Technology

Last November, The Bookseller reported Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning, owned by publishing titan Simon & Schuster, was testing the use of artificial intelligence to help translate several of its books to English.

A federal judge struck down Arkansas' Social Media Safety Act, ruling it unconstitutional for broadly restricting both adult and minor speech and imposing vague requirements on platforms. Engadget reports:

In a ruling (PDF), Judge Timothy Brooks said that the law, known as Act 689 (PDF), was overly broad. "Act 689 is a content-based restriction on speech, and it is not targeted to address the harms the State has identified," Brooks wrote in his decision. "Arkansas takes a hatchet to adults' and minors' protected speech alike though the Constitution demands it use a scalpel." Brooks also highlighted the "unconstitutionally vague" applicability of the law, which seemingly created obligations for some online services, but may have exempted services which had the "predominant or exclusive function [of]... direct messaging" like Snapchat.

"The court confirms what we have been arguing from the start: laws restricting access to protected speech violate the First Amendment," NetChoice's Chris Marchese said in a statement. "This ruling protects Americans from having to hand over their IDs or biometric data just to access constitutionally protected speech online." It's not clear if state officials in Arkansas will appeal the ruling. "I respect the court's decision, and we are evaluating our options," Arkansas Attorney general Tim Griffin said in a statement.

Tech manufacturers continue misleading consumers with impressive-sounding but less useful specs like milliamp-hours and megahertz, while hiding the one measurement that matters most: watts. The Verge argues that the watt provides the clearest picture of a device's true capabilities by showing how much power courses through chips and how quickly batteries drain. With elementary math, consumers could easily calculate battery life by dividing watt-hours by power consumption. The Verge:

The Steam Deck gaming handheld is my go-to example of how handy watts can be. With a 15-watt maximum processor wattage and up to 9 watts of overhead for other components, a strenuous game drains its 49Wh battery in roughly two hours flat. My eight-year-old can do that math: 15 plus 9 is 24, and 24 times 2 is 48. You can fit two hour-long 24-watt sessions into 48Wh, and because you have 49Wh, you're almost sure to get it.

With the least strenuous games, I'll sometimes see my Steam Deck draining the battery at a speed of just 6 watts -- which means I can get eight hours of gameplay because 6 watts times 8 hours is 48Wh, with 1Wh remaining in the 49Wh battery.

Unlike megahertz, wattage also indicates sustained performance capability, revealing whether a processor can maintain high speeds or will throttle due to thermal constraints. Watts is also already familiar to consumers through light bulbs and power bills, but manufacturers persist with less transparent metrics that make direct comparisons difficult.

The European Chips Act has set ambitious goals and its implementation is a significant pan-european effort. From an academic perspective, last year we published an open letter emphasizing the critical importance of open-source EDA for academia in Europe. We were excited and grateful to see that this initiative triggered the definition of a European roadmap in this area, and a matching Chips JU call for project funding. We believe that the projects funded by this call will have a significant impact. Moreover, we already see rising interest from many EU stakeholders, with increasing investments into open-source chip design, especially in open source IP development (e.g. RISC-V cores), and open source EDA tools.

One additional critical barrier remains toward the end-goal of building real open-source chips, especially for prototyping and education: namely, streamlining the access to open source chip production facilities (foundries) is essential. Programs like ChipIgnite, Tiny Tapeout and IHP’s open source program have become “guiding stars” that demonstrate that everyone with a computer can build chips. We believe that having low-cost, regular and easy access to chip production is critical to create excitement and build up expertise, widening the pool of chip designers with tape-out experience: a true silicon democratization and a further de-mystification of chip design.

New US and European tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) have created market opportunities for South Korean manufacturers. While South Korean EV exports remain behind Chinese volumes, manufacturers can gain market share by emphasising design, performance, safety and transparency. As such, the US Inflation Reduction Act benefits South Korean producers, though political uncertainty poses risks. Success depends on leveraging technological expertise while adapting to policy shifts.

TL;DR: Self-Driving Teslas Rear-End Motorcyclists, Killing at Least 5

Brevity is the spirit of wit, and I am just not that witty. This is a long article, here is the gist of it:

• The NHTSA’s self-driving crash data reveals that Tesla’s self-driving technology is, by far, the most dangerous for motorcyclists, with five fatal crashes that we know of.
• This issue is unique to Tesla. Other self-driving manufacturers have logged zero motorcycle fatalities with the NHTSA in the same time frame.
• The crashes are overwhelmingly Teslas rear-ending motorcyclists.

Read our full analysis as we go case-by-case and connect the heavily redacted government data to news reports and police documents.

Oh, and read our thoughts about what this means for the robotaxi launch that is slated for Austin in less than 60 days.

https://societyofauthors.org/2025/04/01/soa-day-of-action-following-allegations-of-metas-mass-theft-of-authors-work/

The SoA is organising a day of protest against Meta following revelations of pirated books being used to train their large language models

On Thursday 20 March, The Atlantic broke the story of how Meta has used the Library Genesis (LIbGen) dataset, which is full of pirated material, to develop their AI systems.

The revelations detailed by The Atlantic come against the background of the recent government consultation into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and copyright and the #MakeItFair campaign which sees the UK creative industries fighting back against the proposed changes to copyright law, which would favour multinational tech companies, but irremediably damage the creative industries.

The fusion-fission hybrid will use high-energy neutrons produced by a fusion reaction to trigger fission in surrounding materials thereby boosting energy output and potentially reducing long-lived nuclear waste.

It garbles advertisers' data as a result, but you must disable uBlock Origin to run it; they can't work simultaneously. I recently moved to it and, so far, am never looking back!

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/60150824

As part of its efforts, the bloc has repeatedly introduced its Chat Control legislation, aimed at weakening the encryption that protects messaging services and force providers to provide a client-side backdoor for law enforcement.