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owl writes:

https://arcadeblogger.com/2023/07/22/environmental-discs-of-tron-roadside-pickup/

Environmental Discs of Tron (or EDOT for short) is arguably the most complex arcade cabinet of the Golden Age of videogaming. Working examples are hard to come by, and when they do, you can expect to pay handsomely for one!

What sets this game apart, is the thought that went into the cabinet design. Brian Colin (who we interviewed on the podcast a while back here), worked extensively on the game. Have a listen to his recollections of what made the game and cabinet so special.

So, finding one of these glorious pieces is a challenge these days. But can you imagine stumbling across one dumped in the street? Well, that's exactly what happened to my friend Tim Lapetino recently.

I was visiting my family in the Chicago suburbs recently, when my niece mentioned she saw "some TRON thing" sitting on a curb while she was riding her bike through the neighbourhood.

Of course we jumped in the car to go take a look, as it was just blocks away from where my parents and other family live. As we drove up to the spot, I uttered "What the &*@$?!" forgetting that my niece was in the car with us. And would you believe it – there it was. An EDOT was sitting by the curb

Tim Lapetino

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/tsmc-delays-us-chip-fab-opening-says-us-talent-is-insufficient/

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) was supposed to have its first Arizona chip factory operational by late 2024 but now has confirmed significant delays. Primarily due to a shortage of technical workers with critical expertise in the US, TSMC projects to finish construction instead by 2025.

This is an "ominous delay," Bloomberg reported, and it comes right when investment in AI is booming.

[...] At the end of last month, TSMC confirmed it would be sending more Taiwanese workers to the US to ensure a "fast ramp up" of its $40 billion fab in Arizona, Reuters reported. A second Arizona fab is planned to be operational by 2026— the most advanced chip factory currently in production, Reuters reported—and, at least so far, it has not been confirmed whether the first fab's delay will result in any further delays on completing the second fab.

[...] Both officials and workers wonder how TSMC will spend US funding to finish its fabs. TSMC seeks up to $15 billion in funding from the CHIPS and Science Act, The Wall Street Journal reported, but has objected to some of the US conditions requiring that TSMC share profits and provide detailed information about its operations. The Biden administration has said that these conditions are only intended to ensure that TSMC makes appropriate use of taxpayer money.

It's clear, though, that TSMC is expected to hire and fairly pay US workers. Last year, President Joe Biden announced that building the first Arizona fab would employ "more than 3,000 union workers," and he previously promised that the CHIPS and Science Act was designed to "create good-paying American jobs."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

If you aren't familiar with the experiment where you try to count the number of times a basketball is passed between people, you should watch the video and try the experiment first before reading on.

Research Reveals We Can Spot the Unexpected Better than Commonly Believed:

We are quite good at spotting unexpected objects while focused on another activity if they are moving fast, reveals a new study by a team of New York University researchers. Their findings cast doubt on a long-standing view that our ability to see the unexpected is necessarily impaired when our attention is already directed elsewhere.

"For decades, it's been thought that when we're intently focused on something relevant, like driving or playing a game, we fail to spot something that unexpectedly enters our field of vision, even if it is clearly visible and moving," says Pascal Wallisch, a clinical associate professor at New York University's Center for Data Science and Department of Psychology and lead author of the paper, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Our study questions the generality of this view because it shows that people, while focusing on a task, are quite capable of noticing unexpected objects that are moving quickly. However, our research confirms that we are indeed less adept at noticing these same objects when they are moving slowly."

The research team, who also included Wayne Mackey, Michael Karlovich, and David Heeger, centered its study on "inattentional blindness"—the inability to notice unexpected objects if attention is focused on a task. [...]

This and similar studies characterized one of the most striking phenomena in cognitive psychology—inattentional blindness—as an inevitable flip side of task focusing, and essentially a deficit.

upstart writes:

Seven AI companies agree to safeguards in the US:

Seven leading companies in artificial intelligence have committed to managing risks posed by the tech, the White House has said.

This will include testing the security of AI, and making the results of those tests public.

Representatives from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI joined US President Joe Biden to make the announcement.

It follows a number of warnings about the capabilities of the technology.

The pace at which the companies have been developing their tools have prompted fears over the spread of disinformation, especially in the run up to the 2024 US presidential election.

"We must be clear-eyed and vigilant about the threats emerging from emerging technologies that can pose - don't have to but can pose - to our democracy and our values," President Joe Biden said during remarks on Friday.

[...] As part of the agreement signed on Friday, the companies agreed to:

• Security testing of their AI systems by internal and external experts before their release.
• Ensuring that people are able to spot AI by implementing watermarks.
• Publicly reporting AI capabilities and limitations on a regular basis.
• Researching the risks such as bias, discrimination and the invasion of privacy.

The goal is for it to be easy for people to tell when online content is created by AI, the White House added.

upstart writes:

Disenchanted mods Ars spoke with want change, not more communication:

Reddit is publicly extending an olive branch to the moderator community that it largely enraged over recent weeks. In a post on Wednesday, a Reddit employee detailed outreach efforts from the company, including new weekly feedback sessions, that it hopes can help repair ties with the social media platform and over 50,000 volunteer mods that it relies on. But as you might expect, mods remain skeptical.

A Reddit admin going by Go_JasonWaterfalls on the site and claiming the title of Reddit VP of community (Ars attempted to confirm the identity of /u/Go_JasonWaterfalls, but Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt declined to confirm the employee's identity by name) acknowledged the shattered relationship between mods—who spend thousands of hours providing free labor and have recently engaged in variously disruptive forms of protest over API pricing on the site—and Reddit—which has responded to said protests by ousting some protesting moderators from their posts. [...]

"So, we've all had a... time on Reddit lately," Go_JasonWaterfalls wrote. "And I'm here to recognize it, acknowledge that our relationship has been tested, and begin the 'now what?' conversation."

Noting that Reddit's "role is facilitation" and to give mods a platform they "can rely on," including necessary tools and resources, Go_JasonWaterfalls emphasized the need for "consistent, inclusive, and direct connection" with mods before detailing outreach efforts, like Weekly Mod Feedback Sessions.

[...] Mods, meanwhile, traumatized by a tumultuous past couple of months, have very low expectations of Reddit's efforts. Ars spoke with some who have already participated in similar efforts, like feedback sessions or the Mod Council, and claimed mixed results in regard to Reddit making actual moves in response to mod critiques and suggestions.

The Aptera streamlined car project has been on and off for something like 10(?) years now, including a bankruptcy and reorg. They just released this statement on some wind tunnel testing, so it does seem like there is at least a little bit of life in the company.

From the link:

Alessandro Aquili, head of wind tunnel at Pininfarina, said, "Aptera's exterior design draws inspiration from the research of Prof. Morelli, the same engineer behind the Pininfarina wind tunnel. By building on Prof. Morelli's ideas, Aptera carries on this philosophy, continuing to push bounds of aerodynamic efficiency."

Steve Fambro, CEO and co-founder of Aptera, remarked, "Working with Pininfarina to validate Aptera's shape marks an exciting chapter in our journey toward creating a passenger vehicle with the lowest drag coefficient ever."

Aptera's aerodynamic shape is key to its energy efficiency. According to the company, it will enable its solar EVs to achieve a range of up to 1,000 miles per charge and the ability to drive up to 40 miles per day directly from the sun's rays.

An average of 10 miles a day would probably be enough for my limited/local car use (work from home), but I'm not in Southern CA, we don't get sun year around like they do.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

You Can Help Stop These Bad Internet Bills:

For the last six months, EFF, our supporters, and dozens of other groups have been sounding the alarm about several #BadInternetBills that have been put forward in Congress. We've made it clear that these bills are terrible ideas, but Congress is now considering packaging them together—possibly into must-pass legislation. I'm asking you to join us, ACLU, Fight for the Future, and other digital rights defenders in a week of action to protect the internet. Will you take a few minutes to join us in telling Congress that these bills must not become law?

The Kids Online Safety Act would increase surveillance and restrict access to information under the guise of protecting children online. KOSA would put the tools of censorship in the hands of state attorneys general. It would greatly endanger the rights and safety of young people online. KOSA's burdens will affect adults, too, who will likely face hurdles, like age verification, to access legal content online as a result of the bill.

The STOP CSAM Act would put security and free speech at risk by potentially making it a crime to offer encryption. The law would undermine digital security for all internet users, impacting private messaging and email app providers, social media platforms, cloud storage providers, and many other internet intermediaries and online services.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/google-demos-unsettling-tool-to-help-journalists-write-the-news/

Google has been developing tools aimed at helping journalists write news articles, reports The New York Times and Reuters. It has demonstrated one tool, dubbed "Genesis," to the Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Reportedly, Google is positioning the tool as a personal assistant for news reporters.

According to Reuters, Genesis is not intended to automate news writing but can instead potentially support journalists by offering suggestions for headlines or alternative writing styles to enhance productivity.

[...] Like OpenAI with its ChatGPT AI assistant that can compose text, Google has also been developing large language models (LLMs) such as PaLM 2

[...] However, unnamed anonymous executives who previewed Google's presentation described Genesis as "unsettling," according to the Times. Two of the executives told the outlet that the Google product seemed to underestimate the effort it takes to produce accurate and interesting news stories.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Avi and Oumuamua: Setting the Record Straight:

As an astrophysicist that searches for signs of alien technology beyond Earth, I'm often asked these days what I think about Avi Loeb.

Loeb, you might know, recently rose to public prominence with his claims that the first discovered interstellar comet, 'Oumuamua, is actually a piece of an alien spacecraft passing through the Solar System. Since then he has headlined UFO conventions, written a very popular book about his claim, and raised millions of dollars to study UFOs with his "Galileo Project" initiative. His latest venture with that money is to sweep a metal detector across the Pacific to find fragments of what he claims is another interstellar visitor that the US military detected crashing into the ocean, resulting in the headline "Why a Harvard professor thinks he may have found fragments of an alien spacecraft" in the Independent.

Loeb has the credentials to be taken seriously. He is a well-respected theoretical cosmologist that has made foundational contributions to our understanding of the early universe. He served as the chair of the Harvard astronomy department, and leads the distinguished Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is well known as an outside-the-box thinker who is brave enough to be wrong often enough to occasionally be right in important and unexpected ways. He is a prolific paper writer, mentor to many students and postdoctoral researchers, and a leader in the community. I, in particular, was strongly influenced by a lecture he gave on "diversifying one's research portfolio" to include a lot of safe but passé research, some more risky cutting edge work, and a small amount of outré science. It's important advice for any scientific field.

But his shenanigans have lately strongly changed the astronomy community's perceptions of him. His recent claims about alien spacecraft and comets and asteroids largely come across to experts as, at best, terribly naive, and often as simply erroneous (Loeb has no formal training or previous track record to speak of in planetary science, which has little in common with the plasma physics he is known for). His promotion of his claims in the media is particularly galling to professionals who discover and study comets, who were very excited about the discovery of 'Oumuamua but have found their careful work dismissed and ridiculed by Loeb, who is the most visible scientist discussing it in the media.

upstart writes:

Stunned Researchers Discover that Metals Can Heal Themselves 'Without Human Intervention':

Scientists for the first time have witnessed pieces of metal crack, then fuse back together without any human intervention, overturning fundamental scientific theories in the process.

If the newly discovered phenomenon can be harnessed, it could usher in an engineering revolution—one in which self-healing engines, bridges, and airplanes could reverse damage caused by wear and tear, making them safer and longer-lasting.

The research team from Sandia National Laboratories and Texas A&M University described their findings today in the journal Nature.

"This was absolutely stunning to watch first-hand," said Sandia materials scientist Brad Boyce.

"What we have confirmed is that metals have their own intrinsic, natural ability to heal themselves, at least in the case of fatigue damage at the nanoscale," he told the Laboratory's press.

Repeated stress or motion causes microscopic cracks to form in machines' metal components. Over time, these cracks grow and spread until the whole device breaks, or in the scientific lingo, it fails.

The fissure Boyce and his team saw disappear was one of these tiny but consequential fractures—measured in nanometers.

"From solder joints in our electronic devices to our vehicle's engines to the bridges that we drive over, these structures often fail unpredictably due to cyclic loading that leads to crack initiation and eventual fracture," Boyce said. "When they do fail, we have to contend with replacement costs, lost time and, in some cases, even injuries or loss of life. The economic impact of these failures is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars every year for the U.S."

mhajicek writes:

https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2023/07/thermal-cloak-keeps-things-cool-when-its-hot-and-warm-in-the-cold/

Cui and colleagues made the outer layer out of silica fibers coated with flakes of hexagonal boron nitride, a material that is the thickness of just a few atoms. The silica fibers reflect visible light while the boron nitride reflects ultraviolet light, so the materials together reflect 96 percent of the sunlight that hits the fabric. The outer layer also absorbs heat from its surroundings and emits it as infrared radiation, which further lowers the temperature under the cloak.

[...] To demonstrate how the cloak could withstand extreme conditions of aerospace, the researchers heated it to 800°C and immersed it in liquid nitrogen. They also blasted it with acid and a blow torch to show. The material did not lose its performance.

[...] The team also made a full-size cloak and tested it outdoors in Shanghai by covering an electric car with it. During the summer, the cabin temperature of an uncovered car reached over 50°C at mid-day, but that of a cloak-covered car reached only about 23°C, 27°C lower than the uncovered car and almost 8°C lower than the temperature outside the car. During winter nights, the cloak kept the car almost 7°C warmer than the outside air.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The decline of science at the FDA has become unmanageable:

Before 1962, US federal law did not require pre-marketing proof of effectiveness for drugs. But senate hearings revealing widespread false advertising of drugs—along with the thalidomide safety disaster—spurred Congress into action. From then on, approval of a New Drug Application (NDA) by the US Food and Drug Administration required proof of "substantial evidence" of effectiveness. This proof was defined as results from "adequate and well-controlled investigations, including clinical investigations," with such evidence also required to advertise claims of safety and effectiveness. A National Academy of Sciences review underscored the need for these mandates, finding over 30% of pre-1962 marketed drugs to be ineffective.

The FDA's legally enforceable regulations detail what "substantial evidence" and "adequate and well-controlled investigations" mean in greater depth, supplemented by guidelines to industry which, although not legally binding, explain the FDA's current interpretation of drug manufacturers' legal obligations. However imperfect, the FDA's enforcement of these provisions assures prescribers, patients, and payers that effectiveness claims are based on science, not science fiction. A published FDA review showed efficacy deficiencies, in whole or in part, underlying initial rejection of 89 of 151 NDAs (59%), highlighting the continuing need for vigilance on this front.

However, as Peter Doshi reports in The BMJ, the FDA subverted the legal standard for effectiveness in its 2019 approval of Recarbrio, a fixed dose combination of imipenem, cilastatin, and relebactam. While the FDA has previously approved products with marginal evidence of effectiveness, approval of the Recarbrio NDA was shocking given its lack of substantial evidence of effectiveness and the complete absence of adequate and well controlled clinical investigations on the actual indication of interest.

[...] What accounts for this descent into cargo cult science? Much of the blame must go to the FDA's reliance on industry paid user fees. Over the past three decades the proportion of the FDA's annual drug budget made up of such fees has risen from less than 10% (fiscal year 1994) to more than two thirds (fiscal year 2023). In addition, the alluring "regulatory flexibilities" provided by the FDA Modernization Act of 1997 and the 21st Century Cures Act have become habit forming, enabling the FDA's leadership and managers to deny scientific reality by defining effectiveness downward. In its quest to avoid difficult choices and hard decisions the FDA has increasingly embraced non-inferiority trials (or vice versa), ignoring the serious regulatory, clinical, and ethical problems caused by their misuse.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/to-defeat-hackers-google-wants-employees-to-work-without-internet-access/

The Internet is dangerous, so what if you just didn't use it? That's the somewhat ironic recommendation Google, one of the world's largest Internet companies, is making to its employees. CNBC's Jennifer Elias reports that Google is "starting a new pilot program where some employees will be restricted to Internet-free desktop PCs" while they work. An internal memo seen by CNBC notes that "Googlers are frequent targets of attacks" by criminals, and a great way to combat that is to not be on the Internet.

Employees of major tech companies are a much richer target for criminals compared to normal people. Tech company employees have all sorts of access to sensitive data, and compromising a single employee could lead to exploiting sensitive infrastructure. Just last week, Microsoft was targeted by a Chinese espionage hacking group that somehow stole a cryptographic key to bypass Microsoft's authentication systems, giving it access to 25 organizations, including multiple government agencies.

Original Submission

ikanreed writes:

A team of Google engineers have proposed an Operating System level security mechanism to guarantee that only officially supported browsers running with no modifications can access certain websites. proposal, hosted on GitHub does not hide their desire to kill adblockers.

Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they're human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.

Considering Google's recent "security concerns" excuse for dramatically weakening AdBlock on chrome, this looks an attempt to kick their war on user choice to high gear.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/chasing-defamatory-hallucinations-ftc-opens-investigation-into-openai/

OpenAI, best known for its ChatGPT AI assistant, has come under scrutiny by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over allegations that it violated consumer protection laws, potentially putting personal data and reputations at risk, according to The Washington Post and Reuters.

As part of the investigation, the FTC sent a 20-page record request to OpenAI that focuses on the company's risk management strategies surrounding its AI models. The agency is investigating whether the company has engaged in deceptive or unfair practices, resulting in reputational harm to consumers.

The inquiry is also seeking to understand how OpenAI has addressed the potential of its products to generate false, misleading, or disparaging statements about real individuals. In the AI industry, these false generations are sometimes called "hallucinations" or "confabulations."

Original Submission