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New study finds no brain injuries among ‘Havana syndrome’ patients

An array of advanced tests found no brain injuries or degeneration among U.S. diplomats and other government employees who suffer mysterious health problems once dubbed “Havana syndrome, ” researchers reported Monday.

The National Institutes of Health’s nearly five-year study offers no explanation for symptoms including headaches, balance problems and difficulties with thinking and sleep that were first reported in Cuba in 2016 and later by hundreds of American personnel in multiple countries.

But it did contradict some earlier findings that raised the specter of brain injuries in people experiencing what the State Department now calls “anomalous health incidents.”

“These individuals have real symptoms and are going through a very tough time,” said Dr. Leighton Chan, NIH’s chief of rehabilitation medicine, who helped lead the research. “They can be quite profound, disabling and difficult to treat.”

PlayStation 5 Pro hardware leak suggests its GPU is a RDNA 3/4-hybrid design, with some big improvements coming this way

Hot on the tails of the rumour that Sony is planning on releasing its own upscaling technology, with the forthcoming PlayStation 5 Pro, comes a wealth of tidbits purporting to be what the next-gen console's hardware is going to be like. The CPU will still be the same ol' Zen 2 core, and the RAM's a bit faster, but the GPU is getting replaced with a whole new design. And it's seemingly a funky blend of RDNA 3 and RDNA 4.

The leaks in question come from Inside Gaming and while they are unsubstantiated claims, the details seem credible enough to me. For example, it's being said that the PS5 Pro's custom AMD APU retains the same Zen 2-powered CPU as in the original PlayStation 5. So that's still eight cores and 16 threads, but that's fine for the majority of games.

It won't be running any faster, though apparently there will be an additional operating mode, letting it draw more power to achieve a 10% higher clock speed. That will come at a cost to the GPU, which would receive less power in that mode, though only losing around 1% of its performance. Why wouldn't Sony go with a faster CPU? The answer to that is simple: Backwards compatibility. All PS5 games, and older ones that also run on the platform, expect a CPU running at 3.5 GHz at best. Changing that by too much could mess up a lot of things.

The same is true of the system RAM. There's 16GB of average speed GDDR6 inside every PS5, and access to it is shared by the CPU and GPU. Running at 14 Gbps on a 256-bit aggregated memory bus, there's a fairly measly 448 GB/s of total bandwidth on offer. The PS5 Pro will apparently offer 576 GB/s of bandwidth and assuming the bus width has changed, that equates to a speed of 18 Gbps.

Apple may hire Google to power new iPhone AI features using Gemini

With Apple's own AI tech lagging behind, the firm looks for a fallback solution.

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Apple is in talks to license Google's Gemini model to power AI features like Siri in a future iPhone software update coming later in 2024, according to people familiar with the situation. Apple has also reportedly conducted similar talks with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

The potential integration of Google Gemini into iOS 18 could bring a range of new cloud-based (off-device) AI-powered features to Apple's smartphone, including image creation or essay writing based on simple prompts. However, the terms and branding of the agreement have not yet been finalized, and the implementation details remain unclear. The companies are unlikely to announce any deal until Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Gemini could also bring new capabilities to Apple's widely criticized voice assistant, Siri, which trails newer AI assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to complex questions. Rumors of Apple's own internal frustration with Siri—and potential remedies—have been kicking around for some time. In January, 9to5Mac revealed that Apple had been conducting tests with a beta version of iOS 17.4 that used OpenAI's ChatGPT API to power Siri.

JPMorgan Chase Paying $348,200,000 Penalty, Issued Cease-and-Desist Order Over ‘Unsafe or Unsound’ Banking Practices

The Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) are hitting banking giant JPMorgan Chase with a $348.20 million fine in a coordinated enforcement action.

Both the Fed and the OCC say JPMorgan engaged in “unsafe or unsound banking practices” in relation to its trade surveilling program.

The OCC says that since 2019, JPMorgan operated with gaps in its trade surveillance program, leading to the bank’s failure to adequately monitor its traders and clients for potential market misconduct in billions of trading instances.

Meanwhile, the Fed says JPMorgan’s trade surveillance program had been deficient at certain points in time from 2014 to 2023. The Fed says the deficiencies allowed the trillion-dollar lender’s corporate and investment bank division to operate without “adequate data oversight and reconciliation processes to achieve effective and comprehensive trade surveillance.”

EPA bans asbestos, a deadly carcinogen still in use decades after a partial ban was enacted

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday announced a comprehensive ban on asbestos, a carcinogen that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year but is still used in some chlorine bleach, brake pads and other products.

The final rule marks a major expansion of EPA regulation under a landmark 2016 law that overhauled regulations governing tens of thousands of toxic chemicals in everyday products, from household cleaners to clothing and furniture.

The new rule would ban chrysotile asbestos, the only ongoing use of asbestos in the United States. The substance is found in products such as brake linings and gaskets and is used to manufacture chlorine bleach and sodium hydroxide, also known as caustic soda, including some that is used for water purification.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan called the final rule a major step to protect public health.

“With today’s ban, EPA is finally slamming the door on a chemical so dangerous that it has been banned in over 50 countries,’' Regan said. ”This historic ban is more than 30 years in the making, and it’s thanks to amendments that Congress made in 2016 to fix the Toxic Substances Control Act,’' the main U.S. law governing use of chemicals.

Massachusetts: Pet DNA company sends back dog breed results from human sample a second time

BOSTON - Have you ever wondered how accurate those pet DNA tests are? The WBZ I-Team put dog breed tests to the test, and it wasn't the first time some very surprising results came back.

"I personally do have concerns about the fact that, from a consumer standpoint, you don't always know what you're getting when you work with those companies," said Elinor Karlsson, who's a geneticist with the Broad Institute and UMass Chan Medical School. "There's not a lot of rules in this space."

Karlsson runs a lab called Darwin's Ark, digging into pet DNA science. It's an industry on track to be worth $723 million by 2030, according to Zion Market Research.

Last year, the I-Team checked up on commercial DNA testing companies, sending a sample from New Hampshire pet owner Michelle Leininger's human cheek to a company called DNA My Dog. The results showed she was part bulldog. Leininger joked, "some people would agree with that at times, but no, no," she said.

£8 billion 'living laboratory' city built for just 2,000 people expected to be completed 'imminently'

The city of smart homes is said to be a 'mass human experiment'

A multi-billion pound city made for 2,000 people which will also serve as a 'mass human experiment' is nearly complete.

Automobile giant Toyota is at the helm of the 175-acre project, having built a mini city which it's named 'Woven City', just miles away from Mount Fuji on the island of Honshū.

The making of the experimental city was announced back in 2021, and its first residents are now 'expected to move in before the end of the year.'

Woven City will be used as a 'living laboratory' so that Toyota can collect data on 'the use of driverless cars, guided by sensors in lights, buildings and roads' across the city.

ChatGPT's ancestor GPT-2 jammed into 1.25GB Excel sheet — LLM runs inside a spreadsheet that you can download from GitHub

Software developer and self-confessed spreadsheet addict Ishan Anand has jammed GPT-2 into Microsoft Excel. More astonishingly, it works – providing insight into how large language models (LLMs) work, and how the underlying Transformer architecture goes about its smart next-token prediction. "If you can understand a spreadsheet, then you can understand AI," boasts Anand. The 1.25GB spreadsheet has been made available on GitHub for anyone to download and play with.

Naturally, this spreadsheet implementation of GPT-2 is somewhat behind the LLMs available in 2024, but GPT-2 was state-of-the-art and grabbed plenty of headlines in 2019. It is important to remember that GPT-2 is not something to chat with, as it comes from before the 'chat' era. ChatGPT came from work done to conversationally prompt GPT-3 in 2022. Moreover, Anand uses the GPT-2 Small model here, and the XLSB Microsoft Excel Binary file has 124 million parameters, and the full version of GPT-2 used 1.5 billion parameters (while GPT-3 moved the bar, with up to 175 billion parameters).

GPT-2 works mainly on smart 'next-token prediction', where the Transformer architecture language model completes an input with the most likely next part of the sequence. This spreadsheet can handle just 10 tokens of input, which is tiny compared to the 128,000 tokens that GPT-4 Turbo can handle. However, it is still good for a demo and Anand claims that his "low-code introduction" is ideal as an LLM grounding for the likes of tech execs, marketers, product managers, AI policymakers, ethicists, as well as for developers and scientists who are new to AI. Anand asserts that this same Transformer architecture remains "the foundation for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Bard/Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and many other LLMs."

Intel Core i9-14900KS Is Already Breaking Records, Overclocked to 9.1GHz on Liquid Helium

As expected, Intel's highest-clocked chip ever is already setting world records even though it's just one day old.

Intel launched the swan song for its LGA 1700 platform on Thursday with the Core i9-14900KS. This "Special Edition" CPU is a binned version of the 14900K, plucked from obscurity due to its ability to overclock to 6.2GHz right out of the box. Now, an overclocking team has taken Intel's newest flagship CPU past 9.1GHz and set a new world record. The team had to use liquid helium to accomplish this task, which is slightly more effective than liquid nitrogen and represents the pinnacle of cooling technology.

An Asus overclocking team led by the esteemed clock-tickler Elmor is responsible for the new CPU world record at an Asus Republic of Gamers overclocking event. Elmor and his crew were able to push the Core i9-14900KS to 9117.75 MHz on an Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex motherboard, which costs around $650. To achieve this clock frequency, the CPU had to be chilled to sub-zero temperatures with liquid helium, and the video shows the elaborate setup required to get it to work correctly. The chip ran at a frosty -230C for the final run at 9.117GHz.

The same team previously set the CPU overclocking record on a 13900K in 2022, which they were able to run at 9.08GHz, so this new record is just slightly better. The previous run also used liquid helium, which is pretty much the go-to setup when records must fall. The only difference between the two runs that we can spot is that the previous one had the multiplier set to 90, whereas the new chip was able to run with a multiplier of 91 on a 100MHz bus.

Video taken of the event shows the chaotic scenario that unfolded, trying to keep the chip cool during the overclocking run. Liquid helium is continuously dumped into a cooling pot sitting atop the processor while a phalanx of fans blow what appears to be smoke away from the motherboard.

Nippon Steel says US Steel acquisition wouldn't cause layoffs, plant closures

Nippon Steel said its proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel won't cause layoffs or plant closures

Nippon Steel said Friday that its proposed $14.9 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel would not result in any layoffs or plant closures as the pending deal faces opposition from President Biden and scrutiny from unionized steelworkers.

Japan-based Nippon Steel, which announced the proposed acquisition in December, released a statement about the deal that looked to address the political concerns of the president and the United Steelworkers (USW) union about its potential impact on workers.

"As part of our proposal to the USW, at the close of the transaction we will commit that U.S. Steel would additionally invest $1.4B, increase the current CBA by over 140%, and there will be no layoffs or plant closures as a result of the transaction," Nippon Steel said in the statement. Reuters reported that the company initially indicated there wouldn't be layoffs or plant closures before September 2026, then reissued the statement to clarify that none would occur due to the deal.

The move comes after Biden on Thursday said in a statement that "U.S. Steel has been an iconic American steel company for more than a century, and it is vital for it to remain an American steel company that is domestically owned and operated."

It’s just water in a can. How did Liquid Death become a billion-dollar brand?

liquid_death.jpg


If you’ve been to a live event recently, you may have noticed something called Liquid Death being sold at food and drink stands.

For those not in the know, the name may be a little intimidating. But “Liquid Death” is just water in a can.

Now the brand, which has been independently owned and operated since its creation in 2017, has raised a new round of investment that values it at $1.4 billion.

In a release Monday, Liquid Death said it had hit $263 million in global sales and can be found in 113,000 retail outlets across the U.S. and U.K. It said it had seen “triple-digit” growth for the third-consecutive year, becoming the fastest-growing water and iced tea brand, citing SPINS, a market research group.

As AI tools get smarter, they’re growing more covertly racist, experts find

As AI tools get smarter, they’re growing more covertly racist, experts find ChatGPT and Gemini discriminate against those who speak African American Vernacular English, report shows.

Popular artificial intelligence tools are becoming more covertly racist as they advance, says an alarming new report.

A team of technology and linguistics researchers revealed this week that large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini hold racist stereotypes about speakers of African American Vernacular English, or AAVE, an English dialect created and spoken by Black Americans.

“We know that these technologies are really commonly used by companies to do tasks like screening job applicants,” said Valentin Hoffman, a researcher at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and co-author of the recent paper, published this week in arXiv, an open-access research archive from Cornell University.

Hoffman explained that previously researchers “only really looked at what overt racial biases these technologies might hold” and never “examined how these AI systems react to less overt markers of race, like dialect differences”.

Quebec woman gives birth outside after finding hospital door locked

A central Quebec health authority has confirmed that a woman gave birth outside a hospital in Drummondville, Que., after the mother arrived to the building and found the main doors locked.

The health authority says employees heard noises outside the Ste-Croix hospital early Tuesday morning and discovered the woman and her newborn.

Spokeswoman Kellie Forand says the main hospital doors are locked at night and access to emergency services is through another door in a different part of the building.

The health authority says a security guard, who was working for a private agency, has been removed from their job for failing to help the woman.

A warming island’s mice are breeding out of control and eating seabirds. An extermination is planned

Mice accidentally introduced to a remote island near Antarctica 200 years ago are breeding out of control because of climate change, and they are eating seabirds and causing major harm in a special nature reserve with “unique biodiversity.”

Now conservationists are planning a mass extermination using helicopters and hundreds of tons of rodent poison, which needs to be dropped over every part of Marion Island’s 115 square miles (297 square kilometers) to ensure success.

If even one pregnant mouse survives, their prolific breeding ability means it may have all been for nothing.

The Mouse-Free Marion project — pest control on a grand scale — is seen as critical for the ecology of the uninhabited South African territory and the wider Southern Ocean. It would be the largest eradication of its kind if it succeeds.

Researchers Solve Mystery of The Sea Creature That Evolved Eyes All Over Its Shell

Small, shelled, and unassuming, chitons have eyes unlike any other creature in the animal kingdom.

Some of these marine mollusks have thousands of bulbous little peepers embedded in their segmented shells, all with lenses made of a mineral called aragonite. Although tiny and primitive, these sensory organs called ocelli are thought to be capable of true vision, distinguishing shapes as well as light.

Other chiton species, however, sport smaller 'eyespots' that function more like individual pixels, much like the components of an insect's or mantis shrimp's compound eye, forming a visual sensor distributed over the chiton's shell.

A new study examining how those different visual systems came to be has now revealed a surprising evolutionary nimbleness to these rock-dwelling creatures: their ancestors hastily evolved eyes on four different occasions, resulting in two very distinct kinds of visual system today.

Gumroad no longer allows most NSFW art, leaving its adult creators panicked

Gumroad, an e-commerce company for creators, updated its rules to more strictly limit NSFW content, citing restrictions from payment processors like Stripe and PayPal.

For creators who sell adult art, like explicit comic books or lewd cosplay photos, these sudden policy changes can be detrimental, resulting in an unforeseen loss of income.

“I’m concerned on a number of levels for my livelihood and the livelihoods of all types of creators in my sphere: artists, writers, sex workers and content creators of all kinds,” Sleepingirl, a kink educator and writer, told TechCrunch. “This is obviously far from the first site that is bending to the pressure of payment processors, and it will not be the last, but this is the first time my content (which is primarily academic and educational) seems to be threatened.”

Adult creators are taught to anticipate this kind of deplatforming; it’s happened on Patreon, which used to be much more lax about NSFW content, and it almost happened on OnlyFans. But that doesn’t make the impact of these policy changes any less debilitating. When creators have to port over their followers to a new platform, or direct fans to a different web shop to buy their products, the friction can result in a loss of income.

Florida Is on Its Way to Banning — and Criminalizing — Alternative Meat

"We're not going to have fake meat. Like that doesn't work," Gov. Ron DeSantis said.

Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to keep lab-grown meat out of Florida.

Over the last several months, Florida legislators have been quietly working to ban — and criminalize — the production and sale of cell-cultivated meat across the state, via the introduction of two bills, HB 1071 and SB 1084. On February 6, the state's House of Representatives passed SB 1084, which now sits on DeSantis' desk awaiting a signature. And if his previous comments are any indication, he will be pulling out his pen soon.

"I know the Legislature is doing a bill to try to protect our meat," DeSantis said in February while visiting the South Florida State College Hardee Campus, according to CBS. "You need meat, OK. And we're going to have meat in Florida." DeSantis added, "We're not going to have fake meat. Like that doesn't work."

Cell-cultivated meat, to be clear, differs from traditional veggie burgers and meat alternatives like Impossible Burgers. As the Congressional Research Service (CRS) defines,

Scientists Identify Speech Trait That Foreshadows Cognitive Decline

Can you pass me the whatchamacallit? It's right over there next to the thingamajig.

Many of us will experience "lethologica", or difficulty finding words, in everyday life. And it usually becomes more prominent with age.

Frequent difficulty finding the right word can signal changes in the brain consistent with the early ("preclinical") stages of Alzheimer's disease – before more obvious symptoms emerge.

However, a recent study from the University of Toronto suggests that it's the speed of speech, rather than the difficulty in finding words that is a more accurate indicator of brain health in older adults.

The researchers asked 125 healthy adults, aged 18 to 90, to describe a scene in detail. Recordings of these descriptions were subsequently analysed by artificial intelligence (AI) software to extract features such as speed of talking, duration of pauses between words, and the variety of words used.

El Salvador Has Thousands More Bitcoins Than Previously Known

The Central American nation moved $400 million in BTC into a cold storage wallet this week.

Bitcoin-forward Central American nation El Salvador this week moved $400 million worth of bitcoin (BTC) – "a big chunk" – into a cold wallet, according to its President, Nayib Bukele.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Bukele referred to the new setup as "our first #Bitcoin piggy bank." El Salvador stored the cold wallet "in a physical vault within our national territory," he said, including a photo of a wallet that held 5,689.68 BTC, worth $411 million at Thursday's prices.

A bitcoin treasury of that size places El Salvador's holdings far higher than previously believed. Even on Thursday, public trackers place the nation's trove at less than 3,000 BTC ($205 million). Earlier this week Buckle teased that the country was not simply buying BTC but also getting it by selling passports, through currency conversions for businesses, from mining and from government services.

The revelation represents the first time that Bukele has tied his nation's holdings to a specific address. He previously relied solely on social media posts to make claims about the size of his trove, providing occasional updates whenever El Salvador bought more.

Searches for VPNs spike in Texas after Pornhub pulls out of the state

(CNN) - Searches for virtual private networking (VPN) software briefly spiked in Texas this week after Pornhub suspended service in the state over a law forcing adult websites to verify the age or identities of their users.

The four-fold rise in Google searches for tools that can circumvent the state-level blocking suggests the law may already be having unintended side effects, days after a federal appeals court upheld the legislation and said it could remain in effect.

Visitors with Texas IP addresses who visit Pornhub’s website are now presented with a full-page message calling the Texas law “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous.”

“Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas,” the message reads. “In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.”

Search interest in VPNs began disproportionately rising in Texas Thursday compared to the rest of the country, according to a CNN analysis of Google Trends data — quadrupling in the hours following Pornhub’s announcement before retreating slightly by early Friday morning.

General chit-chat
Help Users
  • Varine Varine:
    He walked away from the first batch, learned nothing and walked away from the second batch, and then tried to toast it in a saute pan made out of aluminum so it scorched immediately and then I took away and he was sad all day
    +1
  • Varine Varine:
    I know our range sucks but it's still a fucking fire down there, I've never measured it but I'm sure it's like a couple thousand degrees.
    +1
  • The Helper The Helper:
    I wish I had a flat top grill in my kitchen!
  • jonas jonas:
    I wish I could cook asian dishes :D
  • The Helper The Helper:
    You just need a pressure cooker like an instapot for the asian dishes
  • The Helper The Helper:
    they make that stuff easy
  • The Helper The Helper:
    and there is a flat top grill I can buy that will work on my stovetop but it is pricey
  • The Helper The Helper:
    and I have no room for that anyway
  • Varine Varine:
    I have a thing that goes over two burners for my house, but it doesn't work great. I think they make ones that plug in where the coils go but it's not cheap.
  • Varine Varine:
    And yeah if you have a pressure cooker you can do lots of stuff really fast. Depending on what you're trying to do it ranges from really easy to really hard
  • Varine Varine:
    If you want to make tonkotsu broth, you're gonna have a rough time, but if you want to do like stir fries or something that tends to be pretty easy
    +1
  • Varine Varine:
    Ingredients are sometimes hard to find though, which is why we're doing 'fusion'. We don't have wok burners either, so it'll be kind of a weird transition
    +1
  • The Helper The Helper:
    Added another slow cooker recipe - this time a dessert - Slow Cooker Fried Apples https://www.thehelper.net/threads/recipe-slow-cooker-cracker-barrel-fried-apples.192860/
  • Varine Varine:
    I have three teenagers apply for college that all asked for letters of recommendation with like two days notice lol. Like I get it guys, and I'm happy to help, but maybe tell me you need it before you need to turn these applications in?
  • Varine Varine:
    I guess they are literal children, so not exactly the best at thinking ahead. Fucking kids
  • The Helper The Helper:
    Yeah they are just inexperienced and young
  • jonas jonas:
    I'm still horrible at that :eek: often forget things or do things on the last minute
  • The Helper The Helper:
    My daughter is same way
  • The Helper The Helper:
    Happy Saturday people!!!
  • The Helper The Helper:
    I am sure nobody cares but I am seriously considering taking the Gaming News forum and just changing it to General Gaming Discussion since I post so much about gaming in the General Discussion Forum
  • The Helper The Helper:
    guests online 487 at 12:30 and none of them show up on the stats - all bots man
  • The Helper The Helper:
    Latest recipe is a great one - I love Philly Cheese and this is Philly Cheese Meatloaf https://www.thehelper.net/threads/recipe-philly-cheese-meatloaf.192935/
  • Ghan Ghan:
    Beep boop
    +3
  • Varine Varine:
    I for one welcome our bot overlords

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