An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: Tonight during Valve's yearly Dota 2 tournament, a surprise segment introduced what could be the best new player in the world -- a bot from Elon Musk-backed startup OpenAI. Engineers from the nonprofit say the bot learned enough to beat Dota 2 pros in just two weeks of real-time learning, though in that training period they say it amassed "lifetimes" of experience, likely using a neural network judging by the company's prior efforts. Musk is hailing the achievement as the first time artificial intelligence has been able to beat pros in competitive e-sports... Elon Musk founded OpenAI as a nonprofit venture to prevent AI from destroying the world -- something Musk has been beating the drum about for years. "Nobody likes being regulated," Musk wrote on Twitter Friday, "but everything (cars, planes, food, drugs, etc) that's a danger to the public is regulated. AI should be too." Musk also thanked Microsoft on Twitter "for use of their Azure cloud computing platform. This required massive processing power."

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Incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta declared winner of presidential elections, but his rival is refusing to concede defeat.

Muhammadu Buhari says he feels ready to return home from London after three months and is awaiting doctor's permission.

Perl interface to libuv

Converts time intervals of days, hours, minutes, and seconds

Documentation for exception handling in Perl.

Fighter turned mediator dismisses Saudi bloc's criticism of Qatar for hosting Afghan group's office as 'bewildering'.

neutrino38 warns that iOS 10 includes a significant change "overlooked by the general public": It deprecates an API that is crucial for VoIP and other instant messaging applications that enable keeping one socket active despite the fact that the application would run in the background. As a replacement, developers need to use PushKit: when an incoming call is to be forwarded to an iOS VoIP client, the VoIP infrastructure needs to: - withold the call - contact Apple push infrastructure using a proprietary protocol to wake up the client app remotely - wait for the application to reconnect to the infrastructure and release the call when it is ready This "I know better than you" approach is meant to further optimize battery life on iOS devices by avoiding the use of resources by apps running in background. It has also the positive effect of forcing developers to switch to a push model and remove all periodic pollings that ultimately use mobile data and clog the Internet. However, the decision to use an Apple infrastructure has many consequences for VoIP providers: - the reliability of serving incoming calls is directly bound to Apple service - Apple may revoke the PushKit certificate. It thus has life and death decision power over third-party communication infrastructures - organizations wanting to setup IPBX and use iOS client have no option but to open access for the push services of Apple in their firewall - It is not possible to have iOS VoIP or communication clients in network disconnected from the Internet - Pure standard SIP clients are now broken on iOS The original submission argues that Apple is creating "the perfect walled garden," adding that "Ironically, the only VoIP 'app' that is not affected is the (future?) VoLTE client that will be added to iOS one day."

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Dave Knott writes: The Hugo Awards, the most prestigious awards in science fiction, had their 2017 ceremony today, at WorldCon 75 in Helsinki, Finland. The winners are: Best Novel: The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin Best Novella: "Every Heart a Doorway" by Seanan McGuire Best Novelette: "The Tomato Thief" by Ursula Vernon Best Short Story: "Seasons of Glass and Iron", by Amal El-Mohtar Best Related Work: Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016 by Ursula K Le Guin Best Graphic Story: Monstress, Volume 1: Awakening , written by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form): Arrival , screenplay by Eric Heisserer based on a short story by Ted Chiang, directed by Denis Villeneuve Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form): The Expanse: Leviathan Wakes , written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, directed by Terry McDonough Best Series: The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen) John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Ada Palmer This year's slate of nominees, unlike the drama surrounding the 2016 and 2015 Hugos, was less impacted by the ballot-stuffing tactics of the "Rabid Puppies", thanks to a change in the way nominees were voted for this year (including the fact no work could appear in more than one category) in an attempt to avoid tactical slate picks.

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Bot::IRC plugin for leaving messages for nicks

a Perl URI encoder/decoder using C

Patterns for matching Perl functions chmod(), mkdir(), File::Path::mkpath(), File::Path::makepath()

Explosion near site of independence day celebrations claims at least 15 lives in main city of Balochistan province.

Slashdot reader #9,219 Guy Smiley shared this report on a new breed of high-density flash storage. The Inquirer reports: Intel has unveiled a brand new form factor for solid state disc drives (SSDs)... Intel Optane's new "ruler" format will allow up to a petabyte of storage on a single 1U server rack... By using 3D-NAND, the ruler crams in even more data and will provide more stability with less chance of catastrophic failure with data loss. The company has promised that the Ruler will have more bandwidth, input/output operations per second and lower latency than SAS... As part of the announcement, Intel also announced a range of "hard drive replacement" SSDs -- the S4500 and S4600 0 which are said to have the highest density 32-layer 3D NAND on the market, and are specifically aimed at data centres that want to move to solid state simply and if necessary, in stages.

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Rally in Charlottesville comes a day after far-right activists carried torches and clashed with university students.