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Noel Dempsey has spent 30 years salvaging industrial machinery from closed vocational schools across America, highlighting the decline of technical education since the 1980s. The story underscores a critical shortage of skilled manufacturing workers and the urgent need to revitalize career and technical education in the United States. Senator Tim Kaine and other leaders are pushing for increased funding to recruit CTE instructors and rebuild America's manufacturing capabilities.
Historical examples demonstrate how anticipatory obedience enables authoritarian regimes to expand their power, illustrated by events in Nazi Germany and Austria. Stanley Milgram's famous psychological experiments revealed humans' surprising willingness to comply with authority figures, even when asked to harm others. The text explores how voluntary compliance and adaptation to new rules can lead to rapid societal transformation and devastating consequences.
WebAssembly (WASM) is positioned to replace containers by offering true write-once-run-anywhere capabilities, especially in V8 environments like Cloudflare Workers. The technology enables microservices to maintain their benefits while eliminating network overhead costs, though it currently lacks some system interfaces.
The UK government secretly ordered Apple to create a universal backdoor for accessing encrypted user data worldwide, challenging Apple's Advanced Data Protection system. Apple may cease offering encrypted storage in the UK rather than compromise global user security, as the order demands unprecedented access to encrypted content across all countries.
An open-source iOS app was developed to enhance Syncthing's file synchronization capabilities with features like selective sync and media streaming. The project combines Go and Swift programming to create a more user-friendly mobile experience for self-hosted file synchronization, addressing limitations of existing solutions like Dropbox and Resilio Sync.
NOAA plays a crucial role in U.S. weather forecasting by operating a vast network of satellites, airplanes, radar, and weather stations to collect real-time data that feeds into computer models and analysis. The agency's comprehensive weather observation system, which includes 18 satellites and over 1,300 maritime buoys, provides essential data that private companies and media rely on for their weather products and forecasts. NOAA's publicly accessible data and analysis are fundamental for public safety, business operations, and accurate climate monitoring.
Japanese funding agencies predominantly support research within strict disciplinary boundaries, leading to underfunding of interdisciplinary research and missed breakthrough opportunities. The authors propose five directions to foster interdisciplinary research in Japan, including shifting to researcher-focused funding and embracing high-risk projects, while highlighting successful models like OIST's approach to cross-disciplinary collaboration.
BYD announced it will offer advanced self-driving systems free of charge across all its vehicle models, including its cheapest Seagull model priced at $9,555. The 'God's Eye' ADAS comes in three versions offering features from automated parking to urban autonomous driving, potentially triggering a new price war in the EV market. The move poses a significant challenge to Tesla, which charges $8,000 for similar features in the US, and could impact its already declining sales.
An exploration of reimagining car climate controls using a smart rotary dial system combines physical controls with digital interfaces. The project demonstrates how automated temperature management can be achieved through programmable haptic feedback and digital displays, emphasizing the importance of physical controls over touch screens for essential car functions.
Thomson Reuters won a landmark AI copyright lawsuit against Ross Intelligence, establishing a precedent that using copyrighted materials for AI training can constitute infringement. The Delaware District Court rejected Ross Intelligence's fair use defense, particularly noting how the AI firm aimed to compete with Westlaw by creating a market substitute. The ruling could significantly impact ongoing AI copyright cases and challenge how AI companies defend their training data practices.
Novel research demonstrates how large language models can improve their forecasting abilities through self-play and outcome-driven fine-tuning, achieving 7-10% better prediction accuracy without human-curated samples. The approach brings smaller models (Phi-4 14B and DeepSeek-R1 14B) to performance levels comparable to GPT-4 in forecasting tasks.
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a0.dev is a new AI-powered platform that generates React Native apps from text prompts, offering instant live previews and code generation capabilities. The platform aims to significantly reduce mobile app development time from weeks to hours, featuring both UI and logic-focused models along with physical device preview capabilities through an iOS app.
Intel's new Battlemage architecture powers the Arc B580 GPU, offering improved performance over its Alchemist predecessor despite fewer cores and a narrower memory bus, targeting the midrange market at $250 with 12GB VRAM. The architecture features significant improvements in compute utilization, cache latency, and memory handling, while maintaining Intel's unique approach to GPU design distinct from AMD and Nvidia.
A Tesla Cybertruck owner crashed into a utility pole in Reno when the Full Self-Driving system failed to merge lanes, yet praised Tesla's safety engineering despite the incident. The owner's response highlights a notable pattern of Tesla customers defending the company even after system failures, while expressing concern about negative publicity affecting investors.
TSMC's 2nm Platform Technology presentation at IEDM 2024 showcased a 30% power improvement and 15% performance gain compared to their 3nm node, with promising early yield reports indicating >80% average yield for 256Mb SRAM arrays. The technology positions TSMC as a leader in density and power efficiency among 2nm class processes, though Intel's 18A may lead in performance, while pricing concerns at $30,000 per wafer could impact market adoption.
UnitedHealth Group hired defamation law firm Clare Locke to combat social media posts after a plastic surgeon claimed the insurer called her mid-surgery and denied patient care. The surgeon, Elisabeth Potter, faces legal demands to retract her statements, while UnitedHealthcare maintains they previously approved the care and would never request interrupting surgery.
Microsoft released open source PostgreSQL extensions to handle document-style data, challenging MongoDB's dominance in the NoSQL space while blurring the lines between relational and non-relational databases. The extensions enable BSON support and MongoDB-compatible commands, partnering with FerretDB to create a viable MongoDB alternative on PostgreSQL.
Backblaze manages 305,180 drives with a focus on data drives performance and failure rates throughout 2024, revealing an overall improvement in annualized failure rates from 1.70% in 2023 to 1.57% in 2024. The company has successfully integrated new high-capacity 24TB Seagate drives while phasing out older 4TB models, demonstrating their ongoing storage optimization strategy.