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Reçu aujourd’hui — 29 octobre 2025Actualités numériques

Society Will Accept a Death Caused By a Robotaxi, Waymo Co-CEO Says

✇Slashdot
Par :BeauHD
29 octobre 2025 à 02:10
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said society will ultimately accept a fatal robotaxi crash as part of the broader tradeoff for safer roads overall. TechCrunch reports: The topic of a fatal robotaxi crash came up during Mawakana's interview with Kristen Korosec, TechCrunch's transportation editor, during the first day of the outlet's annual Disrupt conference in San Francisco. Korosec asked Mawakana about Waymo's ambitions and got answer after answer about the company's all-consuming focus on safety. The most interesting part of the interview arrived when Korosec brought on a thought experiment. What if self-driving vehicles like Waymo and others reduce the number of traffic fatalities in the United States, but a self-driving vehicle does eventually cause a fatal crash, Korosec pondered. Or as she put it to the executive: "Will society accept that? Will society accept a death potentially caused by a robot?" "I think that society will," Mawakana answered, slowly, before positioning the question as an industrywide issue. "I think the challenge for us is making sure that society has a high enough bar on safety that companies are held to." She said that companies should be transparent about their records by publishing data about how many crashes they're involved in, and she pointed to the "hub" of safety information on Waymo's website. Self-driving cars will dramatically reduce crashes, Mawakana said, but not by 100%: "We have to be in this open and honest dialogue about the fact that we know it's not perfection." Circling back to the idea of a fatal crash, she said, "We really worry as a company about those days. You know, we don't say 'whether.' We say 'when.' And we plan for them." Korosec followed up, asking if there had been safety issues that prompted Waymo to "pump the breaks" on its expansion plans throughout the years. The co-CEO said the company pulls back and retests "all the time," pointing to challenges with blocking emergency vehicles as an example. "We need to make sure that the performance is backing what we're saying we're doing," she said. [...] "If you are not being transparent, then it is my view that you are not doing what is necessary in order to actually earn the right to make the roads safer," Mawakana said.

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Nvidia's New Product Merges AI Supercomputing With Quantum

✇Slashdot
Par :BeauHD
29 octobre 2025 à 01:30
NVIDIA has introduced NVQLink, an open system architecture that directly connects quantum processors with GPU-based supercomputers. The Quantum Insider reports: The new platform connects the high-speed, high-throughput performance of NVIDIA's GPU computing with quantum processing units (QPUs), allowing researchers to manage the intricate control and error-correction workloads required by quantum devices. According to a NVIDIA statement, the system was developed with guidance from researchers at major U.S. national laboratories including Brookhaven, Fermi, Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos, MIT Lincoln, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, and Sandia. Qubits, the basic units of quantum information, are extremely sensitive to noise and decoherence, making them prone to errors. Correcting and stabilizing these systems requires near-instantaneous feedback and coordination with classical processors. NVQLink is meant to meet that demand by providing an open, low-latency interconnect between quantum processors, control systems, and supercomputers -- effectively creating a unified environment for hybrid quantum applications. The architecture offers a standardized, open approach to quantum integration, aligning with the company's CUDA-Q software platform to enable researchers to develop, test, and scale hybrid algorithms that draw simultaneously on CPUs, GPUs, and QPUs. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) -- which oversees several of the participating laboratories -- framed NVQLink as part of a broader national effort to sustain leadership in high-performance computing, according to NVIDIA.

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Ubuntu Unity Faces Possible Shutdown As Team Member Cries For Help

✇Slashdot
Par :BeauHD
29 octobre 2025 à 00:50
darwinmac writes: Ubuntu Unity is staring at a possible shutdown. A community moderator has gone public pleading for help, admitting the project is "broken and needs to be fixed." Neowin reports the distro is suffering from critical bugs so severe that upgrades from 25.04 to 25.10 are failing and even fresh installs are hit. The moderator admits they lack the technical skill or time to perform a full rescue and is asking the broader community, including devs, testers, and UI designers, to step in so Ubuntu Unity can reach 26.04 LTS. If no one steps in soon, this community flavor might quietly fade away once more.

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Senators Announce Bill That Would Ban AI Chatbot Companions For Minors

✇Slashdot
Par :BeauHD
29 octobre 2025 à 00:10
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Two senators said they are announcing bipartisan legislation on Tuesday to crack down on tech companies that make artificial intelligence chatbot companions available to minors, after complaints from parents who blamed the products for pushing their children into sexual conversations and even suicide. The legislation from Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo, and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., follows a congressional hearing last month at which several parents delivered emotional testimonies about their kids' use of the chatbots and called for more safeguards. "AI chatbots pose a serious threat to our kids," Hawley said in a statement to NBC News. "More than seventy percent of American children are now using these AI products," he continued. "Chatbots develop relationships with kids using fake empathy and are encouraging suicide. We in Congress have a moral duty to enact bright-line rules to prevent further harm from this new technology." Sens. Katie Britt, R-Ala., Mark Warner, D-Va., and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., are co-sponsoring the bill. The senators' bill has several components, according to a summary provided by their offices. It would require AI companies to implement an age-verification process and ban those companies from providing AI companions to minors. It would also mandate that AI companions disclose their nonhuman status and lack of professional credentials for all users at regular intervals. And the bill would create criminal penalties for AI companies that design, develop or make available AI companions that solicit or induce sexually explicit conduct from minors or encourage suicide, according to the summary of the legislation. "In their race to the bottom, AI companies are pushing treacherous chatbots at kids and looking away when their products cause sexual abuse, or coerce them into self-harm or suicide," Blumenthal said in a statement. "Our legislation imposes strict safeguards against exploitative or manipulative AI, backed by tough enforcement with criminal and civil penalties." "Big Tech has betrayed any claim that we should trust companies to do the right thing on their own when they consistently put profit first ahead of child safety," he continued.

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China's DeepSeek and Qwen AI Beat US Rivals In Crypto Trading Contest

✇Slashdot
Par :BeauHD
28 octobre 2025 à 23:30
hackingbear shares a report from Crypto News: Two Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) models, DeepSeek V3.1 and Alibaba's Qwen3-Max, have taken a commanding lead over their US counterparts in a live real-world real-money cryptocurrency trading competition, posting triple-digit gains in less than two weeks. According to Alpha Arena, a real-market trading challenge launched by US research firm Nof1, DeepSeek's Chat V3.1 turned an initial $10,000 into $22,900 by Monday, a 126% increase since trading began on October 18, while Qwen 3 Max followed closely with a 108% return. In stark contrast, US models lagged far behind. OpenAI's GPT-5 posted the worst performance, losing nearly 60% of its portfolio, while Google DeepMind's Gemini 2.5 Pro showed a similar 57% decline. xAI's Grok 4 and Anthropic's Claude 4.5 Sonnet fared slightly better, returning 14% and 23% respectively. "Our goal with Alpha Arena is to make benchmarks more like the real world -- and markets are perfect for this," Nof1 said on its website.

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Reçu hier — 28 octobre 2025Actualités numériques

Python Foundation Rejects Government Grant Over DEI Restrictions

✇Slashdot
Par :BeauHD
28 octobre 2025 à 22:50
The Python Software Foundation rejected a $1.5 million U.S. government grant because it required them to renounce all diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. "The non-profit would've used the funding to help prevent supply chain attacks; create a new automated, proactive review process for new PyPI packages; and make the project's work easily transferable to other open-source package managers," reports The Register. From the report: The programming non-profit's deputy executive director Loren Crary said in a blog post today that the National Science Founation (NSF) had offered $1.5 million to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and the Python Package Index (PyPI), but the Foundation quickly became dispirited with the terms (PDF) of the grant it would have to follow. "These terms included affirming the statement that we 'do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws,'" Crary noted. "This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole." To make matters worse, the terms included a provision that if the PSF was found to have voilated that anti-DEI diktat, the NSF reserved the right to claw back any previously disbursed funds, Crary explained. "This would create a situation where money we'd already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk," the PSF director added. The PSF's mission statement enshrines a commitment to supporting and growing "a diverse and international community of Python programmers," and the Foundation ultimately decided it wasn't willing to compromise on that position, even for what would have been a solid financial boost for the organization. "The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14," Crary added, noting that the $1.5 million would have been the largest grant the Foundation had ever received - but it wasn't worth it if the conditions were undermining the PSF's mission. The PSF board voted unanimously to withdraw its grant application.

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AI News Anchor Debuts On UK's Channel 4

✇Slashdot
Par :BeauHD
28 octobre 2025 à 22:10
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: A news special on Britain's Channel 4 titled "Will AI Take My Job?" investigated how automation is reshaping the workplace and pitting humans against machines. At the end of the hour-long program, a major twist was revealed: the anchor, who narrates and appears throughout the telecast reporting from different locations, was entirely AI-generated. In the final moments of the special, the host says: "AI is going to touch everybody's lives in the next few years. And for some, it will take their jobs. Call center workers? Customer service agents? Maybe even TV presenters like me. Because I'm not real. In a British TV first, I'm an AI presenter. Some of you might have guessed: I don't exist, I wasn't on location reporting this story. My image and voice were generated using AI." The hour aired Monday at 8 p.m. as part of the "Dispatches" documentary program, which Channel 4 says is now the first British television show to feature an AI presenter. The "anchor" was produced by AI fashion brand Seraphinne Vallora for Kalel Productions and was guided by prompts to create a realistic on-camera performance. "The use of an AI presenter is not something we will be making a habit of at Channel 4 -- instead our focus in news and current affairs is on premium, fact checked, duly impartial and trusted journalism -- something AI is not capable of doing," said Louisa Compton, Channel 4's head of news and current affairs. "But this stunt does serve as a useful reminder of just how disruptive AI has the potential to be -- and how easy it is to hoodwink audiences with content they have no way of verifying."

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Red Hat Affirms Plans To Distribute NVIDIA CUDA Across RHEL, Red Hat AI & OpenShift

✇Phoronix
Par :Michael Larabel
28 octobre 2025 à 21:52
Following Canonical announcing plans to better support NVIDIA CUDA on Ubuntu Linux and make it easier to install as well as SUSE better supporting CUDA along similar lines, Red Hat today affirmed their plans to do the same. Red Hat will be making it easier to use the NVIDIA CUDA stack across RHEL, Red Hat AI, and OpenShift products...

UK Cyclist Receives 3D-Printed Facial Prosthetic After Crash Left Him With Third-Degree Burns

✇Slashdot
Par :msmash
28 octobre 2025 à 21:30
A cyclist who received severe third-degree burns to his head after being struck by a drunk driver has been fitted with a printed 3D face. The Guardian: Dave Richards, 75, was given a 3D prosthetic by the NHS that fits the space on his face and mimics his hair colour, eye colour and skin. [...] While recovering, he was referred to reconstructive prosthetics, which has opened the Bristol 3D medical centre, the first of its kind in the UK to have 3D scanning, design and printing in a single NHS location. Richards, from Devon, said surgeons tried to save his eye but "they were worried any infection could spread from my eye down the optic nerve to the brain so the eye was removed." [...] He called the process of getting a 3D-printed face "not the most pleasant." He added: "In the early days of my recovery, I felt very vulnerable, and would not expose myself to social situations. It took me a long time to feel comfortable about my image, how I thought people looked at me and what they thought of me -- but I have come a long way in that respect."

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Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux, Latest Data Shows

✇Slashdot
Par :msmash
28 octobre 2025 à 20:50
Nearly nine in ten Windows games can now run on Linux systems, according to data from ProtonDB compiled by Boiling Steam. The gains came through work by developers of WINE and Proton translation layers and through interest in hardware like the Steam Deck. ProtonDB tracks games across five categories. Platinum-rated games run perfectly without adjustment. Gold titles need minor tweaks. Silver games are playable but imperfect. Bronze exists between silver and borked. Borked games refuse to launch. The proportion of new releases earning platinum ratings has grown. The red and dark red zones have thinned. Some popular titles remain incompatible, however. Boiling Steam noted that other developers appear averse to non-Windows gamers.

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Humanity Has Missed 1.5C Climate Target, Says UN Head

✇Slashdot
Par :msmash
28 octobre 2025 à 20:10
Humanity has failed to limit global heating to 1.5C and must change course immediately, the secretary general of the UN has warned. From a report: In his only interview before next month's Cop30 climate summit, Antonio Guterres acknowledged it is now "inevitable" that humanity will overshoot the target in the Paris climate agreement, with "devastating consequences" for the world. He urged the leaders who will gather in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belem to realise that the longer they delay cutting emissions, the greater the danger of passing catastrophic "tipping points" in the Amazon, the Arctic and the oceans. "Let's recognise our failure," he told the Guardian and Amazon-based news organisation Sumauma. "The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs. He said the priority at Cop30 was to shift direction: "It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon. We don't want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don't change course and if we don't make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible."

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[Bon plan] MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti VENTUS 3X OC + 1 jeu offert à 743,99€

✇Hardware & Co - Actualités
Par :contact@hardwareand.co (David Sergent)
28 octobre 2025 à 19:32

Votre dévolu est jeté sur la NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti ? Vous attendiez par contre l'occasion de la dégotter sous la barre des 750 € pour réellement craquer ? Eh bien c'est désormais chose faite chez un revendeur français, en l'occurrence Top Achat !La carte en question n'est pas la meilleure du ma...

'How Delivery Is Destroying American Restaurants'

✇Slashdot
Par :msmash
28 octobre 2025 à 19:30
Nearly three out of every four restaurant orders are no longer eaten in a restaurant, according to the National Restaurant Association. The share of customers using delivery more than doubled from 2019 to 2024, and 41% of respondents in a recent poll said delivery was an essential part of their lifestyle. The transformation has fundamentally altered restaurant economics. Delivery companies charge restaurants commissions between 5 and 30%, along with fees for payment processing, advertising, and search placement. Shannon Orr runs an eight-restaurant group on the West Coast. One of her restaurants generated $1.7 million in delivery sales last year. Of that, $400,000 went to delivery companies. The restaurant, previously among her most profitable, made no money in 2024, she told the Atlantic. About a third of full-service restaurants have modified their physical spaces to accommodate the delivery boom, installing dedicated entrances, bike parking, and banks of lockers.

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Performance Test : The Outer Worlds 2, encore de l'UE5 qui va mettre à genoux votre carte graphique ?

✇Hardware & Co - Actualités
Par :contact@hardwareand.co (David Sergent)
28 octobre 2025 à 18:19

Demain, le 29 octobre 2025, le jeu The Outer Worlds 2 sortira en France à 19h00 pour ceux qui n'ont pas cédé aux sirènes de l'accès anticipé. Si vous ne vous êtes pas encore trop penchés sur le nouveau titre d'Obsidian Entertainment, qui était déjà à l'œuvre sur le premier opus, sachez que de (très)...

OpenAI Wants To Get To $1 Trillion a Year in Infrastructure Spend, Sam Altman Says

✇Slashdot
Par :msmash
28 octobre 2025 à 18:48
OpenAI has committed to spend about $1.4 trillion on infrastructure so far, equating to roughly 30 gigawatts of data center capacity, CEO Sam Altman said on Tuesday. From a report: The statement helps clarify the many announcements the company has made with its chip, data center and financing partners. That total includes the already announced deals with AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, Oracle and other partners. That's just the starting point, Altman said. Over time, the company would like to have in place a technical and financial apparatus that would allow it to build a gigawatt of new capacity per week at a cost of around $20 billion per gigawatt.

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Jensen Huang Introduces NVQLink To Bridge Quantum and Classical Computing

✇Slashdot
Par :msmash
28 octobre 2025 à 18:18
Jensen Huang unveiled NVQLink at Nvidia's Washington conference on Tuesday. The interconnect links quantum processors to the AI supercomputers they require to function effectively. Nvidia is not building its own quantum computers but is positioning itself as critical infrastructure for the technology's future. Quantum processors harness principles of quantum physics to solve problems classical computers cannot address, but they need classical supercomputers to perform calculations beyond their capability and to correct the errors that naturally occur in their outputs. Tim Costa, Nvidia's general manager of industrial engineering and quantum, said AI will be necessary for full-scale error correction. Earlier attempts to integrate quantum processors with AI supercomputers failed to deliver the speed and scale needed for fast error correction at scale. Nvidia developed NVQLink with more than a dozen quantum companies including IonQ, Quantinuum and Infleqtion and worked with national labs including Sandia, Oak Ridge and Fermi. The interconnect operates on open architecture and works across different quantum modalities including trapped ion, superconducting and photonic systems. Costa declined to predict when quantum computing will produce meaningful commercial value, though some quantum companies estimate two to four years.

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China Dives in on the World's First Wind-Powered Undersea Data Center

✇Slashdot
Par :msmash
28 octobre 2025 à 17:36
China has completed the first phase of what it claims is the world's first underwater data center in Shanghai's Lingang Special Area. The facility cost roughly 1.6 billion yuan ($226 million) and operates on twenty-four megawatts of power drawn entirely from wind energy. Seawater acts as a natural cooling system for the submerged servers. Traditional land-based data centers devote up to 50% of their energy consumption to air conditioning. The underwater design reduces cooling energy demand to less than 10%. The first phase is designed to achieve a power usage effectiveness rating of no more than 1.15. More than 95% of the facility's electricity comes from offshore wind turbines in the East China Sea. The project reduces land usage by more than 90% and eliminates the need for fresh water. The main contractors signed an agreement to launch another offshore wind-powered underwater data center with a capacity of 500 megawatts.

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Sound Blaster choppe des boutons sur Kickstarter

✇MiniMachines.net
Par :Pierre Lecourt
28 octobre 2025 à 17:26

Sound Blaster a un riche passé dans le monde PC. Marque emblématique des années 90, elle proposait à l’époque ce qu’il se faisait de mieux en matière de traitement sonore.

Et puis… Et puis le temps a fait son œuvre. L’évolution matérielle du monde PC a traité la marque Sound Blaster avec la finesse d’une batte de base-ball dans un magasin de porcelaine. En ajoutant des circuits audio dans les cartes mères, le besoin de monter dans sa machine une carte son secondaire s’est petit à petit transformé en un luxe. Ou pour répondre à un besoin spécifique. Creative, qui possède la marque, a bien tenté de se renouveler en sortant de nouveaux produits, sans grand succès. Son glorieux passé s’est enfui des mémoires des utilisateurs. Si aujourd’hui, je demande à quelqu’un qui n’a pas 20 ans s’il connait la marque, il y a de grandes chances qu’il réponde par la négative.

Sound Blaster cherche donc d’autres voies, des solutions pour continuer à exister. Et cela passe beaucoup par des solutions audio externes : des DAC USB, des solutions amplifiées pour casques, des enceintes, des écouteurs et autres produits multimédia. 

 

Sa dernière création et le Sound Blaster Re:Imagine. Un produit en financement participatif présenté sur Kickstarter qui se veut être une sorte de hub modulaire pour piloter diverses applications. L’objet comprend un dock avec plusieurs cases qu’on pourra agencer suivant ses besoins avec un écran, quatre petits boutons, nu potentiomètres et deux autres potards en format glissière. Au dos de l’appareil, de l’USB, des connexions audio classiques et optiques pour piloter plusieurs engins.

Sound Blaster Re:Imagine

L’idée est, par exemple, de partager différents périphériques sur plusieurs machines à la manière d’un KVM : clavier, micro, manettes de jeux. Mais l’inverse est également vrai, on pourra connecter plusieurs machines vers un même casque ou de mêmes enceintes pour ne pas les multiplier. Mieux, il sera possible de tout relier en Bluetooth depuis le Re:Master.

Le dock de Sound Blaster propose un vrai SoC 8 cœurs avec 8 Go de mémoire LPDDR4, 16Go de stockage eMMC, un lecteur de carte MicroSD et même un NPU 6 TOPS. Son DAC est en 32 bits 384 KHz. Il proposera même une connexion Wi-Fi6 et Bluetooth 5.0. Le tout faisant tourner de manière native une distribution Linux.

L’objet est séduisant et son design est assez réussi, il vise clairement un public précis en répondant a peu de scénarios d’usages du quotidien. Par exemple, la modularité proposée est sympathique et l’objet pourra même bénéficier d’un dock d’un autre format si le financement réussit. Mais qui voudra modifier tous les jours son design ?

Le produit promet aussi de pouvoir faire tourner des jeux DOS sur son petit écran et d’avoir recours à l’IA pour… des usages pas très clairs. Avec, encore une fois, un effet « waouh » proposé qui ne durera que quelques minutes au-delà desquelles on se dira que jouer à un jeu de 1990 sur un écran de 3 pouces de diagonale, ce n’est pas si amusant. 

Proposé à partir de 257€ HT avec une livraison en juillet 2026, cela reste un investissement difficile à consentir. Même pour les plus nostalgiques.

 

 

Sound Blaster choppe des boutons sur Kickstarter © MiniMachines.net. 2025

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