Month: June 2024
To Escape Six-Figure Student Loan Debt, This Mom Turned to Social Media
Working 10-12 hour days is exhausting, but it’s a temporary sacrifice she’s happy to make to clear her $120,000 loan balance.
Working 10-12 hour days is exhausting, but it’s a temporary sacrifice she’s happy to make to clear her $120,000 loan balance.
T-Mobile Faces Backlash Over Broken Price Guarantee
T-Mobile is facing customer outrage after announcing a $5-per-line price increase on plans that were marketed with a “lifetime” price guarantee. The move has sparked over 1,600 complaints to the Federal Communications Commission, ArsTechnica reports
Kathleen Odean, 70, of Rhode Island, is among the affected customers. “The promise was absolutely clear,” she told Ars. “It’s right there in writing: ‘T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile One plan.'” T-Mobile claims an FAQ page allows for price changes, but customers argue this caveat was never prominently disclosed. The company’s 2017 press release touted the guarantee without mentioning exceptions.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
T-Mobile is facing customer outrage after announcing a $5-per-line price increase on plans that were marketed with a “lifetime” price guarantee. The move has sparked over 1,600 complaints to the Federal Communications Commission, ArsTechnica reports
Kathleen Odean, 70, of Rhode Island, is among the affected customers. “The promise was absolutely clear,” she told Ars. “It’s right there in writing: ‘T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile One plan.'” T-Mobile claims an FAQ page allows for price changes, but customers argue this caveat was never prominently disclosed. The company’s 2017 press release touted the guarantee without mentioning exceptions.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers
Appeals court decision potentially reversing publishers’ suit may come this fall.
Enlarge (credit: mitay20 | iStock / Getty Images Plus)
The Internet Archive (IA) went before a three-judge panel Friday to defend its open library’s controlled digital lending (CDL) practices after book publishers last year won a lawsuit claiming that the archive’s lending violated copyright law.
In the weeks ahead of IA’s efforts to appeal that ruling, IA was forced to remove 500,000 books from its collection, shocking users. In an open letter to publishers, more than 30,000 readers, researchers, and authors begged for access to the books to be restored in the open library, claiming the takedowns dealt “a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others,” who may not have access to a local library or feel “safe accessing the information they need in public.”
During a press briefing following arguments in court Friday, IA founder Brewster Kahle said that “those voices weren’t being heard.” Judges appeared primarily focused on understanding how IA’s digital lending potentially hurts publishers’ profits in the ebook licensing market, rather than on how publishers’ costly ebook licensing potentially harms readers.
Dua Lipa at Glastonbury 2024: Livestream Her Headline Festival Set From Anywhere
The pop queen brings her Radical Optimism to the UK’s biggest summer festival.
The pop queen brings her Radical Optimism to the UK’s biggest summer festival.
The AI prison of the future is just an Outer Limits episode
According to the Prison Policy Institute, the US has a higher incarceration rate per 100,000 people in its population than any other NATO country and it’s even higher than the next five member states combined (the UK, Portugal, Canada, France and Belgium).
So what’s the solution? Hashem Al-Ghaili, a molecular biologist and science communicator from Yemen, claims he’s got it in an interview with Wired: build a virtual prison instead. He’s not talking about stapling a bunch of Meta Quest 3’s to prisoners’ heads for years at a time, but it’s also not far off from that concept.
Al-Ghaili is proposing a new neurological prison system that he calls Cognify. He posted a proposal video of the virtual justice system on his Instagram and YouTube channel and it looks downright horrifying.
Here’s how Cognify works in a theoretical nutshell — Instead of locking prisoners up for long periods of time, prisoners would be subjected to artificial memories in a virtual environment. The system creates customized AI-generated content that’s converted to visual information and delivered to the prisoner’s brain as well as the parts of their DNA and RNA linked to memory formation to establish a long term memory pattern.
Currently, such technology does not exist and Cognify is only a proposal. However, Al-Ghaili claims that experiments conducted on animals prove this process could work on humans at some point in the future. For instance, a study published in March in the scientific journal Nature in March that used mice as its test subjects found that memories are possibly formed by broken and repaired strands of DNA.
Of course, there are ethical implications and effects that would need to be addressed if such a system were to become a reality. Al-Ghaili says Cognify could happen within a decade from now but only “if we could overcome the ethical restrictions that limit testing such technology.”
If that doesn’t send a shiver up your spine, then check your wrist for a pulse. Horror anthology fans like me will remember an episode from the 1990s reboot of The Outer Limits on Showtime called “The Sentence” in which a scientist played by David Hyde Pierce invents a very similar virtual prison system that simulates an entire life sentence within a matter of minutes. He, of course, subjects himself to his own invention that makes him believe he committed a murder and served an entire lifetime in prison. He wakes up only to start denouncing the very system he championed just a few minutes earlier.
You can watch the whole thing on YouTube for free. Someone should send it to this guy.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-ai-prison-of-the-future-is-just-an-outer-limits-episode-200937257.html?src=rss
According to the Prison Policy Institute, the US has a higher incarceration rate per 100,000 people in its population than any other NATO country and it’s even higher than the next five member states combined (the UK, Portugal, Canada, France and Belgium).
So what’s the solution? Hashem Al-Ghaili, a molecular biologist and science communicator from Yemen, claims he’s got it in an interview with Wired: build a virtual prison instead. He’s not talking about stapling a bunch of Meta Quest 3’s to prisoners’ heads for years at a time, but it’s also not far off from that concept.
Al-Ghaili is proposing a new neurological prison system that he calls Cognify. He posted a proposal video of the virtual justice system on his Instagram and YouTube channel and it looks downright horrifying.
Here’s how Cognify works in a theoretical nutshell — Instead of locking prisoners up for long periods of time, prisoners would be subjected to artificial memories in a virtual environment. The system creates customized AI-generated content that’s converted to visual information and delivered to the prisoner’s brain as well as the parts of their DNA and RNA linked to memory formation to establish a long term memory pattern.
Currently, such technology does not exist and Cognify is only a proposal. However, Al-Ghaili claims that experiments conducted on animals prove this process could work on humans at some point in the future. For instance, a study published in March in the scientific journal Nature in March that used mice as its test subjects found that memories are possibly formed by broken and repaired strands of DNA.
Of course, there are ethical implications and effects that would need to be addressed if such a system were to become a reality. Al-Ghaili says Cognify could happen within a decade from now but only “if we could overcome the ethical restrictions that limit testing such technology.”
If that doesn’t send a shiver up your spine, then check your wrist for a pulse. Horror anthology fans like me will remember an episode from the 1990s reboot of The Outer Limits on Showtime called “The Sentence” in which a scientist played by David Hyde Pierce invents a very similar virtual prison system that simulates an entire life sentence within a matter of minutes. He, of course, subjects himself to his own invention that makes him believe he committed a murder and served an entire lifetime in prison. He wakes up only to start denouncing the very system he championed just a few minutes earlier.
You can watch the whole thing on YouTube for free. Someone should send it to this guy.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-ai-prison-of-the-future-is-just-an-outer-limits-episode-200937257.html?src=rss
You’re Paying Too Much for Travel. My Family’s Foolproof Way to Spend Less on Summer Vacations
With the right strategy and a few credit card trips, we’ve knocked hundreds — if not thousands — off our travel costs.
With the right strategy and a few credit card trips, we’ve knocked hundreds — if not thousands — off our travel costs.
‘Let’s Not Go Overboard’ On Worries About AI Energy Use, Bill Gates Says
An anonymous reader shares a report: Bill Gates has defended the rapid rise in energy use caused by AI systems, arguing the technology would ultimately offset its heavy consumption of electricity. Speaking in London, Gates urged environmentalists and governments to “not go overboard” on concerns about the huge amounts of power required to run new generative AI systems, as Big Tech companies such as Microsoft race to invest tens of billions of dollars in vast new data centres.
Data centres will drive a rise in global electricity usage of between 2-6 per cent, the billionaire said. “The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 per cent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” said Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who has been a prolific investor in companies developing sustainable energy and carbon- reduction technologies. In May, Microsoft admitted that its greenhouse gas emissions had risen by almost a third since 2020, in large part due to the construction of data centres.
Gates, who left Microsoft’s board in 2020 but remains an adviser to chief executive Satya Nadella, said tech companies would pay a “green premium” — or higher price — for clean energy as they seek new sources of power, which was helping to drive its development and deployment. “The tech companies are the people willing to pay a premium and to help bootstrap green energy capacity,” he said at the Breakthrough Energy Summit in London on Thursday.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Bill Gates has defended the rapid rise in energy use caused by AI systems, arguing the technology would ultimately offset its heavy consumption of electricity. Speaking in London, Gates urged environmentalists and governments to “not go overboard” on concerns about the huge amounts of power required to run new generative AI systems, as Big Tech companies such as Microsoft race to invest tens of billions of dollars in vast new data centres.
Data centres will drive a rise in global electricity usage of between 2-6 per cent, the billionaire said. “The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 per cent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” said Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who has been a prolific investor in companies developing sustainable energy and carbon- reduction technologies. In May, Microsoft admitted that its greenhouse gas emissions had risen by almost a third since 2020, in large part due to the construction of data centres.
Gates, who left Microsoft’s board in 2020 but remains an adviser to chief executive Satya Nadella, said tech companies would pay a “green premium” — or higher price — for clean energy as they seek new sources of power, which was helping to drive its development and deployment. “The tech companies are the people willing to pay a premium and to help bootstrap green energy capacity,” he said at the Breakthrough Energy Summit in London on Thursday.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Most Embarrassing Part of a Stunning U.S. Men’s Soccer Loss
The U.S. knew what was coming from Panama, and didn’t prepare to respond accordingly, a columnist for The Athletic writes.
The U.S. knew what was coming from Panama, and didn’t prepare to respond accordingly, a columnist for The Athletic writes.