WEDNESDAY, 29 JANUARY 2025, 00:56
After Donald Trump’s reckless bonfire of safeguards, our best plan is to become tech champions ourselves
It was only 11 years ago that Prof Stephen Hawking declared that explosive and untrammelled growth in artificial intelligence could menace the future of humanity.
Two years ago, more than a thousand leaders in artificial intelligence, fearing “loss of control” given its exponential...
Research into the disease has never been more far-reaching, but there is little consensus as to what is causing the rocketing rates of diagnosis in young adults
In 2022, around 16% of the 20 million people with cancer worldwide were under 50. Cancer has always been markedly more of an older person’s disease, says Lynn Turner, director of research at Worldwide Cancer Research. But between 1990...
July saw the news that Meta had launched a powerful open-source AI model, Llama 3.1. But the Free Software Foundation evaluated Llama 3.1’s license agreement, and announced this week that “this is not a free software license and you should not use it, nor any software released under it.”Not only does it deny users their freedom, but it also purports to hand over powers to the licensors that...
Evolution was fueled by endosymbiosis, cellular alliances in which one microbe makes a permanent home inside another. For the first time, biologists made it happen in the lab.
Among the findings in an SIU report on the contract is that its cost has ballooned from an initial R670 million to R1.9 billion.
Danish drug giant found to have failed to accurately report spending even after admitting to errors
The pharmaceutical watchdog has reprimanded Wegovy maker Novo Nordisk for failing to correctly disclose dozens of payments to the UK health sector as it sought to boost sales of its slimming drugs.
The Danish drug giant – Europe’s most valuable listed company – systematically misreported,...
Culross Property Co, which is at the centre of the Dimension Data property debacle, has entered business rescue.
Friday Bill Gates shared an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Source Code: My Beginnings. Published in the Wall Street Journal, the excerpt includes pictures of young Bill Gates when he was 12 (dressed for a hike) and 14 (studying a teletype machine). Gates remembers forming “a sort of splinter group” from the Boy Scouts when he was 13 with a group of boys who “wanted more freedom and more risk”...
A plan to keep TikTok available in the U.S. “involves tapping software company Oracle and a group of outside investors,” reports NPR, “to effectively take control of the app’s global operations, according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks…” “[P]otential investors who are engaged in the talks include Microsoft.”Under the deal now being negotiated by the White House, TikTok’s...
Many have questioned Meta’s motivations for ditching fact checkers – but could it be a positive change?
Two computer scientists at the University of Waterloo in Canada believe changing 30 lines of code in Linux “could cut energy use at some data centers by up to 30 percent,” according to the site Data Centre Dynamics. It’s the code that processes packets of network traffic, and Linux “is the most widely used OS for data center servers,” according to the article:The team tested their solution’s...
Founded in 1947, the Minor Planet Center is the official worldwide authority “for observing and reporting new asteroids, comets and other small bodies in the solar system,” reports USA Today. Unfortunately, “What an amateur astronomer recently took to be a newly discovered asteroid turned out to be a Tesla Roadster,”The Minor Planet Center didn’t initially consider the possibility when the...
An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel the apps’ further development. The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as the fediverse, powered by the same ActivityPub protocol used by X alternative...
CleanTechnicareports that last year Americans “bought 37% more air source heat pumps than the next most popular heating appliance — gas furnaces.” And Americans bought 21% more heat pumps than they did in 2023.Canary Media is quick to point out that in many homes, more than one heat pump is required, so that data should be interpreted with that in mind. Typically, a home uses only one...
ZDNET’s senior editor sees an “overwhelmingly negative” response to Microsoft’s surprise price hike for the 84 million paying subscribers to its Microsoft 365 software suite. Attempting the first price hike in more than 12 years, “they made it a 30% price increase” — going from $10 a month to $13 a month — “and blamed it all on artificial intelligence.” Bad idea. Why? Because… No one wants...
The Oxford English Dictionary announced its word of the year at the end of 2024: ‘brain rot’. The term relates to the supposedly negative effects of consuming social media content, but it struck a chord more widely with many of us who feel we just don’t have the mental capacity we once did. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has been studying our...
2021: “Automotive Startup Canoo Debuts a Snub-Nosed Electric Pickup”2025: Canoo “Goes Belly-Up After Moving to Texas” “Its production volumes paled in comparison to Canoo’s rate of cash burn, which was substantial, with net losses in 2023 totaling just over $300 million…” reports AutoWeek. “It was able to deliver small batches of vans to a few customers, but apparently remained distant from...
TikTok is still not available for download from U.S.-based app stores, reports CBS News. So “Some fast-acting entrepreneurs are selling phones with TikTok preloaded on devices for thousands of dollars online.” The Associated Press notes that New York-based Nicholas Matthews “listed an iPhone 14 Plus with TikTok for $10,000. As of Friday, Matthews said his highest bid was for $4,550.” Another...
TikTok is still not available for download from U.S.-based app stores, reports CBS News. So “Some fast-acting entrepreneurs are selling phones with TikTok preloaded on devices for thousands of dollars online.” The Associated Press notes that New York-based Nicholas Matthews “listed an iPhone 14 Plus with TikTok for $10,000. As of Friday, Matthews said his highest bid was for $4,550.” Another...
The president’s promotion of a speculative digital coin left some crypto investors feeling blindsided, while others saw it as a gimmick that undermined the industry’s credibility.
Slashdot reader jenningsthecat writes:3D printer manufacturer Bambu Labs has faced a storm of controversy and protest after releasing a security update which many users claim is the first step in moving towards an HP-style subscription model. Bambu Labs responded that there’s misinformation circulating online, adding “we acknowledge that our communication might have contributed to the...