For the second time, President Trump has extended the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. operations by 75 days. The TikTok deal "requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed," said Trump in a post on his Truth Social platform. The extension will "keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days." "We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs (Necessary for Fair and Balanced Trade between China and the U.S.A.!)," Trump added. CNBC reports: ByteDance has been in discussion with the U.S. government, the company told CNBC, adding that any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law. "An agreement has not been executed," a spokesperson for ByteDance said in a statement. "There are key matters to be resolved." Before Trump's decision, ByteDance faced an April 5 deadline to carry out a "qualified divestiture" of TikTok's U.S. business as required by a national security law signed by former President Joe Biden in April 2024. ByteDance's original deadline to sell TikTok was on Jan. 19, but Trump signed an executive order when he took office the next day that gave the company 75 more days to make a deal. Although the law would penalize internet service providers and app store owners like Apple and Google for hosting and providing services to TikTok in the U.S., Trump's executive order instructed the attorney general to not enforce it. "This proves that Tariffs are the most powerful Economic tool, and very important to our National Security!," Trump said in the Truth Social post. "We do not want TikTok to 'go dark.' We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: It took only seconds for the judges on a New York appeals court to realize that the man addressing them from a video screen -- a person about to present an argument in a lawsuit -- not only had no law degree, but didn't exist at all. The latest bizarre chapter in the awkward arrival of artificial intelligence in the legal world unfolded March 26 under the stained-glass dome of New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division's First Judicial Department, where a panel of judges was set to hear from Jerome Dewald, a plaintiff in an employment dispute. "The appellant has submitted a video for his argument," said Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels. "Ok. We will hear that video now." On the video screen appeared a smiling, youthful-looking man with a sculpted hairdo, button-down shirt and sweater. "May it please the court," the man began. "I come here today a humble pro se before a panel of five distinguished justices." "Ok, hold on," Manzanet-Daniels said. "Is that counsel for the case?" "I generated that. That's not a real person," Dewald answered. It was, in fact, an avatar generated by artificial intelligence. The judge was not pleased. "It would have been nice to know that when you made your application. You did not tell me that sir," Manzanet-Daniels said before yelling across the room for the video to be shut off. "I don't appreciate being misled," she said before letting Dewald continue with his argument. Dewald later penned an apology to the court, saying he hadn't intended any harm. He didn't have a lawyer representing him in the lawsuit, so he had to present his legal arguments himself. And he felt the avatar would be able to deliver the presentation without his own usual mumbling, stumbling and tripping over words. In an interview with The Associated Press, Dewald said he applied to the court for permission to play a prerecorded video, then used a product created by a San Francisco tech company to create the avatar. Originally, he tried to generate a digital replica that looked like him, but he was unable to accomplish that before the hearing. "The court was really upset about it," Dewald conceded. "They chewed me up pretty good." [...] As for Dewald's case, it was still pending before the appeals court as of Thursday.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Visa has offered Apple roughly $100 million to take over the tech giant's credit card partnership from Mastercard, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. Visa has made a bold push to secure the Apple Card, offering an upfront payment typically reserved for the largest card programs, WSJ reported. American Express is also trying to unseat Mastercard to win the Apple card. Amex is looking to become the card's issuer as well as the network, the report said, citing the sources. Goldman Sachs ended its partnership with Apple in late 2023 as the Wall Street bank retreated from consumer lending.

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Coreboot 25.03 has been released with support for 22 new motherboards and several other significant updates, including enhanced display handling, USB debugging, RISC-V support, and RAM initialization for older Intel platforms. Phoronix reports: Coreboot 25.03 delivers display handling improvements, a better USB debugging experience, CPU topology updates, various improvements to the open-source RAM initialization for aging Intel Haswell platforms, improved USB Type-C and Thunderbolt handling, various embedded controller (EC) improvements, better RISC-V architecture support, DDR5-7500 support, and many bug fixes across the sprawling Coreboot codebase. More details, including a full list of the supported boards, can be found here.

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The M.T.A. has unveiled on Wednesday a revamped New York City subway map -- the first major redesign in nearly 50 years. As reported by the New York Times, the map draws inspiration from the modernist but controversial 1972 Unimark version, prioritizing clarity over geographic precision. It's also a part of a broader effort to refresh the system's image amid calls for infrastructure upgrades and political tensions over transit funding and congestion pricing. From the report: The updated version blends elements of the Unimark design with a successor known to some as the Tauranac map, after John Tauranac, a well-regarded New York mapmaker. That design was led by the firm Michael Hertz Associates. The new map is already being displayed on digital monitors, and will be posted in subway cars and platforms over the next several weeks, the M.T.A. said. For Janno Lieber, the authority's chairman, the occasion was also an opportunity to tie his ambitions for the system to a critical moment in its past. "This is a linchpin moment, like in 1979, when we started to fix the subway system," Mr. Lieber said, referring to the year before the M.T.A. debuted its first capital plan to upgrade the aging transit system. As then, the system is in dire need of new trains and infrastructure improvements. So far, the State Legislature has yet to fully fund the latest $68 billion plan. The Unimark subway map released in 1972. The latest iteration of New York City's map takes cues from the design. Two of the biggest alterations address the legibility of transfer points at some of the busiest hubs and the depiction of the system's accessibility features, said Shanifah Rieara, the authority's chief customer officer. Mr. Lieber declined to say how much the redesign cost, but said it was paid for "entirely in house," without a stand-alone budget.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [...] The study, led by researchers at Brown University, found that the wealthiest Americans lived shorter lives than the wealthiest Europeans. In fact, wealthy Northern and Western Europeans had death rates 35 percent lower than the wealthiest Americans, whose lifespans were more like the poorest in Northern and Western Europe -- which includes countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. "The findings are a stark reminder that even the wealthiest Americans are not shielded from the systemic issues in the US contributing to lower life expectancy, such as economic inequality or risk factors like stress, diet or environmental hazards," lead study author Irene Papanicolas, a professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown, said in a news release. The study looked at health and wealth data of more than 73,000 adults across the US and Europe who were 50 to 85 years old in 2010. There were more than 19,000 from the US, nearly 27,000 from Northern and Western Europe, nearly 19,000 from Eastern Europe, and nearly 9,000 from Southern Europe. For each region, participants were divided into wealth quartiles, with the first being the poorest and the fourth being the richest. The researchers then followed participants until 2022, tracking deaths. The US had the largest gap in survival between the poorest and wealthiest quartiles compared to European countries. America's poorest quartile also had the lowest survival rate of all groups, including the poorest quartiles in all three European regions. While less access to health care and weaker social structures can explain the gap between the wealthy and poor in the US, it doesn't explain the differences between the wealthy in the US and the wealthy in Europe, the researchers note. There may be other systemic factors at play that make Americans uniquely short-lived, such as diet, environment, behaviors, and cultural and social differences. "If we want to improve health in the US, we need to better understand the underlying factors that contribute to these differences -- particularly amongst similar socioeconomic groups -- and why they translate to different health outcomes across nations," Papanicolas said. The findings have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Microsoft is testing a new Windows 11 feature that resizes taskbar icons dynamically like on macOS, with options to shrink icons when the taskbar is full or keep them small at all times. The Verge reports: If you're on the beta, under Taskbar settings - Taskbar behaviors, you can now select options under Show smaller taskbar buttons: Always, Never, or When taskbar is full. The third option will scale down icons so that they all can fit and not get hidden away in a second menu. The behavior appears to be similar to macOS where icons on the dock get smaller as more applications or minimized windows are added. Microsoft is also testing an update to the Start menu. "Now, it has a larger layout that includes the ability to hide the recommended recent apps and can show all of your apps on the page," reports The Verge.

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Google's NotebookLM has added a new "Discover sources" feature that allows users to describe a topic and have the AI find and curate relevant sources from the web -- eliminating the need to upload documents manually. "When you tap the Discover button in NotebookLM, you can describe the topic you're interested in, and NotebookLM will bring back a curated collection of relevant sources from the web," says Google software engineer Adam Bignell. Click to add those sources to your notebook; "it's a fast and easy way to quickly grasp a new concept or gather essential reading on a topic." PCMag reports: You can still add your files. NotebookLM can ingest PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, audio files, Google Docs, or Google Slides and summarize, transcribe, narrate, or convert into FAQs and study guides. "Discover sources" helps incorporate information you may not have saved. [...] The imported sources stay within the notebook you created. You can read the entire original document, ask questions about it via chat, or apply other NotebookLM features to it. Google started rolling out both features on Wednesday. It should be available for all users in about "a week or so." For those concerned about privacy, Google says, "NotebookLM does not use your personal data, including your source uploads, queries, and the responses from the model for training." There's also an "I'm Feeling Curious" button (a reference to its iconic "I'm feeling lucky" search button) that generates sources on a random topic you might find interesting.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Walled Culture has been following closely Italy's poorly designed Piracy Shield system. Back in December we reported how copyright companies used their access to the Piracy Shield system to order Italian Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to all of Google Drive for the entire country, and how malicious actors could similarly use that unchecked power to shut down critical national infrastructure. Since then, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), an international, not-for-profit association representing computer, communications, and Internet industry firms, has added its voice to the chorus of disapproval. In a letter (PDF) to the European Commission, it warned about the dangers of the Piracy Shield system to the EU economy [...]. It also raised an important new issue: the fact that Italy brought in this extreme legislation without notifying the European Commission under the so-called "TRIS" procedure, which allows others to comment on possible problems [...]. As well as Italy's failure to notify the Commission about its new legislation in advance, the CCIA believes that: this anti-piracy mechanism is in breach of several other EU laws. That includes the Open Internet Regulation which prohibits ISPs to block or slow internet traffic unless required by a legal order. The block subsequent to the Piracy Shield also contradicts the Digital Services Act (DSA) in several aspects, notably Article 9 requiring certain elements to be included in the orders to act against illegal content. More broadly, the Piracy Shield is not aligned with the Charter of Fundamental Rights nor the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU -- as it hinders freedom of expression, freedom to provide internet services, the principle of proportionality, and the right to an effective remedy and a fair trial. Far from taking these criticisms to heart, or acknowledging that Piracy Shield has failed to convert people to paying subscribers, the Italian government has decided to double down, and to make Piracy Shield even worse. Massimiliano Capitanio, Commissioner at AGCOM, the Italian Authority for Communications Guarantees, explained on LinkedIn how Piracy Shield was being extended in far-reaching ways (translation by Google Translate, original in Italian). [...] That is, Piracy Shield will apply to live content far beyond sports events, its original justification, and to streaming services. Even DNS and VPN providers will be required to block sites, a serious technical interference in the way the Internet operates, and a threat to people's privacy. Search engines, too, will be forced to de-index material. The only minor concession to ISPs is to unblock domain names and IP addresses that are no longer allegedly being used to disseminate unauthorized material. There are, of course, no concessions to ordinary Internet users affected by Piracy Shield blunders. In the future, Italy's Piracy Shield will add: - 30-minute blackout orders not only for pirate sports events, but also for other live content; - the extension of blackout orders to VPNs and public DNS providers; - the obligation for search engines to de-index pirate sites; - the procedures for unblocking domain names and IP addresses obscured by Piracy Shield that are no longer used to spread pirate content; - the new procedure to combat piracy on the #linear and "on demand" television, for example to protect the #film and #serietv.

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The Louvre Museum will discontinue its use of Nintendo 3DS XL consoles as audio guides by September 2025, replacing them with a new system. NintendoSoup reports: For several years the Louvre has been using specially dedicated New Nintendo 3DS XL consoles to give visitors an audio guided tour of the famous museum. According to the museum's official website however, it seems that the program will be discontinued in September 2025, to be replaced by a new system. Presumably, this is due to Nintendo slowly phasing out the Nintendo 3DS line in general, having stopped supporting repairs for the console in a few countries. The consoles used by the Louvre would have broken down sooner or later, necessitating a change if they could no longer be sent in for repairs. At the time of this writing, it is not known what will become of the unique special edition consoles that were being used for this purpose.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Ryan Whitwam: Researchers at DeepMind have ... released a new technical paper (PDF) that explains how to develop AGI safely, which you can download at your convenience. It contains a huge amount of detail, clocking in at 108 pages before references. While some in the AI field believe AGI is a pipe dream, the authors of the DeepMind paper project that it could happen by 2030. With that in mind, they aimed to understand the risks of a human-like synthetic intelligence, which they acknowledge could lead to "severe harm." This work has identified four possible types of AGI risk, along with suggestions on how we might ameliorate said risks. The DeepMind team, led by company co-founder Shane Legg, categorized the negative AGI outcomes as misuse, misalignment, mistakes, and structural risks. The first possible issue, misuse, is fundamentally similar to current AI risks. However, because AGI will be more powerful by definition, the damage it could do is much greater. A ne'er-do-well with access to AGI could misuse the system to do harm, for example, by asking the system to identify and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities or create a designer virus that could be used as a bioweapon. DeepMind says companies developing AGI will have to conduct extensive testing and create robust post-training safety protocols. Essentially, AI guardrails on steroids. They also suggest devising a method to suppress dangerous capabilities entirely, sometimes called "unlearning," but it's unclear if this is possible without substantially limiting models. Misalignment is largely not something we have to worry about with generative AI as it currently exists. This type of AGI harm is envisioned as a rogue machine that has shaken off the limits imposed by its designers. Terminators, anyone? More specifically, the AI takes actions it knows the developer did not intend. DeepMind says its standard for misalignment here is more advanced than simple deception or scheming as seen in the current literature. To avoid that, DeepMind suggests developers use techniques like amplified oversight, in which two copies of an AI check each other's output, to create robust systems that aren't likely to go rogue. If that fails, DeepMind suggests intensive stress testing and monitoring to watch for any hint that an AI might be turning against us. Keeping AGIs in virtual sandboxes with strict security and direct human oversight could help mitigate issues arising from misalignment. Basically, make sure there's an "off" switch. If, on the other hand, an AI didn't know that its output would be harmful and the human operator didn't intend for it to be, that's a mistake. We get plenty of those with current AI systems -- remember when Google said to put glue on pizza? The "glue" for AGI could be much stickier, though. DeepMind notes that militaries may deploy AGI due to "competitive pressure," but such systems could make serious mistakes as they will be tasked with much more elaborate functions than today's AI. The paper doesn't have a great solution for mitigating mistakes. It boils down to not letting AGI get too powerful in the first place. DeepMind calls for deploying slowly and limiting AGI authority. The study also suggests passing AGI commands through a "shield" system that ensures they are safe before implementation. Lastly, there are structural risks, which DeepMind defines as the unintended but real consequences of multi-agent systems contributing to our already complex human existence. For example, AGI could create false information that is so believable that we no longer know who or what to trust. The paper also raises the possibility that AGI could accumulate more and more control over economic and political systems, perhaps by devising heavy-handed tariff schemes. Then one day, we look up and realize the machines are in charge instead of us. This category of risk is also the hardest to guard against because it would depend on how people, infrastructure, and institutions operate in the future.

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U.S. stock markets suffered their worst day since the Covid pandemic after Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs, triggering a global selloff and wiping out $470 billion in value from tech giants Apple and Nvidia. From a report: The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 6%, while the S&P 500 and the Dow dropped 4.8% and 3.9%, respectively. [...] Meanwhile, the US dollar hit a six-month low, going down at least 2.2% on Thursday morning compared with other major currencies and oil prices sank on fears of a global slowdown. Though the US stock market has been used to tumultuous mornings over the last few weeks, US stock futures -- an indication of the market's likely direction -- had plummeted after the announcement. Hours later, Japan's Nikkei index slumped to an eight-month low and was followed by falls in stock markets in London and across Europe. Multiple major American business groups have spoken out against the tariffs, including the Business Roundtable, a consortium of leaders of major US companies including JP Morgan, Apple and IBM, which called on the White House to "swiftly reach agreements" and remove the tariffs. "Universal tariffs ranging from 10-50% run the risk of causing major harm to American manufacturers, workers, families and exporters," the Business Roundtable said in a statement. "Damage to the US economy will increase the longer the tariffs are in place and may be exacerbated by retaliatory measures."

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Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: A coalition of Washington state business leaders -- which includes Microsoft President Brad Smith and Amazon Chief Legal Officer David Zapolsky -- released a letter Wednesday urging state lawmakers to reconsider recently proposed tax and budget measures. "I actually think it's an almost unprecedented outpouring of support from across the business community," said Microsoft's Smith in an interview. In their letter, which reads in part like it could have been penned by a GenAI Marie Antoinette, the WA business leaders question whether any more spending is warranted given how poorly Washington's 4th and 8th graders compare to children in the rest of the nation on test scores. The letter also laments the increase in WA's homeless population as it celebrates WA Governor Bob Ferguson's announcement that he would not sign a proposed wealth tax. From the letter: "We have long partnered with you in many areas, including education funding. Despite more than doubling K-12 spending and increasing teacher salaries to some of the highest rates in the nation, 4th and 8th grade assessment scores in reading and math are among the worst in the country. Similarly, we have collaborated with you to address housing and homelessness. Despite historic investments in affordable housing and homelessness prevention since 2013, Washington's homeless population has grown by 71 percent, making it the third largest in the nation after California and New York, according to HUD. These outcomes beg the question of whether more investment is needed or whether we need different policies instead." Back in 2010, Smith teamed with then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to fund an effort to defeat an initiative for a WA state income that was pushed for by Bill Gates Sr. In 2023, Bezos moved out of WA state before being subjected to a 7% tax on gains of more than $250,000 from the sale of stocks and bonds, a move that reportedly saved him $1.2 billion in WA taxes on his 2024 Amazon stock sales.

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The European Space Agency's short film Space Debris: Is it a Crisis? highlights the growing danger of orbital clutter, warning that "70% of the 20,000 satellites ever launched remain in space today, orbiting alongside hundreds of millions of fragments left behind by collisions, explosions and intentional destruction." Inkl reports: The approximately eight-minute-long film "Space Debris: Is it a Crisis?" attempts to answer its conjecture with supportive statistics and orbital projections. [...] The film also mentions that the kind of Earth orbit matters when discussing whether we're in a space junk "crisis" -- though unfortunately, orbits at risk appear to be those with satellites that help with communication and navigation, as well as our fight against another primarily human-driven crisis: global warming. Still, the film emphasizes that solutions ought to be thought of carefully: "True sustainability is complex, and rushed solutions risk creating the problem of burden-shifting." You can watch the film on ESA's website.

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Amazon and United Launch Alliance will launch 27 full-scale satellites on April 9 as part of Amazon's Project Kuiper, marking the company's first major step toward building a global satellite internet network to rival SpaceX's Starlink. GeekWire reports: ULA said the three-hour window for the Atlas V rocket's liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Space Launch Complex 41 in Florida is scheduled to open at noon ET (9 a.m. PT) that day. ULA is planning a live stream of launch coverage via its website starting about 20 minutes ahead of liftoff. Amazon said next week's mission -- known as Kuiper-1 or KA-1 (for Kuiper Atlas 1) -- will put 27 Kuiper satellites into orbit at an altitude of 280 miles (450 kilometers). ULA launched two prototype Kuiper satellites into orbit for testing in October 2023, but KA-1 will mark Amazon's first full-scale launch of a batch of operational satellites designed to bring high-speed internet access to millions of people around the world. [...] According to Amazon, the Kuiper satellite design has gone through significant upgrades since the prototypes were launched in 2023. Amazon's primary manufacturing facility is in Kirkland, Wash., with some of the components produced at Project Kuiper's headquarters in nearby Redmond. The mission profile for KA-1 calls for deploying the satellites safely in orbit and establishing ground-to-space contact. The satellites would then use their electric propulsion systems to settle into their assigned orbits at an altitude of 392 miles (630 kilometers), under the management of Project Kuiper's mission operations team in Redmond. Under the current terms of its license from the Federal Communications Commission, Amazon is due to launch 3,232 Kuiper satellites by 2029, with half of those satellites going into orbit by mid-2026.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A "vibe coded" AI app developed by entrepreneur and Y Combinator group partner Tom Blomfield has generated recipes that gave users instruction on how to make "Cyanide Ice Cream," "Thick White Cum Soup," and "Uranium Bomb," using those actual substances as ingredients. Vibe coding, in case you are unfamiliar, is the new practice where people, some with limited coding experience, rapidly develop software with AI assisted coding tools without overthinking how efficient the code is as long as it's functional. This is how Blomfield said he made RecipeNinja.AI. [...] The recipe for Cyanide Ice Cream was still live on RecipeNinja.AI at the time of writing, as are recipes for Platypus Milk Cream Soup, Werewolf Cream Glazing, Cholera-Inspired Chocolate Cake, and other nonsense. Other recipes for things people shouldn't eat have been removed. It also appears that Blomfield has introduced content moderation since users discovered they could generate dangerous or extremely stupid recipes. I wasn't able to generate recipes for asbestos cake, bullet tacos, or glue pizza. I was able to generate a recipe for "very dry tacos," which looks not very good but not dangerous. In a March 20 blog on his personal site, Blomfield explained that he's a startup founder turned investor, and while he has experience with PHP and Ruby on Rails, he has not written a line of code professionally since 2015. "In my day job at Y Combinator, I'm around founders who are building amazing stuff with AI every day and I kept hearing about the advances in tools like Lovable, Cursor and Windsurf," he wrote, referring to AI-assisted coding tools. "I love building stuff and I've always got a list of little apps I want to build if I had more free time." After playing around with them, he wrote, he decided to build RecipeNinja.AI, which can take a prompt as simple as "Lasagna," and generate an image of the finished dish along with a step-by-stape recipe which can use ElevenLabs's AI generated voice to narrate the instruction so the user doesn't have to interact with a device with his tomato sauce-covered fingers. "I was pretty astonished that Windsurf managed to integrate both the OpenAI and Elevenlabs APIs without me doing very much at all," Blomfield wrote. "After we had a couple of problems with the open AI Ruby library, it quickly fell back to a raw ruby HTTP client implementation, but I honestly didn't care. As long as it worked, I didn't really mind if it used 20 lines of code or two lines of code." Having some kind of voice controlled recipe app sounds like a pretty good idea to me, and it's impressive that Blomfield was able to get something up and running so fast given his limited coding experience. But the problem is that he also allowed users to generate their own recipes with seemingly very few guardrails on what kind of recipes are and are not allowed, and that the site kept those results and showed them to other users.

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Robotics and machine learning engineer Naveen Kul developed WattWise, a lightweight open-source CLI tool that monitors power usage via smart plugs and throttles system performance based on electricity pricing and peak hours. Tom's Hardware reports: The simple program, called WattWise, came about when Naveen built a dual-socket EPYC workstation with plans to add four GPUs. It's a power-intensive setup, so he wanted a way to monitor its power consumption using a Kasa smart plug. The enthusiast has released the monitoring portion of the project to the public now, but the portion that manages clocks and power will be released later. Unfortunately, the Kasa Smart app and the Home Assistant dashboard was inconvenient and couldn't do everything he desired. He already had a terminal window running monitoring tools like htop, nvtop, and nload, and decided to take matters into his own hands rather than dealing with yet another app. Naveen built a terminal-based UI that shows power consumption data through Home Assistant and the TP-Link integration. The app monitors real-time power use, showing wattage and current, as well as providing historical consumption charts. More importantly, it is designed to automatically throttle CPU and GPU performance. Naveen's power provider uses Time-of-Use (ToU) pricing, so using a lot of power during peak hours can cost significantly more. The workstation can draw as much as 1400 watts at full load, but by reducing the CPU frequency from 3.7 GHz to 1.5 GHz, he's able to reduce consumption by about 225 watts. (No mention is made of GPU throttling, which could potentially allow for even higher power savings with a quad-GPU setup.) Results will vary based on the hardware being used, naturally, and servers can pull far more power than a typical desktop -- even one designed and used for gaming. WattWise optimizes the system's clock speed based on the current system load, power consumption as reported by the smart plug, and the time -- with the latter factoring in peak pricing. From there, it uses a Proportional-Integral (PI) controller to manage the power and adapts system parameters based on the three variables. A blog post with more information is available here. WattWise is also available on GitHub.

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NaNoWriMo, the nonprofit behind the annual novel-writing challenge, is shutting down after 20 years but will keep its websites online temporarily so users can retrieve their content. The Guardian reports: A 27-minute YouTube video posted the same day by the organization's interim executive director Kilby Blades explained that it had to close due to ongoing financial problems, which were compounded by reputational damage. In November 2023, several community members complained to the nonprofit's board, Blades said. They believed that staff had mishandled accusations made in May 2023 that a NaNoWriMo forum moderator was grooming children on a different website. The moderator was eventually removed, though this was for unrelated code of conduct violations and occurred "many weeks" after the initial complaints. In the wake of this, community members came forward with other complaints related to child safety on the NaNoWriMo sites. The organization was also widely criticized last year over a statement on the use of artificial intelligence in creative writing. After stating that it did not support or explicitly condemn any approach to writing, including the use of AI, it said that the "categorical condemnation of artificial intelligence has classist and ableist undertones." It went on to say that "not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing," and that "not all brains have same abilities ... There is a wealth of reasons why individuals can't 'see' the issues in their writing without help." "We hold no belief that people will stop writing 50,000 words in November," read Monday's email. "Many alternatives to NaNoWriMo popped up this year, and people did find each other. In so many ways, it's easier than it was when NaNoWriMo began in 1999 to find your writing tribe online."

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A joint investigation found that at least five popular VPN apps on the App Store and Google Play have ties to Qihoo 360, a Chinese company with military links. Apple has since removed two of the apps but has not confirmed the status of the remaining three, which 9to5Mac notes have "racked up more than a million downloads." The five apps in question are Turbo VPN, VPN Proxy Master, Thunder VPN, Snap VPN, and Signal Secure VPN (not associated with the Signal messaging app). The Financial Times reports: At least five free virtual private networks (VPNs) available through the US tech groups' app stores have links to Shanghai-listed Qihoo 360, according to a new report by research group Tech Transparency Project, as well as additional findings by the Financial Times. Qihoo, formally known as 360 Security Technology, was sanctioned by the US in 2020 for alleged Chinese military links. The US Department of Defense later added Qihoo to a list of Chinese military-affiliated companies [...] In recent recruitment listings, Guangzhou Lianchuang says its apps operate in more than 220 countries and that it has 10mn daily users. It is currently hiring for a position whose responsibilities include "monitoring and analyzing platform data." The right candidate will be "well-versed in American culture," the posting says.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic announced on Wednesday that it's launching a new Claude for Education tier, an answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT Edu plan. The new tier is aimed at higher education, and gives students, faculty, and other staff access to Anthropic's AI chatbot, Claude, with a few additional capabilities. One piece of Claude for Education is "Learning Mode," a new feature within Claude Projects to help students develop their own critical thinking skills, rather than simply obtain answers to questions. With Learning Mode enabled, Claude will ask questions to test understanding, highlight fundamental principles behind specific problems, and provide potentially useful templates for research papers, outlines, and study guides. Anthropic says Claude for Education comes with its standard chat interface, as well as "enterprise-grade" security and privacy controls. In a press release shared with TechCrunch ahead of launch, Anthropic said university administrators can use Claude to analyze enrollment trends and automate repetitive email responses to common inquiries. Meanwhile, students can use Claude for Education in their studies, the company suggested, such as working through calculus problems with step-by-step guidance from the AI chatbot. To help universities integrate Claude into their systems, Anthropic says it's partnering with the company Instructure, which offers the popular education software platform Canvas. The AI startup is also teaming up with Internet2, a nonprofit organization that delivers cloud solutions for colleges. Anthropic says that it has already struck "full campus agreements" with Northeastern University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Champlain College to make Claude for Education available to all students. Northeastern is a design partner -- Anthropic says it's working with the institution's students, faculty, and staff to build best practices for AI integration, AI-powered education tools, and frameworks. Anthropic hopes to strike more of these contracts, in part through new student ambassador and AI "builder" programs, to capitalize on the growing number of students using AI in their studies.

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