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Comment It's a "Badge" . . . (Score 2) 55

. . . "rumored to be a takeover target by Apple!"

A name-dropping salesman once tossed out while chatting with me that Apple was "interested" in them.

He wore it like a Badge of Pride:

"Approached by Apple, decided to stay independent . . . for the moment."

. . . um, . . . OK . . . like, yeah.

Submission + - Researcher Discovers That Stable Diffusion Can Compress Images (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, Swiss software engineer Matthias Bühlmann discovered that the popular image synthesis model Stable Diffusion could compress existing bitmapped images with fewer visual artifacts than JPEG or WebP at high compression ratios, though there are significant caveats. Stable Diffusion is an AI image synthesis model that typically generates images based on text descriptions (called "prompts"). The AI model learned this ability by studying millions of images pulled from the Internet. During the training process, the model makes statistical associations between images and related words, making a much smaller representation of key information about each image and storing them as "weights," which are mathematical values that represent what the AI image model knows, so to speak.

When Stable Diffusion analyzes and "compresses" images into weight form, they reside in what researchers call "latent space," which is a way of saying that they exist as a sort of fuzzy potential that can be realized into images once they're decoded. With Stable Diffusion 1.4, the weights file is roughly 4GB, but it represents knowledge about hundreds of millions of images. While most people use Stable Diffusion with text prompts, Buhlmann cut out the text encoder and instead forced his images through Stable Diffusion's image encoder process, which takes a low-precision 512x512 image and turns it into a higher-precision 64x64 latent space representation. At this point, the image exists at a much smaller data size than the original, but it can still be expanded (decoded) back into a 512x512 image with fairly good results.

While running tests, Bühlmann found that images compressed with Stable Diffusion looked subjectively better at higher compression ratios (smaller file size) than JPEG or WebP. In one example, he shows a photo of a candy shop that is compressed down to 5.68KB using JPEG, 5.71KB using WebP, and 4.98KB using Stable Diffusion. The Stable Diffusion image appears to have more resolved details and fewer obvious compression artifacts than those compressed in the other formats. Buhlmann's method currently comes with significant limitations, however: It's not good with faces or text, and in some cases, it can actually hallucinate detailed features in the decoded image that were not present in the source image. (You probably don't want your image compressor inventing details in an image that don't exist.) Also, decoding requires the 4GB Stable Diffusion weights file and extra decoding time.

Submission + - Tim Cook: 'No good excuse' for lack of women in tech (bbc.com) 4

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Apple chief executive Tim Cook says there are still "not enough women at the table" at the world's tech firms — including his own. He said there were "no good excuses" for the lack of women in the sector. Apple has just launched its founders' development programme for female founders and app creators in the UK.

"I think the the essence of technology and its effect on humanity depends upon women being at the table," Mr Cook says. "Technology's a great thing that will accomplish many things, but unless you have diverse views at the table that are working on it, you don't wind up with great solutions." Apple had 35% female staff in the US in 2021, according to its own diversity figures. It launched its original Apple Health Kit in 2014 without a period tracker — which led to accusations that this was an oversight due to male bias among its developers.

One challenge facing the sector is the lack of girls choosing to pursue science, tech, engineering and maths subjects at school. "Businesses can't cop out and say 'there's not enough women taking computer science — therefore I can't hire enough'," says Mr Cook. "We have to fundamentally change the number of people that are taking computer science and programming." His view is that everybody should be required to take some sort of coding course by the time they finish school, in order to have a "working knowledge" of how coding works and how apps are created.

Submission + - Putin Grants Snowden Russian Citizenship (ria.ru)

Submitted by nunya_bizns
nunya_bizns writes: "Putin signs decree granting Snowden Russian citizenship," according to state-run RIA Novosti. "In accordance with paragraph 'a' of Article 89 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, I decide: to accept the following persons in the citizenship of the Russian Federation: Edward Joseph Snowden, born June 21, 1983, in the United States of America."

Submission + - California First State To Ban Natural Gas Heaters and Furnaces (thehill.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new proposal passed by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) cements the state as the first to ban natural gas heaters and furnaces. The decision, which was passed unanimously, aims to phase out sales of the space heater and water heater appliances by 2030. The commitment is part of a broader range of environmental efforts passed by the board this week to meet the federal 70 parts per billion, 8-hour ozone standard over the next 15 years.

Residential and commercial buildings in California account for approximately five percent of the state’s total nitrogen oxide emissions due to natural gas combustion, according to the originally proposed plan (PDF), released in August 2022. In addition, space and water heating make up nearly 90 percent of all building-related natural gas demand. When burned, natural gas does emit less carbon dioxide than oil or coal. However, natural gas leaks pose health risks to homeowners, as they contain varying levels of volatile chemicals linked with cancer.
The new regulations will rely on adoption of heat pump technologies, which are being sold to electrify new and existing homes. Although the proposal does not include gas stoves, several cities and towns in the state currently ban or discourage use of gas stoves in new buildings. California’s Public Utilities Commission also eliminated subsidies for new natural gas hookups last week, marking the first state to do so. The move will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lower utility bills for consumers.

Submission + - Linux Distro For Apple Silicon Macs Is Already Up and Running On M2 Chip (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Unlike Intel Macs, Apple silicon Macs were designed to run only Apple's software. But the developers on the Asahi Linux team have been working to change that, painstakingly reverse-engineering support for Apple's processors and other Mac hardware and releasing it as a work-in-progress distro that can actually boot up and run on bare metal, no virtualization required. The Asahi Linux team put out a new release today with plenty of additions and improvements. Most notably, the distro now supports the M1 Ultra and the Mac Studio and has added preliminary support for the M2 MacBook Pro (which has been tested firsthand by the team) and the M2 MacBook Air (which hasn't been tested but ought to work). Preliminary Bluetooth support for all Apple silicon Macs has also been added, though the team notes that it works poorly when connected to a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network because "Wi-Fi/Bluetooth coexistence isn't properly configured yet."

There are still many other things that aren't working properly, including the USB-A ports on the Studio, faster-than-USB-2.0 speeds from any Type-C/Thunderbolt ports, and GPU acceleration, but progress is being made on all of those fronts. GPU work in particular is coming along, with a "prototype driver" that is "good enough to run real graphics applications and benchmarks" already up and running, though it's not included in this release. The Asahi team has said in the past that it expects support for new chips to be relatively easy to add to Asahi since Apple's chip designers frequently reuse things and don't make extensive hardware changes unless there's a good reason for it. Adding basic support for the M2 to Asahi happened over the course of a single 12-hour development session, and just "a few days" of additional effort were needed to get the rest of the hardware working as well as it does with M1-based Macs.

Submission + - Code bloat has become astronomical (positech.co.uk) 3

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: An indie game programmer Cliff Harris shares his concerns about the current state of compute: Code bloat sounds like something that grumpy old programmers in their fifties (like me) make a big deal out of, because we are grumpy and old and also grumpy. I get that. But us being old and grumpy means complaining when code runs 50% slower than it should, or is 50% too big. This is way, way, way beyond that. We are at the point where I honestly do believe that 99.9% of the code in files on your PC is absolutely useless and is never even executed. Its just there, in a suite of 65 DLLS, all because some coder wanted to do something trivial, like save out a bitmap and had *no idea how easy that is*, so they just imported an entire bucketful of bloatware to achieve it.

Like I say, I really should not be annoyed at young programmers doing this. Its what they learned. They have no idea what high performance or constraint-based development is. When you tell them the original game Elite had a sprawling galaxy, space combat in 3D, a career progression system, trading and thousands of planets to explore, and it was 64k, I guess they HEAR you, but they don’t REALLY understand the gap between that, and what we have now.

Computers are so fast these days that you should be able to consider them absolute magic. Everything that you could possibly imagine should happen between the 60ths of a second of the refresh rate. And yet, when I click the volume icon on my microsoft surface laptop (pretty new), there is a VISIBLE DELAY as the machine gradually builds up a new user interface element, and eventually works out what icons to draw and has them pop-in and they go live. It takes ACTUAL TIME. I suspect a half second, which in CPU time, is like a billion fucking years.

Submission + - Biden Waives Solar Panel Tariffs, Seeks To Boost Production (apnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: President Joe Biden ordered emergency measures Monday to boost crucial supplies to U.S. solar manufacturers and declared a two-year tariff exemption on solar panels from Southeast Asia as he attempted to jumpstart progress toward his climate change-fighting goals. His invoking of the Defense Production Act and other executive actions comes amid complaints by industry groups that the solar sector is being slowed by supply chain problems due to a Commerce Department inquiry into possible trade violations involving Chinese products. The Commerce Department announced in March that it was scrutinizing imports of solar panels from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia, concerned that products from those countries are skirting U.S. anti-dumping rules that limit imports from China.

White House officials said Biden’s actions aim to increase domestic production of solar panel parts, building installation materials, high-efficiency heat pumps and other components including cells used for clean-energy generated fuels. They called the tariff suspension affecting imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia a bridge measure while other efforts increase domestic solar power production — even as the administration remains supportive of U.S. trade laws and the Commerce Department investigation. [...]

The use of executive action comes as the Biden administration’s clean energy tax cuts, and other major proposals meant to encourage domestic green energy production, have stalled in Congress. The Defense Production Act lets the federal government direct manufacturing production for national defense and has become a tool used more commonly by presidents in recent years. The Trump administration used it to produce medical equipment and supplies during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Biden invoked its authority in April to boost production of lithium and other minerals used to power electric vehicles.

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