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Researchers should not be using tools like ChatGPT to automatically peer review papers, warned organizers of top AI conferences and academic publishers worried about maintaining intellectual integrity. From a report: With recent advances in large language models, researchers have been increasingly using them to write peer reviews -- a time-honored academic tradition that examines new research and assesses its merits, showing a person's work has been vetted by other experts in the field. That's why asking ChatGPT to analyze manuscripts and critique the research, without having read the papers, would undermine the peer review process. To tackle the problem, AI and machine learning conferences are now thinking about updating their policies, as some guidelines don't explicitly ban the use of AI to process manuscripts, and the language can be fuzzy. The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) is considering setting up a committee to determine whether it should update its policies around using LLMs for peer review, a spokesperson told Semafor. At NeurIPS, researchers should not "share submissions with anyone without prior approval" for example, while the ethics code at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), whose annual confab kicked off Tuesday, states that "LLMs are not eligible for authorship." Representatives from NeurIPS and ICLR said "anyone" includes AI, and that authorship covers both papers and peer review comments. A spokesperson for Springer Nature, an academic publishing company best known for its top research journal Nature, said that experts are required to evaluate research and leaving it to AI is risky.

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Stack Overflow's new deal giving OpenAI access to its API as a source of data has users who've posted their questions and answers about coding problems in conversations with other humans rankled. From a report: Users say that when they attempt to alter their posts in protest, the site is retaliating by reversing the alterations and suspending the users who carried them out. A programmer named Ben posted a screenshot yesterday of the change history for a post seeking programming advice, which they'd updated to say that they had removed the question to protest the OpenAI deal. "The move steals the labour of everyone who contributed to Stack Overflow with no way to opt-out," read the updated post. The text was reverted less than an hour later. A moderator message Ben also included says that Stack Overflow posts become "part of the collective efforts" of other contributors once made and that they should only be removed "under extraordinary circumstances." The moderation team then said it was suspending his account for a week while it reached out "to avoid any further misunderstandings."

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Researchers have hailed another "leap forward" for AI after Google DeepMind unveiled the latest version of its AlphaFold program, which can predict how proteins behave in the complex symphony of life. From a report: The breakthrough promises to shed fresh light on the biological machinery that underpins living organisms and drive breakthroughs in fields from antibiotics and cancer therapy to new materials and resilient crops. "It's a big milestone for us," said Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind and the spin-off, Isomorphic Labs, which co-developed AlphaFold3. "Biology is a dynamic system and you have to understand how properties of biology emerge through the interactions between different molecules." Earlier versions of AlphaFold focused on predicting the 3D structures of 200m proteins, the building blocks of life, from their chemical constituents. Knowing what shape a protein takes is crucial because it determines how the protein will function -- or malfunction -- inside a living organism. AlphaFold3 was trained on a global database of 3D molecular structures and goes a step further by predicting how proteins will interact with the other molecules and ions they encounter. When asked to make a prediction, the program starts with a cloud of atoms and steadily reshapes it into the most accurate predicted structure. Writing in Nature, the researchers describe how AlphaFold3 can predict how proteins interact with other proteins, ions, strands of genetic code, and smaller molecules, such as those developed for medicines. In tests, the program's accuracy varied from 62% to 76%.

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Full repairs to three submarine internet cables damaged in the Red Sea in February are being held up by disputes over who controls access to infrastructure in Yemeni waters. From a report: The Yemeni government has granted permits for the repair of two out of three cables, but refused the third because of a dispute with one of the cable's consortium members. Repairs to the Seacom and EIG cables have been approved, but the consortium that runs AAE-1, which includes telecommunications company TeleYemen, was not granted a permit by Yemen's internationally recognized government, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. Three out of more than a dozen cables that run through the Red Sea, a critical route for connecting Europe's internet infrastructure to Asia's, were knocked offline by the Houthi-sunk Rubymar vessel in late February. Although the telecommunications data that passes along the damaged cables was re-routed, the incident highlighted the vulnerability of critical subsea infrastructure and the challenges of making repairs in a conflict zone. The dispute over the third cable derives from the split political control of TeleYemen, the country's sole telecommunications provider, a reflection of the country's broader geopolitical divisions.

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Less than 24 hours after Apple held a special event to unveil the new, record-thin (0.20 inch, the thinnest Apple device yet) iPad Pro with M4 chip inside, which the company says is optimized for AI, it is facing a loud and fast-spreading public backlash to one of its new marquee video advertisements promoting the device -- a spot called "Crush." VentureBeat: The video features a giant, industrial hydraulic press machine -- a device category famous for appearing in viral videos over the last decade-and-a-half -- literally pressing down upon and destroying dozens of other objects and creative instruments, from trumpets to cans of paint. The ad concludes with the press lifting to reveal these objects have somehow been transformed into a new iPad Pro. The metaphor and messaging is pretty obvious: the iPad Pro can subsume and replace all these older legacy instruments and technologies inside of it, and all in a more portable, sleek, and more powerful form factor than ever before. It's analogous to similar observations and advertisements other fans and creatives have made in the past about how PCs and smartphones replaced nearly all the individual gadgets -- stereo radios/boom boxes, journals, calculators, drawing pads, typewriters, video cameras -- of yore by offering many of their same core capabilities in a smaller, unified, more portable form factor. [...] People are revolted by the bluntness of Apple's metaphor, the destruction of beloved traditional instruments and objects which people hold in high esteem and affix intangible value to for their creative potential, and the overarching and perhaps unintentional messaging that Apple wants to literally flatten creativity and violently crush the creative tools of yesterday in favor of a multi-hundred dollar piece of luxury technology whose operating system and ecosystem of applications it tightly controls and restricts.

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Our new AI model AlphaFold 3 can predict the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy.Our new AI model AlphaFold 3 can predict the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy.

AstraZeneca said on Tuesday it had initiated the worldwide withdrawal of its COVID-19 vaccine due to a "surplus of available updated vaccines" since the pandemic. From a report: The company also said it would proceed to withdraw the vaccine Vaxzevria's marketing authorizations within Europe. "As multiple, variant COVID-19 vaccines have since been developed there is a surplus of available updated vaccines," the company said, adding that this had led to a decline in demand for Vaxzevria, which is no longer being manufactured or supplied. According to media reports, the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker has previously admitted in court documents that the vaccine causes side-effects such as blood clots and low blood platelet counts.

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The Biden administration is poised to open up a new front in its effort to safeguard U.S. AI from China with preliminary plans to place guardrails around the most advanced AI models, the core software of artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, Reuters reported Wednesday. From the report: The Commerce Department is considering a new regulatory push to restrict the export of proprietary or closed source AI models, whose software and the data it is trained on are kept under wraps, three people familiar with the matter said. Any action would complement a series of measures put in place over the last two years to block the export of sophisticated AI chips to China in an effort to slow Beijing's development of the cutting edge technology for military purposes. Even so, it will be hard for regulators to keep pace with the industry's fast-moving developments. Currently, nothing is stopping U.S. AI giants like Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Alphabet's Google DeepMind and rival Anthropic, which have developed some of the most powerful closed source AI models, from selling them to almost anyone in the world without government oversight. Government and private sector researchers worry U.S. adversaries could use the models, which mine vast amounts of text and images to summarize information and generate content, to wage aggressive cyber attacks or even create potent biological weapons. To develop an export control on AI models, the sources said the U.S. may turn to a threshold contained in an AI executive order issued last October that is based on the amount of computing power it takes to train a model. When that level is reached, a developer must report its AI model development plans and provide test results to the Commerce Department.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSN: The US has revoked licenses allowing Huawei to buy semiconductors from Qualcomm and Intel, according to people familiar with the matter, further tightening export restrictions against the Chinese telecom equipment maker. Withdrawal of the licenses affects US sales of chips for use in Huawei phones and laptops, according to the people, who discussed the move on condition of anonymity. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul confirmed the administration's decision in an interview Tuesday. He said the move is key to preventing China from developing advanced AI. "It's blocking any chips sold to Huawei," said McCaul, a Texas Republican who was briefed about the license decisions for Intel and Qualcomm. "Those are two companies we've always worried about being a little too close to China." While the decision may not affect a significant volume of chips, it underscores the US government's determination to curtail China's access to a broad swathe of semiconductor technology. Officials are also considering sanctions against six Chinese firms that they suspect could supply chips to Huawei, which has been on a US trade restrictions list since 2019. [...] Qualcomm recently said that its business with Huawei is already limited and will soon shrink to nothing. It has been allowed to supply the Chinese company with chips that provide older 4G network connections. It's prohibited from selling ones that allow more advanced 5G access.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: According to data analyzed by Morgan Stanley and Pitchbook, the number of active venture capital firms worldwide surged from 2014 levels, more than doubling by 2021, before sharply contracting to below 2014 figures in a stunning reversal.

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Computer models have found that recent heat waves in the north Pacific may be due to a large reduction in aerosols emitted by factories in China. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Phys.Org reports: In this new effort, the research team noted that the onset of the heat waves appeared to follow successful efforts by the Chinese government to reduce aerosol emissions from their country's factories. Beginning around 2010, factories and power generating plants in China began dramatically reducing emissions of aerosols such as sulfate, resulting in much cleaner air. Noting that aerosols can act like mirrors floating in the air, reflecting heat from the sun back into space, and also pointing out that earlier research efforts had suggested that massive reductions of aerosols in one place could lead to warming in other places -- they wondered if reductions of aerosols in China might be playing a role in the heat waves that began happening in the north Pacific. To find out if that might be the case, the team began collecting data and then input it into 12 different computer climate models. They ran them under two conditions -- one where emissions from East Asia remained as they were over the past several decades and one where they dropped in the way they had in reality. They found that the models with no declines did not cause much change elsewhere, whereas those with aerosol drops showed heat waves occurring in the northeast parts of the Pacific Ocean. The models also showed why -- as less heat was reflected back into space over China, warming of coastal regions in Asia began, resulting in the development of high-pressure systems. That in turn made low-pressure systems in the middle Pacific more intense. And that resulted in the Aleutian Low growing bigger and moving south which weakened the westerly winds that typically cool the sea surface. The result was hotter conditions.

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SteamVR 2.5 released with multiple Linux fixes  GamingOnLinux

Red Hat launches RHEL for AI  InfoWorld

Renewable energy accounted for more than 30% of the world's electricity for the first time last year, according to climate thinktank Ember. The Guardian reports: Clean electricity has already helped to slow the growth in fossil fuels by almost two-thirds in the past 10 years, according to the report by climate thinktank Ember. It found that renewables have grown from 19% of electricity in 2000 to more than 30% of global electricity last year. Solar was the main supplier of electricity growth, according to Ember, adding more than twice as much new electricity generation as coal in 2023. It was the fastest-growing source of electricity for the 19th consecutive year, and also became the largest source of new electricity for the second year running, after surpassing wind power. The first comprehensive review of global electricity data covers 80 countries, which represent 92% of the world's electricity demand, as well as historic data for 215 countries. The surge in clean electricity is expected to power a 2% decrease in global fossil fuel generation in the year ahead, according to Ember. [...] World leaders are aiming to grow renewables to 60% of global electricity by 2030 under an agreement struck at the UN's Cop28 climate change conference in December. This would require countries to triple their current renewable electricity capacity in the next six years, which would almost halve power sector emissions.

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Lawyers for the defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX said customers would receive all the money they lost when the firm collapsed in 2022 and receive interest on top of it. "But the recoveries come with a caveat," reports the New York Times. "The amount owed to customers was calculated based on the value of their holdings at the time of FTX's bankruptcy in November 2022. That means customers won't reap the benefits of a recent surge in the crypto market that sent the price of Bitcoin to a record high." From the report: The announcement was a landmark in the attempt to recover the $8 billion in customer assets that disappeared when FTX imploded virtually overnight, setting off a crisis in the crypto industry. Under a plan filed in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware, virtually all FTX's creditors, including hundreds of thousands of ordinary investors who used the exchange to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, would receive cash payments equivalent to 118 percent of the assets they had stored on FTX, the lawyers said. Those payments would flow from a pool of assets that FTX's lawyers have pulled together in the 17 months since the exchange collapsed, the lawyers said. [...] It will take months for the payouts to begin. The plan must be approved by the federal judge overseeing FTX's bankruptcy, John T. Dorsey.

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If you are writing a Bash shell script, you should read command-line arguments into an array for some time. This allows us to process any number of arguments provided when the script is run. This makes the script adaptable to different use cases. Instead of dealing with fixed variables like $1, $2, $3, etc., you can work with any number of arguments more dynamically using bash for loop or bash while loop, depending upon your needs. Arrays make it simple to loop through each argument and perform operations on them, whether basic printing or complex processing. Bash provides a mapfile (readarray command) internal built-in command to read lines from a file into an array variable. Let us see how to use mapfile to read all command line arguments into an array. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post A Bash Script to Read All Command Line Arguments into an Array: Simplify Argument Handling appeared first on nixCraft. 2024-05-07T10:40:08Z 2024-05-07T10:40:08Z Vivek Gite

CentOS, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Fedora and other clones of RHEL, such as Oracle, Alma, and Rocky, offer support for version pinning. This feature allows developers and system administrators to lock a particular package to a specific version, preventing it from being automatically updated by yum or dnf commands. Sometimes, it is necessary to protect packages from being updated to newer versions to avoid incompatibility issues with your applications. For example, you can lock down PHP version 8.3.6 and avoid using updated PHP version 8.4. Let us see how to lock a package to a specific version, only exclude a package from yum update or dnf update on a CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, and friends. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post How to Pin Versions in Yum or Dnf for RHEL or CentOS Linux appeared first on nixCraft. 2024-05-07T09:01:47Z 2024-05-07T09:01:47Z Vivek Gite

Here's a quick tip for vim users. You can perform find and replace operations within a visual selection in Vim for text or code block. Visual selection for finding and replacing text in Vim allows developers and Linux/Unix users precise and efficient text editing. It's handy when you want to change specific portions of text or code blocks within a larger file without affecting other occurrences. This method required to minimizing manual search and reducing the risk of unintended code or text modifications. Let us see how to find and replace in Vim visual mode selection. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post How to perform find and replace operations within a visual selection in Vim appeared first on nixCraft. 2024-05-07T06:14:33Z 2024-05-07T06:14:33Z Vivek Gite

Unhide is a little handy forensic tool to find hidden processes and TCP/UDP ports by rootkits / LKMs or by another hidden technique. This tool works under Linux, Unix-like system, and MS-Windows operating systems. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post How to find hidden processes and ports on Linux/Unix/Windows appeared first on nixCraft. 2024-05-07T05:05:51Z 2024-05-07T05:05:51Z Vivek Gite

Do you need to open a TCP port 43 for outgoing whois command for communication using iptables command? Fear not. You can add a rule to allow incoming or outgoing traffic on that specific port. Here's an example of how to do it. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post How to open a TCP port 43 for whois command using iptables appeared first on nixCraft. 2023-07-17T20:11:55Z 2023-07-17T20:11:55Z Vivek Gite