Will be Prosumer's Revolution and Technical Revolution in the Future!
Linux User/Developer is also Windows User/Developer... Cross Platform Engineer...
"21C 공학인을 대통령, 국회의원으로 만들자!" "더욱 더 많은 동지분들이 공학제국 건설에 동참할 수 있도록 널리 알려주세요~" [ F = m * a ]
과학기술/공학인이 대한민국 국회 의석의 50% 이상을 확보하는 그날을 위하여~ ^___^
In a 9,000-word expose, a writer for Harper's visited San Francisco's young entrepreneurs in September to mockingly profile "tech's new generation and the end of thinking."
There's Cluely founder Roy Lee. ("His grand contribution to the world was a piece of software that told people what to do.") And the Rationalist movement's Scott Alexander, who "would probably have a very easy time starting a suicide cult..."
Alexander's relationship with the AI industry is a strange one. "In theory, we think they're potentially destroying the world and are evil and we hate them," he told me. In practice, though, the entire industry is essentially an outgrowth of his blog's comment section... "Many of them were specifically thinking, I don't trust anybody else with superintelligence, so I'm going to create it and do it well." Somehow, a movement that believes AI is incredibly dangerous and needs to be pursued carefully ended up generating a breakneck artificial arms race.
There's a fascinating story about teenaged founder Eric Zhu (who only recently turned 18):
Clients wanted to take calls during work hours, so he would speak to them from his school bathroom. "I convinced my counselor that I had prostate issues... I would buy hall passes from drug dealers to get out of class, to have business meetings." Soon he was taking Zoom calls with a U.S. senator to discuss tech regulation... Next, he built his own venture-capital fund, managing $20 million. At one point cops raided the bathroom looking for drug dealers while Eric was busy talking with an investor. Eventually, the school got sick of Eric's misuse of the facilities and kicked him out. He moved to San Francisco.
Eric made all of this sound incredibly easy. You hang out in some Discord servers, make a few connections with the right people; next thing you know, you're a millionaire... Eric didn't think there was anything particularly special about himself. Why did he, unlike any of his classmates, start a $20 million VC fund? "I think I was just bored. Honestly, I was really bored." Did he think anyone could do what he did? "Yeah, I think anyone genuinely can."
The article concludes Silicon Valley's investors are rewarding young people with "agency". Although "As far as I could tell, being a highly agentic individual had less to do with actually doing things and more to do with constantly chasing attention online." Like X.com user Donald Boat, who successfully baited Sam Altman into buying him a gaming PC in "a brutally simplified miniature of the entire VC economy." (After which "People were giving him stuff for no reason except that Altman had already done it, and they didn't want to be left out of the trend.")
Shortly before I arrived at the Cheesecake Factory, [Donald Boat] texted to let me know that he'd been drinking all day, so when I met him I thought he was irretrievably wasted. In fact, it turned out, he was just like that all the time... He seemed to have a constant roster of projects on the go. He'd sent me occasional photos of his exploits. He went down to L.A. to see Oasis and ended up in a poker game with a group of weapons manufacturers. "I made a bunch of jokes about sending all their poker money to China," he said, "and they were not pleased...."
"I don't use that computer and I think video games are a waste of time. I spent all the money I made from going viral on Oasis tickets." As far as he was concerned, the fact that tech people were tripping over themselves to take part in his stunt just confirmed his generally low impression of them. "They have too much money and nothing going on..." Ever since his big viral moment, he'd been suddenly inundated with messages from startup drones who'd decided that his clout might be useful to them. One had offered to fly him out to the French Riviera.
The author's conclusion? "It did not seem like a good idea to me that some of the richest people in the world were no longer rewarding people for having any particular skills, but simply for having agency."
Saturday afternoon Sam Altman announced he'd start answering questions on X.com about OpenAI's work with America's Department of War — and all the developments over the past few days. (After that department's negotions had failed with Anthropic, they announced they'd stop using Anthropic's technology and threatened to designate it a "Supply-Chain Risk to National Security". Then they'd reached a deal for OpenAI's technology — though Altman says it includes OpenAI's own similar prohibitions against using their products for domestic mass surveillance and requiring "human responsibility" for the use of force in autonomous weapon systems.)
Altman said Saturday that enforcing that "Supply-Chain Risk" designation on Anthropic "would be very bad for our industry and our country, and obviously their company. We said [that] to the Department of War before and after. We said that part of the reason we were willing to do this quickly was in the hopes of de-esclation.... We should all care very much about the precedent... To say it very clearly: I think this is a very bad decision from the Department of War and I hope they reverse it. If we take heat for strongly criticizing it, so be it."
Altman also said that for a long time, OpenAI was planning to do "non-classified work only," but this week found the Department of War "flexible on what we needed..."
Sam Altman: The reason for rushing is an attempt to de-escalate the situation. I think the current path things are on is dangerous for Anthropic, healthy competition, and the U.S. We negotiated to make sure similar terms would be offered to all other AI labs.
I know what it's like to feel backed into a corner, and I think it's worth some empathy to the Department of War. They are... a very dedicated group of people with, as I mentioned, an extremely important mission. I cannot imagine doing their work. Our industry tells them "The technology we are building is going to be the high order bit in geopolitical conflict. China is rushing ahead. You are very behind." And then we say "But we won't help you, and we think you are kind of evil." I don't think I'd react great in that situation. I do not believe unelected leaders of private companies should have as much power as our democratically elected government. But I do think we need to help them.
Question: Are you worried at all about the potential for things to go really south during a possible dispute over what's legal or not later on and be deemed a supply chain risk...?
Sam Altman: Yes, I am. If we have to take on that fight we will, but it clearly exposes us to some risk. I am still very hopeful this is going to get resolved, and part of why we wanted to act fast was to help increase the chances of that...
Question: Why the rush to sign the deal ? Obviously the optics don't look great.
Sam Altman: It was definitely rushed, and the optics don't look good. We really wanted to de-escalate things, and we thought the deal on offer was good.
If we are right and this does lead to a de-escalation between the Department of War and the industry, we will look like geniuses, and a company that took on a lot of pain to do things to help the industry. If not, we will continue to be characterized as as rushed and uncareful. I don't where it's going to land, but I have already seen promising signs. I think a good relationship between the government and the companies developing this technology is critical over the next couple of years...
Question: What was the core difference why you think the Department of War accepted OpenAI but not Anthropic?
Sam Altman: [...] We believe in a layered approach to safety--building a safety stack, deploying FDEs [embedded Forward Deployed Engineers] and having our safety and alignment researcher involved, deploying via cloud, working directly with the Department of War. Anthropic seemed more focused on specific prohibitions in the contract, rather than citing applicable laws, which we felt comfortable with. We feel that it it's very important to build safe system, and although documents are also important, I'd clearly rather rely on technical safeguards if I only had to pick one...
I think Anthropic may have wanted more operational control than we did...
Question: Were the terms that you accepted the same ones Anthropic rejected?
Sam Altman: No, we had some different ones. But our terms would now be available to them (and others) if they wanted.
Question: Will you turn off the tool if they violate the rules?
Sam Altman: Yes, we will turn it off in that very unlikely event, but we believe the U.S. government is an institution that does its best to follow law and policy. What we won't do is turn it off because we disagree with a particular (legal military) decision. We trust their authority.
Questions were also answered by OpenAI's head of National Security Partnerships (who at one point posted that they'd managed the White House response to the Snowden disclosures and helped write the post-Snowden policies constraining surveillance during the Obama years.) And they stressed that with OpenAI's deal with Department of War, "We control how we train the models and what types of requests the models refuse."
Question: Are employees allowed to opt out of working on Department of War-related projects?
Answer: We won't ask employees to support Department of War-related projects if they don't want to.
Question: How much is the deal worth?
Answer: It's a few million $, completely inconsequential compared to our $20B+ in revenue, and definitely not worth the cost of a PR blowup. We're doing it because it's the right thing to do for the country, at great cost to ourselves, not because of revenue impact...
Question: Can you explicitly state which specific technical safeguard OpenAI has that allowed you to sign what Anthropic called a 'threat to democratic values'?
Answer: We think the deal we made has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic's. Other AI labs (including Anthropic) have reduced or removed their safety guardrails and relied primarily on usage policies as their primary safeguards in national security deployments. Usage policies, on their own, are not a guarantee of anything. Any responsible deployment of AI in classified environments should involve layered safeguards including a prudent safety stack, limits on deployment architecture, and the direct involvement of AI experts in consequential AI use cases. These are the terms we negotiated in our contract.
They also detailed OpenAI's position on LinkedIn:
Deployment architecture matters more than contract language. Our contract limits our deployment to cloud API. Autonomous systems require inference at the edge. By limiting our deployment to cloud API, we can ensure that our models cannot be integrated directly into weapons systems, sensors, or other operational hardware...
Instead of hoping contract language will be enough, our contract allows us to embed forward deployed engineers, commits to giving us visibility into how models are being used, and we have the ability to iterate on safety safeguards over time. If our team sees that our models aren't refusing queries they should, or there's more operational risk than we expected, our contract allows us to make modifications at our discretion. This gives us far more influence over outcomes (and insight into possible abuse) than a static contract provision ever could.
U.S. law already constrains the worst outcomes. We accepted the "all lawful uses" language proposed by the Department, but required them to define the laws that constrained them on surveillance and autonomy directly in the contract. And because laws can change, having this codified in the contract protects against changes in law or policy that we can't anticipate.
Friday was "a horrible day" for investors in Duolingo, reports Fast Company. But Friday's one-day 14% drop is just part of a longer story.
Since last May, Duolingo's stock has dropped 81%. Yes, the company faced a social media backlash that month after its CEO promised they'd become an "AI-first" company (favoring AI over human contractors). And yes, Duolingo did double its language offerings using generative AI. But more importantly, that summer OpenAI showed how easy it was to just roll your own language-learning tool from a short prompt in a GPT-5 demo, while Google built an AI-powered language-learning tool into its Translate app.
And yet, Friday Duolingo's shares dropped another 14%, after announcing good fourth quarter results but an unpopular direction for its future. Fast Company reports:
On the surface, many of the company's most critical metrics saw decent gains for the quarter, including:
— Daily Active Users: 52.7 million (up 30% year-over-year)
— Paid Subscribers: 12.2 million (up 28% year-over-year)
— Revenue: $282.9 million (up 35% year-over-year)
— Total bookings: $336.8 million (up 24% year-over-year)
The company also reported its full-year 2025 financials, revealing that for the first time in its history, it crossed the $1 billion revenue mark for a fiscal year.
But the Motley Fool explains that Duolingo's higher ad loads and repeated pushes for subscription plans "generated revenues in the short term, but made the Duolingo platform less engaging. Ergo, user growth decelerated while revenues rose." Thursday Duolingo announced a big change to address that, including moving more features into lower-priced tiers. Barron's reports:
D.A. Davidson analyst Wyatt Swanson, who rates Duolingo stock at Neutral, posited that the push to monetize "led to disgruntled users and a meaningful negative impact to 'word-of-mouth' marketing." Duolingo has guided for bookings growth between 10% and 12% in 2026, compared with the 20% rate the company would have expected to see "if we operated like we have in past years...."
If stock reaction is any indication, investors are concerned about Duolingo's new focus.
"The drought of upcoming Star Wars movies is coming to an end soon," writes Cinemablend. In May the The Mandalorian and Grogu opens, and one year later there's the release of the Ryan Gosling-led Star Wars: Starfighter.
But "there are some insiders who already believe that Starfighter will be a bigger hit than The Mandalorian and Grogu..."
According to unnamed sources who spoke with Variety, there's a "sense" that Star Wars: Starfighter, which is directed by Deadpool & Wolverine's Shawn Levy, will be a more satisfying viewing experience. These same sources are allegedly impressed by the early footage they've seen of Ryan Gosling's performance and also suggested that Levy has "recaptured the franchise's spirit of fun." Furthermore, the article states that there's concern that because The Mandalorian and Grogu is spinning out of a streaming-exclusive series, it might not have as much appeal to people who aren't already fans of The Mandalorian... Star Wars: Starfighter, on the other hand, will be accessible to everyone equally. It's set five years after The Rise of Skywalker, which is an unexplored period for the Star Wars franchise onscreen. It's also expected that most, if not all of its featured characters will be brand-new, so no knowledge of past adventures is required.
Slashdot reader gaiageek reminds us that 2027 will also see a special 50-year anniversary event in movie in theatres: a "newly restored" version of the original 1977 Star Wars.
It started Friday when all U.S. federal agencies were ordered to "immediately cease" using Anthropic's AI technology after contract negotiations stalled when Anthropic requested prohibitions against mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. But later Friday there were even more repercussions...
In a post to his 1.1 million followers on X.com, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth criticized Anthropic for what he called "a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon."
Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic's models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic... Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of "effective altruism," [Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei] have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission — a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives. The Terms of Service of Anthropic's defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield. Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable...
In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic... America's warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.
Meanwhile, Anthrophic said on Friday that "no amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position." (And "We will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.")
Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action — one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company. We are deeply saddened by these developments. As the first frontier AI company to deploy models in the US government's classified networks, Anthropic has supported American warfighters since June 2024 and has every intention of continuing to do so. We believe this designation would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government... Secretary Hegseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. The Secretary does not have the statutory authority to back up this statement.
Anthropic also defended the two exceptions they'd requested that had stalled contract negotiations. "[W]e do not believe that today's frontier AI models are reliable enough to be used in fully autonomous weapons. Allowing current models to be used in this way would endanger America's warfighters and civilians. Second, we believe that mass domestic surveillance of Americans constitutes a violation of fundamental rights."
Also Friday, OpenAI announced that "we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network."
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman emphasized that the agreement retains and confirms OpenAI's own prohibitions against using their products for domestic mass surveillance — and requires "human responsibility" for the use of force including for autonomous weapon systems. "The Department of War agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the Department of War also wanted. "
We are asking the Department of War to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.
There's already 5,000 sensors embedded in Antarctica's ice to look for evidence of neutrinos, reports the Washington Post. But in November scientists drilled six new holes at least a mile and a half deep and installed cables with hundreds more light detectors — an upgrade to the massive 15-year-old IceCube Neutrino Observatory to detect the charged particles produced by lower-energy neutrinos interacting with matter:
When they do, the neutrinos produce charged particles that travel through the ice at nearly the speed of light, creating a blue glow called Cherenkov radiation... "Within the first couple years, we should be making much better measurements," [said Erin O'Sullivan, an associate professor of physics at Uppsala University in Sweden and a spokesperson for the project.] "There's hope to expand the detector, by an order of magnitude in volume, so the important thing there is we're not just seeing a few neutrino point sources, but we're starting to be a true telescope. ... That's really the dream."
The scientists spent seven years planning the upgrade, according to the article. "To drill holes a mile and a half deep takes about 30 hours, and 18 more hours to return to the surface," the article points out. "Then, the race begins because almost immediately, the hole starts to shrink as the water refreezes." ("If it takes too much time, the principal investigator says, "the instruments don't fit in anymore!")
Interesting Engineering reports:
US tech giant Google announced on Tuesday that it will build a new data center in Pine Island, Minnesota. The new facility will be powered by 1.9 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy from wind and solar, coupled with a 300-megawatt battery, claimed to be the 'world's largest', with a 30-gigawatt-hour (GWh) capacity and 100-hour duration... The planned battery would dwarf a 19 GW lithium-ion project in the UAE...
Form Energy's batteries work very differently from most large batteries today. Instead of using lithium like the batteries in electric cars, they store electricity by making iron rust and then reversing the rusting process to release the energy when needed... Form's iron-air batteries are heavier and less efficient than their counterparts; they can only return about 50% to 70% of the energy used to charge them, while lithium-ion batteries return more than 90%. However, Form's batteries have one distinct advantage. They are cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, costing about $20 per kilowatt-hour of storage, which is almost three times as cheap... It will store 150 MWh of electricity and can supply to the grid for up to 100 hours, delivering about 1.5 MW at peak output.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
CNN reports that images from Iran's capital "have shown cars jammed along Tehran's street, with heavy traffic on major roads after today's wave of attacks by the US and Israel." And though Iran has a population of 93 million, the attacks suddenly plunged Iran into "a near-total internet blackout with national connectivity at 4% of ordinary levels," according to internet monitoring experts at NetBlocks.
CNN reports:
Since Iran's brutal crackdown earlier this year, the regime has made progress to allow only a subset of people with security clearance to access the international web, experts said. After previous internet shutdowns, some platforms never returned. The Iranian government blocked Instagram after the internet shutdown and protests in 2022, and the popular messaging app Telegram following protests in 2018.
The International Atomic Energy Agency announced an hour ago that they're "closely monitoring developments" — keeping in contact with countries in the region and so far seeing "no evidence of any radiological impact." They're also urging "restraint to avoid any nuclear safety risks to people in the region."
UPDATE (1 PM PST):
Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait "are shifting to remote learning starting Sunday until further notice following Iranâ(TM)s retaliatory strikes on Saturday," reports CNN.
Tuesday Pew Research announced their newest findings: that 54% of America's teens use AI help with schoolwork:
One-in-five teens living in households making less than $30,000 a year say they do all or most of their schoolwork with AI chatbots' help. A similar share of those in households making $30,000 to just under $75,000 annually say this. Fewer teens living in higher-earning households (7%) say the same."
"The survey did not ask students whether they had used chatbots to write essays or generate other assignments..." notes the New York Times. "But nearly 60% of teenagers told Pew that students at their school used chatbots to cheat 'very often' or 'somewhat often.'" Agreeing with that are the Pew Researchers themselves. "Our survey shows that many teens think cheating with AI has become a regular feature of student life."
One worried teenager still told the researchers that AI "makes people lazy and takes away jobs." But another teenager told the researchers that "Everyone's going to have to know how to use AI or they'll be left behind."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.
A start-up called Reflect Orbital "proposes to use large, mirrored satellites to redirect sunlight to Earth at night," reports the Washington Post, "with plans to bathe solar farms, industrial sites and even entire cities in light that could, if desired, reach the intensity of daylight...."
Slashdot noted their idea in 2022 — but Reflect Orbital now expects to launch its first satellite in April, according to the article. "But its grand vision is largely 'aspirational,' as its young founder, Ben Nowack, told me..."
Reflect Orbital's Nowack describes a scene right out of sci-fi: An extremely bright star appears on the northern horizon and makes its way across the sky, illuminating a 5-kilometer circle on Earth, then setting on the southern horizon about five minutes later, just as another such "star" appears in the north. To make the night even brighter, a customer could make 10 "stars" appear at once in the north by ordering them on an app. Two such artificial stars are in development in Reflect Orbital's factory. Nowack showed them to me on a Zoom call. The first to launch is 50 feet across, but he plans later to build them three times that size. If all goes according to plan, he'll have 50,000 of them circling the Earth in 2035 at an altitude of around 400 miles.
Nowack plans to start selling the service "in mostly developing nations or places that don't have streetlights yet." Eventually, he thinks, he can illuminate major cities, turn solar fields and farms into round-the-clock operations for any business or municipality that pays for it. He likened his technology to the invention of crop irrigation thousands of years ago. "I see this as much the same thing," he said, arguing that people would no longer have to "wait for the sun to shine."
The article adds that Elon Musk's SpaceX "wants to launch as many as a million satellites to serve as orbiting data centers — 70 times the number of satellites now in orbit." (America's satellite-regulation Federal Communications Commission
grants a "categorical exclusion" from environmental review to satellites on the grounds that their operations "normally do not have significant effects on the human environment.")
The public comment periods for the two proposals close on March 6 and March 9.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google on Friday unveiled its plan for its Chrome browser to secure HTTPS certificates against quantum computer attacks without breaking the Internet. The objective is a tall order. The quantum-resistant cryptographic data needed to transparently publish TLS certificates is roughly 40 times bigger than the classical cryptographic material used today. Today's X.509 certificates are about 64 bytes in size, and comprise six elliptic curve signatures and two EC public keys. This material can be cracked through the quantum-enabled Shor's algorithm. Certificates containing the equivalent quantum-resistant cryptographic material are roughly 2.5 kilobytes. All this data must be transmitted when a browser connects to a site.
To bypass the bottleneck, companies are turning to Merkle Trees, a data structure that uses cryptographic hashes and other math to verify the contents of large amounts of information using a small fraction of material used in more traditional verification processes in public key infrastructure. Merkle Tree Certificates, "replace the heavy, serialized chain of signatures found in traditional PKI with compact Merkle Tree proofs," members of Google's Chrome Secure Web and Networking Team wrote Friday. "In this model, a Certification Authority (CA) signs a single 'Tree Head' representing potentially millions of certificates, and the 'certificate' sent to the browser is merely a lightweight proof of inclusion in that tree."
[...] Google is [also] adding cryptographic material from quantum-resistant algorithms such as ML-DSA (PDF). This addition would allow forgeries only if an attacker were to break both classical and post-quantum encryption. The new regime is part of what Google is calling the quantum-resistant root store, which will complement the Chrome Root Store the company formed in 2022. The [Merkle Tree Certificates] MTCs use Merkle Trees to provide quantum-resistant assurances that a certificate has been published without having to add most of the lengthy keys and hashes. Using other techniques to reduce the data sizes, the MTCs will be roughly the same 64-byte length they are now [...]. The new system has already been implemented in Chrome.
On February 24th, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory activated its automated alert system, sending out roughly 800,000 real-time notifications flagging asteroids, supernovae, flaring black holes and "other transient celestial events," reports Scientific American. And this is only the beginning -- that number is projected to climb into the millions as it continues scanning the ever-changing sky. From the report: The astronomical observatory equipped with world's largest camera hit a key milestone on February 24, when a complex data-processing system pushed hundreds of thousands of alerts out to scientists eager to pore over its most exciting sightings. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory began operations last year, capturing stunning, panoramic time-lapse views of the cosmos with ease. Rubin's first images, based on just 10 hours of observations, let space fans zoom seemingly forever into an overwhelmingly starry sky. But watchful astronomers were always awaiting the next step: the system that would automatically alert them to the most promising activity in the overhead sky amid the 1,000 or so enormous images that Rubin's telescope captures every night.
"We can detect everything that changes, moves and appears," said Yusra AlSayyad, an astronomer at Princeton University and Rubin's deputy associate director for data management, to Scientific American last summer. "It's way too much for one person to manually sift through and filter and monitor themselves." So even as they were designing and building the Rubin Observatory itself, scientists were also designing an alert system to help astronomers navigate the flood of data. As soon as the telescope began observations, the team started constructing a static reference image of the entire sky in impeccable detail.
Now the data processing systems that support the observatory are starting to automatically compare every new Rubin image to the corresponding section of that background template. The systems identify all of the differences, each of which is individually flagged. The algorithms can also distinguish between a potential supernova and a possible newfound asteroid, for example. Alerting the scientific community is the final, crucial step. Astronomers -- as well as members of the public -- can sign up for notifications based on the type of sighting they're interested in and the brightness of the observation in question. And now that the alerts system has gone live, users receive a tiny, fuzzy image with some astronomical metadata of each observation that fits their criteria -- all just a couple of minutes after Rubin captures the original image.
Southern California's air quality board rejected proposed rules to phase out gas-powered appliances after receiving more than 20,000 opposition comments generated through CiviClick, "the first and best AI-powered grassroots advocacy platform." Phys.org reports: A Southern California-based public affairs consultant, Matt Klink, has taken credit for using CiviClick to wage the opposition campaign, including in a sponsored article on the website Campaigns and Elections. The campaign "left the staff of the Southern California Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) reeling," the article says. It is not clear how AI was deployed in the campaign, and officials at CiviClick did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But their website boasts several tools, including "state of the art technology and artificial intelligence message assistance" that can be used to create custom advocacy letters, as opposed to repetitive form letters or petitions often used in similar campaigns.
When staffers at the air district reached out to a small sample of people to verify their comments, at least three said they had not written to the agency and were not aware of any such messages, records show. But the email onslaught almost certainly influenced the board's June decision, according to agency insiders, who noted that the number of public comments typically submitted on agenda items can be counted on one hand.
The proposed rules were nearly two years in the making and would have placed a fee on natural gas-powered water heaters and furnaces, favoring electric ones, in an effort to reduce air pollution in the district, which includes Orange County and large swaths of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Gas appliances emit nitrogen oxides, or NOx -- key pollutants for forming smog. The implications are troubling, experts said, and go beyond the use of natural gas furnaces and heaters in the second-largest metropolitan area in the country.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: OpenAI has fired an employee following an investigation into their activity on prediction market platforms including Polymarket, WIRED has learned. OpenAI CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, disclosed the termination in an internal message to employees earlier this year. The employee, she said, "used confidential OpenAI information in connection with external prediction markets (e.g. Polymarket)." "Our policies prohibit employees from using confidential OpenAI information for personal gain, including in prediction markets," says spokesperson Kayla Wood. OpenAI has not revealed the name of the employee or the specifics of their trades.
Evidence suggests that this was not an isolated event. Polymarket runs on the Polygon blockchain network, so its trading ledger is pseudonymous but traceable. According to an analysis by the financial data platform Unusual Whales, there have been clusters of activities, which the service flagged as suspicious, around OpenAI-themed events since March 2023. Unusual Whales flagged 77 positions in 60 wallet addresses as suspected insider trades, looking at the age of the account, trading history, and significance of investment, among other factors. Suspicious trades hinged on the release dates of products like Sora, GPT-5, and the ChatGPT Browser, as well as CEO Sam Altman's employment status. In November 2023, two days after Altman was dramatically ousted from the company, a new wallet placed a significant bet that he would return, netting over $16,000 in profits. The account never placed another bet.
The behavior fits into patterns typical of insider trades. "The tell is the clustering. In the 40 hours before OpenAI launched its browser, 13 brand-new wallets with zero trading history appeared on the site for the first time to collectively bet $309,486 on the right outcome," says Unusual Whales CEO Matt Saincome. "When you see that many fresh wallets making the same bet at the same time, it raises a real question about whether the secret is getting out." [...] Though this is the first confirmed case of a large technology company firing an employee over trades in prediction markets, it's almost certainly not the last. Opportunities for tech sector employees to make trades on markets abound. "The data tells me this is happening all over the place," Saincome says.
Researchers at Cortical Labs used living human neurons grown on a chip to learn how to play Doom in about a week. "While its performance is not up to par with humans, experts say it brings biological computers a step closer to useful real-world applications, like controlling robot arms," reports New Scientist. From the report: In 2021, the Australian company Cortical Labs used its neuron-powered computer chips to play Pong. The chips consisted of clumps of more than 800,000 living brain cells grown on top of microelectrode arrays that can both send and receive electrical signals. Researchers had to carefully train the chips to control the paddles on either side of the screen. Now, Cortical Labs has developed an interface that makes it easier to program these chips using the popular programming language Python. An independent developer, Sean Cole, then used Python to teach the chips to play Doom, which he did in around a week.
"Unlike the Pong work that we did a few years ago, which represented years of painstaking scientific effort, this demonstration has been done in a matter of days by someone who previously had relatively little expertise working directly with biology," says Brett Kagan of Cortical Labs. "It's this accessibility and this flexibility that makes it truly exciting."
The neuronal computer chip, which used about a quarter as many neurons as the Pong demonstration, played Doom better than a randomly firing player, but far below the performance of the best human players. However, it learnt much faster than traditional, silicon-based machine learning systems and should be able to improve its performance with newer learning algorithms, says Kagan. However, it's not useful to compare the chips with human brains, he says. "Yes, it's alive, and yes, it's biological, but really what it is being used as is a material that can process information in very special ways that we can't recreate in silicon." Cortical Labs posted a YouTube video showing its CL1 biological computer running Doom. There's also source code available on GitHub, with additional details in a README file.
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LUG 포인트 정책 : [회원가입 : +100점] [로그인(하루한번) : +100점] [글쓰기 : +20점] [코멘트 : +10점] [다운로드 : -200점] [질문 포인트 : 최소 200점]
데스크탑 프로그래밍(gcc, g++, wxGTK[wxWidgets] 등)은 "Fedora"를 사용하고, 서버 운영(WEB, FTP 등)은 "CentOS"를 사용하시길 권장합니다.
도전하는자, 자신을 투자하는자만이 뜻하는바를 이룰 수 있다.
Information should be Exchanged with Interactive, not One Way Direction. 준회원,
정회원,
우수회원,
VIP회원,
기업회원,
관리자 Be Maker!
인생에서, 100% 순이익을 보장하는건 없다. 1%의 지식을 나눔으로써, 가끔씩 손해볼 필요도 있다.
그대가 가진 1%의 지식만이라도 공공을 위해 포스팅하라. 손해본다는 생각이 앞선다면 그대의 인생은 힘들어질것이다.
자신이 가진 지식의 1%도 투자하지 않고, 오로지 자신의 이익만 탐하는자와는 동지가 되지마라.
만나서 대화하면 모두 좋은 사람들이지만, 유독 인터넷에서만 자신을 밝히지 않고, 좀비로 서식하는 사람들이 많다.
부지불식간[不知不識間], 좀비(하류) 인생이 될지도 모르니, 항상 자신을 경계하도록 하라.
[도서 안내]
1. CentOS Linux
2. gcc로 공부하는 C++
베스트셀러 입성^^
한국리눅스유저그룹 - LUG KOREA
준회원,
정회원,
우수회원,
VIP회원,
기업회원,
관리자
