SoylentNews

owl writes:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/26/24206529/intel-13th-14th-gen-crashing-instability-cpu-voltage-q-a

On Monday, it initially seemed like the beginning of the end for Intel's desktop CPU instability woes — the company confirmed a patch is coming in mid-August that should address the "root cause" of exposure to elevated voltage. But if your 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processor is already crashing, that patch apparently won't fix it.

Citing unnamed sources, Tom's Hardware reports that any degradation of the processor is irreversible, and an Intel spokesperson did not deny that when we asked. Intel is "confident" the patch will keep it from happening in the first place. (As another preventative measure, you should update your motherboard BIOS ASAP.) But if your defective CPU has been damaged, your best option is to replace it instead of tweaking BIOS settings to try and alleviate the problems.

And, Intel confirms, too-high voltages aren't the only reason some of these chips are failing. Intel spokesperson Thomas Hannaford confirms it's a primary cause, but the company is still investigating. Intel community manager Lex Hoyos also revealed some instability reports can be traced back to an oxidization manufacturing issue that was fixed at an unspecified date last year.

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

Over on Ars Technica a user has provided a Gen Z translation of the Bible Linked to Ars because that's where I stole the summary from, the real deal is here

I'd never heard of this before but I saw someone I know post about it... upset that it existed and lots of people commented about being upset. More searching found more people upset including a few saying that it should be "illegal" and penalties need to exist for doing something like this. I did a little more searching and found that at some point, it was something done on TikTok by someone and it got a following. I then found an online version like those other online versions of Bibles. The original post I saw had a screenshot of a page, which I figured was just a prop or photoshopped but it turns out, someone has used ChatGPT to do a Gen-Z slang translation that can be purchased in physical form. Evidently, some people are buying them and taking them to church. In some discussion, I saw people saying that this might be a way to reach some younger people, as a positive.

Anyway... I think it's pretty hilarious. I'm sure a bunch of folks will be gasping and clutching pearls. I figured I'd make a post as a PSA in case others haven't heard about it before (like me).

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://ewpratten.com/blog/camping-radio/

Recently, my father and I took a trip out to a local provincial park for a weekend of camping.

Last time I had been camping happened to coincide with the period of time that I was starting to gain curiosity about amateur radio. I vividly recall being out there wishing I had a radio that I could use to communicate from the campsite.

So, to appease my past self, the present-tense radio-license-having version of me took my HF rig along to make some contacts.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

There is not enough evidence to prove an ingredient used in a popular weed killer causes cancer, a Federal Court judge has found:

Justice Michael Lee handed down his judgement in the class action against widely-used herbicide Roundup on Thursday afternoon.

The case, launched by Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, claims Roundup's active ingredient glyphosate caused the cancer of more than 800 Australian non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients.

Justice Lee ruled there is not enough current evidence to say glyphosate is carcinogenic and capable of causing non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans.

The judge only needed to consider the question of general causation – not the specific claims of lead applicant Kelvin McNickle or the other class action group members.

Justice Lee ordered the proceedings be dismissed.

Bayer, which acquired Roundup's producer Monsanto in 2018, has previously stated glyphosate-based herbicides have been rigorously tested in hundreds of studies and it is safe when used as directed.

Related:
    •Study First to Link Weed Killer Roundup to Convulsions in Animals
    •US Supreme Court Rejects Bayer's Bid to End Roundup Lawsuits
    •Bayer Loses Appeal of Ruling That its Weed Killer Causes Cancer
    •Widely Used Herbicide Linked to Preterm Births

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In a study recently published in Nature Astronomy, the researchers detail how they tested the unparalleled capabilities of Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and observed the entire orbit of WASP-43b, a giant, gas-filled exoplanet. These “phase curve” observations, conducted during Webb’s inaugural year, revealed the temperature distribution across the entire planet and shed light on the planetary climate. The researchers found thick clouds and a surprising lack of methane on the planet’s nightside, and ubiquitous water presence throughout its atmosphere. This is the first time clouds have been inferred on the nightside of the planet; they were found at much higher altitudes in the planetary atmosphere compared to typical clouds observed on Earth.

WASP-43b shares a comparable size and mass with Jupiter, yet it diverges significantly in its planetary characteristics. Its host star, WASP-43A, is much cooler and redder than our sun and is around 86 lightyears away from the Earth. WASP-43b orbits very closely to its star, resulting in a year that lasts only 19.5 hours. This close proximity causes the planet’s rotation to synchronize with its orbit, with one side always facing the star, similar to the tidal locking observed with our moon. As a result, one-half of the planet (dayside) is permanently illuminated and very hot, while the other half (nightside) is permanently shadowed and much colder.

[...] The team found that WASP-43b’s permanently illuminated dayside is as hot as 2285°F (1250°C), while the planet’s nightside, although permanently shadowed, was still very hot 1115°F (600°C).

“The absence of direct sunlight on the planet’s nightside causes significant temperature differences between the day and night sides, which prompts the formation of exceptionally strong winds,” said Dobbs-Dixon, an expert in 3-dimensional atmospheric models and heat redistribution of exoplanetary atmospheres. “While winds on Earth form in a similar manner due to variations in temperature, the close proximity of WASP-43b to its host star results in much more extreme temperature differences. This produced winds of thousands of kilometers per hour, far surpassing those on Earth, crucial for the distribution of heat and shaping the overall planetary climate.”

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Twenty-five years ago, Space Shuttle Columbia launched the Chandra X-ray observatory and nearly ended in catastrophe. As the then-ascent flight director John Shannon observed: "Yikes. We don't need another one of those."

Space Shuttle Columbia was launched from Kennedy Space Center's LC-39B on the morning of July 23, 1999. Two previous launch attempts, on July 20 and 22, were scrubbed because of a faulty sensor and bad weather.

The launch was third time lucky in more ways than one.

Unknown to the Shuttle's crew and flight controllers, Columbia contained several flaws – as do all vehicles – some of which were about to make their presence felt during the launch phase of the mission. A bit of wiring within the payload bay had chafed against a burred screw head, a single gold-plated pin was slightly loose in a deactivated Liquid Oxygen (LOX) post in the main injector of the right engine, and the main center engine had a slight bias in pressure measurements on its B channel that would only show when the engine reached full throttle.

Oh, and there was a slightly loose connection on a hydraulic pressure sensor on the right solid rocket booster (SRB).

The team was blissfully unaware of any of this.

owl writes:

https://blog.mattstuchlik.com/2024/07/21/fastest-memory-read.html

Summing ASCII Encoded Integers on Haswell at the Speed of memcpy turned out more popular than I expected, which inspired me to take on another challenge on HighLoad: Counting uint8s. I'm currently only #13 on the leaderboard, ~7% behind #1, but I already learned some interesting things. In this post I'll describe my complete solution (skip to that) including a surprising memory read pattern that achieves up to ~30% higher transfer rates on fully memory bound, single core workloads compared to naive sequential access, while apparently not being widely known (skip to that).

As before, the program is tuned to the input spec and for the HighLoad system: Intel Xeon E3-1271 v3 @ 3.60GHz, 512MB RAM, Ubuntu 20.04. It only uses AVX2, no AVX512.

The Challenge

"Print the number of bytes whose value equals 127 in a 250MB stream of bytes uniformly sampled from [0, 255] sent to standard input."

Nothing much to it!

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The automaker announced the pivot in an earnings call this week, with CEO Mary Barra citing the Origin's "unique design" as creating too much "regulatory uncertainty." That design was indeed unusual, with no immediately obvious front or rear, and not a single spot for a human driver.

Instead of the Origin, GM's Cruise autonomous driving division will refocus on modifying existing Chevy Bolt EVs for self-driving capabilities. A new generation of autonomous Bolts is slated for production in 2025, and Barra says going this route will reduce costs per vehicle.

GM's chief financial officer Paul Jacobson says the company "might" revisit Origin down the road, but currently the efforts are "really going to be focused" on the Bolt.

Cruise has been under fire since an incident last October when one of its self-driving test vehicles struck and dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco. California regulators swiftly grounded the robotaxis.

[...] The entire industry has sunk billions into cracking this nut, with the promise of one day raking in massive profits from fleets of driverless robotaxis. However, as Cruise's setbacks show, actually delivering on that reality has been one pothole-ridden road. Many analysts think we're still years away from having a truly driverless car roll up, if it ever happens at all.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-apology-gift-card-to-say-sorry-for-outage/

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that crashed millions of computers with a botched update all over the world last week, is offering its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology, according to several people who say they received the gift card, as well as a source who also received one.

On Tuesday, a source told TechCrunch that they received an email from CrowdStrike offering them the gift card because the company recognizes "the additional work that the July 19 incident has caused."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A team of marine biologists and ecotoxicologists affiliated with several institutions in Brazil has found cocaine in muscle and liver samples collected from Brazilian Sharpnose sharks harvested off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. Their study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, highlights the potential impact of the presence of illicit drugs in marine environments.

Prior research has suggested that much cocaine winds up in the ocean via wastewater from sewage systems, drainage from labs and packages abandoned by traffickers attempting to prevent discovery. What is not known is how long the drug persists in the sea and what impact it has on ocean life. For this new study, the research team tested Brazilian Sharpnose sharks, a small variety that makes its home in the shallow waters along many of Brazil's coastal areas.

The researchers purchased 13 of the sharks from local fishermen. Each was dissected in the lab, where the team also collected muscle and liver samples and assessed them with tandem mass spectrometry. They found cocaine in all the samples at concentrations approximately 100 times higher than observed in any other marine animal.

The researchers suggest their findings are just a starting point regarding research into the presence of cocaine in the sea. They note that it is not known what sort of impact the cocaine might have on the sharks. They do not know, for example, if it impacts their behavior, as it does humans, or if it impacts other functions such as their reproductive abilities.

More information:Gapriel de Farias Araujo et al, "Cocaine Shark": First report on cocaine and benzoylecgonine detection in sharks, Science of The Total Environment (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.174798
                                                                               

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

A "battle of the giants" is unfolding in the market for chips for real-time artificial intelligence systems:

A separate "front line" in this confrontation is the development and implementation of SoM [System on Module] with Programmable Logic. This post is dedicated to one small "battle," on the example of which we want to show why, in our opinion, China could win this "war."

Since the announcement in 2019 by Xilinx (which then bore this name without a proud three-letter prefix), Versal ACAP (Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform) chips were inaccessible to developers—the first development boards cost tens of thousands of U.S. dollars, and the difficulty of developing your own board for this chip would scare off anyone other than Tony Stark.

A lot of water flowed, and a lot of developers' tears were shed, but a silicon Versal is just as unavailable as The Palace of Versailles: the cheapest kit from AMD–VEK280 is sold by the official suppliers for $7K, excluding delivery and customs clearance. The classic argument in the style of "if you don't have money for an iron door, you don't need it" does not always work in the field of R&D—a rare developer will refuse to study a top-end chip at the expense of his employer, but even with this approach, the cost is too high.

[...] The problem is that the announcement of AMD Xilinx has so far remained an announcement, but the developers from Alinx, the Chinese company, did not waste any time. This company already is known for its inexpensive development boards with Zynq‑7000 and Ultrascale+ on board, not much different from SoM. Now they not only promised, but also mass-produced the SoM V100 with the XCVE2302-SFVA784-1LP-E-S chip (Versal AI Edge family) for $750 [1].

[...] There is, of course, a fly in the V100 ointment. The developers from Alinx were so inspired by Kria that they also used "legendary" Samtec connectors "well-liked" by all designers and engineers. Who among us hasn't drilled them from the side with the thinnest drill, forgetting to route that very necessary pin right in the middle in the inner row? However, to achieve the required transmission speeds with a compact size, there is hardly an alternative to Samtec connectors.

V100 SoM specs: 4 GBytes DDR4 (64-bit data-bus), 64 MBytes QSPI FlashROM, 8 GBytes eMMC, Gen4 ×8 PCI-Express, 8 x GTY up to 12.5 Gbps, 53 (for ARM cores) + 106 (for FPGA part) input/output lines, two Samtec ADF6-40-03.5-L-4-2-A-TR connectors with 160 pins each, single supply voltage 12V, and the dimensions are 65 x 60 mm.

Related:

• $119+ BeagleV "Powerful", Open-Hardware RISC-V Linux SBC Targets AI Applications
• AMD Confirms Ryzen AI 300 PCs Won't Feature Copilot+ Features At Launch
• AMD is Convinced its Latest CPUs will Crush Qualcomm AI Chips

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A Chinese lunar probe found traces of water in samples of the moon's soil, scientists have said, as the country pushes its ambitious space program into high gear.

The Chang'e-5 rover completed its mission in 2020, returning to Earth with rock and soil samples from the moon.

The lunar samples "revealed the presence of trace water", the group of scientists from Chinese universities wrote in the Nature Astronomy journal published Monday.

A NASA infrared detector already confirmed in 2020 the existence of water on the moon, while scientists found traces of water in recent analyses of samples dating from the 1960s and 1970s.

But the Chang'e-5 samples are from a "much higher latitude", providing new clues as to what form water takes on the moon's surface, the Chinese scientists wrote.

The samples suggest that "water molecules can persist in sunlit areas of the moon in the form of hydrated salts", they said.

Reference: Shifeng Jin et al, Evidence of a hydrated mineral enriched in water and ammonium molecules in the Chang'e-5 lunar sample, Nature Astronomy (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-024-02306-8

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://nrk.neocities.org/articles/cpu-vs-common-sense

Recently one of my older post about strlcpy has sparked some discussion on various forums. Presumably the recently released POSIX edition had something to do with it. One particular counter-argument was raised by multiple posters - and it's an argument that I've heard before as well:

In the common case where the source string fits in to the destination buffer, strlcpy would only traverse the string once whereas strlen + memcpy would traverse it twice always.

Hidden in this argument is the assumption that traversing the string once is faster. Which - to be clear - is not at all an unreasonable assumption. But is it actually true? That's the focus of today's article.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

When it comes to discoveries about our upper atmosphere, it pays to know your surroundings.

Using data from the Twin Rockets to Investigate Cusp Electrodynamics (TRICE-2) rocket launch, NASA scientists Francesca Di Mare and Gregory Howes from the University of Iowa studied waves traveling down Earth's magnetic field lines into the polar atmosphere.

These waves were known to accelerate electrons, which pick up speed as they "surf" along the electric field of the wave. But their effect on ions—a more heterogenous group of positively charged particles, which exist alongside electrons—was unknown.

By estimating the ion mixture they were flying through—predominantly protons and singly charged oxygen ions—the scientists discovered that these waves were accelerating protons as they circle about the Earth's magnetic field lines as well as electrons as they surf the waves. The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, reveal a new way our upper atmosphere is energized.

Journal information: Physical Review Letters ZZZ

More information: Francesca Di Mare, [et al]. New Regime of Inertial Alfvén Wave Turbulence in the Auroral Ionosphere, Physical Review Letters (2024). [DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.045201]

Original Submission

Chimpanzees gesture back and forth quickly like in human conversations:

"While human languages are incredibly diverse, a hallmark we all share is that our conversations are structured with fast-paced turns of just 200 milliseconds on average," said Catherine Hobaiter at the University of St Andrews, UK. "But it was an open question whether this was uniquely human, or if other animals share this structure."

"We found that the timing of chimpanzee gesture and human conversational turn-taking is similar and very fast, which suggests that similar evolutionary mechanisms are driving these social, communicative interactions," says Gal Badihi, the study's first author.

The researchers knew that human conversations follow a similar pattern across people living in places and cultures all over the world. They wanted to know if the same communicative structure also exists in chimpanzees even though they communicate through gestures rather than through speech. To find out, they collected data on chimpanzee "conversations" across five wild communities in East Africa.

Altogether, they collected data on more than 8,500 gestures for 252 individuals. They measured the timing of turn-taking and conversational patterns. They found that 14% of communicative interactions included an exchange of gestures between two interacting individuals. Most of the exchanges included a two-part exchange, but some included up to seven parts.

Overall, the data reveal a similar timing to human conversation, with short pauses between a gesture and a gestural response at about 120 milliseconds. Behavioral responses to gestures were slower. "The similarities to human conversations reinforce the description of these interactions as true gestural exchanges, in which the gestures produced in response are contingent on those in the previous turn," the researchers write.

"We did see a little variation among different chimp communities, which again matches what we see in people where there are slight cultural variations in conversation pace: some cultures have slower or faster talkers," Badihi says.

"Fascinatingly, they seem to share both our universal timing, and subtle cultural differences," says Hobaiter. "In humans, it is the Danish who are 'slower' responders, and in Eastern chimpanzees that's the Sonso community in Uganda."