Source: Hacker News
Source: The Verge - All Posts
The US is investing $8.9 billion into Intel, but most of the funds come from money that the government was supposed to pay the embattled chipmaker anyway. In an announcement on Friday, Intel said the federal government will fund its investment using the remaining $5.7 billion in grants it hasn’t yet received under the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act, in addition to the $3.2 billion received as part of the Secure Enclave program.
President Donald Trump confirmed the investment during a press briefing before the formal announcement, saying Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan agreed to give the government a 10 percent stake. Earlier this month, Trump called on Tan to resign over his ties to China, and today he positioned the deal as a way for the executive to “keep his job.”
Trump told reporters that he floated the offer during negotiations with Tan. “I said, ‘I think it would be good having the United States as your partner,’” Trump said. “They’ve agreed to do it, and I think it’s a great deal for them.” Intel has already received $2.2 billion under the CHIPS Act.
The government’s investment in Intel “will be a passive ownership, with no Board representation or other governance or information rights,” according to Intel. “We are grateful for the confidence the President and the Administration have placed in Intel, and we look forward to working to advance U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership,” Tan says in the press release.
The confirmation of the deal comes just days after SoftBank announced plans to invest $2 billion into Intel to “further expand” chipmaking in the US.
The federal government’s stake in the embattled chipmaker marks yet another move that blurs the line between government and business, as reports suggest that the Trump administration has demanded that Nvidia and AMD give the government a 15 percent cut of chip sales to China.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hinted at the government’s potential investment this week, saying during an interview with CNBC that it “would be a conversion of grants” meant to “stabilize the company for chip production here in the US.”
It doesn’t seem like this is the end for Trump’s approach to deal-making, as he said during the briefing that “he’ll do more of them” in the future.
Update, August 22nd: Added information from Intel.
Source: NYT > U.S.
The founder of the evangelical group Focus on the Family, he spent decades denouncing what he saw as the unraveling of the social order.
Source: Boing Boing
Welp, if you live in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, or West Virginia, and you've recently bought shrimp at Walmart, you're going to want to check to make sure you didn't get the ones that are radioactive. — Read the rest
The post FDA warns public to throw out potentially radioactive shrimp appeared first on Boing Boing.
Source: Hacker News
Source: OSNews
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Hi, FAB 2025 is still happening in Prague and it has been a wonderful event. It’s been great to meet so many people from our community at home, in Czechia! But during my chats with the attendee’s, there was one topic which was emerging time and time again, and that is the state of open hardware. I cannot talk about all of the open hardware, but I can share experience from 3D printing. And it is not good! Open hardware in 3D printing is dead – you just don’t know it yet. This is an opinion piece, imagine we are talking about this topic over a cold Pilsner…
↫ Josef Prusa
What happens when the Chinese government lists 3D printing as an industry it wants to dominate? Well, an explosion in bogus patents and the death of tons of smaller, local brands, leaving only major players from China and perhaps one or two bigger non-Chinese brands. That’s the conclusion by Josef Prusa, founder of Prusa Research, a major 3D printer maker from Prague, Czechia. Prusa’s printers used to be entirely open source, but starting in 2023, this is no longer the case – ostensibly because being open source hardware meant that competitors were copying their work wholesale without contributing anything back, or worse, stealing their work entirely and keeping it all closed, despite the copyleft license in use.
Looking at the numbers, it seems clear that smaller companies will not be able to deal with the onslaught of bogus patents, as fighting patent infringement claims in court and getting patents invalidated, even if prior art exists in abundance, is prohibitively expensive and incredibly time-consuming. It’s a game of really expensive whack-a-mole against people with far deeper pockets than you.
Still, this whole thing does taste a bit sour considering Prusa’s abandonment of its open source roots and ideals. There’s a business to be run here, I understand that, but principles do matter, and if not even a company priding itself on producing open source hardware stands by its ideals, why should anyone else?
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: OSNews
Almost three weeks ago, Mozilla released Firefox 141 that, among other features like memory optimizations for Linux and a built-in unit converter, brought controversial AI-enhanced tab groups.
Powered by a local AI model, these groups identify related tabs and suggest names for them. There is even a “Suggest more tabs for group” button that users can click to get recommendations.
Now, several users have taken to the Firefox subreddit to complain about high CPU usage when using the feature, as well as express their disappointment in Mozilla for adding AI to the browser.
↫ David Uzondu at NeoWin
Is anybody even asking for “AI” features in Firefox? Of the six people still left using Firefox, does even one of them want a chatbot in Firefox? Is any Firefox user the type of user to use some nebulous “AI” tool to organize their open tabs? Seeing these kinds of frivolities in Chrome or Edge or whatever makes sense, but in Firefox?
At least they’re easy to disable through about:config – just set both browser.ml.chat.enabled and browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled to false. I mean, I guess I can understand Mozilla trying to ride the hype bubble, but at least make this nonsense opt-in, instead of asking users to dig around in obtuse config flags.
Source: The Verge - All Posts
Reddit says that it has caught AI companies scraping its data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so it’s going to start blocking the Internet Archive from indexing the vast majority of Reddit. The Wayback Machine will no longer be able to crawl post detail pages, comments, or profiles; instead, it will only be able to index the Reddit.com homepage, which effectively means Internet Archive will only be able to archive insights into which news headlines and posts were most popular on a given day.
“Internet Archive provides a service to the open web, but we’ve been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.
The Internet Archive’s mission is to keep a digital archive of websites on the internet and “other cultural artifacts,” and the Wayback Machine is a tool you can use to look at pages as they appeared on certain dates, but Reddit believes not all of its content should be archived that way. “Until they’re able to defend their site and comply with platform policies (e.g., respecting user privacy, re: deleting removed content) we’re limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors,” Rathschmidt says.
The limits will start “ramping up” today, and Reddit says it reached out to the Internet Archive “in advance” to “inform them of the limits before they go into effect,” according to Rathschmidt. He says Reddit has also “raised concerns” about the ability of people to scrape content from the Internet Archive in the past.
Reddit has a recent history of cutting off access to scraper tools as AI companies have begun to use (and abuse) them en masse, but it’s willing to provide that data if companies pay. Last year, Reddit struck a deal with Google for both Google Search and AI training data early last year, and a few months later, it started blocking major search engines from crawling its data unless they pay. It also said its infamous API changes from 2023, which forced some third-party apps to shut down, leading to protests, were because those APIs were abused to train AI models.
Reddit also struck an AI deal with OpenAI, but it sued Anthropic in June, claiming Anthropic was still scraping from Reddit even after Anthropic said it wasn’t scraping anymore.
“We have a longstanding relationship with Reddit and continue to have ongoing discussions about this matter,” Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, says in a statement to The Verge.
Update, August 11th: Added statement from the Wayback Machine.
