System76's CEO Carl Richell announced that HP has chosen the Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS operating system to run on its 14-inch developer-focused notebook called "Dev One." Brian Fagioli from BetaNews speculates that a HP acquisition of System76 "could be a possibility in the future -- if this new relationship pans out at least." He continues: HP could be testing the waters with the upcoming Dev One. Keep in mind, System76 does not even build its own laptops, so we could see the company leave the notebook business and focus on desktops only -- let HP handle the Pop!_OS laptops. "We've got you covered. Experience exceptional multi-core performance from the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO processor and multitask with ease. Compile code, run a build, and keep all your apps running with more speed from the 16GB memory. Plus, load and save files in a flash, thanks to 1TB fast PCIe NVMe M.2 storage. We've even added a Linux Super key so shortcuts are a click away. Simply put, HP Dev One is built to help you code better," explains HP.

The company adds, "Pop!_OS is at your service. Create your ideal work experience with multiple tools to help you perform with peak efficiency. Use Stacking to organize and access multiple applications, browsers, and terminal windows. Move, resize, and arrange windows with ease or, let Pop!_OS keep you organized and efficient with Auto-tiling. And use Workspaces to reduce clutter by organizing windows across multiple desktops." Apparently, there will only be one configuration priced at $1,099. So far, no details about a release date have been announced other than "coming soon."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Some 5400 years ago, about the time humans were inventing writing, an alerce tree (Fitzroya cupressoides) may have started to grow in the coastal mountains of present-day Chile. Sheltered in a cool, damp ravine, it avoided fires and logging that claimed many others of its kind, and it grew into a grizzled giant more than 4 meters across. Much of the trunk died, part of the crown fell away, and the tree became festooned with mosses, lichens, and even other trees that took root in its crevices. Now, the tree -- known as the Alerce Milenario or Gran Abuelo (great-grandfather) tree -- might claim a new and extraordinary title: the oldest living individual on Earth.

Using a combination of computer models and traditional methods for calculating tree age, Jonathan Barichivich, a Chilean environmental scientist who works at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory in Paris, has estimated that the Alerce Milenario is probably more than 5000 years old. That would make it at least 1 century senior to the current record holder: Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in eastern California with 4853 years' worth of annual growth rings under its gnarled bark. (Some clonal trees that originate from a common root systems, such as that of the Utah-based aspen colony known as "Pando," are thought to be older, but dendrochronologists tend to focus on individual trunks with countable rings.) Many dendrochronologists are likely to be skeptical of Barichivich's claim, which has not yet been published, because it does not involve a full count of tree growth rings. But at least some experts are open to the possibility. "I fully trust the analysis that Jonathan has made," says Harald Bugmann, a dendrochronologist at ETH Zurich. "It sounds like a very smart approach."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Jokes, sarcasm and humor require understanding the subtleties of language and human behavior. When a comedian says something sarcastic or controversial, usually the audience can discern the tone and know it's more of an exaggeration, something that's learned from years of human interaction. But PaLM, or Pathways Language Model, learned it without being explicitly trained on humor and the logic of jokes. After being fed two jokes, it was able to interpret them and spit out an explanation. In a blog post, Google shows how PaLM understands a novel joke not found on the internet.

Understanding dad jokes isn't the end goal for Alphabet, parent company to Google. The capability to parse the nuances of natural language and queries means that Google can get answers to complex questions faster and more accurately across more languages and peoples. This, in turn, can break down barriers and move humans away from communicating with machines through predetermined means and instead more seamlessly interact. This can include answering questions in one language by finding information in another or writing code to a program as a person is speaking into the model with a specific task.

PaLM is Google's largest AI model to date and trained on 540 billion parameters. It can generate code from text, answer a math word problem and explain a joke. It does this through chain-of-thought prompting, which can describe multi-step problems as a series of intermediate steps. On stage, Pichai described it as a teacher giving a step-by-step example to help a student understand how to solve a problem. If what Pichai said on stage is accurate, Google has essentially leapfrogged over Star Trek and 400 years of fictional AI development, as evidenced by the character Data, who never truly understood the subtleties of humor. More so, it seems that Google has caught up with TARS from the movie Interstellar, which takes place in the year 2090, an AI that was so adept at humor that Matthew McConaughey's character told it to tune it down.

Chinese engineers will take the ideas of a research paper and turn it into the world's largest 3D-printed project. Popular Mechanics: Within two years, officials behind this project want to fully automate the unmanned construction of a 590-foot-tall dam on the Tibetan Plateau to build the Yangqu hydropower plant -- completely with robots. The paper, published last month in the Journal of Tsinghua University (Science and Technology), laid out the plans for the dam, as first reported in the South China Morning Post. Researchers from the State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing explain the backbone of automation for the planned Yellow River dam that will eventually offer nearly five billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. (It's worth noting that China's Three Gorges Dam -- a hydroelectric gravity dam spanning the Yangtze River -- is the world's largest power station in terms of energy output.) But it's hard to tell what's more ambitious: the fact that the researchers plan to turn a dam site into effectively a massive 3D-printing project, or that through every step of the process the project eliminates human workers as they go fully robotic.

In the dam-"printing" process, machinery will deliver construction materials to the worksite -- the exact location needed, eliminating human error, they say -- and then unmanned bulldozers, pavers, and rollers will form the dam layer by layer. Sensors on the rollers will keep the artificial intelligence (AI) system informed about the firmness and stability of each of the 3D-printed layers until it reaches 590 feet in height, about the same height as the Shasta Dam in California and shorter than the Hoover Dam's 726 feet. With the largest existing 3D-printed structures rising about 20 feet tall -- from houses in China to an office building in Dubai -- the exploration of 3D-printed projects continues to expand. Already we've seen a 1,640-foot-long retention wall in China, housing and office buildings across the globe, and now the U.S. Army has plans for barracks at Fort Bliss in Texas.

iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens sat down with Ars Technica to discuss the fight for the right to repair. Here's an excerpt from their report: Tech repairs got complicated in 1998 when Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [PDF]. Section 1201 of the copyright law essentially made it illegal to distribute tools for, or to break encryption on, manufactured products. Created with DVD piracy in mind, it made fixing things like computers and tractors significantly harder, if not illegal, without manufacturer permission. It also represented "a total sea change from what historic property rights have been," Wiens said. This makes Washington, DC, the primary battleground for the fight for the right to repair. "Because this law was passed at the federal level, the states can't preempt. Congress at the federal level reset copyright policy. This fix has to happen at the US federal level," Wiens told Ars Technica during the Road to Frontiers talk.

The good news is that every three years, the US Copyright Office holds hearings to discuss potential exemptions. Right to repair advocates are hoping Congress will schedule this year's hearing soon. Wiens also highlighted the passing of the Freedom to Repair Act [PDF] introduced earlier this year as critical for addressing Section 1201 and creating a permanent exemption for repairing tech products.

Apple's self-service repair program launched last month marked a huge step forward for the right to repair initiated by a company that has shown long-standing resistance. Wiens applauded the program, which provides repair manuals for the iPhone 12, 13, and newest SE and will eventually extend to computers. He emphasized how hard it is for iFixit to reverse-engineer such products to determine important repair details, like whether a specific screw is 1 or 1.1 mm. [...]

Wiens envisioned a world where gadgets not only last longer but where you may also build relationships with local businesses to keep your products functioning. He lamented the loss of businesses like local camera and TV repair shops extinguished by vendors no longer supplying parts and tools. [...] He also discussed the idea of giving gadgets second and even third lives: An aged smartphone could become a baby monitor or a smart thermostat. "I think we should be talking about lifespans of smartphones in terms of 20, 25 years," Wiens said. The livestream of the discussion can be viewed here.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Pakistani operator of popular torrent site MKVCage can be held personally liable for contributory copyright infringement in the US. The case in question was filed by the makers of the film Hellboy. US District Court Judge Seabright concludes that the use of US-based services invokes jurisdiction, even though a magistrate judge concluded otherwise.

Citing a report from The Information's Wayne Ma (paywalled), MacRumors reports Apple's long-rumored AR/VR headset is said to feature 14 cameras that enable lifelike avatars with accurate facial expressions. The company is also working with former design chief Jony Ive on the project. From the report: For starters, one of the headset's marquee features is said to be lifelike avatars with accurate facial expressions captured by 14 cameras: "Other challenges, such as incorporating 14 cameras on the headset, have caused headaches for hardware and algorithm engineers. The cameras include those that will track the user's face to ensure virtual avatars accurately represent their expressions and mouth movements, a marquee feature."

The report adds that Apple's former design chief Jony Ive has remained involved with the headset project as an external consultant to the company: "One person familiar with the matter said Ive's consulting work for Apple since he left includes the headset, adding that he is often brought in to help his former team push through their preferences in areas such as battery, camera placement and ergonomics over those of engineers. Two people said even after Ive left Apple, some employees on the headset project were still required to make the trek from Cupertino to San Francisco, where Ive has a home, to get his approval on changes. Ive has continued to tweak the headset's design. While earlier prototypes had the battery in the headband, he prefers a design that would tether the headset to a battery the user wears, similar to Magic Leap's headset design. It couldn't be learned if this approach will make it into the final design."

The initial version of Apple's headset is said to lack a focus on gaming: "Four people who have worked on the project also criticized its lack of focus on gaming, a category of software that appeals to early adopters, which was important to the success of the iPhone and has been a big priority for Meta's VR group. Those people said Rockwell's group almost never mentioned games in internal presentations about possible uses for the headset. Apple isn't developing game controllers for the device and is aiming to use hand tracking or in combination with a clothespin-like finger clip as inputs for the device, multiple people familiar with the project say." On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Apple executives previewed the upcoming headset to the company's board last week, "indicating that development of the device has reached an advanced stage."

The collapse of the tokens linked to the Terra ecosystem, stablecoin terraUSD (UST) and Luna (LUNA), has led to some major investors coming clean and detailing their losses. Two more backers of Terra are disclosing exactly how their balance sheets have been affected. CoinDesk reports: Delphi Digital, a research firm and boutique investor, said in a blog post that it always had concerns about the structure of UST and LUNA, but believed that the sizable reserves in the Luna Foundation Guard, a nonprofit that supports the Terra network, would prevent the unthinkable from happening. The firm wrote that in the first quarter of 2021, Delphi Ventures Master Fund purchased a small amount of LUNA, worth 0.5% of its net asset value (NAV) at the time. That position grew as LUNA's value increased and the fund increased its holdings, including a $10 million investment in the LFG's funding round in February. That investment is now worthless. While Delphi said that it didn't sell any LUNA, it's now sitting on "a large unrealized loss."

One of Terra's other prominent backers is Hashed, an early-stage venture fund based in Seoul, South Korea. The company played a part in Terra's 2021 venture round, where it helped raise $25 million according to Crunchbase data. Publicly, Hashed has said that it is "financially sound" and Hashed Ventures hasn't been affected by the crisis. Hashed didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, but on-chain data shows that the firm had staked over 27 million in LUNA on the Columbus 3 mainnet, 9.7 million in LUNA for the Columbus 4 mainnet and 13.2 million in LUNA on the current Columbus 5 mainnet. All in all, Hashed's losses amount to over $3.5 billion using pricing data from early April.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The saga surrounding Arm's joint venture in China just took another intriguing turn: a mysterious firm named Lotcap Group claims it has signed a letter of intent to buy a 51 percent stake in Arm China from existing investors in the country. In a Chinese-language press release posted Wednesday, Lotcap said it has formed a subsidiary, Lotcap Fund, to buy a majority stake in the joint venture. However, reporting by one newspaper suggested that the investment firm still needs the approval of one significant investor to gain 51 percent control of Arm China.

The development comes a couple of weeks after Arm China said that its former CEO, Allen Wu, was refusing once again to step down from his position, despite the company's board voting in late April to replace Wu with two co-chief executives. SoftBank Group, which owns 49 percent of the Chinese venture, has been trying to unentangle Arm China from Wu as the Japanese tech investment giant plans for an initial public offering of the British parent company. According to the South China Morning Post, Lotcap claimed in the press release that its proposed deal has "support" from Arm. We asked Arm about this, and despite a spokesperson saying in an email to The Register that the British chip designer is "not commenting at this time," the representative did say that an updated press release from Lotcap does not mention Arm or SoftBank supporting Lotcap's deal.

The Google search engine collects data on users who think they can be anonymous if they use a "private browsing" mode, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed on Thursday, filing an amended privacy lawsuit against the Alphabet unit. Reuters reports: Texas, Indiana, Washington State and the District of Columbia filed separate suits against Google in January in state courts over what they called deceptive location-tracking practices that invade users' privacy. Paxton's filing adds Google's Incognito mode to the lawsuit filed in January. Incognito mode or "private browsing" is a web browser function that Paxton said implies Google will not track search history or location activity.

The lawsuit said Google offers the option of "private browsing" that could include "viewing highly personal websites that might indicate, for example, their medical history, political persuasion, or sexual orientation. Or maybe they simply want to buy a surprise gift without the gift recipient being tipped off by a barrage of targeted ads." The suit said "in reality, Google deceptively collects an array of personal data even when a user has engaged Incognito mode." Paxton previously alleged Google misled consumers by continuing to track their location even when users sought to prevent it. Google has a "Location History" setting and informs users if they turn it off "the places you go are no longer stored," Texas said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the best things about electric cars, other than their power trains, immediate torque, and relaxing quiet, is the fact that as the electrical grid becomes cleaner, so too does every EV that uses that grid to charge. That process took a step forward this week with the news that by next year, the Electrify America (EA) charging network will be entirely offset by solar energy.

On Wednesday, EA signed a 15-year agreement with Terra-Gen to purchase electricity from a 75 MW solar farm being built by the latter in San Bernardino County, California. The Electrify America Solar Glow 1 project will break ground later this year, and when it's fully operational in 2023, it should have an annual energy production of 225,000 MWh. That's more than enough to account for the annual energy use of the EA charging network. In fact, EA says that as of April, its electricity is already 100 percent renewable thanks to purchases from various suppliers, but with the commissioning of Solar Glow 1, the charging company should have complete confidence that it's putting more solar energy into the grid than it uses to charge our cars.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the late 1990s, Yoshitaka Murayama made a name for himself among a subset of video game fans by creating and directing Suikoden, a series of Japanese roleplaying games (RPGs) that became beloved for their scope and depth. A catchy way to think of them is "Game of Thrones" meets Pokemon. But in 2002, as the third Suikoden game was finishing development, Murayama quit his job at the game publisher Konami Holdings and went off on his own. In the two decades that followed, he didn't work on many games of note, leaving fans to wonder what had become of him. Eventually Konami abandoned the Suikoden franchise, perhaps believing that RPGs weren't lucrative enough. In the early 2010s, players started asking Murayama: why not fund a new RPG on Kickstarter?

In the summer of 2020, Murayama finally answered fans' wishes. He raised 481.6 million yen (around $4.5 million at the time) from more than 46,000 backers, with a Kickstarter for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, a spiritual successor to the Suikoden series. It became the No. 1 video game on Kickstarter that year. Getting to that point was a long journey, Murayama told me in a recent interview. He said he only started seriously considering a Kickstarter after meeting up with some of his old collaborators, such as artist Junko Kawano, at a concert for Suikoden music. Murayama was also driven by the success of Nintendo's Octopath Traveler, which has sold more than 2.5 million copies since its release in 2018. The audience for turn-based RPGs had been "shrinking," Murayama said, but Octopath Traveler proved that âoethere is a promising marketâ for games like his.

Match Group, the parent company of dating apps Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid, is getting along better with Google, just by a little bit. From a report: On Friday, Match withdrew its request for a temporary restraining order against the company, which it accuses of wielding unfair monopoly power in its mobile app marketplace. Match filed an antitrust lawsuit against the search giant earlier this month over the company's restrictions on Android in-app payments, which drive app users toward remaining in its mobile ecosystem. The company filed the temporary restraining order request a day after suing Google.

Match cited a handful of "concessions" from Google in its decision to withdraw the restraining order request, including assurances that its apps would not be rejected or deleted from the Google Play Store for providing alternative payment options. The company will also place up to $40 million aside in an escrow account in lieu of paying fees to Google directly for Android app payments that happen outside of Google Play's payment system, arguing that those fees are "illegal under federal and state law." The escrow account will remain in place while the case awaits its day in court.

An ancient forest has been found at the bottom of a giant sinkhole in China, with trees up to 40 metres (130ft) tall. From a report: Scientists believe it could contain undiscovered plant and animal species. Cave explorers in the Guangxi region of southern China alerted scientists when they found the sinkhole, which had a primitive forest inside. Among 30 sinkholes in Leye County this is the largest, at 306 metres long, 150 metres wide and 192 metres deep. Zhang Yuanhai, a senior engineer at the Institute of Karst Geology of the China Geological Survey, told the state news agency Xinhua that the site had three caves in its walls and a well-preserved primitive forest at the bottom. Scientists trekked for hours to reach the base of the sinkhole to see what it contained. Chen Lixin, who led the expedition team, said that as well as the trees there was dense undergrowth on the floor that came up to his shoulders.