Mitch Kapor dropped out of MIT’s business school in 1979 — and had soon cofounded the pioneering spreadsheet company Lotus. He also cofounded the EFF, was the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, and is now a billionaire (and an VC investor at Kapor Capital). 45 years later, when the 74-year-old was invited to give a guest lecture at MIT’s business school last year by an old friend...

“Researchers are embarking on an ambitious project to construct human genetic material from scratch,” reports the Guardian, “to learn more about how DNA works and pave the way for the next generation of medical therapies.”Scientists on the Synthetic Human Genome (SynHG) project will spend the next five years developing the tools and knowhow to build long sections of human genetic code in the...

The Wall Street Journal reports that “consumers have less trust in offerings labeled as being powered by artificial intelligence, which can reduce their interest in buying them, researchers say.” The effect is especially pronounced for offerings perceived to be riskier buys, such as a car or a medical-diagnostic service, say the researchers, who were from Washington State University and Temple...

What happens if you track how much heat enters Earth’s atmosphere and how much heat leaves? You discover that Earth’s energy budget “is now well and truly out of balance,” three climate researchers write at The Conversation:Our recent research found this imbalance has more than doubled over the last 20 years. Other researchers have come to the same conclusions. This imbalance is now...

The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit — and they’re having some fun with it. They’ve just announced a summer fundraiser, “and that means the GNU Press Shop is open!”From now until July 28, you can buy your FSF gear at the GNU Press shop. First and foremost, there’s the launch of the FSF’s fortieth anniversary shirt in a summery yellow. We’re taking orders for a limited time for these...

An anonymous reader shared this report from the tech news site The Register:The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) this week published guidance urging software developers to adopt memory-safe programming languages. “The importance of memory safety cannot be overstated,” the inter-agency report says… The CISA/NSA report revisits...

Just four weeks after an early June flight to the edge of space, Blue Origin has again carried six more passengers there and back again, reports CBS News, noting that the 10-minute ride was Blue Origin’s 13th flight “out of the discernible atmosphere.”The New Shepard capsule’s stubby single-stage booster roared to life just after 9:38 a.m. EDT, throttled up to full thrust and smoothly climbed...

“The potential threat of bosses attempting to replace human workers with AI agents is just one of many compounding reasons people are critical of generative AI…” writes Wired, arguing that there’s an AI backlash that “keeps growing strong.” “The pushback from the creative community ramped up during the 2023 Hollywood writer’s strike, and continued to accelerate through the current wave of...

The problem? “Companies want their products and brands to appear in chatbot results,” reports 9to5Mac. And “Since Reddit forms a key part of the training material for Google’s AI, then one effective way to make that happen is to spam Reddit.”Huffman has confirmed to the Financial Times that this is happening, with companies using AI bots to create fake posts in the hope that the content will be...

In its first 10 hours the Rubin space telescope found 2,104 never-before-seen asteroids in our solar system. And Gizmodo reports the data went directly to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center (MPC), which “plays an essential role in the early detection and monitoring of asteroids that threaten Earth.” The MPC has spent years preparing for the deluge of data from Rubin,...