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Submission + - Bombshell report exposes how Meta relied on scam ad profits to fund AI (arstechnica.com)

schwit1 writes: Documents showed that internally, Meta was hesitant to abruptly remove accounts, even those considered some of the “scammiest scammers,” out of concern that a drop in revenue could diminish resources needed for artificial intelligence growth.

Instead of promptly removing bad actors, Meta allowed “high value accounts” to “accrue more than 500 strikes without Meta shutting them down,” Reuters reported. The more strikes a bad actor accrued, the more Meta could charge to run ads, as Meta’s documents showed the company “penalized” scammers by charging higher ad rates. Meanwhile, Meta acknowledged in documents that its systems helped scammers target users most likely to click on their ads.

“Users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests,” Reuters reported.

Internally, Meta estimates that users across its apps in total encounter 15 billion “high risk” scam ads a day. That’s on top of 22 billion organic scam attempts that Meta users are exposed to daily, a 2024 document showed. Last year, the company projected that about $16 billion, which represents about 10 percent of its revenue, would come from scam ads.

Submission + - Musk Wins $1 Trillion Pay Package, Creating Split Screen on Wealth in America (nytimes.com)

schwit1 writes: Tesla shareholders approved a plan to grant Elon Musk shares worth nearly $1 trillion if he meets ambitious goals, including vastly expanding the company’s stock market valuation.

Much like an earlier pay plan that Tesla shareholders approved in 2018, this 12-step package asks Mr. Musk, the company’s chief executive, to vastly expand Tesla’s stock market valuation — to $8.5 trillion from around $1.4 trillion — while hitting a variety of other goals. Those include selling one million robots with humanlike qualities and 10 million paid subscriptions to the company’s self-driving software.

Comment Re:Summon MacMann (Score 1) 183

Not only are nuclear reactors expensive, the build time is twice what the major nuclear construction companies would say it will take.

Hinckley Point C in the UK is still being constructed - it's a 3.2GW plant, it is costing twice the cost as planned (in 2015 prices) and is going to be 4 years late. In the time it's taken we've installed 28GW of wind and solar capacity.

Comment Re:Tesla will expand faster than Waymo tho (Score 1) 40

I don't trust that Tesla will expand it's robotaxi service to 8 to 10 major US cities in less than two months.

Musk has always, constantly and consistently, lied about how long things take, and often they haven't happened at all. He is the master of hype and short on substance.

Will the service go driverless in Austin by the end of the year? I doubt it. Tesla's robotaxis are already crashing in Austin. (https://www.techspot.com/news/110085-tesla-robotaxis-already-crashing-austin-data-points-gaps.html)

Submission + - New Drug Kills Cancer 20,000x More Effectively With No Detectable Side Effects (scitechdaily.com) 2

fahrbot-bot writes: SciTechDaily is reporting that researchers at Northwestern University have redesigned the molecular structure of a well-known chemotherapy drug, greatly increasing its solubility, effectiveness, and safety.

For this study, the scientists created the drug entirely from scratch as a spherical nucleic acid (SNA), a nanoscale structure that incorporates the drug into DNA strands surrounding tiny spheres. This innovative design transforms a compound that normally dissolves poorly and works weakly into a highly potent, precisely targeted treatment that spares healthy cells from damage.

When tested in a small animal model of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive and hard-to-treat blood cancer, the SNA-based version showed remarkable results. It entered leukemia cells 12.5 times more efficiently, destroyed them up to 20,000 times more effectively, and slowed cancer progression by a factor of 59, all without causing noticeable side effects.

“In animal models, we demonstrated that we can stop tumors in their tracks,” said Northwestern’s Chad A. Mirkin, who led the study. “If this translates to human patients, it’s a really exciting advance. It would mean more effective chemotherapy, better response rates and fewer side effects. That’s always the goal with any sort of cancer treatment.”

Comment Re:specification & testing (Score 1) 52

That's amazing, frankly.

I wrote a simple bash script the other day to handle a video encoding queue, with this line:

if [[ $(date +%s -r "$file") -lt $(date +%s --date="1 min ago") ]]

It's running on Debian 12 but to imagine that if it were running on Ubuntu it would have failed?

Wild that this wasn't caught as soon as the dud utility shipped in a distro. I would have expected somebody's scripts to have failed, they ran it under bash -x and thought, "Oh, boy," then off to file a bug.

I like the idea of using Rust and the idea of Software Engineering. But together.

Comment Book Scanner Recommendations? (Score 4, Interesting) 39

We heard a while back about Google making a nondestructive book scanner that used puffs of air to turn pages and multiple cameras with stitching algorithms.

Is there a home version that people can recommend, product or build plans?

I have at least a hundred out-of-print books, some on taboo subjects, that I'd love to be able to scan and lend out privately.

Frankly this would be a good item to lend around; I'd only need one for a few days a year.

Comment Re:Replacing cast-iron bicycle with a titanium one (Score 1) 53

To be fair there's a common way to compile Lua to JVM bytecode so it's likely just a Java front-end, not using the basic interpreter.

Back in the day there was a craze to port Lua, Ruby, Perl, Groovy(!), to run as Java front-ends. Not many got put into production outside of Lua.

However the real point here is that it's now "tell me why I shouldn't use Rust" time.

Moving ABI might be a reasonable objection for a small team but Cloudflare has over a hundred engineers on this so it's not a problem.

They get speed and memory safety in exchange for learning "The Rust Way". Seems like a good engineering tradeoff.

IMO Rust is still for the top 20% of engineers so Java's "solid middle" is still quite safe.

Comment Re:Solid electrolyte, but not metal anode ... (Score 1) 74

I thought that until I learned that they need weekly maintenance tending.

Somebody would need to build an automated battery watering system for homeowners who go away for a long vacation and forget to water their houseplants.

At some point it's too Rube Goldberg to be usable. Now, a few square miles of grid-scale ... somebody could make a business case where land is cheap and sun and water are plentiful.

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