Apple Moves the M4 Mac Mini’s Power Button To the Bottom
Further reading: Apple’s New Mouse Retains Flawed Charging Design.
The 12-year-old publishing platform has undertaken a dizzying number of pivots over the years. It’s finally on a financial upswing, having turned a monthly profit for the first time this summer. Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine and other executives at the company have described the platform as “a home for human writing.” But there is evidence that robot bloggers are increasingly flocking to the platform, too.
Earlier this year, WIRED asked AI detection startup Pangram Labs to analyze Medium. It took a sampling of 274,466 recent posts over a six-week period and estimated that over 47 percent were likely AI-generated. “This is a couple orders of magnitude more than what I see on the rest of the internet,” says Pangram CEO Max Spero. (The company’s analysis of one day of global news sites this summer found 7 percent as likely AI-generated.)
The strain of slop on Medium tends toward the banal, especially compared with the dadaist flotsam clogging Facebook. Instead of Shrimp Jesus, one is more apt to see vacant dispatches about cryptocurrency. The tags with the most likely AI-generated content included “NFT” — out of 5,712 articles tagged with this phrase over the last several months, Pangram found that 4,492, or around 78 percent, came back as likely AI-generated — as well as “web3,” “ethereum,” “AI,” and, for whatever reason, “pets.”
I’m glad to see the base model starts at 16GB. I realize memory is faster, architecture is better, blah blah blah, but it’s ridiculous that Macbooks start with 8GB RAM in 2024.
Now that you can put Asahi Linux on it, its starting to look like a very attractive package. Price not bad for what it is, too.
YouTube is reportedly testing a new website layout that removes the date when a video was uploaded and the amount of views it has. […] On Monday, October 28, VidIQ reported in a post on X that YouTube is testing a new homepage layout that removes view counts and dates.
Awww, trying to protect the sensitive from the slings and arrows of critics?
That’s the only reason I can see behind this — thin-skinned creators who get their buttholes sore when the downvotes come whined, and this is youtube’s way of “protecting” them.
I’m sure an extension will come along shortly just like the one to restore the showing of downvotes.
That’s just for a nefarious profit-making purpose (and ironically potentially short-term — somebody needs a quick promotion?). Every compelling reason for doing that is nefarious, no amount of corporate spin and sophistry can change that.
Linus is overly generous here.
Indeed. I mean even obvious use cases like image generation deeply suck, because by now it is blatantly obvious something was AI generated and immediately can be seen as “low quality crap”.
The fact that someone on a “Tech” site can say this as if the current state of computer capability is static and not a frenetic state of change makes it clear how IBM could think the world needed no more than five computers. You, on the other hand, have access to decades of computer history and quite possibly a couple decades of using computers in you daily life, and yet you think that? (You’re not the only one who thinks this btw.) Any ‘low quality crap’ you purchase these days is on the shelf at all only because it’s multiple generations out of date. The Good Stuff behind the curtain is coming along nicely, thank you. You’re just not in the club that gets to play with it. So has it always been.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” argues Jeff Bezos in The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media, a WaPo op-ed defense of his decision as owner of The Washington Post to end the newspaper’s tradition of endorsing candidates for president.
“No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.”
I’ve been a subscriber since 1999. I’ve seen the Post go through a period of declining quality. Thing like spelling errors. It improved when Bezos first bought the paper, then started to decline again. After Biden got elected Bezos really started putting the screws to the paper. Instead of having good journalists reporting from a neutral stance they started packing the paper with “Opinion” articles. A lot of those are written by right-leaning people, and they’re not held accountable for being truthful. It’s not just that they put spin on their position, they just plain lie.
So, if they paper is getting so bad you might ask why I’m not dropping my subscription. It’s because I think Bezos wants to kill the paper. He wants to push anyone who’s objective out of the newsroom and he wants to turn it into another right-wing rag. Undermining independent journalism isn’t a consequence, its the point.
So I’m keeping my subscription to the Post. Instead, I’m cutting Prime and anything connected to Amazon.
But he obviously does *not* want that, as the WaPo, like every other newspaper, continues to print opinion pieces and editorials all the time, and indeed his own piece sharing his point of view was published in the comment pages.
Why people insist on treating obvious bad faith bullshit as good faith arguments is beyond me.
Shame is a tool we as a society have used since the dawn of mankind. Having shame encourages people to do things like brushing their teeth and telling the truth. Donald Trump isn’t media-savvy, our media just doesn’t have the tools necessary to deal with someone who doesn’t care whether or not people will believe them tomorrow.
It is stupidly, painfully obvious that Trump is a poor candidate for our nation’s highest office. This is no longer a hypothetical - we know what a Trump administration would look like. He showed us. He’s told us about his future plans. A person would have to be willfully ignorant - some might call that stupidity - to believe otherwise. You can’t say “Trump speaks his mind” and then defend what he says with “That’s not what he meant” and expect grown people to take you seriously.
People should feel guilty about saying they believe one way and then acting hypocritically. Calling themselves Christian while insisting we should deport people who are here pursuing a better life just like our ancestors that settled the lands we now occupy. It goes with shame in encouraging people to be philosophically and ethically consistent. What a person shouldn’t feel guilt about is existing as a gay person or wanting to alter their consciousness.
This “need to be right” is called having a coherent worldview and epistemology and understanding how coherent thought is a keystone of any decent civilization/society. It’s OK to be wrong - I’ve been wrong a lot - but I’m confused how the desire to be correct in thought, word, and deed is somehow a character flaw.
Have some self respect and reflect about why you’re wrong about all of this.
When met with the choice of a black woman, or a self-worshipping asshole .
Does her being black give her some special virtue or qualification for office?
No, it shouldn’t have any bearing at all, but there are a *LOT* of folks in this country absolutely losing their shit over the possible of electing another non-white to the office of president. I think it’s idiotic that we have to tolerate such asinine behavior, but that’s the joys of living in a free society. You’re free to be a complete asshole. Just realize that I’m also free to see that those folks are being complete assholes.
It found carbon dioxide is accumulating faster than at any time in human history, with concentrations having risen by more than 10% in just two decades. “Another year, another record,” said Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the WMO. “This should set alarm bells ringing among decision makers.” The increase was driven by humanity’s “stubbornly high” burning of fossil fuels, the WMO found, and made worse by big wildfires and a possible drop in the ability of trees to absorb carbon. The concentration of CO2 reached 420 parts per million (ppm) in 2023, the scientists observed. The level of pollution is 51% greater than before the Industrial Revolution, when people began to burn large amounts of coal, oil and fossil gas.
Japan had its joint hottest summer on record this year with temperatures between June and August being 1.76C (3.1F) higher than an average.
In September, temperatures continued to be warmer than expected as the sub-tropical jet stream’s more northerly position allowed a warmer southerly flow of air over Japan.
Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.” But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments. Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.Further reading: AI Tool Cuts Unexpected Deaths In Hospital By 26%, Canadian Study Finds
The full extent of the problem is difficult to discern, but researchers and engineers said they frequently have come across Whisper’s hallucinations in their work. A University of Michigan researcher conducting a study of public meetings, for example, said he found hallucinations in eight out of every 10 audio transcriptions he inspected, before he started trying to improve the model. A machine learning engineer said he initially discovered hallucinations in about half of the over 100 hours of Whisper transcriptions he analyzed. A third developer said he found hallucinations in nearly every one of the 26,000 transcripts he created with Whisper. The problems persist even in well-recorded, short audio samples. A recent study by computer scientists uncovered 187 hallucinations in more than 13,000 clear audio snippets they examined. That trend would lead to tens of thousands of faulty transcriptions over millions of recordings, researchers said.
So what testing methods did OpenAI use to ensure this product would meet the appropriate mean time between faults for a medical environment?
This is not a dupe, it’s a transcription of https://tech.slashdot.org/stor…
Seriously, it hasn’t been even 3 days.
It’s like deja vu all over again....
The Moon to Mars program alone created $23.8 billion in economic output and 96,479 jobs, while investments in climate research and technology contributed $7.9 billion and 32,900 jobs. The report also drills down into impacts in each state, with 45 states seeing over $10 million in impact and eight states surpassing the $1 billion mark. […]The full NASA economic impact report can be found here.
NASA’s missions supported 304,803 jobs across America, according to the report — the third agency-wide study of its kind — generating an estimated total of $9.5 billion in federal, state, and local taxes. Additionally, NASA’s technological innovations and transfers in 2023 led to 40 new patent applications, 69 patents issued, and thousands of software usage agreements. A number of NASA technology spinoffs have become everyday household items.
we no longer can afford so much deficit spending for this non-critical group. Some reduction in NASA programs is approriate.
Hardly. Why the hell can’t people count? That figure is 0.4% of the federal budget. During Apollo, it was 10 times that! With a 3-10x ROI on top of being such a trivial portion of spending, suggesting there’s any purpose whatsoever in cutting NASA is unfounded.
If you pay $10,000 in federal income taxes, and your rate was reduced proportional to a budget cut, the complete elimination of NASA would save you $40 a year. Merely making it debt-neutral would only save you a fraction of a cent per year while gutting the agency’s capabilities. In what universe does that make fiscal sense? Its budget should be several times higher.
449 pages of autofellatio is pretty hilarious, but makes sense in light of extremes of US bureaucracy today. Someone’s got to earn their living.
For those looking for actual tangible effects in their everyday lives, a good example is basic power tools. The reason why you no longer have to have corded drills, impact hammers and so on is because NASA needed portable tools for work in space. And then they figured out that results of that research also works on the surface. And now everyone is using what is essentially NASA’s space tools for even the most basic construction work without knowing.
They also created industrial scale things that enable modern life like modern water filtering systems and fire retardant gear firemen use.
There are countless of similar examples. NASA develops the base technology, and then we figure out that it actually works great in everyday lives too. It is rapidly adopted and becomes an everyday commodity.
Here’s a good primer:
Surely, a 25% increase, to $40B, would create even more economic activity. All they need to do is NOT give the DoD *MORE* than they asked for… and they could add 25% to the NIH as well.
For those who follow NASA’s human spaceflight program, a burning question for the last year-and-a-half has been what caused the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield to crack and chip away during atmospheric reentry on the unpiloted Artemis I test flight in late 2022. Multiple NASA officials said Monday they now know the answer, but they’re not telling. Instead, agency officials want to wait until more reviews are done to determine what this means for Artemis II, the Orion spacecraft’s first crew mission around the Moon, officially scheduled for launch in September 2025.
“We have gotten to a root cause,” said Lakiesha Hawkins, assistant deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Moon to Mars program office, in response to a question from Ars on Monday at the Wernher von Braun Space Exploration Symposium. “We are having conversations within the agency to make sure that we have a good understanding of not only what’s going on with the heat shield, but also next steps and how that actually applies to the course that we take for Artemis II,” she said. “And we’ll be in a position to be able to share where we are with that hopefully before the end of the year.”
While the space program is far down the list of most voters’ priorities, this means a decision and announcement on what will happen with Artemis II won’t come until the post-election lame duck period in the waning weeks of the Biden administration, and likely Bill Nelson’s tenure as NASA administrator. This is several months later than NASA officials expected to make a decision. The question here is whether NASA managers decide it is safe enough to fly the Orion heat shield as-is on Artemis II, or if it is too risky with people onboard. Artemis II will be a 10-day mission taking its four-person crew on a path around the far side of the Moon, then back to Earth. This will be the first time people travel to such distances since the Apollo program ended more than 50 years ago.
The rule is, it was aliens.
It’s always aliens.
Not the pet-eating kind. Maaaaybe.
Or maybe they don’t want to put out an unfinished report and have to deal with the flood of comments from a million dipshits who fancy themselves to be engineers because they did a google search.
How ever will the tech writers get to play out their dreams of being middle-management busybodies who contribute nothing but noise if NASA doesn’t continually feed them unfinished reports?
Damn those engineers for doing their jobs and not feeding the 24/7 news cycle!
How does a finished report solve that ? :)
Grab your wagons and oxen, and get ready to ford a river: A movie adaptation of the popular grade school computer game Oregon Trail is in development at Apple. The studio landed the film pitch, still in early development, that has Will Speck and Josh Gordon attached to direct and produce. EGOT winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul will provide original music and produce via their Ampersand production banner. Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the movie will feature a couple of original musical numbers in the vein of Barbie.The film will likely debut on Apple TV+, but details are scarce at the moment.
The Lucas Bros. (Judas and the Black Messiah) and Max Reisman are set to pen the screenplay about the game that is meant to mimic 19th-century pioneer times, following a covered wagon train heading west. Created in 1971, the game reached cult status among American grade schoolers by the 1990s as one of the first educational computer games allowed in schools — and for its hilariously dark storylines filled with broken arms, typhoid and dysentery.
If the cast doesn’t all die of dysentery then 1/10 0% fresh bleh.
Yes. It’s currently “in development”
Monopoly movie: Margot Robbie’s company LuckyChap to produce film
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ent…
If the cast doesn’t all die of dysentery
Now THAT would be method acting.
I’d like to think of it as a prequel to Wagons East.
Uno - Wild Draw Four Electric Boogaloo
Le Monde found that some U.S. Secret Service agents use the Strava fitness app, including in recent weeks after two assassination attempts on Trump, in a video investigation released in French and in English. Strava is a fitness tracking app primarily used by runners and cyclists to record their activities and share their workouts with a community. Le Monde also found Strava users among the security staff for French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In one example, Le Monde traced the Strava movements of Macron’s bodyguards to determine that the French leader spent a weekend in the Normandy seaside resort of Honfleur in 2021. The trip was meant to be private and wasn’t listed on the president’s official agenda.
Le Monde said the whereabouts of Melania Trump and Jill Biden could also be pinpointed by tracking their bodyguards’ Strava profiles. In a statement to Le Monde, the U.S. Secret Service said its staff aren’t allowed to use personal electronic devices while on duty during protective assignments but “we do not prohibit an employee’s personal use of social media off-duty.” “Affected personnel has been notified,” it said. “We will review this information to determine if any additional training or guidance is required.” “We do not assess that there were any impacts to protective operations or threats to any protectees,” it added. Locations “are regularly disclosed as part of public schedule releases.”
In another example, Le Monde reported that a U.S. Secret Service agent’s Strava profile revealed the location of a hotel where Biden subsequently stayed in San Francisco for high-stakes talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2023. A few hours before Biden’s arrival, the agent went jogging from the hotel, using Strava which traced his route, the newspaper found. The newspaper’s journalists say they identified 26 U.S. agents, 12 members of the French GSPR, the Security Group of the Presidency of the Republic, and six members of the Russian FSO, or Federal Protection Service, all of them in charge of presidential security, who had public accounts on Strava and were therefore communicating their movements online, including during professional trips. Le Monde did not identify the bodyguards by name for security reasons.
It’s just doing its job tracing your workout route. Seems to me the real issue is Secret Service people carrying personal devices while on the job, or using work phones that are not managed properly when it comes to restricting app installs.
If you can get access to the cell towers near where you expect a VIP, it wouldn’t take long to link particular signals to particular people. Once you’ve tagged a phone in your database, you can follow that person as long as the phone is on and able to be seen by the local towers. Even with location services off, you can triangulate well enough to follow a motorcade or tell when someone is stepping outside a building.
And (engaging Evil Genius mode), you could theoretically rig a drone carrying a small explosive to target the signal of your choice much like a missile can follow an IR designator. There are already drones out there that look like birds - multiple companies make them for surveillance. Do you think protection details are looking for suspicious seagulls 500 feet above them?
The bank on Monday filed lawsuits in at least three federal courts, taking aim at some of the people who withdrew the highest amounts in the so-called infinite money glitch that went viral on TikTok and other social media platforms in late August. […] JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, is investigating thousands of possible cases related to the “infinite money glitch,” though it hasn’t disclosed the scope of associated losses. Despite the waning use of paper checks as digital forms of payment gain popularity, they’re still a major avenue for fraud, resulting in $26.6 billion in losses globally last year, according to Nasdaq’s Global Financial Crime Report.“Fraud is a crime that impacts everyone and undermines trust in the banking system,” JPMorgan spokesman Drew Pusateri said in a statement to CNBC. “We’re pursuing these cases and actively cooperating with law enforcement to make sure if someone is committing fraud against Chase and its customers, they’re held accountable.”
The infinite money glitch episode highlights the risk that social media can amplify vulnerabilities discovered at a financial institution. Videos began circulating in late August showing people celebrating the withdrawal of wads of cash from Chase ATMs shortly after bad checks were deposited. Normally, banks only make available a fraction of the value of a check until it clears, which takes several days. JPMorgan says it closed the loophole a few days after it was discovered.
The lawsuits are likely to be just the start of a wave of litigation meant to force customers to repay their debts and signal broadly that the bank won’t tolerate fraud, according to the people familiar. JPMorgan prioritized cases with large dollar amounts and indications of possible ties to criminal groups, they said. The civil cases are separate from potential criminal investigations; JPMorgan says it has also referred cases to law enforcement officials across the country.
“Fraud is a crime”, unless it is perpetrated by the banks, then it is just business as usual.
P.S. that it still takes days to clear a check is borderline criminally negligent with modern day technologies. How hard is it to scan a check and send it to the issuing bank to clear? 24 hours is more than adequate for the whole process.
It was not a glitch. The bank allowed you to deposit a check, and then to immediately draw on that check as a sign of good faith on the validity of said check. If the check was bad, though, you’re on the hook for that money. No different than if you went to a teller and did the same thing, except that there was no human contact.
To think this was a glitch is to reveal one’s own gullibility.
I would fully expect the account to have been debited once the bad check was discovered, and a penalty applied on top of that, according to the rules of the account. I would also expect the largest abusers to have been malicious, rather than merely opportunistic, for whom legal remedy is justified. Everyone else got to pay a fee to learn a lesson about writing checks.
“Hi everyone, watch me commit fraud, theft, and god only knows many other felonies in my public video!”
Anything for likes.
… zoomers rediscover check kiting.
Over the past year we have seen Raspberry Pi working a lot on Wayland support for the Raspberry Pi OS desktop and using it on their latest Raspberry Pi models. With today’s new Raspberry Pi OS update, Wayland is being used by default across all Raspberry Pi devices. The new Raspberry Pi OS update shipping today is using Wayland across all Raspberry Pi models. Labwc is also now the Wayland compositor of choice and those upgrading their existing Raspberry Pi OS installation will be prompted whether to switch to Labwc or keep using the prior Wayfire compositor. Raspberry Pi developers feel that the Labwc Wayland compositor offers the best experience on their single board computers.You can learn more about the update and download it via the RaspberryPi.com blog.
It takes good jobs
From us folks who specialize in filling the internet with insipid meaningless posts.