ICT news

• Binance Temporarily Pausesd Bitcoin Transactions Over Network Congestion, Also Faces Government Scrutiny

  07-05-2023 23:52 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  CoinDesk reports that Binance "temporarily paused bitcoin withdrawals Sunday morning U.S. time as the Bitcoin blockchain became overwhelmed with pending transactions and sky-high fees."
  The company resumed withdrawals within two hours of its initial Twitter posting about the withdrawals.On-chain data shows that there are nearly 400,000 unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions, which is higher than anything seen during the bull runs of 2018 and 2021. The average transaction fee has also doubled since Mar
  
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• Binance Temporarily Paused Bitcoin Transactions Over Network Congestion, Also Faces Government Scrutiny

  07-05-2023 23:52 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  CoinDesk reports that Binance "temporarily paused bitcoin withdrawals Sunday morning U.S. time as the Bitcoin blockchain became overwhelmed with pending transactions and sky-high fees."
  The company resumed withdrawals within two hours of its initial Twitter posting about the withdrawals.On-chain data shows that there are nearly 400,000 unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions, which is higher than anything seen during the bull runs of 2018 and 2021. The average transaction fee has also doubled since Mar
  
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• America's FTC Warns Businesses Not to Use AI to Harm Consumers

  07-05-2023 22:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  America's consumer-protecting federal agency has a division overseeing advertising practices. Its web site includes a "business guidance" section with "advice on complying with FTC law," and this week one of the agency's attorney's warned that the FTC "is focusing intensely on how companies may choose to use AI technology, including new generative AI tools, in ways that can have actual and substantial impact on consumers."
  The warning came in a blog post titled "The Luring Test: AI and the engin
  
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• Florida EVs May Be Charged 'Inductively' By One Mile of Highway

  07-05-2023 21:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  A Norwegian company named ENRX "wants to inductively charge electric vehicles with 200 kW while driving on a section of highway in Florida," according to the "electric mobility industry" news site electrive.com.
  "A one-mile section of a four-lane highway near Orlando is to be electrified."ENRX has teamed up with the Central Florida Expressway Authority and the Aspire Engineering Research Center for an initiative to build a one-mile (1.6-kilometre) section on a four-lane highway near Orlando that
  
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• Ask Slashdot: Should Libraries Eliminate Fines for Overdue Books?

  07-05-2023 20:34 via ask.slashdot.org
  
  Fines for overdue library books were eliminated more than three years ago in Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco — as well as at the Los Angeles Public Library system (which serves 18 million people). The Hill reported that just in the U.S., more than 200 cities and municipalities had eliminated the fines by the end of 2019:
  Fines account for less than 1 percent of Chicago Public Library's revenue stream, and there is also a collection cost in terms of staff time, keeping cash on hand, ban
  
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• Cosmic-Ray Muons Used to Detect Underground Tombs In Naples

  07-05-2023 19:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shared this report from LiveScience:
  Cosmic rays and lasers have revealed that deep underneath the city streets of Naples, Italy, lie the remains of the Greeks who originally settled the area, as well as the catacombs of Christians who lived there during the Roman era nearly two millennia ago, a new study finds...
  The layers of contemporary buildings make it difficult to access ancient sewers, cisterns and tombs 33 feet (10 meters) underneath the streets, so a group of
  
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• ChatGPT is Powered by $15-an-Hour Contractors

  07-05-2023 18:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from NBC News:Alexej Savreux, a 34-year-old in Kansas City, says he's done all kinds of work over the years. He's made fast-food sandwiches. He's been a custodian and a junk-hauler. And he's done technical sound work for live theater.
  These days, though, his work is less hands-on: He's an artificial intelligence trainer.
  Savreux is part of a hidden army of contract workers who have been doing the behind-the-scenes labor of teaching AI systems how to analyze
  
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• Swift Creator's Company Builds New Programming Language 'Mojo' - a Python Superset

  07-05-2023 17:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  While working at Apple, Chris Lattner designed Swift to "fully leverage the power of LLVM," and "led a team for a while at Google to try to move Swift out of its Apple comfort zone, to become a replacement for Python in AI model development." That's according to a blog post by Jeremy Howard, an advisor to Lattner's Modular AI (which he co-founded in 2022 to build a next-generation AI platform for developers).
  "But sadly," Howard writes, Swift "did not receive the support it needed from either Ap
  
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• Linus Torvalds Cleaned Up the Intel LAM Code for Linux 6.4

  07-05-2023 16:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Last week Linus Torvalds personally cleaned up the x86 memory copy code for Linux 6.4, Phoronix reports — and this week "he's merged more of his own code as he took issue with some of the code merged by Intel engineers as part of their Linear Address Masking enabling."Back during the Linux 6.2 days at the end of last year, Linus rejected the Intel LAM code at the time for various technical issues. Intel then reworked it for Linux 6.4. This time around Linus merged Intel LAM into Linux 6.4
  
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• OpenAI CEO: Fully Remote Work for Startups is 'One of the Tech Industry's Worst Mistakes'

  07-05-2023 13:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  ChatGPT creator OpenAI is now valued at nearly $30 billion, reports Fortune — adding that CEO Sam Altman "still thinks startups are most effective when employees work together in an office."
  The idea of fully remote work becoming the norm has come and gone, he said this week at a fireside chat in San Francisco organized by the fintech company Stripe. "I think definitely one of the tech industry's worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups di
  
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• What Happens When AI Tries to Generate a Pizza Commercial?

  07-05-2023 09:34 via idle.slashdot.org
  
  The Today show's food reporter delivers a strange report on a viral AI-generated ad "for an imaginary pizza place called 'Pepperoni Hug Spot'."
  Everything looks slightly ... off. Generated by AI, the audience is reminded constantly through the uncanny valley that the people aren't real — and neither is the pizza. "Cheese, pepperoni, vegetable, and more secret things," says the voiceover, which is also artificially generated... "Knock, knock, who's there? Pizza magic," the AI narrator says
  
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• 'Faster, Leaner' Python 3.12 Released Today with Improvements to Speed, Multiprocessing

  07-05-2023 05:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Python 3.12 was released today, with improvements to speed and efficiency, reports InfoWorld. Core developers explained the improvements at this year's PyCon convention in Salt Lake City, Utah, including efforts to reduce Python's memory use, make the interpreter faster, and optimize compilation for more efficient code:Subinterpreters is a mechanism where the Python runtime can have multiple interpreters running together inside a single process, as opposed to each interpreter being isolated in i
  
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• Racehorse Owned by 391 Users of a Sports-Investment App Wins Kentucky Derby

  07-05-2023 03:34 via idle.slashdot.org
  
  This year's Kentucky Derby was won by a 15-to-1 longshot named Mage, reports sports magazine the Athletic. It was only the horse's third race — but the story gets even stranger:
  Mage is owned by a collective of horse racing fans that doesn't follow your standard ownership structure. Fans can purchase shares of a horse for as little as $50. It's a publicly owned racehorse. Mage has 391 owners on the Commonwealth app. Many were at the 2023 Kentucky Derby wearing Mage hats and they were shown
  
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• Bill Gates Visits Planned Site of 'Most Advanced Nuclear Facility in the World'

  07-05-2023 00:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Friday Bill Gates visited Kemmerer, Wyoming (population: 2,656) — where a coal plant was shutting down after 50 years. But Gates was there "to celebrate the latest step in a project that's been more than 15 years in the making: designing and building a next-generation nuclear power plant..."
  The new plant will employ "between 200 and 250 people," Gates writes in a blog post, "and those with experience in the coal plant will be able to do many of the jobs — such as operating a turbine
  
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