Month: January 2024
The e-waste “gold mining” efforts are booming
The components of your antiquated desktop computer, laptop, TV, and other electronics include valuable metals like copper and gold. Tiny
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The components of your antiquated desktop computer, laptop, TV, and other electronics include valuable metals like copper and gold. Tiny businesses are profiting from the e-waste industry’s unrealized potential by recycling outdated electronic circuit boards and can earn up to $85,000 daily. The projects will probably keep growing because there are estimated to be $55–60 billion worth of precious metals ready to be recovered from abandoned circuit boards globally.
E-waste is currently one of the biggest environmental threats to our planet. A significant amount of the more than 50 million tons of electronics that end up in the trash are recycled in third-world countries like India. The environmental crisis is anticipated to increase over the next ten years due to our thought processes that say we need a new laptop or gaming PCs, TVs, phones, watches, and other electrically powered gadgets — we want the newest upgrade.
From BusinessInsider:
Much of our e-waste doesn’t get recycled at all and is left in landfills. Only about 15% of the daily e-waste produced by American citizens is collected for recycling. Following several scrappers in a small startup in Sydney, Australia, BusinessInsider revealed that although individual scrappers cannot earn a living from e-waste at this time, those employed by larger companies, especially those with heavy machinery at their disposal, can potentially make substantial profits.
Scrappers can earn several thousand dollars per load when they find and gather e-waste
Mint Innovation was one “gold mining” startup that Business Insider spoke with. Scrappers can earn several thousand dollars per load if they find e-waste and bring it to Mint Innovation. Using a ton of specialized machinery and a proprietary sauce to disassemble electronic circuit boards and extract valuable metals from unwanted plastics and other materials to which the metals are attached, Mint Innovation has all but perfected the art of extracting metal from e-waste. The raw metals that Mint Innovation extracts from e-waste can bring in an impressive $85,000 a day for the completely automated system that it has constructed. That is equivalent to an annual income of almost $30 million.
Mint Innovation aptly demonstrates the amount of potential revenue that the e-waste business can currently access through tech innovation. However, the lack of infrastructure for processing e-waste makes it challenging for e-waste scavengers to earn a living. Innovation in “tough tech” sectors will continue. That might readily alter as e-waste pollution keeps rising and more businesspeople become aware of the potential revenue e-waste can produce.
Stacks of pins from donor boards; tomshardware.com
If you want to try your own “digging for gold” experiment — Tomshardware will guide you through the chemistry lesson on how to do it. Here. You won’t go away empty-handed from the tutorial.
Featured Image Credit: Tomshardware.com
The post The e-waste “gold mining” efforts are booming appeared first on ReadWrite.
Comcast Reluctantly Agrees To Stop Its Misleading ’10G Network’ Claims
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast has reluctantly agreed to discontinue its “Xfinity 10G Network” brand name after losing an appeal of a ruling that found the marketing term was misleading. It will keep using the term 10G in other ways, however. Verizon and T-Mobile both challenged Comcast’s advertising of 10G, a term used by cable companies since it was unveiled in January 2019 by industry lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association. We wrote in 2019 that the cable industry’s 10G marketing was likely to confuse consumers and seemed to be a way of countering 5G hype generated by wireless companies.
10G doesn’t refer to the 10th generation of a technology. It is a reference to potential 10Gbps broadband connections, which would be much faster than the actual speeds on standard cable networks today. The challenges lodged against Comcast marketing were filed with the advertising industry’s self-regulatory system run by BBB National Programs. BBB’s National Advertising Division (NAD) ruled against Comcast in October 2023, but Comcast appealed to the National Advertising Review Board (NARB). The NARB announced its ruling today, agreeing with the NAD that “Comcast should discontinue use of the term 10G, both when used in the name of the service itself (‘Xfinity 10G Network’) as well as when used to describe the Xfinity network. The use of 10G in a manner that is not false or misleading and is consistent with the panel decision is not precluded by the panel recommendations.”
Comcast agreed to make the change in an advertiser’s statement that it provided to the NARB. “Although Comcast strongly disagrees with NARB’s analysis and approach, Comcast will discontinue use of the brand name ‘Xfinity 10G Network’ and will not use the term ’10G’ in a manner that misleadingly describes the Xfinity network itself,” Comcast said. Comcast said it disagrees with “the recommendation to discontinue the brand name” because the company “makes available 10Gbps of Internet speed to 98 percent of its subscribers upon request.” But those 10Gbps speeds aren’t available in Comcast’s typical service plans and require a fiber-to-the-home connection instead of a standard cable installation. Comcast said it may still use 10G in ways that are less likely to confuse consumers. “Consistent with the panel’s recommendation… Comcast reserves the right to use the term ’10G’ or ‘Xfinity 10G’ in a manner that does not misleadingly describe the Xfinity network itself,” the company said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast has reluctantly agreed to discontinue its “Xfinity 10G Network” brand name after losing an appeal of a ruling that found the marketing term was misleading. It will keep using the term 10G in other ways, however. Verizon and T-Mobile both challenged Comcast’s advertising of 10G, a term used by cable companies since it was unveiled in January 2019 by industry lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association. We wrote in 2019 that the cable industry’s 10G marketing was likely to confuse consumers and seemed to be a way of countering 5G hype generated by wireless companies.
10G doesn’t refer to the 10th generation of a technology. It is a reference to potential 10Gbps broadband connections, which would be much faster than the actual speeds on standard cable networks today. The challenges lodged against Comcast marketing were filed with the advertising industry’s self-regulatory system run by BBB National Programs. BBB’s National Advertising Division (NAD) ruled against Comcast in October 2023, but Comcast appealed to the National Advertising Review Board (NARB). The NARB announced its ruling today, agreeing with the NAD that “Comcast should discontinue use of the term 10G, both when used in the name of the service itself (‘Xfinity 10G Network’) as well as when used to describe the Xfinity network. The use of 10G in a manner that is not false or misleading and is consistent with the panel decision is not precluded by the panel recommendations.”
Comcast agreed to make the change in an advertiser’s statement that it provided to the NARB. “Although Comcast strongly disagrees with NARB’s analysis and approach, Comcast will discontinue use of the brand name ‘Xfinity 10G Network’ and will not use the term ’10G’ in a manner that misleadingly describes the Xfinity network itself,” Comcast said. Comcast said it disagrees with “the recommendation to discontinue the brand name” because the company “makes available 10Gbps of Internet speed to 98 percent of its subscribers upon request.” But those 10Gbps speeds aren’t available in Comcast’s typical service plans and require a fiber-to-the-home connection instead of a standard cable installation. Comcast said it may still use 10G in ways that are less likely to confuse consumers. “Consistent with the panel’s recommendation… Comcast reserves the right to use the term ’10G’ or ‘Xfinity 10G’ in a manner that does not misleadingly describe the Xfinity network itself,” the company said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Senators Denounce Tech Companies Over Child Sex Abuse Online
Senators criticized the chief executives of Meta, TikTok, Snap, X and Discord for not doing enough to prevent child sexual abuse online, amid rising fears over how the platforms affect youths.
Senators criticized the chief executives of Meta, TikTok, Snap, X and Discord for not doing enough to prevent child sexual abuse online, amid rising fears over how the platforms affect youths.
Microsoft LASERs away LLM inaccuracies
Illustration: The Verge
During the January Microsoft Research Forum, Dipendra Misra, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Lab NYC and AI Frontiers, explained how Layer-Selective Rank Reduction (or LASER) can make large language models more accurate.
With LASER, researchers can “intervene” and replace one weight matrix with an approximate smaller one. Weights are the contextual connections models make. The heavier the weight, the more the model relies on it. So, does replacing something with more correlations and contexts make the model less accurate? Based on their test results, the answer, surprisingly, is no.
“We are doing intervention using LASER on the LLM, so one would expect that the model loss should go up as we are doing more approximation, meaning that the model is going to perform bad, right, because we are throwing out information from an LLM, which is trained on large amounts of data,” Misra said. “But to our surprise, we find that if the right type of LASER intervention is performed, the model loss doesn’t go up but actually goes down.”
Misra said his team successfully used LASER on three different open-source models: RoBERTa, Llama 2, and Eleuther’s GPT-J. He said, at times, model improvement increased by 20 to 30 percentage points. For example, the performance of GPT-J for gender prediction based on biographies went from 70.9 percent accuracy to 97.5 percent after a LASER intervention.
AI models make a lot of factual mistakes, so LLM accuracy remains a concern, and it’s not just fear of hallucinations, which are less about getting things wrong and more about making things up. Hallucinations and inaccurate AI models can be entertaining, but they can do considerable harm, too.
Illustration: The Verge
During the January Microsoft Research Forum, Dipendra Misra, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Lab NYC and AI Frontiers, explained how Layer-Selective Rank Reduction (or LASER) can make large language models more accurate.
With LASER, researchers can “intervene” and replace one weight matrix with an approximate smaller one. Weights are the contextual connections models make. The heavier the weight, the more the model relies on it. So, does replacing something with more correlations and contexts make the model less accurate? Based on their test results, the answer, surprisingly, is no.
“We are doing intervention using LASER on the LLM, so one would expect that the model loss should go up as we are doing more approximation, meaning that the model is going to perform bad, right, because we are throwing out information from an LLM, which is trained on large amounts of data,” Misra said. “But to our surprise, we find that if the right type of LASER intervention is performed, the model loss doesn’t go up but actually goes down.”
Misra said his team successfully used LASER on three different open-source models: RoBERTa, Llama 2, and Eleuther’s GPT-J. He said, at times, model improvement increased by 20 to 30 percentage points. For example, the performance of GPT-J for gender prediction based on biographies went from 70.9 percent accuracy to 97.5 percent after a LASER intervention.
AI models make a lot of factual mistakes, so LLM accuracy remains a concern, and it’s not just fear of hallucinations, which are less about getting things wrong and more about making things up. Hallucinations and inaccurate AI models can be entertaining, but they can do considerable harm, too.
Senators Denounce Tech Companies Over Child Sex Abuse Online
Senators criticized the chief executives of Meta, TikTok, Snap, X and Discord for not doing enough to prevent child sexual abuse online, amid rising fears over how the platforms affect youths.
Senators criticized the chief executives of Meta, TikTok, Snap, X and Discord for not doing enough to prevent child sexual abuse online, amid rising fears over how the platforms affect youths.