hubie writes:

Scientists are aiming to revolutionise British diets by slipping more UK-grown beans into our daily bread:

Researchers and chefs at the University of Reading aim to encourage British consumers and food producers to switch to bread containing faba beans (commonly known as broad beans), making it healthier and less damaging to the environment.

[...] Five teams of researchers within the University of Reading, along with members of the public, farmers, industry, and policy makers, are now working together to bring about one of the biggest changes to UK food in generations.

[...] This is by increasing pulses in the UK diet, particularly faba beans, due to their favourable growing conditions in the UK and the sustainable nutritional enhancement they provide.

Despite being an excellent alternative to the ubiquitous imported soya bean, used currently in bread as an improver, the great majority of faba beans grown in the UK go to animal feed at present.

[...] "96% of people in the UK eat bread, and 90% of that is white bread, which in most cases contains soya. We've already performed some experiments and found that faba bean flour can directly replace imported soya flour and some of the wheat flour, which is low in nutrients. We can not only grow the faba beans here, but also produce and test the faba bean-rich bread, with improved nutritional quality."

For those who prefer their information in YouTube format

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upstart writes:

In-hardware security can be defeated with just two extra bytes:

The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) secure crypto-processor became a topic for public debate in 2021 when Microsoft forced TPM 2.0 adoption as a minimum requirement for installing Windows 11. The dedicated hardware controller should provide "extra hard" security to data and cryptographic algorithms, but the official specifications are bugged.

Security researchers recently discovered a couple of flaws in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 reference library specification, two dangerous buffer overflow vulnerabilities that could potentially impact billions of devices. Exploiting the flaws is only possible from an authenticated local account, but a piece of malware running on an affected device could do exactly that.

The two vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2023-1017 and CVE-2023-1018, or as "out-of-bounds write" and "out-of-bounds read" flaws. The issue was discovered within the TPM 2.0's Module Library, which allows writing (or reading) two "extra bytes" past the end of a TPM 2.0 command in the CryptParameterDecryption routine.

By writing specifically crafted malicious commands, an attacker could exploit the vulnerabilities to crash the TPM chip making it "unusable," execute arbitrary code within TPM's protected memory or read/access sensitive data stored in the (theoretically) isolated crypto-processor.

In other words, successful exploitation of the CVE-2023-1017 and CVE-2023-1018 flaws could compromise cryptographic keys, passwords and other critical data, making security features of modern, TPM-based operating systems like Windows 11 essentially useless or broken.

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upstart writes:

Arm says it decided a sole US listing in 2023 was "the best path forward":

[...] Arm's decision not to pursue a listing on the London Stock Exchange this year has raised concerns that the UK market is not doing enough to attract tech company stock offerings, with US exchanges seen to offer higher profiles and valuations.

SoftBank Group Corp's founder and chief executive Masayoshi Son said last year he would probably look to the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange for a potential Arm listing.

[...] "Arm is proud of its British heritage, and continues to work with the British Government," he said. "We will continue to invest and play a significant role in the British tech ecosystem."

A Government spokesperson said: "The UK is taking forward ambitious reforms to the rules governing its capital markets, building on our continued success as Europe's leading hub for investment, and the second largest globally."

They added the UK "continues to attract some of the most innovative and largest companies in the world" and acknowledged Arm's commitment to its UK presence with more jobs and investment.

[...] Russ Shaw CBE, founder of Tech London Advocates and Global Tech Advocates, said Arm's statement offered "glimpses of hope" for its commitment to its British roots, but Arm and SoftBank's decision to opt for a sole US listing is "a significant blow to the UK tech sector".

[...] He added Arm's decision "must be upheld as a case study for the UK Government of how 'not to do it'" - citing the company's sale to SoftBank in 2016 as a factor determining its US-only listing.

"Nations like the US and China that recognise the strategic value of chip companies would not have allowed such decisions to be made - then or now - and the UK must now endeavour to proactively protect its semiconductor industry," said Mr Shaw.

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upstart writes:

The Foss community is giving yet another try with an app store for all Linux OSes:

Some influential people in the open-source community are pushing for the adoption of a one-stop app store for Linux-based operating systems. The store would be built on Flatpak, a popular software deployment and package management utility, and it could provide customers with the same user-friendly approach other popular app stores in the consumer market are known for.

[...] The proposal's main goal is to "promote diversity and sustainability" in the Linux desktop community by "adding payments, donations and subscriptions" to the Flathub app store. Flathub is the standard app repository for Flatpak, a project described as a "vendor-neutral service" for Linux application development and deployment.

[...] The universal app store proponents say that "a healthy application ecosystem is essential for the success of the OSS desktop," so that end-users can "trust and control" their data and development platforms on the device they are using. Flathub has been jointly built by the GNOME foundation and KDE, and it isn't the only app store available in the Linux world.

Alternative solutions like Canonical's Snaps, however, are sitting under the control of a single corporation and aren't designed as a universal Linux app store from the get-go. Canonical has recently decided that neither Ubuntu, nor the other Ubuntu-based distros (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, etc.), will give their official support to Flatpak. Users can manually add the tool after installing the operating system, though.

Besides providing a universal app store for the entire Linux world, Flatpak supporters also want to "incentivize participation in the Linux application ecosystem," and remove financial barriers that prevent diverse participation. For this reason, the proponents are planning to add a new way to send donations and payments via Stripe within this year.

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NASA: DART Mission Proves Kinetic Impact Can Save Earth From Incoming Asteroids

upstart writes:

NASA's DART mission was a smashing success:

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test ended last year with the spacecraft colliding with an asteroid known as Dimorphos. NASA announced in the following weeks that DART had altered the asteroid's trajectory, and now we have four peer-reviewed papers that explore just how successful the mission was. The news is good NASA has confirmed that DART validates kinetic impact as a viable way to deflect dangerous asteroids.

[...] Scientists are working to reconstruct the impact to evaluate DART's autonomous targeting ability. The authors of this study concluded that a DART-like mission to redirect a dangerous asteroid could theoretically do so without an advanced reconnaissance flight. [...]

Another of the four studies confirmed via two different measurement techniques that Dimorphos' orbit shifted by 33 minutes. NASA had expected the impact to push the asteroid by at least seven minutes, but the recoil effect of ejecta blasted off the surface had a greater effect than predicted. [...]

A separate study looked at the momentum transfer from the impact. The researchers found that DART instantly altered Dimorphos' orbit, slowing it by 2.7 millimeters per second. [...] The final study discusses what we can learn from DART beyond the planetary defense angle. Dimorphos it's now an "active asteroid" surrounded by a cloud of dust. The authors say analysis of this comet-like tail could help us learn more about the natural processes at work on asteroids.

Luckily, there are no known asteroid threats for at least the next century, but our catalog of near-Earth objects is incomplete. We could discover an asteroid with a high chance of impact tomorrow. It's happened before, and it'll happen again. For decades, kinetic redirection was seen as a potential way to save Earth from those rare but inevitable events, but no one knew if it would work. Now we do humanity has the tools to prevent at least one kind of doomsday.

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upstart writes:

Dish Network Finally Acknowledges Huge Hack After Days Of Not Answering Questions:

Early this week reports began to emerge that Dish Network was suffering from a widespread outage that effectively prevented a large chunk of the company's employees from being able to work for more than four days. Initially, Dish tried to downplay the scope of the problem in press reports, only stating that they'd experienced an ambiguous "systems issue."

Five days in and it was finally revealed that the company had been hacked, subjected to a ransomware attack, and subscriber data had been compromised. But, of course, customers didn't find out from Dish, they only learned about it via leaked internal communications:

Dish has told employees that it's "investigating a cybersecurity incident" and that it's "aware that certain data was extracted" from its IT systems as a result of this incident, according to an internal email sent by CEO Erik Carlson and obtained by The Verge. This comes on the fifth day of an internal outage that's taken down some of the company's internal networks, customer support systems, and websites such as boostinfinite.com and dish.com.

Employees have been completely locked out of their systems, telling Bleeping Computer that they're seeing blank screen icons common during ransomware attacks. As of this writing, things are so bad at Dish that their primary website is a placeholder page, though at least they finally got around to confirming things in an ambiguous statement.

You might recall that Dish Network was part of a doomed Trump-era plan to justify the T-Mobile Sprint merger by encouraging Dish to build its own 5G network. That plan isn't going so well either, and similar to T-Mobile's comical inability to secure its network, you have to wonder how much merger logistics distracted the...

fliptop writes:

Europe's original plan to bring AI under control is no match for the technology's new, shiny chatbot application:

Artificial intelligence's newest sensation the gabby chatbot-on-steroids ChatGPT is sending European rulemakers back to the drawing board on how to regulate AI.

[...] The technology has already upended work done by the European Commission, European Parliament and EU Council on the bloc's draft artificial intelligence rulebook, the Artificial Intelligence Act. The regulation, proposed by the Commission in 2021, was designed to ban some AI applications like social scoring, manipulation and some instances of facial recognition. It would also designate some specific uses of AI as "high-risk," binding developers to stricter requirements of transparency, safety and human oversight.

[...] These AIs "are like engines. They are very powerful engines and algorithms that can do quite a number of things and which themselves are not yet allocated to a purpose," said Drago Tudorache, a Liberal Romanian lawmaker who, together with S&D Italian lawmaker Brando Benifei, is tasked with shepherding the AI Act through the European Parliament.

Already, the tech has prompted EU institutions to rewrite their draft plans. The EU Council, which represents national capitals, entrust the Commission with establishing cybersecurity, transparency and risk-management requirements for general-purpose AIs.

[...] Professionals in sectors like education, employment, banking and law enforcement have to be aware "of what it entails to use this kind of system for purposes that have a significant risk for the fundamental rights of individuals," Benifei said.

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upstart writes:

Air Force has already successfully tested and approved the sustainable aviation fuel:

As more companies focus on lowering their own carbon emissions, one startup is looking to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and create sustainable aviation fuel. It already has a small-scale working process and says that if it and other manufacturers scale up production, it could "mitigate" at least 10 percent of carbon emissions.

A startup specializing in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) signed a $65 million contract with the US Department of Defense to create jet fuel out of thin air. The contract will provide a startup called Air Company funds to advance research and development of a system that can extract CO2 from the air and convert it into fuel-grade alcohols and paraffin.

Air Company already has a process of converting CO2 to jet fuel and published a white paper on the procedure. The company claims to have eliminated a step in the nearly 100-year-old Fischer-Tropsch process. It involves creating, harvesting, and storing CO2 from industrial corn fermentation. It then uses water electrolysis to produce hydrogen gas (H2) and oxygen (O2).

The O2 is released into the atmosphere, and the H2 feeds into a reactor with the captured CO2 and a catalyst. The chemical reaction produces ethanol, methanol, water, and paraffin. Distillation separates these components for use in other products, including vodka, perfume, hand sanitizer, and SAF.

The company cannot yet produce at the scale needed to impact global CO2 levels. However, CEO Gregory Constantine says that if Air Company and others can build to scale and all fuel-dependant industries switch to SAF, it could mitigate over 10 percent of carbon emissions.

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hubie writes:

A physicist's task is to constantly create equations that keep up with our observations of physical phenomena:

Researching a cosmic mystery like dark matter has its downsides. On the one hand, it's exciting to be on the road to what might be a profound scientific discovery. On the other hand, it's hard to convince people it's worth studying something that's invisible, untouchable, and apparently made of something entirely unknown.

While the vast majority of physicists find the evidence for dark matter's existence convincing, some continue to examine alternatives, and the views in the press and the public are significantly more divided. The most common response I get when I talk about dark matter is: "isn't this just something physicists made up to make the math work out?"

The answer to that might surprise you: yes! In fact, everything in physics is made up to make the math work out.

[...] This level of abstraction is especially apparent in particle physics, because the existence or non-existence of a single particle on a subatomic scale is a rather fuzzy notion. The equations describing the motion of an electron through space don't actually include a particle at all, but rather an abstract mathematical object called a wavefunction that can spread out and interfere with itself.

Is it ever true, then, to say that an electron is 'real' when it's in motion? If we believe that electrons are real things, have we just made up the wavefunction to make the math work out? Absolutely that was, in fact, the whole point. We couldn't get the equations to work if the electron was a solid, isolated particle, so we made up something that wasn't, and then the numbers started making sense.

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upstart writes:

Russian Nuclear Company Tests 'Beaver' PCs With Homegrown Baikal CPUs:

A daughter company of Rosatom, a nuclear energy company owned by the Russian government, is testing PCs from Delta Computers called Beaver that are based on a processor designed by Russia's Baikal Microelectronics and a Linux distribution approved for use by state agencies. The company is trying to replace PCs designed by Western companies with something domestic, reports 3DNews. But they may have an obstacle in their way.

Delta Computers' Beaver is a small form-factor PC running Baikal Electronics's Baikal-M1 (BE-M1000) chip and the Astra Linux Special Edition operating system. The Beaver can have up to 64GB of DDR4 memory and up to 16TB of HDD and SSD storage. The machine has multiple USB Type-A 2.0/3.0 ports, PS/2 connectors, an RS-232 header, two Ethernet ports, an HDMI output, and two 3.5-mm audio connectors for headphones and microphones. The PC can be upgraded with low-profile PCIe 3.0 x8 add-in-boards, such as graphics cards. The system uses an LCD display, a corded keyboard, and a corded mouse.

"The concern has purchased the first batch of 'Beaver' domestic personal computers based on the Baikal processor and is getting ready to introduce them into the infrastructure of the Rosenergoatom energy generating company," a statement by Rosatom reads.

Delta's Beaver is nothing special if not for its Baikal-M1 SoC. The Baikal-M1 is a rather well-known processor that packs eight Arm Cortex-A57 cores with an 8MB L3 cache operating at 1.50 GHz and mated with an eight-cluster Arm Mali-T628 GPU with two display pipelines. The SoC, which uses technologies from 2014 2015, is made by TSMC using one of its 28nm-class process technologies. But such processors cannot be shipped to a Russian or a Belarussian entity from Taiwan due to restrictions imposed by the government.

While Rosatom might have procured samples of Beaver (Bober in Russian), Delta Computers can't get enough processors as the owner of Baikal Microelectronics went bankrupt in late 2022.

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upstart writes:

Droughts, flash floods the future for the Midwest ... probably:

A climate model developed by researchers at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Labs, projects prolonged droughts across much of the US which will be followed by brief but devastating floods. But these events won't happen overnight.

Instead, they're forecast to place with increasing frequency over the next 50 years. But even by the middle of the century just a short 27 years from now simulations suggest that large portions of the Midwest will be in a state of persistent drought, and the American West isn't looking much better off, despite recent rainstorms that have raised hopes of more lush times ahead.

[...] However, extreme drought isn't the only thing Argonne researchers' models forecast. They also predict brief but intense periods of precipitation a characteristic of many drought prone areas leading to extensive flooding.

According to researchers, the American Midwest could bear the brunt of these extreme weather events as the climate continues to shift. While precipitation might sound like a reprieve from drought conditions, the researchers note that as the soil dries out, it becomes hydrophobic, causing it to repel water. They note that similar phenomena have been observed with wildfires in California.

Ultimately, scientists hope that improved models will give policymakers something to think about when approaching climate issues.

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upstart writes:

Interstate feuds threaten to complicate the already-difficult task of getting regional power grids off fossil fuels:

In early February, lawmakers in Minnesota passed a law requiring the state's power utilities to supply customers with 100 percent clean electricity by 2040 one of the more ambitious clean energy standards in the United States. Democrats, who clinched control of the state legislature in last year's midterm elections, were euphoric. But not everyone in the region is enthused about Minnesota's clean energy future. The state may soon face a legal challenge from its next-door neighbor, North Dakota.

Not long after Minnesota's governor signed the law, the North Dakota Industrial Commission, the three-member body that oversees North Dakota's utilities, agreed unanimously to consider a lawsuit challenging the new legislation. The law, North Dakota regulators said, infringes on North Dakota's rights under the Dormant Commerce Clause in the United States Constitution by stipulating what types of energy it can contribute to Minnesota's energy market.

"This isn't about the environment. This is about state sovereignty," North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, the chair of the Industrial Commission, said. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a longtime proponent of clean energy legislation, was quick to respond. "I trust that this bill is solid," he told reporters. "I trust that it will stand up because it was written to do exactly that."

[...] It's no mystery why North Dakota was so quick to go on the offensive. Most of the state's power comes from coal, and it sells some 50 percent of the electricity it generates to nearby states. Its biggest customer is Minnesota. [...]

"Minnesota is under no legal duty to prop up North Dakota power plants," Michael Gerrard, founder of Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told Grist. The state would find itself in legal trouble if it discriminated between in-state and out-of-state power plants, he said. [...]

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mrpg writes:

The increase in estradiol may help prepare the lemurs for fatherhood:

Red-bellied lemurs are one of only a handful of mammal species in which the males are active participants in caring for their young. New University of Arizona-led research suggests that expectant lemur dads may experience hormonal changes during their mates' pregnancies that help prepare them for parenting.

Red-bellied lemurs are monogamous, tree-dwelling primates found throughout Madagascar's eastern rainforests. They live together in close family units, with offspring going off on their own at about 3 to 4 years old.

When a female is pregnant, researchers have found, her male partner sees a significant increase in estradiol an estrogen steroid hormone and major female sex hormone that, in several mammalian species, is associated with increased maternal sensitivity and responsiveness.

[...] "Males, when they're expecting, even when they're not carrying the infant, are responding to the developing fetus," said Tecot, who is also a member of the university's BIO5 Institute. "I was shocked by how much of a change there is in estradiol when their partner is pregnant."

Tecot and her colleagues suspect that the hormonal shift is part of nature's way of preparing male lemurs for fatherhood.

[...] Previous research has shown that expectant human, tamarin monkey and certain rodent fathers also undergo hormonal changes that appear to occur in response to their partners' pregnancies. During the last trimester and shortly after the birth of an infant, cortisol, oxytocin, prolactin and androgen levels have been found to change significantly in these species. However, estradiol has not been studied extensively in males, Tecot said.

"We put a lot of pressure on pregnant individuals as the influencers of infant outcomes instead of thinking about the environment, including everyone who interacts with them," she said. "If male lemurs are interacting with the pregnant female and their hormones are responding, that suggests this is a group effort. Something is happening to both parents as they're all preparing for the baby to arrive."

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2023.105324

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canopic jug writes:

The Linux mailing list had an admonition for Mutt users to fix their Mutt configuration. A recent change to that otherwise popular e-mail client has broken the way Message-ID headers are formed in Mutt. The developers have proven unwilling so far to fix it, therefore the onus falls upon Mutt's regular users to make local reconfigurations to avoid breaking the mailing lists and archives they might be participating in.

At some point in the recent past, mutt changed the way it generates Message-ID header values. Instead of the perfectly good old way of doing it, the developers switched to using base64-encoded random bytes. The base64 dictionary contains the / character, which causes unnecessary difficulties when linking to these messages on lore.kernel.org, since the / character needs to be escaped as %2F for everything to work properly.

Those receiving Mutt-generated messages will thank you for it, even if silently.

Previously:
(2018) (Neo)mutt F***ery with Multipart Messages

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upstart writes:

The curious comfort of victim-blaming Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow:

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which they wrote, "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the "large-scale hypertextual web search-engine" they were describing was their new project, which they called "Google." They were 100% correct prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called "Kiinthaila.com." We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we'd have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

[...] In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it's haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it's several of the top ads.

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upstart writes:

"Ecofascism," "liminal space," "digital nomad," and "petfluencer" are just some of the words born from our digital world:

Every so often, dictionaries spruce up their database of lexicography in order to get with the times. Dictionary.com is no different, and announced this week the new additions to the website's catalog of words.

This new suite of 313 new words demonstrates, intentionally or not, the way that technology and the digital world are changing our own language. The phrase "digital nomad," for example, which describes someone who works remotely from different corners of the globe, can't exist in a world without laptops.

[...] "Language is, as always, constantly changing, but the sheer range and volume of vocabulary captured in our latest update to Dictionary.com reflects a shared feeling that change today is happening faster and more than ever before," said John Kelly, senior director of editorial at Dictionary.com, in a press release sent to Gizmodo. "Our team of lexicographers is documenting and contextualizing that unstoppable swirl of the English languagenot only to help us better understand our changing times, but how the times we live in change, in turn, our language."

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upstart writes:

Half of all active satellites are now from SpaceX. Here's why that may be a problem:

SpaceX's rapidly growing fleet of Starlink internet satellites now make up half of all active satellites in Earth orbit.

On February 27, the aerospace company launched 21 new satellites to join its broadband internet Starlink fleet. That brought the total number of active Starlink satellites to 3,660, or about 50 percent of the nearly 7,300 active satellites in orbit, according to analysis by astronomer Jonathan McDowell using data from SpaceX and the U.S. Space Force.

"These big low-orbit internet constellations have come from nowhere in 2019, to dominating the space environment in 2023," says McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "It really is a massive shift and a massive industrialization of low orbit."

SpaceX has been launching Starlink satellites since 2019 with the goal of bringing broadband internet to remote parts of the globe. And for just as long, astronomers have been warning that the bright satellites could mess up their view of the cosmos by leaving streaks on telescope images as they glide past.

Even the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits more than 500 kilometers above the Earth's surface, is vulnerable to these satellite streaks, as well as those from other satellite constellations. From 2002 to 2021, the percentage of Hubble images affected by light from low-orbit satellites increased by about 50 percent, astronomer Sandor Kruk of the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and colleagues report March 2 in Nature Astronomy.

The number of images partially blocked by satellites is still small, the team found, rising from nearly 3 percent of images taken between 2002 and 2005 to just over 4 percent between 2018 and 2021 for one of Hubble's cameras. But there are already thousands more Starlink satellites now than there were in 2021.

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upstart writes:

China has a "stunning lead" over the US:

The Biden administration might be limiting China's ability to manufacture advanced chips, but according to an independent think tank, the Asian nation is still ahead of the US when it comes to research in 37 out of 44 crucial and emerging technologies, including AI, defense, and key quantum tech areas.

Insider reports that the Canberra-based Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) believes China has a "stunning lead" over the US when it comes to high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.

[...] The think tank notes that for some of these technologies, the ten leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country, which is usually the US. What could be especially worrying for America is that two areas where China really excels are Defense and space-related technologies. ASPI writes that China's advancements in nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles took the US by surprise in 2021.

How is China so far ahead? Some of it is down to imported talent. The report notes that one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States). However, most of China's progress comes from deliberate design and long-term policy planning by President Xi Jinping and his predecessors.

The near-term effects of China's lead could see it gaining a stranglehold on the global supply of certain critical technologies, while the long-term impact could result in the authoritarian state gaining more global influence and power.

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hubie writes:

OpenAI is today unrecognizable, with multi-billion-dollar deals and corporate partnerships:

OpenAI is at the center of a chatbot arms race, with the public release of ChatGPT and a multi-billion-dollar Microsoft partnership spurring Google and Amazon to rush to implement AI in products. OpenAI has also partnered with Bain to bring machine learning to Coca-Cola's operations, with plans to expand to other corporate partners.

There's no question that OpenAI's generative AI is now big business. It wasn't always planned to be this way.

[...] While the firm has always looked toward a future where AGI exists, it was founded on commitments including not seeking profits and even freely sharing code it develops, which today are nowhere to be seen.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization by Altman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, among other tech leaders. In its founding statement, the company declared its commitment to research "to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." The blog stated that "since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact," and that all researchers would be encouraged to share "papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world."

Now, eight years later, we are faced with a company that is neither transparent nor driven by positive human impact, but instead, as many critics including co-founder Musk have argued, is powered by speed and profit. And this company is unleashing technology that, while flawed, is still poised to increase some elements of workplace automation at the expense of human employees. Google, for example, has highlighted the efficiency gains from AI that autocompletes code, as it lays off thousands of workers.

[...] With all of this in mind, we should all carefully consider whether OpenAI deserves the trust it's asking for the public to give.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

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upstart writes:

Commuting to work is pass and employers are embracing the brave new world of remote work:

Remote work became a necessity during the pandemic, but it has since reshaped how American workers do their jobs. While working from home is a relatively new experience for the majority of people, most have taken to it like a duck to water, and are refusing to go back to their cubicles. As it turns out, they've got good reasons to want to continue working from home.

The "2023 State of Software Engineers Report" by job search portal Hired has revealed many interesting facts about software engineers in Silicon Valley and beyond. One telling result from the survey is the overwhelming preference for remote work, with as many as 39% of respondents saying they would prefer remote work over in-office work any day.

According to the report, salaries are almost identical for both remote and local work. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, where salaries are the highest, software engineers working remotely made $176,000 last year, while those working locally made $180,000. In some smaller markets, remote roles even commanded higher salaries than in-office work.

When asked what they would do if mandated to return to the office, 21% of respondents said they would quit, while 49% said that they will look for other remote work opportunities while continuing to work at their current company. Employers apparently already have an inkling of their employees' preferences, as many of them are offering 'flexible work schedules' as one of the top benefits alongside healthcare and paid time off.

[...] Looking forward to 2023, 57% of surveyed engineers said they believe AI, machine learning and data science will be the hottest sector, followed by fintech and healthtech. Almost 2 out 3 (64%) surveyed engineering candidates also expected Python to be the top programming language to master in 2023.

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upstart writes:

The Morning After: FDA reportedly denied Neuralink's request to begin human trials of its brain implant:

Neuralink's efforts to bring a brain-computer interface still have a way to go. According to a new report from Reuters, Elon Musk's startup was apparently denied authorization by the FDA in 2022 to conduct human trials using the same devices that, well, killed 1,500 animals. Those tests, according to internal reports, lead to needless suffering and death of test subjects.

Current and former Neuralink employees told Reuters: "The agency's major safety concerns involved the device's lithium battery; the potential for the implant's tiny wires to migrate to other areas of the brain; and questions over whether and how the device can be removed without damaging brain tissue."

The FDA is concerned that, because of the minuscule size of the electrical leads, they are at risk of breaking off during removal (or even during use). At Neuralink's open house last November, Musk claimed the company would secure FDA approval "within six months," basically by this spring. That's looking increasingly unlikely.

Previously:

• Elon Musk and Neuralink Announce... Nope Nope Nope Nope Nope NOPE Nope No.
• Neuralink Aims to Market a Brain-Computer Interface Product Within 4 Years

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