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takyon writes:

Microsoft adding new PC button in its first significant keyboard change in decades

Microsoft is adding an artificial intelligence button to its Windows keyboards in a move that marks the company's first significant keyboard change in nearly three decades.

The button — called the Copilot key — will launch Microsoft's AI chatbot, the company's executive vice president Yusuf Mehdi wrote in the Thursday announcement. He said Microsoft sees the key addition as "the entry point into the world of AI on the PC."

"We believe it will empower people to participate in the AI transformation more easily," Mehdi wrote.

[...] Starting this month, some new PCs running Windows 11 will have the Copilot keyboard button. The key will also be included on some upcoming Surface devices.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/spacex-launches-first-starlink-satellites-that-will-work-with-t-mobile-phones/

SpaceX last night launched the first six Starlink satellites that will provide cellular transmissions for customers of T-Mobile and other carriers.

SpaceX said it launched 21 satellites overall, including "the first six Starlink satellites with Direct to Cell capabilities that enable mobile network operators around the world to provide seamless global access to texting, calling, and browsing wherever you may be on land, lakes, or coastal waters without changing hardware or firmware. The enhanced Starlink satellites have an advanced modem that acts as a cellphone tower in space, eliminating dead zones with network integration similar to a standard roaming partner," the company said.
[...]
While SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote that the satellites will "allow for mobile phone connectivity anywhere on Earth," he also described a significant bandwidth limit. "Note, this only supports ~7Mb per beam and the beams are very big, so while this is a great solution for locations with no cellular connectivity, it is not meaningfully competitive with existing terrestrial cellular networks," Musk wrote.
[...]
T-Mobile said that field testing of Starlink satellites with the T-Mobile network will begin soon.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Over at ACM.org, Herbert Bruderer posits:

Digitization has many downsides. It puts many people at a disadvantage and relegates them to the sidelines. Many service providers apparently are unaware of this, or consciously accept it. It disadvantages many weaker, disabled, and older people. Digital devices are often more difficult to use than analog ones. The more (mostly unused) options, the more difficult it is.

The analog landline telephone is easy to use and works even in the event of a power failure. Countless people are overwhelmed by digital cell phones. Digitization excludes many people from social or economic life. They are left behind. Without computer skills, it is difficult to use ticket machines, for example. Analog coffee machines, washing machines, stoves, and refrigerators are more user-friendly than digital ones. This is especially true for radios and televisions.

The author gives examples on being penalized for not using digital payment transactions, and places where if you're without a cell phone you're on your own in an emergency, concluding:

The digital world is often ruthless and undemocratic. It also consumes a lot of electrical energy, especially artificial intelligence.

Original Submission

New antibiotic family kills superbugs in a way they can't resist

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/medical/antibiotic-polymer-family-kills-superbugs-resistance/

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are poised to become a global health concern in the coming decades. In the race to develop new weapons, scientists from Texas A&M have created a novel family of antibacterial polymers that can kill 'superbugs' in a way they can't evolve resistance to.
...
Bacteria are adaptable little pests, and so they quickly evolved defenses against antibiotics. Scientists in turn developed new ones, but of course bacteria soon evolved resistance to those too, in a cycle that lasted decades. Unfortunately, in recent years the tides have begun to turn in favor of bacteria – we're running out of new drugs, but they're not running out of evolution. Our last lines of defense are beginning to fail, and there are now strains of superbugs that are immune to anything and everything we can throw at them.

We need brand new tactics if we're going to prevent a global health crisis, and antibiotic polymers are a decent step in that direction. These synthetic molecules latch onto and disrupt the outer membranes of bacteria, in a form of attack that the bugs can't develop resistance to.

In the new study, the Texas A&M team developed new polymers that are more customizable, allowing them to be tuned to fight superbugs even more effectively. The key is a catalyst called AquaMet, which can handle a high concentration of charges and is water-soluble. That charge tolerance is important – antibacterial polymers work because their positive charge attracts them to the negative charge of the bacteria.

Journal Reference:
Sarah N. Hancock, Nattawut Yuntawattana, Emily Diep, and Quentin Michaudel, Ring-opening metathesis polymerization of N-methylpyridinium-fused norbornenes to access antibacterial main-chain cationic polymers, PNAS, 120 (51) e2311396120 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2311396120

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The kind of benchmark that IT normally worries about isn't without importance. How fast a particular data set is learned, how quickly prompts can be processed, what resources are required and how it all scales? If you're creating an AI system as part of your business, you'd better get those things right, or at the least understand their bounds.

They don't much matter otherwise, although you can be sure marketing and pundits will disagree. The fact it doesn't matter is a good thing: benchmarks too often become targets that distort function, and they should be kept firmly in their kennels.

The most important benchmark for AI is how truthful it is or, more usefully, how little it is misrepresented by those who sell or use it. As Pontius Pilate was said to have said 2,000 years ago, what is truth? There is no benchmark. Despite the intervening millennia and infinite claims to have fixed this, there still isn't. The most egregious of liars can command the support of nations in the midst of what should be a golden age of reason. If nobody's prepared or able to stop them, what chance have we got to keep AI on the side of the angels?

The one mechanism that's in with a chance is that curious synthesis of regulatory bodies and judicial systems which exists – in theory – outside politics but inside democratic control. Regulators set standards, the courts act as backstop to those powers and adjudicators of disputes.

[...] Which takes us to the regulators. It should be that the more technical and measurable the field being regulated, the easier the regulator's job is. If you're managing the radio spectrum or the railways, something going wrong shows up quickly in the numbers. Financial regulators, operating in the miasma of capital economics and corporate misdirection, go through a cycle of being weakened in the name of strong growth until everything falls apart and a grand reset follows. Wince and repeat. Yet very technical regulators can go wrong, as with the FAA and Boeing's 737 MAX. Regulatory capture by their industries or the politicians is a constant threat. And sometimes we just can't tell – GDPR has been with us for five years. Is it working?

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

I recently managed to anger both the iPhone users who are in favor of sideloading and the ones who aren’t. I explained several times that I will never use sideloading, third-party app stores, or third-party payment systems on my iPhone. Some of our readers were not happy with that line of thinking.

I also said that Apple should make sideloading available internationally rather than only in specific markets where regulators force it to. That way, it would deal with the PR mess around these sensitive topics. Then I heard from another round of BGR readers who were unhappy with my point of view.

I might not want to sideload apps on my iPhone, but Apple might be forced to support the feature in more markets. Following the decision in the Europan Union (EU), other regions are looking to impose similar measures on Apple, including Japan and the US.

[...] Reports have said that Apple plans to restrict sideloading and all that comes with it to the EU region. International users won’t even be able to VPN services to trick Apple into allowing sideloading on their iPhones.

Japan is looking at similar laws to improve competition on iPhone and Android. They would impact Apple, Google, and other companies that manage similar platforms.

As for the US, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has launched an antitrust investigation into the same App Store issues. Per The Financial Times (via 9to5Mac), the case against Apple is “firing on all cylinders.”

canopic jug writes:

System administrator and prolific blogger, Chris Siebenmann, has a brief note that e-mail addresses are not good 'permanent' identifiers for accounts.

The biggest problem with email addresses as 'permanent' identifiers is that people's email addresses change even within a single organization (for example, a university). They change for the same collection of reasons that people's commonly used names and logins change. An organization that refuses to change or redo the email addresses it assigns to people is being unusually cruel in ways that are probably not legally sustainable in any number of places.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2024/016856.html

I am deeply saddened to have received the news of Niklaus Wirth's passing and extend my heartfelt condolences to his family and all those who were dear to him. I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the profound and positive impact that Niklaus had on my life and career, and to express my gratitude for all that he meant to me.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In a nutshell: Mozilla is seemingly on a journey to change the internet again, but it will not get there with Firefox. The open-source browser is barely mentioned throughout the company's latest corporate manifesto, where AI algorithms have become the real focus of the show.

In the recently published State of Mozilla for 2023, the open-source foundation made some bold statements about its plans for the future. The organization aims to build a better internet "by the people, for the people," countering the overwhelming influence of Big Tech corporations with open data and AI services.

The updated State of Mozilla is essentially designed to be a company manifesto written in corporate lingo but it also comes with the latest financial statements related to 2022 results, providing some interesting food for thought about how and where the organization is spending its money.

Mozilla's CEO, Mitchell Baker, received a substantial compensation increase, as stated in the document, going from $5,591,406 (2021) to $6,903,089 in 2022. Baker mentioned that the organization is clearly moving in the right direction but needs to do more and have a larger impact on the market.

[...] Mozilla's CEO is being paid a lot more while Firefox keeps losing users, and someone has suggested that the organization's plan is now to fully transition away from the open-source browser. Mozilla is increasing its pile of financial assets, and Baker has clearly stated that the organization is ready to make "difficult choices" when it comes to shutting down unprofitable projects.

So, what future is Mozilla trying to build for itself and internet users? The foundation is pushing the idea of a trustworthy AI, improved ML algorithms with rich data, and privacy prioritization. Mozilla still wants to put people ahead of profit, the company's CEO said, but also take more risks and move quickly in the growing AI market.

See also: Linux Foundation Spending on Actual Linux Down to 2% of Their Budget

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-fog-mountainous-areas.html

Of the world's various weather phenomena, fog is perhaps the most mysterious, forming and dissipating near the ground with fluctuations in air temperature and humidity interacting with the terrain itself.

While fog presents a major hazard to transportation safety, meteorologists have yet to figure out how to forecast it with the precision they have achieved for precipitation, wind and other stormy events.

This is because the physical processes resulting in fog formation are extremely complex, according to Zhaoxia Pu, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah.

"Our understanding is limited. In order to accurately forecast fog we should better understand the process that controls fog formation," said Pu, who led a fog study focusing on a northern Utah valley.

Now, in a recent paper published by the American Meteorological Society, Pu and her colleagues have reported their findings from the Cold Fog Amongst Complex Terrain (CFACT) project, conceived to investigate the life cycle of cold fog in mountain valleys.
...
Today, most forecasting uses a computer model known as Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP), which processes massive meteorological observations with computer models to output predictions for precipitation, temperature, and all sorts of other elements of the weather. However the current computer model doesn't work well for fog, and Pu's team hopes that improvements can be made using the masses of data they gathered over seven weeks in the winter of 2022 at several sites in the Heber Valley.

canopic jug writes:

Daniel Stenberg of cURL fame has written about the impact of fake, LLM-generated bug reports has on his project, cURL. The main problem with LLM-generated bug reports is that they tend to be bunk while at the same time looking close enough to a real bug report as to end up wasting a lot of developer time which could have been used triaging and addressing real bugs.

A security report can take away a developer from fixing a really annoying bug. because a security issue is always more important than other bugs. If the report turned out to be crap, we did not improve security and we missed out time on fixing bugs or developing a new feature. Not to mention how it drains you on energy having to deal with rubbish.

Often wannabe security consultants will take the output of an LLM and modify it with their own language, thus intentionally or unintentionally obscuring some of the telltale warning signs of LLM-generated bunk.

Previously:
(2023) "cURL", the URL Code That Can, Marks 25 Years of Transfers
(2023) Half of Curl's Security Vulnerabilities Due to C Mistakes
(2020) curl up 2020 and Other Conferences Go Online Only
(2018) Daniel Stenberg, Author of cURL and libcurl, Denied US Visit Again

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Samsung is delaying the start of mass production at its Texas foundry to 2025, according to a report by Business Korea. The new fabbing plant, which was originally set to begin mass production in the second half of 2024, is now expected to have only limited production by that time. Samsung is apparently scaling back its Texas operation due to uncertain financial factors, including CHIPS Act subsidies and the global economy.

The Korean conglomerate will invest $200 billion in Texas alone, with 11 total foundries to produce 4nm chips, the first one being built at Taylor, Texas. The Taylor fab has been delayed, much like TSMC's Fab 21 in Arizona. But the delay at Samsung's first fab is apparently intentional, with the corporation deciding to postpone mass production in favor of a smaller output levels until 2025. In contrast, TSMC's foundry hit conflicts with local workers and unions.

[...] Business Korea claims that finances are a key concern of Samsung, especially when considering CHIPS Act subsidies and the state of the global economy. The CHIPS and Science Act is supposed to grant subsidies to semiconductor companies like Samsung to encourage the construction of foundries in the U.S. However, these subsidies are still largely in the pipeline, with just $35 million of the total $52 billion granted so far.

[...] The health of the global economy is also on Samsung's mind. Although the U.S. has seemingly achieved a so-called soft landing and has avoided a true recession, other parts of the world aren't so lucky. Samsung is still reeling from low SSD and RAM prices, even though revenue is finally on the rise. The PC market is forecasted to finally recover to 2020 levels in 2025, but the high peaks of 2021 are apparently well in the past. All of this just makes Samsung tepid about its $200 billion investment in the U.S., which could spell success or disaster for the company.  

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Vitamin D deficiency, depression and diabetes are among a number of health issues that increase the risk of young-onset dementia, a major study suggests.

The condition - which around 70,000 people in the UK are thought to be living with - is when symptoms of dementia develop before the age of 65.

The study challenges the notion that genetics are the sole cause of the condition, researchers have said.

Targeting the factors they identified could help reduce the risk, they added.

A list of 15 factors - which is similar to that for late-onset dementia - includes alcohol abuse, stroke, social isolation and hearing impairment.

Those with a higher formal education were seen to be at less of a risk.

The study "breaks new ground" and could "herald a new era" for interventions to reduce new cases, said Dr Janice Ranson, one of the study's authors.

The most common feature of dementia is memory loss, but other symptoms include changes in behaviour, and becoming lost in familiar places.

[...] The study, conducted by scientists from the UK and the Netherlands, is the "largest and most robust study of its kind ever conducted", one of it's authors, Professor David Llewellyn, has said.

[...] Prof Llewellyn said there was still much to learn but the study "reveals that we may be able to take action to reduce risk of this debilitating condition".

"This pioneering study shines important and much-needed light on factors that can influence the risk of young-onset dementia."

[...] "The cause is often assumed to be genetic, but for many people we don't actually know exactly what the cause is. This is why we also wanted to investigate other risk factors in this study."

The full list, from the paper's results: "In the final model, 15 factors were significantly associated with a higher YOD risk, namely lower formal education, lower socioeconomic status, carrying 2 apolipoprotein ε4 allele, no alcohol use, alcohol use disorder, social isolation, vitamin D deficiency, high C-reactive protein levels, lower handgrip strength, hearing impairment, orthostatic hypotension, stroke, diabetes, heart disease, and depression."

Journal Reference:
Hendriks S, Ranson JM, Peetoom K, et al. Risk Factors for Young-Onset Dementia in the UK Biobank. JAMA Neurol. Published online December 26, 2023. doi:10.1001/jamaneurol.2023.4929

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Some excerpts from an Ars Technica interview with historian Rebecca Simon on the real-life buccaneer bylaws that shaped every aspect of a pirate's life:

One of the many amusing scenes in the 2003 film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl depicts Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) invoking the concept of "parley" in the pirate code to negotiate a cease of hostilities with pirate captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush). "The code is more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules," he informs her. Rebecca Simon, a historian at Santa Monica College, delves into the real, historical set of rules and bylaws that shaped every aspect of a pirate's life with her latest book. The Pirates' Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ship.

Ars Technica: How did the idea of a pirates' code come about?

Rebecca Simon: Two of the pirates that I mention in the book—Ned Low and Bartholomew Roberts—their code was actually published in newspapers in London. I don't where they got it. Maybe it was made up for the sake of readership because that is getting towards the tail end of the Golden Age of Piracy, the 1720s. But we find examples of other codes in A General History of the Pyrates written by a man named Captain Charles Johnson in 1724. It included many pirate biographies and a lot of it was very largely fictionalized. So we take it with a grain of salt. But we do know that pirates did have a notion of law and order and regulations and ritual based on survivor accounts.

You had to be very organized. You had to have very specific rules because as a pirate, you're facing death every second of the day, more so than if you are a merchant or a fisherman or a member of the Royal Navy.  Pirates go out and attack to get the goods that they want. In order to survive all that, they have to be very meticulously prepared. Everyone has to know their exact role and everyone has to have a game plan going in. Pirates didn't attack willy-nilly out of control. No way. They all had a role.

[...] Ars Technica: Some of the pirate codes seemed surprisingly democratic. They divided the spoils equally according to rank, so there was a social hierarchy. But there was also a sense of fairness.

Rebecca Simon: You needed to have a sense of order on a pirate ship. One of the big draws that pirates used to recruit hostages to officially join them into piracy was to tell them they'd get an equal share. This was quite rare on many other ships. where payment was based per person, or maybe just a flat rate across the board. A lot of times your wages might get withheld or you wouldn't necessarily get the wages you were promised. On a pirate ship, everyone had the amount of money they were going to get based on the hierarchy and based on their skill level. The quartermaster was in charge of doling out all of the spoils or the stolen goods. If someone was caught taking more of their share, that was a huge deal.

You could get very severely punished perhaps by marooning or being jailed below the hold. The punishment had to be decided by the whole crew, so it didn't seem like the captain was being unfair or overly brutal. Pirates could also vote out their captain if they felt the captain was doing a bad job, such as not going after enough ships, taking too much of his share, being too harsh in punishment, or not listening to the crew. Again, this is all to keep order. You had to keep morale very high, you had to make sure there was very little discontent or infighting.

canopic jug writes:

Bryan Lunduke has gone over the 2023 Linux Foundation report. He has observed that the foundation spends even less on the kernel than ever, both in absolute dollars and in percentage of the budget. It spends around 2% on Linux and 98% on everything else.

While it's true that The Linux Foundation continues to grow substantially -- now bringing in over a quarter of a Billion dollars per year (seriously) -- the total amount spent on the Linux kernel dropped roughly $400,000 in 2023.   (Not surprising as The Lunduke Journal previously pointed out that lowering the total support of Linux appeared to be the goal.)

• The percentage of The Linux Foundation revenue spent on Linux dropped in 2023.
• And the total amount spent dropped as well.
• All while funding of non-Linux projects (such as AI and Blockchain) continued to dominate.

As many notice, budget aside, the foundation does not advance or promote the kernel, rather the opposite. It represents its members' corporate interests inside kernel development. Bruce Perens pointed out about six years ago that the membership the basically amounts to a GPL infringers club.

Previously:
(2023) Linux Foundation Launches New Organization to Maintain TLA+
(2021) Linux Foundation and Partners Announce "Open 3D Foundation"
(2021) Linux Foundation Unveils Sigstore
(2020) Linux Foundation Does Not Eat its Own Dogfood

Original Submission