“Just about the entire cast of The Lord of the Rings gathered their Zoom screens together for a reunion nearly two decades after the end of the epic fantasy film trilogy,” reports CNET:

io9 notes that it was comic actor-singer Josh Gad who “gathered the hobbits, the wizards, the elves, and the wicked menfolk to go to Isen — YouTube, where they joke, talk shop, reminisce, and just seem to really thoroughly enjoy each others’ presence. In this stream are Elijah Wood [Frodo], Sena Astin [Sam], Ian McKellen [Gandalf], Orlando Bloom [Legolas], Viggo Mortensen [Aragorn], Liv Tyler [Arwen], and more, along with director Peter Jackson and, presumably, the kind doting ghost of J.R.R. Tolkien just off-screen.”
The Wrap has more details, including the fact that the event was to support No Kid Hungry, a charity in support of ending childhood hunger, and some ways they changed J.R.R. Tolkein’s book for the movie:

“Gandalf does not say, ‘You shall not pass!’ in the book,” McKellen notes. “He says, ‘You will not pass.” [Co-writer Philippa] Boyens also notes that Gandalf’s first line in the trilogy was one she came up with herself, instead of coming from Tolkien: “A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.”

Another moment from the trilogy that gained Internet immortality was Boromir’s famous “One does not simply” speech, where he warns the Council of Elrond that trying to sneak into Mordor to destroy the One Ring is impossible. Jackson admits that the speech was written the day before the council scene was filmed and while Sean Bean’s speech was done so well that it became a meme, he needed some help to remember it.
“What Sean did, which I thought was really clever, is he got a print-out of the speech taped to his knee,” Jackson said, pointing out Bean places his hand to his head to display Boromir’s sense of despair. “If you watch the scene now, you’ll see every time that Sean has to check his script.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘Lord of the Rings’ Reunion Brings Actors, Director, Writers Together on Zoom

Walmart uses “Everseen” AI technology in thousands of its stores “to prevent shoplifting at registers and self-checkout kiosks,” reports Wired.
But some Walmart workers claim that instead it’s often failed to stop actual instances of stealing, misidentified innocuous behavior as theft — and made it harder for them to social distance:

The workers said they had been upset about Walmart’s use of Everseen for years and claimed colleagues had raised concerns about the technology to managers but were rebuked. They decided to speak to the press, they said, after a June 2019 Business Insider article reported Walmart’s partnership with Everseen publicly for the first time. The story described how Everseen uses AI to analyze footage from surveillance cameras installed in the ceiling and can detect issues in real time, such as when a customer places an item in their bag without scanning it. When the system spots something, it automatically alerts store associates…

In interviews, the workers, whose jobs include knowledge of Walmart’s loss-prevention programs, said their top concern with Everseen was false positives at self-checkout. The employees believe that the tech frequently misinterprets innocent behavior as potential shoplifting, which frustrates customers and store associates, and leads to longer lines. “It’s like a noisy tech, a fake AI that just pretends to safeguard,” said one worker.
The coronavirus pandemic has given their concerns more urgency. One Concerned Home Office Associate said they worry false positives could be causing Walmart workers to break social-distancing guidelines unnecessarily. When Everseen flags an issue, a store associate needs to intervene and determine whether shoplifting or another problem is taking place. In an internal communication from April obtained by WIRED, a corporate Walmart manager expressed strong concern that workers were being put at risk by the additional contact necessitated by false positives and asked whether the Everseen system should be turned off to protect customers and workers.
Before COVID-19, “it wasn’t ideal, it was a poor customer experience,” the worker said. “AI is now creating a public health risk.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Walmart Employees Complain Its Anti-Shoplifting AI Is Buggy, Inaccurate, and Dangerous

Food delivery services like Grubhub should be thriving, especially during the pandemic. But they’re not, The Markup reports:

In August 2019, analysts from the investment firm Cowen estimated that Uber Eats was losing $3.36 on every order and would continue to lose money on every order for the next five years. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi acknowledged that Uber Eats is not yet profitable in an email to employees in March after its parent company laid off more than 3,700 employees…. In early March, DoorDash filed to go public despite losing an estimated $450 million in 2019, according to The New York Times. DoorDash declined to comment on that estimate or its path to profitability, but regarding the latter CEO Tony Xu told Fortune in February that “we’re working our way there….”
Meanwhile, other companies have been ditching the food delivery business: Yelp sold Eat24 to Grubhub, Square sold Caviar to DoorDash, and Amazon shut down its Amazon Restaurants delivery service.

Grubhub, which also owns Seamless, is publicly traded and the only one of the big four that has achieved profitability. Still, it lost more than a third of its value after revenue fell below investors’ expectations in the third quarter of 2019. In a letter to shareholders, the company revealed two things: Customers were “promiscuous,” or not loyal to the Grubhub platform, and the delivery part of the business was fundamentally not profitable. Instead, delivery was just a “means to an end” — getting restaurants to sign up on the Grubhub platform and then upselling them on “marketing” benefits, like greater visibility in Grubhub’s search results. In other words, like many tech companies, GrubHub is primarily an advertising company.
“Bottom line is that you need to pay someone enough money to drive to the restaurant, pick up food and drive it to a diner. . . ,” the company wrote. “At some point, delivery drones and robots may reduce the cost of fulfillment, but it will be a long time before the capital costs and ongoing operating expenses are less than the cost of paying someone for 30-45 minutes of their time.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Are Food Delivery Services Actually Losing Money?

“The Linux kernel has officially deprecated its coding style that the length of lines of code comply with 80 columns as the ‘strong preferred limit’,” reports Phoronix:
The Linux kernel like many long-standing open-source projects has a coding style guideline that lines of code be 80 columns or less, but now that while still recommended is no longer going to be enforced. This stems from Linus Torvalds commenting on Friday that excessive linebreaks are bad and he is against ugly wrapped code that is strictly sticking to 80 characters per line. This is part of the broader trend that most are no longer using 80×25 terminals…
This deprecation involves updating the documentation on the kernel’s coding style to be more sensible and updating the checkpatch.pl script that checks patches to no longer have a max line length of 80. Instead, the check patch script is using a maximum line length of 100.

Torvalds noted Friday that spreading code over multiple lines created problems for single-line utilities like grep, while longer lines “are fundamentally useful…”
[H]onestly, I don’t want to see patches that make the kernel reading experience worse for me and likely for the vast majority of people, based on the argument that some odd people have small terminal windows… If you or Christoph have 80 character lines, you’ll get possibly ugly wrapped output. Tough. That’s _your_ choice. Your hardware limitations shouldn’t be a pain for the rest of us…

So no. I do not care about somebody with a 80×25 terminal window getting line wrapping. For exactly the same reason I find it completely irrelevant if somebody says that their kernel compile takes 10 hours because they are doing kernel development on a Raspberry PI with 4GB of RAM. People with restrictive hardware shouldn’t make it more inconvenient for people who have better resources…

If you choose to use a 80-column terminal, you can live with the line wrapping. It’s just that simple.

“Yes, staying withing 80 columns is certainly still _preferred_,” notes the official commit message for this change. “But it’s not the hard limit that the checkpatch warnings imply, and other concerns can most certainly dominate. Increase the default limit to 100 characters. Not because 100 characters is some hard limit either, but that’s certainly a ‘what are you doing’ kind of value and less likely to be about the occasional slightly longer lines.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Linus Torvalds Argues Against 80-Column Line Length Coding Style, As Linux Kernel Deprecates It

“I don’t think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday.
Since then, Vice reports, “Fake news about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is being shared widely on the internet, including on his own social network…”

Zuckerberg’s quote is particularly confusing because Facebook does fact-check some news posts, and uses a byzantine, third-party system to do so. Nonetheless, Donald Trump later quoted Zuckerberg’s favorable response in a tweet. Now, two satirical articles by websites with Australian domain names are going viral on Facebook, spreading misinformation about Zuckerberg and calling attention to his stance against fact checking by social media companies.

The first article, posted on Thursday by a site called The Chaser, is titled “‘Social media should not fact check posts,’ says child molester Mark Zuckerberg,” which also baselessly alleges that the CEO likes black jellybeans. It has more than 200,000 interactions on Facebook, according to the Facebook-owned analytics platform Crowdtangle. This article has also gone viral on Twitter, where The Chaser’s tweet has amassed more than 4,000 retweets.
Another article, also posted on Thursday from a site called The Shovel, is titled “Mark Zuckerberg — Dead at 36 — Says Social Media Should Not Fact Check Posts.” This post has nearly 50,000 interactions on Facebook and is also viral on Twitter.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Protesting Mark Zuckerberg Comments About Fact-Checking, Fake News About Mark Zuckerberg Goes Viral