"Google is testing the ability to automatically archive and delete inactive tabs in Chrome on Android," writes Windows Report: The experimental feature, called Tab Declutter, aims to simplify tab management by automating the process... After a set period of inactivity, Chrome will automatically archive inactive tabs. You will no longer see the archived tabs but you will be able to retrieve them if needed.

As for deleting the tabs, you can set Chrome to remove them after a longer period of inactivity. This feature will free up memory and improve the browser's performance. Obviously, you will have control over the archival threshold and the period of time after which the browser takes action... obviously, you will have control over the archival threshold and the period of time after which the browser takes action

Lyle Smith reports via StorageReview.com: Proxmox has introduced a new import wizard for Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), aiming to simplify the migration process for importing VMware ESXi VMs. This new feature comes at an important time in the industry, as it aims to ease the transition for these organizations looking to move away from VMware's vSphere due to high renewal costs.

The new import wizard is integrated into Proxmox VE's existing storage plugin system, allowing for direct integration into the platform's API and web-based user interface. It offers users the ability to import VMware ESXi VMs in their entirety, translating most of the original VM's configuration settings to Proxmox VE's configuration model (all while minimizing downtime). Currently, the import wizard is in a technical preview state, having been added during the Proxmox VE 8.2 development cycle. Although it is still under active development, early reports suggest the wizard is stable and holds considerable promise for future enhancements, including the planned addition of support for other import sources like OVF/OVA files. [...]

This tool represents Proxmox's commitment to providing accessible, open-source virtualization solutions. By leveraging the official ESXi API and implementing a user space filesystem with optimized read-ahead caching in Rust (a safe, fast, and modern programming language ideal for system-level tasks), Proxmox aims to ensure that this new feature can be integrated smoothly into its broader ecosystem.

Apple has sued its former employee Andrew Aude for leaking information about more than a half-dozen Apple products and policies, including its then-unannounced Journal app and Vision Pro headset, product development policies, strategies for regulatory compliance, employee headcounts, and more. MacRumors reports: Aude joined Apple as an iOS software engineer in 2016, shortly after graduating college. He worked on optimizing battery performance, making him "privy to information regarding dozens of Apple's most sensitive projects," according to the complaint. In April 2023, for example, Apple alleges that Aude leaked a list of finalized features for the iPhone's Journal app to a journalist at The Wall Street Journal on a phone call. That same month, The Wall Street Journal's Aaron Tilley published a report titled "Apple Plans iPhone Journaling App in Expansion of Health Initiatives."

Using the encrypted messaging app Signal, Aude is said to have sent "over 1,400" messages to the same journalist, who Aude referred to as "Homeboy." He is also accused of sending "over 10,000 text messages" to another journalist at the website The Information, and he allegedly traveled "across the continent" to meet with her. Other leaks relate to the Vision Pro and other hardware: "As another example, an October 2020 screenshot on Mr. Aude's Apple-issued work iPhone shows that he disclosed Apple's development of products within the spatial computing space to a non-Apple employee. Mr. Aude made this disclosure even though Apple's development efforts were confidential and not known to the public. Over the following months, Mr. Aude disclosed additional Apple confidential information -- including information concerning unannounced products, and hardware information."

Apple believes that Aude's actions were "extensive and purposeful," with Aude allegedly admitting that he leaked information so he could "kill" products and features with which he took issue. The company alleges that his wrongful disclosures resulted in at least five news articles discussing the company's confidential and proprietary information. Apple says these public revelations impeded its ability to "surprise and delight" with its latest products. Apple said it learned of Aude's wrongful disclosures in late 2023, and the company fired him for his alleged misconduct in December of that year. [...] Apple is seeking both compensatory and punitive damages in an amount to be determined at trial, and it is also seeking other legal remedies. The full complaint can be read here (PDF).

Amazon plans to spend almost $150 billion in the coming 15 years on data centers, giving the cloud-computing giant the firepower to handle an expected explosion in demand for artificial intelligence applications and other digital services. From a report: The spending spree is a show of force as the company looks to maintain its grip on the cloud services market, where it holds about twice the share of No. 2 player Microsoft. Sales growth at Amazon Web Services slowed to a record low last year as business customers cut costs and delayed modernization projects. Now spending is starting to pick up again, and Amazon is keen to secure land and electricity for its power-hungry facilities.

"We're expanding capacity quite significantly," said Kevin Miller, an AWS vice president who oversees the company's data centers. "I think that just gives us the ability to get closer to customers." Over the past two years, according to a Bloomberg tally, Amazon has committed to spending $148 billion to build and operate data centers around the world. The company plans to expand existing server farm hubs in northern Virginia and Oregon as well as push into new precincts, including Mississippi, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge, written by Nilay Patel: Today, I'm talking to Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky Social, which is a decentralized competitor to Twitter, er, X. Bluesky actually started inside of what was then known as Twitter — it was a project from then-CEO Jack Dorsey, who spent his days wandering the earth and saying things like Twitter should be a protocol and not a company. Bluesky was supposed to be that protocol, but Jack spun it out of Twitter in 2021, just before Elon Musk bought the company and renamed it X. Bluesky is now an independent company with a few dozen employees, and it finds itself in the middle of one of the most chaotic moments in the history of social media. There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization -- the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish -- is the future. It's a powerful concept that's been kicking around for a long time, but now it feels closer to reality than ever before. You've heard us talk about it a lot on Decoder: the core idea is that no single company -- or individual billionaire -- can amass too much power and control over our social networks and the conversations that happen on them.

Bluesky's approach to this is something called the AT Protocol, which powers Bluesky's own platform but which is also a technology that anyone can use right now to host their own servers and, eventually, interoperate with a bunch of other networks. You'll hear Jay explain how building Bluesky the product alongside AT Protocol the protocol has created a cooperate-compete dynamic that runs throughout the entire company and that also informs how it's building products and features -- not only for its own service but also for developers to build on top of. Jay and I also talked about the growth of the Bluesky app, which now has more than 5 million users, and how so many of the company's early decisions around product design and moderation have shaped the type of organic culture that's taken hold there. Content moderation is, of course, one of the biggest challenges any platform faces, and Bluesky, in particular, has had its fair share of controversies. But the idea behind AT Protocol and Bluesky is devolving control, so Bluesky users can pick their own moderation systems and recommendation algorithms -- a grand experiment that I wanted to know much more about.

Finally, Jay and I had the opportunity to get technical and go deeper on standards and protocols, which are the beating heart of the decentralization movement. Bluesky's AT Protocol is far from the only protocol in the mix -- there's also ActivityPub, which is what powers Mastodon and, soon, Meta's Threads. There's been some real animosity between these camps, and I asked Jay about the differences between the two, the benefits of Bluesky's approach, and how she sees the two coexisting in the future.

The European Union has launched investigations into Apple, Meta and Google under its sweeping new digital-competition law, adding to the regulatory scrutiny large U.S. tech companies are facing worldwide. From a report: The suite of probes [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; official press release here] announced Monday are the first under the EU's Digital Markets Act law, which took effect earlier this month. They come less than a week after the Justice Department sued Apple over allegations it makes it difficult for competitors to integrate with the iPhone, ultimately raising prices for customers. Apple and Google will now face EU scrutiny of how they are complying with rules that say they must allow app developers to inform customers about alternative offers outside those companies' main app stores. The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said it is concerned about constraints the tech companies place on developers' ability to freely communicate with users and promote their offers.

The bloc will also examine changes that Google made to how its search results appear in Europe. The new digital competition law says companies cannot give their own services preference over similar services that are offered by rivals. Another probe will look at how Apple complies with rules that say users should be able to easily remove software applications and change default settings on their iPhones, as well as how the company shows choice screens that offer alternative search engine and browser options.

An Internet service provider that admitted lying to the FCC about where it offers broadband will pay a $10,000 fine and implement a compliance plan to prevent future violations. ArsTechnica: Jefferson County Cable (JCC), a small ISP in Toronto, Ohio, admitted that it falsely claimed to offer fiber service in an area that it hadn't expanded to yet. A company executive also admitted that the firm submitted false coverage data to prevent other ISPs from obtaining government grants to serve the area. Ars helped expose the incident in a February 2023 article.

The FCC announced the outcome of its investigation on March 15, saying that Jefferson County Cable violated the Broadband Data Collection program requirements and the Broadband DATA Act, a US law, "in connection with reporting inaccurate information or data with respect to the Company's ability to provide broadband Internet access service." The FCC said: "To settle this matter, Jefferson County Cable agrees to pay a $10,000 civil penalty to the United States Treasury. Jefferson County Cable also agrees to implement enhanced compliance measures. This action will help further the Commission's efforts to bridge the digital divide by having accurate data of locations where broadband service is available."

couchslug shares a report from ITPro: A European cloud trade body has called for an investigation into Broadcom amid concerns over changes it has made to VMware licensing structures. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) consortium called on regulatory and legislative bodies across Europe to investigate the changes Broadcom has made to the VMware operating model, which it says will "decimate" the region's cloud infrastructure. "CISPE calls upon regulators, legislators and courts across Europe to swiftly scrutinize the actions of Broadcom in unilaterally canceling license terms for essential virtualization software," the trade body said in a statement. Since acquiring VMware in November 2023, Broadcom has embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of software licensing at the firm, which has drawn widespread criticism from customers. Broadcom stated it would continue to support customers under a perpetual licensing agreement for the period defined in the contract, but following this customers would need to exchange any remaining licenses for subscription-based products. This has left both cloud service vendors and customers in limbo, according to CISPE, without any solid information on how, when, or if they will be able to license VMware products essential for their operations from April 2024. Moreover, even if they are able to relicense the VMware software, a number of customers reported dramatic price hikes of as much as 12 times.

CISPE's characterisation of the move was far less charitable, arguing Broadcom is using VMware's market dominance, controlling almost 45% of the virtualization market, to charge exorbitant rents from cloud providers. Several CISPE members admitted that without the ability to license VMware products they will be unable to operate and will go bankrupt, with some stating that over 75% of their revenue depends on VMware virtualization tech. Members added that they often received termination notices late, if at all, with short notice periods that spanned just a few weeks. In addition, CISPE also complained about the decision to remove hundreds of products without any notice, and re-bundle the outstanding products under new prohibitive contract terms, despite there being no changes to the products themselves. Francisco Mingorance, secretary general of CISPE, said the changes will hurt both European customers and cloud service providers by increasing costs and reducing choice. At a time when our members are moving to support the requirements for switching and portability between cloud services outlined in the Data Act, Broadcom is holding the sector to ransom by leveraging VMware's dominance of the virtualization sector to enforce unfair license terms and extract unfair rents from European cloud customers," Mingorance said.

CISPE noted that for some cloud sector applications that require certifications by software or service providers, VMware products are the only viable option. As such, the association called for Broadcom to be recognized as a designated gatekeeper under the terms of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that came into force on March 7, 2024. Mingorance argued Broadcom's moves will only further restrict an already limited set of options for cloud providers in Europe, warning that Broadcom has a dangerous degree of control over the region's digital ecosystems. "As well as inflicting financial damage on the European digital economy, these actions will decimate Europe's independent cloud infrastructure sector and further reduce the diversity of choice for customers," he explained. "Dominant software providers, in any sector from productivity software to virtualization, must not be allowed to wield life or death power over Europe's digital ecosystems."

The Justice Department sued Apple on Thursday, alleging the tech giant blocked software developers and mobile gaming companies from offering better options on the iPhone, resulting in higher prices for consumers. WSJ: The government's antitrust complaint, filed in a New Jersey federal court, alleges Apple used its control of the iPhone to prevent competitors from offering innovative services such as digital wallets and limited the functionality of hardware products that compete with Apple's own devices. The suit also claims that Apple makes it difficult for users to switch to devices that don't use Apple's operating system, such as Android smartphones.

"Consumers should not have to pay higher prices because companies violate the antitrust laws," Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. Apple said it plans to vigorously defend against the lawsuit. "This lawsuit threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets," an Apple spokesman said in a statement. "If successful, it would hinder our ability to create the kind of technology people expect from Apple -- where hardware, software, and services intersect." The case against Apple is the last shoe to drop on the big four tech giants by U.S. antitrust officials.

Neuralink, the brain-chip startup founded by Elon Musk, showed its first patient using his mind to play online chess. Reuters reports: Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, played chess on his laptop and moved the cursor using the Neuralink device. The implant seeks to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts. Arbaugh had received an implant from the company in January and could control a computer mouse using his thoughts, Musk said last month.

"The surgery was super easy," Arbaugh said in the video streamed on Musk's social media platform X, referring to the implant procedure. "I literally was released from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairments. I had basically given up playing that game," Arbaugh said, referring to the game Civilization VI, "you all (Neuralink) gave me the ability to do that again and played for 8 hours straight."

Elaborating on his experience with the new technology, Arbaugh said that it is "not perfect" and they "have run into some issues." "I don't want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there's still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google closed its Fitbit acquisition in 2021. Since then, the tech behemoth has pushed numerous changes to the wearable brand, including upcoming updates announced this week. While Google reshapes its fitness tracker business, though, some long-time users are regretting their Fitbit purchases and questioning if Google's practices will force them to purchase their next fitness tracker elsewhere.

As is becoming common practice with consumer tech announcements of late, Google's latest announcements about Fitbit seemed to be trying to convince users of the wonders of generative AI and how that will change their gadgets for the better. In a blog post yesterday, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, Google's chief health officer, announced that Fitbit Premium subscribers would be able to test experimental AI features later this year (Google hasn't specified when). "You will be able to ask questions in a natural way and create charts just for you to help you understand your own data better. For example, you could dig deeper into how many active zone minutes... you get and the correlation with how restorative your sleep is," she wrote. DeSalvo's post included an example of a user asking a chatbot if there was a connection between their sleep and activity and said that the experimental AI features will only be available to "a limited number of Android users who are enrolled in the Fitbit Labs program in the Fitbit mobile app."

Fitbit is also working with the Google Research team and "health and wellness experts, doctors, and certified coaches" to develop a large language model (LLM) for upcoming Fitbit mobile app features that pull data from Fitbit and Pixel devices, DeSalvo said. In a blog post yesterday, Yossi Matias, VP of engineering and research at Google, said Google wants to use the LLM to add personalized coaching features, such as the ability to look for sleep irregularities and suggest actions "on how you might change the intensity of your workout." Google's Fitbit is building the LLM on Gemini models that are tweaked on de-identified data from unspecified "research case studies," Matias said, adding: "For example, we're testing performance using sleep medicine certification exam-like practice tests." Other recent changes to Fitbit include a name tweak from Fitbit by Google, to Google Fitbit, as spotted by 9to5Google this week. Charge 5 users are especially concerned after users noticed their devices suddenly stopped holding a charge after a December firmware update was pushed. The problem has persisted with Google offering no solution other than offer discounts or, if the device was within its warranty period, a replacement.

"This is called planned obsolescence. I'll be upgrading to a watch style tracker from a different company. I wish Fitbit hadn't sold out to Google," a forum user going by Sean77024 wrote on Fitbit's support forum yesterday. "Others, like 2MeFamilyFlyer, have also accused Fitbit of planning Charge 5 obsolescence," notes Ars. "2MeFamilyFlyer said they're seeking a Fitbit alternative."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The generative AI company helmed by Sam Altman is on track to put out GPT-5 sometime mid-year, likely during summer, according to two people familiar with the company. Some enterprise customers have recently received demos of the latest model and its related enhancements to the ChatGPT tool, another person familiar with the process said. These people, whose identities Business Insider has confirmed, asked to remain anonymous so they could speak freely. "It's really good, like materially better," said one CEO who recently saw a version of GPT-5.

OpenAI demonstrated the new model with use cases and data unique to his company, the CEO said. He said the company also alluded to other as-yet-unreleased capabilities of the model, including the ability to call AI agents being developed by OpenAI to perform tasks autonomously. The company does not yet have a set release date for the new model, meaning current internal expectations for its release could change. OpenAI is still training GPT-5, one of the people familiar said. After training is complete, it will be safety tested internally and further "red teamed," a process where employees and typically a selection of outsiders challenge the tool in various ways to find issues before it's made available to the public.

Haje Jan Kamps writes via TechCrunch: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) -- often referred to as "strong AI," "full AI," "human-level AI" or "general intelligent action" -- represents a significant future leap in the field of artificial intelligence. Unlike narrow AI, which is tailored for specific tasks (such as detecting product flaws, summarize the news, or build you a website), AGI will be able to perform a broad spectrum of cognitive tasks at or above human levels. Addressing the press this week at Nvidia's annual GTC developer conference, CEO Jensen Huang appeared to be getting really bored of discussing the subject -- not least because he finds himself misquoted a lot, he says. The frequency of the question makes sense: The concept raises existential questions about humanity's role in and control of a future where machines can outthink, outlearn and outperform humans in virtually every domain. The core of this concern lies in the unpredictability of AGI's decision-making processes and objectives, which might not align with human values or priorities (a concept explored in depth in science fiction since at least the 1940s). There's concern that once AGI reaches a certain level of autonomy and capability, it might become impossible to contain or control, leading to scenarios where its actions cannot be predicted or reversed.

When sensationalist press asks for a timeframe, it is often baiting AI professionals into putting a timeline on the end of humanity -- or at least the current status quo. Needless to say, AI CEOs aren't always eager to tackle the subject. Predicting when we will see a passable AGI depends on how you define AGI, Huang argues, and draws a couple of parallels: Even with the complications of time-zones, you know when new year happens and 2025 rolls around. If you're driving to the San Jose Convention Center (where this year's GTC conference is being held), you generally know you've arrived when you can see the enormous GTC banners. The crucial point is that we can agree on how to measure that you've arrived, whether temporally or geospatially, where you were hoping to go. "If we specified AGI to be something very specific, a set of tests where a software program can do very well -- or maybe 8% better than most people -- I believe we will get there within 5 years," Huang explains. He suggests that the tests could be a legal bar exam, logic tests, economic tests or perhaps the ability to pass a pre-med exam. Unless the questioner is able to be very specific about what AGI means in the context of the question, he's not willing to make a prediction. Fair enough.

Christopher Harper reports via Tom's Hardware: Earlier this month, Danluu.com released an exhaustive 23-page analysis/op-ed/manifesto on the current status of unoptimized web pages and web app performance, finding that just loading a web page can even bog down an entry-level device that can run the popular game PUBG at 40 fps. In fact, the Wix webpage requires loading 21MB of data for one page, while the more famous websites Patreon and Threads load 13MB of data for one page. This can result in slow load times that reach up to 33 seconds or, in some cases, result in the page failing to load at all.

As the testing above shows, some of the most brutally intensive websites include the likes of... Quora, and basically every major social media platform. Newer content production platforms like Squarespace and newer Forum platforms like Discourse also have significantly worse performance than their older counterparts, often to the point of unusability on some devices. The Tecno S8C, one of the prominent entry-level phones common in emerging markets, is one particularly compelling test device that stuck. The device is actually quite impressive in some ways, including its ability to run PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Mobile at 40 FPS -- but the same device can't even run Quora and experiences nigh-unusable lag when scrolling on social media sites.

That example is most likely the best summation of the overall point, which is that modern web and app design is increasingly trending toward an unrealistic assumption of ever-increasing bandwidth and processing. Quora is a website where people answer questions -- there is absolutely no reason any of these websites should be harder to run than a Battle Royale game.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla Firefox 124 looks like a small update that only updates the Caret Browsing mode to also work in the PDF viewer and adds support for the Screen Wake Lock API to prevent devices from dimming or locking the screen when an application needs to keep running. The Firefox View feature has been updated as well in this release to allow users to sort open tabs by either recent activity (default setting) or tab order. Also, Firefox 124 expands Qwant's availability to all languages in the France region along with Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland.

This release also adds support for using HTTP(S) and relative URLs when creating WebSockets, as well as support for the AbortSignal: any() static method, which takes an iterable of abort signals and returns an AbortSignal (more details are available here). For Android users, Firefox 124 enables the Pull to Refresh feature, which is now more robust than ever, by default and adds support for the HTML drag and drop API when using a mouse, which accepts plain text or HTML text by the drop operation from external apps.

For macOS users, this release uses the fullscreen API for all types of full-screen windows, promising a better match to the expected macOS user experience for full-screen spaces, the Menubar, and the Dock. If you want to disable this feature, you'll need to set the full-screen-api.macos-native-full-screen preference to false in about:config. For Windows users, this release adds the ability to populate the Windows taskbar jump list more efficiently. According to Mozilla, this change should allow for a "smoother overall browsing experience."

Google researchers have developed a new AI system that can generate lifelike videos of people speaking, gesturing and moving -- from just a single still photo. From a report: The technology, called VLOGGER, relies on advanced machine learning models to synthesize startlingly realistic footage, opening up a range of potential applications while also raising concerns around deepfakes and misinformation. Described in a research paper titled "VLOGGER: Multimodal Diffusion for Embodied Avatar Synthesis," (PDF) the AI model can take a photo of a person and an audio clip as input, and then output a video that matches the audio, showing the person speaking the words and making corresponding facial expressions, head movements and hand gestures. The videos are not perfect, with some artifacts, but represent a significant leap in the ability to animate still images.

The researchers, led by Enric Corona at Google Research, leveraged a type of machine learning model called diffusion models to achieve the novel result. Diffusion models have recently shown remarkable performance at generating highly realistic images from text descriptions. By extending them into the video domain and training on a vast new dataset, the team was able to create an AI system that can bring photos to life in a highly convincing way. "In contrast to previous work, our method does not require training for each person, does not rely on face detection and cropping, generates the complete image (not just the face or the lips), and considers a broad spectrum of scenarios (e.g. visible torso or diverse subject identities) that are critical to correctly synthesize humans who communicate," the authors wrote.

Mozilla Location Service offered "a free, open way to offer GPS-style location detection features" for developers on devices without GPS hardware, remembers the Linux blog OMG Ubuntu. It used signals like Wi-Fi access points and Bluetooth beacons "without any of the privacy implications most competing geolocation services have."

But Friday they reported that Mozilla "has announced it is ending access to Mozilla Location Service (MLS), which provides accurate, privacy-respecting, and crowdsourced geolocation data." Developers and 3rd-party projects that use MLS to detect a users' location, such as the freedesktop.org location framework GeoClue, which is used by apps like GNOME Maps and Weather, have only a few months left to continue using the service... In late March, POST data submissions will return 403 responses. Finally, on June 12, all 3rd-party API keys will be removed and MLS data only accessible by Mozilla...

MLS' accuracy has declined in recent years. Patent infringement claims in 2019 saw Mozilla reach a settlement to avoid litigation. As part of that settlement it was forced to make changes to MLS that impacted its ability to invest in (commercially exploit?) and improve the service.
The article notes that GeoClue "already supports multiple location detection methods, including IP-based ones," so it should continue operating.

"But the sad reality is that there just aren't a lot of free, open, privacy-friendly, accurate, and (rather importantly for a framework built in to Linux desktops) reliable alternatives to Mozilla Location Services, which has built up a colossal 'signal map' from which to pinpoint locations."

"We are grateful for the contributions of the community to MLS to both the code and the dataset," a Mozilla senior engineering manager said in a statement.

The Street interviewed Chad Anderson, founder/managing partner of the "space economy" investment firm Space Capital, who calls SpaceX's progress "unprecedented," and believes their next launch could carry "operational" payloads like Starlink satellites. Anderson added that Starship reaching orbital velocity and reentering the atmosphere at those speeds (roughly 16,000 miles per hour) was "a really big deal," though it's specifically important for the reusability of the vehicle, which would further cheapen the cost of launch.

"The fact that they did all those things and they can now move into operations as an investor is hugely important and significant," Anderson said. "Having an operational Starship vehicle is really important because, at the moment, they just can't launch Starlink satellites fast enough. Starship is going to be able to launch 10 times more than Falcon 9 can, and that's really important...."

The ship is so big that, according to Anderson, Starship could conceivably serve as a space station, or a hotel, or a manufacturing facility. There is also the potential of Starship actually competing with commercial airlines, flying, for example, from New York to Shanghai in 45 minutes.
Clayton Swope, senior fellow at CSIS, also believes Starship could be used for "last-mile delivery... where you could move something in less than an hour, anywhere from a point on Earth to another point on Earth, and you're just kind of using space as that transit point."

There's also defense applications. Defense One notes the U.S. Defense Department uses SpaceX to launch most of its satellites. "With a payload capacity of 100 to 150 tons, Starship could carry a bunch of satellites simultaneously and increase the Space Force's launch rate as it builds out a network of hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit." Once Starship is operational, it will be able to put things into higher orbits, which is key for the Pentagon's push to operate in the cislunar environment, the area between the geosynchronous orbit and the moon. "The Chinese have already begun cislunar operations and have put vehicles on the far side of the moon, which is something the U.S. doesn't really have the ability to do right now," said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

However, the advantage the U.S. will get with Starship "won't last forever," and it will take years to build satellites specifically designed to take advantage of the rocket's payload capacity, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "At this rate, they will have Starship operational this year. We need payloads to go on that, if we're actually going to take advantage of it during this window of opportunity when it's a capability only we have. If you want those payloads available next year, you needed to start building them five years ago," Harrison said.

Starship could be used to put very large objects into space, such as fuel barges or energy stations, at a reasonable cost. "You could use this to put up an orbital bus that you can then put on and remove payloads from, so you can have a satellite on orbit that's basically a large docking station," Clark said... "[I]t could be a way to do that kind of thing where you establish essentially an unmanned, little space station that can carry various payloads."

Longtime Slashdot reader ahbond shares a report from VentureBeat: Today, Cognition, a recently formed AI startup backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and tech industry leaders including former Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu, announced a fully autonomous AI software engineer called "Devin." While there are multiple coding assistants out there, including the famous Github Copilot, Devin is said to stand out from the crowd with its ability to handle entire development projects end-to-end, right from writing the code and fixing the bugs associated with it to final execution. This is the first offering of this kind and even capable of handling projects on Upwork, the startup has demonstrated. [...]

In a blog post today on Cognition's website, Scott Wu, the founder and CEO of Cognition and an award-winning sports coder, explained Devin can access common developer tools, including its own shell, code editor and browser, within a sandboxed compute environment to plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions. The human user simply types a natural language prompt into Devin's chatbot style interface, and the AI software engineer takes it from there, developing a detailed, step-by-step plan to tackle the problem. It then begins the project using its developer tools, just like how a human would use them, writing its own code, fixing issues, testing and reporting on its progress in real-time, allowing the user to keep an eye on everything as it works. [...]

According to demos shared by Wu, Devin is capable of handling a range of tasks in its current form. This includes common engineering projects like deploying and improving apps/websites end-to-end and finding and fixing bugs in codebases to more complex things like setting up fine-tuning for a large language model using the link to a research repository on GitHub or learning how to use unfamiliar technologies. In one case, it learned from a blog post how to run the code to produce images with concealed messages. Meanwhile, in another, it handled an Upwork project to run a computer vision model by writing and debugging the code for it. In the SWE-bench test, which challenges AI assistants with GitHub issues from real-world open-source projects, the AI software engineer was able to correctly resolve 13.86% of the cases end-to-end -- without any assistance from humans. In comparison, Claude 2 could resolve just 4.80% while SWE-Llama-13b and GPT-4 could handle 3.97% and 1.74% of the issues, respectively. All these models even required assistance, where they were told which file had to be fixed. Currently, Devin is available only to a select few customers. Bloomberg journalist Ashlee Vance wrote a piece about his experience using it here.

"The Doom of Man is at hand," captions Slashdot reader ahbond. "It will start with the low-hanging Jira tickets, and in a year or two, able to handle 99% of them. In the short term, software engineers may become like bot farmers, herding 10-1000 bots writing code, etc. Welcome to the future."

Will Knight, writing for Wired: Goat Simulator 3 is a surreal video game in which players take domesticated ungulates on a series of implausible adventures, sometimes involving jetpacks. That might seem an unlikely venue for the next big leap in artificial intelligence, but Google DeepMind today revealed an AI program capable of learning how to complete tasks in a number of games, including Goat Simulator 3. Most impressively, when the program encounters a game for the first time, it can reliably perform tasks by adapting what it learned from playing other games. The program is called SIMA, for Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent, and it builds upon recent AI advances that have seen large language models produce remarkably capable chabots like ChatGPT.

[...] DeepMind's latest video game project hints at how AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini could soon do more than just chat and generate images or video, by taking control of computers and performing complex commands. "The paper is an interesting advance for embodied agents across multiple simulations," says Linxi "Jim" Fan, a senior research scientist at Nvidia who works on AI gameplay and was involved with an early effort to train AI to play by controlling a keyboard and mouse with a 2017 OpenAI project called World of Bits. Fan says the Google DeepMind work reminds him of this project as well as a 2022 effort called VPT that involved agents learning tool use in Minecraft.

"SIMA takes one step further and shows stronger generalization to new games," he says. "The number of environments is still very small, but I think SIMA is on the right track." [...] For the SIMA project, the Google DeepMind team collaborated with several game studios to collect keyboard and mouse data from humans playing 10 different games with 3D environments, including No Man's Sky, Teardown, Hydroneer, and Satisfactory. DeepMind later added descriptive labels to that data to associate the clicks and taps with the actions users took, for example whether they were a goat looking for its jetpack or a human character digging for gold. The data trove from the human players was then fed into a language model of the kind that powers modern chatbots, which had picked up an ability to process language by digesting a huge database of text. SIMA could then carry out actions in response to typed commands. And finally, humans evaluated SIMA's efforts inside different games, generating data that was used to fine-tune its performance. Further reading: DeepMind's blog post.