Oracle has moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to offer its employees a better lifestyle. Nashville pledged $175 million in incentives and the state of Tennessee $65 million to help build the Oracle campus in 2021. There were no additional incentives from the city ahead of Oracle's headquarters announcement. Oracle plans to get closer to the healthcare industry - the Nashville area's healthcare industry employs more than 300,000 people and adds $68 billion to the Nashville region's economy.
ByteDance would rather shut down TikTok than sell the company. The US only provides a quarter of TikTok's global revenue and only represents 5% of ByteDance's daily active users across all of its media platforms. The short deadline to sell would likely put downward pressure on any potential sale price, making the option even less appealing. Selling the company would mean divesting the algorithms that power TikTok and its video recommendations, which raises more complications.
Intelligent androids will be a part of industrial activities and aspects of everyday life over the next decade. Modern AI models have changed the game, allowing robots to learn from online text, images, and videos. This article takes a look at the modern robotics industry, highlighting new technologies, current capabilities, potential applications, major players in the space, and the impacts the technology will have on society.
Engineers have partially restored a 1970s-era computer on NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft after five months of long-distance troubleshooting. Voyager 1 is on an outbound trajectory more than 15 billion miles from Earth, so it takes almost two days for engineers to uplink a command and get a response. The spacecraft suddenly stopped transmitting intelligible data in November. Engineers eventually found the issue, which was in the system responsible for packaging engineering and scientific data for transmission to Earth. A single chip responsible for storing a portion of memory stopped working, probably due to either a cosmic ray hit or a failure of aging hardware.
The llamafile project has become one of Mozilla's top three most-favorited repositories on GitHub. llamafile is an easy and fast way to run a wide range of open large language models on consumer hardware. This article covers the project's development, explaining the changes that have been implemented since v0.1. The latest release includes support for the very latest open models and a number of big performance improvements for CPU inference.
The crystalruby project allows writing and running Crystal methods inline inside a Ruby file, bringing significant performance improvements to code compared to their pure Ruby versions. However, the Ruby implementation the project uses contains a subtle mistake that causes significantly more work than it needs to. Fixing this mistake makes the Ruby code run faster than the 'crystalized' method. Future advancements in the Ruby JIT may make these small tweaks unnecessary.
Startups and megacorps have used and abused open source to build up billions in revenue over the past decade. Corporate Open Source has died - open source cultures rely on trust, and time and time companies have shattered that trust with the developers who helped build them. Contributor License Agreements are a strategy employed by commercial companies to subvert the open source social contract. Developers should stay away from projects that require them and stick to open source licenses that respect their freedom.
The Federal Communications Commission has voted to reinstate net neutrality, barring broadband providers from slowing or blocking internet traffic to some sites while improving access to others. The FCC had announced that it would pursue this as a policy goal in September and there was no reason the Commission would vote against it. The new net neutrality rules still have to weather challenges in court, and depending on the outcome of the election, they may be rolled back or legislated away. The rules still have to be published in the Federal Register - and then there is another waiting period - before they will take effect.