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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Raspberry Pi, the company that sells tiny, cheap, single-board computers, is releasing an add-on that is going to open up several use cases -- and yes, because it's 2024, there's an AI angle. Called the Raspberry Pi AI Camera, this image sensor comes with on-board AI processing and is going to cost $70. In more technical terms, the AI Camera is based on a Sony image sensor (the IMX500) paired with a RP2040, Raspberry Pi's own microcontroller chip with on-chip SRAM. Like the rest of the line-up, the RP2040 follows Raspberry Pi's overall philosophy -- it is inexpensive yet efficient. In other words, AI startups aren't going to replace their Nvidia GPUs with RP2040 chips for inference. But when you pair it with an image sensor, you get an extension module that can capture images and process those images through common neural network models. As an added benefit, on-board processing on the camera module means that the host Raspberry Pi isn't affected by visual data processing. The Raspberry Pi remains free to perform other operations -- you don't need to add a separate accelerator. The new module is compatible with all Raspberry Pi computers. This isn't Raspberry Pi's first camera module. The company still sells the Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3, a simple 12-megapixel image sensor from Sony (IMX708) mounted on a small add-on board that you can pair with a Raspberry Pi with a ribbon cable. As Raspberry Pi promises to keep production running for many years, the Camera Module 3 will remain available for around $25. The AI Camera is the same size as the Camera Module 3 (25mm x 24mm) but slightly thicker due to the structure of the optical sensor. It comes pre-loaded with the MobileNet-SSD model, an object detection model that can run in realtime.

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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it has fined Cruise $1.5 million for failing to disclose that a pedestrian was seriously injured by one of its driverless vehicles in San Francisco last year. The Verge reports: Last October, a Cruise vehicle hit a pedestrian and then dragged her 20 feet after she was initially struck by a human driver in a hit-and-run incident. In the aftermath, Cruise disclosed that its vehicle had struck a pedestrian but omitted details about the victim being dragged. As a result, the California Department of Motor Vehicles pulled the GM-backed company's permit to operate self-driving cars in the state, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation into the incident. Today, NHTSA announced the $1.5 million penalty as part of a broader consent order with Cruise that includes additional requirements around safety and disclosure. The company submitted several "incomplete reports" under the agency's Standing General Order, which requires crash reports to be filed within a certain period of time, depending on their severity. In its first report to NHTSA, filed one day after the incident, Cruise failed to disclose "that the Cruise vehicle had dragged the pedestrian," the consent order reads. The company also filed an additional report 10 days later in which it also failed to disclose the dragging incident. "It is vitally important for companies developing automated driving systems to prioritize safety and transparency from the start," NHTSA Deputy Administrator Sophie Shulman said. "NHTSA is using its enforcement authority to ensure operators and manufacturers comply with all legal obligations and work to protect all road users." After its permit was suspended, Cruise hired a law firm to conduct an investigation into what went wrong. The firm's report concluded that the company had tried to send a 45-second video to regulators that showed its vehicle dragging the victim but was hampered by "internet connectivity issues." Also, Cruise employees failed to point out the dragging incident in subsequent conversations with regulators.

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From Cher to T-Pain, auto-tune has been prevalent in music for a long time (whether you noticed or not). Tom Scott breaks down how auto-tune works.

Apple has withdrawn from discussions to invest in OpenAI's $6.5 billion funding round, though reasons for the decision remain unclear. The company still plans to proceed with integrating ChatGPT into Siri. MacRumors reports: The development comes just a month after WSJ reported that Apple was considering an investment in OpenAI as part of a fundraising effort that could value the AI company at over $100 billion. The high valuation reflects the intense competition in the artificial intelligence sector that OpenAI helped ignite with ChatGPT's launch in late 2022. While Apple has stepped away, other major tech companies remain involved. Microsoft, which has already invested $13 billion in OpenAI, is expected to contribute about $1 billion to this latest round. Nvidia is also reportedly in talks to participate. OpenAI's transition into a for-profit structure may have factored into Apple's decision. Last week, Reuters reported on OpenAI's plan to restructure its core business into a for-profit benefit corporation that will no longer be controlled by its non-profit board. "Chief executive Sam Altman will also receive equity for the first time in the for-profit company, which could be worth $150 billion after the restructuring as it also tries to remove the cap on returns for investors," reported Reuters.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: It will soon be illegal for public and private universities in California to consider an applicant's relationship to alumni or donors when deciding whether to admit them. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed a ban on the practice known as legacy admissions, a change that will affect prestigious institutions including Stanford University and the University of Southern California. California's law, which will take effect Sept. 1, 2025, is the nation's fifth legacy admissions ban, but only the second that will apply to private colleges. "In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work," Newsom said in a statement. "The California Dream shouldn't be accessible to just a lucky few, which is why we're opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly." Like other states, California won't financially penalize violators, but it will post the names of violators on the state Department of Justice's website. California will also add to data reporting requirements that it implemented in 2022, when private colleges had to start sharing the percentage of admitted students who were related to donors and alumni. Schools that run afoul of the new law will also have to report more granular demographic information about their incoming classes to the state, including the race and income of enrolled students as well as their participation in athletics. [...] Public universities in California won't be affected by the change. California State University does not consider legacy or donor ties, and the University of California system stopped doing so in 1998, two years after California voters banned race-conscious admissions through a statewide ballot measure.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Mazda recently surprised customers by requiring them to sign up for a subscription in order to keep certain services. Now, notable right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann is calling out the brand. He points to several moves by Mazda as reasons for his anger toward them. However, it turns out that customers might still have a workaround. Previously, the Japanese carmaker offered connected services, that included several features such as remote start, without the need for a subscription. At the time, the company informed customers that these services would eventually transition to a paid model. It's important to clarify that there are two very different types of remote start we're talking about here. The first type is the one many people are familiar with where you use the key fob to start the vehicle. The second method involves using another device like a smartphone to start the car. In the latter, connected services do the heavy lifting. What is wild is that Mazda used to offer the first option on the fob. Now, it only offers the second kind, where one starts the car via phone through its connected services for a $10 monthly subscription, which comes to $120 a year. Rossmann points out that one individual, Brandon Rorthweiler, developed a workaround in 2023 to enable remote start without Mazda's subscription fees.

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Monday, September 30, 2024, 3:30 PM Eastern Update: 

ARRL leadership has been engaged throughout the weekend with key volunteers in the southeast, especially in hard hit North Carolina, to facilitate any support headquarters can provide to the impacted area. The devastation is widespread and greater than many seasoned emergency responders have ever seen before.

There are ad-hoc health and welfare...

Learn everything you need to know about AI in 15 minutes. Well, maybe not quite everything but it might get you started. This post on Tensor Labbet condenses 27 papers articles and books (~300,000 words) into quick digestible reads.

The original reading list was compiled from a twitter thread citing OpenAI founder Ilya Sutskevers:

While the list is fragmentary and much has happened in the field since, this endorsement and the claim that it was part of onboarding at OpenAI quickly made it go somewhat viral.

At about 300,000 words total, the combined content nonetheless corresponds to around one thousand book pages of dense, technical text and requires a decent investment in time and energy for self-study. After doing just that, I therefore dedicate this blog post to all those of us who provisionally bookmarked it (“for later”) and are still curious. What follows is my own condensed and structured summary with about 120 words per item, free of mathematical notation, to capture the essential key points, context and some perspective gained from reading it with the surrounding literature.

Learn more!

More American workers are seeing their compensation tied to performance metrics, a shift from traditional fixed salaries. A 2024 survey by Alexander Group found 28% of over 300 companies are incorporating incentive pay into new roles, extending a practice once limited to sales and executive positions. Employers argue this model boosts productivity, while some workers report earning less than expected, WSJ reported Monday.

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Linus Åkesson (lftkryo on YouTube) makes 8-bit SID music on a Commodore 64 without any software apart from the built-in BASIC interpreter.

This involves poking numbers into memory and hardware registers and writing machine code in decimal.

Check it out in the video below and Linus’ website here.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Udemy, an e-learning platform with more than 250,000 online classes, recently announced that it would train generative AI on the classes that its users contribute to the site. Not only were class teachers automatically opted in to having their classes used as training, Udemy said teachers would have only a three-week "window" to opt-out of training. That window has now passed. "We want to officially announce that the opt-out period for our Generative AI Program (GenAI Program) begins today, August 21st, and goes through September 12th. The choice to participate in the GenAI program is yours. If you want to participate, no action is needed!," Udemy said in a post on its community forums August 21. In an "Instructor Generative AI Policy" document, it says it plans to offer "Annual Periods designated by us" during which instructors can opt-out of having their classes trained on, and said that when people opt-out of training, it will remove the instructors' classes from its dataset "by the end of the calendar year." It has also told instructors that "By opting out, you'll lose access to all AI features and benefits, which may affect your course visibility and potential earnings." With the first opt-out window having passed, instructors are now seeing a grayed-out option in their settings if they didn't know about the window or would like to opt-out now.

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Dan Marler, K7REX, the challenger seeking the position of ARRL Northwestern Division Director, was declared disqualified Saturday by the ARRL Ethics and Elections Committee (E&E). Marler was running against incumbent Mark Tharp, KB7HDX. Due to the disqualification, the committee has declared Tharp elected.

ARRL’s election rules state, “All matters concerning campaigns, including remedies for iss...

TheaTTYr is a terminal theater for playing VT100 art and animations.

The VT100, introduced by DEC in 1978, was among the first video terminals to support ANSI escape codes.

The ANSI art scene used the VT100’s animation capabilities, made possible by codes that allowed cursor movement, deletion, and character updates to create animated effects.

Usually, they represent a long hand-crafted process done by a single person to tell a story. Some of these files may date back to the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Orhun Parmaksız developed this tool over a series of livestreams, which you can check out here.

You can see demonstrations and code on GitHub.

DirecTV has agreed to acquire struggling rival Dish Network, creating a satellite TV behemoth with nearly 20 million subscribers. The complex transaction, announced Monday, involves private equity firm TPG acquiring a majority stake in DirecTV from AT&T for $7.6 billion. DirecTV will then purchase Dish for $1 and assume its debt. The deal provides a lifeline for Dish, which faces $2 billion in debt due November with only $500 million in available cash. EchoStar, Dish's parent company, will retain its wireless spectrum investments and operate independently. Subject to regulatory approval and creditor agreement, the merger is expected to close in late 2025. DirecTV and TPG will provide $2.5 billion to cover Dish's immediate financial needs. The deal's fate remains uncertain, as a similar 2002 merger attempt was blocked on antitrust grounds.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

drew’s dev blog posts on everything you need to know about Python 3.13 – JIT and GIL went up the hill

So what makes this release different, and why should you care about it?

In short, there are two big changes being made to how Python runs at a core level which have the potential to radically change the performance profile of Python code in the future.

Those changes are:

• A “free-threaded” version of CPython which allows you to disable the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), and
• Support for experimental Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation.

Python 3.13 is a big release in introducing some exciting new concepts and features to the runtime. It’s unlikely to make any immediate different to how you write and run your Python, but it’s likely that over the next few months and years as both free-threading and JIT become more mature and well established, they’ll begin to have more and more of an impact on the performance profile of Python code, particularly for CPU-bound tasks.

Check out the details in the post here.

Simon Willison:

Audio Overview is a fun new feature of Google’s NotebookLM which is getting a lot of attention right now. It generates a one-off custom podcast against content you provide, where two AI hosts start up a “deep dive” discussion about the collected content. These last around ten minutes and are very podcast, with an astonishingly convincing audio back-and-forth conversation.

Here’s an example podcast created by feeding in an earlier version of this article (prior to creating this example).

I listened to the whole 15-minute podcast this morning. It was, indeed, surprisingly effective. It remains somewhere in the uncanny valley, but not at all in a creepy way. Just more in a “this is a bit vapid and phony” way. I think that if you played this example podcast for a non-technical person who isn’t informed at all about the current state of generative AI, that they would assume for the first few minutes, without question, that this was a recorded podcast between two actual humans, and that they might actually learn a few things about generative AI. But given that the “conversation” is literally about creating artificial podcasts like this very example, I wonder how many would, by the end, suspect that they were in fact listening to an AI-generated podcast? It’s quite meta — which the male voice on the podcast even says during the episode.

But ultimately the conversation has all the flavor of a bowl of unseasoned white rice. Give it a listen, though. It’s remarkable.

 ★ 

This video from Vox details how Kodak transformed the photography landscape. With its introduction of the Brownie point and shoot, which was originally marketed to children, amateur photography completely took off. Kodak dominated the market for a little over a century. Watch the full video here.

Kodak gave way to pocket digitals and eventually the iPhone but amateur photography is still going strong. It’s very much alive in the DIY circuit and we stock a bunch of cool cameras in the Adafruit shop. Here are some of our current faves:

• Raspberry Pi High Quality HQ Camera – 12MP

• Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 – 12MP 120 Degree Wide Angle Lens

• TTL Serial JPEG Camera with NTSC Video

• Zero Spy Camera for Raspberry Pi Zero

• Ultra Tiny USB Camera with GC0307 Sensor

Reddit has implemented new restrictions on moderators' ability to alter community visibility settings, the social media platform announced Monday. Moderators must now obtain admin approval before switching subreddits between public, private, or NSFW status. The move comes in response to last year's widespread protests against API pricing changes, during which thousands of subreddits went private, disrupting platform accessibility. Reddit VP Laura Nestler stated the policy aims to prevent actions that "deliberately cause harm" and protect the site's long-term health.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What do music teachers talk about when they talk about the future? Find out in this report from the annual Missouri state music teachers conference! Here’s more from Music Matters:

Our opening session titled “Innovating for the Future” included a panel with renowned leaders in the field of music education – Dr. Jennifer Snow, CEO and Executive Director of the Frances Clark Center; Dr. Courtney Crappell, long-time columnist for the American Music Teacher magazine and Dean of UMKC; Andrea Miller, founder of Music Studio Startup; Dr. Curtis Pavey, UMKC Assistant Professor and Manager of Online Publications for the Frances Clark Center for Keyboard Pedagogy; Dr. Sara Ernst, Associate Professor at University of Oklahoma and Director of Teacher Engagement and programming for the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy; and Dr. Christopher Madden, UMKC Assistant Professor and co-author of the Technique through Repertoire books. They were tasked with finishing the statement, “I believe in a future that…” I appreciated hearing the vision each of them shared for the future of music teaching as a profession and was challenged with a number of questions to consider for myself, my studio, and our community. Very thought-provoking!

See and hear more!

 

The Energy Department said on Monday that it had finalized a $1.52 billion loan guarantee to help a company restart a shuttered nuclear plant in Michigan -- the latest sign of rising government support for nuclear power. From a report: Two rural electricity providers that planned to buy power from the reactor would also receive $1.3 billion in federal grants [Editor's note: the link is likely paywalled; alternative source] under a program approved by Congress to help rural communities tackle climate change. The moves will help Holtec International reopen the Palisades nuclear plant in Covert Township, Mich., which ceased operating in 2022. The company plans to inspect and refurbish the plant's reactor and seek regulatory approval to restart the plant by October 2025. After years of stagnation, America's nuclear industry is seeing a resurgence of interest. Both Congress and the Biden administration have offered billions of dollars in subsidies to prevent older nuclear plants from closing and to build new reactors. Despite concerns about high costs and hazardous waste, nuclear plants can generate electricity at all hours without emitting the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet. David Turk, the deputy secretary of energy, said he expected U.S. electricity demand would grow by 15 percent over the next few years, driven by an increase in electric vehicles, a boom in battery and solar factories as well as a surge of new data centers for artificial intelligence. That meant the nation needs new low-carbon sources of power that could run 24/7 and complement wind and solar plants.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.