🦞🌯 Lobster Roll

NIH director launches "Scientific Freedom" lectures with non-scientist (arstechnica.com)
First speaker minimizes climate change, COVID risks—and is a lab leak proponent.
ASUS Executive Says MacBook Neo is 'Shock' to PC Industry (hardware.slashdot.org)
ASUS says the MacBook Neo is a "shock" to the Windows PC ecosystem. "In the past, Apple's pricing situation has always been high, so for them to release a very budget-friendly product, this is obviously a shock to the entire industry," said ASUS co-CEO S.Y. Hsu in a Tuesday earnings call. While he e...
Verdict: Yes, you should go see Project Hail Mary as soon as possible (arstechnica.com)
A brief spoiler-free review of the film, which opens in the US on March 20.
Meta To Charge Advertisers a Fee To Offset Europe's Digital Taxes (meta.slashdot.org)
Meta will begin charging advertisers a 2-5% "location fee" to offset digital services taxes imposed by several European countries, including the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Turkey. Reuters reports: The fee, for image or video ads delivered on Meta platforms including WhatsApp click-to-mes...
What crackdown? Trump's EPA enforcement claims don't pass sniff test. (arstechnica.com)
75% of the criminal cases closed last fiscal year originated before Trump took office.
Yann LeCun Raises $1 Billion To Build AI That Understands the Physical World (slashdot.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a new Paris-based startup cofounded by Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, announced Monday it has raised more than $1 billion to develop AI world models. LeCun argues that most human reasoning is grounded ...
Don't lick that cold metal pole in winter—if you do, don't panic (arstechnica.com)
Highest risk of part of tongue being torn off is with temps between -5° and -15° C (23° to 5 °F).
Quantum computing meets the Möbius molecule (arstechnica.com)
A complex structure with multiple electrons is within reach of today's hardware.
Valve Faces Second, Class-Action Lawsuit Over Loot Boxes (yro.slashdot.org)
Valve is facing a new consumer class-action lawsuit two weeks after New York sued the video game company for "letting children and adults illegally gamble" with loot boxes. The new lawsuit is similar, alleging that loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2 are "carefully...
A 1,300-Pound NASA Spacecraft To Re-Enter Earth's Atmosphere (science.slashdot.org)
Van Allen Probe A, a 1,300-pound (600 kg) NASA satellite launched in 2012 to study Earth's radiation belts, is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere this week. While most of it is expected to burn up during descent, "some components may survive," reports the BBC. "The space agency said there is a ...
After Outages, Amazon To Make Senior Engineers Sign Off On AI-Assisted Changes (slashdot.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Amazon's ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a "deep dive" into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant said there had been a "...
Reentry of NASA satellite will exceed the agency's own risk guidelines (arstechnica.com)
"Due to late-stage design changes, the potential risk of uncontrolled reentry increased."
FDA contradicts Trump admin, declines to approve generic drug for autism (arstechnica.com)
In the end, the FDA only approved the drug for a rare genetic condition with clearer data.
AI can rewrite open source code—but can it rewrite the license, too? (arstechnica.com)
Is it clean "reverse engineering" or just an LLM-filtered "derivative work"?