Northwestern University scientists may have figured out why pulling an all-nighter can leave us feeling loopy and downright giddy for days after. In a new study out this week, the researchers found that acute sleep deprivation in mice can trigger a rapid release of dopamine within the brain and boost its plasticity,…
Source: Gizmodo – Scientists Might Know Why You Feel Loopy After an All-Nighter
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on shipping KDE Plasma 6.0 as the KDE desktop option for Fedora 40. Additionally, as part of this change, the plan is to drop the KDE X11 session to leave only the KDE Plasma Wayland session available…
Source: Phoronix – KDE Plasma 6.0 Approved For Fedora 40 – Including Dropping The X11 Session
Boku no Natsuyasumi 2, which translates to My Summer Vacation 2, is the sequel to the chill simulation game, Boku no Natsuyasumi. The game follows Boku on summer vacation with his family in the countryside, as he spends his time fishing, collecting stag beetles, and making new friends. The game was originally released…
Source: Kotaku – 21 Years Later, This Cult-Classic Game Is Finally Playable In English
With the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III imminent, folks are noticing something unusual about the PlayStation 5 version: it doesn’t appear to have a platinum trophy. Oddly, the game is also treated as simply DLC for Modern Warfare II. Keep in mind that this is a full $70 video game. But currently, it’s…
Source: Kotaku – PS5 Trophies Treat Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Like DLC For MW2
Brave joins the growing list of browsers that come with built-in generative AI assistants. The open source browser developer has started rolling out an update for Brave on desktop, which gives users access to its AI assistant Leo. Brave introduced Leo through its Nightly experimental channel back in August and has been testing it ever since. The assistant is based on the Llama 2 large language model, which Microsoft and Meta had developed together for commercial and research purposes.
Like other AI assistants, users can ask Leo to do various tasks, such as creating summaries of web pages and videos, translating and/or rewriting pages and even generating new content. The Llama 2-powered Leo is available for free to all users, but Brave has also introduced a paid version capable of “higher-quality conversations.” Leo Premium, as it’s called, is powered by Anthropic’s Claude Instant and can produce longer and more detailed responses. Users will have to pay $15 a month for it, but they will also get priority queuing during peak periods and early access to new features.
In its announcement, Brave Software emphasized that Leo preserves users’ privacy. The developer said that conversations with Leo are not persisted on its servers and that the assistant’s responses are immediately discarded and “not used for model training.” It also explained that it doesn’t collect IP addresses and retain personal data that can identify a user. Plus, users don’t even have to create an account to use Leo.
Back in July, Brave came under fire after it was accused of selling copyrighted information to train artificial intelligence models without consent. “Brave Search has the right to monetize and put terms of service on the output of its search-engine,” the company’s Chief of Search, Josep M. Pujol, said at the time in response to the allegations. “The ‘content of web page’ is always an excerpt that depends on the user’s query, always with attribution to the URL of the content. This is a standard and expected feature of all search engines.”
Brave is rolling out Leo on desktop in phases over the next few days. Those using the browser on their Android and iOS devices, however, will have to keep an eye out for its release on mobile in the coming months.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/braves-ai-assistant-comes-to-its-desktop-browser-160010918.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Brave’s AI assistant comes to its desktop browser
Walmart is the third major retailer to formally and officially announce its Black Friday plans, after Target and Best Buy. Early Black Friday deals this year are good, and you should be checking them out if you haven’t already. However, make sure to shop smartly this Black Friday so you don’t end up duped or…
Source: LifeHacker – What to Expect From Walmart’s Early Black Friday Deals
Uber and Lyft have agreed to pay a combined $328 million in settlements following a wage theft investigation by the New York attorney general’s office. According to New York AG Letitia James, the companies’ policies “systematically cheated their drivers out of hundreds of millions of dollars in pay and benefits.” They’ll both now have to pay settlement funds to more than 100,000 current and former drivers in New York, and offer both minimum hourly pay rates and paid sick leave.
In the two settlements, Uber has to pay $290 million, while Lyft must pay $38 million. The AG’s office found both Uber and Lyft shortchanged drivers by deducting sales taxes from drivers’ commissions that should have been paid by riders between 2014 and 2017. They also did not offer paid sick leave. As a result of the settlement, drivers outside of New York City will be guaranteed an earnings floor of $26 per hour (NYC drivers already have minimum rates under Taxi & Limousine Commission regulations), and will earn one hour of sick pay for every 30 hours worked. This will be capped at 56 hours per year.
NYC drivers will get $17 per hour for sick leave, while drivers outside of the city will get $26 per hour. Both rates will be adjusted annually for inflation. Drivers can put in a claim for their share of the settlement on the New York Attorney General’s website. The companies will also be required to update their apps to improve the process for putting in sick leave requests and provide support for pay-related questions, plus earnings statements for drivers which explain their compensation in detail.
Uber separately settled with the Department of Labor today as well following two lawsuits over its failure to provide unemployment benefits for drivers. The company will now have to make quarterly payments into the New York State Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund to cover its drivers, and pay an as yet undisclosed amount in retroactive payments going back to 2013.
The New York Taxi Workers Alliance has sued multiple times seeking unemployment benefits for drivers, as the fight over whether they should be considered employees or independent contractors continues. “Today’s settlement is a victory for Uber drivers across the state who will no longer be denied timely access to life-saving benefits by Uber in their darkest hour, and New York taxpayers will no longer have to subsidize the billionaires at Uber and Lyft,” the NYWTA and Legal Services NYC said in a statement about the settlement. “Drivers for the state’s largest employer will now be able to access unemployment benefits moving forward without endless obstacles and denials.”
New York has been cracking down on app-based service providers in recent years amid a push by the Biden administration to see gig workers classified as employees. A California court, however, slapped down one such bill in March, allowing companies to continue classifying their drivers as contractors. But NY has made progress recently in securing more protections. In September, Uber, GrubHub and DoorDash were told they must pay their delivery workers a minimum wage.
Update, November 2 2023, 3:10PM ET: This story has been updated to include information on a second settlement Uber reached today with the New York Department of Labor, and a statement from the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/uber-and-lyft-must-pay-328-million-to-new-york-drivers-in-massive-wage-theft-settlement-155716817.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Uber and Lyft must pay 8 million to New York drivers in massive wage theft settlement
Bolt on your metal armor and pull out your automatic Beretta, because Robocop: Rogue City releases today. This new title from the developers of sleeper hit Terminator: Resistance has had almost no marketing, yet its extremely faithful adaptation of the film and Unreal Engine 5-powered graphics managed to garner the game a surprising amount
Source: Hot Hardware – Intel’s Latest Arc GPU Driver Claims Massive FPS Improvements Up To A Staggering 750%
Linux firmware upgrading utility fwupd has been updated today to version 1.9.7, a release that adds support for more hardware devices, new features, as well as various bug fixes.
Source: LXer – Fwupd 1.9.7 Adds Support for More Synaptics Prometheus Fingerprint Readers
The Beatles are back, sort of. The fab four just released a new song, the group’s first since 1995. “Now and Then” is being advertised as the final Beatles track, which makes sense given that two of the members have passed and the other two are well over 80 years old.
The song was built using a demo track from John Lennon dating back to the 1970s and a guitar track from George Harrison from 1995. The surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, finished off the tune with the help of modern machine learning technology.
The software, which was first used by director Peter Jackson when making the Get Back documentary for Apple, was able to split Lennon’s vocal from the piano without any bleed, giving the remaining Beatles free rein to add whatever they wanted. You can watch a documentary on the making of the song right here.
As for the song itself, it’s a relatively slow Lennon ballad, with his vocals being a highlight. McCartney lays down one of his effortless bass lines and Starr hits the drums. The guitar solo is in the style of Harrison, but not actually played by him, though he handles some of the rhythm guitar in the background. There’s also a full orchestral arrangement because, well, it’s the Beatles. This likely won’t go down as one of the group’s most beloved tracks, but that Lennon vocal is both haunting and beautiful.
“Now and Then” was supposed to come out back in 1995 as part of The Beatles Anthology, along with “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”, two other tracks culled from 1970s Lennon demos. Back in the 1990s, however, the technology just wasn’t there to separate Lennon’s vocal from the piano without some serious degradation to the original take.
The Beatles may say this is their last song ever, but we’ll report back in 2053 and see if that ends up being true. See you then. In the meantime, check out the track.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/listen-to-the-final-beatles-track-made-with-machine-learning-and-archival-recordings-153253946.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Listen to the ‘final’ Beatles song, ‘Now and Then,’ made with help from AI
Leftover cornbread is a sad, dusty thing. It’s hard to believe it could ever even be left over—the stuff is so exquisite when fresh—but Thanksgiving leads to leftover everything. Whether you made too much for your famous stuffing, or the cornbread muffins were forgotten at dinner, there’s a way you can give stale…
Source: LifeHacker – Make Crispy Corn Crackers From Leftover Cornbread
One of the core objectives of any confidential-computing implementation is
to protect a guest system’s memory from access by actors outside of the
guest itself. The host computer and hypervisor are part of the group that
is to be excluded from such access; indeed, they are often seen as
threat in their own right. Hardware vendors have added features like memory
encryption to make memory inaccessible to the host, but such features can
be difficult to use and are not available on all CPUs, so there is ongoing
interest in software-only solutions that can improve confidentiality. The
guest-first
memory patch set, posted by Sean Christopherson and containing work by
several developers, looks poised to bring some software-based protection to
an upcoming kernel release.
Source: LWN.net – [$] Guest-first memory for KVM
Microsoft halted all of its AI-generated polls on news articles after the tech company caught heat for having a poll appear beside a story about a woman’s death. The poll ran within Microsoft’s curated news aggregator platform Microsoft Start, and asked readers what they thought of the woman’s death.
Artificial intelligence has been the
Source: Hot Hardware – Microsoft’s AI Catches Heat For Tone Deaf Poll On Woman’s Tragic Death
NASA has announced a new streaming service called NASA+ that’s set to hit most major platforms next week. It’ll be completely free, with no subscription requirements, and you won’t be forced to sit through ads. NASA+ will be available starting November 8.
We launch more than rockets. This month, we launch our new streaming service, NASA+. https://t.co/McWnWOKXSu
No subscription req.
No ads. No cost. Family friendly!
Emmy-winning live shows
Original series
On most major platforms pic.twitter.com/5ffjptumUJ— NASA (@NASA) November 1, 2023
The space agency previously teased the release of its upcoming streaming service over the summer as it more broadly revamped its digital presence. At the time, it said NASA+ would be available on the NASA iOS and Android apps, and streaming players including Roku, Apple TV and Fire TV. You’ll also be able to watch it on the web.
There aren’t too many details out just yet about the content itself, but NASA says its family friendly programming “embeds you into our missions” with live coverage and original video series. NASA already has its own broadcast network called NASA TV, and the new streaming service seems to be an expansion of that. But, we’ll know more when it officially launches next Wednesday.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nasa-is-launching-a-free-streaming-service-with-live-shows-and-original-series-150128180.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – NASA is launching a free streaming service with live shows and original series
Julia Evans has posted a list of
confusing Git terms and behavior along with explanations of what is
actually going on.
“Your branch is up to date with ‘origin/main’”
This message seems straightforward – it’s saying that your main branch is
up to date with the origin!But it’s actually a little misleading. You might think that this means that
your main branch is up to date. It doesn’t. What it actually means is – if
you last ran git fetch or git pull 5 days ago, then your main branch is up
to date with all the changes as of 5 days ago.So if you don’t realize that, it can give you a false sense of security.
Source: LWN.net – Evans: Confusing git terminology
Home
Assistant 2023.11 is available. New features include a to-do list
manager, Matter
1.2 support, customizable tile cards, new integrations, and more. (LWN
looked at Home Assistant last month).
Source: LWN.net – Home Assistant 2023.11 released
The GNU awk text-processing utility, gawk, has released version
5.3.0. The main new features add compatibility with “The One True Awk” (also known
as “BWK awk”); version 5.3.0 adds CSV (comma-separated values) parsing and
the ability to use u escape sequences for Unicode code points.
Read on for other changes in the release.
Source: LWN.net – Gawk 5.3.0 released
NASA’s Lucy probe cuts its teeth with its first up-close encounter with an asteroid named Dinkinesh before moving on to observe 10 other asteroids on its 12-year journey. Lucy had been tracking the asteroid since September 3, 2023.
According to NASA, the encounter was the first time that Lucy got a close look at an object that, up to this
Source: Hot Hardware – NASA’s Lucy Probe Calls An Audible And Rushes A Dark And Mysterious Asteroid
Following Red Hat’s decision to limit access to the RHEL source code to their customers, various RHEL-based Linux distributions were caught in a tailspin. CIQ (Rocky Linux), SUSE, and Oracle decided to form the Open Enterprise Linux association (OpenELA) to collaborate around the development of distributions with compatibility against Red Hat Enterprise Linux and ensuring open and free access to EL source code. Today they are announcing initial source available for their EL8 and EL9 packages…
Source: Phoronix – OpenELA Publishes Initial Source Code For Building RHEL Derivatives
Believe it or not, it’s already been over a year since AMD released its desktop Ryzen 7000 series processors based on Zen 4, along with its socket AM5 platform that it plans to support through at least 2026 (AMD initially said through 2025, then later extended its commitment). What that all means is it’s not too early to talk about Zen 5.
Source: Hot Hardware – What AMD Said About Zen 5 Will Have You Excited For Its Next-Gen CPUs