Technology

Considering the stats at useragents.me,

What is your opinion on "hiding among the crowd" versus "eternal polymorph"?

The CEO of Intuit (who make financial software) did an interview, and it seems a pretty normal interview. But some senior guy at the company asked for part of the interview to be deleted, after it took place.

By putting in that unusual request (rather angrily), more attention is being drawn to the interview.

Thoughts?

According to GIMPS, this is the first time a prime number was not found by an ordinary PC, but rather a “‘cloud supercomputer’ spanning 17 countries” that utilized an Nvidia A100 GPU chip to make the initial diagnosis. The primary architect of this find is Luke Durant, who worked at Nvidia as a software engineer for 11 years

In a letter Friday to Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) said the plans — which involve using facial recognition tools in digital displays to target advertising to customers and collect information on them — potentially pave the way for biased pricing discrimination.

“Studies have shown that facial recognition technology is flawed and can lead to discrimination in predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods,” Tlaib wrote in the letter, which was posted on social media Tuesday. “The racial biases of facial recognition technology are well documented and should not be extended into our grocery stores.”

Kroger is the largest grocery store chain in the country with nearly 3,000 stores and $3.1 billion in profits in 2023. Kroger and other retailers already use electronic shelving labels instead of paper labels to rapidly adjust prices based on a variety of factors, including time of purchase, where a grocery store is located and other data.

The plan to use facial recognition technology could allow the retailer to build individual profiles on customers, based on data like their gender and shopping habits.

In an August letter sent to McMullen about the same plans, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bob Casey (D-PA) said they were concerned about the chain building “personalized profiles of each customer, and then use those profiles ‘to determine how much price hiking each of us can tolerate,’ quickly updating and displaying the customer’s maximum willingness to pay on the digital price tag.”

The use of facial recognition tools in Kroger stores also raises concerns about how Kroger intends to “adequately” safeguard customer data, the Warren and Casey letter said.

Antitrust law has long recognized that monopolies stifle innovation and gouge consumers on price. When it comes to Big Tech, harm to innovation—in the form of “kill zones,” where major corporations buy up new entrants to a market before they can compete with them—has been easy to find. Consumer harms have been harder to quantify, since a lot of services the Big Tech companies offer are “free.” This is why we must move beyond price as the major determinator of consumer harm. And once that’s done, it’s easier to see even greater benefits competition brings to the greater internet ecosystem.

In the decades since the internet entered our lives, it has changed from a wholly new and untested environment to one where a few major players dominate everyone's experience. Policymakers have been slow to adapt and have equated what's good for the whole internet with what is good for those companies. Instead of a balanced ecosystem, we have a monoculture. We need to eliminate the build up of power around the giants and instead have fertile soil for new growth.

This is an update to a post that was previously shared in the community: Concerns Raised Over Bitwarden Moving Further Away From Open-Source

I hate to be the one posting this ( I hate Google), but due to the need for this, I am leaving this info here for people who might need it.

I have always been a fan of Microsoft hardware, I currently own Surface 6 and am quite happy with it. However, due to circumstances, I will need to present simple project in Unreal Engine 5 in 6 weeks time and have no portable machine to run it on. So I am thinking about buying a new laptop and preferably it would be the recently released Surface Laptop with Snapdragon X Elite (X1E-78-100). I have found one YouTube video showing Unreal Engine Editor presumably running on the machine with 30 FPS. I know that the hardware is not a gaming one and I don't plan to use it like it but I would love to use it for my UE presentation. Does someone here have a Snapdragon X Elite machine who can confirm that Unreal Engine 5 is usable on it for simple projects?

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/18286017

Source.