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Submission + - US Energy Department Unveils Interactive Map Showing New Clean Energy Investment (energy.gov)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Thursday America's Energy Department released an interactive map showing America's clean energy investments, "for tracking the industrial revitalization happening across the country, fostered by a clean energy transition..."

The map aims to show how both the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act "are leading to announcements of historic levels of private sector investments in the United States," which the head of America's Energy Department credited for "a manufacturing renaissance across the U.S." A senior White House energy advisor specifically described it as "a clean energy boom" and called the map "a great resource for understanding the widespread and important impact this boom is having on communities all across our nation."

The announcement notes 500 "planned investments in at least 450 new or expanded clean energy manufacturing facilities, totaling over $160 billion in announced private and public sector investments" in solar, battery, and offshore wind manufacturing projects — as well as in electric vehicle assembly, components, and chargers. Ford received over $12 billion for battery pack/cell projects and EV assembly, along with billions more for Ford's joint venture with BlueOval SK to build a battery plant. And six of the projects are Tesla — totalling over $2 billion for projects in battery materials, cells, packs, and EV assembly.

Submission + - Discord.io Temporarily Shuts Down After Breach Affecting 760,000 Members (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: The Discord.io custom invite service has temporarily shut down after suffering a data breach exposing the information of 760,000 members.

Discord.io is not an official Discord site but a third-party service allowing server owners to create custom invites to their channels. Most of the community was built around the service's Discord server, with over 14,000 members.

Submission + - UK Woman Fitted With AI-Powered Bionic Arm (bbc.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: "This is straight out of science fiction. The technology is absolutely incredible..." says a woman who received an AI-powered bionic arm. "I'm just absolutely in awe of the technology and excited about the future prospects this will give me."

The short video clip (produced by the BBC) also features the woman's doctor explaining that "the top section is customized to fit...with electrodes there recording the unique pattern of movement, that then talk to a little computer inside the forearm that then, through AI, build data and record those movements to tell the arm what to do."

A GoFundMe campaign had raised £296,613 (about $378,121 USD) to purchase the bionic arm — and last week the grateful recipient shared a long-awaited status update. "It's here. It fits. It works...! 6 months after I first signed up in the clinic I have my bionic arm. State of the art, tailored to my body, the price of a very nice sports car. 24h in and I'm already putting it to good use. The feeling of freedom is unbeatable. Being able to carry things in 2 hands! Open a bottle! Give my husband a 2 arm hug!

"I wouldn't have been able to do this without you, you believed in me since the very beginning. You stood by me in my darkest hour. THANK YOU."

Submission + - Building a Better Server? Oxide Computer Ships Its First Rack (thenewstack.io)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Oxide Computer Company spent four years working toward “The power of the cloud in your data center bringing hyperscaler agility to the mainstream enterprise.” And on June 30, Oxide finally shipped its very first server rack.

It’s the culmination of years of work — to fulfill a long-standing dream. In December of 2019, Oxide co-founder Jess Frazelle had written a blog post remembering conversations over the year with people who’d been running their own workloads on-premises... “Hyperscalers like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have what I like to call ‘infrastructure privilege’ since they long ago decided they could build their own hardware and software to fulfill their needs better than commodity vendors. We are working to bring that same infrastructure privilege to everyone else!”

Frazelle had seen a chance to make an impact with “better integration between the hardware and software stacks, better power distribution, and better density. It’s even better for the environment due to the energy consumption wins.”

Submission + - Mark Hamill Interviewed by CBS News, Remembers 1977 'Star Wars' Audition (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: CBS News interviewed 71-year-old Mark Hamill, who remembers that in his first audition for Star Wars, they didn't give him the whole script. So "I couldn't figure out, is this like a send-up of Flash Gordon or whatever? You couldn't tell. Because nobody talks like this!"

Hamill also does impressions of the other actors he worked with. "I was asking Harrison, because he had been in American Graffiti. I said, 'You know George. Is this like a joke, or — should we send it up, make fun of it?'" And then he mimics Harrison Ford as saying "Yeah, Whatever. Get it done." ("So he was no help.") Later Hamill also describes meeting Alec Guinness, who eventually had to remind Hamill to stop calling him "Sir Alec." ("I want to be known by my name, not my accolade...")

And after playing Mozart in the Broadway production of Amadeus, Hamill remembers the reaction when he'd suggested appearing in the movie adaptation. Director Milos Forman says, "Oh ho ho ho. No, no, no. The Luke Skywalker is not to be being the Mozart." (Hamill's reaction? "At least he's honest.")

Submission + - Relativity Space launches world's first 3D-printed rocket on historic test fligh (space.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: The Relativity Space rocket, called Terran 1, lifted off from Launch Complex 16 at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 8:25 p.m. EST (0025 GMT on March 23), kicking off a test flight called "Good Luck, Have Fun" (GLHF).

Terran 1 performed well initially. For example, it survived Max-Q â" the part of flight during which the structural loads are highest on a rocket â" and its first and second stages separated successfully. But something went wrong shortly thereafter, at around three minutes into the flight, when the rocket failed to reach orbit.

"No one's ever attempted to launch a 3D-printed rocket into orbit, and, while we didn't make it all the way today, we gathered enough data to show that flying 3D-printed rockets is viable," Relativity Space's Arwa Tizani Kelly said during the company's launch webcast on Wednesday night.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Podcast About Computer Science?

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: They say "always be learning" — but do podcasts actually help? I've been trying to find podcasts that discuss programming, and I've enjoyed Lex Fridman's interviews with language creators like Guido van Rossum, Chris Lattner, and Brendan Eich (plus his long interviews with Donald Knuth). Then I discovered that GitHub, Red Hat, Stack Overflow, and the Linux Foundation all have their own podcast.

There's a developer podcast called "Corecursive" that I like with the tagline "the stories behind the code," plus a whole slew of (sometimes language-specific) podcasts at Changelog (including an interview with Brian Kernighan). And it seems like there's an entirely different universe of content on YouTube — like the retired Microsoft engineer doing "Dave's Garage," Software Engineering Daily, and the various documentaries by Honeypot.io. (Computerphile has also scored various interviews with Brian Kernighan, and if you search YouTube enough you'll find stray interviews with Steve Wozniak.)

But I wanted to ask Slashdot's readers: Do you listen to podcasts about computer science? And if so, which ones? (Because I'm always stumbling across new programming podcasts, which makes me worry about what else I've been missing out on.) Maybe I should also ask if you ever watch coding livestreams on Twitch — although that gets into the more general question of just how much content we consume that's related to our profession.

Submission + - China is Exporting Its Tiny EV Obsession (restofworld.org)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: It's so tiny and boxy. And yet...

The Wuling electric vehicle is an object of fascination. Priced at around $5,500 and famously outselling Tesla in China, it’s a tiny, comically square car, produced in joint partnership with General Motors and SAIC. The micro EV has been fodder for articles and YouTubers — even while it’s remained unavailable outside China.

Until last summer, that is, when Wuling attempted to go international. First stop: Indonesia. With its Air model selling at a mere $16,000 — less than half the price of alternatives — the minimalist EV was depicted in advertising as a gateway to the future, a slick solution for busy Indonesian city-dwellers.

Six months later, the Wuling Air now dominates EV sales in the country, according to the Association of Indonesia Automotive Industries (Gaikindo). Since entering Indonesia last August, it’s sold some 8,000 vehicles. The number may be small compared to the manufacturers’ sales figures in their home turfs of the U.S. and China, but it’s equivalent to 78% of the EV market in the Southeast Asian country....

It’s not perfect; customers complain of battery failure and the anxiety of finding charge points. But the price tag counts for a lot.... A $48,000 Nissan Leaf or Hyundai Ioniq is way out of most Indonesians’ price brackets. But a Wuling — $16,000 for standard range, which lasts 250 kilometers on a full charge, and $20,000 for long-range, at 450 kilometers — is achievable.

Submission + - Meta Announces Paid Subscriptions Offering Extra Verification, Promotion, Protec (fb.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Meta announced a new $11.99-a-month subscription service on Sunday (or $14.99-a-month for Android and iOS). For your money you mainly get the privilege of authenticating your own account with a government ID, so that it can then display the official "verified" badge. (Accounts must have a prior posting history, with account holders verified to be at least 18 years old.)

Meta promises they won't change already-verified Facebook and Instagram accounts — at least, not "as we test and learn." But they immediately follow that sentence by warning that in the longer-term they're "evolving the meaning" of verification, aiming to making everyone want to subscribe. Meta calls this "expanding access."

Paying subscribers will also get:

— Protection from account impersonation (at a higher level that's apparently not made available to non-paying members), including "proactive account monitoring".

— "Help when you need it with access to a real person for common account issues."

— Exclusive "stickers" for Facebook and Instagram Stories and Facebook Reels, plus 100 free Facebook "stars" each month "so you can show your support for other creators."


But most importantly, Meta is also promising to grant "increased visibility and reach" to paying members, promising "prominence" in parts of the service (including search, recommendations, and in comments). Although a footnote warns this may vary — depending on what you're trying to post about — and all content "will be treated according to our existing guidelines for recommendations on Instagram or Facebook and our Content Guidelines."

George Takei once calculated roughly 80% of your friends never see the things you post on Facebook. But now Facebook is deliberately evolving into a two-tiered system where some wil always be relegated to less-likely-to-be-seen status, always outshined by wealthier friends with $144 a year to spend on upgrading their Facebook accounts.

The internet already has a two-tiered system for news, where the best news articles are only available to those with the funds to climb over multiple paywalls. But now even the lower tier of discourse — all that non-journalistic content floating around Facebook — will transform from a cesspool of burbling anger and misinformation into something worse. It's like Facebook's algorithm went from promoting just the most divisive content to promoting content from whoever most desires to foist their ideas onto other people. This may not end well.

Is it just me, or does this seem like a desperate grab for money?

— They're monetizing Meta's inability to stop account impersonators.

— Their announcement admits that "access to account support" remains a top request of their creators. Yet paying members are apparently more likely to get it than non-paying members. Maybe that can be their new marketing slogan. "Help when you need it — sold separately."

— This is happening. It becomes available for purchase this week on Instagram or Facebook in Australia and New Zealand.

Submission + - Carbonyl Lets You Use a Graphical Web Browser in Your Linux Terminal (makeuseof.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Someone made a Chromium fork... for your terminal. The terminal-based browser Carbonyl "adheres to, and is compatible with modern standards," writes MUO, "meaning that pages behave as they should, and you can even watch streaming video, within the Linux terminal!"

But best of all, "Pages connect and render in an instant—seemingly quicker than a desktop GUI browser, and every page we visited was rendered correctly."

There are a bunch of good reasons to browse the internet from the comfort of your terminal. It could be that eschewing the bloat of X.org and Wayland, a terminal is all you have. Maybe you like SSHing into remote machines and browsing the internet from there.

Perhaps you, like us, just really, really like terminals.

Whatever the reason, your choices of web browsers have, until recently, been limited, and your experience of the world wide web has been a janky, barely-functional one.... We tested Carbonyl in a range of Linux terminals, including the XFCE terminal. GNOME terminal, kitty, and the glorious Cool Retro Terminal. Carbonyl was smooth, fast, and flawless in all of them.

We even connected to our Raspberry Pi via SSH in CRT, and ran Carbonyl remotely, watching Taylor Swift music videos on YouTube. No problem.

Comment Evidence says the opposite (Score 2) 1

by destinyland (#63247419) Attached to: Evidence says offshore wind development is killing lots of whales
Everything on the page where the quote is from says the exact opposite: that wind power is not killing whales.

What is the cause of recent whale deaths off New York and New Jersey? Is it related to offshore wind development?

No, it is not related to offshore wind development. Since January 2016, NOAA Fisheries has been monitoring an Unusual Mortality Event for humpback whales with elevated strandings along the entire East Coast. To date, there are 178 humpback whale mortalities included in the UME. Partial or full necropsy examinations were conducted on approximately half of the whales. Of the whales examined, about 40 percent had evidence of human interaction, either ship strike or entanglement. Vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are the greatest human threats to large whales.

Submission + - Amazon Announces 'Hey Disney' Voice Assistant Using Star Wars, Pixar, Disney IP (aboutamazon.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: "Hey Disney" is the answer to a riddle that nobody asked: What do you get when you cross Amazon's Alexa voice assistant with the voices of Disney characters? In a few months (and for a few bucks) you'll be able to purchase what Amazon calls a "first-of-its-kind voice assistant" for your Echo devices. Yes, your favorite Disney, Pixar, and Star Wars characters will be available to tell you jokes or play trivia games — whether it's Mickey Mouse, Dory the fish from Finding Nemo, or Olaf the snowman from Frozen.

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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