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Comment Why maping (Score 1) 95

by DrYak (#65859491) Attached to: Roomba Maker 'iRobot' Files for Bankruptcy After 35 Years

Maybe it's me who lived in apartment with much simpler floor plans than everyone else, but I never saw the need for room mapping and navigation.
I've always use the randomly going around and bump into things models, and they have always been good enough for the daily cleans in house with cats.

I really don't care how silly they bump into thing as long as they keep the pet hair low in their daily runs.

What I do care about are the batteries, but luckily after-market LiIon batteries that integrate their own BMS inside the battery and are drop-in replacement for Roomba, boosting up the run by a large factore arre a thing.
Businesses

Cisco Stock Hits New All-Time High, 25 Years After the Dotcom Bubble Burst (ft.com) 29

Posted by msmash from the inflation-adjusted-tears dept.
Cisco's stock price touched $80.25 on Wednesday, finally eclipsing its dotcom-era peak of $80.06 set on March 27, 2000 -- when the networking giant briefly surpassed Microsoft to become the world's most valuable company. The journey back took 25 years, eight months and 13 days. The company's fundamentals improved dramatically over that period, of course. Revenues have nearly quintupled since 1999, profits have quadrupled, earnings per share have grown eightfold, and margins have remained healthy throughout. Investors who bought at the peak still lost money to inflation for a generation.

Cisco's trajectory draws obvious comparisons to Nvidia, today's dominant "picks and shovels" supplier for the AI boom. Nvidia trades at a price-to-earnings ratio above 45 and an enterprise value-to-sales ratio near 24. At its 2000 peak, Cisco traded at a P/E above 200 and EV/sales of 31.

Comment Re:I laughed (Score 1) 56

by garcia (#65850943) Attached to: Same Product, Same Store, but on Instacart, Prices Might Differ

For Aldi, which uses Instacart, I assumed it was because there is no 'fee' for pickup, but they have to pay someone to shop for you. I consider the difference a convenience fee.

That said, by not shopping in store, I end up getting only what is on my list and end up paying FAR LESS than I would if I was wandering around.

Comment Cheap (Score 2) 125

by DrYak (#65849541) Attached to: HDMI Forum Continues To Block HDMI 2.1 For Linux, Valve Says

However I suspect it would be a bit more than $10 today.

A bit, but not much. (random example off AliExpress, that use this synaptic chip)

Worse yet, such a setup would most certainly add latency to an application, gaming, that is sensitive already to any delays. Gaming is what drives the 120Hz and above refresh rates...

There's no real reason why latency should be more than a couple of "scan-lines" (well, at least the DSC's equivalent horizontal-lines, if the signal needs conversion between compression variants). And there's a big incentive: less on-chip built-in RAM - it's litteraly cheaper to make the chip only keep the most recent relevant data and immediately start streaming out the HDMI 2.1 signal as soon as possible, rather than keeping multiple entire frames.

Comment Dongles (Score 1) 125

by DrYak (#65849189) Attached to: HDMI Forum Continues To Block HDMI 2.1 For Linux, Valve Says

I fear that most DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 dongles are not active adapters but instead passive physical connection switches.

Most, but not all. I litterally have a DisplayProt to HDMI + DVI + VGA combo dongle on my workstation at home.

But they tend to by a tiny bit more expensive (think 10 bucks instead of 1 bucks on AliExpress. Or 50 bucks at your local TV shop), because they require a dedicated chip inside the dongle.

Although to my frustration it has never worked the other way around with a HDMI ports being simply physical convertible to a DisplayPort.

Depends on the device. Can happen in some professional projectors: some enterprise-grade projectors can litteraly support "any protocol over any wiring with enough pins", i.e.: the presence of a HDMI, DP, DVI or VGA connector on a given port is mainly a convenience. This is so you could reuse wathever cabling is embed in the walls, you don't need to tear down the walls and redo the cabling (which could get expensive in a large conference room). This is also the reason you could find ultra cheap passive VGA-to-HDMI cables on AliExpress/eBay/Amazon for the last segment between the VGA port built into the lectern of some old university lecture room and the laptop outputting the HDMI that the projector is actually configured to fetch from the VGA cabling embed in the walls.

Comment SteamDeck (Score 1) 125

by DrYak (#65849149) Attached to: HDMI Forum Continues To Block HDMI 2.1 For Linux, Valve Says

You can use DisplayPort instead. Is it possible to convert DP to HDMI 2.1?

Yes, that's litteraly how the SteamDeck handles this.
The SteamDeck can output DisplayPort on its USB-C connector (similar to tons of laptops and some smartphones), and the SeamDeck's Dock has a dedicated hardware chip that does the translation into HDMI signal.
This way no need to tweak any support into opensource GPL'd drivers inside the SteamDeck and then risking running afoul of HDMI's licensing restrictions.

Comment Open source drivers (Score 4, Informative) 125

by DrYak (#65849135) Attached to: HDMI Forum Continues To Block HDMI 2.1 For Linux, Valve Says

cheaper to just pay the license fee

The problem is that unlike Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, Valve isn't selling a closed box with proprietary blob.
Their hardware runs Linux with a close-to-upstream kernel(*).
Among other, they are using the FOSS stack: Linux kernel driver, user space Mesa libraries, etc.
All this is GPL meaning that the code is released (or at least pull requests with the latest are wainting to be eventually upstreamed)

And the HDMI's licencing currently prohibits making that code available (or conversly, GPL means that every body should be able to read and modify the code that does HDMI 2.1 shit even people who haven't paid the license).

(*): except for the dock. The Steam Deck's dock has a dedicated chip that does the USB-C DisplayPort to HDMI conversion, so no need to tweak anything on the drivers running inside the SteamDeck.
Democrats

Democrats Warn Their Party May Try To Unravel Any Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery Deal (semafor.com) 203

Posted by msmash from the remember-us? dept.
As the battle over Warner Bros. Discovery grows, two Democratic lawmakers are warning that their party may try to block or unravel any acquisition by Paramount when it returns to power. Semafor: In a letter to the WBD board and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent first shared with Semafor, Reps. Sam Liccardo (D-Calif.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said they were concerned about the national security risk of letting foreign entities control a large portion of the US entertainment and media industry.

They also hinted that a future Democratic Congress and administration could try to unravel any Paramount-WBD deal. "Future Congresses ... will review many of the decisions of the current Administration, and may recommend that regulators push for divestitures, which would undermine the strategic logic of this merger," they wrote. "We urge the Board to weigh these national security and regulatory liabilities in evaluating a transaction burdened by uncertain but potentially extensive mitigation obligations, foreign influence risks, or adverse regulatory action."
Businesses

The Inevitable Shape of Cheap Online Retail (indiadispatch.com) 15

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Pinduoduo in China, Shopee in Southeast Asia, and Meesho in India operate in markets that could hardly be more different -- an upper-middle-income industrial state, a stitched-together archipelago of under-banked economies, and a country where three-quarters of retail is unorganized and e-commerce penetration sits at about 7% -- yet all three have landed on the same business model.

These platforms run asset-light marketplaces specializing in cheap goods and slow delivery, monetizing through logistics mark-ups, advertising, and installment credit rather than retail margins. Temu and Shein are further variations now expanding in the U.S. and Europe.

The economics are thin for all. Pinduoduo's EBITDA margins on GMV (gross merchandise value) sit in a 0-4% band; Meesho's group-wide EBITDA hovers around break-even. Neither charges commissions on most sales; both earn through logistics mark-ups and advertising. Sponsored listings account for 1-3% of GMV at Indian marketplaces and 4-5% at Alibaba and Pinduoduo.

Credit is the more consequential side business. In India, cash on delivery functions as unofficial credit. Meesho CEO Vidit Aatrey said the customers prefer CoD for its "built-in delay," which effectively makes it "a five-day loan." Geography, income, and regulation were supposed to produce different answers. They produced one: a 3% endgame where e-commerce clips a few points of GMV and relies on attention and credit for profits.
Medicine

The Rarest of All Diseases Are Becoming Treatable (msn.com) 39

Posted by msmash from the encouraging-signs dept.
In February, a six-month-old baby named KJ Muldoon became the first person ever to receive a CRISPR gene-editing treatment customized specifically for his unique genetic mutation, a milestone that researchers say marks a turning point in how medicine might approach the thousands of rare diseases that collectively affect 30 million Americans. Muldoon was born with a type of urea-cycle disorder that gives patients roughly a 50% chance of surviving infancy and typically requires a liver transplant; he is now a healthy 1-year-old who recently took his first steps.

The treatment's significance extends beyond one child. Scientists at UC Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia are now planning clinical trials that would use Muldoon's therapy as a template, tweaking the molecular "address" in the CRISPR system to target different mutations in other children with urea-cycle disorders. Last month, FDA officials Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad announced a new drug pathway designed to accelerate approvals for such personalized treatments -- a framework inspired in large part by Muldoon's case. Current gene-editing delivery mechanisms limit treatments to disorders in the blood and liver. Many families will still go without bespoke therapies.
Education

'Colleges Oversold Education. Now They Must Sell Connection' (msn.com) 145

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
A tenured USC professor is arguing that universities need to fundamentally rethink their value proposition as AI rapidly closes the gap on human instruction and a loneliness epidemic grips the generation most likely to be sitting in their lecture halls. Eric Anicich, an associate professor at USC's Marshall School of Business, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that nearly three-quarters of 16- to 24-year-olds now report feeling lonely, young adults spend 70% less time with friends in person compared to two decades ago, and a growing majority of Gen Z college graduates say their degree was a "waste of money."

Anicich points to a recent Harvard study finding that students using an AI tutor learned more than twice as much as those in traditional active-learning classes, and did so in less time. The implication is stark: if instruction becomes abundant and cheap, colleges must sell what remains scarce -- genuine human community. He notes that his doctoral training included zero coursework on teaching, a norm he says persists across academia. His proposal: fund student life as seriously as research labs, hire professional "experience designers," and treat rituals and collaborative projects as core curriculum rather than amenities.
Medicine

Science Journal Retracts Study On Safety of Monsanto's Roundup (theguardian.com) 44

Posted by BeauHD from the long-time-coming dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology has formally retracted a sweeping scientific paper published in 2000 that became a key defense for Monsanto's claim that Roundup herbicide and its active ingredient glyphosate don't cause cancer. Martin van den Berg, the journal's editor in chief, said in a note accompanying the retraction that he had taken the step because of "serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the authors of this article and the academic integrity of the carcinogenicity studies presented."

The paper, titled Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans, concluded that Monsanto's glyphosate-based weed killers posed no health risks to humans -- no cancer risks, no reproductive risks, no adverse effects on development of endocrine systems in people or animals. Regulators around the world have cited the paper as evidence of the safety of glyphosate herbicides, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in this assessment (PDF). [...]

In explaining the decision to retract the 25-year-old research paper, Van den Berg wrote: "Concerns were raised regarding the authorship of this paper, validity of the research findings in the context of misrepresentation of the contributions by the authors and the study sponsor and potential conflicts of interest of the authors." He noted that the paper's conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate were solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto, ignoring other outside, published research. "The retraction of this study is a long time coming," said Brent Wisner, one of the lead lawyers in the Roundup litigation and a key player in getting the internal documents revealed to the public. Wisner said the study was the "quintessential example of how companies like Monsanto could fundamentally undermine the peer-review process through ghostwriting, cherrypicking unpublished studies, and biased interpretations."

"This garbage ghostwritten study finally got the fate it deserved,â Wisner added. "Hopefully, journals will now be more vigilant in protecting the impartiality of science on which so many people depend."
The Internet

Evidence That Humans Now Speak In a Chatbot-Influenced Dialect Is Getting Stronger (gizmodo.com) 83

Posted by BeauHD from the cultural-feedback-loop dept.
Researchers and moderators are increasingly concerned that ChatGPT-style language is bleeding into everyday speech and writing. The topic has been explored in the past but "two new, more anecdotal reports, suggest that our chatbot dialect isn't just something that can be found through close analysis of data," reports Gizmodo. "It might be an obvious, every day fact of life now." Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Over on Reddit, according to a new Wired story by Kat Tenbarge, moderators of certain subreddits are complaining about AI posts ruining their online communities. It's not new to observe that AI-armed spammers post low-value engagement bait on social media, but these are spaces like r/AmItheAsshole, r/AmIOverreacting, and r/AmITheDevil, where visitors crave the scintillation or outright titillation of bona fide human misbehavior. If, behind the scenes, there's not really a grieving college student having her tuition cut off for randomly flying off the handle at her stepmom, there's no real fun to be had. The mods in the Wired story explain how they detect AI content, and unfortunately their methods boil down to "It's vibes." But one novel struggle in the war against slop, the mods say, is that not only are human-written posts sometimes rewritten by AI, but mods are concerned that humans are now writing like AI. Humans are becoming flesh and blood AI-text generators, muddying the waters of AI "detection" to the point of total opacity.

As "Cassie" an r/AmItheAsshole moderator who only gave Wired her first name put it, "AI is trained off people, and people copy what they see other people doing." In other words, Cassie said, "People become more like AI, and AI becomes more like people." Meanwhile, essayist Sam Kriss just explored the weird way chatbots "write" for the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine, and he discovered along the way that humans have accidentally taken cues from that weirdness. After parsing chatbots' strange tics and tendencies -- such as overusing the word "delve" most likely because it's in a disproportional number of texts from Nigeria, where that word is popular -- Kriss refers to a previously reported trend from over the summer. Members of the U.K. Parliament were accused of using ChatGPT to write their speeches.

The thinking goes that ChatGPT-written speeches contained the phrase "I rise to speak," an American phrase, used by American legislators. But Kriss notes that it's not just showing up from time to time. It's being used with downright breathtaking frequency. "On a single day this June, it happened 26 times," he notes. While 26 different MPs using ChatGPT to write speeches is not some scientific impossibility, it's more likely an example of chatbots, "smuggling cultural practices into places they don't belong," to quote Kriss again. So when Kriss points out that when Starbucks locations were closing in September, and signs posted on the doors contained tortured sentences like, "It's your coffeehouse, a place woven into your daily rhythm, where memories were made, and where meaningful connections with our partners grew over the years," one can't state with certainty that this is AI-generated text (although let's be honest: it probably is).
News

Denmark Posts Its Last Letters as Hallowed National Mail Ends (thetimes.com) 66

Posted by msmash from the you've-got-no-mail dept.
Denmark's postal service, established by King Christian IV four centuries ago as one of Europe's first modern mail systems, will stop delivering letters on December 30, ending a tradition that once saw riders given a maximum of 45 minutes to cover each 10-kilometer stretch of routes running from Hamburg to Norway.

PostNord, the postal service Denmark has shared with Sweden since 2009, started removing its 1,500 remaining red post boxes in June; a handful will go to museums. Letter volumes collapsed from nearly 1.5 billion in 2000 to 110 million last year. A standard stamp now costs 29 Danish kroner ($4.52). A private logistics firm called DAO will take over letter delivery. PostNord will continue handling parcels. The decision has rattled postal services elsewhere in Europe. Deutsche Post in Germany, still delivering 61 million letters daily, has warned it faces the same trends.
Businesses

How the Dollar-Store Industry Overcharges Cash-Strapped Customers While Promising Low Prices (theguardian.com) 108

Posted by msmash from the sticker-shock dept.
Dollar General and Family Dollar stores have collectively failed more than 6,400 government price-accuracy inspections since January 2022, charging customers more at checkout than the prices displayed on shelves for everything from frozen pizzas to puppy food, according to an investigation by the Guardian. The review examined records from 45 states and more than 140 counties and cities. Dollar General stores failed over 4,300 inspections across 23 states, and Family Dollar failed more than 2,100 in 20 states. Error rates at the worst-performing locations reached staggering levels -- 76% at a Dollar General in Hamilton, Ohio and 68% at a Family Dollar in Bound Brook, New Jersey. A Family Dollar in Provo, Utah failed 28 consecutive inspections.

Industry watchers, employees and lawsuits attribute the discrepancies to minimal staffing. Registers update automatically when prices change, but shelf labels require manual replacement, and workers often lack the time. State attorneys general have pursued settlements -- Arizona reached a $600,000 deal with Family Dollar in May, Colorado settled with Dollar General for $400,000 in October and Ohio secured $1 million from Dollar General after finding error rates as high as 88%. Both companies declined interview requests but said they remain committed to pricing accuracy.

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