Amazon has discontinued its secretive "Encore" project to develop an at-home fertility tracker, resulting in layoffs for around 100 employees. The project, part of Amazon's Grand Challenge division, aimed to launch a device and app that would predict fertility through saliva testing but was ultimately terminated to control costs. CNBC reports: The project was born out of the company's 2020 acquisition of Wisconsin-based startup bluDiagnostics, the sources said. BluDiagnostics was founded in 2015 by Weibel, Katie Brenner and Jodi Schroll, all of whom joined Grand Challenge. The startup had developed a thermometer-like device, called FertilityFinder, to help women track their fertility from home by testing their saliva and measuring two key hormones, estradiol and progesterone. The results of the test were viewable through a corresponding app. Business Insider reported on aspects of the fertility device in 2022, when its codename was Project Tiberius. The team was working to develop its own saliva collection device and mobile app, which could predict when a user might be in the fertile window. Users could also log their period symptoms, sexual activity and other data to assist with tracking their fertility. There are similar offerings on the market from companies including Inne, Oova, Ava and Mira, along with fertility and ovulation tracking apps such as Flo, Clue and Max Levchin's Glow. Amazon initially aimed to release the product this year, but the timing was pushed out after the team encountered technical issues with the device, one of the people said. It was a costly endeavor and required significant upfront investments for lab research and development, in addition to the high salaries for scientists and engineers, the sources said, adding that the team's weekly overhead was roughly $1.5 million. Amazon didn't comment on the figure. Only one project now remains active within Grand Challenge. Its focus is on health tech, the people said. "We regularly review our businesses to ensure we focus on areas where we can make the biggest difference for customers," said Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan. "Following a recent review, we've decided to discontinue this project within Grand Challenge, and we're working directly with employees whose roles are impacted to support them through the transition and help them find other opportunities within Amazon."

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Meta said it plans to introduce advertisements on Threads starting in early 2025, according to a report by The Information (paywalled). GuruFocus reports: Leading the effort -- which is still in its early phases -- is a team inside Instagram's advertising division. One source said Threads is anticipated to let a small number of marketers produce and post material on the platform in January. Threads had about 275 million monthly active users as late as October. During the company's third-quarter earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg observed that Threads daily sign-up count was about one million, each day.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: OpenAI is preparing to launch a new artificial intelligence agent codenamed "Operator" that can use a computer to take actions on a person's behalf (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), such as writing code or booking travel [...]. In a staff meeting on Wednesday, OpenAI's leadership announced plans to release the tool in January as a research preview and through the company's application programming interface for developers [...]. The one nearest completion will be a general-purpose tool that executes tasks in a web browser, one of the people said. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman hinted at the shift to agents in response to a question last month during an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. "We will have better and better models," Altman wrote. "But I think the thing that will feel like the next giant breakthrough will be agents." The move to release an agentic AI tool also comes as OpenAI and its competitors have seen diminishing returns from their costly efforts to develop more advanced AI models.

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Microsoft's gaming division is developing prototypes for a handheld gaming device that won't launch for "a few years," gaming chief Phil Spencer said Wednesday. In an interview with Bloomberg, Spencer said that while Microsoft is actively working on prototypes, the company will first focus on improving its Xbox app performance on existing portable devices and establishing hardware partnerships. The gaming unit wants to be "informed by learning and what's happening now" before introducing its own device, Spencer said. "Longer term, I love us building devices," Spencer said, adding that Microsoft's team "could do some real innovative work."

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Italy has emerged as a major global spyware hub alongside Israel and India, with at least six major vendors operating in the country with limited oversight, The Record reported this week, citing researchers and Italian experts. Companies like RCS Labs, which has operated since 1992, sell surveillance tools to both domestic law enforcement and foreign governments including Kazakhstan, Syria, and several Asian nations. Italian authorities can rent spyware for $160 per day without large acquisition costs, leading to thousands of domestic surveillance operations in recent years. While new regulations taking effect in February 2024 will require judges to evaluate specific reasons for spyware use, critics cited in the story say the reform package won't address core issues like the lack of centralized oversight. The country's competitive marketplace and relatively lax export controls have also enabled Italian vendors to expand their overseas sales.

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Leading AI systems are solving less than 2% of problems in a new advanced mathematics benchmark, revealing significant limitations in their reasoning capabilities, research group Epoch AI reported this week. The benchmark, called FrontierMath, consists of hundreds of original research-level mathematics problems developed in collaboration with over 60 mathematicians, including Fields Medalists Terence Tao and Timothy Gowers. While top AI models like GPT-4 and Gemini 1.5 Pro achieve over 90% accuracy on traditional math tests, they struggle with FrontierMath's problems, which span computational number theory to algebraic geometry and require complex reasoning. "These are extremely challenging. [...] The only way to solve them is by a combination of a semi-expert like a graduate student in a related field, maybe paired with some combination of a modern AI and lots of other algebra packages," Tao said. The problems are designed to be "guessproof," with large numerical answers or complex mathematical objects as solutions, making it nearly impossible to solve without proper mathematical reasoning. Further reading: New secret math benchmark stumps AI models and PhDs alike.

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Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning has announced plans to use AI for translating commercial fiction, drawing sharp criticism from literary professionals despite promises of human oversight and author consent. Award-winning translator Michele Hutchison, who won the 2020 International Booker Prize, argues that translation extends beyond word conversion. "We build bridges between cultures, taking into account the target readership every step of the way," she said, noting that translators convey rhythm, poetry, and cultural nuances while conducting precise terminology research.

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Microsoft seems set to rebrand the AI-powered features in Windows to "Windows Intelligence" even if some of the more controversial elements, such as Recall, are to remain as they are. The Register: Word of Windows Intelligence has circulated for a while, although Microsoft has yet to issue any official confirmation. In October, Tero Alhonen posted what appeared to be options for apps that use AI services. Over the weekend, X user Albacore turned up a placeholder page in a Windows 24H2 build for Windows Intelligence settings. Although Microsoft has made substantial investments in artificial intelligence, AI as part of a brand is a little generic. Apple's approach, to define AI as being "Apple Intelligence," manages to keep the familiar "AI" initialism while ensuring its own brand is kept front and center. With Windows Intelligence, Microsoft is attempting something similar, although "Apple Intelligence" can be handily shortened to "AI". The recently overhauled Copilot and delayed Recall have sparked debate in the Windows community, yet neither seems likely to be rebranded to Windows Intelligence at this stage. However, Windows Intelligence could represent an umbrella for AI technologies on the Microsoft platform and provide users with a quick and easy way of controlling the access AI apps have to user data and how that data is used.

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AmiMoJo writes: The climate-damaging vapors left behind by jet planes could be easily tackled, aviation experts say, with a new study suggesting they could be eliminated for a few pounds per flight. Jet condensation trails, or contrails, have spawned wild conspiracy theories alleging mind control and the spreading of disease, but scientists say the real problem is their warming effect. "They create an artificial layer of clouds, which traps the heat from the Earth that's trying to escape to outer space," said Carlos Lopez de la Osa, from the Transport & Environment campaign group, which has carried out a new study on the solutions to contrails. "The scale of the warming that's associated with them is roughly having a similar impact to that of aviation carbon emissions." Tweaking the flight paths of a handful of aircraft could reduce contrail warming by more than half by 2040, at a cost of less than $5.1 per flight. Geography and a flight's latitude have a strong influence on whether a contrail is warming. Time of day also influences the climate effects of contrails. Those formed by evening and night flights have the largest warming contribution. Seasonality is also important -- the most warming contrails tend to occur in winter. "Planes are already flying around thunderstorms and turbulence areas," Mr Lopez de la Osa said. "We will need to add one more constraint to flight planning, which is avoiding areas of contrail formation."

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Mark Rainey: Engineers are currently debugging why the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is 15 billions miles away, turned off its main radio and switched to a backup radio that hasn't been used in over forty years! I've had some tricky debugging issues in the past, including finding compiler bugs and debugging code with no debugger that had been burnt into prom packs for terminals, however I have huge admiration for the engineers maintaining the operation of Voyager 1. Recently they sent a command to the craft that caused it to shut off its main radio transmitter, seemingly in an effort to preserve power and protect from faults. This prompted it to switch over to the backup radio transmitter, that is lower power. Now they have regained communication they are trying to determine the cause on hardware that is nearly 50 years old. Any communication takes days. When you think you have a difficult issue to debug, spare a thought for this team.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Officials inside the Secret Service clashed over whether they needed a warrant to use location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on smartphones, with some arguing that citizens have agreed to be tracked with such data by accepting app terms of service, despite those apps often not saying their data may end up with the authorities, according to hundreds of pages of internal Secret Service emails obtained by 404 Media. The emails provide deeper insight into the agency's use of Locate X, a powerful surveillance capability that allows law enforcement officials to follow a phone, and person's, precise movements over time at the click of a mouse. In 2023, a government oversight body found that the Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement all used their access to such location data illegally. The Secret Service told 404 Media in an email last week it is no longer using the tool. "If USSS [U.S. Secret Service] is using Locate X, that is most concerning to us," one of the internal emails said. 404 Media obtained them and other documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Secret Service.

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Paul Kinlan, who leads the Chrome and the Open Web Developer Relations team at Google, asks and answers the question (with a no.): Frameworks are abstractions over a platform designed for people and teams to accelerate their teams new work and maintenance while improving the consistency and quality of the projects. They also frequently force a certain type of structure and architecture to your code base. This isn't a bad thing, team productivity is an important aspect of any software. I'm of the belief that software development is entering a radical shift that is currently driven by agents like Replit's and there is a world where a person never actually has to manipulate code directly anymore. As I was making broad and sweeping changes to the functionality of the applications by throwing the Agent a couple of prompts here and there, the software didn't seem to care that there was repetition in the code across multiple views, it didn't care about shared logic, extensibility or inheritability of components... it just implemented what it needed to do and it did it as vanilla as it could. I was just left wondering if there will be a need for frameworks in the future? Do the architecture patterns we've learnt over the years matter? Will new patterns for software architecture appear that favour LLM management?

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Apple executives have defended the relocation of the power button to the bottom of its new M4 Mac mini, citing the computer's significantly reduced size as the driving factor behind the design change. In a Bilibili video interview, Apple's Greg Joswiak and John Ternus explained that the Mac mini's form factor, now half the size of its predecessor, necessitated finding a new position for the power button. The executives said that the bottom placement allows for convenient access despite initial user criticism.

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OpenAI's latest large language model, known internally as Orion, has fallen short of performance targets, marking a broader slowdown in AI advancement across the industry's leading companies, according to Bloomberg, corroborating similar media stories in recent days. The model, which completed initial training in September, showed particular weakness in novel coding tasks and failed to demonstrate the same magnitude of improvement over its predecessor as GPT-4 achieved over GPT-3.5, the publication reported Wednesday. Google's upcoming Gemini software and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Opus are facing similar challenges. Google's project is not meeting internal benchmarks, while Anthropic has delayed its model's release, Bloomberg said. Industry insiders cited by the publication pointed to growing scarcity of high-quality training data and mounting operational costs as key obstacles. OpenAI's Orion specifically struggled due to insufficient coding data for training, the report said. OpenAI has moved Orion into post-training refinement but is unlikely to release the system before early 2024. The report adds: [...] AI companies continue to pursue a more-is-better playbook. In their quest to build products that approach the level of human intelligence, tech firms are increasing the amount of computing power, data and time they use to train new models -- and driving up costs in the process. Amodei has said companies will spend $100 million to train a bleeding-edge model this year and that amount will hit $100 billion in the coming years. As costs rise, so do the stakes and expectations for each new model under development. Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, said AI models will keep improving, but the rate at which that will happen is questionable. "We got very excited for a brief period of very fast progress," he said. "That just wasn't sustainable." Further reading: OpenAI and Others Seek New Path To Smarter AI as Current Methods Hit Limitations.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Royal assent was granted to two right to repair bills last week that amend Canada's Copyright Act to allow the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if this is done for the purposes of "maintaining or repairing a product, including any related diagnosing," and "to make the program or a device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component." The pair of bills allow device owners to not only repair their own stuff regardless of how a program is written to prevent such non-OEM measures, but said owners can also make their devices work with third-party components without needing to go through the manufacturer to do so. Bills C-244 (repairability) and C-294 (interoperability) go a long way toward advancing the right to repair in Canada and, as iFixit pointed out, are the first federal laws anywhere that address how TPMs restrict the right to repair -- but they're hardly final. TPMs can take a number of forms, from simple administrative passwords to encryption, registration keys, or even the need for a physical object like a USB dongle to unlock access to copyrighted components of a device's software. Most commercially manufactured devices with proprietary embedded software include some form of TPM, and neither C-244 nor C-294 place any restrictions on the use of such measures by manufacturers. As iFixit points out, neither Copyright Act amendments do anything to expand access to the tools needed to circumvent TPMs. That puts Canadians in a similar position to US repair advocates, who in 2021 saw the US Copyright Office loosen DMCA restrictions to allow limited repairs of some devices despite TPMs, but without allowing access to the tools needed to do so. [...] Canadian Repair Coalition co-founder Anthony Rosborough said last week that the new repairability and interoperability rules represent considerable progress, but like similar changes in the US, don't actually amount to much without the right to distribute tools. "New regulations are needed that require manufacturers and vendors to ensure that products and devices are designed with accessibility of repairs in mind," Rosborough wrote in an op-ed last week. "Businesses need to be able to carry out their work without the fear of infringing various intellectual property rights."

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A new analysis of data from NASA's Voyager 2 mission reveals that the planet Uranus and its five largest moons might harbor subsurface oceans and potential conditions for life. The BBC reports: Much of what we know about them was gathered by Nasa's Voyager 2 spacecraft which visited nearly 40 years ago. But a new analysis shows that Voyager's visit coincided with a powerful solar storm, which led to a misleading idea of what the Uranian system is really like. [...] So, for 40 years we have had an incorrect view of what Uranus and its five largest moons are normally like, according to Dr William Dunn of University College London. "These results suggest that the Uranian system could be much more exciting than previously thought. There could be moons there that could have the conditions that are necessary for life, they might have oceans below the surface that could be teeming with fish!". It has been nearly 40 years since Voyager 2 last flew past the icy world and its moons. Nasa has plans to launch a new mission, the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, to go back for a closer look in 10 years' time. According to Nasa's Dr Jamie Jasinski, whose idea it was to re-examine the Voyager 2 data, the mission will need to take his results into account when designing its instruments and planning the scientific survey. "Some of the instruments for the future spacecraft are very much being designed with ideas from what we learned from Voyager 2 when it flew past the system when it was experiencing an abnormal event. So we need to rethink how exactly we are going to design the instruments on the new mission so that we can best capture the science we need to make discoveries." Nasa's Uranus probe is expected to arrive by 2045, which is when scientists hope to find out whether these far-flung icy moons, once thought of as being dead worlds, might have the possibility of being home to life. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

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Longtime Slashdot reader thephydes writes: The hearing will go ahead on November 13 at 11:30 ET (16:30 GMT). Apparently, it will "further pull back the curtain on secret UAP research programs conducted by the U.S. government, and undisclosed findings they have yielded," according to a House statement. It's driven by two republicans, Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), who say: "Americans deserve to understand what the government has learned about UAP sightings, and the nature of any potential threats these phenomena pose. We can only ensure that understanding by providing consistent, systemic transparency. We look forward to hearing from expert witnesses on ways to shed more light and bring greater accountability to this issue." "Expert witnesses in the hearing will include Luis Elizondo, a decorated former counterintelligence officer who has claimed for years that the U.S. government is hiding knowledge of UAP, including materials recovered from crashed flying saucers," reports Space.com. "The House hearing will also include Tim Gallaudet, a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral who unidentified submersible objects, arguing that 'these underwater anomalies jeopardize US maritime security.'" "Other speakers at the hearing include journalist Michael Shellenberger, who has also claimed the U.S. government is hiding UFO crash retrieval programs, and former NASA Associate Administrator of Space Policy and Partnerships Michael Gold, who is a member of NASA's independent UAP study team."

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Alicia recently inherited a whole suite of home-grown enterprise applications. Like a lot of these kinds of systems, it needs to do batch processing. She went tracking down a mysterious IllegalStateException only to find this query causing the problem:

select * from data_import where id > 10000

The query itself is fine, but the code calling it checks to see if this query returned any rows- if it did, the code throws the IllegalStateException.

First, of course, this should be a COUNT(*) query- no need to actually return rows here. But also… what? Why do we fail if there are any transactions with an ID greater than 10000? Why on Earth would we care?

Well, the next query it runs is this:

update data_import set id=id+10000

Oh. Oh no. Oh nooooo. Are they… are they using the ID to also represent some state information about the status of the record? It sure seems like it!

The program then starts INSERTing data, using a counter which starts at 1. Once all the new data is added, the program then does:

delete from data_import where id > 10000

All this is done within a single method, with no transactions and no error handling. And yes, this is by design. You see, if anything goes wrong during the inserts, then the old records don't get deleted, so we can see that processing failed and correct it. And since the IDs are sequential and always start at 1, we can easily find which row caused the problem. Who needs logging or any sort of exception handling- just check your IDs.

The underlying reason why this started failing was because the inbound data started trying to add more than 10,000 rows, which meant the INSERTs started failing (since we already had rows there for this). Alicia wanted to fix this and clean up the process, but too many things depended on it working in this broken fashion. Instead, her boss implemented a quick and easy fix: they changed "10000" to "100000".

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Former Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years for stealing classified information from the Pentagon and sharing it online, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts announced. Teixeira received the sentence before Judge Indira Talwani in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. In March, the national guardsman pleaded guilty to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information under the Espionage Act. He was arrested by the FBI in North Dighton, Massachusetts, in April 2023 and has been in federal custody since mid-May 2023. According to court documents, Teixeira transcribed classified documents that he then shared on Discord, a social media platform mostly used by online gamers. He began sharing the documents in or around 2022. A document he was accused of leaking included information about providing equipment to Ukraine, while another included discussions about a foreign adversary's plot to target American forces abroad, prosecutors said. [...] While the documents were discovered online in March 2023, Teixeira had been sharing them online since January of that year, according to prosecutors.

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"Researchers at the University of Texas have unveiled a new thermal interface material that could revolutionize cooling, outperforming top liquid metal solutions by up to 72% in heat dissipation," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "This breakthrough not only improves energy efficiency but also enables higher-density data center setups, cutting cooling costs and energy usage significantly." TechSpot reports: Thanks to a mechanochemically engineered combination of the liquid metal alloy Galinstan and ceramic aluminum nitride, this thermal interface material, or TIM, outperformed the best commercial liquid metal cooling products by a staggering 56-72% in lab tests. It allowed dissipation of up to 2,760 watts of heat from just a 16 square centimeter area. The material pulls this off by bridging the gap between the theoretical heat transfer limits of these materials and what's achieved in real products. Through mechanochemistry, the liquid metal and ceramic ingredients are mixed in an extremely controlled way, creating gradient interfaces that heat can flow across much more easily. Beyond just being better at cooling, the researchers claim that the higher performance reduces the energy needed to run cooling pumps and fans by up to 65%. It also unlocks the ability to cram more heat-generating processors into the same space without overheating issues. [...] As for how you can get your hands on the material: it's yet to make it out of the labs. The UT team has so far only tested it successfully at small scales but is now working on producing larger batches to put through real-world trials with data center partners. The material has been detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

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