We don’t generally think of heavy cream as a “cooking fat,” or at least I don’t. To me, it is a drinking fat, a whipping fat, a drizzling fat, and I’m sure it’s all of those things to you as well, but don’t let these cold-temperature applications prevent you from getting heated, especially when it comes to eggs.
Source: LifeHacker – Scramble Your Eggs in a Puddle of Simmering Cream
If you’ve got an NVIDIA RTX 40-series GPU and you feel like you need more frames in heavily ray-traced games Cyberpunk 2077 and Dying Light 2: Stay Human, you’re in luck: both titles got updated today with support for the Ada Lovelace-exclusive DLSS 3 Frame Generation.
The third whole-number iteration of NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling
Source: Hot Hardware – Heads Up, Cyberpunk 2077 And Dying Light 2 Finally Got GeForce DLSS 3 And Reflex Support
Apex Legends Mobile, the mobile port of EA and Respawn’s popular battle royale shooter, is not long for this world. EA confirmed today, just eight months after the game’s launch, that the free-to-play offshoot will be shutting down on May 1, 2023. What’s more, EA plans to sunset Battlefield Mobile as well.
Source: Kotaku – Apex Legends Mobile Shutting Down After Only 8 Months, Battlefield Mobile Canceled
A new rebrand is in the works for Paramount after CEO Bob Bakish announced the company is merging Showtime and Paramount+. As part of the merger, Paramount+ will be rebranded as Paramount+ With Showtime, which will be overseen by Tom Ryan. Meanwhile, Chris McCarthy will continue to oversee network operations for…
Source: Gizmodo – A Paramount Rebrand Is in the Works Merging Showtime and Paramount+
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor got a March 17 release date just last month and it’s already blowing past it. Electronic Arts announced the game will now come out at the end of April instead as developer Respawn Entertainment focuses on bug fixes, performance issues, and generally making sure the game doesn’t come out busted…
Source: Kotaku – Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Is The Next Big Game Delay Of 2023
Red Hat on Tuesday that it’s partnered with Oracle to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Although this doesn’t surprise me at…
The post Red Hat Beds With Oracle in New Cloud Deal appeared first on FOSS Force.
Source: FOSS Force – Red Hat Beds With Oracle in New Cloud Deal
Star Wars fans will need to wait an extra month and a half to play the next chapter of Cal Kestis’ story. On Tuesday afternoon, Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment announced the delay of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor to April 28th. The game was previously slated to arrive on March 17th.
“In order for the team to hit the Respawn quality bar, provide the team the time they need, and achieve the level of polish our fans deserve, we have added six crucial weeks to our release schedule — Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will now launch globally on April 28th,” Respawn posted on Twitter. The studio said it would use the extra time to fix bugs and polish the game to improve performance, stability and the player experience. The delay means Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will arrive on the same day as Dead Island 2, provided that title doesn’t suffer a last-minute delay.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor picks up five years after the events of Fallen Order, and features an older, harder Cal Kestis. Respawn has promised the game will feature new worlds in the Star Wars galaxy for players to explore. Cal, now a Jedi Knight, also has new skills and weapons in his arsenal to take on the Galactic Empire.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Now Arrives April 28th pic.twitter.com/PNtsL6kmER
— EA Star Wars (@EAStarWars) January 31, 2023
Source: Engadget – ‘Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’ is delayed to April 28th
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Four pixelated cartoon characters talk to each other about coffee, Amazon deliveries, and veganism as they stand apart in a decorated NYC apartment. There is one woman and three men who seem to be the animated versions of Seinfeld’s main characters, Elaine, Jerry, George, and Kramer. But unlike Seinfeld, these characters are set in a modern-era NYC, and their voices and bodies look and sound robotic. That’s because “Nothing, Forever” is a live-streaming show that’s almost entirely generated by algorithms. It’s been streaming non-stop on Twitch since December 14. […] Skyler Hartle, the co-creator of “Nothing, Forever,” told Motherboard that the show was created as a parody to Seinfeld. “The actual impetus for this was it originally started its life as this weird, very, off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project,” Hartle said. “But then we kind of worked over the years to bring it to this new place. And then, of course, generative media and generative AI just kind of took off in a crazy way over the past couple of years.”
Hartle and his co-creator, Brian Habersberger, used a combination of machine learning, generative algorithms, and cloud services to build the show. Hartle told Motherboard that the dialogue is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model and that there is very little human moderation of the stream, outside of GPT-3’s built-in moderation filters. “Aside from the artwork and the laugh track you’ll hear, everything else is generative, including: dialogue, speech, direction (camera cuts, character focus, shot length, scene length, etc), character movement, and music,” one of the creators wrote in a Reddit comment. […] Hartle also said that unlike most television shows, “Nothing, Forever” is able to change based on people’s feedback that is received through the Twitch stream chat. “The show can effectively change and the narrative actually evolves based on the audience. One of the major factors that we’re thinking about is how do we get people involved in crafting the narrative so it becomes their own,” he said. “As generative media gets better, we have this notion that at any point, you’re gonna be able to turn on the future equivalent of Netflix and watch a show perpetually, nonstop as much as you want. You don’t just have seven seasons of a show, you have seven hundred, or infinite seasons of a show that has fresh content whenever you want it. And so that became one of our grounding pillars,” Hartle said. “Our grounding principle was, can we create a show that can generate entertaining content forever? Because that’s truly where we see the future emerging towards. Our goal with the next iterations or next shows that we release is to actually trade a show that is like Netflix-level quality.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – ‘Nothing, Forever’ Is an Endless ‘Seinfeld’ Episode Generated By AI
Not to be left behind in any trend-chasing, Hollywood is scrambling after the promise of artificial intelligence. In this case, one movie is banking its premise on the promise of AI-driven deepfake tech.
Source: Gizmodo – Hollywood Plans to Use AI to Youngify Tom Hanks in Adaptation of Surreal Graphic Novel Here
It’s February, traditionally a month for romance—but 2023 is also bringing a bumper crop of frights! There are several big horror titles out this month, including Stephen Graham Jones’ sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw and author Matt Ruff’s return to Lovecraft Country… as well as all the sci-fi and fantasy your…
Source: Gizmodo – 49 New Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Books to Sweeten Your February
For scrubbing walls, there’s nothing better than a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (which is actually just a melamine sponge, brand names be damned). But these bad boys can do a whole lot more than de-scuff your walls—when Mr. Clean says “magic,” he means it.
Source: LifeHacker – 24 Ways You Can Use Magic Erasers (But Aren’t)
Kees Cook has posted a
detailed document describing the work to improve safety of
flexible-length arrays
in the kernel.
Converting such codebases to use “modern” language features, like
those in C99 (still from the prior millennium), can be a major
challenge, but it is an entirely tractable problem. This post is a
deep dive into an effort underway in the Linux kernel to make array
index overflows (and more generally, buffer overflows) a thing of
the past, where they belong. Our success hinges on replacing
anachronistic array definitions with well-defined C99 flexible
arrays.
This work has been covered here as well.
Source: LWN.net – Cook: Bounded flexible arrays in C
The European Space Agency has released its image of the month for January, and it is (perhaps unsurprisingly) a stunning shot from the Webb Space Telescope.
Source: Gizmodo – Webb Telescope Captures Countless Galaxies in New Image
OpenAI has released a tool to help you determine whether text was more likely written by a human or AI. However, the ChatGPT maker warns that its equivalent of Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampff test can also get it wrong.
The tool includes a box where you can paste text that’s at least 1,000 characters long. It will then spit out a verdict, like “The classifier considers the text to be very unlikely AI-generated” or “The classifier considers the text to be possibly AI-generated.”
I tested it by prompting ChatGPT to write an essay about the migratory patterns of birds, which the detection tool then described as “possibly AI-generated.” Meanwhile, it rated several human-written articles as “very unlikely AI-generated.” So although the tool could raise false flags in either direction, my (tiny sample size) test suggests at least a degree of accuracy. Still, OpenAI cautions not to use the tool alone to determine content’s authenticity; it also works best with text of 1,000 words or longer.
The startup has faced pressure from educators after the November release of its ChatGPT tool, which produces AI-written content that can sometimes pass for human writing. The natural-language model can create essays in seconds based on simple text prompts — even passing a graduate business and law exam — while providing students with a tempting new cheating opportunity. As a result, New York public schools banned the bot from their WiFi networks and school devices.
While ChatGPT’s arrival has been a buzzed-about topic of late, even extending into media outlets eager to automate SEO-friendly articles, the bot is big business for OpenAI. The company reportedly secured a $10 billion investment earlier this month from Microsoft, which plans to integrate it into Bing and Office 365. OpenAI allegedly discussed selling shares at a $29 billion valuation late last year, which would make it one of the most valuable US startups.
Although ChatGPT is currently the best publicly available natural language AI model, Google, Baidu and others are working on competitors. Google’s LaMDA is convincing enough that one former researcher threw away his job with the search giant last year by claiming the chatbot is sentient. (The human tendency to project feelings and consciousness onto algorithms is a concept we’ll likely hear much about in the coming years.) Google has only released extremely constricted versions of its chatbot in a beta, presumably out of ethical concerns. With the genie out of the bottle, it will be interesting to see how long that restraint lasts.
Source: Engadget – OpenAI’s new tool may help you identify text written by ChatGPT
Enlarge / Apple logo on stage at an iPhone launch presentation in September 2019.
(credit: Getty Images | picture alliance )
Apple violated US labor laws through various workplace rules and statements made by executives, National Labor Relations Board officials determined after reviewing allegations from two former employees. An NLRB official will file a formal complaint against Apple unless the company reaches a settlement with the former employees, who filed complaints about Apple’s focus on secrecy.
An NLRB spokesperson confirmed to Ars today that the labor board’s regional office “found merit to four charges alleging that various work rules, handbook rules, and confidentiality rules at Apple violated Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act because they reasonably tend to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of their right to protected concerted activity.”
The regional office additionally “found merit to a charge alleging statements and conduct by Apple—including high-level executives—also violated the National Labor Relations Act,” the NLRB statement said. That’s apparently a reference to an email in which Apple CEO Tim Cook warned staff not to leak confidential information.
Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Apple’s focus on secrecy violated employee rights, US regulators find
Starlink, the satellite-based internet service from SpaceX, has an active presence on the continent of Africa, with the company announcing yesterday that Starlink is now available in Nigeria.
Source: Gizmodo – SpaceX Claimed Starlink Was Available in Africa Last Year, but It Just Arrived
Yesterday, Twitch streamer Brandon “Atrioc” Ewing issued a tearful apology during his livestream after he accidentally revealed that he had deepfake pornography of popular female Twitch streamers open on his computer. The video of his apology—in which he claims to have clicked an ad on PornHub because he was…
Source: Kotaku – Popular Female Twitch Streamers Targeted In Deepfake Pornography Scandal
If you’re employed, you’re likely receiving one of two primary types of payment: a salary or an hourly wage. While the difference between the two is easy to understand on its face, it’s important to consider the pros and cons of being being a salaried versus a wage worker.
Source: LifeHacker – The Difference Between a Wage and a Salary (and Why It Matters)
Enlarge (credit: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
Huawei has been hobbling along for a few years now with limited access to US chips and technology, with both the Trump and Biden administrations banning general exports to the company. Huawei hasn’t seen zero US chips, but every sale has had to be approved by the government, with the restrictions being tweaked several times since the initial ban in 2019. Reuters, The Financial Times, and several other outlets have reported that the Biden administration is putting even tighter restrictions on Huawei, with FT saying the US is working toward a “total ban” on sales to the Chinese tech company.
Like every tech company, Huawei buys components from a bunch of different suppliers to make its network equipment and smartphones. While a ton of manufacturing is done in China, there aren’t many options for CPUs, and US companies Qualcomm and Intel have been keeping Huawei afloat with limited government-granted export licenses. Intel chips have meant the company can still build servers, and while 5G tech was banned from export, Qualcomm went out of its way to make special, 4G-only versions of its latest SoCs.
As the US tried to balance hurting Huawei without hurting US suppliers that have Huawei as a customer, the decision was made to still allow sales, just not of the latest technology. The cutoff point for this was the always-nebulous moniker of “5G,” but now even that is being shut off. Reuters says: “U.S. officials are creating a new formal policy of denial for shipping items to Huawei that would include items below the 5G level, including 4G items, Wifi 6 and 7, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing and cloud items.” It sounds like that would ban all sales from Intel and Qualcomm.
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Source: Ars Technica – No more export licenses: US plans to fully cut off Huawei from chip suppliers
Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are returning to the app game with a new innovative startup since leaving the ‘gram in 2018. Artifact is a new social media platform that will provide a feed of articles and facts aimed to create a dialogue between users to discuss things of interest.
Source: Gizmodo – Instagram Co-Founders Introduce Text-Based App
