Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the how-about-that department: Actress Scarlett Johansson's legal team has sent two letters to OpenAI, demanding the company disclose how it developed an AI personal assistant voice that the actress claims sounds uncannily similar to her own. The controversy was prompted after OpenAI held a live demonstration of the voice, dubbed "Sky," which many observers compared to Johansson's voice in the 2013 film "Her."
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had approached Johansson months prior and as recently as two days before the event, proposing to license her voice for the new ChatGPT voice assistant, but she declined the offer, she said. Johansson said she was "shocked and angered" at the similarity between the AI voice and her own, stating, "in a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity." OpenAI denied any connection between Johansson and the "Sky" voice, claiming it was developed from the voice of another actress. The company paused using the voice in its products on Monday.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the nothing-to-see-here department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google has preemptively paid damages to the U.S. government, an unusual move aimed at avoiding a jury trial in the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit over its digital advertising business. Google disclosed (PDF) the payment, but not the amount, in a court filing last week that said the case should be heard and decided by a judge directly. Without a monetary damages claim, Google argued, the government has no right to a jury trial. The Justice Department, which has not said if it will accept the payment, declined to comment on the filing. Google asserted that its check, which it said covered its alleged overcharges for online ads, allows it to sidestep a jury trial whether or not the government takes it.
The Justice Department filed the case last year with Virginia and other states, alleging Google was stifling competition for advertising technology. The government has said Google should be forced to sell its ad manager suite. Google, which has denied the allegations, said in a statement that the Justice Department "manufactured a damages claim at the last minute in an attempt to secure a jury trial." Without disclosing the size of its payment, Google said that after months of discovery, the Justice Department could only point to estimated damages of less than $1 million. The company said the government has said the case is "highly technical" and "outside the everyday knowledge of most prospective jurors."
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the not-looking-good department: Recent research led by the University of California, Irvine has discovered warm, high-pressure seawater causing significant melting under the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. "There are places where the water is almost at the pressure of the overlying ice, so just a little more pressure is needed to push up the ice," said lead author Eric Rignot, UC Irvine professor of Earth system science. "The water is then squeezed enough to jack up a column of more than half a mile of ice." Interesting Engineering reports: A team of glaciologists led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine employed high-resolution satellite radar data to uncover evidence of the warm, high-pressure seawater intrusion beneath the glacier. A statement by the scientists noted that the widespread contact between ocean water and the glacier -- a process replicated throughout Antarctica and in Greenland -- causes "vigorous melting" and may require a reassessment of global sea level rise projections.
In a bid to comprehend the impact of ocean-water interaction on glacial melting, glaciologists examined data collected between March 2023 and June 2023 sourced from Finland's ICEYE commercial satellite mission. These satellites represent a collection that resembles constellations in polar orbit around the planet. They employ InSAR -- interferometric synthetic aperture radar -- to continuously track changes on the Earth's surface. "When we have a continuous time series and compare that with the tidal cycle, we see the seawater coming in at high tide and receding and sometimes going farther up underneath the glacier and getting trapped," said Rignot. "Thanks to ICEYE, we're beginning to witness this tidal dynamic for the first time."
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Posted by from MMO Champion
WoW Hotfixes - May 20, 2024
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria
Shirts and tabards can now be purchased from Larah Treebender
at any Infinite Bazaar, Mei Steadypaw outside the Shrine of Two Moons and the Shrine of Seven Stars, and Hanchoon Yi at Paw'don Village, Honeydew Village, Shrine of Two Moons, and Shrine of Seven Stars.
Fixed a bug preventing Timerunners with a legendary Infinite Cloak of Potential from accessing Ordon Sanctuary as intended.
Fixed an issue with the spawning of Voress'thalik which prevented the completion of "Devastation Below".
Fixed an issue preventing players from learning Amber Pterrordax.
Fixed a bug causing Gulp Frogs to unintentionally drop Lesser Charms of Good Fortune.
Enemy power scaling, particularly in group content, has been adjusted to be less aggressive. This is particularly applicable in the player level 40 - 70 range, before players have been able to power up their cloak, upgrade their gems, and increase their item level.
Gear drop-rates have been improved from world rares, rare elites, and quests. This will help players who have had their item levels fall behind as leveling speed increases, especially at higher levels when cloak bonus experience is powered up.
Developers’ notes: This will also increase player Bronze and appearance acquisition by increasing the number of items to place into the Unraveling Sands for additional Bronze.
The first-time bonus for queueing each LFR wing will grant a Thread of Experience in addition to the existing Lesser Bronze Cache.
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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the major-breakthroughs department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Medical Xpress: A team of medical researchers at the National Children's Medical Center, Children's Hospital, Fudan University, in China, has developed a technique to freeze and thaw brain tissue without causing damage. In their study, published in the journal Cell Reports Methods, the group tested bathing brain organoid tissue in candidate chemicals before freezing them using liquid nitrogen. [...] The work involved dipping or soaking brain organoids (brain tissue grown from stem cells) in candidate compounds and then freezing and thawing them to see how they fared. After many attempts, they found one combination of solutions that worked best -- a mix of ethylene glycol, methylcellulose DMSO and Y27632. They named the solution mix MEDY.
The research team then tested MEDY under a variety of conditions to see how well it prevented damage from freezing. The conditions involved changing variables, such as the age of the organoids prior to freezing and how long they were soaked in a MEDY solution. They then allowed the organoids to resume growing after they were thawed for up to 150 days. The researchers found little difference between organoids that had been frozen and those that had not -- even those that had been frozen for as long as 18 months. As a final test, the research team used their technique on a sample of brain tissue obtained from a live human patient and found that it worked just as well.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the responding-to-the-critics department: In a new blog post, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has shared his thoughts on three issues core to Ethereum's decentralization: MEV, liquid staking, and the hardware requirements of nodes. The Block reports: In his post, published on May 17, Buterin first addresses the issue of MEV, or the financial gain that sophisticated node operators can capture by reordering the transactions within a block. Buterin characterizes the two approaches to MEV as "minimization" (reducing MEV through smart protocol design, such as CowSwap) and "quarantining" (attempting to reduce or eliminate MEV altogether through in-protocol techniques). While MEV quarantining seems like an alluring option, Buterin notes that the prospect comes with some centralization risks. "If builders have the power to exclude transactions from a block entirely, there are attacks that can quite easily arise," Buterin noted. However, Buterin championed the builders working on MEV quarantining through concepts like transaction inclusion lists, which "take away the builder's ability to push transactions out of the block entirely." "I think ideas in this direction - really pushing the quarantine box to be as small as possible - are really interesting, and I'm in favor of going in that direction," Buterin concluded.
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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the AI-all-the-things department: HP announced today that it will resurrect the "Omni" branding it first coined for its business-oriented laptops introduced in 1993. The vintage branding will now be used for the company's new consumer-facing laptops, with HP retiring the Spectre and Dragonfly brands in the process. Furthermore, computers under consumer PC series names like Pavilion will also no longer be released. "Instead, every consumer computer from HP will be called either an OmniBook for laptops, an OmniDesk for desktops, or an OmniStudio for AIOs," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The computers will also have a modifier, ranging from 3 up to 5, 7, X, or Ultra to denote computers that are entry-level all the way up to advanced. For instance, an HP OmniBook Ultra would represent HP's highest-grade consumer laptop. "For example, an HP OmniBook 3 will appeal to customers who prioritize entertainment and personal use, while the OmniBook X will be designed for those with higher creative and technical demands," Stacy Wolff, SVP of design and sustainability at HP, said via a press announcement today. [...] So far, HP has announced one new Omni computer, the OmniBook X. It has a 12-core Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, 16GB or 32GB of MPDDR5x-8448 memory, up to 2TB of storage, and a 14-inch, 2240x1400 IPS display. HP is pointing to the Latin translation of omni, meaning "all" (or everything), as the rationale behind the naming update. The new name should give shoppers confidence that the computers will provide all the things that they need.
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Mattel Creations Hot Wheels Transformers Optimus Prime “Behind The Scenes” Video 2024-05-20 16:05:02
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