Month: October 2024

Raspberry Pi owners have always been prone to coming up with elaborate, technically-interesting-but-practically-questionable projects, and Pi enthusiast Jeff Geerling has an exciting new submission to that canon: an old AMD Radeon RX 460 GPU, connected to the Raspberry Pi 5's PCI Express bus and managing to play demanding titles like Doom 3 (2004) and Tux Racer at a crisp 4K resolution.

Geerling's maze of adapters, software tweaks, and workarounds is a testament both to his ingenuity and the flexibility of the Raspberry Pi and its ecosystem. By default, the Pi 5 provides a single PCI Express 2.0 lane for use with external accessories (most commonly M.2 SSDs for storage). Geerling uses an M.2 slot on the Pi and then connects it to an external GPU dock using an M.2-to-Oculink adapter. This gets the GPU connected to the Pi's PCIe bus.

But there were other problems that had to be solved as well. The Pi's PCIe slot can only provide 5 W of power for external accessories, far short of the 75 W that a desktop graphics card would be able to get from a typical PCIe slot in a motherboard. Geerling needed to provide external power to both the GPU and to the slot itself to make sure that the RX 460 could draw all the power it needed to.

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Hurricane Helene crossed the Gulf of Mexico at a time when sea surface temperatures were at record highs and then barreled into a region where heavy rains had left the ground saturated. The result was historic catastrophic flooding.

One key question is how soon we might expect history to repeat itself. Our rapidly warming planet has tilted the odds in favor of some extreme weather events in a way that means we can expect some events that had been extremely rare to start occurring with some regularity. Our first stab at understanding climate change's influence on Helene was released on Wednesday, and it suggests that rainfall of the sort experienced by the Carolinas may now be a once-in-70-year event, which could have implications for how we rebuild some of the communities shattered by the rain.

Rapid attribution

The quick analysis was done by the World Weather Attribution project, which has developed peer-reviewed methods of looking for the fingerprints of climate change in major weather events. In general, this involves identifying the key weather patterns that produced the event and then exploring their frequency using climate models run with and without the carbon dioxide we've added to the atmosphere.

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If 2022 was the year AI image generators went mainstream, 2024 has arguably been the year that AI video synthesis models exploded in capability. These models, while not yet perfect, can generate new videos from text descriptions called prompts, still images, or existing videos. After OpenAI made waves with Sora in February, two major AI models emerged from China: Kuaishou Technology's Kling and Minimax's video-01.

Both Chinese models have already powered numerous viral AI-generated video projects, accelerating meme culture in weird new ways, including a recent shot-for-shot translation of the Princess Mononoke trailer using Kling that inspired death threats and a series of videos created with Minimax's platform. The videos show a synthesized version of TV chef Gordon Ramsay doing ridiculous things.

Kling first emerged in June, and it can generate two minutes of 1080p HD video at 30 frames per second with a level of detail and coherency that some think surpasses Sora. It's currently only available to people with a Chinese telephone number, and we have not yet used it ourselves.

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Compounding pharmacies are suing the Food and Drug Administration so they can keep making imitation versions of popular—and lucrative—tirzepatide drugs, namely knockoffs of Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for weight loss.

Generally, compounding pharmacies make customized formulations of drugs for patients with specific needs, like when a patient has an allergy to a filler ingredient or if a child needs a liquid version of a drug that normally comes as a capsule. But larger compounding operations are also legally allowed to make imitations of branded drugs if those drugs are in short supply, acting as a stopgap for patients.

Tirzepatide has certainly been in short supply in recent years. Given the high prevalence of diabetes and obesity in America and the drug's effectiveness, demand for tirzepatide and other drugs in the new GLP-1 class have skyrocketed, and many patients have struggled to fill prescriptions. The FDA placed tirzepatide on its drug shortage list in December of 2022—and that's where it remained until last week.

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Honda is recalling almost 1.7 million vehicles due to a steering defect. An improperly made part can cause certain cars' steering to become "sticky"—never an attribute one wants in a moving vehicle.

The problem affects a range of newer Hondas and an Acura; the earliest the defective parts were used on any vehicle was February 2021. But it applies to the following:

• 2022–2025 Honda Civic four-door
• 2025 Honda Civic four-door hybrid
• 2022–2025 Honda Civic five-door
• 2025 Honda Civic five-door Hybrid
• 2023–2025 Honda Civic Type-R
• 2023–2025 Honda CR-V
• 2023–2025 Honda CR-V Hybrid
• 2025 Honda CR-V Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle
• 2023–2025 Honda HR-V
• 2023–2025 Acura Integra
• 2024–2025 Acura Integra Type S

Honda says that a combination of environmental heat, moisture, and "an insufficient annealing process and high load single unit break-in during production of the worm wheel" means there's too much pressure and not enough grease between the worm wheel and worm gear. On top of that, the worm gear spring isn't quite right, "resulting in higher friction and increased torque fluctuation when steering.

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The US Department of Justice finally proposed sweeping remedies to destroy Google's search monopoly late yesterday, and, predictably, Google is not loving any of it.

On top of predictable asks—like potentially requiring Google to share search data with rivals, restricting distribution agreements with browsers like Firefox and device makers like Apple, and breaking off Chrome or Android—the DOJ proposed remedies to keep Google from blocking competition in "the evolving search industry." And those extra steps threaten Google's stake in the nascent AI search world.

This is only the first step in the remedies stage of litigation, but Google is already showing resistance to both expected and unexpected remedies that the DOJ proposed. In a blog from Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, the company accused the DOJ of "overreach," suggesting that proposed remedies are "radical" and "go far beyond the specific legal issues in this case."

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Over the last few years, Virginia Tech scientists have been looking to the octopus for inspiration to design technologies that can better grip a wide variety of objects in underwater environments. Their latest breakthrough is a special switchable adhesive modeled after the shape of the animal's suckers, according to a new paper published in the journal Advanced Science.

“I am fascinated with how an octopus in one moment can hold something strongly, then release it instantly. It does this underwater, on objects that are rough, curved, and irregular—that is quite a feat,” said co-author and research group leader Michael Bartlett. "We’re now closer than ever to replicating the incredible ability of an octopus to grip and manipulate objects with precision, opening up new possibilities for exploration and manipulation of wet or underwater environments.”

As previously reported, there are several examples in nature of efficient ways to latch onto objects in underwater environments, per the authors. Mussels, for instance, secrete adhesive proteins to attach themselves to wet surfaces, while frogs have uniquely structured toe pads that create capillary and hydrodynamic forces for adhesion. But cephalopods like the octopus have an added advantage: The adhesion supplied by their grippers can be quickly and easily reversed, so the creatures can adapt to changing conditions, attaching to wet and dry surfaces.

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MediaTek’s new Dimensity 9400 processor promises up to a 35 percent boost in single-core CPU performance, up to 28 percent faster multi-core performance, and up to a 41 boost in peak graphics performance when compared with the previous-gen Dimensity 9300. It’s also said to bring memory and AI improvements. At the same time, MediaTek is promising […]

The post MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400 promises makes a play for next-gen flagship phones appeared first on Liliputing.

Back in 2019, Google made waves by claiming it had achieved what has been called "quantum supremacy"—the ability of a quantum computer to perform operations that would take a wildly impractical amount of time to simulate on standard computing hardware. That claim proved to be controversial, in that the operations were little more than a benchmark that involved getting the quantum computer to behave like a quantum computer; separately, improved ideas about how to perform the simulation on a supercomputer cut the time required down significantly.

But Google is back with a new exploration of the benchmark, described in a paper published in Nature on Wednesday. It uses the benchmark to identify what it calls a phase transition in the performance of its quantum processor and uses it to identify conditions where the processor can operate with low noise. Taking advantage of that, they again show that, even giving classical hardware every potential advantage, it would take a supercomputer a dozen years to simulate things.

Cross entropy benchmarking

The benchmark in question involves the performance of what are called quantum random circuits, which involves performing a set of operations on qubits and letting the state of the system evolve over time, so that the output depends heavily on the stochastic nature of measurement outcomes in quantum mechanics. Each qubit will have a probability of producing one of two results, but unless that probability is one, there's no way of knowing which of the results you'll actually get. As a result, the output of the operations will be a string of truly random bits.

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Mobilfunk als Festnetzersatz ist in den USA ein Hit. Doch die hohe Datennutzung macht FWA auch zum Problem. (Mobilfunk, Wirtschaft)