SoylentNews

[Updated to add on February 21

Following our exclusive, HP Inc has reversed course on the 15-minute forced wait.
--Bytram]

Frosty Piss writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/20/hp_deliberately_adds_15_minutes/

Not that anyone ever received any satisfaction from either support option, HP is trying to force consumer PC and print customers to use online and other digital support channels by setting a minimum 15-minute wait time for anyone that phones the call center to get answers to troublesome queries. At the beginning of a call to telephone support, a message will be played stating: "We are experiencing longer waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience. The next available representative will be with you in about 15 minutes." Those who want to continue to hold are told to "please stay on the line."

The reason for the change? Getting people to figure it out themselves using online support. As HP put it: "Encouraging more digital adoption by nudging customers to go online to self-solve," and "taking decisive short-term action to generate warranty cost efficiencies."

The staff email says customer experience metrics are being tracked weekly in terms of customer satisfaction, escalations, and others. As are the number of phone calls that subsequently give up and move to social channels or live chat.

For some Reg readers, 15 minutes might not seem like an eternity, especially if they are used to dealing with UK tax collector HMRC, which was found to have kept callers waiting on hold, collectively, for 798 years in the year to March 2023, something it was also recently criticized for again.

An insider in HP's European ops told us: "Many within HP are pretty unhappy [about] the measures being taken and the fact those making decisions don't have to deal with the customers who their decisions impact."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Those who follow web comics may be saddened to hear of the passing of web comic author AndyOh (Andy Odendhal) who was the author of the Too Much Information web comic at https://tmi-comic.com which is now permanently offline. There are no plans to bring the site back. Compilations and clips of the site can be found on archive.org and the wayback machine. The comic was started in 13/12/2004 with updates up until Andy experienced health issues and declined in the 2020s. An update was posted to Facebook confirming Andy's passing.

Now we will never know if Ace got home in time for the wedding.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/02/googles-new-ai-generates-hypotheses-for-researchers/

Over the past few years, Google has embarked on a quest to jam generative AI into every product and initiative possible. Google has robots summarizing search results, interacting with your apps, and analyzing the data on your phone. And sometimes, the output of generative AI systems can be surprisingly good despite lacking any real knowledge. But can they do science?

Google Research is now angling to turn AI into a scientist—well, a "co-scientist."
[...]
This is still a generative AI system like Gemini, so it doesn't truly have any new ideas or knowledge. However, it can extrapolate from existing data to potentially make decent suggestions. At the end of the process, Google's AI co-scientist spits out research proposals and hypotheses. The human scientist can even talk with the robot about the proposals in a chatbot interface.
[...]
Today's popular AI systems have a well-known problem with accuracy. Generative AI always has something to say, even if the model doesn't have the right training data or model weights to be helpful, and fact-checking with more AI models can't work miracles.
[...]
However, Google partnered with several universities to test some of the AI research proposals in the laboratory. For example, the AI suggested repurposing certain drugs for treating acute myeloid leukemia, and laboratory testing suggested it was a viable idea. Research at Stanford University also showed that the AI co-scientist's ideas about treatment for liver fibrosis were worthy of further study.

This is compelling work, certainly, but calling this system a "co-scientist" is perhaps a bit grandiose. Despite the insistence from AI leaders that we're on the verge of creating living, thinking machines, AI isn't anywhere close to being able to do science on its own.
[...]
Google says it wants more researchers working with this AI system in the hope it can assist with real research. Interested researchers and organizations can apply to be part of the Trusted Tester program, which provides access to the co-scientist UI as well as an API that can be integrated with existing tools.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

GNOME 48 has entered beta testing, which also means that it's in feature, API, and UI freeze. In other words, nothing substantial should change from now until its release, which is expected on March 19. There is a full list of changes in the Beta News announcement, and it's substantial, so we'll try to focus on some of the highlights.

Version 48 doesn't look to be a massive release. It carries on the trajectory of recent GNOME releases, such as reducing dependencies on X11 on its way to a pure-Wayland future. Some of the new accessories that have replaced older apps in the desktop's portfolio continue to gain new functionality, which will help push worthy veterans such as Gedit and Evince into retirement.

In terms of the long and troubled road to Wayland, version 49 of the GNOME Display Manager, gdm for short, no longer requires Xwayland. So, on a pure Wayland system, it won't require X11 at all right from the login screen onward. Even some desktops and distributions that don't use anything else from GNOME use GDM for their login screen, so this change may have a wide impact. The latest version of Gtk 4 will also remove OpenGL support, and it deprecates X11 and the Broadway in-browser display. It does add Android support, though.

[...] Among the changes that we suspect will affect quite a few people in this release, there are tweaks to package management, music playback, and file viewing.

GNOME Software can now handle web links to Flatpak apps, as explained in a 2023 discussion and a 2024 proposal, which catches up with similar functionality in Canonical's Snap. A discussion is going on about potentially completely removing RPM support from the app in future, which may surprise some folks on the other side of the fence from the Debian world.

[...] Another new app is GNOME Papers, a simple file and document viewer, which can display various document and image formats, including e-books and electronic comics. This replaces the well-established Evince document viewer, and that might have a knock-on effect on this vulture's preferred tool, Linux Mint's Xreader, which was forked from Evince.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

DRAM and NAND flash prices are expected to rise starting during the second quarter of 2025, according to a report by Digitimes. NAND and DRAM prices fluctuated throughout 2024 due to weaker consumer demand for DDR4 and DDR3 RAM, which are reportedly ceasing production by late 2025. However, the surge in NAND flash pricing is expected, as Kioxia previously forecasted growth thanks to AI advancements.

It's believed that the market conditions are ideal for a pricing uptick now that inventory and demand have gained traction. This results from the booming AI industry, as companies build AI servers and consumer products such as Nvidia's Project Digits begin to release.

Digitimes reports that Micron forecasts that DRAM prices will rise. At the same time, NAND prices should stabilize and then increase during the second quarter of 2025, with other manufacturers anticipated to follow suit. However, according to the report, memory makers have also been facing oversupply issues since the second half of 2024, meaning that pricing has also been affected.

With products based on HBM3E anticipated to hit the market soon, they are poised to capitalize on the AI boom. Apple and Google intend to construct new datacenters and purchase products designed to handle large-scale AI. As newer models debut, such as the recently released Grok 3, it's expected that the hardware demands of running large-scale models aren't letting up just yet.

Memory manufacturers are expected to keep producing HBM at the cost of other memory types, notably DDR5 DRAM. Other factors, such as a magnitude 6.4 earthquake, are speculated to have impacted memory maker Micron (though Micron hasn't publicly stated if they had been affected).

[...] DRAM and NAND price increases are another reason why consumers may be feeling a painful sting when shopping around for tech in 2025. Other contributing factors include tariffs, which will inevitably be passed onto customers in the US, and rising bill-of-materials costs for key components, as enterprise customers spend big on AI products.

Original Submission

We have had recent stories and discussion regarding the connector on GPUs which are causing overheating and, in a small number of case, actually catching fire. :

• RTX5090 Cable Overheats to 150 C Where Uneven Current Distribution Likely the Culprit
• Handful of Users Claim New Nvidia GPUs Are Melting Power Cables Again

It seems that there are new connectors being developed.

The 12VHPWR connector (and its 12V-2x6 successor) is notorious for their vulnerability to high temperatures on power-hungry GPUs, to the point where it can melt. To combat this on the adapter side, third-party manufacturers such as Ezdiy-fab and Cablemod have been forced to resort to "exotic" solutions sporting copper PCBs, thermal pads, and aluminum heatsinks to ensure their adapters stay cool.

Ezdiy-fab's 90- and 180-degree adapters take advantage of a 2oz copper PCB strapped to a thermal pad and aluminum heatsink cover. The copper PCB allegedly keeps the voltage impedance low while the thermal pad and heatsink on top of it ensure cool operation. CableMod's latest adapter uses the same design but takes advantage of a copper foil applied to its copper PCBs, in addition to a thermal pad and aluminum heatsink.

All of this additional cooling shows how fragile the new 16-pin connectors are to potential overheating. Virtually all current 16-pin adapters we could find (from various third-party makers) take advantage of some cooling system. By contrast, you can find angled 8-pin adapters that don't come with any fancy cooling gizmos (some do, but the point is that cooling components on 8-pin adapters don't seem to be required.) You can find angled 8-pin adapters with a simple plastic shell, contributing almost nothing to cool the interior components.

Cablemod had to recall its original V1.0 adapters due to temperature problems associated with the connectors loosening unintentionally, a flaw in the original design. Even though the design flaw only affected 1% of units sold, the total amount of property damage was estimated to be over $74,500 thanks in no small part to the sky-high prices of flagship GPUs lately. The cable manufacturer replaced the original version with an updated model that rectified the adapter's previous issue.

Lately, there have been melting concerns regarding the new RTX 50-series that comes with the revised 12V-2x6 power connector. It has been discovered that using previous-generation 12VHPWR cables with the RTX 5090 can result in melting issues regardless. We saw this when the first recorded RTX 5090 16-pin connector meltdown was published by a Reddit user online, who used an old 12VHPWR third-party cable with his new GPU. The cable's maker came out with a statement, clarifying that only its cables that are made in 2025 using the newer 12V-2x6 standard support RTX 50 series GPUs. (Reminder: 12V-2x6 is backward compatible with 12VHPWR.)

Initially, it was thought that the melting problem was due to connection seating only, especially with the original 12VHPWR connectors. However, multiple theories have come out suggesting that the connector may be doomed to fail. One theory suggests that the 16-pin standard as a whole is pushed way too close to its physical limits. Another suggests improper load balancing between the wires is causing the connectors to fail as well due to a lack of shunt resistors on RTX 40 and RTX 50 series GPUs.

Regardless of where exactly the problem is, it's clear that the new 16-pin connector standard is far less robust than its 8-pin and 6-pin predecessors. Maybe at some point, Nvidia and the PCI SIG committee will make an entirely new connector with a new design. But for now, those "lucky" enough to snag a high-end Nvidia GPU will have to live with the 16-pin connector, flaws and all.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In an unexpected turn of events Justin Hotard, the executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center and AI Group (DCAI) at Intel, left the company to become chief executive of Nokia. Intel has appointed an internal head for its datacenter and AI unit and will start searching for a new permanent general manager immediately. 

"We have a strong DCAI team that will continue to advance our priorities in service to our customers," a statement by Intel reads. "Karin Eibschitz Segal has been appointed interim head of the DCAI business and is an accomplished executive with nearly two decades of Intel leadership experience spanning products, systems and infrastructure roles. We are grateful for Justin Hotard's contributions and wish him the best in his new role." 

Justin Hotard joined Intel from HPE in early 2024. His tenure was arguably a mixed bag, though much of what he oversaw was more or less in place before he arrived. Intel successfully launched its Xeon 6 'Granite Rapids' and 'Sierra Forest' CPUs for servers,  but sales of its Gaudi 3 processors for AI missed the company's own rather modest expectations. In addition, the company had to cancel its Falcon Shores as a product and delay its Clearwater Forest datacenter CPU by at least a quarter. 

Justin Hotard has over 25 years of experience working at major technology companies. Before joining Intel, he held leadership positions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NCR Corporation. His background includes expertise in AI and datacenter markets, which are said to be critical areas for Nokia's future. 

"I am delighted to welcome Justin to Nokia," said Sari Baldauf, Chair of Nokia’s Board of Directors. "He has a strong track record of accelerating growth in technology companies along with vast expertise in AI and datacenter markets, which are critical areas for Nokia's future growth. In his previous positions, and throughout the selection process, he has demonstrated the strategic insight, vision, leadership and value creation mindset required for a CEO of Nokia." 

Nokia's current CEO Pekka Lundmark will step down on March 31, 2025, and Justin Hotard will take over the role starting April 1, 2025. Lundmark will stay on as an advisor until the end of the year. Hotard will be based in Espoo, Finland, where Nokia’s headquarters are located. 

Lundmark has led Nokia since 2020, a period marked by significant challenges. Under his leadership, the company strengthened its position in 5G technology, cloud-based network infrastructure, and patent licensing. With this leadership change, Nokia aims to continue its transformation, focusing on AI, datacenters, and next-generation connectivity. 

"I am honored by the opportunity to lead Nokia, a global leader in connectivity with a unique heritage in technology," said Justin Hotard. "Networks are the backbone that power society and businesses, and enable generational technology shifts like the one we are currently experiencing in AI. I am excited to get started and look forward to continuing Nokia's transformation journey to maximize its potential for growth and value creation." 

Justin Hotard leaves a couple of months after Pat Gelsinger, chief executive of Intel, was ousted by the board of directors. As a result, Intel now does not have a permanent CEO or a permanent head of its key DCAI unit.

Original Submission

Please cast your vote in the comments to this Meta.

A valid vote should contain a single word - either "Yes" to accept the documents or "No" to reject them. A single vote is required to accept ALL of the proposed documents.

TO OVERCOME THE TECHNICAL PROBLEM: Please include a single paragraph containing anything at all - it will be ignored by the software during vote counting. However, the vote "Yes" or "No" must be on a line all by itself.

For ease of reference links to the documents are repeated here:

• Soylent Phoenix - Bylaws (as submitted for Company Registration)
• IRC Section 501(c)(3)
• Policy
• Definitions and Common Terms
• Transfer of Assets Agreement
• Discussion Policy

[Voting closed as of 23:59 UTC 28 Feb]

Don't worry - this will be a relatively short Meta, and it is not to explain another site outage!

Community Vote on Site Documentation

In December 2024 I released a Meta which detailed the proposed documentation for the site under the Soylent Phoenix board. This is a legal requirement resulting from the creation of a new company. I repeated the links to the documentation in January. The next step is for the community to accept or reject the proposed documentation. The previous voting software is no longer available to us but I believe that a straightforward count of comments will suffice.

I will publish another Meta which will contain the links to the proposed documentation but it is not to be used for any discussion regarding the contents. Each current account in good standing (i.e. having a karma of 20+ and created on or before the publication of the December Meta (16 Dec 2024 - that is up to and including account #49487 ) will be eligible to vote. In order to cast your vote your comment should be limited to a single word - "Yes" or "No" (upper or lower case is acceptable) on a line all by itself. "Yes" will indicate your acceptance of the documentation and "No" will indicate your rejection of it. Your last comment of a maximum of 2 attempts will be the one that counts so you will have the opportunity to change your vote. Any more than 2 attempts from an account to cast a vote will be discarded. Comments may contain a single paragraph to overcome the 'lame comment' filter. The contents of the paragraph will be ignored. The vote will remain open for 1 week and will close at 23:59 (UTC) on 28 February 2025. The result will be made public once the Board are satisfied that the voting has been fair and democratic.

Existing votes will remain valid and do not have to be redone.

Entering into a discussion in the vote or justifying why you have voted in a particular fashion will nullify your comment. There has been a period of over 2 months for discussion and suggested changes.

It is important that you cast a vote. As an extreme example, if 1 person alone votes Yes and 2 people vote No then the documentation will NOT be accepted. Not casting a vote doesn't make any statement whatsoever but may result in the majority of true community opinion being ignored.

Essentially, the documentation is the same as that adopted in 2014 except it has been rewritten where necessary to clarify the meaning or intent. It also incorporates in one location changes to the rules that have been accepted by the community since 2014 (e.g. the definition of Spam which was adopted by the site in 2021).

AnonTechie writes:

An interesting thought experiment ...

Imagine a supervillain attacking you with his unique superpower of creating small black holes. An invisible force zips through your body at unimaginable speed. You feel no push, no heat, yet, deep inside your body, atoms momentarily shift in response to the gravitational pull of something tiny yet immensely dense — a Primordial Black Hole (PBH).

What would this do to you? Would it cause minor, localized damage, or would it simply rip through your entire body? Physicist Robert J. Scherrer from Vanderbilt University investigated this very scenario. His study examines what happens when a tiny black hole, like the ones formed in the early universe, passes through the human body.

[...] While the idea of a tiny black hole silently piercing through your body is an intriguing thought experiment, the actual probability of it happening is close to zero. And even if one did, it would have to be exceptionally massive (by microscopic standards) to cause harm.

[Journal Ref]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09734
[Source]: ZME Science

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-protein-emergence-spoken-language.html

The origins of human language remain mysterious. Are we the only animals truly capable of complex speech? Are Homo sapiens the only hominids who could give detailed directions to a far-off freshwater source or describe the nuanced purples and reds of a dramatic sunset?

Close relatives of ours such as the Neanderthals likely had anatomical features in the throat and ears that could have enabled the speaking and hearing of spoken language, and they share with us a variant of a gene linked to the ability to speak. And yet it is only in modern humans that we find expanded brain regions that are critical for language production and comprehension.

Now researchers from The Rockefeller University have unearthed intriguing genetic evidence: a protein variant found only in humans that may have helped shape the emergence of spoken language.

In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers in the lab of Rockefeller researcher Robert B. Darnell discovered that when they put this exclusively human variant of NOVA1—an RNA-binding protein in the brain known to be crucial to neural development—into mice, it altered their vocalizations as they called to each other.

The study also confirmed that the variant is not found in either Neanderthals or Denisovans, archaic humans that our ancestors interbred with, as is evidenced by their genetic traces that remain in many human genomes today.

"This gene is part of a sweeping evolutionary change in early modern humans and hints at potential ancient origins of spoken language," says Darnell, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Neuro-Oncology. "NOVA1 may be a bona fide human 'language gene,' though certainly it's only one of many human-specific genetic changes."

Anatomical adaptations of the vocal tract and intricate neural networks enable our language capabilities. But the genetics behind them isn't well understood.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/02/burning-in-womans-legs-turned-out-to-be-slug-parasites-digging-in-her-brain/

It started with a bizarre burning sensation in her feet. Over the next two days, the searing pain crept up her legs. Any light touch made it worse, and over-the-counter pain medicine offered no relief.

On the third day, the 30-year-old, otherwise healthy woman from New England went to an emergency department. Her exam was normal. Her blood tests and kidney function were normal. The only thing that stood out was a high number of eosinophils—white blood cells that become active with certain allergic diseases, parasitic infections, or other medical conditions, such as cancer. The woman was discharged and advised to follow up with her primary care doctor.
[...]
At home again, with little relief, a family member gave her a prescription sleep aid to help her get some rest. The next day, she awoke confused, saying she needed to pack for a vacation and couldn't be reasoned with to return to bed.
[...]
In a case report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors explain how they figured out the source of her fiery symptoms—worms burrowing into her brain. By this point, she was alert but disoriented and restless. She couldn't answer questions consistently or follow commands.
[...]
Blood smear tests showed no evidence of parasites, and a computed tomography (CT) scan of her head showed no acute intracranial abnormalities. But, the results of a spinal tap showed a clear problem: her cerebrospinal fluid showed a count of 694 white blood cells per microliter. The reference range was 0 to 5.
[...]
They went through them one by one, crossing things off the list that didn't quite fit with everything they knew of her case. They ended with angiostrongyliasis, caused by the nematode (roundworm) Angiostrongylus cantonensis, also known as rat lungworm.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and privacy expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World - an examination of how government agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his predictions feel eerily accurate.

At stake, he argued then, was a possibly irreversible loss of privacy, and the archiving of everything. As he wrote, science fiction author Charlie Stross described the situation as the "end of prehistory," in that every facet of our lives would be on a computer somewhere and available to anyone who knew how to find them.

Since the book was published, we've seen data harvesting continue, particularly for training AI models. The battle to keep even the most basic facts about us private seems all but lost.

We sat down with Bruce Schneier for an update on his work, and what we can expect in the future.

The Register: Data and Goliath came out nearly two years after Snowden's leaks and just months before Congress finally made a few moves on the surveillance issue with the USA Freedom Act. Ten years on, how do you feel things have changed, if at all?

At the same time, the information environment has gotten worse. More of our data is in the cloud, where companies have easier access to it. We have more Internet-of-Things devices around ourselves, which keep us under constant surveillance. And every one of us carries an incredibly sophisticated surveillance device around with us wherever we go: our smartphones. Everywhere you turn, privacy is losing.

[...]

The Register: If the mass privatization of the government that's looking likely happens, what are the implications of all that data being leased out to the private sector?

And by security, I mean two things. Obviously, there's the possibility that the data will be stolen and used by foreign governments and corporations. And there is the high probability that it will end up in the hands of data brokers, and then bought and sold and combined with other data.

Surveillance in the US is largely a corporate business; this will just make it worse.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Data storage has always depended on systems that toggle between "on" and "off" states. However, the physical size of the components storing these binary states has traditionally limited how much information can be packed into a device.

Now, researchers at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have developed a way to overcome this constraint. They've successfully demonstrated how missing atoms within a crystal structure can be used to store terabytes of data in a space no larger than a millimeter.

"We found a way to integrate solid-state physics applied to radiation dosimetry with a research group that works strongly in quantum, although our work is not exactly quantum," said first author Leonardo França, a postdoctoral researcher in Zhong's lab.

Their study, published in Nanophotonics, explores how atomic-scale crystal defects can function as individual memory cells, merging quantum methodologies with classical computing principles.

Led by assistant professor Tian Zhong, the research team developed this novel storage method by introducing rare-earth ions into a crystal. Specifically, they incorporated praseodymium ions into a yttrium oxide crystal, though they suggest the approach could extend to other materials due to rare-earth elements' versatile optical properties.

The memory system is activated by a simple ultraviolet laser, which energizes the rare-earth ions, causing them to release electrons. These electrons then become trapped in the crystal's natural defects. By controlling the charge state of these gaps, the researchers effectively created a binary system, where a charged defect represents a "one" and an uncharged defect represents a "zero."

[...] The researchers believe this breakthrough could redefine data storage limits, paving the way for ultra-compact, high-capacity storage solutions in classical computing.

Journal Reference: França, Leonardo V. S., Doshi, Shaan, Zhang, Haitao and Zhong, Tian. "All-optical control of charge-trapping defects in rare-earth doped oxides" Nanophotonics, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1515/nanoph-2024-0635

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people's hearing problems? They are not going deaf but the brain are having difficulty processing sounds. As it has not been trained on sorting out sounds and noise due to constant headphone usage filtering out the auditory realities.

... auditory processing disorder (APD), a neurological condition where the brain finds it difficult to understand sounds and spoken words.

Her audiologist and others in England are now calling for more research into whether the condition is linked to overuse of noise-cancelling headphones.

Five NHS audiology departments have told the BBC that there has been an increase in the number of young people referred to them from GPs with hearing issues - only to find their hearing is normal when tested and it is their ability to process sound that is struggling.

Noise-cancelling headphones do have their benefits, particularly for long-term ear health where their soundproofing feature can prevent high frequency and loud noise from reaching and damaging the ear - even while listening to music.

... by blocking everyday sounds such as cars beeping, there is a possibility the brain can "forget" to filter out the noise.

"You have almost created this false environment by wearing those headphones of only listening to what you want to listen to. You are not having to work at it,"

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgkjvr7x5x6o

Original Submission