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No child process left behind

Later this year, MITRE is getting its hands on a modest supercomputer and is planning to use it to divvy out AI computing time to US government agencies.…

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

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

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Sources slam aggressive 'back to school' grading system as HR vows to track VPN use, badge swipes

Exclusive  Dell has told workers it will track the onsite presence of hybrid employees – those who work part remotely, part in the office – using electronic badge swipes, VPN monitoring, and a rather creepy color-coding system.…

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

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Or at least it might well be if these trial programs work out, with some civil lib oversight etc etc etc

RSAC  AI is a double-edged sword in that the government can see ways in which the tech can protect and also be used to attack Americans, says US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.…

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

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

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

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Avoid traffic-redirecting snoops who have TunnelVision

A newly discovered vulnerability undermines countless VPN clients in that their traffic can be quietly routed away from their encrypted tunnels and intercepted by snoops on the network.…

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

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Nintendo has said it will finally announce its Switch successor console "within this fiscal year," so at some point before March 31, 2025. From a report: In a statement published to X / Twitter, Shuntaro Furukawa, President of Nintendo, confirmed the new console as Nintendo published its financial report for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024. Furukawa also confirmed a Nintendo Direct for this June, but said there will be no mention of the Switch successor during that presentation. Instead, it will focus on Switch games for the latter half of 2024.

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Short on cores, big on threads and matrix math

Not to be left out of the AI infrastructure game, on Tuesday IBM unveiled a pair of tiny Power 10 servers designed to preprocess data at the network edge.…

The GNOME Foundation today published their 2023 annual report that outlines their accomplishments as well as a look at the finances...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating whether Boeing failed to complete required inspections on 787 Dreamliner planes and whether Boeing employees falsified aircraft records, the agency said this week. The investigation was launched after an employee reported the problem to Boeing management, and Boeing informed the FAA. "The FAA has opened an investigation into Boeing after the company voluntarily informed us in April that it may not have completed required inspections to confirm adequate bonding and grounding where the wings join the fuselage on certain 787 Dreamliner airplanes," the FAA said in a statement provided to Ars today. The FAA said it "is investigating whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records. At the same time, Boeing is reinspecting all 787 airplanes still within the production system and must also create a plan to address the in-service fleet." The agency added that it "will take any necessary action -- as always -- to ensure the safety of the flying public." Boeing VP Scott Stocker, who leads the 787 Dreamliner program, described "misconduct" in an April 29 email to employees in South Carolina. Boeing provided a copy of the email to Ars. "After receiving the report, we quickly reviewed the matter and learned that several people had been violating Company policies by not performing a required test, but recording the work as having been completed," Stocker wrote. "As you all know, we have zero tolerance for not following processes designed to ensure quality and safety. We promptly informed our regulator about what we learned and are taking swift and serious corrective action with multiple teammates."

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In the first year alone, that's saved us all a lot of money and woe

Interview  As ransomware gangs step up their attacks against healthcare, schools, and other US critical infrastructure, CISA is ramping up a program to help these organizations fix flaws exploited by extortionists in the first place.…

Along with introducing a new iPad Air and iPad Pro during its Let Loose event, Apple quietly killed its ninth-gen iPad -- also known as the last iPad with a headphone jack. From a report: The 10th-gen iPad is now the sole entry-level iPad in Apple's official lineup and, as such, has received a $100 price cut. Released in late 2022, the 10th-generation iPad arrived starting at $449, or about $120 more than base entry-level iPads from previous years. Apple justified the price increase with new iPad Air-like features, like a 10.9-inch screen and USB-C support.

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Oh, right – there's new iPad Pro and Air models, a pencil and some other stuff

Apple held its anticipated iPad event today, and the most attention-grabbing news wasn't the new device models or the refreshed iPad Air lineup - it was the unveiling of Apple's homegrown M4 chip with a surprisingly powerful neural processing unit (NPU). …

Nothing like folks in Beijing lecturing us on the Constitution

TikTok and its China-based parent ByteDance sued the US government today to prevent the forced sale or shutdown of the video-sharing giant.…

Financial Times Alphaville: Look, we know we write a lot about Jane Street, but it's a fascinating place, and people seem interested in it. So it was hard to resist writing about the trading shop entering the mobile phone game space (kinda). Back in 2013 Jane Street developed a card game called "Figgie," which it made to simulate open outcry trading, teach trading nous, and generally burnish its reputation for quirkiness -- de rigueur in the industry. All you need are 40 cards from a normal deck, and the rules have been public for a while. During Covid, Jane Street made a virtual version for remote interns. Now it's a mobile game that's publicly available on the official Apple and Google app stores.

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