An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: We are often told that setting the bar high is key to success. After all, if you shoot for the moon and miss, at least you'll land with the stars. But Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang wants privileged Gen Z grads to lower their expectations. "People with very high expectations have very low resilience -- and unfortunately, resilience matters in success," Huang said during a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations."

Indeed, as the billionaire boss pointed out, those at elite institutions like Stanford probably have higher expectations for their future than your average Joe. The university is one of the most selective in the United States -- it ranks third best in the country, according to the QS World University Rankings, and the few students who get picked to study there are charged $62,484 in tuition fees for the premium, compared to the average $26,027 per annum cost. But, unfortunately for those saddled with student debt, not even the best universities in the world can teach you resilience. "I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you," Huang added. [...]

For those fortunate enough to never have personally experienced hardship growing up, Huang doesn't have any advice on how to welcome more of it into your life now. But he did have some advice on embracing tough times. "I don't know how to do it [but] for all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering," Huang said. "Greatness comes from character and character isn't formed out of smart people -- it's formed out of people who suffered."It's why despite Nvidia's success -- the company has a $2 trillion market cap -- Huang would still welcome hardship at his organization."To this day I use the phrase 'pain and suffering' inside our company with great glee," he added. "I mean that in a happy way because you want to refine the character of your company." Essentially, if you want your workforce to always be on their A game, don't let them rest on their laurels.

Swedish music streaming company Spotify is rolling out full-length music videos in a limited beta launch for premium subscribers, venturing into an arena that YouTube has dominated for nearly two decades. From a report: Music videos will be available to premium users in the UK, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Kenya, in beta starting on Wednesday, the company said, as it attempts to grow its user base. While it aims to reach 1 billion users by 2030, Spotify's new plan faces competition from Apple Music and Alphabet's YouTube, which allows users to watch music videos for free.

Tom Warren reports via The Verge: Discord will soon allow developers to build new games and apps that can be used directly in its chat app. A selection of minigames and apps have been available to Discord users for months now, but starting March 18th, all Discord developers will get access to a new Embedded App SDK that lets them build these special embedded apps. Discord has used its Activities feature to enable apps like YouTube, promote minigames like poker, and even encourage users to play with a shared whiteboard experience. These apps all appear as an embedded iframe inside Discord, but they've been limited to select developers so far.

The SDK will open up this Activities section of Discord to many more developers, so we're bound to see a lot more minigames that can be played directly inside Discord chats. [...] Discord is also experimenting with a way to allow users to add apps to their accounts so they roam across servers. Developers will be able to enable their apps for accounts, and the experiment will launch alongside the app SDK on March 18th. Discord is also bringing back its app pitches, where developers can pitch prototype app ideas and secure up to $30,000 in funding.

The openVertebrate (oVert) project is now complete, offering free online access to incredibly detailed 3D images of over 13,000 vertebrates. New Atlas reports: More than a research project, oVert was a collaboration between like-minded specialists across 25 institutions whose sole objective was to add value to museum collections by making them more widely available. Importantly, these images provide an insight that would only otherwise be obtained by destructive dissection and tissue sampling. Over the course of six years, project members took CT scans of more than half the classes, or genera, of all amphibians, reptiles, fishes, birds, and mammals, rendering models that provide an intimate look at the creatures, inside and out. [...]

For a working example of the incredible detail and information contained in oVert's images, head to Sketchfab to view a sample of interactive 3D models like the olive sea snake. Or go to MorphoSource to access the full oVert repository. [...] If you have 30 minutes to spare, check out the full video produced by the Florida Museum, which showcases a collection of diverse oVert specimens. A study presenting a summary of the oVert project was published in the journal BioScience.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: YouTube is no longer showing recommended videos to users logged out of a Google account or using Incognito mode, making people concerned they are being bullied into always being signed into the service. This change, which is now rolling out, shows a simple YouTube homepage without any videos or tips on what to watch. Before, even in incognito mode or when not logged in, Google would still show you video suggestions. Now, users see a message saying "Get Started" and "Start watching videos to help us build a feed of videos you'll love" when they open YouTube in incognito mode, with videos no longer being recommended.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently took to the stage to claim that Nvidia's GPUs are "so good that even when the competitor's chips are free, it's not cheap enough." Huang further explained that Nvidia GPU pricing isn't really significant in terms of an AI data center's total cost of ownership (TCO). The impressive scale of Nvidia's achievements in powering the booming AI industry is hard to deny; the company recently became the world's third most valuable company thanks largely to its AI-accelerating GPUs, but Jensen's comments are sure to be controversial as he dismisses a whole constellation of competitors, such as AMD, Intel and a range of competitors with ASICs and other types of custom AI silicon.

Starting at 22:32 of the YouTube recording, John Shoven, Former Trione Director of SIEPR and the Charles R. Schwab Professor Emeritus of Economics, Stanford University, asks, "You make completely state-of-the-art chips. Is it possible that you'll face competition that claims to be good enough -- not as good as Nvidia -- but good enough and much cheaper? Is that a threat?" Jensen Huang begins his response by unpacking his tiny violin. "We have more competition than anyone on the planet," claimed the CEO. He told Shoven that even Nvidia's customers are its competitors, in some cases. Also, Huang pointed out that Nvidia actively helps customers who are designing alternative AI processors and goes as far as revealing to them what upcoming Nvidia chips are on the roadmap.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Police: Seven years ago, Google announced that it would phase out all Chrome apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux by 2018 (it would actually take until 2023). In its place would be what the company called Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), web apps that can be installed on a user's desktop that act as if they are practically natural apps and programs. The idea grew quickly, with Chrome users having installed PWAs in record numbers by the beginning of 2022. Soon, every website will be installable on desktops through PWAs.

In Chrome Canary (the daily build version of Google Chrome and typically a couple of versions ahead of the stable build), websites can now be installed on desktops. As part of the latest daily build, Google has added an "Install page as app" option to the "Save and share" submenu on the desktop version (via @Leopeva64 on X). This makes clicking the app -- which is just the website made to look and feel like a native app -- always open in its own window. Sites that already have their own PWAs, like YouTube or Reddit, have been prompting users to install them for a while now and will have their "Install page as app" function actually showing the name of the site. For example, YouTube's entry will show as "Install YouTube." In February, it became possible to enable the flags necessary to make any website into a PWA, but it seems to have just now become fully implemented.

Lindsay Clark reports via The Register: Palantir has won a US Army contract worth $178.4 million to house a battlefield intelligence system inside a big truck. In what purports to be the Army's first AI-defined vehicle, Palantir will provide systems for the TITAN "ground station," which is designed to access space, high altitude, aerial, and terrestrial sensors to "provide actionable targeting information for enhanced mission command and long range precision fires", according to a Palantir statement.

TITAN stands for Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node, which might sound harmless enough. Who was ever killed by a node? The TITAN solution is built to "maximize usability for soldiers, incorporating tangible feedback and insights from soldier touchpoints at every step of the development and configuration process," the statement said. The aim of the TITAN project is to bring together military software and hardware providers in a new way. These include "traditional and non-traditional partners" of the US armed forces, such as Northrop Grumman, Anduril Industries, L3Harris Technologies, Pacific Defense, SNC, Strategic Technology Consulting, and World Wide Technology, as well as Palantir.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Alex Karp, Palantir's motor-mouth CEO, said TITAN was the logical extension of Maven, a controversial project for using machine learning and engineering to tell people and objects apart in drone footage in which Palantir is a partner and from which Google famously pulled out after employees protested. Karp said TITAN was a partnership between "people who've built software products that have been used on the battlefield and used commercially." "That simple insight which you see in the battlefield in Ukraine, which you see in Israel is something that is hard for institutions to internalize. [For] the Pentagon this step is one of the most historic steps ever because what it basically says is, 'We're going to fight for real, we're going to put the best on the battlefield and the best is not just one company.' It's a team of people led by the most prominent software provider in defense in the world: Palantir," he said. On Thursday, Palantir was one of the companies included in a new U.S. consortium assembled to support the safe development and deployment of generative AI.

Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are all experiencing issues. From a report: The three Meta-owned platforms aren't working for many users, with the widespread outage seeming to start around 10AM ET. Some users are experiencing issues logging in to their Meta Quest headsets, too. Facebook is logging users out of their accounts, leaving them unable to get back in. Meanwhile, over on Instagram, some users, including several of us at The Verge, can't refresh their feeds. YouTube is down, too.

Piracy was traditionally seen as something that predominantly young males were interested in. This is a largely outdated representation of reality, as girls and women began to catch up a long time ago. In some countries, including Indonesia, more women pirate music, movies, and TV-shows than their male counterparts. TorrentFreak reports: [N]ew findings published by researchers from Northumbria University Newcastle, which include gender, are worth highlighting. The survey data, looking at piracy trends in Thailand and Indonesia, was released by Marketing professor Dr. Xuemei Bian and Ms. Humaira Farid. The results were presented to WIPO's Advisory Committee on Enforcement recently and the associated presentation (PDF) was published online. Through an online survey and in-person interviews, the research aims to map consumer attitudes and behaviors in Indonesia and Thailand, particularly in connection with online copyright infringement.

One of the overall conclusions is that piracy remains a common activity in both Asian countries. Pirates are present in all age groups but and music, movies en TV-shows tend to be in highest demand and younger people. Those under 40, are more likely to pirate than their older counterparts. These findings are not out of the ordinary and the same trends are visible in other countries too. Interestingly, however, some notable differences between the two countries appear when gender is added to the mix. The tables below show that women are more likely to pirate than men in Indonesia. This is true for all content categories, except for software, where men are slightly in the lead. In Thailand, however, men are more likely to pirate across all categories. The researchers do not attempt to explain these differences. However, they show once again that 'dated' gender stereotypes don't always match with reality. And when they have little explanatory value, one can question whether gender is even relevant in a piracy context.

Looking at other differences between Thai and Indonesian consumers there are some other notable findings. For example, in Indonesia, 64% of the respondents say they're aware of the availability of pirated movies and TV-shows on YouTube, compared to 'just' 32% in Thailand. Indonesian consumers are also more familiar with music piracy sites and pirate much more frequently than Thai consumers, as the table below shows. Finally, the researchers also looked at various attitudes toward piracy. This shows that Thai pirates would be most likely to stop if legal services were more convenient, while Indonesian pirates see cheaper legal services as the largest discouraging factor.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from The Washington Post: A YouTube contractor was addressing the Austin City Council on Thursday, calling on them to urge Google to negotiate with his union, when a colleague interrupted him with jaw-dropping news: His 43-person team of contractors had all been laid off...

The YouTube workers, who work for Google and Cognizant, unanimously voted to unionize under the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA in April 2023. Since then, the workers say that Google has refused to bargain with them. Thursday's layoff signifies continued tensions between Google and its workers, some of whom in 2021 formed a union...

Workers had about 20 minutes to gather their belongings and leave the premises before they were considered trespassing.
Video footage of the moment is embedded at the top of the article. "I was speechless, shocked," said the contractor who'd been speaking. He told the Washington Post "I didn't know what to do. But angered, that was the main feeling." The council meeting was streaming live online and has since spread on social media. The contractors view the layoff as retaliation for unionizing, but Google and information technology subcontractor Cognizant said it was the normal end of a business contract.

The ability for layoffs to spread over social media highlights how the painful experience of a job loss is frequently being made public, from employees sharing recordings of Zoom meetings to posting about their unemployment. The increasing tension between YouTube's contractors and Google comes as massive layoffs continue to hit the tech industry — leaving workers uneasy and companies emboldened. Google already has had rounds of cuts the past two years.

Google has been in a long-running battle with many of its contractors as they seek the perks and high pay that full-time Google workers are accustomed to. The company has tens of thousands of contractors doing everything from food service to sales to writing code... Google maintains that Cognizant is responsible for the contractors' employment and working conditions, and therefore isn't responsible for bargaining with them. Cognizant said it is offering the workers seven weeks of paid time to explore other roles at the company and use its training resources.

Last year, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Cognizant and Google are joint employers of the contractors. In January, the NLRB sent a cease-and-desist letter to both employers for failing to bargain with the union. Since then the issue of joint employment, which would ultimately determine which company is responsible for bargaining, has landed in an appeals court and has yet to be ruled on.
"Workers say they don't have sick pay, receive minimal benefits and are paid as little as $19 an hour," according to the article, "forcing some to work multiple jobs to make ends meet." Sam Regan, a data analyst contractor for YouTube Music, told the Washington Post that he was one of the last workers to leave the meeting where the layoffs were announced.

"Upon leaving, he heard one of the security guards call the non-emergency police line to report trespassers."

The US Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments Monday in two cases that could dramatically reshape social media, weighing whether states such as Texas and Florida should have the power to control what posts platforms can remove from their services. From a report: The high-stakes battle gives the nation's highest court an enormous say in how millions of Americans get their news and information, as well as whether sites such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok should be able to make their own decisions about how to moderate spam, hate speech and election misinformation. At issue are laws passed by the two states that prohibit online platforms from removing or demoting user content that expresses viewpoints -- legislation both states say is necessary to prevent censorship of conservative users.

More than a dozen Republican attorneys general have argued to the court that social media should be treated like traditional utilities such as the landline telephone network. The tech industry, meanwhile, argues that social media companies have First Amendment rights to make editorial decisions about what to show. That makes them more akin to newspapers or cable companies, opponents of the states say. The case could lead to a significant rethinking of First Amendment principles, according to legal experts. A ruling in favor of the states could weaken or reverse decades of precedent against "compelled speech," which protects private individuals from government speech mandates, and have far-reaching consequences beyond social media. A defeat for social media companies seems unlikely, but it would instantly transform their business models, according to Blair Levin, an industry analyst at the market research firm New Street Research.

The first privately built spacecraft has successfully landed on the lunar surface on Thursday. "We can confirm, without a doubt, that our equipment is on the surface of the moon," said Stephen Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that operated the Odysseus spacecraft. "Welcome to the moon." From a report: As it approached the surface of the moon, Odysseus lost contact with NASA, resulting in several anxious minutes for those who worked on the joint project. But after approximately 15 minutes of searching, officials confirmed that they were once again receiving signals from the spacecraft. "A commercial lander named Odysseus, powered by a company called Intuitive Machines, launched up on a Space X rocket, carrying a bounty of NASA scientific instruments and bearing the dream of a new adventure, a new adventure in science, innovation and American leadership, well, all of that aced the landing of a lifetime," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said after contact had been reestablished. "Today for the first time in more than a half century, the U.S. has returned to the moon."

Altemus had estimated that Odysseus had an 80% chance of successfully landing on the moon, citing previous failed attempts as an advantage. "We've stood on the shoulders of everybody who's tried before us," Altemus said. It was the first American mission to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972 and the first private spacecraft ever to make a soft landing there. While it was a private mission, NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to deliver six instruments to the moon. And the U.S. space agency provided streaming video of the landing.

In a new report today, Nielsen found that YouTube is once again the overall top streaming service in the U.S., with 8.6% of viewing on television screens. Netflix was a close second at 7.9% of TV usage. TechCrunch reports: In a blog post celebrating the achievement, the Google-owned streaming service announced that viewers now watch a daily average of over 1 billion hours of YouTube content on their televisions, which could indicate that there's a preference for user-generated videos among U.S. consumers rather than traditional TV shows. Sixty-one percent of Gen Z reported that they favor user-generated content over other content formats. [...]

Although YouTube may have precedence in the living room, TikTok continues to dominate on mobile devices. The short-form video app recently began testing the ability for TikTokers to upload 30-minute videos, which could step on YouTube's toes. TikTok also entered the spatial reality space, launching a native app on the Apple Vision Pro. Meanwhile, YouTube decided to not build a dedicated app for the device.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that it's working on a finger tracking neural wristband that will be ready to ship "in the next few years." UploadVR reports: Appearing on the Morning Brew Daily talk show on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg said "we're actually kind of close to having something here that we're going to have in a product in the next few years." [...] An entirely different approach to finger tracking is to sense the neural electrical signals passing through your wrist to your fingers from your brain, using a technique called electromyography (EMG). Theoretically this could have zero or even negative latency, perfect accuracy, work regardless of lighting conditions, and not be subject to occlusion. When discussing the technology in 2021 Reardon claimed that a recent breakthrough enabled decoding the activity of individual neurons for "almost infinite control over machines." Occlusion-free finger tracking of this quality and reliability could enable precise control of complex interfaces with incredibly subtle movements of your hand resting on your lap, making it an ideal input method for headsets and AR glasses. [...]

So how will this arrive in a Meta product? In early 2023 an internal Meta AR/VR hardware roadmap leaked to The Verge, revealing details about Quest 3, the existence of the headset now rumored to be called Quest 3 Lite, and the cancelation of the 2024 candidate for Quest Pro 2 in favor of a more ambitious but "way out" model. But this roadmap also mentioned that Meta was planning to release the neural wristband alongside the third generation Ray-Ban smartglasses in 2025 as the input method.

According to that roadmap, two models of the wristband will be offered at different price points - one with the neural input tech only and another that also has a display and camera to act as a smartwatch too. A second generation of the wristband will also apparently act as the input device for the true AR glasses Meta plans to launch in 2027. We should however note that this plan or the timeline may have changed in the year since.

schwit1 writes: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won a preliminary injunction against the White House and other federal defendants in his suit alleging government censorship of his statements against vaccines on social media. The injunction, however, will be stayed until the US Supreme Court rules in a related case brought by Missouri and Louisiana. An injunction is warranted because Kennedy showed he is likely to succeed on the merits of his claims, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana said Wednesday.

The White House defendants, the Surgeon General defendants, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defendants, the Federal Bureau of Investigation defendants, and the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency defendants likely violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, Doughty said. Kennedy's class action complaint, brought with health care professional Connie Sampognaro and Kennedy's nonprofit, Children's Health Defense, alleges that the federal government, beginning in early 2020, began a campaign to induce Facebook, Google (YouTube), and X, formerly known as Twitter, to censor constitutionally protected speech.

Specifically, Kennedy said, the government suppressed "facts and opinions about the COVID vaccines that might lead people to become 'hesitant' about COVID vaccine mandates." Kennedy has sufficiently shown that these defendants "jointly participated in the actions of the social media" platforms by '"insinuating' themselves into the social-media companies' private affairs and blurring the line between public and private action," Doughty said.

The European Union is expanding its strict digital rulebook on Saturday to almost all online platforms in the bloc, in the next phase of its crackdown on toxic social media content and dodgy ecommerce products that began last year by targeting the most popular services. From a report: The EU's trailblazing Digital Services Act has already kicked in for nearly two dozen of the biggest online platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon and Wikipedia. The DSA imposes a set of strict requirements designed to keep internet users safe online, including making it easier to report counterfeit or unsafe goods or flag harmful or illegal content like hate speech as well as a ban on ads targeted at children.

Now the rules will apply to nearly all online platforms, marketplaces and "intermediaries" with users in the 27-nation bloc. Only the smallest businesses, with fewer than 50 employees and annual revenue of less than 10 million euros ($11 million), are exempt. That means thousands more websites could potentially be covered by the regulations. It includes popular ones such as eBay and OnlyFans that escaped being classed as the biggest online platforms requiring extra scrutiny.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a lawsuit against four of the nation's largest social media companies, accusing them of fueling a "national youth mental health crisis." From a report: The lawsuit was filed to hold TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube Accountable for their damaging influence on the mental health of children, Adams said. The lawsuit, filed in California Superior Court, alleged the companies intentionally designed their platforms to purposefully manipulate and addict children and teens to social media applications. The lawsuit pointed to the use of algorithms to generate feeds that keep users on the platforms longer and encourage compulsive use.

"Over the past decade, we have seen just how addictive and overwhelming the online world can be, exposing our children to a non-stop stream of harmful content and fueling our national youth mental health crisis," Adams said. "Our city is built on innovation and technology, but many social media platforms end up endangering our children's mental health, promoting addiction, and encouraging unsafe behavior." The lawsuit accused the social media companies of manipulating users by making them feel compelled to respond to one positive action with another positive action.

"These platforms take advantage of reciprocity by, for example, automatically telling the sender when their message was seen or sending notifications when a message was delivered, encouraging teens to return to the platform again and again and perpetuating online engagement and immediate responses," the lawsuit said. The city is joining hundreds of school districts across the nation in filing litigation to force the tech companies to change their behavior and recover the costs of addressing the public health threat.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nintendo's Satellaview, a Japan-only satellite add-on for the Super Famicom, is a rich target for preservationists because it was the home to some of the most ephemeral games ever released. That includes a host of content for Nintendo's own games, including F-Zero. That influential Super Nintendo (Super Famicom in Japan) racing title was the subject of eight weekly broadcasts sent to subscribing Japanese homes in 1996 and 1997, some with live "Soundlink" CD-quality music and voiceovers. When live game broadcasts were finished, the memory cartridges used to store game data would report themselves as empty, even though they technically were not. Keeping that same 1MB memory cartridge in the system when another broadcast started would overwrite that data, and there were no rebroadcasts.

As reported by Matthew Green at Press the Buttons (along with Did You Know Gaming's informative video), data from some untouched memory cartridges was found and used to re-create some of the content. Some courses, part of a multi-week "Grand Prix 2" event, have never been found, despite a $5,000 bounty offering and extensive effort. And yet, remarkably, the 10 courses in those later broadcasts were reverse-engineered, using a VHS recording, machine learning tools, and some manual pixel-by-pixel re-creation. The results are "north of 99.9% accurate," according to those who crafted it and exist now as a mod you can patch onto an existing F-Zero ROM. [...] Their work means that, 25 years later, a moment in gaming that was nearly lost to time and various corporate currents has been, if not entirely restored, brought as close as is humanly (and machine-ably) possible to what it once was.

Nvidia is releasing an early version of Chat with RTX today, a demo app that lets you run a personal AI chatbot on your PC. From a report: You can feed it YouTube videos and your own documents to create summaries and get relevant answers based on your own data. It all runs locally on a PC, and all you need is an RTX 30- or 40-series GPU with at least 8GB of VRAM. I've been briefly testing out Chat with RTX over the past day, and although the app is a little rough around the edges, I can already see this being a valuable part of data research for journalists or anyone who needs to analyze a collection of documents. Chat with RTX can handle YouTube videos, so you simply input a URL, and it lets you search transcripts for specific mentions or summarize an entire video.