A free webinar being presented this week by Social Movement Technologies might be just the thing for disgruntled Twitter users making the move to Mastodon.
The post Want to Master Mastodon? There’s an Upcoming Free Webinar for That appeared first on FOSS Force.
Source: FOSS Force – Want to Master Mastodon? There’s an Upcoming Free Webinar for That
MPV Media Player 0.35.1 is now available, with several bug fixes from 0.35 to make the user experience even smoother and more enjoyable.
Source: LXer – MPV Media Player 0.35.1 is now available, with bug fixes from 0.35
Annie Wersching recently passed away at the age of 45. Per her friends and family, and confirmed by Deadline, the Star Trek and Timeless actor was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 2020.
Source: Gizmodo – Timeless Actor Annie Wersching Passes Away at 45
“San Francisco is trying to slow the expansion of robotaxis,” reports NBC News, “after repeated incidents in which cars without drivers stopped and idled in the middle of the street for no obvious reason, delaying bus riders and disrupting the work of firefighters.”
The city’s transportation officials sent letters this week to California regulators asking them to halt or scale back the expansion plans of two companies, Cruise and Waymo, which are competing head-to-head to be the first to offer 24-hour robotaxi service in the country’s best-known tech hub.
The outcome will determine how quickly San Francisco and possibly other cities forge ahead with driverless technology that could remake the world’s cities and potentially save some of the 40,000 people killed each year in American traffic crashes…. Neither vehicles from Cruise or Waymo have killed anyone on the streets of San Francisco, but the companies need to overcome their sometimes comical errors, including one episode last year in which a Cruise car with nobody in it slowly tried to flee from a police officer.
In one recent instance documented on social media and noted by city officials, five disabled Cruise vehicles in San Francisco’s Mission District blocked a street so completely that a city bus with 45 riders couldn’t get through and was delayed for at least 13 minutes. Cruise’s autonomous cars have also interfered with active firefighting, and firefighters once shattered a car’s window to prevent it from driving over their firehoses, the city said….
“A series of limited deployments with incremental expansions — rather than unlimited authorizations — offer the best path toward public confidence in driving automation and industry success in San Francisco and beyond,” three city officials wrote Thursday in a letter to the utilities commission, the state agency that decides if a company gets a robotaxi license. A second letter expressed concerns about Waymo….
Cruise has argued that its service is safer than the status quo.
A Cruise spokesperson also provided letters of support “written by local San Francisco merchants associations, disability advocates and community groups.” And U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told Quartz last year that “it would be hard to do worse than human drivers when it comes to what we could get to theoretically with the right kind of safe autonomous driving.”
But in 2021 CBS reported that dozens and dozens of Waymo’s robo-taxis kept mistakenly driving down the same dead-end street. And in 2018 a self-driving Uber test vehicle struck and killed a woman in Arizona.
More stories from the Verge:
In July, a group of driverless Cruise vehicles blocked traffic for hours after the cars inexplicably stopped working, and a similar incident occurred in September. Meanwhile, a driverless Waymo vehicle created a traffic jam in San Francisco after it stopped in the middle of an intersection earlier this month. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into Cruise last December over concerns about the vehicles blocking traffic and causing rear-end collisions with hard braking… [San Francisco] city officials also express concern over the way driverless vehicles deal with emergency vehicles. Last April, officials say an autonomous Cruise vehicle stopped in a travel lane and “created an obstruction for a San Francisco Fire Department vehicle on its way to a 3 alarm fire….”
Other incidents involve Cruise calling 911 about “unresponsive” passengers on three separate occasions, only for emergency services to arrive and find that the rider just fell asleep…. Officials say companies should be required to collect more data about the performance of the vehicles, including how often and how long their driverless vehicles block traffic.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Blocked Traffic, Disrupted Firefighters: Why San Francisco Wants to Slow Robotaxi Rollout
Visceral Games’ Dead Space felt like a shot in the arm for survival horror games when it was originally released in 2008. The franchise has always been fondly remembered, so when EA revealed that Motive was working on a remake of the first game, it felt exciting to hear after the series stumbled into retirement with …
Source: Gizmodo – Dead Space’s Remake Gives Extra Substance to the Scares
Xbox head Phil Spencer says Microsoft remains committed to the Halo franchise and developer 343 Industries. In an interview following this week’s Xbox and Bethesda Developer Direct showcase, Spencer told IGN “the heart and soul of Halo is with 343 and the team’s that there, and I have the utmost confidence in the team that’s there and leading and the plan that they have going forward.”
Spencer’s comments come after 343 was reportedly “hit hard” by Microsoft’s recently announced company-wide layoffs. The number of employees Microsoft let go at the studio is unknown, but according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Halo Infinite’s campaign team saw significant cuts. The news prompted 343 to publish a brief statement on the layoffs last weekend. “Halo and Master Chief are here to stay,” studio head Pierre Hintze said. “343 Industries will continue to developer Halo now and in the future, including epic stories, multiplayer, and more of what makes Halo great.”
According to Spencer, the layoffs were an effort by Microsoft to position 343 for the future. “What we’re doing now is we want to make sure that leadership team is set up with the flexibility to build the plan that they need to go build,” he said. “Halo will remain critically important to what Xbox is doing, and 343 is critically important to the success of Halo.”
Frustratingly, Spencer wouldn’t discuss the franchise’s future beyond the broad strokes he offered. He declined to comment on whether Microsoft still has a 10-year support plan in place for Halo Infinite. “I’m going to let 343 talk about the plans that they have right now,” Spencer said when asked about the subject. However, he did offer reassurances for Halo fans left worrying about what comes next for Master Chief. “I expect that we’ll be continuing to support and grow Halo for as long as the Xbox is a platform for people to play.” The rest of the interview is well worth reading if you’re an Xbox fan. The piece covers a lot of ground, including the console’s lackluster 2022.
Source: Engadget – Phil Spencer says Microsoft will continue to ‘support and grow’ Halo amid 343 layoffs
Pokémon cards have always been a big deal, but the last several years have been eventful for the trading card game. Right alongside announcements of new mechanics and updates to how the game is played, the process of getting cards has become a whole ordeal as collectors have looked to snatch up cards and either keep…
Source: Gizmodo – After 20 Years, Pokémon is Putting Kadabra Back in The Deck
Last week Microsoft announced 10,000 layoffs — and a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT.
But OpenAI also released a tool called Codex in August of 2021 “designed to translate natural language into code,” reports Semafor. And now OpenAI “has ramped up its hiring around the world, bringing on roughly 1,000 remote contractors over the past six months in regions like Latin America and Eastern Europe, according to people familiar with the matter.”
The article points out that roughly 40% of those contractors “are computer programmers who are creating data for OpenAI’s models to learn software engineering tasks.”
“A well-established company, which is determined to provide world-class AI technology to make the world a better and more efficient place, is looking for a Python Developer,” reads one OpenAI job listing in Spanish, which was posted by an outsourcing agency….
OpenAI appears to be building a dataset that includes not just lines of code, but also the human explanations behind them written in natural language. A software developer in South America who completed a five-hour unpaid coding test for OpenAI told Semafor he was asked to tackle a series of two-part assignments. First, he was given a coding problem and asked to explain in written English how he would approach it. Then, the developer was asked to provide a solution. If he found a bug, OpenAI told him to detail what the problem was and how it should be corrected, instead of simply fixing it.
“They most likely want to feed this model with a very specific kind of training data, where the human provides a step-by-step layout of their thought-process,” said the developer, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid jeopardizing future work opportunities.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – OpenAI Hires an Army of Contractors. Will They Make Coding Obsolete?
From tweaking Tom Cruise to advancing deepfake detection with Intel, AI manipulation of photo, video, and audio sources is becoming more mainstream daily. Now, one company is taking this tech to Hollywood with the debut of TrueSync, a generative AI tool to change the dialogue in filmed content.
Announced on Twitter earlier this week, TrueSync
Source: Hot Hardware – Flawless Demos Its Wild AI Film Dialogue Manipulation And Language Translation
If you’re looking to set up a development environment on your Raspberry Pi, one of the best options is Visual Studio Code (VS Code). In this article, we’ll walk you through installing VS Code on your Raspberry Pi, so you can start writing code and building projects immediately.
Source: LXer – How to Install VS Code on Raspberry Pi in 3 Easy Steps
Rolls-Royce, a company well known for its luxury vehicles, teased a nuclear reactor on its Twitter account that could power a moonbase, or space travel to Mars and beyond. The company also announced its partnership with the UK Space Agency for a study to look into nuclear power for space exploration.
While the race to the moon and beyond
Source: Hot Hardware – Rolls-Royce Teases A Nuclear Reactor That Could Power A NASA Moonbase
Is it about time to upgrade your CPU? Well, with the launch of the Ryzen 7000X3D series coming in February this year, the recently-released standard processors in the Ryzen 7000 series have some great discounts going on. So dust off your wallet and look at what we’ve put together for you below. There are some solid savings to be had these
Source: Hot Hardware – AMD Ryzen 7000 Zen 4 CPUs Get Huge Price Cuts, Check These Deals Over 25% Off
“The manufacture of ‘green steel’ moved one step closer to reality Friday,” reports the Associated Press, “as Massachusetts-based Boston Metal announced a $120 million investment from the world’s second-largest steelmaker, ArcelorMittal.”
Boston Metal will use the injection of funds to expand production at a pilot plant in Woburn, near Boston, and help launch commercial production in Brazil.
The company uses renewable electricity to convert iron ore into steel. Steel is one of the world’s dirtiest heavy industries. Three-quarters of world production uses a traditional method that burns through train loads of coal to heat the furnaces and drive the reaction that releases pure iron from ore. Making steel releases more climate-warming carbon dioxide than any other industry, according to the International Energy Agency — about 8% of worldwide emissions. Many companies are working on alternatives.
The financial package by global steel giant ArcelorMittal is the biggest single investment made to date by the firm’s carbon innovation fund. Microsoft is another investor. Tadeu Carneiro, CEO of Boston Metal, said its technology is “designed to decarbonize steel production at scale” and would “disrupt the industry.” The company’s technology was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professors Donald Sadoway and Antoine Allanore, experts in energy storage and metallurgy respectively, are the founders….
Boston Metal said it can eliminate all carbon dioxide from its steel production and hopes to ramp up production to millions of tons by 2026. As a bonus, it said, it is able to extract metals from slag normally considered waste.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – World’s Second-Largest Steelmaker Invests 0M in ‘Green Steel’
To no one’s surprise, HBO has already renewed its TV adaptation of The Last of Us for season two after just two episodes under its belt. While the TV show has brought much of the original 2013 game’s story to life thus far, it’s also knowingly taking some fairly substantial divergences or additions to make the…
Source: Gizmodo – The Last of Us’ Second Season May Be a Two-Parter
Less than three months after arriving on store shelves, Meta’s pricy Quest Pro headset is on sale for the first time ever. After a hefty 27 percent discount, the headset is currently $1,100 or $400 off through Amazon and other retailers. That’s an all-time low for a device that typically costs $1,500.
Even with its price tag cut by nearly a third, the Quest Pro isn’t for everyone. Thanks to its Snapdragon XR2+ chipset and 12GB of RAM, the Quest Pro is 50 percent more powerful than the Quest 2. It also features solid built-in speakers with support for spatial audio, meaning you don’t necessarily need to reach for a pair of headphones when using the Quest Pro.
Additionally, it adds a variety of advanced sensors designed to facilitate more lifelike virtual meetings in Horizon Workrooms. However, all of those features come in a package that weighs over a pound and a half, making it less comfortable to wear for extended periods of time than the Quest 2. Battery life also suffers due to those more advanced components, and if you’re looking for a VR headset for gaming, the Quest Pro doesn’t offer a significantly better experience than its more affordable predecessor. Engadget’s Sam Rutherford gave the Quest Pro a score of 83 when he reviewed the headset last October but said the device’s $1,500 price tag made it too pricey for all but the most enthusiastic VR users. At $1,100, that’s still true.
Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
Source: Engadget – The Meta Quest Pro is 0 off right now
Long-time Slashdot reader Beave writes: Security researchers and practitioners at Quadrant Information Security recently found themselves in a battle with the Russian ransomware gang known as “Black Basta”… Quadrant discovered the Russian gang attempting to exfiltrate data from a network. Once a victim’s data is fully exfiltrated the gang then encrypts workstations and servers, and demands ransom payments from the victim in order to decrypt their data and to prevent Black Basta from releasing exfiltrated data to the public.
Fortunately, in this case, Black Basta didn’t make it that far. Instead, the security researchers used the opportunity to better understand Black Basta’s “backend servers”, tools, and methods. Black Basta will sometimes use a victim’s network to log into their own servers, which leads to interesting opportunities to observe the gang’s operations…
The first write up goes into technical details about the malware and tactics Black Basta used. The second second write up focuses on Black Basta’s “backend” servers and how they manage them. TLDR? You can also listen to two of the security researchers discuss their findings on the latest episode of the “Breaking Badness” podcast.
The articles go into great detail – even asking whether deleting their own exfiltrated data from the gang’s server “would technically constitute a federal offense per the ‘The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act’ of 1986.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Security Researchers Breached Server of Russia’s ‘Black Basta’ Ransomware Gang
In this brief guide, I’m going to explain why and how to autostart a tmux session on a remote system when logging in via SSH in Linux.
The post How to Autostart tmux Sessions Remotely When Logging in via SSH appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – How to Autostart tmux Sessions Remotely When Logging in via SSH
Cacti and other succulents have been popular houseplants for years now—and given how easy they are to care for, that’s hardly surprising. The downside? They can also be pricey.
Source: LifeHacker – The Easiest Way to Sprout New Succulents
Earlier in the week, the news broke that the DC shows Titans and Doom Patrol were simultaneously canceled in the middle of their respective fourth seasons. The two shows were the final holdouts from the DC Universe app that later jumped ship over to HBO Max, and come as the 2010 era of live-action DC Comics shows are…
Source: Gizmodo – Open Channel: What TV Cancellation Still Stings in Your Heart?
“From the maintainer of Ubuntu Unity and the Unity desktop environment, here comes blendOS,” writes 9to5Linux, “a GNU/Linux distribution that aims to be the last distribution you’ll ever use, especially if you distro hop.”
blendOS is here to offer you “a seamless blend of all Linux distributions,” as its creator wants to call it. blendOS is based on Arch Linux and GNOME on Wayland, but it lets you use apps from other popular distributions, such as Fedora Linux or Ubuntu.
This is possible because you can use the native package managers from Arch Linux (pacman — included by default), Fedora Linux (dnf), and Ubuntu (apt), which are included as containers using Distrobox/Podman. However, the DNF and APT package managers aren’t included in the live ISO image, nor blendOS’s own blend package manager…. It also follows a rolling release model, since it’s derived from Arch Linux.
Even if it comes with the GNOME desktop by default on the live ISO image, blendOS will let you deploy a new installation with another popular desktop environment, such as KDE Plasma, MATE, or Xfce, or even window managers like Sway or i3. Apart from the fact that you can install any app from any of the supported Linux distributions, blendOS also comes with out-of-the-box support for sandboxed Flatpak apps, which you can easily install directly from the Flathub Store app, which is a Web App that puts the Flathub website on your desktop.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – New Distro ‘blendOS’ Combines Arch Linux, Fedora Linux and Ubuntu