The U.S. Patent Office is proposing new rules to limit who can challenge wrongly granted patents. If approved, these rules would primarily benefit patent trolls by making challenging patents more burdensome, and sometimes impossible. Organizations, such as the EFF, which has used this process to fight certain patents, could be barred from filing patent challenges […]
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The author highlights Canada’s state-sponsored assisted suicide program, or MAID, and its concerning expansion beyond the original eligibility requirements. The author argues that the program has expanded to include people with mental illness and the poor, who may not have had other alternatives due to their socio-economic status. The author also points out a disturbing […]
Pneumatic Antenna Launching Systems are a simple, safe, and effective way to deploy antennas over trees, especially for temporary or emergency field use. The launchers use a tennis ball as a projectile, propelled by compressed air, and can reach heights of up to 200 feet towing a fishing line. Pneumatic launchers are preferable to slingshots […]
The lack of transparency from builders of big closed language models, such as GPT-3 and GPT-4, regarding their training data is causing concern among users. The main issue is that there is no way to confidently state that private data being passed to these models isn’t being used to train future models, given the lack […]
Parents in Greystones, Ireland, have implemented a voluntary smartphone ban for primary school-aged children in an effort to curb anxiety and exposure to unsuitable content. The ban has won support from parents’ associations across the area’s eight primary schools, and is meant to be enforced not only at school, but also at home. The ban […]
The author discusses their desire to automate their home and the challenges they faced due to complexity and high prices from vendors. After purchasing smart devices, they were underwhelmed with the limitations of available apps and sought out a more customizable solution. They settled on using Lua and the Mako Server to create their own […]
An anonymous post on 4chan has led to a discovery about the perplexing superpermutation problem, or how long a list of any given series of numbers must be such that it can include every possible order of that series. Australian science fiction author Greg Egan used the 4chan post to establish a new upper bound for […]
Looking to dive into the world of Generative AI? Look no further than this curated learning path, brought to you by Google Cloud. We’ve compiled a comprehensive collection of resources that cover the fundamentals of Large Language Models, as well as practical advice for creating and deploying generative AI solutions on our cloud platform. With […]
A new survey conducted by anti-piracy group Rights Alliance shows that despite lawsuits and public calls to avoid piracy, over 50% of Danish students find it acceptable to use pirated textbooks. The majority of the survey participants were already aware of the illegal nature of book piracy, however, this fact has only served to have […]
MSI has unveiled the world’s first USB-4 expansion card at Computex this week. The add-in card includes two DisplayPort connections and two USB-C outputs with a power delivery of up to 100W. The primary USB-C port allows fast charging, which should suffice for some laptops, tablets and handheld gaming consoles. TechPowerUp reports that both ports […]