Google is accelerating Chrome's major release cadence from four weeks to two starting with version 153 on September 8th. "...our goal is to ensure developers and users have immediate access to the latest performance improvements, fixes and new capabilities," says Google. "Building on our history of adapting our release process to match the demands of a modern web, Chrome is moving to a two-week release cycle." The company says the "smaller scope" of these releases "minimizes disruption and simplifies post-release debugging." They also cite "recent process enhancements" that will "maintain [Chrome's] high standards for stability." 9to5Google reports: There will still be weekly security updates between milestones. This applies to desktop, Android, and iOS, while there are "no changes to the Dev and the Canary channels": "A Chrome Beta for each version will ship three weeks before the stable release. We recommend developers test with the beta to keep up to date with any upcoming changes that might impact your sites and applications."

The eight-week Extended Stable release schedule for enterprise customers and Chromium embedders will not change. Chromebooks will also have "extended release options": "Our priority is a seamless experience, so the latest Chrome releases will roll out to Chromebooks after dedicated platform testing. We are adapting these channels for the new two-week browser cycle and we will share more details soon regarding milestone updates for managed devices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

darwinmac writes: While many users choose Microsoft Office over LibreOffice because of its support for the proprietary formats (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx), others prefer Office for its "better" ribbon interface. These users often criticize LibreOffice for having a "clunky" UI instead of the "standard" ribbon interface you would find in Word, Excel, and other Office apps.

Now, Neowin reports that LibreOffice is fighting back, arguing that its UI is actually superior because it is customizable, with several modes such as the classic toolbar interface, an Office-inspired ribbon layout, a sidebar-focused design, and more. Furthermore, it argues that there is no evidence that the ribbon offers "superior usability" over other interface modes. LibreOffice says in a blog post: Incidentally, the characterization of ribbon-style interfaces as "modern" or "standard," used by several users, is not based on any objective usability parameter or design principle, but is the result of Microsoft's dominance in the market and the huge investments made when the ribbon was introduced in Office 2007 as a new paradigm for productivity software. The idea that "modern" equals "similar to a ribbon" is a normalization effect: the Microsoft interface has become a benchmark because of its ubiquity, not because of its proven advantages in terms of usability. Added to this is the fact that many users evaluate office software through the lens of familiarity with Microsoft Office and consider deviation from it as a problem rather than a design choice. Before this, LibreOffice had also criticized its competitor OnlyOffice, accusing it of being "fake open source" because it believes OnlyOffice is working with Microsoft to lock users into the Office ecosystem by prioritizing the formats mentioned earlier instead of LibreOffice's own OpenDocument Format (ODF).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Users of Meta's AI smart glasses in Europe may be unknowingly sharing intimate video and sensitive financial information with moderators outside of the bloc, according to a report from Sweden's Svenska Dagbladet released last week. Employees in Kenya doing AI "annotation" told the journalists that they've seen people nude, using the toilet and engaging in sexual activity, along with credit card numbers and other sensitive information.

With Meta's Ray-Ban Display and other glasses with AI capabilities, users can record what they're looking at or get answers to questions via a Meta AI assistant. If a wearer wants to make use of that AI, though, they must agree to Meta's terms of service that allow any data captured to be reviewed by humans. That's because Meta's large language models (LLMs) often require people to annotate visual data so that the AI can understand it and build its training models.

This data can end up in places like Nairobi, Kenya, often moderated by underpaid workers. Such actions are subject to Europe's GDPR rules that require transparency about how personal data is processed, according to a data protection lawyer cited in the report. However, Svenska Dagbladet's reporters said they needed to jump through some hoops to see Meta's privacy policy for its wearable products. That policy states that either humans or automated systems may review sensitive data, and puts the onus on the user to not share sensitive information.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Struggle: Managing 1,400 pages of documentation and 200+ Jira tickets manually is a recipe for burnout. The Band-Aid: I initially built open-source scripts (OAS Validator, Release Notes Generator) to handle specific tasks. The Problem: Scripts couldn't solve "Documentation Drift"—the silent gap between code and docs. The Solution: I built SudoDocs to consolidate these tools into one AI-powered workflow that "Unit Tests" documentation while keeping a human in the loop.

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Scientists have peered inside the Sun and observed subtle shifts and “glitches” that have occurred over four decades, shedding light on the enigmatic long-term vibrations of our star, reports a study published on Tuesday in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Sun goes through a roughly 11-year cycle that includes a period of high and low activity, known as solar maximum and minimum. The past few cycles have revealed changes in solar behavior that could have implications for predicting space weather and unraveling the internal dynamics of our Sun, along with other Sun-like stars. 

To drill down on this mystery, researchers with the Birmingham Solar-Oscillations Network (BiSON), a network of telescopes that have monitored the Sun since the 1970s, compared the last four solar minima using this unique 40-year dataset and focused on internal vibrations that make the sun subtly oscillate.

“The entire Sun oscillates in a globally coherent way, and the oscillations are formed by sound waves trapped inside the Sun that make it resonate just like a musical instrument,”said Bill Chaplin, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Birmingham who co-authored the study, in a call with 404 Media.  

“For this particular study, we were interested in seeing whether there are differences in what the Sun is doing in its structure when you focus on the periods or epochs when the Sun is very quiet,” he continued. “The last few cycles have seen some quite marked changes in behavior.”

For example, scientists have been perplexed for years by an unusually long and quiet solar minimum between cycle 23 to 24, which occurred from 2008 to 2009. Chaplin and his colleagues were able to use BiSON’s long record of asteroseismology—the study of stellar interiors—to directly contrast the interior vibrations of the Sun during this minimum to others.

“There were hints that there were things that were different” about this cycle, said Chaplin. “But now that we have the cycle 24-25 minimum—the last one in about 2019—in the bag, then we thought, ‘okay, now's the time to actually go back and look at this.’”

The team specifically looked for an acoustic wave “glitch” caused by an interior layer in which helium atoms lose electrons, producing a detectable change in the Sun’s internal structure. This glitch was significantly stronger during the 2008–2009 minimum, suggesting that the Sun’s outer interior was slightly hotter and allowed sound waves to travel faster at that time of magnetic weakness.

“The ionizing helium affects the speed at which the sound waves move through that region,” explained Chaplin. “It leaves a characteristic imprint.”

“It's not just that there is a difference with the other cycles, but it's starting to tell us about what physically has really changed beneath the surface,” he added. “They're quite subtle changes, but it's nevertheless giving us clues as to what is actually happening beneath the Sun during this very quiet period.”

The results confirm that the Sun doesn’t return to the same minimum baseline at the end of every cycle, and its activity varies within timescales of decades and centuries. For example, Chaplin pointed to one bizarrely long quiet period from 1645 to 1715, known as the Maunder Minimum. 

Astronomers during this time marvelled at the prolonged lack of visible sunspots on the Sun’s surface, a sign of extremely low solar activity. Centuries later, BiSON and other solar observatories are allowing scientists to study the interior dynamics behind these shifts in depth for the first time.

“This is the first step in actually demonstrating that there are changes,” Chaplin said. “Does this mean that there are systematic changes in the way that the Sun is generating its field? It's really only now, because we have this long dataset, that we can start to ask questions like that. Previously, we just didn't have enough data to say.”

Scientists hope to keep recording the long-term behavior of the Sun with projects like BiSON so that we can better understand its mercurial nature over time. This is interesting work on its own merits, but it is also useful for refining forecasts of space storms that can wreak havoc on power grids and space assets (while also producing pretty auroras). 

Chaplin also nodded to the European space telescope PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO), due for launch in 2027. This mission will search for analogous oscillations in stars beyond the Sun, building on similar work conducted by NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope. 

Studying the vibrations of the Sun and other similar stars is not only important for life here on Earth; it also has implications in the search for extraterrestrial life, because local solar activity is one key to assessing the habitability of star systems similar to our own. 

“The data that we have on other stars from Kepler has really helped to understand and get a better picture of the cyclic variability of other stars, like the Sun,” Chaplin concluded. “But it's still not an entirely clear picture; let's put it that way. Seismology now enables you to do really detailed analysis of stars that you can't do by other means.”

Company aims to stitch tens of thousands of GPUs together for more efficient training and inference

It's a good time to be an AI chip startup, especially if you happen to specialize in silicon photonics.…

Probably not an isolated incident only as researchers have already found 2,863 live API keys exposed

A developer says their company is on the hook for more than $82,000 in unauthorized charges after a stolen Google Gemini API key racked massive usage costs up in just 48 hours.…

Go outside and smell some flowers

Meta’s flagship service, Facebook, is experiencing an outage.…

Injected liver cells stayed viable and functional for eight weeks in mice

Can’t keep waiting on the transplant list? How about an injectable “satellite liver” instead? After an MIT research project showed early success, the idea of a mini organ that could be injected into the body to take over for a failing liver doesn’t sound so far-fetched.…

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

“Warriorhood is an act of living an awakened life,” says Rupy C. Tut, referencing the continual battles that emerge from being a person in the world. Tut has long invoked her family’s history of migration and Punjabi heritage to consider kinship, a theme that has more recently evolved into a recurring warrior character. “The privilege of belonging and being seen as a part of a place, without needing explanations, is not available to my characters, who are finding ways to navigate and battle that out-of-place-ness,” she adds.

Depicting suited figures floating amid translucent jellyfish, the dream-like “Battle Ready” is one such work. The creatures’ tentacles trail across the composition, shrouding both the blue expanse and the subjects’ limbs in their wispy lines. These patterns also offer insight into the emotional register of the piece. “If the environment is meant to assuage, then the character’s bodysuit is chaotic distress,” the artist tells Colossal. “Similarly, if the bodysuit is meant to pacify the narrative of the character’s purpose, then the environment is lurking with dangers and chaotic, unsafe possibilities nearby.”

Tut is drawn to these kinds of metaphorical pairings, and her handmade pigments are another example. The artist assigns emotion and themes to each color that recur throughout her practice. “Yellow lead oxide predominantly signals a place or moment of struggle for my characters, whereas Cinnabar red deepens the earthiness of the conversation in the painting by rooting the story in blood and earth,” she says.

By limiting her palette, the artist has further constructed a world in which ideas evolve over time yet have a clear lineage to their forebears, adding, “This meaning-making is a way of indexing my thinking and making as well, where paintings from different times are placed in dialogue through this growing symbolism of color.”

For Tut, painting in this way is both therapeutic and devotional, particularly as she navigates life as a woman, mother, and artist continually struggling against stereotypes and convention. The slow act of creating pigments and working in the studio tethers her to something larger and excavates the voids she feels.

It could be a significant childhood building you felt small and safe in, or a home that allowed you to dream freely, or a road trip lined by trees you no longer see, or values of slowing down, of being present, of being happy in nothingness yet striving for excellence, of history books that didn’t cover your grandparents’ trauma, or politics that don’t notice nor praise the immigrant Indian girl wearing an American flag scarf in her senior pictures to prove her identity in a post 9/11 world; these are all examples of voids I hope to fill through my work and in my practice of making paintings. 

This is also where the warrior returns. Tut sees this strong, fearless figure as representing “responsibility, honesty, justice, and a commitment to humility as an act of bravery,” values that emerge in both her life and work. Whether rendering the swirling pattern of a figure’s bodysuit or patiently waiting for a pigment to dry only to find the formula is wrong, the artist creates as both an homage to her ancestors and as a way to connect with people amid their own turmoil.

Tut’s work is currently on view at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and the National Portrait Gallery. Later this week, she will also be included in a group exhibition opening at the Horton Art Gallery at San Joaquin Delta College. Explore more of her practice on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Rendered in Handmade Pigments, Rupy C. Tut’s Warriors March Toward Belonging appeared first on Colossal.

• United manager admits a lot of wins would be needed

• Carrick: ‘You can’t rule anything out in football’

Michael Carrick has refused to rule out Manchester United catching Arsenal and challenging for the title, though the interim manager admitted a lot of wins would be needed.

United recorded a sixth victory under Carrick when defeating Crystal Palace 2-1 at Old Trafford on Sunday, making it 19 points from 21 since he took over. Their form is the best in the Premier League over that period but United trail Arsenal by 13 points with a game in hand and have 10 matches to play. Carrick was asked before United’s game at Newcastle on Wednesday whether he would rule out catching Mikel Arteta’s team.

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Only five days earlier Rob Edwards had streamed down the touchline and pulled his calf, he said, celebrating Wolves’s second goal in a rare victory against rivals Aston Villa. This time he cut loose again deep into six minutes of second-half stoppage time, as André’s deflected strike floored Liverpool. Edwards booted a ball off a pitch-side cone and went to drink in the moment with the locals. Joe Gomez dragged his red Liverpool shirt over his face. Arne Slot was punch-drunk. Liverpool were beaten by the league’s bottom club.

Wolves had stunned the visitors by taking the lead with 12 minutes of regular time to play, Rodrigo Gomes’s clinical finish capping a well-worked attack that Virgil van Dijk will not want to see again in a hurry. Liverpool were toiling but then, after another anonymous display, Mohamed Salah came to life with an equaliser.

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Sunderland departed West Yorkshire 13 months ago on a snowy February night with their hopes of automatic promotion from the Championship seemingly in tatters.

Leeds had come from behind to clinch a 95th-minute victory that took them top of the second tier and only the most optimistic visiting fans expected a rematch this season.

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Texas showdowns between Republicans John Cornyn v Ken Paxton as well as Democrats James Talarico v Jasmine Crockett have made US Senate seat most expensive primary on record

On the Democratic side of the Texas Senate primary, two rising stars in the party are going head to head with completely different playbooks.

US House representative Jasmine Crockett, the Associated Press notes, has made a name for herself through confrontation. She is a fierce critic of president Donald Trump. My colleague Lauren Gambino writes, “Casting herself as a ‘proven fighter’ who ‘drives the president crazy’, Crockett contends that high turnout among young voters and voters of color – not ideological moderation – is the key to winning statewide.”

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Tears for Fears

LLMs are getting pretty good at unmasking pseudonymous users — their success rate is “far greater” than humans alone can manage.