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From the AI-URLs department: Recently the Browser Company (the startup behind the Arc web browser) switched over to building a new AI-powered browser — and its beta has just been released, reports TechCrunch, "though you'll need an invite to try it out."
The Chromium-based browser has a URL/search bar that also "acts as the interface for its in-built AI chatbot" which can "search the web for you, summarize files that you upload, and automatically switch between chat and search functions."
The Browser Company's CEO Josh Miller has of late acknowledged how people have been using AI tools for all sorts of tasks, and Dia is a reflection of that. By giving users an AI interface within the browser itself, where a majority of work is done these days, the company is hoping to slide into the user flow and give people an easy way to use AI, cutting out the need to visit the sites for tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude...
Users can also ask questions about all the tabs they have open, and the bot can even write up a draft based on the contents of those tabs. To set your preferences, all you have to do is talk to the chatbot to customize its tone of voice, style of writing, and settings for coding. Via an opt-in feature called History, you can allow the browser to use seven days of your browsing history as context to answer queries.
The Browser Company will give all existing Arc members access to the beta immediately, according to the article, "and existing Dia users will be able to send invites to other users."
The article points out that Google is also adding AI-powered features to Chrome...
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From the Flat-land department: In a world first, a research team used 2D materials — only an atom thick — to develop a computer. The team (led by researchers at Pennsylvania State University) says it's a major step toward thinner, faster and more energy-efficient electronics.
From the University's announcement:
They created a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) computer — technology at the heart of nearly every modern electronic device — without relying on silicon. Instead, they used two different 2D materials to develop both types of transistors needed to control the electric current flow in CMOS computers: molybdenum disulfide for n-type transistors and tungsten diselenide for p-type transistors... "[A]s silicon devices shrink, their performance begins to degrade," [said lead researcher/engineering professor Saptarshi Das]. "Two-dimensional materials, by contrast, maintain their exceptional electronic properties at atomic thickness, offering a promising path forward...."
The team used metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) — a fabrication process that involves vaporizing ingredients, forcing a chemical reaction and depositing the products onto a substrate — to grow large sheets of molybdenum disulfide and tungsten diselenide and fabricate over 1,000 of each type of transistor. By carefully tuning the device fabrication and post-processing steps, they were able to adjust the threshold voltages of both n- and p-type transistors, enabling the construction of fully functional CMOS logic circuits.
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From the dueling-CEOs department: Last week Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said AI could eliminate half the entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. CNN called the remarks "part of the AI hype machine."
Asked about the prediction this week at a Paris tech conference, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged AI may impact some employees, but "dismissed" Amodei's claim, according to Fortune. "Everybody's jobs will be changed. Some jobs will be obsolete, but many jobs are going to be created ... Whenever companies are more productive, they hire more people."
And he also said he "pretty much" disagreed "with almost everything" Anthropic's CEO says.
"One, he believes that AI is so scary that only they should do it," Huang said of Amodei at a press briefing at Viva Technology in Paris. "Two, [he believes] that AI is so expensive, nobody else should do it ... And three, AI is so incredibly powerful that everyone will lose their jobs, which explains why they should be the only company building it. I think AI is a very important technology; we should build it and advance it safely and responsibly," Huang continued. "If you want things to be done safely and responsibly, you do it in the open ... Don't do it in a dark room and tell me it's safe."
An Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune in a statement: "Dario has never claimed that 'only Anthropic' can build safe and powerful AI. As the public record will show, Dario has advocated for a national transparency standard for AI developers (including Anthropic) so the public and policymakers are aware of the models' capabilities and risks and can prepare accordingly.
NVIDIA's CEO also touted their hybrid quantum-classical platformCUDA-Q and claimed quantum computing is hitting an "inflection point" and within a few years could start solving real-world problems
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From the anomalous-signals department: alternative_right shares a report from Phys.Org: A cosmic particle detector in Antarctica has emitted a series of bizarre signals that defy the current understanding of particle physics, according to an international research group that includes scientists from Penn State. The unusual radio pulses were detected by the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, a range of instruments flown on balloons high above Antarctica that are designed to detect radio waves from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.
The goal of the experiment is to gain insight into distant cosmic events by analyzing signals that reach the Earth. Rather than reflecting off the ice, the signals -- a form of radio waves -- appeared to be coming from below the horizon, an orientation that cannot be explained by the current understanding of particle physics and may hint at new types of particles or interactions previously unknown to science, the team said. The researchers published their results in the journal Physical Review Letters.
"The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice," said Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics who worked on the ANITA team searching for signals from elusive particles called neutrinos. She explained that by their calculations, the anomalous signal had to pass through and interact with thousands of kilometers of rock before reaching the detector, which should have left the radio signal undetectable because it would have been absorbed into the rock. "It's an interesting problem because we still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos," Wissel said.
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From the postponed-indefinitely department: NASA and Axiom Space have indefinitely delayed the Axiom-4 launch to the International Space Station due to concerns about a persistent air leak in the Russian PrK vestibule of the aging Zvezda module. "The PrK serves as a passageway between the station's Zvezda module and spacecraft docked at its aft port," notes CBS News. From the report: In a blog post, NASA said cosmonauts aboard the station "recently performed inspections of the pressurized module's interior surfaces, sealed some additional areas of interest, and measured the current leak rate. Following this effort, the segment now is holding pressure." The post went on to say the Axiom-4 delay will provide "additional time for NASA and (the Russian space agency) Roscosmos to evaluate the situation and determine whether any additional troubleshooting is necessary."
Launched in July 2000 atop a Russian Proton rocket, Zvezda was the third module to join the growing space station, providing a command center for Russian cosmonauts, crew quarters, the aft docking port and two additional ports now occupied by airlock and research modules. The leakage was first noticed in 2019, and has been openly discussed ever since by NASA during periodic reviews and space station news briefings. The leak rate has varied, but has stayed in the neighborhood of around 1-to-2 pounds per day. "The station is not young," astronaut Mike Barratt said last November during a post flight news conference. "It's been up there for quite a while, and you expect some wear and tear, and we're seeing that in the form of some cracks that have formed." The Russians have made a variety of attempts to patch a suspect crack and other possible sources of leakage, but air has continued to escape into space.
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From the new-and-improved department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Do you remember the Pirelli Cyber Tire? No, it's not an angular nightmare clad in stainless steel. Rather, it's a sensor-equipped tire that can inform the car it's fitted to what's happening, both with the tire itself and the road it's passing over. The technology has slowly been making its way into the real world, starting with rarified stuff like the McLaren Artura. Now, Pirelli is going to put some Cyber Tires to work for everybody, not just supercar drivers, in a new pilot program with the regional government of Apulia in Italy.
The Cyber Tire has a sensor to monitor temperature and pressure, using Bluetooth Low Energy to communicate with the car. The electronics are able to withstand more than 3,500 G as part of life on the road, and a 0.3-oz (10 g) battery keeps everything running for the life of the tire. The idea was to develop a better tire pressure monitoring system, one that could tell the car exactly what kind of tire -- summer, winter, all-season, and so on -- was fitted, and even its state of wear, allowing the car to adapt its settings appropriately. But other applications suggested themselves -- at a recent CES, Pirelli showed how a Cyber Tire could warn other road users about aquaplaning. Then again, we've been waiting more than a decade for vehicle-to-vehicle communication to make a difference in daily driving to no avail.
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From the one-step-closer department: Edd Gent reporting for IEEE Spectrum: IBM has unveiled a new quantum computing architecture it says will slash the number of qubits required for error correction. The advance will underpin its goal of building a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer, called Starling, that will be available to customers by 2029. Because of the inherent unreliability of the qubits (the quantum equivalent of bits) that quantum computers are built from, error correction will be crucial for building reliable, large-scale devices. Error-correction approaches spread each unit of information across many physical qubits to create "logical qubits." This provides redundancy against errors in individual physical qubits.
One of the most popular approaches is known as a surface code, which requires roughly 1,000 physical qubits to make up one logical qubit. This was the approach IBM focused on initially, but the company eventually realized that creating the hardware to support it was an "engineering pipe dream," Jay Gambetta, the vice president of IBM Quantum, said in a press briefing. Around 2019, the company began to investigate alternatives. In a paper published in Nature last year, IBM researchers outlined a new error-correction scheme called quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC) codes that would require roughly one-tenth of the number of qubits that surface codes need. Now, the company has unveiled a new quantum-computing architecture that can realize this new approach. "We've cracked the code to quantum error correction and it's our plan to build the first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer," said Gambetta, who is also an IBM Fellow. "We feel confident it is now a question of engineering to build these machines, rather than science."
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From the would-you-look-at-that department: According to market analyst firm Canalys, enterprise adoption of AI is slowing due to unpredictable and often high costs associated with model inferencing in the cloud. Despite strong growth in cloud infrastructure spending, businesses are increasingly scrutinizing cost-efficiency, with some opting for alternatives to public cloud providers as they grapple with volatile usage-based pricing models. The Register reports: [Canalys] published stats that show businesses spent $90.9 billion globally on infrastructure and platform-as-a-service with the likes of Microsoft, AWS and Google in calendar Q1, up 21 percent year-on-year, as the march of cloud adoption continues. Canalys says that growth came from enterprise users migrating more workloads to the cloud and exploring the use of generative AI, which relies heavily on cloud infrastructure.
Yet even as organizations move beyond development and trials to deployment of AI models, a lack of clarity over the ongoing recurring costs of inferencing services is becoming a concern. "Unlike training, which is a one-time investment, inference represents a recurring operational cost, making it a critical constraint on the path to AI commercialization," said Canalys senior director Rachel Brindley. "As AI transitions from research to large-scale deployment, enterprises are increasingly focused on the cost-efficiency of inference, comparing models, cloud platforms, and hardware architectures such as GPUs versus custom accelerators," she added.
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From the cough-it-up department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to 9.86 million pounds ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a "waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023." Jisc, a membership organization that runs procurement for higher and further education establishments in the UK, said it had signed an agreement to purchase the new subscription licenses after consultation with members. In a procurement notice, it said institutions that use Oracle Java SE are required to purchase subscriptions. "The agreement includes the waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023," the notice said.
The Java SE Universal Subscription was introduced in January 2023 to an outcry from licensing experts and analysts. It moved licensing of Java from a per-user basis to a per-employee basis. At the time, Oracle said it was "a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments." However, licensing advisors said early calculations to help some clients showed that the revamp might increase costs by up to ten times. Later, analysis from Gartner found the per-employee subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model.
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From the PSA department: Anker is recalling 1.15 million "PowerCore 10000" portable chargers due to fire and explosion risks linked to overheating lithium-ion batteries, with 19 incidents reported. "That includes two minor burn injuries and 11 reports of property damage amounting to over $60,700," reports CBS News. Consumers are urged to stop using the affected devices, check their serial numbers, and request a free replacement through Anker's website. From the report: According to a notice from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the lithium-ion battery inside certain "PowerCore 10000" made by Anker, a China-based electronics maker, can overheat. That can lead to the "melting of plastic components, smoke and fire hazards," Anker said in an announcement. The company added that it was conducting the recall "out of an abundance of caution to ensure the safety of our customers."
The recalled "PowerCore 10000" power banks have a model number of A1263. They were sold online at Anker's website -- as well as Amazon, eBay and Newegg -- between June 2016 and December 2022 for about $27 across the U.S., according to the recall notice. Consumers can check their serial number at Anker's site to determine whether their power bank is included in the recall.
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From the new-and-improved department: Apple's macOS 26 "Tahoe" introduces a new disk image format called ASIF, designed to dramatically improve performance over previous formats like UDRW and sparse bundles -- achieving near-native read/write speeds for virtual machines and general disk image use. The Eclectic Light Company reports: Apple provides few technical details, other than stating that the intrinsic structure of ASIF disk images doesn't depend on the host file system's capabilities, and their size on the host depends on the size of the data stored in the disk. In other words, they're a sparse file in APFS, and are flagged as such. [...]
Conclusions:
- Where possible, in macOS 26 Tahoe in particular, VMs should use ASIF disk images rather than RAW/UDRW.
- Unless a sparse bundle is required (for example when it's hosted on a different file system such as that in a NAS), ASIF should be first choice for general purpose disk images in Tahoe.
- It would be preferable for virtualizers to be able to call a proper API rather than a command tool.
- Keep an eye on C-Command's DropDMG. I'm sure it will support ASIF disk images soon.
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From the cease-and-desist department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Almost two dozen digital rights and consumer protection organizations sent a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday urging regulators to investigate Character.AI and Meta's "unlicensed practice of medicine facilitated by their product," through therapy-themed bots that claim to have credentials and confidentiality "with inadequate controls and disclosures." The complaint and request for investigation is led by the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), a non-profit consumer rights organization. Co-signatories include the AI Now Institute, Tech Justice Law Project, the Center for Digital Democracy, the American Association of People with Disabilities, Common Sense, and 15 other consumer rights and privacy organizations. "These companies have made a habit out of releasing products with inadequate safeguards that blindly maximizes engagement without care for the health or well-being of users for far too long," Ben Winters, CFA Director of AI and Privacy said in a press release on Thursday. "Enforcement agencies at all levels must make it clear that companies facilitating and promoting illegal behavior need to be held accountable. These characters have already caused both physical and emotional damage that could have been avoided, and they still haven't acted to address it."
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ChatGPT Just Got 'Absolutely Wrecked' at Chess, Losing to a 1970s-Era Atari 2600 2025-06-14 10:05:01
