AI Learns To Write Computer Code In ‘Stunning’ Advance

DeepMind’s new artificial intelligence system called AlphaCode was able to “achieve approximately human-level performance” in a programming competition. The findings have been published in the journal Science. Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine:
AlphaCode’s creators focused on solving those difficult problems. Like the Codex researchers, they started by feeding a large language model many gigabytes of code from GitHub, just to familiarize it with coding syntax and conventions. Then, they trained it to translate problem descriptions into code, using thousands of problems collected from programming competitions. For example, a problem might ask for a program to determine the number of binary strings (sequences of zeroes and ones) of length n that don’t have any consecutive zeroes. When presented with a fresh problem, AlphaCode generates candidate code solutions (in Python or C++) and filters out the bad ones. But whereas researchers had previously used models like Codex to generate tens or hundreds of candidates, DeepMind had AlphaCode generate up to more than 1 million.

To filter them, AlphaCode first keeps only the 1% of programs that pass test cases that accompany problems. To further narrow the field, it clusters the keepers based on the similarity of their outputs to made-up inputs. Then, it submits programs from each cluster, one by one, starting with the largest cluster, until it alights on a successful one or reaches 10 submissions (about the maximum that humans submit in the competitions). Submitting from different clusters allows it to test a wide range of programming tactics. That’s the most innovative step in AlphaCode’s process, says Kevin Ellis, a computer scientist at Cornell University who works AI coding.

After training, AlphaCode solved about 34% of assigned problems, DeepMind reports this week in Science. (On similar benchmarks, Codex achieved single-digit-percentage success.) To further test its prowess, DeepMind entered AlphaCode into online coding competitions. In contests with at least 5000 participants, the system outperformed 45.7% of programmers. The researchers also compared its programs with those in its training database and found it did not duplicate large sections of code or logic. It generated something new — a creativity that surprised Ellis. The study notes the long-term risk of software that recursively improves itself. Some experts say such self-improvement could lead to a superintelligent AI that takes over the world. Although that scenario may seem remote, researchers still want the field of AI coding to institute guardrails, built-in checks and balances.

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Did Sam Bankman-Fried Finally Admit the Obvious?

CoinDesk’s Daniel Kuhn writes in an opinion piece: Despite the focus on FTX following its catastrophic collapse, it’s remarkable how little we know about how the crypto exchange and its in-house trading firm Alameda Research actually operated. New CEO John Jay Ray III has called Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto trading empire the “greatest failure of corporate controls” he’s seen. Wednesday, Coffeezilla, a YouTuber with a rising star who has made a career of shining a light on sketchy projects in and out of crypto, pressed Bankman-Fried for information related to how different customer accounts were treated at the exchange. It turns out, there wasn’t much differentiation — at the very least during the final days the exchange was in business, Bankman-Fried admitted. “At the time, we wanted to treat customers equally,” SBF said during a Twitter Spaces event. “That effectively meant that there was, you know, if you want to put it this way, like fungibility created” between the exchange’s spot and derivatives business lines. For Coffeezilla, this looks like a smoking gun that fraud was committed.

At the very least, this is a contradiction of what Bankman-Fried had said just minutes before when first asked about the exchange’s terms of service (ToS). “I do think we’re treating them differently,” Bankman-Fried said, referring to customer assets used for “margin versus staking versus spot versus futures collateral.” All of those services come with different levels of risk, different promises made to customers and different responsibilities for the exchange. According to FTX’s ToS, everyday users just looking to buy or store their cryptocurrencies on the centralized exchange could trust they were doing just that, buying and storing cryptographically unique digital assets. But now, thanks to skillful questioning by Coffeezilla, we know there were instead “omnibus” wallets and that spot and derivatives traders were essentially assuming the same level of risk.

We can also assume this was a longstanding practice at FTX. Bankman-Fried noted that during the “run on the exchange” (pardon the language), when people were attempting to get their assets off before withdrawals were shut down, FTX allowed “generalized withdrawals” from these omnibus wallets. But he also deflected, saying what, you wanted us to code up an entirely new process during a liquidity crisis? Before now, Bankman-Fried had been asked multiple times about the exchange’s ToS and often managed to derail the conversation. He would often point to other sections of the document that stated clients using margin (taking out debt from FTX) could have their funds used by the exchange. Or he would bring up a vestigial wire process in place before FTX had banking relationships. Apparently, according to SBF, customers had sent money to Alameda to fund accounts on FTX and somewhere along the lines this capital ended up in a rarely seen subaccount. This also had the benefit of inflating Alameda’s books, another dark corner of the empire. Further reading: FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Is Said To Face Market Manipulation Inquiry

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Windows 11 Is Finally Getting a Built-In Screen Recording Tool

Microsoft is finally bringing a built-in screen recorder to Windows. The Verge reports: The Snipping Tool in Windows 11 will soon be updated to include screen recording, meaning Windows users won’t have to rely on the Xbox Game Bar or third-party tools just to record their screens. Windows 11 testers will start getting access to the updated Snipping Tool today, and the new record option will allow you to record an entire screen or even a section that gets cropped. The update comes more than four years after Microsoft first introduced a new screenshot experience for Windows. […] Microsoft has only just started testing this with Windows 11 testers in the Dev Channel, so it’s likely some weeks or months before this Snipping Tool is released to everyone using Windows 11.

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Supercomputer Re-Creates One of the Most Famous Pictures of Earth

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Fifty years ago today, astronauts aboard Apollo 17, NASA’s last crewed mission to the Moon, took an iconic photograph of our planet. The image became known as the Blue Marble — the first fully illuminated picture of Earth, in color, taken by a person. Now, scientists have re-created that image during a test run of a cutting-edge digital climate model. The model can simulate climatic phenomena, such as storms and ocean eddies, at 1-kilometer resolution, as much as 100 times sharper than typical global simulations.

To re-create the swirling winds of the Blue Marble — including a cyclone over the Indian Ocean — the researchers fed weather records from 1972 into the supercomputer-powered software. The resulting world captured distinctive features of the region, such as upwelling waters off the coast of Namibia and long, reedlike cloud coverage. Experts say the stunt highlights the growing sophistication of high-resolution climate models. Those are expected to form the core of the European Union’s Destination Earth project, which aims to create a ‘digital twin’ of Earth to better forecast extreme weather and guide preparation plans.

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Amazon Joins Open Invention Network

Amazon and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) — the world’s largest patent non-aggression consortium. ZDNet reports: OIN has long protected Linux and Linux-related software from patent aggression by rival companies. With the recent increase in patent troll attacks, the OIN is also defending companies from these assaults. This is a natural move for Amazon. Besides relying on Linux and open-source software both for its retail and cloud businesses, Amazon has a strict policy against patent infringement, and users who engage in this behavior can have their listings removed or accounts deleted. Nevertheless, like all large companies, Amazon has also been sued for patent violations. Joining the OIN simply makes good business sense. Nithya Ruff, the Amazon Open Source Program Office director, added: “Linux and open source are essential to many of our customers and a key driver of innovation across Amazon. We are proud to support a broad range of open-source projects, foundations, and partners, and we are committed to the long-term success and sustainability of open source as a whole. By joining OIN, we are continuing to strengthen open source communities and helping to ensure technologies like Linux remain thriving and accessible to everyone.”

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Atari Revives Unreleased Arcade Game That Was Too Damn Hard For 1982 Players

Atari is reviving Akka Arrh, a 1982 arcade game canceled because test audiences found it too difficult. Engadget reports: For the wave shooter’s remake, the publisher is teaming up with developer Jeff Minter, whose psychedelic, synthwave style seems an ideal fit for what Atari describes as “a fever dream in the best way possible.” The remake will be released on PC, PS5 and PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Atari VCS in early 2023. The original Akka Arrh cabinet used a trackball to target enemies, as the player controls the Sentinel fixed in the center of the screen to fend off waves of incoming attackers. Surrounding the Sentinel is an octagonal field, which you need to keep clear; if enemies slip in, you can zoom in to fend them off before panning back out to fend off the rest of the wave. Given the simplicity of most games in the early 1980s, it’s unsurprising this relative complexity led to poor test-group screenings.

Since Atari pulled the plug on the arcade version before its release, only three Akka Arrh cabinets are known to exist. But the Minter collaboration isn’t the game’s first public availability. After an arcade ROM leaked online in 2019, Atari released the original this fall as part of its Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration collection. […] Atari says the remake has two modes, 50 levels and saves, so you don’t have to start from the beginning when enemies inevitably overrun your Sentinel. Additionally, the company says it offers accessibility settings to tone down the trippy visuals for people sensitive to intense light, color and animations.

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New Winamp Update Adds Features, Fixes, and (Sigh) Support For ‘Music NFTs’

The release candidate for Winamp version 5.9.1 builds on the groundwork laid by August’s 5.9 update to fix some bugs and add new features to the reanimated music player. “Most of these are straightforward updates or improvements to existing features, but because it’s 2022, one of the only new features is support for music NFTs,” reports Ars Technica. From the report: “Winamp’s latest version lets music fans link their Metamask wallet via Brave, Chrome, or Firefox to Winamp. It then connects their favorite music NFTs to their tried-and-true player,” the company said in a press release provided to Ars. “Winamp supports audio and video files distributed under both the ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards, and is launching this new feature for Ethereum and Polygon/Matic protocols.” To directly display websites needed to download these NFT playlists, according to the release notes, would require an updated rendering engine for Winamp’s in-app browser, which is currently based on Internet Explorer 10.

There’s still plenty here for legacy Winamp fans to like, and it’s nice to see that all the modernization work done in the 5.9 update is paying off in the form of faster updates. Among many other fixes, the new release includes a “memory footprint reduction,” a bandwidth increase for streamed music, an update to OpenSSL 3.0.5, and a few other updates for the underlying codecs and other software that Winamp uses to do its thing. As for the NFT support, Winamp developer Eddy Richman (who goes by the handle “DJ Egg” on the Winamp forums) wrote that people who don’t want it can remove it, either during the install process or after Winamp is installed.

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Apple Music Is Getting a Karaoke Mode

Real-ID Requirement Pushed Back To 2025

frdmfghtr shares a report from NBC News: The Department of Homeland Security announced Monday that it is extending the deadline to require Real ID-compliant identification for air travelers, pushing the start date from May 3, 2023, to May 7, 2025. The deadline for the new IDs has already been extended previously. While time extensions in the past were caused by a lack of full state compliance with the requirements for issuing the more secure driver’s licenses, the deadline was previously pushed from October 2021 to this coming May, officials said at the time, because the pandemic had made it harder for people to get into state motor vehicle departments to obtain the new identifications. “For those who aren’t aware, this requirement came about after the 9/11 attacks way back in 2001, supposedly required to make the IDs harder to counterfeit,” adds Slashdot reader frdmfghtr in a comment. “If the requirement has been pushed out repeatedly to almost 20 years after the original deadline, then it could not have been that necessary.”

In 2005, the U.S. Senate passed the Real ID act 100-0. It was included in the $82 billion Iraq Supplemental Spending Bill.

In an article from 2006, Ars Technica detailed some of the financial and technological challenges associated with implementing the act.

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How ‘Goblin Mode’ Became Oxford’s Word of the Year

This year, Oxford Languages, the creator of the Oxford English Dictionary, titled “goblin mode” as the 2022 Word of the Year, meaning it best reflected the ethos and mood of the past 12 months. The slang term is defined as a “type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.” NPR reports: The term first appeared on Twitter in 2009 but didn’t go viral until 2022, according to Oxford Languages. “It captured the prevailing mood of individuals who rejected the idea of returning to ‘normal life’, or rebelled against the increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and unsustainable lifestyles exhibited on social media,” the group wrote in a press release. “People are embracing their inner goblin,” said Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages.

The Word of the Year is typically based on analyzing language data on emerging words and their popularity. But this year, Oxford Languages incorporated a public vote into the process and asked people to cast their ballot between the top three expressions of the year: “goblin mode,” “metaverse” and “#IStandWith.” More than 300,000 people voted with an overwhelming majority — about 93% — favoring “goblin mode.”

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