Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Merriam-Webster’s Word For 2023 Is ‘Authentic’
  2. Michigan Installs First Wireless EV Charging Road In US
  3. Researchers Quantify the Carbon Footprint of Generating AI Images
  4. Meta Will Enforce Ban On AI-Powered Political Ads In Every Nation, No Exceptions
  5. PlayStation To Delete A Ton Of TV Shows Users Already Paid For
  6. OpenAI Delays Launch of Custom GPT Store Until Early 2024
  7. Brazilian City Enacts an Ordinance That Was Secretly Written By ChatGPT
  8. China is Building Nuclear Reactors Faster Than Any Other Country
  9. Mystery Customer For Palmer Luckey’s Aircraft-Killing Drone Is US Special Forces
  10. Vanishing Graduate Tech Jobs Worsen Modi’s Headache Before Elections
  11. Meta Says There’s Been No Downside To Sharing AI Technology
  12. Xbox Talking To Partners for Mobile Store, CEO Spencer Says
  13. Lucid Dream Startup Says Engineers Can Write Code In Their Sleep
  14. Valve Launches Official Steam Link PC VR Streaming App On Quest
  15. Rolls-Royce Exits Electric Propulsion To Focus On Core Businesses

Alterslash picks up to the best 5 comments from each of the day’s Slashdot stories, and presents them on a single page for easy reading.

Merriam-Webster’s Word For 2023 Is ‘Authentic’

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
On Monday, Merriam-Webster announced its word of the year is “authentic — the term for something we’re thinking about, writing about, aspiring to, and judging more than ever.” The Associated Press reports:
Authentic cuisine. Authentic voice. Authentic self. Authenticity as artifice. Lookups for the word are routinely heavy on the dictionary company’s site but were boosted to new heights throughout the year, editor at large Peter Sokolowski told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview. “We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity,” he said ahead of Monday’s announcement of this year’s word. “What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”

Sokolowski and his team don’t delve into the reasons people head for dictionaries and websites in search of specific words. Rather, they chase the data on lookup spikes and world events that correlate. This time around, there was no particularly huge boost at any given time but a constancy to the increased interest in “authentic.” […] “Can we trust whether a student wrote this paper? Can we trust whether a politician made this statement? We don’t always trust what we see anymore,” Sokolowski said. “We sometimes don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance itself.”

There’s “not false or imitation: real, actual,” as in an authentic cockney accent. There’s “true to one’s own personality, spirit or character.” There’s “worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact.” There’s “made or done the same way as an original.” And, perhaps the most telling, there’s “conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features.”

Michigan Installs First Wireless EV Charging Road In US

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The first wireless charging public roadway in the United States has been installed in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. Electrek reports:
Wireless charging provider Electreon provided inductive-charging copper coils that were installed below the road’s surface. The coils will charge EVs equipped with Electreon receivers as they drive over the road. The road’s charging segments transfer electricity wirelessly through a magnetic field, which is then transferred as energy to the vehicle’s battery, charging it. Detroit’s wireless charging roadway is a pilot that will test and aim to perfect the wireless charging technology in a real-world environment. Researchers are using a Ford E-Transit equipped with an Electreon receiver.

The plan is to open it up to the public in the next few years. MDOT and Electreon have entered a five-year commitment to develop and pilot the electric road system on Michigan roads. The pilot is on a quarter-mile stretch on 14th Street between Marantette and Dalzelle Streets in Detroit’s historic Corktown. It runs alongside the Newlab at Michigan Central Building, home to more than 60 tech and mobility startups, where the wireless charging tech will be further tested and developed beginning in early 2024. In 2024, MDOT will begin seeking bids to rebuild part of Michigan Avenue (US-12) and will install additional inductive charging.

Sounds awfully wasteful

By jenningsthecat • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Magnetic field strength falls off as the CUBE of distance. That’s what helps Near Field Communications devices to be (relatively) secure. But it hurts transmission of energy - I’d be interested to know just how much power that’s put into the coils in the road doesn’t make it to the batteries / motor in the vehicle.

Researchers Quantify the Carbon Footprint of Generating AI Images

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University discovered (PDF) that generating an image using artificial intelligence has a carbon footprint equivalent to charging a smartphone. Meanwhile, AI-generated text takes up as much energy as charging a smartphone to about 16 percent full. Engadget reports:
The study didn’t just look into image and text generation by machine learning programs. The researchers examined a total of 13 tasks, ranging from summarization to text classification, and measured the amount of carbon dioxide produced per every 1000 grams. For the sake of keeping the study fair and the datasets diverse, the researchers said they ran the experiments on 88 different models using 30 datasets. For each task, the researchers ran 1,000 prompts while gathering the “carbon code” to measure both the energy consumed and the carbon emitted during an exchange.

The findings highlight that the most energy-intensive tasks are those that ask an AI model to generate new content, whether it be text generation, summarization, image captioning, or image generation. Image generation ranked highest in the amount of emissions it produced and text classification was classified as the least energy-intensive task. The researchers urge machine learning scientists and practitioners to “practice transparency regarding the nature and impacts of their models, to enable better understanding of their environmental impacts.”

Meta Will Enforce Ban On AI-Powered Political Ads In Every Nation, No Exceptions

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet:
Meta says its generative artificial intelligence (AI) advertising tools cannot be used to power political campaigns anywhere globally, with access blocked for ads targeting specific services and issues. The social media giant said earlier this month that advertisers will be barred from using generative AI tools in its Ads Manager tool to produce ads for politics, elections, housing, employment, credit, or social issues. Ads related to health, pharmaceuticals, and financial services also are not allowed access to the generative AI features. This policy will apply globally, as Meta continues to test its generative AI ads creation tools, confirmed Dan Neary, Meta’s Asia-Pacific vice president.
“This approach will allow us to better understand potential risks and build the right safeguards for the use of generative AI in ads that relate to potentially sensitive topics in regulated industries,” said Neary.

uh-huh…

By SeaFox • Score: 3 Thread

I’ll believe it when I see it.

PlayStation To Delete A Ton Of TV Shows Users Already Paid For

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Sony is about to delete tons of Discovery shows from PlayStation users’ libraries even if they already “purchased” them. Why? Because most users don’t actually own the digital content they buy thanks to the mess of online DRM and license agreements. Some of the soon-to-be-deleted TV shows include Mythbusters and Naked and Afraid. Kotaku reports:
The latest pothole in the road to an all-digital future was discovered via a warning Sony recently sent out to PlayStation users who purchased TV shows made by Discovery, the reality TV network that recently merged with Warner Bros. in one of the most brutal and idiotic corporate maneuvers of our time. “Due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library,” read a copy of the email that was shared with Kotaku.

It linked to a page on the PlayStation website listing all of the shows impacted. As you might imagine, given Discovery’s penchant for pumping out seasons of relatively cheap to produce but popular reality TV and documentary-based shows, there are a lot of them. They include, but are not limited to, hits such as: Say Yes to the Dress, Shark Week, Cake Boss, Long Island Medium, Deadly Women, and many, many more. […] Now, essentially anything you buy on PSN, whether a PS5 blockbuster or, uh, Police Women of Cincinnati, is essentially just on indefinite loan until such time as the PlayStation servers die or the original copyright owner decides to pull the content.

Fraud?

By NewtonsLaw • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Surely it’s an act of fraud to sell someone something that you do not own or to sell rights (ie: in perpetuity) for something you only hold transiently?

Sounds liike class-action lawsuit time to me.

And this is why I still buy my music and my favourite movies on physical media. It’s another reason that piracy will never die until the day that we can gain a transferrable (cross-platform) life-time license to watch/listen to media that is streamed.

It was bad enough that I had to buy my favourite music on vinyl, then buy it again on tape, then buy it a third time on CD. Just what *are* you buying?

If it’s a license to use/liste/watch then damaged media should be replaced for the cost of that media.

If it’s just the media you’re buying then what’s wrong with ripping and burning?

Piracy is a market force as well

By pegr • Score: 3 Thread

Personally, I would have no ethical problem for anyone who paid for the content to just go ahead and pirate it. Sue me, I dare ya!

unless it was clerly stated you didnt own

By Growlley • Score: 3 Thread
and where only renting a copy - then that sounds like fraud and theft and numerous other things a creative lawyer ould come up with - false advertising etc,

OpenAI Delays Launch of Custom GPT Store Until Early 2024

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
According to Axios, OpenAI is delaying the launch of a GPT store until early next year. The store was expected to open last month. From the report:
OpenAI’s announcement of custom GPTs and the accompanying store was a highlight of last month’s DevDay conference. “We are now planning to launch the GPT Store early next year,” OpenAI said in the memo. “While we had expected to release it this month, a few unexpected things have been keeping us busy!”

For now the custom GPTs can be shared directly via a link. With the store, developers will be able to distribute them more broadly and OpenAI has also said it plans to share some revenue it gets from ChatGPT Plus subscriptions with those who create popular GPTs, though it has yet to release details. “In the meantime, we will have some other great updates to ChatGPT soon,” the company told developers. “Thank you for investing time to build a GPT.”

Brazilian City Enacts an Ordinance That Was Secretly Written By ChatGPT

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press:
City lawmakers in Brazil have enacted what appears to be the nation’s first legislation written entirely by artificial intelligence — even if they didn’t know it at the time. The experimental ordinance was passed in October in the southern city of Porto Alegre and city councilman Ramiro Rosario revealed this week that it was written by a chatbot, sparking objections and raising questions about the role of artificial intelligence in public policy. Rosario told The Associated Press that he asked OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT to craft a proposal to prevent the city from charging taxpayers to replace water consumption meters if they are stolen. He then presented it to his 35 peers on the council without making a single change or even letting them know about its unprecedented origin.

“If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn’t even have been taken to a vote,” Rosario told the AP by phone on Thursday. The 36-member council approved it unanimously and the ordinance went into effect on Nov. 23. “It would be unfair to the population to run the risk of the project not being approved simply because it was written by artificial intelligence,” he added. […] Keeping the proposal’s origin secret was intentional. Rosario told the AP his objective was not just to resolve a local issue, but also to spark a debate. He said he entered a 49-word prompt into ChatGPT and it returned the full draft proposal within seconds, including justifications.

“I am convinced that … humanity will experience a new technological revolution,” he said. “All the tools we have developed as a civilization can be used for evil and good. That’s why we have to show how it can be used for good.” And the council president [Hamilton Sossmeier], who initially decried the method, already appears to have been swayed. “I changed my mind,” Sossmeier said. “I started to read more in depth and saw that, unfortunately or fortunately, this is going to be a trend.”

if you can’t be bothered to write it

By OrangeTide • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Then why would anyone bother reading it? I swear these glorified Markov-chain text generators are not a good basis for your art, culture, and government. Future generations are going to pick through our ashes and look on this like we look at the Romans drinking leaded wine.

Simple Use Case for ChatGPT

By Aero77 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Generating an Ordinance modeled after other typical Ordinances of this type. This has to be one of the most obvious uses of AI, copying other human generated work for the common good. AI has many pitfalls and downsides, but I don’t think this is something that we need to complain about.

Nothing wrong as long as reviewed by people

By XaXXon • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

and presumably the people voting read it, right?

The source is irrelevant, the contents are what matter.

Re:Nothing wrong as long as reviewed by people

By Junta • Score: 5, Funny Thread

While none of the people voting read it, they did paste it into ChatGPT and asked “Can you sum this up in 50 words or less?”

China is Building Nuclear Reactors Faster Than Any Other Country

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader shares a report:
To wean their country off imported oil and gas, and in the hope of retiring dirty coal-fired power stations, China’s leaders have poured money into wind and solar energy. But they are also turning to one of the most sustainable forms of non-renewable power. Over the past decade China has added 37 nuclear reactors, for a total of 55, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a un body. During that same period America, which leads the world with 93 reactors, added two.

Facing an ever-growing demand for energy, China isn’t letting up. It aims to install between six and eight nuclear reactors each year. Some officials seem to think that target is low. The country’s nuclear regulator says China has the capacity to add between eight and ten per year. The State Council (China’s cabinet) approved the construction of ten in 2022. All in all, China has 22 nuclear reactors under construction, many more than any other country. The growth of nuclear power has stalled in Western countries for a number of reasons. Reactors require a large upfront investment and take years to construct. The industry is heavily regulated.

China, though, has smoothed the path for nuclear power by providing state-owned energy companies with cheap loans, as well as land and licences. Suppliers of nuclear energy are given subsidies known as feed-in tariffs. All of this has driven down the price of nuclear power in China to around $70 per megawatt-hour, compared with $105 in America and $160 in the European Union, according to the International Energy Agency, an official forecaster. China is not immune to the safety concerns that have turned many in the West against nuclear power. After the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in 2011, China temporarily put its construction programme on hold. It has maintained a ban on inland nuclear plants, which have to use river water for cooling. Earlier this year China reacted angrily when Japan began releasing treated and totally harmless wastewater from the Fukushima plant into the ocean.

Good!

By backslashdot • Score: 5, Informative Thread

1. The less countries dependent on Middle East oil, the better for national security.
2. The less countries burning oil the better for the environment — it causes not just climate change but health risks. Crude oil processing and burning injects hazardous radioactivity into the air and environment than nuclear power plants because of the health risks (cancer especially) caused by exposure to Radium-226 and Radium-228. You don’t wanna breathe in those particles.

Re:Consider they’re still massively dependent on C

By drolli • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

They add 50-100GW install solar power *per year*.

So to make it clear: right now China adds roughly as much solar power per year as they have nuclear power in total......

So it seems that this in *not* their only option to get rif of the dependency on coal. It seems that it is a minor complementing technology which is important to have a national nuclear fuel cycle so that the govt does not have to pay for the nuclear technology alone for nuclear weapons.

Re:Consider they’re still massively dependent on C

By iAmWaySmarterThanYou • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

I can explain. I have a huge solar setup on my roof. Pretty much every place a panel can go has a panel. I have 6 10+kw batteries. That required 2 control panels so I effectively have 2 separate solar setups, not one, but they’re cross wired to each other at the battery level. The batteries burn to zero in about 4 hours if I have the AC on and I live in a very sunny place where AC is necessary but I get maximum sun.

If I’m lucky, I will pay off the whole thing in about 15-20 years after which I’ll become ever more dependent on the power company as the panels produce less power. As it is now as a brand new and EXTREMELY expensive (well over 100k after tax credits) system, it covers my usage on the really sunny days but not the rest of the time. What’s my usage? AC, fridge, freezer, electric stove, tv, laptop, some lights, laundry, dish washer, and model 3 Tesla charge about once a week. The Tesla is the only unusual item and it isn’t a particularly huge drain relative to the rest of what’s going on.

Tl;dr: too expansive, doesn’t generate enough power, batteries don’t hold enough power, lucky to last long enough to pay for itself, increased my insurance costs too.

Re:Consider they’re still massively dependent on C

By guruevi • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I would take the propaganda on the topic from China with a grain of salt. They are still responsible for over a third of all global emissions and according to the WEF - China’s air pollution is now higher than pre-pandemic levels, China’s CO2 emissions increased an estimated 10% year-on-year.

Even if you take the sponsored study at face value, their metrics are still 40% worse than US and 20-30% worse than EU.

Re:Good!

By sfcat • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
The problem is the FUD you spread and disingenuous environmental groups who knowingly spread dis and misinformation. Your entire post is completely non-scientific. You don’t need or even use civilian NPPs to make weapons. You can take some of the outputs from a NPP as inputs to a weapons program but that’s at best a cost saving measure. Its more efficient to build specialized reactors for such things if all you want is a weapon. Even the technology used by the two are completely different. You don’t care about laser isotope isolation in civilian nuclear power for example. But its a game changer for a weapons program.

Mystery Customer For Palmer Luckey’s Aircraft-Killing Drone Is US Special Forces

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Slash_Account_Dot writes:
U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has paid over ten million dollars for a new autonomous aircraft made by Anduril, the defense startup run by Palmer Luckey, which is capable of carrying explosive warheads and taking down other aircraft, or re-landing itself if it doesn’t engage in an attack, 404 Media has found.

On Friday, Anduril announced the existence of the person-size drone called “Roadrunner.” In his own Twitter thread, Luckey said Roadrunner has been “operationally validated with an existing U.S. government customer,” but did not name the agency. Multiple publications which appeared to have the news under embargo, including Bloomberg and Defense One, added that the company is not allowed to say which customer bought the technology. It took 404 Media around 25 seconds to find the customer is likely USSOCOM.

Vanishing Graduate Tech Jobs Worsen Modi’s Headache Before Elections

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
For years, India’s tech graduates could bank on a job offer from one of the country’s IT giants. Now those starting positions are suddenly waning, leaving hundreds of thousands in peril and creating a fresh headache for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. From a report:
Infosys and Wipro were among companies that shocked students nationwide last month, saying they were cutting college recruitment as demand for their services cooled across the globe. […] The unusual pullback from the $245 billion industry risks exacerbating youth unemployment in the world’s most populous nation, a potential scar on Modi’s ambitious plan to keep India growing at a fast clip and make it the third-biggest economy during his reign. The high-profile problem of youth joblessness also gives the opposition another rallying point ahead of next year’s elections, in which Modi is trying to snag a third term that would extend his tenure to 15 years.

The tech-services industry is one of the largest employers in India, and accounts for 7.5% of the South Asian country’s more than $3 trillion economy. The biggest tech companies have each traditionally hired tens of thousands of tech graduates every year, then rigorously trained them for tasks such as writing software for some of the world’s biggest enterprises ranging from Apple to PepsiCo. The IT companies hired particularly aggressively in the past two years as the pandemic prompted customers to spend on services and technologies enabling remote working. The top two IT companies, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, hired more than 284,000 graduates over that period combined. Now the uncertainty caused by Russia’s attack on Ukraine as well as high global inflation and interest rates are causing customers around the world to hold off on spending. Meanwhile, technologies such as artificial intelligence are increasingly performing tasks previously handled by entry-level IT workers.

I was literally just fired

By NobleNobbler • Score: 3 Thread

Because I was too expensive and was replaced with 4 h1bs who have totally fraudulent creds. They’re destroying the codebase right now and I have the privilege of being forced to have to act like I’m still employed here and not care.

Like instant PR approval for “caching” that caches secrets by the same hash key no matter which client. Instantly bringing the service down and no one has a clue why.

Meta Says There’s Been No Downside To Sharing AI Technology

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Meta executives said there’s been no major drawbacks to openly sharing its AI technology, even as many peers take the opposite approach. From a report:
Over the past few months, Meta has been releasing open-source versions of its large language models — the technology behind AI chatbots like ChatGPT. The idea is to keep those models free and then gain an advantage by building products and services on top of them, executives said at an event for the company’s AI research Lab FAIR. “There is really no commercial downside to also making it available to other people,” said Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist. Meta has joined most of the world’s biggest technology companies in embracing generative AI, which can create text, images and even video based on simple prompts. But they aren’t taking the same path.

Many of the top AI developers, including OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, don’t currently open-source their large language models. Companies are often fearful of opening up their work because competitors could steal it, said Mike Schroepfer, Meta’s senior fellow and former chief technology officer. “I feel like we’re approaching this world where everyone is closing down as it becomes competitively important,” he said. But staying open has its advantages. Meta can rely on thousands of developers across the world to help enhance its AI models.

Good for Lecun

By WDot • Score: 3 Thread
This AI safety drama has been so odd, from a rhetorical standpoint. Lecun almost seems like an island, cheering open source models which have already been a massive boon to both scientists and engineers for the past decade. On the other hand, OpenAI and Google and Geoffrey Hinton are going around saying “ooga booga, if you don’t watch out Skynet will become real! The only solution is to give us a regulated monopoly!” When pressed on how these statistical models will become Skynet, they never point to any mainstream AI literature, but only hint at the obscure research of a bunch of nuts who have not built actual models but have made sophisticated mathematical doodles out of their imaginary doomsday scenarios.

Even reasonable questions like “if the AI really does start acting maliciously, how about we just unplug it like we do any other piece of misbehaving machinery” are scoffed at, but no actual realistic response is provided. It seems to be an assumption that these models will magically discover new laws of physics that will allow them to transcend the heavy infrastructure requirements (electricity, communications, teams of competent engineers) that allow them to run at all, and then use these new laws of physics to kill everyone on earth on purpose.

Re:Good for Lecun

By jd • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

IMHO, the threat comes not from AI (which is just an overblown stats package), but from AI’s users, some of whom honestly believe “AI” is sentient (and therefore capable of following standards), whilst others ascribe to it a level of accuracy that isn’t there.

We know, for example, that Israel is picking targets based on the output of generative AI because they’ve said so. This does not seem safe. The statistical odds of words being linked is not a reliable indicator of threat status.

It is entirely possible that intelligence services will consider AI the next step from their big data meta-analysis that Snowdon reported on. Again, word association is not an indicator of threat, and if indeed anyone is employing AI this way then our security apparatus will be largely useless against any actual threats.

Likewise, if police forces try to use AI to anticipate crime, we could see absolutely disastrous results, with resources being distributed according to word association rather than risk association.

These aren’t the fault of the AI system. The AI would be working perfectly, telling people what words are commonly associated with other words. The problem would be with the people making mystical assumptions from this. And, as noted, we’re already seeing at least one government agenct, the IDF, do this.

I don’t fear Skynet, but I am terrified of those who treat algorithms as holy and divine.

China

By groobly • Score: 3 Thread

Open sourcing AI or anything else for that matter, makes it available to China, Russia, and North Korea. There are tradeoffs, and that includes downsides.

Xbox Talking To Partners for Mobile Store, CEO Spencer Says

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Microsoft is talking to partners to help launch a mobile gaming store that will take on Apple and Google’s dominant position in the business, according to Phil Spencer, who leads the company’s Xbox video-game division. From a report:
“It’s an important part of our strategy and something we are actively working on today not only alone, but talking to other partners who’d also like to see more choice for how they can monetize on the phone,” Spencer said in an interview in Sao Paulo during the CCXP comics and entertainment convention.

The executive declined to give a specific date for a launch of the online store, which earlier reports suggested could be next year. “I don’t think this is multiple years away, I think this is sooner than that,” he said. Microsoft earlier this year expanded its Game Pass subscription service for players on personal computers to 11 new Latin American countries, leading to a 7% increase in customers. Peru and Costa Rica are the standouts in terms of customer interest, accounting for almost half of new signups, Spencer said. Globally Brazil is the second-biggest market for the PC Game Pass. “In many ways Brazil leads a lot of the trends that we see globally,” Spencer said.

Lucid Dream Startup Says Engineers Can Write Code In Their Sleep

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader writes:
People spend one-third of their lives asleep. What if employees could work during that time … in their dreams? Prophetic, a venture-backed startup founded earlier this year, wants to help workers do just that. Using a headpiece the company calls the “Halo,” Prophetic says consumers can induce a lucid dream state, which occurs when the person having a dream is aware they are sleeping. The goal is to give people control over their dreams, so they can use that time productively. A CEO could practice for an upcoming board meeting, an athlete could run through plays, a web designer could create new templates — “the limiting factor is your imagination,” founder and CEO Eric Wollberg told Fortune.

Consumer devices claiming to induce lucid dream states aren’t new. Headbands, eye masks, and boxes with electrodes that stick to the forehead all populate the market. Even some supplements claim to do the trick. But there’s still an appetite for new technologies, since the potential for creativity and problem-solving is so great and since many on the market don’t work to the extent they promise, a dreaming expert told Fortune. The potential of lucid dreaming is less about conquering specific problems and more about finding new, creative ways to approach topics that a sleeper couldn’t previously fathom. For example, a mathematician might not reach a specific, numerical answer to a math problem while asleep, but the lucid dream allows them to explore new strategies to tackle the equation while awake.
Halos will cost around $1,500 to $2,000 each.

Great…we can work 24-7

By Miles_O’Toole • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Work when you’re awake. Work when you’re asleep. Work when you’re having sex. Work instead of being a parent to your kids. The dystopian nightmare that is our future lurches closer and closer.

My God, are there no limits to the greed?

By nightflameauto • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The fact that workers need to sleep drives the owner class absolutely insane. They’ve been fighting it since the concept of the 8 hour work day came along. If they can make it work, and work well enough to justify foisting it out into the world, I can see the corporate fat-cats lobbying to make it a legally viable option to force programmers to run this shit during every sleep cycle. And most likely, somewhere down the line, lobbying to make it legal to induce perma-sleep states for the best programmers in sleep-state so that they never have to lose critical momentum.

If this actually flies, at all, it’ll be a race to see if we can get AI up to speed enough we no longer need human programmers, and warehouses filled with sleeping bodies programming 24/7 in dream-state, never actually living. Jesus wept. We are truly headed towards a nightmarish dystopia of hell.

Re:What nonsense

By Zaraday • Score: 5, Informative Thread

While you may or may not be joking, I know I’ve actually had it happen before where I’ve spent a week or more on a problem at work and eventually had a dream about coding the solution. After typing it up the next day, it worked. I’d be surprised if that didn’t happen to other people.

Re:What nonsense

By kmahan • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Taking a shower to relax and unwind has also helped solve many a coding problem. (insert obligatory jokes)

Re:That’s nice

By AmiMoJo • Score: 5, Funny Thread

No this is great, I can sleep through work!

Valve Launches Official Steam Link PC VR Streaming App On Quest

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR:
Valve just launched a free official Steam Link app on Meta Quest. The app, which is on the official Quest Store and approved by Meta, lets you wirelessly play SteamVR games like Half-Life: Alyx on your Quest 2, Quest Pro, or Quest 3 by streaming from your gaming PC over your home Wi-Fi network. You can also play your traditional non-VR Steam games on a giant virtual screen.

Suprised

By JackieBrown • Score: 3 Thread

I’m pleastantly suprised Meta allowed this on their store.

Now there is no real reason to purchase the meta version of games (other than they may be better optimized for controllers but since this is now an offical app, hopefully devs start supporting meta on steam)

Latency?

By Intellectual Elitist • Score: 3 Thread

How will this not be nausea-inducing if the wi-fi connection alone adds a 20-30ms delay, plus whatever additional delay from protocol, encoding/decoding, etc.?

Rolls-Royce Exits Electric Propulsion To Focus On Core Businesses

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot
Rolls-Royce announced plans to sell its electric flight division to focus on its core businesses. AeroTime reports:
The sale of the electric business division could bring in between 1 and 1.5 billion pounds to Rolls-Royce coffers. In this regard, Rolls-Royce is betting on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) as the main driver of decarbonization for the aviation industry. All of Rolls-Royce’s in-production engine types will be able to run on 100% SAF. The engine maker is optimistic about its new UltraFan, an improved efficiency engine technology which was successfully tested earlier in 2023. Rolls-Royce expects UltraFan engines to power both widebody and narrowbody aircraft in the future. Rolls-Royce also noted that it sees opportunities in the executive aviation segment and is targeting 8-9% growth in Pearl engine deliveries.

Rolls-Royce is currently in the middle of a restructuring program to turn itself around and boost profitability. The pandemic had a strong impact on the engine maker, as the company’s service revenues depend heavily on the number of hours engines are in use. [CEO Tufan Erginbilgic] said he expected the group to increase its profits to the 2.5-2.8 billion pound range, up from the 0.65 billion pound profit it reported in 2022. The civilian aerospace division is expected to make the largest contribution to this turnaround and reach profit margins of 15 to 17% by 2027 (compared to the group’s goal of 13-15%), up from the meagre 2.5% it reported for the last fiscal year.
New submitter HammerOn1024 comments: “They are SELLING not shutting down, so keep the harping to a dull roar please.”

I’ve seen this before!

By sd4f • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Spinning off a business isn’t anything particularly special, the thing to watch is where to key management end up. If they go with the new electrical offshoot, then it’s clear that the old business is destined to ride off into the sunset, meanwhile the electrical part is where they think the growth is. When it comes to non-consumer brands, the name is more or less meaningless. Reputation is important, but being called “Rolls-Royce” bears no weight in business decisions, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the offshoot abandons the brand recognition.

This has happened a few times in the automotive industry, because investment in combustion powertrains has pretty much died off, so some companies have split themselves up, and kept the name with the old established hydrocarbon reliant parts of the business, while the spun off section is profitable and has a somewhat more resilient business, fit for the future.

Re:Electric Flight

By VeryFluffyBunny • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
BTW, the idea in the EU is to do the short journeys by high speed train. Same in China and many other countries. A train carries many more passengers than an aircraft, boarding & alighting is much faster, getting to train stations is easier & quicker, they can stop at multiple destinations along the way, & security’s really quick & simple (It’s much harder to make a train crash from inside). Plus, long haul flights make you sleep in your chair whereas long, overnight train journeys tend to have proper beds & a restaurant car.

Sure, if you’re going really long distances, flying makes more sense, but it also makes sense to cut down on aviation significantly with good high-speed rail networks.

Re:Electric Flight

By SandorZoo • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

I think it is more realistic than “sustainable” aircraft fuel, especially if you consider how power hungry aircraft are, and that growing biofuel means not growing crops on the same land.

SAF isn’t just biofuels, it also covers synthetic fuels made from electricity, water and CO2. This is obviously not very energy efficient, but if we end up having to massively over-supply wind power to cope with its worst-case capacity factor, we might end up having power to spare much of the time.

Re:Electric Flight

By Errol backfiring • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Well, it may seem old fashioned, but both the UK (Airlander) and France (Flying Whale) are actively developing airships (although not yet for transatlantic flights). While the basic technology is old, it has not stood still. We know much more about flying, the jet stream, high altitudes, etc.

Re:Electric Flight

By iAmWaySmarterThanYou • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

True. We should just end all flights for normal people so the rich and connected can continue to fly in to climate conferences in exotic places to party and discuss what else the rest of us don’t need.

How come a major climate conference has never been held in a place like Iowa? Weirrrrrrd!