ICT news

• Chess.com Visits Spike with New Cat-Themed AI Bot Named 'Mittens'

  22-01-2023 23:35 via games.slashdot.org
  
  On New Year's Day, Chess.com launched five chess-playing bots — each with a cat persona. But the Deseret News reports that something unexpected happened with "Mittens"...
  Interest generated by Mittens is outpacing the surge that came on the heels of the wildly popular, chess-centric Netflix miniseries from 2020, "The Queen's Gambit". Chess.com has averaged 27.5 million games played per day in January and is on track for more than 850 million games this month — 40% more than any month
  
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• Hobbyist's Experiment Creates a Self-Soldering Circuit Board

  22-01-2023 22:34 via build.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader wonkavader found a video on YouTube where, at the 2:50 mark, there's time-lapse footage of soldering paste magically melting into place. The secret?
  Many circuit boards include a grounded plane as a layer. This doesn't have to be a big unbroken expanse of copper — it can be a long snake to reduce the copper used. Well, if you run 9 volts through that long snake, it acts as a resistor and heats up the board enough to melt solder paste. Electronics engineer Carl Bug
  
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• Which Performs Better on Linux: Firefox or Chrome?

  22-01-2023 21:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Phoronix compares the performance of Firefox and Chrome on the Linux desktop. They used recent releases (at default settings) for both browsers on an Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" system with Radeon RX 6700XT graphics, concluding "out-of-the-box Google Chrome continues performing much better overall than Mozilla Firefox."
  One area where Firefox does better out-of-the-box is around the HTML5 Canvas such as measured via the CanvasMark test case. For the demanding JetStream 2 benchmark as one
  
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• From Halo to the Simpsons, Would Fictional Mad Scientists Pass Ethical Review?

  22-01-2023 20:34 via games.slashdot.org
  
  From Science magazine:Cave Johnson is almost ready to start a new study in his secret underground facility. The founder of the Michigan-based technology company Aperture Science, he's invented a portal gun that allows people to teleport to various locations. Now, he and his colleagues want to see whether they can make portals appear on previously unfit surfaces with a new "conversion gel" containing moon dust. "It may be toxic. We are unsure," he wrote in a recent research proposal.
  To test the
  
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• How OneCoin's 'Cryptoqueen' Scammed Investors Out of $4 Billion

  22-01-2023 19:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  CNN remembers how in 2016 Ruja Ignatova "touted her company, OneCoin, as a lucrative rival to Bitcoin in the growing cryptocurrency market." As OneCoin's co-founder, Ignatova told one audience in 2016 that "In two years, nobody will speak about Bitcoin anymore.
  "Sixteen months later, Ignatova boarded a plane in Sofia, Bulgaria, and vanished. She hasn't been seen since."
  Authorities say OneCoin was a pyramid scheme that defrauded people out of more than $4 billion as Ignatova convinced investors
  
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• Automation Caused More than Half America's Income Inequality Since 1980, Study Claims

  22-01-2023 18:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  A newly published study co-authored by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu "quantifies the extent to which automation has contributed to income inequality in the U.S.," reports SciTechDaily, "simply by replacing workers with technology — whether self-checkout machines, call-center systems, assembly-line technology, or other devices."Over the last four decades, the income gap between more- and less-educated workers has grown significantly; the study finds that automation accounts for more than hal
  
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• Astronomers Detect Radio Signal from Most Distant Galaxy Yet

  22-01-2023 17:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "Astronomers have detected a radio signal from the most distant galaxy yet," reports Space.com — thanks to a naturally occurring phenomenon called gravitational lensing."The signal is bent by the presence of another massive body, another galaxy, between the target and the observer," says researcher Nirupam Roy, an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the Indian Institute of Science. In a statement announcing the discovery, Roy says "This effectively results in the magnificat
  
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• Linux Foundation's New 'Open Metaverse Foundation' Launches

  22-01-2023 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Linux Foundation's new Open Metaverse Foundation wants to unite industries "to work on developing open source software and standards for an inclusive, global, vendor-neutral and scalable Metaverse."
  In a blog post this week the group's executive director explained the advantages of an open Metaverse:
  It can create new jobs and industries in the digital space. It can bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds while providing an amazing world where anyone can create their own oppor
  
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• Rodney Brooks Reviews 5-Year-Old Predictions, Makes New Ones on Crypto, Metaverse, Robots, AI

  22-01-2023 13:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  The Los Angeles Times explores an interesting exercise in prognisticating about the future. In 2018 robotics entrepreneur Rodney Brooks made a list of predictions about hot tech topics like robots, space travel, and AI, "and promised to review them every year until Jan. 1, 2050, when, if he's still alive, he will have just turned 95."His goal was to "inject some reality into what I saw as irrational exuberance." Each prediction carried a time frame — something would either have occurred by
  
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• Rodney Books Reviews 5-Year-Old Predictions, Makes New Ones on Crypto, Metaverse, Robots, AI

  22-01-2023 13:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  The Los Angeles Times explores an interesting exercise in prognisticating about the future. In 2018 robotics entrepreneur Rodney Brooks made a list of predictions about hot tech topics like robots, space travel, and AI, "and promised to review them every year until Jan. 1, 2050, when, if he's still alive, he will have just turned 95."His goal was to "inject some reality into what I saw as irrational exuberance." Each prediction carried a time frame — something would either have occurred by
  
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• Can California's Power Grid Handle a 15x Increase in Electric Cars?

  22-01-2023 09:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  California state officials "claim that the 12.5 million electric vehicles expected on California's roads in 2035 will not strain the grid," writes the nonpartisan and nonprofit news organization Cal Matters.
  "But their confidence that the state can avoid brownouts relies on a best-case — some say unrealistic — scenario: massive and rapid construction of offshore wind and solar farms, and drivers charging their cars in off-peak hours...."Powering the vehicles means the state must trip
  
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• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on GPT-4 Hype: 'People are Begging to be Disappointed and They Will Be'

  22-01-2023 05:36 via slashdot.org
  
  The Verge writes:OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has addressed rumors regarding GPT-4 — the company's as yet unreleased language model and latest in the GPT-series that forms the foundation of AI chatbot ChatGPT — saying that "people are begging to be disappointed and they will be." During an interview with StrictlyVC, Altman was asked if GPT-4 will come out in the first quarter or half of the year, as many expect. He responded by offering no certain timeframe. "It'll come out at some point, w
  
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• Industrial Espionage: How China Sneaks Out America's Technology Secrets

  22-01-2023 03:34 via slashdot.org
  
  The BBC reports:
  It was an innocuous-looking photograph that turned out to be the downfall of Zheng Xiaoqing, a former employee with energy conglomerate General Electric Power. According to a Department of Justice indictment, the US citizen hid confidential files stolen from his employers in the binary code of a digital photograph of a sunset, which Mr Zheng then mailed to himself. It was a technique called steganography, a means of hiding a data file within the code of another data file. Mr Zhe
  
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• Can Cities Transform 'Dead Downtowns' by Converting Offices Into Apartments?

  22-01-2023 00:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The Washington Post's editorial board recently commented on the problem of America's "dead downtowns. Tourists are back, but office workers are still missing in action.... [R]estaurants, coffee hangouts, stores and transit systems cannot sustain themselves without more people in center cities...."
  The problem? America "is in the midst of one of the biggest workforce shifts in generations: Many now have experienced what it is like to work from home and have discovered they prefer it."Their propos
  
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