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Key TakeawaysTSMC’s Arizona plant has exceeded its Taiwanese facilities in yield.The first of three plants in Arizona is on track to reach full volume production in 2025.TSMC aims to start other facilities by 2028 and manufacture 2nm chips in the US by 2030.TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, has achieved better yield in its new Arizona factory than its Taiwan facilities. Taiwanese giant TSMC’s new chipset manufacturing unit in the US has overtaken its domestic plants in terms of yield—a key metric in semiconductor production. The update from TSMC’s newly commenced plant in Phoenix, Arizona is good news for the...

It is the 52nd Mersenne prime to be found since they were first studied over 350 years ago. A spiral representing primes. Image credit: Bocskai Istvan/Shutterstock.com The largest prime number ever discovered has been found by an amateur mathematician using Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). Prime numbers, as you likely learned in school, are numbers that can only be divided by one and themselves. There are an infinite number of them, with all numbers greater than 1 being either a prime number or a composite of primes. But having discovered a whole lot of them, new primes are now...

Director Tim Burton has revealed that being on the internet makes him feel "quite depressed". Ahead of the opening of a major career retrospective in London, he told BBC News: "Anybody who knows me knows I'm a bit of a technophobe. "If I look at the internet, I found that I got quite depressed," the 66-year-old said. "It scared me because I started to go down a dark hole. So I try to avoid it, because it doesn't make me feel good." The World of Tim Burton at the Design Museum features 600 items which organisers say give "a rare...

This is odd. When I try to copy urls to repost the url disappears. Instead I am provided with a statement that SAYS SEARCH OR TYPE URL. This is occurring on X, YOUTUBE, FB and other media. This is new. Not with FR. I often cut and paste across platforms. But not now. Just started yesterday. What am I doing wrong

A 14-year-old Florida boy killed himself after a lifelike “Game of Thrones” chatbot he’d been messaging for months on an artificial intelligence app sent him an eerie message telling him to “come home” to her, a new lawsuit filed by his grief-stricken mom claims. Sewell Setzer III committed suicide at his Orlando home in February after becoming obsessed and allegedly falling in love with the chatbot on Character.AI — a role-playing app that lets users engage with AI-generated characters, according to court papers filed Wednesday. The ninth-grader had been relentlessly engaging with the bot “Dany” — named after the HBO...

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Anthropic on Tuesday released an upgraded version of its Claude 3.5 Sonnet model that can understand and interact with any desktop app. Via a new “Computer Use” API, now in open beta, the model can imitate keystrokes, button clicks, and mouse gestures, essentially emulating a person sitting at a PC. “We trained Claude to see what’s happening on a screen and then use the software tools available to carry out tasks,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch. “When a developer tasks Claude with using a piece of computer software and gives it the necessary access, Claude looks...

Microsoft Excel, the true successor to the throne of COBOL. Version 1.0 was released on the last day of September 1985, four decades ago.Since the original US English version of Windows 1.0 went to manufacturing at the end of November that year, this means that the default spreadsheet for Microsoft Windows is itself older than Windows. (The European version of Windows didn't appear until May 1986, but that doesn't really matter, nobody cared about it either.)Excel 2 wasn't pretty, but it was prettier than 1-2-3 – click to enlargeAs the old joke goes, like an "incel", it still incorrectly assumes...

Why bother with making information accessible and usable if you can tell people what you want them to hear instead?When Google launched in the late 1990s, it quickly overtook the market for search engines. Its proprietary method of indexing led users to results they were actually looking for rather than producing the hodgepodge of results offered by other search engines of the time. Within just a few years, it was dominating the market. Today, it is a money-printing machine.It’s also increasingly horrible at the core mission that produced such success. The company’s leadership may have realized early on that to...

I meant to make notes on everything you guys suggested, but I can't find it.

A federal rule banning fake online reviews is now in effect. The Federal Trade Commission issued the rule in August banning the sale or purchase of online reviews. The rule, which went into effect Monday, allows the agency to seek civil penalties against those who knowingly violate it. “Fake reviews not only waste people’s time and money, but also pollute the marketplace and divert business away from honest competitors,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said about the rule in August. She added that the rule will “protect Americans from getting cheated, put businesses that unlawfully game the system on notice, and...

Big tech is going big on nuclear, with Amazon becoming the newest addition to the club with a $500 million deal, joining Microsoft, Google, and Oracle by investing in nuclear projects to support surging data-center energy demand.With powerful advances in generative AI, the US has become the fastest-growing market for data centers, according to McKinsey, which forecasts demand to more than triple by 2030 to 80 gigawatts. The boom has sent stock prices of nuclear-energy companies soaring, briefly making utilities the best-performing sector of the S&P 500 Index this year.Going nuclear As commercial nuclear-power plants went global in the 1970s...

TikTok developed an internal strategy for using content on its platform to win favor from Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell and other politicians, according to recently revealed portions of a lawsuit against the tech giant. The idea was part of an internal company document that, according to the complaint filed by the Kentucky attorney general, “seeks to identify TikTok accounts that might persuade each politician - along with his or her staff - as to the value of the Platform.” TikTok videos by Kentucky businesses including a hot dog shop, a record store and a bait and ammunition store were proposed...

Google on Tuesday announced a fresh Chrome browser update that addresses 17 vulnerabilities, including 13 security defects reported by external researchers.The most severe of the externally reported bugs is CVE-2024-9954, a high-risk use-after-free defect in AI . . .The latest Chrome iteration is now rolling out as versions 130.0.6723.58/.59 for Windows and macOS, and as version 130.0.6723.58 for Linux.

This is a link to the Real Clear Politics page that summarizes where the online betting sites have the race.

Meta provides workers with $25 meal vouchers for use at the office.. Meta fired roughly two dozen staffers based in Los Angeles for abusing the company's $25 meal vouchers to purchase non-food household items... Meta fired the workers last week after the company discovered that the workers were abusing its food credit system by using the funds to buy other household items, ranging from acne pads and wine glasses to laundry detergent. According to the report, Meta staff are given daily allowances of $20 for breakfast, $25 for lunch and another $25 for dinner — similar perks to what other...

Lightmatter, a company building computer chips that process information with light, has raised a $400 million Series D at a $4.4 billion valuation, highlighting investors’ appetite for novel solutions to AI’s computational demands. T. Rowe Price Associates led the round with additional backing from previous investors GV and Fidelity. The raise continues Boston-based Lightmatter’s remarkable growth. Founded in 2017, the company has raised $709 million in the past 18 months. With its Series D, Lightmatter has nearly quadrupled its previous valuation of $1.2 billion in a $155 million Series C-2 that closed in December 2023. In May 2023, it raised...

Among the California police departments that have tried using Teslas was the Ukiah Police Department, the largest municipal police force in Mendocino County. There, Police Chief Cedrick Crook requested the City Council approve the purchase of two Tesla Model 3s, which is the company's sedan, on August 7, 2024. That purchase totaled nearly $150,000 between the cost of the cars and $35,000 in modifications to make the Teslas patrol-ready, Crook told the San Francisco Gate. He said the vehicles needed the standard emergency lights, sirens, radio, antenna, push bar, partition and gun rack, but the Teslas also needed to be...

TOCKHOLM (AP) — Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats for humanity. Hinton, who is known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton. “These two gentlemen were really the pioneers,” said Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce. The artificial neural networks — interconnected computer...

Do any FReepers have experience with cell phone extenders such as the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Network Extender ASK-SFE116? This is not a repeater, instead, it works through and existing Ethernet Connection to your computer / the Web, and functions like a little "mini-tower" in your home. I did find this useful vid: https://www.verizon.com/support/verizon-lte-network-extender-setup-video/ However, I've not found much info. regarding range. My guess is that it is similar to a typical Wi-Fi router. Unfortunately these "extenders" do not connect via a Wi-Fi router.) It also appears activation can be a problem if buying a used unit, as evidently the...