Slashdot

An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg column: Worries over China's "3D" problem -- that deflation, debt and demographics are structurally hampering growth -- are melting away. Instead, investors are talking about how the world's second-largest economy can take on the US and challenge its technological dominance. There is the prevailing sense that China's "engineer dividend" is finally paying off. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of engineers has ballooned from 5.2 million to 17.7 million, according to the State Council. That reservoir can help the nation move up the production possibility frontier, the thinking goes. In a way, DeepSeek shouldn't have come as a surprise. Size matters. A bigger talent pool alone gives China a better chance to disrupt. In 2022, 47% of the world's top 20th percentile AI researchers finished their undergraduate studies in China, well above the 18% share from the US, according to data from the Paulson Institute's in-house think tank, MacroPolo. Last year, the Asian nation ranked third in the number of innovation indicators compiled by the World Intellectual Property Organization, after Singapore and the US. What this also means is that innovative breakthroughs can pop out of nowhere. [...] More importantly, China's got the cost advantage. Those under the age of 30 account for 44% of the total engineering pool, versus 20% in the US, according to data compiled by Kaiyuan Securities. As a result, compensation for researchers is only about one-eighth of that in the US. Credit must be given to President Xi Jinping for his focus on higher education as he seeks to upgrade China's value chain. These days, roughly 40% of high-school graduates go to universities, versus 10% in 2000. Meanwhile, engineering is one of the most popular majors for post-graduate studies. It's a welcome reprieve for a government that has been struggling with a shrinking population.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FaunaDB, a serverless database combining relational and document features, will shut down by the end of May due to unsustainable capital demands. The company plans to open source its core technology, including its FQL query language, in hopes of continuing its legacy within the developer community. The Register reports: The startup pocketed $27 million in VC funding in 2020 and boasted that 25,000 developers worldwide were using its serverless database. However, last week, FaunaDB announced that it would sunset its database services. FaunaDB said it plans to release an open-source version of its core database technology. The system stores data in JSON documents but retains relational features like consistency, support for joins and foreign keys, and full schema enforcement. Fauna's query language, FQL, will also be made available to the open-source community. "Driving broad based adoption of a new operational database that runs as a service globally is very capital intensive. In the current market environment, our board and investors have determined that it is not possible to raise the capital needed to achieve that goal independently," the leadership team said. "While we will no longer be accepting new customers, existing Fauna customers will experience no immediate change. We will gradually transition customers off Fauna and are committed to ensuring a smooth process over the next several months," it added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Sunday, leaving the fate of millions of people's genetic information up in the air as the company deals with the legal and financial fallout of not properly protecting that genetic information in the first place. The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA directly to a large, for-profit commercial genetic database; 23andMe is now looking for a buyer to pull it out of bankruptcy. 23andMe said in court documents viewed by 404 Media that since hackers obtained personal data about seven million of its customers in October 2023, including, in some cases "health-related information based upon the user's genetics," it has faced "over 50 class action and state court lawsuits," and that "approximately 35,000 claimants have initiated, filed, or threatened to commence arbitration claims against the company." It is seeking bankruptcy protection in part to simplify the fallout of these legal cases, and because it believes it may not have money to pay for the potential damages associated with these cases. CEO and cofounder Anne Wojcicki announced she is leaving the company as part of this process. The company has the genetic data of more than 15 million customers. According to its Chapter 11 filing, 23andMe owes money to a host of pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, artificial intelligence companies (including a company called Aganitha AI and Coreweave), as well as health insurance companies and marketing companies. Shortly before the filing, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued an "urgent" alert to 23andMe customers: "Given 23andMe's reported financial distress, I remind Californians to consider invoking their rights and directing 23andMe to delete their data and destroy any samples of genetic material held by the company." In a letter to customers Sunday, 23andMe said: "Your data remains protected. The Chapter 11 filing does not change how we store, manage, or protect customer data. Our users' privacy and data are important considerations in any transaction, and we remain committed to our users' privacy and to being transparent with our customers about how their data is managed." It added that any buyer will have to "comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data." 404 Media's Jason Koebler notes that "there's no way of knowing who is going to buy it, why they will be interested, and what will become of its millions of customers' DNA sequences. 23andMe has claimed over the years that it strongly resists law enforcement requests for information and that it takes customer security seriously. But the company has in recent years changed its terms of service, partnered with big pharmaceutical companies, and, of course, was hacked."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CERN faces a pivotal decision about its future as the Large Hadron Collider approaches the end of its usefulness by the early 2040s. Management proposes building the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a machine with a 90-kilometer circumference that would smash particles at eight times the energy of the LHC. This hugely consequential plan faces significant challenges. Much of the required technology doesn't exist yet, including superconducting magnets strong enough to bend high-energy particle beams. The project also lacks the clear rationale that the LHC had in finding the Higgs boson. The proposal has divided physicists. Critics worry about the decades-long timeline, potential cost overruns, and the risk of sacrificing other valuable CERN activities. Germany, which provides 20% of the lab's budget, has already indicated it won't increase contributions. A council-appointed group is now gathering input from the physics community before making recommendations in December. Nature's editorial board adds: Unless some nations step up with a major infusion of cash, the FCC faces an uncertain prospect of being funded. But waiting too long could mean that there will be a large gap between the new facility opening and the closure of the LHC, and precious expertise could end up being lost. Although physicists might disagree on what CERN should do, they nearly unanimously care about the lab's future. They and their leaders must now make the case for why European taxpayers, who fund most of the lab's yearly budget should care, too. The stakes are beyond science, and even beyond Europe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Valve's early anti-piracy efforts, which eventually led to the Steam platform, were sparked by co-founder Monica Harrington's nephew using her money to buy a CD burner for copying games, she revealed at last week's Game Developers Conference. Harrington said her nephew's "lovely thank you note" about sharing games with friends represented a "generational shift" in piracy attitudes that could "put our entire business model at risk." Half-Life subsequently launched with CD key verification in 1998. When players complained about authentication failures, co-founder Mike Harrington discovered "none of them had actually bought the game," confirming the system worked. Although easily bypassed, this early protection influenced Steam's more robust DRM implemented with Half-Life 2 in 2004, which became the industry standard for PC game distribution.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists are developing biomarkers to objectively measure pain, addressing a fundamental medical challenge that has contributed to the opioid crisis and led to consistent underestimation of pain in women and minorities. Four research teams funded by the Department of Health and Human Services are developing technologies to quantify pain like other vital signs. Their approaches include a blood test for endometriosis pain, a device measuring nerve response through pupil dilation, microneedle patches sampling interstitial fluid, and a wearable sensor detecting pain markers in sweat. "When patients are told that the pain is all in their head, the implication is that it's imagined, but the irony is that's sort of right," said Adam Kepecs, a neuroscience professor at Washington University. "The pain only exists in your brain. It's neural activity, which is why it's invisible and uniquely personal. But it's still real." These innovations could transform treatment for the nearly 25% of Americans suffering from chronic pain, while potentially saving billions in healthcare costs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Pentagon has canceled its troubled Defense Civilian Human Resources Management System after years of delays and budget overruns, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said. The project, launched in 2018 with a one-year timeline and $36 million budget, ultimately ran eight years and exceeded costs by $280 million, reaching 780% over budget. "We're not doing that anymore," Hegseth said in a video announcing the cancellation. Officials have 60 days to develop a new plan to modernize DoD's civilian HR systems. The cuts are part of a broader $580 million spending reduction that includes $360 million in diversity, climate change and COVID-19 grant programs, plus $30 million in consulting contracts with Gartner and McKinsey.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has confirmed that a technical issue has permanently deleted location history data for numerous users of its Maps application, with no recovery possible for most affected customers. The problem emerged after Google transitioned its Timeline feature from cloud to on-device storage in 2024 to enhance privacy protections. Users began reporting missing historical location data on support forums and social media platforms in recent weeks. "This is the result of a technical issue and not user error or an intentional change," said a Google spokesperson. Only users who manually enabled encrypted cloud backups before the incident can recover their data, according to Google. The company began shifting location storage policies in 2023, initially stopping collection of sensitive location data including visits to abortion clinics and domestic violence shelters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 writes: A compact, deep-sea, cable-cutting device, capable of severing the world's most fortified underwater communication or power lines, has been unveiled by China -- and it could shake up global maritime power dynamics. The revelation marks the first time any country has officially disclosed that it has such an asset, capable of disrupting critical undersea networks. The tool, which is able to cut lines at depths of up to 4,000 metres (13,123 feet) -- twice the maximum operational range of existing subsea communication infrastructure -- has been designed specifically for integration with China's advanced crewed and uncrewed submersibles like the Fendouzhe, or Striver, and the Haidou series.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's Cyberspace Administration and Ministry of Public Security have outlawed the use of facial recognition without consent. From a report: The two orgs last Friday published new rules on facial recognition and an explainer that spell out how orgs that want to use facial recognition must first conduct a "personal information protection impact assessment" that considers whether using the tech is necessary, impacts on individuals' privacy, and risks of data leakage. Organizations that decide to use facial recognition must data encrypt biometric data, and audit the information security techniques and practices they use to protect facial scans. Chinese that go through that process and decide they want to use facial recognition can only do so after securing individuals' consent. The rules also ban the use of facial recognition equipment in public places such as hotel rooms, public bathrooms, public dressing rooms, and public toilets. The measures don't apply to researchers or to what machine translation of the rules describes as "algorithm training activities" -- suggesting images of citizens' faces are fair game when used to train AI models.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Countries must develop their own artificial intelligence infrastructure or risk significant economic losses as the technology transforms global economies, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said last week. "It will have an impact on GDP of every country in the double digits in the coming years," Mensch told the A16z podcast, warning that nations without domestic AI systems would see capital flow elsewhere. The French startup executive compared AI to electricity adoption a century ago. "If you weren't building electricity factories, you were preparing yourself to buy it from your neighbors, which creates dependencies," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

prisoninmate shares a report: Highlights of Linux 6.14 include Btrfs RAID1 read balancing support, a new ntsync subsystem for Win NT synchronization primitives to boost game emulation with Wine, uncached buffered I/O support, and a new accelerator driver for the AMD XDNA Ryzen AI NPUs (Neural Processing Units). Also new is DRM panic support for the AMDGPU driver, reflink and reverse-mapping support for the XFS real-time device, Intel Clearwater Forest server support, support for SELinux extended permissions, FUSE support for io_uring, a new fsnotify file pre-access event type, and a new cgroup controller for device memory.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DNA-testing company 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection [non-paywalled source] in Missouri and announced CEO Anne Wojcicki's immediate resignation, weeks after rejecting her proposal to buy back the business she co-founded. The bankruptcy filing represents "the best path forward to maximize the value of the business," said Mark Jensen, board member and special committee chair. Further reading: DNA of 15 Million People for Sale in 23andMe Bankruptcy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's "live-recording the World Wide Web," according to NPR, with a digital library that includes "hundreds of billions of copies of government websites, news articles and data." They described the 29-year-old nonprofit Internet Archive as "more relevant than ever." Every day, about 100 terabytes of material are uploaded to the Internet Archive, or about a billion URLs, with the assistance of automated crawlers. Most of that ends up in the Wayback Machine, while the rest is digitized analog media — books, television, radio, academic papers — scanned and stored on servers. As one of the few large-scale archivists to back up the web, the Internet Archive finds itself in a particularly unique position right now... Thousands of [U.S. government] datasets were wiped — mostly at agencies focused on science and the environment — in the days following Trump's return to the White House... The Internet Archive is among the few efforts that exist to catch the stuff that falls through the digital cracks, while also making that information accessible to the public. Six weeks into the new administration, Wayback Machine director [Mark] Graham said, the Internet Archive had cataloged some 73,000 web pages that had existed on U.S. government websites that were expunged after Trump's inauguration... According to Graham, based on the big jump in page views he's observed over the past two months, the Internet Archive is drawing many more visitors than usual to its services — journalists, researchers and other inquiring minds. Some want to consult the archive for information lost or changed in the purge, while others aim to contribute to the archival process.... "People are coming and rallying behind us," said Brewster Kahle, [the founder and current director of the Internet Archive], "by using it, by pointing at things, helping organize things, by submitting content to be archived — data sets that are under threat or have been taken down...." A behemoth of link rot repair, the Internet Archive rescues a daily average of 10,000 dead links that appear on Wikipedia pages. In total, it's fixed more than 23 million rotten links on Wikipedia alone, according to the organization. Though it receives some money for its preservation work for libraries, museums, and other organizations, it's also funded by donations. "From the beginning, it was important for the Internet Archive to be a nonprofit, because it was working for the people," explains founder Brewster Kahle on its donations page: Its motives had to be transparent; it had to last a long time. That's why we don't charge for access, sell user data, or run ads, even while we offer free resources to citizens everywhere. We rely on the generosity of individuals like you to pay for servers, staff, and preservation projects. If you can't imagine a future without the Internet Archive, please consider supporting our work. We promise to put your donation to good use as we continue to store over 99 petabytes of data, including 625 billion webpages, 38 million texts, and 14 million audio recordings. Two interesting statistics from NPR's article: "A Pew Research Center study published last year found that roughly 38% of web pages on the internet that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible as of 2023." "According to a Harvard Law Review study published in 2014, about half of all links cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer led to the original source material." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader jtotheh for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy. Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness. This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.) The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone. This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.") Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery. As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lenovo demonstrated "a laptop with a foldable screen and one that can get extra battery life from solar power," reports CNBC, emphasizing that "These laptops are just concepts, meaning they are not commercially available." But "Lenovo, the world's biggest PC maker, has a history of showing off imaginative concepts with some becoming reality, so it's worth keeping an eye on what the Chinese technology giant is up to..." The latest concepts were unveiled at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona... When fully unfolded, the screen is an 18-inch display [on the Lenovo ThinkBook 'flip' concept]... The screen can then be folded in half horizontally to create two screens — one on the front and one on the back. The entire display can be folded down flat so the laptop turns into a tablet-like device. Lenovo also showed off a Yoga Solar PC concept, reports Gizmodo, calling it "relatively thin and light" despite a solar panel in its lid with "a supposed 24% solar conversion rate": Lenovo claims they achieved this by maneuvering the gridlines you usually find on a solar panel behind the solar cells, offering more real estate for energy absorption... Lenovo's software showed the power accumulation at around 7 V when facing away from the sunlight and 12 V when facing toward it. It could get more when getting direct sunlight. Despite the presence of the solar panel, the laptop still weighs a little more than 2.6 pounds, which isn't out of the realm of what to expect from most modern laptops. We should note that the panel isn't generating the required power to run the PC continuously. Lenovo claimed that 20 minutes of direct sunlight will transform into about one hour of video playback battery life. Depending on the CPU and battery, that could be 1/20 of the laptop's battery life. CNBC had slightly different statistics for the laptop's battery life. "Lenovo said that the solar panels can absorb even ambient light in a person's surroundings to give a user an extra hour of laptop use at the end of an eight-hour work day..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite a January announcement that America would explore the idea of a national digital asset stockpile, the exact cryptocurrecies weren't specified. Today on social media the president posted that it would include bitcoin, ether, XRP, Solana's SOL token and Cardano's ADA, reports CNBC — prompting a Sunday rally in cryptocurrencies trading. XRP surged 33% after the announcement while the token tied to Solana jumped 22%. Cardano's coin soared more than 60%. Bitcoin rose 10% to $94,425.29, after dipping to a three-month low under $80,000 on Friday. Ether, which has suffered some of the biggest losses in crypto year-to-date, gained 12%... This is the first time Trump has specified his support for a crypto "reserve" versus a "stockpile." While the former assumes actively buying crypto in regular installments, a stockpile would simply not sell any of the crypto currently held by the U.S. government. "The total cryptocurrency market has risen about 10%," reports Reuters, "or more than $300 billion, in the hours since Trump's announcement, according to CoinGecko, a cryptocurrency data and analysis company." "A U.S. Crypto Reserve will elevate this critical industry..." the president posted, promising to "make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World," reports The Hill: His announcement comes just after the White House announced it would be welcoming cryptocurrency industry professionals on March 7 in a first-of-its-kind summit... It's unclear what exactly Trump's crypto reserve would look like, and while he previously dismissed crypto as a scam, he's embraced the industry throughout his most recent campaign.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earth's core "burns with an estimated forty-four trillion watts of power," the New Yorker reminds us — enough to "satisfy the entire world's energy needs" with a power source that's carbon-free, ubiquitous — and unlimited. (Besides running 24 hours a day, one of geothermal energy's key advantages is "it can be used for both electricity and heating, which collectively account for around 38% of global climate emissions...") And one drilling expert tells them there's been an "exponential spin-up of activity in geothermal" energy projects over the last two years. (Ironically it was the fracking boom also brought an "explosion of new drilling practices — such as horizontal drilling and magnetic sensing — that inspired a geothermal resurgence.") In 2005 one research team calculated that just 2% of the heat just four miles underground in America "could meet the entire country's energy needs — two thousand times over," according to the article. So their new article checks in on the progress of geothermal energy projects around the world, including a Utah company using a diamond-bit drill to dig nearly a mile into the earth to install a 150-ton steel tube surrounded by special heat-resistant cement — all to create "a massive straw" for transporting hot water (and steam). The biggest problem is drilling miles through hot rock, safely. If scientists can do that, however, next-generation geothermal power could supply clean energy for eons... At 6:15 P.M. on May 3rd, cement had started flowing into the hole. Four hours later, part of the cement folded in on itself. The next morning, the cement supply ran out; the men had miscalculated how much they needed. This brought the three-hundred-million-dollar operation to a maddening halt... The cement truck from Bakersfield arrived around 8:30 P.M. By ten-thirty, the men were pouring cement again, gluing the enormous metal straw in place. Next, the team scanned the borehole with gamma rays...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Thousands of buildings across the United States are staying cool with the help of cutting-edge batteries made from one of the world's simplest materials," reports the Washington Post — ice. When electricity is cheap, the batteries freeze water. When energy costs go up, building managers turn off their pricey chillers and use the ice to keep things cool. A typical building uses about a fifth of its electricity for cooling, according to the International Energy Agency. By shifting their energy use to cheaper times of day, the biggest buildings can save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on their power bills. They can also avoid using electricity from the dirtiest fossil fuel plants. In places where the weather is hot and energy prices swing widely throughout the day — for instance, Texas, Southern California and most of the American Southwest — buildings could cut their power bills and carbon emissions by as much as a third, experts say... When every building is blasting its air conditioner at the same moment on a hot day, power companies often fire up backup generators, known as peaker plants, which are generally extra pricey and polluting. If utilities avoid using peaker plants, they'll pollute less and save money. Last year, the Energy Department struck a tentative $306 million loan deal with the ice-battery-maker Nostromo Energy to install its systems in 193 California buildings to make energy cheaper and cleaner while lowering the state's blackout risk. "The batteries themselves are huge..." the article acknowledges, citing one in New York City that uses 100 parking spot-sized tanks "which collectively make 3 million margaritas' worth of ice each night... But that's starting to change." (And they believe new smaller designs "could bring the batteries into smaller buildings and even houses.") Wherever they can squeeze into the market, ice batteries could be a cheaper and longer-lasting option than the lithium-ion batteries that power phones, cars and some buildings because their main ingredient is water, experts say. The pricey chemicals in a lithium-ion cell might degrade after 10 years, but water never wears out. And according to the article, one company has already installed ice batteries in over 4,000 buildings...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A "decision science partner" at a seed-stage venture fund (who is also a cognitive-behavioral decision science author and professional poker player) explored what happens when GPT-4 Turbo converses with conspiracy theorists: Researchers have struggled for decades to develop techniques to weaken the grip of conspiracy theories and cult ideology on adherents. This is why a new paper in the journal Science by Thomas Costello of MIT's Sloan School of Management, Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University and David Rand, also of Sloan, is so exciting... In a pair of studies involving more than 2,000 participants, the researchers found a 20 percent reduction in belief in conspiracy theories after participants interacted with a powerful, flexible, personalized GPT-4 Turbo conversation partner. The researchers trained the AI to try to persuade the participants to reduce their belief in conspiracies by refuting the specific evidence the participants provided to support their favored conspiracy theory. The reduction in belief held across a range of topics... Even more encouraging, participants demonstrated increased intentions to ignore or unfollow social media accounts promoting the conspiracies, and significantly increased willingness to ignore or argue against other believers in the conspiracy. And the results appear to be durable, holding up in evaluations 10 days and two months later... Why was AI able to persuade people to change their minds? The authors posit that it "simply takes the right evidence," tailored to the individual, to effect belief change, noting: "From a theoretical perspective, this paints a surprisingly optimistic picture of human reasoning: Conspiratorial rabbit holes may indeed have an exit. Psychological needs and motivations do not inherently blind conspiracists to evidence...." It is hard to walk away from who you are, whether you are a QAnon believer, a flat-Earther, a truther of any kind or just a stock analyst who has taken a position that makes you stand out from the crowd. And that's why the AI approach might work so well. The participants were not interacting with a human, which, I suspect, didn't trigger identity in the same way, allowing the participants to be more open-minded. Identity is such a huge part of these conspiracy theories in terms of distinctiveness, putting distance between you and other people. When you're interacting with AI, you're not arguing with a human being whom you might be standing in opposition to, which could cause you to be less open-minded. Answering questions from Slashdot readers in 2005, Wil Wheaton described playing poker against the cognitive-behavioral decision science author who wrote this article...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.