that major corporations have lied about the dangers of these chemicals.

3M, one of the country's largest PFAS manufacturers, recently said it would stop producing forever chemicals by 2026. Retailer REI also recently announced that it would ban all PFAS from its items including clothing by 2024. Major companies including DuPont and 3M have recently agreed to pay out billions of dollars in settlements due to the use of forever chemicals in their products. But this comes a little too late. Major manufacturers have known about the public health risks their products posed to the public for decades. The chemicals are already in our environment, the exposure risk will continue to persist until stricter regulations are put in place throughout the country.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/07/8086-pins.html

The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) started the x86 architecture that continues to this day. In this blog post, I'm focusing on a small part of the chip: the address and data pins that connect the chip to external memory and I/O devices. In many processors, this circuitry is straightforward, but it is complicated in the 8086 for two reasons. First, Intel decided to package the 8086 as a 40-pin DIP, which didn't provide enough pins for all the functionality. Instead, the 8086 multiplexes address, data, and status. In other words, a pin can have multiple roles, providing an address bit at one time and a data bit at another time.

The second complication is that the 8086 has a 20-bit address space (due to its infamous segment registers), while the data bus is 16 bits wide. As will be seen, the "extra" four address bits have more impact than you might expect. To summarize, 16 pins, called AD0-AD15, provide 16 bits of address and data. The four remaining address pins (A16-A19) are multiplexed for use as status pins, providing information about what the processor is doing for use by other parts of the system. You might expect that the 8086 would thus have two types of pin circuits, but it turns out that there are four distinct circuits, which I will discuss below.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

They're requesting a temporary injunction blocking the law:

Uber, DoorDash and Grubhub are suing for an injunction to stop New York City's new $18 minimum wage law for food delivery app workers, The Washington Post has reported. The app delivery platforms are asking for a temporary restraining order against the new rules, set to be implemented on July 12th. "We will not stand by and let the harmful impacts of this earnings standard on New York City customers, merchants, and the delivery workers it was intended to support go unchecked," a DoorDash spokesperson told CNN.

The Worker's Justice Project that backed the survey decried the new lawsuit. "This latest legal maneuver to prop up their business model comes at the expense of workers who can barely survive in a city facing a massive affordability crisis," director Ligia Guallpa told the Post.

New York became the first US city to mandate a minimum wage for food delivery workers, ordering platforms to pay workers $17.96 per hour, plus tips, by July 12th. The minimum wage in the city is $15 per hour, but the extra amount accounts for the fact that delivery workers are usually paid as contractors, so have higher taxes and must pay work-related expenses out of pocket. According to an estimate from the DCWP (NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection), NYC has more than 60,000 food delivery workers who earn an average of $7.09 per hour.

[...] App services like Uber have fought for years against regulations against the "gig worker" economy. Earlier this year, a court ruled that Uber and Lyft could keep treating drivers as contractors, rather than reclassifying them as salaried employees.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Will people ever learn?:

Facepalm: When will people who smuggle hardware into China learn that strapping thousands of dollars of components to your body often leads to arrest? Once again, the country's customs have caught someone trying the same old trick. On this occasion, a trafficker had 420 M.2 SSDs attached to his torso using tape.

[...] The 420 M.2 SSDs are said to be worth around HK$258,000 or $32,984.94. That works out to an average of $78.53 each, so they're likely on the higher end of the quality scale.

[...] Smugglers have been trying imaginative ways of sneaking tech goods into China for years. In 2015, a man was caught with an impressive 146 iPhones strapped to his body. A woman attempted the same thing a few years later, reducing the number of iPhones to 102.

Taping CPUs to one's body is also popular. A pair of men tried to smuggle 256 Intel Core i7-10700 and Core i9-10900K processors, then worth $123,000, by attaching them to their calves and torsos at the height of the chip shortage in 2021. Another man did the same thing a year later, wrapping 160 CPUs and 16 folding phones to his body, and it was only in March when someone tried this with 239 CPUs.

Not everyone goes for the taping method. A woman in 2022 tried to enter China with over 200 Intel CPUs hidden in a fake pregnant belly, and a man this year tried to sneak 84 SSDs past Chinese customs by stuffing them inside an electric scooter. Some people are just lazy and simply lie about what's inside the crates they are transporting, like the man who tried to smuggle HK$30 million (about $3.8 million) of electronics through Man Kam To Control Point from Hong Kong into mainland China a few months ago.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Blockchain technology, investor sentiment, and economic stress are useful for forecasting, while bitcoin's detachment from economic fundamentals make it a poor safe-haven asset:

Blockchain technology, investor sentiment, and economic stress levels are significant predictors of bitcoin returns, according to a groundbreaking paper from Illinois Institute of Technology researchers that provides empirical evidence to help guide investors, economists, and academics.

Sang Baum "Solomon" Kang, associate professor of finance at Illinois Tech's Stuart School of Business and co-author of the paper, also found that the cryptocurrency is detached from economic fundamentals and therefore may not effectively serve as a diversifier or safe-haven asset. Additionally, Kang reported that returns on commodities, securities, and other assets do not predict bitcoin returns well.

[...] The team used predictive analytics techniques and dimension-reduction models on data from January 2011 to January 2020, analyzing 25 information variables under the categories macroeconomics, blockchain technology, other assets, stress level, and investor sentiment.

"We find that blockchain technology, investor sentiment, and stress level have predictive power for bitcoin returns," says Kang. "Similar to traditional assets, bitcoin shows higher return predictability with longer return horizons. These findings support the dual nature of bitcoin as a technical artifact and speculative asset."

fliptop writes:

PL/I stands for Programming Language 1, and its aim was to be the Highlander of programming languages:

...there would be no need for 2, 3, or 4 if everything went to plan. While it is clear today that goal was never reached, what might not be evident is that what PL/I was trying to achieve was a pretty reasonable idea, or at least not entirely crazy. What also wasn't evident at the time was how enormously difficult that reasonable idea turned out to be.

PL/I was designed by IBM with the goal of bringing together the power of 3 different programming languages: FORTRAN (1954), ALGOL (1958), and COBOL (1959).

On paper, this makes a lot of sense. Computer programming can be difficult, and why should there be multiple programming languages? And because computer programming of the era required a lot of punched cards, having One Good Programming Language would have on paper (or cardboard) benefits to simplify the process of development as well. Work on the PL/I specification started in 1964, and work on the first compiler in 1966.

[...] But PL/I wasn't just a development effort, it was also in effect a system conversion. There was an explicit goal for developers to start using PL/I, but were also implicit goals for developers not just to only stop using FORTRAN, COBOL, and ALGOL directly, as well as to convert their existing solutions and codebases to PL/I. As if that wasn't hard enough, compounding the problem was that FORTRAN, COBOL, and ALGOL were all evolving in real time. As I described in my BLOG@CACM post "The Art of Speedy Systems Conversions," a system conversion is one of the most difficult things to do in software engineering. The existing system typically has massive head start, and the replacing system needs to start up development, accelerate, reach feature parity, and then both systems need to be stable long enough to make the switch.

The author presents development timelines of COBOL, FORTRAN and ALGOL showing development on these languages was active for years after PL/I development had started. The historical verdict?

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

Elliptic Curves Yield Their Secrets in a New Number System

https://www.quantamagazine.org/elliptic-curves-yield-their-secrets-in-a-new-number-system-20230706/

Caraiani and Newton achieved modularity — for all elliptic curves over about half of all imaginary quadratic fields — by figuring out how to adapt a process for proving modularity pioneered by Wiles and others to elliptic curves over imaginary quadratic fields.

[...] The work is a technical achievement in its own right, and it opens the door to making progress on some of the most important questions in math in the imaginary setting.

[...] In the late 1950s, Yutaka Taniyama and Goro Shimura proposed that there is a perfect 1-to-1 matching between certain modular forms and elliptic curves. The next decade Robert Langlands built on this idea in the construction of his expansive Langlands program, which has become one of the most far-reaching and consequential research programs in math.

If the 1-to-1 correspondence is true, it would give mathematicians a powerful set of tools for understanding the solutions to elliptic curves. For example, there's a kind of numerical value associated with each modular form. One of math's most important open problems (proving it comes with a million-dollar prize) — the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture — proposes that if that value is zero, then the elliptic curve associated to that modular form has infinitely many rational solutions, and if it's not zero, the elliptic curve has finitely many rational solutions.

But before anything like that can be tackled, mathematicians need to know that the correspondence holds: Hand me an elliptic curve, and I can hand you its matching modular form. Proving this is what many mathematicians, from Wiles to Caraiani and Newton, have been up to over the last few decades.

[...] Their result provides a foundation for investigating some of the same basic questions about elliptic curves over imaginary quadratic fields that mathematicians pursue over the rationals and the reals. This includes the imaginary version of Fermat's Last Theorem — though additional groundwork needs to be laid before that is approachable — and the imaginary version of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.

----

The elliptic curve equation used in Bitcoin's cryptography is called secp256k1 which uses this equation: y²=x³+7, a=0 b=7.

Journal Reference:
Ana Caraiani and James Newton, On the modularity of elliptic curves over imaginary quadratic fields, arXiv:2301.10509 [math.NT]

Original Submission

hubie writes:

This bias can be explained by the way our brain is organized, but its evolutionary significance is not yet known:

Sounds that we hear around us are defined physically by their frequency and amplitude. But for us, sounds have a meaning beyond those parameters: we may perceive them as pleasant or unpleasant, ominous or reassuring, and interesting and rich in information, or just noise.

One aspect that affects the emotional 'valence' of sounds – that is, whether we perceive them as positive, neutral, or negative – is where they come from. Most people rate looming sounds, which move towards us, as more unpleasant, potent, arousing, and intense than receding sounds, and especially if they come from behind rather than from the front. This bias might give a plausible evolutionary advantage: to our ancestors on the African savannah, a sound approaching from behind their vulnerable back might have signaled a predator stalking them.

Now, neuroscientists from Switzerland have shown another effect of direction on emotional valence: we respond more strongly to positive human sounds, like laughter or pleasant vocalizations, when these come from the left. The results are published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

"Here we show that human vocalizations that elicit positive emotional experiences, yield strong activity in the brain's auditory cortex when they come from the listener's left side. This does not occur when positive vocalizations come from the front or right," said first author Dr Sandra da Costa, a research staff scientist at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

takyon writes:

Android phone hits 24GB of RAM, as much as a 13-inch MacBook Pro

Android manufacturers tend to love big spec sheets, even if those giant numbers won't do much for day-to-day phone usage. In that vein, we've got the new high-water mark for ridiculous amounts of memory in a phone. The new Nubia RedMagic 8S Pro+ is an Android gaming phone with an option for 24GB of RAM.

The base model of the RedMagic 8S Pro+ starts with 16GB of RAM, but GSMArena has pictures and details of the upgraded 24GB SKU, which is the most amount of memory ever in an Android phone. Because we're all about big numbers, it also comes with 1TB of storage. [...] This suped-up 24GB version of the phone appears to be a China-exclusive, with the price at CNY 7,499 (about $1,034), which is a lot for a phone in China.

You definitely want an adequate amount of RAM in an Android phone. All these apps are designed around cheap phones, though, and with Android's aggressive background app management, there's usually not much of a chance to use a ton of RAM. Theoretically, a phone like this would let you multitask better, since apps could stay in memory longer, and you wouldn't have to start them back up when switching tasks. Most people aren't quickly switching through that many apps, though, and some heavy apps, games especially, will just automatically turn off a few seconds once they're in the background.

There were a few smartphones on the market with 18 GB, but it looks like 20 GB has been skipped entirely by Nubia.

Now we need to be on the lookout for 32 GB of RAM and alien technology in upcoming smartphones.

Previously: SK Hynix Begins Production of 18 GB LPDDR5 Memory... for Smartphones
Samsung Announces Development of LPDDR5X Memory

Original Submission

upstart writes:

After Decades of Observations, Astronomers have Finally Sensed the Pervasive Background Hum of Merging Supermassive Black Holes:

We've become familiar with LIGO/VIRGO's detections of colliding black holes and neutron stars that create gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time. However, the mergers between supermassive black holes – billions of times the mass of the Sun — generate gravitational waves too long to register with these instruments.

But now, after decades of careful observations, astronomers around the world using a different type of gravitational wave detection method have finally gathered enough data to measure what is essentially a gravitational wave background hum of the Universe, mostly from supermassive black holes spiraling toward collision.

Scientists say the newly detected gravitational waves are by far the most powerful ever measured, and they persist for years to decades. They carry roughly a million times as much energy as the one-off bursts of gravitational waves from black hole and neutron star mergers detected by LIGO and Virgo.

"It's like a choir, with all these supermassive black hole pairs chiming in at different frequencies," said scientist Chiara Mingarelli, who worked about 190 other scientists with the NANOGrav (North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves). "This is the first-ever evidence for the gravitational wave background. We've opened a new window of observation on the universe."

[...] For this collaboration, 25 years of observing 25 pulsars revealed the gravitational waves with wavelengths much longer than those seen by other experiments.

[...] Since they are long-lasting, the gravitational-wave signals from these gigantic binaries are expected to overlap, like voices in a crowd or instruments in an orchestra, producing an overall background hum that imprints a unique pattern in pulsar timing data.