Record-Breaking Heat Wave In India Threatens Residents, Crucial Wheat Harvest

A record-breaking heat wave in India exposing hundreds of millions to dangerous temperatures is damaging the country’s wheat harvest, which experts say could hit countries seeking to make up imports of the food staple from conflict-riven Ukraine. NBC News reports: With some states in India’s breadbasket northern and central regions seeing forecasts with highs of 120 Fahrenheit this week, observers fear a range of lasting impacts, both local and international, from the hot spell. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told U.S. President Joe Biden earlier this month that India could step in to ease the shortfall created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The two countries account for nearly a third of all global wheat exports, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that the conflict could leave an additional 8 million to 13 million people undernourished by next year.

India’s wheat exports hit 8.7 million tons in the fiscal year ending in March, with the government predicting record production levels — some 122 million tons — in 2022. But the country has just endured its hottest March since records began, according to the India Meteorological Department, and the heat wave is dragging well into harvest time. The heat wave is hitting India’s main wheat-growing regions particularly hard, with temperatures this week set to hit 112 F in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh; 120 F in Chandigarh, Punjab; and 109 F in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. Devendra Singh Chauhan, a farmer from Uttar Pradesh’s Etawah district, told NBC News that his wheat crop was down 60 percent compared to normal harvests.

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Brooklyn Public Library is Offering Free Digital Library Cards To Young Adults in the US

Are You the Asshole? New AI Mimics Infamous Advice Subreddit

Two artists are illustrating bias in machine learning with data from one of the most opinionated sites on the internet: the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit. Motherboard reports: Now boasting 3.9 million users, the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit has become known as one of the leading forums where users can seek and share advice with virtual strangers. Internet artists Morry Kolman and Alex Petros trained three AI models using comments from over 60,000 posts from the popular subreddit. They filtered the comments according to the original subreddit’s formal voting guidelines where users vote on whether the poster is the asshole or if ESH (Everyone Sucks Here). What results is a positive bot, a negative bot, and a neutral bot that respond to every scenario submitted. The project, funded by Digital Void, aims to illustrate how training data can bias the decision-making abilities of artificial intelligence models. Now, their bots can help you answer the age-old question: Are you the asshole?

Users can submit their own moral dilemmas — real or not — and get a positive, negative, and swing response that can go either way. The three AI models are trained on data derived from Reddit users passing judgment so what results is a funny microcosm of what it’s like to debate on the internet now. Any topic can inspire strong, contradictory reactions from total strangers. “When reading the results of a judgment, note the way in which the AI constructs ideas from snippets of human reasoning,” their website reads. “Sometimes the AI can produce stunning results, but it is fundamentally attempting to mimic the ways that humans put together arguments.”

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Half of Tesla’s New Cars Produced Use Cobalt-Free LFP Batteries

Tesla confirmed that nearly half of all its vehicles produced last quarter are already using cobalt-free iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries. Electrek reports: Over the last few years, CEO Elon Musk has said multiple times that Tesla plans to shift more electric cars to LFP batteries in order to overcome nickel and cobalt supply concerns. Iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, which don’t use nickel or cobalt, are traditionally cheaper and safer, but they offer less energy density, which means less efficient and shorter range for electric vehicles. However, they have improved enough recently that it now makes sense to use cobalt-free batteries in lower-end and shorter-range vehicles. It also frees up the production of battery cells with other, more energy-dense chemistries to produce more longer-range vehicles.

Tesla already moved its Standard Range Model 3 and Model Y produced in China to LFP cells. Last year, Tesla also announced it is “shifting to Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) battery chemistry globally” for “standard range vehicles.” It confirmed that the automaker planned to switch the Model 3 Standard Range, also known as Model 3 Rear-Wheel-Drive, being produced in the Fremont factory to LFP cells, too.

Now with the release of Tesla’s Q1 2022 financial results, Tesla confirmed that nearly half of all vehicles produced are now using LFP batteries: “Diversification of battery chemistries is critical for long-term capacity growth, to better optimize our products for their various use cases and expand our supplier base. This is why nearly half of Tesla vehicles produced in Q1 were equipped with a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery, containing no nickel or cobalt. Currently, LFP batteries are used in most of our standard range vehicle products, as well as commercial energy storage applications. As a result of our energy efficient motors, a Model 3 with an LFP battery pack can still achieve a 267-mile EPA range.” This would mean that roughly half of Tesla’s volume comes from Model 3 Rear-Wheel-Drive, the cheapest Tesla vehicle, and the Model Y Standard Range, which is only offered in China.

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What Happened After Russia Seized Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster Site?

The Associated Press files this report from Chernobyl, where invading tanks in February “churned up highly contaminated soil from the site of the 1986 accident that was the world’s worst nuclear disaster…”

“Here in the dirt of one of the world’s most radioactive places, Russian soldiers dug trenches. Ukrainian officials worry they were, in effect, digging their own graves.”

For more than a month, some Russian soldiers bunked in the earth within sight of the massive structure built to contain radiation from the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor. A close inspection of their trenches was impossible because even walking on the dirt is discouraged…. Maksym Shevchuck, the deputy head of the state agency managing the exclusion zone, believes hundreds or thousands of soldiers damaged their health, likely with little idea of the consequences, despite plant workers’ warnings to their commanders. “Most of the soldiers were around 20 years old,” he said….

The full extent of Russia’s activities in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is still unknown, especially because the troops scattered mines that the Ukrainian military is still searching for. Some have detonated, further disturbing the radioactive ground. The Russians also set several forest fires, which have been put out.
Ukrainian authorities can’t monitor radiation levels across the zone because Russian soldiers stole the main server for the system, severing the connection on March 2. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Saturday it still wasn’t receiving remote data from its monitoring systems. The Russians even took Chernobyl staffers’ personal radiation monitors….
When the Russians hurriedly departed March 31 as part of a withdrawal from the region that left behind scorched tanks and traumatized communities, they took more than 150 Ukrainian national guard members into Belarus. Shevchuck fears they’re now in Russia. In their rush, the Russians gave nuclear plant managers a choice: Sign a document saying the soldiers had protected the site and there were no complaints, or be taken into Belarus. The managers signed.

The article includes more stories from Chernobyl’s staff:
Even now, weeks after the Russians left, “I need to calm down,” the plant’s main security engineer, Valerii Semenov, told The Associated Press. He worked 35 days straight, sleeping only three hours a night, rationing cigarettes and staying on even after the Russians allowed a shift change. “I was afraid they would install something and damage the system,” he said in an interview….

Another Ukrainian nuclear plant, at Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine, remains under Russian control. It is the largest in Europe.

Long-time Slashdot reader MattSparkes also notes reports that researchers at Chernobyl “had been looking for bacteria to eat radioactive waste — but they now fear that their work was irreparably lost during the Russian invasion of the facility.”

New Scientist reports (in a pay-walled article) that scientist Olena Pareniuk “was attempting to identify bacteria that could consume radioactive waste within Chernobyl’s destroyed reactor before the Russian invasion. If her samples are lost it will likely be impossible to replace them.”

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Is Clean Energy Buried at the Bottom of Abandoned Oil Wells?

“The U.S. is spending millions to explore a surprising source of untapped power,” reports Recode, describing a new pilot program from America’s Department of Energy”

Geothermal energy works on a simple premise: The Earth’s core is hot, and by drilling even just a few miles underground, we can tap into that practically unlimited heat source to generate energy for our homes and businesses without creating nearly as many of the greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning fossil fuels. However, drilling doesn’t come cheap — it accounts for half the cost of most geothermal energy projects — and requires specialized labor to map the subsurface, drill into the ground, and install the infrastructure needed to bring energy to the surface.

But the US, in the wake of an oil and gas boom, just so happens to have millions of oil and gas wells sitting abandoned across the country. And oil and gas wells, it turns out, happen to share many of the same characteristics as geothermal wells — namely that they are deep holes in the ground, with pipes that can bring fluids up to the surface. So, the DOE asks, why not repurpose them?

That’s exactly what the agency’s pilot program, called Wells of Opportunity: ReAmplify, aims to do, awarding a total of $8.4 million to four projects across the country that will each try to tap into some of those old wells to extract geothermal energy rather than gas or oil. If they work, they could be the key to not only reducing the country’s use of planet-damaging fossil fuels, but also helping answer the question of how to transition many of the more than 125,000 people who work in oil and gas extraction across the country into clean-energy jobs….

[T]he next year or so will be spent on planning and assessing the feasibility of turning oil wells into geothermal resources, after which energy generation will slowly ramp up. The biggest question is just how scalable these ideas are: One megawatt is, after all, a pittance compared to the country’s energy needs.

“Some European countries already rely on direct use of geothermal energy on a large scale,” the article points out.

Volcanically-active Iceland, for example, “uses its vast reserves of geothermal energy to heat 90 percent of its homes.”

Thanks to Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the story

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Michigan Announces America’s First Public In-Road Charging Test for Electric Vehicles

The governor of Michigan has announced America’s first “public wireless in-road charging system,” which would allow electric vehicles (EV) to charge — both while in motion and when stationary.

The GreenBiz site takes a look at this “inductive vehicle charging pilot program.”
There’s perhaps no place more fitting for this pilot than Detroit. The city that led the nation’s first wave of automobile technology is helping lead its second, as the Michigan Department of Transportation has awarded a $1.9 million contract to Electreon to install one mile of in-road EV charging in Motor City.

“Wireless is the future for this technology,” said Stefan Tongur, vice president of business development for Electreon in the U.S. The wireless charging company is already building out the tech across Europe, where it has pilots in Germany, Italy and Sweden. The Michigan project is expected to be operational in 2023.

“We’ve always, for the past century, stopped to fuel the car, and we’re thinking the same with EVs,” Tongur said. But that creates many challenges when it comes to large-scale batteries and fleets especially, Tongur noted… So Electreon and others envision a network of strategic corridors with wireless, in-road charging that could gradually power vehicles along a route, rather than all at once at the destination. Fleet operators could either pay a subscription to use the chargers or integrate the costs into highway tolling, depending on the situation, Tongur said.

He described Electreon’s business model as “charging as a service.”

Alex Gruzen, CEO of wireless charging company WiTricity, tells the site this technology ultimately could accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. “The company’s own research indicates that wireless charging can increase a consumer’s intent to purchase an EV by 68%, according to Gruzen, which could help move EVs beyond the early adopter stage.”

Or, as Gruzen puts it, “What we want to do is show that the EV ownership experience can be better than any experience you’ve ever had with a car before.”

Thanks to Slashdot reader doyouwantahotpocket for submitting the story.

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Should Companies Audit Their Software Stacks for Critical Open Source Dependencies?

Thoughtworks is a technology consultancy/distributed agile software design company. The principle technologist in its CTO’s office warns that managers of IT assets “need to keep up” with the changing economics of open source:

Early 2022 has brought with it an unusually high level of commotion in the open-source community, largely focused on the economics of who — and how we — should pay for “free” software. But this isn’t just some geeky flame war. What’s at stake is critical for vast swaths of the business world….

We know of many open-source enthusiasts who maintain their software personally while leading busy professional lives — the last thing they want is the responsibility of a service-level agreement because someone paid them for their creation. So, is this the end of the road for the open-source dream? Certainly, many of the open-source naysayers will view the recent upheavals as proof of a failed approach. They couldn’t be more wrong. What we’re seeing today is a direct result of the success of open-source software. That success means there isn’t a one-size-fits-all description to define open-source software, nor one economic model for how it can succeed.

For internet giants like Facebook or Netflix, the popularity, or otherwise, of their respective JavaScript library and software tool — React and Chaos Monkey — is beside the point. For such companies, open-source releases are almost a matter of employer branding — a way to show off their engineering chops to potential employees. The likelihood of them altering licensing models to create new revenue streams is small enough that most enterprises need not lose sleep over it. Nonetheless, if these open-source tools form a critical part of your software stack or development process, you might want some form of contingency plan — you’re likely to have very little sway over future developments, so understanding your risks helps.

For companies that have built platforms containing open-source software, the risks are more uncertain. This is in line with Thoughtworks’ view that all businesses can benefit from a greater awareness of what software is running in their various systems. In such cases, we advise companies to consider the extent to which they’re reliant on that piece of software: are there viable alternatives? In extreme circumstances, could you fork the code and maintain it internally?

Once you start looking at crucial parts of your software stack where you’re reliant on hobbyists, your choices begin to dwindle. But if Log4J’s case has taught us anything, it’s this: auditing what goes into the software that runs your business puts you in a better place than being completely caught by surprise.

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OpenBSD 7.1 Released with Support for Apple M1, Improvements for ARM64 and RISC-V

“Everyone’s favorite security focused operating system, OpenBSD 7.1 has been released for a number of architectures,” writes long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker, “including Apple M1 chips.”

Phoronix calls it “the newest version of this popular, security-minded BSD operating system.”
With OpenBSD 7.1, the Apple Silicon support is now considered “ready for general use” with keypad/touchpad support for M1 laptops, a power management controller driver added, I2C and SPI controller drivers, and a variety of other driver additions for supporting the Apple Silicon hardware.
OpenBSD 7.1 also has a number of other improvements benefiting the 64-bit ARM (ARM64) and RISC-V architectures. OpenBSD 7.1 also brings SMP kernel improvements, support for futexes with shared anonymous memory, and more. On the graphics front there is updating the Linux DRM code against the state found in Linux 5.15.26 as well as now enabling Intel Elkhart Lake / Jasper Lake / Rocket Lake support.

The Register notes OpenBSD now “supports a surprisingly wide range of hardware: x86-32, x86-64, ARM7, Arm64, DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, Hitachi SH4, Motorola 88000, MIPS64, SPARC64, RISC-V 64, and both Apple PowerPC and IBM POWER.”
The Register’s FOSS desk ran up a copy in VirtualBox, and we were honestly surprised how quick and easy it was. By saying “yes” to everything, it automatically partitioned the VM’s disk into a rather complex array of nine slices, installed the OS, a boot loader, an X server and display manager, plus the FVWM window manager. After a reboot, we got a graphical login screen and then a rather late-1980s Motif-style desktop with an xterm.
It was easy to install XFCE, which let us set the screen resolution and other modern niceties, and there are also KDE, GNOME, and other pretty front-ends, plus plenty of familiar tools such as Mozilla apps, LibreOffice and so on….

We were expecting to have to do a lot more work. Yes, OpenBSD is a niche OS, but the project gave the world OpenSSH, LibreSSL, the PF firewall as used in macOS, much of Android’s Bionic C library, and more besides…. In a world of multi-gigabyte OSes, it’s quite refreshing. It felt like stepping back into the early 1990s, the era of Real Unix, when you had to put in some real effort and learn stuff in order to bend the OS to your will — but in return, you got something relatively bulletproof.

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How US Billionaires Can Avoid Paying Income Taxes

On April 15th Americans filed their taxes with the Internal Revenue Service (or IRS). But on the same day ProPublica was reporting a difference between “the rich and the rest of us” — that their wealth just isn’t easily defined:

For one, wages make up only a small part of their earnings. And they have broad latitude in how they account for their businesses and investments. Their incomes aren’t defined by a tax form. Instead, they represent the triumph of careful planning by skilled professionals who strive to deliver the most-advantageous-yet-still-plausible answers to their clients. For them, a tax return is an opening bid to the IRS. It’s a kind of theory….

We counted at least 16 other billionaires (along with hundreds of other ultrawealthy people, including hedge fund managers and former CEOs) among the stimulus check recipients. This is just how our system works. It’s why, in 2011, Jeff Bezos, then worth $18 billion, qualified for $4,000 in refundable child tax credits. (Bezos didn’t respond to our questions.) A recent study by the Brookings Institution set out with a simple aim: to compare what owners of privately held businesses say they earn with the income that appears on the owners’ tax returns. The findings were stark: “More than half of economic income generated by closely held businesses does not appear on tax returns and that ratio has declined significantly over the past 25 years.”

That doesn’t mean business owners are illegally hiding income from the IRS, though it’s certainly a possible contributor. There are plenty of ways to make income vanish legally. Tax perks like depreciation allow owners to create tax losses even as they expand their businesses… “Losses” from one business can also be used to wipe out income from another. Sometimes spilling red ink can be lots of fun: For billionaires, owning sports teams and thoroughbred racehorses are exciting loss-makers. Congress larded the tax code with these sorts of provisions on the logic that what’s good for businesses is good for the economy. Often, the evidence for this broader effect is thin or nonexistent, but you can be sure all this is great for business owners. The Brookings study found that households worth $10 million or more benefited the most from being able to make income disappear….

In the tax system we have, billionaires who’d really rather not pay income taxes can usually find a way not to. They can bank their accumulating gains tax-free and deploy tax losses to wipe out whatever taxable income they might have. They can even look forward to a few thousand dollars here and there from the government to help them raise their kids or get through a national emergency.
This system also means it’s much harder to catch underreported income on the tax returns of the wealthy, the article points out. And with so many legal deducations, it’s also hard to prove the low incomes really exceed what the law allows. Even then, the wealthy can still hire an army of the best tax lawyers to make their case in court.

And now thousands of auditors have left the agency — and have not been replaced. The end result? “Audits of the wealthy have plummeted.

“Business owners have still more reason to be bold….”

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