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Last updated 06 Nov, 11:11 PM
BBC News
Ivanka, Melania, a golf champion: Who was in Trump's huge victory entourage? - A closer look at the dozens of family members, advisers and allies who joined the president-elect on stage.
Seven things Trump says he will do as president - From immigration to the Ukraine war - these are the pledges he made ahead of his return to the White House.
What happens to the president-elect's legal cases now? - Donald Trump is facing three criminal cases and a sentencing over a felony conviction.
The outstanding House of Representatives races to watch - It's too early to determine if Republicans will keep their majority in the US House of Representatives.
Starmer congratulates Trump in first phone call - The PM and president-elect agreed UK-US relations will "continue to thrive", No 10 says.
The Register
Cybercrooks are targeting Bengal cat lovers in Australia for some reason - In case today’s news cycle wasn’t shocking enough, here’s a gem from Sophos Fresh from a series of serious reports detailing its five-year battle with Chinese cyberattackers, Sophos has dropped a curious story about users of a popular infostealer-cum-RAT targeting a niche group of victims.…
Intel sued over Raptor Lake voltage instability - Failure to warn customers about chip flaw leads to fraud claim Intel was sued in a federal court in San Jose, California, on Tuesday, based on claims that the chipmaker's 13th and 14th generation desktop processors from 2022 and 2023 are defective.…
Arecibo telescope might have failed because of weak sockets - Electromagnetic radiation contributed to that zincing feeling: analysts The collapse of the 305-meter telescope at Arecibo Observatory in 2020 is being attributed to zinc creep – slow deformation due to stress – in the telescope's cable spelter sockets, according to a committee report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.…
Thanks Linus. Torvalds patch improves Linux performance by 2.6% - 21 lines that show the big man still has what it takes A relatively tiny code change by penguin premier Linus Torvalds is making a measurable improvement to Linux's multithreaded performance.…
EU charges Corning with antitrust violations over Gorilla Glass dominance - US firm made OEMs, glass processors sign exclusivity deals, tattle on competitors, claims Euro Commish Corning's Gorilla Glass is found in countless tech products, from smartphones and wearables to automobile windshields, and the European Commission has an inkling its success is due in part to the US-based business cutting anticompetitive deals. …
New Scientist - News
Knots made in a weird quantum fluid can last forever - Shapes created by vortices in water often fall apart, but an odd quantum fluid made from ultracold atoms could support vortex knots that never lose their knottiness
More people are living with pain today than before covid emerged - Chronic pain has increased among adults in the US since 2019, which could be due to a rise in sedentary lifestyles or reduced access to healthcare amid covid-19 restrictions
Ancient Egyptians shaped sheep's horns – and we don't know why - The earliest evidence of livestock with modified horns has been discovered in ancient Egypt – sheep skulls with horns that point in unnatural directions suggest humans forced them to grow that way
2024 is set to be the first year that breaches the 1.5°C warming limit - This year’s average global temperature is almost certain to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial times – a milestone that should spur urgent action, say climate scientists
Cancer deaths expected to nearly double worldwide by 2050 - Experts predict that the number of cancer cases around the world will skyrocket, resulting in millions more fatalities by 2050
Hacker News
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Slashdot
Anthropic's Haiku 3.5 Surprises Experts With an 'Intelligence' Price Increase - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, Anthropic launched the latest version of its smallest AI model, Claude 3.5 Haiku, in a way that marks a departure from typical AI model pricing trends -- the new model costs four times more to run than its predecessor. The reason for the price increase is causing some pushback in the AI community: more smarts, according to Anthropic. "During final testing, Haiku surpassed Claude 3 Opus, our previous flagship model, on many benchmarks -- at a fraction of the cost," Anthropic wrote in a post on X. "As a result, we've increased pricing for Claude 3.5 Haiku to reflect its increase in intelligence." "It's your budget model that's competing against other budget models, why would you make it less competitive," wrote one X user. "People wanting a 'too cheap to meter' solution will now look elsewhere." On X, TakeOffAI developer Mckay Wrigley wrote, "As someone who loves your models and happily uses them daily, that last sentence [about raising the price of Haiku] is *not* going to go over well with people." In a follow-up post, Wrigley said he was not surprised by the price increase or the framing, but saying it out loud might attract ire. "Just say it's more expensive to run," he wrote. The new Haiku model will cost users $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, compared to 25 cents per million input tokens and $1.25 per million output tokens for the previous Claude 3 Haiku version. Presumably being more computationally expensive to run, Claude 3 Opus still costs $15 per million input tokens and a whopping $75 per million output tokens. Speaking of Opus, Claude 3.5 Opus is nowhere to be seen, as AI researcher Simon Willison noted to Ars Technica in an interview. "All references to 3.5 Opus have vanished without a trace, and the price of 3.5 Haiku was increased the day it was released," he said. "Claude 3.5 Haiku is significantly more expensive than both Gemini 1.5 Flash and GPT-4o mini -- the excellent low-cost models from Anthropic's competitors." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
German Firms' 4-Day Workweek Trial Slashes Stress, Keeps Productivity High - A six-month German pilot of a four-day workweek across 45 companies demonstrated that most employees experienced reduced stress and maintained productivity, with some companies adopting optimized processes and digital tools to enhance efficiency. The report says 70% of the firms plan to continue the model. DW News reports: Earlier this year, some 45 German firms launched a 4-day workweek project to find out if such a fundamental change to how we work can achieve positive results for employers and employees. For six months, and closely watched by researchers from Munster University in Germany, the volunteer companies allowed their employees to work fewer hours without reducing their salaries. The pilot run was initiated by Berlin-based management consultancy, Intraprenor, in collaboration with the nonprofit organization 4 Day Week Global (4DWG). [...] Julia Backmann, the scientific lead of the pilot study, says employees generally felt better with fewer hours and remained just as productive as they were with a five-day week, and, in some cases, were even more productive. Participants reported significant improvements in mental and physical health, she told DW, and showed less stress and burnout symptoms, as confirmed by data from smartwatches tracking daily stress minutes. According to Backmann's findings, two out of three employees reported fewer distractions because processes were optimized. Over half of the companies redesigned their meetings to make them less frequent and shorter, while one in four companies adopted new digital tools to boost efficiency. "The potential of shorter working hours seems to be stifled by complex processes, too many meetings, and low digitalization," said Carsten Meier from Intraprenor. The study has also shown that participants were more physically active during the 4-day workweek, and they slept an average of 38 minutes more per week than those in the five-day control group. However, monthly sick days only dropped slightly, a statistically insignificant difference compared to the same period a year ago. Marika Platz from Munster University, who analyzed the data, said she was surprised at the number of sick days because similar studies in other countries showed a significant reduction. Another surprise, she told DW, was the lack of environmental benefits from reduced working hours during the German test as other countries reported a positive impact from offices that could be shut down completely for one day, and fewer commutes to work that resulted in higher energy savings. The reason for this was probably that some German employees took advantage of the long weekends to travel, she said, which reduced any potential energy savings. Study director Backmann stressed that the study was not about advocating for a blanket rollout of the 4-day workweek across all sectors, but rather exploring "an innovative work-time model and its effects." Carsten Meier from the Intraprenor consultancy added that the positive results of the trial cannot be "automatically translated" into similar gains for every company in Germany. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
'A New Gaming CPU King': AMD's New Ryzen 7 9800X3D Reviewed - "AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D debuts with impressive performance gains, powered by advanced 3D V-Cache technology and improved thermal efficiency," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "While the CPU shines as a top choice right out of the gate, AMD's history of quick price cuts suggests waiting could yield even better value for savvy buyers." TechSpot reports: Today we're finally able to show you how AMD's new Ryzen 7 9800X3D performs, and spoiler alert -- it's a real weapon that solves the issues we encountered with the non-3D Zen 5 chips before this. Without question, this is the best CPU released since the 7800X3D, making this launch particularly exciting. [...] For now, the 9800X3D is mighty impressive, the undisputed king of gaming, and it marks a historic milestone. We don't think AMD has ever been this dominant over Intel, certainly not in the last 15 years. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Facebook Asks US Supreme Court To Dismiss Fraud Suit Over Cambridge Analytica Scandal - An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The US supreme court grappled on Wednesday with a bid by Meta's Facebook to scuttle a federal securities fraud lawsuit brought by shareholders who accused the social media platform of misleading them about the misuse of user data. The justices heard arguments in Facebook's appeal of a lower court's decision allowing the 2018 class action suit led by Amalgamated Bank to proceed. The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages in part to recoup the lost value of the Facebook stock held by the investors. It is one of two cases coming before them this month -- the other one involving artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia on 13 November -- that could lead to rulings making it harder for private litigants to hold companies to account for alleged securities fraud. At issue is whether Facebook broke the law when it failed to detail the prior data breach in subsequent business-risk disclosures, and instead portrayed the risk of such incidents as purely hypothetical. Facebook argued in a supreme court brief that it was not required to reveal that its warned-of risk had already materialized because "a reasonable investor" would understand risk disclosures to be forward-looking statements. "When we think about these questions, we're not looking only to lies or complete false statements," the liberal justice Elena Kagan told Kannon Shanmugam, the lawyer for Facebook. "We're also looking to misleading statements or misleading omissions." The conservative justice Samuel Alito asked Shanmugam: "Isn't it the case that an evaluation of risks is always forward-looking?" "It is. And that is essentially what underlies our argument here," Shanmugam responded. The plaintiffs accused Facebook of misleading investors in violation of the Securities Exchange Act, a 1934 federal law that requires publicly traded companies to disclose their business risks. They claimed the company unlawfully withheld information from investors about a 2015 data breach involving British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica that affected more than 30 million Facebook users. Edward Davila, a US district judge, dismissed the lawsuit but the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals revived it. The supreme court's ruling is expected by the end of June. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
UK Will Legislate Against AI Risks in Next Year, Pledges Kyle - The UK will bring in legislation to safeguard against the risks of AI in the next year, technology secretary Peter Kyle has said, as he pledged to invest in the infrastructure that will underpin the sector's growth. From a report: Kyle told the Financial Times' Future of AI summit on Wednesday that Britain's voluntary agreement on AI testing was "working, it's a good code" but that the long-awaited AI bill would be focused on making such accords with leading developers legally binding. The legislation, which Kyle said would be presented to MPs in the current parliament, will also turn the UK's AI Safety Institute into an arms-length government body, giving it "the independence to act fully in the interests of British citizens." At present, the body is a directorate of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. At the UK-organised AI safety summit last November, companies including OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic signed a "landmark" but non-binding agreement allowing partner governments to test their forthcoming large language models for risks and vulnerabilities before they were released to consumers. Kyle said that while he was "not fatalistic" about advancements in AI, "citizens need to know that we are mitigating the potential risks." Read more of this story at Slashdot.