Linus Torvalds has delivered the first release candidate for version 6.5 of the Linux kernel, but warned this release may not go entirely smoothly. From a report: Torvalds's headline assessment of rc1 is "none of it looks hugely unusual." "The biggest single mention probably goes to what wasn't merged, with the bcachefs pull request resulting in a long thread (we didn't hit a hundred emails yet, but it's not far away)." As The Register reported in 2022, bcachefs is a filesystem that's been in development for nigh on a decade without being added to the kernel.

Kernel-watching outlet Phoronix on Sunday wrote that the filesystem is in good shape but debate over "code changes needed to the kernel outside of the kernel module itself" have proved contentious. As a result, conversation on the Linux kernel mailing list is "often becoming heated" when the topic turns to bcachefs. In his announcement post for rc1, Torvalds wrote "Let's calm this party down."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Commission today decided it is safe for personal data to be transferred from the European Union to US-based companies, handing a victory to firms like Facebook and Google despite protests from privacy advocates who worry about US government surveillance. The commission announced that it "adopted its adequacy decision for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework," concluding "that the United States ensures an adequate level of protection -- comparable to that of the European Union -- for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies under the new framework. On the basis of the new adequacy decision, personal data can flow safely from the EU to US companies participating in the Framework, without having to put in place additional data protection safeguards."

In May, Facebook-owner Meta was fined 1.2 billion euros for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with transfers of personal data to the United States and was ordered to stop storing European Union user data in the US within six months. But Meta said at the time that if the pending data-transfer pact "comes into effect before the implementation deadlines expire, our services can continue as they do today without any disruption or impact on users." The data-transfer deal "is expected to face a legal challenge from European privacy advocates, who have long said that the US needs to make substantial changes to surveillance laws," a Wall Street Journal report said today. "Transfers of data from Europe to the US have been in question since an EU court ruled in 2020 that a previous deal allowing trans-Atlantic data flows was illegal because the US didn't give EU individuals an effective way to challenge surveillance of their data by the US government."

The EC's announcement said the new framework has "binding safeguards to address all the concerns raised by the European Court of Justice, including limiting access to EU data by US intelligence services to what is necessary and proportionate, and establishing a Data Protection Review Court (DPRC), to which EU individuals will have access." The new court "will be able to order the deletion" of data that is found to have been collected in violation of the new rules. The framework will be administered and monitored by the US Department of Commerce and the "US Federal Trade Commission will enforce US companies' compliance," the EC announcement said. EU residents who challenge data collection will have free access to "independent dispute resolution mechanisms and an arbitration panel." US companies can join the EU-US framework "by committing to comply with a detailed set of privacy obligations, for instance the requirement to delete personal data when it is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was collected, and to ensure continuity of protection when personal data is shared with third parties," the European Commission said. The latest deal is expected to get challenged, according to the WSJ. European Parliament member Birgit Sippel, who is in Germany's Social Democratic Party, said the "framework does not provide any meaningful safeguards against indiscriminate surveillance conducted by US intelligence agencies," according to The New York Times.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, which represents major tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, said: "Today's decision means that EU and US businesses will soon have full legal certainty again to transfer personal data across the Atlantic... Data flows are vital to transatlantic trade and the EU-US economic relationship, which is worth 5.5 trillion euros per year. Nevertheless, the two economies had been left without guidelines for data transfers after an EU Court ruling invalidated the previous framework back in 2020."

Comedian Sarah Silverman and two authors have filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Meta and OpenAI for allegedly using their content without permission to train artificial intelligence language models. From a report: The proposed class action lawsuits filed by Silverman, Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden in San Francisco federal court Friday allege Facebook parent company Meta and ChatGPT maker OpenAI used copyrighted material to train chat bots. The lawsuits underscore the legal risks developers of chat bots face when using troves of copyrighted material to create apps that deliver realistic responses to user prompts. Silverman, Kadrey and Golden allege Meta and OpenAI used their books without authorization to develop their so-called large language models, which their makers pitch as powerful tools for automating tasks by replicating human conversation. In their lawsuit against Meta, the plaintiffs allege that leaked information about the company's artificial intelligence business shows their work was used without permission.

"More major cities in the United States are letting public transit riders hop on board for free," reports CNN: Kansas City; Raleigh; Richmond; Olympia; Tucson; Alexandria, Virginia; and other cities are testing dropping fares on their transit systems. Denver is dropping fares across its system this summer. Boston is piloting three zero-fare public bus routes, and New York City is expected to test free buses on five lines.

Eliminating fares gives a badly needed boost to ridership, removes cost burdens — particularly for lower-income riders — — and reduces boarding times at stops. Proponents also hope it will compel more people to get out of their cars and ride transit... At least 35 US agencies have eliminated fares across their network, according to the American Public Transit Association. Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey and US Rep. Ayanna Pressley have introduced a bill in Congress to establish a $25 billion grant program to support state and local efforts for fare-free systems.

The zero-fare push comes as ridership nationwide remains sluggish after people shifted to working from home during the pandemic. Ridership is at about 70% of pre-pandemic levels nationwide, and transit agency budget shortfalls threaten service cuts, layoffs and fare hikes.
CNN also reports the case against. Experts "say there are more effective policies to get people out of their cars and onto transit, such as congestion pricing and parking restrictions.

"And dropping fares does not make buses run on time or lead to faster and cleaner trains. These are the improvements that will get more people to take transit instead of drive, according to passenger surveys."

"The Reddit community is still reckoning with the consequences of the platform's API price hike..." reports Ars Technica.

"The latest group to announce its departure is BotDefense." BotDefense, which helps remove rogue submission and comment bots from Reddit and which is maintained by volunteer moderators, is said to help moderate 3,650 subreddits. BotDefense's creator told Ars Technica that the team is now quitting over Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward moderators and developers, with concerning implications for spam moderation on some large subreddits like r/space.

BotDefense started in 2019 as a volunteer project and has been run by volunteer mods, known as "dequeued" and "abrownn" on Reddit. Since then, it claims to have populated its ban list with 144,926 accounts, and it helps moderate subreddits with huge followings, like r/gaming (37.4 million members), /r/aww (34.2 million), r/music (32.4 million), r/Jokes (26.2 million), r/space (23.5 million), and /r/LifeProTips (22.2 million). Dequeued told Ars that other large subreddits BotDefense helps moderates include /r/food, /r/EarthPorn, /r/DIY, and /r/mildlyinteresting. On Wednesday, dequeued announced that BotDefense is ceasing operations. BotDefense has already stopped accepting bot account submissions and will disable future action on bots. BotDefense "will continue to review appeals and process unbans for a minimum of 90 days or until Reddit breaks the code running BotDefense," the announcement said...

Dequeued, who said they've been moderating for nearly nine years, said Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward devs and mods are the only reason BotDefense is closing. The moderator said there were plans for future tools, like a new machine learning system for detecting "many more" bots. Before the API battle turned ugly, dequeued had no plans to stop working on BotDefense...

[S]ubreddits that have relied on BotDefense are uncertain about managing their subreddits without the tool, and the tool's impending departure are new signs of a deteriorating Reddit community.
Ironically, Reddit's largest shareholder — Advance Publications — owns Ars Technica's parent company Conde Naste.

The article notes that Reddit "didn't respond to Ars' request for comment on BotDefense closing, how Reddit fights spam bots and karma farms, or about users quitting Reddit."

For a "vibrant content ecosystem," Google's VP of Trust says web publishers need "choice and control over their content, and opportunities to derive value from participating in the web ecosystem." (Does this mean Google wants to buy the right to scrape your content?)

In a blog post, Google's VP of trust starts by saying that unfortunately, "existing web publisher controls" like your robots.txt file (a community-developed web standard) came from nearly 30 years ago, "before new AI and research use cases..." We believe it's time for the web and AI communities to explore additional machine-readable means for web publisher choice and control for emerging AI and research use cases. Today, we're kicking off a public discussion, inviting members of the web and AI communities to weigh in on approaches to complementary protocols. We'd like a broad range of voices from across web publishers, civil society, academia and more fields from around the world to join the discussion, and we will be convening those interested in participating over the coming months.
They're announcing an "AI web publisher controls" mailing list (which you can sign up for at the bottom of Google's blog post).

Am I missing something? It seems like this should be as easy as adding a syntax for opting in, like

AI-ok: *


Thanks to Slashdot reader terrorubic for sharing the article.

"The obsession with EV range is all wrong," argues a new article in the Washington Post's Climate section. "This year, one EV on the market — the sleek $140,000 Lucid Air Grand Touring — boasts a whopping 516-mile range. Toyota recently announced that it had achieved a breakthrough with solid-state battery technology, saying it will soon be able to produce electric cars that can go 746 miles on a single charge.

"But some analysts say that all that range — and all that battery — misses the point, and wastes resources." Only 5% of trips in the U.S. are longer than 30 miles. The vast majority of big batteries will never be used — particularly if the owner has a place to plug in their car every day... Those batteries are massive, in every sense of the word: the battery on the electric F-150 Lightning, which allows the car to go more than 300 miles on a single charge, weighs a whopping 1,800 pounds.

But is all that necessary? Americans drive a lot, but most of our trips are not very long. According to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, 95.1% of trips taken in personal vehicles are less than 31 miles; almost 60% of all trips are less than 6 miles. In total, the average U.S. driver only covers about 37 miles per day. And there is evidence that much smaller batteries could do the lion's share of the work. In a study published in 2016, researchers at MIT found that a car with a 73-mile range (like an early version of the Nissan Leaf), charged only at night, could satisfy 87% of all driving days in the United States. Providing Nissan Leafs to everyone whose driving fit that pattern, the researchers found, would cut 61% of U.S. gasoline consumption by personal vehicles...

So most of the time, drivers are lugging around giant batteries but only using 10 to 15% of their actual power. And those big batteries require mining a lot of metals, damaging the environment and workers' health... In a report by researchers at the University of California at Davis, the Climate and Community Project, and Providence College, experts found that simply switching to smaller EV batteries — batteries that could give a small car a range of 125 miles or so — could cut lithium demand by 42%...


The article notes that the upcoming Dodge Ram 1500 REV, with a range of about 500 miles, will need a battery "roughly equivalent in terms of resources to 16 batteries for the Prius Prime plug-in hybrid..."

"For those who need to take frequent long road trips and don't want to have to plug in, a plug-in hybrid can be a good option. But for most Americans, an EV with medium range will do just fine."

Google says it would take the world's leading supercomputer more than 47 years to match the calculation speed of its newest quantum computer, reports the Telegraph: Four years ago, Google claimed to be the first company to achieve "quantum supremacy" — a milestone point at which quantum computers surpass existing machines. This was challenged at the time by rivals, which argued that Google was exaggerating the difference between its machine and traditional supercomputers. The company's new paper — Phase Transition in Random Circuit Sampling — published on the open access science website ArXiv, demonstrates a more powerful device that aims to end the debate.

While [Google's] 2019 machine had 53 qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers, the next generation device has 70. Adding more qubits improves a quantum computer's power exponentially, meaning the new machine is 241 million times more powerful than the 2019 machine...

Steve Brierley, the chief executive of Cambridge-based quantum company Riverlane, said: "This is a major milestone. The squabbling about whether we had reached, or indeed could reach, quantum supremacy is now resolved."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

2096 subreddits were still dark on Friday, as PC Magazine shared this update about ongoing protests at Reddit: To stamp out any remaining protests, Reddit is sending "final warnings" to subreddits that decided to permit NSFW content as a way to derail the company's advertising business.

Reddit sent warnings to subreddits including r/PICs, r/Military, r/dndmemes, and r/JustNoMil, which was first noticed by The Verge. The message states: "This is a final warning for inaccurately labeling your community NSFW, which is a violation of the Mod Code of Conduct rule 2. Your subreddit has not historically been considered NSFW nor would they under our current policies."

The warning threatens to punish volunteer moderators of the affected subreddits. "Please immediately correct the NSFW labeling on your subreddit. Failure to do so will result in action being taken on your moderator team by the end of this week," Reddit told the moderators of r/PICs. "This means moderators involved in this activity will be removed from this mod team..."

However, the r/PICs subreddit wants to remain a NSFW destination, citing the adult and profane content that users often post. "We are not in violation of the cited rule as it is written. Moreover, according to Reddit's listed policies, our subreddit is considered NSFW," the moderators for r/PICs told Reddit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NewScientist: Netflix researchers have created a new type of AI-powered green-screen technology that can produce realistic visual effects for film and television in real time. Green-screen technology is routinely used to capture footage of actors that can then be inserted in the foreground of virtual or prerecorded scenes. To do this, actors are filmed against a bright green background, which is easily isolated and removed digitally. This process can be done automatically with reasonable accuracy, such as in television weather forecasts, but it can be thrown by items of green clothing or by transparent or fine objects, like wisps of hair. When greater accuracy is needed in films or television series, specialist operators tweak settings manually, sometimes requiring hours to perfect a shot.

In a bid to create a technique that is both fast and accurate, Netflix has come up with a method it calls Magenta Green Screen (MGS). Actors are filmed against a background of bright green LEDs while being lit from the front with red and blue ones, which together create a magenta glow (see video, [here]). Because digital cameras work by taking an individual red, green and blue value for each pixel, this technique has the effect of creating a green channel that records only the background, with the foreground appearing black, and red and blue channels that record only the foreground, leaving the background looking black. Together these create the magenta and green look. Film editors can replace the green channel in real time, realistically and instantly placing the actors in the foreground of another scene, with even potentially tricky areas, such as transparent bottles or the area around strands of hair, working without problems.

But there is a problem with the method. Because the foreground is only recorded in blue and red, it leaves the actors looking magenta-tinted. To solve this, Netflix uses artificial intelligence to put the full range of color back into the foreground, using a photograph of the actors lit normally as a reference to create a realistic-looking green channel. This AI works quickly, but not yet in real time, although fast techniques such as averaging the red and blue channels to create an approximation of a green channel work effectively enough for the director to monitor while filming.

Long-time Slashdot reader hpickens writes: Richard A. Muller Has an interesting op-ed in the WSJ that asserts that World War III may not be what you expect (Source paywalled; alternative source) and that a two-front biological and cyberattack could lead to a U.S. defeat before we know what hit us. Muller paints a picture of what such a dual attack would look like. "The great value to the attacker of a two-pronged biological and cyber attack is the possibility of achieving destructive goals while keeping the whole operation covert," writes Muller. "Covid wasn't a deliberate attack, but it quickly and successfully damaged the American economy. Any nation thinking of using a deadly virus as a weapon of war would first need to immunize its own people, perhaps under the guise of a flu vaccination. Long-term population-level immunity would require the virus be sufficiently optimized, before release, to reduce the probability of further mutation."

The second prong of the attack would target hospitals with ransomware viruses. "Ransomware could simultaneously target energy grids, power plants, factories, refineries, trains, airlines, shipping, banking, water supplies, sewage-treatment plants and more. But hospitals would be the most salient targets. Avoiding obvious military targets would enhance the illusion that World War III hadn't begun."

"Deterring such an attack will require a clear, credible and articulated promise to respond to aggression. It can't be covert. If China, Russia or both attacked the U.S. this way, how would we react? Policy makers need to come up with an answer. An economic embargo seems suboptimal. Many would interpret nuclear retaliation as disproportionate. Developing a retaliatory virus would take time, and responding this way would clearly violate the Biological Weapons Convention."

Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua, New Guinea in 2014. CBS News reports: Loeb and his team just brought the materials back to Harvard for analysis. The U.S. Space Command confirmed with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that the material came from another solar system. The government gave Loeb a 10 km (6.2 mile) radius of where it may have landed. "That is where the fireball took place, and the government detected it from the Department of Defense. It's a very big area, the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down," said Loeb. "We figured the distance of the fireball based off the time delay between the arrival of blast wave, the boom of explosion, and the light that arrived quickly."

Their calculations allowed them to chart the potential path of the meteor. Those calculations happened to carve a path right through the same projected 10 km range that came from the U.S. government. Loeb and his crew took a boat called the Silver Star out to the area. The ship took numerous passes along and around the meteor's projected path. Researchers combed the ocean floor by attaching a sled full of magnets to their boat. "We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background," explained Loeb, "They have colors of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth."

An analysis of the composition showed that the spherules are made of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, and 2% titanium, plus trace elements. They are sub-millimeter in size. The crew found 50 of them in total. "It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before, and catalogued by NASA," added Loeb, "We calculated its speed outside the solar system. It was 60 km per second, faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun. The fact that it was made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun, suggested potentially it could be a spacecraft from another civilization or some technological gadget." He likens the situation to any of the Voyager spacecrafts launched by NASA.

Mercedes-Benz is the latest automaker to commit to adopting Tesla's electric vehicle charging connectors for its vehicles. The Verge reports: Starting in 2024, the German automaker will offer adapters to its customers so they can access Tesla Supercharger stations, which use the company's North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug and outlet. And in 2025, Mercedes will begin to manufacture EVs with Tesla's charging port, obviating the need for an adapter. The company joins Ford, GM, Volvo, Polestar, and Rivian in adopting Tesla's connector, which is rapidly becoming the de facto charging standard in North America and Europe. Mercedes is also the first German automaker to jump on the Tesla bandwagon, putting pressure on Volkswagen and BMW to follow suit. VW, along with Hyundai, Kia, and Stellantis, has previously confirmed it is in talks with Musk's company about adopting NACS.

Mercedes also announced it plans on expanding its network of EV charging stations in North America to 400 hubs with more than 2,500 "high-power chargers," which will also grow to include Tesla's NACS connector. The company plans on installing 2,000 hubs with 10,000 chargers worldwide. Mercedes announced earlier this year that it was working with ChargePoint and MN8, a solar company, to install chargers in key cities and along major highways. The first stations, which will be accessible to Mercedes and non-Mercedes EV owners, are scheduled to open in the fourth quarter of 2023.

A Bangladeshi government website leaked the personal information of citizens, including full names, phone numbers, email addresses and national ID numbers. TechCrunch reports: Viktor Markopoulos, a researcher who works for Bitcrack Cyber Security, said he accidentally discovered the leak on June 27, and shortly after contacted the Bangladeshi e-Government Computer Incident Response Team (CERT). He said the leak includes data of millions of Bangladeshi citizens. TechCrunch was able to verify that the leaked data is legitimate by using a portion to query a public search tool on the affected government website. By doing this, the website returned other data contained in the leaked database, such as the name of the person who applied to register, as well as -- in some cases -- the name of their parents. We attempted this with 10 different sets of data, which all returned correct data.

TechCrunch is not naming the government website because the data is still available online, according to Markopoulos, and we haven't heard back from any of the Bangladeshi government organizations that we emailed asking for comment and alerting of the data exposure. In Bangladesh, every citizen aged 18 and older is issued a National Identity Card, which assigns a unique ID to every citizen. The card is mandatory and gives citizens access to several services, such as getting a driver's license, passport, buying and selling land, opening a bank account, and others.

Markopoulos said finding the data "was too easy." "It just appeared as a Google result and I wasn't even intending on finding it. I was Googling an SQL error and it just popped up as the second result," he told TechCrunch, referring to SQL, a language designed for managing data in a database. The exposure of email addresses, phone numbers and national ID card numbers is bad on its own, but Markopoulos said that having this type of information could also "be used in the web application to access, modify, and/or delete the applications as well as view the Birth Registration Record Verification."

Apple plans to launch its Vision Pro mixed-reality headset in select US markets early next year, with designated sections in Apple stores offering demos, seating, and tools for sizing accessories. Bloomberg reports: The company will designate special areas in the stores with seating, headset demo units and tools to size accessories for buyers. While the device will be sold at all of Apple's roughly 270 US locations, the company is planning the sections for the Vision Pro initially at stores in major areas -- such as New York and Los Angeles -- before rolling them out nationwide, according to people with knowledge of the plans.

Apple said it will offer the headset in other countries at the end of 2024. The company is discussing the UK and Canada as two of its first international markets with Asia and Europe soon after, although a final decision hasn't been made, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing internal matters. Apple engineers are working to localize the device for France, Germany, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea, the people said. Apple will also sell the Vision Pro through its US web store in early 2024 before expanding online elsewhere.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A decentralized group of safe streets activists in San Francisco realized they can disable Cruise and Waymo robotaxis by placing a traffic cone on a vehicle's hood, and they're encouraging others to do it, too. The "Week of Cone," as the group is calling the now-viral prank on Twitter and TikTok, is a form of protest against the spread of robotaxi services in the city, and it appears to be gaining traction with residents who are sick of the vehicles malfunctioning and blocking traffic. The protest comes in the lead-up to a hearing that will likely see Waymo and Cruise expand their robotaxi services in San Francisco. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is set to approve the expansion of both Cruise's and Waymo's autonomous vehicle passenger service deployments in San Francisco on July 13. The agency doesn't give companies permission to operate their AVs on public roads -- that's the Department of Motor Vehicles' domain. But it does grant companies the authority to charge passengers a fare for that service, which is an essential ingredient to scaling robotaxi and autonomous delivery operations sustainably. In May, the CPUC posted draft resolutions approving the expansion, despite mounting opposition from city agencies and residents.

Opponents called out the string of AVs that have impeded traffic, public transit and emergency responders, and asked that the CPUC move cautiously, set up workshops, collect more data, prohibit robotaxi deployment downtown and during peak hours, and limit the expansion of fleet sizes. Other opponents like the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance and the Alliance for Independent Workers have protested the spread of robotaxis, which they say will eliminate the need for taxi and ride-hail drivers. Safe Street Rebel's cone campaign is a bid to raise awareness and invite more pissed-off San Franciscans to submit public comments to the CPUC before next week's hearing. "These companies promise their cars will reduce traffic and collisions, but instead they block buses, emergency vehicles and everyday traffic," reads one video posted on social media. "They even un-alived a person and a dog. And they're partnering with the police to record everyone all the time without anyone's consent. And most importantly they require streets that are designed for cars, not people or transit. They exist only for profit-driven car companies to stay dominant and make it harder for transit to stay afloat."

While the above statement is a bit hyperbolic, there are nuggets of truth. [...] Nonetheless, the group brings up a common concern about unleashing autonomous vehicles onto public roads -- the lack of input from everyday people who have to deal with the vehicles on the ground. Congressional efforts to regulate self-driving cars have lagged for several years, so most regulation comes from state departments of transportation and departments of motor vehicles. The group is inviting others to follow its lead and disable the vehicles by "gently placing" cones on a driverless -- meaning, empty -- car's hood. Some people are apparently sending in submissions, but it's unclear how many people have sent images to Safe Street Rebel. "Not only is this understanding of how AVs operate incorrect, but this is vandalism and encourages unsafe and disrespectful behavior on our roadways," Waymo said in a statement. "We will notify law enforcement of any unwanted or unsafe interference of our vehicles on public roadways."

"Cruise's fleet provides free rides to late-night service workers without more reliable transportation options, has delivered over 2 million meals to food insecure San Franciscans, and recovers food waste from local businesses," said Cruise in a statement. "Intentionally obstructing vehicles gets in the way of those efforts and risks creating traffic congestion for local residents."

Jony Ive has been busy since leaving Apple, with his design agency working on things like a typeface, a charity clown nose and "the future of Airbnb." LoveFrom's latest project takes Ive back to his hardware days -- it's a new model of a modular turntable that's been around for half a century. From a report: LoveFrom helped refine Linn's Sondek LP12 for a 50th anniversary edition. Ive told Fast Company it was a "very gentle and modest project" for LoveFrom that stems from his team's admiration for Linn. Perhaps as a result of that, LoveFrom carried out the work pro bono. "There are many things that I've always wanted to be able to do purely for the love of doing them," Ive noted.

The design firm approached Linn about working together, in part because Ive is a long-time fan of the brand. The two teams examined every aspect of the LP12 but couldn't change the turntable very much owing to concerns over impact to the sound quality. Still, LoveFrom "saw a number of areas where there could be small improvements and gentle evolutions of the current design," Ive said. [...] If you're interested in owning the first post-Apple hardware that Ive worked on, you'll have to dig deep into your pockets. The Sondek LP12-50 costs $60,000 and Linn is only making 250 of them.

Open-world sci-fi RPG Cyberpunk 2077's biggest subreddit recently switched to NSFW (not safe for work,) with the explanation that the game it is focused on is a mature game filled with nudity and gore. However, Reddit allegedly demanded that mods of the subreddit quickly revert the change. From a report: The mods aren't complying and users are now posting nude images of in-game characters as part of a protest to show why the subreddit deserves to be NSFW. Since May, Reddit has been at war with its users and subreddits as the company clamps down on third-party apps and their ability to access the site's backend or API. It's not gone well for Reddit, leading to popular subreddits like r/bestof, r/sports, and r/music going dark. And as part of this ongoing backlash, some subreddits switched to NSFW. This designation is reserved mainly for porn-y subreddits and blocks ads from appearing, but also lets users freely post nudity and more adult content.

Some mods and subreddits have used this designation to punch back at Reddit and its despised CEO. Now the Cyberpunk 2077 subreddit has seemingly wandered into this mess. According to a post from July 5 by moderator Tabnam, the decision to make the Cyberpunk 2077 subreddit NSFW was made because the game is "an 18+ game" and happened now because the mods had "never thought to change it until recently." Tabnam added that this subreddit should have already been NSFW. This decision apparently didn't go over well with Reddit.

Chinese regulators imposed more than $1 billion in fines on tech giants Ant Group and Tencent Holdings, signalling an end to a crackdown on the sector that had wiped out billions in market value and derailed the world's biggest initial public offering. From a report: The People's Bank of China fined Ant 7.12 billion yuan ($984 million), wrapping more than two years of probes into the finance technology giant founded by billionaire Jack Ma. Tencent was levied a 2.99 billion yuan fine, according to statements from the central bank Friday. Shares in Ant affiliate Alibaba Group Holding soared more than 6% in New York trading. Investors are betting the fines draw a line under the multi-year crackdown that torpedoed Ant's planned IPO in 2020 and ensnared some of the nation's most powerful private firms in sectors from online education to gaming. It paves the way for Ant to revive growth and eventually resurrect plans for an IPO.

Inflection AI, an AI startup company, has built a cutting-edge supercomputer equipped with 22,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. Wccftech reports: For those unfamiliar with Inflection AI, it is a business that aims at creating "personal AI for everyone." The company is widely known for its recently introduced Inflection-1 AI model, which powers the Pi chatbot. Although the AI model hasn't yet reached the level of ChatGPT or Google's LaMDA models, reports suggest that Inflection-1 performs well on "common sense" tasks, making it much more suitable for applications such as personal assistance.
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Coming back, Inflection announced that it is building one of the world's largest AI-based supercomputers, and it looks like we finally have a glimpse of what it would be. It is reported that the Inflection supercomputer is equipped with 22,000 H100 GPUs, and based on analysis, it would contain almost 700 four-node racks of Intel Xeon CPUs. The supercomputer will utilize an astounding 31 Mega-Watts of power.

The surprising fact about the supercomputer is the acquisition of 22,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. We all are well aware that, in recent times, it has been challenging to acquire even a single unit of the H100s since they are in immense demand, and NVIDIA cannot cope with the influx of orders. In the case of Inflection AI, NVIDIA is considering being an investor in the company, which is why in their case, it is easier to get their hands on such a massive number of GPUs.