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Comment Eh? Surely the opposite (Score 1) 19

Maybe I missed some sarcasm?
How does showing that the algorithms are physiologically addictive i.e. impairing self-control, let Meta (reels) or Alphabet (shorts) "off the hook"? TikTok is probably the worst offender and I'm not sure how it managed to get off with a "confidential settlement", but it doesn't absolve the others.

Submission + - Evidence of the Covid origin cover-up emerging in court (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'A British zoologist involved in risky bat coronavirus experiments in Wuhan is accused of plotting with a senior US health official to shut down the theory that Covid-19 leaked from a lab.

'Dr Peter Daszak, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance, sent bottles of wine to David Morens, thanking him for his “behind the scenes shenanigans” and promising further gifts, such as dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants, US court documents state.

'Morens, 78, a former employee at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and adviser to Dr Anthony Fauci, this week pleaded guilty to conspiring to evade public records laws and conceal government documents related to grant research funding and the Covid-19 pandemic.

'He is facing five years in jail. No charges have been brought against Dr Daszak.'

Submission + - American Airlines Changed Passengers' Flights w/o Asking and No Human Oversight (inc.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In recent years, American Airlines has embraced artificial intelligence. Now the new technology appears to be changing flight tickets.

Earlier this week, columnist Marc Thiessen took to social media to voice his frustration with American‘s rebooking system. He claimed the airline rebooked his connecting flight in Chicago without his knowledge when his inbound flight was delayed. “Since when do you change my itinerary without asking?” Thiessen wrote on X.

The rebooking automation appears to be part of an American Airlines system called AURA (for AUtomated ReAccommodation). The system, which initially rolled out in 2023, is meant to help passengers with their connecting flights. “Our Automated Reaccommodation tool proactively rebooks customers impacted by flight cancellations and delays, and exchanges tickets,” the company said on its site. However, the automated system appears to have negatively impacted more than one traveler.

Below Thiessen’s post, media consultant Beverly Hallberg replied that American had done the same thing to her the day before. “I had to call and switch my connecting flight back to the original itinerary, and I had enough time to do that since we were stuck on the tarmac for so long. But, like you, they didn’t ask,” she wrote on X.

https://x.com/danikkk_wqs/stat...

Comment Re:Teaching AI to fail (Score 1) 50

Knowing how not to do a thing is also valuable. But just in general there were lots of emails, Strtegy documents, etc that would be valuable as how to make this thing even if the data inside is bad or the decision made on it was bad. Plus the customer info is valuable. Spirit tried to maximize extra purchases while keeping low initial costs. It failed eventually but the internal metrics at what was working and what was not would be very useful. They didn't immediately fail.

Submission + - Low emission zone led to better lung size and function among London children (theguardian.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Children’s lungs grew bigger and stronger after the most polluting vehicles were restricted from entering London, a study has found. Examinations of London schoolchildren before and after the introduction of the city’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) found a restoration of lung capacity that had been stunted by exposure to pollution. The researchers said the findings were a vindication of the low-emission zone policy, which had been criticized as a burden on motorists.

Air pollution from traffic has stunted the development of children’s lungs in London for decades. Previous research found that by the age of eight or nine, children from the most polluted areas had 5-10% less lung capacity than their peers elsewhere. That impairment, which scientists said was the result of exposure to nitrogen dioxide, put them at increased risk as adults of developing respiratory diseases, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and premature death.

Submission + - Supply chain issues delaying grid batteries' installation (latimes.com)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: There is a long installation queue for various reasons. The scale is remarkable:

'Nationwide, some 750 gigawatts of energy storage projects — roughly equivalent to the generating capacity of more than 700 nuclear reactors — are in line to get grid connections, according to the lab’s research. Not all of these projects will get built. Many developers already abandoned the queue because of delays. Still, the waiting time is increasing; the median was five years in 2025, up from a year and a half in 2015.'

Submission + - 23 Years after SimCity 4's release, "Eternal Commuter" bug finally fixed (reddit.com)

Submitted by Striek
Striek writes: RIP Maxis. The greatest city-building game lives on, however, thanks to 23 years of modding efforts by the community.

The "eternal commuter loop" was a longstanding bug in SimCity 4. It features very interesting "region" gameplay, where you can make many different cities that border each other and connect/interact. Due to hardware/software limitations back in the day, limited info was shared between these city borders and only one city was actively "loaded" at at time.

https://www.simtropolis.com/ob...

Due to that lack of live-info-sharing, Sims who traveled across city borders to find a job could accidently get stuck in an infinite loop if they went in a circle and ended up back in the city they started in. Without ever finding a job destination, those Sims would move out of your city and cause ugly abandoned buildings.

This bug was previously considered unsolvable as it was locked away in parts of the game code that were inaccessible. The Network Addon Mod historically updated to Version 50 today, and thanks to advanced Dynamic-Link Library modding, a fix has been implemented for one of the oldest and most frustrating bugs in this game. Free for download on Simtropolis!

https://community.simtropolis....

Submission + - Physicists entangle quantum memories across a record-breaking 420 km (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information via entangled quantum particlesâ"potentially enabling instantaneous exchanges of information across vast distances. Such a system could eventually be the basis of a future 'quantum internet,' offering a level of security and computing power beyond anything possible today.

Submission + - The global race to make a practical quantum computer just took a big leap forwar (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Quantum computers harness the power of quantum mechanics, the laws that govern physics at atomic and subatomic scales. Among various designs for such machines, Helios is a trapped-ion quantum computer, which means it uses charged atoms suspended in free space using electromagnetic fields.

It operates using 98 qubitsâ"the units of information that a quantum computer uses to process data. This number of qubits makes it the largest trapped-ion quantum computer built so far. Quantinuum, the company behind the device, is based in Cambridge, U.K., and Broomfield, Colorado. It demonstrated earlier machines operating on 32 qubits in 2023 and 56 qubits in 2025.

Helios and its predecessors use an architecture (or operational structure) with separate regions for storing and processing quantum information. The architecture is called a QCCD (quantum charge-coupled device) and was invented in 2002. This is akin to the architecture of classical computers that have memory for storage (hard disk drives, solid-state drives) and a separate processor (CPU, GPU).

The specific geometry of Helios resembles a rosette, with a ring for storage and two streamers for processing. The crucial element is the four-way X junction where they meet. A QCCD physically transports the charged objects (the ions) electrically from the storage to the processing regions.

The processing is done using laser pulses. This requires a quantum algorithm to be broken up into ion transport and quantum processing. This differs substantially from other quantum computing architectures, such as superconducting qubits, where the qubits are fixed in space and processing is executed by electrical signals switched on and off in time.

Submission + - Election Spam Is About To Get Even Worse In Your Inbox Thanks To New Google Move (dailywire.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Google quietly changed Gmail this week to make it easier for political campaigns and PACs to bypass spam folders and pump endless fundraising emails into the inboxes of millions of users.

The move could help qualifying political groups keep fundraising pleas out of the email graveyard and boost donations ahead of the midterm elections. The change follows years of complaints from Republicans that Gmailâ(TM)s spam filters disproportionately blocked their emails more often than Democrats.

The companyâ(TM)s new policy, first reported by the New York Times, came through an opaque policy announcement on its Help Center on Monday.

Comment Re:Anonymized yet Correlatable? (Score 1) 50

by uncqual (#66295420) Attached to: Google Buys All of Spirit Airlines' Data to Feed Its AI Models

There's really no "need" for Google to have any of this information (they wouldn't have had it if Spirit had been purchased and Google wouldn't have gone out of business as a result).

The article didn't say what Google wants to use the data for.

The data would likely have some value even with removal of all names/email addresses/employee numbers/etc -- i.e., absolutely no way to correlate any record with any other record. Even dates of hire and termination in the HR records could help identify the associated employee so, for example, those fields could not be linked to titles, performance reviews, salaries, etc in any way.

Perhaps that's what is being done but the value of data so cleansed seems pretty minimal for most uses -- but $10M is a drop in the bucket for Google so maybe they bought it on a whim even though it was going to be stripped of most of its value.

This reminds me of a customer we had when I worked at a database company long ago. This customer was almost certainly a government agency but had a bland "generic" name in a genre like "Optimized Marketing Partners" and their installation was in a brick building in Virginia with no windows and surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Anyway, they had a SQL query that was crashing the system and we asked for the query. In response, we got a few pages of fan-fold paper containing a printout of what appeared to be a very long SQL query -- but it was hard to tell because an X-ACTO (likely) knife had been used to cut out every field name, table name, database name, literal, and (apparently) expression. They left the SQL keywords, the periods between database/table/column names (which was impressive given the fragility of the resulting printout), and (IIRC) the comparison operators. It certainly was a fairly secure transmission of the information -- and in doing so it was rendered completely useless in resolving the problem. We never heard about that problem again after we requested more information -- presumably they figured out a way to express the question that didn't cause a crash or decided they didn't care that much about the answer to the question.

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