In one of his first public speaking appearances since joining Facebook to lead its AI initiatives, VP Jerome Pesenti expressed concern about the growing amount of compute power needed to create powerful AI systems. From a report: "I can tell you this is keeping me up at night," Pesenti said. "The peak compute companies like Facebook and Google can afford for an experiment, we are reaching that already." More software innovation will be required if artificial intelligence is to grow unhindered, he said, and optimization of hardware and software -- rather than brute force compute -- may be critical to AI in years ahead. [...] "We still see gains with increase of compute, but the pressure from the problem is just going to become bigger," Pesenti said. "I think we will still continue to use more compute, you will still net, but it will go slower, because you cannot keep pace with 10 times a year. That's just not possible."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every year, about two billion tonnes of plastic waste is produced, according to the World Bank.

Gas-rich Turkmenistan facing worst economic crisis in 30 years, coupled with rights concerns, UK think-tank reports.

Rights groups call rule preventing most Central Americans from claiming asylum an attempt to 'dismantle asylum system'.

During the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Electronics Resurgence Initiative 2019 summit in Detroit, Michigan, Intel unveiled a system codenamed "Pohoiki Beach," a 64-chip computer capable of simulating 8 million neurons in total. From a report: Intel Labs managing director Rich Uhlig said Pohoiki Beach will be made available to 60 research partners to "advance the field" and scale up AI algorithms like spare coding and path planning. [...] Pohoiki Beach packs 64 128-core, 14-nanometer Loihi neuromorphic chips, which were first detailed in October 2017 at the 2018 Neuro Inspired Computational Elements (NICE) workshop in Oregon. They have a 60-millimeter die size and contain over 2 billion transistors, 130,000 artificial neurons, and 130 million synapses, in addition to three managing Lakemont cores for task orchestration. Uniquely, Loihi features a programmable microcode learning engine for on-chip training of asynchronous spiking neural networks (SNNs) -- AI models that incorporate time into their operating model, such that components of the model don't process input data simultaneously. This will be used for the implementation of adaptive self-modifying, event-driven, and fine-grained parallel computations with high efficiency.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

His membership in a commission that could help the Trump administration roll back human rights is the last straw.

US accuses Iran's foreign minister of using American freedoms 'to spread malign propaganda' as tensions surge.

An anonymous reader writes: Twitter today began rolling out a new version of Twitter.com, rebuilt "from the ground up." The company says the project, which impacts the front end and the back end, has been years in the making. Twitter's biggest redesign in nearly seven years is meant to be a clean slate that will help the team more quickly bring new features and functionality to the site. On the front end, that means a faster and more personalized experience. On the back end, that means serving the right experience based on the user and device. The front end redesign brings Twitter's Explore feature from its apps to the website. That translates to more content like live video and local moments personalized to your location, context with profile information within conversations, and Top Trends in any view. Bookmarks, Lists, and Profile now have their own spots on the side navigation. Whether you have one profile or multiple, the site handles switching between accounts faster, also from the side navigation. You no longer have to login and logout. [...] Twitter has rebuilt the back end to support a site that is "personalized, efficient, faster, and more conversational." The Twitter web team says it needed to rebuild the back end from scratch because many of the problems stemmed from old architectural decisions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Neo-Nazi who killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer when he rammed his car into anti-racists gets second life sentence.

The new 2019 MacBook Air with a True Tone display, upgraded keyboard and a price cut has been out for a week already, but we're finding out more about. The latest bit of information from Consomac confirms an unfortunate drawback: the SSD is slower than the previous 2018 model. From a report: The French site conducted some tests on the new 2019 MacBook Air using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and it achieved speeds of 1.3 GB/s read and 1 GB/s write. Compare it to the 2018 MacBook Air, which achieved 2 GB/s read and 0.9 GB/s write. Apple's newer laptop improved slightly on the writing side, but its performance downgraded by 35% on the reading side. That can be attributed to a slower SSD Apple included in the new MacBook Air.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter in the Middle East changed from a tool for transparency to a platform overrun by bots and propaganda.

Explosion in southern province injures at least 35 other pilgrims on their way to a shrine, officials say.

We've been hearing for quite some time that the traditional PC is dying, but it's not quite dead yet. Business analyst firms Gartner and IDC tackle the numbers differently, but both agree that sales of traditional PCs were up -- in some regions, way up -- in Q2 2019. From a report: While both firms reported market growth in year-on-year PC sales, their actual figures differed. IDC reported a 4.7% growth in Q2 sales, where Gartner only reported 1.5%. The two firms' numbers for US regional sales differed even more sharply, with Gartner claiming a 0.4% loss and IDC claiming a "high single digit gain." We spoke to IDC's Jitesh Ubrani about the difference, and it turns out the two companies don't quite agree on what is or is not a traditional PC. IDC counts Chromebooks as traditional PCs but doesn't count Microsoft Surface tablets; Gartner does count Surface but doesn't count Chromebooks. The higher numbers from IDC indicate a stronger market for Chromebooks than Surface, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone with children in North American schools, where the inexpensive and easily locked-down Chromebooks are ubiquitous.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Announcement of the vote comes as Trump doubles down on his remarks, insisting his tweets weren't racist.

You'll be able to complete the trifecta of tiny 16-bit throwback systems on March 19, 2020, when Konami releases the TurboGrafx-16 Mini. From a report: It'll include Dracula X, Bonk's Revenge, Gradius and many more games, including many Japanese exclusives. Konami said last week that it will sell the device exclusively through Amazon, with preorders opening up on Monday, July 15 during the online retailer's "Prime Day" promotion. The U.S. will get the TurboGrafx-shaped device shown above, while Japan will get a version modeled after the PC Engine and Europe's model will be styled after the CoreGrafx revision. No price has been announced for the U.S. model, but the Japanese one will cost 10,500 yen or around $100. The game library will be almost identical across all three systems, including 24 American versions of games and 26 Japanese versions. There is a little bit of overlap between the two -- for example, both the U.S. and Japanese versions of the action RPG Neutopia are included. That means it's not quite 50 games total, but it's still a rich lineup, which even includes CD-ROM games and some games from the Japanese SuperGrafx system.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.