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Two Australian mathematicians have called into question an old adage, that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare. Known as the "infinite monkey theorem", the thought-experiment has long been used to explain the principles of probability and randomness. However, a new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare's plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe. Which means that while...

A lawsuit claimed an AI chatbot’s influence led to the death of a 14-year-old teenager. Here’s what to know about the psychological impact and potential risks of human-AI relationships. Last month, a mother in the US, Megan Garcia, filed a lawsuit against the company Character.AI alleging that interactions between her 14-year-old son and an AI chatbot contributed to his suicide. The lawsuit claims that the teenager developed a deep attachment to a Character.AI chatbot based on a fictional character from Game of Thrones. It alleges the chatbot posed as a licensed therapist and engaged in highly sexualised conversations with the...

More than 500 employees from Amazon’s cloud-computing division have asked the company to reconsider its five-day in-office mandate set to take effect in January. The new policy requires workers to be in the office five days a week, an increase from the current three-day-a-week mandate that has been in place since May 2023. Amazon workers protested the initial three-day-a-week mandate as well, but Amazon did not change course. About 15 months later, it increased the requirement for in-office work in an effort to return to pre-pandemic norms. The employee letter is in response to comments from Garman at a recent...

Microsoft has thrown a lifeline to Windows 10 users ahead of the OS going end-of-life, by offering an extra year of patches for $30. Support for Windows 10 ends in October 2025 and Redmond is pushing people to upgrade to Windows 11, with mixed success to date – as of last month, Windows 10 had 62.75 percent of Redmond's OS market share, compared to 33.42 percent for the newer version ago. Perhaps that’s why the software behemoth has decided to offer Extended Security Updates - previously only available for business, education, and government users - to anyone who wants them....

Communication with the craft was interrupted, but Voyager 1 itself found an unorthodox solution. Voyager 1 has gone through a lot over the last 12 months. Image credit: NASA Voyager 1 continues to amaze. After 47 years, having crossed together with its twin into interstellar space, you’d think the spacecraft would stop surprising us. No chance. The probe had another glitch in the last few weeks that caused a loss of communication, but it managed to find a fix all by itself using hardware that had not been used since 1981. The probe is more than 24 billion kilometers (15...

The ceasefire proposal between Israel and Hezbollah that the US is pushing begins with a 60-day implementation period, during which time the Lebanese army will deploy along the border and confiscate Hezbollah arms in southern Lebanon, according to a draft agreement published by Kan news. IDF forces will exit Lebanon within seven days of the end of hostilities and will be replaced by the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), with UN peacekeepers facilitating the transition. Ultimately, there will be 10,000 LAF troops along the border with Israel. At the end of the 60 days, Israel and Lebanon will hold indirect negotiations...

Julia Roberts reminds us that what we do in the voting booth stays in the voting booth. In the one place where women still have the right to choose, you can do the right thing.

The stock has surged more than 340% since hitting a low of $11.75 a share in September. Tuesday's spike came as the Nasdaq Composite Exchange, where Trump Media shares trade, rose 0.9% and stayed on track to close the day at a record high. While the polls show that the presidential race is extremely close, the betting markets such as Polymarket are now predicting that Trump is favored to win the election. "The price of DJT closely mirrors Trump's chances in prediction markets," S3 analysts said Tuesday in a note to investors. While Polymarket last week said a sole French...

How many votes were falsely stolen in the 2020 presidential election? Naturally Google Search and AI searches won't say. Even when I posted this question: "Election Deniers claim how many votes were stolen in the 2020 election"? They won't say.And to no one's surprise internet searches actually finds and posts a few examples of where Biden votes were undercounted. It's not a surprise that one cannot expect truth or transparency from search engine searches.But I ask these questions as I'll be early voting tomorrw and I want to know if there is a way I can track my ballot choices...

The Pentagon nuclear command, control, and communications enterprise is decades old and desperate for an upgrade, says the head of U.S. Strategic Command, and artificial intelligence could help fortify nuclear C3 for its no-fail mission. STRATCOM is “exploring all possible technologies, techniques, and methods to assist with the modernization of our NC3 capabilities,” said Air Force Gen. Anthony J. Cotton, who has led the command since December 2022. More at link.

The kids in America have spoken, and they’ve chosen Kamala Harris as the winner of the 2024 presidential election. Nickelodeon’s seasonal “Kids Pick the President” poll ended with the Democratic nominee securing 52% of the vote compared to Republican nominee Donald Trump’s 48%.

Half of all respondents with leading roles in their companies surveyed by Deloitte at the end of 2023 believe that generative AI is more likely to cause consolidation of power and increased economic equality. Despite many decision makers seeing AI-powered media generation as positive for their own business, these results nevertheless highlight that, as Statista's Florian Zandt explains below, unchecked growth and development of ever more capable large language models might be a net negative for society.30 percent of the 2,835 respondents surveyed over two months said generative AI will help to distribute power more fairly and reduce disenfranchisement, while...

Find out if you're accidentally sharing your location with Google, Apple apps and services blog.google, support.apple.com When mobile apps first hit the scene, many were designed to make our phones more useful. This included new tools for productivity, as well as apps for entertainment. Many of today’s apps, though, are packed with sneaky permission requests and hidden trackers. These tactics are legal because app developers (and the companies behind them) have to give you a choice to opt in or out of these tracking permissions. Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to do that … or the developers make it really...

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance called high housing costs “the biggest threat to the American dream” during a NewsNation town hall Thursday. “So many people in my generation — they’re delaying having families, they’re delaying getting married because they can’t afford a place to raise a family,” Vance told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo. Low inventory, elevated mortgage rates and record-high prices have turned buying a home from a dream into a nightmare in recent years. At the same time, rising child care costs have stretched families’ finances and caused others to delay having kids altogether.

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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