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Ancient Slashdot reader jd shares a report from The Guardian: Neuralink's first attempt at implanting its chip in a human being's skull hit an unexpected setback after the device began to detach from the patient's brain, the company revealed on Wednesday. The patient, Noland Arbaugh, underwent surgery in February to attach a Neuralink chip to his brain, but the device's functionality began to decrease within the month after his implant. Some of the device's threads, which connect the miniature computer to the brain, had begun to retract. Neuralink did not disclose why the device partly retracted from Arbaugh's brain, but stated in a blog post that its engineers had refined the implant and restored functionality. The decreased capabilities did not appear to endanger Arbaugh, and he could still use the implant to play a game of chess on a computer using his thoughts, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first broke the news of the issue with the chip. The possibility of removing the implant was considered after the detachment came to light, the Journal reported. [...] Arbaugh praised the implant during a demonstration in March and said that it had "already changed his life," while also stating that it had not been perfect and they "have run into some issues."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jess Weatherbed reports via The Verge: At least 224 people with diabetes have reported injuries linked to a defective iOS app that caused their insulin pumps to shut down prematurely, according to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). On Wednesday, the agency announced that California-based medical device manufacturer Tandem Diabetes Care has issued a recall for version 2.7 of the iOS t:connect mobile app, which is used in conjunction with the company's t:slim X2 insulin pump. Specifically, the recall relates to a software issue that can cause the app to repeatedly crash and relaunch, resulting in the pump's battery being drained by excessive Bluetooth communication. This battery drain can cause the pump to shut down "earlier than typically expected" according to Tandem, though the pump will notify users of an imminent shutdown via an alarm and low-power alert. The company has notified customers to update the mobile app to version 2.7.1 or later, which should fix the defective software. While no physical recall is taking place, the FDA has identified this as a "Class I" recall -- the most serious type, as it relates to issues with products that can potentially cause serious injuries or death. No deaths linked to the issues have been reported as of April 15th. Tandem is encouraging pump users to take particular care when they sleep as it's easier to miss battery depletion warnings, and is asking impacted customers to confirm they have been notified of the recall via this online form. For any other questions or concerns about the insulin pump recall, customers should contact Tandem Diabetes Care directly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

T-Mobile and Verizon are in talks to buy parts of U.S. Ceullar in separate transactions, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Reuters reports: T-Mobile is closing in on a deal to buy a chunk of U.S. Cellular for more than $2 billion, taking over some operations and wireless spectrum licenses, the report said citing people familiar with the matter. Verizon's talks with the regional carrier is expected to take longer and might not result in an agreement, the report added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: In 2022, at the height of the "great resignation," a record 4.5 million workers each month -- about 3% of the U.S. workforce -- were quitting their jobs. While some economists have said this pandemic-era trend is over, new research from Microsoft and LinkedIn forecasts that even more people plan to leave their jobs in 2024. Nearly half (46%) of professionals say they're considering quitting in the year ahead -- higher than the 40% who said the same ahead of 2021s great resignation, according to new research from Microsoft and LinkedIn, which surveyed more than 30,000 people in 31 countries between February and March 2024. In the U.S., LinkedIn has seen a 14% increase in job applications per opening since last fall, with 85% of workers saying they plan to look for a new role in 2024, a survey of 1,013 U.S. professionals conducted between November and December 2023 found. And Americans' confidence in their job-hunting prospects has reached its highest point in two years, a February 2024 ZipRecruiter survey of more than 2,000 jobseekers shows. This renewed sense of optimism is aided by the fact that the U.S. economy avoided the recession forecast for 2023, ZipRecruiter chief economist Julia Pollak tells CNBC Make It. [...] It's not just better labor market conditions driving more U.S. workers to consider a career change in 2024. Inflation is still squeezing Americans' budgets; nearly half (45%) of workers planning to switch jobs this year say they need a higher income, according to Monster's 2024 Work Watch Report. Job switchers tend to increase their salaries more quickly than those who stay put, per data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Changing jobs is coming with greater pay gains: New data from ADP shows the median year-over-year pay increase for job switchers was 10% in March, up from 2.9% six months prior. With salaries finally keeping up with inflation, Pollak adds, the return on investment of switching jobs feels "much higher" than it did six months ago.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ArchieBunker quotes a report from Bloomberg: Texas electricity prices soared almost 100-fold as a high number of power-plant outages raised concerns of a potential evening shortfall. Spot prices at the North Hub, which includes Dallas, jumped to more than $3,000 a megawatt-hour just before 7 p.m. local time, versus about $32 at the same time Tuesday, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. This morning, Ercot, as the state's main grid operator is known, issued a "watch" for a potential capacity reserve shortage from about 7-9 p.m., meaning the buffer of spare supplies could fall to low enough levels to call on back-up generation, cancel or delay outages or curb usage. The conditions are the tightest of the year so far and raises the risk of prices rising to the $5,000 cap -- which they last did on April 16, when Ercot also warned of a potential shortfall. Unusually hot weather in the region has boosted demand for cooling and lowered the efficiency of many power plants. Wind output has also fallen from a day earlier and there are more outages. "Ercot has not called for conservation this evening," it said by email. "The grid is operating under normal conditions at this time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Citing a memo distributed to Apple Store employees, 9to5Mac reports that the new iPad Pro and iPad Air lineups will not include Apple stickers in the box -- "a key piece of memorabilia" that dates back as far as 1977's Apple II, notes Ars Technica. While the company says that this is part of its environmental goals to completely remove plastic from its packaging, it begs the question: is the era of stickers in Apple boxes coming to an end? 9to5Mac reports: The M3 MacBook Air that launched in March includes stickers in the box, but Apple Vision Pro (which launched in February) does not. Will the iPhone 16 include stickers in the box? Only time will tell. Ars' Andrew Cunningham writes about the origins of the Apple stickers: Apple has included stickers with its products at least as far back as the Apple II in 1977 when the stickers still said "Apple Computer" on them in the company's then-favored Motter Tektura typeface (I couldn't track down a vintage Apple II unboxing, but I did find some fun photos of Apple enthusiast Dan Budiac opening a sealed-in-box mid-'80s-era Apple IIc, complete with rainbow pack-in stickers). I myself became familiar with them during the height of the iPod in the early to mid-2000s when Apple was still firmly a tech underdog, and people would stick white Apple logo stickers to their cars to show off their non-conformist cred and/or Apple brand loyalty. As Apple's products became more colorful in the 2010s, the Apple logo stickers would sometimes be color-matched to the device you had just bought, a cute bit of attention to detail that has carried over into present-day MagSafe cables and color-matched iMac keyboards and trackpads. The report notes that you can still request an Apple sticker at Apple Stores at the time of your purchase; however, Amazon, Best Buy, and other retailers don't appear to have them available.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Maryland legislature passed two bills over the weekend limiting tech platforms' ability to collect and use consumers' data. Maryland Governor Wes Moore is expected to sign one of those bills, the Maryland Kids Code, on Thursday, MoCo360 reports. If signed into law, the other bill, the Maryland Online Privacy Act, will go into effect in October 2025. The legislation would limit platforms' ability to collect user data and let users opt out of having their data used for targeted advertising and other purposes. Together, the bills would significantly limit social media and other platforms' ability to track their users -- but tech companies, including Amazon, Google, and Meta, have opposed similar legislation. Lawmakers say the goal is to protect children, but tech companies say the bills are a threat to free speech. Part of the Maryland Kids Code -- the Maryland Age-Appropriate Design Code Act -- will go into effect much sooner, on October 1st. It bans platforms from using "system design features to increase, sustain, or extend the use of the online product," including autoplaying media, rewarding users for spending more time on the platform, and spamming users with notifications. Another part of the legislation prohibits certain video game, social media, and other platforms from tracking users who are younger than 18. "It's meant to rein in some of the worst practices with sensible regulation that allows companies to do what's right and what is wonderful about the internet and tech innovation, while at the same time saying, 'You can't take advantage of our kids,'" Maryland state Delegate Jared Solomon, one of the bill's sponsors, said in a press conference Wednesday. "We are technically the second state to pass a kids code," Solomon told The New York Times. "But we are hoping to be the first state to withstand the inevitable court challenge that we know is coming."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple will deliver some of its upcoming AI features this year via data centers equipped with its own in-house processors, part of a sweeping effort to infuse its devices with AI capabilities. From a report: The company is placing high-end chips -- similar to ones it designed for the Mac -- in cloud-computing servers designed to process the most advanced AI tasks coming to Apple devices, according to people familiar with the matter. Simpler AI-related features will be processed directly on iPhones, iPads and Macs, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is still under wraps. The move is part of Apple's much-anticipated push into generative artificial intelligence -- the technology behind ChatGPT and other popular tools. The company is playing catch-up with Big Tech rivals in the area but is poised to lay out an ambitious AI strategy at its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 10. Apple's plan to use its own chips and process AI tasks in the cloud was hatched about three years ago, but the company accelerated the timeline after the AI craze -- fueled by OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini -- forced it to move more quickly. The first AI server chips will be the M2 Ultra, which was launched last year as part of the Mac Pro and Mac Studio computers, though the company is already eyeing future versions based on the M4 chipRead more of this story at Slashdot.

The world is on the verge of a climate abyss, the UN has warned, in response to a Guardian survey that found that hundreds of the world's foremost climate experts expect global heating to soar past the international target of 1.5C. From a report: A series of leading climate figures have reacted to the findings, saying the deep despair voiced by the scientists must be a renewed wake-up call for urgent and radical action to stop burning fossil fuels and save millions of lives and livelihoods. Some said the 1.5C target was hanging by a thread, but it was not yet inevitable that it would be passed, if an extraordinary change in the pace of climate action could be achieved. The Guardian got the views of almost 400 senior authors of reports by the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Almost 80% expected a rise of at least 2.5C above preindustrial levels, a catastrophic level of heating, while only 6% thought it would stay within the 1.5C limit. Many expressed their personal anguish at the lack of climate action. "The goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C is hanging by a thread," said the official spokesperson for Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary general. "The battle to keep 1.5C alive will be won or lost in the 2020s -- under the watch of political and industry leaders today. They need to realise we are on the verge of the abyss. The science is clear and so are the world's scientists: the stakes for all humanity could not be higher." Alok Sharma, the president of the Cop26 climate summit in 2021, said: "The results of the Guardian's survey should be another wake-up call for governments to stop prevaricating and inject much more urgency into delivering on the climate commitments they have already made." He said world leaders needed to get on and deliver on the pledge they made to transition away from fossil fuels at Cop28 in December.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world's atmosphere has just occurred, according to researchers who monitor the relentless accumulation of the primary gas that is heating the planet. From a report: The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO2 levels over a 12-month period. The increase has been spurred, scientists say, by the periodic El Nino climate event, which has now waned, as well as the ongoing and increasing amounts of greenhouse gases expelled into the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. "It's really significant to see the pace of the increase over the first four months of this year, which is also a record," said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "We aren't just breaking records in CO2 concentrations, but also the record in how fast it is rising." The global CO2 readings have been taken from a station perched upon the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii since the measurements began in 1958 under Keeling's father, Charles. The concentrations of CO2 have increased each year since, as the heat-trapping gas continues to progressively accumulate due to rampant emissions from power plants, cars, trucks and other sources, with last year hitting a new global record in annual emissions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Sonos has responded to the avalanche of feedback -- some good, plenty bad -- about the company's redesigned mobile app that was released on May 7th. In the days since, customers have complained about missing features like sleep timers, broken local music library management, and no longer having the ability to edit playlists or the upcoming song queue. More alarmingly, the Sonos app's accessibility has also taken a hit, something the company says it's aiming to resolve by next month. In a statement provided to The Verge, Sonos confirms that it's keenly aware of the gripes that customers have expressed about the new app. It's hearing their response and is working to address the functionality that has (for now) gone missing. But the company is also standing behind its decision to roll out the app this week, basically describing it as a rough patch that will, in theory, lead to a much better experience for everyone down the line. "Redesigning the Sonos app is an ambitious undertaking that represents just how seriously we are committed to invention and re-invention," said chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin. "It takes courage to rebuild a brand's core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Technology giant Dell notified customers on Thursday that it experienced a data breach involving customers' names and physical addresses. TechCrunch: In an email seen by TechCrunch and shared by several people on social media, the computer maker wrote that it was investigating "an incident involving a Dell portal, which contains a database with limited types of customer information related to purchases from Dell." Dell wrote that the information accessed in the breach included customer names, physical addresses, and "Dell hardware and order information, including service tag, item description, date of order and related warranty information." Dell did not say if the incident was caused by malicious outsiders or inadvertent error. The breached data did not include email addresses, telephone numbers, financial or payment information, or "any highly sensitive customer information," according to the company. The company downplayed the impact of the breach in the message.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is exploring whether users should be allowed to create AI-generated pornography and other explicit content with its products. From a report:While the company stressed that its ban on deepfakes would continue to apply to adult material, campaigners suggested the proposal undermined its mission statement to produce "safe and beneficial" AI. OpenAI, which is also the developer of the DALL-E image generator, revealed it was considering letting developers and users "responsibly" create what it termed not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content through its products. OpenAI said this could include "erotica, extreme gore, slurs, and unsolicited profanity." It said: "We're exploring whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts ... We look forward to better understanding user and societal expectations of model behaviour in this area." The proposal was published as part of an OpenAI document discussing how it develops its AI tools. Joanne Jang, an employee at the San Francisco-based company who worked on the document, told the US news organisation NPR that OpenAI wanted to start a discussion about whether the generation of erotic text and nude images should always be banned from its products. However, she stressed that deepfakes would not be allowed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The sudden closure of several video-game studios at Microsoft's Xbox division was the result of a widespread cost-cutting initiative that still isn't finished. From a report: This week, Xbox began offering voluntary severance agreements to producers, quality assurance testers and other staff at ZeniMax, which it purchased in 2020 for $7.5 billion, according to people familiar with the company's plans. Others across the Xbox organization have been told that more cuts are on the way. Employees were shocked by the unexpected shuttering Tuesday of three Xbox subsidiaries and the absorption of a fourth. The closures included Tokyo-based Tango Gameworks, which last year released the critically acclaimed action game Hi-Fi Rush. Tango was in the process of pitching a sequel, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information. During a town hall with ZeniMax staff on Wednesday morning, Xbox president Matt Booty praised Hi-Fi Rush but did not specify why the company had shut down the development studio behind it, according to three people who were in attendance. Speaking about the closures more broadly, Booty said that the company's studios had been spread too thin -- like "peanut butter on bread" -- and that leaders across the division had felt understaffed. They decided to close these studios to free up resources elsewhere, he said. Booty added that the shutdown of subsidiary Arkane Austin, the longtime developer of games such as Prey, was not connected to the performance of its new multiplayer game, Redfall, a critical and commercial flop.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) said in an email to affected trademark applicants this week that their private domicile address -- which can include their home address -- appeared in public records between August 23, 2023 and April 19, 2024. U.S. trademark law requires that applicants include a private address when filing their paperwork with the agency to prevent fraudulent trademark filings. USPTO said that while no addresses appeared in regular searches on the agency's website, about 14,000 applicants' private addresses were included in bulk datasets that USPTO publishes online to aid academic and economic research. The agency took blame for the incident, saying the addresses were "inadvertently exposed as we transitioned to a new IT system," according to the email to affected applicants, which TechCrunch obtained. "Importantly, this incident was not the result of malicious activity," the email said. Upon discovery of the security lapse, the agency said it "blocked access to the impacted bulk data set, removed files, implemented a patch to fix the exposure, tested our solution, and re-enabled access." Last June, the USPTO inadvertently exposed about 61,000 applicants' private addresses "in a years-long data spill in part through the release of its bulk datasets," reports TechCrunch. It told affected individuals that the issue was fixed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The North Yorkshire Council in England announced it will ban apostrophes on street signs as it can affect geographical databases. Resident Anne Keywood told the BBC that she urged the authority to retain apostrophes, saying: "If you start losing things like that then everything goes downhill doesn't it?" From the report: North Yorkshire Council said it "along with many others across the country" had opted to "eliminate" the apostrophe from street signs. A spokesperson added: "All punctuation will be considered but avoided where possible because street names and addresses, when stored in databases, must meet the standards (PDF) set out in BS7666. "This restricts the use of punctuation marks and special characters (e.g. apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carl Zimmer reports via the New York Times: Ever since the discovery of whale songs almost 60 years ago, scientists have been trying to decipher their lyrics. Are the animals producing complex messages akin to human language? Or sharing simpler pieces of information, like dancing bees do? Or are they communicating something else we don't yet understand? In 2020, a team of marine biologists and computer scientists joined forces to analyze the click-clacking songs of sperm whales, the gray, block-shaped leviathans that swim in most of the world's oceans. On Tuesday, the scientists reported that the whales use a much richer set of sounds than previously known, which they called a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet." In the study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers found that sperm whales communicate using sequences of clicks, called codas, that exhibit contextual and combinatorial structure. MIT News reports: The researchers identified something of a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet," where various elements that researchers call "rhythm," "tempo," "rubato," and "ornamentation" interplay to form a vast array of distinguishable codas. For example, the whales would systematically modulate certain aspects of their codas based on the conversational context, such as smoothly varying the duration of the calls -- rubato -- or adding extra ornamental clicks. But even more remarkably, they found that the basic building blocks of these codas could be combined in a combinatorial fashion, allowing the whales to construct a vast repertoire of distinct vocalizations. [...] By developing new visualization and data analysis techniques, the CSAIL researchers found that individual sperm whales could emit various coda patterns in long exchanges, not just repeats of the same coda. These patterns, they say, are nuanced, and include fine-grained variations that other whales also produce and recognize. "One of the intriguing aspects of our research is that it parallels the hypothetical scenario of contacting alien species. It's about understanding a species with a completely different environment and communication protocols, where their interactions are distinctly different from human norms," says Pratyusha Sharma, an MIT PhD student in EECS, CSAIL affiliate, and the study's lead author. "We're exploring how to interpret the basic units of meaning in their communication. This isn't just about teaching animals a subset of human language, but decoding a naturally evolved communication system within their unique biological and environmental constraints. Essentially, our work could lay the groundwork for deciphering how an 'alien civilization' might communicate, providing insights into creating algorithms or systems to understand entirely unfamiliar forms of communication."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Once a week, Sun Kai has a video call with his mother. He opens up about work, the pressures he faces as a middle-aged man, and thoughts that he doesn't even discuss with his wife. His mother will occasionally make a comment, like telling him to take care of himself -- he's her only child. But mostly, she just listens. That's because Sun's mother died five years ago. And the person he's talking to isn't actually a person, but a digital replica he made of her -- a moving image that can conduct basic conversations. They've been talking for a few years now. After she died of a sudden illness in 2019, Sun wanted to find a way to keep their connection alive. So he turned to a team at Silicon Intelligence, an AI company based in Nanjing, China, that he cofounded in 2017. He provided them with a photo of her and some audio clips from their WeChat conversations. While the company was mostly focused on audio generation, the staff spent four months researching synthetic tools and generated an avatar with the data Sun provided. Then he was able to see and talk to a digital version of his mom via an app on his phone. "My mom didn't seem very natural, but I still heard the words that she often said: 'Have you eaten yet?'" Sun recalls of the first interaction. Because generative AI was a nascent technology at the time, the replica of his mom can say only a few pre-written lines. But Sun says that's what she was like anyway. "She would always repeat those questions over and over again, and it made me very emotional when I heard it," he says. There are plenty of people like Sun who want to use AI to preserve, animate, and interact with lost loved ones as they mourn and try to heal. The market is particularly strong in China, where at least half a dozen companies are now offering such technologies and thousands of people have already paid for them. In fact, the avatars are the newest manifestation of a cultural tradition: Chinese people have always taken solace from confiding in the dead. The technology isn't perfect -- avatars can still be stiff and robotic -- but it's maturing, and more tools are becoming available through more companies. In turn, the price of "resurrecting" someone -- also called creating "digital immortality" in the Chinese industry -- has dropped significantly. Now this technology is becoming accessible to the general public. Some people question whether interacting with AI replicas of the dead is actually a healthy way to process grief, and it's not entirely clear what the legal and ethical implications of this technology may be. For now, the idea still makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But as Silicon Intelligence's other cofounder, CEO Sima Huapeng, says, "Even if only 1% of Chinese people can accept [AI cloning of the dead], that's still a huge market."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dell is making sure its employees follow the company's updated return-to-office policy through a series of new tracking techniques. According to The Register, Dell will track employees' badge swipes and VPN connections and include a color-coded attendance grading system that summarizes employee presence. "In the latest Jeff Clarke return-to-grade-school initiative, HR will be keeping an attendance report card on employees, grading them at four levels based on how well they meet the goal of being in the office 39 days a quarter," a source familiar with Dell told The Register, referring to the IT giant's chief operating officer. "Employees who do not meet the attendance requirement will have their status escalated up the ladder to Jeff Clarke, who apparently believes that being a hall monitor trumps growing revenue." From the report: Starting next Monday, May 13, the enterprise hardware slinger plans to make weekly site visit data from its badge tracking available to employees through the corporation's human capital management software and to give them color-coded ratings that summarize their status. Those ratings are: Blue flag indicates "consistent onsite presence"; Green flag indicates "regular onsite presence"; Yellow flag indicates "some onsite presence"; Red flag indicates "limited onsite presence". A second Dell source explained managers aren't on the same page about the consequences of the color tiers, with some bosses suggesting employees want to remain Blue at all times and others indicating there's more leeway and they could put up with a few red flags. "It's a shit show here," we're told. [...] "Dell is tracking badge-ins and VPN connections to ensure employees are onsite when they claim they are (to deter 'coffee badging' or scanning your badge then going immediately home)," a third source told us. "This is likely in response to the official numbers about how many of our staff members chose to remain remote after the RTO mandate." [...] We're told that the goal of the worker tracking appears to be workforce attrition. "The problem is the market is soft right now for tech," our second source, pointing to recent AWS job cuts. "Everyone is laying off." This person anticipates further Dell layoffs over the summer, though no dates have been set. Our third source indicated that the onsite tracking policy seems unusually aggressive for Dell. "Even pre-pandemic, they never pushed or pressured folks to be in the office," this person said. "A common phrase used to be 'Work happens where you make it,' with the office often being a ghost town multiple times a week, or after lunch, or pre-holidays." Dell in February reported fiscal year 2024 revenue of $88.4 billion, down 14 percent from 2023, and profits of $3.2 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced on Tuesday that it will be exiting One Market Plaza, a prominent office complex in San Francisco that it had been occupying since 2018. The company's lease for the 300,000-square-foot-office will expire next April. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: Many of Google's employees are already working outside of the giant waterfront office, in light of the company's flexible approach to office attendance. As one of the city's largest office properties and a prominent feature on its skyline, the 1.6-million-square-foot One Market Plaza complex features two high-rise towers and a 11-story office annex building known as the Landmark." Ryan Lamont, a spokesperson for Google, said the company will be moving out of One Market's Spear Tower, but will continue to occupy the smaller Landmark building. He declined to comment on how long Google plans to remain in the latter." As we've said before, we're focused on investing in real estate efficiently to meet the current and future needs of our hybrid workforce," Lamont said in an email to the Chronicle. "We remain committed to our long-term presence in San Francisco." Real estate market participants who spoke with the Chronicle indicated that Google plans to consolidate much of its operations from One Market to nearby 345 Spear St., where the company leases about 400,000 square feet. These individuals said that Google will likely renew its lease at that property once it expires next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new national survey (PDF) from CNBC/Generation Lab of 1,033 people aged 18 to 34 found that an overwhelming 81% of respondents believe a four-day workweek would boost their company's productivity, while 19% said productivity would decline. CNBC reports: Those results from the "Youth & Money in the USA" survey come amid discussions around the potential benefits of switching from the standard five-day U.S. workweek to a four-day cadence without a pay cut. Some companies have begun testing the arrangement, and say it has mitigated employee burnout and strengthened business performance. Exos, a U.S. coaching company that trains top athletes and leads corporate wellness programs, recently reported results from the first six months of an ongoing four-day workweek experiment. The company said the shortened workweek increased efficiency along with revenue and retention. Although respondents to the CNBC/Generation Lab survey largely agreed on workweek length, they were less unified when asked about work setting. A 60% majority said they do their best work in the office, while the other 40% said they do so at home. Further reading: 32-Hour Workweek for America Proposed by Senator Bernie SandersRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Ransomware infections have morphed into "a psychological attack against the victim organization," as criminals use increasingly personal and aggressive tactics to force victims to pay up, according to Google-owned Mandiant. "We saw situations where threat actors essentially SIM swap the phones of children of executives, and start making phone calls to executives, from the phone numbers of their children," Charles Carmakal, Mandiant's CTO, recounted during a Google Security Threat Intelligence Panel at this year's RSA Conference in San Francisco on Monday. "Think about the psychological dilemma that the executive goes through - seeing a phone call from the children, picking up the phone and hearing that it's somebody else's voice? Sometimes, it's caller ID spoofing. Other times, we see demonstrated SIM swapping family members." Either way, it's horrifying. It's the next step in the evolution of ransomware tactics, which have now moved far beyond simply encrypting victims' files and even stealing their data. "There are a few threat actors that really have no rules of engagement in terms of how far [they] try to coerce victims," Carmakal noted, recalling ransomware incidents in which the criminals have directly contacted executives, their family members, and board members at their homes. The criminals have moved from just staging an attack against a company, its customers and their data, and becomes "more against the people," he added. It changes the calculation involved in deciding whether to pay the extortion demand, Carmakal said. "It's less about 'do I need to protect my customers?' But more about 'how do I better protect my employees and protect the families of employees?' That's a pretty scary shift."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Librarians are fighting a nationwide battle against high e-book prices, which so far has yielded minimal results. Despite efforts and temporary legislative victories, strict renewal and loan policies imposed by publishers keep e-book costs high, limiting the number of popular titles libraries can offer and leading to frustration among patrons. Axios reports: Publishers typically require libraries to renew the license to each e-book every two years, or after 26 loans -- policies that libraries call prohibitively expensive. This restricts the number of e-books -- particularly popular bestsellers -- that they can lend out to patrons, who are angry and baffled by the limitations. Readers love the free (to them) apps that allow them to borrow countless e-books and audiobooks: Libby (the dominant one, run by OverDrive) and hoopla. But some libraries say that the cost of renewing their contracts with OverDrive and hoopla are prohibitive, so they're dropping the apps -- hoopla in particular. The Association of American Publishers argues that it must protect the rights of copyright owners -- that is, authors -- to be fairly compensated for their work. hoopla and Libby say they're just the middlemen. "It's really not up to us, to be honest," Ann Ford, a vice president at hoopla, tells Axios. "It's the publishers that make the rules." Libraries have a "unique and determinative public mission" that should entitle them to more favorable e-book purchasing terms when using public funds, says Kyle Courtney, a lawyer and Harvard librarian who drafted model e-book legislation for states. "These are nonnegotiable contracts, and the libraries have been trying to get a deal for years. We need the coercive power of the state sitting behind us at the table saying, 'We need a special slice of the pie.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Building off the recent release of Fedora 40, Fedora Asahi Remix 40 is now available for this downstream of Fedora Linux that's optimized to run on Apple Silicon ARM systems. Fedora Asahi Remix continues to be one of the best ways of enjoying a Linux experience atop recent Apple Macs making use of their in-house M1/M2/M3 SoCs. With the Fedora Asahi Remix 40 release there is now conformant OpenGL 4.6 support thanks to the upgraded Mesa. There is also improved device compatibility with its newer kernel. Fedora Asahi Remix continues to cater to using the KDE Plasma desktop by default. With the upgrade to Fedora Asahi Remix 40 this also means now transitioning to the KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop environment for their flagship desktop experience. A GNOME variant using GNOME 46 is also available. You can learn more about the release via FedoraMagazine.org. Installation options are available at FedoraProject.org.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission clarified its net neutrality rules to prohibit more kinds of fast lanes. While the FCC voted to restore net neutrality rules on April 25, it didn't release the final text of the order until yesterday. The final text (PDF) has some changes compared to the draft version released a few weeks before the vote. Both the draft and final rules ban paid prioritization, or fast lanes that application providers have to pay Internet service providers for. But some net neutrality proponents raised concerns about the draft text because it would have let ISPs speed up certain types of applications as long as the application providers don't have to pay for special treatment. The advocates wanted the FCC to clarify its no-throttling rule to explicitly prohibit ISPs from speeding up applications instead of only forbidding the slowing of applications down. Without such a provision, they argued that ISPs could charge consumers more for plans that speed up specific types of content. [...] "We clarify that a BIAS [Broadband Internet Access Service] provider's decision to speed up 'on the basis of Internet content, applications, or services' would 'impair or degrade' other content, applications, or services which are not given the same treatment," the FCC's final order said. The "impair or degrade" clarification means that speeding up is banned because the no-throttling rule says that ISPs "shall not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of Internet content, application, or service." The updated language in the final order "clearly prohibits ISPs from limiting fast lanes to apps or categories of apps they select," leaving no question as to whether the practice is prohibited, said Stanford Law professor Barbara van Schewick. Under the original plan, "there was no way to predict which kinds of fast lanes the FCC might ultimately find to violate the no-throttling rule," she wrote. "This would have given ISPs cover to flood the market with various fast-lane offerings, arguing that their version does not violate the no-throttling rule and daring the FCC to enforce its rule. The final order prevents this from happening."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Smart home device maker Brilliant has laid off most of its staff and is seeking a buyer after failing to secure funding, CEO Aaron Emigh told The Verge. The company has shut down its support center and halted sales of its smart light switches and controllers, which integrate with various smart home platforms. Emigh said existing devices will continue to function, but their long-term functionality remains uncertain. Founded in 2016, Brilliant aimed to simplify smart home control but struggled with high prices, interoperability issues, and slower-than-expected market growth. The company raised $60 million in funding over eight years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon Prime Video subscribers will see new types of advertisements this broadcast year. Amazon announced today that it's adding new ad formats to its video streaming service, hoping to encourage people to interact with the ads and shop on Amazon. From a report: In January, Prime Video streams included commercials unless subscribers paid $3 extra per month. That has meant that watching stuff on Prime Video ad-free costs $12 per month or, if you're also a Prime subscriber, $18 per month. Amazon has heightened focus on streaming ads this year. Those who opted for Prime Video with commercials will soon see shoppable carousel ads, interactive pause ads, and interactive brand trivia ads, as Amazon calls them. Amazon said that advertisers could buy these new displays to be shown "across the vast majority of content on Prime Video, wherever it's streamed." All the new ad formats allow a viewer to place advertised products in their Amazon cart. With carousel ads, subscribers will be pushed to shop "a sliding lineup of" products during ad breaks during shows and movies, Amazon said, adding: "The ad automatically pauses so that customers can browse, and automatically resumes play when ad interaction has stopped."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: One Raspberry Pi often leads to another. Soon enough, you're running out of spots in your free RealVNC account for your tiny boards and "real" computers. Even if you go the hardened route of SSH or an X connection, you have to keep track of where they all are. All of this is not the easiest thing to tackle if you're new to single-board computers or just eager to get started. Enter Raspberry Pi Connect, a new built-in way to access a Raspberry Pi from nearly anywhere you can open a browser, whether to control yourself or provide remote assistance. On a Raspberry Pi 4, 5, or Pi 400 kit, you install Pi connect with a single terminal line, reboot the Pi, and then click a new tray icon to connect the Pi to a Raspberry Pi ID (and then enable two-factor authentication, of course). From then on, visiting connect.raspberrypi.com gives you an encrypted connection to your desktop. It's a direct connection if possible, and if not, it runs through relay servers in London, encrypting it with DTLS and keeping only the metadata needed for the service to work. The Pi will show a notification in its tray that somebody has connected, and you can manage screen sharing from there.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several large-scale, human-driven changes to the planet -- including climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the spread of invasive species -- are making infectious diseases more dangerous to people, animals and plants, according to a new study. From a report: Scientists have documented these effects before in more targeted studies that have focused on specific diseases and ecosystems. For instance, they have found that a warming climate may be helping malaria expand in Africa and that a decline in wildlife diversity may be boosting Lyme disease cases in North America. But the new research, a meta-analysis of nearly 1,000 previous studies, suggests that these patterns are relatively consistent around the globe and across the tree of life. "It's a big step forward in the science," said Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University, who was not an author of the new analysis. "This paper is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that I think has been published that shows how important it is health systems start getting ready to exist in a world with climate change, with biodiversity loss." In what is likely to come as a more surprising finding, the researchers also found that urbanization decreased the risk of infectious disease. The new analysis, which was published in Nature on Wednesday, focused on five "global change drivers" that are altering ecosystems across the planet: biodiversity change, climate change, chemical pollution, the introduction of nonnative species and habitat loss or change.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers should not be using tools like ChatGPT to automatically peer review papers, warned organizers of top AI conferences and academic publishers worried about maintaining intellectual integrity. From a report: With recent advances in large language models, researchers have been increasingly using them to write peer reviews -- a time-honored academic tradition that examines new research and assesses its merits, showing a person's work has been vetted by other experts in the field. That's why asking ChatGPT to analyze manuscripts and critique the research, without having read the papers, would undermine the peer review process. To tackle the problem, AI and machine learning conferences are now thinking about updating their policies, as some guidelines don't explicitly ban the use of AI to process manuscripts, and the language can be fuzzy. The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) is considering setting up a committee to determine whether it should update its policies around using LLMs for peer review, a spokesperson told Semafor.At NeurIPS, researchers should not "share submissions with anyone without prior approval" for example, while the ethics code at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), whose annual confab kicked off Tuesday, states that "LLMs are not eligible for authorship." Representatives from NeurIPS and ICLR said "anyone" includes AI, and that authorship covers both papers and peer review comments. A spokesperson for Springer Nature, an academic publishing company best known for its top research journal Nature, said that experts are required to evaluate research and leaving it to AI is risky.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stack Overflow's new deal giving OpenAI access to its API as a source of data has users who've posted their questions and answers about coding problems in conversations with other humans rankled. From a report: Users say that when they attempt to alter their posts in protest, the site is retaliating by reversing the alterations and suspending the users who carried them out. A programmer named Ben posted a screenshot yesterday of the change history for a post seeking programming advice, which they'd updated to say that they had removed the question to protest the OpenAI deal. "The move steals the labour of everyone who contributed to Stack Overflow with no way to opt-out," read the updated post. The text was reverted less than an hour later. A moderator message Ben also included says that Stack Overflow posts become "part of the collective efforts" of other contributors once made and that they should only be removed "under extraordinary circumstances." The moderation team then said it was suspending his account for a week while it reached out "to avoid any further misunderstandings."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have hailed another "leap forward" for AI after Google DeepMind unveiled the latest version of its AlphaFold program, which can predict how proteins behave in the complex symphony of life. From a report: The breakthrough promises to shed fresh light on the biological machinery that underpins living organisms and drive breakthroughs in fields from antibiotics and cancer therapy to new materials and resilient crops. "It's a big milestone for us," said Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind and the spin-off, Isomorphic Labs, which co-developed AlphaFold3. "Biology is a dynamic system and you have to understand how properties of biology emerge through the interactions between different molecules." Earlier versions of AlphaFold focused on predicting the 3D structures of 200m proteins, the building blocks of life, from their chemical constituents. Knowing what shape a protein takes is crucial because it determines how the protein will function -- or malfunction -- inside a living organism. AlphaFold3 was trained on a global database of 3D molecular structures and goes a step further by predicting how proteins will interact with the other molecules and ions they encounter. When asked to make a prediction, the program starts with a cloud of atoms and steadily reshapes it into the most accurate predicted structure. Writing in Nature, the researchers describe how AlphaFold3 can predict how proteins interact with other proteins, ions, strands of genetic code, and smaller molecules, such as those developed for medicines. In tests, the program's accuracy varied from 62% to 76%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Full repairs to three submarine internet cables damaged in the Red Sea in February are being held up by disputes over who controls access to infrastructure in Yemeni waters. From a report: The Yemeni government has granted permits for the repair of two out of three cables, but refused the third because of a dispute with one of the cable's consortium members. Repairs to the Seacom and EIG cables have been approved, but the consortium that runs AAE-1, which includes telecommunications company TeleYemen, was not granted a permit by Yemen's internationally recognized government, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. Three out of more than a dozen cables that run through the Red Sea, a critical route for connecting Europe's internet infrastructure to Asia's, were knocked offline by the Houthi-sunk Rubymar vessel in late February. Although the telecommunications data that passes along the damaged cables was re-routed, the incident highlighted the vulnerability of critical subsea infrastructure and the challenges of making repairs in a conflict zone. The dispute over the third cable derives from the split political control of TeleYemen, the country's sole telecommunications provider, a reflection of the country's broader geopolitical divisions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Less than 24 hours after Apple held a special event to unveil the new, record-thin (0.20 inch, the thinnest Apple device yet) iPad Pro with M4 chip inside, which the company says is optimized for AI, it is facing a loud and fast-spreading public backlash to one of its new marquee video advertisements promoting the device -- a spot called "Crush." VentureBeat: The video features a giant, industrial hydraulic press machine -- a device category famous for appearing in viral videos over the last decade-and-a-half -- literally pressing down upon and destroying dozens of other objects and creative instruments, from trumpets to cans of paint. The ad concludes with the press lifting to reveal these objects have somehow been transformed into a new iPad Pro. The metaphor and messaging is pretty obvious: the iPad Pro can subsume and replace all these older legacy instruments and technologies inside of it, and all in a more portable, sleek, and more powerful form factor than ever before. It's analogous to similar observations and advertisements other fans and creatives have made in the past about how PCs and smartphones replaced nearly all the individual gadgets -- stereo radios/boom boxes, journals, calculators, drawing pads, typewriters, video cameras -- of yore by offering many of their same core capabilities in a smaller, unified, more portable form factor. [...] People are revolted by the bluntness of Apple's metaphor, the destruction of beloved traditional instruments and objects which people hold in high esteem and affix intangible value to for their creative potential, and the overarching and perhaps unintentional messaging that Apple wants to literally flatten creativity and violently crush the creative tools of yesterday in favor of a multi-hundred dollar piece of luxury technology whose operating system and ecosystem of applications it tightly controls and restricts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AstraZeneca said on Tuesday it had initiated the worldwide withdrawal of its COVID-19 vaccine due to a "surplus of available updated vaccines" since the pandemic. From a report: The company also said it would proceed to withdraw the vaccine Vaxzevria's marketing authorizations within Europe. "As multiple, variant COVID-19 vaccines have since been developed there is a surplus of available updated vaccines," the company said, adding that this had led to a decline in demand for Vaxzevria, which is no longer being manufactured or supplied. According to media reports, the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker has previously admitted in court documents that the vaccine causes side-effects such as blood clots and low blood platelet counts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration is poised to open up a new front in its effort to safeguard U.S. AI from China with preliminary plans to place guardrails around the most advanced AI models, the core software of artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, Reuters reported Wednesday. From the report: The Commerce Department is considering a new regulatory push to restrict the export of proprietary or closed source AI models, whose software and the data it is trained on are kept under wraps, three people familiar with the matter said. Any action would complement a series of measures put in place over the last two years to block the export of sophisticated AI chips to China in an effort to slow Beijing's development of the cutting edge technology for military purposes. Even so, it will be hard for regulators to keep pace with the industry's fast-moving developments. Currently, nothing is stopping U.S. AI giants like Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Alphabet's Google DeepMind and rival Anthropic, which have developed some of the most powerful closed source AI models, from selling them to almost anyone in the world without government oversight. Government and private sector researchers worry U.S. adversaries could use the models, which mine vast amounts of text and images to summarize information and generate content, to wage aggressive cyber attacks or even create potent biological weapons. To develop an export control on AI models, the sources said the U.S. may turn to a threshold contained in an AI executive order issued last October that is based on the amount of computing power it takes to train a model. When that level is reached, a developer must report its AI model development plans and provide test results to the Commerce Department.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSN: The US has revoked licenses allowing Huawei to buy semiconductors from Qualcomm and Intel, according to people familiar with the matter, further tightening export restrictions against the Chinese telecom equipment maker. Withdrawal of the licenses affects US sales of chips for use in Huawei phones and laptops, according to the people, who discussed the move on condition of anonymity. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul confirmed the administration's decision in an interview Tuesday. He said the move is key to preventing China from developing advanced AI. "It's blocking any chips sold to Huawei," said McCaul, a Texas Republican who was briefed about the license decisions for Intel and Qualcomm. "Those are two companies we've always worried about being a little too close to China." While the decision may not affect a significant volume of chips, it underscores the US government's determination to curtail China's access to a broad swathe of semiconductor technology. Officials are also considering sanctions against six Chinese firms that they suspect could supply chips to Huawei, which has been on a US trade restrictions list since 2019. [...] Qualcomm recently said that its business with Huawei is already limited and will soon shrink to nothing. It has been allowed to supply the Chinese company with chips that provide older 4G network connections. It's prohibited from selling ones that allow more advanced 5G access.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: According to data analyzed by Morgan Stanley and Pitchbook, the number of active venture capital firms worldwide surged from 2014 levels, more than doubling by 2021, before sharply contracting to below 2014 figures in a stunning reversal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer models have found that recent heat waves in the north Pacific may be due to a large reduction in aerosols emitted by factories in China. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Phys.Org reports: In this new effort, the research team noted that the onset of the heat waves appeared to follow successful efforts by the Chinese government to reduce aerosol emissions from their country's factories. Beginning around 2010, factories and power generating plants in China began dramatically reducing emissions of aerosols such as sulfate, resulting in much cleaner air. Noting that aerosols can act like mirrors floating in the air, reflecting heat from the sun back into space, and also pointing out that earlier research efforts had suggested that massive reductions of aerosols in one place could lead to warming in other places -- they wondered if reductions of aerosols in China might be playing a role in the heat waves that began happening in the north Pacific. To find out if that might be the case, the team began collecting data and then input it into 12 different computer climate models. They ran them under two conditions -- one where emissions from East Asia remained as they were over the past several decades and one where they dropped in the way they had in reality. They found that the models with no declines did not cause much change elsewhere, whereas those with aerosol drops showed heat waves occurring in the northeast parts of the Pacific Ocean. The models also showed why -- as less heat was reflected back into space over China, warming of coastal regions in Asia began, resulting in the development of high-pressure systems. That in turn made low-pressure systems in the middle Pacific more intense. And that resulted in the Aleutian Low growing bigger and moving south which weakened the westerly winds that typically cool the sea surface. The result was hotter conditions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Renewable energy accounted for more than 30% of the world's electricity for the first time last year, according to climate thinktank Ember. The Guardian reports: Clean electricity has already helped to slow the growth in fossil fuels by almost two-thirds in the past 10 years, according to the report by climate thinktank Ember. It found that renewables have grown from 19% of electricity in 2000 to more than 30% of global electricity last year. Solar was the main supplier of electricity growth, according to Ember, adding more than twice as much new electricity generation as coal in 2023. It was the fastest-growing source of electricity for the 19th consecutive year, and also became the largest source of new electricity for the second year running, after surpassing wind power. The first comprehensive review of global electricity data covers 80 countries, which represent 92% of the world's electricity demand, as well as historic data for 215 countries. The surge in clean electricity is expected to power a 2% decrease in global fossil fuel generation in the year ahead, according to Ember. [...] World leaders are aiming to grow renewables to 60% of global electricity by 2030 under an agreement struck at the UN's Cop28 climate change conference in December. This would require countries to triple their current renewable electricity capacity in the next six years, which would almost halve power sector emissions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lawyers for the defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX said customers would receive all the money they lost when the firm collapsed in 2022 and receive interest on top of it. "But the recoveries come with a caveat," reports the New York Times. "The amount owed to customers was calculated based on the value of their holdings at the time of FTX's bankruptcy in November 2022. That means customers won't reap the benefits of a recent surge in the crypto market that sent the price of Bitcoin to a record high." From the report: The announcement was a landmark in the attempt to recover the $8 billion in customer assets that disappeared when FTX imploded virtually overnight, setting off a crisis in the crypto industry. Under a plan filed in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware, virtually all FTX's creditors, including hundreds of thousands of ordinary investors who used the exchange to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, would receive cash payments equivalent to 118 percent of the assets they had stored on FTX, the lawyers said. Those payments would flow from a pool of assets that FTX's lawyers have pulled together in the 17 months since the exchange collapsed, the lawyers said. [...] It will take months for the payouts to begin. The plan must be approved by the federal judge overseeing FTX's bankruptcy, John T. Dorsey.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: A key supplier to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies is building a $20 million supercomputer with buzzy chipmaker Nvidia to speed deployment of artificial intelligence capabilities across the U.S. federal government, the MITRE think tank said Tuesday. MITRE, a federally funded, not-for-profit research organization that has supplied U.S. soldiers and spies with exotic technical products since the 1950s, says the project could improve everything from Medicare to taxes. "There's huge opportunities for AI to make government more efficient," said Charles Clancy, senior vice president of MITRE. "Government is inefficient, it's bureaucratic, it takes forever to get stuff done. ... That's the grand vision, is how do we do everything from making Medicare sustainable to filing your taxes easier?" [...] The MITRE supercomputer will be based in Ashburn, Va., and should be up and running late this year. [...] Clancy said the planned supercomputer will run 256 Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, at a cost of $20 million. This counts as a small supercomputer: The world's fastest supercomputer, Frontier in Tennessee, boasts 37,888 GPUs, and Meta is seeking to build one with 350,000 GPUs. But MITRE's computer will still eclipse Stanford's Natural Language Processing Group's 68 GPUs, and will be large enough to train large language models to perform AI tasks tailored for government agencies. Clancy said all federal agencies funding MITRE will be able to use this AI "sandbox." "AI is the tool that is solving a wide range of problems," Clancy said. "The U.S. military needs to figure out how to do command and control. We need to understand how cryptocurrency markets impact the traditional banking sector. ... Those are the sorts of problems we want to solve."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pam Belluck reports via the New York Times: Scientists are proposing a new way of understanding the genetics of Alzheimer's that would mean that up to a fifth of patients would be considered to have a genetically caused form of the disease. Currently, the vast majority of Alzheimer's cases do not have a clearly identified cause. The new designation, proposed in a study published Monday, could broaden the scope of efforts to develop treatments, including gene therapy, and affect the design of clinical trials. It could also mean that hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone could, if they chose, receive a diagnosis of Alzheimer's before developing any symptoms of cognitive decline, although there currently are no treatments for people at that stage. The new classification would make this type of Alzheimer's one of the most common genetic disorders in the world, medical experts said. "This reconceptualization that we're proposing affects not a small minority of people," said Dr. Juan Fortea, an author of the study and the director of the Sant Pau Memory Unit in Barcelona, Spain. "Sometimes we say that we don't know the cause of Alzheimer's disease," but, he said, this would mean that about 15 to 20 percent of cases "can be tracked back to a cause, and the cause is in the genes." The idea involves a gene variant called APOE4. Scientists have long known that inheriting one copy of the variant increases the risk of developing Alzheimer's, and that people with two copies, inherited from each parent, have vastly increased risk. The new study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, analyzed data from over 500 people with two copies of APOE4, a significantly larger pool than in previous studies. The researchers found that almost all of those patients developed the biological pathology of Alzheimer's, and the authors say that two copies of APOE4 should now be considered a cause of Alzheimer's -- not simply a risk factor. The patients also developed Alzheimer's pathology relatively young, the study found. By age 55, over 95 percent had biological markers associated with the disease. By 65, almost all had abnormal levels of a protein called amyloid that forms plaques in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer's. And many started developing symptoms of cognitive decline at age 65, younger than most people without the APOE4 variant.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the 27th annual Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said today's ChatGPT chatbot "will be laughably bad" compared to what it'll be capable of a year from now. "We think we're going to move toward a world where they're much more capable," he added. Business Insider reports: Lightcap says large language models, which people use to help do their jobs and meet their personal goals, will soon be able to take on "more complex work." He adds that AI will have more of a "system relationship" with users, meaning the technology will serve as a "great teammate" that can assist users on "any given problem." "That's going to be a different way of using software," the OpenAI exec said on the panel regarding AI's foreseeable capabilities. In light of his predictions, Lightcap acknowledges that it can be tough for people to "really understand" and "internalize" what a world with robot assistants would look like. But in the next decade, the COO believes talking to an AI like you would with a friend, teammate, or project collaborator will be the new norm. "I think that's a profound shift that we haven't quite grasped," he said, referring to his 10-year forecast. "We're just scratching the surface on the full kind of set of capabilities that these systems have," he said at the Milken Institute conference. "That's going to surprise us." You can watch/listen to the talk here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"With all the improvements in car safety over the decades, the recent addition of a plethora of high tech sensors and warnings comes with increased costs," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "And not just to have to have them on your car. Any time you get into an accident, even a minor one, it will most likely require a detailed examination of any sensors which may have been affected and their subsequent realignment, replacement, and calibration." CNN reports: Some vehicles require "dynamic calibration," which means, once the sensors and cameras are back in place, a driver needs to take the vehicle out on real roads for testing. With proper equipment attached the car can, essentially, recalibrate itself as it watches lane lines and other markers. It requires the car to be driven for a set distance at a certain speed but weather and traffic can create problems. "If you're in Chicago or L.A., good luck getting to that speed," said [Hami Ebrahimi, chief commercial officer at Caliber] "or if you're in Seattle or Chicago or New York, with snow, good luck picking up all the road markings." More commonly, vehicles need "static calibration," which can be done using machinery inside a closed workshop with a flat, level floor. Special targets are set up around the vehicle at set distances according to instructions from the vehicle manufacturer. "The car [views] those targets at those specific distances to recalibrate the world into the car's computer," Ebrahimi said. These kinds of repairs also demand buildings with open space that meet requirements including specific colors and lighting. And it requires special training for employees to perform these sorts of recalibrations, he said "The change that we've seen in the last five years is greater than we've seen, probably, in the last five decades," said Todd Dillender, chief operating officer of Caliber Collision, one of the biggest auto body repair companies in the United States with more than 1,700 locations across 41 states. [...] With a rapidly changing industry, qualified auto body repair technicians are in short supply, just as they are in the engine repair business. That's also led to upward pressure on pay in the industry as technicians have to be highly qualified and educated, Dillender said. That's good for people who work in the industry, of course, but tougher for those who pay, and for the insurance companies who, in turn, pay for the repairs. A new study from consumer automotive group AAA says the cost to fix sensors and cameras in new vehicles "now accounts for more than a third of the post-crash repair costs," reports CNN. However, "no one, including AAA, recommends not getting these features because of repair costs," since many of them can cut crash rates in half and improve a car's overall safety. "They're not going to prevent everything," said Greg Brannon, director of automotive engineering at AAA. "And when you are in a crash, there are additional costs so it's sort of the old 'there's no free ride' when it comes to these things."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Amazon plans to start flying delivery drones in Arizona this year -- but don't count on them to bring you a refreshing drink on a hot day. The hexacopter can't operate when temperatures top 104 degrees Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius, the company says, and average daily highs exceed that for three months of the year in Tolleson, the city outside Phoenix where Amazon is preparing to offer aerial deliveries from inside a 7.5-mile radius. The drones can't help with midnight snacks either, because they'll be grounded after sunset. Potentially being inoperable for a quarter of the year might make launching drone deliveries in Tolleson and neighboring desert communities seem like an odd choice. It's far from the first challenge faced by Amazon's much-delayed drone project. The unit is years behind its goals of flying items to customers in under an hour on a regular basis, and a one-time target of 500 million deliveries by 2030 seems distant. Amazon Prime Air has completed just thousands of deliveries, falling behind rivals; Alphabet subsidiary Wing has notched hundreds of thousands of delivery flights and Walmart more than 20,000. In the California wine country town of Lockeford, where Amazon initially launched drone deliveries, some residents told WIRED last year that they ordered only because Amazon lured them with gift cards. In Arizona, it could be discouraging not being able to rely on drones during those hours when one might not want to venture too far from the comfort of air conditioning. [...] That temperature and other environmental conditions could ground or hamper the drone industry has been known for years. A team from University of Calgary's geography department estimated that on average across the world, drones with limitations similar to Amazon's, including from weather and daylight, would be limited to flying about 2 hours a day. In the world's 100 most populous cities, the average daily flight time would be 6 hours. "Weather is an important and poorly resolved factor that may affect ambitions to expand drone operations," they wrote in a study published in 2021. Heat, in particular, forces motors to work harder to keep drones aloft, and their batteries are only so powerful.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wayve, a UK-based AI firm focused on developing self-driving car technology, has secured a record $1.05 billion in funding, with Microsoft and Nvidia participating in the round led by SoftBank. According to the BBC, this investment is the largest for an AI company in Europe. The BBC reports: Wayve says the funding will allow it to help build the autonomous cars of the future. [...] Wayve is developing technology intended to power future self-driving vehicles by using what it calls "embodied AI." Unlike AI models carrying out cognitive or generative tasks such as answering questions or creating pictures, this new technology interacts with and learns from real-world surroundings and environments. "[The investment] sends a crucial signal to the market of the strength of the UK's AI ecosystem, and we look forward to watching more AI companies here thrive and scale," said Wayve head Alex Kendall.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the second time, the disgraced former CEO of Theranos has had her federal prison sentence shortened. In July, it was reduced by two years. Now, 40-year-old Holmes is scheduled for release on August 16, 2032 instead of December 29, 2032 -- a reduction of more than four months. The Guardian reports: People incarcerated in the U.S. can have their sentences shortened for good conduct and for completing rehabilitation programs, such as a substance abuse program. The latest reduction of Holmes's sentence still meets federal sentencing guidelines. Those guidelines mandate that people convicted of federal offenses must serve at least 85% of their sentence, regardless of reductions for good behavior. In 2022, Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison after being convicted on four counts of defrauding investors. She was also ordered to pay $452m in restitution to those she defrauded, but a judge delayed those payments due to Holmes's "limited financial resources." Holmes's lawyers have already begun attempts to get her conviction overturned. Oral arguments for her appeal are set to begin on June 11 in a federal appeals court in San Francisco, California, NBC News reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In a major shake-up of its chip roadmap, Apple has announced a new M4 processor for today's iPad Pro refresh, barely six months after releasing the first MacBook Pros with the M3 and not even two months after updating the MacBook Air with the M3. Apple says the M4 includes "up to" four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency cores, and a 10-core GPU. Apple's high-level performance estimates say that the M4 has 50 percent faster CPU performance and four times as much graphics performance. Like the GPU in the M3, the M4 also supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing to enable more advanced lighting effects in games and other apps. Due partly to its "second-generation" 3 nm manufacturing process, Apple says the M4 can match the performance of the M2 while using just half the power. As with so much else in the tech industry right now, the M4 also has an AI focus; Apple says it's beefing up the 16-core Neural Engine (Apple's equivalent of the Neural Processing Unit that companies like Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Microsoft have been pushing lately). Apple says the M4 runs up to 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS), considerably ahead of Intel's Meteor Lake platform, though a bit short of the 45 TOPS that Qualcomm is promising with the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus series. The M3's Neural Engine is only capable of 18 TOPS, so that's a major step up for Apple's hardware. Apple's chips since 2017 have included some version of the Neural Engine, though to date, those have mostly been used to enhance and categorize photos, perform optical character recognition, enable offline dictation, and do other oddities. But it may be that Apple needs something faster for the kinds of on-device large language model-backed generative AI that it's expected to introduce in iOS and iPadOS 18 at WWDC next month. A separate report from the Wall Street Journal says Apple is developing a custom chip to run AI software in datacenters. "Apple's server chip will likely be focused on running AI models, also known as inference, rather than in training AI models, where Nvidia is dominant," reports Reuters. Further reading: Apple Quietly Kills the Old-school iPad and Its Headphone JackRead more of this story at Slashdot.

The Pixel 8A is officially here. The 8A gets Google's latest processor, adds a bunch of new AI features, and still starts at $499 in the US. But the very best news is that the 8A adopts the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro's seven years of software support, which is just unheard of in a midrange phone. From a report: The 8A retains the same general shape and size as its predecessor. But its 6.1-inch screen gets a couple of significant updates: the top refresh rate is now 120Hz, up from 90Hz, and the panel gets up to 40 percent brighter, up to 2,000 nits in peak brightness mode. They're important upgrades, especially since the 8A's main competition in the US, the OnePlus 12R, comes with an excellent display. It comes with the same generative AI photo and video features that made a splash on the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, including Best Take, Magic Editor, and Audio Magic Eraser. Circle to Search is also available, and the 8A will be able to run Google's mobile-optimized on-device AI model, Gemini Nano. As on the Pixel 8, it'll be a developer option delivered via feature drop. Other specs are either unchanged or slightly boosted compared to the last generation. There's still 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, though there's now a 256GB option. Camera hardware is unchanged from the 7A, including a stabilized 64-megapixel main sensor. There's an IP67 rating, consistent with the 7A, and battery capacity is a little higher at 4,492mAh compared to 4,385mAh. Wireless charging is available via Qi 1.3 at up to 7.5W -- no Qi2 here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.