SoylentNews

Freeman writes:

Elon Musk's X ad revenue reportedly fell $1.5B this year amid boycotts

It's hard to know exactly how dire the financial situation is at Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter). However, insider sources recently revealed to Bloomberg that the social media platform expects to end 2023 with "roughly" $2.5 billion in advertising revenue.

That's "a significant slump from prior years," sources said. It's also about half a billion short of the $3 billion that X executives expected to make in ad sales in 2023, one source said.

Last year, Twitter raked in more than $1 billion in ad revenue per quarter, sources said. But in each of the first three quarters of 2023, X only managed to generate "a little more than $600 million" in ad revenue.

[...] After Musk boosted an antisemitic post on X, he apologized, but he never removed his controversial post and continued antagonizing advertisers that he claimed were "going to kill the company."

Among the major brands pausing advertising on X is Disney, which seems to have particularly offended Musk. He's spent the past week targeting Disney CEO Bob Iger in a series of X posts, calling out Disney for boycotting X. Musk appears particularly frustrated that Disney is advertising on Meta platforms after New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a lawsuit alleging that Facebook and Instagram are "prime locations for predators to trade child pornography and solicit minors for sex."

Original Submission

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Wednesday, December 20th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.

Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance

The community, welcome to observe and participate, is encouraged to attend the meeting.

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/12/386-xor-circuits.html

Intel's 386 processor (1985) was an important advance in the x86 architecture, not only moving to a 32-bit processor but also switching to a CMOS implementation. I've been reverse-engineering parts of the 386 chip and came across two interesting and completely different circuits that the 386 uses to implement an XOR gate: one uses standard-cell logic while the other uses pass-transistor logic. In this article, I take a look at those circuits.

[...] Parts of the 386 were implemented with standard-cell logic. The idea of standard-cell logic is to build circuitry out of standardized building blocks that can be wired by a computer program. In earlier processors such as the 8086, each transistor was carefully positioned by hand to create a chip layout that was as dense as possible. This was a tedious, error-prone process since the transistors were fit together like puzzle pieces. Standard-cell logic is more like building with LEGO. Each gate is implemented as a standardized block and the blocks are arranged in rows, as shown below. The space between the rows holds the wiring that connects the blocks.

[...] Some parts of the 386 implement XOR gates completely differently, using pass transistor logic. The idea of pass transistor logic is to use transistors as switches that pass inputs through to the output, rather than using transistors as switches to pull the output high or low. The pass transistor XOR circuit uses 8 transistors, compared with 10 for the previous circuit.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

BC psychologists probe the roots of truth judgments in the 'post-truth' era:

Putting truth to the test in the "post-truth" era, Boston College psychologists conducted experiments that show when Americans decide whether a claim of fact should qualify as true or false, they consider the intentions of the information source, the team reported recently in Nature's Scientific Reports.

That confidence is based on what individuals think the source is trying to do – in this case either informing or deceiving their audience.

"Even when people know precisely how accurate or inaccurate a claim of fact is, whether they consider that claim to be true or false hinges on the intentions they attribute to the claim's information source," said Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Liane Young, an author of the report. "In other words, the intentions of information sources sway people's judgments about what information should qualify as true."

Lead author Isaac Handley-Miner, a PhD student and researcher in Young's Morality Lab, said the so-called post-truth era has revealed vigorous disagreement over the truth of claims of fact — even for claims that are easy to verify.

"That disagreement has alarmed our society," said Handley-Miner. "After all, it's often assumed that the labels 'true' and 'false' should correspond to the objective accuracy of a claim. But is objective accuracy actually the only criterion people consider when deciding what should qualify as true or false? Or, even when people know how objectively accurate a given claim of fact is, might they be sensitive to features of the social context—such as the intentions of the information source? We set out to test whether the intentions of information sources affect whether people consider a claim of fact to be true or false even when they have access to the ground truth."

[...] The findings suggest that, even if people have access to the same set of facts, they might disagree about the truth of claims if they attribute discrepant intentions to information sources.

The results demonstrated that people are not merely sensitive to the objective accuracy of claims of fact when classifying them as true or false. While this study focused on the intent of the information source, Young and Handley-Miner say intent is probably not the only other feature people use to evaluate truth.

Journal Reference:
Handley-Miner, I.J., Pope, M., Atkins, R.K. et al. The intentions of information sources can affect what information people think qualifies as true. Sci Rep 13, 7718 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-34806-4

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA donates Ingenuity Mars Helicopter prototype to Smithsonian:

The Smithsonian would love to display the first vehicle to achieve powered flight on another world, but with NASA's Ingenuity helicopter still busy setting records on Mars, the Washington, D.C. institution has accepted the next best thing.

Officials from NASA and the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum marked the agency's donation of the aerial prototype for Ingenuity into the museum's collection at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia on Friday (Dec. 15). The full-scale prototype was the first to demonstrate that an aircraft could fly in the atmosphere of another planet during tests performed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The prototype's first free flight in a simulated Mars environment gave NASA the confidence to commit to sending Ingenuity to Mars. The helicopter and its companion Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-reveals-secret-sites-america-migrating.html

Every year, billions of birds migrate thousands of miles from their summer breeding ranges to their warmer wintering ranges and back. However, the question of where these birds stop to rest and refuel along the way has long stumped ornithologists.

Princeton Ph.D. student Fengyi Guo and her colleagues from Princeton and the University of Delaware address this question in a newly published paper by using weather radar imagery to map the birds' migratory stopover sites in North America.

Using weather surveillance radar to compute and compare bird movement patterns across five years of spring and fall migrations, Guo and her team pinpointed over 2.4 million hectares of land as key stopover hotspots for land birds across the eastern United States.

[...] The radar imagery showed that stopover hotspots along the eastern U.S. consist primarily of deciduous forests, including forest fragments in broadly deforested regions. These hotspots serve as crucial pitstops for large numbers of land birds each year. Protecting these sites helps to ensure the long-term viability of all the bird species that sojourn at these sites.

However, only half of the currently protected hotspots are free from any form of extractive resource use, and two-thirds of all identified hotspots lack any formal protection at all. Guo also found substantial seasonal differences in where hotspots were located.

upstart writes:

How Police Have Undermined the Promise of Body Cameras:

RepublishCo-published with The New York Times Magazine

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When Barbara and Belvett Richards learned that the police had killed their son, they couldn't understand it. How, on that September day in 2017, did their youngest child come to be shot in his own apartment by officers from the New York Police Department?

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they're published.

When Barbara and Belvett Richards learned that the police had killed their son, they couldn't understand it. How, on that September day in 2017, did their youngest child come to be shot in his own apartment by officers from the New York Police Department?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Vaccines delivered through the nose or mouth should help stop infection where it begins:

The federal government is working to speed things along with an injection of cash through Project NextGen, a $5 billion effort to usher new and improved covid vaccines to market. In October, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that nearly $20 million would go to two companies developing mucosal vaccines—Codagenix and CastleVax. That money will help the companies gear up for studies to test how well their vaccines work to prevent symptomatic infections.

Codagenix's candidate, a nasal vaccine called CoviLiv, is already part of a phase 3 global efficacy trial coordinated by the World Health Organization. And in October, the company reported results from a safety study in adults in the UK who had never been vaccinated for covid before. The nasal mist prompted robust immunity, at least as measured by markers in the blood. But evidence of an immune response in the blood doesn't necessarily indicate an immune response in the mucosal lining of the airways. Or, as one physician puts it, "just like the 'far, dark side of the Moon', which is invisible from the earth, the mucosal response to pathogens is a far, dark side of immunity that is poorly or not visible from the peripheral blood and more complicated to probe than systemic immunity."

What's the best way to elicit mucosal immunity?

TBD. Different groups are trying a variety of strategies. The goal is to induce immunity in the airways that is robust, broad, and durable. But which strategy will succeed is a bit of a question mark at the moment. Mucosal vaccines fall into a few categories depending on how they're administered and the platform they use. Some are sprays that are squirted into the nose (CovLiv, for example). Others are meant to be inhaled into the lungs (such as one developed by CanSinBIO in China).

Sometimes these two routes of administration get lumped together, but they actually are very different, says Mangalakumari Jeyanathan, a researcher at McMaster University and coauthor of an editorial that accompanies the new inhalable-vaccine paper. With a nasal vaccine, the contents go into the nasal cavity. But Jeyanathan thinks inhaled vaccines, which go deep into the lungs, are likely to work better. Her team's research suggests that nasal vaccines induce immune responses only in the upper respiratory tract, not in the lower respiratory tract. That means, she says, that if the vaccine doesn't prevent infection, the lungs are still vulnerable, and "we really need the immune responses to prevent any sort of serious damage to the lung."

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Public Domain Day 2024 is coming up in a few weeks. The Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a briefing document, Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle, about what happens when the earlier versions of Mickey Mouse finally elevate to the public domain at the start of 2024. Included is a Venn diagram of what you can and can't work with.

Steamboat Willie and the characters it depicts – which include both Mickey and Minnie Mouse – will be in the public domain. As indicated in the green circle, this means that anyone can share, adapt, or remix that material. You can start your creative engines too—full steam ahead! You could take a page out of the Winnie-the-Pooh: the Deforested Edition playbook and create “Steamboat Willie: the Climate Change Edition,” in which Mickey’s boat is grounded in a dry riverbed. You could create a feminist remake with Minnie Mouse as the central figure. You could reimagine Mickey and Minnie dedicating themselves to animal welfare. (The animals in Steamboat Willie are contorted rather uncomfortably into musical instruments. PETA would not approve.)

You can do all of this and more, so long as you steer clear of the subsisting rights indicated by the orange circles, namely:

• Use the original versions of Mickey and Minnie Mouse from 1928, without copyrightable elements of later iterations (though not every later iteration will be copyrightable, as I explain below) and

• Do not confuse consumers into thinking that your creation is produced or sponsored by Disney as a matter of trademark law. One way to help ensure that your audience is not confused is to make the actual source of the work – you or your company – clear on the title screen or cover, along with a prominent disclaimer indicating that your work was not produced, endorsed, licensed, or approved by Disney.

So, is January 1, 2024 doomsday for Disney? No. Disney still retains copyright over newer iterations of Mickey such as the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” Mickey from Fantasia (1940) as well as trademarks over Mickey as a brand identifier. People will still go to its theme parks, pay to see its movies, buy its merchandise. Its brand identity will remain intact.

In sum, yes, you can use Mickey in new creative works. There are some more complex peripheral legal issues, but here is your guide through them.

Cory Doctorow has an analysis of this upcoming milestone event in a recent post on his blog.

Previously:
(2023) What Happens When 'Steamboat Willie' Hits The Public Domain In 2024?

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/12/turing-test-on-steroids-chatbot-arena-crowdsources-ratings-for-45-ai-models/

As the AI landscape has expanded to include dozens of distinct large language models (LLMs), debates over which model provides the "best" answers for any given prompt have also proliferated (Ars has even delved into these kinds of debates a few times in recent months). For those looking for a more rigorous way of comparing various models, the folks over at the Large Model Systems Organization (LMSys) have set up Chatbot Arena, a platform for generating Elo-style rankings for LLMs based on a crowdsourced blind-testing website.

[...] Since its public launch back in May, LMSys says it has gathered over 130,000 blind pairwise ratings across 45 different models (as of early December). Those numbers seem poised to increase quickly after a recent positive review from OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy that has already led to what LMSys describes as "a super stress test" for its servers.

[...] Chatbot Arena's latest public leaderboard update shows a few proprietary models easily beating out a wide range of open-source alternatives. OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 Turbo leads the pack by a wide margin, with only an older GPT-4 model ("0314," which was discontinued in June) coming anywhere close on the ratings scale. But even months-old, defunct versions of GPT-3.5 Turbo outrank the highest-rated open-source models available in Chatbot Arena's testbed.

[...] Chatbot Arena users may also naturally gravitate towards certain types of prompts that favor certain types of models.

[...] To balance out these potential human biases, LMSys has also developed a completely automated ranking system called LLM Judge

[...] LMSys's academic paper on the subject finds that "strong LLM judges like GPT-4 can match both controlled and crowdsourced human preferences well, achieving over 80% agreement, the same level of agreement between humans." From those results, the organization suggests that having LLMs rank other LLMs provides "a scalable and explainable way to approximate human preferences, which are otherwise very expensive to obtain."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A new report reveals that the world's largest publisher may be selling readers' intimate personal data to the highest bidder:

Three in ten Americans read digital books. Whether they're accessing online textbooks or checking out the latest bestselling e-book from the public library, the majority of these readers are subject to both the greed of Big Publishing and the priorities of Big Tech. In fact, Amazon's Kindle held 72% of the e-reader market in 2022. And if there's one thing we know about Big Tech companies like Amazon, their real product isn't the book. It's the user data.

Major publishers are giving Big Tech free rein to watch what you read and where, including books on sensitive topics, like if you check out a book on self care after an abortion. Worse, tech and publishing corporations are gobbling up data beyond your reading habits—today, there are no federal laws to stop them from surveilling people who read digital books across the entire internet.

Reader surveillance is a deeply intersectional threat, according to a congressional letter issued last week from a coalition of groups whose interests span civil rights, anti-surveillance, anti-book ban, racial justice, reproductive justice, LGBTQ+, immigrant, and antimonopoly. Our letter calls on federal lawmakers to investigate the harms of tech and publishing corporations' powerful hold over digital book access.

[...] In the age of artificial intelligence, the ability to analyze unfathomably detailed data on individual people, create reports and inferences about those people, and use the whole lot of it to train AI models is constantly improving. The incentives to exploit the data of readers are the strongest they have ever been.

Big Publishing is clearly seeing nothing but dollar signs as apps like Hoopla gobble up identity-linked data on readers—and so it would be natural to put our hope in public libraries, which view patron privacy as a fundamental right essential to a functioning democracy. In the human rights community, libraries' resistance against government surveillance under the Patriot Act is legendary.

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."

Original Submission

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

Original Submission