ICT news

• Russian Forces Suffer Radiation Sickness After Digging Trenches and Fishing in Chernobyl

  30-04-2023 23:55 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The Independent reports:Russian troops who dug trenches in Chernobyl forest during their occupation of the area have been struck down with radiation sickness, authorities have confirmed.
  Ukrainians living near the nuclear power station that exploded 37 years ago, and choked the surrounding area in radioactive contaminants, warned the Russians when they arrived against setting up camp in the forest. But the occupiers who, as one resident put it to The Times, "understood the risks" but were "just
  
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• Chess has a New World Champion: China's Ding Liren

  30-04-2023 22:34 via games.slashdot.org
  
  The Guardian reports:
  The Magnus Carlsen era is over. Ding Liren becomes China's first world chess champion. The country now can boast the men's and women's titleholders: an unthinkable outcome during the Cultural Revolution when it was banned as a game of the decadent West.
  After 14 games which ended in a 7-7 draw, the championship was decided by four "rapid chess" games — with just 25 minutes on each players clock, and 10 seconds added after each move. Reuters reports that the competitio
  
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• Droids for Space? Startup Plans Satellites With Robotic Arms For Repairs and Collecting Space Junk

  30-04-2023 21:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  The Boston Globe reports on a 25-person startup pursuing an unusual solution to the problem of space junk:"Imagine if every car we ever created was just left on the road," said aerospace entrepreneur Jeromy Grimmett. "That's what we're doing in space." Grimmett's tiny company, Rogue Space Systems Corp., has devised a daring solution. It's building "orbots" — satellites with robotic arms that can fly right up to a disabled satellite and fix it. Or these orbots could use their arms to collec
  
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• Ben & Jerry's Cofounder Launches Nonprofit Cannabis Line

  30-04-2023 20:34 via idle.slashdot.org
  
  The "Ben" in Ben & Jerry's "has gone from ice cream to cannabis with a social mission," reports the Chicago Tribune:Ben Cohen has started Ben's Best Blnz, a nonprofit cannabis line with a stated mission of helping to right the wrongs of the war on drugs. The company says on its website that 80% of its profits will go to grants for Black cannabis entrepreneurs while the rest will be equally divided between the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance and the national Last Prisoner Project, which is wo
  
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• Transition to EVs Cited as More Automakers Reduce Workforces

  30-04-2023 19:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  This February Ford cut 3,800 jobs, according to CNN, "citing difficult economic conditions and its major push toward electric vehicles... The veteran automaker said the layoffs were primarily triggered by its transition to electric vehicles, and a reduction in 'vehicle complexity.'"
  Then in March GM also "unexpectedly cut several hundred jobs to help it trim costs and form a top-tier workforce to guide its transition to an all-electric car company," according to the Detroit Free Press — wh
  
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• OpenAI CTO Says AI Systems Should 'Absolutely' Be Regulated

  30-04-2023 18:34 via slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: Mira Murati, CTO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, says artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems should be "absolutely" be regulated. In a recent interview, Murati said the company is constantly talking with governments and regulators and other organizations to agree on some level of standards. "We've done some work on that in the past couple of years with large language model developers in aligning on some basic safety standards for deployment of these models,"
  
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• Linux Foundation Announces DentOS 3.0, an Open Source Network OS for Disaggregated Networks

  30-04-2023 17:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  This month the Linux Foundation announced version 3.0 of DentOS, an open source network operating system using the Linux kernel, Switchdev, and other Linux-based projects for a standardized network operating system "without abstractions or overhead," according to the project's web page. "All underlying infrastructure — including ASIC and Silicon for networking and datapath — is treated equally; while existing abstractions, APIs, drivers, low-level overhead, and other open software ar
  
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• Facebook Advertisers Angry About Major Glitch That Temporarily Spiked Prices

  30-04-2023 16:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Last weekend around 2 a.m. Sunday, "Facebook's advertising system went haywire," reports Gizmodo, "overcharging customers and wasting money on ads that didn't work."
  Reports suggest Meta, the social network's parent company, charged some advertisers more than double what they agreed to pay, ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meta briefly stopped showing ads on part of its network with practically zero communication to its millions of customers.The company confirmed the bu
  
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• AI Coding Competition Pits GPT-4 Against Bard, GitHub Co-Pilot, Bing, and Claude+

  30-04-2023 13:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  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
  
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• China's Mars Rover Discovers Signs of Recent Water in Martian Sand Dunes

  30-04-2023 09:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  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, tho
  
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• Microsoft is Now Supporting Right-to-Repair Legislation

  30-04-2023 06:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  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 consume
  
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• Can OpenAI Trademark 'GPT'?

  30-04-2023 04:16 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  "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 infring
  
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• Red Hat's 30th Anniversary: How a Microsoft Competitor Rose from an Apartment-Based Startup

  30-04-2023 00:53 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  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
  
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