"According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 73% of businesses reported that their workers rarely or never engaged in remote work in 2022 — closing in on pre-pandemic levels," writes a Seattle Times business columnist. "But this minority of the civilian workforce working remotely casts a large shadow over our economy, especially central business districts."

The column's headline argues that Seattle "is still facing the reckoning from remote work" — which may also be true in other big tech cities. Kastle Systems, which tracks back-to-the-office moves, estimated 49.8% occupancy as of late June. Kastle uses a 10-city average ranging from New York to Los Angeles but doesn't include Seattle. In the latest report, Houston led at nearly 61% occupancy. San Jose, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, where remote work flourishes, was the lowest at 38%. As of May, 48% of workers in Seattle's central core have returned to the office compared with 2019, according to the Downtown Seattle Association. The most significant boost has come from Amazon, which mandated employees must work in the office at least three days a week.

So, you can be an offices-half-full or an offices-half-empty kind of person.

Still, Capital Economics, an independent research firm, estimated this past month that remote work will shave 35% from the value of the U.S. office sector. In addition, it predicted many office buildings won't return to their previous peak values until 2040 or later... As loans come due for commercial real estate properties, many cities face a reckoning. Refinancing is difficult with high interest rates. In some cases, buildings are worth less than the land they occupy. Foreclosures and defaults are rising. This is already spilling over to hurt sectors that are dependent on offices, such as architects, cleaning services, construction and others. The Wall Street Journal estimates this accounts for a "multibillion-dollar ecosystem."

As a result, many American cities are struggling to convert office buildings unlikely to see workers again into other uses, especially apartments. Rigid zoning and building codes, the footprint of the structures, and resistance from nearby homeowners to increased density all make this difficult. Seattle is facing some of the same challenges. Mayor Bruce Harrell announced a "call for ideas" to alter some of the city's office space to residential or other uses...

Several trend lines are moving in the right direction — return of workers, number of residents, visitors and hotel occupancy are all going up, and crime is going down, with violent crime and property crime down the first five months of the year compared with 2022. Downtown has seen a 13.8% decrease in violent crime and a 35.1% drop in property crime over the same period... To be sure, we're in undiscovered territory. But giving up on downtown Seattle is not an option. It accounts for the majority of the city's business taxes and majority of its workers...

Whether remote or hybrid work remains for much of the local workforce or a gradual return to the office continues, the heart of the city must be healthy.

The booster just touched down on the droneship. "The Falcon 9 first-stage has now successfully launched and landed for a record-breaking 16th time," announced SpaceX's feed on YouTube. It was also SpaceX's 206th landing of an orbital-class rocket.

Long-time Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone quotes Spaceflight Now on how SpaceX tested "the limits of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday evening." The booster, tail number 1058, made its historic debut on May 20, 2020, carrying the first astronauts to ride atop a Falcon 9 aboard the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour. The first stage is distinctive in the SpaceX fleet as it is the only one to display a red NASA "worm" logo on its fuselage. It went on to fly 14 more times, including the launches of South Korea's Anasis 2 military communications satellite, a space station cargo delivery run, two Transporter ride-share missions and ten batches of Starlink satellites. With 15 flights already accomplished, it is the joint fleet leader with booster 1060.

Originally, the company hoped to reuse each Falcon 9 first stage 10 times.

"We got to 10 [flights] and the vehicles were still looking really good, so we started the effort to qualify for 15," Jon Edwards, SpaceX vice president of Falcon launch vehicles and Falcon engineering, told the trade publication Aviation Week & Space Technology in an interview last year.

SpaceX is now further pushing the envelope by going beyond the previously certified limit of 15 flights. It has been over 200 days since booster 1058 last flew. During that time it is likely SpaceX conducted extensive inspections and refurbishment work to clear the rocket for additional launches.

For its 16th ride to space, booster 1058 will carry 22 second-generation Starlink 'V2 mini' satellites into orbit, on a mission designated Starlink 6-5.

G/O Media is the owner of top sites like Gizmodo, Kotaku, Quartz, and the Onion. Last month they announced "modest tests" of AI-generated content on their sites — and it didn't go over well within the company, reports the Washington Post.

Soon the Deputy Editor of Gizmodo's science fiction section io9 was flagging 18 "concerns, corrections and comments" about an AI-generated story by "Gizmodo Bot" on the chronological order of Star Wars movies and TV shows. "I have never had to deal with this basic level of incompetence with any of the colleagues that I have ever worked with," James Whitbrook told the Post in an interview. "If these AI [chatbots] can't even do something as basic as put a Star Wars movie in order one after the other, I don't think you can trust it to [report] any kind of accurate information." The irony that the turmoil was happening at Gizmodo, a publication dedicated to covering technology, was undeniable... Merrill Brown, the editorial director of G/O Media, wrote that because G/O Media owns several sites that cover technology, it has a responsibility to "do all we can to develop AI initiatives relatively early in the evolution of the technology." "These features aren't replacing work currently being done by writers and editors," Brown said in announcing to staffers that the company would roll out a trial to test "our editorial and technological thinking about use of AI."

"There will be errors, and they'll be corrected as swiftly as possible," he promised... In a Slack message reviewed by The Post, Brown told disgruntled employees Thursday that the company is "eager to thoughtfully gather and act on feedback..." The note drew 16 thumbs down emoji, 11 wastebasket emoji, six clown emoji, two face palm emoji and two poop emoji, according to screenshots of the Slack conversation...

Earlier this week, Lea Goldman, the deputy editorial director at G/O Media, notified employees on Slack that the company had "commenced limited testing" of AI-generated stories on four of its sites, including A.V. Club, Deadspin, Gizmodo and The Takeout, according to messages The Post viewed... Employees quickly messaged back with concern and skepticism. "None of our job descriptions include editing or reviewing AI-produced content," one employee said. "If you wanted an article on the order of the Star Wars movies you ... could've just asked," said another. "AI is a solution looking for a problem," a worker said. "We have talented writers who know what we're doing. So effectively all you're doing is wasting everyone's time."
The Post spotted four AI-generated stories on the company's sites, including io9, Deadspin, and its food site The Takeout.

At least two of those four stories had to be corrected after publication.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Recalling a past Computer History Museum look at the evolution of programming languages, Doug Meil ponders the age-old question of Why Are There So Many Programming Languages? in a new Communications of the ACM blog post.

"It's worth noting and admiring the audacity of PL/I (1964)," Meil writes, "which was aiming to be that 'one good programming language.' The name says it all: Programming Language 1. There should be no need for 2, 3, or 4. [Meil expands on this thought in Lessons from PL/I: A Most Ambitious Programming Language.] Though PL/I's plans of becoming the Highlander of computer programming didn't play out like the designers intended, they were still pulling on a key thread in software: why so many languages? That question was already being asked as far back as the early 1960's."

One of PL/I's biggest fans was Digital Research Inc. (DRI) founder Gary Kildall, who crafted the PL/I-inspired PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers) in 1973 for Intel. But IBM priced PL/I higher than the languages it sought to replace, contributing to PL/I's failure to gain traction. (Along the lines of how IBM's deal with Microsoft gave rise to a price disparity that was the undoing of Kildall's CP/M OS, bundled with every PC in a 'non-royalty' deal. Windows was priced at $40 while CP/M was offered 'a la carte' at $240.) As a comp.lang.pl1 poster explained in 2006, "The truth of the matter is that Gresham's Law: 'Bad money drives out good' or Ruskin's principle: 'The hoi polloi always prefer an inferior, cheap product over a superior, more expensive one' are what govern here."

Nine days ago the U.S. government released a report on the advantages of studying "scientific and societal implications" of "solar radiation modification" (or SRM) to explore its possible "risks and benefits...as a component of climate policy."

The report's executive summary seems to concede the technique would "negate (explicitly offset) all current or future impacts of climate change" — but would also introduce "an additional change" to "the existing, complex climate system, with ramifications which are not now well understood." Or, as Politico puts it, "The White House cautiously endorsed the idea of studying how to block sunlight from hitting Earth's surface as a way to limit global warming in a congressionally mandated report that could help bring efforts once confined to science fiction into the realm of legitimate debate."

But again, the report endorsed the idea of studying it — to further understand the risks, and also help prepare for "possible deployment of SRM by other public or private actors." Politico emphasized how this report "added a degree of skepticism by noting that Congress has ordered the review, and the administration said it does not signal any new policy decisions related to a process that is sometimes referred to — or derided as — geoengineering." "Climate change is already having profound effects on the physical and natural world, and on human well-being, and these effects will only grow as greenhouse gas concentrations increase and warming continues," the report said. "Understanding these impacts is crucial to enable informed decisions around a possible role for SRM in addressing human hardships associated with climate change..."

The White House said that any potential research on solar radiation modification should be undertaken with "appropriate international cooperation."
It's not just the U.S. making official statements. Their report was released "the same week that European Union leaders opened the door to international discussions of solar radiation modification," according to Politico's report: Policymakers in the European Union have signaled a willingness to begin international discussions of whether and how humanity could limit heating from the sun. "Guided by the precautionary principle, the EU will support international efforts to assess comprehensively the risks and uncertainties of climate interventions, including solar radiation modification and promote discussions on a potential international framework for its governance, including research related aspects," the European Parliament and European Council said in a joint communication.
And it also "follows an open letter by more than 60 leading scientists calling for more research," reports Scientific American. They also note a new supercomputer helping climate scientists model the effects of injecting human-made, sun-blocking aerosols into the stratosphere: The machine, named Derecho, began operating this month at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and will allow scientists to run more detailed weather models for research on solar geoengineering, said Kristen Rasmussen, a climate scientist at Colorado State University who is studying how human-made aerosols, which can be used to deflect sunlight, could affect rainfall patterns... "To understand specific impacts on thunderstorms, we require the use of very high-resolution models that can be run for many, many years," Rasmussen said in an interview. "This faster supercomputer will enable more simulations at longer time frames and at higher resolution than we can currently support..."

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a report in 2021 urging scientists to study the impacts of geoengineering, which Rasmussen described as a last resort to address climate change.

"We need to be very cautious," she said. "I am not advocating in any way to move forward on any of these types of mitigation efforts. The best thing to do is to stop fossil fuel emissions as much as we can."

George Church was part of the team that pioneered CRISPR gene editing. In 2021 he co-founded a kind of real-world "Jurassic Park" — Colossal Biosciences, a biotech startup working to de-extinct the Woolly Mammoth.

For the 30th anniversary of the movie Jurassic Park, Rolling Stone brought in Colossal's co-founder and CEO, Ben Lamm, to share how the movie inspired and influenced their plans. Lamm writes that in 1993 he was 11 years old when he'd first seen the movie Jurassic Park. And even then, "Yes, as an 11-year-old I thought, what if dinosaurs could be real?"

Lamm says he's now excited at "not just de-extincting animals but at the possibility for endless discoveries that would arise from the pursuit of doing so..." When I first told my lawyer that I was interested in starting Colossal and bringing back the woolly mammoth, he asked me if I had read Michael Crichton's book or seen Spielberg's Jurassic Park movie. Since then, it's a question that has come up in nearly every meeting with investors, journalists, and lawyers. I have, which meant that I spent a number of years thinking about if we should de-extinct animals before I set out to figure out if we could. (Thanks, Dr. Ian Malcolm.) Before ever setting foot in a lab, I spent many years and countless hours thinking about the moral questions at the heart of the story.

And, with each successive year, I watched, heard, and learned about more and more animals dying due to climate change — a modern-day extinction. I came to the conclusion that the question is no longer should we practice de-extinction science but how long do we have to get it right... [T]he scary vision of the future isn't one where dinosaurs escape Isla Nubar and fly to the mainland, putting a healthy planet at risk, but instead a future where there aren't enough animals left to support food webs and ecosystems. And that includes humans, too... [I]t is our belief that it is possible to safeguard against or even stop that fatalist future vision using a similar approach in the original movie with some slight variations. It all goes back to genetics and a lot of what I learned about when I first met George...

In the same way that wireless headsets, CAT scans, LEDs, the computer mouse, and thermal blankets are all products of going to the moon, de-extinction efforts have created breakthroughs already for both conservation and human healthcare. In Colossal's first few years of work, our woolly mammoth research alone has not only accelerated genetic rescue in elephants, but also, it is working to cure a deadly elephant virus that kills 25% of all baby elephants worldwide each year. The de-extinction toolkit is also establishing a genetic backup of all living elephant species, and building the necessary tools for elephant cloning and gestation. And now, unlike Dr. Hammond, who bought an island and hid his experiment from the world, governments are coming to us asking if we can help them to restore their critically endangered animals and help safeguard their keystone species.
Lamm points out that you can get good DNA samples from specimens frozen in permafrost, skeletons preserved in caves, and from preserved specimens in museums.

But "You can't get DNA from amber. Trust us. It's porous and doesn't preserve well."

"More major cities in the United States are letting public transit riders hop on board for free," reports CNN: Kansas City; Raleigh; Richmond; Olympia; Tucson; Alexandria, Virginia; and other cities are testing dropping fares on their transit systems. Denver is dropping fares across its system this summer. Boston is piloting three zero-fare public bus routes, and New York City is expected to test free buses on five lines.

Eliminating fares gives a badly needed boost to ridership, removes cost burdens — particularly for lower-income riders — — and reduces boarding times at stops. Proponents also hope it will compel more people to get out of their cars and ride transit... At least 35 US agencies have eliminated fares across their network, according to the American Public Transit Association. Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey and US Rep. Ayanna Pressley have introduced a bill in Congress to establish a $25 billion grant program to support state and local efforts for fare-free systems.

The zero-fare push comes as ridership nationwide remains sluggish after people shifted to working from home during the pandemic. Ridership is at about 70% of pre-pandemic levels nationwide, and transit agency budget shortfalls threaten service cuts, layoffs and fare hikes.
CNN also reports the case against. Experts "say there are more effective policies to get people out of their cars and onto transit, such as congestion pricing and parking restrictions.

"And dropping fares does not make buses run on time or lead to faster and cleaner trains. These are the improvements that will get more people to take transit instead of drive, according to passenger surveys."

"The Reddit community is still reckoning with the consequences of the platform's API price hike..." reports Ars Technica.

"The latest group to announce its departure is BotDefense." BotDefense, which helps remove rogue submission and comment bots from Reddit and which is maintained by volunteer moderators, is said to help moderate 3,650 subreddits. BotDefense's creator told Ars Technica that the team is now quitting over Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward moderators and developers, with concerning implications for spam moderation on some large subreddits like r/space.

BotDefense started in 2019 as a volunteer project and has been run by volunteer mods, known as "dequeued" and "abrownn" on Reddit. Since then, it claims to have populated its ban list with 144,926 accounts, and it helps moderate subreddits with huge followings, like r/gaming (37.4 million members), /r/aww (34.2 million), r/music (32.4 million), r/Jokes (26.2 million), r/space (23.5 million), and /r/LifeProTips (22.2 million). Dequeued told Ars that other large subreddits BotDefense helps moderates include /r/food, /r/EarthPorn, /r/DIY, and /r/mildlyinteresting. On Wednesday, dequeued announced that BotDefense is ceasing operations. BotDefense has already stopped accepting bot account submissions and will disable future action on bots. BotDefense "will continue to review appeals and process unbans for a minimum of 90 days or until Reddit breaks the code running BotDefense," the announcement said...

Dequeued, who said they've been moderating for nearly nine years, said Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward devs and mods are the only reason BotDefense is closing. The moderator said there were plans for future tools, like a new machine learning system for detecting "many more" bots. Before the API battle turned ugly, dequeued had no plans to stop working on BotDefense...

[S]ubreddits that have relied on BotDefense are uncertain about managing their subreddits without the tool, and the tool's impending departure are new signs of a deteriorating Reddit community.
Ironically, Reddit's largest shareholder — Advance Publications — owns Ars Technica's parent company Conde Naste.

The article notes that Reddit "didn't respond to Ars' request for comment on BotDefense closing, how Reddit fights spam bots and karma farms, or about users quitting Reddit."

Long-time Slashdot reader beforewisdom shared this report from the Independent: South Koreans have begun to hoard excessive amounts of sea salt and other items as Japan prepares to dump treated radioactive water from the Fukushima power plant into the ocean... Tokyo has repeatedly assured that the water is safe and has been filtered to remove most isotopes though it does contain traces of tritium, an isotope of hydrogen hard to separate from water.

Although Japan has not set a date for the release, the announcement has made fishermen and shoppers across the region apprehensive. South Korea's fisheries authorities have vowed to ramp up efforts to monitor natural salt farms for any rise in radioactive substances and maintain a ban on seafood from the waters near Fukushima... The panic buying has led to a 27 per cent rise in the price of salt in South Korea in June from two months ago, though officials say the weather and lower production were also to blame. The Korean government in response has decided to release about 50 metric tons of salt a day from stocks, at a 20 per cent discount from market prices, until 11 July...

More than 85 per cent of the South Korean public oppose Japan's plan, according to a survey last month by local pollster Research View. Seven in 10 people reportedly said that they would consume less seafood if the waste water release goes ahead.

The world's largest spherical structure "squats on the Las Vegas skyline like an enormous spaceship, black and mysterious," reports CNN, "until night falls, when it will glow like the Earth from space."

The $2 billion arena — called "The Sphere" — was built just east of the Venetian hotel/casino. It's 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide (or 111 meters tall and 157 meters wide) — and it boasts the world's highest-resolution wraparound LED screen: Its exterior is fitted with 1.2 million hockey puck-sized LEDs that can be programmed to flash dynamic imagery on a massive scale — again, reportedly the world's largest... The acts onstage will be dwarfed by the towering 16K LED screen, which wraps over and around much of the audience.
It was fully illuminated for the first time on Tuesday to celebrate the Fourth of July, CNN points out (offering some video footage). When it opens in September, the plan is to light up its exterior with animations every day and night.

Slashdot reader Tony Isaac says the news "got me wondering how they got such great video on the curved surface of the sphere." It turns out there's a whole lot more than just the exterior that breaks new ground in audio and video technology. An older IBC article goes into detail about how they accomplished both the exterior and interior screens, and the high-resolution audio inside.
CNN reports: Rich Claffey, Sphere's chief operations officer, says that more than 160,000 speakers spread around the bowl will deliver the same pristine sound to every seat, whether someone is in the top row or down on the floor. The venue also is equipped with haptic seats that can vibrate to match whatever is happening onscreen — an earthquake, for example — and 4D machines that can create wind, temperature and even scent effects.

"The way I describe it to my friends and family is, it's the entertainment venue of the future," Claffey says. If it all sounds a little over the top, well — this is Vegas.
The arena's first act will be 25 concerts by U2 (with tickets starting at $140). "There's nothing like it. It's light years ahead of everything that's out there," says U2's The Edge during a tour of the venue in a recent Apple Music video...

And U2's Bono adds that "Most music venues are sports venues. They're built for sports — they're not built for music. They're not built for art. This building was built for immersive experiences in cinema and performance... "

For a "vibrant content ecosystem," Google's VP of Trust says web publishers need "choice and control over their content, and opportunities to derive value from participating in the web ecosystem." (Does this mean Google wants to buy the right to scrape your content?)

In a blog post, Google's VP of trust starts by saying that unfortunately, "existing web publisher controls" like your robots.txt file (a community-developed web standard) came from nearly 30 years ago, "before new AI and research use cases..." We believe it's time for the web and AI communities to explore additional machine-readable means for web publisher choice and control for emerging AI and research use cases. Today, we're kicking off a public discussion, inviting members of the web and AI communities to weigh in on approaches to complementary protocols. We'd like a broad range of voices from across web publishers, civil society, academia and more fields from around the world to join the discussion, and we will be convening those interested in participating over the coming months.
They're announcing an "AI web publisher controls" mailing list (which you can sign up for at the bottom of Google's blog post).

Am I missing something? It seems like this should be as easy as adding a syntax for opting in, like

AI-ok: *


Thanks to Slashdot reader terrorubic for sharing the article.

"The obsession with EV range is all wrong," argues a new article in the Washington Post's Climate section. "This year, one EV on the market — the sleek $140,000 Lucid Air Grand Touring — boasts a whopping 516-mile range. Toyota recently announced that it had achieved a breakthrough with solid-state battery technology, saying it will soon be able to produce electric cars that can go 746 miles on a single charge.

"But some analysts say that all that range — and all that battery — misses the point, and wastes resources." Only 5% of trips in the U.S. are longer than 30 miles. The vast majority of big batteries will never be used — particularly if the owner has a place to plug in their car every day... Those batteries are massive, in every sense of the word: the battery on the electric F-150 Lightning, which allows the car to go more than 300 miles on a single charge, weighs a whopping 1,800 pounds.

But is all that necessary? Americans drive a lot, but most of our trips are not very long. According to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, 95.1% of trips taken in personal vehicles are less than 31 miles; almost 60% of all trips are less than 6 miles. In total, the average U.S. driver only covers about 37 miles per day. And there is evidence that much smaller batteries could do the lion's share of the work. In a study published in 2016, researchers at MIT found that a car with a 73-mile range (like an early version of the Nissan Leaf), charged only at night, could satisfy 87% of all driving days in the United States. Providing Nissan Leafs to everyone whose driving fit that pattern, the researchers found, would cut 61% of U.S. gasoline consumption by personal vehicles...

So most of the time, drivers are lugging around giant batteries but only using 10 to 15% of their actual power. And those big batteries require mining a lot of metals, damaging the environment and workers' health... In a report by researchers at the University of California at Davis, the Climate and Community Project, and Providence College, experts found that simply switching to smaller EV batteries — batteries that could give a small car a range of 125 miles or so — could cut lithium demand by 42%...


The article notes that the upcoming Dodge Ram 1500 REV, with a range of about 500 miles, will need a battery "roughly equivalent in terms of resources to 16 batteries for the Prius Prime plug-in hybrid..."

"For those who need to take frequent long road trips and don't want to have to plug in, a plug-in hybrid can be a good option. But for most Americans, an EV with medium range will do just fine."

Google says it would take the world's leading supercomputer more than 47 years to match the calculation speed of its newest quantum computer, reports the Telegraph: Four years ago, Google claimed to be the first company to achieve "quantum supremacy" — a milestone point at which quantum computers surpass existing machines. This was challenged at the time by rivals, which argued that Google was exaggerating the difference between its machine and traditional supercomputers. The company's new paper — Phase Transition in Random Circuit Sampling — published on the open access science website ArXiv, demonstrates a more powerful device that aims to end the debate.

While [Google's] 2019 machine had 53 qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers, the next generation device has 70. Adding more qubits improves a quantum computer's power exponentially, meaning the new machine is 241 million times more powerful than the 2019 machine...

Steve Brierley, the chief executive of Cambridge-based quantum company Riverlane, said: "This is a major milestone. The squabbling about whether we had reached, or indeed could reach, quantum supremacy is now resolved."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.