The official Tesla Optimus account shared an update video showing the progress its humanoid robot has made since it was announced in August 2021. In a video that looks like CGI, you can see Optimus sorting blocks and performing some yoga poses, among other things. Interesting Engineering reports: The video begins with the Tesla Bot aka the Optimus robot performing a self-calibration routine, which is essential for adapting to new environments. It then shows how TeslaBot can use its vision and joint position sensors to accurately locate its limbs in space, without relying on any external feedback. This enables TeslaBot to interact with objects and perform tasks with precision and dexterity. One of the tasks that Optimus demonstrates is sorting blue and green blocks into matching trays. Tesla Optimus can grasp each block with ease and sort them at a human-like speed. It can also handle dynamic changes in the environment, such as when a human intervenes and moves the blocks around. TeslaBot can quickly adjust to the new situation and resume its task. It can also correct its own errors, such as when a block lands on its side and needs to be rotated. The video also showcases Tesla Bot's balance and flexibility, as it performs some yoga poses that require standing on one leg and extending its limbs. These poses are not related to any practical workloads, but they show how TeslaBot can control its body and maintain its stability. The video ends with a call for more engineers to join the Tesla Optimus team, as the project is still in development and needs more talent. There is no information on when TeslaBot will be ready for production or commercial use, but the video suggests that it is making rapid progress and using the same software as the Tesla cars.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Denmark's Lego said on Monday that it remains committed to its quest to find sustainable materials to reduce carbon emissions, even after an experiment by the world's largest toymaker to use recycled bottles did not work. Lego said it has "decided not to progress" with making its trademark colorful bricks from recycled plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, known as PET, and after more than two years of testing "found the material didn't reduce carbon emissions." Lego enthusiastically announced in 2021 that the prototype PET blocks had become the first recycled alternative to pass its "strict" quality, safety and play requirements, following experimentation with several other iterations that proved not durable enough. The company said scientists and engineers tested more than 250 variations of PET materials, as well as hundreds of other plastic formulations, before nailing down the prototype, which was made with plastic sourced from suppliers in the U.S. that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration and European Food Safety Authority. On average, a one-liter plastic PET bottle made enough raw material for ten 2 x 4 Lego bricks. Despite the determination that the PET prototype failed to save on carbon emissions, Lego said it remained "fully committed to making Lego bricks from sustainable materials by 2032." [...] Lego said it will continue to use bio-polypropylene, the sustainable and biological variant of polyethylene -- a plastic used in everything from consumer and food packaging to tires -- for parts in Lego sets such as leaves, trees and other accessories.

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Amazon has created a new rule limiting the number of books that authors can self-publish on its site to three a day, after an influx of suspected AI-generated material was listed for sale in recent months. The Guardian: The company announced the new limitations in a post on its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) forum on Monday. "While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations," read the statement. KDP allows authors to self-publish their books and list them for sale on Amazon's site. Amazon told the Guardian that the limit is set at three titles, though this number may be adjusted "if needed." The company confirmed that there had already been a limit to the number of books authors could list a day, but declined to say what this previous limit was. The post stated that Amazon is "actively monitoring the rapid evolution of generative AI and the impact it is having on reading, writing, and publishing" and that "very few" publishers will be affected by the change. Authors and publishers will also have the option to seek an exception to the rule.

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Lenovo launched the first foldable laptop in 2020, but the first real era of foldable PCs is only starting to unfold now. From a report: Today, LG became the latest OEM to announce a foldable-screen laptop, right after HP announced its first attempt, the Spectre Foldable PC, earlier this month. LG only announced the Gram Fold in South Korea thus far. A Google translation of LG's Korean announcement said the laptop is 9.4-mm (0.37-inches) thick when unfolded and used like a 17-inch tablet. Alternatively, the OLED PC can be folded in half to use like an approximately 12.2-inch laptop. In the latter form, a virtual keyboard can appear on the bottom screen, and you can dock a Bluetooth keyboard to the bottom screen or pair a keyboard with the system wirelessly. The screen has 1920Ã--2560 pixels for a pixel density of 188.2 pixels per inch. One draw of foldable PCs is supposed to be portability. The Gram Fold weighs 2.76 pounds (1,250g), which is even lighter than LG's latest Gram clamshell laptop (2.9 pounds). According to Android Authority, LG's laptop will have an Intel Core i5-1335U, which has 8 Efficient cores (E-cores) at up to 3.4 GHz, two Performance cores (P-cores) at up to 4.6 GHz, 12 threads, and 12MB of cache. The PC is also supposed to have 16GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe SSD, a 72 Wh battery, Wi-Fi 6E, and two USB-C ports. LG is claiming 99.5 percent DCI-P3 color coverage with the laptop. [...] It's also possible we'll see similar designs from other laptop brands, as panel supplier LG Display announced today that it will start mass production of 17-inch foldable OLED laptop panels. The foldable OLED is made with what LG Display calls a Tandem OLED structure, using two-stack OLED technology, "which adds an extra organic emitting layer to deliver brighter screens while effectively dispersing energy across OLED components for optimal stability and longer lifespans," LG Display's announcement said. LG Display first entered mass production of foldable (13.3-inch) laptop panels in 2020. However, foldable PCs didn't immediately take off then, despite the panel being used in Lenovo's 2020 ThinkPad X1 Fold. Foldable PCs lacked the software support that Windows 11 now affords with its Snap windows layouts that make organizing windows across dual or folded screens more intuitive.

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Spotify is testing an AI-powered feature that will translate podcasts from the likes of Dax Shepard and Lex Fridman to other languages, the audio-streaming company said on Monday. From a report: The feature marks the latest attempt by the Swedish company to capitalize on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that has taken the world by storm after the rise of ChatGPT, to tap new users and boost revenue. The translated versions, powered by Microsoft-backed OpenAI's newly released voice generation technology, would mimic the original speaker's style and will be more natural than traditional dubbing, Spotify said. The company had also worked with other podcasters including Monica Padman, Bill Simmons and Steven Bartlett for the feature. The voice translations would be available in languages including Spanish, French and German for a select number of catalog episodes and future episode releases, said Spotify, which could expand the audience of the shows.

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Web3 is Going Great reports: After the Hong Kong-based JPEX exchange limited withdrawals amidst what appeared to be an impending collapse of the platform, things are now looking a lot more like fraud. Police have received more than 2,200 complaints pertaining to the exchange, involving $178 million in possible losses. Eleven people, including various crypto influencers who had promoted the exchange, were taken in for questioning. However, police have said those eleven people were not likely central to the fraud, and that the leaders of the JPEX project are on the run.

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ChatGPT has learned to talk. OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up, released a version of its popular chatbot on Monday that can interact with people using spoken words. As with Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and other digital assistants, users can talk to ChatGPT and it will talk back. From a report: For the first time, ChatGPT can also respond to images. People can, for example, upload a photo of the inside of their refrigerator, and the chatbot can give them a list of dishes they could cook with the ingredients they have. "We're looking to make ChatGPT easier to use -- and more helpful," said Peter Deng, OpenAI's vice president of consumer and enterprise product. OpenAI has accelerated the release of its A.I tools in recent weeks. This month, it unveiled a version of its DALL-E image generator and folded the tool into ChatGPT. ChatGPT attracted hundreds of millions of users after it was introduced in November, and several other companies soon released similar services. With the new version of the bot, OpenAI is pushing beyond rival chatbots like Google Bard, while also competing with older technologies like Alexa and Siri. Alexa and Siri have long provided ways of interacting with smartphones, laptops and other devices through spoken words. But chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard have more powerful language skills and are able to instantly write emails, poetry and term papers, and riff on almost any topic tossed their way. OpenAI has essentially combined the two communication methods. The company sees talking as a more natural way of interacting with its chatbot. It argues that ChatGPT's synthetic voices -- people can choose from five different options, including male and females voices -- are more convincing than others used with popular digital assistants. Over the next two weeks, the company said, the new version of the chatbot would start rolling out to everyone who subscribes to ChatGPT Plus, a service that costs $20 a month. But the bot can respond with voice only when used on iPhones, iPads and Android devices. The bot's synthetic voices are more natural than many others on the market, though they still can sound robotic.

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Reddit announced a contributor program on Monday, which awards users actual, real money for their fake internet points. From a report: Now, eligible users will be able to convert their Reddit gold and karma into fiat currency (no, not crypto), which is dispersed once per month. So far, the Reddit contributor program is limited to users in the United States (to start, at least) who are over the age of 18 and can verify their identity via Persona and Stripe. Accounts must have existed for over 30 days, and only safe for work posts can be monetized.

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Huawei largely omitted mention of its Mate 60 smartphone series at a grand showcase of its new consumer products on Monday. From a report: The Shenzhen-based company will increase smartphone production in response to demand, said consumer division chief Richard Yu, without naming the handset triggering that surge. The Mate 60 Pro earned international notoriety with its advanced made-in-China processor last month, causing concern in Washington about Huawei's progress toward developing in-house chipmaking capabilities despite US trade curbs. Huawei's new phones have fired up the company's sales and were among the top sellers in China in the week before Apple's latest iPhone launch. They are the first 5G-capable handsets that Huawei's put on sale since the Trump administration's sanctions cut it off from advanced tech suppliers. That connectivity is provided by the 7-nanometer Kirin 9000s processor inside -- made by Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. -- which is accompanied by a broad range of China-made components inside each phone.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Following the launch of the iPhone 15 series today, a few readers of our website have reached out to highlight that the devices support USB-C to Ethernet adapters, allowing for a wired internet connection with faster download speeds than Wi-Fi. Apple confirmed this information in a support document last week, with USB to Ethernet adapters listed as compatible with iPhone 15 models. When an iPhone is connected to an Ethernet cable, an otherwise hidden Ethernet menu appears in the Settings app with IP-related information and various configuration options.

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Tom Ivan, reporting for VGC: Ransomware group Ransomed[dot]vc claims to have successfully breached Sony Group and is threatening to sell a cache of data stolen from the Japanese company. While its claims remain unverified, Cyber Security Connect reports that the relative ransomware newcomer "has racked up an impressive amount of victims" since bursting onto the scene last month. "We have successfully compromissed [sic] all of sony systems," the group claimed on both the clear and dark nets. "We won't ransom them! We will sell the data. Due to Sony not wanting to pay. DATA IS FOR SALE." According to Cyber Security Connect, the group has posted some proof-of-hack data, although it says this is "not particularly compelling information on the face of things." It includes what appear to be screenshots of an internal log-in page, an internal PowerPoint presentation, several Java files, and a file tree of the leak which seemingly includes fewer than 6,000 files. Most of the Ransomed[dot]vc's members reportedly operate out of Ukraine and Russia.

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Getty Images is so confident its new generative AI model is free of copyrighted content that it will cover any potential intellectual-property disputes for its customers. From a report: The generative AI system, announced today, was built by Nvidia and is trained solely on images in Getty's image library. It does not include logos or images that have been scraped off the internet without consent. "Fundamentally, it's trained; it's clean. It's viable for businesses to use. We'll stand behind that claim," says Craig Peters, the CEO of Getty Images. Peters says companies that want to use generative AI want total legal certainty they won't face expensive copyright lawsuits. [...] The legal challenges have sparked many attempts by others to benefit from generative AI while also protecting intellectual property. Adobe recently launched Firefly, which it claims is similarly trained on copyright-free content. Shutterstock has said it is planning on reimbursing artists whose works have been sold to AI companies to train models. Microsoft recently announced it will also foot any copyright legal bills for clients using its text-based generative models. Peters says that the creators of the images -- and any people that appear in them -- have consented to having their art used in the AI model. Getty is also offering a Spotify-style compensation model to creatives for the use of their work.

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Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic, the two firms said, as the e-commerce group steps up its rivalry against Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia in the fast-growing sector that many technologists believe could be the next great frontier. From a report: The e-commerce group said it will initially invest $1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic, which like Google's Bard and Microsoft-backed OpenAI also operates an AI-powered, text analyzing chatbot. As part of the deal, Amazon said it has an option to increase its investment in Anthropic to a total of $4 billion.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix: One of the new features merged for the Linux 6.6 kernel was multi-grained timestamps for the VFS layer and wiring it up for the EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and Tmpfs file-systems. This alternative though to coarse-grained timestamps ended up exposing some problems and this week ahead of Linux 6.6-rc3, the feature has been stripped entirely from the kernel. Multi-grain timestamps were intended for addressing cases where the current coarse-grained timestamps can be ineffective for updating creation/modification times with a lot of I/O potentially happening within the once per jiffy timestamp... Multi-grained timestamps though were only to be selectively enabled to avoid the performance overhead. Christian Brauner of Microsoft who originally submitted the feature for Linux 6.6 went ahead and submitted the pull request, which has already been honored, for dropping the short-lived kernel feature... "As there are multiple solutions discussed the honest thing to do here is not to fix this up or disable it but to cleanly revert. The general infrastructure will probably come back but there is no reason to keep this code in mainline."

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During World War II, "Los Alamos was the perfect spot for the U.S. government's top-secret Manhattan Project," remembers the Associated Press. "The community is facing growing pains again, 80 years later, as Los Alamos National Laboratory takes part in the nation's most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since World War II." The mission calls for modernizing the arsenal with droves of new workers producing plutonium cores — key components for nuclear weapons. Some 3,300 workers have been hired in the last two years, with the workforce now topping more than 17,270. Close to half of them commute to work from elsewhere in northern New Mexico and from as far away as Albuquerque, helping to nearly double Los Alamos' population during the work week... While the priority at Los Alamos is maintaining the nuclear stockpile, the lab also conducts a range of national security work and research in diverse fields of space exploration, supercomputing, renewable energy and efforts to limit global threats from disease and cyberattacks... The headline grabber, though, is the production of plutonium cores. Lab managers and employees defend the massive undertaking as necessary in the face of global political instability. With most people in Los Alamos connected to the lab, opposition is rare. But watchdog groups and non-proliferation advocates question the need for new weapons and the growing price tag... Aside from pressing questions about the morality of nuclear weapons, watchdogs argue the federal government's modernization effort already has outpaced spending predictions and is years behind schedule. Independent government analysts issued a report earlier this month that outlined the growing budget and schedule delays. "A hairline scratch on a warhead's polished black cone could send the bomb off course..." notes an earlier article. "The U.S. will spend more than $750 billion over the next 10 years replacing almost every component of its nuclear defenses, including new stealth bombers, submarines and ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in the country's most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since the Manhattan Project."

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Mike was refactoring an old web application written in Perl. We joke about Perl being a "write only language," but the original developer wanted to take that unreadable attitude to the JavaScript front-end portion of the application.

function setup() { position('m1',46,220); position('m1g',33,200); position('m1c',33,200); position('m2',46,330); position('m2g',33,310); position('m2c',33,310); // ... snip 50 lines }

The strings reference the IDs of various elements on the page. The IDs themselves, however, mean nothing. Why m1g? No idea.

function offall() { hideitem('m2i1'); hideitem('m2i1c'); // ... snip 50 lines }

As you can also see, there's no attempt to use CSS classes or other selectors to make it easy to find all of the UI widgets that need to be hidden- one simply needs to access each one by its meaningless ID value.

Which also means when it comes time to show elements, it gets nasty:

function rollonmenu(item) { clearcurrenttimeout(); offall(); overmenu=1; highlight(item); if (item=='m1') { // ... } if (item=='m2') { showitem('m2i1'); showitem('m2i1c'); // ... snip 20 lines } if (item=='m3') { // ... snip 20 lines } if (item=='m4') { // ... } if // ... more }

All this is in the service of hiding or showing sub-options based on which item a user has selected. And it's cryptic, verbose, and ugly. But this isn't the real WTF in this code. TRWTF is how they insert the menu into the web page:

var _targ = document.getElementById('menu'); _targ.innerHTML='<div ... 10441 characters all on one line ';

The HTML describing this UI widget is a single JavaScript string, all on one line.

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"After several long consecutive days of negotiations, the Writers Guild of America and the labor group representing studios and streamers have reached a tentative deal on a new contract," according to the Hollywood Reporter. "We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional," the Guild's negotiating committee told its members in an email, "with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership." The Hollywood Reporter calls the news "a major development that could precipitate the end of a historic, 146-day writers' strike." Details from the Los Angeles Times: The proposed three-year contract, which would still have to be ratified by the union's 11,500 members, would boost pay rates and residual payments for streaming shows and impose new rules surrounding the use of artificial intelligence... With the tentative pact with the WGA done, entertainment company leaders are expected to turn their attention to the 160,000-member performers union, SAG-AFTRA, to accelerate those stalled talks in an effort to get the industry back to work. Actors have been on strike since mid-July... The writers' strike was, in many ways, a response to the tectonic changes wrought by streaming. Shorter seasons for streaming shows and fewer writers being hired have cut into guild members' pay and job stability, making it harder to earn a sustainable living in the expensive media hubs of Los Angeles and New York, guild members have said. The studios came into negotiations with their own set of challenges. The pay-TV business is in decline because of cable cord-cutting and falling TV ratings, which have eroded vital sources of revenue. At the same time, the traditional companies have spent massively to launch robust streaming services to compete with Netflix, losing billions of dollars in the process.

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In an online Q&A Friday, Unity president Marc Whitten said they're pursuing a "sustainable" long-term future for Unity by creating a "shared success" business model that still allows for "massively, deeply investing in the engine". But Whitten began with acknowledging they had work to do to earn trust. "I just want to say that I'm sorry. I know it's been a very tough week to hear a bunch of the very well-deserved feedback on the changes we made. It's very clear we did not take enough feedback, listen to enough feedback before we rolled out the program." Ars Technica writes> : If there's one thing Unity Create President and General Manager Marc Whitten wants to make clear, it's that he appreciates your feedback. "It's been a very feedback-giving week for Unity," Whitten told Ars, possibly the biggest understatement he made during an interview accompanying the new, scaled-back fee structure plans... "There was a lot more [feedback than we expected] for sure... I think that feedback has made us better, even though it has sometimes been difficult." But Whitten was also quick to find the bright side of the tsunami of backlash that came Unity's way in the week since the company announced its (now outdated) plans for per-install fees of up to $0.20 on all Unity games starting in 2024. That's because that anger reflected "the extraordinary passion that our community has for their craft, their livelihoods, and their tools, including Unity," Whitten said. "When Unity disappoints them, in a way where they're overly surprised or whatever, they give very, very critical feedback. I don't love hearing every single one of those pieces of feedback — sometimes they can be pretty pointed — but I love that that passion exists." "They let us know when we disappoint them," he added. "That's not always easy to hear, but it's really, really great feedback, and it makes us better...." Whitten said he hopes the new fee structure — which removes ongoing fees for free Unity Personal tier subscribers [and Unity Plus subscribers] — makes it clear that this move was never meant to extract excessive value from the company's smallest development partners. "It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way," he said. Other changes announced by Unity: No games created with any currently supported Unity versions will be impacted. Only those created with or upgraded to the Long Term Support version releasing in 2024 (or later), currently referred to as the 2023 LTS will be impacted. For those games, the fee is only applicable after a game has crossed two thresholds: $1,000,000 (USD) in gross revenue (trailing 12 months) AND 1,000,000 initial engagements. After crossing these two thresholds, you can choose to pay the Runtime Fee, either based on monthly initial engagements or 2.5% of your game's monthly gross revenue. Ultimately, you will be charged the lesser of the two.

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In GNOME Shell there's a dark background for the Quick Settings menu, the calendar applet, and desktop notification-- but in Ubuntu 23.10, "the default Yaru theme uses a light style for GNOME Shell elements," according to the blog OMG Ubuntu. "But there's a new GNOME extension that lets you change this without affecting the rest of your desktop..." You can make GNOME Shell dark in Ubuntu by turning the 'Dark Style' toggle on but that also makes apps use a dark theme too. Not everyone wants that; they want a 'mixed' look... [I]f you would like to use dark GNOME Shell elements in Ubuntu 23.10 without using the dark mode preference (which, as said, will turn your apps dark too) then the Dark Style GNOME extension is exactly what you need. It only works with Ubuntu 23.10 and GNOME 45.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times' media reporter: In a nondescript office park minutes from Disneyland sits a nondescript warehouse. Inside this nameless, faceless building, an era is ending. The building is a Netflix DVD distribution plant. Once a bustling ecosystem that processed 1.2 million DVDs a week, employed 50 people and generated millions of dollars in revenue, it now has just six employees left to sift through the metallic discs. And even that will cease on Friday, when Netflix officially shuts the door on its origin story and stops mailing out its trademark red envelopes. "It's sad when you get to the end, because it's been a big part of all of our lives for so long," Hank Breeggemann, the general manager of Netflix's DVD division, said in an interview. "But everything runs its cycle. We had a great 25-year run and changed the entertainment industry, the way people viewed movies at home." When Netflix began mailing DVDs in 1998 — the first movie shipped was "Beetlejuice" — no one in Hollywood expected the company to eventually upend the entire entertainment industry... At its height, Netflix was the Postal Service's fifth-largest customer, operating 58 shipping facilities and 128 shuttle locations that allowed Netflix to serve 98.5 percent of its customer base with one-day delivery... Netflix's DVD operations still serve around one million customers, many of them very loyal... To ease the backlash, Netflix is allowing its DVD customers to hold on to their final rentals. "One hundred people at Netflix still work on the DVD side of the business, though most will soon be leaving the company."

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