HackerNoon tested five AI bots on coding problems from Leetcode.com — GPT-4, GitHub Co-Pilot, Bard, Bing, and Claude+.

There’s some interesting commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of each one — and of course, the code that they ultimately output. The final results?

[GPT-4’s submission] passes all tests. It beat 47% of submissions on runtime and 8% on memory. GPT-4 is highly versatile in generating code for various programming languages and applications. Some of the caveats are that it takes much longer to get a response. API usage is also a lot more expensive and costs could ramp up quickly. Overall it got the answer right and passed the test.

[Bing’s submission] passed all the tests. It beat 47% of submissions on runtime and 37% on memory. This code looks a lot simpler than what GPT-4 generated. It beat GPT-4 on memory and it used less code! Bing seems to have the most efficient code so far, however, it gave a very short explanation of how it solved it. Nonetheless, best so far.

But both Bard and Claude+ failed the submission test (badly), while GitHub Copilot “passes all the tests. It scored better than 30% of submissions on runtime and 37% on memory.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – AI Coding Competition Pits GPT-4 Against Bard, GitHub Co-Pilot, Bing, and Claude+

The Associated Press reports that “water may be more widespread and recent on Mars than previously thought, based on observations of Martian sand dunes by China’s rover.” A paper published in Science suggests thin films of water appeared on sand dunes sometime between 1.4 million years ago and as recently as 400,000 years ago — or perhaps even sooner:

The finding highlights new, potentially fertile areas in the warmer regions of Mars where conditions might be suitable for life to exist, though more study is needed…

Before the Zhurong rover fell silent, it observed salt-rich dunes with cracks and crusts, which researchers said likely were mixed with melting morning frost or snow as recently as a few hundred thousand years ago… Conditions during that period were similar to now on Mars, with rivers and lakes dried up and no longer flowing as they did billions of years earlier…

The rover did not directly detect any water in the form of frost or ice. But Qin said computer simulations and observations by other spacecraft at Mars indicate that even nowadays at certain times of year, conditions could be suitable for water to appear… Small pockets of water from thawing frost or snow, mixed with salt, likely resulted in the small cracks, hard crusty surfaces, loose particles and other dune features like depressions and ridges, the Chinese scientists said.

Space.com explains exactly how the discovery was confirmed:

The laser-induced breakdown spectrometer (MarSCoDe) instrument onboard the rover zapped sand grains into millimeter-sized particles. Their chemical makeup revealed hydrated minerals like sulfates, silica, iron oxide and chlorides… Researchers say water vapor traveled from Martian poles to lower latitudes like Zhurong’s spot a few million years ago, when the planet’s polar ice caps released high amounts of water vapor, thanks to a different tilt that had Mars’ poles pointed more directly toward the sun. Frigid temperatures on the wobbling planet condensed the drifting vapor and dropped it as snow far from the poles, according to the latest study.

Mars’ tilt changes over a 124,000-year cycle, so “this offers a replenishing mechanism for vapor in the atmosphere to form frost or snow at low latitudes where the Zhurong rover has landed,” Qin told Space.com. But “no water ice was detected by any instrument on the Zhurong rover.” Instead, in the same way that salting roads on Earth melts icy patches during storms, salts in Martian sand dunes warmed the fallen snow and thawed it enough to form saltwater. The process also formed minerals such as silica and ferric oxides, which Zhurong spotted, researchers say. The saltwater, however, didn’t stay around for long. Temperatures on Mars swing wildly and spike in the mornings between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., so the saltwater evaporated and left behind salt and other newly formed minerals that later seeped between the dune’s sand grains, cementing them to form a crust, according to the study…

“The phenomenon was documented at one site, but it should be applicable to a fairly large fraction of Mars’ surface at similar latitudes,” Manasvi Lingam, an assistant professor of astrobiology at the Florida Institute of Technology who wasn’t involved in the new research, told Space.com.
Since the rover found water activity on (and in) salty Martian dunes, the researchers now suggest future missions search for salt-tolerant microbes , and are raising the possibility of “extant life on Mars.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – China’s Mars Rover Discovers Signs of Recent Water in Martian Sand Dunes

Microsoft’s headquarters are in the state of Washington — and this year when the state legislature considered a right-to-repair bill, Microsoft showed its support.
The nonprofit “climate solutions” site Grist reports that the committee considering that bill received an email from Microsoft’s senior director of government affairs, saying that the bill “fairly balances the interests of manufacturers, customers, and independent repair shops and in doing so will provide more options for consumer device repair.”

The Fair Repair Act stalled out a week later due to opposition from all three Republicans on the committee and Senator Lisa Wellman, a Democrat and former Apple executive. (Apple frequently lobbies against right-to-repair bills, and during a hearing, Wellman defended the iPhone maker’s position that it is already doing enough on repair.) But despite the bill’s failure to launch this year, repair advocates say Microsoft’s support — a notable first for a major U.S. tech company — is bringing other manufacturers to the table to negotiate the details of other right-to-repair bills for the first time.

“We are in the middle of more conversations with manufacturers being way more cooperative than before,” Nathan Proctor, who heads the U.S. Public Research Interest Group’s right-to-repair campaign, told Grist. “And I think Microsoft’s leadership and willingness to be first created that opportunity….”

Like other consumer tech giants, Microsoft has historically fought right-to-repair bills while restricting access to spare parts, tools, and repair documentation to its network of “authorized” repair partners. In 2019, the company even helped kill a repair bill in Washington state. But in recent years the company has started changing its tune on the issue. In 2021, following pressure from shareholders, Microsoft agreed to take steps to facilitate the repair of its devices — a first for a U.S. company. Microsoft followed through on the agreement by expanding access to spare parts and service tools, including through a partnership with the repair guide site iFixit. The tech giant also commissioned a study that found repairing Microsoft products instead of replacing them can dramatically reduce both waste and carbon emissions. Microsoft has also started engaging more cooperatively with lawmakers over right-to-repair bills. In late 2021 and 2022, the company met with legislators in both Washington and New York to discuss each state’s respective right-to-repair bill. In both cases, lawmakers and advocates involved in the bill negotiations described the meetings as productive…

When Washington lawmakers revived their right-to-repair bill for the 2023 legislative cycle, Microsoft once again came to the negotiating table. From state senator and bill sponsor Joe Nguyen’s perspective, Microsoft’s view was, “We see this coming, we’d rather be part of the conversation than outside. And we want to make sure it is done in a thoughtful way.” Proctor, whose organization was also involved in negotiating the Washington bill, said that Microsoft had a few specific requests, including that the bill require repair shops to possess a third-party technical certification and carry insurance. It was also important to Microsoft that the bill only cover products manufactured after the bill’s implementation date, and that manufacturers be required to provide the public only the same parts and documents that their authorized repair providers already receive. Some of the company’s requests, Proctor said, were “tough” for advocates to concede on. “But we did, because we thought what they were doing was in good faith.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Microsoft is Now Supporting Right-to-Repair Legislation

“ThreatGPT, MedicalGPT, DateGPT and DirtyGPT are a mere sampling of the many outfits to apply for trademarks with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in recent months,” notes TechCrunch, exploring the issue of whether OpenAI can actually trademark the phrase ‘GPT’…

Little wonder that after applying in late December for a trademark for “GPT,” which stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” OpenAI last month petitioned the USPTO to speed up the process, citing the “myriad infringements and counterfeit apps” beginning to spring into existence. Unfortunately for OpenAI, its petition was dismissed last week… Given the rest of the queue in which OpenAI finds itself, that means a decision could take up to five more months, says Jefferson Scher, a partner in the intellectual property group of Carr & Ferrell and chair of the firm’s trademark practice group. Even then, the outcome isn’t assured, Scher explains… [H]elpful, says Scher, is the fact that OpenAI has been using “GPT” for years, having released its original Generative Pre-trained Transformer model, or GPT-1, back in October 2018…

Even if a USPTO examiner has no problem with OpenAI’s application, it will be moved afterward to a so-called opposition period, where other market participants can argue why the agency should deny the “GPT” trademark. Scher describes what would follow this way: In the case of OpenAI, an opposer would challenge Open AI’s position that “GPT” is proprietary and that the public perceives it as such instead of perceiving the acronym to pertain to generative AI more broadly…

It all begs the question of why the company didn’t move to protect “GPT” sooner. Here, Scher speculates that the company was “probably caught off guard” by its own success… Another wrinkle here is that OpenAI may soon be so famous that its renown becomes a dominant factor, says Scher. While one doesn’t need to be famous to secure a trademark, once an outfit is widely enough recognized, it receives protection that extends far beyond its sphere. Rolex is too famous a trademark to be used on anything else, for instance.

Thanks to Slashdot reader rolodexter for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Can OpenAI Trademark ‘GPT’?

For Red Hat’s 30th anniversary, North Carolina’s News & Observer newspaper ran a special four-part series of articles.
In the first article Red Hat co-founder Bob Young remembers Red Hat’s first big breakthrough: winning InfoWorld’s “OS of the Year” award in 1998 — at a time when Microsoft’s Windows controlled 85% of the market.
“How is that possible,” Young said, “that one of the world’s biggest technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?” The answer, he would tell the many reporters who suddenly wanted to learn about his upstart company, strikes at “the beauty” of open-source software.
“Our engineering team is an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft’s engineering team on Windows, and I don’t really care how many people they have,” Young would say. “Like they may have thousands of the smartest operating system engineers that they could scour the planet for, and we had 10,000 engineers by comparison….”

Young was a 40-year-old Canadian computer equipment salesperson with a software catalog when he noticed what Marc Ewing was doing. [Ewing was a recent college graduate bored with his two-month job at IBM, selling customized Linux as a side hustle.] It’s pretty primitive, but it’s going in the right direction, Young thought. He began reselling Ewing’s Red Hat product. Eventually, he called Ewing, and the two met at a tech conference in New York City. “I needed a product, and Marc needed some marketing help,” said Young, who was living in Connecticut at the time. “So we put our two little businesses together.”

Red Hat incorporated in March 1993, with the earliest employees operating the nascent business out of Ewing’s Durham apartment. Eventually, the landlord discovered what they were doing and kicked them out.
The four articles capture the highlights. (“A visual effects group used its Linux 4.1 to design parts of the 1997 film Titanic.”) And it doesn’t leave out Red Hat’s skirmishes with Microsoft. (“Microsoft was owned by the richest person in the world. Red Hat engineers were still linking servers together with extension cords. “) “We were changing the industry and a lot of companies were mad at us,” says Michael Ferris, Red Hat’s VP of corporate development/strategy. Soon there were corporate partnerships with Netscape, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell, and IBM — and when Red Hat finally goes public in 1999, its stock sees the eighth-largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, rising in value in days to over $7 billion and “making overnight millionaires of its earliest employees.”

But there’s also inspiring details like the quote painted on the wall of Red Hat’s headquarters in Durham: “Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era…” It’s fun to see the story told by a local newspaper, with subheadings like “It started with a student from Finland” and “Red Hat takes on the Microsoft Goliath.”

Something I’d never thought of. 2001’s 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center “destroyed the principal data centers of many Wall Street investment banks, which were housed in the twin towers. With their computers wiped out, financial institutions had to choose whether to rebuild with standard proprietary software or the emergent open source. Many picked the latter.” And by the mid-2000s, “Red Hat was the world’s largest provider of Linux…’ according to part two of the series. “Soon, Red Hat was servicing more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies.”
By then, even the most vehement former critics were amenable to Red Hat’s kind of software. Microsoft had begun to integrate open source into its core operations. “Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally,” Microsoft President Brad Smith later said.
In the 2010s, “open source has won” became a popular tagline among programmers. After years of fighting for legitimacy, former Red Hat executives said victory felt good. “There was never gloating,” Tiemann said.

“But there was always pride.”
In 2017 Red Hat’s CEO answered questions from Slashdot’s readers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Red Hat’s 30th Anniversary: How a Microsoft Competitor Rose from an Apartment-Based Startup

In October professional poker player Garrett Adelstein lost to a relative newcomer. Last month 15,000 viewers tuned in for his first new public interview, Poker News reports. Adelstein “reiterated his confidence that he was cheated,” and said he will not fund the $135,000 the newcomer gave hiim as a peace offering.

[Newcomer Robbi Jade Lew] denied cheating and Hustler’s third-party investigation concluded there was “no evidence of wrongdoing.” Early in the two-hour interview, Polk asked his guest if he still feels the same about what went down on that memorable evening. “In essence, I stand completely by the statement I made. I think it’s extremely likely that I was cheated,” the high-stakes pro responded… Adelstein said that Lew “has a lot of balls” to return to live-stream poker after, as he claims, cheating him out of a massive pot…

Over the past six months, numerous poker fans have called for Adelstein to return [the $135,000] to, as they believe, its rightful owner. He instead donated it to a charity. But still many believe the right decision is for him to give it back to Lew. Polk asked him if he would do so. “No, I will not be refunding Robbi the money, period. I am extremely confident I was cheated in this hand,” Adelstein defiantly stated. Adelstein then pleaded with those who are on “Team Robbi” to put themselves in his shoes and and think about how they’d react if they felt they were cheated at the poker table.

The next week — on April 1st — Poker News jokingly reported that Robbi Jade Lew had published a new book titled If I Did It..

The April Fool’s day satire quotes Robbi Jade Lew as saying “I thought it would be fun to write a book about how I would have cheated if I’d actually done it. Which I didn’t….”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Six Months Later, Poker Player Garrett Adelstein Still Thinks He Was Cheated

The Information reports:
Late last year, a trio of engineers who had just helped Apple modernize its search technology began working on the type of technology underlying ChatGPT… For Apple, there was only one problem: The engineers no longer worked there.
They’d left Apple last fall because “they believed Google was a better place to work on LLMs…according to two people familiar with their thinking… They’re now working on Google’s efforts to reduce the cost of training and improving the accuracy of LLMs and the products based on these models, according to one of those people.”

MacRumors summarizes the article this way. “Siri and Apple’s use of AI has been severely held back by caution and organizational dysfunction, according to over three dozen former Apple employees who spoke to The Information’s Wayne Ma.”

The extensive paywalled report explains why former Apple employees who worked in the company’s AI and machine learning groups believe that a lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction have hindered âOESiriâOE and the company’s AI technologies. Apple’s virtual assistant is apparently “widely derided” inside the company for its lack of functionality and minimal improvement over time. By 2018, the team working on âOESiriâOE had apparently “devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant.”

SiriâOE’s leadership did not want to invest in building tools to analyse âOESiriâOE’s usage and engineers lacked the ability to obtain basic details such as how many people were using the virtual assistant and how often they were doing so. The data that was obtained about âOESiriâOE coming from the data science and engineering team was simply not being used, with some former employees calling it “a waste of time and money…” Apple executives are said to have dismissed proposals to give âOESiriâOE the ability to conduct extended back-and-forth conversations, claiming that the feature would be difficult to control and gimmicky. Apple’s uncompromising stance on privacy has also created challenges for enhancing âOESiriâOE, with the company pushing for more of the virtual assistant’s functions to be performed on-device.

Cook and other senior executives requested changes to âOESiriâOE to prevent embarassing responses and the company prefers âOESiriâOE’s responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers, rather than AI-generated. There were also specific decisions to exclude information such as iPhone prices from âOESiriâOE to push users directly to Apple’s website instead. âOESiriâOE engineers working on the feature that uses material from the web to answer questions clashed with the design team over how accurate the responses had to be in 2019. The design team demanded a near-perfect accuracy rate before the feature could be released. Engineers claim to have spent months persuading âOESiriâOE designers that not every one of its answers needed human verification, a limitation that made it impossible to scale up âOESiriâOE to answer the huge number of questions asked by users.

Similarly, Apple’s design team repeatedly rejected the feature that enabled users to report a concern or issue with the content of a âOESiriâOE answer, preventing machine-learning engineers from understanding mistakes, because it wanted âOESiriâOE to appear “all-knowing.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Report: Apple’s AI and ‘Siri’ Efforts Hindered by Caution, Dysfunction

Long-time software engineer Blake1024 (Slashdot reader #846,727) writes:

We are thrilled to announce the release of Kiss v2.0, a comprehensive, Java-based, open-source, full-stack web development framework… Kiss v2.0 provides an even more seamless, out-of-the-box experience, including pre-configured front-end and back-end components… Key Features:

* Custom HTML controls* RESTful web services* Microservices architecture* Built-in authentication* SQL API integration* Robust reporting capabilities Kiss utilizes microservices, allowing developers to work on a running system without the need for rebuilds, redeploys, or server reboots… Production systems can be updated without any downtime. With proven success in commercial applications, Kiss v2.0 is ready for prime time. It’s not a beta, but a reliable solution for your web development needs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Long-time Slashdot Reader Announces Open Source, Java-Based, Full-Stack Web Development Framework

CNBC reports that 84 Amazon delivery drivers at a California facility “joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union said Monday, in a win for labor organizers that have long sought to gain a foothold at the e-retailer.”

An anonymous reader shared this follow-up report from Vox:

[T]hey unanimously ratified the contract, which will bring their wages from around $20 currently to $30 by September and would allow them to refuse to do deliveries they consider unsafe. But that victory is a bit complicated… They wear Amazon vests and drive Amazon-branded vehicles, have schedules dictated by Amazon, and can even be fired by Amazon. But they’re technically employed by Battle Tested Strategies (BTS), one of approximately 3,000 delivery contract companies that make up Amazon’s extensive delivery network. BTS voluntarily recognized the union after a majority of workers signed union authorization cards and negotiated the union contract.

Amazon has told Vox that its contract with BTS, which exclusively delivers for Amazon, was terminated “well before” workers notified the tech giant Monday, but that the contract hasn’t expired yet. The union said that the delivery people are still working for Amazon and that the contract goes through October, when it typically would auto-renew. What happens next depends on Amazon, the workers, and the interpretation of outdated US labor law… At the crux of the delivery driver issue is whether Amazon controls enough of what the workers do to be considered a joint employer. “If Amazon is able to get away with ignoring the workers’ decision and hiding behind the subcontractor relationships, then I’m afraid we’ll have yet another story of the failure of American labor law,” said Benjamin Sachs, a labor professor at Harvard Law School. “If this leads to a recognition that these drivers are Amazon employees, joint employees, then this could be massively important.”

One element of note: These workers organized in California, which has a lower bar for who is considered an employee, and by extension, who enjoys union protections… Another element that the National Labor Relations Board will likely have to decide is whether Amazon terminated the contract with BTS in order to avoid working with a union, something that would be illegal if they were considered employees.

The article also notes that elsewhere, 50 YouTube contractors also voted to unionize this week.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – 84 Amazon Delivery Drivers Just Won a an Hour Union Contract