Technical Issues’ Stall MLB’s Adoption of Robots to Call Balls and Strikes

Will Major League Baseball games use “automated” umpires next year to watch pitches from home plate and call balls and strikes?
“We still have some technical issues,” baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said Thursday. NBC News reports:

“We haven’t made as much progress in the minor leagues this year as we sort of hoped at this point. I think it’s becoming more and more likely that this will not be a go for ’25.”

Major League Baseball has been experimenting with the automated ball-strike system in minor leagues since 2019. It is being used at all Triple-A parks this year for the second straight season, the robot alone for the first three games of each series and a human with a [robot-assisted] challenge system in the final three.

In “challenge-system” games, robo-umpires are only used for quickly ruling on challenges to calls from human umpires. (As demonstrated in this 11-second video.)

CBS Sports explains:

Each team is given a limited number of “incorrect” challenges per game, which incentivizes judicious use of challenges… In some ways, the challenge system is a compromise between the traditional method of making ball-strike calls and the fully automated approach. That middle ground may make approval by the various stakeholders more likely to happen and may lay the foundation for full automation at some future point.

Manfred cites “a growing consensus in large part” from Major League players that that’s how they’d want to see robo-umpiring implemented, according to a post on X.com from The Athletic’s Evan Drellich. (NBC notes one concern is eliminating the artful way catchers “frame” caught pitches to convince umpires a pitch passed through the strike zone.)

But umpires face greater challenges today, adds CBS Sports:

The strong trend, stretching across years, of increased pitch velocity in the big leagues has complicated the calling of balls and strikes, as has the emphasis on high-spin breaking pitches. Discerning balls from strikes has always been challenging, and the stuff of the contemporary major-league pitcher has made anything like perfect accuracy beyond the capabilities of the human eye. Big-league umpires are highly skilled, but the move toward ball-strike automation and thus a higher tier of accuracy is likely inevitable. Manfred’s Wednesday remarks reinforce that perception.

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Memory Sealing ‘mseal’ System Call Merged For Linux 6.10

“Merged this Friday evening into the Linux 6.10 kernel is the new mseal() system call for memory sealing,” reports Phoronix:

The mseal system call was led by Jeff Xu of Google’s Chrome team. The goal with memory sealing is to also protect the memory mapping itself against modification. The new mseal Linux documentation explains:

“Modern CPUs support memory permissions such as RW and NX bits. The memory permission feature improves security stance on memory corruption bugs, i.e. the attacker can’t just write to arbitrary memory and point the code to it, the memory has to be marked with X bit, or else an exception will happen. Memory sealing additionally protects the mapping itself against modifications. This is useful to mitigate memory corruption issues where a corrupted pointer is passed to a memory management system… Memory sealing can automatically be applied by the runtime loader to seal .text and .rodata pages and applications can additionally seal security-critical data at runtime. A similar feature already exists in the XNU kernel with the VM_FLAGS_PERMANENT flag and on OpenBSD with the mimmutable syscall.”
The mseal system call is designed to be used by the likes of the GNU C Library “glibc” while loading ELF executables to seal non-writable memory segments or by the Google Chrome web browser and other browsers for protecting security sensitive data structures.

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Proposed Zero-Carbon Cement Solution Called ‘Absolute Miracle’

“Concrete and steel production are major sources of CO2 emissions,” writes New Atlas, “but a new solution from Cambridge could recycle both at the same time.”

Throwing old concrete into steel-processing furnaces not only purifies iron but produces “reactivated cement” as a byproduct. If done using renewable energy, the process could make for completely carbon-zero cement.

Concrete is the world’s most used building material, and making it is a particularly dirty business — concrete production alone is responsible for about 8% of total global CO2 emissions. Unfortunately it’s not easy to recycle back into a form that can be used to make new concrete structures… For the new study, Cambridge researchers investigated how waste concrete could be converted back into clinker, the dry component of cement, ready to be used again. “I had a vague idea from previous work that if it were possible to crush old concrete, taking out the sand and stones, heating the cement would remove the water, and then it would form clinker again,” said Dr. Cyrille Dunant, first author of the study…

An electric arc furnace needs a “flux” material, usually lime, to purify the steel. This molten rocky substance captures the impurities, then bubbles to the surface and forms a protective layer that prevents the new pure steel from becoming exposed to air. At the end of the process, the used flux is discarded as a waste material. So for the Cambridge method, the lime flux was swapped out for the recycled cement paste. And sure enough, not only was it able to purify the steel just fine, but if the leftover slag is cooled quickly in air, it becomes new Portland cement.

The resulting concrete has similar performance to the original stuff. Importantly, the team says this technique doesn’t add major costs to either concrete or steel production, and significantly reduces CO2 emissions compared to the usual methods of making both. If the electric arc furnace was powered by renewable sources, it could essentially make for zero-emission cement.

“The first industrial-scale trials are underway this month,” the article adds.
“Producing zero emissions cement is an absolute miracle, but we’ve also got to reduce the amount of cement and concrete we use,” said Professor Julian Allwood, who led the research.

And the professor has also recorded a thoughtful video visualizing the process — and explaining the significance of their breakthrough.

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Elon Musk Says AI Could Eliminate Our Need to Work at Jobs

In the future, “Probably none of us will have a job,” Elon Musk said Thursday, speaking remotely to the VivaTech 2024 conference in Paris. Instead, jobs will be optional — something we’d do like a hobby — “But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.”
CNN reports that Musk added this would require “universal high income” — and “There would be no shortage of goods or services.”
In a job-free future, though, Musk questioned whether people would feel emotionally fulfilled. “The question will really be one of meaning — if the computer and robots can do everything better than you, does your life have meaning?” he said. “I do think there’s perhaps still a role for humans in this — in that we may give AI meaning.”

CNN accompanied their article with this counterargument:
In January, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab found workplaces are adopting AI much more slowly than some had expected and feared. The report also said the majority of jobs previously identified as vulnerable to AI were not economically beneficial for employers to automate at that time. Experts also largely believe that many jobs that require a high emotional intelligence and human interaction will not need replacing, such as mental health professionals, creatives and teachers.

CNN notes that Musk “also used his stage time to urge parents to limit the amount of social media that children can see because ‘they’re being programmed by a dopamine-maximizing AI’.”

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How Internet Pioneers Celebrated 50 Years of the Internet

Founded in 1963, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers held a special event Sunday that they said would be “inspiring engineering for the next 50 years.”

The event featured talks on the origins of the internet from 80-year-old “father of the internet” Vint Cerf, along with John Shoch (who helped develop the Ethernet and internetwork protocols at Xerox PARC), Judith Estrin (who worked with Cerf on the TCP project), and Robert Kahn (who with Cerf first proposed the IP and TCP protocols). Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe also spoke at the end of the event.

Long-time Slashdot reader repett0 was an onsite volunteer, and shares that “it was incredible to meet and greet such a wonderful mix of people making technology happen… [T]he event celebrated many key technologies and innovators from the past 50 years and considerations of what is to come in the next 50 years.”

Video streams are available and more are coming online (including interviews with key innovators, society leadership, and more). If you could not make this event event, follow-on activities continue, including the People-Centered Internet Imagine Workshop where a mix of society is working together to consider how to improve humanity’s intersection with ever-expanding abilities thanks to technology.

They add that the event was made possible “through the collaboration of many professional computing societies” including the IEEE, People-Centered Internet, Google, Internet Society, IEEE Computer Society, GIANT Protocol, IEEE Foundation — and volunteers from the SF Bay Area ACM and Internet Society.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.