Tuesday the Wikimedia Foundation released its annual list of the most-visited Wikipedia pages. (Scroll down to where it says "The full top 25"...)

But while the top subjects seem to be politics and pop culture, CNN reports that in the end "a list of deaths in 2024 was the most visited page, garnering over 44 million views." A page about deaths in a given year has ranked at the top of the list five times since 2015, when the Wikimedia Foundation began releasing the data. The topic has never fallen below third place on the list.

People also searched for U.S. political figures... [The #2, #3, #5, #7, and #9 most-visited pages were, respectively, for Kamala Harris, the 2024 United States presidential election, Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Project 2025.] While U.S. politics was a notable search subject, popular culture had the largest share of the top 25. The fourth most-visited page was about Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers who were sentenced to life in prison for the 1989 murder of their parents and are now facing a resentencing trial. The case received renewed public attention after a Netflix documentary was published this year. The Wikipedia page about the brothers received over 26 million views in 2024.

The "Deadpool & Wolverine" and "Dune: Part Two" movies were eighth and 23rd, respectively... [Other high-ranking pop-culture pages included Taylor Swift (#11)and the 2024 Summer Olympics (#14).]

"Wikipedia readers in India continue to make a big impact on the list, a trend we saw in 2023 as well," Wikimedia Foundation's Alikhan said. The Indian Premier League, a cricket league in India, garnered over 24.5 million views this year as the site's sixth most visited page... [The 2024 Indian general election came in at #10]
Wikipedia's entry on ChatGPT came in at #12, while Elon Musk came in at #17.

"When people want to learn about our world — the good, bad, weird, and wild alike — they turn to Wikipedia," explains the blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation, calling Wikipedia "the largest knowledge resource ever assembled in the history of the world" and "a reflection of all the people who live on our planet. its story is your story, your interests, your questions, and your curiosity."

Other statistics about Wikipedia in 2024:

• Nearly 3.5 billion bytes of information were added this year via over 31 million edits.

• People spent an estimated 2.4 billion hours — nearly 275,000 years! — reading English Wikipedia in 2024, according to data from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Startup Spines plans to publish up to 8,000 books in 2025 using AI, charging authors between $1,200 and $5,000 for editing, design and distribution services. The venture-backed company, which recently secured $16 million in funding, promises to reduce publishing timelines to two to three weeks while allowing authors to retain full royalties.

Co-founder Yehuda Niv describes Spines as a "publishing platform" rather than self-publishing. The announcement has drawn criticism from industry professionals. Independent publisher Canongate condemned the company for automating book production "with the least possible attention, care or craft." The Society of Authors urged writers to exercise caution, citing concerns about AI systems potentially trained on unlicensed content.

"Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit." That's how Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet ended a post on the Linux kernel mailing list.

This was followed by "insufficient action to restore the community's faith in having otherwise productive technical discussions without the fear of personal attacks," according to an official ruling by committee enforcing the kernel community's code of conduct. After formalizing an updated enforcement process for unacceptable behaviors, it then recommended that during the Linux 6.13 kernel development cycle, Overstreet's participation should be restricted (with his pull requests declined). Phoronix covered their ruling, and ItsFOSS and The Register offer some of the backstory.

Overstreet had already acknowledged that "Things really went off the rails (and I lost my cool, and earned the ire of the CoC committee)" in a 6,200-word blog post on his Patreon page. But he also emphasized that "I'm going to keep writing code no matter what. Things may turn into more of a hassle to actually get the code, but people who want to keep running bcachefs will always be able to (that's the beauty of open source, we can always fork), and I will keep supporting my users..."

More excerpts from Overstreet's blog post: I got an emails from multiple people, including from Linus, to the effect of "trust me, you don't want to be known as an asshole — you should probably send him an apology"... Linus is a genuinely good guy: I know a lot of people reading this will have also seen our pull request arguments, so I specifically wanted to say that here: I think he and I do get under each other's skin, but those arguments are the kind of arguments you get between people who care deeply about their work and simply have different perspectives on the situation...

[M]y response was to say "no" to a public apology, for a variety of reasons: because this was the result of an ongoing situation that had now impacted two different teams and projects, and I think that issue needs attention — and I think there's broader issues at stake here, regarding the CoC board. But mostly, because that kind of thing feels like it ought to be kept personal... I'd like a better process that isn't so heavy handed for dealing with situations where tensions rise and communications break down. As for that process: just talk to people... [W]e're a community. We're not interchangeable cogs to be kicked out and replaced when someone is "causing a problem", we should be watching out for each other...

Another note that I was raising with the CoC is that a culture of dismissiveness, of finding ways to avoid the technical discussions we're supposed to be having, really is toxic, and moreso than mere flamewars... we really do need to be engaging properly with each other in order to do our work well.
After the official response from the committee, Overstreet responded on the kernel mailing list. "I do want to apologize for things getting this heated the other day, but I need to also tell you why I reacted the way I did... I do take correctness issues very seriously, and I will get frosty or genuinely angry if they're being ignored or brushed aside."

Google has warned websites they will be penalized for hosting marketing content designed to exploit search rankings, regardless of whether they created or outsourced the material. The crackdown on so-called "parasite SEO" targets websites that leverage their search rankings to promote unrelated content, such as news sites hiding shopping coupon codes or educational platforms publishing affiliate marketing material.

Chris Nelson from Google's search quality team said the policy applies even when content involves "white label services, licensing agreements, partial ownership agreements, and other complex business arrangements." The move follows Google's March announcement targeting site reputation abuse, which gained attention after Sports Illustrated was found publishing AI-generated product reviews through third-party marketing firm AdVon Commerce.

ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports: [...] At KubeCon North America 2024 this week, CNCF executive director Priyanka Sharma said in her keynote, "Patent trolls are not contributors or even adopters in our ecosystem. Instead, they prey on cloud-native adopters by abusing the legal system. We are here to tell the world that these patent trolls don't stand a chance because CNCF is uniting the ecosystem to deter them. Like a herd of musk oxen, we will run them off our pasture." CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk added: "The reason trolls can make money is that many companies find it too expensive to fight back, so they pay trolls a settlement fee to avoid the even higher cost of litigation. Now, when a whole herd of companies band together like musk oxen to drive a troll off, it changes the cost structure of fighting back. It disrupts their economic model."

How? Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's executive director, said, "We don't negotiate with trolls. Instead, with United Patents, we go to the PTO and crush those patents. We strive to invalidate them by working with developers who have prior art, bringing this to the attention of the USPTO, and killing patents. No negotiation, no settlement. We destroy the very asset that made patent trolls' business work. Together, since we've started this effort, 90% of the time, we've been able to go in there and destroy these patents." "It's time for us to band together," said Joanna Lee, CNCF's VP of strategic programs and legal. "We encourage all organizations in our ecosystem to get involved. Join the fight, enhance your own company's protection, protect your customers, enhance our community defense, and save money on legal expenses."

While getting your company and its legal department involved in the effort to fend off patent trolls is important, developers can also help. CNCF announced the Cloud Native Heroes Challenge, a patent troll bounty program in which cloud-native developers and technologists can earn swag and win prizes. They're asking you to find evidence of preexisting technology -- referred to by patent lawyers as "prior art" -- that can kill off bad patents. This could be open-source documentation (including release notes), published standards or specifications, product manuals, articles, blogs, books, or any publicly available information. All entrants who submit an entry that conforms to the contest rules will receive a free "Cloud Native Hero" t-shirt that can be picked up at any future KubeCon+CloudNativeCon. The winner will also receive a $3,000 cash prize.

In the inaugural contest, the CNCF is seeking information that can be used to invalidate Claim 1 from US Patent US-11695823-B1. This is the major patent asserted by Edge Networking Systems against Kubernetes users. As is often the case with such patents, it's much too broad. This patent describes a network architecture that facilitates secure and flexible programmability between a user device and across a network with full lifecycle management of services and infrastructure applications. That describes pretty much any modern cloud system. If you can find prior art that describes such a system before June 13, 2013, you could be a winner. Some such materials have already been found. This is already listed in the "known references" tab of the contest information page and doesn't qualify. If you care about keeping open-source software easy and cheap to use -- or you believe trolls shouldn't be allowed to take advantage of companies that make or use programs -- you can help. I'll be doing some digging myself.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Flock is one of the largest vendors of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in the country. The company markets itself as having the goal to fully "eliminate crime" with the use of ALPRs and other connected surveillance cameras, a target experts say is impossible. [...] Flock and automated license plate reader cameras owned by other companies are now in thousands of neighborhoods around the country. Many of these systems talk to each other and plug into other surveillance systems, making it possible to track people all over the country.

"It went from me seeing 10 license plate readers to probably seeing 50 or 60 in a few days of driving around," [said Alabama resident and developer Will Freeman]. "I wanted to make a record of these things. I thought, 'Can I make a database of these license plate readers?'" And so he made a map, and called it DeFlock. DeFlock runs on Open Street Map, an open source, editable mapping software. He began posting signs for DeFlock (PDF) to the posts holding up Huntsville's ALPR cameras, and made a post about the project to the Huntsville subreddit, which got good attention from people who lived there. People have been plotting not just Flock ALPRs, but all sorts of ALPRs, all over the world. [...]

When I first talked to Freeman, DeFlock had a few dozen cameras mapped in Huntsville and a handful mapped in Southern California and in the Seattle suburbs. A week later, as I write this, DeFlock has crowdsourced the locations of thousands of cameras in dozens of cities across the United States and the world. He said so far more than 1,700 cameras have been reported in the United States and more than 5,600 have been reported around the world. He has also begun scraping parts of Flock's website to give people a better idea of where to look to map them. For example, Flock says that Colton, California, a city with just over 50,000 people outside of San Bernardino, has 677 cameras.

People who submit cameras to DeFlock have the ability to note the direction that they are pointing in, which can help people understand how these cameras are being positioned and the strategies that companies and police departments are using when deploying them. For example, all of the cameras in downtown Huntsville are pointing away from the downtown core, meaning they are primarily focused on detecting cars that are entering downtown Huntsville from other areas.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shared this report from Science magazine: Elephants love showering to cool off, and most do so by sucking water into their trunks and spitting it over their bodies. But an elderly pachyderm named Mary has perfected the technique by using a hose as a showerhead, much in the way humans do. The behavior is a remarkable example of sophisticated tool use in the animal kingdom. But the story doesn't end there.

Mary's long, luxurious baths have drawn so much attention that an envious elephant at the Berlin Zoo has figured out how to shut the water off on her supersoaking rival—a type of sabotage rarely seen among animals.

Both behaviors, reported today in Current Biology, further cement elephants as complex thinkers, says Lucy Bates, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Portsmouth not involved in the study. The work, she says, 'suggests problem solving or even 'insight.''

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Rightsholders have asked Google to remove more than 10 billion 'copyright infringing' URLs from its search results. The search engine doesn't celebrate the milestone in any way, but the takedown notices document intriguing shifts in volume over time, as well as shifting takedown interests. [...] The path to 10 billion was turbulent. When Google first made DMCA details public it was processing a few million DMCA takedown requests in a year. That number swiftly increased to hundreds of millions and eventually reached a billion DMCA requests in 2016.

The exponential growth curve eventually flattened out and around 2017, the takedown volume started to decline. The decrease was in part due to various anti-piracy algorithms making pirated content less visible in search results. By downranking pirate sites, infringing content became harder to find. As a result, Google processed fewer takedown notices, a welcome change for both rightsholders and the search engine. Today, Google continues to make pirate sites less visible in search, but the reduction in takedown notices didn't last. On the contrary, over the past several months, Google search processed a record number of DMCA notices.

Last summer, the search giant recorded the 7 billionth takedown request and after that the numbers shot up, adding billions more in the year that followed. The company is now handling removal requests at a rate of roughly 2.5 billion per year; a new record. This represents more than 50 million takedown requests per week and roughly 5,000 every minute. [...] While the 10 billionth reported URL is undoubtedly a milestone, this number is largely driven by a few rightsholders, reporting outfits, and domain names. The aforementioned takedown outfit Link-Busters, for example, accounts for roughly 15% of all reported links, nearly 1.5 billion. Similarly, the ten most prolific rightsholders, including the BPI, HarperCollins, and VIZ Media, are responsible for 40% of all reported links. These ten companies are only a tiny fraction of the 600,000 rightsholders that reported pirated links, however. A small group of domains also receives a disproportionate amount of attention. In total, 5,400,061 domains have been reported, with the top domains having dozens of millions of flagged URLs each. However, most domains have only a few flagged links, some of which are erroneous.

Five years ago remote workers were offered $10,0000 to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma for at least a year. Since then roughly 3,300 have accepted the offer, according to the New York TImes. [Alternate URL here.] But more importantly, now researchers are looking at the results: Their research, released this month, surveyed 1,248 people — including 411 who had participated in Tulsa Remote and others who were accepted but didn't move or weren't accepted but had applied to the program — and found that remote workers who moved to Tulsa saved an average of $25,000 more on annual housing costs than the group that was chosen but didn't move... Nearly three-quarters of participants who have completed the program are still living in Tulsa. The program brings them together for farm-to-table dinners, movie nights and local celebrity lectures to help build community, given that none have offices to commute to.
The article says every year the remote workers contribute $14.9 million in state income taxes and $5.8 million in sales taxes (more than offsetting the $33 million spent over the last five years). And additional benefits could be even greater. "We know that for every dollar we've spent on the incentive, there's been about a $13 return on that investment to the city," the program's managing director told Fortune — pointing out that the remote workers have an average salary of $100,000. (500 of the 3,300 even bought homes...)

The Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation — which provides the $10,000 awards — told the New York Times it will continue funding the program "so long as it demonstrates to be a community-enhancing opportunity." And with so much of the population now able to work remotely, the lead author on the latest study adds that "Every heartland mayor should pay attention to this..."

An enormous fine levied by a Russian court on Google caught the attention of the Kremlin -- which hopes Google will notice in turn. From a report: President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, commented on the sum on Thursday. It came after a court demanded payment equivalent of $20.6 decillion -- an almost incomprehensible figure that exceeds the world's GDP. The sum came from a penalty for suspending the YouTube accounts of various Russian outlets. It has been regularly doubling for years, with no limit, leading it into realms of the absurd, which Peskov seemed to acknowledge. "Although it is a specific amount, I cannot even pronounce this number, it is rather filled with symbolism," said Peskov in response to a question from NBC News.

The Register's Tobias Mann reports: Supermicro shares took a nose dive on Wednesday, sliding more than 30 percent after the accounting firm hired to review its reporting practices resigned after determining they were just a bit too sketchy to warrant the risk. "We are resigning due to information that has recently come to our attention which has led us to no longer be able to rely on management's and audit committee's representations," Ernst & Young wrote in a resignation letter, which also raised alarm bells regarding Supermicro CEO Charles Liang's influence over the board. The concerns, disclosed in a recent SEC filing, only serve to stoke the fires of controversy surrounding Supermicro, which, after more than two months, still hasn't filed its 10-K annual report and faces the possibility of being de-listed from the Nasdaq as a result. [...]

EY's resignation apparently came months after it raised concerns with management regarding the "governance, transparency, and completeness of" Supermicro's financial reporting, and warned that the release of the server maker's annual report was at significant risk. In response, Supermicro's board appointed an independent special committee and hired Cooley and forensic accounting firm Secretariat Advisors to review its internal controls and governance procedures. It seems EY was not too pleased with the special committee's findings which apparently raised yet more red flags. "After receiving additional information through the Review process, EY informed the special committee that the additional information EY received raised questions, including about whether the Company demonstrates a commitment to integrity and ethical values," the SEC filing reads.

Communications of the ACM checks in on the quest for room-temperature superconductivity. "Time and time again, physicists have announced breakthroughs that were later found to be irreproducible, in error, or even fraudulent."

But "The issue is once again simmering..." In January 2024, a group of researchers from Europe and South America announced they had achieved a milestone in room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductivity. Using Scotch-taped cleaved pyrolytic graphite with surface wrinkles, which formed line defects, they observed a room-temperature superconducting state. Their paper, published in the journal Advanced Quantum Technologies, has gained considerable attention in the scientific world... Although many in the scientific community remain incredulous, if valid, this development could help solve a key piece of the puzzle: how defects and wrinkles in a material such as scotch-taped cleaved pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) affect electrical properties and behavior within superconductive systems...

"We haven't reached a point where there is a clear path to room temperature superconductivity because researchers are either overly enthusiastic or deceptive," said Elie Track, chief technology officer at HYPRES, Inc., an Elmsford, NY, company that develops and commercializes superconductor integrated circuits (ICs) and systems. "People fail to check measurements and others can't reproduce their results. There is a lot of carelessness and sloppy science surrounding the space because people are so eager to achieve success." The team conducting research into scotch-taped cleaved pyrolytic graphite believe their discovery could tilt the search for practically useful room-temperature superconductivity in a favorable direction. They reported they were able to achieve one-dimensional superconductivity in pyrolytic graphite at temperatures as great as 300 degrees Kelvin (26.85 degrees Celsius), and at ambient pressure. Vinokur and physicist Maria Cristina Diamantini described the development as the first "unambiguous experimental evidence" for a global room temperature zero-resistance state. If true, the team's research could illuminate a path to new superconducting materials....

Others remain skeptical, however. For example Alan Kadin [a technical consultant in the field and a former professor of electrical engineering at the University of Rochester] pointed out that one of the key researchers for the project, Yakov Kopelevich, has been working in the field for two decades and, so far, "The results are not reproducible in other labs...Until someone else independently reproduces these results, I think we can safely ignore them," he argued...

Yet as scientists continue to bang away at the superconducting challenge — including the possibility of using generative AI to explore materials and techniques — optimism is growing that a major breakthrough could occur.

theodp writes: "Computer science education is a necessity for all students," argues tech-backed nonprofit Code.org in its newly-published 2024 State of Computer Science Education (Understanding Our National Imperative) report. "Students of all identities and chosen career paths need quality computer science education to become informed citizens and confident creators of content and digital tools."

In the 200-page report, Code.org pays special attention to participation in "foundational computer science courses" in high school. "Across the country, 60% of public high schools offer at least one foundational computer science course," laments Code.org (curiously promoting a metric that ignores school size which nonetheless was embraced by Education Week and others).

"A course that teaches foundational computer science includes a minimum amount of time applying learned concepts through programming (at least 20 hours of programming/coding for grades 9-12 high schools)," Code.org explains in a separate 13-page Defining Foundational Computer Science document. Interestingly, Code.org argues that Data and Informatics courses -- in which "students may use Oracle WebDB, SQL, PL/SQL, SPSS, and SAS" to learn "the K-12 CS Framework concepts about data and analytics" -- do not count, because "the course content focuses on querying using a scripting language rather than creating programs [the IEEE's Top Programming Languages 2024 begs to differ]." Code.org similarly dissed the use of the Wolfram Language for broad educational use back in 2016.

With its insistence on the importance of kids taking Code.org-defined 'programming' courses in K-12 to promote computational thinking, it's probably no surprise to see that the data behind the 2024 State of Computer Science Education report was prepared using Python (the IEEE's top programming language) and presented to the public in a Jupyter notebook. Just kidding. Ironically, the data behind the 2024 State of Computer Science Education analysis is prepared and presented by Code.org in a no-code Tableau workbook.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: When Canadian developer Peter Todd found out that a new HBO documentary, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, was set to identify him as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, he was mostly just pissed. "This was clearly going to be a circus," Todd told WIRED in an email. The identity of the person -- or people -- who created Bitcoin has been the subject of speculation since December 2010, when they disappeared from public view. The mystery has proved all the more irresistible for the trove of bitcoin Satoshi is widely believed to have controlled, suspected to be worth many billions of dollars today. When the documentary was released on October 8, Todd joined a long line of alleged Satoshis.

Documentary maker Cullen Hoback, who in a previous film claimed to have identified the individual behind QAnon, laid out his theory to Todd on camera. The confrontation would become the climactic scene of the documentary. But Todd nonetheless claims he didn't see it coming; he alleges he was left with the impression the film was about the history of Bitcoin, not the identity of its creator. Since the documentary aired, Todd has repeatedly and categorically denied that he created Bitcoin: "For the record, I am not Satoshi," he alleges. "I think Cullen made the Satoshi accusation for marketing. He needed a way to get attention for his film."

For his part, Hoback remains confident in his conclusions. The various denials and deflections from Todd, he claims, are part of a grand and layered misdirection. "While of course we can't outright say he is Satoshi, I think that we make a very strong case," says Hoback. Whatever the truth, Todd will now bear the burden of having been unmasked as Satoshi. He has gone into hiding. [...] Todd expects that "continued harassment by crazy people" will become the indefinite status quo. But he says the potential personal safety implications are his chief concern -- and the reason he has gone into hiding. "Obviously, falsely claiming that ordinary people of ordinary wealth are extraordinarily rich exposes them to threats like robbery and kidnapping," says Todd. "Not only is the question dumb, it's dangerous. Satoshi obviously didn't want to be found, for good reasons, and no one should help people trying to find Satoshi." "I think the idea that it puts their life [at risk] is a little overblown," says Hoback. "This person is potentially on track to become the wealthiest on Earth."

"If countries are considering adopting this in their treasuries or making it legal tender, the idea that there's potentially this anonymous figure out there who controls one twentieth of the total supply of digital gold is pretty important."

"The Wayback Machine, Archive-It, scanning, and national library crawls have resumed," announced the Internet Archive Thursday, "as well as email, blog, helpdesk, and social media communications. Our team is working around the clock across time zones to bring other services back online."

Founder Brewster Kahle told The Washington Post it's the first time in its almost 30-year history that it's been down more than a few hours. But their article says the Archive is "fighting back." Kahle and his team see the mission of the Internet Archive as a noble one — to build a "library of everything" and ensure records are kept in an online environment where websites change and disappear by the day. "We're all dreamers," said Chris Freeland, the Internet Archive's director of library services. "We believe in the mission of the Internet Archive, and we believe in the promise of the internet." But the site has, at times, courted controversy. The Internet Archive faces lawsuits from book publishers and music labels brought in 2020 and 2023 for digitizing copyrighted books and music, which the organization has argued should be permissible for noncommercial, archival purposes. Kahle said the hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties from the lawsuits could sink the Internet Archive.

Those lawsuits are ongoing. Now, the Internet Archive has also had to turn its attention to fending off cyberattacks. In May, the Internet Archive was hit with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a fairly common type of internet warfare that involves flooding a target site with fake traffic. The archive experienced intermittent outages as a result. Kahle said it was the first time the site had been targeted in its history... [After another attack October 9th], Kahle and his team have spent the week since racing to identify and fix the vulnerabilities that left the Internet Archive open to attack. The organization has "industry standard" security systems, Kahle said, but he added that, until this year, the group had largely stayed out of the crosshairs of cybercriminals. Kahle said he'd opted not to prioritize additional investments in cybersecurity out of the Internet Archive's limited budget of around $20 million to $30 million a year...

[N]o one has reliably claimed the defacement and data breach that forced the Internet Archive to sequester itself, said [cybersecurity researcher] Scott Helmef. He added that the hackers' decision to alert the Internet Archive of their intrusion and send the stolen data to Have I Been Pwned, the monitoring service, could imply they didn't have further intentions with it.... Helme said the episode demonstrates the vulnerability of nonprofit services like the Internet Archive — and of the larger ecosystem of information online that depends on them. "Perhaps they'll find some more funding now that all of these headlines have happened," Helme said. "And people suddenly realize how bad it would be if they were gone."
"Our priority is ensuring the Internet Archive comes online stronger and more secure," the archive said in Thursday's statement. And they noted other recent-past instances of other libraries also being attacked online: As a library community, we are seeing other cyber attacks — for instance the British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library, and now Calgary Public Library. We hope these attacks are not indicative of a trend."

For the latest updates, please check this blog and our official social media accounts: X/Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon.

Thank you for your patience and ongoing support.

Apple's AI research team has uncovered significant weaknesses in the reasoning abilities of large language models, according to a newly published study. MacRumors: The study, published on arXiv [PDF], outlines Apple's evaluation of a range of leading language models, including those from OpenAI, Meta, and other prominent developers, to determine how well these models could handle mathematical reasoning tasks. The findings reveal that even slight changes in the phrasing of questions can cause major discrepancies in model performance that can undermine their reliability in scenarios requiring logical consistency.

Apple draws attention to a persistent problem in language models: their reliance on pattern matching rather than genuine logical reasoning. In several tests, the researchers demonstrated that adding irrelevant information to a question -- details that should not affect the mathematical outcome -- can lead to vastly different answers from the models.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neuroscience News: Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder -- also known as ADHD -- is typically thought of as a childhood condition. But more adults are realizing that their struggles with attention, focus and restlessness could in fact be undiagnosed ADHD, thanks in large part to trending social media videos racking up millions of views. A new national survey of 1,000 American adults commissioned by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine finds that 25% of adults now suspect they may have undiagnosed ADHD. But what worries mental health experts is that only 13% of survey respondents have shared their suspicions with their doctor. That's raising concerns about the consequences of self-diagnosis leading to incorrect treatment.

"Anxiety, depression and ADHD -- all these things can look a lot alike, but the wrong treatment can make things worse instead of helping that person feel better and improving their functioning," said psychologist Justin Barterian, PhD, clinical assistant professor in Ohio State's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health. An estimated 4.4% of people ages 18 to 44 have ADHD, and some people aren't diagnosed until they're older, Barterian said. "There's definitely more awareness of how it can continue to affect folks into adulthood and a lot of people who are realizing, once their kids have been diagnosed, that they fit these symptoms as well, given that it's a genetic disorder," Barterian said. The survey found that younger adults are more likely to believe they have undiagnosed ADHD than older generations, and they're also more likely to do something about it. Barterian said that should include seeing a medical professional, usually their primary care provider, to receive a referral to a mental health expert to be thoroughly evaluated, accurately diagnosed and effectively treated.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Amazon might not have ChatGPT, but it has a roadmap that includes developing even more advanced forms of artificial intelligence -- including AI agents that are hell-bent on helping you buy stuff. The ecommerce company is already sprinkling ChatGPT-like AI over its website and apps -- today announcing, among other enhancements, AI-generated shopping guides for hundreds of different product categories. Executives at the company say its engineers are also exploring more ambitious AI services, including autonomous AI shopping agents that recommend goods to a customer or even add items to their cart.

"It's on our roadmap. We're working on it, prototyping it, and when we think it's good enough, we'll release it in whatever form makes sense," says Trishul Chilimbi, a VP and distinguished scientist at Amazon who works on applying the company's core AI to its products and services. Chilimbi says the first step toward AI agents will likely be chatbots that proactively recommend products based on what they know of your habits and interests, as well as a grasp of broader trends. He acknowledges that making this feel nonintrusive will be crucial. "If it's no good and annoying, then you'll tune it out," he says. "But if it comes up with surprising things that are interesting, you'll use it more." [...]

Like many tech companies, Amazon is looking beyond chat and turning its attention toward the potential of so-called agents, which use LLMs but attempt to carry out useful tasks on users' behalf either by writing code on-the-fly, inputing text, or moving a computer's cursor. Future AI agents might, for instance, navigate various websites to sort out a parking ticket, or they might operate a PC to file a tax return. Getting LLM-powered programs to do this reliably is elusive, however, because such tasks are vastly more complex than simple queries and require a new level of precision and reliability.

Amazon's agents are, of course, likely to be more focused on helping customers find and buy whatever they need or want. A Rufus agent might notice when the next book in a series someone is reading becomes available and then automatically recommend it, add it to your cart, or even buy it for you, says Rajiv Mehta, a vice president at Amazon who works on conversational AI shopping. "It could say, 'We have one bought for you. We can ship it today, and it will arrive tomorrow morning at your door. Would you like that?'" Mehta says. He adds that Amazon is thinking about how advertising can be incorporated into its model's recommendation. Chilimbi and Mehta say that eventually, an agent might go on a shopping spree when a customer says, "I'm going on a camping trip, buy me everything I need." An extreme, though not impossible, scenario would involve agents that decide for themselves when a customer needs something, and then buy and ship it to their door. "You could maybe give it a budget," Chilimbi says with a grin.

The man identified as Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in a new HBO documentary has something to say: Wrong again, world. From a report: In the just-released HBO film on the history of the world's biggest digital currency -- Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery -- documentary filmmaker Cullen Hoback comes to the conclusion that the anonymous creator of Bitcoin was none other than a long-time member of the community and early Bitcoin developer Peter Todd. Todd dismissed the claim in the documentary, released yesterday, and denied it again when asked by The Register.

"[Hoback's] evidence for me being Satoshi is the same kind of coincidence-based, circumstantial thinking that fuels conspiracies like QAnon," Todd told us in an email. "Which is ironic, given that [Hoback's] previous big project was a documentary on QAnon. He clearly didn't try to debunk his theories either." Hoback's previous project -- Q: Into the Storm -- aimed to unmask the person behind QAnon, perhaps giving him an interest in uncovering the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Todd, however, thinks Hoback was just trying to drum up interest in his new film.

"I think [Hoback] only included the Satoshi claim as a marketing ploy: he was really creating a documentary about Bitcoin, and needed a hook to get media attention," Todd said. "He picked me to accuse mainly because I was an unlikely candidate, which helped drum up even more attention. I don't think he had any interest in finding the real truth."

Researchers at BitEnergy AI, Inc. have developed Linear-Complexity Multiplication (L-Mul), a technique that reduces AI model power consumption by up to 95% by replacing energy-intensive floating-point multiplications with simpler integer additions. This method promises significant energy savings without compromising accuracy, but it requires specialized hardware to fully realize its benefits. Decrypt reports: L-Mul tackles the AI energy problem head-on by reimagining how AI models handle calculations. Instead of complex floating-point multiplications, L-Mul approximates these operations using integer additions. So, for example, instead of multiplying 123.45 by 67.89, L-Mul breaks it down into smaller, easier steps using addition. This makes the calculations faster and uses less energy, while still maintaining accuracy. The results seem promising. "Applying the L-Mul operation in tensor processing hardware can potentially reduce 95% energy cost by element wise floating point tensor multiplications and 80% energy cost of dot products," the researchers claim. Without getting overly complicated, what that means is simply this: If a model used this technique, it would require 95% less energy to think, and 80% less energy to come up with new ideas, according to this research.

The algorithm's impact extends beyond energy savings. L-Mul outperforms current 8-bit standards in some cases, achieving higher precision while using significantly less bit-level computation. Tests across natural language processing, vision tasks, and symbolic reasoning showed an average performance drop of just 0.07% -- a negligible tradeoff for the potential energy savings. Transformer-based models, the backbone of large language models like GPT, could benefit greatly from L-Mul. The algorithm seamlessly integrates into the attention mechanism, a computationally intensive part of these models. Tests on popular models such as Llama, Mistral, and Gemma even revealed some accuracy gain on certain vision tasks.

At an operational level, L-Mul's advantages become even clearer. The research shows that multiplying two float8 numbers (the way AI models would operate today) requires 325 operations, while L-Mul uses only 157 -- less than half. "To summarize the error and complexity analysis, L-Mul is both more efficient and more accurate than fp8 multiplication," the study concludes. But nothing is perfect and this technique has a major achilles heel: It requires a special type of hardware, so the current hardware isn't optimized to take full advantage of it. Plans for specialized hardware that natively supports L-Mul calculations may be already in motion. "To unlock the full potential of our proposed method, we will implement the L-Mul and L-Matmul kernel algorithms on hardware level and develop programming APIs for high-level model design," the researchers say.