SoylentNews

owl writes:

https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-doom-guy-john-romero-abrams-press-143005383.html

Since its release in 1993, id Software's DOOM franchise has become one of modern gaming's most easily recognizable IPs. The series has sold more than 10 million copies to date and spawned myriad RPG spinoffs, film adaptations and even a couple tabletop board games. But the first game's debut turned out to be a close thing, id Software cofounder John Romero describes in an excerpt from his new book DOOM GUY: Life in First Person. With a mere month before DOOM was scheduled for release in December 1993, the iD team found itself still polishing and tweaking lead programmer John Carmack's novel peer-to-peer multiplayer architecture, ironing out level designs — at a time when the studio's programmers were also its QA team — and introducing everybody's favorite killer synonym to the gamer lexicon.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/us-rejects-ai-copyright-for-famous-state-fair-winning-midjourney-art/

On Tuesday, the US Copyright Office Review Board rejected copyright protection for an AI-generated artwork that won a Colorado State Fair art contest last year because it lacks human authorship required for registration, Reuters reports. The win, which was widely covered in the press at the time, ignited controversy over the ethics of AI-generated artwork.
[...]
In August 2022, Artist Jason M. Allen created the piece in question, titled Theatre D'opera Spatial, using the Midjourney image synthesis service, which was relatively new at the time. The image depicting a futuristic royal scene won top prize in the fair's "Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography" category.
[...]
This is not the first time the Copyright Office has rejected AI-generated artwork. In February, it revoked copyright protection for images made by artist Kris Kashtanova using Midjourney for the graphic novel Zarya of the Dawn but allowed copyrighting the human-arranged portions of the work.

Related:
AI Systems Can't Patent Inventions, US Federal Circuit Court Confirms

Original Submission

X is Suing California Over Social Media Content Moderation Law

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[SEE ALSO: X sues Calif. to avoid revealing how it makes "controversial" content decisions]

X, the social media company previously known as Twitter, is suing the state of California over a law that requires companies to disclose details about their content moderation practices. The law, known as AB 587, requires social media companies to publish information about their handling of hate speech, extremism, misinformation and other issues, as well as details about internal moderation processes.

Lawyers for X argue that the law is unconstitutional and will lead to censorship. It “has both the purpose and likely effect of pressuring companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally-protected speech,” the company wrote in the lawsuit. “The true intent of AB 587 is to pressure social media platforms to ‘eliminate’ certain constitutionally-protected content viewed by the State as problematic.”

[...] At the same time, AB 587's backers have said it’s necessary to increase the transparency of major platforms. “If @X has nothing to hide, then they should have no objection to this bill,” Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, who wrote AB 587, said in response to X’s lawsuit.

X Seems To Be Slipping Unlabeled Ads Into People's Feeds

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

X, the company formerly known as Twitter, may not be labeling its ads properly, putting it at risk of — once again — running afoul of the FTC. There have been numerous reports over the last several days of ads appearing in users’ timelines without being labeled as such, according to TechCrunch, which was first to report on the stealth ads.

[...] While the unlabeled ads have irked users, who may mistakenly believe the platform is showing posts from accounts they don’t follow in their following timeline, the issue also risks stirring up more regulatory trouble with the FTC. Nandini Jammi, co-founder of watchdog group Check My Ads, has been sharing examples on her Twitter account over the past couple days. The nonprofit group is tracking the issue and encouraging X users to report any examples they find.

It’s unclear if the unlabeled ads are the result of a bug or an intentional change by the company. X, which no longer has a functioning communications department, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/openai-admits-that-ai-writing-detectors-dont-work/

Last week, OpenAI published tips for educators in a promotional blog post that shows how some teachers are using ChatGPT as an educational aid, along with suggested prompts to get started. In a related FAQ, they also officially admit what we already know: AI writing detectors don't work, despite frequently being used to punish students with false positives.

In a section of the FAQ titled "Do AI detectors work?", OpenAI writes, "In short, no. While some (including OpenAI) have released tools that purport to detect AI-generated content, none of these have proven to reliably distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated content."

In July, we covered in depth why AI writing detectors such as GPTZero don't work, with experts calling them "mostly snake oil."
[...]
That same month, OpenAI discontinued its AI Classifier, which was an experimental tool designed to detect AI-written text. It had an abysmal 26 percent accuracy rate.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Thirty years after the first flight of a pioneering reusable rocket ship known as the Delta Clipper Experimental, or DC-X, a commercial venture is aiming to bring its legacy to life in the Seattle area. Even its name — New Frontier Aerospace — is a callback to the earlier days of America’s space effort, going back to John F. Kennedy references to outer space as part of his “New Frontier.”

“We’re sort of like the grandson of DC-X,” New Frontier’s co-founder and CEO, Bill “Burners” Bruner, said at the startup’s headquarters in Tukwila.

But he doesn’t see New Frontier as a space launch venture in the strictest sense of the word. “We’re not doing the squat, or cylindrical or conical shapes that we were talking about in those days,” he told GeekWire. “We’re proposing to combine the hypersonic research of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, and some of those geometries, with reusable rockets to attack the trillion-dollar air transportation market instead of the $11 billion space launch market.”

[...] The startup is one of several companies whose prospects are on the rise partly because of the U.S. military’s interest in hypersonic aerial vehicles that travel at more than five times the speed of sound. Like Stratolaunch — a company founded by the late Seattle billionaire Paul Allen more than a decade ago — New Frontier aims to help the Pentagon counter hypersonic threats from Russia and China.

Bruner said New Frontier is taking a step-by-step approach, starting with the Pathfinder, a hypersonic vehicle that could be used for weapons testing or suborbital point-to-point cargo transport. The company has been awarded $2.25 million to develop the craft’s 3D-printed Mjölnir rocket engine, which is named after the hammer wielded by Thor in Norse mythology (and in Marvel movies). In June, New Frontier received an additional $150,000 from NASA for Mjölnir development.

upstart writes:

Fresh analysis of data from the 1970s has revealed that, when hit by the morning sun each day, the base of the Apollo 17 lander "starts popping off":

When NASA astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of the Apollo 17 mission departed the lunar surface on December 14, 1972, they left a few things behind — including a US flag, a Moon buggy, and the lunar module's descent stage.

A new study by researchers from the California University of Technology has revealed that the latter regularly causes extra, tiny "moonquakes" which shake the lunar surface.

This finding comes, ironically, thanks to another thing Cernan and Schmitt left near their landing site — an array of four geophones used to conduct seismic experiments.

Reactivated between October 1976 and May 1977 for passive listening, these seismometers recorded thousands of subtle tremors on the Moon, the result of daily temperature variations.

Until now, however, the poor quality of the data had made a comprehensive analysis difficult — hiding the fact that some of the moonquakes were not quite what they initially seemed.

[...] In their study, geophysicist Professor Allen Husker of the California University of Technology and his colleagues used techniques not available in the seventies — like machine learning — to clean up the Apollo 17 passive seismic data and undertake a more robust analysis.

looorg writes:

https://www.thelocal.se/20230906/how-swedish-criminal-gangs-allegedly-launder-money-through-spotify

Spotify used to launder drug money?

On a series of articles gang members, criminals and investigators from the police tell how Spotify is used to launder drug money.

"I can say with 100 percent certainty that this goes on. I have been involved in it myself," SvD quoted one anonymous gang member as saying.

He said his gang began using the music streaming giant Spotify for money laundering in 2019, around the time Swedish gangster rap became popular in the country and started winning music awards.

"We have paid people who have done this for us systematically," he said.

Describing the process, he said the gangs would convert their dirty cash to bitcoin, then used the cryptocurrency to pay people who sold fake streams on Spotify, which is a Swedish company.

Spotify is feigning ignorance. They somehow missed that this has been going on for at least four years.

Do other entertainment services have the same problems in the modern digital world?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Young people are using social media more, and their mental health is suffering:

Researchers at Iowa State University found a simple intervention could help. During a two-week experiment with 230 college students, half were asked to limit their social media usage to 30 minutes a day and received automated, daily reminders. They scored significantly lower for anxiety, depression, loneliness and fear of missing out at the end of the experiment compared to the control group.

They also scored higher for "positive affect," which the researchers describe as "the tendency to experience positive emotions described with words such as 'excited' and 'proud.'" Essentially, they had a brighter outlook on life.

"It surprised me to find that participants' well-being did not only improve in one dimension but in all of them. I was excited to learn that such a simple intervention of sending a daily reminder can motivate people to change their behavior and improve their social media habits." says Ella Faulhaber, a Ph.D. student in human-computer interaction and lead author of the paper.

[...] Many of the participants in the ISU study commented that the first few days of cutting back were challenging. But after the initial push, one student felt more productive and in tune with life. Others shared that they were getting better sleep or spending more time with people in person.

[...] "We live in an age of anxiety. Lots of indicators show that anxiety, depression, loneliness are all getting worse, and that can make us feel helpless. But there are things we can do to manage our mental health and well-being," says Gentile.

Paying more attention to how much time we spend on social media and setting measurable goals can help.

See also: Just 15 Minutes of Solitude can do Wonders for Your Mood and Your Mind

Journal Reference:
Faulhaber, M. E., Lee, J. E., & Gentile, D. A. (2023). The Effect of Self-Monitoring Limited Social Media Use on Psychological Well-Being. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 4(2: Summer 2023). https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000111

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/judge-issues-legal-permaban-500k-judgment-against-serial-destiny-2-cheater/

Just over a year ago, Bungie went to court to try to stop a serial Destiny 2 cheater who had evaded multiple account bans and started publicly threatening Bungie employees. Now, that player has been ordered to pay $500,000 in copyright-based damages and cannot buy, play, or stream Bungie games in the future.

In a consent judgment that has apparently been agreed to by both sides of the lawsuit (as dug up by TorrentFreak), district court judge Richard Jones agrees with Bungie's claim that defendant Luca Leone's use of cheat software constitutes "copyright infringement" of Destiny 2.

[...] Leone also created new accounts to get around multiple ban attempts by Bungie and tried to "opt out" of the game's license agreement as a minor in an attempt to do a legal end run around Bungie's multiple account bans.

[...] While a judge dismissed one such case against cheat maker AimJunkies last year, Bungie has since been awarded $12 million, $13.5 million, $6.7 million, and $16.2 million in damages in four separate copyright-based judgments against cheat makers.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The crewless spacecraft has traveled 4.4 billion miles through space over the past seven years on a quest to visit a near-Earth asteroid. The robot reached its destination, Bennu, and collected gravel — perhaps about a cup's worth — in October 2020.

Now that the spacecraft is closing in on Earth, the team will attempt to bring that sample all the way home by dropping the capsule 63,000 miles above the planet — about one-third the distance from Earth to the moon. The ground target is just 250 square miles, in a high mountain desert of Utah.

"It's the equivalent of throwing a dart across the length of a basketball court and hitting the bulls-eye," said Rich Burns, NASA's project manager.

If it works, OSIRIS-Rex will be the first U.S. mission to return an asteroid sample.

[...] Not since the Apollo moon rocks, collected between 1969 and 1972, has NASA brought back space souvenirs of this magnitude. Japan's space agency, JAXA, on the other hand, has retrieved smaller asteroid samples twice already, from Itokawa and Ryugu.

[...] Bennu earned the nickname "the trickster asteroid" because it has baffled the team throughout the mission. Scientists believed that when the spacecraft touched down to collect the sample three years ago, it would encounter a solid surface. Instead, the asteroid responded to the spacecraft more like a fluid, or a child's ball pit.

[...] By probing a sample of Bennu, the team is poised to chip away at big questions, like how do organic materials originate, and why did life emerge on Earth? Scientists still don't fully grasp how to get from simple carbon molecules, like the natural gas methane, to complex ones, such as amino acids that make proteins and nucleic acid that makes up genetic material, Lauretta said.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Dennis Austin, co-creator of the ubiquitous if not quite universally-loved presentation software PowerPoint, is dead at 76. With Robert Gaskins, Austin developed the software for Forethought, which led Microsoft to buy the company so that it could include the app in its core Office suite. Though many know Austin's magnum opus from long and perhaps unnecessary workplace meetings, PowerPoint has its fans, including David Byrne:

There's a lot of criticism of PowerPoint" — for encouraging users to do things in a particular way and discouraging them from other things, such as putting more than seven bullet points on a slide, he acknowledged. "But if you can't edit it down to seven, maybe you should think about talking about something else." PowerPoint restricts users no more than any other communication platform, he asserted, including a pencil: "When you pick up a pencil you know what you're getting — you don't think, 'I wish this could write in a million colors.'"…

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Researchers have now applied machine learning (ML) to high-frequency neurophysiologic data to improve hit song prediction accuracy:

Every day, tens of thousands of songs are released. This constant stream of options makes it difficult for streaming services and radio stations to choose which songs to add to playlists. To find the ones that will resonate with a large audience, these services have used human listeners and artificial intelligence. This approach, however, lingering at a 50% accuracy rate, does not reliably predict if songs will become hits.

Now, researchers in the US have used a comprehensive machine learning technique applied to brain responses and were able to predict hit songs with 97% accuracy.

"By applying machine learning to neurophysiologic data, we could almost perfectly identify hit songs," said Paul Zak, a professor at Claremont Graduate University and senior author of the study published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. "That the neural activity of 33 people can predict if millions of others listened to new songs is quite amazing. Nothing close to this accuracy has ever been shown before."

Study participants were equipped with off-the-shelf sensors, listened to a set of 24 songs, and were asked about their preferences and some demographic data. During the experiment, the scientists measured participants' neurophysiologic responses to the songs. "The brain signals we've collected reflect activity of a brain network associated with mood and energy levels," Zak said. This allowed the researchers to predict market outcomes, including the number of streams of a song – based on the data of few.

[...] After data collection, the researchers used different statistical approaches to assess the predictive accuracy of neurophysiological variables. This allowed for direct comparison of the models. To improve predictive accuracy, they trained a ML model that tested different algorithms to arrive at the highest prediction outcomes.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Insufficient packaging capacity is to blame.

The chairman of TSMC admitted that the ongoing short supply of compute GPUs for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications is caused by constraints of its chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging capacity. This shortage is expected to persist for around 18 months due to rising demand for generative AI applicationsand relatively slow expansion of CoWoS capacity at TSMC.  

"It is not the shortage of AI chips, it is the shortage of our CoWoS capacity," said Mark Liu, the chairman of TSMC, in a conversation with Nikkei at Semicon Taiwan. "Currently, we cannot fulfill 100% of our customers' needs, but we try to support about 80%. We think this is a temporary phenomenon. After our expansion of [advanced chip packaging capacity], it should be alleviated in one and a half years."

TSMC is the producer of the majority of AI processors, including Nvidia's A100 and H100 compute GPUs that are integral to AI tools like ChatGPT and are predominantly used in AI data centers. These processors, just like solutions from other players like AMD, AWS, and Google, use HBM memory (which is essential for high bandwidth and proper functioning of extensive AI language models) and CoWoS packaging, which puts additional strain on TSMC's advanced packaging facilities.

Liu said that demand for CoWoS surged unexpectedly earlier this year, tripling year-over-year, leading to the current supply constraints. TSMC recognizes that demand for generative AI services is growing and so is demand for appropriate hardware, so it is speeding up expansion of CoWoS capacity to meet demand for compute GPUs as well as specialized AI accelerators and processors.

At present, the company is installing additional tools for CoWoS at its existing advanced packaging facilities, but this takes time and the company expects its CoWoS capacity to double only by the end of 2024.

TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

Arthur T Knackerbracket has also processed the following story:

Until TSMC can bring additional capacity online, Nvidia's H100 and older A100 – which power many popular generative AI models, such as GPT-4 – are at the heart of this shortage. However, it's not just Nvidia. AMD's upcoming Instinct MI300-series accelerators – which it showed off during its Datacenter and AI event in June – make extensive use of CoWoS packaging technology.

AMD's MI300A APU is currently sampling with customers and is slated to power Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's El Capitan system, while the MI300X GPU is due to start making its way into customers' hands in Q3.

We've reached out to AMD for comment on whether the shortage of CoWoS packaging capacity could impact availability of the chip and we'll let you know if we hear anything back.

It's worth noting that TSMC's CoWoS isn't the only packaging tech out there. Samsung, which is rumored to pick up some of the slack for the production of Nvidia GPUs, has I-Cube and H-Cube for 2.5D packaging and X-Cube for 3D packaging.

Intel, meanwhile, packages several of the chiplets used in its Ponte Vecchio GPU Max cards, but doesn't rely on CoWoS tech to stitch them together. Chipzilla has developed its own advanced packaging tech, which can work with chips from different fabs or process nodes. It's called embedded multi-die interconnect bridge (EMIB) for 2.5D packaging and Foveros for vertically stacking chiplets on top of one another.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Scientists testing coffee against plain caffeine found that plain caffeine only partially reproduces the effects of drinking a cup of coffee:

For many people, the day doesn't start until their coffee mug is empty. Coffee is often thought to make you feel more alert, so people drink it to wake themselves up and improve their efficiency. Portuguese scientists studied coffee-drinkers to understand whether that wakefulness effect is dependent on the properties of caffeine, or whether it's about the experience of drinking coffee.

"There is a common expectation that coffee increases alertness and psychomotor functioning," said Prof Nuno Sousa of the University of Minho, corresponding author of the study in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience and Field Chief Editor of the journal. "When you get to understand better the mechanisms underlying a biological phenomenon, you open pathways for exploring the factors that may modulate it and even the potential benefits of that mechanism."

[...] Because of the known neurochemical effects of drinking coffee, the scientists expected that the functional MRI scans would show that the people who drank coffee had higher integration of networks that are linked to the prefrontal cortex, associated with executive memory, and the default mode network, involved in introspection and self-reflection processes. They found that the connectivity of the default mode network was decreased both after drinking coffee and after taking caffeine, which indicates that consuming either caffeine or coffee made people more prepared to move from resting to working on tasks.

However, drinking coffee also increased the connectivity in the higher visual network and the right executive control network – parts of the brain which are involved in working memory, cognitive control, and goal-directed behavior. This didn't happen when participants only took caffeine. In other words, if you want to feel not just alert but ready to go, caffeine alone won't do – you need to experience that cup of coffee.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Sharon Daniels, 66, had lived in Antioch, California, since 1984.

But growing concerned about crime, she and her husband decided it was time to move away from the East Bay and its delta breezes to a more affordable, far-flung community in the San Joaquin Valley.

She and her husband, Anthony, saw ads for new developments in the city of Lathrop in San Joaquin County, where they could build a new home for the same price as buying an existing one in Antioch. The median home in Lathrop sold for $530,400 in June 2023, compared with $930,000 in Antioch's Contra Costa County, according to the California Association of Realtors.

[...] As with most communities in California, the stark difference in home prices between the Danielses' former and current counties of residence is inversely related to the climate: The hotter a region is, the more affordable housing is.

[...] A Times analysis showed a clear link between projected extreme heat and home prices in California: Counties with higher home prices are less likely to face dire heat projections, and vice versa.

[...] Part of the dynamic is explained by the fact that the state's most expensive counties are coastal, and thus less likely to be hit hardest by extreme heat, though other climate change-fueled dangers such as sea level rise are still of concern.

The most efficient places to grow are California's coastal cities, both in terms of lessening the environmental footprint of residents and limiting their exposure to heat, said Zack Subin, an associate research director for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley.

However, these cities are the least affordable places to build and live in the state.