Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the supply-and-demand department: In an op-ed for MIT Technology Review, authors Carsten T. Charlesworth, Henry T. Greely, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi make the case for human "bodyoids" that could reduce animal testing, improve drug development, and alleviate organ shortages: Why do we hear about medical breakthroughs in mice, but rarely see them translate into cures for human disease? Why do so few drugs that enter clinical trials receive regulatory approval? And why is the waiting list for organ transplantation so long? These challenges stem in large part from a common root cause: a severe shortage of ethically sourced human bodies. It may be disturbing to characterize human bodies in such commodifying terms, but the unavoidable reality is that human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress.
This imbalance between supply and demand is the underlying cause of the organ shortage crisis, with more than 100,000 patients currently waiting for a solid organ transplant in the US alone. It also forces us to rely heavily on animals in medical research, a practice that can't replicate major aspects of human physiology and makes it necessary to inflict harm on sentient creatures. In addition, the safety and efficacy of any experimental drug must still be confirmed in clinical trials on living human bodies. These costly trials risk harm to patients, can take a decade or longer to complete, and make it through to approval less than 15% of the time.
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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the state-of-the-web department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measures -- adjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious traffic -- Iaso found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies. Desperate for a solution, Iaso eventually resorted to moving their server behind a VPN and creating "Anubis," a custom-built proof-of-work challenge system that forces web browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing the site. "It's futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more," Iaso wrote in a blog post titled "a desperate cry for help." "I don't want to have to close off my Gitea server to the public, but I will if I have to."
Iaso's story highlights a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.
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Posted by from MMO Champion
WoW Hotfixes - March 25, 2025
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Classes
Death Knight
Frost
All ability damage increased by 4%. Does not apply to PvP combat.
Demon Hunter
Vengeance
Deflecting Spikes (Talent) now causes Demon Spikes to increase Parry chance by 10% (was 15%).
Druid
Balance
Wrath damage increased by 30%.
Starsurge damage increased by 5%.
Elune’s Chosen: Lunar Calling increases Starfire’s damage to its primary target by 160% (was 100%).
Guardian
Druid of the Claw: Dreadful Wound damage increased by 20%.
Druid of the Claw: Empowered Shapeshifting increases Swipe’s damage by 12% (was 6%) and Mangle’s damage by 25% (was 15%).
Druid of the Claw: Wildpower Surge’s bonus to Rip damage reduced to 200% (was 225%).
Evoker
Augmentation
Developers’ notes: After our last round of tuning, we were pleased with Augmentation’s support capabilities, as that’s the strength of the spec. However, their personal damage contribution is lower than we’d like. We’re buffing their personal damage to bring their overall output up without further increasing their support contributions.
Damage of all spells and abilities increased by 15%.
Devastation
Fixed an issue where the final tick of Disintegrate would not benefit from Titanic Wrath or Iridescence while talented into Azure Celerity.
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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the too-many-flavors-to-choose department: The Register's Richard Speed reports: Baffled by the plethora of Outlook options out there? You aren't alone. Microsoft veteran Scott Hanselman posted a list of some more variants that could be used to do the same thing. It's a problem common to several Microsoft products. A file needs to be opened, but which app should be used? Should it be Outlook New, or Outlook (New)? With tongue firmly in cheek, Hanselman listed some more options: Outlook (Zero Sugar), Outlook (Caffeine Free), and so on. Hanselman, Developer Community veep at Microsoft, also included Outlook '95, although to our mind the peak came with the version of Outlook in Office 97. A happier, more trusting time when security was less important.
While users can create multiple Outlook profiles to store email account details and data locations, Hanselman's post on Bluesky highlights an issue facing many users of Microsoft's software: which incarnation of the application to use. Teams users often find themselves presented with a variety of applications -- Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams (Personal), for example, can often appear side by side in the system tray. [...]
There is a cautionary tale about what happened when a soft drinks company tried to replace a well-liked product with a "new" version and renamed the previous preferred version as "classic." The list posted by Hanselman -- who is also notable for tips on managing Microsoft's personal information manager -- is amusing, but also highlights the perils of having multiple, similarly functioning options to do the same thing, and the potential for confusing users.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the second-chance department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: World of Warcraft Classic's Hardcore mode has set itself apart from the average MMO experience simply by making character death permanent across the entire in-game realm. For years, Blizzard has not allowed any appeals or rollbacks for these Hardcore mode character deaths, even when such deaths came as the direct result of a server disconnection or gameplay bug. Now, Blizzard says it's modifying that policy somewhat in response to a series of "unprecedented distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks" undertaken "with the singular goal of disrupting players' experiences." The World of Warcraft developer says it may now resurrect Classic Hardcore characters "at our sole discretion" when those deaths come "in a mass event which we deem inconsistent with the integrity of the game." WoW's Classic Hardcore made it a hotspot for streamers, especially members of the OnlyFangs Guild, who embraced the challenge that one mistake could end a character's run. However, as Ars Technica reports, a series of DDOS attacks timed with their major livestreamed raids led to character deaths and widespread frustration, prompting streamer sodapoppin to declare the guild's end.
Blizzard responded by updating its Hardcore policy to resurrect characters lost specifically to DDOS attacks. "Recently, we have experienced unprecedented distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks that impacted many Blizzard game services, including Hardcore realms, with the singular goal of disrupting players' experiences," WoW Classic Associate Production Director Clay Stone wrote in a public message. "As we continue our work to further strengthen the resilience of WoW realms and our rapid response time, we're taking steps to resurrect player-characters that were lost as a result of these attacks."
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the moving-forward department: Google DeepMind has launched Gemini 2.5, a new family of AI models designed to "think" before responding to queries. The initial release, Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, tops the LMArena leaderboard by what Google claims is a "significant margin" and demonstrates enhanced reasoning capabilities across technical tasks. The model achieved 18.8% on Humanity's Last Exam without tools, outperforming most competing flagship models. In mathematics, it scored 86.7% on AIME 2025 and 92.0% on AIME 2024 in single attempts, while reaching 84.0% on GPQA's diamond benchmark for scientific reasoning.
For developers, Gemini 2.5 Pro demonstrates improved coding abilities with 63.8% on SWE-Bench Verified using a custom agent setup, though this falls short of Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet score of 70.3%. On Aider Polyglot for code editing, it scores 68.6%, which Google claims surpasses competing models. The reasoning approach builds on Google's previous experiments with reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought prompting. These techniques allow the model to analyze information, incorporate context, and draw conclusions before delivering responses. Gemini 2.5 Pro ships with a 1 million token context window (approximately 750,000 words). The model is available immediately in Google AI Studio and for Gemini Advanced subscribers, with Vertex AI integration planned in the coming weeks.
Posted by from MMO Champion
Holy Paladin Hotfixes are Now Live - March 25, 2025
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
In order to address a game performance issue with Beacon of Light use, we’ve made the following changes via hotfixes that are now live:
Classes
Paladin
Holy
Beacon of Light no longer transfers healing from Dawnlight or Sun’s Avatar.
Dawnlight’s healing increased by 15%.
Sun’s Avatar healing increased by 15%.
Tooltips will be updated in a future patch to reflect this change.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the new-world-order department: Boeing is seeking to withdraw an earlier agreement to plead guilty in a long-running criminal case that blamed the company for deceiving regulators before two deadly crashes of 737 MAX jets, WSJ is reporting, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The aerospace giant is seeking more lenient treatment from the Justice Department, which under the Trump administration is reviewing numerous pending criminal cases that haven't yet gone to trial or been approved by courts. Boeing nearly sealed its fate last year, agreeing in July to plead guilty to defrauding the Federal Aviation Administration. But a federal judge in Texas rejected the proposed deal in December, pushing the resolution beyond the Biden administration.
Now Boeing stands to benefit from fresh eyes at Trump's Justice Department, which is inclined to at least modify parts of the agreement, some of the people said. Allowing Boeing to rescind its plea agreement, or lightening the company's punishment, would mark one of the most prominent examples of the Trump administration's lighter-touch approach to some white-collar enforcement. There were 346 people killed in the two 737 MAX crashes, in 2018 and 2019. The two sides are still negotiating how to propose changes to the deal, expected by April 11, to U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, who oversees the case. One possible change under discussion: whether Boeing can forgo hiring an outside monitor to ensure its compliance with the law, the people said.
If you are excited to play CD Projekt Red’s upcoming RPG The Witcher 4, just know that you’re gonna be waiting a long time. The developer has confirmed that the earliest possible release date for the sequel is sometime in 2027, making me wonder if The Witcher 4 might end up being a game we all play on PlayStation 6.
The first thing I thought after watching the Wildgate trailer was that we already have Concord at home (or at least we used to). The second was that the sci-fi extraction shooter from ex-Blizzard developers might be able to succeed where Sony’s hero shooter did not thanks to a gameplay loop that looks way more like Sea…
Professional skater and Jackass star Bam Margera will be included in the next major Tony Hawk skateboarding game after Hawk himself reportedly stepped in and forced Activison to add Margera to the game’s roster.
With only a week to go until the Switch 2's big Nintendo Direct showcase, there’s new reporting about when the console will launch and some of what players can expect from the hardware’s first six months.
Napster, a once-popular website people used in the late ‘90s to illegally share music online that went bankrupt in 2001, has been sold for $207 million to a 3D technology company with plans to bring the brand into the metaverse.
