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canopic jug writes:

The US Surgeon General has published his 2023 advisory on social control media and youth mental health [warning for PDF]. The report's scope is only on the health and mental health effects, not the weaponized nature of the phenomenon. The body of the report is 17 pages long and includes a call to action.

Extreme, inappropriate, and harmful content continues to be easily and widely accessible by children and adolescents. This can be spread through direct pushes, unwanted content exchanges, and algorithmic designs. In certain tragic cases, childhood deaths have been linked to suicide- and self-harm-related content and risk-taking challenges on social media platforms. This content may be especially risky for children and adolescents who are already experiencing mental health difficulties. Despite social media providing a sense of community for some, a systematic review of more than two dozen studies found that some social media platforms show live depictions of self-harm acts like partial asphyxiation, leading to seizures, and cutting, leading to significant bleeding. Further, these studies found that discussing or showing this content can normalize such behaviors, including through the formation of suicide pacts and posting of self-harm models for others to follow.

Social media may also perpetuate body dissatisfaction, disordered eating behaviors, social comparison, and low self-esteem, especially among adolescent girls. A synthesis of 20 studies demonstrated a significant relationship between social media use and body image concerns and eating disorders, with social comparison as a potential contributing factor. Social comparison driven by social media is associated with body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, and depressive symptoms. When asked about the impact of social media on their body image, nearly half (46%) of adolescents aged 13–17 said social media makes them feel worse, 40% said it makes them feel neither better nor worse, and only 14% said it makes them feel better.

Previously:
(2023) Seattle's Schools are Suing Tech Giants for Harming Young People's Mental Health
(2022) Leaked Documents Reveal Instagram Was Pushing Girls Towards Content That Harmed Mental Health
(2022) Social Media Break Improves Mental Health
(2021) Facebook Documents Show How Toxic Instagram is for Teens, Wall Street Journal Reports

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

When it is very windy, the grid cannot handle the extra power generated. Wind farms are paid to switch off and gas-powered stations are paid to fire up. The cost is passed on to consumers.

The government said major reforms will halve the time it takes to build energy networks to cope with extra wind power.

Energy regulator Ofgem announced new rules in November, which it said would speed up grid connections.

Most of the UK's offshore wind farms are in England - Dogger Bank off the coast of Yorkshire is the largest in the world. Meanwhile, around half of onshore wind farms are in Scotland but most electricity is used in south-east England.

Carbon Tracker said the main problem in getting electricity to where it is needed is a bottleneck in transmission between Scotland and England.

The practice of switching off wind farms and ramping up power stations is known as "wind curtailment" and the costs are passed on to consumers, it said.

[...] "The problem is, there are not enough cables. The logical solution would be to build more grid infrastructure," said Lorenzo Sani, analyst at Carbon Tracker.

"It's not even that expensive," he added, compared with mounting wind curtailment costs.

[...] However, historically it has taken between 10 and 15 years for new transmission cables to be approved.

[...] In November, the government set out a plan to reduce the time it takes to build new infrastructure from 14 to seven years, "speeding up grid connections, supporting thousands of jobs and reducing electricity bills for households across Great Britain", a spokesperson said.

Energy regulator Ofgem said there was a "long queue" of energy projects "which could generate almost 400GW of electricity - well in excess of what is needed to power the entire British energy system".

The watchdog said new rules "will allow stalled or speculative 'zombie' projects to be forced out of the queue, meaning viable projects can be connected quicker".

Mr Sani from Carbon Tracker said it was unclear how much difference these projects would make before 2030.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

AMD has finally launched its Instinct MI300X accelerators, a new generation of server GPUs designed to provide compelling performance levels for generative AI workloads and other high-performance computing (HPC) applications. MI300X is faster than H100, AMD said earlier this month, but Nvidia tried to refute the competitor's statements with new benchmarks released a couple of days ago.

Nvidia tested its H100 accelerators with TensorRT-LLM, an open-source library and SDK designed to efficiently accelerate generative AI algorithms. According to the GPU company, TensorRT-LLM was able to run 2x faster on H100 than on AMD's MI300X with proper optimizations.

AMD is now providing its own version of the story, refuting Nvidia's statements about H100 superiority. Nvidia used TensorRT-LLM on H100, instead of vLLM used in AMD benchmarks, while comparing performance of FP16 datatype on AMD Instinct MI300X to FP8 datatype on H100. Furthermore, Team Green inverted AMD's published performance data from relative latency numbers to absolute throughput.

AMD suggests that Nvidia tried to rig the game, while it is still busy identifying new paths to unlock performance and raw power on Instinct MI300 accelerators. The company provided the latest performance levels achieved by the Llama 70B chatbot model on MI300X, showing an even higher edge over Nvidia's H100.

By using the vLLM language model for both accelerators, MI300X was able to achieve 2.1x the performance of H100 thanks to the latest optimizations in AMD's software stack (ROCm). The company highlighted a 1.4x performance advantage over H100 (with equivalent datatype and library setup) earlier in December. vLLM was chosen because of its broad adoption within the community and the ability to run on both GPU architectures.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The technologies, policies, and commitments providing a glimmer of hope in an otherwise gloomy year:

It's been the hottest year on record, with January through November clocking in at 1.46 °C (2.62 °F) warmer on average than preindustrial temperatures. Meanwhile, emissions from fossil fuels hit a new high—36.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, 1.1% more than in 2022.

Scientists are loudly warning that the world is running out of time to avoid dangerous warming levels. The picture is grim. But if you know where to look, there are a few bright spots shining through the darkness.

[...] EVs are on track to make up 15.5% of automotive sales this year, according to BNEF. Between battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, this new growth means there are almost 41 million passenger EVs on the road. China has the largest share of EVs in the world, making up nearly a quarter of the global fleet.

[...] While many signs are positive, it's not all rosy for electric vehicles. Growth in sales slowed between 2022 and 2023, and changing demand has some automakers slowing production for models like the Ford F-150 Lightning. Charging infrastructure isn't available or reliable enough in most markets, a problem that has become one of the biggest barriers to EV adoption.

Cars are being sold at a record pace and road emissions are still going up, so EV sales need to accelerate to make a dent in transportation's climate impact. But EVs' progress so far seems to be an encouraging story of a new climate-friendly technology becoming a mainstream option. Let's hope it keeps going in 2024—all gas, no brakes.

janrinok writes:

Now Photoshop giant needs to cough up that $1B break-up fee:

Adobe has decided to abandon its $20 billion acquisition of Figma in a concession to regulatory pressure in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The two software makers said on Monday they had reached a joint decision to cancel the pending deal, which was announced in September, 2022.

"It’s not the outcome we had hoped for, but despite thousands of hours spent with regulators around the world detailing differences between our businesses, our products, and the markets we serve, we no longer see a path toward regulatory approval of the deal," said Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, in a statement.

Shantanu Narayen, chair and CEO of Adobe, offered a similar concession speech: "Adobe and Figma strongly disagree with the recent regulatory findings, but we believe it is in our respective best interests to move forward independently."

Doing so will cost Adobe $1 billion – that's the amount of the breakup fee due to Figma for Adobe's failure to complete the deal. Everyone knows Adobe is the home of Photoshop, Illustrator, and other tools; Figma, meanwhile, makes software primarily for planning and sketching out graphic designs in a collaborative way with others.

[...] The cancellation of the acquisition is one of the higher profile antitrust blows struck by regulators against Big Tech in several years of political jawboning on both sides of the Atlantic about the need to tame technology firms.

vux984 writes:

Never submitted a story before, but thought this was interesting, and it was the first I'd heard of it. I thought it was actually a pretty good idea.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/12/turquoise-taillights-tell-you-this-mercedes-is-driving-autonomously/

As some cars gain more autonomy, it's probably helpful if they have a way to signal their intentions to other road users. Concept cars have explored this idea for some time—we've seen demos of cars using their headlights to project crosswalks in front of pedestrians or using exterior panels to communicate to a cyclist that the car has seen them, or just emote to everyone nearby.

As is often the case when an idea goes from concept to reality, the result in practice is a little less futuristic. Mercedes says it picked turquoise for the marker lights in the headlight and taillight clusters as well as the side mirror because the color is differentiated enough from other colored lights that road users might encounter while driving; and human factor research points to turquoise as the optimal color for this application.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/19/business/mercedes-adds-new-light-color-blue-for-self-driving/index.html

All other driving assistance systems, including Tesla's so-called Full Self Driving and General Motor's Super Cruise, require the driver to pay attention to what's happening around the vehicle. Mercedes' Drive Pilot allows the driver to take their eyes off the road continuously until the system alerts the driver of a need to take over such as when traffic speeds up. In the meantime, drivers can surf the Internet or play games on the car's big center screen. (Sensors in the car ensure the driver does not fall asleep, though.)

The light blue color was selected because it's eye-catching and it won't be confused with anything else. It's not similar to the color of any other lights on a passenger car but it's also clearly different from the darker blue used by police and other emergency vehicles.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Law enforcement have long tapped users' location data hoarded by tech giants:

Google will soon allow users to store their location data on their devices rather than on Google's servers, effectively ending a long-running surveillance practice that allowed police and law enforcement to tap Google's vast banks of location data to identify potential criminals.

The use of so-called "geofence warrants" have exploded in recent years, in large part thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones coupled with hungry data companies like Google vacuuming up and storing huge amounts of its users' location data, which becomes obtainable by law enforcement requests.

Police can use geofence warrants (also known as reverse-location warrants) to demand that Google turn over information on which users' devices were in a particular geographic area at a certain point in time.

But critics say geofence warrants are unconstitutional and inherently overly broad, since these demands often also include the information of entirely innocent people who were nearby at a time when a crime was committed. Even the courts cannot agree on whether geofence warrants are legal, likely setting up an eventual challenge at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Google's announcement this week did not mention geofence warrants specifically, saying only that the move to store location data on their devices would give users' "more control" over their data. In reality, the move forces police to seek a search warrant to access that specific device instead, rather than asking Google for the data.

janrinok writes:

Most see these two as a winner-take-all, zero-sum contest:

In almost every discussion about RISC-V's position in the ecosystem, the instruction set architecture (ISA) is often seen as a direct competitor to Arm. Most people view the two ISAs as being engaged in a winner-take-all, zero-sum contest, where only one can prevail. However, we believe that, at least for the foreseeable future, the industry will witness a greater degree of mixing and matching. Both ISAs are likely to coexist side by side within increasingly heterogeneous chips.

Admittedly, the entire history of technology is against us on this one. Over the past 40 years, we have seen a recurring pattern: software ecosystems tend to consolidate around a single platform. No one wants to write the same software twice, and not just write but design, test, and debug. So, developers have generally followed their own paths to maximize profits, which, over time, leads to the dominance of a single platform.

However, this old truism is not entirely accurate... ISAs are not exactly software.

[...] Arm cores are largely fixed in their capabilities, whereas RISC-V cores are marketed as being very 'flexible' (though not entirely, but close enough for our discussion). By mixing and matching the two systems, chip designers can find more optimal paths for their needs.

This is not just theory; we have seen it in practice. Apple's A- and M-Series processors, as well as Google's TPUs, appear to incorporate both Arm and RISC-V cores. This trend is evident in many other chips as well.

[...] Will this remain the case forever? Ask anyone on either side, and they are quick to say no. Highlander rules apply, there can be only one. However, in practice, we are not so certain. Chips are changing, becoming more diverse and heterogeneous, as designers search for ways to cope with the slowing of Moore's Law. This has opened up the door to a rethinking of past rules. Therefore, we expect that for a long time to come, we will see both RISC-V and Arm sitting next to each other in many chips.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

North America's first people may have arrived by sea ice highway as early as 24,000 years ago:

One of the hottest debates in archaeology is how and when humans first arrived in North America. Archaeologists have traditionally argued that people walked through an ice-free corridor that briefly opened between ice sheets an estimated 13,000 years ago.

But a growing number of archaeological and genetic finds—including human footprints in New Mexico dated to around 23,000 years old—suggests that people made their way onto the continent much earlier. These early Americans likely traveled along the Pacific coastline from Beringia, the land bridge between Asia and North America that emerged during the last glacial maximum when ice sheets bound up large amounts of water causing sea levels to fall.

Now, in research to be presented Friday, 15 December at the American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting (AGU23) in San Franciso, paleoclimate reconstructions of the Pacific Northwest hint that sea ice may have been one way for people to move farther south.

[...] To get a fuller picture of ocean conditions during these crucial windows of human migration, Summer Praetorius of the US Geological Survey and her colleagues looked at climate proxies in ocean sediment from the coast. Most of the data came from tiny, fossilized plankton. The abundance and chemistry of these organisms help reconstruct ocean temperatures, salinity, and sea ice cover.

[...] Praetorious' team used climate models and found that ocean currents were more than twice the strength they are today during the height of the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago due to glacial winds and lower sea levels. While not impossible to paddle against, these conditions would have made traveling by boat very difficult, Praetorius said.

However, the records also showed that much of the area was home to winter sea ice until around 15,000 years ago. As a cold-adapted people, "rather than having to paddle against this horrible glacial current, maybe they were using the sea ice as a platform," Praetorius said.

https://decrypt.co/208614/chinese-tech-giant-alibaba-shows-off-ai-that-can-animate-anyone

If you can't dance, Animate Anyone can make it happen with just one still photo.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/04/animate-anyone-heralds-the-approach-of-full-motion-deepfakes/

As if still-image deepfakes aren't bad enough, we may soon have to contend with generated videos of anyone who dares to put a photo of themselves online: with Animate Anyone, bad actors can puppeteer people better than ever.

[...] The new generative video technique was developed by researchers at Alibaba Group's Institute for Intelligent Computing. It's a big step forward from previous image-to-video systems like DisCo and DreamPose, which were impressive all the way back in summer but are now ancient history.

A video showing many different examples is provided.

Original Submission

kreuzfeld writes:

Help please: here in Lawrence, Kansas the public school district has recently started using Gaggle," a system for monitoring all digital documents and communications created by students on school-provided devices. Unsurprisingly, the system inundates employees with false 'alerts' but the district nonetheless hails this pervasive, dystopic surveillance system as a great success. What useful advice can readers here offer re. successful methods to get public officials to backtrack from a policy so corrosive to liberty, trust, and digital freedoms?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

I came across an interesting blog post that suggests the Web is splitting into two with an offshoot made up of a commercial dystopia that is increasingly viewed as the "normal web," leaving an insurmountable chasm developing between the two. Regular readers of SN will appreciate the points made, but do you agree with them, particularly where you'll eventually need to pick one side or the other?

https://ploum.net/2023-08-01-splitting-the-web.html

There's an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web. A web which has only one objective: making us click. It measures clicks, optimises clicks, generates clicks. It gathers as much information as it could about us and spams every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications, vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent titles.

A web which boils down to Idiocracy in a Blade Runner landscape, a complete cyberpunk dystopia.

Then there's the tech-savvy web. People who install adblockers or alternative browsers. People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.

Between those two extremes, the gap is widening. You have to choose your camp. When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content.

[...] Something strange is happening: it's not only a part of the web which is disappearing for me. As I'm blocking completely google analytics, every Facebook domain and any analytics I can, I'm also disappearing for them. I don't see them and they don't see me!

Think about it! That whole "MBA, designers and marketers web" is now optimised thanks to analytics describing people who don't block analytics (and bots pretending to be those people). Each day, I feel more disconnected from that part of the web.

[...] It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can't stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.

Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in two.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Mathematicians have found a new way to impose order on chaos in the form of an answer to a challenge which has puzzled them for nearly a century:

In mathematics, Ramsey theory deals with the 'order in disorder'. No matter how complex a large system is, order will emerge as a smaller subsystem with unique structure.

Humans are pattern-seeking creatures living in a world of random chaos. We look for order in everything, from our lives, the world around us, to the Universe, and you could say Ramsey theory explains our ability to find it.

Ramsey numbers can be thought of as representing the boundaries of disorder. And it's notoriously hard to figure them out.

Since mathematician Frank Ramsey proved Ramsey's Theorem in the late 1920s, there's been perplexion on the specific problem that Sam Mattheus and Jacques Verstraete of the University of California, San Diego, finally cracked.

"Many people have thought about r(4,t) – it's been an open problem for over 90 years," Verstraete says.

"It really did take us years to solve. And there were many times where we were stuck and wondered if we'd be able to solve it at all."

[...] A common analogy for Ramsey theory requires us to consider how many people to invite to a party so that at least three people will either already be acquainted with each other or at least three people will be total strangers to each other.

Here, the Ramsey number, r, is the minimum number of people needed at the party so that either s people know each other or t people don't know each other. This can be written as r(s,t), and we know the answer to r(3,3) = 6.

"It's a fact of nature, an absolute truth. It doesn't matter what the situation is or which six people you pick – you will find three people who all know each other or three people who all don't know each other," Verstraete says.

"You may be able to find more, but you are guaranteed that there will be at least three in one clique or the other."

[...] After almost a year and several math obstacles, they found r(4,t) is close to a cubic function of t. For a party with four people who all know each other or t people who don't, you need t³ people.

[...] "One should never give up, no matter how long it takes," Verstraete says. "If you find that the problem is hard and you're stuck, that means it's a good problem."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

It may seem like blasphemy for an Engadget writer to diss touch controls, but as the demise of the MacBook Pro's Touch Bar has proven, those aren't always a good idea — especially on cars. As spotted by Autocar at Volkswagen City Studio in Copenhagen, the ID. 2all concept electric car now features a slightly updated interior, with the most notable change being the return of physical buttons below the central touchscreen. According to the brand's interior designer Darius Watola, this will be "a new approach for all models" based on "recent feedback from customers" — especially those in Europe who wanted "more physical buttons."

In Autocar's Tiguan launch interview back in June, Volkswagen CEO Thomas Schäfer already acknowledged customers' criticism on the over-reliance on touch controls — namely on the Golf Mk8 and ID.3, not to mention the same trend across the motor industry. The exec went as far as saying the earlier touch-heavy approach — endorsed by his predecessor, Herbert Diess — "definitely did a lot of damage" in terms of customer loyalty.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An EV from Chinese manufacturer Nio will soon go on sale with a "semi-solid state" 150kWh battery (140kWh usable) that's the largest in any passenger car, Car News China reported. To show [how] much range that will deliver, Nio CEO William Li drove a prototype version of the ET7 1,044km (650 miles) in 14 hours, a distance surpassing many gas-powered vehicles.

The test was run in relatively cool temperatures (between 28 – 54 F) and livestreamed. Driving was done mainly in semi-autonomous (or Navigate-on-Pilot+, as Nio calls it), and speed-limited to 90 km/h (56 MPH). The average speed was 83.9 km/h (a respectable 52.4 MPH), with a travel time of 12.4 hours excluding stops.

"The completion of this endurance challenge proves the product power of the 150kWh ultra-long endurance battery pack," said Li in a Weibo post (Google translation). "More importantly, all models on sale can be flexibly upgraded to 150kWh batteries through the Nio battery swap system."

In fact, the ET7's 150kWh battery will only be available on a lease separate from the car, much as we've seen with some cars sold in Europe. Previously, the company said that the battery alone would cost as much as an entire car (the company's entry-level ET5 EV), or around $42,000.

[...] Nio is a luxury EV manufacturer in China that offers vehicles without a battery, letting you sign up to a battery-as-a-service (BAAS) monthly subscription. That service also allows you to swap out your battery at any time for a larger one.

Original Submission