Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the act-locally department: The non-profit environmental site Grist reports on "an internal, employee-led effort to raise ethical concerns about Microsoft's work helping oil and gas producers boost their profits by providing them with cloud computing resources and AI software tools." There's been some disappointments — but also some successes, starting with the founding of an internal sustainability group within Microsoft that grew to nearly 10,000 employees:
Former Microsoft employees and sources familiar with tech industry advocacy say that, broadly speaking, employee pressure has had an enormous impact on sustainability at Microsoft, encouraging it to announce industry-leading climate goals in 2020 and support key federal climate policies.
But convincing the world's most valuable company to forgo lucrative oil industry contracts proved far more difficult... Over the past seven years, Microsoft has announced dozens of new deals with oil and gas producers and oil field services companies, many explicitly aimed at unlocking new reserves, increasing production, and driving up oil industry profits...
As concerns over the company's fossil fuel work mounted, Microsoft was gearing up to make a big sustainability announcement. In January 2020, the company pledged to become "carbon negative" by 2030, meaning that in 10 years, the tech giant would pull more carbon out of the air than it emitted on an annual basis... For nearly two years, employees watched and waited. Following its carbon negative announcement, Microsoft quickly expanded its internal carbon tax, which charges the company's business groups a fee for the carbon they emit via electricity use, employee travel, and more. It also invested in new technologies like direct air capture and purchased carbon removal contracts from dozens of projects worldwide.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by Silver Optimus from TFW2005
Rotten Tomatoes has disclosed the titles, synopses, and release date for the first ten episodes of the forthcoming second season of Transformers: Earthspark. The info also reveals new and returning characters for the show; further confirming recent toy reveals and leaks. Season 2 Part I will air on Friday, June 7th, 2024. Due to the heavy spoiler nature of the content, you can read all about it, after the jump. Spoilers Below! Episode 1 – Aftermath One year after Mandroid’s defeat and the Emberstone’s shattering, the Maltos go on a search for the shards. When a Decepticon creates a new foe
» Continue Reading. The post
Transformers: Earthspark Season 2 Part I – Episode Titles, Plot Summaries, Air Date, And New Character Names Revealed appeared first on
Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the sharing-the-software department: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave an hour-long interview to the "All-In" podcast (hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg).
And when asked about this summer's launch of the next version of ChatGPT, Altman said they hoped to "be thoughtful about how we do it, like we may release it in a different way than we've released previous models...
Altman: One of the things that we really want to do is figure out how to make more advanced technology available to free users too. I think that's a super-important part of our mission, and this idea that we build AI tools and make them super-widely available — free or, you know, not-that-expensive, whatever that is — so that people can use them to go kind of invent the future, rather than the magic AGI in the sky inventing the future, and showering it down upon us. That seems like a much better path. It seems like a more inspiring path.
I also think it's where things are actually heading. So it makes me sad that we have not figured out how to make GPT4-level technology available to free users. It's something we >really want to do...
Q: It's just very expensive, I take it?
Altman: It's very expensive.
But Altman said later he's confident they'll be able to reduce cost.
Altman: I don't know, like, when we get to intelligence too cheap to meter, and so fast that it feels instantaneous to us, and everything else, but I do believe we can get there for, you know, a pretty high level of intelligence. It's important to us, it's clearly important to users, and it'll unlock a lot of stuff.
Altman also thinks there's "great roles for both" open-source and closed-source models, saying "We've open-sourced some stuff, we'll open-source more stuff in the future.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the Optimized-Signal-as-a-Service department: "Researchers are exploring ways to use features in modern cars, such as GPS, to make traffic safer and more efficient," reports the Associated Press.
"Eventually, the upgrades could do away entirely with the red, yellow and green lights of today, ceding control to driverless cars."
Among those reimagining traffic flows is a team at North Carolina State University led by Ali Hajbabaie, an associate engineering professor. Rather than doing away with today's traffic signals, Hajbabaie suggests adding a fourth light, perhaps a white one, to indicate when there are enough autonomous vehicles on the road to take charge and lead the way. "When we get to the intersection, we stop if it's red and we go if it's green," said Hajbabaie, whose team used model cars small enough to hold. "But if the white light is active, you just follow the vehicle in front of you."
He points out that this approach could be years aways, since it requires self-driving capability in 40% to 50% of the cars on the road.
But the article notes another approach which could happen sooner, talking to Henry Liu, a civil engineering professor who is leading ">a study through the University of Michigan:
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the Linux-live department: "6.9 is now out," Linus Torvalds posted on the Linux kernel mailing list, "and last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal)."
Phoronix writes that Linux 6.9 "has a number of exciting features and improvements for those habitually updating to the newest version." And Slashdot reader prisoninmate shared this report from 9to5Linux:
Highlights of Linux kernel 6.9 include Rust support on AArch64 (ARM64) architectures, support for the Intel FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) mechanism for improved low-level event delivery, support for AMD SNP (Secure Nested Paging) guests, and a new dm-vdo (virtual data optimizer) target in device mapper for inline deduplication, compression, zero-block elimination, and thin provisioning.
Linux kernel 6.9 also supports the Named Address Spaces feature in GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) that allows the compiler to better optimize per-CPU data access, adds initial support for FUSE passthrough to allow the kernel to serve files from a user-space FUSE server directly, adds support for the Energy Model to be updated dynamically at run time, and introduces a new LPA2 mode for ARM 64-bit processors...
Linux kernel 6.9 will be a short-lived branch supported for only a couple of months. It will be succeeded by Linux kernel 6.10, whose merge window has now been officially opened by Linus Torvalds. Linux kernel 6.10 is expected to be released in mid or late September 2024.
"Rust language has been updated to version 1.76.0 in Linux 6.9," according to the article. And Linus Torvalds shared one more details on the Linux kernel mailing list.
"I now have a more powerful arm64 machine (thanks to Ampere), so the last week I've been doing almost as many arm64 builds as I have x86-64, and that should obviously continue during the upcoming merge window too."
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the suing-the-Snoo department: Reddit reported its first results since going public in late March. Yahoo Finance reports:
Daily active users increased 37% year over year to 82.7 million. Weekly active unique users rose 40% from the prior year. Total revenue improved 48% to $243 million, nearly doubling the growth rate from the prior quarter, due to strength in advertising. The company delivered adjusted operating profits of $10 million, versus a $50.2 million loss a year ago. [Reddit CEO Steve] Huffman declined to say when the company would be profitable on a net income basis, noting it's a focus for the management team. Other areas of focus include rolling out a new user interface this year, introducing shopping capabilities, and searching for another artificial intelligence content licensing deal like the one with Google.
Bloomberg notes that already Reddit "has signed licensing agreements worth $203 million in total, with terms ranging from two to three years. The company generated about $20 million from AI content deals last quarter, and expects to bring in more than $60 million by the end of the year."
And elsewhere Bloomberg writes that Reddit "plans to expand its revenue streams outside of advertising into what Huffman calls the 'user economy' — users making money from others on the platform... "
In the coming months Reddit plans to launch new versions of awards, which are digital gifts users can give to each other, along with other products... Reddit also plans to continue striking data licensing deals with artificial intelligence companies, expanding into international markets and evaluating potential acquisition targets in areas such as search, he said.
Meanwhile, ZDNet notes that this week a Reddit announcement "introduced a new public content policy that lays out a framework for how partners and third parties can access user-posted content on its site."
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the open-discussion department: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave an hour-long interview to the "All-In" podcast (hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg). And speaking on technology's advance, Altman said "Phones are unbelievably good.... I personally think the iPhone is like the greatest piece of technology humanity has ever made. It's really a wonderful product."
Q: What comes after it?
Altman: I don't know. I mean, that was what I was saying. It's so good, that to get beyond it, I think the bar is quite high.
Q: You've been working with Jony Ive on something, right?
Altman: We've been discussing ideas, but I don't — like, if I knew...
Altman said later he thought voice interaction "feels like a different way to use a computer."
But the conversation turned to Apple in another way. It happened in a larger conversation where Altman said OpenAI has "currently made the decision not to do music, and partly because exactly these questions of where you draw the lines..."
Altman: Even the world in which — if we went and, let's say we paid 10,000 musicians to create a bunch of music, just to make a great training set, where the music model could learn everything about song structure and what makes a good, catchy beat and everything else, and only trained on that — let's say we could still make a great music model, which maybe we could. I was posing that as a thought experiment to musicians, and they were like, "Well, I can't object to that on any principle basis at that point — and yet there's still something I don't like about it." Now, that's not a reason not to do it, um, necessarily, but it is — did you see that ad that Apple put out... of like squishing all of human creativity down into one really iPad...?
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the forbidden-planet department: An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:
A thick atmosphere has been detected around a planet that's twice as big as Earth in a nearby solar system, researchers reported Wednesday.
The so-called super Earth — known as 55 Cancri e — is among the few rocky planets outside our solar system with a significant atmosphere, wrapped in a blanket of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The exact amounts are unclear. Earth's atmosphere is a blend of nitrogen, oxygen, argon and other gases. "It's probably the firmest evidence yet that this planet has an atmosphere," said Ian Crossfield, an astronomer at the University of Kansas who studies exoplanets and was not involved with the research.
The research was published in the journal Nature.
"The boiling temperatures on this planet — which can reach as hot as 4,200 degrees Fahrenheit (2,300 degrees Celsius) — mean that it is unlikely to host life," the article points out.
"Instead, scientists say the discovery is a promising sign that other such rocky planets with thick atmospheres could exist that may be more hospitable."
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the better-batteries department: Researchers believe they've discovered a new material structure that can improve the energy storage of capacitors.
The structure allows for storage while improving the efficiency of ultrafast charging and discharging.
The new find needs optimization but has the potential to help power electric vehicles.
*
An anonymous reader shared this report from Popular Mechanics:
In a study published in Science, lead author Sang-Hoon Bae, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, demonstrates a novel heterostructure that curbs energy loss, enabling capacitors to store more energy and charge rapidly without sacrificing durability... Within capacitors, ferroelectric materials offer high maximum polarization. That's useful for ultra-fast charging and discharging, but it can limit the effectiveness of energy storage or the "relaxation time" of a conductor. "This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems," the study authors write.
Bae makes the change — one he unearthed while working on something completely different — by sandwiching 2D and 3D materials in atomically thin layers, using chemical and nonchemical bonds between each layer. He says a thin 3D core inserts between two outer 2D layers to produce a stack that's only 30 nanometers thick, about 1/10th that of an average virus particle... The sandwich structure isn't quite fully conductive or nonconductive.
This semiconducting material, then, allows the energy storage, with a density up to 19 times higher than commercially available ferroelectric capacitors, while still achieving 90 percent efficiency — also better than what's currently available.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
Square Enix has announced that it will be moving away from releasing games exclusively to select platforms, opting instead to pursue multiplatform launches in the near-future to amplify the sales of its flagging games. It’s all part of “aggressively pursuing” a new business strategy after a few years of bizarre… 
