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owl writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/touchscreens

Tactile controls are back in vogue. Apple added two new buttons to the iPhone 16, home appliances like stoves and washing machines are returning to knobs, and several car manufacturers are reintroducing buttons and dials to dashboards and steering wheels.

With this "re-buttonization," as The Wall Street Journal describes it, demand for Rachel Plotnick's expertise has grown. Plotnick, an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the leading expert on buttons and how people interact with them. She studies the relationship between technology and society with a focus on everyday or overlooked technologies, and wrote the 2018 book Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing. Now, companies are reaching out to her to help improve their tactile controls.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

UCLA Chemists Challenge Century-Old Rule:

UCLA chemists have discovered a major flaw in a fundamental rule of organic chemistry that has held for 100 years. They say it's time to rewrite the textbooks.

Organic molecules, which are primarily made of carbon, have specific shapes and arrangements of atoms. Molecules called olefins contain double bonds, or alkenes, between two carbon atoms. Typically, these atoms and their attached groups lie in the same 3D plane, and deviations from this structure are rare.

The rule being questioned, known as Bredt's rule, was established in 1924. It asserts that molecules cannot have a double bond at the "bridgehead" position—the junction of a bridged bicyclic molecule—because this position would distort the geometry of the double bond. Bredt's rule has constrained the design of synthetic molecules by preventing chemists from creating certain structures. Since olefins play a critical role in pharmaceutical research, Bredt's rule has limited the types of molecules that scientists could envision, potentially holding back innovations in drug discovery.

A new paper published on November 1 by UCLA scientists in the journal Science has invalidated that idea. They show how to make several kinds of molecules that violate Bredt's rule, called anti-Bredt olefins, or ABOs, allowing chemists to find practical ways to make and use them in reactions.

"People aren't exploring anti-Bredt olefins because they think they can't," said corresponding author Neil Garg, the Kenneth N. Trueblood Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA. "We shouldn't have rules like this — or if we have them, they should only exist with the constant reminder that they're guidelines, not rules. It destroys creativity when we have rules that supposedly can't be overcome."

[...] "There's a big push in the pharmaceutical industry to develop chemical reactions that give three-dimensional structures like ours because they can be used to discover new medicines," Garg said. "What this study shows is that contrary to one hundred years of conventional wisdom, chemists can make and use anti-Bredt olefins to make value-added products."

Journal Reference:
"A solution to the anti-Bredt olefin synthesis problem" by Luca McDermott, Zach G. Walters, Sarah A. French, et al., 1 November 2024, Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.adq3519

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Apple is committing over a billion dollars more to its existing satellite provider GlobalStar in order to have it expand its ground bases and add more satellites for iPhone messaging.

Two years after it first launched Emergency SOS via Satellite with the iPhone 14, Apple is now working to greatly expand the facility. It's already added features such as Roadside Assistance via satellite, and expanded to non-emergency messaging.

Now its satellite provider GlobalStar has announced a new expansion of its Apple deal, which comes in two parts. The first has Apple paying up to $1.1 billion in upfront payments specifically so GlobalStar can add what it describes as a new satellite constellation.

The second is that Apple has now taken a 20% stake in GlobalStar. According to Street Insider, this is an equity deal that is worth approximately $400 million.

This announcement is a financial one from GlobalStar, rather than specific news of new features from either it or Apple. But it will result in greater capacity for expanded features on the iPhone.

Previously: Supported iPhones in the US and Canada Can Now Contact Emergency Services Via Satellite

Original Submission

Frosty Piss writes:

Nvidia will replace Intel on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, indicating the massive impact of the AI boom on the semiconductor and tech industries and the entire market. According to CNBC, this change will happen on November 8, about three months after news of Intel's financial woes broke out.

The move was sparked by Intel's massive stock price drop—over 30% overnight—following the disastrous financial results released last August. The company has been bleeding cash through its data center and foundry divisions, resulting in a $1.6 billion loss for the second quarter of 2024. This was soon followed by news of massive layoffs, with over 15,000 employees affected.

Nvidia shares, on the other hand, have climbed over 170% so far in 2024 after jumping roughly 240% last year, as investors have rushed to get a piece of the AI chipmaker. Nvidia's market cap has swelled to $3.3 trillion, second only to Apple among publicly traded companies.

Related: Intel Losses Hit $16.6B As Restructuring Efforts Take A Toll

Original Submission

upstart writes:

It's a really old rock:

Scientists in Virginia are looking for mysterious dark matter - and have turned to really old rocks.

The substance, which makes up more than 80 percent of all matter in the universe, shapes and affects the cosmos. But it is entirely invisible and remains undetectable by normal sensors and techniques.

Analyzing billion-year-old rocks, researchers at Virginia Tech hope to find traces of dark matter. The idea was first proposed in the 1980s. Technological advances since then led them to revisit the idea. What if there were traces in Earth's minerals?

"It's crazy. When I first heard about this idea, I was like — this is insane. I want to do it," physics professor Patrick Huber said in a statement.

[...] Using new imaging, Huber and his colleagues hope to uncover trails of destruction from long-ago dark matter interactions inside crystal lattice structures - a pattern of atoms found in a mineral crystal.

Dark matter's interactions with other matter is impossible to perceive except when it collides with the nucleus of a visible matter atom. The nucleus recoils from the collision and releases energy.

Vsevolod Ivanov, who is collaborating with Huber, explained that when a high-energy particle inside a rock bounces off of the charged core of an atom – the basic building block of matter – inside a rock, backward movement can pop that core, or nucleus, out of place. The gap the nucleus leaves behind marks structural changes within the crystal.

"We'll take a crystal that's been exposed to different particles for millions of years and subtract the distributions that correspond to things we do know," Ivanov said. "Whatever is left must be something new, and that could be the dark matter."

The researchers are working to identify and locate potential candidates that could be dark matter detectors.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/openai-launches-chatgpt-with-search-taking-google-head-on/

One of the biggest bummers about the modern Internet has been the decline of Google Search. Once an essential part of using the web, it's now a shadow of its former self, full of SEO-fueled junk and AI-generated spam.

On Thursday, OpenAI announced a new feature of ChatGPT that could potentially replace Google Search for some people: an upgraded web search capability for its AI assistant that provides answers with source attribution during conversations.
[...]
Each search result in ChatGPT comes with a citation link, and users can click a "Sources" button beneath responses to view referenced materials in a sidebar that pops up beside the chat history.

The new search system runs on a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, which OpenAI says it post-trained using synthetic data output from its o1-preview model.
[...]
ChatGPT with Search also helps OpenAI take advantage of its new publishing partnerships and reframe those media relationships into something beyond merely scraping web data to train its AI models, which caused legal trouble in the past.
[...]
As mentioned above, over the past few years, OpenAI has established new partnerships with major news organizations, collaborating with the Associated Press, Axel Springer, Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, GEDI, Hearst, Le Monde, News Corp, Prisa (El País), Reuters, The Atlantic, Time, and Vox Media.
[...]
In a hands-on test of ChatGPT with Search, the new feature seemed to consistently pull relevant links from the web while answering our questions, but it wasn't perfect, returning a few errant sources here and there. It also sometimes provided irrelevant images that were shown beside some search results.
[...]
All these new avenues for ChatGPT to potentially prefer one website, source of information, company, brand, or shop brings up a big question: Will OpenAI offer preferential content placement for media partners or advertisers in the future?
[...]
In the future, OpenAI plans to add to the new search feature with custom answers for shopping and travel-related queries. The company also plans to use OpenAI's o1 series for deeper search capabilities and expand the search experience to Advanced Voice Mode and Canvas features.

The search function launches today for ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers through chatgpt.com and mobile apps. Enterprise and education users will gain access in the coming weeks, with a broader rollout to free users planned over several months.

owl writes:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/column-live-nation-decision-will-force-companies-rethink-consumer-arbitration-2024-10-29/

Oct 29 (Reuters) - In a case against entertainment behemoth Live Nation (LYV.N), a U.S. appeals court has rejected a common corporate tactic to combat mass consumer arbitration and has cast doubt on whether companies can force consumers into consolidated arbitration protocols.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Monday that Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, cannot compel its customers to arbitrate antitrust claims because Live Nation's mandatory arbitration provisions were too unfair to be enforceable.

As my Reuters colleague Mike Scarcella reported, the appeals court concluded that the mass arbitration protocol offered by Live Nation's arbitration provider, New Era, featured rules that were "so dense, convoluted and internally contradictory to be borderline unintelligible." (New Era disputed that characterization, insisting that its rules are "objective [and] easy to understand.")

...

In a concurrence, VanDyke said flatly, "The Federal Arbitration Act just does not apply to the type of mass 'arbitration' contemplated by Live Nation's agreements."

That has to be a chilling sentence for companies relying on batch-and-bellwether protocols to mitigate the time and expense of defending thousands of arbitration demands.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Detecting a graviton — the hypothetical particle thought to carry the force of gravity — is the ultimate physics experiment. Conventional wisdom, however, says it can’t be done. According to one infamous estimate, an Earth-size apparatus orbiting the sun might pick up one graviton every billion years. To snag one in a decade, another calculation has suggested, you’d have to park a Jupiter-size machine next to a neutron star. In short: not going to happen.

A new proposal overturns the conventional wisdom. Blending a modern understanding of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves with developments in quantum technology, a group of physicists has devised a new way of detecting a graviton — or at least a quantum event closely associated with a graviton. The experiment would still be a herculean undertaking, but it could fit into the space of a modest laboratory and the span of a career.

[...] Currently, Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity attributes gravity to smooth curves in the space-time fabric. But a conclusive graviton detection would prove that gravity comes in the form of quantum particles, just like electromagnetism and the other fundamental forces. Most physicists believe that gravity does have a quantum side, and they’ve spent the better part of a century striving to determine its quantum rules. Nabbing a graviton would confirm that they’re on the right track.

But even if the experiment is relatively straightforward, the interpretation of what, exactly, a detection would prove is not. The simplest explanation of a positive result would be the existence of gravitons. But physicists have already found ways to interpret such a result without reference to gravitons at all.

[...] It’s hard to experimentally probe gravity because the force is extremely weak. You need huge masses — think planets — to significantly warp space-time and generate obvious gravitational attraction. By way of comparison, a credit card-size magnet will stick to your fridge. Electromagnetism is not a subtle force.

One way to study these forces is to disturb an object, then observe the ripples that travel outward as a consequence. Shake a charged particle, and it will create waves of light. Disturb a massive object, and it will emit gravitational waves. We pick up light waves with our eyeballs, but gravitational waves are another matter. It took decades of effort and the construction of the colossal, miles-long detectors that make up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to first sense a rumble in space-time in 2015 — one sent out by a collision between distant black holes.

[...] It would take another conceptual leap to go from a gravitational wave detector to a detector for individual gravitons. In the recent paper, which appeared in Nature Communications in August, Pikovski and his co-authors outlined how the graviton detector would work.

fliptop writes:

Citing various market and macroeconomic headwinds, Electric vehicle startup Fisker Group, a luxury sports car maker, filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy and shut down all operations to restructure its business and seek funding from investors:

Fisker had begun deliveries of its Ocean battery-electric crossover SUV in 2023 to compete with Tesla, but by February 2024 the vehicle began having various problems. Some of the problems included suddenly losing power, loss of brake power, defective key fobs, and front hoods opening at high speeds. The vehicle also had difficulties with gear shifting.

Fisker warned that it may not have enough money to survive the next 12 months in its fourth-quarter earnings report on Feb. 29. Other problems arose as in June, former Fisker employees revealed the company had no plan to stockpile spare parts for Ocean vehicle repairs.

The spare parts problem led technicians and employees to dismantle perfectly good cars to provide spare parts.

Previously:

• Bankrupt Fisker Says It Can't Migrate its EVs to a New Owner's Server (2024)
• Henrik Fisker Debuts EMotion EV at CES (2016)
• Fisker Automotive Comes Back Under New Name, Plans to Launch Electric Car (2016)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Reddit's getting more popular:

In May 2023, Reddit announced that its API would no longer be free, signaling the demise of most third-party Reddit apps and the start of a new Reddit era. Reddit was always interested in making money, but the social media platform's drive to reach profitability intensified with its API rule changes, which was followed by it going public and other big moves. With Reddit reporting this week that it has finally turned its first profit, we can expect further evolution from Reddit, whether old-time Redditors like it or not.

In its fiscal Q4 2024 results announced on Tuesday [PDF], Reddit said that in the quarter ending on September 30, it made a profit of $29.9 million. This is significant growth from fiscal Q3 2024, when Reddit lost $7.4 million. Revenue, meanwhile, was up 68 percent year over year, going from $207.5 million to $384.4 million. Reddit is expecting $385 to $400 million in revenue for fiscal Q4.

[...] Of course, more users give ads sold on Reddit the chance to gain more eyeballs, something that can help drive ad sales. Reddit's ad revenue has grown alongside its daily user base. In Q3 2024, Reddit made $315.1 million in ad revenue, a 56 percent year-over-year increase.

Reddit has historically made the majority of its revenue from ad sales. Huffman has long claimed that Reddit started charging for its API in order to prevent big companies, like Google, from using Reddit content for free AI training. However, the high pricing killing third-party apps also fed Reddit's goals of getting users onto its native website and apps—where Reddit sells ads.

Reddit is expected to continue its aggressive ads push, including by exploring new ways to incorporate ads into the user experience. For example, Reddit has previously discussed exploring the addition of ads in Reddit search and in comments. It also added ads to conversation pages and made personalized ads mandatory this year.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Much of mathematics is driven by intuition, by a deep-rooted sense of what should be true. But sometimes instinct can lead a mathematician astray. Early evidence might not represent the bigger picture; a statement might seem obvious, only for some hidden subtlety to reveal itself.

Unexpectedly, three mathematicians have now shown that a well-known hypothesis in probability theory called the bunkbed conjecture falls into this category. The conjecture — which is about the different ways you can navigate the mathematical mazes called graphs when they’re stacked on top of each other like bunk beds — seemed natural, even self-evident. “Anything our brain tells us suggests the conjecture should be true,” said Maria Chudnovsky, a graph theorist at Princeton University who was not involved in the new work.

[...] In the mid-1980s, a Dutch physicist named Pieter Kasteleyn wanted to mathematically prove an assertion about how liquids flow throughout porous solids. His work led him to pose the bunkbed conjecture.

[...] The bunkbed conjecture says that the probability of finding the path on the bottom bunk is always greater than or equal to the probability of finding the path that jumps to the top bunk. It doesn’t matter what graph you start with, or how many vertical posts you draw between the bunks, or which starting and ending vertices you choose.

For decades, mathematicians thought this had to be true. Their intuition told them that moving around on just one bunk should be easier than moving between two — that the extra vertical jump required to get from the lower to the upper bunk should significantly limit the number of available paths.

[...] In June, Lawrence Hollom of the University of Cambridge disproved a version of the bunkbed problem in a different context. Instead of dealing with graphs, this formulation of the conjecture asked about objects called hypergraphs. In a hypergraph, an edge is no longer defined as the connection between a pair of vertices, but rather as the connection between any number of vertices.

[...] In the meantime, Pak says, it’s clear that mathematicians need to engage in a more active discussion about the nature of mathematical proof. He and his colleagues ultimately didn’t have to rely on controversial computational methods; they were able to disprove the conjecture with total certainty. But as computer- and AI-based lines of attack become more common in mathematics research, some mathematicians are debating whether the field’s norms will eventually have to change. “It’s a philosophical question,” Alon said. “How do we view proofs that are only true with high probability?”

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Intel posted a $16.6 billion loss in the third quarter – the largest in the silicon veteran's history – as it booked more than $18 billion in restructuring and impairment related charges.

While the loss was obviously not what Intel wanted, revenues for the quarter came in at the upper end of forecasts at $13.3 billion – up four percent from last quarter, though still down six percent from last year.

Executives expect Intel to continue to rebound in the fourth quarter, forecasting revenues of between $13.3 and $14.3 billion – a decrease of 7.14 and 13.6 percent year over year. In spite of this, the prospect of another flat to positive quarter of sequential revenue growth was enough to send the embattled chipmaker's share price skyward.

Intel's share price surged by up to 15 percent in after-hours trading on what investors saw as a positive outlook. However the biz has fallen a long way from its glory days, and faces numerous challenges with respect to ongoing restructuring costs which are expected to challenge profitability again in the third quarter.

During the third quarter, Intel faced in excess of 18.5 billion dollars in charges associated in part with its plan to cut 10 billion in annual spending – announced amid mass layoffs last quarter.

As you might expect, cutting 15,000 staff by the end of the year will save Intel a boatload of cash in the future. But in the short term it must write many severance and early retirement checks.

According to CEO Pat Gelsinger, the bulk of the layoffs occurred during the quarter – but even this only accounted for $2.2 billion of the charges. Another $528 million of restructure-related costs were somewhat vaguely attributed to "non-cash charges."

The largest of the losses were instead driven by the decision to write off $9.9 billion worth of deferred tax assets accumulated over the past three years of losses, CFO David Zinsner explained.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/11/microsoft-delays-rollout-of-the-windows-11-recall-feature-yet-again/

When Microsoft launched its Copilot+ AI PC initiative over the summer, one of the flagship features was Recall, a feature that would log months' worth of your PC usage, with the stated goal of helping you remember things you did and find them again. But if you've heard of Recall, it's probably because of the problems that surfaced in preview builds of Windows before the feature could launch: It stored all of its data in plaintext, and it was relatively trivial for other users on the PC (or for malicious software) to access the database and screenshots, potentially exposing huge amounts of user data.

[...] Microsoft has officially announced that the Recall preview is being delayed yet again and that it will begin rolling out to testers in December.

"We are committed to delivering a secure and trusted experience with Recall. To ensure we deliver on these important updates, we're taking additional time to refine the experience before previewing it with Windows Insiders," said Microsoft Windows Insider Senior Program Manager Brandon LeBlanc in a statement provided to The Verge.

[...] When it does start to roll out, Recall will still require a Copilot+ PC, which gets some AI-related features not available to typical Windows 11 PCs. To meet the Copilot+ requirements, PCs must have at least 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, plus a neural processing unit (NPU) that can perform at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

Original Submission

hubie writes:

"This is the dystopian nightmare that we've kind of entered in":

A former jockey who was left paralyzed from the waist down after a horse riding accident was able to walk again thanks to a cutting-edge piece of robotic tech: a $100,000 ReWalk Personal exoskeleton.

When one of its small parts malfunctioned, however, the entire device stopped working. Desperate to gain his mobility back, he reached out to the manufacturer, Lifeward, for repairs. But it turned him away, claiming his exoskeleton was too old, 404 media reports.

"After 371,091 steps my exoskeleton is being retired after 10 years of unbelievable physical therapy," Michael Straight posted on Facebook earlier this month. "The reasons why it has stopped is a pathetic excuse for a bad company to try and make more money."

According to Straight, the issue was caused by a piece of wiring that had come loose from the battery that powered a wristwatch used to control the exoskeleton. This would cost peanuts for Lifeward to fix up, but it refused to service anything more than five years old, Straight said.

[...] As this infuriating case shows, advanced medical devices can change the lives of people living with severe disabilities — but the flipside is that they also make their owners dependent on the whims of the devices' manufacturers, who often operate in ruthless self-interest.

[...] That some of these manufacturers can come and go isn't the point, though. As 404 notes, the issue is the nefarious practices that many of them use to make their devices difficult to fix without their help.

[...] "This is the dystopian nightmare that we've kind of entered in, where the manufacturer perspective on products is that their responsibility completely ends when it hands it over to a customer," Nathan Proctor, head of the right to repair project at the US Public Interest Research Group, told 404. "That's not good enough for a device like this, but it's also the same thing we see up and down with every single product."

"People need to be able to fix things, there needs to be a plan in place," he added. "A $100,000 product you can only use as long as the battery lasts, that's enraging."

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

ProPublica is reporting on a number of ad networks posting fake/deceptive/scam ads on Meta properties.

Reporting highlights from TFA:

• Deceptive Political Ads: Eight deceptive advertising networks have placed over 160,000 election and social issues ads across more than 340 Facebook pages in English and Spanish.
• Harmed Users: Some of the people who clicked on ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges or lost health coverage, among other consequences.
• Spotty Enforcement: Meta removed some ads after first approving them, but it failed to catch others with similar or identical content — or to stop networks from launching new pages and ads.

More from TFA:

In December, the verified Facebook page of Adam Klotz, a Fox News meteorologist, started running strange video ads.

Some featured the distinctive voice of former President Donald Trump promising "$6,400 with your name on it, no payback required" just for clicking the ad and filling out a form.

In other ads with the same offer, President Joe Biden's well-known cadence assured viewers that "this isn't a loan with strings attached."

There was no free cash. The audio was generated by AI. People who clicked were taken to a form asking for their personal information, which was sold to telemarketers who could target them for legitimate offers — or scams.
[...]
Klotz's page had been co-opted by a sprawling ad account network that has operated on Facebook for years, churning out roughly 100,000 misleading election and social issues ads despite Meta's stated commitment to crack down on harmful content, according to an investigation and analysis by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism School's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, as well as research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that researches large tech platforms. The organizations combined data and shared their analyses. TTP's report was produced independently of ProPublica and Tow's investigation and was shared with ProPublica prior to publication.

The network, which uses the name Patriot Democracy on many of its ad accounts, is one of eight deceptive Meta advertising operations identified by ProPublica and Tow. These networks have collectively controlled more than 340 Facebook pages, as well as associated Instagram and Messenger accounts. Most were created by the advertising networks, with some pages masquerading as government entities. Others were verified pages of people with public roles, like Klotz, who had been hacked. The networks have placed more than 160,000 election and social issues ads on these pages in English and Spanish. Meta showed the ads to users nearly 900 million times across Facebook and Instagram.
[..]
Most of these networks are run by lead-generation companies, which gather and sell people's personal information. People who clicked on some of these ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges, among many other schemes. Some, for example, were conned by an unscrupulous insurance agent into changing their Affordable Care Act health plans. While the agent earns a commission, the people who are scammed can lose their health insurance or face unexpected tax bills because of the switch.

The ads run by the networks employ tactics that Meta has banned, including the undisclosed use of deepfake audio and video of national political figures and promoting misleading claims about government programs to bait people into sharing personal information. Thousands of ads illegally displayed copies of state and county seals and the images of governors to trick users. "The State has recently approved that Illinois residents under the age of 89 may now qualify for up to $35,000 of Funeral Expense Insurance to cover any and all end-of-life expenses!" read one deceptive ad featuring a photo of Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois state seal.

There's much, much more, so please do read TFA.

What say you Soylentils? What's the solution to this sort of thing? My solution was to leave Facebook (in 2014) and never return.

Original Submission