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Поебда [Jan. 15th, 2025|05:48 am]

lj_xaxam

Сделка

Мой комментарий в ЖЖ коллеги Иркудского, оставшийся там без ответа.
❝Ты за израильтян берёшься рассуждать, я и за себя-то толком не знаю, что сказать. Всё, конечно, ещё неопределено и может повернуться любым боком, но судя по тому, что нам поют сегодня, я пока (пока!) чувствую себя обосранным.

Чтоб не вдаваться в пространные дебаты, попробуй прикинуть: какой промежуток тишины покупает себе Израиль ценой такой сделки? Какой ущерб нанесён Хамасу и что он выиграл на своём поле? Я может и напишу про это подробнее, но пока ситуация мне видится кислой.

Теракт 10/7 формально обозначался Хамасом как операция по освобождению своих заключённых из израильских тюрем. Это тема, гораздо более жгучая не для Газы (где Израиль не действует с 2006-го), а для ЙоШ, где периодически "подстригают газон". Добиться освобождения террористов из ЙоШ — гарантировать себе суперпопулярность именно там, где Хамас бодается с прогнившим ФАТХом. Проект сделки вроде чего-то там предполагает на предмет высылки за границу террористов с кровью на руках, но кто и как им помешает вернуться, для начала в Свободную Газу, — большой вопрос. Да и родственники смогут прокатиться в Турцию пообниматься с героями, сочетание приятного с полезным. Эта основная цель будет несомненно заявлена как выполненная, фанфары и фейерверки победителям обеспечены. Великая Победа над Сионистами.

А ведь и вправду победа. То, что в процессе войны в Газе мы исключительно малой кровью перехуячили хамасовскую верхушку, — дело житейское. Шахиды уже заслуженно трахаются с гуриями у подножия престола аллаха, зато все социальные лифты заработают сейчас с перегрузкой, только успевай карьеру делать. А навербовать на пушечное мясо молодых придурков, для которых всё равно никакой альтернативной карьеры в Газе нет и не предвидится — раз плюнуть.

Фактором deterrence могло бы стать обнуление Газы, — она действительно лежит в руинах. Какому другому народишку подобный исторический эпизод стал бы уроком: полтора года жить в холоде, жаре, грязи, без малейших социальных услуг, — могли бы и взбухтеть, попытавшись кетменями снести хамасовскую власть. Но не взбухтят, не сметут, прошлые трудные времена забудутся, а Газу восстановят по чертежам Сингапура, уж за поток бабла беспокоиться не приходится...

Резюмирую. В идеальном случае мы за примерно 2,000 жизней израильтян (часть — мудаковатые киббуцники, собиравшиеся обниматься с террористами из Газы, но часть — соль земли, "мелах ха-Арец") покупаем сейчас максимум 15 лет спокойствия на южной границе.

За эти 15 лет у арабов вырастет непизженное поколение, которое будет свято верить, что они почти скинули евреев в море. За эти 15 лет у евреев вырастет непизженное поколение, которое будет в очередной раз распевать "Шир ле-шалом" и заниматься hairsplitting'ом, на каких условиях мы сможем договориться о правилах общежития в нашей Вороньей Слободке.

А сколько наших детей и внуков погибнет в очередной кровавой бане через 15 лет, — я не предскажу. Добавлю только, что война последних полутора лет была фантастически успешной. Мы отмудохали в Газе сравнительно малой кровью (400 убитых) Хамас как военную силу. Если ты вспомнишь, то на все прошлые инциденты с обстрелами из Газы израильские правительства отвечали бомбёжкой пустырей, а на вопрос, почему не делается ничего больше, следовал стереотипный ответ, мол, "вы что же, хотите вернуть наших мальчиков в Газу и терять там тысячами погибших?" Оказалось, что если сажать, то всё растёт, и потери оказались в разы меньше. Я уж не говорю про то, как красиво отмудохали Хизбаллу, как оторвали яйца у иранских ПВО, и как (уж совсем бонус-трек) выпиздили Ассада из Сирии.

И вот сейчас все эти нехилые достижения пойдут по пизде. Будет ли полная сделка (я мало верю, в Хамасе не дураки сидят), или отпустят часть, оставив рычаг давления на Израиль, — я не могу знать. Хамас не хуже тебя и меня понимает, как можно крутить яйца израильскому правительству. ❞
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US Deaths Expected To Outpace Births Within the Decade [Jan. 15th, 2025|03:30 am]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The number of deaths in the U.S. is expected to exceed the number of births by 2033, according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) annual 30-year projection of the U.S. population released on Monday. That estimation comes seven years earlier than what the CBO estimated in its 30-year population outlook released last year. At that time, in January 2024, the CBO projected deaths to outpace births by 2040. The CBO's 2025 report projected lower population growth over the next three decades than it did in its 2024 demographic outlook. The CBO's population estimate for 2025 is 350 million, a slight increase from the 346 million it predicted for 2025 last year. But its projection for 2054 -- 372 million people -- has decreased since last year, when the CBO projected the population would be 383 million in 2054. The rate of growth projected over the next three decades -- 0.2 percent -- is significantly slower than the rate seen in the prior five decades, from 1975 to 2024, when the population grew at 0.9 percent. The growth rate over the next three decades is also expected to slow. From 2025 to 2035, the population is expected to grow an average of 0.4 percent a year. From 2036 to 2055, however, the growth rate is projected to be 0.1 percent. The CBO attributes this projected slow rate of growth to a variety of factors, including lower fertility, an aging population and lower immigration.

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Australian Open Avatars Helping Tennis Reach New Audience [Jan. 15th, 2025|02:02 am]

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The Australian Open has introduced a project called AO Animated -- "near-live, commentated coverage of the Australian Open, free to anyone across the world via YouTube, enhanced via a stream of comments from a like-minded online community," reports The Guardian. Blending real-world data with virtual avatars, the animated coverage has garnered significant viewer interest, especially among gamers and tech enthusiasts. From the report: [I]t's no surprise a project called AO Animated has taken off at this year's grand slam tournament at Melbourne Park. The catch? The players, ball and court are all computer-generated. That hasn't dissuaded hundreds of thousands of viewers from tuning into this vision of the Australian Open, featuring video game-like avatars but using real-world data in an emerging category of sports broadcasting helping tennis reach new fans. The loophole allows the Australian Open to show a version of live events at the tournament on its own channels, despite having sold lucrative exclusive broadcast rights to partners across the globe. The technology made its debut at the grand slam last year and audiences peaked for the men's final, the recording of which has attracted almost 800,000 views on YouTube. Interest appears to be trending up this year and the matches are attracting roughly four times as many viewers than the equivalent time in 2024. The director of innovation at Tennis Australia, Machar Reid, said although the technology was far from polished it was developing quickly. "Limb tracking is complex, you've got 12 cameras trying to process the silhouette of the human in real time, and stitch that together across 29 points in the skeleton," he said. "It's not as seamless as it could be -- we don't have fingers -- but in time you can begin to imagine a world where that comes." The data from sensors on the court is ingested and fed into a system that can produce the graphic reproduction with a two-minute delay. The same commentary and arena noises that would otherwise be heard on the television -- as well as interstitial vision direct from the broadcast -- are synced with the virtual representation of the match.

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Pixelfed, Instagram's Decentralized Competitor, Is Now On iOS and Android [Jan. 15th, 2025|01:25 am]

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Pixelfed has launched its mobile app for iOS and Android, solidifying its position as a viable alternative to Instagram. The move also comes at a pivotal moment, as a potential Supreme Court ban on TikTok could drive users to explore other social media platforms. Pixelfed is ad-free, open source, decentralized, defaults to chronological feeds and doesn't share user data with third parties. Engadget reports: The platform launched in 2018, but was only available on the web or through third-party app clients. The Android app debuted on January 9 and the iOS app released today. Creator Daniel Supernault posted on Mastodon Monday evening that the platform had 11,000 users join over the preceding 24 hours and that more than 78,000 posts have been shared to Pixelfed to date. The platform runs on ActivityPub, the same protocol that powers several other decentralized social networks in the fediverse, such as Mastodon and Flipboard. The iOS and Android apps are available at their respective links. Further reading: Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed

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OpenAI's AI Reasoning Model 'Thinks' In Chinese Sometimes, No One Really Knows Why [Jan. 15th, 2025|12:45 am]

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OpenAI's "reasoning" AI model, o1, has exhibited a puzzling behavior of "thinking" in Chinese, Persian, or some other language -- "even when asked a question in English," reports TechCrunch. While the exact cause remains unclear, as OpenAI has yet to provide an explanation, AI experts have proposed a few theories. From the report: Several on X, including Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue, alluded to the fact that reasoning models like o1 are trained on datasets containing a lot of Chinese characters. Ted Xiao, a researcher at Google DeepMind, claimed that companies including OpenAI use third-party Chinese data labeling services, and that o1 switching to Chinese is an example of "Chinese linguistic influence on reasoning." "[Labs like] OpenAI and Anthropic utilize [third-party] data labeling services for PhD-level reasoning data for science, math, and coding," Xiao wrote in a post on X. "[F]or expert labor availability and cost reasons, many of these data providers are based in China." [...] Other experts don't buy the o1 Chinese data labeling hypothesis, however. They point out that o1 is just as likely to switch to Hindi, Thai, or a language other than Chinese while teasing out a solution. Other experts don't buy the o1 Chinese data labeling hypothesis, however. They point out that o1 is just as likely to switch to Hindi, Thai, or a language other than Chinese while teasing out a solution. Rather, these experts say, o1 and other reasoning models might simply be using languages they find most efficient to achieve an objective (or hallucinating). "The model doesn't know what language is, or that languages are different," Matthew Guzdial, an AI researcher and assistant professor at the University of Alberta, told TechCrunch. "It's all just text to it." Tiezhen Wang, a software engineer at AI startup Hugging Face, agrees with Guzdial that reasoning models' language inconsistencies may be explained by associations the models made during training. "By embracing every linguistic nuance, we expand the model's worldview and allow it to learn from the full spectrum of human knowledge," Wang wrote in a post on X. "For example, I prefer doing math in Chinese because each digit is just one syllable, which makes calculations crisp and efficient. But when it comes to topics like unconscious bias, I automatically switch to English, mainly because that's where I first learned and absorbed those ideas." [...] Luca Soldaini, a research scientist at the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI, cautioned that we can't know for certain. "This type of observation on a deployed AI system is impossible to back up due to how opaque these models are," they told TechCrunch. "It's one of the many cases for why transparency in how AI systems are built is fundamental."

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US Finalizes Rule To Effectively Ban Chinese Vehicles [Jan. 15th, 2025|12:02 am]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Biden administration finalized a new rule that would effectively ban all Chinese vehicles from the US under the auspices of blocking the "sale or import" of connected vehicle software from "countries of concern." The rule could have wide-ranging effects on big automakers, like Ford and GM, as well as smaller manufacturers like Polestar -- and even companies that don't produce cars, like Waymo. The rule covers everything that connects a vehicle to the outside world, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular, and satellite components. It also addresses concerns that technology like cameras, sensors, and onboard computers could be exploited by foreign adversaries to collect sensitive data about US citizens and infrastructure. And it would ban China from testing its self-driving cars on US soil. "Cars today have cameras, microphones, GPS tracking, and other technologies connected to the internet," US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a statement. "It doesn't take much imagination to understand how a foreign adversary with access to this information could pose a serious risk to both our national security and the privacy of U.S. citizens. To address these national security concerns, the Commerce Department is taking targeted, proactive steps to keep [People's Republic of China] and Russian-manufactured technologies off American roads." The rules for prohibited software go into effect for model year 2027 vehicles, while the ban on hardware from China waits until model year 2030 vehicles. According to Reuters, the rules were updated from the original proposal to exempt vehicles weighing over 10,000 pounds, which would allow companies like BYD to continue to assemble electric buses in California. The Biden administration published a fact sheet with more information about this rule. "[F]oreign adversary involvement in the supply chains of connected vehicles poses a significant threat in most cars on the road today, granting malign actors unfettered access to these connected systems and the data they collect," the White House said. "As PRC automakers aggressively seek to increase their presence in American and global automotive markets, through this final rule, President Biden is delivering on his commitment to secure critical American supply chains and protect our national security."

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[Jan. 15th, 2025|01:24 am]

kyzma
Удаленное из исходника новой (древне-одесской) притчи всё же оставлю отдельно.

Змейка задала лисичке математическую задачу.
Лисичка интуитивно сразу её решила правильно.
А потом начала думать и сразу всё непонятно стало.

Задача:

Как-то вечером сова решила подсчитать зверей в лесу: зайчиков, белочек и енотиков.
Насчитала 674 животинок. Суммарное количество заек и белочек: 427, а заек и енотиков: 390.
Cовка засомневалась по поводу точности подсчетов ведь звери очень быстро перемещались из норки в норку.
Она прикинула, что скорее всего была допущена погрешность в 81% для заек, 93% для белочек и 74% для енотиков.

1. Сколько совка точно подсчитала неточное количество зверей?
2. Сколько получилось с учетом погрешности более точное количество?
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Microsoft Pauses Hiring In US Consulting Unit [Jan. 14th, 2025|11:20 pm]

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A week after announcing performance-based job cuts similar to those at Meta, Microsoft said it also plans to pause hiring in part of its consulting unit. CNBC reports: The changes by the U.S. consulting division are meant to align with a policy by the Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions organization, which has about 60,000 employees, according to a page on Microsoft's website. The changes are in place through the remainder of the 2025 fiscal year ending in June. To reduce costs, Microsoft's consulting division will hold off on hiring new employees and back-filling roles, consulting executive Derek Danois told employees in the memo. Careful management of costs is of utmost importance, Danois wrote. The memo also instructs employees to not expense travel for any internal meetings and use remote sessions instead. Additionally, executives will have to authorize trips to customers' sites to ensure spending is being used on the right customers, Danois wrote. Additionally, the group will cut its marketing and non-billable external resource spend by 35%, the memo says. Further reading: Companies Deploy AI To Curb Hiring as 'Cost Avoidance' Gains Ground

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ChatGPT Now Lets You Schedule Reminders and Recurring Tasks [Jan. 14th, 2025|10:40 pm]

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ChatGPT can now schedule reminders and recurring tasks -- but only if you're a ChatGPT Plus, Team, or Pro subscriber. TechCrunch reports: With tasks, users can set simple reminders with ChatGPT such as, "Remind me when my passport expires in six months," and the AI assistant will follow up with a push notification on whatever platform you have tasks enabled. Users can also now set recurring requests to ChatGPT, such as, "Every Friday, give me a weekend plan based on my location and the weather forecast," or "Give me a news briefing every day at 7 a.m." [...] Users can access tasks by selecting "4o with scheduled tasks" from a dropdown menu in ChatGPT. From there, they can send ChatGPT a message telling the AI assistant what reminder or action they want to create. At times, OpenAI says ChatGPT may suggest certain tasks based on chats. Users can set and manage tasks by chatting with the AI assistant on any platform, or through a dedicated tasks manager tab that's only available on the web app. Through the tasks feature, ChatGPT can now browse the web on a set schedule, but it will not run continuous searches in the background or make purchases. For example, you could instruct ChatGPT to check once a month for concert tickets to see your favorite artist in your area, but you can neither tell the AI assistant to alert you the moment the tickets go live, nor can ChatGPT buy tickets for you. That said, it's a step toward those [agentic] systems.

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Texas Sues Allstate For Collecting Driver Data To Raise Premiums [Jan. 14th, 2025|10:00 pm]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Texas has sued (PDF) one of the nation's largest car insurance providers alleging that it violated the state's privacy laws by surreptitiously collecting detailed location data on millions of drivers and using that information to justify raising insurance premiums. The state's attorney general, Ken Paxton, said the lawsuit against Allstate and its subsidiary Arity is the first enforcement action ever filed by a state attorney general to enforce a data privacy law. It also follows a deceptive business practice lawsuit he filed against General Motors accusing the car manufacturer of misleading customers by collecting and selling driver data. In 2015, Allstate developed the Arity Driving Engine software development kit (SDK), a package of code that the company allegedly paid mobile app developers to install in their products in order to collect a variety of sensitive data from consumers' phones. The SDK gathered phone geolocation data, accelerometer, and gyroscopic data, details about where phone owners started and ended their trips, and information about "driving behavior," such as whether phone owners appeared to be speeding or driving while distracted, according to the lawsuit. The apps that installed the SDK included GasBuddy, Fuel Rewards, and Life360, a popular family monitoring app, according to the lawsuit. Paxton's complaint said that Allstate and Arity used the data collected by its SDK to develop and sell products to other insurers like Drivesight, an algorithmic model that assigned a driving risk score to individuals, and ArityIQ, which allowed other insurers to "[a]ccess actual driving behavior collected from mobile phones and connected vehicles to use at time of quote to more precisely price nearly any driver." Allstate and Arity marketed the products as providing "driver behavior" data but because the information was collected via mobile phones the companies had no way of determining whether the owner was actually driving, according to the lawsuit. "For example, if a person was a passenger in a bus, a taxi, or in a friend's car, and that vehicle's driver sped, hard braked, or made a sharp turn, Defendants would conclude that the passenger, not the actual driver, engaged in 'bad' driving behavior," the suit states. Neither Allstate and Arity nor the app developers properly informed customers in their privacy policies about what data the SDK was collecting or how it would be used, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit violates Texas' Data Privacy and Security Act (DPSA) and insurance code by failing to address violations within the required 30-day cure period. "In its complaint, filed in federal court, Texas requested that Allstate be ordered to pay a penalty of $7,500 per violation of the state's data privacy law and $10,000 per violation of the state's insurance code, which would likely amount to millions of dollars given the number of consumers allegedly affected," adds the report. "The lawsuit also asks the court to make Allstate delete all the data it obtained through actions that allegedly violated the privacy law and to make full restitution to customers harmed by the companies' actions."

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How Research Credibility Suffers in a Quantified Society [Jan. 14th, 2025|09:20 pm]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Academia is in a credibility crisis. A record-breaking 10,000 scientific papers were retracted in 2023 because of scientific misconduct, and academic journals are overwhelmed by AI-generated images, data, and texts. To understand the roots of this problem, we must look at the role of metrics in evaluating the academic performance of individuals and institutions. To gauge research quality, we count papers, citations, and calculate impact factors. The higher the scores, the better. Academic performance is often expressed in numbers. Why? Quantification reduces complexity, makes academia manageable, allows easy comparisons among scholars and institutions, and provides administrators with a feeling of grip on reality. Besides, numbers seem objective and fair, which is why we use them to allocate status, tenure, attention, and funding to those who score well on these indicators. The result of this? Quantity is often valued over quality. In The Quantified Society I coin the term "indicatorism": a blind focus on enhancing indicators in spreadsheets, while losing sight of what really matters. It seems we're sometimes busier with "scoring" and "producing" than with "understanding." As a result, some started gaming the system. The rector of one of the world's oldest universities, for one, set up citation cartels to boost his citation scores, while others reportedly buy(!) bogus citations. Even top-ranked institutions seem to play the indicator game by submitting false data to improve their position on university rankings!

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US Removes Malware Allegedly Planted on Computers By Chinese-Backed Hackers [Jan. 14th, 2025|08:40 pm]

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The U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday that it has deleted malware planted on more than 4,200 computers by a group of criminal hackers who were backed by the People's Republic of China. From a report: The malware, known as "PlugX," affected thousands of computers around the globe and was used to infect and steal information, the department said. Investigators said the malware was installed by a band of hackers who are known by the names "Mustang Panda" and "Twill Typhoon."

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Сегодня дым наш без огня [Jan. 14th, 2025|11:54 pm]

elesin
Сегодня дым наш без огня,
И на столе почти свинина.
Два года, месяц и три дня,
Ну а потом – гуляй, рванина.

Такая, граждане, фигня,
Какая милая картина.
Два года, месяц и три дня,
Ну а потом – гуляй, рванина.

Ничто не радует меня,
Кругом чужая писанина.
Два года, месяц и три дня,
Ну а потом – гуляй, рванина.

Пускай не лязгает броня,
Пусть лучше пляшет балерина.
Два года, месяц и три дня,
Ну а потом – гуляй, рванина.

Судьбу неистово кляня,
Лежит усталая скотина.
Два года, месяц и три дня,
Ну а потом – гуляй, рванина.

Годива есть, но нет коня,
Зато шикарная малина.
Два года, месяц и три дня,
Ну а потом – гуляй, рванина.

Давайте сядем возле пня,
Долой хандру, не надо сплина.
Два года, месяц и три дня,
Ну а потом – гуляй, рванина.

Я не просил: «Огня! огня!..»,
Меня устроит и перина.
Два года, месяц и три дня,
Ну а потом – гуляй, рванина.
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Double-keyed Browser Caching Is Hitting Web Performance [Jan. 14th, 2025|08:01 pm]

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A Google engineer has warned that a major shift in web browser caching is upending long-standing performance optimization practices. Browsers have overhauled their caching systems that forces websites to maintain separate copies of shared resources instead of reusing them across domains. The new "double-keyed caching" system, implemented to enhance privacy, is ending the era of shared public content delivery networks, writes Google engineer Addy Osmani. According to Chrome's data, the change has led to a 3.6% increase in cache misses and 4% rise in network bandwidth usage.

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Nearly Three-Quarters of All Known Bacterial Species Have Never Been Studied [Jan. 14th, 2025|07:22 pm]

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Nearly three-quarters of all known bacterial species have never been studied in scientific literature, while just 10 species account for half of all published research, according to a new analysis published on bioRxiv. The study of over 43,000 bacterial species found that E. coli dominates with 21% of all publications, followed by human pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus. Microbes crucial for human health and Earth's ecosystems remain largely unexplored, University of Michigan biologist Paul Jensen reported. A new $1-million project by non-profit Align to Innovate aims to help close this gap by studying 1,000 microbes under varying conditions.

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Nobel Prize Winners Call For Urgent 'Moonshot' Effort To Avert Global Hunger Catastrophe [Jan. 14th, 2025|06:40 pm]

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More than 150 Nobel and World Food prize laureates have signed an open letter calling for "moonshot" efforts to ramp up food production before an impending world hunger catastrophe. From a report: The coalition of some of the world's greatest living thinkers called for urgent action to prioritise research and technology to solve the "tragic mismatch of global food supply and demand." Big bang physicist Robert Woodrow Wilson; Nobel laureate chemist Jennifer Doudna; the Dalai Lama; economist Joseph E Stiglitz; Nasa scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig; Ethiopian-American geneticist Gebisa Ejeta; Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank; Wole Soyinka, Nobel prize for literature winner; and black holes Nobel physicist Sir Roger Penrose were among the signatories in the appeal coordinated by Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food prize laureate and US special envoy for global food security. Citing challenges including the climate crisis, war and market pressures, the coalition called for "planet-friendly" efforts leading to substantial leaps in food production to feed 9.7 billion people by 2050. The plea was for financial and political backing, said agricultural scientist Geoffrey Hawtin, the British co-recipient of last year's World Food prize. [...] The world was "not even close" to meeting future needs, the letter said, predicting humanity faced an "even more food insecure, unstable world" by mid-century unless support for innovation was ramped up internationally.

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Developer Makes Doom Run Inside a PDF File [Jan. 14th, 2025|06:01 pm]

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Programmers have found ways to run the 1993 first-person shooter Doom on an array of unexpected platforms, and now a PDF file joins that list. Developer ading2210's DoomPDF project shows the game operating within a document format primarily designed for static content display. The creator says he drew inspiration from pdftris, another PDF-based game port by Thomas Rinsma.

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LA Wildfires Push California Insurance Market To Its Limit [Jan. 14th, 2025|05:20 pm]

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Five wildfires in Los Angeles have already burned more than 10,000 structures, threatening to upend California's fragile balance between climate risk and home insurance. The Palisades Fire has damaged or destroyed more than 5,000 buildings in an area that liability experts had previously identified as one of three particularly vulnerable regions in the state. JPMorgan Chase estimates insured damages could reach $20 billion, positioning this as likely the costliest wildfire in U.S. history. The crisis comes as California's insurance market struggles, with seven of the 12 biggest home insurers having limited their coverage in the state over the past two years. The state-backed insurer of last resort, the California FAIR Plan, now faces exposure of up to $458 billion, while holding only $200 million in surplus cash reserves and $2.5 billion in reinsurance. Gusts of up to 100 miles per hour have fanned the flames, with more than 57,000 structures in severe danger and more than 150,000 people under evacuation.

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Meta To Cut 3,600 Jobs, Targeting Lowest Performers [Jan. 14th, 2025|04:15 pm]

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Meta is cutting roughly 5% of its staff through performance-based eliminations and plans to hire new people to fill their roles this year, according to a company memo. From a report: As of September, Meta employed about 72,000 people, so a 5% reduction could affect roughly 3,600 jobs. "I've decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster," Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in the note posted to an internal message board and reviewed by Bloomberg News. "We typically manage out people who aren't meeting expectations over the course of a year," he said, "but now we're going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle."

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UK Plans To Ban Public Sector Organizations From Paying Ransomware Hackers [Jan. 14th, 2025|04:00 pm]

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U.K. public sector and critical infrastructure organizations could be banned from making ransom payments under new proposals from the U.K. government. From a report: The U.K.'s Home Office launched a consultation on Tuesday that proposes a "targeted ban" on ransomware payments. Under the proposal, public sector bodies -- including local councils, schools, and NHS trusts -- would be banned from making payments to ransomware hackers, which the government says would "strike at the heart of the cybercriminal business model." This government proposal comes after a wave of cyberattacks targeting the U.K. public sector. The NHS last year declared a "critical" incident following a cyberattack on pathology lab provider Synnovis, which led to a massive data breach of sensitive patient data and months of disruption, including canceled operations and the diversion of emergency patients. According to new data seen by Bloomberg, the cyberattack on Synnovis resulted in harm to dozens of patients, leading to long-term or permanent damage to their health in at least two cases.

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