A professor of religion at Columbia University writes, "I do not think human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process." Whatever comes next will be neither simply organic nor simply machinic but will be the result of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between human beings and technology. Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other... So-called "artificial" intelligence is the latest extension of the emergent process through which life takes ever more diverse and complex forms.
The article lists "four trajectories that will be increasingly important for the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines."

- Writing about neuroprosthetics, the professor argues that "Increasing possibilities for symbiotic relations between computers and brains will lead to alternative forms of intelligence that are neither human nor machinic, but something in between."

- Then there's biobots. The article argues that with nanotechnology, "it will be increasingly difficult to distinguish the natural from the artificial."

But there's also an interesting discussion about synthetic biology. "Michael Levin and his colleagues at the Allen Discovery Center of Tufts University — biologists, computer scientists and engineers — have created "xenobots," which are "biological robots" that were produced from embryonic skin and muscle cells from an African clawed frog." As Levin and his colleagues wrote in 2020...

Here we show a scalable pipeline for creating functional novel lifeforms: AI methods automatically design diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform some desired function, and transferable designs are then created using a cell-based construction toolkit to realize living systems with predicted behavior. Although some steps in this pipeline still require manual intervention, complete automation in the future would pave the way for designing and deploying living systems for a wide range of functions.
And the article concludes with a discussion of organic-relational AI: While Levin uses computational technology to create and modify biological organisms, the German neurobiologist Peter Robin Hiesinger uses biological organisms to model computational processes by creating algorithms that evolve. This work involves nothing less than developing a new form of "artificial" intelligence... Non-anthropocentric AI would not be merely an imitation of human intelligence, but would be as different from our thinking as fungi, dog and crow cognition is from human cognition.

Machines are becoming more like people and people are becoming more like machines. Organism and machine? Organism or machine? Neither organism nor machine? Evolution is not over; something new, something different, perhaps infinitely and qualitatively different, is emerging.

Who would want the future to be the endless repetition of the past?

Cambridge dictionary's word of the year for 2023 is "hallucinate," a verb that took on a new meaning with the rise in popularity of artificial intelligence chatbots. The Guardian reports: The original definition of the chosen word is to "seem to see, hear, feel, or smell" something that does not exist, usually because of "a health condition or because you have taken a drug." It now has an additional meaning, relating to when artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT, which generates text that mimics human writing, "hallucinates" and produces false information. The word was chosen because the new meaning "gets to the heart of why people are talking about AI," according to a post on the dictionary site.

Generative AI is a "powerful" but "far from perfect" tool, "one we're all still learning how to interact with safely and effectively -- this means being aware of both its potential strengths and its current weaknesses." The dictionary added a number of AI-related entries this year, including large language model (or LLM), generative AI (or GenAI), and GPT (an abbreviation of Generative Pre-trained Transformer). "AI hallucinations remind us that humans still need to bring their critical thinking skills to the use of these tools," continued the post. "Large language models are only as reliable as the information their algorithms learn from. Human expertise is arguably more important than ever, to create the authoritative and up-to-date information that LLMs can be trained on."

Greek economist/politician Yanis Varoufakis "was briefly Greek finance minister in 2015," remembers the Conversation. Now his new book asks the question, "What killed capitalism," with the title's first word providing an answer.

"Techno-feudalism." Varoufakis argues that we no longer live in a capitalist society... "Today, capitalist relations remain intact, but techno-feudalist relations have begun to overtake them," writes Varoufakis. Traditional capitalists, he proposes, have become "vassal capitalists". They are subordinate and dependent on a new breed of "lords" — the Big Tech companies — who generate enormous wealth via new digital platforms. A new form of algorithmic capital has evolved — what Varoufakis calls "cloud capital" — and it has displaced "capitalism's two pillars: markets and profits".

Markets have been "replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets". The moment you enter amazon.com "you exit capitalism" and enter something that resembles a "feudal fief": a digital world belonging to one man and his algorithm, which determines what products you will see and what products you won't see. If you are a seller, the platform will determine how you can sell and which customers you can approach. The terms in which you interact, share information and trade are dictated by an "algo" that "works for [Jeff Bezos'] bottom line"...

Access to the "digital fief" comes at the cost of exorbitant rents. Varoufakis notes that many third-party developers on the Apple store, for example, pay 30% "on all their revenues", while Amazon charges its sellers "35% of revenues". This, he argues, is like a medieval feudal lord sending round the sheriff to collect a large chunk of his serfs' produce because he owns the estate and everything within it.

There is "no disinterested invisible hand of the market" here. The Big Tech platforms are exempted from free-market competition.
And in the meantime, users are unknowingly training their algorithms for them — so "In this interaction, we are all high-tech 'cloud serfs'... [T]he 'cloud capital' we are generating for them all the time increases their capacity to generate yet more wealth, and thus increases their power — something we have only begun to realise." Approximately 80% of the income of traditional capitalist conglomerates go to salaries and wages, according to Varoufakis, while Big Tech's workers, in contrast, collect "less than 1% of their firms' revenues"... For Varoufakis, we are not just living through a tech revolution, but a tech-driven economic revolution. He challenges us to come to terms with just what has happened to our economies — and our societies — in the era of Big Tech and Big Finance.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the article.

Ars Technica reports: In three-and-a-half years of service, one of SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 boosters stands apart from the rest of the company's rocket inventory. This booster, designated with the serial number B1058, has now flown 18 times.

For its maiden launch on May 30, 2020, the rocket propelled NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into the history books on SpaceX's first mission to send people into orbit. This ended a nine-year gap in America's capability to launch astronauts into low-Earth orbit and was the first time a commercial spacecraft achieved this feat... Over the course of its flights to space and back, that white paint has darkened to a charcoal color. Soot from the rocket's exhaust has accumulated, bit by bit, on the 15-story-tall cylinder-shaped booster. The red NASA worm logo is now barely visible.

On Friday night, this rocket launched for the 18th time, breaking a tie at 17 flights with another Falcon 9 booster in SpaceX's fleet... It fired three engines for a braking burn to slow for reentry, then ignited a single engine and extended four carbon-fiber landing legs to settle onto a floating platform holding position near the Bahamas. The drone ship will return the rocket to Cape Canaveral, where SpaceX will refurbish the vehicle for a 19th flight.
Other interesting statistics from the article:

• This single booster rocket has launched 846 satellites into space. (Astrophysicist/spaceflight tracker Jonathan McDowell calculates there are now over 5,000 Starlink satellites in orbit.)

• A SpaceX official told Ars Technica the company might extend the limit on Falcon 9 booster flights beyond 20 for Starlink satellites.

• Friday's launch became the 79th launch so far in 2023 of a Falcon rocket, with SpaceX aiming for a total of 100 by the end of December, and 144 in 2023 (an average of one flight every two-and-a-half days).

• Since 2016, SpaceX has now had 249 consecutive successful launches of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets

The World Science Fiction Society "administers and presents the Hugo Awards, the oldest and most noteworthy award for science fiction," according to Wikipedia. Its members vote on each year's winners, and this year they received 1,847 nominating ballots.

This year the 81st edition of their World Science Fiction Convention was held from October 18 to 22 in Chengdu, China. More details from Gizmodo: While fan-favorite cozy fantasy novel Legends & Lattes lost Best Novel to T. Kingfisher's excellent horror-fantasy Nettle & Bone, Legends & Lattes author Travis Baldtree won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Everything Everywhere All at Once snagged film's top honor, and The Expanse's finale episode did the same for televsion, beating out both nominated Andor episodes among others. Some other great standouts include short fiction editor Neil Clarke, who has kept Clarkesworld magazine running despite getting swamped by AI-generated submissions earlier this year.
And "By winning Best Graphic Story or Comic, [Bartosz] Sztybor-who also served as a producer on the overwhelmingly popular Netflix anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners-also becomes the first Polish author to win a Hugo," reports Forbes: [Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams] is set in Night City-as seen in Cyberpunk 2077-and follows the story of two small-time thieves, Tasha and Mirek, who are trying to survive the harsh metropolis together. "Tasha and Mirek make a living for themselves stealing cyberware and indulging in parties and braindances," the official teaser explains...
Other highlights from this year's awards:

• Best novella: Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)
• Best Novelette: "The Space-Time Painter", by Hai Ya (Galaxy's Edge, April 2022)
• Best Short Story: "Rabbit Test", by Samantha Mills (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2022)
• Best Series: Children of Time series, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Pan Macmillan/Orbit)
• Best Related Work: Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins (Doubleday)

The chief executive of Bloomsbury Publishing has warned of the threat of artificial intelligence to the publishing industry, saying tech groups are already using the work of authors to train up generative AI programmes. From a report: Nigel Newton, who signed Harry Potter author JK Rowling to Bloomsbury in the 1990s, also said ministers needed to act urgently to address competition concerns between large US tech groups and the publishing industry given their increasing market dominance in selling books across the world. The warning came as Bloomsbury reported its highest-ever first-half results on the back of the boom in fantasy novels, leading the publisher to boost its interim dividend. The group said revenues grew 11 per cent to $165.7mn, sending profits 11 per cent higher at $21.4mn, for the six months to August 31.

Newton pointed to the "huge" growth in fantasy novels, with sales of books by Sarah J Maas and Samantha Shannon growing 79 per cent and 169 per cent respectively in the period and demand for Harry Potter books, 26 years after publication, remaining strong. The next Maas book, scheduled for January, has already received "staggering" pre-orders of 750,000 copies for the hardback edition, he said, underscoring the resurgence of the book-selling industry. The group's consumer division will also publish new books in the expanding Harry Potter franchise -- such as a new Wizarding Almanac this autumn.

Corinne Purtill reports via Phys.Org: Before epilepsy was understood to be a neurological condition, people believed it was caused by the moon, or by phlegm in the brain. They condemned seizures as evidence of witchcraft or demonic possession, and killed or castrated sufferers to prevent them from passing tainted blood to a new generation. Today we know epilepsy is a disease. By and large, it's accepted that a person who causes a fatal traffic accident while in the grip of a seizure should not be charged with murder. After more than 40 years studying humans and other primates, Sapolsky has reached the conclusion that virtually all human behavior is as far beyond our conscious control as the convulsions of a seizure, the division of cells or the beating of our hearts.

This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane. "The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over," Sapolsky said. "We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there."

Sapolsky, a MacArthur "genius" grant winner, is extremely aware that this is an out-there position. Most neuroscientists believe humans have at least some degree of free will. So do most philosophers and the vast majority of the general population. Free will is essential to how we see ourselves, fueling the satisfaction of achievement or the shame of failing to do the right thing. Saying that people have no free will is a great way to start an argument. This is partly why Sapolsky, who describes himself as "majorly averse to interpersonal conflict," put off writing his new book "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will." [...]

Analyzing human behavior through the lens of any single discipline leaves room for the possibility that people choose their actions, he says. But after a long cross-disciplinary career, he feels it's intellectually dishonest to write anything other than what he sees as the unavoidable conclusion: Free will is a myth, and the sooner we accept that, the more just our society will be. "Determined," which comes out today, builds on Sapolsky's 2017 bestseller "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst," which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a slew of other accolades. The book breaks down the neurochemical influences that contribute to human behaviors, analyzing the milliseconds to centuries preceding, say, the pulling of a trigger or the suggestive touch on an arm. "Determined" goes a step further. If it's impossible for any single neuron or any single brain to act without influence from factors beyond its control, Sapolsky argues, there can be no logical room for free will.

A Harvard professor on the history of science looks at our response to the pandemic, criticizing "a report that gave the false impression that masking didn't help." From Scientific American: The group's report was published by Cochrane, an organization that collects databases and periodically issues "systematic" reviews of scientific evidence relevant to health care. This year it published a paper addressing the efficacy of physical interventions to slow the spread of respiratory illness such as COVID... The review of studies of masking concluded that the "results were inconclusive..." [and] it was "uncertain whether wearing [surgical] masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses." Still, the authors were also uncertain about that uncertainty, stating that their confidence in their conclusion was "low to moderate." You can see why the average person could be confused... The Cochrane finding was not that masking didn't work but that scientists lacked sufficient evidence of sufficient quality to conclude that they worked...

Cochrane has made this mistake before. In 2016 a flurry of media reports declared that flossing your teeth was a waste of time... The answer demonstrates a third issue with the Cochrane approach: how it defines evidence. The organization states that its reviews "identify, appraise and synthesize all the empirical evidence that meets pre-specified eligibility criteria." The problem is what those eligibility criteria are. Cochrane Reviews base their findings on randomized controlled trials (RCTs), often called the "gold standard" of scientific evidence. But many questions can't be answered well with RCTs, and some can't be answered at all...

In fact, there is strong evidence that masks do work to prevent the spread of respiratory illness. It just doesn't come from RCTs. It comes from Kansas. In July 2020 the governor of Kansas issued an executive order requiring masks in public places. Just a few weeks earlier, however, the legislature had passed a bill authorizing counties to opt out of any statewide provision. In the months that followed, COVID rates decreased in all 24 counties with mask mandates and continued to increase in 81 other counties that opted out of them... Cochrane ignored this epidemiological evidence because it didn't meet its rigid standard.

I have called this approach "methodological fetishism," when scientists fixate on a preferred methodology and dismiss studies that don't follow it. Sadly, it's not unique to Cochrane. By dogmatically insisting on a particular definition of rigor, scientists in the past have landed on wrong answers more than once.
Vox also points out that while Cochrane's review included 78 studies, "only six were actually conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic... Instead, most of them looked at flu transmission in normal conditions, and many of them were about other interventions like hand-washing.

"Only two of the studies are about Covid and masking in particular. Furthermore, neither of those studies looked directly at whether people wear masks, but instead at whether people were encouraged or told to wear masks by researchers."

"The Worker as Futurist project assists rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short speculative fiction," explains its web site. "In a world where massive corporations not only exploit people but monopolize the power of future-making, how can workers and other people fight and write back?"

I couldn't find any short stories displayed on their site, but there are plans to publish a book next year collecting the workers' writing about "the world after Amazon" in print, online and in audiobook format. And there's also a podcast about "the world Amazon is building and the workers and writers struggling for different futures."

From their web site: A 2022 pilot project saw over 25 workers gather online to discuss how SF shed light on their working conditions and futures. In 2023, 13 workers started to meet regularly to build their writing skills and learn about the future Amazon is compelling its workers to create... The Worker as Futurist project aims, in a small way, to place the power of the imagination back in the hands of workers. This effort is in solidarity with trade union mobilizations and workers self-organization at Amazon. It is also in solidarity with efforts by civil society to reign in Amazon's power.
Four people involved with the project shared more details in the socialist magazine Jacobin : At stake is a kind of corporate storytelling, which goes beyond crass propaganda but works to harness the imagination. Like so many corporations, Amazon presents itself as surfing the wave of the future, responding to the relentless and positive force of the capitalist market with innovation and optimism. Such stories neatly exonerate the company and its beneficiaries from the consequences of their choices for workers and their world...

WWS doesn't focus on science fiction. But it does show the radical power of the imagination that comes when workers don't just read inspiring words, but come together to write and thereby take the power of world-building and future-making back into their hands. This isn't finding individual commercial or literary success, but dignity, imagination, and common struggle... Our "Worker as Futurist" project returns the power of the speculative to workers, in the name of discovering something new about capitalism and the struggle for something different. We have tasked these workers with writing their own futures, in the face of imaginaries cultivated by Amazon that see the techno-overlords bestride the world and the stars.

Thanks to funding from Canada's arms-length, government-funded Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, our team of scholars, teachers, writers, and activists has been able to pay Amazon workers (warehouse workers, drivers, copy editors, MTurk workers, and more) to participate in a series of skill-building writing workshops and information sessions. In each of these online forums, we were joined by experts on speculative fiction, on Amazon, and on workers' struggles. At the end of this series of sessions, the participants were supported to draft the stories they wanted to tell about "The World After Amazon...."

We must envision the futures we want in order to mobilize and fight for them together, rather than cede that future to those who would turn the stars into their own private sandbox. It is in the process of writing and sharing writing we can come to an awareness of something our working bodies know but that we cannot otherwise articulate or express. The rank-and-file worker — the target of daily exploitation, forced to build their boss's utopia — may have encrypted within them the key to destroying his world and building a new one.

The government of India said on Tuesday that it plans to put an astronaut on the moon by 2040 and build an Earth-orbiting space station by 2035. Space.com reports: On Aug. 23, India became just the fourth nation ever to soft-land a spacecraft -- its Chandrayaan-3 lander-rover duo -- on the surface of the moon. In a recent meeting with the Indian government department that manages the country's space program, Prime Minister Narendra Modi "directed that India should now aim for new and ambitious goals," according to an official statement. India's future moon exploration efforts will include a series of additional robotic Chandrayaan missions, a new launch pad and a heavy-lift launch vehicle, the statement added.

India's delayed Gaganyaan human spaceflight program, now aiming to fly three astronauts to low Earth orbit in 2025, will feature 20 major tests, including three uncrewed missions to test the launch vehicle over the course of the remainder of this year and all of next. [...] By the middle of the 2030s, India hopes to have a 20-ton space station in a fixed orbit 248 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, with capabilities to host astronauts for 15 to 20 days at a time, K. Sivan, former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), has previously said.

Further down the pipeline of missions, ISRO is planning a Venus orbiter called Shukrayaan-1 to study the surface of that hellishly hot planet. The payloads for that mission are currently being developed, current ISRO chairman S. Somanath had said last month. A second orbiter mission to Mars is also on the books, according to the latest statement. The nation's first, the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), was launched in 2013 and studied the Red Planet's atmosphere for eight years before it lost contact with Earth in April 2022. The follow-up mission, Mars Orbiter Mission 2 or MOM 2, will likely include cameras to study the planet's crust and may also include a lander, although many of the mission plans are yet to be finalized.

A new book by Nobel prize-winning economist Angus Deaton"feels like an existential crisis," writes Fast Company, "as he questions his own legacy — and wonders whether policies prescribed by economists over the years have unintentionally contributed to inequality" in America. Angus Deaton: People who have a four-year college degree are doing pretty well. But if you go to the people who don't have a college degree, horrible things are happening to them... The opportunities are getting bigger and bigger, but the safety net's falling further and further away. . . I think of it as much broader than income inequality: People without a BA are like an underclass. They're dispensable...

Fast Company: Why has Europe been able to avoid so many of these rises in inequality and "deaths of despair" and the U.S. hasn't?

Deaton: Anne [Case, my wife] and I wrestled with that in our book Deaths of Despair. One reason is that we don't have any safety net here... The other story is we've got this hideous healthcare system... we're spending [almost] 20% of GDP. There's no other country that spends anything like that. That money comes out of other things we could have, like a safety net and a better education system. And it's not delivering much, except the healthcare providers are doing really quite well: the hospitals, the doctors, the pharma companies, the device manufacturers. Not only does it cost a lot, but we fund it in this really bizarre way, which is that for most people who are not old enough to qualify for Medicare, they get their health insurance through their employer...

Fast Company : The theme of your new book seems to be something of an existential crisis for you as an economist. How much are economists to blame for some of these issues?

Deaton: [...] I think there are some broad things that we didn't do very well. We bent the knee a little too much to the Chicago libertarian view, that markets could do everything. I'm not trying to say that I was right and everybody else was wrong. I was with the mob. I think we thought that financial markets were much safer than they'd been in the past, and we didn't have to worry about them as much. That was dead wrong. I think we were way overenthusiastic about hyperglobalization. We had this belief that people would lose their jobs but they'd find other, better jobs, and that really didn't happen. So there are a lot of things that I think are going to be seriously reconsidered over the next years.
But he admits economists are short on solutions for economic inequality. "When they say, 'Well, what would work'" there's this uncomfortable silence where you feel foolish. Everybody's quoting [former Italian philosopher and politician Antonio] Gramsci [saying that] the old system is broken but the new system is struggling to be born. No one really knows what it's going to look like."

The book is titled Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality. But in the interview Deaton still remains hopeful about America, calling it "a very inventive place," and noting that in the field of economics "there's always hope and there's always change; economics is a very open profession, and it changes very quickly."

Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again — two novellas based on Toho's first two Godzilla movies — were finally published in an English translation this month.

Both were written by science fiction author Shigeru Kayama, "who also penned the original scenarios from which the films in question were based," according to Our Culture magazine. And the book's translator calls Kayama both "a figure who is a little bit like Philip K. Dick in this country" and "the key person who developed the contours of the Godzilla story. I think it is no exaggeration to say that he perhaps the closest to being Godzilla's real father than anyone else. Without him, the monster we have today wouldn't exist." The original Godzilla film is a deeply powerful, mournful film that isn't just about a big monster stomping on buildings. It is a serious reflection on Japan's nuclear fears during the Cold War, which left it caught between heavily armed superpowers. Japan recognized that radioactive weapons of mass destruction being developed by the U.S. and U.S.S.R were threats that had the power to suddenly emerge and destroy its citizens and cities at any moment — like Godzilla. We should remember that in the film, it was hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific that disturbed Godzilla, who then took revenge for his destroyed habitat by trampling Tokyo and blasting it with atomic rays...

Interestingly, in the novellas that I've translated, Kayama sometimes restored elements that the director and his assistants removed in the moviemaking process. Perhaps the most noticeable one is that in the scenario, Kayama wanted to begin with a long voice-over that talks directly about the horrors of atomic and hydrogen bombs. He envisioned that as the voice was speaking, the screen would show images from historical footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as images of the tremendously unlucky (and ironically named) fishing vessel Lucky Dragon No. 5, which accidentally found itself in the path of an H-bomb test in the South Pacific in early 1954. (The horrific fate of this boat directly inspired the producer at Toho Studios to make the film.)

However, the director of the film, Ishiro Honda, and his assistant who helped with the screenplay both felt that this kind of direct commentary was too direct for a popular film, and so they toned down the "protest" element in the story. It's clear that they, like Kayama, wanted Godzilla to serve as a monstrous embodiment of radiation and all of the destruction that it could bring, but they also didn't point fingers at the U.S. military which had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and was busily developing even more horrifying weapons. After all, the U.S.S.R. had built its own arsenal, and so nuclear weapons no longer belonged to a single country — the threat was broader than that. Plus, protest films rarely attracted a big, popular following. So, Honda and his crew toned down the outspoken language and imagery, but there was still imagery left enough for viewers in 1954 to recall Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Lucky Dragon. Interestingly, when Kayama published the novellas, he included an author preface that talks about the anti-nuclear movement and encourages readers to read Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again as his contribution to that movement.
Next the translator hopes to create an English translation of the novel The Luminous Fairies and Mothra.

But for this book, he struggled with how to assign a gender to Godzilla. "Some people feel very viscerally, like the people at Toho studios feel very strongly that Godzilla is an 'it' and not a 'he' or 'she' or 'they,'" he told MovieWeb. "I kind of give my rationale for that choice in the afterward — Kayama thought about Godzilla as a stand-in for the nuclear bomb, and it was men in America who were developing the hydrogen bombs that frightened Japan so much in 1954. So maybe it's perhaps not inappropriate to call Godzilla 'he.'"

"OpenAI's latest image generation model, DALL-E 3, makes it SO easy to create comic books!" posted Ammaar Reshi on Twitter. The former Palintir product manager (now a design manager at Brex) then shared "four panels for a fan-made Batman comic made in under five minutes."

Comic Book Resources reports that then "social media spent most of the day dunking on the post, criticizing the idea of celebrating the idea of a 'comic' created through 'A.I. art.'" Comic book artist Javier Rodriguez noted that this is no different from simply cutting and pasting other comic books into a comic... ["You could do the same thing a while ago with a photocopier and some scissors. Stealing other people's art seems easier now and lucrative for those behind generative models."] Comic book writer Sarah Horrocks called out the use of Brian Bolland's work... ["That's literally just Brian Bolland's Joker. The shamelessness of this 'technology' is appalling. I guess it's okay to steal. Just call it AI."]

Justine Bateman, the former actor who has become a vocal opponent of A.I. usage in the arts, explained that DC must act to legally protect usage like this in the future... ["@DCOfficial, the longer you wait to send legal teams to @OpenAI, etc to demand that generative #AI training sets containing your copyrighted work be deleted, the more you make your entire library 'fair use'..."]

Twenty years ago, a group of friends shot a Matrix fan film on a limited budget. Sharing their creation with the rest of the word initially appeared to be too expensive, but then they discovered a new technology called BitTorrent. Fast forward two decades and their "Fanimatrix" release is the oldest active torrent that's still widely shared today. Ernesto Van der Sar writes via TorreantFreak: The oldest surviving torrent we have seen is a copy of the Matrix fan film "The Fanimatrix." The torrent was created in September 2003 and will turn 20 years old in a few days. A truly remarkable achievement. The film was shot by a group of New Zealand friends. With a limited budget of just $800, nearly half of which was spent on a leather jacket, they managed to complete the project in nine days. While shooting the film was possible with these financial constraints, finding a distribution channel proved to be a major hurdle. Free video-sharing services didn't exist yet and server bandwidth was still very costly. Technically the team could host their own server, but that would cost thousands of dollars, which wasn't an option. Luckily, however, the group's IT guy, Sebastian Kai Frost, went looking for alternatives.

Frost had a bit part in the film and did some other work as well, but the true breakthrough came when he stumbled upon a new technology called BitTorrent. This appeared to be exactly what they were looking for. "It looked promising because it scaled such that the more popular the file became, the more the bandwidth load was shared. It seemed like the perfect solution," Frost told us earlier. After convincing the crew that BitTorrent was the right choice, Frost created a torrent on September 28, 2003. He also compiled a tracker on his own Linux box and made sure everything was running correctly. Today, more than twenty years have passed and the torrent is still up and running with more than a hundred seeders. As far as we know, it's the oldest active torrent on the Internet, one that deserves to be in the history books. "I never expected to become the world's oldest torrent but now it's definitely become a thing I'd love to keep carrying on. So I'll be keeping this active as long as I physically can," Frost tells TorrentFreak. "It's really heartening seeing the community pull together around this torrent, despite its usually low transfer count, and work together to keep it alive and kicking. It warms my heart on the daily."

"We're super pumped that it's still going and that people still take an interest in it. Looking forward to the 25th and having something special to share with the world," Frost concludes.

Amazon has created a new rule limiting the number of books that authors can self-publish on its site to three a day, after an influx of suspected AI-generated material was listed for sale in recent months. The Guardian: The company announced the new limitations in a post on its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) forum on Monday. "While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations," read the statement. KDP allows authors to self-publish their books and list them for sale on Amazon's site.

Amazon told the Guardian that the limit is set at three titles, though this number may be adjusted "if needed." The company confirmed that there had already been a limit to the number of books authors could list a day, but declined to say what this previous limit was. The post stated that Amazon is "actively monitoring the rapid evolution of generative AI and the impact it is having on reading, writing, and publishing" and that "very few" publishers will be affected by the change. Authors and publishers will also have the option to seek an exception to the rule.

From science fiction author/blogger/technology activist Cory Doctorow: Right to repair has no cannier, more dedicated adversary than Apple, a company whose most innovative work is dreaming up new ways to sneakily sabotage electronics repair while claiming to be a caring environmental steward, a lie that covers up the mountains of e-waste that Apple dooms our descendants to wade through... Tim Cook laid it out for his investors: when people can repair their devices, they don't buy new ones. When people don't buy new devices, Apple doesn't sell them new devices. It's that's simple...
Specifically Doctorow is criticizing the way Apple equips parts with a tiny system-on-a-chip just to track serial numbers solely "to prevent independent repair technicians from fixing your gadget." For Apple, the true anti-repair innovation comes from the most pernicious US tech law: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). DMCA 1201 is an "anti-circumvention" law. It bans the distribution of any tool that bypasses "an effective means of access control." That's all very abstract, but here's what it means: if a manufacturer sticks some Digital Rights Management (DRM) in its device, then anything you want to do that involves removing that DRM is now illegal — even if the thing itself is perfectly legal...

When California's right to repair bill was introduced, it was clear that it was gonna pass. Rather than get run over by that train, Apple got on board, supporting the legislation, which passed unanimously. But Apple got the last laugh. Because while California's bill contains many useful clauses for the independent repair shops that keep your gadgets out of a landfill, it's a state law, and DMCA 1201 is federal. A state law can't simply legalize the conduct federal law prohibits. California's right to repair bill is a banger, but it has a weak spot: parts-pairing, the scourge of repair techs...

Parts-pairing is bullshit, and Apple are scum for using it, but they're hardly unique. Parts-pairing is at the core of the fuckery of inkjet printer companies, who use it to fence out third-party ink, so they can charge $9,600/gallon for ink that pennies to make. Parts-pairing is also rampant in powered wheelchairs, a heavily monopolized sector whose predatory conduct is jaw-droppingly depraved...

When Bill Clinton signed DMCA 1201 into law 25 years ago, he loaded a gun and put it on the nation's mantlepiece and now it's Act III and we're all getting sprayed with bullets. Everything from ovens to insulin pumps, thermostats to lightbulbs, has used DMCA 1201 to limit repair, modification and improvement. Congress needs to rid us of this scourge, to let us bring back all the benefits of interoperability. I explain how this all came to be — and what we should do about it — in my new Verso Books title, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

A group of publishers in the U.S. have filed a lawsuit against the "notorious" online database Library Genesis (Libgen), a website known for providing free access to scientific papers and books. The lawsuit accuses Libgen of facilitating the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted academic materials. The Register reports: The suit, filed in a New York federal court [PDF], asks for a legal order "requiring the transfer of the Libgen domain names to plaintiffs or, at plaintiffs' election, canceling or deleting the Libgen domain names," with the idea of frustrating visitors -- mostly students -- believed to number in their millions. The filing said that according to similarweb.com, the sites collectively were visited by 9 million people from the U.S. each month from March to May 2023. The suit alleges that several of the Libgen websites solicit "donations" from users. "These solicitations are in English and seek payments only in Bitcoin or [Monero]." It adds: "one Libgen Site reports that it has raised $182,540 from donations since January 1, 2023."

The publishers also claim the people who run LibGen -- named in the suit as Does 1-50 and whom it says "are believed to reside outside of the United States at unknown foreign locations" -- derive "revenue from interstate or international commerce, including through advertisements." It goes on to add: "Defendants compete directly with Plaintiffs by distributing infringing copies of their works for free, displacing legitimate sales. When a consumer obtains Plaintiffs' works from the Libgen Sites instead of through legitimate channels, no remuneration is provided to Plaintiffs or their authors for the substantial investments they have made to create and publish the works."

The textbook publishers claim that "through social media and from their peers, students are bombarded with messages to use the Libgen Sites instead of paying for legal copies of textbooks" -- thus depriving the publishers and the authors they represent of their income. The suit also asks for damages without detailing an amount, although it asks for "an accounting and disgorgement of Defendants' profits, gains, and advantages realized from their unlawful conduct." The complaint claims the ads are in English and for various "U.S. products, such as browser extensions and online games". The suit adds that some "also appear to be phishing attempts, which can result in users downloading a virus or other malicious program onto their computers."

The lawsuit also calls out Google and "other intermediaries," U.S. companies it claims help LibGen "conduct their unlawful operations" -- "NameCheap for domain registration services, Cloudflare for proxy services, and Google for search engine services." It goes on to include a screenshot of Google's "knowledge panel," which it says "describes Libgen as a site [that] enables free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: As young children went back to school across Sweden last month, many of their teachers were putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice and devoting less time to tablets, independent online research and keyboarding skills. The return to more traditional ways of learning is a response to politicians and experts questioning whether the country's hyper-digitalized approach to education, including the introduction of tablets in nursery schools, had led to a decline in basic skills. Swedish Minister for Schools Lotta Edholm, who took office 11 months ago as part of a new center-right coalition government, was one of the biggest critics of the all-out embrace of technology. "Sweden's students need more textbooks," Edholm said in March. "Physical books are important for student learning."

The minister announced last month in a statement that the government wants to reverse the decision by the National Agency for Education to make digital devices mandatory in preschools. It plans to go further and to completely end digital learning for children under age 6, the ministry also told The Associated Press. [...] "There's clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance student learning," Sweden's Karolinska Institute said in a statement last month on the country's national digitalization strategy in education. "We believe the focus should return to acquiring knowledge through printed textbooks and teacher expertise, rather than acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy," said the institute, a highly respected medical school focused on research. To counter Sweden's decline in 4th grade reading performance, the Swedish government announced an investment worth 685 million kronor (60 million euros or $64.7 million) in book purchases for the country's schools this year. Another 500 million kronor will be spent annually in 2024 and 2025 to speed up the return of textbooks to schools. "The Swedish government does have a valid point when saying that there is no evidence for technology improving learning, but I think that's because there is no straightforward evidence of what works with technology," said Neil Selwyn, a professor of education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. "Technology is just one part of a really complex network of factors in education."

Last week IEEE Spectrum released its 10th annual rankings of the Top Programming Languages. It choose a top language for each of three categories: actively used among typical IEEE members and working software engineers, in demand by employers, or "in the zeitgeist".

The results? This year, Python doesn't just remain No. 1 in our general "Spectrum" ranking — which is weighted to reflect the interests of the typical IEEE member — but it widens its lead.

Python's increased dominance appears to be largely at the expense of smaller, more specialized, languages. It has become the jack-of-all-trades language — and the master of some, such as AI, where powerful and extensive libraries make it ubiquitous. And although Moore's Law is winding down for high-end computing, low-end microcontrollers are still benefiting from performance gains, which means there's now enough computing power available on a US $0.70 CPU to make Python a contender in embedded development, despite the overhead of an interpreter. Python also looks to be solidifying its position for the long term: Many children and teens now program their first game or blink their first LED using Python. They can then move seamlessly into more advanced domains, and even get a job, with the same language.

But Python alone does not make a career. In our "Jobs" ranking, it is SQL that shines at No. 1. Ironically though, you're very unlikely to get a job as a pure SQL programmer. Instead, employers love, love, love, seeing SQL skills in tandem with some other language such as Java or C++. With today's distributed architectures, a lot of business-critical data live in SQL databases...

But don't let Python and SQL's rankings fool you: Programming is still far from becoming a monoculture. Java and the various C-like languages outweigh Python in their combined popularity, especially for high-performance or resource-sensitive tasks where that interpreter overhead of Python's is still too costly (although there are a number of attempts to make Python more competitive on that front). And there are software ecologies that are resistant to being absorbed into Python for other reasons.
The article cites the statistical analysis/visualization language R, as well as Fortran and Cobol, as languages that are hard to port code from or that have accumulated large already-validated codebases. But Python also remains at #1 in their third "Trending" category — with Java in second there and on the general "IEEE Spectrum" list.

JavaScript appears below Python and Java on all three lists. Java is immediately below them on the Trending and "Jobs" list, but two positions further down on the general "Spectrum" list (below C++ and C).

The metrics used for the calculation include the number of hits on Google, recent questions on Stack Overflow, tags on Discord, mentions in IEEE's library of journal articles and its CareerBuilder job site, and language use in starred GitHub repositories and number of new programming books.

Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, has declared itself in financial distress after troubled Oracle project costs ballooned from $25 million to around $125.5 million. The Register reports: Contributing to the publication of a legal Section 114 Notice, which says the $4.3 billion revenue organization is unable to balance the books, is a bill of up to $954 million to settle equal pay claims. In a statement today, councillors John Cotton and Sharon Thompson, leader and deputy leader respectively, said the authority was also hit by financial stress owing to issues with the implementation of its Oracle IT system. The council has made a request to the Local Government Association for additional strategic support, the statement said.

In May, Birmingham City Council said it was set to pay up to $125.5 million for its Oracle ERP system -- potentially a fourfold increase on initial estimated expenses -- in a project suffering from delays, cost over-runs, and a lack of controls. After grappling with the project to replace SAP for core HR and finance functions since 2018, the council reviewed the plan in 2019, 2020, and again in 2021, when the total implementation cost for the project almost doubled to $48.5 million. The project, dubbed Financial and People, was "crucial to an organisation of Birmingham City Council's size," a spokesperson said at the time. Cotton said the system had a problem with how it was "tracking our financial transactions and HR transactions issues as well. That's got to be fixed," he said.

Earlier this year, one insider told The Register that Oracle Fusion, the cloud-based ERP system the council is moving to, "is not a product that is suitable for local authorities, because it's very much geared towards a manufacturing/trading organization." They said the previous SAP system had been heavily customized to meet the council's needs and it was struggling to recreate these functions in Oracle.