Slashdot

Some of the water around Antarctica has been getting saltier. And that has affected the amount of sea ice at the bottom of the planet. From a report: A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that increases in salinity in seawater near the surface could help explain some of the decrease in Antarctic sea ice that have been observed over the past decade, reversing a previous period of growth. "The impact of Antarctic ice is massive in terms of sea-level rise, in terms of global warming, and therefore, in terms of extremes," said Alessandro Silvano, a senior scientist at the University of Southampton studying the Southern Ocean and lead author of the study. The findings mean "we are entering a new system, a new world," he said. The Times adds: "the Department of Defense announced it would be no longer be providing some of the satellite data that researchers use to monitor changes in sea ice."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Software engineer Sean Goedecke argues that AI coding agents have already been commoditized because they require no special technical advantages, just better base models. He writes: All of a sudden, it's the year of AI coding agents. Claude released Claude Code, OpenAI released their Codex agent, GitHub released its own autonomous coding agent, and so on. I've done my fair share of writing about whether AI coding agents will replace developers, and in the meantime how best to use them in your work. Instead, I want to make what I think is now a pretty firm observation: AI coding agents have no secret sauce. [...] The reason everyone's doing agents now is the same reason everyone's doing reinforcement learning now -- from one day to the next, the models got good enough. Claude Sonnet 3.7 is the clear frontrunner here. It's not the smartest model (in my opinion), but it is the most agentic: it can stick with a task and make good decisions over time better than other models with more raw brainpower. But other AI labs have more agentic models now as well. There is no moat. There's also no moat to the actual agent code. It turns out that "put the model in a loop with a 'read file' and 'write file' tool" is good enough to do basically anything you want. I don't know for sure that the closed-source options operate like this, but it's an educated guess. In other words, the agent hackers in 2023 were correct, and the only reason they couldn't build Claude Code then was that they were too early to get to use the really good models.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters: The European Union's landmark rules on AI will be rolled out according to the legal timeline in the legislation, the European Commission said on Friday, dismissing calls from some companies and countries for a pause. Google owner Alphabet, Facebook owner Meta and other U.S. companies as well as European businesses such as Mistral and ASML have in recent days urged the Commission to delay the AI Act by years. Financial Times adds: In an open letter, seen by the Financial Times, the heads of 44 major firms on the continent called on European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to introduce a two-year pause, warning that unclear and overlapping regulations are threatening the bloc's competitiveness in the global AI race. [...] The current debate surrounds the drafting of a "code of practice," which will provide guidance to AI companies on how to implement the act that applies to powerful AI models such as Google's Gemini, Meta's Llama and OpenAI's GPT-4. Brussels has already delayed publishing the code, which was due in May, and is now expected to water down the rules.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.