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Both create an aural oasis of sonic stillness. But only one let me watch John Wick 4 for free

For years, the first thing I've packed for any trip involving long-haul flights is a pair of over-the-ear active noise cancelling headphones. I adore the cocoon of quiet they create amid the constant noise of a jet – and appreciate the way they warm my ears and head while in the air.…

Next year Intel introduces a new transistor — RibbonFET — and a new way of powering it called "PowerVia." This so-called "backside power" approach "aims to separate power and I/O wiring, shifting power lines to the back of the wafer," reports Tom's Hardware, which "eliminates any possible interference between the data and power wires and increases logic transistor density." IEEE Spectrum explains this approach "leaves more room for the data interconnects above the silicon," while "the power interconnects can be made larger and therefore less resistive." And Intel has already done some successful powering tests using it on Intel's current transistors: The resulting cores saw more than a 6 percent frequency boost as well as more compact designs and 30 percent less power loss. Just as important, the tests proved that including backside power doesn't make the chips more costly, less reliable, or more difficult to test for defects. Intel is presenting the details of these tests in Tokyo next week at the IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits... [C]ores can be made more compact, decreasing the length of interconnects between logic cells, which speeds things up. When the standard logic cells that make up the processor core are laid out on the chip, interconnect congestion keeps them from packing together perfectly, leaving loads of blank space between the cells. With less congestion among the data interconnects, the cells fit together more tightly, with some portions up to 95 percent filled... What's more, the lack of congestion allowed some of the smallest interconnects to spread out a bit, reducing parasitic capacitance that hinders performance... With the process for PowerVia worked out, the only change Intel will have to make in order to complete its move from Intel 4 to the next node, called 20A, is to the transistor... Success would put Intel ahead of TSMC and Samsung, in offering both nanosheet transistors and backside power.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Insider: The recent tsunami of tech layoffs could leave a wave of union organizing in its wake. That's according to Skylar Hinnant, a senior QA tester at Microsoft's ZeniMax, who supported a successful union campaign at the gaming unit of the software giant... Within tech companies, roles such as quality assurance testers and contractors are less revered, so those workers are more likely to unionize, Hinnant explained. "In these roles, people will be treated differently, it's sort of derogatory," he added. Layoffs, cuts in perks, and other benefits, and a slowing of pay increases have marred the tech industry's reputation as a great place to work. That has kicked off a power struggle between employees and management. "When an employer lays off 16,000 employees in a day, that's a power play making employees realize how powerless they are," Rahul Dhaundiyal, a director of engineering at Indeed, told Insider... Dhaundiyal agreed with Hinnant that for lower-level tech workers the call to unionize rings louder. "In certain lower paid jobs where decision-making is top-down, where you are seen as a resource and not a human being to invest in, those kinds of roles end up maximizing disbalance and would unionize first," Dhaundiyal said.

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The international space station is equpped with four 39-foot blankets (11.8-meters), reports CBS News. The first one was delivered in December of 2000 — and now it's time for some changes: Two astronauts ventured outside the International Space Station Friday and installed the fifth of six roll-out solar array blankets — iROSAs — needed to offset age-related degradation and micrometeoroid damage to the lab's original solar wings. Floating in the Quest airlock, veteran Stephen Bowen, making his ninth spacewalk, and crewmate Woody Hoburg, making his first, switched their spacesuits to battery power at 9:25 a.m. EDT, officially kicking off the 264th spacewalk devoted to ISS assembly and maintenance and the seventh so far this year. NASA is in the process of upgrading the ISS's solar power system by adding six iROSAs to the lab's eight existing U.S. arrays. The first four roll-out blankets were installed during spacewalks in 2021 and 2022. Bowen and Hoburg installed the fifth during Friday's spacewalk and plan to deploy the sixth during another excursion next Thursday. The two new iROSAs were delivered to the space station earlier this week in the unpressurized trunk section of a SpaceX cargo Dragon. The lab's robot arm pulled them out Wednesday and mounted them on the right side of the station's power truss just inboard the starboard wings... As the station sailed 260 miles above the Great Lakes, the 63-foot-long solar array slowly unwound like a window shade to its full length. Well ahead of schedule by that point, the spacewalkers carried out a variety of get-ahead tasks to save time next week when they float back outside to install the second new iROSA. They returned to the airlock and began re-pressurization procedures at 3:28 p.m., bringing the 6-hour three-minute spacewalk to a close. With nine spacewalks totaling 60 hours and 22 minutes under his belt, Bowen now ranks fifth on the list of the world's most experienced spacewalkers. "Combined with the 95-kilowatt output of the original eight panels, the station's upgraded system will provide about 215,000 kilowatts of power."

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InfoWorld explores how the new Mojo program language "resembles Python, how it's different, and what it has to offer." The newly unveiled Mojo language is being promoted as the best of multiple worlds: the ease of use and clear syntax of Python, with the speed and memory safety of Rust. Those are bold claims, and since Mojo is still in the very early stages of development, it will be some time before users can see for themselves how the language lives up to them. But Mojo's originator — a company named Modular — has provided early access [through a limited-enrollment preview program] to an online playground: a Jupyter Notebook environment where users can run Mojo code and learn about the language's features and behavior... Mojo can be described as a "superset" of Python. Programs written in Python are valid Mojo programs, although some Python behaviors haven't yet been implemented... It's also possible to use the actual Python runtime for working with existing Python modules, although there is a performance cost. When Mojo introduces new syntax, it's for system-level programming features, chiefly manual memory handling. In other words, you can write Python code (or something almost exactly like it) for casual use cases, then use Mojo for more advanced, performance-intensive programming scenarios... Mojo's other big difference from Python is that Mojo's not interpreted through a runtime, as Python is. Mojo is compiled ahead-of-time to machine-native code, using the LLVM toolchain. To that end, the best performance comes from using features specific to Mojo. Python features are likely to come at the cost of emulating Python's dynamic behaviors, which are inherently slow — or again, by just using the Python runtime. Many of Mojo's native language features do one of two things. They're either entirely new features not found in Python at all, or expansions of a Python feature that make it more performant, although with less of Python's dynamism. For example, Mojo has its own fn keyword which defines a function with explicitly-typed and immutable-by-default arguments, and its own struct keyword which is less like a Python class and more like its C/C++ and Rust counterpart "with fixed layouts determined at compile time but optimized for machine-native speed." But "At a glance, the code closely resembles Python. Even the new Mojo-specific keywords integrate well with existing Python syntax, so you can run your eye down the code and get a general idea of what's happening." And then there's the speed... The notebook demos also give examples of how Mojo code can be accelerated via parallelism, vectorizing, and "tiling" (increasing cache locality for operations). One of the demos, a 128x128 matrix multiplication demo, yielded a claimed 17-times speedup over Python (using the Python runtime in the Mojo playground) by simply running as-is with no special modification. Mojo added 1866x speedup by adding type annotations, 8500x speedup by adding vectorized operations, and 15000x speedup by adding parallelization.

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Researchers at a London-based public research university had already discovered that for 5-10% of people with hypertension, the cause is a gene mutation in their adrenal glands. (The mutation results in excessive production of a hormone called aldosterone.) But that was only the beginning, according to a new announcement from the university shared by SciTechDaily: Clinicians at Queen Mary University of London and Barts Hospital have identified a gene variant that causes a common type of hypertension (high blood pressure) and a way to cure it, new research published in the journal Nature Genetics shows. The cause is a tiny benign nodule, present in one-in-twenty people with hypertension. The nodule produces a hormone, aldosterone, that controls how much salt is in the body. The new discovery is a gene variant in some of these nodules which leads to a vast, but intermittent, over-production of the hormone. The gene variant discovered today causes several problems which makes it hard for doctors to diagnose some patients with hypertension. Firstly, the variant affects a protein called CADM1 and stops cells in the body from 'talking' to each other and saying that it is time to stop making aldosterone. The fluctuating release of aldosterone throughout the day is also an issue for doctors, which at its peak causes salt overload and hypertension. This fluctuation explains why patients with the gene variant can elude diagnosis unless they happen to have blood tests at different times of day. The researchers also discovered that this form of hypertension could be cured by unilateral adrenalectomy — removing one of the two adrenal glands. Following removal, previously severe hypertension despite treatment with multiple drugs disappeared, with no treatment required through many subsequent years of observation. Fewer than 1% of people with hypertension caused by aldosterone are identified because aldosterone is not routinely measured as a possible cause. The researchers are recommending that aldosterone is measured through a 24-hour urine test rather than one-off blood measurements, which will discover more people living with hypertension but going undiagnosed.

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In less than two years, NASA plans to have astronauts walking on the moon again — the first time in over half a century. "And one potential surprise could be detecting life on the moon," reports Space.com: New research suggests that future visitors to the lunar south pole region should be on the lookout for evidence of life in super-cold permanently shadowed craters — organisms that could have made the trek from Earth. Microbial life could potentially survive in the harsh conditions near the lunar south pole, suggested Prabal Saxena, a planetary researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "One of the most striking things our team has found is that, given recent research on the ranges in which certain microbial life can survive, there may be potentially habitable niches for such life in relatively protected areas on some airless bodies," Saxena told Space.com. Indeed, the lunar south pole may possess the properties that can enable survival and potentially even episodic growth of certain microbial life, Saxena said. "We're currently working on understanding which specific organisms may be most suited for surviving in such regions and what areas of the lunar polar regions, including places of interest relevant to exploration, may be most amenable to supporting life," he said. In work presented at a recent science workshop on the potential Artemis 3 landing sites, Saxena and study members reported that the lunar south pole may contain substantial surface niches that could be potentially habitable for a number of microorganisms. While it's possible organic molecules from earth might have been hurled to the moon after a meteor impact, there's a much more likely possibility. A NASA organic geochemist on the study views humans as "the most likely vector, given the extensive data that we have about our history of exploration..." Especially if humans start visiting these temperate radiation-protected sites...

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ZDNet asks the million-dollar question. "Despite the potential for vast productivity gains from generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot, will technology professionals' jobs actually grow more complicated? " People can now pump out code on demand in an abundance of languages, from Java to Python, along with helpful recommendations. Already, 95% of developers in a recent survey from Sourcegraph report they use Copilot, ChatGPT, and other gen AI tools this way. But auto-generating new code only addresses part of the problem in enterprises that already maintain unwieldy codebases, and require high levels of cohesion, accountability, and security. For starters, security and quality assurance tasks associated with software jobs aren't going to go away anytime soon. "For programmers and software engineers, ChatGPT and other large language models help create code in almost any language," says Andy Thurai, analyst with Constellation Research, before talking about security concerns. "However, most of the code that is generated is security-vulnerable and might not pass enterprise-grade code. So, while AI can help accelerate coding, care should be taken to analyze the code, find vulnerabilities, and fix it, which would take away some of the productivity increase that AI vendors tout about." Then there's code sprawl. An analogy to the rollout of generative AI in coding is the introduction of cloud computing, which seemed to simplify application acquisition when first rolled out, and now means a tangle of services to be managed. The relative ease of generating code via AI will contribute to an ever-expanding codebase — what the Sourcegraph survey authors refer to as "Big Code". A majority of the 500 developers in the survey are concerned about managing all this new code, along with code sprawl, and its contribution to technical debt. Even before generative AI, close to eight in 10 say their codebase grew five times over the last three years, and a similar number struggle with understanding existing code generated by others. So, the productivity prospects for generative AI in programming are a mixed bag.

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The Associated Press reports: Tracking someone through apps and devices like the popular Apple AirTag without their consent could soon be deemed a criminal offense in Ohio, after the state's Republican-led Senate advanced the measure Wednesday with a unanimous bipartisan vote... [V]iolators could be charged with a new first-degree misdemeanor offense of the "illegal use of a device or application," resulting in up to 180 days in jail. If the individual holds a prior conviction of menacing by stalking, the charge could escalate to a fourth-degree felony, resulting in six to 18 months in jail... There is no known opposition to the measure. Exceptions to the proposal include some law enforcement activity; parents or guardians tracking their children; caregivers tracking an elderly or disabled person they are entrusted with; a non-private investigator acting on behalf of a "legitimate business purpose;" and private investigators on certain cases. The bill now heads to Ohio's House of Representatives for further consideration.

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This week venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published "his views on AI, the risks it poses and the regulation he believes it requires," reports CNBC. But they add that "In trying to counteract all the recent talk of 'AI doomerism,' he presents what could be seen as an overly idealistic perspective of the implications..." Though he starts off reminding readers that AI "doesn't want to kill you, because it's not alive... AI is a machine — it's not going to come alive any more than your toaster will." Andreessen writes that there's a "wall of fear-mongering and doomerism" in the AI world right now. Without naming names, he's likely referring to claims from high-profile tech leaders that the technology poses an existential threat to humanity... Tech CEOs are motivated to promote such doomsday views because they "stand to make more money if regulatory barriers are erected that form a cartel of government-blessed AI vendors protected from new startup and open source competition," Andreessen wrote... Andreessen claims AI could be "a way to make everything we care about better." He argues that AI has huge potential for productivity, scientific breakthroughs, creative arts and reducing wartime death rates. "Anything that people do with their natural intelligence today can be done much better with AI," he wrote. "And we will be able to take on new challenges that have been impossible to tackle without AI, from curing all diseases to achieving interstellar travel...." He also promotes reverting to the tech industry's "move fast and break things" approach of yesteryear, writing that both big AI companies and startups "should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can" and that the tech "will accelerate very quickly from here — if we let it...." Andreessen says there's work to be done. He encourages the controversial use of AI itself to protect people against AI bias and harms... In Andreessen's own idealist future, "every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful." He expresses similar visions for AI's role as a partner and collaborator for every person, scientist, teacher, CEO, government leader and even military commander. Near the end of his post, Andreessen points out what he calls "the actual risk of not pursuing AI with maximum force and speed." That risk, he says, is China, which is developing AI quickly and with highly concerning authoritarian applications... To head off the spread of China's AI influence, Andreessen writes, "We should drive AI into our economy and society as fast and hard as we possibly can." CNBC also points out that Andreessen himself "wants to make money on the AI revolution, and is investing in startups with that goal in mind." But Andreessen's sentiments are clear. "Rather than allowing ungrounded panics around killer AI, 'harmful' AI, job-destroying AI, and inequality-generating AI to put us on our back feet, we in the United States and the West should lean into AI as hard as we possibly can."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times: Two senators sent a letter to TikTok's chief executive on Tuesday, accusing the company of making misleading claims to Congress around how it stores and handles American user data, and demanding answers to more than a dozen questions by the end of next week. The letter, from Senators Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, and Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, focused on how sensitive data about American users may be stored in China and how employees there may have access to it. The lawmakers said recent reports from The New York Times and Forbes raised questions about statements made during congressional testimony in March by Shou Chew, TikTok's chief executive, and in an October 2021 hearing involving Michael Beckerman, TikTok's head of public policy for the Americas. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. "We are deeply troubled by TikTok's recurring pattern of providing misleading, inaccurate or false information to Congress and its users in the United States, including in response to us during oversight hearings and letters," the senators wrote... Forbes reported last month that TikTok has stored the sensitive financial information of creators, including Social Security numbers and tax IDs, on servers in China, where employees there can have access to them... The Times reported earlier in the month that American user data, including driver's licenses and potentially illegal content such as child sexual abuse materials, was shared at TikTok and ByteDance through an internal messaging and collaboration tool called Lark. The information was often available in Lark "groups" — chat rooms of employees — with thousands of members, alarming some workers because ByteDance workers in China and elsewhere could easily see the material.

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Microsoft retiring the calendar board view a few short years

That didn't take long. Relatively speaking, anyway. Microsoft has drained the Moca cup for Outlook.…

The Associated Press reports: The artificial intelligence chatbot asked the believers in the fully packed St. Paul's church in the Bavarian town of Fuerth to rise from the pews and praise the Lord. The ChatGPT chatbot, personified by an avatar of a bearded Black man on a huge screen above the altar, then began preaching to the more than 300 people who had shown up on Friday morning for an experimental Lutheran church service almost entirely generated by AI. "Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year's convention of Protestants in Germany," the avatar said with an expressionless face and monotonous voice. The 40-minute service — including the sermon, prayers and music — was created by ChatGPT and Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna. "I conceived this service — but actually I rather accompanied it, because I would say about 98% comes from the machine," the 29-year-old scholar told The Associated Press... At times, the AI-generated avatar inadvertently drew laughter as when it used platitudes and told the churchgoers with a deadpan expression that in order "to keep our faith, we must pray and go to church regularly." The service was included as part of a Protestant convention that's held every two years, according to the article. The theme of this year's event? "Now is the time."

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Slashdot reader e065c8515d206cb0e190 shared the big announcement from Debian.org: After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 12 (code name bookworm). bookworm will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team... This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as obsolete. 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for bookworm is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code. bookworm has more translated man pages than ever thanks to our translators who have made man-pages available in multiple languages such as: Czech, Danish, Greek, Finnish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. All of the systemd man pages are now completely available in German. The Debian Med Blend introduces a new package: shiny-server which simplifies scientific web applications using R. We have kept to our efforts of providing Continuous Integration support for Debian Med team packages. Install the metapackages at version 3.8.x for Debian bookworm. The Debian Astro Blend continues to provide a one-stop solution for professional astronomers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists with updates to almost all versions of the software packages in the blend. astap and planetary-system-stacker help with image stacking and astrometry resolution. openvlbi, the open source correlator, is now included. Support for Secure Boot on ARM64 has been reintroduced: users of UEFI-capable ARM64 hardware can boot with Secure Boot mode enabled to take full advantage of the security feature. 9to5Linux has screenshots, and highlights some new features: Debian 12 also brings read/write support for APFS (Apple File System) with the apfsprogs and apfs-dkms utilities, a new tool called ntfs2btrfs that lets you convert NTFS drives to Btrfs, a new malloc implementation called mimalloc, a new kernel SMB server called ksmbd-tools, and support for the merged-usr root file system layout... This release also includes completely new artwork called Emerald, designed (once again) by Juliette Taka. New fonts are also present in this major Debian release, along with a new fnt command-line tool for accessing 1,500 DFSG-compliant fonts. Debian 12 "bookworm" ships with several desktop environments, including: Gnome 43, KDE Plasma 5.27, LXDE 11, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, Xfce 4.18

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CNN summarizes the issue. "A recent advisory from U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy says there's not enough evidence to determine whether social media is safe enough for children and adolescents when it comes to their mental health." (Although a CNN news anchor points out that "Nearly all of the research points to negative impacts.") CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent interviewed U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy "to examine what led him to sound the alarm, and who should be responsible for tackling the issue." And the surgeon general remembers when his five-year-old daughter asked to post a picture on social media. "I think finding the right balance is not easy, in part because, you know, the platforms weren't necessarily designed for balance. They were designed to maximize how much time we spend on them." CNN: How worried are you? When people hear something coming from the surgeon general's office, they think of, you know, smoking, opioids, things like this. Social media — is it at that level of concern for you? Surgeon General: Yes, I would say yes, it is. And, and — but it's it's more complicated... because we know that some kids do actually get benefit from their experience of social media. Some are able to connect more easily with friends and family, to express themselves more creatively and more openly than they otherwise would, and to find community... But one of the things that has become an increasing source of worry for me is that the the association between social media use and harmful outcomes... [W]e're asking parents to somehow figure it out all on their own. And the reason I issued an advisory on this topic is I worry that we have not taken enough action to support parents and kids... CNN: What is the level of evidence about the dangers of social media and what is the level of evidence that you want? I mean, what does it take for you as a surgeon general to act on this...? Surgeon General: I think the first question I'm asking is where is the evidence of safety...? There's a lot of association data, right, that's showing an association between use and certain and negative outcomes, like for example, for kids who who use more than 3 hours of social media a day, they face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms. But we also know that kids are telling us in their own words and their own experience how they're experiencing social media. So, for example, about nearly half of adolescents are saying that using social media makes them feel worse about their body image... And one of the consistent messages I hear from researchers who's been studying this area for a long time is that they are having a hard time getting access to the data from social media companies. You know, as a parent, I don't ever want to feel like someone or anyone is hiding information from me about how a product affects my child. But that's how a lot of parents are feeling right now. And so that's a place where I think transparency matters. Let's get the data out there so independent researchers can assess it and can help us understand the harms and benefits and which kids are most impacted so we can design, you know, our approach, you know, in a more informed way... One of the things we call for in my advisory is for the policymakers to step in and establish actual, transparent, enforceable safety standards like we do for other products so that parents have some reassurance around safety... This technology is already being used by 95% of kids, Right. And I don't think that's realistic to put the genie back in the bottle here or to say somehow nobody should be using social media, that that's not the goal here... We don't like leave it up to car manufacturers to determine whether or not they've hit the standards or not. We don't do that with medications either. There should be, you know, independent authority that parents can trust are looking primarily in solely out for the welfare of their kids, and they should be the ones who enforce these standards.... You know, just to put it bluntly, I do not think we have done our job as a society to have the backs of kids and parents on this because we haven't moved fast enough to get the information to ultimately guide them on safe use... [P]arents across the country, people are trying to do the best they can with limited information. The surgeon general also says their ideal legislation would also "help to reduce kids exposure to harmful content" and include "restrictions on features that seek to manipulate kids into spending excessive amounts of time on these platforms."

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We already have automated processes that detect bugs, test solutions, and generate documentation, notes a new post on Stack Overflow's blog. But beyond that, several developers "have written in the past on the idea of self-healing code. Head over to Stack Overflow's CI/CD Collective and you'll find numerous examples of technologists putting this ideas into practice." Their blog post argues that self-healing code "is the future of software development." When code fails, it often gives an error message. If your software is any good, that error message will say exactly what was wrong and point you in the direction of a fix. Previous self-healing code programs are clever automations that reduce errors, allow for graceful fallbacks, and manage alerts. Maybe you want to add a little disk space or delete some files when you get a warning that utilization is at 90% percent. Or hey, have you tried turning it off and then back on again? Developers love automating solutions to their problems, and with the rise of generative AI, this concept is likely to be applied to both the creation, maintenance, and the improvement of code at an entirely new level... "People have talked about technical debt for a long time, and now we have a brand new credit card here that is going to allow us to accumulate technical debt in ways we were never able to do before," said Armando Solar-Lezama, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. "I think there is a risk of accumulating lots of very shoddy code written by a machine," he said, adding that companies will have to rethink methodologies around how they can work in tandem with the new tools' capabilities to avoid that. Despite the occasional "hallucination" of non-existent information, Stack Overflow's blog acknowledges that large-language models improve when asked to review their response, identify errors, or show its work. And they point out the project manager in charge of generative models at Google "believes that some of the work of checking the code over for accuracy, security, and speed will eventually fall to AI." Google is already using this technology to help speed up the process of resolving code review comments. The authors of a recent paper on this approach write that, "As of today, code-change authors at Google address a substantial amount of reviewer comments by applying an ML-suggested edit. We expect that to reduce time spent on code reviews by hundreds of thousands of hours annually at Google scale. Unsolicited, very positive feedback highlights that the impact of ML-suggested code edits increases Googlers' productivity and allows them to focus on more creative and complex tasks...." Recently, we've seen some intriguing experiments that apply this review capability to code you're trying to deploy. Say a code push triggers an alert on a build failure in your CI pipeline. A plugin triggers a GitHub action that automatically send the code to a sandbox where an AI can review the code and the error, then commit a fix. That new code is run through the pipeline again, and if it passes the test, is moved to deploy... Right now his work happens in the CI/CD pipeline, but [Calvin Hoenes, the plugin's creator] dreams of a world where these kind of agents can help fix errors that arise from code that's already live in the world. "What's very fascinating is when you actually have in production code running and producing an error, could it heal itself on the fly?" asks Hoenes... For now, says Hoenes, we need humans in the loop. Will there come a time when computer programs are expected to autonomously heal themselves as they are crafted and grown? "I mean, if you have great test coverage, right, if you have a hundred percent test coverage, you have a very clean, clean codebase, I can see that happening. For the medium, foreseeable future, we probably better off with the humans in the loop." Last month Stack Overflow themselves tried an AI experiment that helped users to craft a good title for their question.

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The Associated Press reports: Two apologetic lawyers responding to an angry judge in Manhattan federal court blamed ChatGPT Thursday for tricking them into including fictitious legal research in a court filing... [Attorney Steven A. Schwartz] told U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel he was "operating under a misconception ... that this website was obtaining these cases from some source I did not have access to." He said he "failed miserably" at doing follow-up research to ensure the citations were correct. "I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases," Schwartz said... The judge confronted Schwartz with one legal case invented by the computer program. It was initially described as a wrongful death case brought by a woman against an airline only to morph into a legal claim about a man who missed a flight to New York and was forced to incur additional expenses. "Can we agree that's legal gibberish?" Castel asked. Schwartz said he erroneously thought that the confusing presentation resulted from excerpts being drawn from different parts of the case. When Castel finished his questioning, he asked Schwartz if he had anything else to say. "I would like to sincerely apologize," Schwartz said. He added that he had suffered personally and professionally as a result of the blunder and felt "embarrassed, humiliated and extremely remorseful." He said that he and the firm where he worked — Levidow, Levidow & Oberman — had put safeguards in place to ensure nothing similar happens again. An attorney for the law firm also told the judge that lawyers have historically had a hard time with technology, particularly new technology. "And it's not getting easier."

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This week the Linux Foundation and the National Spectrum Consortium "announced formal collaboration" on developing software prototypes and demonstrations for Open RAN (open radio access network): The two organizations have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to solidify their working relationship and commitment to minimizing barriers to further R&D necessary for OpenRAN acceleration within the United States. More open and flexible wireless networks ultimately increase vendor diversity and competition, prevent vendor lock-in, increase innovation in wireless networking technology, lower deployment and operational costs, and even increase security and energy efficiency. "We are eager to work with the NSC in creating a stable, open, secure reference stack for Open RAN," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge & IoT, the Linux Foundation. "By combining resources, we'll accelerate access to Open RAN and wireless technology across the United States across verticals and into government, academia, and small business." The collaborations goals include: Establish an open source reference software architecture for Open RAN that will kickstart academic and commercial R&D by lowering the cost and complexity of entry Rally support from industry with guidance and funds to leap forward in a true open and secure RAN

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Because he targeted universities and airlines, the FBI had dubbed him the Unabomber, reports the Associated Press: Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died Saturday. He was 81... Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told The Associated Press. He was found unresponsive in his cell early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 a.m., she said. A cause of death was not immediately known. Before his transfer to the prison medical facility, he had been held in the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years for a campaign of terror that set universities nationwide on edge. He admitted committing 16 bombings from 1978 and 1995, permanently maiming several of his victims. Years before the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax mailing, the "Unabomber's" deadly homemade bombs changed the way Americans mailed packages and boarded airplanes, even virtually shutting down air travel on the West Coast in July 1995. He forced The Washington Post, in conjunction with The New York Times, to make the agonizing decision in September 1995 to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future," which claimed modern society and technology was leading to a sense of powerlessness and alienation. [The Post published it "at the urging of federal authorities, after the bomber said he would desist from terrorism if a national publication published his treatise."] But it led to his undoing. Kaczynski's brother David and David's wife, Linda Patrik, recognized the treatise's tone and tipped off the FBI, which had been searching for the "Unabomber" for years in nation's longest, costliest manhunt. Authorities in April 1996 found him in a 10-by-14-foot (3-by-4-meter) plywood and tarpaper cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, that was filled with journals, a coded diary, explosive ingredients and two completed bombs. A psychiatrist who interview him in prison said Kaczynski suffered from persecutorial delusions, the article points out. "I certainly don't claim to be an altruist or to be acting for the 'good' (whatever that is) of the human race," Kaczynski wrote on April 6, 1971. "I act merely from a desire for revenge." A stand-up comic once joked that the only technology that Kaczynski didn't have a problem with....was bombs.

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CNN explores tech-company efforts to curtail remote working. "Salesforce is trying to lure staff into offices by offering to donate $10 to a local charity for each day an employee comes in from June 12 to June 23, according to an internal Slack message reported on by Fortune." CNN notes a recent walk-out at Amazon protesting (in part) new return-to-office policies, as well as Meta's upcoming three-days-a-week in-office mandate. But CNN adds that it's Google that "has long been a bellwether for workplace policies in the tech industry and beyond" — and that recently Google announced plans to factor in-person attendance into its performance reviews. "Overnight, workers' professionalism has been disregarded in favor of ambiguous attendance tracking practices tied to our performance evaluations," Chris Schmidt, a software engineer at Google and member of the grassroots Alphabet Workers Union, told CNN in a statement. "The practical application of this new policy will be needless confusion amongst workers and a disregard for our various life circumstances... " Schmidt said that even if you go into the office, there's no guarantee you'll have people on your team to work with or even a desk to sit at. "Many teams are distributed, and for some of us there may not be anyone to collaborate with in our physical office locations," Schmidt said. "Currently, New York City workers do not even have enough desks and conference rooms for workers to use comfortably." A Google spokesperson countered that its policy of working in the office three days a week is "going well, and we want to see Googlers connecting and collaborating in-person, so we're limiting remote work to exception only...."

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