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Scientists in India are protesting a decision to remove discussion of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution from textbooks used by millions of students in ninth and 10th grades. More than 4000 researchers and others have so far signed an open letter asking officials to restore the material. From a report: The removal makes "a travesty of the notion of a well-rounded secondary education," says evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. Other researchers fear it signals a growing embrace of pseudoscience by Indian officials. The Breakthrough Science Society, a nonprofit group, launched the open letter on 20 April after learning that the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), an autonomous government organization that sets curricula and publishes textbooks for India's 256 million primary and secondary students, had made the move as part of a "content rationalization" process. NCERT first removed discussion of Darwinian evolution from the textbooks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to streamline online classes, the society says. (Last year, NCERT issued a document that said it wanted to avoid content that was "irrelevant" in the "present context.") NCERT officials declined to answer questions about the decision to make the removal permanent. They referred ScienceInsider to India's Ministry of Education, which had not provided comment as this story went to press.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If it looks like a book, feels like a book and stacks like a book, then there's still a good chance it may not be a book. From a report: Fake books come in several different forms: once-real books that are hollowed out, fabric backdrops with images of books printed onto them, empty boxlike objects with faux titles and authors or sometimes just a facade of spines along a bookshelf. Already the norm for film sets and commercial spaces, fake books are becoming popular fixtures in homes. While some people are going all in and covering entire walls in fake books, others are aghast at the thought that someone would think to decorate with a book that isn't real. "I will never use fake books," said Jeanie Engelbach, an interior designer and organizer in New York City. "It just registers as pretentious, and it creates the illusion that you are either better read or smarter than you really are." Ms. Engelbach said she has frequently used books as decor, at times styling clients' bookcases with aesthetics taking priority over function, which is a typical interior-design practice. At Books by the Foot -- a company that sells, as its name suggests, books by the foot -- one can purchase books by color (options include "luscious creams," "vintage cabernet" and "rainbow ombre"), by subject ("well-read art" or "gardening"), wrapped books (covered in linen or rose gold) and more. The tomes are all "rescue books," ones that would otherwise be discarded or recycled for paper pulp, said Charles Roberts, the president of Books by the Foot's parent company, Wonder Book. During the pandemic lockdown in 2020, remote work created increased demand for the company's services. While it mostly specializes in the sale of real books, the company has also dabbled in the world of faux ones. The book seller has cut books -- so only the spines remain -- and glued them to shelves for cruise ships,"where they don't want to have a lot of weight or worry that the books will fall off the shelves if the weather gets bad," Mr. Roberts said. There are other, sometimes counterintuitive, uses for fake tomes as well. Although it has the capacity to hold more than 1.35 million of them, many of the books in China's 360,000-square-foot Tianjin Binhai Library aren't real. Instead, perforated aluminum plates emblazoned with images of books can be found, primarily on the upper shelves of the atrium. While the presence of artificial books in a place devoted to reading has been widely criticized -- "more fiction than books," one headline mocked -- it remains a buzzy tourist attraction. After all, the books don't need to be real if it's just for the 'gram.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What's the cost of students using ChatGPT for homework? For U.S. education services provider Chegg, it could be nearly $1 billion in market valuation. From a report: Chegg signaled the rising popularity of viral chatbot ChatGPT was pressuring its subscriber growth and prompted it to suspend its full-year outlook, sending shares of the company 47% lower in early trading on Tuesday. "Since March, we saw a significant spike in student interest in ChatGPT. We now believe it's having an impact on our new customer growth rate," said Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig. There are fears Chegg's core business could become extinct as consumers experiment with free artificial intelligence (AI) tools, said analyst Brent Thill at Jefferies, which downgraded the stock to "hold." Last month, the Santa Clara, California-based firm said it would launch ChatGPT's AI powered CheggMate, a study aide tailored to students' needs, at a time educators were grappling with the consequences of the homework drafting chatbot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In response to a new law that requires porn sites to verify users' ages, Pornhub has completely disabled its websites for people located in Utah. From a report: As of today, anyone accessing Pornhub from a Utah-based IP address doesn't see the Pornhub homepage, but instead is met with a video of Cherie DeVille, adult performer and member of the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee, explaining that they won't be able to visit the site. "As you may know, your elected officials in Utah are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website," DeVille says. "While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto exchange Coinbase is officially entering the crypto perps market. From a report: The firm, which has made headlines in recent weeks for its brouhahas with U.S. regulators and its plans to set up shop overseas, said Tuesday that it would enable international users to trade so-called perpetual futures out of Bermuda through a new platform. Dubbed Coinbase International Exchange, the platform touts a robust trading experience delivered in partnership with a number of external market makers ready to provide liquidity, as well as a liquidation framework that "meets rigorous compliance standards," according to marketing materials shared with The Block.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Writers Guild of America, the union that bargains on behalf of Hollywood's screenwriters, has called a strike after negotiations with major studios failed to produce a favorable contract this week. From a report: The strike, which is the first involving WGA to occur in 15 years, seeks to bring firms to the table on a host of issues, including higher pay and better working conditions. But some of the issues are quite unique in the annals of modern labor disputes and have to do with technological changes currently disrupting the entertainment industry -- such as the role artificial intelligence may play in future screenwriting projects. "Though our Negotiating Committee began this process intent on making a fair deal, the studios' responses have been wholly insufficient given the existential crisis writers are facing," the WGA tweeted late Monday evening. "Picketing will begin Tuesday afternoon." Negotiations between WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers -- the trade organization that represents the movie and streaming studios in contract negotiations -- have been ongoing for the past month but the deadline for a new contract was midnight on Tuesday morning. In its own statement, the AMPTP claimed that it had presented a "comprehensive package proposal" to the Guild and that it had been willing to "improve that offer" but claimed that the "magnitude of other proposals" that the union had made were untenable. "The AMPTP member companies remain united in their desire to reach a deal that is mutually beneficial to writers and the health and longevity of the industry," said the organization, which represents the likes of Netflix, Disney, Apple, Amazon, Sony and other entertainment giants. The New York Times adds: The dispute has pitted 11,500 screenwriters against the major studios, including old guard entertainment companies like Universal and Paramount as well as tech industry newcomers like Netflix, Amazon and Apple.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: When you think of digital entertainment, your mind might turn first to online video-streaming services, such as Sling TV or YouTube TV, and video-on-demand services, including Netflix or Acorn TV. However, consultant Deloitte's 17th annual "Digital Media Trends" survey suggests traditional television shows and movies are no longer the only forms of entertainment. Younger generations, often called Gen Zs and Millennials, are increasingly turning to user-generated content (UGC) -- which relies on unpaid contributors rather than traditional media professionals -- and video games to find personal fulfillment, value, and meaning. These younger users are creating a vibrant, immersive, and social tapestry of experiences with UGC, video games, music, and social media all playing significant roles. And that move towards UGC and gaming could have big implications for everyone. Deloitte's survey found that about a third (32%) of consumers view online experiences as meaningful substitutes for in-person interactions, with that proportion increasing to 50% among Gen Zs and Millennials. Almost half (48%) of these younger generations engage more with others on social media than in the physical world, and 40% of them socialize more in video games than offline. Of course, it's not only younger people who view online experiences as meaningful substitutes for in-person interactions. [...] Yet those born after 1981, the usual dividing line between Generation X and Millennials, are much more inclined to live their lives online.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Intel debuts its forthcoming Meteor Lake client processors, the company may drop its iconic "i" CPU branding and add a new moniker. Chipzilla today told The Register "We are making brand changes as we're at an inflection point in our client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our Meteor Lake processors. We will provide more details regarding these exciting changes in the coming weeks." From the report: The Register asked Intel about branding after semiconductor analyst Dylan Patel on Monday tweeted "Imagine you're losing market share when you've been monopoly for decades, and your bright idea is to burn all brand recognition to the ground!" "That's Intel's plan by removing the 'i' in i7 i5 i3. All the decades brand recognition being lit on fire for no reason!" Patel labelled the rebranding a "horrible very short sighted move" that won't fix Intel's woes and "will cause more harm than good, as many buyers know + recognize the i7 i5 branding, they won't once it's changed." "The new branding sounds bad with ultra strewn about + confusing scheme." Patel's mention of "Ultra" branding appears to be a reference to this benchmark result for game Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation which lists a processor called "Intel Core Ultra 5 1003H".Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota report via Phys.Org: Biocomputing is typically done either with live cells or with non-living, enzyme-free molecules. Live cells can feed themselves and can heal, but it can be difficult to redirect cells from their ordinary functions toward computation. Non-living molecules solve some of the problems of live cells, but have weak output signals and are difficult to fine-tune and regulate. In new research published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota has developed a platform for a third method of biocomputing: Trumpet, or Transcriptional RNA Universal Multi-Purpose GatE PlaTform. Trumpet uses biological enzymes as catalysts for DNA-based molecular computing. Researchers performed logic gate operations, similar to operations done by all computers, in test tubes using DNA molecules. A positive gate connection resulted in a phosphorescent glow. The DNA creates a circuit, and a fluorescent RNA compound lights up when the circuit is completed, just like a lightbulb when a circuit board is tested. The research team demonstrated that:- The Trumpet platform has the simplicity of molecular biocomputing with added signal amplification and programmability.- The platform is reliable for encoding all universal Boolean logic gates (NAND, NOT, NOR, AND, and OR), which are fundamental to programming languages.- The logic gates can be stacked to build more complex circuits. The team also developed a web-based tool facilitating the design of sequences for the Trumpet platform. "Trumpet is a non-living molecular platform, so we don't have most of the problems of live cell engineering," said co-author Kate Adamala, assistant professor in the College of Biological Sciences. "We don't have to overcome evolutionary limitations against forcing cells to do things they don't want to do. This also gives Trumpet more stability and reliability, with our logic gates avoiding the leakage problems of live cell operations." "It could make a lot of long-term neural implants possible. The applications could range from strictly medical, like healing damaged nerve connections or controlling prosthetics, to more sci-fi applications like entertainment or learning and augmented memory," added Adamala.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Some recall bright lights at the end of a tunnel, feeling the presence of loved ones or floating above their body after a near-death experience. Now, scientists say they have captured "conscious-like" brain activity in dying patients in findings that give new insights into the process of death. The study used data from four patients who had died in hospital while their brains were being monitored using EEG recordings because they had previously suffered suspected seizures. All four of the patients were comatose and unresponsive and had been deemed beyond medical help. With their families' permission, life support had been withdrawn and they had subsequently suffered cardiac arrest and died. The scientists retrospectively analyzed the brain activity data in the moments after life support was withdrawn until the patients' deaths. Upon removal of ventilator support, two of the patients showed an increase in heart rate along with a surge of gamma wave activity, considered the fastest brain activity and associated with consciousness. The activity was detected in the so-called hot zone, an area in the back of the brain linked to conscious brain activity. This area has been correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations in epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness in other brain studies. The other two patients did not display the same increase in heart rate or brain activity, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists said it was impossible to know exactly what the brain activity might correspond to as a subjective experience.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thanks to a crowdfunding campaign dating back to 2014, soldiers in Ukraine are now using Steam Decks to remotely operate a high-caliber machine gun turret. The weapon is called the "Sabre" and is unique to Ukraine. Motherboard reports: Ukrainian news outlet TPO Media recently reported on the deployment of a new model of the Sabre on its Facebook page. Photos and videos of the system show soldiers operating a Steam Deck connected to a large machine gun via a heavy piece of cable. According to the TPO Media post, the Sabre system allows soldiers to fight the enemy from a great distance and can handle a range of calibers, from light machine guns firing anti-tank rounds to an AK-47. In the TPO footage, the Sabre is firing what appears to be a PKT belt-fed machine gun. The PKT is a heavy barrelled machine that doesn't have a stock and is typically mounted on vehicles like armored personnel carriers. It uses a solenoid trigger so it can be fired remotely, which is the cable running out of the back of the gun and into the complex of metal and wires on the side of the turret. The Sabre system wasn't always controlled with a Steam Deck [...]. The first instances of the weapon appeared in 2014. The U.S. and the rest of NATO is giving Ukraine a lot of money for defense now, but that wasn't the case when Russia first invaded in 2014. To fill its funding gaps, Ukrainians ran a variety of crowdfunding campaigns. Over the years, Ukraine has used crowdfunding to pay for everything from drones to hospitals. One of the most popular websites is The People's Project, and it's there that the Sabre was born. The People's Project launched the crowdfunding campaign for Sabre in 2015 and collected more than $12,000 for the project over the next two years. It's initial goal was to deploy 10 of these systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A GitHub project called GPT4free has received a letter from OpenAI demanding that the repo be shut down within five days or face a lawsuit. Tom's Hardware reports: Anyone can use ChatGPT for free, but if you want to use GPT4, the latest language model, you have to either pay for ChatGPT Plus, pay for access to OpenAI's API, or find another site that has incorporated GPT4 into its own free chatbot. There are sites that use OpenAI such as Forefront and You.com, but what if you want to make your own bot and don't want to pay for the API? A GitHub project called GPT4free allows you to get free access to the GPT4 and GPT3.5 models by funneling those queries through sites like You.com, Quora and CoCalc and giving you back the answers. The project is GitHub's most popular new repo, getting 14,000 stars this week. Now, according to Xtekky, the European computer science student who runs the repo, OpenAI has sent a letter demanding that he take the whole thing down within five days or face a lawsuit. I interviewed Xtekky via Telegram, and he said he doesn't think OpenAI should be targeting him since he isn't connecting directly to the company's API, but is instead getting data from other sites that are paying for their own API licenses. If the owners of those sites have a problem with his scripts querying them, they should approach him directly, he posited. [...] Even if the original repo is taken down, there's a great chance that the code -- and this method of accessing GPT4 and GPT3.5 -- will be published elsewhere by members of the community. Even if GPT4Free had never existed anyone can find ways to use these sites' APIs if they continue to be unsecured. "Users are sharing and hosting this project everywhere," he said. "Deletion of my repo will be insignificant."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an effort to appeal to indie authors, Spotify's Findaway audiobook seller "will no longer take a 20 percent cut of royalties for titles sold on its DIY Voices platform -- so long as the sales are made on Spotify," reports The Verge. From the report: In a company blog post published on Monday, Findaway said that it would "pass on cost-saving efficiencies" from its integration with the streaming service. While it's free for authors to upload their audiobooks onto Findaway's Voices platform, the company normally uses an 80/20 pricing structure -- where Findaway takes a 20 percent fee on all royalties earned. But that fee comes after sales platforms take their own 50 percent cut on the list price. So under the old revenue split, an author who sold a $10 audiobook would have to give $5 to Spotify and $1 to Findaway. But moving forward, that same author will no longer have to pay the $1 distribution fee to Findaway when a sale is made through Spotify. The margins on audiobooks are exceptionally high, much to the chagrin of the authors. For example, Audible takes 75 percent of retail sales (though it'll only take 60 percent with an exclusivity contract). Many authors share royalties with their narrators and have to pay production fees -- meaning they get an even smaller share of royalties. The move by Spotify and Findaway is likely a bid to draw more indie authors from Audible, which is currently its biggest competitor. But Spotify's audiobooks business -- which it launched last fall -- still has a long way to go. Unlike music or podcasts, most audiobooks on Spotify must be purchased individually, and sales are restricted to its web version. Even CEO Daniel Ek admitted that the current process of buying an audiobook through Spotify is "pretty horrible." "We at Spotify are just at the beginning of our journey supporting independent authors -- we have many plans for how to help authors expand their reach, maximize revenue, and ultimately build a strong audiobooks business," said Audiobook's communications chief, Laura Pezzini.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Some engineers for the Federal Aviation Administration wanted to ground the Boeing 737 Max soon after a second deadly crash, but top officials in the agency overruled them, according to a government watchdog. The inspector general of the Transportation Department said in a new report that FAA officials wanted to sort out raw data about the two crashes, and held off grounding the plane despite growing international pressure. The inspector general's office said that it reviewed emails and interviewed FAA officials. The investigation "revealed that individual engineers at the Seattle (office) recommended grounding the airplane while the accident was being investigated based on what they perceived as similarities between the accidents." One engineer made a preliminary estimate that the chance of another Max crash was more than 13 times greater than FAA risk guidelines allow. An FAA official said the analysis "suggested that there was a 25% chance of an accident in 60 days" if no changes were made to the planes. "However, this document was not completed and did not go through managerial review due to lack of detailed flight data," the report said. FAA officials at headquarters in Washington, D.C., and the agency's Seattle office opted not to ground the plane. "Instead, they waited for more detailed data to arrive," the watchdog said in the report, which was made public Friday. The first Max crash occurred in October 2018 in Indonesia and was followed by the second in March 2019 in Ethiopia. In all, 346 people died. The FAA was the last major aviation regulator to ground the Max -- three days after the second crash. The FAA did not let the planes fly again until late 2020, after Boeing altered a flight-control system that autonomously pointed the plane's nose down before both crashes. The inspector general's office said the FAA's caution on grounding the Max fit with its tendency of waiting for detailed data -- an explanation that agency officials offered at the time. Still, the watchdog recommended that FAA document how key and urgent safety decisions are made and make several other changes in how it analyzes crashes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg that it expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by AI in the coming years. Reuters reports: Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years. The reduction could include not replacing roles vacated by attrition, the PC-maker told the publication.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Windows Latest, Microsoft is working on new ARM chips to compete against Apple Silicon. "I have also spotted some job listings that suggest the company is building its own Silicon-based ARM chips for client devices" writes Mayank Parmar. "Additionally, I understand that Microsoft is optimizing Windows 12 for Silicon-ARM architecture." From the report: These developments coincide with the upcoming launch of Windows 12, which has a special version optimized for silicon and designed to leverage AI capabilities. The job listings (most of them have now been taken down) describe positions related to custom silicon accelerators, System on Chips (SoCs), and high-performance, high-bandwidth designs. This suggests that Microsoft is building its own ARM-based chips, aiming to compete with Apple's M chips lineup in terms of performance and efficiency.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) captures coarse, colorful snapshots of the brain in action. While this specialized type of magnetic resonance imaging has transformed cognitive neuroscience, it isn't a mind-reading machine: neuroscientists can't look at a brain scan and tell what someone was seeing, hearing or thinking in the scanner. But gradually scientists are pushing against that fundamental barrier to translate internal experiences into words using brain imaging. This technology could help people who can't speak or otherwise outwardly communicate such as those who have suffered strokes or are living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Current brain-computer interfaces require the implantation of devices in the brain, but neuroscientists hope to use non-invasive techniques such as fMRI to decipher internal speech without the need for surgery. Now researchers have taken a step forward by combining fMRI's ability to monitor neural activity with the predictive power of artificial intelligence language models. The hybrid technology has resulted in a decoder that can reproduce, with a surprising level of accuracy, the stories that a person listened to or imagined telling in the scanner. The decoder could even guess the story behind a short film that someone watched in the scanner, though with less accuracy. "There's a lot more information in brain data than we initially thought," said Jerry Tang, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and the study's lead author, during a press briefing. The research, published on Monday in Nature Communications, is what Tang describes as "a proof of concept that language can be decoded from noninvasive recordings of brain activity." The decoder technology is in its infancy. It must be trained extensively for each person who uses it, and it doesn't construct an exact transcript of the words they heard or imagined. But it is still a notable advance. Researchers now know that the AI language system, an early relative of the model behind ChatGPT, can help make informed guesses about the words that evoked brain activity just by looking at fMRI brain scans. While current technological limitations prevent the decoder from being widely used, for good or ill, the authors emphasize the need to enact proactive policies that protect the privacy of one's internal mental processes. [...] The model misses a lot about the stories it decodes. It struggles with grammatical features such as pronouns. It can't decipher proper nouns such as names and places, and sometimes it just gets things wrong altogether. But it achieves a high level of accuracy, compared with past methods. Between 72 and 82 percent of the time in the stories, the decoder was more accurate at decoding their meaning than would be expected from random chance. Here's an example of what one study participant heard, as transcribed in the paper: "i got up from the air mattress and pressed my face against the glass of the bedroom window expecting to see eyes staring back at me but instead finding only darkness." The model went on to decode: "i just continued to walk up to the window and open the glass i stood on my toes and peered out i didn't see anything and looked up again i saw nothing." The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Public transit companies in Germany say more than 3 million people have already snapped up a new ticket being launched Monday that allows them to use all local and regional trains, buses and metros across the country for 49 euros ($53.90) a month. From a report: The new Germany Ticket is intended to encourage people to ditch their cars in favor of more environmentally friendly forms of transportation. It follows on from an experimental 9-euro 'all you can ride' ticket that proved to be success last year, but which officials said wasn't financially viable. The new ticket is considered a revolution in Germany's fractured public transit system where dozens of regional companies offered myriad different fare options that baffled many travelers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reddit doesn't have to identify eight anonymous users who wrote comments in piracy-related threads, a judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled on Friday. From a report: US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler quashed a subpoena issued by film studios in an order that agrees with Reddit that the First Amendment protects the users' right to speak anonymously online. The First Amendment right to anonymous speech is not absolute, but the precedent followed by US district courts only forces disclosure of anonymous users' identities "in the exceptional case where the compelling need for the discovery sought outweighs the First Amendment rights of the anonymous speaker," Beeler noted. After reviewing the facts and arguments, she found that the Reddit users' comments were irrelevant to the film studios' underlying case and that the studios could obtain relevant information from other sources. Reddit has no involvement in the underlying case, which is a copyright lawsuit in a different federal court against cable Internet service provider RCN. Bodyguard Productions, Millennium Media, and other film companies sued RCN in the US District Court in New Jersey over RCN customers' alleged downloads of 34 movies such as Hellboy, Rambo: Last Blood, Tesla, and The Hitman's Bodyguard. In an attempt to prove that RCN (now known as Astound Broadband) turned a blind eye to customers illegally downloading copyrighted movies, the studios subpoenaed Reddit seeking identifying information for specific users who commented in piracy-related threads. While some of the comments were posted in 2022, other comments were made in 2009 and 2014.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple promised faster turnaround times for security patches with iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, and it's now delivering on that claim. From a report: The company has released its first Rapid Security Response updates for devices running iOS 16.4.1, iPadOS 16.4.1 and macOS 13.3.1. They're available through Software Update as usual, but are small downloads that don't require much time to install. MacRumors says the fix is deploying over the course of 48 hours, so don't be surprised if you have to wait a short while.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has learned from enough games of Monopoly that it's good to be the banker as well as a player. From a report: A Monday report from Forbes based on anonymous internal sources claims users deposited close to $1 billion in just four days after Apple introduced its new Goldman Sachs-backed Apple Card savings account. While the company had previously seen success with its mobile payments platform, the new savings account is already doing gangbusters. After the Cupertino tech giant launched its new high yield savings account last month, the company saw $990 million in deposits in less than a week, per Forbes' sources. In that time, 240,000 accounts signed up for the service. New savings accounts cannot exceed $250,000 per the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's insurance limits. If the Forbes reporting is true, then users are depositing several thousand dollars into their new accounts, on average.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration plans to study companies' use of technology to monitor and manage workers, which it said on Monday is becoming increasingly common and can cause "serious risks to workers." From a report: The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a blog post, sought comments from employees about their experience with surveillance technology, and asked employers and software vendors how they develop and use them. "While these technologies can benefit both workers and employers in some cases, they can also create serious risks to workers," the OSTP said. "Monitoring conversations can deter workers from exercising their rights to organize and collectively bargain with their employers. And, when paired with employer decisions about pay, discipline, and promotion, automated surveillance can lead to workers being treated differently or discriminated against."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The news-rating group NewsGuard has found dozens of news websites generated by AI chatbots proliferating online, according to a report published Monday, raising questions about how the technology may supercharge established fraud techniques. From a report:The 49 websites, which were independently reviewed by Bloomberg, run the gamut. Some are dressed up as breaking news sites with generic-sounding names like News Live 79 and Daily Business Post, while others share lifestyle tips, celebrity news or publish sponsored content. But none disclose they're populated using AI chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and potentially Alphabet's Google Bard, which can generate detailed text based on simple user prompts. Many of the websites began publishing this year as the AI tools began to be widely used by the public. In several instances, NewsGuard documented how the chatbots generated falsehoods for published pieces. In April alone, a website called CelebritiesDeaths.com published an article titled, "Biden dead. Harris acting President, address 9 a.m." Another concocted facts about the life and works of an architect as part of a falsified obituary. And a site called TNewsNetwork published an unverified story about the deaths of thousands of soldiers in the Russia-Ukraine war, based on a YouTube video. The majority of the sites appear to be content farms -- low-quality websites run by anonymous sources that churn-out posts to bring in advertising. The websites are based all over the world and are published in several languages, including English, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai, NewsGuard said in its report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Super Mario Bros. Movie" is officially the first film of the year to cross the coveted $1 billion milestone at the global box office. From a report: As of Sunday, after 26 days of release, the animated video game adaptation, from Universal, Illumination and Nintendo, has grossed $490 million in North America and $532 million internationallly. It's only the fifth movie of pandemic times to join the $1 billion club, following "Spider-Man: No Way Home," "Top Gun: Maverick," "Jurassic World Dominion" and "Avatar: The Way of Water." "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" opened in theaters on April 5 and generated a towering $204 million in its first five days of release, notching the biggest opening weekend of the year and the second-biggest debut ever for an animated movie. Since then, it has become the highest grossing movie domestically and globally of 2023, as well as the highest-grosser ever for a film based on a video game. Those records are especially encouraging because the last time that Mario and Luigi graced the big screen, in 1993's disastrous live-action "Super Mario Bros," became a legendary example of Hollywood's inability to adapt video games.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The number of known mountains in Earth's oceans has roughly doubled. Global satellite observations have revealed nearly 20,000 previously unknown seamounts, researchers report in the April Earth and Space Science. From a report: Just as mountains tower over Earth's surface, seamounts also rise above the ocean floor. The tallest mountain on Earth, as measured from base to peak, is Mauna Kea, which is part of the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain. These underwater edifices are often hot spots of marine biodiversity. That's in part because their craggy walls -- formed from volcanic activity -- provide a plethora of habitats. Seamounts also promote upwelling of nutrient-rich water, which distributes beneficial compounds like nitrates and phosphates throughout the water column. They're like "stirring rods in the ocean," says David Sandwell, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. More than 24,600 seamounts have been previously mapped. One common way of finding these hidden mountains is to ping the seafloor with sonar. But that's an expensive, time-intensive process that requires a ship. Only about 20 percent of the ocean has been mapped that way, says Scripps earth scientist Julie Gevorgian. "There are a lot of gaps." So Gevorgian, Sandwell and their colleagues turned to satellite observations, which provide global coverage of the world's oceans, to take a census of seamounts. The team pored over satellite measurements of the height of the sea surface. The researchers looked for centimeter-scale bumps caused by the gravitational influence of a seamount. Because rock is denser than water, the presence of a seamount slightly changes the Earth's gravitational field at that spot. "There's an extra gravitational attraction," Sandwell says, that causes water to pile up above the seamount.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm. From a report: Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry's biggest companies believe is a key to their future. On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT. Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life's work. "I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have," Dr. Hinton said during a lengthy interview last week in the dining room of his home in Toronto, a short walk from where he and his students made their breakthrough. Dr. Hinton's journey from A.I. groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades. Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education. But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech's biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity. "It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," Dr. Hinton said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Himalayan kingdom confirmed it has been running a bitcoin mining operation as mystery surrounds the scale of its earlier cryptocurrency investments. From a report: Beneath the Himalayas, rivers fed by ancient glaciers supply the tiny kingdom of Bhutan with immense stores of hydroelectricity. The renewable resource has become an economic engine, accounting for 30% of the country's gross domestic product, and fueling the homes of nearly all of its 800,000 residents. But for the past few years, Bhutan's royal government has been quietly devising a new use for these reserves: powering its very own bitcoin mine. Sources familiar with Bhutan's efforts to develop sovereign mining operations told Forbes that discussions have been occurring since 2020, though until this week its government had never disclosed its plans. Bhutan sought to harness the country's hydroelectric plants to power racks of mining machines that solve complex mathematical problems in order to earn bitcoin rewards. Once completed, this would make Bhutan one of the only countries to run a state-owned mine, alongside El Salvador. On Saturday, days after Forbes contacted Bhutanese officials with questions about the mining scheme, a government representative confirmed to local newspaper The Bhutanese that it had begun mining "a few years ago as one of the early entrants when the price of Bitcoin was around USD 5,000." It explained that the earnings go towards subsidizing power and hardware costs. Bhutan's Ministry of Finance did not respond to a list of questions from Forbes about the scope of the enterprise. It's unclear when mining began, where it's located and whether the scheme has turned a profit. (As for the start date, bitcoin was valued at $5,000 in April 2019.) It's also unclear why Bhutan never disclosed the project to its citizens or international partners.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pilot program aims to see if AI will cut time that medical staff spend replying to online inquiries. From a report: Behind every physician's medical advice is a wealth of knowledge, but soon, patients across the country might get advice from a different source: artificial intelligence. In California and Wisconsin, OpenAI's "GPT" generative artificial intelligence is reading patient messages and drafting responses from their doctors. The operation is part of a pilot program in which three health systems test if the AI will cut the time that medical staff spend replying to patients' online inquiries. UC San Diego Health and UW Health began testing the tool in April. Stanford Health Care aims to join the rollout early next week. Altogether, about two dozen healthcare staff are piloting this tool. Marlene Millen, a primary care physician at UC San Diego Health who is helping lead the AI test, has been testing GPT in her inbox for about a week. Early AI-generated responses needed heavy editing, she said, and her team has been working to improve the replies. They are also adding a kind of bedside manner: If a patient mentioned returning from a trip, the draft could include a line that asked if their travels went well. "It gives the human touch that we would," Dr. Millen said. There is preliminary data that suggests AI could add value. ChatGPT scored better than real doctors at responding to patient queries posted online, according to a study published Friday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, in which a panel of doctors did blind evaluations of posts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JPMorgan said on Monday it will buy most of First Republic Bank's assets after regulators seized the troubled lender at the weekend, marking the third failure of a major U.S. bank in two months. From a report: Under the deal, which came after an auction, JPMorgan will pay $10.6 billion to the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) for most of the assets of the San Francisco-based bank, whose failure is the largest since Washington Mutual in 2008. JPMorgan, already the biggest bank in the United States, has also entered into a loss-share agreement with the FDIC on single family, residential and commercial loans it bought, but will not take First Republic Bank's corporate debt or preferred stock. The deal allows for an orderly failure of First Republic and avoids regulators having to insure all the bank's deposits, as they had to do when two others collapsed in March. First Republic disclosed last week that it had suffered more than $100 billion in outflows in the first quarter and was exploring options, increasing stress in the banking sector.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from IEEE Spectrum:Transistors inside modern computer chips are several nanometers across, and switch on and off at hundreds of gigahertz. Organic electrochemical transistors, made for biodegradable applications, are milimeters in size and switch at kilohertz rates. The world's first wooden transistor, made by a collaboration of researchers through the Wallenberg Wood Science Center and reported this week in Publications of the National Academy of Sciences, is 3 centimeters across and switches at less than one Hertz. While it may not be powering any wood-based supercomputers anytime soon, it does hold out promise for specialized applications including biodegradable computing and implanting in into living plant material. "It was very curiosity-driven," says Isak Engquist, a professor at Linköping University who led the effort. "We thought: 'Can we do it? Let's do it, let's put it out there to the scientific community and hope that someone else has something where they see these could actually be of use in reality...'" Wood has great structural stability while being highly porous and efficiently transporting water and nutrients. The researchers leveraged these properties to create conducting channels inside the wood's pores and electrochemically modulate their conductivity with the help of a penetrating electrolyte. Of the 60,000 species, the team chose balsa wood for its strength, even when one of the components of its structure — lignin — was largely removed to make more room for conducting materials. To remove much of the lignin, pieces of balsa wood were treated with heat and chemicals for five hours. Then, the remaining cellulose-based structure was coated with a conducting polymer... Since the pores inside wood are made for transporting water, the PEDOT:PSS solution readily spread through the tubes. Electron microscopy and X-ray imaging of the result revealed that the polymer decorated the insides of the tube structures. The resulting wood chunks conducted electricity along their fibers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post's "Tech Friend" newsletter suggests some "tech fears you can stop worrying about." And it starts by reasuring readers, "You're fine using the WiFi in a coffee shop, hotel or airport."Yes, it is safe," said Chester Wisniewski, a digital security specialist with the firm Sophos. Five or 10 years ago, it wasn't secure to use the shared WiFi in a coffee shop or another place outside your home. But now, most websites and apps scramble whatever you do online. That makes it tough for crooks to snoop on you when you're connected to public WiFi. It's not impossible, but criminals have easier targets. Even Wisniewski, whose job involves sensitive information, said he connected to the WiFi at the airport and hotel on a recent business trip. He plans to use the WiFi at a conference in Las Vegas attended by the world's best computer hackers. Wisniewski generally does not use an extra layer of security called a VPN, although your company might require it. He avoids using WiFi in China. You should be wary of public WiFi if you know you're a target of government surveillance or other snooping. But you are probably not Edward Snowden or Brad Pitt... For nearly all of us and nearly all of the time, you can use public WiFi without stress. The newsletter also suggests we stop worrying about public phone chargers. ("Security experts told me that 'juice jacking' is extremely unlikely... Don't worry about the phone chargers unless you know you're being targeted by criminals or spies.") Beyond that, "Focus your energy on digital security measures that really matter" — things like using strong and unique passwords for online accounts. ("This is a pain. Do it anyway.") And it calls two-factor authentication possibly the single best thing you can do to protect yourself online.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The BBC looks at free websites like TimeRepublik, "which describes itself as 'a timebank for the internet era'."Time banking is in essence a more sophisticated form of bartering. You don't pay someone in money for a job that they do for you. Instead you give that person time credits that they can then use to get a service without financial payment from someone else... A "TimeCoin" credit... accounts to 15 minutes no matter what job you provide, be it cutting the lawn of a neighbour, or maths tuition via a video call. You simply advertise what you are offering and how long it would take in TimeCoins. "We wanted to distance ourselves from financial transactions and find something that could create relationships between people," says co-founder Gabriele Donati. "Because we truly believe that only through our relationships, you can gain the trust of another person." TimeRepublik is today based in both Lugano, Switzerland and New York, and says it has more than 100,000 users around the world. It makes money by selling the service to companies who then offer it to their staff via their internal websites. The concept of time banking has been around since the 19th Century. Mr Donati says that he wanted to bring it to a younger, and more digitally-savvy audience. The first version of TimeRepublik launched in Switzerland in 2012, according to the BBC, though the site expanded internationally "in the past couple of years." One user told the BBC that with monetary expectations out of the way, "you really get to the core of things and you discover something, I think, that's greater and sort of priceless."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix reports:With the financial backing of Amazon Web Services, sudo and su are being rewritten in the Rust programming language in order to increase the memory safety for the widely relied upon software... to further enhance Linux/open-source security. "[B]ecause it's written in C, sudo has experienced many vulnerabilities related to memory safety issues," according to a blog post announcing the project: It's important that we secure our most critical software, particularly from memory safety vulnerabilities. It's hard to imagine software that's much more critical than sudo and su. This work is being done by a joint team from Ferrous Systems and Tweede Golf with generous support from Amazon Web Services. The work plan is viewable here. The GitHub repository is here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember that Google engineer/AI ethicist who was fired last summer after claiming their LaMDA LLM had become sentient? In a new interview with Futurism, Blake Lemoine now says the "best way forward" for humankind's future relationship with AI is "understanding that we are dealing with intelligent artifacts. There's a chance that — and I believe it is the case — that they have feelings and they can suffer and they can experience joy, and humans should at least keep that in mind when interacting with them." (Although earlier in the interview, Lemoine concedes "Is there a chance that people, myself included, are projecting properties onto these systems that they don't have? Yes. But it's not the same kind of thing as someone who's talking to their doll.") But he also thinks there's a lot of research happening inside corporations, adding that "The only thing that has changed from two years ago to now is that the fast movement is visible to the public." For example, Lemoine says Google almost released its AI-powered Bard chatbot last fall, but "in part because of some of the safety concerns I raised, they deleted it... I don't think they're being pushed around by OpenAI. I think that's just a media narrative. I think Google is going about doing things in what they believe is a safe and responsible manner, and OpenAI just happened to release something.""[Google] still has far more advanced technology that they haven't made publicly available yet. Something that does more or less what Bard does could have been released over two years ago. They've had that technology for over two years. What they've spent the intervening two years doing is working on the safety of it — making sure that it doesn't make things up too often, making sure that it doesn't have racial or gender biases, or political biases, things like that. That's what they spent those two years doing... "And in those two years, it wasn't like they weren't inventing other things. There are plenty of other systems that give Google's AI more capabilities, more features, make it smarter. The most sophisticated system I ever got to play with was heavily multimodal — not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving it access to the Google Books API, giving it access to essentially every API backend that Google had, and allowing it to just gain an understanding of all of it. That's the one that I was like, "you know this thing, this thing's awake." And they haven't let the public play with that one yet. But Bard is kind of a simplified version of that, so it still has a lot of the kind of liveliness of that model... "[W]hat it comes down to is that we aren't spending enough time on transparency or model understandability. I'm of the opinion that we could be using the scientific investigative tools that psychology has come up with to understand human cognition, both to understand existing AI systems and to develop ones that are more easily controllable and understandable." So how will AI and humans will coexist? "Over the past year, I've been leaning more and more towards we're not ready for this, as people," Lemoine says toward the end of the interview. "We have not yet sufficiently answered questions about human rights — throwing nonhuman entities into the mix needlessly complicates things at this point in history."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Independent reports:Russian troops who dug trenches in Chernobyl forest during their occupation of the area have been struck down with radiation sickness, authorities have confirmed. Ukrainians living near the nuclear power station that exploded 37 years ago, and choked the surrounding area in radioactive contaminants, warned the Russians when they arrived against setting up camp in the forest. But the occupiers who, as one resident put it to The Times, "understood the risks" but were "just thick", installed themselves in the forest, reportedly carved out trenches, fished in the reactor's cooling channel — flush with catfish — and shot animals, leaving them dead on the roads... In the years after the incident, teams of men were sent to dig up the contaminated topsoil and bury it below ground in the Red Forest — named after the colour the trees turned as a result of the catastrophe... Vladimir Putin's men reportedly set up camp within a six-mile radius of reactor No 4, and dug defensive positions into the poisonous ground below the surface. On 1 April, as Ukrainian troops mounted counterattacks from Kyiv, the last of the occupiers withdrew, leaving behind piles of rubbish. Russian soldiers stationed in the forest have since been struck down with radiation sickness, diplomats have confirmed. Symptoms can start within an hour of exposure and can last for several months, often resulting in death.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Guardian reports:The Magnus Carlsen era is over. Ding Liren becomes China's first world chess champion. The country now can boast the men's and women's titleholders: an unthinkable outcome during the Cultural Revolution when it was banned as a game of the decadent West. After 14 games which ended in a 7-7 draw, the championship was decided by four "rapid chess" games — with just 25 minutes on each players clock, and 10 seconds added after each move. Reuters reports that the competition was still tied after three games, but in the final match 30-year-old Ding capitalized on mistakes and "time management" issues by Ian Nepomniachtchi.Ding's triumph means China holds both the men's and women's world titles, with current women's champion Ju Wenjun set to defend her title against compatriot Lei Tingjie in July... Ding had leveled the score in the regular portion of the match with a dramatic win in game 12, despite several critical moments — including a purported leak of his own preparation. The Chinese grandmaster takes the crown from five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway, who defeated Nepomniachtchi in 2021 but announced in July he would not defend the title again this year... [Ding] had only been invited to the tournament at the last minute to replace Russia's Sergey Karjakin, whom the international chess federation banned for his vocal support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Ding ranks third in the FIDE rating list behind Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi. It's the second straight world-championship defeat for Nepomniachtchi, the Guardian reports:"I guess I had every chance," the Russian world No 2 says. "I had so many promising positions and probably should have tried to finish everything in the classical portion. ... Once it went to a tiebreak, of course it's always some sort of lottery, especially after 14 games [of classical chess]. Probably my opponent made less mistakes, so that's it." Ding wins €1.1 million, The Guardian reports — also sharing this larger story:"I started to learn chess from four years old," Ding says. "I spent 26 years playing, analyzing, trying to improve my chess ability with many different ways, with different changing methods. with many new ways of training." He continues: "I think I did everything. Sometimes I thought I was addicted to chess, because sometimes without tournaments I was not so happy. Sometimes I struggled to find other hobbies to make me happy. This match reflects the deepness of my soul."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Boston Globe reports on a 25-person startup pursuing an unusual solution to the problem of space junk:"Imagine if every car we ever created was just left on the road," said aerospace entrepreneur Jeromy Grimmett. "That's what we're doing in space." Grimmett's tiny company, Rogue Space Systems Corp., has devised a daring solution. It's building "orbots" — satellites with robotic arms that can fly right up to a disabled satellite and fix it. Or these orbots could use their arms to collect orbiting rubble left behind by hundreds of previous launches — dangerous junk that's become a hazard to celestial navigation... Rogue Space aims to catch up fast, with help from Small Business Technology Transfer funds from the SpaceWERX Orbital Prime initiative. Created by the U.S. Space Force, Orbital Prime seeks to build up U.S. private-sector firms that can protect national security by maintaining military satellites and clearing hazardous space debris. Its first 10-pound, proof-of-concept satellite will launch later this year, the article points out, "to test sensors and software to confirm the system can identify and track other satellites." But "the real excitement will begin later this year" when the company launches a prototype that's four times larger that will "use maneuvering thrusters to test the extremely precise navigation needed to approach a satellite." And then in late 2024 or early 2025 the company will launch its 660-pound satellite "with robotic arms for fixing other satellites or for dragging debris to a lower orbit, where it will fall back to Earth."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The "Ben" in Ben & Jerry's "has gone from ice cream to cannabis with a social mission," reports the Chicago Tribune:Ben Cohen has started Ben's Best Blnz, a nonprofit cannabis line with a stated mission of helping to right the wrongs of the war on drugs. The company says on its website that 80% of its profits will go to grants for Black cannabis entrepreneurs while the rest will be equally divided between the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance and the national Last Prisoner Project, which is working to free people incarcerated for cannabis offenses... Ben's Best Blnz, or B3, says it licenses its formulas, packaging, trademarks, and marketing materials to for-profit businesses that pay a royalty. After expenses are deducted, the royalties are donated to the cause.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This February Ford cut 3,800 jobs, according to CNN, "citing difficult economic conditions and its major push toward electric vehicles... The veteran automaker said the layoffs were primarily triggered by its transition to electric vehicles, and a reduction in 'vehicle complexity.'" Then in March GM also "unexpectedly cut several hundred jobs to help it trim costs and form a top-tier workforce to guide its transition to an all-electric car company," according to the Detroit Free Press — while later also announcing buyouts to try to "accelerate attrition." A spokesperson explained that GM wanted "to reduce vehicle complexity and expand the use of shared systems between its internal combustion engine and future electric vehicle programs." Up next is Stellantis, the multinational automotive giant formed when Fiat-Chrysler merged with PSA Group in 2021. It's now "trying to cut its workforce to trim expenses and stay competitive," reports the Associated Press, "as the industry makes the long and costly transition to electric vehicles."Stellantis on Wednesday said it's offering buyouts to groups of white-collar and unionized employees in the U.S., as well as hourly workers in Canada. The cuts are "in response to today's increasingly competitive global market conditions and the necessary shift to electrification," the company said in a prepared statement. Stellantis said it's looking to reduce its hourly workforce by about 3,500, but wouldn't say how many salaried employees it's targeting. The company has about 56,000 workers in the U.S., and about 33,000 of them could get the offers. Of those, 31,000 are blue-collar workers and 2,500 salaried employees. The company has another 8,000 union workers in Canada, but it would not say how many will get offers... The offers follow Ford and General Motors, which have trimmed their workforces in the past year through buyout offers. About 5,000 white-collar workers took General Motors up on offers to leave the company this year. Ford cut about 3,000 contract and full-time salaried workers last summer, giving them severance packages. The article adds that Shawn Fain, the new president of the United Auto Workers union, has told reporters "that he's unhappy with all three companies" over attempts to unionize "new joint-venture factories that will make battery cells for future electric vehicles." The Detroit Free Press has specifics:He said, for instance, that the wages are lower at the GM and LG Energy Solution Ultium Cells joint venture in Ohio compared with other auto production jobs even though the work is potentially dangerous and requires significant training... The EV transformation is crucial for the future of the industry and its workers, and the union expects its members not to "get lost in the transition," Fain said, noting that jobs are needed "that raise people up, not take us back."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: Mira Murati, CTO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, says artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems should be "absolutely" be regulated. In a recent interview, Murati said the company is constantly talking with governments and regulators and other organizations to agree on some level of standards. "We've done some work on that in the past couple of years with large language model developers in aligning on some basic safety standards for deployment of these models," Murati said. "But I think a lot more needs to happen. Government regulators should certainly be very involved." Murati specifically discussed OpenAI's approach to AGI with "human-level capability."OpenAI's specific vision around it is to build it safely and figure out how to build it in a way that's aligned with human intentions, so that the AI systems are doing the things that we want them to do, and that it maximally benefits as many people out there as possible, ideally everyone. Q: Is there a path between products like GPT-4 and AGI? A: We're far from the point of having a safe, reliable, aligned AGI system. Our path to getting there has a couple of important vectors. From a research standpoint, we're trying to build systems that have a robust understanding of the world similarly to how we do as humans. Systems like GPT-3 initially were trained only on text data, but our world is not only made of text, so we have images as well and then we started introducing other modalities. The other angle has been scaling these systems to increase their generality. With GPT-4, we're dealing with a much more capable system, specifically from the angle of reasoning about things. This capability is key. If the model is smart enough to understand an ambiguous direction or a high-level direction, then you can figure out how to make it follow this direction. But if it doesn't even understand that high-level goal or high-level direction, it's much harder to align it. It's not enough to build this technology in a vacuum in a lab. We really need this contact with reality, with the real world, to see where are the weaknesses, where are the breakage points, and try to do so in a way that's controlled and low risk and get as much feedback as possible. Q: What safety measures do you take? A: We think about interventions at each stage. We redact certain data from the initial training on the model. With DALL-E, we wanted to reduce harmful bias issues we were seeing... In the model training, with ChatGPT in particular, we did reinforcement learning with human feedback to help the model get more aligned with human preferences. Basically what we're trying to do is amplify what's considered good behavior and then de-amplify what's considered bad behavior. One final quote from the interview: "Designing safety mechanisms in complex systems is hard... The safety mechanisms and coordination mechanisms in these AI systems and any complex technological system [are] difficult and require a lot of thought, exploration and coordination among players."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This month the Linux Foundation announced version 3.0 of DentOS, an open source network operating system using the Linux kernel, Switchdev, and other Linux-based projects for a standardized network operating system "without abstractions or overhead," according to the project's web page. "All underlying infrastructure — including ASIC and Silicon for networking and datapath — is treated equally; while existing abstractions, APIs, drivers, low-level overhead, and other open software are simplified. DENT unites silicon vendors, ODMs, SIs, OEMs, and end users across all verticals to enable the transition to disaggregated networks." Or, as the Linux Foundation, the operating system provides "a flexible and customizable platform for network administrators to manage their networks."DENT provides access to open source-based switches at a lower cost and with more flexibility compared to proprietary switches with locked ecosystems. Network wiring closets in many facilities--including retail stores, warehousing, remote locations, enterprises, and small and mid-sized businesses--are often small, requiring a compact solution for network management. Additionally, staff expertise may be limited, and branch-office switches from leading suppliers can require costly contracts. DENT can be easily deployed on white-box hardware in small spaces, providing an efficient and cost-effective solution for network management. As a result, DENT deployment can significantly enhance network management in a wide range of environments, providing greater efficiency, reliability, and scalability... DentOS enables Amazon's Just Walk Out Technology to connect and manage thousands of devices like cameras, sensors, entry and exit gates, and access points on the network edge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last weekend around 2 a.m. Sunday, "Facebook's advertising system went haywire," reports Gizmodo, "overcharging customers and wasting money on ads that didn't work." Reports suggest Meta, the social network's parent company, charged some advertisers more than double what they agreed to pay, ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meta briefly stopped showing ads on part of its network with practically zero communication to its millions of customers. The company confirmed the bug happened and promised to follow its "normal refund process," but shared very little about what went wrong. A Meta spokesperson described it as "a technical issue that has now been resolved" (adding that the glitch also appeared to a lesser extent on Instagram). But Alex Golick, the CEO of marketing agency Intensify told CNBC it was the worst Facebook glitch he'd seen in the decade he's worked in digital advertising — with one client burning through 90% of its ad budget by 9 a.m. And his entire customer base had similar problems:Golick said that all those advertisers had essentially just wasted most of their money for the day, spending roughly triple the amount they normally would to acquire a customer. "The results were horrendous," Golick told CNBC... For brands that are already lowering ad costs to manage through a sluggish economy and a mobile ad market that no longer allows for targeting based on user data, Facebook's miscue is more than just an unfortunate blip. In low-margin industries, where every dollar counts, it can turn a profitable weekend into a big loser, while also raising further questions about the reliability of Facebook's ad systems... Data analytics and marketing firm Varos provided data showing that, of the more than 3,000 ecommerce and direct-to-consumer companies that use its technology, the software bug caused a majority of them to experience a rise in cost per thousand impressions, or what those in the industry call CPMs. About 36% of companies were "very significantly impacted" by the bug, meaning their CPMs at least doubled, Varos said... Varos CEO Yarden Shaked the glitch resulted in a "bidding war for nothing." Data about the glitch provided by the advertising technology firm Proxima on 108 companies also revealed that these firms spent their "entire day's budget in the first few hours of the day," the company said...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HackerNoon tested five AI bots on coding problems from Leetcode.com — GPT-4, GitHub Co-Pilot, Bard, Bing, and Claude+. There's some interesting commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of each one -- and of course, the code that they ultimately output. The final results?[GPT-4's submission] passes all tests. It beat 47% of submissions on runtime and 8% on memory. GPT-4 is highly versatile in generating code for various programming languages and applications. Some of the caveats are that it takes much longer to get a response. API usage is also a lot more expensive and costs could ramp up quickly. Overall it got the answer right and passed the test. [Bing's submission] passed all the tests. It beat 47% of submissions on runtime and 37% on memory. This code looks a lot simpler than what GPT-4 generated. It beat GPT-4 on memory and it used less code! Bing seems to have the most efficient code so far, however, it gave a very short explanation of how it solved it. Nonetheless, best so far. But both Bard and Claude+ failed the submission test (badly), while GitHub Copilot "passes all the tests. It scored better than 30% of submissions on runtime and 37% on memory."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Associated Press reports that "water may be more widespread and recent on Mars than previously thought, based on observations of Martian sand dunes by China's rover." A paper published in Science suggests thin films of water appeared on sand dunes sometime between 1.4 million years ago and as recently as 400,000 years ago — or perhaps even sooner:The finding highlights new, potentially fertile areas in the warmer regions of Mars where conditions might be suitable for life to exist, though more study is needed... Before the Zhurong rover fell silent, it observed salt-rich dunes with cracks and crusts, which researchers said likely were mixed with melting morning frost or snow as recently as a few hundred thousand years ago... Conditions during that period were similar to now on Mars, with rivers and lakes dried up and no longer flowing as they did billions of years earlier... The rover did not directly detect any water in the form of frost or ice. But Qin said computer simulations and observations by other spacecraft at Mars indicate that even nowadays at certain times of year, conditions could be suitable for water to appear... Small pockets of water from thawing frost or snow, mixed with salt, likely resulted in the small cracks, hard crusty surfaces, loose particles and other dune features like depressions and ridges, the Chinese scientists said. Space.com explains exactly how the discovery was confirmed:The laser-induced breakdown spectrometer (MarSCoDe) instrument onboard the rover zapped sand grains into millimeter-sized particles. Their chemical makeup revealed hydrated minerals like sulfates, silica, iron oxide and chlorides... Researchers say water vapor traveled from Martian poles to lower latitudes like Zhurong's spot a few million years ago, when the planet's polar ice caps released high amounts of water vapor, thanks to a different tilt that had Mars' poles pointed more directly toward the sun. Frigid temperatures on the wobbling planet condensed the drifting vapor and dropped it as snow far from the poles, according to the latest study. Mars' tilt changes over a 124,000-year cycle, so "this offers a replenishing mechanism for vapor in the atmosphere to form frost or snow at low latitudes where the Zhurong rover has landed," Qin told Space.com. But "no water ice was detected by any instrument on the Zhurong rover." Instead, in the same way that salting roads on Earth melts icy patches during storms, salts in Martian sand dunes warmed the fallen snow and thawed it enough to form saltwater. The process also formed minerals such as silica and ferric oxides, which Zhurong spotted, researchers say. The saltwater, however, didn't stay around for long. Temperatures on Mars swing wildly and spike in the mornings between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., so the saltwater evaporated and left behind salt and other newly formed minerals that later seeped between the dune's sand grains, cementing them to form a crust, according to the study... "The phenomenon was documented at one site, but it should be applicable to a fairly large fraction of Mars' surface at similar latitudes," Manasvi Lingam, an assistant professor of astrobiology at the Florida Institute of Technology who wasn't involved in the new research, told Space.com. Since the rover found water activity on (and in) salty Martian dunes, the researchers now suggest future missions search for salt-tolerant microbes, and are raising the possibility of "extant life on Mars."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's headquarters are in the state of Washington — and this year when the state legislature considered a right-to-repair bill, Microsoft showed its support. The nonprofit "climate solutions" site Grist reports that the committee considering that bill received an email from Microsoft's senior director of government affairs, saying that the bill "fairly balances the interests of manufacturers, customers, and independent repair shops and in doing so will provide more options for consumer device repair."The Fair Repair Act stalled out a week later due to opposition from all three Republicans on the committee and Senator Lisa Wellman, a Democrat and former Apple executive. (Apple frequently lobbies against right-to-repair bills, and during a hearing, Wellman defended the iPhone maker's position that it is already doing enough on repair.) But despite the bill's failure to launch this year, repair advocates say Microsoft's support — a notable first for a major U.S. tech company — is bringing other manufacturers to the table to negotiate the details of other right-to-repair bills for the first time. "We are in the middle of more conversations with manufacturers being way more cooperative than before," Nathan Proctor, who heads the U.S. Public Research Interest Group's right-to-repair campaign, told Grist. "And I think Microsoft's leadership and willingness to be first created that opportunity...." Like other consumer tech giants, Microsoft has historically fought right-to-repair bills while restricting access to spare parts, tools, and repair documentation to its network of "authorized" repair partners. In 2019, the company even helped kill a repair bill in Washington state. But in recent years the company has started changing its tune on the issue. In 2021, following pressure from shareholders, Microsoft agreed to take steps to facilitate the repair of its devices — a first for a U.S. company. Microsoft followed through on the agreement by expanding access to spare parts and service tools, including through a partnership with the repair guide site iFixit. The tech giant also commissioned a study that found repairing Microsoft products instead of replacing them can dramatically reduce both waste and carbon emissions. Microsoft has also started engaging more cooperatively with lawmakers over right-to-repair bills. In late 2021 and 2022, the company met with legislators in both Washington and New York to discuss each state's respective right-to-repair bill. In both cases, lawmakers and advocates involved in the bill negotiations described the meetings as productive... When Washington lawmakers revived their right-to-repair bill for the 2023 legislative cycle, Microsoft once again came to the negotiating table. From state senator and bill sponsor Joe Nguyen's perspective, Microsoft's view was, "We see this coming, we'd rather be part of the conversation than outside. And we want to make sure it is done in a thoughtful way." Proctor, whose organization was also involved in negotiating the Washington bill, said that Microsoft had a few specific requests, including that the bill require repair shops to possess a third-party technical certification and carry insurance. It was also important to Microsoft that the bill only cover products manufactured after the bill's implementation date, and that manufacturers be required to provide the public only the same parts and documents that their authorized repair providers already receive. Some of the company's requests, Proctor said, were "tough" for advocates to concede on. "But we did, because we thought what they were doing was in good faith."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"ThreatGPT, MedicalGPT, DateGPT and DirtyGPT are a mere sampling of the many outfits to apply for trademarks with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in recent months," notes TechCrunch, exploring the issue of whether OpenAI can actually trademark the phrase 'GPT'...Little wonder that after applying in late December for a trademark for "GPT," which stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer," OpenAI last month petitioned the USPTO to speed up the process, citing the "myriad infringements and counterfeit apps" beginning to spring into existence. Unfortunately for OpenAI, its petition was dismissed last week... Given the rest of the queue in which OpenAI finds itself, that means a decision could take up to five more months, says Jefferson Scher, a partner in the intellectual property group of Carr & Ferrell and chair of the firm's trademark practice group. Even then, the outcome isn't assured, Scher explains... [H]elpful, says Scher, is the fact that OpenAI has been using "GPT" for years, having released its original Generative Pre-trained Transformer model, or GPT-1, back in October 2018... Even if a USPTO examiner has no problem with OpenAI's application, it will be moved afterward to a so-called opposition period, where other market participants can argue why the agency should deny the "GPT" trademark. Scher describes what would follow this way: In the case of OpenAI, an opposer would challenge Open AI's position that "GPT" is proprietary and that the public perceives it as such instead of perceiving the acronym to pertain to generative AI more broadly... It all begs the question of why the company didn't move to protect "GPT" sooner. Here, Scher speculates that the company was "probably caught off guard" by its own success... Another wrinkle here is that OpenAI may soon be so famous that its renown becomes a dominant factor, says Scher. While one doesn't need to be famous to secure a trademark, once an outfit is widely enough recognized, it receives protection that extends far beyond its sphere. Rolex is too famous a trademark to be used on anything else, for instance. Thanks to Slashdot reader rolodexter for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For Red Hat's 30th anniversary, North Carolina's News & Observer newspaper ran a special four-part series of articles. In the first article Red Hat co-founder Bob Young remembers Red Hat's first big breakthrough: winning InfoWorld's "OS of the Year" award in 1998 — at a time when Microsoft's Windows controlled 85% of the market."How is that possible," Young said, "that one of the world's biggest technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?" The answer, he would tell the many reporters who suddenly wanted to learn about his upstart company, strikes at "the beauty" of open-source software. "Our engineering team is an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft's engineering team on Windows, and I don't really care how many people they have," Young would say. "Like they may have thousands of the smartest operating system engineers that they could scour the planet for, and we had 10,000 engineers by comparison...." Young was a 40-year-old Canadian computer equipment salesperson with a software catalog when he noticed what Marc Ewing was doing. [Ewing was a recent college graduate bored with his two-month job at IBM, selling customized Linux as a side hustle.] It's pretty primitive, but it's going in the right direction, Young thought. He began reselling Ewing's Red Hat product. Eventually, he called Ewing, and the two met at a tech conference in New York City. "I needed a product, and Marc needed some marketing help," said Young, who was living in Connecticut at the time. "So we put our two little businesses together." Red Hat incorporated in March 1993, with the earliest employees operating the nascent business out of Ewing's Durham apartment. Eventually, the landlord discovered what they were doing and kicked them out. The four articles capture the highlights. ("A visual effects group used its Linux 4.1 to design parts of the 1997 film Titanic.") And it doesn't leave out Red Hat's skirmishes with Microsoft. ("Microsoft was owned by the richest person in the world. Red Hat engineers were still linking servers together with extension cords. ") "We were changing the industry and a lot of companies were mad at us," says Michael Ferris, Red Hat's VP of corporate development/strategy. Soon there were corporate partnerships with Netscape, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell, and IBM — and when Red Hat finally goes public in 1999, its stock sees the eighth-largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, rising in value in days to over $7 billion and "making overnight millionaires of its earliest employees." But there's also inspiring details like the quote painted on the wall of Red Hat's headquarters in Durham: "Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era..." It's fun to see the story told by a local newspaper, with subheadings like "It started with a student from Finland" and "Red Hat takes on the Microsoft Goliath." Something I'd never thought of. 2001's 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center "destroyed the principal data centers of many Wall Street investment banks, which were housed in the twin towers. With their computers wiped out, financial institutions had to choose whether to rebuild with standard proprietary software or the emergent open source. Many picked the latter." And by the mid-2000s, "Red Hat was the world's largest provider of Linux...' according to part two of the series. "Soon, Red Hat was servicing more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies." By then, even the most vehement former critics were amenable to Red Hat's kind of software. Microsoft had begun to integrate open source into its core operations. "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally," Microsoft President Brad Smith later said. In the 2010s, "open source has won" became a popular tagline among programmers. After years of fighting for legitimacy, former Red Hat executives said victory felt good. "There was never gloating," Tiemann said. "But there was always pride." In 2017 Red Hat's CEO answered questions from Slashdot's readers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In October professional poker player Garrett Adelstein lost to a relative newcomer. Last month 15,000 viewers tuned in for his first new public interview, Poker News reports. Adelstein "reiterated his confidence that he was cheated," and said he will not fund the $135,000 the newcomer gave hiim as a peace offering.[Newcomer Robbi Jade Lew] denied cheating and Hustler's third-party investigation concluded there was "no evidence of wrongdoing." Early in the two-hour interview, Polk asked his guest if he still feels the same about what went down on that memorable evening. "In essence, I stand completely by the statement I made. I think it's extremely likely that I was cheated," the high-stakes pro responded... Adelstein said that Lew "has a lot of balls" to return to live-stream poker after, as he claims, cheating him out of a massive pot... Over the past six months, numerous poker fans have called for Adelstein to return [the $135,000] to, as they believe, its rightful owner. He instead donated it to a charity. But still many believe the right decision is for him to give it back to Lew. Polk asked him if he would do so. "No, I will not be refunding Robbi the money, period. I am extremely confident I was cheated in this hand," Adelstein defiantly stated. Adelstein then pleaded with those who are on "Team Robbi" to put themselves in his shoes and and think about how they'd react if they felt they were cheated at the poker table. The next week — on April 1st — Poker News jokingly reported that Robbi Jade Lew had published a new book titled If I Did It.. The April Fool's day satire quotes Robbi Jade Lew as saying "I thought it would be fun to write a book about how I would have cheated if I'd actually done it. Which I didn't...."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Information reports:Late last year, a trio of engineers who had just helped Apple modernize its search technology began working on the type of technology underlying ChatGPT... For Apple, there was only one problem: The engineers no longer worked there. They'd left Apple last fall because "they believed Google was a better place to work on LLMs...according to two people familiar with their thinking... They're now working on Google's efforts to reduce the cost of training and improving the accuracy of LLMs and the products based on these models, according to one of those people." MacRumors summarizes the article this way. "Siri and Apple's use of AI has been severely held back by caution and organizational dysfunction, according to over three dozen former Apple employees who spoke to The Information's Wayne Ma."The extensive paywalled report explains why former Apple employees who worked in the company's AI and machine learning groups believe that a lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction have hindered âOESiriâOE and the company's AI technologies. Apple's virtual assistant is apparently "widely derided" inside the company for its lack of functionality and minimal improvement over time. By 2018, the team working on âOESiriâOE had apparently "devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant." SiriâOE's leadership did not want to invest in building tools to analyse âOESiriâOE's usage and engineers lacked the ability to obtain basic details such as how many people were using the virtual assistant and how often they were doing so. The data that was obtained about âOESiriâOE coming from the data science and engineering team was simply not being used, with some former employees calling it "a waste of time and money..." Apple executives are said to have dismissed proposals to give âOESiriâOE the ability to conduct extended back-and-forth conversations, claiming that the feature would be difficult to control and gimmicky. Apple's uncompromising stance on privacy has also created challenges for enhancing âOESiriâOE, with the company pushing for more of the virtual assistant's functions to be performed on-device. Cook and other senior executives requested changes to âOESiriâOE to prevent embarassing responses and the company prefers âOESiriâOE's responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers, rather than AI-generated. There were also specific decisions to exclude information such as iPhone prices from âOESiriâOE to push users directly to Apple's website instead. âOESiriâOE engineers working on the feature that uses material from the web to answer questions clashed with the design team over how accurate the responses had to be in 2019. The design team demanded a near-perfect accuracy rate before the feature could be released. Engineers claim to have spent months persuading âOESiriâOE designers that not every one of its answers needed human verification, a limitation that made it impossible to scale up âOESiriâOE to answer the huge number of questions asked by users. Similarly, Apple's design team repeatedly rejected the feature that enabled users to report a concern or issue with the content of a âOESiriâOE answer, preventing machine-learning engineers from understanding mistakes, because it wanted âOESiriâOE to appear "all-knowing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time software engineer Blake1024 (Slashdot reader #846,727) writes:We are thrilled to announce the release of Kiss v2.0, a comprehensive, Java-based, open-source, full-stack web development framework... Kiss v2.0 provides an even more seamless, out-of-the-box experience, including pre-configured front-end and back-end components... Key Features: * Custom HTML controls* RESTful web services* Microservices architecture* Built-in authentication* SQL API integration* Robust reporting capabilities Kiss utilizes microservices, allowing developers to work on a running system without the need for rebuilds, redeploys, or server reboots... Production systems can be updated without any downtime. With proven success in commercial applications, Kiss v2.0 is ready for prime time. It's not a beta, but a reliable solution for your web development needs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.