Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has died. Born in 1924, he had just celebrated his 100th birthday on October 1st. If you want to catch a glimpse of his political charisma, YouTube has a clip of Carter's appearance on "What's My Line" when he was still only governor of Georgia. Within five years he'd be president of the United States, serving from 1977 to 1981.

But it seems like today everyone has a story to tell. More than two decades later, long-time Slashdot reader destinyland saw Jimmy Carter speak in Las Vegas in 2001 on the final day of the CTIA Wireless tradeshow. "I feel thrilled to be a part of this," 77-year-old Carter had said.... Carter applauded the work of "entrepreneurs and scientists and engineers that are transforming the face of the globe." And he noted their technologies could address problems targeted by the Carter Center.

Interrupted by a few cellphone rings, the former President conversed on a stage at the Sands Expo and Venetian Hotel with Tom Wheeler, the president of the wireless communications trade association. Wheeler reminded the audience of Carter's decidedly nontechnical background, discussing An Hour Before Daylight, Carter's memoir about growing up on a farm in Georgia during the Great Depression. "We were the only family blessed with an outhouse," Carter told the crowd.

Wheeler also asked a question many in the technology community could relate to. Carter, he pointed out, had been involuntarily retired. "What's it feel like?" The former President told the audience he'd re-focussed his energies into humanitarian efforts through the Carter Center, which is active in providing health services around the world as well as monitoring elections. Carter donated his appearance fee to the Carter Center...

Midway through the hour-long discussion, the former President touted his administration's record of deregulating several industries, including transportation, energy, and communications, saying "If it hadn't been for that deregulation, this environment in which you all live wouldn't have been possible." Carter also shared with the business crowd that it was a belief in free enterprise that made him want to enter politics, drawn from his experiences selling peanuts as a young boy for a dollar a day.

The audience greeted the former president warmly, giving him a standing ovation both when he took the stage and when he left. Carter joked it was almost enough to make him want to get back into politics.
Everyone has their own opinion. When a friend of mine was in high school, she got to meet Jimmy Carter early in his presidency. He'd seemed unusually kind and good, she said, but remembered her first reaction. "They're going to eat you alive." And yet then, pointing to the humanitarian work he would continue for four decades, she said he was also clearly America's very best ex-president.

And the liberal blog Talking Points Memo argues Carter's accomplishments as president are being re-evaluated: Some found him to be distinctly unsung, with little attention given to his brokering of peace with the Camp David Accords and emphasis on global human rights. And some just liked him. A serious, intelligent, faithful, deeply honest man who spurned political expediency and burned through hundreds of pages of memos a day, he preached self-restraint, stewardship and commonality to an electorate that cast him off four years later for the glib excesses of Ronald Reagan.... "People assume that because he wasn't warm and cuddly with Congress that he didn't get much through," said John Alter [who wrote the first independent Carter biography in 2020]. "He signed more legislation in four years than Clinton or Obama did in eight. He has the most prodigious legislative record since World War II, with the exception of Lyndon Johnson."

That record includes, by Alter's count, 14 major pieces of environmental legislation. In one of Carter's more creative moves, he dusted off the 1906 Antiquities Act to keep pristine 56 million acres of Alaskan wilderness. His piecemeal approach, cloaked in distinctly unsexy bills like the 1978 Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act, planted the seeds for a changing national energy system in the face of climate change. Carter had started underlining passages in scientific journals about what is now the most existential crisis of our time as early as 1971. What's most wrenching about Carter's improvements in energy and environmental policy now is what he wasn't able to accomplish. On his way out of office, he issued a report that included recommendations for cutting carbon emissions — at exactly the same rate the Paris Climate Accords coalesced behind 35 years later....

His Carter Center has virtually eradicated certain devastating diseases on the African continent, part of the work for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He and Rosalynn have also helped build and repair over 4,000 homes for Habitat for Humanity, work that continued well into his 90s.
I've got my own story. As a young boy I saw Jimmy Carter give a speech in 1977 — just six months after he'd assumed the presidency. A crowd of teenagers thrilled to see the president gave him a long, loud round of applause. And when it finally died down, Carter said...

"I wish I got that kind of reception from Congress."

"Every single one of the top ten box office hits of 2024 was a sequel, a remake... or a prequel," writes The Hollywood Reporter.

Here's the list of 2024's top-grossing films published by the movie blog SlashFilm:

10. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
9. Venom: The Last Dance
8. Kung Fu Panda 4
7. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
6. Wicked
5. Dune: Part Two
4. Moana 2
3. Despicable Me 4
2. Deadpool & Wolverine
1. Inside Out 2


2024 was the year Godzilla celebrated its 70th year as a franchise — but it wasn't the only long-running franchise. "When the Marvel Cinematic Universe went R-rated with Deadpool & Wolverine... it was literally more successful than any other R-rated movie in history," SlashFilm points out, while Venom: The Last Dance was the year's 9th highest-earner. (But several other big superhero movies flopped and "the misses outweighed the hits this year, while DC sat it out entirely as the world waits for Superman to usher in James Gunn's new DC Universe.")

They also marvel that Wicked earned $572 million after opening on the same day as Ridley Scott's Gladiator II....

But in the end SlashFilm describes 2024 as "a banner year for animation," with computer-animated movies filling four of the top ten spots (Kung Fu Panda 4, Moana 2, Despicable Me 4, and Inside Out 2). And another interesting trend? Though the world flocked to Tim Burton's first sequel to Beetlejuice after 36 years, Warner Bros. was, "at one point, pushing for Beetlejuice 2 to go directly to streaming on Max." And Disney original had the same idea for Moana 2, leading SlashFilm to conclude that 2024's box office "should be the death of the big direct-to-streaming movie." SlashFilm notes that Disney also sent several Pixar originals to Disney+ between 2020 and 2022, which "did immeasurable damage to the brand, something that even CEO Bob Iger has acknowledged." And then after a theatrical debut Pixar's Inside Out 2 became "the eighth biggest movie ever at the box office, with $1.698 billion to its name" — and the highest-grossing animated film ever made.

And Dune: Part Two? Denis Villeneuve accomplished nothing shy of a miracle with 2021's "Dune," an adaptation of Frank Herbert's cherished sci-fi novel that was faithful to the material, massive in scale, but still felt like an auteur film... The only downside? 2021 was a terrible time to release a movie, particularly a Warner Bros. movie, as all of the studio's films were going to HBO Max the same day they hit theaters. Yet, "Dune" made $400 million in its original run, which was enough to justify a sequel. Evidently, the audience for this franchise grew exponentially in the years before "Dune: Part Two" hit theaters in early March... All told, Villeneuve's sweeping, epic sequel pulled in $714.4 million worldwide, all while garnering tons of acclaim once again. Also, not for nothing, Villeneuve got it made for less than $200 million...

Without "Dune: Part Two" making what it made, the box office might have been in truly dire shape. As a relatively dead April and very weak May followed, this overperformance helped keep theaters afloat until greener pastures arrived in the back half of the year. The Spice must flow, as it were.
The Hollywood Reporter offers another take on the significance of 2024: Total domestic box office revenue appears to be heading toward around $8 billion, down from 2023's exhilarating post-COVID turnaround of $9 billion, but the National Association of Theatre Owners prefers to accentuate the positive, attributing the dip to a shortage of product due to the labor strikes and taking encouragement from the renewal of the movie habit...

Interestingly, or thankfully, the cinematic universes of Marvel, DC, and Star Wars failed to expand: except for Deadpool & Wolverine, not one of the huge hits came from a comic book franchise or a galaxy far, far away.
The article then complains about people using their phones during the movie for texting, talking, and photographing the movie itself. (Though it applauds a PSA against the practice in which Deadpool and Wolverine "delivered the message in laudably blunt terms.")

And on Wikipedia, Deadpool & Wolverine and Dune: Part Two were the eighth and 23rd most popular articles of 2024.

It had a 4.8-inch display. Introduced in 1991, Hewlett-Packard's (DOS-based) HP 95LX Palmtop PC — a collaboration with Lotus — was finally discontinued back in 2003.

But one found its way to long-time Slashdot reader Shayde (who in November repaired a 48-year-old handheld videogame console from Mattel). "I really wanted to get this HP95LX talking to the internet at large," they told Slashdot, " but network stacks for DOS in 1991 were pretty limited, and this machine didn't even have the hardware for a network connection.

"It did have a serial port though — a flat 4-pin custom interface. I did a bunch of research and learned how to custom-build an RS-232 hookup for this port, and using an external Wifi module, got it online — and talking to the retrocomputing BBS!"

There's a video documenting the whole experience. (Along the way he uses 20-gauge hook-up wire from Amazon, a zip tie, solder cups, and an internet modem (the WiFi232 Hayes modem emulator). The whole thing is powered by two AA batteries — it has 512K of memory, and about half a meg of storage. My favorite technical detail?

"Conveniently, the HP 95 [Palmtop PC] uses the exact same pinout as the HP 48GX handheld graphing calculator. So looking up on the Internet, we can determine what pins we need to map from the HP unit over to what would be a DB25 serial port..."

A wave of fraudulent copyright takedowns on YouTube has exposed vulnerabilities in the platform's content moderation system, enabling anonymous users to threaten creators' channels through false legal claims, The Verge is reporting. Several gaming content creators, including a channel with 1.5 million subscribers, received takedown notices from someone impersonating Nintendo's legal team. Though YouTube acknowledged the false claims, the company declined to explain how it verifies takedown requests or detail measures to prevent abuse of its copyright system.

PayPal-owned browser extension Honey manipulates affiliate marketing systems and withholds discount information from users, according to an investigation by YouTube channel MegaLag.

The extension -- which rose in popularity after promising consumers it would find them the best online deals -- replaces existing affiliate cookies with its own during checkout, diverting commission payments from content creators who promoted the products to PayPal, MegaLag reported in a 23-minute video [YouTube link].

The investigation revealed that Honey, which PayPal acquired in 2019 for $4 billion, allows merchants in its cashback program to control which coupons appear to users, hiding better publicly available discounts.

"From the moment GPT-4 came out in March 2023, OpenAI has been working on GPT-5..." reports the Wall Street Journal. [Alternate URL here.] But "OpenAI's new artificial-intelligence project is behind schedule and running up huge bills. It isn't clear when — or if — it'll work."

"There may not be enough data in the world to make it smart enough." OpenAI's closest partner and largest investor, Microsoft, had expected to see the new model around mid-2024, say people with knowledge of the matter. OpenAI has conducted at least two large training runs, each of which entails months of crunching huge amounts of data, with the goal of making Orion smarter. Each time, new problems arose and the software fell short of the results researchers were hoping for, people close to the project say... [And each one costs around half a billion dollars in computing costs.]

The $157 billion valuation investors gave OpenAI in October is premised in large part on [CEO Sam] Altman's prediction that GPT-5 will represent a "significant leap forward" in all kinds of subjects and tasks.... It's up to company executives to decide whether the model is smart enough to be called GPT-5 based in large part on gut feelings or, as many technologists say, "vibes."

So far, the vibes are off...
OpenAI wants to use its new model to generate high-quality synthetic data for training, according to the article. But OpenAI's researchers also "concluded they needed more diverse, high-quality data," according to the article, since "The public internet didn't have enough, they felt." OpenAI's solution was to create data from scratch. It is hiring people to write fresh software code or solve math problems for Orion to learn from. [And also theoretical physics experts] The workers, some of whom are software engineers and mathematicians, also share explanations for their work with Orion... Having people explain their thinking deepens the value of the newly created data. It's more language for the LLM to absorb; it's also a map for how the model might solve similar problems in the future... The process is painfully slow. GPT-4 was trained on an estimated 13 trillion tokens. A thousand people writing 5,000 words a day would take months to produce a billion tokens.

OpenAI's already-difficult task has been complicated by internal turmoil and near-constant attempts by rivals to poach its top researchers, sometimes by offering them millions of dollars... More than two dozen key executives, researchers and longtime employees have left OpenAI this year, including co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever and Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati. This past Thursday, Alec Radford, a widely admired researcher who served as lead author on several of OpenAI's scientific papers, announced his departure after about eight years at the company...

OpenAI isn't the only company worrying that progress has hit a wall. Across the industry, a debate is raging over whether improvement in AIs is starting to plateau. Sutskever, who recently co-founded a new AI firm called Safe Superintelligence or SSI, declared at a recent AI conference that the age of maximum data is over. "Data is not growing because we have but one internet," he told a crowd of researchers, policy experts and scientists. "You can even go as far as to say that data is the fossil fuel of AI."

And that fuel was starting to run out.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: TikTokasked the Supreme Court on Monday to temporarily block a law that would effectively ban it in the United States in a matter of weeks. Saying that the law violates both its First Amendment rights and those of its 170 million American users, TikTok, which is controlled by a Chinese parent company, urged the justices to maintain the status quo while they decide whether to hear an appeal. "Congress's unprecedented attempt to single out applicants and bar them from operating one of the most significant speech platforms in this nation presents grave constitutional problems that this court likely will not allow to stand," lawyers for TikTok wrote in their emergency application.

President Biden signed the law this spring after it was enacted with wide bipartisan support. Lawmakers said the app's ownership represented a risk because the Chinese government's oversight of private companies would allow it to retrieve sensitive information about Americans or to spread propaganda, though they have not publicly shared evidence that this has occurred. They have also noted that American platforms like Facebook and YouTube are banned in China, and that TikTok itself is not allowed in the country.

YouTube is introducing an optional feature allowing creators to let third-party companies use their videos to train AI models, with the default setting being opt-out. The Verge reports: "We see this as an important first step in supporting creators and helping them realize new value for their YouTube content in the AI era," a TeamYouTube staffer named Rob says in a support post. "As we gather feedback, we'll continue to explore features that facilitate new forms of collaboration between creators and third-party companies, including options for authorized methods to access content."

YouTube will be rolling out the setting in YouTube Studio "over the next few days," and unauthorized scraping "remains prohibited," Rob writes. Another support page says that you'll be able to pick and choose from a list of third-party companies that can train on your videos or you can simply allow all third-party companies to train on them.

This month Bill Gates recommended four books about making sense of the world, including The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman. Gates calls it "the book I recommend more than any other on AI — to heads of state, business leaders, and anyone else who asks — because it offers something rare: a clear-eyed view of both the extraordinary opportunities and genuine risks ahead." After helping build DeepMind from a small startup into one of the most important AI companies of the past decade, [Suleyman] went on to found Inflection AI and now leads Microsoft's AI division. But what makes this book special isn't just Mustafa's firsthand experience — it's his deep understanding of scientific history and how technological revolutions unfold. He's a serious intellectual who can draw meaningful parallels across centuries of scientific advancement. Most of the coverage of The Coming Wave has focused on what it has to say about artificial intelligence — which makes sense, given that it's one of the most important books on AI ever written. And there is probably no one as qualified as Mustafa to write it...

But what sets his book apart from others is Mustafa's insight that AI is only one part of an unprecedented convergence of scientific breakthroughs. Gene editing, DNA synthesis, and other advances in biotechnology are racing forward in parallel. As the title suggests, these changes are building like a wave far out at sea — invisible to many but gathering force. Each would be game-changing on its own; together, they're poised to reshape every aspect of society... [P]rogress is already accelerating as costs plummet and computing power grows. Then there are the incentives for profit and power that are driving development. Countries compete with countries, companies compete with companies, and individuals compete for glory and leadership. These forces make technological advancement essentially unstoppable — and they also make it harder to control...

How do we limit the dangers of these technologies while harnessing their benefits? This is the question at the heart of The Coming Wave, because containment is foundational to everything else. Without it, the risks of AI and biotechnology become even more acute. By solving for it first, we create the stability and trust needed to tackle everything else... [Suleyman] lays out an agenda that's appropriately ambitious for the scale of the challenge — ranging from technical solutions (like building an emergency off switch for AI systems) to sweeping institutional changes, including new global treaties, modernized regulatory frameworks, and historic cooperation among governments, companies, and scientists...
In an accompanying Christmas-themed video, Gates adds that "Of all the books on AI, that's the one I recommend the most."

Gates also recommends The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, saying it "made me reflect on how much of my younger years — which were often spent running around outside without parental supervision, sometimes getting into trouble — helped shape who I am today. Haidt explains how the shift from play-based childhoods to phone-based childhoods is transforming how kids develop and process emotions." (In the video Gates describes it as "kind of a scary book, but very convincing. [Haidt] writes about the rise of mental illness, and anxiety in children. He, unlike some books, actually has some prescriptions, like kids not using phones until much later, parenting style differences. I think it's a super-important book.")

Gates goes into the book's thesis in a longer blog post: that "we're actually facing two distinct crises: digital under-parenting (giving kids unlimited and unsupervised access to devices and social media) and real-world over-parenting (protecting kids from every possible harm in the real world). The result is young people who are suffering from addiction-like behaviors — and suffering, period — while struggling to handle challenges and setbacks that are part of everyday life." [Haidt] makes a strong case for better age verification on social media platforms and delaying smartphone access until kids are older. Literally and figuratively, he argues, we also need to rebuild the infrastructure of childhood itself — from creating more engaging playgrounds that encourage reasonable risk-taking, to establishing phone-free zones in schools, to helping young people rediscover the joy of in-person interaction.
Gates also recommends Engineering in Plain Sight, by Grady Hillhouse, a book which he says "encourages curiosity." ("Hillhouse takes all of the mysterious structures we see every day, from cable boxes to transformers to cell phone towers, and explains what they are and how they work. It's the kind of read that will reward your curiosity and answer questions you didn't even know you had.")

And finally, Gates recommends an autobiography by 81-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning historian/biographer/former sports journalist Doris Kearns Goodwin, who assesses the impact of President Lyndon Johnson's policies in a surprising "personal history of the 1960s."

Researchers used Canada's national synchrotron light source facility "to analyze a new type of lithium-ion battery material — called a single-crystal electrode — that's been charging and discharging non-stop in a Halifax lab for more than six years," reports Tech Xplore.

The results? The battery material "lasted more than 20,000 cycles before it hit the 80% capacity cutoff," which they say is equivalent to driving 8 million kms (nearly 5 million miles). That's more than eight times the life of a regular lithium-ion battery that lasted 2,400 cycles before reaching the 80% cutoff — and "When the researchers looked at the single crystal electrode battery, they saw next to no evidence of this mechanical stress." (One says the material "looked very much like a brand-new cell." Toby Bond [a senior scientist at the CLS, who conducted the research for his Ph.D.] attributes the near absence of degradation in the new style battery to the difference in the shape and behavior of the particles that make up the battery electrodes... The single crystal is, as its name implies, one big crystal: it's more like an ice cube. "If you have a snowball in one hand, and an ice cube in the other, it's a lot easier to crush the snowball," says Bond. "The ice cube is much more resistant to mechanical stress and strain." While researchers have for some time known that this new battery type resists the micro cracking that lithium-ion batteries are so susceptible to, this is the first time anyone has studied a cell that's been cycled for so long...

Bond says what's most exciting about the research is that it suggests we may be near the point where the battery is no longer the limiting component in an EV — as it may outlast the other parts of the car. The new batteries are already being produced commercially, says Bond, and their use should ramp up significantly within the next couple of years. "I think work like this just helps underscore how reliable they are, and it should help companies that are manufacturing and using these batteries to plan for the long term."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Witcher 4's first trailer debuted at the 2024 Game Awards — a six-minute cinema-quality thriller. It's a teaser for a game that "aims to be the most immersive and ambitious open-world Witcher game to date," according to an announcement from CD Projekt Red. The trailer is pre-rendered in a custom build of Unreal Engine 5 on an unannounced NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU. Powered by the same tech that The Witcher IV is built on, using assets and models from the game itself, it aims to provide players with a cinematic look at the kind of experience the game is aspiring to provide.
The trailer shows "a remote village that has been terrorized for generations by a fearsome monster demanding human sacrifices..." their announcement notes. ("At the heart of the trailer is Ciri's perspective as an outsider to the village.") "Geralt will appear in the game, but we don't want to spoil his role precisely," CD Projekt Red told IGN.

Kotaku reminds fans there's also Netflix's animated movie The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep in February 2025 — plus the first new Witcher novel in over a decade (with an English translation) expected sometime next year as well...

Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the news.

Nvidia is hosting its first LAN party in over a decade to celebrate the debut of the RTX 50 series. It'll occur at CES 2025 in January and feature a 50-hour gaming marathon with tournaments, prizes, and global remote sessions. Tom's Hardware reports: The LAN party (dubbed GeForce LAN 50) will start on January 4 at 4:30 pm PT and end right before Nvidia CES Jensen Huang gives his opening speech at the CES event in Las Vegas on January 6 at 6:30 pm PT. The main LAN event will occur in Las Vegas, while remote sessions will take place in Beijing, Berlin, and Taipei. The event will purportedly host up to 400 gamers, requiring a $125 refundable deposit to sign up. The 400 lucky people who manage to make the list will not include content creators who might be invited directly to the LAN party from Nvidia.

As mentioned, the LAN party will be a full-blown 50-hour gaming marathon with in-game and LAN contests, tournaments, and prize raffles. For everyone who won't be able to get into the LAN party, Nvidia is providing additional prizes through its Nvidia App dubbed "LAN" missions. More prizes will be given out through the hashtag #GeForceGreats on social media. Nvidia is going all out for its GeForce RTX 50 series debut early next month. The last time Nvidia hosted a LAN party was purportedly 13 years ago.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Shaun Golden, the sheriff of Monmouth County, N.J., wants feds to get to the bottom of recent mysterious drone activity in his state. Local officials, including Golden, are urging Gov. Phil Murphy (D) to declare a state of emergency. "We continue to urge our governor to press the federal government to put more resources out here," Golden said Thursday on NewsNation's "Dan Abrams Live." "The only way we're going to solve this is by the federal government coming in here and doing full investigations as to what these things are, how their movements are made," he added.

The White House insist that the drones do not represent a threat. The Pentagon also said it currently does not appear that a foreign enemy is behind the mysterious drones in the New Jersey sky. Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) claimed the drones are being launched by an Iranian "mothership," but Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said during a briefing there is "not any truth to that." With the investigation ongoing, Golden has called for the governor to declare a state of emergency and to issue an executive order banning nighttime use of recreational drones. Even more drone sightings are being reported in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland, reports NBC News. "What is happening is outrageous. Thousands of drones and unmanned aerial systems flying above us, and our government is not telling us who's operating them and for what purpose," Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., said a press conference in Staten Island on Friday. "I don't believe that the United States of America, with its military capabilities, does not know what these objects are. And what I'm asking, and what we're all asking, is for you to be straight with us and just tell us what is going on."

A senior official said there have been 79 sightings across New Jersey alone last night. "The sightings -- which occur up to 180 times per night, according to several New Jersey officials -- have remained consistent for nearly a month," adds NBC News.

Police in New Jersey are investigating a possible drone crash in Hillsborough, NJ. Police were called out at approximately 8:35 p.m. but are being extremely tightlipped, referring all questions to the FBI. A reporter asked a firefighter leaving the scene if they found anything and he said that he is not at liberty to say.

Additionally, at least four commercial airline pilots encountered mysterious, colorful circular lights "moving at extreme speeds" through the skies above Oregon this past weekend. You can listen to air traffic control audio archives from Dec. 7 via OregonLive.

German broadcaster Deutsche Welle is reporting that drones were spotted over sensitive military and industrial sites, including the U.S. air base at Ramstein in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

Developing...

Nearly half of American teenagers say they are online "constantly," according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. The report was based on a survey of 1,391 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 conducted from Sept. 18 to Oct. 10, 2024. The Associated Press reports: As in past years, YouTube was the single most popular platform teenagers used -- 90% said they watched videos on the site, down slightly from 95% in 2022. Nearly three-quarters said they visit YouTube every day. There was a slight downward trend in several popular apps teens used. For instance, 63% of teens said they used TikTok, down from 67% and Snapchat slipped to 55% from 59%.

This small decline could be due to pandemic-era restrictions easing up and kids having more time to see friends in person, but it's not enough to be truly meaningful. X saw the biggest decline among teenage users. Only 17% of teenagers said they use X, down from 23% in 2022, the year Elon Musk bought the platform. Reddit held steady at 14%. About 6% of teenagers said they use Threads, Meta's answer to X that launched in 2023. [...]

Meta's messaging service WhatsApp was a rare exception in that it saw the number of teenage users increase, to 23% from 17% in 2022. Pew also asked kids how often they use various online platforms. Small but significant numbers said they are on them âoealmost constantly.â For YouTube, 15% reported constant use, for TikTok, 16% and for Snapchat, 13%.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Besides phones and tablets, Android is available on smartwatches, TVs, and even cars. Google today announced Android XR as the next form factor the operating system is coming to. Google is using the catch-all term of extended reality (XR) to describe virtual (VR), mixed (MR), and augmented reality (AR). Android XR is for all device types, including headsets that offer video or optical see-through, screen-less "AI glasses," and AR glasses with displays. Going into Android XR, Google believes it has a proven track record of creating platforms. That is more than just making an operating system for themselves, but also catering to OEM partners, cultivating a developer ecosystem, and managing an app store.

[...] Google says Android XR is the first OS built from the ground up with Gemini. Google and Samsung are starting with the headset, which both consider a good starting point. Samsung has a developer kit called Project Moohan (or "infinity" in Korean) that is lightweight, has an external battery, and powered by the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2. Google imagines Android XR headsets as offering an infinite desktop for productivity. In this scenario, you're at a desk with a physical keyboard and mouse. A few partners already have this dev kit and more are being distributed to partners starting this week. Meanwhile, first-party apps like Chrome, YouTube, Google TV, Google Photos, and Google Maps are being optimized for Android XR.

However, glasses are the end goal and frames running Android XR are coming for "directions, translations or message summaries without reaching for your phone," though they are paired like any other wearable. The final realization of this vision is in-lens display. However, Google does not think that displays are a must, and this opens the door to display-less glasses that have microphones and cameras for input, while Gemini capably handles output. Google will "soon begin real-world testing of prototype glasses running Android XR with a small group of users." With today's launch, Google is releasing the Android XR SDK Developer Preview and an Android XR Emulator.

You can get a glimpse into the world of Android XR via this YouTube video.

BrianFagioli writes: In a move sure to rattle some subscribers, YouTube TV has announced a price increase for its Base Plan. Starting January 13, 2025, the monthly subscription cost will jump from $72.99 to $82.99. The search giant cites the rising costs of content and investments in service quality as the primary reasons for this adjustment.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Russia has reportedly cut some regions of the country off from the rest of the world's internet for a day, effectively siloing them, according to reports from European and Russian news outlets reshared by the US nonprofit Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and Western news outlets.

Russia's communications authority, Roskomnadzor, blocked residents in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, which have majority-Muslim populations, ISW says. The three regions are in southwest Russia near its borders with Georgia and Azerbaijan. People in those areas couldn't access Google, YouTube, Telegram, WhatsApp, or other foreign websites or apps -- even if they used VPNs, according to a local Russian news site.

Russian digital rights NGO Roskomsvoboda told TechRadar that most VPNs didn't work during the shutdown, but some apparently did. It's unclear which ones or how many actually worked, though. Russia has been increasingly blocking VPNs more broadly, and Apple has helped the country's censorship efforts by taking down VPN apps on its Russian App Store. At least 197 VPNs are currently blocked in Russia, according to Russian news agency Interfax.

"Generative AI is transforming software development by enabling natural language prompts to generate code, reducing the need for traditional programming skills," argues Analytics India magazine. Traditionally, coding was the bastion of the select few who had mastered mighty languages like C++, Python, or Java. The idea of programming seemed exclusively reserved for those fluent in syntax and logic. However, the narrative is now being challenged by natural language coding being implemented in AI tools like GitHub Copilot. Andrej Karpathy, senior director of AI at Tesla predicted this trend last year.... English is emerging as the universal coding language.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang believes that English is becoming a new programming language thanks to AI advancements. Speaking at the World Government Summit, Huang explained, "It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human"... He calls this a "miracle of AI," emphasising how it closes the technology divide and empowers people from all fields to become effective technologists without traditional coding skills... "In the future, you will tell the computer what you want, and it will do it,"â Huang commented. Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4 and its successors have made this possible...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been equally vocal about the potential of English for coding. Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, an AI code assistant, enables developers to describe their needs in natural language and receive functional code in response. Nadella describes this as part of a broader mission to "empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more".... In a discussion earlier last year, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque claimed, "41% of codes on GitHub are AI-generated"...

In 2024, the ability to program is no longer reserved for a few. It's a skill anyone can wield, thanks to the power of natural language processing and AI
"No longer is the power to create software restricted to those who can decipher programming languages," the article concludes. "Anyone with a problem to solve and a clear enough articulation of that problem can now write software."

Although the article also includes this consoling quote from Nvidia's Huang in March. "There is an artistry to prompt engineering. It's how you fine-tune the instructions to get exactly what you want"

Peter Jackson is co-executive producer of a new animated Lord of the Rings prequel called The War of the Rohirrim. "Set in an epic world 183 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the King of Rohan is forced into a last stand in ancient Hornburg after a sudden attack..." explains The Hollywood Reporter.

But Variety writes that the movie "fizzled" in its overseas debut this weekend: "Moana 2" has notched $600 million in global ticket sales, standing as the sixth-biggest movie of the year after just two weeks of release. Disney's animated sequel, which was developed as a TV series before pivoting to theaters, has generated $300 million overseas and $300 million domestically... Among new offerings, the Warner Bros. anime fantasy film "The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim," faltered with $2 million from 3,410 screens in 31 territories... [The movie] opens in North America and an additional 42 offshore markets on Dec. 13. Top earning territories were Spain with $347,000 followed by Mexico with $239,000 and Thailand with $146,000...

Meanwhile, Paramount's "Gladiator II" collected $17 million in its fourth frame at the international box office, boosting its tally to $235 million overseas and $368.4 million globally. The quarter-century-in-the-making sequel Ridley Scott's Oscar-winning 2000 epic "Gladiator" has been far bigger in offshore markets... There's also "Red One," a Christmas-set action comedy starring the Rock as Santa's head of security, which collected $3.5 million from 4,000 screens in 75 overseas markets. The film, from Amazon MGM, has generated a soft $78.2 million from offshore territories and $164 million globally. "Red One" was originally destined for streaming before the studio opted for a theatrical release, so any coinage from the big screen could be viewed as a win for movie theaters, Amazon MGM and Warner Bros. (which has international rights on Amazon MGM releases). From a strictly theatrical standpoint, though, "Red One" carries a $250 million budget before marketing and stands as one of the year's biggest misfires.

Wednesday OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced "12 Days of OpenAI," promising that "Each weekday, we will have a livestream with a launch or demo..." And sure enough, today he announced the launch of two things:

- "o1, the smartest model in the world. Smarter, faster, and more features (e.g. multimodality) than o1-preview. Live in ChatGPT now, coming to API soon."

- "ChatGPT Pro. $200/month. Unlimited usage and even-smarter mode for using o1. More benefits to come!"

Altman added this update later: For extra clarity: o1 is available in our plus tier, for $20/month. With the new pro tier ($200/month), it can think even harder for the hardest problems. Most users will be very happy with o1 in the plus tier!
VentureBeat points out that subscribers "also gain access to GPT-4o, known for its advanced natural language generation capabilities, and the Advanced Voice feature for speech-based interactions."

And even for non-subscribers, ChatGPT can now also analyze images, points out VentureBeat, "a hugely helpful feature upgrade as it enables users to upload photos and have the AI chatbot respond to them, giving them detailed plans on how to build a birdhouse entirely from a single candid photo of one, for one fun example." In another, potentially more serious and impressive example, it is now capable of helping design data centers from sketches... o1 represents a significant evolution in reasoning model capabilities, including better handling of complex tasks, image-based reasoning, and enhanced accuracy. Enterprise and Education users will gain access to the model next week... OpenAI's updates also include safety enhancements, with the o1-preview scoring 84 on a rigorous safety test, compared to 22 for its predecessor...

To encourage the use of AI in societal-benefit fields, OpenAI has announced the ChatGPT Pro Grant Program. The initiative will initially award 10 grants to leading medical researchers, providing free access to ChatGPT Pro tools.
In a video Altman displays graphs showing o1 dramatically outperforms gpt4o on math questions, on competition coding at CodeForces, and on PhD-level science questions.