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Comment rip nvidia (Score 1) 131

Great, another company absolutely absorbed fully by buzzwords because they don't know how to market their own tech without it. Cant wait to get charged $10,000 usd for a card that renders at 1/8th the scale then runs it through an upscaler that's quite literally guessing. if this becomes a thing AMD will become a monopoly in more serious fields besides the epic leet 420 no scope gamers. even if somehow dlss becomes the standard in games ill take the performance hit to not use it. or, you know, we could go back to optimizing game rendering for the hardware we have in front of us. No? Okay.

Comment in this thread (Score 1) 299

Redditors who have jumped off the ship and the people of slashdot who haven't been following the story duke it out over semantics. Lots of talk of scorched earth ideas on how to end this without thinking that nobody wants to moderate through the bullshit without effective tools to do so, sure they can find someone starry eyed to do it but that won't last the moment they run into something worse than a porn bot. hardcore users of reddit have been using the same apps for years, and i've read many times that once they die off it will probably be the end of reddit for them. slashdot users trying to remind them that a website needs to make money even though reddit has been profitable for some time now.

Submission + - Reddit Communities Plan To Extend the Blackout Indefinitely (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Moderators of many Reddit communities are pledging to keep their subreddits private or restricted indefinitely. For the vast majority of subreddits, the blackout to protest Reddit’s expensive API pricing changes was expected to last from Monday until Wednesday. But in response to a Tuesday post on the r/ModCoord subreddit, users are chiming in to say that their subreddits will remain dark past that 48-hour window. “Reddit has budged microscopically,” u/SpicyThunder335, a moderator for r/ModCoord, wrote in the post. They say that despite an announcement that access to a popular data-archiving tool for moderators would be restored, “our core concerns still aren’t satisfied, and these concessions came prior to the blackout start date; Reddit has been silent since it began.” SpicyThunder335 also bolded a line from a Monday memo from CEO Steve Huffman obtained by The Verge — “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well" — and said that “more is needed for Reddit to act.”

Ahead of the Tuesday post, more than 300 subreddits had committed to staying dark indefinitely, SpicyThunder335 said. The list included some hugely popular subreddits, like r/aww (more than 34 million subscribers), r/music (more than 32 million subscribers), and r/videos (more than 26 million subscribers). Even r/nba committed to an indefinite timeframe at arguably the most important time of the NBA season. But SpicyThunder335 invited moderators to share pledges to keep the protests going, and the commitments are rolling in. SpicyThunder335 notes that not everyone will be able to go dark indefinitely for valid reasons. “For example, r/stopDrinking represents a valuable resource for a communities in need, and the urgency of getting the news of the ongoing war out to r/Ukraine obviously outweighs any of these concerns,” SpicyThunder335 wrote. As an alternative, SpicyThunder335 recommended implementing a “weekly gesture of support on ‘Touch-Grass-Tuesdays,’” which would be left up to the discretion of individual communities. SpicyThunder335 also acknowledged that some subreddits would need to poll their users to make sure they’re on board. As of this writing, more than 8,400 subreddits have gone private or into a restricted mode. The blackouts caused Reddit to briefly crash on Monday.

Comment meaningless dribble? (Score 1) 36

This is like watching grandma rant about how her pictures were on the internet before facebook was invented and she put them there willingly. the information presented here is concerning but in the same way that it was concerning last time we heard this information. in the hands of idiots who don't know how to ask the right questions or hand the mic to someone who knows how to ask the right questions all this will end up being is a culture war of "we have to hate this because china like it! you dont like china do you?!" and nothing more. if there are security concerns investigate them! if they turn out to be true then use that as ammo, not the fact that a foreign company with no need to stand to our powers that be has lied to the senate.

Submission + - Debian 12 bookworm released (debian.org)

e065c8515d206cb0e190 writes: After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 12 (code name bookworm).

bookworm will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.

This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as obsolete. 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for bookworm is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code.

bookworm has more translated man pages than ever thanks to our translators who have made man-pages available in multiple languages such as: Czech, Danish, Greek, Finnish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. All of the systemd man pages are now completely available in German.

The Debian Med Blend introduces a new package: shiny-server which simplifies scientific web applications using R. We have kept to our efforts of providing Continuous Integration support for Debian Med team packages. Install the metapackages at version 3.8.x for Debian bookworm.

The Debian Astro Blend continues to provide a one-stop solution for professional astronomers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists with updates to almost all versions of the software packages in the blend. astap and planetary-system-stacker help with image stacking and astrometry resolution. openvlbi, the open source correlator, is now included.

Support for Secure Boot on ARM64 has been reintroduced: users of UEFI-capable ARM64 hardware can boot with Secure Boot mode enabled to take full advantage of the security feature.

Comment Re:Went way beyond anything reasonable. (Score 1) 108

Second, no way to enforce it - unless you are going to be arresting the children that violate it and click the box that says "over 18?" Are you 'protecting' the kid or attacking them?

in short, there is already a system to do this. In louisiana you have a digital id card (la wallet) and you use that to "verify" you're over 18 by signing into the app and doing a 2 step verification if need be. makes looking at adult sites a pain in the ass. the solution? a vpn

Comment Re:Does this solve a problem? (Score 1) 18

It mainly solves a problem of convenience. working with the limited information and how it works currently, my guess is its going to be like androids biometrics where they just save you from having to input a password when they work, and ask for that password when they don't. I see this being most useful to a more tech illiterate person who already uses things like windows hello/touch id to authenticate into their computer.

Comment a bit of a stretch (Score 1) 39

Its particularly bothersome to me that this was published in cell reports, a biology journal, and not a computer science journal. It reeks of a set of peers that aren't very versed on the topic. its true that ChatGPT is becoming an issue in schools, its undeniable that my peers are using it to get easy answers to questions that would take a while to search for, but the scope of this paper is just impractical. No PhD student would directly go to a bot known to give bad answers with questions on something as reviewed as a scientific paper, never mind a doctor. I like to think that the peer review system would spot the hallucinations and tear it to shreds, but as others have pointed out the peer review system is flawed in its own ways. I think the researchers would have a better shot if their dataset targeted a different set of formal writing instead of academic science.

Submission + - GameStop Fires Its CEO, Meme Stock Investor Ryan Cohen Takes Over (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes: GameStop has fired CEO Matt Furlong, the company announced as part of its first quarter 2023 earnings on Wednesday. There’s no immediate replacement, though board chairman Ryan Cohen has been appointed executive chairman, the company said in a short press release about Furlong’s firing. Cohen, who founded the e-commerce site Chewy, has invested in a number of “memestocks” including GameStop and Bed, Bath and Beyond. His surprise sale of Bed, Bath, and Beyond stock in 2022 raised eyebrows and led to at least one lawsuit accusing him of pumping and dumping the stock. His initial investment in GameStop back in early 2021 led to an enormous rise in the stock and contributed to its status as a memestock beloved by the Reddit sub r/wallstreetbets.

Matthew Furlong was fired on June 5th without cause, the company wrote in the 10-Q. Furlong started at GameStop in June 2021 — which was after the beginning of the chaos with GameStop’s stock price — and he oversaw things like the company’s move into NFTs, November layoffs, and firing the company’s CFO. GameStop has also made Mark Robinson the company’s new “principal executive officer” with a title of general manager, according to a form 10-Q from the company. Robinson has been at GameStop for nearly eight years, according to his LinkedIn, and he most recently served as the company’s general counsel. GameStop canceled its earnings call today.

Submission + - Dell In Hot Water For Making Shoppers Think Overpriced Monitors Were Discounted (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Dell Technologies' Australia subsidiary misled online shoppers into thinking that adding a monitor to their purchase would get them a discount on the display, even though doing so sometimes resulted in customers paying a higher price for the monitor than if they had bought it on its own. That's according to a declaration by the Australian Federal Court on Monday. The deceptive practices happened on Dell's Australian website, but they serve as a reminder to shoppers everywhere that a strikethrough line or sale stamp on an online retailer doesn't always mean you're getting a bargain. On June 5, the Federal Court said Dell Australia was guilty of making "false or misleading representations with respect to the price" of monitors that its website encouraged shoppers to add to their purchase. The purchases were made from August 2019 to the middle of December 2021.

The website would display the add-on price alongside a higher price that had a strikethrough line, suggesting that the monitor was typically sold at the price with the line going through it but that customers would get a discount if they added it to their cart at purchase. (The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, or ACCC, posted a screenshot example here.) However, the strikethrough prices weren't actually representative of what Dell was charging for the monitors for most of the time before the purported discount. In fact, the allegedly discounted price occasionally turned out to be a rip-off, as ACCC commission Liza Carver said in a statement today: "In some cases, consumers paid more for the add-on monitor advertised as 'discounted' than they would have paid if they had bought it as a stand-alone product, which is shocking."

The Australian Federal Court also found that Dell's Australian website used deceptive language, like "Includes x% off," “Total Savings" plus a dollar amount, “Discounted Price” and a dollar amount, and "Get the best price for popular accessories when purchased with this product." According to the ACCC, shoppers spent over $2 million Australian dollars ($1.33 million USD) on 5,300 add-on monitors during this time period. The Australian Federal Court ordered Dell Australia to give full or partial refunds to affected customers. The company must also hire an "independent compliance professional" and contact affected customers. The Australian Federal Court will take comment on further penalties Dell Australia should incur, which could include fines, at a future date.

Submission + - Health Firm 'Grail' Wrongly Told Hundreds of People They Might Have Cancer (cbsnews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A biotechnology company selling a $949 blood test that it bills as a "first of its kind" to detect cancer said it incorrectly informed about 400 customers that they might have the disease. The Menlo Park, California, company, called Grail, said it sent a form letter to some customers who had bought its Galleri test, which detects a marker for more than 50 types of cancer, "stating incorrectly that a cancer signal was detected," a company spokeswoman told CBS MoneyWatch in a statement. The company blamed a vendor, PWN Health, for the error, citing a "software configuration issue."

In a statement, PWN Health said it said the problem was due to "a misconfiguration of our patient engagement platform used to send templated communications to individuals." It added that it has added processes to make sure such a mistake doesn't occur again, and started contacting the people who received the erroneous letters within 36 hours. The error comes amid an increased demand for health care screening tests, especially for chronic diseases such as cancer.

Grail is billing its service as a complement to routine single-cancer tests for diseases such as colon or breast cancer, and said that the blood test can detect forms of the disease that aren't routinely screened for, such as in the gallbladder and pancreas. Grail said it hasn't received reports of patient harm or "adverse events" due to the erroneous letters.

Submission + - Redditor Creates Working Anime QR Codes Using Stable Diffusion (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, a Reddit user named "nhciao" posted a series of artistic QR codes created using the Stable Diffusion AI image-synthesis model that can still be read as functional QR codes by smartphone camera apps. The functional pieces reflect artistic styles in anime and Asian art. [...] In this case, despite the presence of intricate AI-generated designs and patterns in the images created by nhciao, we've found that smartphone camera apps on both iPhone and Android are still able to read these as functional QR codes. If you have trouble reading them, try backing your camera farther away from the images.

Stable Diffusion is an AI-powered image-synthesis model released last year that can generate images based on text descriptions. It can also transform existing images using a technique called "img2img." The creator did not detail the exact technique used to create the novel codes in English, but based on this blog post and the title of the Reddit post ("ControlNet for QR Code"), they apparently trained several custom Stable Diffusion ControlNet models (plus LoRA fine tunings) that have been conditioned to create different-styled results. Next, they fed existing QR codes into the Stable Diffusion AI image generator and used ControlNet to maintain the QR code's data positioning despite synthesizing an image around it, likely using a written prompt. Other techniques exist to make artistic-looking QR codes by manipulating the positions of dots within the codes to make meaningful patterns that can still be read. In this case, Stable Diffusion is not only controlling dot positions but also blending picture details to match the QR code.

This interesting use of Stable Diffusion is possible because of the innate error correction feature built into QR codes. This error correction capability allows a certain percentage of the QR code's data to be restored if it's damaged or obscured, permitting a level of modification without making the code unreadable. In typical QR codes, this error correction feature serves to recover information if part of the code is damaged or dirty. But in nhciao's case, it has been leveraged to blend creativity with utility. Stable Diffusion added unique artistic touches to the QR codes without compromising their functionality. [...] This discovery opens up new possibilities for both digital art and marketing. Ordinary black-and-white QR codes could be turned into unique pieces of art, enhancing their aesthetic appeal. The positive reaction to nhciao's experiment on social media may spark a new era in which QR codes are not just tools of convenience but also interesting and complex works of art.

Submission + - AWS 'Retiring' Open-Source-and-on-GitHub Documentation

theodp writes: On the AWS News Blog, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr has published an obituary for AWS Documentation on GitHub (RIP, 2018-2023). From the blog post:

"About five years ago I announced that AWS Documentation is Now Open Source and on GitHub. After a prolonged period of experimentation we will archive most of the repos starting the week of June 5th, and will devote all of our resources to directly improving the AWS documentation and website."

"The primary source for most of the AWS documentation is on internal systems that we had to manually sync with the GitHub repos. Despite the best efforts of our documentation team, keeping the public repos in sync with our internal ones has proven to be very difficult and time consuming, with several manual steps and some parallel editing. With 262 separate repos and thousands of feature launches every year, the overhead was very high and actually consumed precious time that could have been put to use in ways that more directly improved the quality of the documentation."

"Our intent was to increase value to our customers through openness and collaboration, but we learned through customer feedback that this wasn’t necessarily the case. After carefully considering many options we decided to retire the repos and to invest all of our resources in making the content better."

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