Feed aggregator
Boot Up in Style — Design Your Own GRUB Menu for Linux - Tom's Hardware
Boot Up in Style — Design Your Own GRUB Menu for Linux Tom's Hardware
Categories: Linux
FDA To Use AI In Drug Approvals To 'Radically Increase Efficiency'
The FDA plans to use AI to "radically increase efficiency" in deciding whether to approve new drugs and devices, drawing on lessons from Operation Warp Speed to reduce review times to weeks. The plan was laid out in an article published Tuesday in JAMA. The New York Times reports: Another initiative involves a review of chemicals and other "concerning ingredients" that appear in U.S. food but not in the food of other developed nations. And officials want to speed up the final stages of making a drug or medical device approval decision to mere weeks, citing the success of Operation Warp Speed during the Covid pandemic when workers raced to curb a spiraling death count. [...]
Last week, the agency introduced Elsa, an artificial intelligence large-language model similar to ChatGPT. The FDA said it could be used to prioritize which food or drug facilities to inspect, to describe side effects in drug safety summaries and to perform other basic product-review tasks. The FDA officials wrote that A.I. held the promise to "radically increase efficiency" in examining as many as 500,000 pages submitted for approval decisions.
Current and former health officials said the A.I. tool was helpful but far from transformative. For one, the model limits the number of characters that can be reviewed, meaning it is unable to do some rote data analysis tasks. Its results must be checked carefully, so far saving little time. Staff members said that the model was hallucinating, or producing false information. Employees can ask the Elsa model to summarize text or act as an expert in a particular field of medicine.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nexus Mods new app gets more UI improvements, performance upgrades and a Linux fix - GamingOnLinux
Categories: Linux
Nexus Mods new app gets more UI improvements, performance upgrades and a Linux fix - GamingOnLinux
Categories: Linux
Meet the 35 startups in our final Ukraine Support Fund cohortMeet the 35 startups in our final Ukraine Support Fund cohortHead of Google for Startups, Central and Eastern Europe
Learn more about our new Google for Startups Ukraine Support Fund recipients spanning healthcare to AI.Learn more about our new Google for Startups Ukraine Support Fund recipients spanning healthcare to AI.
Categories: Technology
A Mathematician Calculated The Size of a Giant Meatball Made of Every Human
A mathematician on Reddit calculated that if all 8.2 billion humans were blended into a uniform goo, the resulting meatball would form a sphere just under 1 kilometer wide -- small enough to fit inside Central Park. ScienceAlert reports: "If you blended all 7.88 billion people on Earth into a fine goo (density of a human = 985 kg/m3, average human body mass = 62 kg), you would end up with a sphere of human goo just under 1 km wide," Reddit contributor kiki2703 wrote in a post ... Reasoning the density of a minced human to be 985 kilograms per cubic meter (62 pounds per cubic foot) is a fair estimate, given past efforts have judged our jiggling sack of grade-A giblets to average out in the ballpark of 1 gram per cubic centimeter, or roughly the same as water. And in mid-2021, the global population was just around 7.9 billion, give or take.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Self-Paced CFP: Insurance Planning Highlights and Self-Paced Study Experiences
Finally… I passed the “Insurance Planning” course for my University of Georgia Self-Paced CFP class. That’s only #2 out of the 7 topics, but here are a few quick observations so far:
- After trying a couple of times… 😅 I was not able to pass the course exams without studying the course materials first. You need 80% correct to pass, and I’d be in the 60% to 80% range without any studying.
- I’ve been able to pass the exams after only reading the online course slides and review questions. I haven’t opened the textbooks once (as shown in pristine condition above!), even though I spent extra for the physical textbooks (as opposed to electronic-only).
- As a personal finance geek, I did know a lot of the material beforehand, but there are definitely new bits that I’m learning here and there. The material is dry, but it covers a lot of topics.
- Like many other professional certification exams, much of passing means studying specifically for the test. The questions aren’t necessarily weighted by what’s commonly used in financial planning practice, but by what is easiest to test in a multiple-choice format. That means memorizing formulas that require a financial calculator, “none of the above”, “all of the above”-type questions, and minor differences in definitions. I now understand why even after completing this educational course requirement, most CFP applicants sign up for another ~$1,000 “cram course” that just drills you on sample test questions.
Back to Insurance Planning. I got stuck on this course for while as it is a very wide topic with some rather dull topics, so here is a high-level overview of what was covered.
Three main categories of “Pure Risk” for individuals and families:
- Personal
- Property
- Liability
Principles and Purpose of Insurance
- Types of risk (pure vs. speculative)
- Methods of managing risk (avoidance, reduction, retention, transfer)
Property and Casualty Insurance
- Homeowners and renters insurance
- Auto insurance
- Liability and umbrella policies
- Business-related coverage
Life Insurance
- Types (term, whole, universal, variable)
- Suitability and needs analysis
- Policy selection, riders, beneficiary designations
Health Insurance and Disability Insurance
- Health plans (PPO, HMO, HDHP, etc.)
- Medicare and Medicaid
- Social Security
- Disability coverage (short-term, long-term, own vs. any occupation)
- Long-Term Care Insurance
Employee and Group Benefits
- Group life, health, and disability plans
- COBRA and continuation coverage
- Cafeteria and flexible spending accounts
Annuities
- Types (fixed, variable, immediate, deferred)
- Payout options and guarantees
- Tax treatment and suitability
Role of a financial planner.
- Coverage level determination
- Help clients identify coverage gaps or excesses.
- Refer clients to qualified Property & Casualty (P&C) agents.
- Evaluate insurance as part of a broader financial plan.
- Review and update over time
For example, for personal liability insurance you would ask about:
- Personal Auto Policy (PAP): For motor vehicle-related liabilities.
- Homeowners Policy: Covers bodily injury/property damage to others.
- Comprehensive Personal Liability (CPL) Policy: Standalone liability coverage.
- Umbrella Policy: Broad, high-limit policy supplementing existing coverages.
You may not need all of them individually, but some combination of these should work together to make sure there no holes. It’s also possible that you may have duplicate coverage or otherwise too much insurance.
A lot of financial advice focuses on “offense”: maximizing income, minimizing expenses, and optimizing investments. But “defense” is just as important, as it includes protecting from loss of future income and loss of existing assets.
Categories: Finance
Tech Giants' Indirect Operational Emissions Rose 50% Since 2020
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indirect carbon emissions from the operations of four of the leading AI-focused tech companies rose on average by 150% from 2020-2023, due to the demands of power-hungry data centers, a United Nations report (PDF) said on Thursday. The use of artificial intelligence by Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta drove up their global indirect emissions because of the vast amounts of energy required to power data centers, the report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the U.N. agency for digital technologies, said.
Indirect emissions include those generated by purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling consumed by a company.
Amazon's operational carbon emissions grew the most at 182% in 2023 compared to three years before, followed by Microsoft at 155%, Meta at 145% and Alphabet at 138%, according to the report. The ITU tracked the greenhouse gas emissions of 200 leading digital companies between 2020 and 2023. [...] As investment in AI increases, carbon emissions from the top-emitting AI systems are predicted to reach up to 102.6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, the report stated.
The data centres that are needed for AI development could also put pressure on existing energy infrastructure. "The rapid growth of artificial intelligence is driving a sharp rise in global electricity demand, with electricity use by data centers increasing four times faster than the overall rise in electricity consumption," the report found. It also highlighted that although a growing number of digital companies had set emissions targets, those ambitions had not yet fully translated into actual reductions of emissions. UPDATE: The headline has been revised to clarify that four leading AI-focused tech companies saw their operational emissions rise to 150% of their 2020 levels by 2023 -- a 50% increase, not a 150% one.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tech Giants' Indirect Emissions Rose 150% In Three Years
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indirect carbon emissions from the operations of four of the leading AI-focused tech companies rose on average by 150% from 2020-2023, due to the demands of power-hungry data centers, a United Nations report (PDF) said on Thursday. The use of artificial intelligence by Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta drove up their global indirect emissions because of the vast amounts of energy required to power data centers, the report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the U.N. agency for digital technologies, said.
Indirect emissions include those generated by purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling consumed by a company.
Amazon's operational carbon emissions grew the most at 182% in 2023 compared to three years before, followed by Microsoft at 155%, Meta at 145% and Alphabet at 138%, according to the report. The ITU tracked the greenhouse gas emissions of 200 leading digital companies between 2020 and 2023. [...] As investment in AI increases, carbon emissions from the top-emitting AI systems are predicted to reach up to 102.6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, the report stated.
The data centres that are needed for AI development could also put pressure on existing energy infrastructure. "The rapid growth of artificial intelligence is driving a sharp rise in global electricity demand, with electricity use by data centers increasing four times faster than the overall rise in electricity consumption," the report found. It also highlighted that although a growing number of digital companies had set emissions targets, those ambitions had not yet fully translated into actual reductions of emissions.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
FreeBSD 14.3 Released
Michael Larabel of Phoronix highlights the key updates in today's stable release of FreeBSD 14.3: FreeBSD 14.3 has back-ported a number of improvements from FreeBSD 15 back to the FreeBSD 14 series. Plus a number of routine package updates and other fixes. Some of the FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE highlights include:
- Updating the ZFS support against OpenZFS 2.2.7.
- Merging of the Realtek RTW88 and RTW89 WiFi drivers based on the Linux 6.14 kernel code.
- The LinuxKPI code has been improved to support crypto offload as well as the 802.11n and 802.11ac standards.
- The Intel IX Ethernet driver has added support for the x550 1000BAS-BX SFP modules.
- Thor2 PCI IDs added to the Broadcom NetXtreme "BNXT" driver along with support for 400G speed modules.
- XZ 5.8.1, OpenSSH 9.9p2, OpenSSL 3.0.16, and many other package updates.
- Syscons as the legacy system console driver is now considered deprecated. Syscons is not compatible with UEFI, lacks UTF-8 support, and is Giant-locked. You can download and learn more about FreeBSD 14.3 via FreeBSD.org.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
