Anyone who works as a freelancer these days has to be at least a bit familiar with techie things. But it isn’t just that. When I was a kid and those vaguely SF puppet shows were on the television and all the other kids wanted to be Greg Gogetem or Steve Savetheuniverse, I wanted to be the guy in a white coat and glasses called Doc or Brains. Here are some technology-related feeds I find useful and/or entertaining.
Slashdot » Thanks to Machine Learning, Scientist Finally Recover Text From The Charred Scrolls of Vesuvius
The great libraries of the ancient classical world are "legendary… said to have contained stacks of texts," writes ScienceAlert. But from Rome to Constantinople, Athens to Alexandria, only one collection survived to the present day. And here in 2024, "we can now start reading its contents." A worldwide competition to decipher the charred texts of the Villa of Papyri — … [Link]
Slashdot » US Cities Try Changing Their Zoning Rules to Allow More Housing
Tech workers are accused of driving up rents in America's major cities — but in fact, the problem may be everywhere. Half of America's renters "are paying more than a third of their salary in housing costs," reports NPR's Weekend Edition, "and for those looking to buy, scant few homes on the market are affordable for a typical household. "To … [Link]
Slashdot » Pranksters Mock AI-Safety Guardrails with New Chatbot 'Goody-2'
"A new chatbot called Goody-2 takes AI safety to the next level," writes long-time Slashdot reader klubar. "It refuses every request, responding with an explanation of how doing so might cause harm or breach ethical boundaries." TechCrunch describes it as the work of Brain, "a 'very serious' LA-based art studio that has ribbed the industry before." "We decided to build … [Link]
Slashdot » To Combat Space Pollution, Japan Plans Launch of World's First Wooden Satellite
Japanese scientists plan to launch a satellite made of magnolia wood this summer on a U.S. rocket, reports the Observer. Experiments carried out on the International Space Station showed magnolia wood was unusually stable and resistant to cracking — and "when it burns up as it re-enters the atmosphere after completing its mission, will produce only a fine spray of … [Link]
Slashdot » Reddit Has Reportedly Signed Over Its Content to Train AI Models
An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: Reddit has signed a contract allowing an AI company to train its models on the social media platform's content, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter… The agreement, signed with an "unnamed large AI company", could be a model for future contracts of a similar nature, Bloomberg reported. Mashable writes … [Link]
Slashdot » Is the Go Programming Language Surging in Popularity?
The Tiobe index tries to gauge the popularity of programming languages based on search results for courses, programmers, and third-party vendors, according to InfoWorld. And by that criteria, "Google's Go language, or golang, has reached its highest position ever…" The language, now in the eighth ranked position for language popularity, has been on the rise for several years…. In 2015, … [Link]
Slashdot » 'Apple Pay' Is Down for Some Customers
"It appears that Apple Pay is down — particularly for Chase customers," reports the Verge: Verge staffers have had their cards declined while trying to pay with Chase cards using Apple Pay, while using the same physical card works just fine. Several people on Threads confirmed the same issue when I asked — although people with non-Chase banks like Citi … [Link]
Slashdot » Intel Accused of Inflating Over 2,600 CPU Benchmark Results
An anonymous reader shared this report from PCWorld: The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, better known as SPEC, has invalidated over 2600 of its own results testing Xeon processors in the 2022 and 2023 version of its popular industrial SPEC CPU 2017 test. After investigating, SPEC found that Intel had used compilers that were, quote, "performing a compilation that specifically improves … [Link]
Slashdot » OpenZFS Native Encryption Use Has New(ish) Data Corruption Bug
Some ZFS news from Phoronix this week. "At the end of last year OpenZFS 2.2.2 was released to fix a rare but nasty data corruption issue, but it turns out there are other data corruption bug(s) still lurking in the OpenZFS file-system codebase." A Phoronix reader wrote in today about an OpenZFS data corruption bug when employing native encryption and … [Link]
Slashdot » 'Luddite' Tech-Skeptics See Bad Outcomes for Labor – and Humanity
"I feel things fraying," says Nick Hilton, host of a neo-luddite podcast called The Ned Ludd Radio Hour. But he's one of the more optimistic tech skeptics interviewed by the Guardian: Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience — taking things slowly for a novice like … [Link]
Slashdot » What Happens After Throughput to DNA Storage Drives Surpasses 2 Gbps?
High-capacity DNA data storage "is closer than you think," Slashdot wrote in 2019. Now IEEE Spectrum brings an update on where we're at — and where we're headed — by a participant in the DNA storage collaboration between Microsoft and the Molecular Information Systems Lab of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of … [Link]
Slashdot » Ocean Temperatures Are Skyrocketing
"For nearly a year now, a bizarre heating event has been unfolding across the world's oceans," reports Wired. "In March 2023, global sea surface temperatures started shattering record daily highs and have stayed that way since…" Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. "It's really getting to be strange that we're just seeing the records break by … [Link]
Slashdot » AI Expert Falsely Fined By Automated AI System, Proving System and Human Reviewers Failed
"Dutch motorist Tim Hansenn was fined 380 euros for using his phone while driving," reports the Jerusalem Post. "But there was one problem: He wasn't using his phone at all…" Hansenn, who works with AI as part of his job with the firm Nippur, found the photo taken by the smart cameras. In it, he was clearly scratching his head … [Link]
Slashdot » Linux Becomes a CVE Numbering Authority (Like Curl and Python). Is This a Turning Point?
From a blog post by Greg Kroah-Hartman: As was recently announced, the Linux kernel project has been accepted as a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) for vulnerabilities found in Linux. This is a trend, of more open source projects taking over the haphazard assignments of CVEs against their project by becoming a CNA so that no other group can assign CVEs … [Link]
Slashdot » Can Robots.txt Files Really Stop AI Crawlers?
In the high-stakes world of AI, "The fundamental agreement behind robots.txt [files], and the web as a whole — which for so long amounted to 'everybody just be cool' — may not be able to keep up…" argues the Verge: For many publishers and platforms, having their data crawled for training data felt less like trading and more like stealing. … [Link]
Slashdot » How Rust Improves the Security of Its Ecosystem
This week the non-profit Rust Foundation announced the release of a report on what their Security Initiative accomplished in the last six months of 2023. "There is already so much to show for this initiative," says the foundation's executive director, "from several new open source security projects to several completed and publicly available security threat models." From the executive summary: … [Link]
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