An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols: The latest Linux kernel is out with a slew of new features -- and, for once, this release has been nice and easy. [...] Speaking of Rust, everyone's favorite memory-safe language, the new kernel comes with user-mode Linux support for Rust code. Miguel Ojeda, the Linux kernel developer, who's led the efforts to bring Rust to Linux, said the additions mean we're, "getting closer to a point where the first Rust modules can be upstreamed."

Other features in the Linux 6.3 kernel include support and enablement for upcoming and yet-to-be-released Intel and AMD CPUs and graphics hardware. While these updates will primarily benefit future hardware, several changes in this release directly impact today's users' day-to-day experience. The kernel now supports AMD's automatic Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) feature for Spectre mitigation, providing a less performance-intensive alternative to the retpoline speculative execution.

Linux 6.3 also includes new power management drivers for ARM and RISC-V architectures. RISC-V has gained support for accelerated string functions via the Zbb bit manipulation extension, while ARM received support for scalable matrix extension 2 instructions. For filesystems, Linux 6.3 brings AES-SHA2-based encryption support for NFS, optimizations for EXT4 direct I/O performance, low-latency decompression for EROFS, and a faster Brtfs file-system driver. Bottom line: many file operations will be a bit more secure and faster.

For gamers, the new kernel provides a native Steam Deck controller interface in HID. It also includes compatibility for the Logitech G923 Xbox edition racing wheel and improvements to the 8BitDo Pro 2 wired game controllers. Who says you can't game on Linux? Single-board computers, such as BannaPi R3, BPI-M2 Pro, and Orange Pi R1 Plus, also benefit from updated drivers in this release. There's also support for more Wi-Fi adapters and chipsets. These include: Realtek RTL8188EU Wi-Fi adapter support; Qualcomm Wi-Fi 7 wireless chipset support; and Ethernet support for NVIDIA BlueField 3 DPU. For users dealing with complex networks that have both old-school and modern networks, the new kernel can also handle multi-path TCP handling mixed flows with IPv4 and IPv6. Linux 6.3 is available from kernel.org. You can learn how to compile the Linux kernel yourself here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: Americans' IQ scores are trending in a downward direction. In fact, they've been falling for over a decade. According to a press release, in studying intelligence testing data from 2006 to 2018, Northwestern University researchers noticed that test scores in three out of four "cognitive domains" were going down. This is the first time we've seen a consistent negative slope for these testing categories, providing tangible evidence of what is known as the "Reverse Flynn Effect."

In a 1984 study, James Flynn noticed that intelligence test scores had steadily increased since the early 1930s. We call that steady rise the Flynn Effect. Considering that overall intelligence seemed to be increasing faster than could be explained by evolution, the reason increase became a source of debate, with many attributing the change to various environmental factors. But now, it seems that a Reverse Flynn Effect is, well, in effect.

The study, published in the journal Intelligence, used an online, survey-style personality test called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans. The researchers recorded responses from 2006 and 2018, in order to examine if and how cognitive ability scores were changing over time within the country. The data showed drops in logic and vocabulary (known as verbal reasoning), visual problem solving and analogies (known as matrix reasoning), and computational and mathematical abilities (known as letter and number series). Not every domain is going down though, notes the report. "[S]cores in spatial reasoning (known as 3D rotation) followed the opposite pattern, trending upward over the 12-year period."

"If all the scores were going in the same direction, you could make a nice little narrative about it, but that's not the case," says Elizabeth Dworak, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University and one of the authors on the study. "We need to do more to dig into it." She adds: "It doesn't mean their mental ability is lower or higher; it's just a difference in scores that are favoring older or newer samples. It could just be that they're getting worse at taking tests or specifically worse at taking these kinds of tests."

AI now "automates creative impulses," writes New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka — then wonders where that will lead. Chayka's first example is a Berlin-based photographer using AI tools to create a viral video showing Harry Potter characters as fashion models for the upscale French label Balenciaga: A.I. tools were involved in each step of Alexander Niklass's process, and in each element of the video. He created the basic static images with Midjourney, evoking the Harry Potter actors and outfits through text prompts such as "male model, grotesque, balenciaga commercial." Then he used ElevenLabs — a "voice-cloning" tool — to create models of the actors' voices based on previously recorded audio. Finally, he fed the images into a service called D-ID, which is used to make "avatar videos" — subtly animated portraits, not so far off from those that appear in the newspapers of the Potter world. D-ID added the signature lip synchs and head nods, which Niklass explained were a reference to fashion models tilting their chins for the cameras.

The combination of child-friendly film and adult luxury fashion held no particular symbolism nor expressed an artistic intent. It's "entertainment," Niklass said. Yet the video's most compelling aspect might be its vacuity, a meaningless collision of cultural symbols. The nonsense is the point.
The article also cites a song where the French group AllttA performs with an AI-generated simulation of Jay-Z. Chayka marvels at a world where "The A.I. content has the appearance of realism, without actual reality — reality solely as a style.... it seems that a Rubicon has been crossed: It doesn't matter that these artifacts are generated by A.I.; we can just enjoy them for what they are. It happened faster than I thought possible, but now that A.I.-generated pop culture has entered the mainstream, it seems unlikely that we'll ever get rid of it."

Chayka asked ChatGPT how AI-generated imagery is changing our perceptions, and "It responded that there has been a 'blurring of the lines between real and artificial.'"

The article ultimately ponders the possible implications of "a world in which every style, every idea, and every possible remix is generated as fast and frictionlessly as possible, and the successful ones stick and get attention." But at the same time, Chayka believes the final output's quality still depends on the humans involved (arguing that the Harry Potter fashion video was still more "appealingly odd" than later AI-generated videos copying the idea, like "Matrix by Gucci," "Star Wars by Balenciaga," and "The Office by Balenciaga".) A.I. tools may have been able to replicate actors' faces and generate fashionable outfits, but only Niklass could have come up with the concept, which required keen observation of both high fashion and the wizarding world — and also a very specific, extremely online sense of humor. With tools like Midjourney publicly available to anyone online, "everybody can create something visually appealing now," he said. "But A.I. can't generate taste yet," he continued....

To put it another way, execution may have been democratized by generative A.I., but ideas have not. The human is still the originator, editor, and curator of A.I.'s effects.

A boom in artificial intelligence startup funding sparked by OpenAI has spilled over to China, the world's second-biggest venture capital market. Now American institutional investors are indirectly financing a rash of Chinese AI startups aspiring to be China's answer to OpenAI. From a report: The American investors, including U.S. endowments, back key Chinese VC firms such as Sequoia Capital China, Matrix Partners China, Qiming Venture Partners and Hillhouse Capital Management that are striking local AI startup deals, which haven't been previously reported. U.S. government officials have grown increasingly wary of such investments in Chinese AI as well as semiconductors because they could aid a geopolitical rival. For instance, Sequoia China, the Chinese affiliate of the Silicon Valley VC stalwart, recently made a U.S.-dollar investment in a brand-new AI venture created by Yang Zhilin, a young assistant professor at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University, which is sometimes described as China's equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to a person with direct knowledge of the deal. Yang, who got his doctorate from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, in 2019, is considered one of China's top AI researchers. He previously co-founded another startup Sequoia China backed, Recurrent AI, which develops tools for salespeople, according to the company's website. Matrix and Qiming, meanwhile, recently funded another Beijing-based AI startup, Frontis, which has compared its product to ChatGPT. It was founded in 2021 by Zhou Bowen, a Tsinghua professor who once led JD.com's AI research lab, according to the company's website. The deal gave the startup a paper valuation of hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars, the company said.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey said in a blog post on Tuesday that he will give a grant of $1 million per year to encrypted messaging app Signal, the first in a series of grants he plans to make to support "open internet development." Reuters reports: Social media should not be "owned by a single company or group of companies," and needs to be "resilient to corporate and government influence," Dorsey wrote in a post on Revue, a newsletter service owned by Twitter. [Editor's note: The post has been moved to Pastebin since Revue is shutting down early next year.] TechCrunch adds: Dorsey said that his hope to build a Twitter according to his wishes died in 2020 with the entrance of an unnamed activist investor. "I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company," he wrote. The principles he had hoped to build on -- resilience to corporate and government control, user-controlled content with no exceptions and algorithmic moderation -- are not present in today's Twitter, nor in the one he led, he admitted. Even so, he wrote that, contrary to the insinuations accompanying the so-called Twitter Files, "there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time."

As to actual solutions, Dorsey is of course hard at work (or at least present) at Bluesky, but he calls out Mastodon and Matrix as other worthwhile avenues for development: "There will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn't about a 'decentralized Twitter.' This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Register: GitHub Copilot -- a programming auto-suggestion tool trained from public source code on the internet -- has been caught generating what appears to be copyrighted code, prompting an attorney to look into a possible copyright infringement claim. On Monday, Matthew Butterick, a lawyer, designer, and developer, announced he is working with Joseph Saveri Law Firm to investigate the possibility of filing a copyright claim against GitHub. There are two potential lines of attack here: is GitHub improperly training Copilot on open source code, and is the tool improperly emitting other people's copyrighted work -- pulled from the training data -- to suggest code snippets to users?

Butterick has been critical of Copilot since its launch. In June he published a blog post arguing that "any code generated by Copilot may contain lurking license or IP violations," and thus should be avoided. That same month, Denver Gingerich and Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) said their organization would stop using GitHub, largely as a result of Microsoft and GitHub releasing Copilot without addressing concerns about how the machine-learning model dealt with different open source licensing requirements.

Copilot's capacity to copy code verbatim, or nearly so, surfaced last week when Tim Davis, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, found that Copilot, when prompted, would reproduce his copyrighted sparse matrix transposition code. Asked to comment, Davis said he would prefer to wait until he has heard back from GitHub and its parent Microsoft about his concerns. In an email to The Register, Butterick indicated there's been a strong response to news of his investigation. "Clearly, many developers have been worried about what Copilot means for open source," he wrote. "We're hearing lots of stories. Our experience with Copilot has been similar to what others have found -- that it's not difficult to induce Copilot to emit verbatim code from identifiable open source repositories. As we expand our investigation, we expect to see more examples. "But keep in mind that verbatim copying is just one of many issues presented by Copilot. For instance, a software author's copyright in their code can be violated without verbatim copying. Also, most open-source code is covered by a license, which imposes additional legal requirements. Has Copilot met these requirements? We're looking at all these issues." GitHub's documentation for Copilot warns that the output may contain "undesirable patterns" and puts the onus of intellectual property infringement on the user of Copilot, notes the report.

Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy is less willing to set aside how Copilot deals with software licenses. "What Microsoft's GitHub has done in this process is absolutely unconscionable," he said. "Without discussion, consent, or engagement with the FOSS community, they have declared that they know better than the courts and our laws about what is or is not permissible under a FOSS license. They have completely ignored the attribution clauses of all FOSS licenses, and, more importantly, the more freedom-protecting requirements of copyleft licenses."

Brett Becker, assistant professor at University College Dublin in Ireland, told The Register in an email, "AI-assisted programming tools are not going to go away and will continue to evolve. Where these tools fit into the current landscape of programming practices, law, and community norms is only just beginning to be explored and will also continue to evolve." He added: "An interesting question is: what will emerge as the main drivers of this evolution? Will these tools fundamentally alter future practices, law, and community norms -- or will our practices, law and community norms prove resilient and drive the evolution of these tools?"

Last week, DeepMind announced it discovered a more efficient way to perform matrix multiplication, conquering a 50-year-old record. This week, two Austrian researchers at Johannes Kepler University Linz claim they have bested that new record by one step. Ars Technica reports: In 1969, a German mathematician named Volker Strassen discovered the previous-best algorithm for multiplying 4x4 matrices, which reduces the number of steps necessary to perform a matrix calculation. For example, multiplying two 4x4 matrices together using a traditional schoolroom method would take 64 multiplications, while Strassen's algorithm can perform the same feat in 49 multiplications. Using a neural network called AlphaTensor, DeepMind discovered a way to reduce that count to 47 multiplications, and its researchers published a paper about the achievement in Nature last week.

To discover more efficient matrix math algorithms, DeepMind set up the problem like a single-player game. The company wrote about the process in more detail in a blog post last week. DeepMind then trained AlphaTensor using reinforcement learning to play this fictional math game -- similar to how AlphaGo learned to play Go -- and it gradually improved over time. Eventually, it rediscovered Strassen's work and those of other human mathematicians, then it surpassed them, according to DeepMind. In a more complicated example, AlphaTensor discovered a new way to perform 5x5 matrix multiplication in 96 steps (versus 98 for the older method).

This week, Manuel Kauers and Jakob Moosbauer of Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, published a paper claiming they have reduced that count by one, down to 95 multiplications. It's no coincidence that this apparently record-breaking new algorithm came so quickly because it built off of DeepMind's work. In their paper, Kauers and Moosbauer write, "This solution was obtained from the scheme of [DeepMind's researchers] by applying a sequence of transformations leading to a scheme from which one multiplication could be eliminated."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: DeepMind has used its board-game playing AI AlphaZero to discover a faster way to solve a fundamental math problem in computer science, beating a record that has stood for more than 50 years. A year after it took biologists by surprise, AlphaFold has changed how researchers work and set DeepMind on a new course. The problem, matrix multiplication, is a crucial type of calculation at the heart of many different applications, from displaying images on a screen to simulating complex physics. It is also fundamental to machine learning itself. Speeding up this calculation could have a big impact on thousands of everyday computer tasks, cutting costs and saving energy.

Despite the calculation's ubiquity, it is still not well understood. A matrix is simply a grid of numbers, representing anything you want. Multiplying two matrices together typically involves multiplying the rows of one with the columns of the other. The basic technique for solving the problem is taught in high school. But things get complicated when you try to find a faster method. This is because there are more ways to multiply two matrices together than there are atoms in the universe (10 to the power of 33, for some of the cases the researchers looked at).

The trick was to turn the problem into a kind of three-dimensional board game, called TensorGame. The board represents the multiplication problem to be solved, and each move represents the next step in solving that problem. The series of moves made in a game therefore represents an algorithm. The researchers trained a new version of AlphaZero, called AlphaTensor, to play this game. Instead of learning the best series of moves to make in Go or chess, AlphaTensor learned the best series of steps to make when multiplying matrices. It was rewarded for winning the game in as few moves as possible. [...] The researchers describe their work in a paper published in Nature today. The headline result is that AlphaTensor discovered a way to multiply together two four-by-four matrices that is faster than a method devised in 1969 by the German mathematician Volker Strassen, which nobody had been able to improve on since. The basic high school method takes 64 steps; Strassen's takes 49 steps. AlphaTensor found a way to do it in 47 steps. "Overall, AlphaTensor beat the best existing algorithms for more than 70 different sizes of matrix," concludes the report. "It reduced the number of steps needed to multiply two nine-by-nine matrices from 511 to 498, and the number required for multiplying two 11-by-11 matrices from 919 to 896. In many other cases, AlphaTensor rediscovered the best existing algorithm."

In April ZDNet called its beta "the cutest Linux distro you'll ever use," praising the polished "incredible elegance" of Debian-based Cutefish OS, with its uncluttered, MacOS-like "Cutefish DE" desktop.

But now CutefishOS.com times out, with at least one Reddit user complaining "their email is not responding" and seeking contributors for a fork.

But meanwhile, the technology site DebugPoint.com shares another update: It looks like the OpenMandriva project is already continuing with the development of the Cutefish DE (not the OS) for its own OS. For more details, visit the Matrix discussion page.

Besides, it's worth mentioning that Arch Linux already have the Cutefish desktop packages in the community repo. You can even install it as a standalone desktop environment in Arch Linux with easy steps. As you can see, it is easier to maintain the desktop environment to continue its development because the structure is already out there.

I have tested and reviewed hundreds of distros for years, and Cutefish OS is the promising one with its stunning desktop environment. It was written from the ground up with QML and C++ and took advantage of KWin. It would have been an attractive desktop as a separate component and could have been another great option besides KDE Plasma or GNOME.

Many open-source projects are born and die every year, and it's unfortunate to see the situation of Cutefish OS. I hope an official fork comes up soon, and we all can contribute to it.

slack_justyb writes: Thunderbird 102 has been released with some new UI improvements and new features. There has been a change in the icons, the layout of the address book has been upgraded to feature a more modern UI, and a new UI feature known as the spaces toolbar to get around Thunderbird. New features include an updated import and export wizard, a UI for editing the email header settings, and Matrix client support within Thunderbird, which is a messaging system using HTTPS that is similar to Discord if you've used that.

Finally, the Thunderbird Twitter account released the first screenshot of the new UI that is being targeted for the 114 release. For those wondering what the Thunderbird team has done and is doing, you can always head over to the planning section of the developer site. The roadmap are things they're working on the current release and the backlog are the things they are working towards.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Korea Times: Samsung Display has decided to close its liquid-crystal display (LCD) business in June, hobbled by a declining global competitive edge due to cheaper products made by its Chinese and Taiwanese counterparts, according to the industry, Sunday. No investment plan details have since been announced. The decision by the display affiliate of Samsung Group came six months sooner than expected, due in large part to rapid losses from falling LCD prices. According to Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC), a U.S. market research firm, the average price index of LCD panels, measured against 100 in January 2014, will fall to 36.6 in September of this year. The figure has dropped farther from the record low of 41.5 in April of this year, and 58 percent lower than the record high of 87 in June 2021.

Samsung Display will no longer produce LCDs used for large TV screens and focus instead on manufacturing organic light-emitting diode (OLED) and quantum dot (QD) displays. The employees of the LCD businesses are expected to be transferred to the QD businesses. The display affiliate was first formed in 1991, as an LCD business arm under Samsung Electronics. It formally launched in 2012 as Samsung Display and has since merged with three local and Japanese makers of active matrix organic light-emitting diodes (AMOLED), for the production of advanced types of displays.

"It's no longer possible to watch any content starring Keanu Reeves in China," reports PC Magazine, "and searching for his name returns no results from search engines."

The AV Club explains: Earlier this year, about a month after the release of The Matrix Resurrections, Reeves was announced as a performer at the 35th annual Tibet House Benefit Concert. The concert was organized by Tibet House, a nonprofit founded by supporters of the Dalai Lama that Chinese authorities have labeled "a separatist organization advocating for Tibetan independence," according to The Hollywood Reporter....

Now, after his appearance at the show, it's being reported by the Los Angeles Times that the Matrix movies, Speed, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, The Lake House, and more films from the actor's catalog can no longer be streamed on platforms such as Tencent Video, Youku, and Migu Video.... The one Reeves picture that is still up and available to stream in the country is Toy Story 4 — but that's because the film's credits feature the dubbing cast, not the original cast from the American release.
But it's more than that, notes PC Magazine: As Reuters reports, the Chinese authorities have seemingly wiped the actor's existence from servers across the country.... And with the internet being so restricted and controlled there, it's relatively simple for those in power to digitally disappear someone. So far, Tencent and iQiyi have removed at least 19 of the actor's movies from their streaming platforms, and performing a search for either his English name or its Chinese translation will return zero results from search engines, apparently.
The Los Angeles Times supplies some context: The development emerged just after his latest film "The Matrix: Resurrections" became the first blockbuster to hit Chinese theaters in over two months, ending an unusually prolonged drought of censorship approvals on U.S. titles in a year of rising geopolitical tensions and a further cooling of relations with Hollywood.... "It's a curious case that's worth following. We tend to think of the censorship machine in China as this really coordinated monster, but the fact that we're seeing these conflicting signals [between the online and theatrical markets] suggests that some of these measures come from different places," said Alex Yu, a researcher at China Digital Times, a U.S.-based news organization that translates and archives content censored in China.

It's unclear who ordered the deletions, China's regulatory agencies or platforms acting proactively to remove potentially troublesome content, Yu said.... "Why all of a sudden did they decide to take this measure at this exact moment? It's a question we as outsiders might never be able to answer," Yu said. "The system is so opaque that it's pretty much impossible to pinpoint which agency or person is responsible...."

The ban on Reeves' past works bodes poorly for the China prospects of his upcoming projects. These include animation "DC League of Super-Pets," starring Chinese fan favorite Dwayne Johnson, and the pandemic-delayed sequel "John Wick: Chapter 4," which appears to target mainland viewers with its top billing of Donnie Yen, the Hong Kong action star known for his expressions of loyalty to China's ruling Communist Party....

Despite the original trilogy's popularity, "The Matrix: Resurrections" was a flop in China even before it faced nationalist backlash, grossing only $13.6 million and notching just 5.7 out of 10 on the taste-making ratings platform Douban.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is finally poised to legalize adaptive beam headlights in the US. From a report: The NHTSA announced that it has issued a final rule that will update the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, which currently only allow for "dumb" high- and low-beam lights. Adaptive beam lights use a matrix of projectors, some of which can be turned off to shape the beam so the lights illuminate the road but don't shine at an oncoming driver. (These are an advancement over the auto-high beam technology that you may have fitted to your current car.) The technology has been around for nearly two decades in Europe and Japan.

joshuark shares a report from Popular Mechanics: A mathematician from Harvard University has (mostly) solved a 150-year-old Queen's gambit of sorts: the delightful n queens puzzle. In newly self-published research (meaning it has not yet been peer-reviewed), Michael Simkin, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, estimated the solution to the thorny math problem, which is based loosely on the rules of chess. The queen is largely understood to be the most powerful piece on the board because she can move in any direction, including diagonals. So how many queens can fit on the chess board without falling into each other's paths? The logic at play here is similar to a sudoku puzzle, dotting queens on the board so that they don't intersect.

Picture a classic chess board, which is an eight-by-eight matrix of squares. The most well-known version of the puzzle matches the board because it involves eight queens -- and there are 92 solutions in this case. But the "n queens problem" doesn't stop there; that's because its nature is asymptotic, meaning its answers approach an undefined value that reaches for the infinite. Up until now, experts have explicitly solved for all the natural numbers (the counting numbers) up to 27 queens in a 27-by-27 board. However, there is no solution for two or three, because there's no possible positioning of queens that satisfies the criteria. But what about numbers above 27?

Consider this: for eight queens, there are just 92 solutions, but for 27 queens, there are over 200 quadrillion solutions. It's easy to see how solving the problem for numbers higher than 27 becomes extremely unwieldy or even impossible without more computing power than we have at the moment. That's where Simkin's work enters the arena. His work approached the topic through a sharp mathematical estimate of the number of solutions as n increases. Ultimately, he arrived at the following formula: (0.143n)n. In other words, there are approximately (0.143n)n ways that you can place the queens so that none are attacking one another on an n-by-n chessboard.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has flown a UH-60A Black Hawk helicopter without a pilot for the first time ever. CNET reports: DARPA's Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System program was used to fly the helicopter on autopilot over Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on Saturday. The Black Hawk was kitted out with Sikorsky Matrix autonomous flying technology, and DARPA says it repeated the "uninhabited flight" on Monday. "Pilots can focus on mission management instead of the mechanics," Stuart Young, program manager in DARPA's Tactical Technology Office, said in a statement. "ALIAS ... includes the ability to operate aircraft at all times of the day or night, with and without pilots, and in a variety of difficult conditions, such as contested, congested, and degraded visual environments."

When The Matrix Resurrections premiered in San Francisco, the city's mayor "celebrated the appearance of her fair city in the film and cheered the film's economic contributions to the region," reports SFGate. "But there's a problem of aesthetics at play here... It is undeniably a dystopian hellscape where police rule the city and technology looms over all..." In the first section of the movie, the metaphor of the Matrix mirrors that of the tech industry depicted in the film. Tech is stereotypical here — lots of T-shirt-wearing men playing ping-pong and talking about how to design the next great video game. The most annoying character in the film, Jude (Andrew Caldwell), is a proxy for all annoying tech bros...
Meanwhile Politico writes that the original 1999 film The Matrix actually "changed politics, almost entirely by mistake," and calls the new Matrix Resurections "a sophisticated self-critique of the culture that swallowed it." In the past two decades, the idea of a "red pill" has taken on a life of its own in American culture, most prominently at first in an infamous misogynist subreddit, and then more broadly as a symbol of any kind of political awakening, almost always on the right. The idea has proliferated wildly throughout politics, and especially the darkest ideological corners of the internet, in which to be "red-pilled" means to realize that American society has been hopelessly debased by liberals, requiring a total rethink of its premises... Hugo Weaving, who memorably portrayed the original films' villain, lamented in a 2020 interview how people "will take something that they think is cool and they will repurpose it to fit themselves when the original intention or meaning of that thing was quite the opposite...." [T]he Wachowskis have been largely silent about the "meaning" of their creation — a movie franchise that not only became a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon, but predicted the cultural tenor of politics in the digital age with an eerie, oracular accuracy. We know they got it right, but what did they think about it?

Wednesday saw the release of "The Matrix Resurrections," a long-delayed sequel from one of the original writer/directors (Lana directed; Lilly sat it out) — and also an answer to that question. As a movie, it's everything its predecessors was, an impressive feat of visual-effects artistry, action choreography and original sci-fi worldbuilding. But even more, it's a two hour and 27-minute-long piece of cultural criticism. The film interrogates, to a jarringly specific degree, not just its own iconography, but how American culture has evolved around and bastardized it over the past two decades. "The Matrix Resurrections" is both wildly successful popcorn entertainment and a window into a long-misunderstood creative mind. But in refitting its entire premise to the social media age, it illustrates just how much the contours of American society have changed in the intervening decades....

The original "Matrix" was deeply of its time. Reeves' Neo a was a quintessential late 1990s corporate drone, captive to the professional ennui also depicted in films of the era like "Fight Club" and "Office Space." Its modern incarnation is a cry of protest against something else: society's willingness to trade individual agency for the neurological reward pellets of the Online. Visual metaphors abound, with Reeves disoriented by a procession of mirrors that serve as gateways to another world, another possible truth. "Your brain is hooked on this shit the Matrix has been feeding you for years," one character tells him. "They don't know you like I do.

"I know exactly what you need...."
The movie is streaming now on HBOMax for subscribers in their $15 ad-free tier — but, like, Dune, only during its 31-day theatrical run.

Supply is low, demand is high -- but that alone cannot explain the weird indignity of renting a vehicle. From a report: The present situation is "the most challenging in the history of car rental," says Chris Brown, the digital editor of the industry trade publication Auto Rental News. "Last year ... it was a disaster." Nobody could have planned for such a catastrophic revenue loss, he told me, and while the airline industry received a government bailout, the rental-car industry did not. "Hertz had 3,000 cars burned to the ground because someone lit a match, and they just burned in a field," he added. (Something like this did happen in Florida, though only around 1,000 of the 4,500 cars destroyed in the fire belonged to Hertz, and investigators blamed the episode on a hot exhaust pipe and dry grass.) Given the context, some negative customer experiences were to be expected, Brown argued. "But I think it's really impressive how car-rental [companies have] been able to pull themselves out of this very difficult time managing as well as they are."

Well, I'm not trying to be unfair to any companies, but many car-rental businesses did receive funds from the Paycheck Protection Program. And many of their negative customer experiences have nothing to do with a car shortage or a pandemic. Why is that car-rental employee typing for so long? We'll never know. Why are the printers so old and loud and broken? Who could say! Will you ever get a straight answer as to how much insurance to buy, or whether to prepay for gas, or why it's forbidden for you to drive this rental car out of the state of Florida? What does the pandemic have to do with Avis allegedly repossessing a rental car from someone's driveway in the middle of the night in Teaneck, New Jersey, and then allegedly claiming to know absolutely nothing about it, in one of the oddest stories I have ever read? And what does the pandemic have to do with the stream of complaints about rental-car companies on the Better Business Bureau website, a surprising number of which come from people who insist that they do not smoke yet they have been charged as much as $450 for allegedly smoking in a car?

I reached out with questions of this kind to the three largest rental-car companies, which control the large majority of the rental-car business in the United States. Enterprise Holdings did not respond. Avis Budget declined to comment about either the state of the industry or the alleged incident in Teaneck. A Hertz spokesperson said, in part, "Hertz is working closely with our automotive partners to add new vehicles to our fleet as quickly as possible amid the microchip shortage that continues to impact the car rental industry. We're also purchasing low-mileage, pre-owned vehicles, and moving vehicles to the areas with highest demand." The financial structure of these companies is as inscrutable as a contract printed on a dot-matrix printer and signed in a dim underground parking garage. Some of them have gone bankrupt; at least one has done so multiple times. Take Hertz for instance: Private-equity firms acquired the company from Ford in 2005, then made a profit of $1 billion with an IPO while the company itself remained deeply in debt. The company is also on its sixth CEO since 2014 and has been deemed a "Frankenstein of financial engineering" by Axios. Most of the cars that Hertz rents out are owned by "special-purpose" subsidiaries of Hertz, from which Hertz then leases them. When Hertz was sliding into bankruptcy in spring 2020, it was because the company had missed lease payments -- to put it crudely -- to itself. I can barely understand this, yet I will walk into a rental-car office and suffer for it.

While 1999 movie influenced everything from videogames to action movies to the metaverse, latest installment shows some restraint. From a report: The jaw-dropping visual effects in "The Matrix" transformed the quest to prove what is possible on screen. The franchise returns this week to find out if there is anything more that can be done. For the 1999 original, filmmakers invented a way to make Keanu Reeves's hero, Neo, defy physics while dodging bullets on screen. The effect blew enough minds to get a nickname -- "bullet time" -- plus changed the look of action movies, and influenced mediums from animation to videogames. For the new sequel, "The Matrix Resurrections," filmmakers deployed much-higher-caliber technologies, including three-dimensional imagery made using artificial intelligence. But after 22 years of digital evolution, high-end movie effects are approaching a plateau near perfection. "We went from pulling off what seemed to be impossible, to a sort of inability to create surprise" in the movie industry, says John Gaeta, who helped craft the bullet-time effect. He was a visual-effects designer on the first three "Matrix" films; now he is making things for the metaverse.

This year the movies presented us with a car slingshotting from cliff to cliff ("F9"); Ryan Reynolds running amok inside a videogame ("Free Guy"); and giant monsters crushing the Hong Kong skyline ("Godzilla vs. Kong"). Any viewers who paused to ask themselves -- "How did they do that?" -- likely came up with the same answer: "Computers." Human characters that are totally computer-generated and believable are still on the frontier, "but I'm not sure if there is anything else that can't be done given enough money or time," says Ian Failes, editor of befores and afters, a magazine covering visual-effects artistry. Despite any numbness among viewers to digital spectacles, Hollywood's demand for them has only increased. Visual-effects houses have raced to compete in a global production boom and fuel the streaming wars with flashy content. Some directors are reacting to the VFX arms race by practicing more restraint. Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" depicts settings such as the desert planet Arrakis with a naturalistic look. Instead of zooming viewers into a fleet of attacking space ships, the director presented the nighttime ambush in silhouette at a distance, conveying a somber sense of scale. "He was just showing the reality of the world," says Namit Malhotra, chief executive of DNEG, a visual-effects company that worked on "Dune" and "The Matrix Resurrections." He adds: "When you're spending that kind of money, it's hard for filmmakers to control the desire for more, a little more oomph."

In the new "Matrix" release, director and co-writer Lana Wachowski plays with expectations that the sequel must level up. Spoiler alert: In the movie, Mr. Reeves's character is reintroduced as a videogame designer whose big hit was called, yes, "The Matrix." The events in the film franchise supposedly happened within the world of his videogame -- including that signature action sequence in which Neo bends time and space. As a group of videogame developers brainstorm ideas for a sequel to "The Matrix," one declares, "We need a new bullet time!" The original bullet time was "a borderline hack," as Mr. Gaeta recalls it, that started with 120 still cameras firing off film photographs of Mr. Reeves dangling on wires. Those images were stitched together with software to simulate a swooping camera move in slow motion. The successor to that technique is known as volumetric capture. A camera array captures people or spaces from every angle, and then A.I. meshes this video into 3-D footage that can be viewed and manipulated from any perspective.

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm quotes a report from Futurism: Researchers at the biotechnology startup Cortical Labs have created "mini-brains" consisting of 800,000 to one million living human brain cells in a petri dish, New Scientist reports.

The cells are placed on top of a microelectrode array that analyzes the neural activity... To teach the mini-brains the game, the team created a simplified version of "Pong" with no opponent. A signal is sent to either the right or left of the array to indicate where the ball is, and the neurons from the brain cells send signals back to move the paddle...

Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs and research lead of the project, said that while the mini-brains can't play the game as well as a human, they do learn faster than some AIs.

"The amazing aspect is how quickly it learns, in five minutes, in real time," he told New Scientist. "That's really an amazing thing that biology can do."

While this is certainly some amazing Twitch fodder, the team at Cortical Labs hope to use their findings to develop sophisticated technology using "live biological neurons integrated with traditional silicon computing," according to their website.
There's actually video of the brain cells playing Pong. The chief scientific officer told New Scientist that when the cells are in the game, they actually believe they are the paddle.

"We often refer to them as living in the Matrix."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Even if the wind stops blowing in the next three weeks, wind power will end the year as the leading source of electricity in Spain. This will mean wind overtaking nuclear in the national energy matrix for the first time since 2013, the only year since records began in which wind turbines were the main source of power. That year was particularly good in terms of wind resources while nuclear was affected by the closure of the Garoña plant in Burgos. Since then, however, wind power has continued to grow as a percentage of total energy generated both in absolute and relative terms, a trend that looks to continue in the near future. The milestone, advanced by Spanish news site Nius, is just a taste of things to come. "Wind power is going to dominate the Spanish electricity grid for a long time," says Francisco Valverde, a consultant at the energy company Menta Energia.

According to the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC), released by the Spanish government last year, the installed capacity of wind turbines will almost double between now and 2030. During this period, the rate of growth of solar photovoltaic will be even greater as installed capacity more than quadruples, making it the second most important electricity source, though it will still lag far behind wind power, even when solar thermal is taken into account. Meanwhile, installed nuclear power will fall to less than half its current level. And both combined-cycle plants, which use natural gas, and hydroelectricity will maintain their weight in a mix in which coal will no longer be included.