मुख्य कंटेंट तक स्किप करें

2023-06-11

Ted Kaczynski has died

  • Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, has died at the age of 81 in prison.
  • He was responsible for a string of bombings from 1978 to 1995 that targeted academics, businessmen, and civilians.
  • Kaczynski's manifesto argued against the effects of technology and society, using violence to support his message.
  • His legacy is now being viewed differently, with some young people online expressing an ironic appreciation for him.
  • Kaczynski's papers have become popular at a university collection, and a correction was made regarding a mass murderer who copied passages from his manifesto.

Industry Reactions

  • Ted Kaczynski, the infamous "Unabomber," has died while serving a life sentence for mailing bombs to academics and technologists.
  • Opinions on Kaczynski's ideas are varied, with some finding them thought-provoking while others criticize his use of violence.
  • Kaczynski's manifesto critiques society's reliance on technology and some argue that his ideas are still relevant to current societal issues.

Debian 12 "Bookworm"

  • Debian 12 "Bookworm" has been released after 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development.
  • The release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed.
  • Users of UEFI-capable ARM64 hardware can boot with Secure Boot mode enabled, and there is support for 78 different languages.

Industry Reactions

  • Debian 12 "Bookworm" has been released, with notable changes including the inclusion of non-free firmware by default and continued support for numerous init systems.
  • The decision to include proprietary blobs has been criticized by some in the open-source community, but others see it as necessary for hardware support.
  • Despite criticisms, Debian remains a solid and reliable OS with a strong community and features such as backports and comprehensive wireless network driver support.

MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

  • MusicGen is a single language model that generates high-quality samples of compressed discrete music representations.
  • It allows for better control over generated output by being conditioned on textual description or melodic features.
  • MusicGen's approach is superior to evaluated baselines in a standard text-to-music benchmark.

Industry Reactions

  • OpenAI's MusicGen is an AI model that lets users generate music by entering text prompts, providing immediate feedback and low costs for passion projects.
  • Users can train the model on their data, but critics argue that the model falls short of creativity and emotion and may not replace human-generated music.
  • Facebook AI's Audiocraft is a generative AI audio toolkit that produces high-quality audio from MIDI files or audio samples, with chord recognition and a machine learning guide for custom training.

Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

  • Mercedes-Benz is the first company authorized to sell or lease level-3 automated driving systems in California.
  • The DRIVE PILOT system controls speed, follow distance, and takes traffic signs, route profile, and road events into account, making evasive maneuvers and alerting first responders in emergency situations.
  • The system is restricted to limited roads, speeds of up to 40 mph, and daytime use on California highways and the I-15 between California and Nevada. Tesla's Autopilot is a level-2 driver support feature and may be overrated.

Industry Reactions

  • Mercedes obtains permit to test Level 4 autonomous car in California, first automaker to do so- Tesla's Full Self-Driving system capable of navigating complex city streets without human intervention, but critics point out it is still in beta
  • Safety, liability, and regulation are primary concerns for autonomous driving systems

OBS merges WebRTC support

  • OBS has added support for WebRTC.
  • This will enable users to stream video and audio over the internet in real-time.
  • The development team consisted of several contributors who have implemented various fixes and features.

Industry Reactions

  • OBS has merged WebRTC support, allowing for new features such as serverless streaming, sub-second latency, multi-track input, and mobility, which is a significant development that will inspire new features and functionality for users.
  • WebRTC has features such as low latency and direct connection between streamer and receiver, but it may not work well in bad connectivity or a conference call situation. SFUs can help reduce direct connections across large calls, while WHIP enables the use of WebRTC in conjunction with media servers and CDNs, allowing users to stream online easily.
  • The comment thread on a recent post about OBS discusses the technical complexities of using STUN/TURN servers to enable WebRTC video conferencing on networks with NAT and firewalls, with suggestions for alternative screen capture software and potential solutions to address the limitations of STUN/TURN.

Reddit bans subreddit detailing how to move to competitor Kbin

  • The subreddit KbinMigration has been banned by Reddit due to spamming.
  • The subreddit provided users with guidance on how to move to competitor Kbin.
  • Reddit has taken action to prevent the promotion of competitor services on their platform.

Industry Reactions

  • Kbin is a Reddit alternative that has recently gained interest due to concerns over Reddit's privacy and political policies.
  • Some users have encountered issues with overloaded servers and privacy on alternative platforms like Kbin and Lemmy.
  • The conversation also touches on the challenges and limitations of scaling open source Reddit-like content aggregator and microblogging platforms like Kbin.

New York City will charge drivers going downtown

  • Biden administration to allow New York City to toll vehicles entering Lower Manhattan, known as "congestion pricing"- First program of its kind in the United States, with proposals ranging from charging vehicles $9 to $23 during peak hours
  • Designed to reduce the number of vehicles entering the congestion zone by at least 10% every day, slash the number of miles cars travel within the zone by 5%, and generate revenue to fund $15 billion in future investments to modernize the city's public transit system.

Industry Reactions

  • New York City is implementing a congestion charge to reduce traffic and raise revenue for public transit.
  • There are debates surrounding the regressive nature of the fees and concerns about retrofitting transit stations for safety and efficiency.
  • Discussions also involve the challenges of government mismanagement of transportation funds and the impact on low-income individuals and families.

Emoji Kitchen

  • Google's new feature called 'Emoji Kitchen' lets users mix and match various emojis to create new ones.
  • This feature is available for Android users on Gboard, Google's official keyboard app.
  • Users can select an emoji, and Emoji Kitchen will suggest different combinations of emojis to create a new, custom emoji.

Industry Reactions

  • Emoji Kitchen is a Google feature with over 20,000 combinations of unique emojis- Users can combine emojis and get an exaggerated version or even combine the same emoji with itself
  • Some users express admiration for the project's creative potential and wonder how Google paid for such a huge number of illustrations.

Barracuda urges replacing, not patching, its email security gateways

  • Barracuda Networks is urging customers to replace, not patch, its email security gateways due to a zero-day vulnerability that caused a malware threat, compromising its email security appliances since October 2022.
  • The incident response firm Mandiant was hired to fix the issue, but Barracuda found out that attackers first started exploiting the flaw; thus, replacement would be a better option than just patching.
  • Barracuda will provide the replacement product at no cost, and only ESG appliances were impacted, so no other products suffered any damage. Also, impacted customers should rotate any credentials associated with the appliance(s) and check for signs of compromise dating back to at least October 2022.

Industry Reactions

  • Barracuda urges customers to replace their vulnerable email security gateways rather than just patching them due to deep access gained by attackers.
  • The company is offering to replace the devices for free, but logistics will still represent a challenge for customers.
  • Some speculate whether they need to replace the hardware of the same vendor or purchase from a different vendor.

GCP automatically lowered our quota, caused an incident, and refused to upgrade](https://twitter.com/JustJake/status/1667478906591666176)

Industry Reactions

  • Twitter user accuses GCP of automatically lowering their quota, causing an incident, and refusing to upgrade, blaming it on exceeding the rate limit that the user claimed was never communicated nor different from the approved quota- Commenters express issues with GCP's support and billing surprise while others praise their network and modern UI
  • Discussion on customer service experiences with AWS and GCP with some saying AWS has better customer service, others having positive experiences with GCP, and some speculating on GCP's poor customer service being due to a cultural problem within Google