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Friday, January 19th, 2024
| Time | Event |
| 4:40p | Cop28 Deal Will Fail Unless Rich Countries Quit Fossil Fuels, Says Climate Negotiator The credibility of the Cop28 agreement to "transition away" from fossil fuels rides on the world's biggest historical polluters like the US, UK and Canada rethinking current plans to expand oil and gas production, according to the climate negotiator representing 135 developing countries. The Guardian: In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Pedro Pedroso, the outgoing president of the G77 plus China bloc of developing countries, warned that the landmark deal made at last year's climate talks in Dubai risked failing. "We achieved some important outcomes at Cop28 but the challenge now is how we translate the deal into meaningful action for the people," Pedroso said. "As we speak, unless we lie to ourselves, none of the major developed countries, who are the most important historical emitters, have policies that are moving away from fossil fuels, on the contrary, they are expanding," said Pedroso. These countries must also deliver adequate finance for poorer nations to transition -and adapt to the climate crisis. In Dubai, Sultan Al Jaber, Cop28 president and chief of the Emirates national oil company, was subject to widespread scrutiny -- understandable given that the UAE is the world's seventh biggest oil producer with the fifth largest gas reserves. Yet the US was by far the biggest oil and gas producer in the world last year -- setting a new record, during a year that was the hottest ever recorded. The US, UK, Canada, Australia and Norway account for 51% of the total planned oil and gas expansion by 2050, according to research by Oil Change International. "It's very easy to label some emerging economies, especially the Gulf states, as climate villains, but this is very unfair by countries with historic responsibilities -- who keep trying to scapegoat and deviate the attention away from themselves. Just look at US fossil fuel plans and the UK's new drilling licenses for the North Sea, and Canada which has never met any of its emission reduction goals, not once," said Pedroso, a Cuban diplomat. 
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 5:20p | Game Developer Survey: 50% Work at a Studio Already Using Generative AI Tools A new survey of thousands of game development professionals finds a near-majority saying generative AI tools are already in use at their workplace. But a significant minority of developers say their company has no interest in generative AI tools or has outright banned their use. From a report: The Game Developers Conference's 2024 State of the Industry report, released Thursday, aggregates the thoughts of over 3,000 industry professionals as of last October. While the annual survey (conducted in conjunction with research partner Omdia) has been running for 12 years, this is the first time respondents were asked directly about their use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, GitHub Copilot, and Adobe Generative Fill. Forty-nine percent of the survey's developer respondents said that generative AI tools are currently being used in their workplace. That near-majority includes 31 percent (of all respondents) that say they use those tools themselves and 18 percent that say their colleagues do. The survey also found that different studio departments showed different levels of willingness to embrace AI tools. Forty-four percent of employees in business and finance said they were using AI tools, for instance, compared to just 16 percent in visual arts and 13 percent in "narrative/writing."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 6:01p | Microsoft Bringing Teams Meeting Reminders To Windows 11 Start Menu Microsoft is getting ready to place Teams meeting reminders on the Start menu in Windows 11. From a report: The software giant has started testing a new build of Windows 11 with Dev Channel testers that includes a Teams meeting reminder in the recommended section of the Start menu. Microsoft is also testing an improved way to instantly access new photos and screenshots from Android devices. [...] The Teams meeting reminders will be displayed alongside the regular recently used and recommended file list on the Start menu, and they won't be displayed for non-business users of Windows 11.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 6:40p | Viasat Tries To Stop Citizen Effort To Revive FCC Funding for Starlink A resident in Virginia has urged the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider canceling $886 million in federal funding for SpaceX's Starlink system. But rival satellite company Viasat has gone out of its way to oppose the citizen-led petition.ÂPCMag: On Jan. 1, the FCC received a petition from the Virginia resident Greg Weisiger asking the commission to reconsider denying the $886 million to SpaceX. "Petitioner is at an absolute loss to understand the Commission's logic with these denials," wrote Weisiger, who lives in Midlothian, Virginia. "It is abundantly clear that Starlink has a robust, reliable, affordable service for rural and insular locations in all states and territories." The petition arrived a few weeks after the FCC denied SpaceX's appeal to receive $886 million from the commission's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which is designed to subsidize 100Mbps to gigabit broadband across the US. SpaceX wanted to use the funds to expand Starlink access in rural areas. But the FCC ruled that "Starlink is not reasonably capable of offering the required high-speed, low latency service throughout the areas where it won auction support." Weisiger disagrees. In his petition, he writes that the FCC's decision will deprive him of federal support to bring high-speed internet to his home. "Thousands of other Virginia locations were similarly denied support," he added.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 7:20p | Crime Rings Are Trafficking in an Unlikely Treasure: Sand Organized crime is mining sand from rivers and coasts to feed demand worldwide, ruining ecosystems and communities. Can it be stopped? Scientific American reports: Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world's largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature's ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. The U.N. report confirms that sand mining at current rates is unsustainable. The greatest demand comes from China, which used more cement in three years (6.6 gigatons from 2011 through 2013) than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons), notes Vince Beiser, author of The World in a Grain. Most sand gets used in the country where it is mined, but with some national supplies dwindling, imports reached $1.9 billion in 2018, according to Harvard's Atlas of Economic Complexity. Companies large and small dredge up sand from waterways and the ocean floor and transport it to wholesalers, construction firms and retailers. Even the legal sand trade is hard to track. Two experts estimate the global market at about $100 billion a year, yet the U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries indicates the value could be as high as $785 billion. Sand in riverbeds, lake beds and shorelines is the best for construction, but scarcity opens the market to less suitable sand from beaches and dunes, much of it scraped illegally and cheaply. With a shortage looming and prices rising, sand from Moroccan beaches and dunes is sold inside the country and is also shipped abroad, using organized crime's extensive transport networks, Abderrahmane has found. More than half of Morocco's sand is illegally mined, he says.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 8:00p | Huawei Makes a Break From Android With Next Version of Harmony OS China's Huawei will not support Android apps on the latest iteration of its in-house Harmony operating system, domestic financial media Caixin reported, as the company looks to bolster its own software ecosystem. From a report: The company plans to roll out a developer version of its HarmonyOS Next platform in the second quarter of this year followed by a full commercial version in the fourth quarter, it said in a company statement highlighting the launch event for the platform in its home city of Shenzhen on Thursday. Huawei first unveiled its proprietary Harmony system in 2019 and prepared to launch it on some smartphones a year later after U.S. restrictions cut its access to Google's technical support for its Android mobile OS. However, earlier versions of Harmony allowed apps built for Android to be used on the system, which will no longer be possible, according to Caixin.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 8:41p | 30TB Hard Drives Are Nearly Here Seagate this week unveiled the industry's first hard disk drive platform that uses heat-assisted media recording (HAMR). Tom's Hardware: The new Mozaic 3+ platform relies on several all-new technologies, including new media, new write and read heads, and a brand-new controller. The platform will be used for Seagate's upcoming Exos hard drives for cloud datacenters with a 30TB capacity and higher. Heat-assisted magnetic recording is meant to radically increase areal recording density of magnetic media by making writes while the recording region is briefly heated to a point where its magnetic coercivity drops significantly. Seagate's Mozaic 3+ uses 10 glass disks with a magnetic layer consisting of an iron-platinum superlattice structure that ensures both longevity and smaller media grain size compared to typical HDD platters. To record the media, the platform uses a plasmonic writer sub-system with a vertically integrated nanophotonic laser that heats the media before writing. Because individual grains are so small with the new media, their individual magnetic signatures are lower, whereas magnetic inter-track interference (ITI) effect is somewhat higher. As a result, Seagate had to introduce its new Gen 7 Spintronic Reader, which features the "world's smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors," according to the company. Because Seagate's new Mozaic 3+ platform deals with new media with a very small grain size, an all-new writer, and a reader that features multiple tiny magnetic field readers, it also requires a lot of compute horsepower to orchestrate the drive's work. Therefore, Seagate has equipped with Mozaic 3+ platform with an all-new controller made on a 12nm fabrication process.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 9:20p | Why Every Coffee Shop Looks the Same An anonymous reader shares a report: These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn't been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself. Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point. The sheer expanse of sameness was too shocking and new to be boring. Of course, there have been examples of such cultural globalisation going back as far as recorded civilisation. But the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as "authentic," an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere "authentic" to have a drink or eat a meal. If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds. In 2016, I wrote an essay titled Welcome to AirSpace, describing my first impressions of this phenomenon of sameness. "AirSpace" was my coinage for the strangely frictionless geography created by digital platforms, in which you could move between places without straying beyond the boundaries of an app, or leaving the bubble of the generic aesthetic. The word was partly a riff on Airbnb, but it was also inspired by the sense of vaporousness and unreality that these places gave me. They seemed so disconnected from geography that they could float away and land anywhere else. When you were in one, you could be anywhere. My theory was that all the physical places interconnected by apps had a way of resembling one another. In the case of the cafes, the growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content. One cafe owner's personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing. On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me -- who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram -- toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map. To court the large demographic of customers moulded by the internet, more cafes adopted the aesthetics that already dominated on the platforms. Adapting to the norm wasn't just following trends but making a business decision, one that the consumers rewarded. When a cafe was visually pleasing enough, customers felt encouraged to post it on their own Instagram in turn as a lifestyle brag, which provided free social media advertising and attracted new customers. Thus the cycle of aesthetic optimisation and homogenisation continued.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 10:05p | Japan's SLIM Probe Lands On Moon, But Suffers Power Problem Geoffrey.landis writes: The Japan SLIM spacecraft has successfully landed on moon, but power problems mean it may be short mission. The good news is that the landing was successful, making Japan only the fifth nation to successfully make a lunar landing, and the ultra-miniature rover and the hopper both deployed. The bad news is that the solar arrays aren't producing power, and unless they can fix the problem in the next few hours, the batteries will be depleted and it will die. But, short mission or long, hurrah for Japan for being the fifth country to successfully land a mission on the surface of the moon (on their third try; two previous missions didn't make it). It's a rather amazing mission. I've never seen a spacecraft concept that lands under rocket power vertically but then rotates over to rest horizontally on the surface.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 10:40p | Plex To Launch a Store For Movies and TV Shows Jay Peters reports via The Verge: Plex, known for its media server software and as a place to watch ad-supported content, is going to launch a store for to buy and rent movies and TV shows in early February, executives told Lowpass' Janko Roettgers. "Most studios" are lined up for the store's launch, and there are "plans to complete the catalog soon after," Roettgers says. The store will also integrate with Plex features like its watchlists for movies. Roettgers points out that that Plex has announced plans in both 2020 and 2023 to launch a movie / TV store -- hopefully Plex is truly ready to do so this time. Plex chief product officer Scott Olechowski told Roettgers that more changes are coming to Plex down the line, including a "pretty major UX refresh" and more social features like public profiles.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 11:20p | US To Ban Pentagon From Buying Batteries From China's CATL, BYD U.S. lawmakers have banned the Defense Department from buying batteries produced by China's biggest manufacturers. "The rule implemented as part of the latest National Defense Authorization Act that passed on Dec. 22 will prevent procuring batteries from Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., BYD Co. and four other Chinese companies beginning in October 2027," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The measure doesn't extend to commercial purchases by companies such as Ford, which is licensing technology from CATL to build electric-vehicle batteries in Michigan. Tesla also sources some of its battery cells from BYD, which became the new top-selling EV maker globally in the fourth quarter. The four other manufacturers whose batteries will be banned are Envision Energy Ltd., EVE Energy Co., Gotion High Tech Co. and Hithium Energy Storage Technology Co. The decision still requires Pentagon officials to more clearly define the reach of the new rule. It adds to previous provisions outlined by the NDAA that decoupled the Defense Department's supply chain from China, including restrictions on use of Chinese semiconductors. While the Defense Department bans apply strictly to defense procurement, industries and lawmakers closely follow the rules as a guide for what materials, products and companies to trust in their own course of business.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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