Technology News

DC went to YC to talk OS.

DC went to YC to talk OS.

Enlarge / Wegovy is an injectable prescription weight-loss medicine that has helped people with obesity. (credit: Getty | Michael Siluk)

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved two injectable versions of the blockbuster weight-loss and diabetes drug, semaglutide (Wegovy and Ozempic). Both come in pre-filled pens with pre-set doses, clear instructions, and information about overdoses. But, given the drugs' daunting prices and supply shortages, many patients are turning to imitations—and those don't always come with the same safety guardrails.

In an alert Friday, the FDA warned that people are overdosing on off-brand injections of semaglutide, which are dispensed from compounding pharmacies in a variety of concentrations, labeled with various units of measurement, administered with improperly sized syringes, and prescribed with bad dosage math. The errors are leading some patients to take up to 20 times the amount of intended semaglutide, the FDA reports.

Though the agency doesn't offer a tally of overdose cases that have been reported, it suggests it has received multiple reports of people sickened by dosing errors, with some requiring hospitalizations. Semaglutide overdoses cause nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, fainting, headache, migraine, dehydration, acute pancreatitis, and gallstones, the agency reports.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Boeing's Strainer spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station in this picture taken July 3. (credit: NASA)

The astronauts who rode Boeing's Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station last month still don't know when they will return to Earth.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been in space for 51 days, six weeks longer than originally planned, as engineers on the groundwork through problems with Starliner's propulsion system.

The problems are twofold. The spacecraft's reaction control thrusters overheated, and some of them shut off as Starliner approached the space station June 6. A separate, although perhaps related, problem involves helium leaks in the craft's propulsion system.

Read 31 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / One day, using pixellated fonts and images to represent that something is a video game will not be a trope. Today is not that day.

SAG-AFTRA has called for a strike of all its members working in video games, with the union demanding that its next contract not allow "companies to abuse AI to the detriment of our members."

The strike mirrors similar actions taken by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) last year, which, while also broader in scope than just AI, were similarly focused on concerns about AI-generated work product and the use of member work to train AI.

"Frankly, it’s stunning that these video game studios haven’t learned anything from the lessons of last year—that our members can and will stand up and demand fair and equitable treatment with respect to A.I., and the public supports us in that,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, chief negotiator for SAG-AFTRA, said in a statement.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Measles, bedbugs, and dengue have all been cited as concerns for tourists and athletes at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, with the tropical virus in particular forcing authorities into action.

Enlarge / The Cadillac V-Series.R is one of General Motors' factory-backed racing programs. (credit: James Moy Photography/Getty Images)

It is hard to escape the feeling that a few too many businesses are jumping on the AI hype train because it's hype-y, rather than because AI offers an underlying benefit to their operation. So I will admit to a little inherent skepticism, and perhaps a touch of morbid curiosity, when General Motors got in touch wanting to show off some of the new AI/machine learning tools it has been using to win more races in NASCAR, sportscar racing, and IndyCar. As it turns out, that skepticism was misplaced.

GM has fingers in a lot of motorsport pies, but there are four top-level programs it really, really cares about. Number one for an American automaker is NASCAR—still the king of motorsport here—where Chevrolet supplies engines to six Cup teams. IndyCar, which could once boast of being America's favorite racing, is home to another six Chevy-powered teams. And then there's sportscar racing; right now, Cadillac is competing in IMSA's GTP class and the World Endurance Championship's Hypercar class, plus a factory Corvette Racing effort in IMSA.

"In all the series we race we either have key partners or specific teams that run our cars. And part of the technical support that they get from us are the capabilities of my team," said Jonathan Bolenbaugh, motorsports analytics leader at GM, based at GM's Charlotte Technical Center in North Carolina.

Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The TikTok influencer and podcast host amassed millions of followers for her roasts—and swears she’ll keep doing it even if TikTok goes away.

The Idea of You, Brittany Runs a Marathon, and American Fiction are just a few of the movies you should be watching on Amazon Prime Video this week.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

Internet service providers are eager to get money from a $42.45 billion government fund, but are trying to convince the Biden administration to drop demands that Internet service providers offer broadband service for as little as $30 a month to people with low incomes.

The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program was created by a US law that requires Internet providers receiving federal funds to offer at least one "low-cost broadband service option for eligible subscribers." The Biden administration says it is merely enforcing that legal requirement, but a July 23 letter sent by over 30 broadband industry trade groups claims that the administration is illegally regulating broadband prices.

The fund is administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The NTIA is distributing money to states, which will then distribute it to ISPs. Before obtaining money from the NTIA, each state must get approval for a plan that includes a low-cost option. Nearly half of US states have already gotten approvals.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / An AI-generated image released by xAI during the open-weights launch of Grok-1. (credit: xAI)

Elon Musk-led social media platform X is training Grok, its AI chatbot, on users' data, and that's opt-out, not opt-in. If you're an X user, that means Grok is already being trained on your posts if you haven't explicitly told it not to.

Over the past day or so, users of the platform noticed the checkbox to opt out of this data usage in X's privacy settings. The discovery was accompanied by outrage that user data was being used this way to begin with.

The social media posts about this sometimes seem to suggest that Grok has only just begun training on X users' data, but users actually don't know for sure when it started happening.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / A jet of particles moving at nearly light-speed emerges from a massive star in this artist’s concept of the BOAT. (credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab)

Scientists have been all aflutter since several space-based detectors picked up a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) in October 2022—a burst so energetic that astronomers nicknamed it the BOAT (Brightest Of All Time). Now an international team of astronomers has analyzed an unusual energy peak detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and concluded that it was an emission spectra, according to a new paper published in the journal Science. Per the authors, it's the first high-confidence emission line ever seen in 50 years of studying GRBs.

As reported previously, gamma-ray bursts are extremely high-energy explosions in distant galaxies lasting between mere milliseconds to several hours. There are two classes of gamma-ray bursts. Most (70 percent) are long bursts lasting more than two seconds, often with a bright afterglow. These are usually linked to galaxies with rapid star formation. Astronomers think that long bursts are tied to the deaths of massive stars collapsing to form a neutron star or black hole (or, alternatively, a newly formed magnetar). The baby black hole would produce jets of highly energetic particles moving near the speed of light, powerful enough to pierce through the remains of the progenitor star, emitting X-rays and gamma rays.

Those gamma-ray bursts lasting less than two seconds (about 30 percent) are deemed short bursts, usually emitting from regions with very little star formation. Astronomers think these gamma-ray bursts are the result of mergers between two neutron stars, or a neutron star merging with a black hole, comprising a "kilonova." That hypothesis was confirmed in 2017 when the LIGO collaboration picked up the gravitational wave signal of two neutron stars merging, accompanied by the powerful gamma-ray bursts associated with a kilonova.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / A bad update to CrowdStrike's Falcon security software crashed millions of Windows PCs last week. (credit: CrowdStrike)

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said Thursday that 97 percent of all Windows systems running its Falcon sensor software were back online, a week after an update-related outage to the corporate security software delayed flights and took down emergency response systems, among many other disruptions. The update, which caused Windows PCs to throw the dreaded Blue Screen of Death and reboot, affected about 8.5 million systems by Microsoft's count, leaving roughly 250,000 that still need to be brought back online.

Microsoft VP John Cable said in a blog post that the company has "engaged over 5,000 support engineers working 24x7" to help clean up the mess created by CrowdStrike's update and hinted at Windows changes that could help—if they don't run afoul of regulators, anyway.

"This incident shows clearly that Windows must prioritize change and innovation in the area of end-to-end resilience," wrote Cable. "These improvements must go hand in hand with ongoing improvements in security and be in close cooperation with our many partners, who also care deeply about the security of the Windows ecosystem."

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / The environment you're eating in can influence what you taste, and space is no exception. (credit: NASA)

Astronauts on the ISS tend to favor spicy foods and top other foods with things like tabasco or shrimp cocktail sauce with horseradish. “Based on anecdotal reports, they have expressed that food in space tastes less flavorful. This is the way to compensate for this,” said Grace Loke, a food scientist at the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Loke’s team did a study to take a closer look at those anecdotal reports and test if our perception of flavor really changes in an ISS-like environment. It likely does, but only some flavors are affected.

Tasting with all senses

“There are many environmental factors that could contribute to how we perceive taste, from the size of the area to the color and intensity of the lighting, the volume and type of sounds present, the way our surroundings smell, down to even the size and shape of our cutlery. Many other studies covered each of these factors in some way or another,” said Loke.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / A digital advertisement board displaying a Barbie movie poster is seen in New York on July 24, 2023. (credit: Getty | Selcuk Acar)

This post contains spoilers—for the movie and women's health care.

There's nothing like stirrups and a speculum to welcome one to womanhood, but for some, the recent Barbie movie apparently offered its own kind of eye-opening introduction.

The smash-hit film ends with the titular character making the brave decision to exit Barbieland and enter the real world as a bona fide woman. The film's final scene follows her as she fully unfurls her new reality, attending her first woman's health appointment. "I’m here to see my gynecologist," she enthusiastically states to a medical receptionist. For many, the line prompted a wry chuckle, given her unsuspecting eagerness and enigmatic anatomy. But for others, it apparently raised some fundamental questions.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Police observe the Eiffel Tower from Trocadero ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 22, 2024. (credit: Hector Vivas/Getty Images)

On the eve of the Olympics opening ceremony, Paris is a city swamped in security. Forty thousand barriers divide the French capital. Packs of police officers wearing stab vests patrol pretty, cobbled streets. The river Seine is out of bounds to anyone who has not already been vetted and issued a personal QR code. Khaki-clad soldiers, present since the 2015 terrorist attacks, linger near a canal-side boulangerie, wearing berets and clutching large guns to their chests.

French interior minister Gérald Darmanin has spent the past week justifying these measures as vigilance—not overkill. France is facing the “biggest security challenge any country has ever had to organize in a time of peace,” he told reporters on Tuesday. In an interview with weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, he explained that “potentially dangerous individuals” have been caught applying to work or volunteer at the Olympics, including 257 radical Islamists, 181 members of the far left, and 95 from the far right. Yesterday, he told French news broadcaster BFM that a Russian citizen had been arrested on suspicion of plotting “large scale” acts of “destabilization” during the Games.

Parisians are still grumbling about road closures and bike lanes that abruptly end without warning, while human rights groups are denouncing “unacceptable risks to fundamental rights.” For the Games, this is nothing new. Complaints about dystopian security are almost an Olympics tradition. Previous iterations have been characterized as Lockdown London, Fortress Tokyo, and the “arms race” in Rio. This time, it is the least-visible security measures that have emerged as some of the most controversial. Security measures in Paris have been turbocharged by a new type of AI, as the city enables controversial algorithms to crawl CCTV footage of transport stations looking for threats. The system was first tested in Paris back in March at two Depeche Mode concerts.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Pole vaulting is a spectacular, dangerous sport. Modern poles could be drastically improved to make them more reliable, with healable tech being developed that could also be used in surfing and cycling.

In a recently uncovered 1983 speech, Steve Jobs predicted the ubiquity of personal computers. In 2024, AI has brought us to another inflection point.

In a recently uncovered 1983 speech, Steve Jobs predicted the ubiquity of personal computers. In 2024, AI has brought us to another inflection point.

Enlarge / Infrastructure!

Howdy, Arsians! Last year, we partnered with IBM to host an in-person event in the Houston area where we all gathered together, had some cocktails, and talked about resiliency and the future of IT. Location always matters for things like this, and so we hosted it at Space Center Houston and had our cocktails amidst cool space artifacts. In addition to learning a bunch of neat stuff, it was awesome to hang out with all the amazing folks who turned up at the event. Much fun was had!

This year, we're back partnering with IBM again and we're looking to repeat that success with not one, but two in-person gatherings—each featuring a series of panel discussions with experts and capping off with a happy hour for hanging out and mingling. Where last time we went central, this time we're going to the coasts—both east and west. Read on for details!

September: San Jose, California

Our first event will be in San Jose on September 18, and it's titled "Beyond the Buzz: An Infrastructure Future with GenAI and What Comes Next." The idea will be to explore what generative AI means for the future of data management. The topics we'll be discussing include:

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments