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Submission + - GM wants parts makers to pull supply chains from China (businesstimes.com.sg)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: General Motors (GM) has directed several thousand of its suppliers to scrub their supply chains of parts from China, four people familiar with the matter said, reflecting automakers’ growing frustration over geopolitical disruptions to their operations.

GM executives have been telling suppliers they should find alternatives to China for their raw materials and parts, with the goal of eventually moving their supply chains out of the country entirely, the people said.

The automaker has set a 2027 deadline for some suppliers to dissolve their China sourcing ties, some of the sources said.

GM approached some suppliers with the directive in late 2024, but the effort took on fresh urgency this past spring, during the early days of an escalating US-China trade battle, the sources said.

Submission + - A potential quantum leap (harvard.edu)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Harvard physicists unveil system to solve long-standing barrier to new generation of supercomputers

The dream of creating game-changing quantum computers — supermachines that encode information in single atoms rather than conventional bits — has been hampered by the formidable challenge known as quantum error correction.

In a paper published Monday in Nature, Harvard researchers demonstrated a new system capable of detecting and removing errors below a key performance threshold, potentially providing a workable solution to the problem.

"For the first time, we combined all essential elements for a scalable, error-corrected quantum computation in an integrated architecture," said Mikhail Lukin, co-director of the Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative, Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor, and senior author of the new paper. "These experiments — by several measures the most advanced that have been done on any quantum platform to date — create the scientific foundation for practical large-scale quantum computation."

In the new paper, the team demonstrated a "fault tolerant" system using 448 atomic quantum bits manipulated with an intricate sequence of techniques to detect and correct errors.

The key mechanisms include physical entanglement, logical entanglement, logical magic, and entropy removal. For example, the system employs the trick of "quantum teleportation" — transferring the quantum state of one particle to another elsewhere without physical contact.

"There are still a lot of technical challenges remaining to get to very large-scale computer with millions of qubits, but this is the first time we have an architecture that is conceptually scalable," said lead author Dolev Bluvstein, Ph.D. '25, who did the research during his graduate studies at Harvard and is now an assistant professor at Caltech. "It's going to take a lot of effort and technical development, but it's becoming clear that we can build fault-tolerant quantum computers."

Submission + - Singapore scammers get the canning treatment (mha.gov.sg) 1

Submitted by D,Petkow
D,Petkow writes: Singapore is often hailed as one of the world’s most ultra-modern hubs — a place of gleaming skyscrapers, cutting-edge fintech, and futuristic urban planning. Yet, beneath the polished surface, the city-state still enforces some of the strictest old-school punishments imaginable.

In a move that stunned many outside observers, Parliament recently passed a law mandating at least six strokes of the cane for scammers and money mules. With scams making up nearly 60% of reported crimes and billions lost since 2020, the government argues that harsh deterrence is necessary.

It’s a striking contrast: a nation leading in smart cities and AI governance, while simultaneously wielding rattan canes against fraudsters. This duality — hyper-modern yet deeply traditional — is part of what makes Singapore fascinating, and sometimes bewildering, to the rest of the world.

https://says.com/my/news/singa...
http://metro.co.uk/2025/11/08/...

Submission + - Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa (substack.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: You know that feeling when you’re waiting for the cable guy, and they said ‘between 8am and 6pm, and you waste your entire day, and they never show up?

Now imagine that, except the cable guy is ‘electricity,’ the day is ‘50 years,’ and you’re one of 600 million people. At some point, you stop waiting and figure it out yourself.

What’s happening across Sub-Saharan Africa right now is the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history, except it’s not being built by governments or utilities or World Bank consortiums. It’s being built by startups selling solar panels to farmers on payment plans. And it’s working.

Over 30 million solar products sold in 2024. 400,000 new solar installations every month across Africa. 50% market share captured by companies that didn’t exist 15 years ago. Carbon credits subsidizing the cost. IoT chips in every device. 90%+ repayment rates on loans to people earning $2/day.

And if you understand what’s happening in Africa, you understand the template for how infrastructure will get built everywhere else for the next 50 years.

Submission + - Bombshell report exposes how Meta relied on scam ad profits to fund AI (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Documents showed that internally, Meta was hesitant to abruptly remove accounts, even those considered some of the “scammiest scammers,” out of concern that a drop in revenue could diminish resources needed for artificial intelligence growth.

Instead of promptly removing bad actors, Meta allowed “high value accounts” to “accrue more than 500 strikes without Meta shutting them down,” Reuters reported. The more strikes a bad actor accrued, the more Meta could charge to run ads, as Meta’s documents showed the company “penalized” scammers by charging higher ad rates. Meanwhile, Meta acknowledged in documents that its systems helped scammers target users most likely to click on their ads.

“Users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests,” Reuters reported.

Internally, Meta estimates that users across its apps in total encounter 15 billion “high risk” scam ads a day. That’s on top of 22 billion organic scam attempts that Meta users are exposed to daily, a 2024 document showed. Last year, the company projected that about $16 billion, which represents about 10 percent of its revenue, would come from scam ads.

Submission + - Musk Wins $1 Trillion Pay Package, Creating Split Screen on Wealth in America (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Tesla shareholders approved a plan to grant Elon Musk shares worth nearly $1 trillion if he meets ambitious goals, including vastly expanding the company’s stock market valuation.

Much like an earlier pay plan that Tesla shareholders approved in 2018, this 12-step package asks Mr. Musk, the company’s chief executive, to vastly expand Tesla’s stock market valuation — to $8.5 trillion from around $1.4 trillion — while hitting a variety of other goals. Those include selling one million robots with humanlike qualities and 10 million paid subscriptions to the company’s self-driving software.

Submission + - Israeli army removing Chinese made service cars from officers - espionage risks (x.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Israeli army has started taking away Chinese-made service cars from officers — espionage risks officially confirmed

The military has strong reasons to believe that built-in cameras, sensors and communication systems in these vehicles could collect data and transmit it to servers in China.

Israel’s Defense Ministry and the IDF have begun a phased phase-out. Hundreds of vehicles are affected — mostly seven-seat CHERY models issued to officers with large families.

  Chinese cars are already banned from entering military bases, and by early 2026 the army plans to completely phase out their use.

Comment Not every 6 months (Score 1) 160

by schwit1 (#65767436) Attached to: Daylight Saving Time: Still Happening. Still Unpopular

Daylight Saving Time (DST): Approximately 238 days per year (about 65% of the year)

From the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November
That's roughly 7 months and 3 weeks

Standard Time: Approximately 127 days per year (about 35% of the year)

From the first Sunday in November to the second Sunday in March
That's roughly 4 months and 1 week

Submission + - Ford to End Production of Failed F-150 Lightning (yahoo.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Ford will stop making its electric vehicle (EV) flagship, the F-150 Lightning. The New York Times reports this could be attributed to both the fire and flagging sales. In the first three quarters of the year, Lightning unit sales were up only 1% to 23,034. The extent to which Ford is entirely a gasoline-powered car company shows up in overall F-Series sales, which rose 12.7% to 620,580. Ford’s management shows wisdom in shutting down Lightning production. The electric pickup never sold well, suggesting its launch was a terrible mistake. Additionally, the U.S. EV market is dying and will not bounce back soon. The $7,500 EV tax credit expired at the end of the third quarter. People who wanted an EV rushed to buy one before the deadline.

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