Computers & the Internet News and Discussions

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wjfox
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AT&T’s new 5-gig and 2-gig fiber internet is here, starting at $110 a month

Jan 24, 2022

AT&T is rolling out 2Gbps and 5Gbps speed tiers for its fiber-optic internet option. The company made the announcement to kick off its Life Gigified event, where it said new and existing AT&T Fiber customers will soon be able to take advantage of these multi-gig connections.

If you don’t know what multi-gig is, it means a single connection that offers speeds higher than 1Gbps. AT&T’s new multi-gig speeds need Wi-Fi 6 technology for “optimal” performance, which means you’ll probably want to upgrade your router, and of course, AT&T has a new “All-Fi” device ready. The company may offer even faster speeds eventually; AT&T says it reached speeds of 10Gbps in a lab environment.

The 2Gbps plan will cost $110 / month, while the 5Gbps plan is priced at $180 / month.

[...]

These new speed tiers will be available in over 70 metro areas, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Dallas. AT&T currently offers its fiber-optic network near cities spread out across the Southern, Midwestern, and Western portions of the US, but it plans to expand its service network to 30 million customers by 2025.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/24/2289 ... ons-speeds
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caltrek
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Maybe Green Energy Needs ‘Information Batteries' Too
by Matt Simon
January 31, 2022

https://www.wired.com/story/maybe-green ... eries-too/

Introduction:
(Wired) FOR ALL ITS faults—and there are many—the electrical grid in the United States is a miracle worker: If you flip a switch the lights come on, almost without fail. But as renewables like solar and wind replace fossil fuels, that miracle work gets a bit tougher because sunlight and wind aren’t always available. Navigating this intermittency, as it’s known among energy geeks, demands a fundamental rethink of how consumers use and even help store energy. One day electric vehicle drivers might, for instance, use their cars as a vast network of batteries that grid operators can tap into when renewables wane.

Another option might be to use information as batteries—of a sort. A pair of researchers has proposed that companies precompute certain data when the grid is humming with solar or wind power, and then stash it away for later use. Although the team dubbed the concept “information batteries,” don’t take “battery” to mean a physical device. This is digital, more of a timing strategy than a real battery, aimed at getting data-hungry companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix to use clean power when it’s plentiful so utilities can avoid burning fossil fuels when it’s not.

This kind of power use is somewhat flexible, says University of California San Diego computer scientist Jennifer Switzer. “You can't charge your car unless the battery has discharged at least a little bit, and you can't wash your clothes until your clothes are dirty,” says Switzer, one of the researchers who proposed the idea in a paper published earlier this month. “But with computing, if you have some way of predicting, with even a small amount of accuracy, what you're going to need in the future, then you can compute results before you actually need them and store those results. Instead of storing energy to use later, you're storing data.”
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wjfox
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Re: Computers & the Internet News and Discussions

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Dystopian...

----------

New MoviePass App Will Use Eye Tracking To Force You To Watch Ads

Published 22 hours ago

Unskippable ads are annoying, right? My fellow British YouTube watchers have probably heard enough of the Just Eat ads to last a lifetime. But at least you don't actually have to pay attention to them, right?

Well, thanks to MoviePass rearing its controversial head once more, we might not be able to say that for much longer. The MoviePass 2.0 app is set to launch this summer, and will sustain itself using microcurrency and ads. However, unlike ads on any other platform, you will be forced to actually watch them, as they'll only play when your eyes are looking at the screen.

https://www.thegamer.com/moviepass-eye-tracking-ads/


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Yuli Ban
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Western Digital says it has lost at least 6.5 exabytes (6.5 billion gigabytes) of flash storage due to contamination issues at its NAND production facilities. The contamination could see the price of NAND — the main component of SSDs — spike up to 10 percent, according to market research firm TrendForce. Any potential NAND shortages or price fluctuations could affect the PC market over the next few months, which had another big year in 2021 despite global chip shortages and demand for GPUs.

The contamination of materials used in the manufacturing processes appears to have been detected in late January at two plants in Japan, with Western Digital’s joint venture partner, Kioxia (previously Toshiba), revealing it has affected BiCS 3D NAND flash memory.

Western Digital and Kioxia’s partnership amounts to around 30 percent of the NAND flash market, according to TrendForce. Both Western Digital and Kioxia primarily supply SSD and eMMC storage drives for PCs, and Western Digital is one of the leading suppliers in the industry.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Computers & the Internet News and Discussions

Post by Yuli Ban »

wjfox wrote: Sat Feb 12, 2022 1:06 pm Dystopian...

----------

New MoviePass App Will Use Eye Tracking To Force You To Watch Ads

Published 22 hours ago

Unskippable ads are annoying, right? My fellow British YouTube watchers have probably heard enough of the Just Eat ads to last a lifetime. But at least you don't actually have to pay attention to them, right?

Well, thanks to MoviePass rearing its controversial head once more, we might not be able to say that for much longer. The MoviePass 2.0 app is set to launch this summer, and will sustain itself using microcurrency and ads. However, unlike ads on any other platform, you will be forced to actually watch them, as they'll only play when your eyes are looking at the screen.

https://www.thegamer.com/moviepass-eye-tracking-ads/


Image
I think literally everyone saw this coming. I personally called it way back in 2015 on the defunct KurzweilAI forums that this was going to happen because of how obsessively companies' profits required ad growth and how advanced biometrics were going to get. I just didn't think it'd be this soon.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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erowind
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Post by erowind »

/\ Awful. That is genuinely the limit for me, the moment youtube and other major services adopt that method is the moment i’m done consuming that media. Hope to god adblocker and or youtube downloaders still work.
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wjfox
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erowind wrote: Sat Feb 12, 2022 8:22 pm
the moment youtube and other major services adopt that method is the moment i’m done consuming that media.
Same here. Hopefully there's a massive backlash over it, and/or regulations to stop it.
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A tensor language prototype for high-performance computers
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-02-ten ... mance.html
by Steve Nadis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
High-performance computing is needed for an ever-growing number of tasks—such as image processing or various deep learning applications on neural nets—where one must plow through immense piles of data, and do so reasonably quickly, or else it could take ridiculous amounts of time. It's widely believed that, in carrying out operations of this sort, there are unavoidable trade-offs between speed and reliability. If speed is the top priority, according to this view, then reliability will likely suffer, and vice versa.

However, a team of researchers, based mainly at MIT, is calling that notion into question, claiming that one can, in fact, have it all. With the new programming language, which they've written specifically for high-performance computing, says Amanda Liu, a second-year Ph.D. student at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), "speed and correctness do not have to compete. Instead, they can go together, hand-in-hand, in the programs we write."

Liu—along with University of California at Berkeley postdoc Gilbert Louis Bernstein, MIT Associate Professor Adam Chlipala, and MIT Assistant Professor Jonathan Ragan-Kelley—described the potential of their recently developed creation, "A Tensor Language" (ATL), last month at the Principles of Programming Languages conference in Philadelphia.

"Everything in our language," Liu says, "is aimed at producing either a single number or a tensor." Tensors, in turn, are generalizations of vectors and matrices. Whereas vectors are one-dimensional objects (often represented by individual arrows) and matrices are familiar two-dimensional arrays of numbers, tensors are n-dimensional arrays, which could take the form of a 3x3x3 array, for instance, or something of even higher (or lower) dimensions.
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Hiddenite: A new AI processor for reduced computational power consumption based on a cutting-edge neural network theory
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-02-hid ... ption.html
by Tokyo Institute of Technology
A new accelerator chip called Hiddenite that can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in the calculation of sparse hidden neural networks with lower computational burdens has now been developed by Tokyo Tech researchers. By employing the proposed on-chip model construction, which is the combination of weight generation and supermask expansion, the Hiddenite chip drastically reduces external memory access for enhanced computational efficiency.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are complex pieces of machine learning architecture for AI that require numerous parameters to learn to predict outputs. DNNs can, however, be "pruned," thereby reducing the computational burden and model size. A few years ago, the lottery ticket hypothesis took the machine learning world by storm. The hypothesis stated that a randomly initialized DNN contains subnetworks that achieve accuracy equivalent to the original DNN after training. The larger the network, the more "lottery tickets" for successful optimization. These lottery tickets thus allow "pruned" sparse neural networks to achieve accuracy equivalent to more complex, "dense" networks, thereby reducing overall computational burdens and power consumptions.

One technique to find such subnetworks is the hidden neural network (HNN) algorithm, which uses AND logic (where the output is only high when all the inputs are high) on the initialized random weights and a "binary mask" called a "supermask" (Fig. 1). The supermask, defined by the top-k% highest scores, denotes the unselected and selected connections as 0 and 1, respectively. The HNN helps reduce computational efficiency from the software side. However, the computation of neural networks also requires improvements in the hardware components.
The new Hiddenite chip offers on-chip weight generation and on-chi
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine read more by land, air and sea risks reverberating across the global chip industry and exacerbating current supply-chain constraints. Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas critical for lasers used in chipmaking and supplies more than 90% of U.S. semiconductor-grade neon, according to estimates from research firm Techcet. About 35% of palladium, a rare metal also used for semiconductors, is sourced from Russia. A full-scale conflict disrupting exports of these elements might hit players like Intel , which gets about 50% of its neon from Eastern Europe according to JPMorgan.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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