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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Intel today is entering the "AI PC" era with the launch of its new Core Ultra notebook chips. Originally codenamed "Meteor Lake," these are Intel's first processors to include an NPU, or neural processing unit, for accelerating AI tasks. The launch comes a week after AMD revealed its upcoming Ryzen 8040 hardware, its second batch of chips to include NPUs. While Intel is playing a bit of AI catch-up, the Core Ultra chips still sound like a solid step forward — at least according to the company's benchmarks.

Intel claims the Core Ultra chips use up to 79 percent less power than AMD's last-gen Ryzen 7840U while idling in Windows, and they're also up to 11 percent faster than AMD's hardware for multithreaded tasks. Intel didn't have the upcoming Ryzen 8040 chips to test, but it'll be interesting to see how they both compare next year.

[...] The Core Ultra family launches with the Ultra 7 165H at the high end, offering 16 cores/22 threads (6P cores, 8 E cores and 2 low-power E cores and a 5GHz Max Turbo frequency. A beefier Ultra 9 185H will arrive in the first quarter of 2024 with a 5.1GHz Max Turbo speed, slightly faster GPU and higher power draw (45 watts, compared to the Ultra 7's 28 watts). As usual, there's also a lower-power "U" series of chips for the thinnest machines.

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-neanderthals-morning-people.html

A new research paper finds that genetic material from Neanderthal ancestors may have contributed to the propensity of some people today to be "early risers," the sort of people who are more comfortable getting up and going to bed earlier.

The findings are published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.

All anatomically modern humans trace their origin to Africa around 300,000 years ago, where environmental factors shaped many of their biological features. Approximately 70,000 years ago, the ancestors of modern Eurasian humans began to migrate out to Eurasia, where they encountered diverse new environments, including higher latitudes with greater seasonal variation in daylight and temperature.

But other hominins, such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans, had lived in Eurasia for more than 400,000 years. These archaic hominins diverged from modern humans around 700,000 years ago, and as a result, our ancestors and archaic hominins evolved under different environmental conditions. This resulted in the accumulation of lineage-specific genetic variation and phenotypes. When humans came to Eurasia, they interbred with the archaic hominins on the continent, and this created the potential for humans to gain genetic variants already adapted to these new environments.

[...] The Eurasian environments where Neanderthals and Denisovans lived for several hundred thousand years are located at higher latitudes with more variable daylight times than the landscape where modern humans evolved before leaving Africa. Thus, the researchers explored whether there was genetic evidence for differences in the circadian clocks of Neanderthals and modern humans.

[...] This indicated that there were likely functional differences between in the circadian clocks in archaic hominins and modern humans. Since the ancestors of Eurasian modern humans and Neanderthals interbred, it was thus possible that some humans could have obtained circadian variants from Neanderthals.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/michael-cohens-lawyer-cited-three-fake-cases-in-possible-ai-fueled-screwup/

A lawyer representing Donald Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen filed a court brief that cited three cases that do not exist, according to a federal judge.

[...] "On November 29, 2023, David M. Schwartz, counsel of record for Defendant Michael Cohen, filed a motion for early termination of supervised release," US District Judge Jesse Furman wrote in an order to show cause yesterday. "In the letter brief, Mr. Cohen asserts that, '[a]s recently as 2022, there have been District Court decisions, affirmed by the Second Circuit Court, granting early termination of supervised release.'"

Schwartz's letter brief named "three such examples," citing United States v. Figueroa-Florez, United States v. Ortiz, and United States v. Amato. The brief provided case numbers, summaries, and ruling dates, but Furman concluded that the cases are fake.

[...] "If he is unable to do so, Mr. Schwartz shall, by the same date, show cause in writing why he should not be sanctioned pursuant to (1) Rule 11(b)(2) & (c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, (2) 28 U.S.C. § 1927, and (3) the inherent power of the Court for citing non-existent cases to the Court," Furman wrote.

Assuming he can't turn up those cases, Schwartz must also provide "a thorough explanation of how the motion came to cite cases that do not exist and what role, if any, Mr. Cohen played in drafting or reviewing the motion before it was filed."

[...] In Texas, one federal judge imposed a rule banning submissions written by artificial intelligence unless the AI's output is checked by a human. In another federal court in the District of Columbia, convicted rapper Prakazrel "Pras" Michel argued that he should get a new trial because his lawyer "used an experimental AI program to write" a "frivolous and ineffectual closing argument."

[...] In the Cohen case, Furman's order to show cause said that one of the three apparently bogus citations "refers to a page in the middle of a Fourth Circuit decision that has nothing to do with supervised release." A second "corresponds to a decision of the Board of Veterans Appeals," and the third "appears to correspond to nothing at all."

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AnonTechie writes:

A few theories on why American productivity is on the decline.

The key to a nation's long-run prosperity is increased productivity. If workers can produce more in an hour, day, or week then they can collectively work less or enjoy more of the fruits of their labor: More pickleball courts and more time to play pickleball.

With all the astonishing improvements that we see on our computers and smartphones, it might seem that productivity is about to explode, that our concern will soon be how to distribute income and manage leisure when machines do all the work that people used to do. The reality is the opposite. The annual rate of increase of productivity in the United States averaged nearly 3% between 1870 and 1970 but has since slowed to less than 1%, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That 2-percentage-point drop isn't much in the short run, but it is everything in the long run. If productivity continues to increase at 1% annual rate instead of 3%, workers will produce a third less output in 20 years, 50% less in 35 years.

A 2020 study published in the American Economic Review, the flagship journal of the American Economics Association, focused on research productivity because this is a key driver of overall productivity improvements.

They looked at specific industries and concluded that

Our robust finding is that research productivity is falling sharply everywhere we look. Taking the US aggregate number as representative, research productivity falls in half every 13 years: ideas are getting harder and harder to find. Put differently, just to sustain constant growth in GDP per person, the United States must double the amount of research effort every 13 years to offset the increased difficulty of finding new ideas.

The authors don't offer a compelling explanation for the drop in research productivity. We will suggest several possibilities. The title of the article, "Are Ideas Harder to Find?," suggests that productive ideas are increasingly scarce and illusive—that the low-ranking fruit have been harvested.

What are your views on this ??

Fast Company

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/dropbox-spooks-users-by-sending-data-to-openai-for-ai-search-features/

On Wednesday, news quickly spread on social media about a new enabled-by-default Dropbox setting that shares Dropbox data with OpenAI for an experimental AI-powered search feature, but Dropbox says data is only shared if the feature is actively being used. Dropbox says that user data shared with third-party AI partners isn't used to train AI models and is deleted within 30 days.

Even with assurances of data privacy laid out by Dropbox on an AI privacy FAQ page, the discovery that the setting had been enabled by default upset some Dropbox users. The setting was first noticed by writer Winifred Burton, who shared information about the Third-party AI setting through Bluesky on Tuesday, and frequent AI critic Karla Ortiz shared more information about it on X.

[...] In a statement to Ars Technica, a Dropbox representative said, "The third-party AI toggle is only turned on to give all eligible customers the opportunity to view our new AI features and functionality, like Dropbox AI. It does not enable customers to use these features without notice. Any features that use third-party AI offer disclosure of third-party use, and link to settings that they can manage. Only after a customer sees the third-party AI transparency banner and chooses to proceed with asking a question about a file, will that file be sent to a third-party to generate answers. Our customers are still in control of when and how they use these features."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

One important tool in this work is the LLL algorithm, named after the researchers who published it in 1982 — Arjen Lenstra, Hendrik Lenstra Jr. and László Lovász. LLL, along with its many descendants, can break cryptographic schemes in some cases; studying how they behave helps researchers design systems that are less vulnerable to attack. And the algorithm's talents stretch beyond cryptography: It's also a useful tool in advanced mathematical arenas such as computational number theory.

Over the years, researchers have honed variants of LLL to make the approach more practical — but only up to a point. Now, a pair of cryptographers have built a new LLL-style algorithm with a significant boost in efficiency. The new technique, which won the Best Paper award at the 2023 International Cryptology Conference, widens the range of scenarios in which computer scientists and mathematicians can feasibly use LLL-like approaches.

"It was really exciting," said Chris Peikert, a cryptographer at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the paper. The tool has been the focus of study for decades, he said. "It's always nice when a target that has been worked on for so long ... shows that there's still surprises to be found."

[...] The new technique has already started to prove useful. Aurel Page, a mathematician with the French national research institute Inria, said that he and his team have put an adaptation of the algorithm to work on some computational number theory tasks.

LLL-style algorithms can also play a role in research related to lattice-based cryptography systems designed to remain secure even in a future with powerful quantum computers. They don't pose a threat to such systems, since taking them down requires finding shorter vectors than these algorithms can achieve. But the best attacks researchers know of use an LLL-style algorithm as a "basic building block," said Wessel van Woerden, a cryptographer at the University of Bordeaux. In practical experiments to study these attacks, that building block can slow everything down. Using the new tool, researchers may be able to expand the range of experiments they can run on the attack algorithms, offering a clearer picture of how they perform.

The new paper mentioned:
Ryan, K., Heninger, N. (2023). Fast Practical Lattice Reduction Through Iterated Compression. In: Handschuh, H., Lysyanskaya, A. (eds) Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2023. CRYPTO 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14083. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38548-3_1

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/12/netflix-finally-reveals-viewing-data-across-its-entire-catalog/

Netflix, the streaming service that has been long criticized for a lack of transparency about how shows and films perform on its platform, will begin publishing a “comprehensive deep dive” into what its subscribers are watching twice a year.

Its first report, released on Tuesday, provided viewer data on more than 18,000 titles, representing a total of nearly 100 billion hours viewed, Netflix said. The Night Agent, a political thriller, was the most watched show on Netflix globally in the first half of 2023, with 812 million hours.

[...] “In the early days, it wasn’t really in our interest to be that transparent because we were building a new business and we needed room to learn. But we also didn’t want to provide road maps to future competitors.”

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taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/live-longer-calorie-restriction/

Scientists fed fruit flies a diet to make them extra plump. In their old age, the researchers put them on a diet and found remarkable results. If the findings transfer to humans, it might mean we can improve our health at any age by cutting calories.

While fruit flies might not seem like the closest human relatives, the diminutive insects actually share about 75% of our DNA, so they are frequently used in scientific studies. They also share a fair amount of the same metabolic pathways as humans, so studies relating to diet can be particularly useful for findings that might apply to human health.

For this go around, researchers at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine put a batch of male fruit flies on a high calorie diet to cause them to become obese. They also restricted the calorie intake of a different group of flies. The calorie-restricted flies were able to live to a maximum of 120 days, which is relatively old for the flies. The fat flies on the high-calorie diet only lived, on average, less than 80 days.

But what really surprised the researchers is that switching diets, even later in life, was able to extend the flies' lifespans. When young flies were switched from a high-calorie to a low-calorie diet at 20 days, they lived almost as long as the flies that had spent their whole lives eating less. Even more notably, when the fat flies were switched to a low-calorie diet at 50 or 60 days – a point at which most of their plump cohorts had already died – the researchers saw extended lifespans and improved metabolisms.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Google is about to launch its grand plan to block third-party cookies in Chrome that many websites use to track your activity across the web for profit.

Starting on January 4th, Google will start testing its new Tracking Protection feature that will eventually restrict website access to third-party cookies by default. It will come to a very small subset of Chrome users at the start, specifically to one percent of users globally. Afterward, Google plans to phase out the use of third-party cookies for all users in the second half of 2024.

[...] Google’s approach to cookie-free advertising sounds helpful to both privacy-focused users and the overall advertiser business in comparison to other web browsers that take more stone-walled approaches to block cross-site tracking. However, Google’s competitors and privacy advocates aren’t fully convinced about its cookie-replacing tech.

Meanwhile, regulators like the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is keeping an eye on Google’s new Tracking Protection to ensure it doesn’t give the company an unfair advantage in selling its own ads. With that in mind, Google says it’s hedging that H2 2024 target for turning the feature on globally in case it needs time to address “any remaining competition concerns.”

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA's veteran Voyager 1 spacecraft has stopped transmitting engineering and science data back to Earth.

The issue appears to be with the Flight Data System (FDS), which is not communicating correctly with one of the probe's subsystems - the Telemetry Modulation Unit (TMU).

Rather than useful data, the TMU is simply transmitting a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes as if it were "stuck," according to NASA.

The FDS is responsible for collecting data from Voyager 1's science instruments as well as on the general health of the spacecraft. This is all packaged up and sent back to Earth by the TMU. Having worked through the possibilities, the Voyager team reckons the issue lies with the FDS.

"This past weekend the team tried to restart the FDS and return it to the state it was in before the issue began, but the spacecraft still isn't returning useable [sic] data," NASA says.

Engineers face multiple challenges. First, the Voyagers are famously old – dealing with their quirks involves poring through decades-old documents. Commands sent to the probes must be meticulously verified to prevent unintended consequences.

And then there is the sheer amount of time it takes to communicate with the Voyagers. A command from mission control on Earth will take more than 22 hours to reach Voyager 1. It can, therefore, take 45 hours to determine whether a given instruction worked as expected.

NASA reckons it will be several weeks of work for engineers to devise a new plan to deal with the problem.

Voyager 1 suffered a telemetry glitch in 2022 that resulted in garbled data on the probe's attitude being sent back to Earth. That issue was resolved by switching to a different computer. However, in that instance, Voyager 1 continued returning science data. The latest problem has stopped that.

The next time you find yourself having to diagnose and fix a problem remotely, remember that it could always be worse, even if sometimes it feels as though that misbehaving server is also 15 billion(*) miles away.

Given the limit imposed by the speed of light, a signal sent to Voyager 1 and immediately returned takes more than 16.6 hours. That's more than 2/3 of a *day*!

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Tom's Hardware is reporting that YouTube uses lower quality options on browsers running on Arm-based systems and that misreporting the browser as running on an x86 CPU appears to be a work around.

Linux developer Hector Martin has discovered that YouTube is "deliberately crippling Firefox on Asahi Linux." Martin, also known by the handle Marcan, says YouTube downgrades the video quality and resolutions served to Firefox users on Macs with Arm-based systems, at least when they're not running MacOS. This behavior is particularly galling as Arm-devices can be very powerful in 2023. Asahi Linux, for example, is a project responsible for porting “a polished Linux experience” to Apple Silicon (Arm CPU architecture) Macs.

Marcan confirmed his YouTube downgrade on Arm hunch by changing the browser user agent (UA) and doing some A/B testing. After changing the Firefox UA parameters from ‘aarch64’ to ‘x86_64’ he says "suddenly you get 4K and everything!"

Previously:
(2023) Youtube Is Reportedly Slowing Down Videos for Firefox Users

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Elon Musk yesterday appealed to the Supreme Court in a last-ditch effort to terminate his settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk has claimed he was coerced into the deal with the SEC and that it violates his free speech rights, but the settlement has been upheld by every court that's reviewed it so far.

In his petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, Musk said the SEC settlement forced him to "waive his First Amendment rights to speak on matters ranging far beyond the charged violations."

[...] Musk told the Supreme Court that the need to get pre-approval for tweets "is a quintessential prior restraint that the law forbids."

In the settlement, "the SEC demanded that Mr. Musk refrain indefinitely from making any public statements on a wide range of topics unless he first received approval from a securities lawyer," Musk's petition said. "Only months later, the SEC sought to hold Mr. Musk in contempt of court on the basis that Mr. Musk allegedly had not obtained such approval for a post on Twitter (now X). In effect, the SEC sought contempt sanctions—up to and including imprisonment—for Mr. Musk's exercise of his First Amendment rights."

In April 2022, Musk's attempt to get out of the settlement was rejected by a US District Court judge. Musk appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, but a three-judge panel unanimously ruled against him in May 2023. Musk asked the appeals court for an en banc rehearing in front of all the court's judges, but that request was denied in July, leaving the Supreme Court as his only remaining option.

upstart writes:

Four years after Tang Mingfang called out the injustices he witnessed at a Foxconn factory in China, nothing has changed — except for him:

Early each summer, the bus began to fill with teenagers. Tang Mingfang, a 40-year-old office manager, watched as his shuttle from the workers' dormitories to Foxconn Hengyang, an Amazon supplier factory in southern China, grew more crowded with kids brought in to assemble Kindle ebooks and Echo speakers for Christmas. By the peak of the production cycle, there were so many that Tang was unable to squeeze on to the bus. Sent by their vocational schools, the students arrived in their hundreds, as part of an arrangement with Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant that operates the plant.

An exclusive assembler of many Apple and Amazon products, Foxconn is China's biggest private employer, with more than 700,000 workers. But during Chinese factories' busiest periods, it's common to see students from age 16 being bussed in to meet the higher demand for products. Once they reached the Hengyang factory, their task was to put together electronic devices often for up to 10 hours per day. Not that the students had much choice. If they said no, their teachers could refuse to let them graduate.

Tang knew it was illegal for students to work overtime or nights. It also seemed unfair. While his generation of graduates had grown up expecting formal contracts for skilled work, these young students were getting a raw deal. Subjected to the intense discipline of the assembly line, their work was limited to mindlessly repeating the same minuscule movements every few seconds. And he disliked the harsh way the children were treated by the teachers who were responsible for them at the factory. A short, serious figure with youthfully round cheeks, Tang uses a single phrase to describe himself: "well behaved". So, at first, he kept his reservations about what was going on private.

owl writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/q-a-with-co-creator-of-the-6502-processor

Few people have seen their handiwork influence the world more than Bill Mensch. He helped create the legendary 8-bit 6502 microprocessor, launched in 1975, which was the heart of groundbreaking systems including the Atari 2600,Apple II, and Commodore 64. Mensch also created the VIA 65C22 input/output chip—noted for its rich features and which was crucial to the 6502's overall popularity—and the second-generation 65C816, a 16-bit processor that powered machines such as the Apple IIGS, and theSuper Nintendo console.

Many of the 65x series of chips are still in production. The processors and their variants are used as microcontrollers in commercial products, and they remain popular among hobbyists who build home-brewed computers. The surge of interest inretrocomputing has led to folks once again swapping tips on how to write polished games using the 6502 assembly code, with new titles being released for the Atari, BBC Micro, and other machines.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://www.science.org/content/article/living-skin-protecting-great-wall-china-erosion

The Great Wall of China used to be much greater. What stands today is only a fraction of the expansive fortifications built on the country's northern borders starting more than 2000 years ago and then eroded by time. But many sections of the remaining walls seem to be getting preservation help from an unlikely source: thin layers of bacteria, moss, lichen, and other organisms known as biocrusts, which grow on the surface of soils.

A study published today in Science Advances finds that these so-called "living skins" have likely protected parts of the Great Wall from wind, rain, and other corrosive forces. And with advances in technology and research, scientists might eventually propagate new biocrusts to spare the wall from further degradation.

The work is "innovative and creative," says Nichole Barger, an ecologist at the Nature Conservancy who was not involved in the new research. She notes it's not necessarily surprising, however, given the growing recognition of the protective effects of biocrusts: These webs of growth are known to help stabilize dryland ecosystems and prevent soil erosion.

Many of the Great Wall's most well-known and visited sections are made of stone or brick, but other parts were built out of soil compacted by workers, often called rammed earth. Over time, this material can break down as rain seeps in, wind blows the soil away, salt crystals form inside, and temperatures fluctuate.

But this compacted soil, much like the natural soils surrounding it, can also become home to biocrusts. These layers of growth have been estimated to cover some 12% of the planet's land surface, and are concentrated in regions with drier climates, including northern China. They come in a variety of forms, from thin networks of bacteria mere millimeters thick to denser layers of moss and lichen up to a few centimeters in height.
...
The researchers suggest these properties and others linked to biocrusts protect the Great Wall from degradation in a few ways, including by reducing wind erosion, preventing water and salt from seeping in, and increasing the overall stability of the rammed earth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, thicker, moss-dominated biocrusts were generally more protective than thinner ones dominated by cyanobacteria.

Journal Reference:
Yousong Cao et al., Biocrusts protect the Great Wall of China from erosion, Sci. Adv., 8 Dec 2023, Vol 9, Issue 49 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk5892

Original Submission