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Submission + - Nvidia Details New AI Chips and Autonomous Car Project With Mercedes (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Monday, [Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip-making giant Nvidia] said the company would begin shipping a new A.I. chip later this year, one that can do more computing with less power than previous generations of chips could. Known as the Vera Rubin, the chip has been in development for three years and is designed to fulfill A.I. requests more quickly and cheaply than its predecessors. Mr. Huang, who spoke during CES, an annual tech conference in Las Vegas, also discussed Nvidia’s surprisingly ambitious work around autonomous vehicles. This year, Mercedes-Benz will begin shipping cars equipped with Nvidia self-driving technology comparable to Tesla’s Autopilot.

Nvidia’s new Rubin chips are being manufactured and will be shipped to customers, including Microsoft and Amazon, in the second half of the year, fulfilling a promise Mr. Huang made last March when he first described the chip at the company’s annual conference in San Jose, Calif. Companies will be able to train A.I. models with one-quarter as many Rubin chips as its predecessor, the Blackwell. It can provide information for chatbots and other A.I. products for one-tenth of the cost. They will also be able to install the chips in data centers more quickly, courtesy of redesigned supercomputers that feature fewer cables. If the new chips live up to their promise, they could allow companies to develop A.I. at a lower cost and at least begin to respond to the soaring electrical demands of data centers being built around the world.

[...] On Monday, he said Nvidia had developed new A.I. software that would allow customers like Uber and Lucid to develop cars that navigate roads autonomously. It will share the system, called Alpamayo, to spread its influence and the appeal of Nvidia’s chip technology. Since 2020, Nvidia has been working with Mercedes to develop a class of self-driving cars. They will begin shipping an early example of their collaboration when Mercedes CLA cars become available in the first half of the year in Europe and the United States. Mr. Huang said the company started working on self-driving technology eight years ago. It has more than a thousand people working on the project. "Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous," Mr. Huang said.

Submission + - Utah allows AI to renew medical prescriptions (utah.gov) 1

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

This agreement marks the first state-approved program in the country that allows an AI system to legally participate in medical decision-making for prescription renewals, an emerging model that could reshape access to care and ultimately improve care outcomes.

Hopefully opioids are excluded.

Submission + - NYC Wegmans is storing biometric data on shoppers' eyes, voices and faces (gothamist.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Wegmans in New York City has begun collecting biometric data from anyone who enters its supermarkets, according to new signage posted at the chain's Manhattan and Brooklyn locations earlier this month.

Anyone entering the store could have data on their face, eyes and voices collected and stored by the Rochester-headquartered supermarket chain. The information is used to "protect the safety and security of our patrons and employees," according to the signage. The new scanning policy is an expansion of a 2024 pilot.

The chain had initially said that the scanning system was only for a small group of employees and promised to delete any biometric data it collected from shoppers during the pilot rollout. The new notice makes no such assurances.

Wegmans representatives did not reply to questions about how the data would be stored, why it changed its policy or if it would share the data with law enforcement.

Comment Re:Surely a laptop is better. (Score 1) 78

by Junta (#65906429) Attached to: HP Pushes PC-in-a-Keyboard for Businesses With Hot Desks

Frankly, in that scenario, I'd want my phone to be that system. Unfortunately, all the phone vendors that tried royally sucked at providing decent window management/desktop shell with zero ability to run alternative desktop shells.

Unfortunately, Android is at the behest of Google who just can't make a decent desktop shell to save their lives and also won't use an external one. I'll begrudingly say that Windows might have done an "ok" job, if they had gotten Windows 10 done earlier, though still not my favorite, better than the Android/Chrome desktop management I've used.

Guess PinePhone should be up my alley, but it seems to kind of suck at being a cell phone, and while I might like my cell phone to be a viable stand in for a laptop, if I have to carry a 'non-cellular' device anyway, guess a laptop still makes sense...

Submission + - Chinese Fusion Reactor Breaks Plasma Density Limit (futurism.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Scientists at China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) program rang in the new year with a stunning accomplishment: empirical evidence that they used the device to achieve nuclear plasma densities once thought to be beyond human capabilities. To reach a point where fusion reactor can power itself — a sustainable fusion reaction — requires that gnarly plasma to stay hot, dense, and stable for long stretches of time. For years, it was understood that higher plasma densities would inevitably result in instability, collapsing the fuel before it could ignite, a threshold known as the Greenwald limit. In deuterium-tritium fusion, the fuel must be heated to about 13 keV (150 million kelvin) to reach optimal conditions. At such temperatures, the amount of fusion power produced increases with the square of the plasma density. This new research seemingly flips all that on its head. As the EAST team explains, the method basically involves creating a high gas pressure environment in the reactor prior to plasma formation, which allows the plasma to interact with the reactor wall in a much less destructive way than it would otherwise. Scientists also manually pump extra energy into the plasma as it heats, allowing an even rise in density. The result is a plasma that remains stable even as its internal density rises, resulting in fuel densities “far exceeding empirical limits.” While there are still plenty of breakthroughs left before humanity achieves practical power production with fusion, shattering the Greenwald represents a major item on the to-do list — and another notch on China’s lengthy green energy belt.

Comment Re:This is fantastic! (Score 1) 96

by Junta (#65906197) Attached to: Microsoft Office Is Now 'Microsoft 365 Copilot App'

Well, I did say exactly that in my conclusion, that it's not that LibreOffice writer/impress are incapable, just different and realistically I *have* to work with people who know only Microsoft Office stuff.

If I was in an org that was LibreOffice-centric, that would be fantastic and I wouldn't use Office. However the practical fact is that when I deal with my own company and 99% of customers, they want to speak in Microsoft products. On the wild occasion that someone sends me an odp file, I'll gleefully fire up LibreOffice to work with it. Which means I need both Office (err... Copilot now I guess...) and LibreOffice.

It may not be reasonably fair that LibreOffice is stuck trying to be compatible without cooperation from Microsoft, but it is the practical reality.

Submission + - Hacker Dressed as the Pink Ranger Takes Down White Supremacist Websites Live (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by t0qer
t0qer writes: On stage at the annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, a hacker known as Martha Root deleted the servers of three websites run by white nationalists. The takedown, performed by Root while dressed up as the Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers, came at the end of a talk on the Nazi online ecosystem that also featured journalists Eva Hoffmann and Christian Fuchs, per TechCrunch. The three sites targeted included WhiteDate, a white nationalist dating site; WhiteChild, a website for matching white sperm and egg donors; and WhiteDeal, an online labor market for white supremacists. As of Monday, the websites remain offline.

Comment Re:Surely a laptop is better. (Score 2) 78

by Junta (#65905843) Attached to: HP Pushes PC-in-a-Keyboard for Businesses With Hot Desks

I suppose the key point would have to be some price advantage for not including a display, touchpad, hinge, and a smaller battery than usual laptop. I'm skeptical, especially now where RAM costs likely make the rest of all of that a rounding error....

I suppose one *could* argue that use with an external monitor would be less awkward. Using a PC with external monitor as your focus can be pretty weird, and generally it's easier to have a separate keyboard which is more desk space.

However a tiny PC mounted between the monitor and a VESA mounting setup seems to be a better choice for the environments imagined. Sure the keyboard is more portable, but by requiring external display and mouse the flexibility is limited anyway. People break their keyboards all the time, and it's nice for those call center like environments to keep the key important piece well away from the users hands and drinks. Cheap keyboards and mice, and keep the system well off the table.

Submission + - Nearly all women in STEM secretly feel like impostors (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Nearly all women in STEM graduate programs report feeling like impostors, despite strong evidence of success. This mindset leads many to dismiss their achievements as luck and fear being “found out.” Research links impostorism to worse mental health, higher burnout, and increased thoughts of dropping out. Supportive environments and shifting beliefs about intelligence may help break the cycle.

Comment Re:This is fantastic! (Score 1) 96

by Junta (#65905713) Attached to: Microsoft Office Is Now 'Microsoft 365 Copilot App'

Yeah, I'd like to, except:
- Impress tends to totally flub the presentations I work on
- For some reason, Calc is tortuously slow at simple things like scrolling some of the data I have, and it's not even a lot of data, and nothing so much as formulas to explain why it would be slow
- Writer flubs document formatting, though not as severely as Impress

For Impress and Writer issues, it's probably fine in and of themselves if everyone else used it instead of Microsoft software since it's more disagreement on formatting rather than capability, but I have to work with other people. The calc performance issue makes it just unusable at all for me.

Comment Re:This is fantastic! (Score 1) 96

by Junta (#65905513) Attached to: Microsoft Office Is Now 'Microsoft 365 Copilot App'

This disproportionately impacts Linux users, actually. It's not *huge*, but in Windows, I think the experience for now is largely the same, you open up the desktop app of your choice, regardless of stupid name, browse the files through explorer even if in onedrive.

For Linux users that need to use Office apps, you use the web versions, which are generally adequate for most tasks. Now instead of getting a document oriented view to work with your files and files shared with you, you get, by default a big old chat prompt. Further, that chat prompt isn't even particularly hooked into your files, so it can only operate about the same as any other chat agent, where you have to manually otherwise find your file, 'attach it' directly and ask questions about it.

Now you can either click through to the 'Search' or an app directly to get back to a workable interface, but the AI-first landing page replaces your entry into the web version.

Submission + - Dell Admits It Made a Huge Mistake When It Abandoned XPS (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: At last year’s CES, Dell made the eyebrow-raising decision to ax all its legacy laptop brand names and instead opt for Apple-like conventions. Instead of XPS, we were forced to comprehend the differences between a “Dell,” a “Dell Pro,” a “Dell Premium,” and a “Dell Pro Max.”

“This complicated brand we called Dell last year was trying to cover this very large consumer space with lots of similar products,” Clarke said. Now those non-XPS products are mostly dedicated to the base consumer and entry-level laptops, “no pluses, minuses, squares, or whatever the hell else we called them.”

“This complicated brand we called Dell last year was trying to cover this very large consumer space with lots of similar products,” Jeff Clarke, Dell’s chief operating officer said. Now those non-XPS products are mostly dedicated to the base consumer and entry-level laptops, “no pluses, minuses, squares, or whatever the hell else we called them.”

“We won’t chase every competitor down every rabbit hole,” he added. What that means is we probably won’t see any kind of handheld PC from Alienware, like that age-old UFO design showed off back in 2020. Just as well, Dell isn’t remodeling its entire laptop lineup for a second time in two years. The company isn’t bringing back brand names like Inspiron (which became mere “Dells) or Latitude (which transformed into “Dell Pro). According to Clarke, Dell Pro “still tests well.”

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