Post Archive by Month

The Independent reports: Russian troops who dug trenches in Chernobyl forest during their occupation of the area have been struck down with radiation sickness, authorities have confirmed. Ukrainians living near the nuclear power station that exploded 37 years ago, and choked the surrounding area in radioactive contaminants, warned the Russians when they arrived against setting up camp in the forest. …

The Guardian reports: The Magnus Carlsen era is over. Ding Liren becomes China’s first world chess champion. The country now can boast the men’s and women’s titleholders: an unthinkable outcome during the Cultural Revolution when it was banned as a game of the decadent West. After 14 games which ended in a 7-7 draw, the championship was decided by four …

The Boston Globe reports on a 25-person startup pursuing an unusual solution to the problem of space junk: “Imagine if every car we ever created was just left on the road,” said aerospace entrepreneur Jeromy Grimmett. “That’s what we’re doing in space.” Grimmett’s tiny company, Rogue Space Systems Corp., has devised a daring solution. It’s building “orbots” — satellites with …

The “Ben” in Ben & Jerry’s “has gone from ice cream to cannabis with a social mission,” reports the Chicago Tribune: Ben Cohen has started Ben’s Best Blnz, a nonprofit cannabis line with a stated mission of helping to right the wrongs of the war on drugs. The company says on its website that 80% of its profits will go …

This February Ford cut 3,800 jobs, according to CNN, “citing difficult economic conditions and its major push toward electric vehicles… The veteran automaker said the layoffs were primarily triggered by its transition to electric vehicles, and a reduction in ‘vehicle complexity.’” Then in March GM also “unexpectedly cut several hundred jobs to help it trim costs and form a top-tier …

Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: Mira Murati, CTO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, says artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems should be “absolutely” be regulated. In a recent interview, Murati said the company is constantly talking with governments and regulators and other organizations to agree on some level of standards. “We’ve done some work on that in the past couple of years with …

This month the Linux Foundation announced version 3.0 of DentOS, an open source network operating system using the Linux kernel, Switchdev, and other Linux-based projects for a standardized network operating system “without abstractions or overhead,” according to the project’s web page. “All underlying infrastructure — including ASIC and Silicon for networking and datapath — is treated equally; while existing abstractions, …

Last weekend around 2 a.m. Sunday, “Facebook’s advertising system went haywire,” reports Gizmodo, “overcharging customers and wasting money on ads that didn’t work.” Reports suggest Meta, the social network’s parent company, charged some advertisers more than double what they agreed to pay, ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meta briefly stopped showing ads on part of its …

HackerNoon tested five AI bots on coding problems from Leetcode.com — GPT-4, GitHub Co-Pilot, Bard, Bing, and Claude+. There’s some interesting commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of each one — and of course, the code that they ultimately output. The final results? [GPT-4’s submission] passes all tests. It beat 47% of submissions on runtime and 8% on memory. GPT-4 …

The Associated Press reports that “water may be more widespread and recent on Mars than previously thought, based on observations of Martian sand dunes by China’s rover.” A paper published in Science suggests thin films of water appeared on sand dunes sometime between 1.4 million years ago and as recently as 400,000 years ago — or perhaps even sooner: The …