PawsUp

Researchers have figured out how make shaped drone rotors that convert audible and ultrasound frequencies into stable mechanical spinning motion, leading to tiny drones that can be completely silent. While scary-sounding (no pun intended) it's unclear how usable these would be in the real world, since a line-of-sight source of sound waves has to be provided.

TLDR on the history side of the article

In 1804, a French weaver named Joseph-Marie Jacquard patented a loom that could weave intricate patterns using punch cards — paper cards with encoded holes.

Once they pass through the loom, the presence or absence of a hole tells the loom which warp thread to raise or lower, acting as the earliest form of binary code programming. Weaving that once required a master weaver and an assistant could now be done by craft hobbyists.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50818812

Aaron Rodgers, then quarterback for the New York Jets, reportedly lived in Cedar Grove, New Jersey when the alleged 2024 donation was made. Drivers passing through Cedar Grove, New Jersey on a routine errand in 2024 may not have noticed the cameras. According to an investigation by FOIAball, every time a car passed certain intersections, a camera was logging its plate, location, and time of arrival into a searchable police database. The person allegedly funding that network was, at roughly the same moment, publicly complaining about surveillance drones over his own property.

TLDR: it's a spec bump for the processor and RAM. One question I personally had is does that mean the motherboard is backward compatible with the og FP6?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50808662

Health data appears to be most affected by administration’s attempt to wipe findings that don’t align with its priorities, tracker shows

A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US embassies around the world.

These are among the hundreds of federal datasets that the Trump administration has taken down or altered as part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all mentions of data findings that do not align with the administration’s priorities.

Over the past year and a half, at least 28 federal datasets have been deleted and another 338 data collections have been modified, according to an online tracker released last week from dataindex.us, a group of data policy experts, researchers and developers that formed last year to monitor changes to government data.

“We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden administration and a cofounder of dataindex.us. “We’re facing a future where we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit American communities.”

Full title: ‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit / ChatGPT prompts show how an expert witness report was created in a $61 million lawsuit over an explosion that killed three people.

GPUs: +19.2% in one month

Fixed basket of 176 GPU models, tracked at 3+ retailers daily for 30 days (July 15 - August 14), to rule out the distortion that happens when cheap cards sell out and skew a simple daily average.

• July 15: €808.57 average
• August 14: €963.56 average +19.2%, same 176 cards throughout

Not a single spike, started climbing around July 24-25 and has been steady since. Consistent across markets too: Germany +19.6%, France +18.1%.

RAM: +18.6% over two months

Same fixed-basket approach: 112 DDR5 kits in stock at 2+ retailers on both June 19 and August 18, tracked daily throughout.

• June 19: €666.80 average
• August 18: €791.14 average +18.6%, same 112 kits throughout

This one had a sharper inflection point: flat through most of June, then a sudden +6% overnight jump on July 1 (checked individual SKUs to rule out a data glitch, it's real, looks like a manufacturer-side price change hitting multiple retailers the same day), followed by continued climbing through mid-July, then a slower steady rise since.

Methodology, for both: price is the average across whichever 2-3+ retailers carried a given product on a given day, not the single cheapest price, and not a blended average across a shifting product list, a fixed set of SKUs, verified daily, same products at the start and end of the period.

Data limitation: RAM figures are consumer DDR5 desktop kits only

Independent corroboration: German tech outlet Heise recently reported a similar ~20% GPU price increase: https://www.heise.de/news/Grafikkarten-werden-nochmals-rund-20-Prozent-teurer-11409262.html

Data source: PriceSquirrel, tracking hardware prices across 20+ EU retailers.

The symbol for Amazon's VGT3, the Las Vegas facility where it scans book for AI training data.

Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.

A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.

That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.

“Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” an Amazon spokesperson told me in a statement.

The world’s AI companies are constantly looking for, and spending extreme resources to locate, more material to train their AI models. With books, that sometimes means destroying them in the process, something that large parts of the public have spoken up against, and which we can now confirm Amazon is doing.

In July, I published a story about booksellers who reported a historical spike in sales starting in the past year. They suspected this spike in sales was due to AI companies acquiring any books they can in search of new training data. Printed books are valuable as training data because a lot of the text they contain is not readily available on the internet, which AI companies have already scraped. The data is also conveniently organized and, if the book was printed before 2022, is guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text, which can make any AI model that is trained on it worse via a recursive process called “model collapse.”

📖 Do you know work at a facility where you scan books? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at @emanuel.404. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.

These booksellers suspected AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases because of the high number of books they were buying, the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, did not seem price sensitive at all. But booksellers couldn’t say for certain who was behind the large purchases because the marketplaces where they sell their books keep the buyers anonymous. When an order comes in, a bookseller ships the sold books to a warehouse operated by the marketplaces, where books are sorted and then sent to the buyer.

In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order. 404 Media granted the bookseller anonymity because they worried sharing this information would harm their business. Biblio did not respond to a request for comment.

Another article to provide some clarity on the types of books: https://finance.biggo.com/news/37a2899b-5f1a-4571-9bb5-1156c0ac4605