Indiana Becomes 9th State To Make CS a High School Graduation Requirement

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: Last October, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org publicly called out Indiana in its 2023 State of Computer Science Education report, advising the Hoosier state it needed to heed Code.org’s new policy recommendation and “adopt a graduation requirement for all high school students in computer science.” Having already joined 49 other Governors who signed a Code.org-organized compact calling for increased K-12 CS education in his state after coming under pressure from hundreds of the nation’s tech, business, and nonprofit leaders, Indiana Governor Eric J. Holcomb apparently didn’t need much convincing. “We must prepare our students for a digitally driven world by requiring Computer Science to graduate from high school,” Holcomb proclaimed in his January State of the State Address. Two months later — following Microsoft-applauded testimony for legislation to make it so by Code.org partners College Board and Nextech (the Indiana Code.org Regional Partner which is also paid by the Indiana Dept. of Education to prepare educators to teach K-12 CS, including Code.org’s curriculum) — Holcomb on Wednesday signed House Bill 1243 into law, making CS a HS graduation requirement. The IndyStar reports students beginning with the Class of 2029 will be required to take a computer science class that must include instruction in algorithms and programming, computing systems, data and analysis, impacts of computing and networks and the internet.

The new law is not Holcomb’s first foray into K-12 CS education. Back in 2017, Holcomb and Indiana struck a deal giving Infosys (a big Code.org donor) the largest state incentive package ever — $31M to bring 2,000 tech employees to Central Indiana — that also promised to make Indiana kids more CS savvy through the Infosys Foundation USA, headed at the time by Vandana Sikka, a Code.org Board member and wife of Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka. Following the announcement of the now-stalled deal, Holcomb led a delegation to Silicon Valley where he and Indiana University (IU) President Michael McRobbie joined Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi and Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka on a Thought Leader panel at the Infosys Confluence 2017 conference to discuss Preparing America for Tomorrow. At the accompanying Infosys Crossroads 2017 CS education conference, speakers included Sikka’s wife Vandana, McRobbie’s wife Laurie Burns McRobbie, Nextech President and co-CEO Karen Jung, Code.org execs, and additional IU educators. Later that year, IU ‘First Lady’ Laurie Burns McRobbie announced that Indiana would offer the IU Bloomington campus as a venue for Infosys Foundation USA’s inaugural Pathfinders Summer Institute, a national event for K-12 teacher education in CS that offered professional development from Code.org and Nextech, as well as an unusual circumvent-your-school’s-approval-and-name-your-own-stipend funding arrangement for teachers via an Infosys partnership with the NSF and DonorsChoose that was unveiled at the White House. And that, Schoolhouse Rock Fans, is one more example of how Microsoft’s National Talent Strategy is becoming Code.org-celebrated K-12 CS state laws!

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Hertz CEO Resigns After Blowing Big Gamble On EVs

Press2ToContinue quotes a report from the Gateway Pundit: Stephen Scherr, chief executive officer of Hertz Global Holdings Inc. and a member of its board of directors, will step down on March 31, following the car rental company’s largest quarterly loss since 2020 after a risky bet on electric vehicles. According to Fox Business, Scherr is working with Gil West, former chief operating officer of Delta Airlines and General Motors’ Cruise unit, to ensure a smooth transition. West will officially start his new role at Hertz on April 1.

Scherr, 59, joined Hertz two years ago as the company was emerging from bankruptcy and putting a big focus on EVs during that time. Hertz soon discovered that EVs are more expensive to maintain than they had initially thought. Scherr reportedly told investors that Hertz’s profits experienced a $348 million loss, which he blamed EVs for. In January, Hertz announced its plan to offload 20,000 electric vehicles from its U.S. fleet throughout 2024, and switch back to gas cars.

In November, the Associated Press reported on a Consumer Reports survey that found EVs from the 2021 to 2023 model years are significantly less reliable than gasoline-powered vehicles. A whopping eighty percent less reliable, according to the AP, particularly with battery and charging systems, as well as fit issues with body panels and interiors. Car dealers and manufacturers are reportedly also struggling to sell EVs despite using deep discounts and promotional tactics. In 2021, Hertz announced plans to order 100,000 Tesla vehicles by the end of 2022. It later said it would buy “up to” 65,000 Polestar EVs for its rental fleet over the next five years.

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Nvidia Reveals Blackwell B200 GPU, the ‘World’s Most Powerful Chip’ For AI

Sean Hollister reports via The Verge: Nvidia’s must-have H100 AI chip made it a multitrillion-dollar company, one that may be worth more than Alphabet and Amazon, and competitors have been fighting to catch up. But perhaps Nvidia is about to extend its lead — with the new Blackwell B200 GPU and GB200 “superchip.” Nvidia says the new B200 GPU offers up to 20 petaflops of FP4 horsepower from its 208 billion transistors and that a GB200 that combines two of those GPUs with a single Grace CPU can offer 30 times the performance for LLM inference workloads while also potentially being substantially more efficient. It “reduces cost and energy consumption by up to 25x” over an H100, says Nvidia.

Training a 1.8 trillion parameter model would have previously taken 8,000 Hopper GPUs and 15 megawatts of power, Nvidia claims. Today, Nvidia’s CEO says 2,000 Blackwell GPUs can do it while consuming just four megawatts. On a GPT-3 LLM benchmark with 175 billion parameters, Nvidia says the GB200 has a somewhat more modest seven times the performance of an H100, and Nvidia says it offers 4x the training speed. Nvidia told journalists one of the key improvements is a second-gen transformer engine that doubles the compute, bandwidth, and model size by using four bits for each neuron instead of eight (thus, the 20 petaflops of FP4 I mentioned earlier). A second key difference only comes when you link up huge numbers of these GPUs: a next-gen NVLink switch that lets 576 GPUs talk to each other, with 1.8 terabytes per second of bidirectional bandwidth. That required Nvidia to build an entire new network switch chip, one with 50 billion transistors and some of its own onboard compute: 3.6 teraflops of FP8, says Nvidia. Further reading: Nvidia in Talks To Acquire AI Infrastructure Platform Run:ai

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Did the Plastic Industry Knowingly Push Recycling Myths For Decades?

A PBS reporter “digs into a new report covering the plastic industry’s tactics to push recycling — and avoid regulation,” according to a new video from PBS News Weekend:

A new report by the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmentalist group, says newly uncovered statements from oil and plastics executives underscore the industry’s decades-long secret skepticism about the viability and efficacy of recycling. The authors of the report reviewed old investigations and new documents, including previously unknown assertions from industry executives. In 1994, one Exxon Chemical executive put the industry’s support for plastics recycling in blunt terms, saying “we are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.”

Another representative from Dupont noted in 1992 that recycling goals were set knowing full well “they were unlikely to meet them.”
In the video NPR correspondent Michael Copley says “I think it’s always striking, when you see a report like this that unearths new statements, new quotes, and to see the way in which they really seem to view recycling as sort of public relations tool, as opposed to an environmental tool that they sort of presented publicly…”

I think the other reason why this matters is, it could potentially be legally problematic for the industry. And by that I mean the oil and gas industry right now is facing dozens of lawsuits from states and localities, based in part on statements it made about climate change and fossil fuel, going back decades. We know that the state of California has opened an investigation into the role of oil and gas companies and the petrochemical industry in the creation of the plastic waste crisis that we’re facing. And the group that put out the report, the Center for Climate Integrity, was upfront, saying that it was compiling this to serve as kind of the fact basis, or the basis of evidence, for potential legal action.
A plastics trade group accused the report of citing “outdated, decades-old technologies” and “mischaracterizing the current state of the industry,” saying they’re looking to have all plastic packaging be “reused, recycled, and recovered by 2040.”

But PBS’s reporter counters that there’s “deep skepticism” of the economics from market analysts — as well as from material scientists. “Obviously the industry has put out this promise. I think that its critics will say, ‘We have been hearing these promises, or promises like it, for decades now, and that there’s nothing in the record to think that now is any different.”

He adds that activists and businesses agree that government regulation will ultimately play a big role. “That gets back in large part to the economics of this. If companies don’t have to deal with these costs, it’s hard to imagine that they will in a sustained way create systems to deal with this if they don’t have to.”

So what’s the solution? Some ideas being seriously discussed:

Reducing plastic production “to a level that is more manageable with recycling systems.”Getting rid of types of plastic that are “especially hard to recycle or you can’t recycle.””Being more transparent about what chemicals go into this stuff that again make recycling hard.”

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Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed

In 2020 Oregon passed Measure 110, decriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs.

But now “America’s most radical experiment with drug decriminalization has ended,” writes the Atlantic, “after more than three years of painful results.”

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has pledged to sign legislation repealing the principal elements of the ballot initiative… Possessing hard drugs is again a crime in Oregon, and courts will return to mandating treatment for offenders. Oregonians had supported Measure 110 with 59 percent of the vote in 2020, but three years later, polling showed that 64 percent wanted some or all of it repealed…

More than $260 million were allocated to services such as naloxone distribution, employment and housing services, and voluntary treatment… Once drugs were decriminalized and destigmatized, the thinking went, those who wanted to continue using would be more willing to access harm-reduction services that helped them use in safer ways. Meanwhile, the many people who wanted to quit using drugs but had been too ashamed or fearful to seek treatment would do so. Advocates foresaw a surge of help-seeking, a reduction in drug-overdose deaths, fewer racial disparities in the health and criminal-justice systems, lower rates of incarceration, and safer neighborhoods for all…

Measure 110 did not reduce Oregon’s drug problems. The drug-overdose-death rate increased by 43 percent in 2021, its first year of implementation — and then kept rising. The latest CDC data show that in the 12 months ending in September 2023, deaths by overdose grew by 41.6 percent, versus 2.1 percent nationwide. No other state saw a higher rise in deaths… Neither did decriminalization produce a flood of help-seeking. The replacement for criminal penalties, a $100 ticket for drug possession with the fine waived if the individual called a toll-free number for a health assessment, with the aim of encouraging treatment, failed completely. More than 95 percent of people ignored the ticket, for which — in keeping with the spirit of Measure 110 — there was no consequence. The cost of the hotline worked out to about $7,000 per completed phone call, according to The Economist. These realities, as well as associated disorder such as open-air drug markets and a sharp rise in violent crime — while such crime was falling nationally — led Oregonians to rethink their drug policy.

The article notes that Oregon was the first U.S. state to decriminalize marijuana back in 1973, and had long shown low rates of imprisonment for non-violent crimes (diverting offenders into so-called “drug courts which could mandate treatment or order court-directed supervision). “However, after Measure 110 was passed and the threat of jail time eliminated, the flow of people into these programs slowed.”

But “One thing Measure 110 got right, at least in principle, is that Oregon’s addiction-treatment system was grossly underfunded,” the article concludes. And it adds that the newly-passed law now “provides extensive new funding for immediate needs, including detox facilities, sobering centers, treatment facilities, and the staff to support those services.”

They recommend other states adopt “adequately funded, evidence-based prevention and treatment” — and instead of punitive incarcerations, “use criminal justice productively to discourage drug use.”

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Mozilla Ends its Privacy-Friendly GPS-Style Location Service

Mozilla Location Service offered “a free, open way to offer GPS-style location detection features” for developers on devices without GPS hardware, remembers the Linux blog OMG Ubuntu. It used signals like Wi-Fi access points and Bluetooth beacons “without any of the privacy implications most competing geolocation services have.”

But Friday they reported that Mozilla “has announced it is ending access to Mozilla Location Service (MLS), which provides accurate, privacy-respecting, and crowdsourced geolocation data.”

Developers and 3rd-party projects that use MLS to detect a users’ location, such as the freedesktop.org location framework GeoClue, which is used by apps like GNOME Maps and Weather, have only a few months left to continue using the service… In late March, POST data submissions will return 403 responses. Finally, on June 12, all 3rd-party API keys will be removed and MLS data only accessible by Mozilla…

MLS’ accuracy has declined in recent years. Patent infringement claims in 2019 saw Mozilla reach a settlement to avoid litigation. As part of that settlement it was forced to make changes to MLS that impacted its ability to invest in (commercially exploit?) and improve the service.

The article notes that GeoClue “already supports multiple location detection methods, including IP-based ones,” so it should continue operating.

“But the sad reality is that there just aren’t a lot of free, open, privacy-friendly, accurate, and (rather importantly for a framework built in to Linux desktops) reliable alternatives to Mozilla Location Services, which has built up a colossal ‘signal map’ from which to pinpoint locations.”

“We are grateful for the contributions of the community to MLS to both the code and the dataset,” a Mozilla senior engineering manager said in a statement.

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Microsoft Criticized For Chrome Popup Ads Resembling Malware That Urge Users to Switch to Bing

“Multiple users around the world have started to notice new Microsoft Bing pop-up ads that look a lot like malware…” reports Lifehacker, describing the adds as “very low quality” and “extremely pixelated…”

“It’s just Microsoft doing a bad job of trying to get you to switch to its products.”

The Register explains:

[W]hile using Google’s desktop browser on Windows 10 or 11, a dialog box suddenly and irritatingly appears to the side of the screen urging folks to make Microsoft’s Bing the default search engine in Chrome. Not only that, netizens are told they can use Chrome to interact with Bing’s OpenAI GPT-4-powered chat bot, allowing them to ask questions and get answers using natural language. We can forgive those who thought this was malware at first glance. “Chat with GPT-4 for free on Chrome!” the pop-up advert, shown below, declares. “Get hundreds of daily chat turns with Bing AI.”

It goes on: “Try Bing as default search,” then alleges: “Easy to switch back. Install Bing Service to improve chat experience.” Users are encouraged to click on “Yes” in the Microsoft pop-up to select Bing as Chrome’s default search engine. What’s really gross is the next part. Clicking “Yes” installs the Bing Chrome extension and changes the default search provider. Chrome alerts the user in another dialog box that something potentially malicious is trying to update their settings. Google’s browser recommends you click on a “Change it back” button to undo the tweak.

But Redmond is one step ahead, displaying a message underneath Chrome’s alert that reads: “Wait — don’t change it back! If you do, you’ll turn off Microsoft Bing Search for Chrome and lose access to Bing AI with GPT-4 and DALL-E 3.”

This is where we’re at: Two Big Tech giants squabbling in front of users via dialog boxes.

“Essentially, users are caught in a war of pop-ups between one company trying to pressure you into using its AI assistant/search engine,” writes Engadget, “and another trying to keep you on its default (which you probably wanted if you installed Chrome in the first place).

“Big Tech’s battles for AI and search supremacy are turning into obnoxious virtual shouting matches in front of users’ eyeballs as they try to browse the web.”

Or, as Lifehacker puts it, “If Microsoft really wants to increase the number of users turning to Bing for its search results, it needs to prove that there’s a real reason to switch. And these malware-like ads aren’t the solution.”

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TikTik is Banned in China, Notes X User Community – Along With Most US Social Media

Newsweek points out that a Chinese government post arguing the bill is “on the wrong side of fair competition” was flagged by users on X. “TikTok is banned in the People’s Republic of China,” the X community note read. (The BBC reports that “Instead, Chinese users use a similar app, Douyin, which is only available in China and subject to monitoring and censorship by the government.”)

Newsweek adds that China “has also blocked access to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google services. X itself is also banned — though Chinese diplomats use the microblogging app to deliver Beijing’s messaging to the wider world.”

From the Wall Street Journal:
Among the top concerns for [U.S.] intelligence leaders is that they wouldn’t even necessarily be able to detect a Chinese influence operation if one were taking place [on TikTok] due to the opacity of the platform and how its algorithm surfaces content to users. Such operations, FBI director Christopher Wray said this week in congressional testimony, “are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national-security concerns represented by TikTok so significant….”

Critics of the bill include libertarian-leaning lawmakers, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who have decried it as a form of government censorship. “The Constitution says that you have a First Amendment right to express yourself,” Paul told reporters Thursday. TikTok’s users “express themselves through dancing or whatever else they do on TikTok. You can’t just tell them they can’t do that.” In the House, a bloc of 50 Democrats voted against the bill, citing concerns about curtailing free speech and the impact on people who earn income on the app. Some Senate Democrats have raised similar worries, as well as an interest in looking at a range of social-media issues at rival companies such as Meta Platforms.

“The basic idea should be to put curbs on all social media, not just one,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said Thursday. “If there’s a problem with privacy, with how our children are treated, then we need to curb that behavior wherever it occurs.”
Some context from the Columbia Journalism Review:
Roughly one-third of Americans aged 18-29 regularly get their news from TikTok, the Pew Research Center found in a late 2023 survey. Nearly half of all TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app, a higher percentage than for any other social media platform aside from Twitter.

Almost 40 percent of young adults were using TikTok and Instagram for their primary Web search instead of the traditional search engines, a Google senior vice president said in mid-2022 — a number that’s almost certainly grown since then. Overall, TikTok claims 150 million American users, almost half the US population; two-thirds of Americans aged 18-29 use the app.
Some U.S. politicians believe TikTok “radicalized” some of their supporters “with disinformation or biased reporting,” according to the article.

Meanwhile in the Guardian, a Duke University law professor argues “this saga demands a broader conversation about safeguarding democracy in the digital age.”

The European Union’s newly enacted AI act provides a blueprint for a more holistic approach, using an evidence- and risk-based system that could be used to classify platforms like TikTok as high-risk AI systems subject to more stringent regulatory oversight, with measures that demand transparency, accountability and defensive measures against misuse.

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Pi Calculated to 105 Trillion Digits. (Stored on 1 Petabyte of SSDs)

Pi was calculated to 100 trillion decimal places in 2022 by a Google team lead by cloud developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao.

But 2024’s “pi day” saw a new announcement…

After successfully breaking the speed record for calculating pi to 100 trillion digits last year, the team at StorageReview has taken it up a notch, revealing all the numbers of Pi up to 105 trillion digits! Spoiler: the 105 trillionth digit of Pi is 6!

Owner and Editor-in-Chief Brian Beeler led the team that used 36 Solidigm SSDs (nearly a petabyte) for their unprecedented capacity and reliability required to store the calculated digits of Pi. Although there is no practical application for this many digits, the exercise underscores the astounding capabilities of modern hardware and an achievement in computational and storage technology…

For an undertaking of this size, which took 75 days, the role of storage cannot be understated. “For the Pi computation, we’re entirely restricted by storage, says Beeler. “Faster CPUs will help accelerate the math, but the limiting factor to many new world records is the amount of local storage in the box. For this run, we’re again leveraging Solidigm D5-P5316 30.72TB SSDs to help us get a little over 1P flash in the system.

“These SSDs are the only reason we could break through the prior records and hit 105 trillion Pi digits.”

“Leveraging a combination of open-source and proprietary software, the team at StorageReview optimized the algorithmic process to fully exploit the hardware’s capabilities, reducing computational time and enhancing efficiency,” Beeler says in the announcement.

There’s a video on YouTubewhere the team discusses their effort.

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How Nintendo’s Destruction of Yuzu Is Rocking the Emulator World

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: When Nintendo sued the developers of Yuzu out of existence on March 4th, it wasn’t just an attack on the leading way to play Nintendo Switch games without a Switch. It was a warning to anyone building a video game emulator. Seven developers have now stepped away from projects, are shutting them down, or have left the emulation scene entirely. Of those that remain, many are circling the wagons, getting quieter and more careful, trying not to paint targets on their backs. Four developers declined to talk to The Verge, telling me they didn’t want to draw attention. One even tried to delete answers to my questions after we’d begun, suddenly scared of attracting press.

Not everyone is so afraid. Four other emulator teams tell me they’re optimistic Nintendo won’t challenge them, that they’re on strong legal footing, and that Yuzu may have been an unusually incriminating case. One decade-long veteran tells me everyone’s just a bit more worried. But when I point out that Nintendo didn’t have to prove a thing in court, they all admit they don’t have money for lawyers. They say they’d probably be forced to roll over, like Yuzu, if the Japanese gaming giant came knocking. “I would do what I’d have to do,” the most confident of the four tells me. “I would want to fight it… but at the same time, I know we exist because we don’t antagonize Nintendo.”

There’s a new meme where Yuzu is the mythical Hydra: cut off one head, and two more take its place. It’s partly true in how multiple forks of Yuzu (and 3DS emulator Citra) sprung up shortly after their predecessors died: Suyu, Sudachi, Lemonade, and Lime are a few of the public names. But they’re not giving Nintendo the middle finger: they’re treating Nintendo’s lawsuit like a guidebook about how not to piss off the company. In its legal complaint, Nintendo claimed Yuzu was “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale,” giving users “detailed instructions” on how to “get it running with unlawful copies of Nintendo Switch games,” among other things. Okay, no more guides, say the Switch emulator developers who spoke to me. They also say they’re stripping out some parts of Yuzu that made it easier to play pirated games. As Ars Technica reported, a forked version called Suyu will require you to bring the firmware, title.keys, and prod.keys from your Switch before you can decrypt and play Nintendo games. Only one of those was technically required before. (Never mind that most people don’t have an easily hackable first-gen Switch and would likely download these things off the net.) The developer of another fork tells me he plans to do something similar, making users “fend for yourself” by making sure the code doesn’t auto-generate any keys.

Most developers I spoke to are also trying to make it clear they aren’t profiting at Nintendo’s expense. One who initially locked early access builds behind a donation page has stopped doing that, making them publicly available on GitHub instead. The leader of another project tells me nothing will ever be paywalled, and for now, there’s “strictly no donation,” either. When I ask about the Dolphin Emulator, which faced a minor challenge from Nintendo last year, I’m told it publicly exposes its tiny nonprofit budget for anyone to scrutinize. But I don’t know that these steps are enough to prevent Nintendo from throwing around its weight again, particularly when it comes to emulating the Nintendo Switch, its primary moneymaker. Since Yuzu’s shut down, a slew of other emulators left the scene. The include (as highlighted by The Verge):

– The Citra emulator for Nintendo 3DS is gone
– The Pizza Boy emulators for Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color are gone
– The Drastic emulator for Nintendo DS is free for now and will be removed
– The lead developer of Yuzu and Citra has stepped away from emulation
– The lead developer of Strato, a Switch emulator, has stepped away from emulation
– Dynarmic, used to speed up various emulators including Yuzu, has abruptly ended development
– One contributor on Ryujinx, a Switch emulator, has stepped away from the project
– AetherSX2, a PS2 emulator, is finally gone (mostly unrelated; development was suspended a year ago)

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