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 » Meta Is Adding AI To Its Ray-Ban Smart Glasses
Starting next month, Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses will support multimodal AI features to perform translation, along with object, animal, and monument identification. The Verge reports: Users can activate the glasses' smart assistant by saying "Hey Meta," and then saying a prompt or asking a question. It will then respond through the speakers built into the frames. The NYT offers a … [Link]
Slashdot » Facebook Allegedly Killed Its Own Streaming Service To Help Sell Netflix Ads
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Do you remember Facebook Watch? Me neither. Mark Zuckerberg's short-lived streaming service never really got off the ground, but court filings unsealed in Meta's antitrust lawsuit claim "Watch" was kneecapped starting in 2018 to protect Zuckerberg's advertising relationship with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. "For nearly a decade, Netflix and Facebook enjoyed a … [Link]
Slashdot » US, UK Investigate $20 Billion of Crypto Transfers To Garantex Russian Exchange
According to Bloomberg, the U.S. and U.K. are investigating more than $20 billion worth of USDT transactions that have passed through Garantex, a Russia-based crypto exchange. Milk Road reports: If confirmed, the $20 billion in transactions would represent one of the most significant breaches of the sanctions imposed on Russia since the conflict began. However, the sources cautioned that the … [Link]
Slashdot » Linux Foundation Launches Valkey As A Redis Fork
Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Given the recent change by Redis to adopt dual source-available licensing for all their releases moving forward (Redis Source Available License v2 and Server Side Public License v1), the Linux Foundation announced today their fork of Redis. The Linux Foundation went public today with their intent to fork Valkey as an open-source alternative to the … [Link]
Slashdot » Biden Orders Every US Agency To Appoint a Chief AI Officer
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The White House has announced the "first government-wide policy (PDF) to mitigate risks of artificial intelligence (AI) and harness its benefits." To coordinate these efforts, every federal agency must appoint a chief AI officer with "significant expertise in AI." Some agencies have already appointed chief AI officers, but any agency that … [Link]
New Scientist – News » The ambitious plans to study the sun during April's solar eclipse
Solar scientists have been preparing for years for a 4-minute window, during the total solar eclipse on 8 April, in which they will study the sun's corona [Link]
Slashdot » How Apple Plans To Update New iPhones Without Opening Them
An anonymous reader writes: What if you could update the device while it's still in the box? That's the latest plan cooked up by Apple, which is close to rolling out a system that will let Apple Stores wirelessly update new iPhones while they're still in their boxes. The new system is called "Presto." French site iGeneration has the first … [Link]
Slashdot » AI Leaders Press Advantage With Congress as China Tensions Rise
Silicon Valley chiefs are swarming the Capitol to try to sway lawmakers on the dangers of falling behind in the AI race. From a report: In recent weeks, American lawmakers have moved to ban the Chinese-owned app TikTok. President Biden reinforced his commitment to overcome China's rise in tech. And the Chinese government added chips from Intel and AMD to … [Link]
Slashdot » New York City Welcomes Robotaxis – But Only With Safety Drivers
An anonymous reader shares a report: New York City announced a new permitting system for companies interested in testing autonomous vehicles on its roads, including a requirement that a human safety driver sit behind the steering wheel at all times. As cities like San Francisco continue to grapple with the problems posed by fully driverless for-hire vehicles, New York City … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Hyperelastic gel is one of the stretchiest materials known to science
A super-stretchy hydrogel can stretch to 15 times its original length and return to its initial shape, and could be used to make soft inflatable robots [Link]
Slashdot » 'Software Vendors Dump Open Source, Go For the Cash Grab'
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ComputerWorld: Essentially, all software is built using open source. By Synopsys' count, 96% of all codebases contain open-source software. Lately, though, there's been a very disturbing trend. A company will make its program using open source, make millions from it, and then — and only then — switch licenses, leaving their contributors, customers, and partners … [Link]
Slashdot » Claude 3 Surpasses GPT-4 on Chatbot Arena For the First Time
Anthropic's recently released Claude 3 Opus large language model has beaten OpenAI's GPT-4 for the first time on Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced leaderboard used by AI researchers to gauge the relative capabilities of AI language models. A report adds: "The king is dead," tweeted software developer Nick Dobos in a post comparing GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 Opus that … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Japan’s SLIM moon lander surprisingly survived a second lunar night
The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon spacecraft has sent back images after surviving its second lunar night – generally these periods are so cold they destroy spacecraft electronics [Link]
Slashdot » Pythagoras Was Wrong: There Are No Universal Musical Harmonies, Study Finds
An anonymous reader shares a report: According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, 'consonance' — a pleasant-sounding combination of notes — is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these 'integer ratios' are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them … [Link]
Slashdot » Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced To 25 Years in Prison
Crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years [non-paywalled link] in prison for a massive fraud that unraveled with the collapse of FTX, once one of the world's most popular platforms for exchanging digital currency. From a report: Bankman-Fried, 32, was convicted in November of fraud and conspiracy — a dramatic fall from a crest of success. U.S. … [Link]
Slashdot » Dashlane To Discontinue Its Authenticator App
Dashlane, in a support page: Due to changes in business priorities, we've decided to discontinue the Dashlane Authenticator app as of May 13, 2024. You can still use the main Dashlane app as an authenticator to protect logins stored in Dashlane with 2-factor authentication. 
Read more of this story at Slashdot. [Link]
New Scientist – News » Could bone marrow transplants transmit Alzheimer's disease?
The mainstream view is that Alzheimer's starts in the brain, but researchers were able to transfer the condition in mice by injections of bone marrow [Link]
Slashdot » Amazon Bets $150 Billion on Data Centers Required for AI Boom
Amazon plans to spend almost $150 billion in the coming 15 years on data centers, giving the cloud-computing giant the firepower to handle an expected explosion in demand for artificial intelligence applications and other digital services. From a report: The spending spree is a show of force as the company looks to maintain its grip on the cloud services market, … [Link]
Slashdot » Nigerian Woman Faces Jail Time For Facebook Review of Tomato Sauce
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Nigeria doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation when it comes to respecting the speech rights of its own citizens, nor the rights of platforms that its citizens use. But I will admit that even with that reputation in place, I'm a bit at a loss as to why the country decided to … [Link]
Slashdot » Fisker Lost Track of Millions of Dollars in Customer Payments For Months
An anonymous reader shares a report: Fisker temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments as it scaled up deliveries, leading to an internal audit that started in December and took months to complete, TechCrunch has learned. The EV startup was ultimately able to track down a majority of those payments or request new ones from customers whose … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Mathematicians are bitterly divided over a controversial proof
An attempt to settle a decade-long argument over a controversial proof by mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki has seen a war of words on both sides, with Mochizuki dubbing the latest effort as akin to a "hallucination" produced by ChatGPT [Link]
New Scientist – News » Chair for gamers boosts player performance and prevents muscular aches
Gamers seemed to be more comfortable after playing in a specialist gaming chair compared with a standard office chair [Link]
New Scientist – News » Some of the greatest cosmic discoveries have come about by accident
The universe has been surprising us ever since we first looked into the cosmic darkness. We should embrace serendipity in science, says Chris Lintott [Link]
Slashdot » Core PostgreSQL Developer Dies In Airplane Crash
Longtime Slashdot reader kriston writes: Core PostgreSQL developer Simon Riggs dies in airplane crash in Duxford, England. Riggs was the sole occupant of a Cirrus SR22-T which crashed on March 26 after performing touch-and-go maneuvers. Riggs was responsible for much of the enterprise-level features in PostgreSQL, including point-in-time recovery, synchronous replication, and hot standby. He also was the head of … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Mars may have captured and split a comet to create its two moons
How the Red Planet acquired its two moons, Phobos and Deimos, is unknown – they could have formed after something collided with the planet, or started out as asteroids – but now there is a hint of a cometary origin [Link]
Slashdot » A Faster Spinning Earth May Cause Timekeepers To Subtract a Second From World Clocks
According to a new study published in the journal Nature, timekeepers may have to consider subtracting a second from our clocks around 2029 because the planet is rotating faster than it used to. The Associated Press reports: "This is an unprecedented situation and a big deal," said study lead author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Early galaxy seen by JWST contains giant young stars and supernovae
The light signature from GLASS-z12, one of the most distant galaxies we have ever seen, suggests some of its stars have already exploded as supernovae [Link]
Slashdot » Oregon Governor Signs Nation's First Right-To-Repair Bill That Bans Parts Pairing
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Oregon Governor Tina Kotek today signed the state's Right to Repair Act, which will push manufacturers to provide more repair options for their products than any other state so far. The law, like those passed in New York, California, and Minnesota, will require many manufacturers to provide the same parts, tools, … [Link]
The Joy of Tech » Siri gets a new brain.
It’s ALIVE! [Link]
Slashdot » Why the US Could Be On the Cusp of a Productivity Boom
Neil Irwin reports via Axios: The dearth of productivity growth over the last couple of decades has held back incomes in the U.S. and other rich countries, according to a report out Wednesday from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the global consultancy. Productivity growth has been weak in the U.S. and Western Europe since the 2008 global … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Spreading rock dust on farms boosts crop yields and captures CO2
We already have evidence that rock dust can remove carbon dioxide from the air – now there are signs that spreading the dust on farm fields also enhances crop growth [Link]
Slashdot » Amazon Fined In Poland For Dark Pattern Design Tricks
Poland has fined Amazon close to $8 million for misleading consumers about the conclusion of sales contracts on its online marketplace. The sanction "also calls out the e-commerce giant for deceptive design elements which may inject a false sense of urgency into the purchasing process and mislead shoppers about elements like product availability and delivery dates," reports TechCrunch. From the … [Link]
Archive
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