After nearly two years of active development and testing, we are proud to announce Meta Low Bitrate audio codec, aka MLow, which achieves two-times-better quality than Opus (POLQA MOS 1.89 vs 3.9 @ 6kbps WB). Even more importantly, we are able to achieve this great quality while keeping MLow’s computational complexity 10 percent lower than that of Opus.
To make the most of their unstructured data, development teams are turning to retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, a method for customizing large language models (LLMs). They can use RAG to keep LLMs up to date with organizational knowledge and the latest information available on the web. They can also use RAG and LLMs to surface and extract insights from unstructured data.
LXC is not typically used for application development but for scenarios requiring full OS functionality or direct hardware integration. Its ability to provide isolated and secure environments with minimal overhead makes it suitable for infrastructure virtualization where traditional VMs might be too resource-intensive.
Docker’s utility in supporting rapid development cycles and complex architectures makes it a valuable tool for developers aiming to improve efficiency and operational consistency in their projects.
Clean architecture is a widely adopted opinionated way to structure your code and to separate the concerns of the application into layers. The main idea is to separate the business logic from the infrastructure and presentation layers.
A push triggers a Kafka event, which is fanned out via independent consumers to many isolated jobs that can process the event without worrying about any other consumers.
Rust’s ownership model is a fundamental feature that enhances both speed and safety. Every value in Rust has a unique owner, responsible for its cleanup when it’s no longer needed. This eliminates the need for a garbage collector and ensures efficient memory management. The ownership rules are enforced at compile time, which means there’s no runtime overhead.
Outside of special cases, Meta maintains its fleet of clusters using a technique called maintenance trains. This is used for all capacity, including compute and storage capacity. A small number of servers are taken out of production and maintained with all applicable upgrades. Trains provide the guarantee that all capacity minus one maintenance domain is up and running 24/7, thus providing capacity predictability. This is mandatory for all capacity that is used for online and recurring training.
Developers can now take advantage of Arm-based hardware hosted by GitHub to build and deploy their release assets anywhere Arm architecture is used. Best of all, these runners are priced at 37% less than our x64 Linux and Windows runners.
Assuming an 8-hour workday and considering 260 workdays per year brings the annual energy cost of one person’s hour of daily work to around 6 kWh[a].
Now for the energy cost of running an LLM. We have set a target of 250 words in an hour. LLMs generate tokens, parts of words, so if we use the standard ratio (for English) of 0.75 words per token, our target for one hour of work is around 333 tokens. Measurements with Llama 65B reported around 4 Joules per output token [4]. This leads to 1,332 Joules for 333 tokens, about 0.00037 kWh.
Microsoft’s upcoming Recall feature in Windows 11 has generated a wave of controversy this week following early testing that revealed huge security holes. The initial version of Recall saves screenshots and a large plaintext database tracking everything that users do on their PCs, and in the current version of the feature, it’s trivially easy to steal and view that database and all of those screenshots for any user on a given PC, even if you don’t have administrator access. Recall also does little to nothing to redact sensitive information from its screenshots or that database.
First and most significantly, the company says that Recall will be opt-in by default, so users will need to decide to turn it on. It may seem like a small change, but many users never touch the defaults on their PCs, and for Recall to be grabbing all of that data by default definitely puts more users at risk of having their data stolen unawares.
The company also says it’s adding additional protections to Recall to make the data harder to access. You’ll need to enable Windows Hello to use Recall, and you’ll need to authenticate via Windows Hello (whether it’s a face-scanning camera, fingerprint sensor, or PIN) each time you want to open the Recall app to view your data.
By providing a reusable, state-of-the-art execution engine that is engine- and dialect-agnostic (i.e, it can be integrated with any data system and extended to follow any SQL-dialect semantic), Velox quickly received attention from the open-source community. Beyond our initial collaborators from IBM/Ahana, Intel, and Voltron Data, today more than 200 individual collaborators from more than 20 companies around the world participate in Velox’s continued development.
A team of physicists has discovered that it’s possible to build a real, actual, physical warp drive and not break any known rules of physics. One caveat: the vessel doing the warping can’t exceed the speed of light, so you’re not going to get anywhere interesting any time soon. But this research still represents an important advance in our understanding of gravity.
Windows 11 24H2 includes an updated compiler, kernel, and scheduler, all lower-level system changes made at least in part to better support Arm-based PCs. Existing Windows-on-Arm systems should also see a 10 or 20 percent performance boost when using x86 applications, thanks to improvements in the translation layer (which Microsoft is now calling Prism).
There are more user-visible changes, too. 24H2 includes Sudo for Windows, the ability to create TAR and 7-zip archives from the File Explorer, Wi-Fi 7 support, a new “energy saver” mode, and better support for Bluetooth Low Energy Audio. It also allows users to run the Copilot AI chatbot in a regular resizable window that can be pinned to the taskbar instead of always giving it a dedicated strip of screen space.
Minnesota this week eliminated two laws that made it harder for cities and towns to build their own broadband networks. The state-imposed restrictions were repealed in an omnibus commerce policy bill signed on Tuesday by Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat.
Minnesota was previously one of about 20 states that imposed significant restrictions on municipal broadband. The number can differ depending on who’s counting because of disagreements over what counts as a significant restriction. But the list has gotten smaller in recent years because states including Arkansas, Colorado, and Washington repealed laws that hindered municipal broadband.
The Minnesota bill enacted this week struck down a requirement that municipal telecommunications networks be approved in an election with 65 percent of the vote. The law is over a century old, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Network Initiative wrote yesterday.
Artificial Intelligence: End-to-end scenarios for building AI-enabled applications, embracing the AI ecosystem, and deep integration with cloud services.
.NET Aspire: for building cloud-native distributed applications, releasing today.
C# 13: Improvements to much loved C# features to make them even better for you.
Performance: Reducing memory and execution time with critical benchmarks.
Enhancements to .NET libraries and frameworks including ASP.NET Core, Blazor, .NET MAUI, and more.
A new study by researchers at the UK’s University of Leeds, however, suggests that … renewables already produce more net energy than the fossil fuels they’re displacing. The key to understanding why is that it’s much easier to do useful things with electricity than it is with a hunk of coal or a glob of crude oil.
We recently launched a new tool to enhance Docker documentation: an AI-powered documentation assistant incorporating kapa.ai. Docker Docs AI is designed to get you the information you need by providing instant, accurate answers to your Docker-related questions directly within our documentation pages.
It’s like magic with one line of code changed in the Linux kernel that Intel is reporting up to 19% performance improvement for Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” and up to an 11% improvement in performance per Watt. Or in another EPP mode, the power consumption during video playback can be reduced by 52%!
Light painting is a technique used in both art and science that involves taking long-exposure photographs while moving some kind of light source—a small flashlight, perhaps, or candles or glowsticks—to essentially trace an image with light. A UK collaboration of scientists and artists has combined light painting with low-cost air pollution sensors to visualize concentrations of particulate matter (PM) in select locations in India, Ethiopia, and Wales. The objective is to creatively highlight the health risks posed by air pollution, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.
There were significant differences in SI between psychologists and AI’s ChatGPT-4 and Bing. ChatGPT-4 exceeded 100% of all the psychologists, and Bing outperformed 50% of PhD holders and 90% of bachelor’s holders. The differences in SI between Google Bard and bachelor students were not significant, whereas the differences with PhDs were significant; Where 90% of PhD holders excel on Google Bird.
NYTimes: Since 2020, California has installed more giant batteries than anywhere in the world apart from China. They can soak up excess solar power during the day and store it for use when it gets dark.
Those batteries play a pivotal role in California’s electric grid, partially replacing fossil fuels in the evening. Between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. on April 30, for example, batteries supplied more than one-fifth of California’s electricity and, for a few minutes, pumped out 7,046 megawatts of electricity, akin to the output from seven large nuclear reactors.
Windows Subsystem for Linux is now automatically releasing stored memory in WSL back for use by Windows. This automatic memory reclaim support is a great addition and makes Windows behave better especially for systems with limited amounts of RAM. Without this support in memory hungry situations like with Docker it was possible for WSL2 to exhaust all of the system’s physical memory.
Windows Subsystem for Linux has also enabled DNS tunneling by default for improved network support.
Meanwhile in experimental form is support for automatic disk reclaim and a new mirrored networking mode that provides for features like IPv6 support.
For nearly two hours, Berkshire Hathaway’s Class A shares were listed as trading at just $185.10 — a price that would represent a loss of 99.97%. Berkshire closed at $627,400 on Friday.
NYSE announced it has decided to “bust,” or cancel, all “erroneous” trades for Berkshire between 9:50 am ET and 9:51 am ET at or below $603,718.30. The exchange said that ruling is not eligible for appeal and indicated it could cancel other trades.
Azure Linux 3.0 shifts from the aging Linux 5.15 kernel to the newer Linux 6.6 LTS kernel as well as significant updates to OpenSSL, systemd, Runc, and other components. Azure Linux 3.0 is also now defaulting to SELinux’s enforcing mode by default.
Yesterday, the European Union’s Copernicus Earth-monitoring service announced that we’ve now gone a full year where every single month has been the warmest version of that month since we’ve had enough instruments in place to track global temperatures.
A study from researchers at the National Energy Technology Laboratory shows the wastewater produced by Pennsylvania’s unconventional wells could contain enough lithium to meet 38 to 40 percent of current domestic consumption.
During the initial deployment of a Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Private Cloud for the customer using an internal tool, there was an inadvertent misconfiguration of the GCVE service by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank. This had the unintended and then unknown consequence of defaulting the customer’s GCVE Private Cloud to a fixed term, with automatic deletion at the end of that period. The incident trigger and the downstream system behavior have both been corrected to ensure that this cannot happen again.
AI passes the restaurant review Turing test. We are rapidly entering an era where we won’t be able to believe anything – articles, photos, videos, voice recordings – is genuine and original. Are you prepared?
In a series of experiments for a new study, Kovács found that a panel of human testers was unable to distinguish between reviews written by humans and those written by GPT-4, the LLM powering the latest iteration of ChatGPT. In fact, they were more confident about the authenticity of AI-written reviews than they were about human-written reviews.
On Monday, OpenAI announced the formation of a new “Safety and Security Committee” to oversee risk management for its projects and operations. The announcement comes as the company says it has “recently begun” training its next frontier model, which it expects to bring the company closer to its goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), though some critics say AGI is farther off than we might think. It also comes as a reaction to two weeks of public setbacks for the company.
Together, we’ve built an integration that includes intuitive navigation and traceability between source code and binaries, CI/CD with GitHub Actions and JFrog Artifactory, and a unified view of security findings across the software supply chain. By providing full control and visibility across the entire software supply chain, we are accelerating our joint vision of making developers’ lives easier and happier.
A massive uptick in traffic to Fedora’s package mirrors is causing problems for the Linux distribution. Some five million additional systems have started putting additional strain on Fedora’s mirror resources since March and appear to be coming from Amazon’s cloud.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-1086 and carrying a severity rating of 7.8 out of a possible 10, allows people who have already gained a foothold inside an affected system to escalate their system privileges. It’s the result of a use-after-free error, a class of vulnerability that occurs in software written in the C and C++ languages when a process continues to access a memory location after it has been freed or deallocated. Use-after-free vulnerabilities can result in remote code or privilege escalation.
The vulnerability, which affects Linux kernel versions 5.14 through 6.6, resides in the NF_tables, a kernel component enabling the Netfilter, which in turn facilitates a variety of network operations, including packet filtering, network address [and port] translation (NA[P]T), packet logging, userspace packet queueing, and other packet mangling. It was patched in January, but as the CISA advisory indicates, some production systems have yet to install it. At the time this Ars post went live, there were no known details about the active exploitation.
Here we see the fundamental flaw of the system: “AI Overviews are built to only show information that is backed up by top web results.” The design is based on the false assumption that Google’s page-ranking algorithm favors accurate results and not SEO-gamed garbage. Google Search has been broken for some time, and now the company is relying on those gamed and spam-filled results to feed its new AI model.
Internet surveillance, and the resultant loss of privacy, is following the same trajectory. Just as certain fish populations in the world’s oceans have fallen 80 percent, from previously having fallen 80 percent, from previously having fallen 80 percent (ad infinitum), our expectations of privacy have similarly fallen precipitously. The pervasive nature of modern technology makes surveillance easier than ever before, while each successive generation of the public is accustomed to the privacy status quo of their youth. What seems normal to us in the security community is whatever was commonplace at the beginning of our careers.
Recall that in the Danish system each mortgage is backed by a matching bond. As a consequence, mortgage holders have two ways to pay a mortgage: 1) hold the mortgage and pay the monthly payments or 2) buy the matching bond and, in effect, extinguish the mortgage. The latter option is valuable because when interest rates rise, the price of mortgages fall.
…Danish sellers are able to earn a profit when they trade in their low mortgage rates for more-expensive ones, making it easier to move even when rates rise.
In all, it’s a bleak finding that bodes poorly for the collective health of Americans, who are now seeing rises in cases of measles and other vaccine-preventable illnesses. Additional surveys by the APPC in 2021, 2022, and 2023 identified a slight increase in the number of survey takers who specifically believe, falsely, that the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine causes autism. In 2021, 9 percent of respondents falsely indicated that MMR vaccine causes autism, responding that the statement was “definitely true” (2 percent) or “probably true” (7 percent). In 2023, 12 percent of respondents fell into those categories, 2 percent for “definitely true” and 10 percent for “probably true.”
Since the start of 2024, the US has seen a steady march of measles infections nationwide. As of May 31, the CDC has recorded 146 cases across 21 states. Of those cases, 64 were part of a large outbreak in Chicago, which was declared over on May 30.
