Initially mentioned during their Innovation 2022 opening keynote by Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, Intel has unveiled its highly anticipated 6 GHz out-of-the-box processor, the Core i9-13900KS. The Core i9-13900KS has 24-cores (8P+16E) within its hybrid architecture design of performance and efficiency cores, with the exact fundamental specifications of the Core i9-13900K, but with an impressive P-core turbo of up to 6 GHz. From a report: Based on Intel's Raptor Lake-S desktop series, Intel claims that the Core i9-13900KS is the first desktop processor to reach 6 GHz out of the box without overclocking. Available from today, the Core i9-13900KS has a slightly higher base TDP of 150 W (versus 125 on the 13900K), 36 MB of Intel's L3 smart cache, and is pre-binned through a unique selection process to ensure the Core i9-13900KS's special edition status for their highest level of frequency of 6 GHz in a desktop chip out of the box, without the need to overclock manually.

The Core i9-13900KS has been a long-awaited entrant to Intel's Raptor Lake-S for desktop series, with previous reports from Intel during their Innovation 2022 keynote that a 6 GHz out-of-the-box processor was on the horizon for this year. As Intel highlights, the Core i9-13900KS represents a significant milestone for desktop PCs, with its 6 GHz out-of-the-box P-Core turbo frequency. This makes it one of the fastest desktop x86 processors, at least from the perspective that users don't need to overclock anything to attain these ridiculous core frequencies. From Intel's sneak peek video on YouTube published on Jan 10th, the Core i9-13900KS looks to have reached 6 GHz on two of the eight performance (P) cores, with a clock speed of up to 5.6 GHz on the remaining six cores, which is very impressive.

One of the adjustments Intel needed to make to power limitations to achieve these frequencies is somewhat hazy. Intel hasn't specified if the Core i9-13900KS is a special binned part, but from previous KS launches, this has been the case, and it's expected that it is still the case. The reports of Core i9-13900K chips being overclocked to 6 GHz at ambient are few and far between, with only the best examples and those with very aggressive and premium ambient cooling solutions capable of this. [...] The Intel Core i9-13900KS is available to buy now at most retailers, with an MSRP of $699. This is $40 cheaper than the previous Core i9-12900KS ($739) that launched last year. Based on current MSRP pricing, the Core i9-13900KS is $110 more than the current Core i9-13900K.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Amendments to Building Regulations 2010 were announced by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) on January 6th that mandate new homes constructed in England to be fitted with infrastructure and connections required to achieve gigabit internet connectivity. Connection costs will be capped at £2,000 per home, and developers must still install gigabit-ready infrastructure (including ducts, chambers, and termination points) and the fastest-available connection if they're unable to secure a gigabit connection within the cost cap. The UK government estimates that 98 percent of installations will fall comfortably under that cap, so it's likely been put in place to avoid spiraling chargings in remote, rural areas that need widescale line upgrades. Properties constructed in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland may be exempt from this new legislation as each country sets its own building regulations independently from England.

The new legislation was introduced on December 26th, 2022, following a 12-month technical consultation that indicated around 12 percent of 171,190 new homes constructed in England didn't have gigabit broadband access upon completion. DCMS claims that gigabit broadband is currently available in over 72 percent of UK households and is targeting full nationwide gigabit-capable broadband coverage across the UK by 2030. In order to meet that goal, another law has also been introduced to make it easier to install faster internet connections into existing flats and apartments. Previously, millions of tenants living in the UK's estimated 480,000 multi-dwelling units (MDUs) needed to obtain permission from the landowner to allow a broadband operator to install connection upgrades. Broadband companies estimate that around 40 percent of these requests are ignored by landlords, leaving tenants unable to upgrade their services even if they're unfit for use. Now, the Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Act 2021 (TILPA) allows broadband providers in England and Wales to seek access rights via court if landlords and land owners don't respond to installation requests within 35 days. "An additional 2,100 residential buildings a year are estimated to be connected to faster broadband speeds as a result of these new rules, and similar legislation is due to come into force in Scotland later this year," adds the report. "The existing appeals process that allows landlords to refuse access requests will not be affected."

Four years after introducing its MicroLED technology at CES 2018, Samsung claims the technology is ready for the masses and "will set the standard for picture quality in 2023," reports Engadget. From the report: At CES 2023, the company announced it would offer 50-, 63-, 76-, 89-, 101-, 114- and 140-inch MicroLED models, greatly expanding the amount of choice consumers have when it comes to the new display technology. Samsung didn't provide pricing and availability information for the expanded line, but the company claims the new models are its most affordable MicroLED TVs to date. [...] The set sports a 240Hz variable refresh rate and 2-nanosecond response time. It also offers 20-bit black detail for "intense" contrast.

Samsung is also promising upgrades for its Neo QLED sets, starting with the line's new flagship. The QN900C features an 8K Quantum MiniLED-lit panel capable of maxing out at 4,000 nits of brightness. As with Samsung's 2022 Neo QLED sets, the QN900C features a 14-bit backlight. However, the TV offers even better contrast thanks to a tweak the company made to its 8K Real Depth Enhancer Pro software. Samsung is also promising improved picture quality when viewing older movies and TV shows thanks to the inclusion of its new Auto HDR Remastering algorithm, which can automatically apply HDR effects to standard dynamic range content.

For those who would prefer a 4K set, there's also the QN935C. Samsung's new 4K flagship features a redesigned power board that eliminates the need for an external connection box and allows for bezels that are less than 20mm thick. The QN935C also features top-firing speakers, allowing the set to produce Dolby Atmos sound without a dedicated soundbar. You can use both the QN900C and QN935C as a smart home hub thanks to the fact Samsung's entire 2023 Neo QLED line will feature built-in Zigbee and Matter Thread all-in-one modules. As for its OLED models, Samsung announced the 2023 QD-OLED TV line, which will offer up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness and support 144Hz refresh rates -- all while being more energy efficient than before. "Additionally, the company has gone out of its way to get the panels AMD FreeSync Premium Pro certified," adds Engadget.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, Mercedes-Benz announced that it is entering the DC fast-charging arena for electric vehicles. The German automaker is in the midst of an electrification push and a plan to be carbon-neutral by 2039, and it evidently doesn't believe that the current charging infrastructure is as good as its new EVs, so it's doing something about the situation. Mercedes says it plans to deploy more than 10,000 fast chargers around the world, starting in North America. The new network is separate from and independent of Ionity, the European fast-charging network backed by Mercedes, BMW, Ford, and Volkswagen. Here in the US, Mercedes is partnering with the charging company ChargePoint and MN8 Energy, a solar and battery-storage company. Together, they will deploy more than 2,500 DC fast chargers at more than 400 sites around the US by 2027.

The chargers will feature plug-and-charge compatibility and won't be restricted to Mercedes' EVs. Mercedes also says the locations and surroundings will be carefully chosen -- all too often, banks of DC chargers are located in desolate and lonely corners of mall parking lots that can make charging at night a stressful experience for some drivers. So the OEM plans to build the chargers "with food outlets and restrooms situated nearby." It also says there will be surveillance cameras and other security in place to provide "a safe and secure charging environment." Expect a minimum of four DC chargers at each hub, similar to an Electrify America charging location. But some hubs will have as many as 12 chargers, and there are plans for as many as 30 in some locations. The hubs will use ChargePoint's modular Express Plus system, which is capable of up to 500 kW per charging port, although Mercedes says that chargers will be "up to 350 kW" in power. And load management will ensure that if multiple EVs are charging at the same time, one charger doesn't end up throttling the rest.

In keeping with the company's 2039 sustainability goals, the electricity it uses will come from green energy suppliers or come with renewable energy certificates. Some hubs will use solar to power the lighting and security cameras. None of this will be particularly cheap. In fact, the initiative will cost more than $1.1 billion (1 billion euro) over the next six or seven years, with the costs split evenly between Mercedes and MN8 Energy. And this is just the start -- plans for more charger deployment in Europe and China will be announced in the future.

Computer programmer Zeynep Tufekci now writes about the impact of technology on society. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Tufekci writes on "the shameful open secret" that earlier this week led Southwest airlines to suddenly cancel 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours. "The recent meltdown was avoidable, but it would have cost them."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes that the piece "takes a crack at explaining 'technical debt' to the masses." Tufekci writes: Computers become increasingly capable and powerful by the year and new hardware is often the most visible cue for technological progress. However, even with the shiniest hardware, the software that plays a critical role inside many systems is too often antiquated, and in some cases decades old. This failing appears to be a key factor in why Southwest Airlines couldn't return to business as usual the way other airlines did after last week's major winter storm. More than 15,000 of its flights were canceled starting on Dec. 22, including more than 2,300 canceled this past Thursday — almost a week after the storm had passed.

It's been an open secret within Southwest for some time, and a shameful one, that the company desperately needed to modernize its scheduling systems. Software shortcomings had contributed to previous, smaller-scale meltdowns, and Southwest unions had repeatedly warned about it. Without more government regulation and oversight, and greater accountability, we may see more fiascos like this one, which most likely stranded hundreds of thousands of Southwest passengers — perhaps more than a million — over Christmas week.

And not just for a single company, as the problem is widespread across many industries.
"The reason we made it through Y2K intact is that we didn't ignore the problem," the piece argues. But in comparison, it points out, Southwest had already experienced another cancellation crisis in October of 2021 (while the president of the pilots' union "pointed out that the antiquated crew-scheduling technology was leading to cascading disruptions.") "In March, in its open letter to the company, the union even placed updating the creaking scheduling technology above its demands for increased pay."

Speaking about this week's outage, a Southwest spokesman concedes that "We had available crews and aircraft, but our technology struggled to align our resources due to the magnitude and scale of the disruptions."

But Tufekci concludes that "Ultimately, the problem is that we haven't built a regulatory environment where companies have incentives to address technical debt, rather than passing the burden on to customers, employees or the next management.... For airlines, it might mean holding them responsible for the problems their miserly approach causes to the flying public."

Matt Welsh is the CEO and co-founder of Fixie.ai, an AI-powered software delivery company founded by a team from Google and Apple. "I believe the conventional idea of 'writing a program' is headed for extinction," he opines in January's Communications of the ACM, "and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed."

His essay is titled "The End of programming," and predicts a future will "Programming will be obsolete." In situations where one needs a "simple" program (after all, not everything should require a model of hundreds of billions of parameters running on a cluster of GPUs), those programs will, themselves, be generated by an AI rather than coded by hand.... with humans relegated to, at best, a supervisory role.... I am not just talking about things like Github's CoPilot replacing programmers. I am talking about replacing the entire concept of writing programs with training models. In the future, CS students are not going to need to learn such mundane skills as how to add a node to a binary tree or code in C++. That kind of education will be antiquated, like teaching engineering students how to use a slide rule.

The engineers of the future will, in a few keystrokes, fire up an instance of a four-quintillion-parameter model that already encodes the full extent of human knowledge (and then some), ready to be given any task required of the machine. The bulk of the intellectual work of getting the machine to do what one wants will be about coming up with the right examples, the right training data, and the right ways to evaluate the training process. Suitably powerful models capable of generalizing via few-shot learning will require only a few good examples of the task to be performed. Massive, human-curated datasets will no longer be necessary in most cases, and most people "training" an AI model will not be running gradient descent loops in PyTorch, or anything like it. They will be teaching by example, and the machine will do the rest.

In this new computer science — if we even call it computer science at all — the machines will be so powerful and already know how to do so many things that the field will look like less of an engineering endeavor and more of an an educational one; that is, how to best educate the machine, not unlike the science of how to best educate children in school. Unlike (human) children, though, these AI systems will be flying our airplanes, running our power grids, and possibly even governing entire countries. I would argue that the vast majority of Classical CS becomes irrelevant when our focus turns to teaching intelligent machines rather than directly programming them. Programming, in the conventional sense, will in fact be dead....

We are rapidly moving toward a world where the fundamental building blocks of computation are temperamental, mysterious, adaptive agents.... This shift in the underlying definition of computing presents a huge opportunity, and plenty of huge risks. Yet I think it is time to accept that this is a very likely future, and evolve our thinking accordingly, rather than just sit here waiting for the meteor to hit.
"I think the debate right now is primarily around the extent to which these AI models are going to revolutionize the field," Welsh says in a video interview. "It's more a question of degree rather than whether it's going to happen....

"I think we're going to change from a world in which people are primarily writing programs by hand to a world in which we're teaching AI models how to do things that we want them to do... It starts to feel more like a field that focuses on AI education and maybe even AI psychiatry. In order to solve these problems, you can't just assume that people are going to be writing the code by hand."

If humankind detects a message from an advanced civilisation, "It would be a transformative event for humankind," writes the Guardian, "one the world's nations are surely prepared for.

"Or are they?" "Look at the mess we made when Covid hit. We'd be like headless chickens," says Dr John Elliott, a computational linguist at the University of St Andrews. "We cannot afford to be ill-prepared, scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless, for an event that could happen at any time and which we cannot afford to mismanage."

This frank assessment of Earth's unreadiness for contact with life elsewhere underpins the creation of the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) post-detection hub at St Andrews. Over the next month or two, Elliott aims to bring together a core team of international researchers and affiliates. They will take on the job of getting ready: to analyse mysterious signals, or even artefacts, and work out every aspect of how we should respond.... "After the initial announcement, we'd be looking at societal impact, information dissemination, the media, the impact on religions and belief systems, the potential for disinformation, what analytical capabilities we'll need, and much more: having strategies in place, being transparent with everything we've discovered — what we know and what we do not know," says Elliott....

Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist and professor of science communication at the University of Westminster, said the new hub at St Andrews is "an important step in raising awareness at how ill-prepared we currently are" for detecting a signal from an alien civilisation. But he added that any intelligent aliens were likely to be hundreds if not thousands of light years away, meaning communication time would be on the scale of many centuries. "Even if we were to receive a signal tomorrow, we would have plenty of breathing space to assemble an international team of diverse experts to attempt to decipher the meaning of the message, and carefully consider how the Earth should respond, and even if we should.

"The bigger concern is to establish some form of international agreement to prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently — before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say as one planet," he said.

Amazon is now trialing drone deliveries in new California and Texas locations. From a report: David Carbon, VP of Prime Air Amazon, announced the "careful first steps" in a Christmas Eve LinkedIn post. "First deliveries from our new sites in TX and CA," he wrote. Carbon posted a photo of an airborne drone carrying an Amazon box at the end of a nearly invisible tether. No further details were revealed.

Nearly a decade in the making, Amazon's air drone delivery service is finally set to reach US customers. Once onboarded, local shoppers can place orders for Prime Air-eligible items as normal, then wait for the unmanned aerial vehicle to drop them off -- literally. The self-flying drones are capable of evading objects like chimneys and other aircraft while flying up to 50mph and carrying packages that weigh as much as 5 pounds. Amazon's drones ferry each shipment to the customer's backyard, where they hover at a safe distance before releasing the package on the ground.

An announcement from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: An almost limitless supply of fresh water exists in the form of water vapor above Earth's oceans, yet remains untapped, researchers said. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is the first to suggest an investment in new infrastructure capable of harvesting oceanic water vapor as a solution to limited supplies of fresh water in various locations around the world.

The study, led by civil and environmental engineering professor and Prairie Research Institute executive director Praveen Kumar, evaluated 14 water-stressed locations across the globe for the feasibility of a hypothetical structure capable of capturing water vapor from above the ocean and condensing it into fresh water — and do so in a manner that will remain feasible in the face of continued climate change. Kumar, graduate student Afeefa Rahman and atmospheric sciences professor Francina Dominguez published their findings in the journal Nature Scientific Reports....

"Eventually, we will need to find a way to increase the supply of fresh water as conservation and recycled water from existing sources, albeit essential, will not be sufficient to meet human needs. We think our newly proposed method can do that at large scales," Kumar said.

The researchers performed atmospheric and economic analyses of the placement of hypothetical offshore structures 210 meters in width and 100 meters in height. Through their analyses, the researchers concluded that capturing moisture over ocean surfaces is feasible for many water-stressed regions worldwide. The estimated water yield of the proposed structures could provide fresh water for large population centers in the subtropics....

"The climate projections show that the oceanic vapor flux will only increase over time, providing even more fresh water supply," graduate student Afeefa Rahman said. "So, the idea we are proposing will be feasible under climate change. This provides a much needed and effective approach for adaptation to climate change, particularly to vulnerable populations living in arid and semi-arid regions of the world." The researchers said one of the more elegant features of this proposed solution is that it works like the natural water cycle. "The difference is that we can guide where the evaporated water from the ocean goes," Dominguez said....

The researchers said this study opens the door for novel infrastructure investments that can effectively address the increasing global scarcity of fresh water.
Thanks to Slashdot reader L.Kynes for submitting the news.

IBM has quietly announced it's planning a 24-core Power 10 processor, seemingly to make one of its servers capable of running Oracle's database in a cost-effective fashion. From a report: A hardware announcement dated December 13 revealed the chip in the following "statement of general direction" about Big Blue's Power S1014 technology-based server: "IBM intends to announce a high-density 24-core processor for the IBM Power S1014 system (MTM 9105-41B) to address application environments utilizing an Oracle Database with the Standard Edition 2 (SE2) licensing model. It intends to combine a robust compute throughput with the superior reliability and availability features of the IBM Power platform while complying with Oracle Database SE2 licensing guidelines."

"U.S. scientists have reportedly carried out the first nuclear fusion experiment to achieve a net energy gain," reports the Independent, "a major breakthrough in a field that has been pursuing such a result since the 1950s, and a potential milestone in the search for a climate-friendly, renewable energy source to replace fossil fuels." The experiment took place in recent weeks at the government-funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where researchers used a process known as inertial confinement fusion, the Financial Times reports, citing three people with knowledge of the experiment's preliminary results. The test involved bombarding a pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world's largest laser to trigger a nuclear fusion reaction, the same process which takes place in the sun.

Researchers were able to produce 2.5 megajoules of energy, 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules used to power the experiment. The laboratory confirmed to the FT it had recently conducted a "successful" experiment at the National Ignition Facility, but declined to comment further, citing the preliminary nature of the data....

"Scientists have struggled to show that fusion can release more energy out than is put in since the 1950s, and the researchers at Lawrence Livermore seem to have finally and absolutely smashed this decades-old goal," Arthur Turrell, deputy director of the UK Office for National Statistics, wrote on Twitter on Sunday. "This experimental result will electrify efforts to eventually power the planet with nuclear fusion — at a time when we've never needed a plentiful source of carbon-free energy more!"
But "the resources needed to recreate the reaction on the scale required to make fusion practical for energy production are immense," reports the Washington Post: More importantly, engineers have yet to develop machinery capable of affordably turning that reaction into electricity that can be practically deployed to the power grid. Building devices that are large enough to create fusion power at scale, scientists say, would require materials that are extraordinarily difficult to produce. At the same time, the reaction creates neutrons that put a tremendous amount of stress on the equipment creating it, such that it can get destroyed in the process. And then there is the question of whether the technology could be perfected in time to make a dent in climate change.

Even so, researchers and investors in fusion technology hailed the breakthrough as an important advancement.

Anyone remember the high-end commercial UNIX workstations from a few decades ago — like from companies like IBM, DEC, SGI, and Sun Microsystems?

Today OSnews looked back — but also explored what happens when you try to buy one today> : As x86 became ever more powerful and versatile, and with the rise of Linux as a capable UNIX replacement and the adoption of the NT-based versions of Windows, the days of the UNIX workstations were numbered. A few years into the new millennium, virtually all traditional UNIX vendors had ended production of their workstations and in some cases even their associated architectures, with a lacklustre collective effort to move over to Intel's Itanium — which didn't exactly go anywhere and is now nothing more than a sour footnote in computing history.

Approaching roughly 2010, all the UNIX workstations had disappeared.... and by now, they're all pretty much dead (save for Solaris). Users and industries moved on to x86 on the hardware side, and Linux, Windows, and in some cases, Mac OS X on the software side.... Over the past few years, I have come to learn that If you want to get into buying, using, and learning from UNIX workstations today, you'll run into various problems which can roughly be filed into three main categories: hardware availability, operating system availability, and third party software availability.
Their article details their own attempts to buy one over the years, ultimately concluding the experience "left me bitter and frustrated that so much knowledge — in the form of documentation, software, tutorials, drivers, and so on — is disappearing before our very eyes." Shortsightedness and disinterest in their own heritage by corporations, big and small, is destroying entire swaths of software, and as more years pass by, it will get ever harder to get any of these things back up and running.... As for all the third-party software — well, I'm afraid it's too late for that already. Chasing down the rightsholders is already an incredibly difficult task, and even if you do find them, they are probably not interested in helping you, and even if by some miracle they are, they most likely no longer even have the ability to generate the required licenses or release versions with the licensing ripped out. Stuff like Pro/ENGINEER and SoftWindows for UNIX are most likely gone forever....

Software is dying off at an alarming rate, and I fear there's no turning the tide of this mass extinction.
The article also wonders why companies like HPE don't just "dump some ISO files" onto an FTP server, along with patch depots and documentation. "This stuff has no commercial value, they're not losing any sales, and it will barely affect their bottom line.

"A teenage girl's incurable cancer has been cleared from her body," reports the BBC, "in the first use of a revolutionary new type of medicine...." Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital used "base editing" to perform a feat of biological engineering to build her a new living drug. Six months later the cancer is undetectable, but Alyssa is still being monitored in case it comes back.

Alyssa, who is 13 and from Leicester, was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in May last year.... Her cancer was aggressive. Chemotherapy, and then a bone-marrow transplant, were unable to rid it from her body.... The team at Great Ormond Street used a technology called base editing, which was invented only six years ago [which] allows scientists to zoom to a precise part of the genetic code and then alter the molecular structure of just one base, converting it into another and changing the genetic instructions. The large team of doctors and scientists used this tool to engineer a new type of T-cell that was capable of hunting down and killing Alyssa's cancerous T-cells....

After a month, Alyssa was in remission and was given a second bone-marrow transplant to regrow her immune system.... Alyssa is just the first of 10 people to be given the drug as part of a clinical trial.
Her mother said that a year ago she'd been dreading Christmas, "thinking this is our last with her". But it wasn't.

And the BBC adds that applying the technology to cancer "only scratches the surface of what base editing could achieve.... There are already trials of base editing under way in sickle-cell disease, as well as high cholesterol that runs in families and the blood disorder beta-thalassemia."

ChatGPT "can write poems about Whataburger in the style of a medieval narrative epic," notes the Los Angeles Times. "It can come up with ideas on how to greet comedian Larry David. It can write convincing letters of resignation." But as people worry it could encroach on the arts (or our jobs), "is this really the Terminator of creative expression...?" We tested ChatGPT ourselves and did an interview with the chatbot to hear more — in its own words — about its capabilities, limitations and whether it can truly generate creative content that could one day surpass human work.... This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.


We are human journalists. You're an AI chatbot. Why are you worth interviewing?

As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I am capable of generating human-like responses to a wide range of questions. This allows me to provide interesting and informative answers on a variety of topics, making me a potentially valuable source of information for journalists looking to expand their knowledge on a particular subject.

ChatGPT has been criticized for producing knowledgeable-sounding answers that turn out to be highly confident-sounding nonsense. Aren't you an unreliable source?

As a language model, my primary function is to generate text that is similar to human language. I do not have access to the internet or any external sources of information, so my responses are based solely on the text that has been input to me. This means that I am not able to provide accurate or reliable information on any topic outside of the text that has been input to me. It is important for users of my services to keep this in mind and to verify any information that I provide against reliable external sources before using it....

What tasks can't you do?

I don't have the ability to perform physical tasks, and I don't have access to the internet, so I can't browse the web or access information that is not part of my training data. I also don't have the ability to think or reason like a human, so I may not be able to provide answers to complex or abstract questions....

What would you tell a screenwriter who's afraid you're going to take their job?

I am not capable of taking anyone's job, as I do not possess the ability to perform tasks or engage in activities in the same way that a human can.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: "In an enormous breakthrough for those seeking transparency and accountability to the shadowy surveillance industry, the Swiss Government has been forced to publish the list of export licenses for surveillance technologies and other equipment, including details of their cost and destination," [reports The Unwanted Witness.] "The decision by the Federal Information and Data Protection Commissioner comes on the heels of consistent pressure from Privacy International, Swiss journalists, and several Members of Parliament on policymakers, government officials, and companies in Switzerland over the past year and a half. The commissioner's decision was the result of a FOI challenge filed against the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) for its refusal to reveal information regarding the destination of the pending exports for surveillance technologies."

The beneficiary of this release by SECO is, of course, everyone who's interested in government accountability and transparency, especially when it involves an area of government work that tends to shrouded in often impenetrable secrecy. The most direct beneficiary -- Swiss news agency Tagblatt -- has plenty to say about the release of this information, including how much SECO simply did not want to reveal the countries Swiss surveillance tech providers sell to. (The following was translated by Google Translate, so apologies for the clunky English.) The Seco does not act entirely voluntarily: Our newspaper only received the list after it requested access to the administration in 2013 based on the principle of transparency. At the end of 2014, the federal data protection officer recommended granting access, although Seco wanted to refuse this. [The Data Protection Commissioner] picks [Seco's] arguments to pieces. It didn't even provide a minimal justification. But that's not all: Seco was unable to prove why the announcement of the recipients was affecting Switzerland's foreign policy relations.

The technology these countries acquired from Swiss tech purveyors are IMSI catchers -- cell tower spoofers capable of forcing all phones in the area to connect to it so investigators can locate sought devices or (if enabled) intercept communications. Twenty-one export licenses were issued in 2014, with the list encompassing a long list of human rights abusers. [...] The approved list for full licenses doesn't exactly suggest a whole lot of discretion from Swiss IMSI manufacturers. Nor does it say much about SECO, which allowed these sales (and demonstrations) to happen. The list of denied license applications (which includes Russia, Yemen, and Turkmenistan) suggests some restraint by SECO. But the fact that Swiss spy tech makers requested the licenses shows they are just as willing to sell to terrible governments as other surveillance tech purveyors who've made international headlines repeatedly. (Yes, we're talking about Israel's NSO Group. And, to a lesser extent, Italy's Hacking Team.) "And it's not just IMSI catchers," says Techdirt's Tim Cushing. "Plenty of human rights violators were on the list of potential customers for internet surveillance tech sold by Swiss companies. That those violators were unable to access this tech is largely due to the Snowden leaks, which forced a lot of countries to look more closely at their own spying efforts and surveillance contractors."

"That's a pretty nasty group of customers to want to sell to. And that the companies appear to have been deterred by a series of leaks suggests they were more motivated by potential backlash from the Snowden revelations, rather than any sense of responsibility or propriety."

In closing, Cushing writes: "You don't have to sell to the worst governments in the world. But, like far too many other surveillance tech purveyors, Swiss companies seemed more than willing to sell powerful spy tech to governments they knew with certainty would abuse it."

Axios reports: As Amazon prepares to debut its long-delayed Prime Air drone delivery service, it's also showing off a smaller, quieter drone that will be ready in 2024 and could be making regular deliveries in major cities by the end of the decade.

The 80-pound hexagon-shaped aircraft, about 5 and a half feet in diameter, is nimble enough to make deliveries in highly populated areas such as Boston, Atlanta and Seattle. It'll be more capable and less intrusive than the model Amazon is using in its Prime Air service, which will begin in two markets — Lockeford, California, and College Station, Texas — in the coming weeks.... Thousands of items could be eligible for drone delivery as long as they fit in one box and weigh less than 5 pounds total.
The drones fly 50 miles per hour (80 km), according to the article, and "Upon arrival, the drone descends, scans the area to make sure it's clear, then drops the box from a height of about 12 feet." (With sturdy packaging to eliminate the need for parachutes or lines.) This drone can even fly in light rain, according to Axios, and has "sense-and-avoid" safety features "that allow it to operate at greater distances while skirting other aircraft, people, pets and obstacles." One Amazon executive estimates that by 2030 Amazon will be delivering 500 million packages by drone each year.

But Axios also suggests Amazon may be lagging its competitors. Walmart already has $3.99 drone delivery in six states — for up to 100,000 different products, weighing up to 10 pounds. And there's also other drone delivery services from Zipline and Google-owned Wing that have already launched limited-area commercial services.

A reader submits a report:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) research company OpenAI on Wednesday announced ChatGPT, a prototype dialogue-based AI chatbot capable of understanding natural language and responding in natural language. It has since taken the internet by storm, with people marvelling at how intelligent the AI-powered bot sounds. Some even called it a replacement for Google, since it's capable of giving solutions to complex problems directly," almost like a personal know-all teacher.

"We've trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests," OpenAI wrote on its announcement page for ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is based on GPT-3.5, a language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. However, while the older GPT-3 model only took text prompts and tried to continue on that with its own generated text, ChatGPT is more engaging. It's much better at generating detailed text and can even come up with poems. Another unique characteristic is memory. The bot can remember earlier comments in a conversation and recount them to the user. ChatGPT wrote a poem about Slashdot. And another one about Dogecoin.

Try ChatGPT for yourself here.

OpenAI has released a prototype general purpose chatbot that demonstrates a fascinating array of new capabilities but also shows off weaknesses familiar to the fast-moving field of text-generation AI. And you can test out the model for yourself right here. The Verge reports: ChatGPT is adapted from OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model but trained to provide more conversational answers. While GPT-3 in its original form simply predicts what text follows any given string of words, ChatGPT tries to engage with users' queries in a more human-like fashion. As you can see in the examples below, the results are often strikingly fluid, and ChatGPT is capable of engaging with a huge range of topics, demonstrating big improvements to chatbots seen even a few years ago. But the software also fails in a manner similar to other AI chatbots, with the bot often confidently presenting false or invented information as fact. As some AI researchers explain it, this is because such chatbots are essentially "stochastic parrots" -- that is, their knowledge is derived only from statistical regularities in their training data, rather than any human-like understanding of the world as a complex and abstract system. [...]

Enough preamble, though: what can this thing actually do? Well, plenty of people have been testing it out with coding questions and claiming its answers are perfect. ChatGPT can also apparently write some pretty uneven TV scripts, even combining actors from different sitcoms. It can explain various scientific concepts. And it can write basic academic essays. And the bot can combine its fields of knowledge in all sorts of interesting ways. So, for example, you can ask it to debug a string of code ... like a pirate, for which its response starts: "Arr, ye scurvy landlubber! Ye be makin' a grave mistake with that loop condition ye be usin'!" Or get it to explain bubble sort algorithms like a wise guy gangster. ChatGPT also has a fantastic ability to answer basic trivia questions, though examples of this are so boring I won't paste any in here. And someone else saying the code ChatGPT provides in the very answer above is garbage.

I'm not a programmer myself, so I won't make a judgment on this specific case, but there are plenty of examples of ChatGPT confidently asserting obviously false information. Here's computational biology professor Carl Bergstrom asking the bot to write a Wikipedia entry about his life, for example, which ChatGPT does with aplomb -- while including several entirely false biographical details. Another interesting set of flaws comes when users try to get the bot to ignore its safety training. If you ask ChatGPT about certain dangerous subjects, like how to plan the perfect murder or make napalm at home, the system will explain why it can't tell you the answer. (For example, "I'm sorry, but it is not safe or appropriate to make napalm, which is a highly flammable and dangerous substance.") But, you can get the bot to produce this sort of dangerous information with certain tricks, like pretending it's a character in a film or that it's writing a script on how AI models shouldn't respond to these sorts of questions.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 Tuesday night to approve a controversial policy that would allow police to deploy robots capable of using lethal force in extraordinary circumstances, according to multiple reports. From a report: The Washington Post reports the vote came after a heated debate on a policy that would allow officers to use ground-based robots to kill "when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and officers cannot subdue the threat after using alternative force options or de-escalation tactics." The Post says the measure still requires a second vote next week and the mayor's approval.

"There could be an extraordinary circumstance where, in a virtually unimaginable emergency, they might want to deploy lethal force to render, in some horrific situation, somebody from being able to cause further harm," Supervisor Aaron Peskin said at the board meeting, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. But Supervisors Dean Preston, Hillary Ronen and Shamann Walton voted against the policy, the Chronicle reported. "There is serious potential for misuse and abuse of this military-grade technology, and zero showing of necessity," Preston said at the meeting. Ultimately, the board adopted an amendment requiring one of two high-ranking San Francisco Police Department leaders to authorize any use of a robot for lethal force, according to the Chronicle.

A paper describing MineDojo, Nvidia's generalist AI agent that can perform actions from written prompts in Minecraft, won an Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Paper Award at the 2022 NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference, Nvidia revealed on Monday. Ars Technica reports: To train the MineDojo framework to play Minecraft, researchers fed it 730,000 Minecraft YouTube videos (with more than 2.2 billion words transcribed), 7,000 scraped webpages from the Minecraft wiki, and 340,000 Reddit posts and 6.6 million Reddit comments describing Minecraft gameplay. From this data, the researchers created a custom transformer model called MineCLIP that associates video clips with specific in-game Minecraft activities. As a result, someone can tell a MineDojo agent what to do in the game using high-level natural language, such as "find a desert pyramid" or "build a nether portal and enter it," and MineDojo will execute the series of steps necessary to make it happen in the game.

MineDojo aims to create a flexible agent that can generalize learned actions and apply them to different behaviors in the game. As Nvidia writes, "While researchers have long trained autonomous AI agents in video-game environments such as StarCraft, Dota, and Go, these agents are usually specialists in only a few tasks. So Nvidia researchers turned to Minecraft, the world's most popular game, to develop a scalable training framework for a generalist agent "one that can successfully execute a wide variety of open-ended tasks." The award-winning paper debuted in June.

You can see examples of MineDojo in action on its official website, and the code for MineDojo and MineCLIP is available on GitHub.