"Billions of people" uses social media every month, notes the Wall Street Journal.. But "fewer and fewer are actually posting."

Instead they're favoring "a more passive experience, surveys of users and research from data-analytics firms say." In an October report from data-intelligence company Morning Consult, 61% of U.S. adult respondents with a social-media account said they have become more selective about what they post. The reasons are varied: People say they feel they can't control the content they see. They have become more protective about sharing their lives online. They also say the fun of social media has fizzled. This lurker mentality is widespread, across Meta Platforms' Instagram and Facebook along with X and TikTok....

In a survey conducted in the U.S. this summer, research firm Gartner found more than half of respondents believed the quality of social media has declined in the past five years. They cited misinformation, toxicity and the proliferation of bots as reasons it has gotten worse. "The less you trust social-media brands, the less of a good experience you're having," says Gartner analyst Emily Weiss. Users are less likely to share opinions or insight into their lives since the community they are looking for isn't there, she adds. Ads and suggested posts have also sucked the joy out of apps, some users say... The algorithmic spotlight on creators and their hyper-curated content has made some users feel insecure and less likely to share their own photos and videos, says Kevin Tran, media and entertainment analyst at Morning Consult. In turn, some now think of social apps more as sources of entertainment, like YouTube or Netflix.

Gartner estimates that 50% of users will either abandon or significantly limit their interactions with social media in the next two years.
Any threat to interacting is a threat to business, the article notes, adding "The companies are responding." They are investing in more private user experiences like messaging, and making interactions more secure. And encouraging people to post to a more intimate audience — as with Instagram's recently expanded Close Friends feature... Meta responded to user complaints, saying it would continue to work on improving recommendations to help creators reach more people. The company added a snooze button that pauses suggested posts for 30 days at a time, and chronological feeds that temporarily only show posts from accounts people follow... Meta began shifting its resources toward messaging, including efforts to enable end-to-end encryption by default across all of its messaging services... TikTok has also shown signs of investing more in the messaging portion of its app, nudging users to chat with people they haven't messaged in a while.
When the Wall Street Journal posted their article on Threads, Adam Mosseri (head of Instagram) responded that "People are sharing to feeds less, but to Stories more," and "even more still" in Messages ("even photos and videos"). Mosseri also said that Instagram's Notes feature — basically a post where you cab specify a smaller subset of your followers to see it — "have quickly become a big thing, particularly for young people.

"So it's no so much that people are sharing less," Mosseri argued, "but rather than they're sharing differently."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by Naomi Kresge: In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of scientists from all over the world banded together in an open-source effort to develop an antiviral that would be available for all. They could never have anticipated the many roadblocks they would face along the way, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which made refugees out of a group of Kyiv chemists who were doing important work for the project. The group, which called itself Covid Moonshot, hasn't given up on its effort to introduce a more affordable, patent-free treatment for the virus. Their open-source Covid antiviral, now funded by Wellcome, is on track to be ready for human testing within the next year and a half, according to Annette von Delft, a University of Oxford scientist and one of the Moonshot group's leaders. More early discovery work on a range of potential inhibitors for other viruses is also still going on and being funded by a US government grant.

"It's a bit like a proof of concept," von Delft says, for bringing a patent-free experimental drug into the clinic, a model that could be repurposed as a tool to fight neglected tropical diseases or antimicrobial resistance, or prepare for future pandemics. "Can we come up with a strategic model that can help those kinds of compounds with less of a business case along?" Of course, there was definitely a business case for a Covid antiviral, and some of the biggest drugmakers rushed to develop them. In 2022, Pfizer Inc.'s Paxlovid was one of the world's best-selling medicines with $18.9 billion in revenue. Demand has since cratered for the pill, which needs to be given shortly after infection and can't be taken alongside a number of other commonly prescribed medicines. Analysts expect the Paxlovid revenue to plunge just shy of $1 billion this year.

However, there is still a need for a better Covid antiviral, particularly in countries where access to the Pfizer pill is limited, according to von Delft. Covid cases have surged again this holiday season, with the rise of a new variant called JN.1 reminding us that the virus is still changing to evade the immunity we've built up so far. Just before Christmas, UK authorities said about one in every 24 people in England and Scotland had the disease. An accessible antiviral could help people return to work more quickly, and it could also be tested as a potential treatment for long Covid. "We know from experience in viral disease that there will be resistance variants evolving over time," von Delft said. "We'll need more than one."

Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi has revealed its first electric car, a sharp-looking sedan called the SU7. Slated to roll out in China next year, it's another entry into an increasingly crowded market for EVs. It's also another attempt in this software-obsessed world to match up the technology people find in their phones to what goes on inside their car. From a report: Xiaomi might have a shot. That's because the car will run Xiaomi's "HyperOS," a new architecture the company has been working on for more than six years that's supposed to be dynamic enough to power everything including phones, smart home systems and cars. The goal is a more seamless experience, one where your apps and preferences are ready to go no matter where you are.

[...] As for the specs, they look impressive on paper. The company is claiming as much range on a full charge as 800 km, or just shy of 500 miles, though that's on China's rosy test cycle. That is on the higher-end model, which is built atop a 101kWh battery pack from Chinese giant CATL. A base model with just 73.6kWh of capacity will allegedly get closer to 668 km, or 415 miles, on a charge. They will charge fast (220 km in five minutes) and will be fast (0-100 km/h in just 2.78 seconds). Pricing will come at a later date.

"Share this holiday fairy tale with your loved ones," urges the Free Software Foundation.

A company offers you a tool to make your life easier, but, when you use it, you find out that the tool forces you to use it only in the way the tool's manufacturer approves. Does this story ring a bell? It's what millions of software users worldwide experience again and again, day after day. It's also the story of Wendell the Elf and the ShoeTool.
They suggest enjoying the video "to remind yourself why you shouldn't let your tools tell you how to use them." First released in 2019, it's available on the free/open-source video site PeerTube, a decentralized (and ActivityPub-federated) platform powered by WebTorrent.

They've also created a shortened URL for sharing on social media (recommending the hashtag #shoetool ). "And, of course, you can adapt the video to your liking after downloading the source files." Or, you can share the holiday fairy tale with your loved ones so that they can learn not to let their tools control them.

If we use free software, we don't need anyone's permission to, for example, modify our tools ourselves or install modifications shared by others. We don't need permission to ask someone else to tailor our tools to serve our wishes, exercise our creativity. The Free Software Foundation believes that everyone deserves full control over their computers and phones, and we hope this video helps you explain the importance of free software to your friends and family.
"Don't let your tools tell you how to use them," the video ends. "Join the Free Software Foundation!"

"The iMessage connection software that powers Beeper Mini and Beeper Cloud is now 100% open source," Beeper announced late this week. " Anyone who wants can use it or continue development."

But while Beeper says it's done trying to bring iMessage to Android, CNET reports that the whole battle was "deeply tied" to Apple's ongoing strategy to control the mobile market: The tide seems to be changing, however: Apple said last month it would be opening up its Messages app (likely due to European regulation) to work with the newer, more feature-rich texting protocol called RCS. This hopefully will lead to a more modern and secure messaging experience when texting between an iPhone and an Android phone, and lead away from the aging SMS and MMS standards. Unfortunately, green bubbles will continue to persist even if there might be little to no functional difference. While third-party apps like Nothing Chats attempted and ultimately failed to bring iMessage to Android, Apple will likely never release the app on Google's mobile operating system.

Until RCS is fully adopted, companies are creating services to allow access to iMessage via Android phones. Apple, for its part, has been quick to block apps like Beeper Mini, citing security concerns. This, however, is raising eyebrows from lawmakers regarding competition in the messaging space and Apple's tight control over the market...

Beeper in a December 21 blog post told users to grab a jailbroken iPhone and install a free Beeper tool that'll generate iMessage registration codes to keep the service operational. It's such a roundabout and potentially expensive way of trying to get iMessage on Android that it likely won't be worth it for most people. For those not willing to go out and jailbreak an iPhone, Beeper said in a now-deleted blog post that it would allow people to rent a jailbroken unit for a small monthly fee starting next year.

"Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says that he stands by the company's decision to charge for API access," writes the blog 9to5Mac, "despite the fact that it was massively unpopular, and led to the demise of the leading Reddit app, Apollo." In an interview with FastCo, Huffman is unrepentant about the API decision, but says it could have been better communicated... "[H]e defended the company's decision to limit free access to its API as a necessary measure to foil AI-training freeloaders. 'Reddit is an open platform, and we love that,' he told me. 'At the same time, we have been taken advantage of by some of the largest companies in the world.'"
The incident ended up reappearing in Reddit's own "recap" pages showing highlights from its popular subreddits. For its Technology subreddit, the official recap shows that two most popular posts were "Apollo for Reddit is shutting down" and "Reddit sparks outrage after a popular app developer said it wants him to pay $20 million a year for data access."

And Reddit's official recap also shows that discussion leading to the second-most popular comment of the entire year for the subreddit. "Users supply all the content, and reddit turns around with this huge fuck you to its users, without whom it's just another crappy link aggregator. No, reddit, fuck you and your money grab."

The first most-popular comment appeared in a related discussion, headlined "Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators From Subreddits Continuing Apollo-Related Blackouts." The comment?

Reddit: You're fired!
Moderator: I don't even work here.

The topic also dominated the official recap for the Programming subreddit, where it was the subject of all three of the top comments — and all three of the year's top posts:

Ironically, FastCo headlined its interview "As the AI era begins, Reddit is leaning into its humanity." ("Rebellious moderators. Large language models' peril and promise. Maybe a long-awaited IPO. Amid it all, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says the web megacommunity is on a roll.") Other work has addressed concerns that bubbled to the surface during the moderator dust-up, such as accessibility issues: "I told the team, 'Just show up and ship,'" Huffman says. The official Reddit apps are finally compatible with screen readers used by users with vision impairments, with full compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium's accessibility guidelines planned by the end of 2024.

As for AI's potential to transform the Reddit experience, Huffman is less prone to exuberant overpromising than the average tech company CEO. But the same attributes that led third-party assemblers of large language models to crave access to the company's corpus of information could help it leverage the technology to its own benefit... Rather than involving the most obvious AI functionality, like a Reddit chatbot, the examples he provides relate to moderation of problem content. For instance, the latitude that individual moderators have to govern their communities means that they can set rules that Huffman describes as "sometimes strict and sometimes esoteric." Newbies may run afoul of them by accident and have their posts yanked just as they're trying to join the conversation. In response, Reddit is currently prototyping an AI-powered feature called "post guidance." It'll flag rule-violating material before it's ever published: "The new user gets feedback, and the mod doesn't have to deal with it," says Huffman. He adds that Reddit will also use AI to crack down on willful bad behavior, such as bullying and hate speech, and that he expects progress on that front in 2024...

Members already engage in acts of commerce such as tipping Photoshop wizards to remove ex-boyfriends from images; he says the company plans to facilitate these transactions with a payment system "that will basically involve users sending money to users, whether it's rewarding them for content or paying for digital services or digital goods or [physical] services." "People are trying to start businesses on Reddit, but it wasn't really built for that," he adds. "So just trying to flesh out that ecosystem, I think that'll be very powerful."

The New Yorker looks at 41-year-old Amabel Holland, an autistic board-game designer who "thinks about the world in terms of systems," and realized you could make a board game about almost anything, "and, when you did, its rules could both mirror and analyze the subject on which it was based."

They've since designed more than 60 games, and the article notes that Holland's work, "which is part of a larger turn toward complexity in the industry, often tackles historical and social subjects — death, religion, misinformation — using surprising 'mechanics,' or building blocks of game play, to immerse players in an experience." "With every game, you build a certain model of the world," Reiner Knizia, a former mathematician who's designed more than eight hundred games, told me. Several of his games illustrate market forces: in Modern Art, for instance, you play as auctioneers and buyers, hoping to buy low and sell high. Knizia is a traditional game designer inasmuch as he aims to "bring enjoyment to the people." But Amabel sometimes aims for the opposite of enjoyment... This Guilty Land, from 2018, is about the struggle to end slavery."
Holland says their games are "meant to evoke frustration" — specifically to communicate how difficult it can be to actually achieve political progress.

Thanks to Slashdot reader silverjacket for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A report at The Information says that AI might already be taking people's jobs at Google. The report cites people briefed on the plans and says Google intends to "consolidate staff, including through possible layoffs, by reassigning employees at its large customer sales unit who oversee relationships with major advertisers." According to the report, the jobs are being vacated because Google's new AI tools have automated them. The report says a future restructuring was apparently already announced at a department-wide Google Ads meeting last week.

Google announced a "new era of AI-powered ads" in May, featuring a "natural-language conversational experience within Google Ads, designed to jump-start campaign creation and simplify Search ads." Google said its new AI could scan your website and "generate relevant and effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images, and other assets," making the Google Ads chatbot one part designer and one part sales expert. [...] The report also notes another benefit of making AI do this work: "Because these tools don't require much employee attention, they carry relatively few expenses, so the ad revenue carries a high-profit margin."

The Information report says, "A growing number of advertisers have adopted PMax since [launch], eliminating the need for some employees who specialized in selling ads for a particular Google service, like search, working together to design ad campaigns for big customers." [Google's Performance Max, or "PMax," is a Google ad tool that can help advertisers actually make ad content and determine the best places for it -- YouTube, Search, Gmail, etc.] According to the report, as of a year ago, Google had about 13,500 people devoted to this kind of sales work, a huge chunk of the 30,000-strong ad division. These 13,500 people aren't necessarily all going to be affected, and those who are won't necessarily be laid off -- they could be reassigned to other areas in Google. We should know the scale of Google Ad's big re-org soon. The report says, "Some employees expect the changes to be announced next month."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Eric Migicovsky insists his Beeper Mini will continue despite Apple's best efforts to prevent it bringing iMessage blue speech bubbles to Android. Beeper Mini is, or is continually trying to be, a way to get iMessage without buying an iPhone -- although users might have to get access to a Mac. Since the start of December 2023, Beeper has launched a service to do this, then Apple blocked it, then Beeper tried another way.

According to The Information, this cycle is going to continue, too, as Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky maintains that his company will persist -- and could take legal action, too. "We're investigating legal ramifications for Apple, definitely," said Migicovsky. "Around antitrust, around competition, around how they've made the experience worse for iPhone users with this change. They've degraded the performance of iMessage for iPhone users," he continued, "all in search of crushing a competitor."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It's no secret that TV makers are seriously invested in pushing ads. Using TVs for advertising goes back to 1941 when the first TV commercial aired. But as we trudge our way through the 21st century, TV vendors are becoming more involved in ensuring that their hardware is used to sell stuff and add to their own recurring revenue. This has taken various forms, but in some cases, we're seeing increasingly invasive strategies for turning TVs into a primary place for shopping. The latest approach catching attention comes from the startup Displace. Its upcoming TVs will use integrated webcams and NFC payment readers to make it easy for people to buy stuff they see on TV. [...]

The two new TVs Displace is adding to its 2024 release plans, the Displace Flex and Displace Mini, are all about making TV shopping better. According to Displace's announcement, the Displace Flex (a 55-inch 4K OLED TV) and Displace Mini (a 27-inch 4K OLED TV) will use proprietary gesture technology and each TV's integrated 4K camera to tell when a user is raising their hand. It's unclear how accurate that will be (could the shopping experience accidentally be activated if I raised my hand to tie my hair up, for example?), but at that point, the TV is supposed to pause the content being played. Then, it uses computer vision to "analyze the screen to find products available for sale. Once they see something they want to purchase, viewers drag and drop the product into the global Displace Shopping Cart," the announcement says. Displace Shopping will work at any moment the TV is on, and users can buy stuff they see in commercials by using the TVs.

Displace's December 14 announcement said: "As soon as the viewer is ready to checkout, Displace Payments makes paying as easy as bringing a user's smartphone or watch near the TV's built-in NFC payment reader, a fully secure process that requires no credit card info. Viewers can also pay from within the Displace app." If the TV can't find a specific product for sale, it will "search for similar items" without user intervention, according to Displace. The TV will show products from any available online retailers, allowing users to select where they want to make their purchase. Displace hasn't provided full details about how it will make money off these transactions, but when reached for comment, founder and CEO Balaji Krishnan told Ars Technica that Displace has "different business models, and one of them is to take a transaction fee," and that Displace will share more details "later." Displace also sees people using Displace Payments to pay for telehealth applications and equipped the Flex and Mini with thermal cameras. To ease privacy concerns, Krishnan says the integrated cameras can be folded into the TVs if a user needs privacy.

Eventually, Displace sees itself working with content publishers to lay its shopping UI over actively playing content. "Users would see a workable buy button right on top of the playing video," adds Ars.

prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: Announced in early August and initially planned for the end of the month, the Fedora Asahi Remix distribution is finally here for those who want to install the Fedora Linux operating system on their Apple Silicon Macs. Previously a remix of Arch Linux ARM, the Fedora Asahi Remix distribution is the result of a multi-year collaboration between the Asahi Linux project and the Fedora Project, enabling you to have a proper daily driver on your Apple Silicon Mac thanks to Fedora Linux's excellent 64-bit ARM support.

The distro is based on the latest Fedora Linux 39 release and ships with the KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment by default, using Wayland. This promises a smooth Linux desktop experience on Apple hardware similar to macOS. Fedora Asahi Remix also comes with XWayland for those who want to run X11 apps. In addition, it features non-conformant OpenGL 3.3 support including GPU-accelerated geometry shaders and transform feedback, PipeWire by default with WirePlumber, as well as the Calamares graphical installer. You can download and install Fedora Asahi Remix here.

Intel launched its Intel Core Ultra processors for AI-powered PCs at its AI Everywhere event today. From a report: The big chip maker said these processors spearhead a new era in computing, offering unparalleled power efficiency, superior compute and graphics performance, and an unprecedented AI PC experience to mobile platforms and edge devices. Available immediately, these processors will be used in over 230 AI PCs coming from renowned partners like Acer, ASUS, Dell, Gigabyte, and more.

The Intel Core Ultra processors represent an architectural shift for Intel, marking its largest design change in 40 years. These processors harness the Intel 4 process technology and Foveros 3D advanced packaging, leveraging leading-edge processes for optimal performance and capabilities. The processors boast a performance-core (P-core) architecture enhancing instructions per cycle (IPC). Efficient-cores (E-cores) and low-power Efficient-cores (LP E-cores). They deliver up to 11% more compute power compared to competitors, ensuring superior CPU performance for ultrathin PCs.

Features of Intel Core Ultra
Intel Arc GPU: Featuring up to eight Xe-cores, this GPU incorporates AI-based Xe Super Sampling, offering double the graphics performance compared to prior generations. It includes support for modern graphics features like ray tracing, mesh shading, AV1 encode and decode, HDMI 2.1, and DisplayPort 2.1 20G.
AI Boost NPU: Intel's latest NPU, Intel AI Boost, focuses on low-power, long-running AI tasks, augmenting AI processing on the CPU and GPU, offering 2.5x better power efficiency compared to its predecessors.
Advanced Performance Capabilities: With up to 16 cores, 22 threads, and Intel Thread Director for optimized workload scheduling, these processors boast a maximum turbo frequency of 5.1 GHz and support for up to 96 GB DDR5 memory capacity.
Cutting-edge Connectivity: Integrated Intel Wi-Fi 6E and support for discrete Intel Wi-Fi 7 deliver blazing wireless speeds, while Thunderbolt 4 ensures connectivity to multiple 4K monitors and fast storage with speeds of 40 Gbps.
Enhanced AI Performance: OpenVINO toolkits, ONNX, and ONNX Runtime offer streamlined workflow, automatic device detection, and enhanced AI performance.

A jury in San Francisco unanimously found (PDF) that Google violated California and federal antitrust laws through deals that stifled competition for its mobile app store. "The verdict delivers the first significant US courtroom loss for big tech in the years-long campaign by rivals, regulators, and prosecutors to tame the power of internet gatekeepers," reports Wired. From the report: The lawsuit next moves to a remedies phase, meaning a judge as soon as the coming weeks will hear arguments about and decide whether to order changes to Google's business practices. Users of devices powered by Google's Android operating system could find more app options to choose from, at lower prices, if Google is forced to allow downloads of rival app stores from Play or share a greater portion of sales with developers selling digital items inside their apps.

The ruling came in a case first filed in 2020 by Epic Games, known for its blockbuster game Fortnite and tools for developers, and argued before a jury since early November. The jury of nine -- a 10th juror dropped out early in the trial -- deliberated for three hours before reaching its verdict. They faced 11 questions such as defining product and geographic markets and whether Google engaged in anticompetitive conduct in those areas. Epic had accused Google of restricting smartphone makers, wireless carriers, and app developers from providing any competition to the Play store, which accounts for over 95 percent of all downloads onto Android phones in the US. Google had denied any wrongdoing, saying that its sole aim was to provide a safe and attractive experience to users, especially as it faced competition from Apple, its iPhone, and its App Store.

With iOS 17.2 rolling out today, Apple is giving users the ability to record spatial videos on their iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. "The new feature lets users film in three dimensions and experience their favorite memories and special moments on Apple Vision Pro, the upcoming mixed-reality headset," reports TechCrunch. From the report: In order to create a three-dimensional video, Apple explains that the iPhone uses both the main and ultrawide cameras when recording. This is then saved as a single file within a new album in the Photos app titled "Spatial." The videos will also sync across devices with iCloud. Spatial videos are captured in 1080p resolution at 30 frames per second. Spatial video recording can be enabled in Settings by toggling on "Spatial Video for Apple Vision Pro" in the Camera section under Formats. Apple suggests holding the iPhone in landscape orientation for optimal results. Spatial videos can be viewed on all iPhones and other devices; however, they'll appear as regular, 2D videos.

The new feature allows users to record videos that Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Greg Joswiak, describes as "magical" and "setting a new bar for what's possible." While that's marketing speak, it's a differentiator for Apple's high-end iPhone, and will deepen users' connections with Apple's latest product, the AR/VR headset, launching next year. As part of today's release, Apple also launched its Journal app, which is designed to allow iOS users to record key moments in their lives.

Slow load times? Choppy videos? The real problem is latency, writes the Verge — but the good news is "there's a plan to almost eliminate latency, and big companies like Apple, Google, Comcast, Charter, Nvidia, Valve, Nokia, Ericsson, T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom, and more have shown an interest." It's a new internet standard called L4S that was finalized and published in January, and it could put a serious dent in the amount of time we spend waiting around for webpages or streams to load and cut down on glitches in video calls. It could also help change the way we think about internet speed and help developers create applications that just aren't possible with the current realities of the internet... L4S stands for Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput, and its goal is to make sure your packets spend as little time needlessly waiting in line as possible by reducing the need for queuing. To do this, it works on making the latency feedback loop shorter; when congestion starts happening, L4S means your devices find out about it almost immediately and can start doing something to fix the problem. Usually, that means backing off slightly on how much data they're sending... [L4S] makes it easier to maintain a good amount of data throughput without adding latency that increases the amount of time it takes for data to be transferred...

If you really want to get into it (and you know a lot about networking), you can read the specification paper on the Internet Engineering Task Force's website... The L4S standard adds an indicator to packets, which says whether they experienced congestion on their journey from one device to another. If they sail right on through, there's no problem, and nothing happens. But if they have to wait in a queue for more than a specified amount of time, they get marked as having experienced congestion. That way, the devices can start making adjustments immediately to keep the congestion from getting worse and to potentially eliminate it altogether... In terms of reducing latency on the internet, L4S or something like it is "a pretty necessary thing," according to Greg White, a technologist at research and development firm CableLabs who helped work on the standard. "This buffering delay typically has been hundreds of milliseconds to even thousands of milliseconds in some cases. Some of the earlier fixes to buffer bloat brought that down into the tens of milliseconds, but L4S brings that down to single-digit milliseconds...."

Here's the bad news: for the most part, L4S isn't in use in the wild yet. However, there are some big names involved with developing it... When we spoke to Greg White from CableLabs, he said there were already around 20 cable modems that support it today and that several ISPs like Comcast, Charter, and Virgin Media have participated in events meant to test how prerelease hardware and software work with L4S. Companies like Nokia, Vodafone, and Google have also attended, so there definitely seems to be some interest. Apple put an even bigger spotlight on L4S at WWDC 2023 after including beta support for it in iOS 16 and macOS Ventura... At around the same time as WWDC, Comcast announced the industry's first L4S field trials in collaboration with Apple, Nvidia, and Valve. That way, content providers can mark their traffic (like Nvidia's GeForce Now game streaming), and customers in the trial markets with compatible hardware like the Xfinity 10G Gateway XB7 / XB8, Arris S33, or Netgear CM1000v2 gateway can experience it right now...

The other factor helping L4S is that it's broadly compatible with the congestion control systems in use today...

UPDATE: John Romero released a new 9-map episode of Doom.

But it was 30 years ago today that Doom "invented the modern PC games industry, as a place dominated by technologically advanced action shooters," remembers the Guardian: In late August 1993, a young programmer named Dave Taylor walked into an office block... The carpets, he discovered, were stained with spilled soda, the ceiling tiles yellowed by water leaks from above. But it was here that a team of five coders, artists and designers were working on arguably the most influential action video game ever made. This was id Software. This was Doom... [W]hen Taylor met id's charismatic designer and coder John Romero, he was shown their next project... "There were no critters in it yet," recalls Taylor of that first demo. "There was no gaming stuff at all. It was really just a 3D engine. But you could move around it really fluidly and you got such a sense of immersion it was shocking. The renderer was kick ass and the textures were so gritty and cool. I thought I was looking at an in-game cinematic. And Romero is just the consummate demo man: he really feeds off of your energy. So as my jaw hit the floor, he got more and more animated. Doom was amazing, but John was at least half of that demo's impact on me." [...]

In late 1992, it had become clear that the 3D engine John Carmack was planning for Doom would speed up real-time rendering while also allowing the use of texture maps to add detail to environments. As a result, Romero's ambition was to set Doom in architecturally complex worlds with multiple storeys, curved walls, moving platforms. A hellish Escher-esque mall of death... "Doom was the first to combine huge rooms, stairways, dark areas and bright areas," says Romero, "and lava and all that stuff, creating a really elaborate abstract world. That was never possible before...."

[T]he way Doom combined fast-paced 3D action with elaborate, highly staged level design would prove hugely influential in the years to come. It's there in every first-person action game we play today... But Doom wasn't just a single-player game. Carmack consumed an entire library of books on computer networking before working on the code that would allow players to connect their PCs via modem to a local area network (LAN) and play in the game together... Doom brought fast-paced, real-time action, both competitive and cooperative, into the gaming mainstream. Seeing your friends battling imps and zombie space marines beside you in a virtual world was an exhilarating experience...

When Doom was launched on 10 December 1993, it became immediately clear that the game was all-consuming — id Software had chosen to make the abbreviated shareware version available via the FTP site of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but that crashed almost immediately, bringing the institution's network to its knees... "We changed the rules of design," says Romero. "Getting rid of lives, which was an arcade holdover that every game had; getting rid of score because it was not the goal of the game. We wanted to make it so that, if the player died, they'd just start that level over — we were constantly pushing them forward. The game's attitude was, I want you to keep playing. We wanted to get people to the point where they always needed more."
It was a unique moment in time. In the article designer Sandy Petersen remembers that "I would sometimes get old dungeons I'd done for D&D and use them as the basis for making a map in Doom." Cheat codes had been included for debugging purposes — but were left in the game rs to discover. The article even includes a link to a half-hour video of a 1993 visit to Id software filmed by BBS owner Dan Linton.

And today on X, John Romero shared a link to the Guardian's article, along with some appreciative words for anyone who's ever played the game. "DOOM is still remembered because of the community that plays and mods it 30 years on. I'm grateful to be a part of that community and fortunate to have been there at its beginning."

The Guardian's article notes that now Romero "is currently working on Sigil 2, a spiritual successor to the original Doom series."

The Gemini LLMs developed by Google Deepmind can process more than text, including images, video and audio. So a team at Google has proposed using AI to create a "bird's-eye" view of users' lives, reports CNBC, "using mobile phone data such as photographs and searches." Dubbed "Project Ellmann," after biographer and literary critic Richard David Ellmann, the idea would be to use LLMs like Gemini to ingest search results, spot patterns in a user's photos, create a chatbot and "answer previously impossible questions," according to a copy of a presentation viewed by CNBC. Ellmann's aim, it states, is to be "Your Life Story Teller."

It's unclear if the company has plans to produce these capabilities within Google Photos, or any other product. Google Photos has more than 1 billion users and 4 trillion photos and videos, according to a company blog post... A product manager for Google Photos presented Project Ellman alongside Gemini teams at a recent internal summit, according to documents viewed by CNBC. They wrote that the teams spent the past few months determining that large language models are the ideal tech to make this bird's-eye approach to one's life story a reality. Ellmann could pull in context using biographies, previous moments and subsequent photos to describe a user's photos more deeply than "just pixels with labels and metadata," the presentation states...

"We trawl through your photos, looking at their tags and locations to identify a meaningful moment," a presentation slide reads. "When we step back and understand your life in its entirety, your overarching story becomes clear...." The team also demonstrated "Ellmann Chat," with the description: "Imagine opening ChatGPT but it already knows everything about your life. What would you ask it?"
Reached for a comment, a Google spokesperson told CNBC that Google Photos "has always used AI to help people search their photos and videos, and we're excited about the potential of LLMs to unlock even more helpful experiences.

"This was an early internal exploration and, as always, should we decide to roll out new features, we would take the time needed to ensure they were helpful to people, and designed to protect users' privacy and safety as our top priority."

The Go team conducted a survey of Go Developers in August — and has just released the results. Among the findings: "90% of survey respondents saying they felt satisfied while working with Go during the prior year," while 6% said they were dissastified. Further, the number of people working with Go continues to increase; we see evidence of this from external research like Stack Overflow's Developer Survey (which found 14% of professional developers worked with Go during the past year, a roughly 15% year-over-year increase), as well as analytics for go.dev (which show an 8% rise in visitors year-over-year). Combining this growth with a high satisfaction score is evidence that Go continues to appeal to developers, and suggests that many developers who choose to learn the language feel good about their decision long afterwards...

As in prior years, the majority of survey respondents told us they work with Go on Linux (63%) and macOS (58%) systems... We do continue to see that newer members of the Go community are more likely to be working with Windows than more experienced Go developers. We interpret this as a signal that Windows-based development is important for onboarding new developers to the Go ecosystem, and is a topic our team hopes to focus on more in 2024...

While x86-compatible systems still account for the majority of development (89%), ARM64 is also now used by a majority of respondents (56%). This adoption appears to be partly driven by Apple Silicon; macOS developers are now more likely to say they develop for ARM64 than for x86-based architectures (76% vs. 71%). However, Apple hardware isn't the only factor driving ARM64 adoption: among respondents who don't develop on macOS at all, 29% still say they develop for ARM64.
The most-preferred code editors among the surveyed Go programmers were VS Code (44%), GoLand (31%), Vim/Neovim (16%), and Emacs (3%). 52% of the survey's respondents actually selected "very satisfied" for their feelings about Go — the highest possible rating.

Other interesting findings:

• " The top requests for improving toolchain warnings and errors were to make the messages more comprehensible and actionable; this sentiment was shared by developers of all experience levels, but was particularly strong among newer Go developers."

• "Three out of every four respondents work on Go software that also uses cloud services; this is evidence that developers see Go as a language for modern, cloud-based development."

• The experimental gonew tool (which offers predefined templates for instantiating new Go projects) "appears to solve critical problems for Go developers (especially developers new to Go) and does so in a way that matches their existing workflows for starting a new project. Based on these findings, we believe gonew can substantially reduce onboarding barriers for new Go developers and ease adoption of Go in organizations."

• And when it comes to AI, "Go developers said they are more interested in AI/ML tooling that improves the quality, reliability, and performance of code they write, rather than writing code for them."

Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft said at an AMD investor event today that they will use AMD's newest AI chip, the Instinct MI300X, as an alternative to Nvidia's expensive graphic processors. "If AMD's latest high-end chip is good enough for the technology companies and cloud service providers building and serving AI models when it starts shipping early next year, it could lower costs for developing AI models and put competitive pressure on Nvidia's surging AI chip sales growth," reports CNBC. From the report: "All of the interest is in big iron and big GPUs for the cloud," AMD CEO Lisa Su said Wednesday. AMD says the MI300X is based on a new architecture, which often leads to significant performance gains. Its most distinctive feature is that it has 192GB of a cutting-edge, high-performance type of memory known as HBM3, which transfers data faster and can fit larger AI models. Su directly compared the MI300X and the systems built with it to Nvidia's main AI GPU, the H100. "What this performance does is it just directly translates into a better user experience," Su said. "When you ask a model something, you'd like it to come back faster, especially as responses get more complicated."

The main question facing AMD is whether companies that have been building on Nvidia will invest the time and money to add another GPU supplier. "It takes work to adopt AMD," Su said. AMD on Wednesday told investors and partners that it had improved its software suite called ROCm to compete with Nvidia's industry standard CUDA software, addressing a key shortcoming that had been one of the primary reasons AI developers currently prefer Nvidia. Price will also be important. AMD didn't reveal pricing for the MI300X on Wednesday, but Nvidia's can cost around $40,000 for one chip, and Su told reporters that AMD's chip would have to cost less to purchase and operate than Nvidia's in order to persuade customers to buy it.

On Wednesday, AMD said it had already signed up some of the companies most hungry for GPUs to use the chip. Meta and Microsoft were the two largest purchasers of Nvidia H100 GPUs in 2023, according to a recent report from research firm Omidia. Meta said it will use MI300X GPUs for AI inference workloads such as processing AI stickers, image editing, and operating its assistant. Microsoft's CTO, Kevin Scott, said the company would offer access to MI300X chips through its Azure web service. Oracle's cloud will also use the chips. OpenAI said it would support AMD GPUs in one of its software products, called Triton, which isn't a big large language model like GPT but is used in AI research to access chip features.

According to China Daily, China has become the world's first nation to deploy a commercial data center underwater. Interesting Engineering reports: China's attempts to set up a commercial data center underwater are the result of a public-private enterprise involving the China Offshore Oil Engineering Co., the country's largest Engineering, Procurement, Construction, and Installation (EPCI) company in the country, and Highlander, a private data center company. Although details of the computing hardware have not been shared, Highlander has claimed that each of its underwater modules is capable of processing over four million high-definition (HD) images in just 30 seconds.

The computing hardware is packed inside a watertight storage module and together weighs 1,300 tons. The module is being submerged about 115 feet (35 m) under the water, a process that takes about three hours. Although work on installing the first module has begun, Highlander has ambitious plans to install 100 such modules at the site and build a capacity of nearly six million computers working at a time. Such a staggering number of computers will also generate a lot of heat which will be naturally cooled by the surrounding sea water. This alone is expected to save 122 million kilowatt-hours of electricity that would have otherwise been spent on cooling if the facility were located on land.

Additionally, the facility, which is expected to be in place by 2025, will also save 732,000 square feet (68,000 square meters) of terrestrial land that can be used for other purposes and 105,000 tons of fresh water, which would be used for cooling efforts. The modules have been built to last 25 years, but a lot remains unknown about how the construction will be impacted by corrosive seawater and underwater ecosystems. Highlander's experience in setting these centers up is fairly limited to the tests it carried out in January of 2021 in the Guangdong port of Zhuhai.