Month: September 2023

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A California law requiring a wide range of platforms to estimate ages of users and protect minors from accessing harmful content appears to be just as unconstitutional as a recently blocked law in Texas requiring age verification to access adult content.

Yesterday, US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman ordered a preliminary injunction stopping California Attorney General Rob Bonta from enforcing the state's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), finding that the law likely violates the First Amendment.

"The Court finds that although the stated purpose of the Act—protecting children when they are online—clearly is important," Freeman wrote, "the CAADCA likely violates the First Amendment."

Enlarge (credit: Click&Boo | Moment)

A California law requiring a wide range of platforms to estimate ages of users and protect minors from accessing harmful content appears to be just as unconstitutional as a recently blocked law in Texas requiring age verification to access adult content.

Yesterday, US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman ordered a preliminary injunction stopping California Attorney General Rob Bonta from enforcing the state's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), finding that the law likely violates the First Amendment.

"The Court finds that although the stated purpose of the Act—protecting children when they are online—clearly is important," Freeman wrote, "the CAADCA likely violates the First Amendment."

Enlarge / David Limp at Amazon's hardware event in Seattle, Washington, on September 27, 2017. (credit: Daniel Berman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

As Amazon prepares for its annual hardware event tomorrow, Reuters is reporting feelings of trepidation and weakened morale among the company's flailing hardware team. The beleaguered department is said to be worried about the potential of upcoming products, while being pressured by a push for cheaper hardware and the impending departure of long-time department head David Limp.

Reuters' report today cited "more than 15 current and former employees" of Amazon's Lab126 for developing hardware. The publication said it was able to uncover five devices Amazon was developing:

• Carbon monoxide detector with Alexa
• Household energy consumption monitor with Alexa
• Digital measuring device with Alexa
• Virus-testing device that was originally "intended to detect COVID," Reuters said
• Home projector

Some of Reuters' sources pointed to additional projects, but the publication couldn't verify full details. Amazon says it doesn't comment on products in development.

Enlarge / David Limp at Amazon's hardware event in Seattle, Washington, on September 27, 2017. (credit: Daniel Berman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

As Amazon prepares for its annual hardware event tomorrow, Reuters is reporting feelings of trepidation and weakened morale among the company's flailing hardware team. The beleaguered department is said to be worried about the potential of upcoming products, while being pressured by a push for cheaper hardware and the impending departure of long-time department head David Limp.

Reuters' report today cited "more than 15 current and former employees" of Amazon's Lab126 for developing hardware. The publication said it was able to uncover five devices Amazon was developing:

• Carbon monoxide detector with Alexa
• Household energy consumption monitor with Alexa
• Digital measuring device with Alexa
• Virus-testing device that was originally "intended to detect COVID," Reuters said
• Home projector

Some of Reuters' sources pointed to additional projects, but the publication couldn't verify full details. Amazon says it doesn't comment on products in development.

Enlarge (credit: LAGUNA DESIGN)

For most proteins, structure is function. The complex three-dimensional shapes that proteins adopt create folds and pockets that can accomplish the remarkably improbable: driving chemical reactions that would otherwise never happen or binding to a single chemical inside the complex environment of a cell. Protein structure is so important that there's an entire discipline, along with several well-developed approaches, to figuring out what a protein looks like when it's all folded up into its active state.

But that's only most proteins. Scientists have also found a growing catalog of intrinsically disordered proteins. Rather than having a set structure, intrinsically disordered proteins seem to have entire sections that can flap around in the breeze of Brownian motion and, yet, were critical to the protein's structure. People haven't been sure whether these proteins temporarily adopted a specific structure to work or the disorder was critical for function.

Now, a new paper describes a case where two intrinsically disordered proteins induce specific structures in each other when they interact. And Google's new AlphaFold AI software was critical to figuring out that structure.

Enlarge (credit: LAGUNA DESIGN)

For most proteins, structure is function. The complex three-dimensional shapes that proteins adopt create folds and pockets that can accomplish the remarkably improbable: driving chemical reactions that would otherwise never happen or binding to a single chemical inside the complex environment of a cell. Protein structure is so important that there's an entire discipline, along with several well-developed approaches, to figuring out what a protein looks like when it's all folded up into its active state.

But that's only most proteins. Scientists have also found a growing catalog of intrinsically disordered proteins. Rather than having a set structure, intrinsically disordered proteins seem to have entire sections that can flap around in the breeze of Brownian motion and, yet, were critical to the protein's structure. People haven't been sure whether these proteins temporarily adopted a specific structure to work or the disorder was critical for function.

Now, a new paper describes a case where two intrinsically disordered proteins induce specific structures in each other when they interact. And Google's new AlphaFold AI software was critical to figuring out that structure.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | eccolo74)

SpaceX has sued US Attorney General Merrick Garland and two other Department of Justice officials in response to the government's allegations that SpaceX discriminated against asylees and refugees in hiring. SpaceX denied the hiring discrimination claims and alleged that the DOJ's administrative process for handling the discrimination complaint is unconstitutional.

The Justice Department filed an administrative complaint against SpaceX on August 24 alleging that from at least September 2018 to at least May 2022, Elon Musk's space company "discriminated against asylees and refugees throughout its hiring process, including during recruiting, screening, and selection, in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act."

The DOJ suit alleged that "asylees and refugees had virtually no chance of being fairly considered for or hired for a job at SpaceX." The DOJ complaint was filed through its own administrative hearing office in which cases are heard by administrative law judges. SpaceX is trying to stop that process by filing a lawsuit in US District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | eccolo74)

SpaceX has sued US Attorney General Merrick Garland and two other Department of Justice officials in response to the government's allegations that SpaceX discriminated against asylees and refugees in hiring. SpaceX denied the hiring discrimination claims and alleged that the DOJ's administrative process for handling the discrimination complaint is unconstitutional.

The Justice Department filed an administrative complaint against SpaceX on August 24 alleging that from at least September 2018 to at least May 2022, Elon Musk's space company "discriminated against asylees and refugees throughout its hiring process, including during recruiting, screening, and selection, in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act."

The DOJ suit alleged that "asylees and refugees had virtually no chance of being fairly considered for or hired for a job at SpaceX." The DOJ complaint was filed through its own administrative hearing office in which cases are heard by administrative law judges. SpaceX is trying to stop that process by filing a lawsuit in US District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

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On Tuesday, Google announced updates to its Google Bard AI assistant—its version of ChatGPT—including integration with Google apps (such as Gmail, Docs, Drive, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights) and a feature to double-check Bard's answers against web content. It also added language support for over 40 languages.

Notably, Bard's new "double-check button" has been designed to provide a counter against confabulations where Bard produces inaccurate information or makes things up (a concept often called "hallucinations" in the AI field). It's a very public admission that Bard often lacks accuracy and isn't a dependable factual reference. Here's how Google describes it:

Starting today with responses in English, you can use Bard’s “Google it” button to more easily double-check its answers. When you click on the “G” icon, Bard will read the response and evaluate whether there is content across the web to substantiate it. When a statement can be evaluated, you can click the highlighted phrases and learn more about supporting or contradicting information found by Search.

To use the double-check feature, users can click a small "G" logo below Bard's results. Bard will perform a search of the web and highlight sentences in its output that match affirmatively with a green highlight. Bard statements that contradict Google Search results get a peach-colored highlight. From our experiments, the double-check button reinforced some statements but did not always catch logical flaws in its output.