It feels like we’ve been hearing about Star Trek: Discovery’s fifth season—even before we knew it would be its final—for a very long time at this point. But at long last, with the arrival of yet another new clip, we now know when Michael Burnham and her friends will begin their last tour of active duty.
Source: Gizmodo – Star Trek: Discovery’s Final Season Goes Monster Hunting For a Premiere Date
Expect the former in a Linux Mint point release later this year. Two of the most popular “traditional” – read Windows-like – desktops happened to land the same version number at once.…
Source: LXer – Cinnamon and KDE sync version numbers in desktop sibling rivalry
It’s been over a full year since the last season of The Boys, and while Gen V’s definitely kept the franchise going, it teed up some interesting developments for the mothership show’s return. While the next season is still a couple of months out, Prime Video’s released a first look at what’s coming next for their…
Source: Gizmodo – The Boys Are Back in Town, and They’re Going to the Polls
Tuesday the New York Times reported that while hosting the global climate summit, the United Arab Emirates also hoped to lobby for oil and gas deals around the world.
But Friday the United Arab Emirates announced that they’d also started a $30 billion climate fund, reports Reuters, and that fund “aims to attract $250 billion of investment by the end of the decade.”
The New York Times notes the fund started just months ago, and “at least 20 percent of the funds, would be earmarked for projects in the developing world, where it is especially difficult to finance clean energy projects because interest rates are high and lenders shy away from what they perceive as risky investments.”
The Washington Post notes that “It immediately becomes one of the world’s largest climate-focused investment funds.”
“This is a big deal,” said Mona Dajani, global head of renewables, energy and infrastructure at the law firm Shearman and Sterling. “We have seen other programs previously, but not at this level. They were too scattered, too small, not aligned to the broader financial sector.”
The lack of cash feeds into other challenges that can make it impossible to scale up clean energy in some countries. Without a steady pipeline of projects, there are no established supply chains, and nations find themselves locked out of markets for key components that are in high demand elsewhere, such as solar cells and critical minerals used to make giant batteries that store renewable power. The Global South will need an immense amount of such battery storage by the end of the decade, according to the Rockefeller Foundation, enough to store about as much power as is produced by 90 large nuclear plants. The storage is used to bottle wind and solar power and distribute it back into grids after dark and when the wind dies down.
The Post also reports that “the money to fund the projects will come largely from oil revenue.”
While the UAE framed its initiative as a call to global action, it is at least partly geared toward generating returns. It is one of several forays the UAE is making into clean-energy finance as it seeks to diversify its economy amid predictions the demand for oil will slump in coming years… The new initiative puts a spotlight on the UAE’s evolving role in the fight against climate change. The country is at once one of the world’s biggest contributors to warming, pumping massive amounts of oil into the global economy, while also using its fossil fuel wealth to put itself on the vanguard of energy innovation.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Investing Billion, the UAE Announces the World’s Largest Climate-Focused Investment Fund
Let’s talk about Grand Theft Auto for a bit, dear reader. Despite only having five mainline games in the series since breakout hit Grand Theft Auto III moved millions of PlayStation 2s in 2001, the “GTA” franchise has continued to be one of the most important in all of gaming. If you need evidence for that claim, look no further than the absolutely
Source: Hot Hardware – Rockstar’s GTA 6 Trailer Looms Near, What To Expect In This Month’s Big Reveal
Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson. (credit: Eric Berger)
Sir Richard Branson has ruled out putting more money into his lossmaking space travel company Virgin Galactic, saying his business empire “does not have the deepest pockets” any more.
Virgin Galactic, which was founded by Branson in 2004, last month announced it was cutting jobs and suspending commercial flights for 18 months from next year, in a bid to preserve cash for the development of a larger plane that could carry passengers to the edge of space.
The group has said it has enough funding to carry it through to 2026, when the bigger Delta vehicle is expected to enter service. But some analysts are expecting Galactic to ask investors for more money in about 2025.
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Source: Ars Technica – No further investments in Virgin Galactic, says Richard Branson
The PVR Vulkan driver being developed within Mesa for modern PowerVR graphics hardware has now landed support for using the upcoming PowerVR DRM kernel driver that is being upstreamed in Linux 6.8…
Source: Phoronix – Mesa 24.0 PVR Vulkan Driver Adds Support For New PowerVR Kernel Driver
This week the White House announced a series of “AI hackathons to strengthen critical mineral supply chains,” starting in February of 2024.
There’s 50 critical minerals are used in everything from electric motors and generators to the fuselage and wings of an airplane. So now the “Critical Mineral Assessments with AI Support” contest aims to “significantly speed up the assessment of the nation’s critical mineral resources by automating key steps” using AI and machine learning tools, according to a DARPA announcement on X, pointing to details on a new DARPA web page:
Clean energy infrastructure, along with many other next-generation technologies, consume more critical minerals than traditional energy sources, and expected demand for critical minerals used in clean energy will quadruple by 2040… The goal of this AI exploration effort is to transform the workflow from a serial, predominantly manual, intermittently updated approach, to a highly parallel, continuous AI-assisted capability that is comprehensive in scope, efficient in scale, and generalizable across an array of applications…
The challenge is that critical mineral assessments are labor intensive and using traditional techniques, assessing all 50 critical minerals would proceed too slowly to address present-day supply chain needs. An AI-assisted workflow could enable the U.S. Geological Survey to accomplish its mission, produce high-quality derivative products from raw input data, and deliver timely assessments that reduce exploration risk and support decisions affecting the management of strategic domestic resources.
While the primary focus will be critical minerals, it is expected that the resulting technologies and resulting data products will be valuable for a wide variety of U.S. government mission areas ranging from water resource management, to potential new clean energy sources.
It all started back in 2022, when the resource-identifying U.S. Geological Survey acknowledged that “The U.S. is under-mapped.” They’d hoped an online contest could close the gap — with a first prize of $10,000 (with $3,000 and $1,000 for the second- and third-place winner). Working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the government-supporting research nonprofit MITRE, DARPA and the U.S. Geological Survey all teamed up for the big “AI for Critical Mineral Assessment” competition.
Participants were given images of maps from somewhere in North America — along with a list of points without their latitude-longitude coordinates (just a pair of numbers indicating their position within that image). They’d have to find a way to automate the determination of real-world latitudes and longitudes. The contest recommended using other features on the map as reference points — like roads, streams, and elevation-indicating topographic lines, as well as government boundary lines (and the names of places on the map). And last December during the awards ceremony a DARPA official said they were “really really pleased at the response we got.”
The new 2024 AI hackathons are now intended to build on the challenges from that 2022 competition. One competitor had described it as a “well-organized competition, really engaging,” adding “I think the complexity of the maps that were part of the data set just made it a really interesting and engaging kind of problem.”
They noted that in the past we’ve always indicated data with maps — but that now, we’re trying to turn maps back into data…
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – US Announces AI Hackathons to Strengthen Critical Mineral Supply Chains
Amazon has released the first official teaser trailer for Fallout, its upcoming live-action series based on the best-selling video games. The clip gives us a look at Amazon’s take on the post-apocalyptic wasteland, and Yellowjackets actor Ella Purnell emerging from Vault 33 to meet it for the first time. The series will be set in Los Angeles 200 years after a nuclear war brought Earth to ruins.
The trailer arrives a few days after Amazon released stills from the show, now showing a deeper look at the characters and the horrors they’ll encounter in the wastes. And it so far seems a promising indication of how the series will approach its well-loved source material.
Starring alongside Purnell, Fallout also features Walton Goggins (The Hateful Eight) as a breakout ghoul, Aaron Moten (Emancipation) as a member of the Brotherhood of Steel and Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks) as a vault overseer. There’s also a dog named CX404, which we see in the video and in marketing materials toting around a severed hand. Fallout comes out on Prime Video on April 12 next year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-just-dropped-the-first-teaser-trailer-for-its-fallout-series-182055521.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Amazon just dropped the first teaser trailer for its Fallout series
Despite initial skepticism, House of the Dragon proved itself to be a solid return to the world of Westeros and a good show in its own right. The Game of Thrones prequel had its second season already locked in almost immediately after premiering, and after being technically allowed to film through the Hollywood strikes
Source: Gizmodo – House of the Dragon Comes Flying Back with a Vengeance
Based on Debian 12.2 “Bookworm,” Proxmox Backup Server 3.1 ships with secure boot and local sync jobs support. Here’s more on that!
Source: LXer – Proxmox Backup Server 3.1 Brings Secure Boot Compatibility
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland summarizes a video report from CNN:
: CNN anchor Jake Tapper interviewed TikTok’s head of public policy last year, asking if they censored content critical of the Chinese party. “We do not censor content on behalf of any government,” the spokesperson answered.
But this week CNN reviewed data the total number of hashtags on both Instagram and on TikTok for topics that might be embarrassing to the Chinese government — and found stark differences. — Hashtag #Uyghurs appears in 10.4X more posts on Instagram than on TikTok. — Hashtag #Tiananmen (referencing the 1989 pro-democracy protests) is 153 more likely to appear on Instagram than on TikTok.
“So yes, the content exists on TikTok, but there’s far less of it on TikTok than on other social media apps,” CNN’s Tapper says. “And that seems very convenient for the Chinese Communist Party.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Does TikTok Censor Content Critical of China? CNN Investigates
The Xbox app now plays nice with handheld consoles thanks to a new “Compact mode.” Windows-based handheld console users no longer need to navigate through tiny text and jumbled sidebars on relatively small screens. But Microsoft, you know what would be even better? A full version of Windows 11 made for handheld.
Source: Gizmodo – Microsoft’s Handheld Version of the Xbox App is a Good First Step; Now Do Windows
Astronomers have found a key ingredient for life in the outer reaches of the Milky Way galaxy. The discovery challenges our understanding of the origins of the element and potentially extends the galactic habitable zone.
The element that was found in a very unexpected location by a group of astronomers from the University of Arizona is phosphorus,
Source: Hot Hardware – Scientists Discover A Key Ingredient For Life At The Edge Of Our Galaxy
Capcom announced on the the social media network formerly known as Twitter, and now called X, that its “Outfit 3” DLC for all 18 launch characters in Street Fighter 6 is now available. Unfortunately for Capcom, the announcement did not go over so well, resulting in players calling out the publisher for its “dreadful pricing.” One user called
Source: Hot Hardware – Street Fighter 6 Gamers Rage At Capcom For Awful Monetization Tactics
The Linux Foundation’s own “Open Software Security foundation” has an associated project called Alpha-Omega funded by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon with a mission to catalyze sustainable security improvements to critical open source projects and ecosystems.
It was established nearly two years ago in February of 2022 — and this month announced plans to continue supporting the Rust Foundation Security Initiative:
2022 was also the first full year of operation for the Rust Foundation — an independent nonprofit dedicated to stewarding the Rust programming language and supporting its global community. Given the considerable growth and rising popularity of the Rust programming language in recent years, it has never been more critical to have a healthy and well-funded foundation in place to help ensure the safety and security of this important language.
When the Rust Foundation emerged, OpenSSF recognized a shared vision of global open source security baked into their organizational priorities from day one. These shared security values were the driving force behind Alpha-Omega’s decision to grant $460k USD to the Rust Foundation in 2022. This funding helped underwrite their Security Initiative — a program dedicated to improving the state of security within the Rust programming language ecosystem and sowing security best practices within the Rust community. The Security Initiative began in earnest this past January and has now been in operation for a full year with many achievements to note and exciting plans in development.
While security is a clear priority of the Rust language itself and can be seen in its memory safety-critical features, the Rust Project cannot reasonably be expected to foster long term, sustainable security without proper support and funding. Indeed, there is still a pervasive attitude across technology that cybersecurity is being managed and prioritized by “someone else.” The unfortunate impact of this attitude is that critical security work often falls on overburdened and under-resourced open source maintainers. By prioritizing the Security Initiative during their first full year in operation, the Rust Foundation has taken on the responsibility of overseeing — and supporting — security improvements within the Rust ecosystem while ensuring meaningful progress…
Alpha-Omega is excited to announce our second year of supporting the Rust Foundation Security Initiative. We believe that this funding will build on the good work and momentum established by the Rust Foundation in 2023. Through this partnership, we are helping relieve maintainer burdens while paving an important path towards a healthier and more secure future within the Rust ecosystem.
Meanwhile, this month the Rust Foundation announced that downloads from Rust’s package repository crates.io have now reached 45 billion — and that the foundation is “committed to facilitating the healthy growth of Rust through funding and resources for the community and the Project.
“After conducting initial planning and research and getting approval from our board of directors, we are pleased to announce our intention to help fulfill this commitment by developing a Rust Foundation training and certification program.”
We continue to be supportive of anyone creating Rust training and education materials. In fact, we are proud to have provided funding to a few individuals involved in this work via our Community Grants Program. Our team is also aware that commercial Rust training courses already exist and that global training entities are already developing their own Rust-focused programs. Given the value of Rust in professional open source, this makes sense. However, we are eager to introduce a program that will allow us to direct profits back into the Rust ecosystem.
As a nonprofit organization, we sit in a unique position thanks to the tools, connections, insights, administrative support, and resources at our disposal — all of which will add value to course material aimed at professional development and adoption. We see our forthcoming program as one tool of many that can be used to verify skills for prospective employers, and for those employers to build out their professional teams of Rust expertise. We will remain supportive of existing training programs offered by Rust Foundation member companies and we’ll look for ways to ensure this remains the case as program development progresses… There is no set launch date for the Rust Foundation training and certification program yet, but we plan to continue laying high-quality groundwork in Q4 of 2023 and the first half of 2024.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Rust Foundation Plans Training/Certification Program. Security Initiative Funded Through 2024
Interplay’s (and later Bethesda’s) Fallout games have always held a special place in the hearts of players. Waits between mainline installments have only grown longer, and there may be plenty of other post-apocalyptic worlds, but folks love the RPG series for its immersive world and black sense of humor. Fallout scratc…
Source: Gizmodo – Fallout’s First Trailer Welcomes You to a Familiar Post-Apocalypse
OpenAI is pushing the launch of its GPT Store to early 2024, according to an email seen by The Verge. The company introduced its GPT Builder tool in early November at its first developer conference, giving subscribers an easy way to create their own custom AI bots. At the time, OpenAI also said it would soon release the GPT Store for users to list their GPTs and potentially make money from them. It was initially slated for a November launch. But, with the surprise ouster of OpenAI’s since-reinstated CEO Sam Altman, the month didn’t quite pan out as planned.
“In terms of what’s next, we are now planning to launch the GPT Store early next year,” OpenAI said in its email to GPT Builder users on Friday. “While we had expected to release it this month, a few things have been keeping us unexpectedly busy!” The email also notes that the company has been making improvements to GPTs based on users’ feedback, and says some updates to ChatGPT are on the way.
OpenAI has been in the process of reorganizing its leadership following the turmoil of the past few weeks. The company confirmed on Wednesday that Altman was back as CEO, with Mira Murati now in place as CTO and Greg Brockman as President. It also announced the formation of a new initial board, which includes representation from Microsoft — its biggest investor — as a non-voting observer.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/openais-gpt-store-wont-be-released-until-2024-162113991.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – OpenAI’s GPT Store won’t be released until 2024
Every week is a big week when you’re preparing a pud for Christmas. Welcome back to my Christmas Pudding Chronicles. It’s week three of documenting my endeavor to make one of the United Kingdom’s most ubiquitous holiday cakes. While this wouldn’t be particularly compelling if I lived under the King’s roof, as an American, it is a new Christmas experience indeed.
If you’re joining me for the first time in this fruit cake fantasy, you can catch up on what a Christmas pudding is and how to soak the fruit here in week one, and read about how I steamed the cake here. Normally a Christmas pudding is made five Sundays before Christmas and “fed” once a week on Sundays. Each edition of this chronicle comes out on Saturday, so you can gather the ingredients you need and tend to your pudding the next day. That being said, feel free to jump in at any time. You don’t have to follow the rules quite like I’m doing, and your pudding doesn’t have to age quite as long.
I’m finally in the “curing the cake” stage, which involves a (completely optional) soak with brandy or another high-proof spirit like rum or whiskey. While you can skip this practice, wrap the pudding, and store it in a dark place until Christmas, doing this step will add flavor and moisture. I confess, “feeding” the pudding is one of the steps I’ve been most looking forward to. I’m not a fiend for alcohol, but I do love a good culinary process to keep up with. Plus, I want to check in on my prune-baby once a week to see how it’s advancing in age. If that happens to be when I dose my cake with alcohol, so be it.
As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, I used Nigella Lawson’s recipe as my guide, and reworked a thing or two here and there. Her website also gives a bit of advice on how to “feed” it. I cross-checked this with other blogs and it looks like general practice is to poke some holes into the pudding with a toothpick or skewer, and dab one to two tablespoons of liquor onto the cake, once a week. Easy enough.
However, before I could get to soaking, I needed a proper brandy. This week, I made it a point to patronize a very pretty liquor store in Manhattan. Sorry, wine and spirits store. I hadn’t prepared well in the first week when I needed to steep my dried fruit in sherry and I ended up using a $6 bottle from the corner liquor store down on my block in Brooklyn. No shade on them, they just don’t specialize in sherry. Or options.
I figured a poor-quality sherry would be passable to plump the sugary fruits, but soaking the cake should be done with a good-quality brandy. The brandy should be a high enough caliber to sip out of a glass alongside the Christmas pudding. I asked the staff at Flatiron Wines and Spirits for a brandy that would pair well with a spice cake or dark, dried fruit. They led me to a gorgeous bottle of Neversink Spirits, Orchard Brandy which is a blend of pear and apple brandies. It’s an American Christmas pudding, so this New York-made brandy seemed just right.
To feed your cake, grab a toothpick or a skewer, or even the sharp end of a probe meat thermometer. Uncover the Christmas pudding and poke holes into it. I spaced them about an inch away from each other and went around in a circle about an inch and a half inside of the edge of the cake. Then I made another concentric ring of holes an inch and a half inside from the first ring. You don’t have to be precise, this is more of a guideline depending on the bowl you ended up steaming your pudding in.
Generally, it looks like two tablespoons of brandy, or other high-proof alcohol, is the maximum. The only warning is, while you can’t under soak the pudding, you can definitely over soak it. Too much alcohol will make the pudding gummy or even muddy. There’s plenty of opportunity for alcohol in this dessert’s lifetime, so I used one tablespoon. Measure out the brandy into a small bowl, and using a pastry brush, daub the brandy across the surface and around the edge. Recover the bowl with the lid or plastic wrap and put it back in its storage space.
Now that the pudding is in its curing stage, I’m going to keep an eye out for any changes in its color, smell, and hydration. When I fed it today, the cake still had an enticing spicy smell, albeit much more subdued than when it was freshly steamed. The pudding seems well hydrated, if not slightly drier than on steaming day. I suspect weekly brandy anointments and keeping it tightly covered will help maintain a moist cake. Other sources say it’s normal for the cake to become slightly darker in color as it sits, and I will certainly report back what I notice next week. Until then, happy brandy soaking, pudding fam.
Source: LifeHacker – Allie’s Christmas Pudding Chronicles: Brandy Soaking
Tesla’s new Cybertruck is more than their first new model since 2020, reports the Verge:
Tesla announced a new “Powershare” vehicle-to-load charging capability, only available on the new Cybertruck. The feature will allow Cybertruck owners to power their camping equipment, power tools, or even their entire home during a blackout, just by using their electric truck as a mobile generator.
The truck also features a 240-volt outlet in the rear bed that can be used to charge other EVs. An image on Tesla’s website shows the Cybertruck charging a Model Y.
The Cybertruck can put out as much as 11.5kW, which is more than the Ford F-150 Lightning’s 9.6kW of onboard power or the GMC Sierra Denali EV’s 10.2kW. Tesla has been talking about manufacturing vehicles with bidirectional charging capabilities for several years now, first teasing the feature at its Battery Day event in 2020. Since then, many of its competitors have adopted the feature for their EVs, including Ford, GM, Hyundai, Kia, and others…
In essence, it treats high-capacity lithium-ion batteries not only as tools to power EVs but also as backup storage cells to charge other electric devices, an entire home, or even to send power to the electrical grid for possible energy savings… Customers who want to take advantage of the Powershare feature in their homes will need a Tesla Powerwall (of course) and a Wall Connector for the most seamless connection.
Tesla held a launch event for the vehicle on Thursday, and demand appears to be high. Jalopnik reports Tesla is now offering people who’d reserved a Cybertruck a $1,000 discount if they’ll instead order another Tesla model.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Tesla’s New Cybertruck Includes a ‘Powershare’ Bidirectional Charging Feature