BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Synchron has just released a public demo showing something that used to feel impossible. A man with ALS is now using his iPad with nothing but his brain. No hands. No voice. No eye-tracking. Just thought. The man in the video is named Mark. He's part of Synchron's COMMAND clinical study and has an implant called the Stentrode. It sits inside his brain's blood vessels and picks up his motor intention. Those signals get sent wirelessly to an external decoder, which then tells the iPad what to do. It's all made possible by Apple's new Brain-Computer Interface Human Interface Device protocol, which lets iPadOS treat brain activity like an actual input method.

Apple's built-in Switch Control feature makes the whole thing work on the software side. The iPad even sends back screen context to the BCI decoder to make everything run more smoothly and accurately. [...] Synchron was the first company to start clinical trials with a permanently implanted BCI. The big difference here is that it doesn't require open brain surgery. The device is implanted through the blood vessels, which makes it way more practical for real-world use.

Google will pause non-essential AI workloads to protect power grids, the advertising giant announced on Monday. From a report: The web giant already does this sort of thing for non-essential workloads like processing YouTube vids, which it moves to datacenters where power is available rather than continuing to run them in places demand for energy strains the grid. Under an agreement with Indiana Michigan Power (I&M) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Google will use the same techniques for AI workloads.

The announcement comes as states served by the power companies brace for a heat wave that will likely strain the grid as residents use air conditioners and increase demand for energy. Amid debate about datacenters' consumption of power and water, the last thing that the Chocolate Factory needs is folks blaming its AI Mode search function for a power outage when temperatures top 100F (37.7C). Under the agreement, if energy demand surges or there's a disruption in the grid due to extreme weather, I&M and TVA can now request that Google reduce its power use by rescheduling workloads or limiting non-urgent tasks until the issue is resolved.

Disney "cloned" Dwayne Johnson when filming a live-action Moana, reports the Wall Street Journal, using an AI process that they were ultimately afraid to use: Under the plan they devised, Johnson's similarly buff cousin Tanoai Reed — who is 6-foot-3 and 250 pounds — would fill in as a body double for a small number of shots. Disney would work with AI company Metaphysic to create deepfakes of Johnson's face that could be layered on top of Reed's performance in the footage — a "digital double" that effectively allowed Johnson to be in two places at once... Johnson approved the plan, but the use of a new technology had Disney attorneys hammering out details over how it could be deployed, what security precautions would protect the data and a host of other concerns. They also worried that the studio ultimately couldn't claim ownership over every element of the film if AI generated parts of it, people involved in the negotiations said. Disney and Metaphysic spent 18 months negotiating on and off over the terms of the contract and work on the digital double. But none of the footage will be in the final film when it's released next summer...

Interviews with more than 20 current and former employees and partners present an entertainment giant torn between the inevitability of AI's advance and concerns about how to use it. Progress has at times been slowed by bureaucracy and hand-wringing over the company's social contract with its fans, not to mention its legal contract with unions representing actors, writers and other creative partners... For Disney, protecting its characters and stories while also embracing new AI technology is key. "We have been around for 100 years and we intend to be around for the next 100 years," said the company's legal chief, Horacio Gutierrez, in an interview. "AI will be transformative, but it doesn't need to be lawless...." [As recently as June, a Disney/Comcast Universal lawsuit had argued that Midjourney "is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism."]

Concerns about bad publicity were a big reason that Disney scrapped a plan to use AI in Tron: Ares — a movie set for release in October about an AI-generated soldier entering the real world. Since the movie is about artificial intelligence, executives pitched the idea of actually incorporating AI into one of the characters... as a buzzy marketing strategy, according to people familiar with the matter. A writer would provide context on the animated character — a sidekick to Jeff Bridges' lead role named Bit — to a generative AI program. Then on screen, the AI program, voiced by an actor, would respond to questions as Bit as cameras rolled. But with negotiations with unions representing writers and actors over contracts happening at the same time, Disney dismissed the idea, and executives internally were told that the company couldn't risk the bad publicity, the people said...

Disney's own history speaks to how studios have navigated technological crossroads before. When Disney hired Pixar to produce a handful of graphic images for its 1989 hit The Little Mermaid, executives kept the incorporation a secret, fearing backlash from fans if they learned that not every frame of the animated film had been hand-drawn. Such knowledge, executives feared, might "take away the magic."
Disney invested $1.5 billion in Fortnite creator Epic Games, acccording to the article, and is planning a world in Fortnite where gamers can interact with Marvel superheroes and creatures from Avatar. But "an experiment to allow gamers to interact with an AI-generated Darth Vader was fraught. Within minutes of launching the AI bot, gamers had figured out a way to make it curse in James Earl Jones's signature baritone." (Though Epic patched the workaround within 30 minutes.)

But the article spells out another concern for Disney executives. "If a Fortnite gamer creates a Darth Vader and Spider-Man dance that goes viral on YouTube, who owns that dance?

Started in 1984, it's been described as the internet's longest-running contest. And yesterday 2025's International Obfuscated C Code Contest concluded — with 23 new winners announced in a special four-and-a-half-hour livestreamed ceremony!

Programmers submitted their funniest programs showcasing C's unusual/obscure subtleties while having some fun. (And demonstrating the importance of clarity and style by setting some very bad examples...) Among this year's winners were an OpenRISC 32-bit CPU emulator, a virtual machine capable of running Doom, and some kind of salmon recipe that makes clever use of C's U"string" literal prefix...

But yes, every entry's source code is ridiculously obfuscated. ("Before you set off on your adventure to decode this program's logic, make sure you have enough food, ammo, clothes, oxen, and programming supplies," read the judge's remarks on the winner of this year's "diabolical logistics" prize. "You'll be driving for 2170 miles through a wild wilderness inspired by Oregon Trail...") And one entrant also struggled mightily in adapting a rough port of their program's old Atari 2600 version, but was never gonna give it up...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader achowe for bringing the news (who has submitted winning entries in four different decades, starting in 1991 and continuing through 2024)...

Including a 2004 award for the best abuse of the contest's guidelines. ("We are not exactly sure how many organisations will be upset with this entry, but we are considering starting an IOCCC standards body just to reign in the likes of Mr Howe....")

Established in 1943 to coordinate America's building of the first atomic bomb, the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico is still "one of the world's largest and most advanced scientific institutions" notes Wikipedia.

And it now has a "National Security AI Office," where senior director Jason Pruet is working to help "prepare for a future in which AI will reshape the landscape of science and security," according to the lab's science and technology magazine 1663. "This year, the Lab invested more in AI-related work than at any point in history..." Pruet: AI is starting to feel like the next great foundation for scientific progress. Big companies are spending billions on large machines, but the buy-in costs of working at the frontiers of AI are so high that no university has the exascale-class machines needed to run the latest AI models. We're at a place now where we, meaning the government, can revitalize that pact by investing in the infrastructure to study AI for the public good... Part of what we're doing with the Lab's machines, like Venado — which has 2500 GPUs — is giving universities access to that scale of computing. The scale is just completely different. A typical university might have 50 or 100 GPUs.

Right now, for example, we have partnerships with the University of California, the University of Michigan, and many other universities where researchers can tap into this infrastructure. That's something we want to expand on. Having university collaboration will be critical if the Department of Energy is going to have a comprehensive AI program at scale that is focused on national security and energy dominance...

There was a time when I wouldn't have advocated for government investment in AI at the scale we're seeing now. But the weight of the evidence has become overwhelming. Large models — "frontier models" — have shown such extraordinary capabilities with recent advances in areas as diverse as hypothesis generation, mathematics, biological design, and complex multiphysics simulations. The potential for transformative impact is too significant to ignore.
"He no longer views the technology as just a tool, but as a fundamental shift in how scientists approach problems and make discoveries," the article concludes.

"The global race humanity is now in... is about how to harness the technology's potential while mitigating its harms."

Thanks to Slashdot reader rabbitface25 — also a Los Alamo Lab science writer — for sharing his article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Australia said on Wednesday it will add YouTube to sites covered by its world-first ban on social media for teenagers, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site and potentially setting up a legal challenge. The decision came after the internet regulator urged the government last month to overturn the YouTube carve-out, citing a survey that found 37% of minors reported harmful content on the site, the worst showing for a social media platform.

"I'm calling time on it," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a statement highlighting that Australian children were being negatively affected by online platforms, and reminding social media of their social responsibility. "I want Australian parents to know that we have their backs." The decision broadens the ban set to take effect in December. YouTube says it is used by nearly three-quarters of Australians aged 13 to 15, and should not be classified as social media because its main activity is hosting videos. "Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens. It's not social media," a YouTube spokesperson said by email.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: Edward Saatchi isn't totally sure people will flock to Showrunner, the new AI-generated TV show service his company is launching publicly this week. But he has a vote of confidence from Amazon, which has invested in Fable, Saatchi's San Francisco-based start-up. The amount of Amazon's funding in Fable isn't being disclosed. The money is going toward building out Showrunner, which Fable has hyped as the "Netflix of AI": a service that lets you type in a few words to create scenes -- or entire episodes -- of a TV show, either from scratch or based on an existing story-world someone else has created.

Fable is launching Showrunner to let users tinker with the animation-focused generative-AI system, following several months in a closed alpha test with 10,000 users. Initially, Showrunner will be free to use but eventually the company plans to charge creators $10-$20 per month for credits allowing them to create hundreds of TV scenes, Saatchi said. Viewing Showrunner-generated content will be free, and anyone can share the AI video on YouTube or other third-party platforms. [...] Fable's Showrunner public launch features two original "shows" -- story worlds with characters users can steer into various narrative arcs. The first is "Exit Valley," described as "a 'Family Guy'-style TV comedy set in 'Sim Francisco' satirizing the AI tech leaders Sam Altman, Elon Musk, et al." The other is "Everything Is Fine," in which a husband and wife, going to Ikea, have a huge fight -- whereupon they're transported to a world where they're separated and have to find each other. [...]

Showrunner is powered by Fable's proprietary AI model, SHOW-2. Last year, the company published a research paper on how it built the SHOW-1 model. As part of that, it released nine AI-generated episodes based on "South Park." The episodes, made without the permission of the "South Park" creators, received more than 80 million views. (Saatchi said he was in touch with the "South Park" team, who were reassured the IP wasn't being deployed commercially.) [...] Out of the gate, Showrunner is focused on animated content because it requires much less processing power than realistic-looking live-action video scenes. Saatchi said Fable wants to stay out of the "knife fight" among big AI companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta that are racing to create photorealistic content. "If you're competing with Google, are you going to win?" Saatchi said. "Our goal is to have the most creative models," he said.

Smartphone maker Nothing's $799 Phone 3 has been "mired in controversy among the same customers who rallied behind the company's past products" since its July launch, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. Tech enthusiasts have "lambasted the company for the phone's peculiar industrial design and what they perceive to be an unreasonable price."

The Android device lacks the most performant Qualcomm processor chip found in premium Android phones and the camera performance "falls short of other handsets in this price bracket," the publication wrote in a scathing review. The phone costs $200 more than its predecessor and matches pricing with Apple's iPhone 16, Samsung's Galaxy S25, and Google's Pixel 9.

Critics across Reddit and social media have attacked Nothing for removing the signature Glyph Lights from previous models. Comments on Nothing's YouTube channel have been "bruising," focusing on the phone's oddly positioned camera array. "At its current price, the handset is too expensive for what it offers," the review concludes.

Google will soon cast an even wider net with its AI age estimation technology. From a report: After announcing plans to find and restrict underage users on YouTube, the company now says it will start detecting whether Google users based in the US are under 18.

Age estimation is rolling out over the next few weeks and will only impact a "small set" of users to start, though Google plans on expanding it more widely. The company says it will use the information a user has searched for or the types of YouTube videos they watch to determine their age. Google first announced this initiative in February. If Google believes that a user is under 18, it will apply the same restrictions it places on users who proactively identify as underage.

YouTube is rolling out age-estimation technology in the U.S. to identify teen users in order to provide a more age-appropriate experience. TechCrunch reports: When YouTube identifies a user as a teen, it introduces new protections and experiences, which include disabling personalized advertising, safeguards that limit repetitive viewing of certain types of content, and enabling digital well-being tools such as screen time and bedtime reminders, among others. These protections already exist on YouTube, but have only been applied to those who verified themselves as teens, not those who may have withheld their real age. [...]

If the new system incorrectly identifies a user as under 18 when they are not, YouTube says the user will be given the option to verify their age with a credit card, government ID, or selfie. Only users who have been directly verified through this method or whose age has been inferred to be over 18 will be able to view the age-restricted content on the platform. The machine learning-powered technology will begin to roll out over the next few weeks to a small set of U.S. users and will then be monitored before rolling out more widely, the company says. [...]

YouTube isn't sharing specifics about the signals it's using to infer a user's age, but notes that it will look at some data like the YouTube activity and the longevity of a user's account to make a determination if the user is under 18. The new system will apply only to signed-in users, as signed-out users already cannot access age-restricted content, and will be available across platforms, including web, mobile, and connected TV.

Satirical singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer died Saturday at age 97. The Associated Press notes Lehrer had long ago "largely abandoned his music career to return to teaching math at Harvard and other universities." Lehrer had remained on the math faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz well into his late 70s. In 2020, he even turned away from his own copyright, granting the public permission to use his lyrics in any format without any fee in return.

A Harvard prodigy (he had earned a math degree from the institution at age 18), Lehrer soon turned his very sharp mind to old traditions and current events... He'd gotten into performing accidentally when he began to compose songs in the early 1950s to amuse his friends. Soon he was performing them at coffeehouses around Cambridge, Massachusetts, while he remained at Harvard to teach and obtain a master's degree in math. [Lehrer also "spent several years unsuccessfully pursuing a doctorate..."]

He cut his first record in 1953, "Songs by Tom Lehrer"... After a two-year stint in the Army, Lehrer began to perform concerts of his material in venues around the world. In 1959, he released another LP called "More of Tom Lehrer" and a live recording called "An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer," nominated for a Grammy for best comedy performance (musical) in 1960. But around the same time, he largely quit touring and returned to teaching math, though he did some writing and performing on the side. Lehrer said he was never comfortable appearing in public...

He did produce a political satire song each week for the 1964 television show "That Was the Week That Was," a groundbreaking topical comedy show that anticipated "Saturday Night Live" a decade later. He released the songs the following year in an album titled "That Was the Year That Was"... [Lehrer's body of work "was actually quite small," the article notes, "amounting to about three dozen songs."] He also wrote songs for the 1970s educational children's show "The Electric Company." He told AP in 2000 that hearing from people who had benefited from them gave him far more satisfaction than praise for any of his satirical works...

He began to teach part-time at Santa Cruz in the 1970s, mainly to escape the harsh New England winters. From time to time, he acknowledged, a student would enroll in one of his classes based on knowledge of his songs. "But it's a real math class," he said at the time. "I don't do any funny theorems. So those people go away pretty quickly."

California researchers planned a multimillion-dollar test of salt water-spraying equipment that could one day be used to dim the sun's rays — over a 3,900-square mile are off the west coasts of North America, Chile or south-central Africa. E&E News calls it part of a "secretive" initiative backed by "wealthy philanthropists with ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley" — and a piece of the "vast scope of research aimed at finding ways to counter the Earth's warming, work that has often occurred outside public view." "At such scales, meaningful changes in clouds will be readily detectable from space," said a 2023 research plan from the [University of Washington's] Marine Cloud Brightening Program. The massive experiment would have been contingent upon the successful completion of the thwarted pilot test on the carrier deck in Alameda, according to the plan.... Before the setback in Alameda, the team had received some federal funding and hoped to gain access to government ships and planes, the documents show.

The university and its partners — a solar geoengineering research advocacy group called SilverLining and the scientific nonprofit SRI International — didn't respond to detailed questions about the status of the larger cloud experiment. But SilverLining's executive director, Kelly Wanser, said in an email that the Marine Cloud Brightening Program aimed to "fill gaps in the information" needed to determine if the technologies are safe and effective.âIn the initial experiment, the researchers appeared to have disregarded past lessons about building community support for studies related to altering the climate, and instead kept their plans from the public and lawmakers until the testing was underway, some solar geoengineering experts told E&E News. The experts also expressed surprise at the size of the planned second experiment....

The program does not "recommend, support or develop plans for the use of marine cloud brightening to alter weather or climate," Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric and climate science professor at the university who leads the program, said in a statement to E&E News. She emphasized that the program remains focused on researching the technology, not deploying it. There are no "plans for conducting large-scale studies that would alter weather or climate," she added.
"More than 575 scientists have called for a ban on geoengineering development," according to the article, "because it 'cannot be governed globally in a fair, inclusive, and effective manner.'" But "Some scientists believe that the perils of climate change are too dire to not pursue the technology, which they say can be safely tested in well-designed experiments... " "If we really were serious about the idea that to do any controversial topic needs some kind of large-scale consensus before we can research the topic, I think that means we don't research topics," David Keith, a geophysical sciences professor at the University of Chicago, said at a think tank discussion last month... "The studies that the program is pursuing are scientifically sound and would be unlikely to alter weather patterns — even for the Puerto Rico-sized test, said Daniele Visioni, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Cornell University. Nearly 30 percent of the planet is already covered by clouds, he noted.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

From the Adafruit blog: Greg Technology (aka Greg Sadetsky) on YouTube demonstrates a version of Chocolate Doom where opponent characters can be cut, copied, and pasted at will to add a bit more fun to the game.
Obviously this means you can paste in your attackers multiple times. ("They're kind of not really happy if you do that..." Greg says at one point in the video. "But then, you can also cut them... like, vaccuum them out.")

In response to a comment on YouTube, Sadetsky explained that "It stores a reference to the kind of monster (every monster has a unique type number).

"So yeah, you could paste them across games!"

At this weekend's Comic-Con, "Excitement has been high over the sneak peeks at Tron: Ares and Predator: Badlands," reports CNET. (Nine Inch Nails has even recorded a new song for Tron: Ares .)

A few highlights from CNET's coverage:

• The Coyote vs. Acme movie will hit theaters next year "after being rescued from the pile of scrapped ashes left by Warner Bros. Discovery," with footage screened during a Comic-Con panel.

• The first episode of Alien: Earth was screened before its premiere August 12th on FX.

• A panel reunited creators of the animated Avatar: The Last Airbender for its 20th anniversary — and discussed the upcoming sequel series Avatar: Seven Havens.

• A trailer dropped for the new Star Trek: Starfleet Academy series on Paramount+ ("Star Trek Goes Full Gen Z..." quips one headline.)

To capture some of the ambience, the Guardian has a collection of cosplayer photos. CNET notes there's even booths for Lego and Hot Wheels (which released toys commemorating the 40th anniversary of Back to the Future and the 50th anniversary of Jaws).

But while many buildings are "wrapped" with slick advertisements, SFGate notes the ads are technically illegal, "with penalties for each infraction running up to $1,000 per day," (according to the San Diego Union-Tribune). "Last year's total ended up at $22,500."

The Union-Tribune notes that "The fines are small enough that advertisers clearly think it is worth it, with about 30 buildings in the process of being wrapped Monday morning."

AMD CEO Lisa Su said that chips produced at TSMC's new Arizona plant will cost 5-20% more than those made in Taiwan, but emphasized that the premium is worth it for supply chain resilience. Bloomberg reports: AMD expects its first chips from TSMC's Arizona facilities by the end of the year, Su said. The extra expense is worth it because the company is diversifying the crucial supply of chips, Su said in an interview with Bloomberg Television following her onstage appearance. That will make the industry less prone to the type of disruptions experienced during the pandemic. "We have to consider resiliency in the supply chain," she said. "We learned that in the pandemic."

TSMC's new Arizona plant is already comparable with those in Taiwan when it comes to the measure of yield -- the amount of good chips a production run produces per batch -- Su told the audience at the forum.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Donald Trump vowed to save TikTok before taking office, claiming only he could make a deal to keep the app operational in the US despite national security concerns. But then, he put Vice President JD Vance in charge of the deal, and after months of negotiations, the US still doesn't seem to have found terms for a sale that the Chinese government is willing to approve. Now, Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has confirmed that if China won't approve the latest version of the deal -- which could result in a buggy version of TikTok made just for the US -- the administration is willing to shut down TikTok. And soon.

On Thursday, Lutnick told CNBC that TikTok would stop operating in the US if China and TikTok owner ByteDance won't sell the app to buyers that Trump lined up, along with control over TikTok's algorithm. Under the deal Trump is now pushing, "China can have a little piece or ByteDance, the current owner, can keep a little piece," Lutnick said. "But basically, Americans will have control. Americans will own the technology, and Americans will control the algorithm." However, ByteDance's board has long maintained that the US can alleviate its national security fears -- that China may be using the popular app to manipulate and spy on Americans -- without forcing a sale. In January, a ByteDance board member, Bill Ford, told World Economic Forum attendees that a non-sale option "could involve a change of control locally to ensure" TikTok "complies with US legislation" without selling off the app or its algorithm.

At this point, Lutnick suggested that the US is unwilling to bend on the requirement that the US control the recommendation algorithm, which is viewed as the secret sauce that makes the app so popular globally. ByteDance may be unwilling to sell the algorithm partly because then it would be sharing its core intellectual property with competitors in the US. Earlier this month, Trump had claimed that he wasn't "confident" that China would approve the deal, even though he thought it was "good for China." Analysts have suggested that China views TikTok as a bargaining chip in its tariff negotiations with Trump, which continue to not go smoothly, and it may be OK with the deal but unwilling to release the bargaining chip without receiving key concessions from the US. For now, the US and China are enjoying a 90-day truce that could end in August, about a month before the deadline Trump set to sell TikTok in mid-September.

Thingiverse, a popular 3D printing file repository, has agreed to remove downloadable gun designs following pressure from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who is pushing for stricter moderation and voluntary cooperation across the 3D printing industry. "However, it's unlikely to slow the proliferation of 3D printed weapons, as many other sites offer downloadable gun designs and parts," reports The Register. From the report: Earlier this year, Bragg wrote to 3D printing companies, asking them to ensure their services can't be used to create firearms. On Saturday, Bragg announced that one such company, Thingiverse, would remove working gun models from its site. The company operates a popular free library of 3D design files and had already banned weapons in its terms of use, but is now promising to improve its moderation procedures and technology. "Following discussions with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office about concerns around untraceable firearms, we are taking additional steps to improve our content moderation efforts," Thingiverse said in a statement. "As always, we encourage our users to report any content that may be harmful." [...]

At any rate, while Thingiverse may be popular among 3D printing mavens, people who like to build their own guns look to other options. [...] Bragg's approach to 3D printing sites and 3D printer manufacturers is to seek voluntary cooperation. Only Thingiverse and YouTube have taken up his call, others may or may not follow. "While law enforcement has a primary role to play in stopping the rise of 3D-printed weapons, this technology is rapidly changing and evolving, and we need the help and expertise of the private sector to aid our efforts," Bragg said. "We will continue to proactively reach out to and collaborate with others in the industry to reduce gun violence throughout Manhattan and keep everyone safe." But it seems doubtful that the sites where Aranda and other 3D gun makers get their files will be rushing to help Bragg voluntarily.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: During his latest trip to Washington, OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, painted a sweeping vision of an AI-dominated future in which entire job categories disappear, presidents follow ChatGPT's recommendations and hostile nations wield artificial intelligence as a weapon of mass destruction, all while positioning his company as the indispensable architect of humanity's technological destiny. Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement. "Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone," he said, singling out customer support roles. "That's a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you're on target and AI, and that's fine." The OpenAI founder described the transformation of customer service as already complete, telling the Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision, Michelle Bowman: "Now you call one of these things and AI answers. It's like a super-smart, capable person. There's no phone tree, there's no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It's very quick. You call once, the thing just happens, it's done."

The OpenAI founder then turned to healthcare, making the suggestion that AI's diagnostic capabilities had surpassed human doctors, but wouldn't go so far as to accept the superior performer as the sole purveyor of healthcare. "ChatGPT today, by the way, most of the time, can give you better -- it's like, a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world," he said. "Yet people still go to doctors, and I am not, like, maybe I'm a dinosaur here, but I really do not want to, like, entrust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop." [...] At the fireside chat, he said one of his biggest worries was over AI's rapidly advancing destructive capabilities, with one scenario that kept him up at night being a hostile nation using these weapons to attack the US financial system. And despite being in awe of advances in voice cloning, Altman warned the crowd about how that same benefit could enable sophisticated fraud and identity theft, considering that "there are still some financial institutions that will accept the voiceprint as authentication".

For the first time ever, a CCTV camera in Myanmar captured real-time footage of a supershear strike-slip earthquake moving at 3.7 miles per second. According to seismologists at Japan's Kyoto University, the analysis has "led to new findings based on real-time visual evidence of tectonic motion," reports Popular Science. From the report: The magnitude 7.7 event took place on March 28 along the Sagaing Fault with an epicenter near Myanmar's second-largest city, Mandalay. Although the initial rupture process lasted barely 80 seconds, it and numerous aftershocks were ultimately responsible for 5,456 confirmed deaths and over 11,000 injuries. Later evaluations indicated the quake was the second deadliest in modern history, as well as the most powerful to hit Myanmar in over a century. According to a separate group's paper published in the same journal, the southern portion of the rupture occurred at an astonishing 3.7 miles per second -- fast enough to qualify as "supershear velocity."

Amid the catastrophe, an outdoor CCTV camera about 74.5 miles south of the epicenter recorded a visceral illustration of its power. Over just a few moments, what at first looks like a single chunk of the ground appears to suddenly divide and horizontally shift past one another in opposite directions. Completely by accident, the camera recorded a direct look of a strike-slip fault, something previously analyzed by remote seismic instruments. To researchers at Kyoto University, the clip wasn't just a jaw-dropping scene -- it was an opportunity to study a strike-slip fault using visual data. You can watch the footage on YouTube.

Fast Company's tech editor Harry McCracken (also harrymccSlashdot reader #1,641,347) writes: As part of Fast Company's "1995 week", I wrote about IBM's ThinkPad 701, the famous model with an expanding "butterfly" keyboard [which could be stretched from 9.7-inches to 11.5 inches]. By putting full-sized keys in a subnotebook-sized laptop, it solved one of mobile computing's biggest problems.

IBM discontinued it before the end of the year, and neither it nor anyone else ever made anything similar again. And yet it remains amazing.
Check out this 1995 ad for the keyboard! The article calls the butterfly ThinkPad "one of the best things the technology industry has ever done with moving parts," and revisits 1995's race "to design a subnotebook-sized laptop with a desktop-sized keyboard." It's still comically thick, standing almost as tall as four MacBook Airs stacked on each other. That height is required to accommodate multiple technologies later rendered obsolete by technological progress, such as a dial-up fax/modem, an infrared port, two PCMCIA expansion card slots, and a bulky connector for an external docking station... Lifting the screen set off a system of concealed gears and levers that propelled the two sections of keyboard into position with balletic grace... A Businesweek article cited sales of 215,000 units and said it was 1995's best-selling PC laptop. Yet by the time that story appeared in February 1996, the 701 had been discontinued. IBM never made anything like it again. Neither did anyone else...

As portable computers became more popular, progress in display technology had made it possible for PC makers to use larger screens. Manufacturers were also getting better at fitting a laptop's necessary components into less space. These advances let them design a new generation of thin, light laptops that went beyond the limitations of subnotebooks. Once IBM could make a lightweight laptop with a wider screen, "the need for an expanding keyboard was no longer essential," says [butterfly ThinkPad engineer] George Karidis. "It would have just been a novelty."
The article notes a fan's open source guides for repairing butterfly Thinkpads at Project Butterfly, and all the fan-community videos about it on YouTube, "from an excellent documentary to people simply being entranced by it.

"As a thing of wonder, it continues to transcend its own obsolescence."