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Submission + - Walmart and Google team up to turn Gemini into the new Amazon killer (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Walmart and Google are teaming up to plug Walmartâ(TM)s catalog straight into Gemini, letting people browse and buy everyday items inside an AI chat instead of jumping through apps or search engines. The idea is simple but timely: if people increasingly ask an AI how to plan a camping trip, stock a pantry, or prep for a party, Walmart wants Gemini to serve up product suggestions automatically and complete the purchase within Walmart or Samâ(TM)s Club. Linked accounts pull in past shopping history, Walmart Plus perks still apply, and the retailerâ(TM)s same-day delivery network closes the loop in as little as thirty minutes in some regions.

It also reflects a defensive move. If AI becomes the main gateway to online shopping, retailers risk losing customers before they ever hit a website. Walmart securing a default presence inside Gemini positions it ahead of the curve, while Google gets a more practical use case than just generating answers or explanations. The pilot starts in the United States with plans to expand internationally, and it lands right as investors are watching whether conversational commerce is hype or the next shift in how people buy things online.

Comment Catching Up (Score 1) 71

by darenw (#65891917) Attached to: Americans Are Watching Fewer New TV Shows and More Free TV

What, there are new TV show series out? I'm still trying to start watching some of the new series that came out ten or fifteen years ago!

I suspect many potential viewers of new shows just don't have time, with all the good stuff on YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, and (don't laugh) real life activities. And like me, some are planning to binge watch Breaking Bad or Game Of Thrones or some other wildly popular series they haven't had time for yet.

Why do the makers of these shows crank out so many?

Submission + - Trump Dismantling National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado (pbs.org)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, moving to dissolve a research lab that a top White House official described as “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.

White House budget director Russ Vought criticized the lab in a social media post Tuesday night and said a comprehensive review of the lab is underway. “Vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location, Vought said.

The research lab, which houses the largest federal research program on climate change, supports research to predict, prepare for and respond to severe weather and other natural disasters. The research lab is managed by a nonprofit consortium of more than 130 colleges and universities on behalf of the National Science Foundation.

A senior White House official cited two instances of the lab’s “woke direction” that wastes taxpayer funds on what the official called frivolous pursuits and ideologies. One funded an Indigenous and Earth Sciences center that aimed to “make the sciences more welcoming, inclusive, and justice-centered,” while another experiment traced air pollution to “demonize motor vehicles, oil and gas operations.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity to speak frankly about the administration’s actions.

Comment Re: Won't anyone think of Spain? (Score 1) 201

by darenw (#65222237) Attached to: Is America Closer to Ending Daylight Saving Time?

Yes! So simple. Each company, school, family, or other entity can just make their schedule fit the available sunlit portion of the diurnal cycle.

Long gone are the days of dozens of people having to show up in synchrony at the assembly line to work in synchrony for several hours.

By dropping pointless shifting of clocks, fewer people will make mistakes showing up an hour late or early, miss flights, etc. With the common sense idea of just do what you need to do requiring sunlight at those times where there's actually sunlight, things will be fine. No kids at the bus stop in the dark.

Comment Re:Maximise useful sunlight hours (Score 1) 201

by darenw (#65222229) Attached to: Is America Closer to Ending Daylight Saving Time?

Daylight Savings Time is irrelevant to those with imperfect vision (and those with good vision), who don't want to drive in the dark. Shifting clocks around won't change how many hours of daylight you have in winter. Adjust your schedule so that you drive to work/school/whatever right after sunrise (regardless of how we name it using numbers) and drive home at a time where your arrive home right before sunset.

The real problem is that, if your latitude is sufficiently far from the equator, you may have only 7 hours of useful daylight, or 6, or less, yet people cling to the idea of working an 8 hour day. Even with 8 hours of daylight, you still need a bit more for commuting. The only real solution to commuting in daylight (even if just strong twilight near sunrise/sunset) is to make the standard work day 7 hours, or 6 hours, or even less depending how far from the equator you live.

Shifting clocks only changes how we name with numbers those times of sunrise, sunset, waking up by alarm clock, and driving. The total number of sunlit hours and the total number of hours at your desk/workstation/classroom/whatever remain the same, no matter how we monkey with our clocks.

Submission + - Could new clocks keep airplanes safe from GPS jamming? (bbc.com)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Over the last three months of 2024, more than 800 cases of GPS interference were recorded in Lithuanian airspace. Estonia and Finland have also raised concerns, accusing Russia of deploying technology to jam satellite navigation signals near Nato's eastern flank. A group of British scientists – dubbed the "Time Lords" – are working on a solution: to develop portable atomic clocks. By carrying a group of atoms cooled to -273C on the plane itself, rather than relying on an external signal, the technology can't be interfered with by jamming. But the problem is that the equipment is still too large to be used routinely on planes. The UK Hub for Quantum Enabled Position Navigation and Timing (QEPNT) was set up last December by the government to shrink the devices on to a chip, making them robust enough for everyday life and affordable for everyone. Henry White, part of the team from BAE Systems that worked on the test flight, told BBC News that he thought the first application could be aboard ships, "where there's a bit more space".

Submission + - Nuclear-diamond battery could power devices for 1000s of years. (livescience.com) 1

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Live Science has a report about the world's first nuclear-diamond battery using carbon-14, which has a half-life of 5,700 years, to power devices.

The nuclear battery uses the reaction of a diamond placed close to a radioactive source to spontaneously produce electricity, scientists at the University of Bristol in the U.K. explained in a Dec. 4 statement. No motion — neither linear nor rotational — is required. That means no energy is needed to move a magnet through a coil or to turn an armature within a magnetic field to produce electric current, as is required in conventional power sources.

The diamond battery harvests fast-moving electrons excited by radiation, similar to how solar power uses photovoltaic cells to convert photons into electricity, the scientists said.

The researchers chose carbon-14 as the source material because it emits short-range radiation, which is quickly absorbed by any solid material — meaning there are no concerns about harm from the radiation. In addition, while carbon-14 is extremely toxic to touch or ingest, the surrounding diamond also provides maximal protection.

A single nuclear-diamond battery containing 0.04 ounce (1 gram) of carbon-14 could deliver 15 joules of electricity per day. For comparison, a standard alkaline AA battery, which weighs about 0.7 ounces (20 grams), has an energy-storage rating of 700 joules per gram. It delivers more power than the nuclear-diamond battery would in the short term, but it would be exhausted within 24 hours.

By contrast, the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years, which means the battery would take that long to be depleted to 50% power. This is close to the age of the world's oldest civilization. As another point of comparison, a spacecraft powered by a carbon-14 diamond battery would reach Alpha Centauri — our nearest stellar neighbor, which is about 4.4 light-years from Earth — long before its power were significantly depleted.

The battery, which was built on a plasma deposition rig near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in the U.K. by a team from the University of Bristol and the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), has no moving parts and thus requires no maintenance, nor does it have any carbon emissions.

Submission + - Is AI making you less creative? (techxplore.com)

Submitted by Big Hairy Gorilla
Big Hairy Gorilla writes: Researchers at the University of Toronto, explore the impact of LLMs on Human Creativity. The use of LLMs in particular, but automation in general, leads to a conundrum. "The smarter the tool the dumber the operator" is how I put it. Observationally, it's clear that we in technology use tools extensively. At what point do we lose skills because the tools do "too much" for you?

Submission + - Were the Egyptian pyramids built with kites? (caltech.edu) 1

Submitted by Smonster
Smonster writes: When people think about the building of the Egyptian pyramids, they probably have a mental image of thousands of slaves laboriously rolling massive stone blocks with logs and levers. But as one Caltech aeronautics professor is demonstrating, the task may have been accomplished by just four or five guys who flew the stones into place with a kite.

On Saturday, June 23, Mory Gharib and his team raised a 6,900-pound, 15-foot obelisk into vertical position in the desert near Palmdale by using nothing more than a kite, a pulley system, and a support frame. Though the blustery winds were gusting upwards of 22 miles per hour, the team set the obelisk upright on second try.

In the course of researching the tools available to the Egyptian pyramid builders, she has discovered, for example, that a brass ankh—long assumed to be merely a religious symbol—makes a very good carabiner for controlling a kite line. And a type of insect commonly found in Egypt could have supplied a kind of shellac to make linen sails hold wind. As for objections to the use of pulleys, the team's intention was always to progress later—actually, "regress" might be a more appropriate word— to the windlasses apparently used to hoist sails on Egyptian ships.

Finally, one might ask whether there was and is sufficient wind in Egypt for a kite or a drag chute to fly. The answer is that steady winds of up to 30 miles-per-hour are not unusual in the areas where the pyramids and obelisks are found.

Submission + - Osmo Startup Wants to Give Computers a Sense of Smell (cnbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Of the five human senses, AI is already able to mimic sight and hearing. And one company wants to use the technology to digitize another: smell.

Alex Wiltschko is the CEO and co-founder of Osmo, a startup that uses artificial intelligence technology to help computers “generate smells like we generate images and sounds,” per the company’s website.

Wiltschko found that molecules can be tricky for computers to analyze due to their complex structures.

“The reason why it’s so challenging is because you can move one tiny thing around in that molecule, like one bond, and the scent of the molecule goes from roses to rotten egg,” he says.

But thanks to advances in AI technology, the model was able to pick up on patterns in the different structures of the molecules and use that knowledge to accurately predict the odor of other molecules.

Submission + - China's battery technology reflects research boom and big spending (archive.is)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: Stressing science education, China is outpacing other countries in research fields like battery chemistry, crucial to its lead in electric vehicles.

= = = = = =

China’s domination of electric cars, which is threatening to start a trade war, was born decades ago in university laboratories in Texas, when researchers discovered how to make batteries with minerals that were abundant and cheap.

Companies from China have recently built on those early discoveries, figuring out how to make the batteries hold a powerful charge and endure more than a decade of daily recharges. They are inexpensively and reliably manufacturing vast numbers of these batteries, producing most of the world’s electric cars and many other clean energy systems.

Batteries are just one example of how China is catching up — or passing — advanced industrial democracies in its technological and manufacturing sophistication. It is achieving many breakthroughs in a long list of sectors, from pharmaceuticals to drones to high-efficiency solar panels.

the article continues...

Submission + - Not Learning to Code In An Age of AI Considered Harmful

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: As the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Conference kicked off Tuesday in Las Vegas, new guidance was issued by authors from tech-backed CSTA and Code.org led TeachAI arguing that K-12 computer science education is more important than ever in an age of AI.

From the press release: "As AI becomes increasingly present in the classroom, educators are understandably concerned about how it might disrupt the teaching of core CS skills like programming. With these briefs, TeachAI and CSTA hope to reinforce the idea that learning to program is the cornerstone of computational thinking and an important gateway to the problem-solving, critical thinking, and creative thinking skills necessary to thrive in today's digitally driven world. The rise of AI only makes CS education more important."

To help drive home the point to educators, the 39-page Guidance on the Future of Computer Science Education in an Age of AI (penned by five authors from nonprofits CSTA and Code.org) includes a pretty grim comic entitled Learn to Program or Follow Commands. In the panel, two high school students who scoff at the idea of having to learn to code and instead use GenAI to create their Python apps wind up getting stuck in miserable warehouse jobs several years later as a result where they're ordered about by an AI robot. One wonders how the comic will play with Code.org Platinum Supporter ($3,000,000+) and CSTA Strategic Partner Amazon, who coincidentally came under fire in a Senate report Wednesday for its treatment of warehouse workers.

Amazon is also the Presenting Sponsor for this week's CSTA 2024 Conference, which will feature a panel Thursday on CS Education in the Age of AI, where experts will be asked the already-answered-by-CSTA questions: "Is computer science education still relevant in the age of AI? Why learn to code when AI can do it for you?"

Comment Re:Early risers get the sunrise and sunset (Score 1) 85

In northern Montana, in the summer the fading twilight is gone at around 11pm (standard not daylight time) and the earliest hint of morning twilight is... I'm usually not awake then... 2am? I'm not in the center of the time zone. Of course use of DST makes the clock times look more extreme. In the winter I joke that I like to make good use of both hours of daylight every day. Even night owls see sunrise and sunset in the winter. I like to say I get up about an hour after sunrise, but that's not realistic when the day/night ratio varies so much around the year.

Makes me wonder - do the researches on circadian rhythms and night owls and early risers take into account latitude and seasons? When daylight hours are abundantly generous or scroogerly miserly, that affects everyone, and maybe not night owls any different as compared to early riser nuts or "normal" people? How do people in northern states deal as a society with varied circadian compared to those living in the tropical zone who get roughly 12 hours and 12 hours all year round?

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