Reuters reports that America's Federal Aviation Administration "is investigating a union's claims that Boeing retaliated against two employees who in 2022 insisted the planemaker re-evaluate prior engineering work on 777 and 787 jets."

The employees' union "said the two unidentified engineers were representatives of the FAA, which delegates some of its oversight authority and certification process to Boeing workers." The FAA noted on Tuesday that in 2022 it boosted oversight of planemakers by protecting aviation industry employees who perform agency functions from interference by their employers. A December 2021 Senate report found "FAA's certification process suffers from undue pressure on line engineers and production staff."

"Boeing can tell Congress and the media all it wants about how retaliation is strictly prohibited," said SPEEA Director of Strategic Development Rich Plunkett. "But our union is fighting retaliation cases on a regular basis, and, in this specific case, Boeing is trying to hide information that would shed light on what happened...."

Last week, Boeing quality engineer whistleblower Sam Salehpour, who raised questions about Boeing widebody jets, told senators he was told to "shut up" when he flagged safety concerns. He has said he was removed from the 787 program and transferred to the 777 jet due to his questions.
Boeing has "zero tolerance for retaliation," according a statement quoted by Reuters, in which the company says they "encourage our employees to speak up when they see an issue. After an extensive review of documentation and interviewing more than a dozen witnesses, our investigators found no evidence of retaliation or interference. We have determined the allegations are unsubstantiated."

The union's version of the story? "After nearly six months of debate, the two engineers, with backing from the FAA, prevailed. Boeing re-did the required analysis." The two engineers were still Boeing employees, however, and Boeing management was not pleased. When they came up for their next performance reviews, the two engineers received identical negative evaluations... Even after the manager of the two engineers admitted that he had rated them both poorly at the request of the 777 and 787 managers who had been forced to resubmit their work, Boeing refused to change the engineers' performance evaluations.

At this point, one of the engineers left in disgust; the other filed a formal "Speak Up" complaint with Boeing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: TSMC announced its leading-edge 1.6nm-class process technology today, a new A16 manufacturing process that will be the company's first Angstrom-class production node and promises to outperform its predecessor, N2P, by a significant margin. The technology's most important innovation will be its backside power delivery network (BSPDN). Just like TSMC's 2nm-class nodes (N2, N2P, and N2X), the company's 1.6nm-class fabrication process will rely on gate-all-around (GAA) nanosheet transistors, but unlike the current and next-generation nodes, this one uses backside power delivery dubbed Super Power Rail. Transistor and BSPDN innovations enable tangible performance and efficiency improvements compared to TSMC's N2P: the new node promises an up to 10% higher clock rate at the same voltage and a 15%-20% lower power consumption at the same frequency and complexity. In addition, the new technology could enable 7%-10% higher transistor density, depending on the actual design.

The most important innovation of TSMC's A16 process, which was unveiled at the company's North American Technology Symposium 2024, is the introduction of the Super Power Rail (SPR), a sophisticated backside power delivery network (BSPDN). This technology is tailored specifically for AI and HPC processors that tend to have both complex signal wiring and dense power delivery networks. Backside power delivery will be implemented into many upcoming process technologies as it allows for an increase in transistor density and improved power delivery, which affects performance. Meanwhile, there are several ways to implement a BSPDN. TSMC's Super Power Rail plugs the backside power delivery network to each transistor's source and drain using a special contact that also reduces resistance to get the maximum performance and power efficiency possible. From a production perspective, this is one of the most complex BSPDN implementations and is more complex than Intel's Power Via. Volume production of A16 is slated for the second half of 2026. "Therefore, actual A16-made products will likely debut in 2027," notes the report. "This timeline positions A16 to potentially compete with Intel's 14A node, which will be Intel's most advanced node at the time."

Seagate has joined Western Digital in increasing the prices of hard drives, with rising demand due to the huge data requirements of AI taking the blame. AI is also behind a rapid growth in orders for Enterprise solid state drives. From a report: One of the big three makers of traditional rotating hard disk drives, Seagate informed customers that it is increasing prices effective immediately for new orders, but also for any changes to orders that are "over and above" previously committed volumes. This was disclosed in a letter from the company seen by analyst Trendforce, and comes just a couple of weeks after rival manufacturer Western Digital sent out a similar letter to customers informing them of price hikes.

According to Trendforce, the cause of the issue is two-fold: rising demand for high-capacity HDD products driven by the current craze for all things AI, and reduced production by hard drive manufacturers that means they are unable to meet the demand, leading to soaring prices. The rising demand comes from AI training requiring huge volumes of data: OpenAI's GPT-3 model is said to have been trained using 45TB of data, which may have been surpassed for newer models. And while flash-based SSDs boast high-speed and low-latency, storing everything in flash would still be costly. Seagate launched a 30TB hard drive line last year. Hard drive production was cut by as much as 20 percent over the last two years or so because of falling orders during the pandemic, and now manufacturers are unprepared for a sudden uptick in demand.

Hartley Charlton reports via MacRumors: Apple is said to be developing its own AI server processor using TSMC's 3nm process, targeting mass production by the second half of 2025. According to a post by the Weibo user known as "Phone Chip Expert," Apple has ambitious plans to design its own artificial intelligence server processor. The user, who claims to have 25 years of experience in the integrated circuit industry, including work on Intel's Pentium processors, suggests this processor will be manufactured using TSMC's 3nm node.

Apple's purported move toward developing a specialist AI server processor is reflective of the company's ongoing strategy to vertically integrate its supply chain. By designing its own server chips, Apple can tailor hardware specifically to its software needs, potentially leading to more powerful and efficient technologies. Apple could use its own AI processors to enhance the performance of its data centers and future AI tools that rely on the cloud. While Apple is rumored to be prioritizing on-device processing for many of its upcoming AI tools, it is inevitable that some operations will have to occur in the cloud. By the time the custom processor could be integrated into operational servers in late 2025, Apple's new AI strategy should be well underway.

Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories, according to reliable Apple leaker and prototype collector known as "Kosutami." From a report: In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability. The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future. Apple introduced FineWoven, a soft fabric material, last year. The company claimed that the material is made of 68 percent post-consumer content and is overall more environmentally friendly compared to the company's previous line of leather accessories. As part of the introduction of FineWoven case, Apple also discontinued the use of leather for new Apple accessories. Reviewers didn't like FineWoven, calling it "bad. Like, really bad."

The Los Angeles Times reports that the U.S.-China rivalry "has a new flashpoint in the battle for technology supremacy: electric cars."

"So far, the U.S. is losing." Last year, China became the world's foremost auto exporter, according to the China Passenger Car Assn., surpassing Japan with more than 5 million sales overseas. New energy vehicles accounted for about 25% of those exports, and more than half of those were created by Chinese brands, a shift from the traditional assembly role China has played for foreign automakers. "The big growth has happened in the last three years," said Stephen Dyer, head of the Asia automotive and industrials unit at AlixPartners, a consulting firm. "With Chinese automakers making inroads for most of the market share, that's a huge challenge for foreign automakers." China's rapid expansion domestically and abroad has added fuel to a series of clashes between the U.S. and China over trade and advanced technology, as competition intensifies between the two superpowers...

One area in which Chinese automakers handily beat Western competitors is on price, thanks to government subsidies that supported the industry's initial rise as well as cheap access to critical minerals and components such as lithium-ion batteries, which account for about a third of the overall cost of production... In March, BYD cut the price of its cheapest EV model in China to less than $10,000. According to Kelley Blue Book, the average EV retail price is $55,343 in the U.S., compared with $48,247 across all vehicles... Though 27.5% tariffs have in effect locked Chinese EVs out of the U.S. market, the fear that the cheaper models could eventually undermine American automakers has started to spread. The Alliance of American Manufacturing warned in a February report that allowing Chinese EVs into the country would be an "extinction-level event" for the U.S. auto industry. The group also cited the risks of Chinese auto companies building facilities across the border in Mexico that could circumvent tariffs....

"When the global market is flooded by artificially cheap Chinese products, the viability of American and other foreign firms is put into question," [said America's Treasury Secretary in April]. The European Union has opened an investigation into government subsidies utilized by China's EV industry and whether such support violates international trade laws.

CNBC visited a small group of bitcoin miners who "set up shop at the site of an extinct volcano" near Kenya's Hell's Gate National Park.

Their mine "consists of a single 500-kilowatt mobile container that, from the outside, looks like a small residential trailer." But what's more interesting is it's operated by a startup called Gridless. (According to its web site Gridless "designs, builds, and operates bitcoin mining sites alongside small-scale renewable energy producers in rural Africa where excess energy is not utilized...") Backed by Jack Dorsey's Block, Gridless electrifies its machines with a mix of solar power and the stranded, wasted energy from a nearby geothermal site. It's one of six mines run by the company in Kenya, Malawi and Zambia, powered by a mix of renewable inputs and working toward a broader mission of securing and decentralizing the bitcoin network... In early 2022, [the three Gridless co-founders] began brainstorming creative solutions for the divide between power generation and capacity, and the lack of access to electricity in Africa. They landed on the idea of bitcoin mining, which could potentially solve a big problem for renewable energy developers by taking their stranded power and spreading it to other parts of the continent.

In Africa, 43% of the population, or roughly 600 million people, lack access to electricity.... Africa is home to an estimated 10 terawatts of solar capacity, 350 gigawatts of hydro and another 110 gigawatts of wind. Some of this renewable energy is being harnessed already, but a lot isn't because building the specialized infrastructure to capture it is expensive. Even with 60% of the best solar resources globally, Africa only has 1% of installed solar PV capacity.

Enter bitcoin miners.

Bitcoin gets a bad rap for the amount of energy it consumes, but it can also help unlock these trapped renewable sources of power. Miners are essentially energy buyers, and co-locating with renewables creates a financial incentive to bolster production. "As often happens, you'll have an overage of power during the day or even at night, and there's nobody to soak that power up," said Hersman. He said his company's 50-kilowatt mining container can "take up whatever is extra throughout the day...." Demand from bitcoin miners on these semi-stranded assets is making renewables in Africa economically viable. The power supplier benefits from selling energy that previously had been discarded, while the energy plants will sometimes lower costs for the customer. At one of the Gridless pilot sites in Kenya, the hydro plant dropped the price of power from 35 cents per kilowatt hour to 25 cents per kWh.

The buildout of capacity is also electrifying households. Gridless says its sites have powered 1,200 houses in Zambia, 1,800 in Malawi and 5,000 in Kenya. The company's mines also have delivered power for containerized cold storage for local farmers, battery charging stations for electric motorcycles and public WiFi points.

"Federal regulators are investigating a whistleblower's claims about flaws in the assembly of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner," NPR reported this week: Longtime Boeing engineer Sam Salehpour went public Tuesday with claims that he observed problems with how parts of the plane's fuselage were fastened together. Salehpour warns that production "shortcuts" could significantly shorten the lifespan of the plane, eventually causing the fuselage to fall apart in mid-flight. "It can cause a catastrophic failure," Salehpour said Tuesday during a press briefing to discuss his claims.

A spokesman for the FAA confirmed that the agency is investigating those allegations, which were first reported by the New York Times, but declined to comment further on them. Boeing immediately pushed back. "These claims about the structural integrity of the 787 are inaccurate and do not represent the comprehensive work Boeing has done to ensure the quality and long-term safety of the aircraft," Boeing spokeswoman Jessica Kowal said in a statement. "We are fully confident in the 787 Dreamliner."
Salehpour and his lawyers argue that Boeing has never adequately addressed production flaws discovered in 2021 (which included unacceptable gaps between the fuselage panels), according to the article. "Instead, he says the company took 'shortcuts' by applying greater force to fit segments of the fuselage together." "Boeing hid the problem by pushing the pieces together with force to make it appear like that the gap didn't exist," Salehpour told reporters at Tuesday's press briefing. Salehpour says he repeatedly raised these concerns with management, but instead of addressing them, they transferred him to work on a different plane, the 777, where he alleges he saw similar problems. "I literally saw people jumping on the pieces of the airplane to get them to align," he said. "That's not how you build a plane."
In a follow-up piece, NPR reports that former Boeing mechanic Davin Fischer "says he spoke up — and paid a steep price for it." He says Boeing's leaders were constantly pushing to speed up production. "Hey, we need to go faster, faster, faster," Fischer said. "They cared more about shareholders and investors than they did planes, their employees, anything." When Fischer finally pushed back, he says he was demoted in retaliation, and then fired from the company in 2019. Fischer says many of his friends who still work at Boeing are afraid to speak out. "People there are scared, a hundred percent," he said. "Because they don't want to get fired."
NPR also cites the example of longtime quality manager John Barnett, who said in a 2019 interview with Ralph Nader that his managers at Boeing retaliated against him by docking his pay and creating a hostile environment.

The Linux Foundation-backed project OpenTofu "has gotten legal pushback from HashiCorp," according to a report — just seven months after forking OpenTofu's code from HashiCorp's IT deployment software Terraform: On April 3, HashiCorp issued a strongly-worded Cease and Desist letter to OpenTofu, accusing that the project has "repeatedly taken code HashiCorp provided only under the Business Software License (BSL) and used it in a manner that violates those license terms and HashiCorp's intellectual property rights." It goes on to note that "In at least some instances, OpenTofu has incorrectly re-labeled HashiCorp's code to make it appear as if it was made available by HashiCorp originally under a different license." Last August, HashiCorp announced that it would be transitioning its software from the open source Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0) to the Business Source License (BSL), a license that permits the source to be viewed, but not run in production environments without explicit approval by the license owner. HashiCorp gave OpenTofu until April 10 to remove any allegedly copied code from the OpenTofu repository, threatening litigation if the project fails to do so.
Others are also covering the fracas, including Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at DevOps.com: OpenTofu replied, "The OpenTofu team vehemently disagrees with any suggestion that it misappropriated, mis-sourced, or otherwise misused HashiCorp's BSL code. All such statements have zero basis in facts." In addition, it said, HashiCorp's claims of copyright infringement are completely unsubstantiated. As for the code in question, OpenTofu claims it can clearly be shown to have been copied from older code under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) 2.0. "HashiCorp seems to have copied the same code itself when they implemented their version of this feature. All of this is easily visible in our detailed SCO analysis, as well as their own comments."

In a detailed source code origination (SCO) examination of the problematic source code, OpenTofu stated that HashiCorp was mistaken. "We believe that this is just a case of a misunderstanding where the code came from." OpenTofu maintains the code was originally licensed under the MPL, not the BSL. If so, then OpenTofu was perfectly within its right to use the code in its codebase...

[OpenTofu's lawyer] concluded, "In the future, if you should have any concerns or questions about how source code in OpenTofu is developed, we would ask that you contact us first. Immediately issuing DMCA takedown notices and igniting salacious negative press articles is not the most helpful path to resolving concerns like this."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week South Korea's SK Hynix announced it would partner with Purdue University on a $3.9 billion semiconductor complex here, the largest single corporate investment in state history. Now comes the hard part. SK Hynix must not only build the fabrication plant, or fab, which will package high-bandwidth memory chips used in artificial intelligence, and a connected research-and-development center. It also has to staff them. "We need several hundred engineers to operate our advanced-packaging manufacturing fab -- in physics, chemistry, material science, electronics engineering," Kwak Noh-Jung, chief executive of SK Hynix, said in an interview following last week's announcement.

Staffing a fab is harder in the U.S. than in South Korea, where SK Hynix has contracts with local universities and its own in-house university. Nonetheless, Kwak said, "the final goal is very clear. We need to have very good engineers for our success in U.S." The U.S. is trying to do something unprecedented: reverse a shrinking share in a key manufacturing sector. Between 1990 and 2020, the U.S. share of world chip making shrank to 12% from 37%, while the combined share of Taiwan, South Korea and China grew to 58%. The federal CHIPS program has showered billions of dollars on Intel for fabs in several states, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.in Arizona and GlobalFoundries in New York and Vermont. SK Hynix hopes for support as well.

Subsidies alone won't guarantee a sustainable industry. Fabs need customers, a supply chain and, above all, a skilled, specialized workforce. From 2000 to 2017, U.S. employment in semiconductor manufacturing shrank to 181,000 from 287,000. It has since recovered to about 200,000. Why did the U.S. share of semiconductor production shrink? As in other industries, the U.S. became an expensive place to manufacture. Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute, who has studied outsourcing, said this wasn't "primarily a story about offshoring." U.S. companies still lead in chip design: Nvidia in artificial intelligence, Qualcomm in communications and Apple in smartphones. Over time they mostly contracted out fabrication of their chips to foundries such as TSMC who benefited from generous domestic subsidies. The theory behind CHIPS is that, by matching Asia's subsidies, the U.S. can again be competitive in chip making. Nonetheless, there is a chicken-egg problem. Fabs need a ready supply of skilled workers. But without fabs, America's best and brightest have little incentive to pursue careers in the sector.

Apple, aiming to boost sluggish computer sales, is preparing to overhaul its entire Mac line with a new family of in-house processors designed to highlight AI. Bloomberg News: The company, which released its first Macs with M3 chips five months ago, is already nearing production of the next generation -- the M4 processor -- according to people with knowledge of the matter. The new chip will come in at least three main varieties, and Apple is looking to update every Mac model with it, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven't been announced.

The new Macs are underway at a critical time. After peaking in 2022, Mac sales fell 27% in the last fiscal year, which ended in September. In the holiday period, revenue from the computer line was flat. Apple attempted to breathe new life into the Mac business with an M3-focused launch event last October, but those chips didn't bring major performance improvements over the M2 from the prior year. Apple also is playing catch-up in AI, where it's seen as a laggard to Microsoft, Alphabet's Google and other tech peers. The new chips are part of a broader push to weave AI capabilities into all its products. Apple is aiming to release the updated computers beginning late this year and extending into early next year.

Liam Proven reports via The Register: Bad news for those who want to play with OpenVMS in non-production use. Older versions are disappearing, and the terms are getting much more restrictive. The corporation behind the continued development of OpenVMS, VMS Software, Inc. -- or VSI to its friends, if it has any left after this -- has announced the latest Updates to the Community Program. The news does not look good: you can't get the Alpha and Itanium versions any more, only a limited x86-64 edition.

OpenVMS is one of the granddaddies of big serious OSes. A direct descendant of the OSes that inspired DOS, CP/M, OS/2, and Windows, as well as the native OS of the hardware on which Unix first went 32-bit, VMS has been around for nearly half a century. For decades, its various owners have offered various flavors of "hobbyist program" under which you could get licenses to install and run it for free, as long as it wasn't in production use. Since Compaq acquired DEC, then HP acquired Compaq, its prospects looked checkered. HP officially killed it off in 2013, then in 2014 granted it a reprieve and sold it off instead. New owner VSI ported it to x86-64, releasing that new version 9.2 in 2022. Around this time last year, we covered VSI adding AMD support and opening a hobbyist program of its own. It seems from the latest announcement that it has been disappointed by the reception: "Despite our initial aspirations for robust community engagement, the reality has fallen short of our expectations. The level of participation in activities such as contributing open source software, creating wiki articles, and providing assistance on forums has not matched the scale of the program. As a result, we find ourselves at a crossroads, compelled to reassess and recalibrate our approach."

Although HPE stopped offering hobbyist licenses for the original VAX versions of OpenVMS in 2020, VSI continued to maintain OpenVMS 8 (in other words, the Alpha and Itanium editions) while it worked on version 9 for x86-64. VSI even offered a Student Edition, which included a freeware Alpha emulator and a copy of OpenVMS 8.4 to run inside it. Those licenses run out in 2025, and they won't be renewed. If you have vintage DEC Alpha or HP Integrity boxes with Itanic chips, you won't be able to get a legal licensed copy of OpenVMS for them, or renew the license of any existing installations -- unless you pay, of course. There will still be a Community license edition, but from now on it's x86-64 only. Although OpenVMS 9 mainly targets hypervisors anyway, it does support bare-metal operations on a single model of HPE server, the ProLiant DL380 Gen10. If you have one of them to play with -- well, tough. Now Community users only get a VM image, supplied as a VMWare .vmdk file. It contains a ready-to-go "OpenVMS system disk with OpenVMS, compilers and development tools installed." Its license runs for a year, after which you will get a fresh copy. This means you won't be able to configure your own system and keep it alive -- you'll have to recreate it, from scratch, annually. The only alternative for those with older systems is to apply to be an OpenVMS Ambassador.

Fairphone, the Dutch smartphone maker known for its user-repairable smartphones, is bringing its ultra-repairable design philosophy to their "Fairbuds" wireless earbuds. Liliputing reports: The Fairbuds have the sort of features we've come to expect from premium earbuds. They're noise-cancelling Bluetooth 5.3 earbuds with support for wind noise reduction and an environmental noise-cancelling feature that sets noise reduction depending on your environment. Fairphone's earbuds have six microphones, 11mm drivers, and an IP54 rating for water (and sweat) resistance. They also support multipoint connectivity, which means you can connect the earbuds to two different devices at the same time (like your phone and your laptop).

The earbuds offer up to 6 hours of battery life and they come with a charging case that gives you another 20 hours of use between charges. And Fairphone offers iOS and Android apps that let you adjust EQ, install firmware updates, and make other changes. Other features include automatic play and pause when the Fairbuds are removed from your ears, capacitive touch controls, and three different ear tips sizes included in the box.

But the key thing that makes these earbuds different from the competition is that they're designed to be repairable rather than replaceable. Lose just one earbud? Fairphone will let you buy a single earbud without paying again for a full set with a case. Is your battery life degrading a few years after purchase? Fairphone will sell battery replacements and let you swap out the batteries in your earbuds or charging case. All told, the company offers seven repairable/replaceable components for the Fairbuds. The company also offers a 3-year warranty for its new Fairbuds and notes that they're manufactured using:

- 70% of all materials used in production are fair and recycled (fair = ethically sourced).
- 100% of rare earth elements used are recycled.
- Plastics used in the Fairbuds and their charging case are recycled. The Fairbuds are currently only available in Europe for 149 euros.

England could produce 13 times more renewable energy than it does now, while using less than 3% of its land, analysis has found. The Guardian: Onshore wind and solar projects could provide enough electricity to power all the households in England two and a half times over, the research by Exeter University, commissioned by Friends of the Earth (FoE), suggested. Currently, about 17 terawatt hours of electricity a year comes from homegrown renewables on land. But there is potential for 130TWh to come from solar panels, and 96TWh from onshore wind. These figures are reached by only taking into account the most suitable sites, excluding national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty, higher grade agricultural land and heritage sites.

Some commentators have argued that solar farms will reduce the UK's ability to grow its own food, but the new analysis suggests there is plenty of land that can be used without impairing agricultural production. More land is now taken up by golf courses than solar farms, and developers can be required to enhance biodiversity through simple measures such as maintaining hedgerows and ponds. Onshore windfarms were in effect banned in 2015 by the then prime minister, David Cameron. Rishi Sunak last year claimed to make moves towards lifting the ban, through small changes to the planning regulations, but campaigners say they were ineffectual and real planning reform is needed. No plans were submitted for new windfarms in England last year, and few new developments are coming forward, despite high gas prices, rising bills and onshore wind being the cheapest form of electricity generation.

For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever. From a report: Google Vids is very much not an app for making beautiful movies... or even not-that-beautiful movies. It's meant more for the sorts of things people do at work: make a pitch, update the team, explain a complicated concept. The main goal is to make everything as easy as possible, says Kristina Behr, Google's VP of product management for the Workspace collaboration apps. "The ethos that we have is, if you can make a slide, you can make a video in Vids," she says. "No video production is required."

Based on what I've seen of Vids so far, it appears to be roughly what you'd get if you transformed Google Slides into a video app. You collect assets from Drive and elsewhere and assemble them in order -- but unlike the column of slides in the Slides sidebar, you're putting together a left-to-right timeline for a video. Then, you can add voiceover or film yourself and edit it all into a finished video. A lot of those finished videos, I suspect, will look like recorded PowerPoint presentations or Meet calls or those now-ubiquitous training videos where a person talks to you from a small circle in the bottom corner while graphics play on the screen. There will be lots of clip art-heavy product promos, I'm sure. But in theory, you can make almost anything in Vids. ou can either do all this by yourself or prompt Google's Gemini AI to make a first draft of the video for you. Gemini can build a storyboard; it can write a script; it can read your script aloud with text-to-speech; it can create images for you to use in the video. The app has a library of stock video and audio that users can add to their own Vids, too.

The Biden administration plans to announce it is awarding more than $6 billion to South Korea's Samsung next week to expand its chip output in Taylor, Texas, as it seeks to ramp up chipmaking in the U.S., Reuters reported Tuesday, citing sources. From the report: The subsidy, which will be unveiled by Commerce Department Secretary Gina Raimondo, will go toward construction of four facilities in Taylor, including one $17 billion chipmaking plant that Samsung announced in 2021, another factory, an advanced packaging facility and a research and development center, one of the sources said.

It will also include an investment in another undisclosed location, the source said, adding that Samsung will more than double its U.S. investment to over $44 billion as part of the deal. One of the sources said it would be the third largest of the program, just behind Taiwan's TSMC, which was awarded $6.6 billion on Monday and agreed to expand its investment by $25 billion to $65 billion and to add a third Arizona factory by 2030.

The U.S. Commerce Department said on Monday it would award Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co's unit a $6.6 billion subsidy for advanced semiconductor production in Phoenix, Arizona and up to $5 billion in low-cost government loans. From a report: TSMC agreed to expand its planned investment by $25 billion to $65 billion and to add a third Arizona fab by 2030, Commerce said in announcing the preliminary award. The Taiwanese company will produce the world's most advanced 2 nanometer technology at its second Arizona fab expected to begin production in 2028, the department said.

"These are the chips that underpin all artificial intelligence, and they are the chips that are necessary components for the technologies that we need to underpin our economy, but frankly, a 21st century military and national security apparatus," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement. TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker and a major supplier to Apple and Nvidia had previously announced plans to invest $40 billion in Arizona. TSMC expects to begin high-volume production in its first U.S. fab there by the first half of 2025, Commerce said. The $65 billion-plus investment by TSMC is the largest foreign direct investment in a completely new project in U.S. history, the department said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Daily Hive: It is now the third consecutive day a major housing funding announcement has been made by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Friday's announcement entails over $600 million in investments targeted to help lower the construction cost of homes and speed up building timelines, with a new focus on creating new building innovation technologies. This includes a new $50 million Homebuilding Technology and Innovation Fund, which the federal government aims to leverage an additional $150 million from the private sector and other levels of government. Another $50 million will be invested in ideas and technology such as prefabricated housing factories, mass timber production, panelization, 3D printing, and pre-approved home design catalogues -- specifically projects already funded.

As well, $11.6 million will go towards the federal government's previously announced Housing Design Catalogue to create a standardized home structure design for simplicity as well as construction and cost efficiencies. The vast majority of today's announced funding will go into the federal Apartment Construction Loan Program, which provides low-cost financing to support new rental housing projects using innovative construction techniques from prefabricated and modular housing manufacturers as well as other homebuilders. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement: "We're changing the way we build homes in Canada. In Budget 2024, we're supporting a new approach to construction, with a focus on innovation and technology. This will make it easier and more cost-effective to build more homes, faster. You should be able to live in the community you love, at a price you can afford."

An anonymous reader writes: Variety reports that following the massive box office success of Dune: Part Two, Legendary has tapped Denis Villeneuve for a third installment that would presumably continue the story of how Paul Atreides goes on to conquer the galaxy. Earlier this year, Villeneuve told Empire that he had already "put words on paper" thinking about where he would like to take the Dune franchise going forward. Legendary has yet to announce any sort of timeline for when production on Dune 3 might begin. But the studio intends for the movie to debut before its next project with Villeneuve -- an adaptation of Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen's 2024 Pulitzer Prize-nominated nonfiction book about how nuclear war scenarios would likely play out.

An anonymous reader writes: In the early 70s, young filmmakers John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon created a spaceship tale for a graduation project -- little knowing it would influence Alien and many other works. Made for $60,000 by film school students, horror maestro John Carpenter's directorial debut Dark Star is now regarded as a sci-fi cult classic. Having just turned 50 years old, it's a world away from much of the sci-fi that came before it and would come after, neither space odyssey nor space opera, rather a bleak, downbeat and often absurd portrait of a group of people cooped together in a malfunctioning interstellar tin can. Arguably its most famous scene consists of an existential debate between an astronaut and a sentient bomb. Dark Star was a collaboration between Carpenter, who directed and scored the film, and Dan O'Bannon, who in addition to co-writing the script, acted as editor, production designer, and visual effects supervisor, as well as playing the volatile, paranoid Sergeant Pinback. They met as budding filmmakers at the University of Southern California. "While [Carpenter and O'Bannon] couldn't be more dissimilar in personality, they were both very energetic and focused," says Daniel Griffiths, director of Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star (2010), the definitive documentary about the making of the film.

The sci-fi films of this period tended to be bleak and dystopian, explains John Kenneth Muir, author of The Films of John Carpenter -- films like Silent Running (1972), in which all plant life on Earth is extinct, or George Lucas's 1971 debut THX-1138, in which human emotion is suppressed. "Dark Star arrived in this world of dark, hopeless imaginings, but took the darkness one step further into absurd nihilism." Carpenter and O'Bannon set out to make the "ultimate riff on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey," says Griffiths. While Kubrick's 1968 film, explains Muir, was one "in which viewers sought meaning in the stars about the nature of humanity, there is no meaning to life in Dark Star". Rather, says Muir, it parodies 2001 "with its own sense of man's irrelevance in the scheme of things". Where Kubrick scored his film with classical music, Dark Star opens with a country song, Benson, Arizona. (A road in the real-life Benson is named in honor of the film). The film was even released with the tagline "the spaced-out odyssey." Dark Star captured the mood of the time in which it was made, says Muir, the atmosphere of Nixon's America. "The 1960s was all about utopian dreaming and bringing change to America in the counterculture. The 1970s represent what writer Johnny Byrne called 'The wake-up from the hippie dream', a reckoning with the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same." [...]

When Dark Star premiered at the FILMEX expo in 1974, the audience response was largely positive. "They recognized the film's absurdist humor and celebrated its student film roots," says Griffiths. It had a limited theatrical release in 1975, but it was not a commercial success. "The film met with negative reviews from critics, and general disinterest from audiences," says Muir. "Both Carpenter and O'Bannon realized that all the struggles they endured to make the film did not matter to audiences, they only cared about the finished product. I think they were discouraged," says Griffiths. The growth of the VHS market, however, helped it find its audience and propelled it towards cult status. Its influence can still be felt, perhaps most directly in Ridley Scott's Alien, for which O'Bannon, who died in 2009, wrote the screenplay. The two films share DNA. Alien is also set on a grotty working vessel with a bickering crew, only this time the alien wasn't played for laughs.