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Consumer Reports awarded a "recommended" rating to Tesla's Modey Y this year, "with owners reporting fewer issues with its suspension, in-car electronics and general build quality than in previous years". Tesla's Model 3 also earned a "recommended" rating. "Tesla's Model 3 and Model Y are now the sweet spot in the automotive industry when it comes to building electric cars," says Jake Fisher, the senior director of auto testing for Consumer Reports. "While Tesla is still a relatively new car company, it has more experience producing EVs than any other automaker." But how about the larger universe of all automakers? Electric vehicle owners continue to report far more problems with their vehicles than owners of conventional cars or hybrids, according to Consumer Reports' newly released annual car reliability survey. The survey reveals that, on average, EVs from the past three model years had 79 percent more problems than conventional cars... "Most electric cars today are being manufactured by either legacy automakers that are new to EV technology, or by companies like Rivian that are new to making cars," says Jake Fisher, senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports. "It's not surprising that they're having growing pains and need some time to work out the bugs." Fisher says some of the most common problems EV owners report are issues with electric drive motors, charging, and EV batteries... This year's survey data show that hybrids continue to be among the most reliable vehicle type: Hybrids have 26 percent fewer problems than conventional models, even though they have both a conventional powertrain and an electric motor and therefore more potential problem spots than conventional cars. "It might not seem that long ago, but Toyota launched the Prius hybrid about 25 years ago," Elek says. "Automakers have been making hybrids long enough that they've gotten really good at it. Plus, many hybrids are also made by manufacturers that tend to produce reliable vehicles overall, such as Toyota, Hyundai, and Kia." Hybrids also are not typically loaded with high-tech features like multiple customizable displays that can be problem-prone, which is why Fisher says they are great options for drivers who are more interested in getting ideal fuel mileage than they are in bells and whistles. "These vehicles are not necessarily a tour de force of technology, so there's just less that can go wrong with them," he says. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), which have both a battery for short-range electric driving and an internal combustion engine for long-range driving, are the least reliable category — 146 percent more problems than conventional cars. "PHEVs are sort of like an EV and a conventional car rolled into one, so by their nature they have more things that can go wrong with them," Fisher says. There are exceptions, notes the auto testing director. Toyota's RAV4 Prime plug-in hybrid "is one of the most reliable models in our survey this year. Similarly, the Ford F-150 hybrid has transmission and other issues that buck the trend of strong hybrid reliability." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

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"Scientists have created tiny living robots from human cells," reports CNN. The mini-bots "can move around in a lab dish and may one day be able to help heal wounds or damaged tissue, according to a new study. " The study's lead author tells CNN, "We don't realize all the competencies that our own body cells have." A team at Tufts University and Harvard University's Wyss Institute have dubbed these creations anthrobots. The research builds on earlier work from some of the same scientists, who made the first living robots, or xenobots, from stem cells sourced from embryos of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis)... The scientists used adult human cells from the trachea, or windpipe, from anonymous donors of different ages and sexes... The tracheal cells are covered with hairlike projections called cilia that wave back and forth. They usually help the tracheal cells push out tiny particles that find their way into air passages of the lungs. Earlier studies had also shown that the cells can form organoids — clumps of cells widely used for research. Study coauthor Gizem Gumuskaya experimented with the chemical composition of the tracheal cells' growth conditions and found a way to encourage the cilia to face outward on the organoids. Once she had found the right matrix, the organoids became mobile after a few days, with the cilia acting a bit like oars... "In our method, each anthrobot grows from a single cell." It's this self-assembly that makes them unique. Biological robots have been made by other scientists, but they were constructed by hand by making a mold and seeding cells to live on top of it, said study author Michael Levin... They survived up to 60 days in laboratory conditions. The experiments outlined in this latest study are at an early stage, but the goal is to find out whether the anthrobots could have medical applications, Levin and Gumuskaya said. To see whether such applications might be possible, researchers examined whether the anthrobots were able to move over human neurons grown in a lab dish that had been "scratched" to mimic damage. They were surprised to see the anthrobots encouraged growth to the damaged region of the neurons, although the researchers don't yet understand the healing mechanism, the study noted.

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"Structured concurrency is a new way to use multithreading in Java," reports InfoWorld. "It allows developers to think about work in logical groups while taking advantage of both traditional and virtual threads." Available in preview in Java 21, structured concurrency is a key aspect of Java's future, so now is a good time to start working with it... Java's thread model makes it a strong contender among concurrent languages, but multithreading has always been inherently tricky. Structured concurrency allows you to use multiple threads with structured programming syntax. In essence, it provides a way to write concurrent software using familiar program flows and constructs. This lets developers focus on the business at hand, instead of the orchestration of threading. As the JEP for structured concurrency says, "If a task splits into concurrent subtasks then they all return to the same place, namely the task's code block." Virtual threads, now an official feature of Java, create the possibility of cheaply spawning threads to gain concurrent performance. Structured concurrency provides the simple syntax to do so. As a result, Java now has a unique and highly-optimized threading system that is also easy to understand... Between virtual threads and structured concurrency, Java developers have a compelling new mechanism for breaking up almost any code into concurrent tasks without much overhead... Any time you encounter a bottleneck where many tasks are occurring, you can easily hand them all off to the virtual thread engine, which will find the best way to orchestrate them. The new thread model with structured concurrency also makes it easy to customize and fine-tune this behavior. It will be very interesting to see how developers use these new concurrency capabilities in our applications, frameworks, and servers going forward. It involves a new class StructuredTaskScope located in the java.util.concurrent library. (InfoWorld points out that "you'll need to use --enable-preview and --source 21 or --source 22 to enable structured concurrency.") Their reporter shared an example on GitHub, and there's more examples in the Java 21 documentation. "The structured concurrency documentation includes an example of collecting subtask results as they succeed or fail and then returning the results."

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It can regenerate bits of its body. Ancient Mexicans revered it as a mischievous, shape-shifting god. They named it axolotl — translation: "water monster" — and it's a "salamander with a Mona Lisa smile," reports the Washington Post, "an alien-looking creature with a permanent grin and a crown of feathery gills". But while there's over a million in the world's scientific laboratories, back in its only natural habitat — the canals of Lake Xochimilco in Mexico City — it's on the brink of extinction. In hopes of preventing the annihilation of a species with mystifying traits, ecologists at Mexico's National Autonomous University are giving the public the chance to virtually adopt an axolotl. For $30, $180 or $360, donors can choose the sex, age and name of the little buddy they get to call theirs for a month, six months or a year, respectively. The axolotls stay in Mexico, but donors receive an adoption kit with an infographic, the axolotl's identification card, a certificate of adoption and a personalized thank-you letter. The campaign also includes options to buy an axolotl a meal for $10 or to fix up one of their homes for $50. And for those wanting to splurge a bit more, participants can adopt the axolotl's refuge of chinampas — the artificial islands that dot Lake Xochimilco — for one, six or 12 months starting at $450. The funds will go toward building refuges for the axolotl and restoring its habitat, which has been devastated by the effects of Mexico City's urbanization over the last decades, said Luis Zambrano, an ecologist at Mexico's National Autonomous University. "A species can't be a species without its habitat," Zambrano said. Axolotls have "helped scientists understand how organs develop in vertebrates, uncover the causes of the birth defect spina bifida and discover thyroid hormones..." "The salamanders have also become beloved exotic pets — to the point that 'there's claw machines in Japan that let you pick up an axolotl to take home,' Zambrano added."

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Tuesday the New York Times reported that while hosting the global climate summit, the United Arab Emirates also hoped to lobby for oil and gas deals around the world. But Friday the United Arab Emirates announced that they'd also started a $30 billion climate fund, reports Reuters, and that fund "aims to attract $250 billion of investment by the end of the decade." The New York Times notes the fund started just months ago, and "at least 20 percent of the funds, would be earmarked for projects in the developing world, where it is especially difficult to finance clean energy projects because interest rates are high and lenders shy away from what they perceive as risky investments." The Washington Post notes that "It immediately becomes one of the world's largest climate-focused investment funds." "This is a big deal," said Mona Dajani, global head of renewables, energy and infrastructure at the law firm Shearman and Sterling. "We have seen other programs previously, but not at this level. They were too scattered, too small, not aligned to the broader financial sector." The lack of cash feeds into other challenges that can make it impossible to scale up clean energy in some countries. Without a steady pipeline of projects, there are no established supply chains, and nations find themselves locked out of markets for key components that are in high demand elsewhere, such as solar cells and critical minerals used to make giant batteries that store renewable power. The Global South will need an immense amount of such battery storage by the end of the decade, according to the Rockefeller Foundation, enough to store about as much power as is produced by 90 large nuclear plants. The storage is used to bottle wind and solar power and distribute it back into grids after dark and when the wind dies down. The Post also reports that "the money to fund the projects will come largely from oil revenue." While the UAE framed its initiative as a call to global action, it is at least partly geared toward generating returns. It is one of several forays the UAE is making into clean-energy finance as it seeks to diversify its economy amid predictions the demand for oil will slump in coming years... The new initiative puts a spotlight on the UAE's evolving role in the fight against climate change. The country is at once one of the world's biggest contributors to warming, pumping massive amounts of oil into the global economy, while also using its fossil fuel wealth to put itself on the vanguard of energy innovation.

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This week the White House announced a series of "AI hackathons to strengthen critical mineral supply chains," starting in February of 2024. There's 50 critical minerals are used in everything from electric motors and generators to the fuselage and wings of an airplane. So now the "Critical Mineral Assessments with AI Support" contest aims to "significantly speed up the assessment of the nation's critical mineral resources by automating key steps" using AI and machine learning tools, according to a DARPA announcement on X, pointing to details on a new DARPA web page: Clean energy infrastructure, along with many other next-generation technologies, consume more critical minerals than traditional energy sources, and expected demand for critical minerals used in clean energy will quadruple by 2040... The goal of this AI exploration effort is to transform the workflow from a serial, predominantly manual, intermittently updated approach, to a highly parallel, continuous AI-assisted capability that is comprehensive in scope, efficient in scale, and generalizable across an array of applications... The challenge is that critical mineral assessments are labor intensive and using traditional techniques, assessing all 50 critical minerals would proceed too slowly to address present-day supply chain needs. An AI-assisted workflow could enable the U.S. Geological Survey to accomplish its mission, produce high-quality derivative products from raw input data, and deliver timely assessments that reduce exploration risk and support decisions affecting the management of strategic domestic resources. While the primary focus will be critical minerals, it is expected that the resulting technologies and resulting data products will be valuable for a wide variety of U.S. government mission areas ranging from water resource management, to potential new clean energy sources. It all started back in 2022, when the resource-identifying U.S. Geological Survey acknowledged that "The U.S. is under-mapped." They'd hoped an online contest could close the gap — with a first prize of $10,000 (with $3,000 and $1,000 for the second- and third-place winner). Working with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the government-supporting research nonprofit MITRE, DARPA and the U.S. Geological Survey all teamed up for the big "AI for Critical Mineral Assessment" competition. Participants were given images of maps from somewhere in North America — along with a list of points without their latitude-longitude coordinates (just a pair of numbers indicating their position within that image). They'd have to find a way to automate the determination of real-world latitudes and longitudes. The contest recommended using other features on the map as reference points — like roads, streams, and elevation-indicating topographic lines, as well as government boundary lines (and the names of places on the map). And last December during the awards ceremony a DARPA official said they were "really really pleased at the response we got." The new 2024 AI hackathons are now intended to build on the challenges from that 2022 competition. One competitor had described it as a "well-organized competition, really engaging," adding "I think the complexity of the maps that were part of the data set just made it a really interesting and engaging kind of problem." They noted that in the past we've always indicated data with maps — but that now, we're trying to turn maps back into data...

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Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland summarizes a video report from CNN: : CNN anchor Jake Tapper interviewed TikTok's head of public policy last year, asking if they censored content critical of the Chinese party. "We do not censor content on behalf of any government," the spokesperson answered. But this week CNN reviewed data the total number of hashtags on both Instagram and on TikTok for topics that might be embarrassing to the Chinese government — and found stark differences. — Hashtag #Uyghurs appears in 10.4X more posts on Instagram than on TikTok. — Hashtag #Tiananmen (referencing the 1989 pro-democracy protests) is 153 more likely to appear on Instagram than on TikTok. "So yes, the content exists on TikTok, but there's far less of it on TikTok than on other social media apps," CNN's Tapper says. "And that seems very convenient for the Chinese Communist Party."

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The Linux Foundation's own "Open Software Security foundation" has an associated project called Alpha-Omega funded by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon with a mission to catalyze sustainable security improvements to critical open source projects and ecosystems. It was established nearly two years ago in February of 2022 — and this month announced plans to continue supporting the Rust Foundation Security Initiative: 2022 was also the first full year of operation for the Rust Foundation — an independent nonprofit dedicated to stewarding the Rust programming language and supporting its global community. Given the considerable growth and rising popularity of the Rust programming language in recent years, it has never been more critical to have a healthy and well-funded foundation in place to help ensure the safety and security of this important language. When the Rust Foundation emerged, OpenSSF recognized a shared vision of global open source security baked into their organizational priorities from day one. These shared security values were the driving force behind Alpha-Omega's decision to grant $460k USD to the Rust Foundation in 2022. This funding helped underwrite their Security Initiative — a program dedicated to improving the state of security within the Rust programming language ecosystem and sowing security best practices within the Rust community. The Security Initiative began in earnest this past January and has now been in operation for a full year with many achievements to note and exciting plans in development. While security is a clear priority of the Rust language itself and can be seen in its memory safety-critical features, the Rust Project cannot reasonably be expected to foster long term, sustainable security without proper support and funding. Indeed, there is still a pervasive attitude across technology that cybersecurity is being managed and prioritized by "someone else." The unfortunate impact of this attitude is that critical security work often falls on overburdened and under-resourced open source maintainers. By prioritizing the Security Initiative during their first full year in operation, the Rust Foundation has taken on the responsibility of overseeing — and supporting — security improvements within the Rust ecosystem while ensuring meaningful progress... Alpha-Omega is excited to announce our second year of supporting the Rust Foundation Security Initiative. We believe that this funding will build on the good work and momentum established by the Rust Foundation in 2023. Through this partnership, we are helping relieve maintainer burdens while paving an important path towards a healthier and more secure future within the Rust ecosystem. Meanwhile, this month the Rust Foundation announced that downloads from Rust's package repository crates.io have now reached 45 billion — and that the foundation is "committed to facilitating the healthy growth of Rust through funding and resources for the community and the Project. "After conducting initial planning and research and getting approval from our board of directors, we are pleased to announce our intention to help fulfill this commitment by developing a Rust Foundation training and certification program." We continue to be supportive of anyone creating Rust training and education materials. In fact, we are proud to have provided funding to a few individuals involved in this work via our Community Grants Program. Our team is also aware that commercial Rust training courses already exist and that global training entities are already developing their own Rust-focused programs. Given the value of Rust in professional open source, this makes sense. However, we are eager to introduce a program that will allow us to direct profits back into the Rust ecosystem. As a nonprofit organization, we sit in a unique position thanks to the tools, connections, insights, administrative support, and resources at our disposal — all of which will add value to course material aimed at professional development and adoption. We see our forthcoming program as one tool of many that can be used to verify skills for prospective employers, and for those employers to build out their professional teams of Rust expertise. We will remain supportive of existing training programs offered by Rust Foundation member companies and we'll look for ways to ensure this remains the case as program development progresses... There is no set launch date for the Rust Foundation training and certification program yet, but we plan to continue laying high-quality groundwork in Q4 of 2023 and the first half of 2024.

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Tesla's new Cybertruck is more than their first new model since 2020, reports the Verge: Tesla announced a new "Powershare" vehicle-to-load charging capability, only available on the new Cybertruck. The feature will allow Cybertruck owners to power their camping equipment, power tools, or even their entire home during a blackout, just by using their electric truck as a mobile generator. The truck also features a 240-volt outlet in the rear bed that can be used to charge other EVs. An image on Tesla's website shows the Cybertruck charging a Model Y. The Cybertruck can put out as much as 11.5kW, which is more than the Ford F-150 Lightning's 9.6kW of onboard power or the GMC Sierra Denali EV's 10.2kW. Tesla has been talking about manufacturing vehicles with bidirectional charging capabilities for several years now, first teasing the feature at its Battery Day event in 2020. Since then, many of its competitors have adopted the feature for their EVs, including Ford, GM, Hyundai, Kia, and others... In essence, it treats high-capacity lithium-ion batteries not only as tools to power EVs but also as backup storage cells to charge other electric devices, an entire home, or even to send power to the electrical grid for possible energy savings... Customers who want to take advantage of the Powershare feature in their homes will need a Tesla Powerwall (of course) and a Wall Connector for the most seamless connection. Tesla held a launch event for the vehicle on Thursday, and demand appears to be high. Jalopnik reports Tesla is now offering people who'd reserved a Cybertruck a $1,000 discount if they'll instead order another Tesla model.

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An anonymous reader writes: Amazon just inked a deal with chief competitor and Elon Musk-helmed SpaceX to launch internet-beaming satellites -- a move that comes even as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pursues his own space dreams with his own rocket company, Blue Origin, and as SpaceX builds its own internet constellation. While Musk and Bezos have notoriously been publicly competitive and have a history of openly sparring on social media, with Musk regularly making crude jokes about Bezos and Blue Origin, it is not uncommon for business rivals to team up in the world of rocket launches. Some Amazon satellites will still ride on a large rocket made by Blue Origin, dubbed the New Glenn. But it's been delayed for years and will make its launch debut next year at the earliest.

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Three days after Amazon announced its AI chatbot Q, some employees are sounding alarms about accuracy and privacy issues. From a report: Q is "experiencing severe hallucinations and leaking confidential data," including the location of AWS data centers, internal discount programs, and unreleased features, according to leaked documents obtained by Platformer. An employee marked the incident as "sev 2," meaning an incident bad enough to warrant paging engineers at night and make them work through the weekend to fix it. [...] In a statement, Amazon played down the significance of the employee discussions. "Some employees are sharing feedback through internal channels and ticketing systems, which is standard practice at Amazon," a spokesperson said. "No security issue was identified as a result of that feedback. We appreciate all of the feedback we've already received and will continue to tune Q as it transitions from being a product in preview to being generally available."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In a preprint research paper titled "Does GPT-4 Pass the Turing Test?", two researchers from UC San Diego pitted OpenAI's GPT-4 AI language model against human participants, GPT-3.5, and ELIZA to see which could trick participants into thinking it was human with the greatest success. But along the way, the study, which has not been peer-reviewed, found that human participants correctly identified other humans in only 63 percent of the interactions -- and that a 1960s computer program surpassed the AI model that powers the free version of ChatGPT. Even with limitations and caveats, which we'll cover below, the paper presents a thought-provoking comparison between AI model approaches and raises further questions about using the Turing test to evaluate AI model performance. In the recent study, listed on arXiv at the end of October, UC San Diego researchers Cameron Jones (a PhD student in Cognitive Science) and Benjamin Bergen (a professor in the university's Department of Cognitive Science) set up a website called turingtest.live, where they hosted a two-player implementation of the Turing test over the Internet with the goal of seeing how well GPT-4, when prompted different ways, could convince people it was human. Through the site, human interrogators interacted with various "AI witnesses" representing either other humans or AI models that included the aforementioned GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and ELIZA, a rules-based conversational program from the 1960s. "The two participants in human matches were randomly assigned to the interrogator and witness roles," write the researchers. "Witnesses were instructed to convince the interrogator that they were human. Players matched with AI models were always interrogators." The experiment involved 652 participants who completed a total of 1,810 sessions, of which 1,405 games were analyzed after excluding certain scenarios like repeated AI games (leading to the expectation of AI model interactions when other humans weren't online) or personal acquaintance between participants and witnesses, who were sometimes sitting in the same room. Surprisingly, ELIZA, developed in the mid-1960s by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, scored relatively well during the study, achieving a success rate of 27 percent. GPT-3.5, depending on the prompt, scored a 14 percent success rate, below ELIZA. GPT-4 achieved a success rate of 41 percent, second only to actual humans. "Ultimately, the study's authors concluded that GPT-4 does not meet the success criteria of the Turing test, reaching neither a 50 percent success rate (greater than a 50/50 chance) nor surpassing the success rate of human participants," reports Ars. "The researchers speculate that with the right prompt design, GPT-4 or similar models might eventually pass the Turing test. However, the challenge lies in crafting a prompt that mimics the subtlety of human conversation styles. And like GPT-3.5, GPT-4 has also been conditioned not to present itself as human." "It seems very likely that much more effective prompts exist, and therefore that our results underestimate GPT-4's potential performance at the Turing Test," the authors write.

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The world's biggest operational experimental nuclear fusion center has been inaugurated in Naka, Japan. The Guardian reports: The goal of the JT-60SA reactor is to investigate the feasibility of fusion as a safe, large-scale and carbon-free source of net energy -- with more energy generated than is put into producing it. The six-storey-high machine, in a hangar in Naka, north of Tokyo, comprises a doughnut-shaped "tokamak" vessel set to contain swirling plasma heated up to 200mC (360mF). It is a joint project between the European Union and Japan, and is the forerunner for its big brother in France, the under-construction International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). Sam Davis, the deputy project leader for the JT-60SA, said the device would "bring us closer to fusion energy." "It's the result of a collaboration between more than 500 scientists and engineers and more than 70 companies throughout Europe and Japan," Davis said at Friday's inauguration. The EU energy commissioner, Kadri Simson, said the JT-60SA was "the most advanced tokamak in the world," and called the start of operations "a milestone for fusion history." "Fusion has the potential to become a key component for energy mix in the second half of this century," Simson added.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Wednesday, a group of military and military-adjacent scientists gathered at a conference to discuss the possibility of creating a super soldier. They discussed breeding programs, Marvel movies, The Matrix, and the various technologies the Pentagon is researching with the goal of creating a real life super soldier complete with cybernetic implants and thorny ethical issues surrounding bodily autonomy. The talk happened at the The Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference, or I/ITSEC, an annual conference where military leaders come to talk shop and simulation corporations gather to demo new products. It's the kind of place where execs and generals don virtual reality helmets and talk about the virtues of VR sims. You could even catch members of congress talking about the importance of simulations and war. "Winning the war of cognition by pushing readiness and lethality boundaries," reads the official poster for the 2019 I/ITSEC. It was here, in Orlando, Florida, where five illustrious members of the military-industrial complex gathered to discuss super soldiers at the "Black Swan -- Dawn of the Super Soldier" panel. Lauren Reinerman-Jones, an analyst from Defense Acquisition University, moderated a panel that included U.S. Army Developmental Command representatives George Matook and Irwin Hudson, research scientist J.J. Walcutt, and Richard McKinley, who works on "non-invasive brain stimulation" for the Air Force. I/TSEC advertised the panel in its program with a picture of the experts next to a posing Master Chief, the genetically enhanced super soldier from the Halo video game franchise. Throughout the conversation, which covered the nuts and bolts of what's possible now and what's about to be possible along with various ethical concerns, references to science fiction and fantasy stories were common. Some of the ideas discussed include synthetic blood, pain-numbing stimulants, limb regeneration, and non-invasive brain stimulation. The discussion references the John Scalzi book about a near future where Earth wages war by offering the elderly new youthful bodies in exchange for military service. They also discuss the ethical and legal concerns surrounding the creation of super soldiers, as well as the societal norms and potential risks. "What risks are we willing to take? There's all these wonderful things we can do," Matook said. "We don't want a fair fight. We really don't, this is not an honorable thing. We want our guys to be over-matching any possible enemies, right? So why aren't we giving them pharmaceutical enhancements? Why are we making them run all week when we could just be giving them steroids? There's all these other things you could do if you change societal norms and ethics. And laws, in some cases." The discussion concludes with considerations about the long-term effects, reversibility of enhancements, and the potential ownership of enhanced individuals by the government. "So if you do these kinds of changes to an individual, what do you do when their service is up? What happens? Or are they just literally owned by the government for life," asks Reinerman-Jones. Hudson replied with a grim joke: "Termination."

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On Monday, Merriam-Webster announced its word of the year is "authentic -- the term for something we're thinking about, writing about, aspiring to, and judging more than ever." The Associated Press reports: Authentic cuisine. Authentic voice. Authentic self. Authenticity as artifice. Lookups for the word are routinely heavy on the dictionary company's site but were boosted to new heights throughout the year, editor at large Peter Sokolowski told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview. "We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity," he said ahead of Monday's announcement of this year's word. "What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more." Sokolowski and his team don't delve into the reasons people head for dictionaries and websites in search of specific words. Rather, they chase the data on lookup spikes and world events that correlate. This time around, there was no particularly huge boost at any given time but a constancy to the increased interest in "authentic." [...] "Can we trust whether a student wrote this paper? Can we trust whether a politician made this statement? We don't always trust what we see anymore," Sokolowski said. "We sometimes don't believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance itself." There's "not false or imitation: real, actual," as in an authentic cockney accent. There's "true to one's own personality, spirit or character." There's "worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact." There's "made or done the same way as an original." And, perhaps the most telling, there's "conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features."

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The first wireless charging public roadway in the United States has been installed in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood. Electrek reports: Wireless charging provider Electreon provided inductive-charging copper coils that were installed below the road's surface. The coils will charge EVs equipped with Electreon receivers as they drive over the road. The road's charging segments transfer electricity wirelessly through a magnetic field, which is then transferred as energy to the vehicle's battery, charging it. Detroit's wireless charging roadway is a pilot that will test and aim to perfect the wireless charging technology in a real-world environment. Researchers are using a Ford E-Transit equipped with an Electreon receiver. The plan is to open it up to the public in the next few years. MDOT and Electreon have entered a five-year commitment to develop and pilot the electric road system on Michigan roads. The pilot is on a quarter-mile stretch on 14th Street between Marantette and Dalzelle Streets in Detroit's historic Corktown. It runs alongside the Newlab at Michigan Central Building, home to more than 60 tech and mobility startups, where the wireless charging tech will be further tested and developed beginning in early 2024. In 2024, MDOT will begin seeking bids to rebuild part of Michigan Avenue (US-12) and will install additional inductive charging.

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Researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University discovered (PDF) that generating an image using artificial intelligence has a carbon footprint equivalent to charging a smartphone. Meanwhile, AI-generated text takes up as much energy as charging a smartphone to about 16 percent full. Engadget reports: The study didn't just look into image and text generation by machine learning programs. The researchers examined a total of 13 tasks, ranging from summarization to text classification, and measured the amount of carbon dioxide produced per every 1000 grams. For the sake of keeping the study fair and the datasets diverse, the researchers said they ran the experiments on 88 different models using 30 datasets. For each task, the researchers ran 1,000 prompts while gathering the "carbon code" to measure both the energy consumed and the carbon emitted during an exchange. The findings highlight that the most energy-intensive tasks are those that ask an AI model to generate new content, whether it be text generation, summarization, image captioning, or image generation. Image generation ranked highest in the amount of emissions it produced and text classification was classified as the least energy-intensive task. The researchers urge machine learning scientists and practitioners to "practice transparency regarding the nature and impacts of their models, to enable better understanding of their environmental impacts."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Meta says its generative artificial intelligence (AI) advertising tools cannot be used to power political campaigns anywhere globally, with access blocked for ads targeting specific services and issues. The social media giant said earlier this month that advertisers will be barred from using generative AI tools in its Ads Manager tool to produce ads for politics, elections, housing, employment, credit, or social issues. Ads related to health, pharmaceuticals, and financial services also are not allowed access to the generative AI features. This policy will apply globally, as Meta continues to test its generative AI ads creation tools, confirmed Dan Neary, Meta's Asia-Pacific vice president. "This approach will allow us to better understand potential risks and build the right safeguards for the use of generative AI in ads that relate to potentially sensitive topics in regulated industries," said Neary.

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Sony is about to delete tons of Discovery shows from PlayStation users' libraries even if they already "purchased" them. Why? Because most users don't actually own the digital content they buy thanks to the mess of online DRM and license agreements. Some of the soon-to-be-deleted TV shows include Mythbusters and Naked and Afraid. Kotaku reports: The latest pothole in the road to an all-digital future was discovered via a warning Sony recently sent out to PlayStation users who purchased TV shows made by Discovery, the reality TV network that recently merged with Warner Bros. in one of the most brutal and idiotic corporate maneuvers of our time. "Due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library," read a copy of the email that was shared with Kotaku. It linked to a page on the PlayStation website listing all of the shows impacted. As you might imagine, given Discovery's penchant for pumping out seasons of relatively cheap to produce but popular reality TV and documentary-based shows, there are a lot of them. They include, but are not limited to, hits such as: Say Yes to the Dress, Shark Week, Cake Boss, Long Island Medium, Deadly Women, and many, many more. [...] Now, essentially anything you buy on PSN, whether a PS5 blockbuster or, uh, Police Women of Cincinnati, is essentially just on indefinite loan until such time as the PlayStation servers die or the original copyright owner decides to pull the content.

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According to Axios, OpenAI is delaying the launch of a GPT store until early next year. The store was expected to open last month. From the report: OpenAI's announcement of custom GPTs and the accompanying store was a highlight of last month's DevDay conference. "We are now planning to launch the GPT Store early next year," OpenAI said in the memo. "While we had expected to release it this month, a few unexpected things have been keeping us busy!" For now the custom GPTs can be shared directly via a link. With the store, developers will be able to distribute them more broadly and OpenAI has also said it plans to share some revenue it gets from ChatGPT Plus subscriptions with those who create popular GPTs, though it has yet to release details. "In the meantime, we will have some other great updates to ChatGPT soon," the company told developers. "Thank you for investing time to build a GPT."

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