ozipital has added a photo to the pool:
It's not often you have the opportunity to photograph a low flying Whistling Kite at a beach as was this one near the Broome Bird Observatory.
John from Brisbane has added a photo to the pool:
Despite the inclement looking weather, sun is coming. No-one is on Shelly Beach at Caloundra looking north but it will clear and what a beautiful walk. Typical of Pacific Ocean beaches in Australia. Just beyond the beach behind me, ringed by a wide rock platform is another long headland like the one in the distance. It is also a great place for exploring except on a very high tide. That headland marks the end of Moreton Bay and the open Pacific proper.
Camera settings still not reporting correctly, I hope flickr are onto it!
iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:
iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:
iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:
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IBM has revealed it is working on a chip with processor cores that can execute instructions for its own mainframe chips and for the Arm architecture – and for the LinuxONE architecture too for good measure. Big Blue says the unnamed chip will be built on a two-nanometer technology node, include 11 high-performance cores operating at more than 5.7 GHz, plus AI inference accelerators for in-transaction fraud detection, a dedicated on-chip data processing unit for I/O acceleration, and a large cache architecture for demanding enterprise workloads. “Each processor core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z, or Arm and LinuxONE, instructions concurrently,” the computing veteran promises. In a blog post, IBM’s Vice President for the zSystems Ecosystem Meredith Stowell pointed out that “The Arm ecosystem includes more than 22 million developers worldwide and supports a rapidly growing portfolio of cloud-native, AI, analytics, infrastructure, and enterprise applications.” IBM’s Z platform is powerful and very well suited to demanding applications. But while mainframes are a big business for IBM, the overall market is small. Rocket Software, a vendor that provides mainframe modernization tools, yesterday told The Register that it is aware of 42 IBM mainframe users in Australia – and that the land down under is therefore a market it needs to prioritize. Commercial application vendors therefore won’t rush to prioritize z/OS and IBM knows it. Big Blue also knows that major hyperscalers have introduced their own Arm processors and that customers are flocking to them in part because almost all major open source infrastructure, cloud-native, and AI tools run on the architecture. George Cozma, an analyst at TechInsights, told The Register that while the mainframe market is “small in unit terms” it remains “strategically important.” “Customers do not casually replace these systems because core applications, decades of operational practice, and data gravity make migration expensive and risky,” he wrote. But while Z is important, the analyst feels it “sits outside the mainstream software targets that define modern cloud and AI infrastructure.” This new chip, Cozma said, represents “ending the platform’s historical isolation from the broader computing mainstream. While IBM Z’s core strengths – reliability, security, and virtualization – remain the gold standard for mission-critical operations, they are tethered to an architecture that has increasingly diverged from the modern software development lifecycle.” IBM is therefore trying to get the best of all possible worlds: continuity for the small group of ISVs that currently make mainframe products and their customers, expanded software choice for existing IBM customers that also makes Z a more interesting choice for the mainframe-curious, and the nine-nines resilience of the mainframe for more workloads. IBM suggested the new chip will arrive in 2028. Big Blue released its most recent generation of mainframes, the z17, in 2025, and typically delivers new models every three years. The chip therefore looks a good candidate to power z18 machines. One last thing: Cozma pointed out that IBM has form developing dual-architecture chips. “Back in the deep, dark annals of the mid-1990s, IBM developed the PowerPC 615, a chip that could run both PowerPC and x86 code, with the active ISA selected at boot,” he wrote. “The chip was reportedly intended for Apple during the clone era, but it was never sold publicly.” ®
When Anthropic disclosed earlier this month that it would be applying a statistical word-choice watermark to its Claude text output, the company noted that at least 190 AI providers have agreed to abide by Europe's AI transparency rules. One such company is Microsoft, which has been applying its own form of watermarking to images created with the assistance of AI in its Paint and Photos applications for Windows. The EU's Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated Content requires that signatories mark content created with the help of AI in a machine-readable format and that associated metadata indicates at least whether content has been manipulated by AI, or entirely created by it. The regulation creates an obligation but does not specify the method of compliance, so signatories can employ whatever technology best achieves the goals [PDF] of "effectiveness, interoperability, robustness, and reliability." Microsoft has gone beyond minimum requirements in an effort to address AI safety concerns. The EU rules encourage, but do not demand, the inclusion of metadata that does more than answer whether creators used AI to produce content. Redmond, as one of the founders of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), has chosen to embed AI-assisted images in Paint and Photos with a globally unique identifier (GUID) linked to the prompt that created the image. Xusheng Li, a software developer at Vector 35, recently published an analysis of Microsoft's approach, which the Windows biz previously disclosed in the Paint and Photos documentation but did not detail. "Microsoft Paint and Photos embed a server-issued GUID as an invisible watermark in locally generated AI images," Li explained in a LinkedIn post. "Your prompt is sent to Microsoft for moderation, and the returned GUID is encoded into the pixels." Li notes that the invisible GUID watermark – a 16-byte integer – is distinct from the visible watermark option that Microsoft provides to users of its Paint software and Microsoft 365 AI features. If Microsoft associates each prompt with the user who sent it, then the company could in theory identify users by referring to the watermark in an image. Long ago, manufacturers of laser printers implemented this sort of tracking and the practice alarmed privacy advocates when it came to light. "Microsoft receives and moderates the prompt, then issues the unique GUID that Paint embeds into the locally generated image," Li said. "Paint also sends the previous promptGenerationId as lastPromptGenerationId with its next moderation request, allowing successive requests to be linked explicitly." Li argues that while Microsoft has disclosed its AI safety measures, it hasn't sufficiently clarified that its C2PA manifest contains a GUID linked to users' AI image prompts. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Other companies are thinking along similar lines. Meta last month said it is working on its own watermarking technology called Content Seal. And OpenAI has been applying Google DeepMind's SynthID and C2PA metadata to its images. Those seeking to avoid having a tracking number embedded in their AI-generated images may want to explore running an open weight model like Stable Diffusion and running on-device open-source tools. ®
After repairs to Hirosaki Castle in Aomori prefecture, officials employed a technique known as hikiya to move the structure more than two metres
To chants of “so-re, so-re”, about 1,800 people came together in northern Japan over the weekend to pull a 360-tonne castle keep a little more than two metres closer to its original resting place as part of ongoing renovations.
The keep – a fortified tower within a castle – had to be moved to repair a wall that was damaged in a major earthquake.
Continue reading...Far-right leader echoes ally Donald Trump and says operations to ‘track down illegal immigrants’ should begin this week, amid earthquake aftermath
Colombia’s far-right president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has announced a crackdown on immigrants, ordering authorities to detain and deport people who are in the country irregularly or have committed crimes.
In office for just over two weeks, the millionaire former lawyer made the announcement on Sunday as the country continued to grapple with the aftermath of a 7.4-magnitude earthquake on 10 August that killed more than 300 people and destroyed more than 30,000 homes.
Continue reading...
Amazon has raised the prices of its hardware devices by as much as 60%, blaming "significant increases in memory and storage component costs." TechCrunch reports: The price explosion impacted Fire TVs, Echos, Kindles, and Eeros. One egregious example that's been cited is that of the Echo Dot, one of Amazon's cheapest smart speakers, the price of which jumped 60% overnight, from $49.99 to $79.99. Price-tracking sites like CamelCamelCamel show the stark uptick, which has previously hovered much lower. [...] The company also said that it would continue to offer occasional promotions to customers over the course of the next year. Amazon said in a statement: "The consumer electronics industry is facing significant increases in memory and storage component costs. After absorbing these increases for as long as we could, we recently adjusted pricing across our product lines."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
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