28 Mar 2024

feedSlashdot

Claude 3 Surpasses GPT-4 on Chatbot Arena For the First Time

Anthropic's recently released Claude 3 Opus large language model has beaten OpenAI's GPT-4 for the first time on Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced leaderboard used by AI researchers to gauge the relative capabilities of AI language models. A report adds: "The king is dead," tweeted software developer Nick Dobos in a post comparing GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 Opus that has been making the rounds on social media. "RIP GPT-4." Since GPT-4 was included in Chatbot Arena around May 10, 2023 (the leaderboard launched May 3 of that year), variations of GPT-4 have consistently been on the top of the chart until now, so its defeat in the Arena is a notable moment in the relatively short history of AI language models. One of Anthropic's smaller models, Haiku, has also been turning heads with its performance on the leaderboard. "For the first time, the best available models -- Opus for advanced tasks, Haiku for cost and efficiency -- are from a vendor that isn't OpenAI," independent AI researcher Simon Willison told Ars Technica. "That's reassuring -- we all benefit from a diversity of top vendors in this space. But GPT-4 is over a year old at this point, and it took that year for anyone else to catch up." Chatbot Arena is run by Large Model Systems Organization (LMSYS ORG), a research organization dedicated to open models that operates as a collaboration between students and faculty at University of California, Berkeley, UC San Diego, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

28 Mar 2024 5:22pm GMT

Pythagoras Was Wrong: There Are No Universal Musical Harmonies, Study Finds

An anonymous reader shares a report: According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, 'consonance' -- a pleasant-sounding combination of notes -- is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these 'integer ratios' are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is thought to make music 'dissonant,' unpleasant sounding. But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two key ways in which Pythagoras was wrong. Their study, published in Nature Communications, shows that in normal listening contexts, we do not actually prefer chords to be perfectly in these mathematical ratios. "We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us," said co-author, Dr Peter Harrison, from Cambridge's Faculty of Music and Director of its Centre for Music and Science. The researchers also found that the role played by these mathematical relationships disappears when you consider certain musical instruments that are less familiar to Western musicians, audiences and scholars. These instruments tend to be bells, gongs, types of xylophones and other kinds of pitched percussion instruments. In particular, they studied the 'bonang,' an instrument from the Javanese gamelan built from a collection of small gongs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

28 Mar 2024 4:40pm GMT

feedOSnews

Oregon’s governor signs right-to-repair law that bans ‘parts pairing’

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has now signed one of the strongest US right-to-repair bills into law after it passed the state legislature several weeks ago by an almost 3-to-1 margin. Oregon's SB 1596 will take effect next year, and, like similar laws introduced in Minnesota and California, it requires device manufacturers to allow consumers and independent electronics businesses to purchase the necessary parts and equipment required to make their own device repairs. Oregon's rules, however, are the first to ban "parts pairing" - a practice manufacturers use to prevent replacement components from working unless the company's software approves them. These protections also prevent manufacturers from using parts pairing to reduce device functionality or performance or display any misleading warning messages about unofficial components installed within a device. Current devices are excluded from the ban, which only applies to gadgets manufactured after January 1st, 2025. ↫ Jess Weatherbed at The Verge Excellent news, and it wouldn't be the first time that one US state's strict (positive) laws end up benefiting all the other states since it's easier for corporations to just develop to the strictest state's standards and use that everywhere else (see California's car safety and emissions regulations for instance). As a European, I hope this will make it way to the European Union, as well.

28 Mar 2024 4:25pm GMT

feedArs Technica

FTX fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

SBF had asked for sentence of just 5 or 6 years. Prosecutors sought 40 to 50.

28 Mar 2024 3:54pm GMT

feedSlashdot

Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced To 25 Years in Prison

Crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years [non-paywalled link] in prison for a massive fraud that unraveled with the collapse of FTX, once one of the world's most popular platforms for exchanging digital currency. From a report: Bankman-Fried, 32, was convicted in November of fraud and conspiracy -- a dramatic fall from a crest of success. U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan imposed the sentence in the same Manhattan courtroom where, four months ago, Bankman-Fried testified that his intention had been to revolutionize the emerging cryptocurrency market with his innovative and altruistic ideas, not to steal. Kaplan said the sentence reflected "that there is a risk that this man will be in position to do something very bad in the future. And it's not a trivial risk at all." He added that it was "for the purpose of disabling him to the extent that can appropriately be done for a significant period of time." Prior to sentencing, Bankman-Fried had said, "My useful life is probably over. It's been over for a while now, from before my arrest."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

28 Mar 2024 3:51pm GMT

feedArs Technica

Yamaha and Lola pair up to enter Formula E next season

Lola has Yamaha as a technical partner and Formula E veterans in key roles.

28 Mar 2024 2:42pm GMT

Embracer Group lets go of Borderlands maker for $460M after three years

Swedish giant releases the largest piece of its Katamari-like studio roll-up.

28 Mar 2024 1:39pm GMT

feedOSnews

lEEt/OS: graphical shell and multitasking environment for DOS

lEEt/OS is a graphical shell and partially posix-compliant multitasking operating environment that runs on top of a DOS kernel. The latest version can be downloaded from this site. lEEt/OS is tested with FreeDOS 1.2 and ST-DOS, but it may also work with other DOS implementations. It can be compiled with Open Watcom compiler. 8086 binaries are also available from this site. ↫ lEEt/OS website I had never heard of lEEt/OS before, but it looks quite interesting - and the new ST-DOS kernel the developer is making further adds to its uniqueness. A very cool project I'm putting on my list of operating systems to write short 'first look' article about for y'all.

28 Mar 2024 11:34am GMT

ARM64EC (and ARM64X) explained

Probably the most confused looks I get from other developers when I discuss Windows and ARM64 is when I used the term "ARM64EC". They ask is the same thing as ARM64? Is it a different instruction set than ARM64? How can you tell if an application is or ARM64 ARM64EC? This tutorial will answer those questions by de-mystifying and explaining the difference between what can be called "classic ARM64" as it existed since Windows 10, and this new "ARM64EC" which was introduced in Windows 11 in 2021. ↫ Darek Mihocka I'm not going to steal the article's thunder, but the short of it is that the 'EC' stands for 'Emulation Compatible', meaning it can call unmodified x86-64 code. ARM64X, meanwhile, is an extended version of Windows PE that allows both ARM64 and emulated x86-64 code to coexist in the same binary (which is not the same as a fat binary, which is an either/or situation). There is a whole lot more to this subject - and I truly mean a lot, this a monster of an in-depth article - so be sure to head on over and read it in full. You'll be busy for a while.

28 Mar 2024 11:27am GMT

05 Mar 2024

feedPlanet Arch Linux

Join the Arch Testing Team - Call for participation

We hope y'all had a good start in the new year of 2024 - With the new year usually come new resolutions. If you don't have any so far, we have one for you: What if you decided to give Arch a bit of help with testing package updates this year? Arch uses testing repositories as a buffer for core/critical package updates (or any other package updates that would benefit from being tested first) before entering the stable repositories. Testing these package updates helps us to catch more bugs upfront and ensures flawless updates for the stable repos, and that is where you can help! By joining the official Arch Linux Testing Team, you'll get the ability to "sign off" packages in testing after vouching for their correctness (or reporting a bug otherwise). This helps Arch Package Maintainers catching eventual bugs upfront and helps to move packages out of the testing repositories faster and more efficiently. We are not necessarilly looking for in depth testing. Verifiying that a program launches correctly and that you're able to perform your usual routine with it is already a good test on its own. You can also check the general testing guidelines. This is a very effective and rather easy way to contribute to Arch Linux. The more testers we have, the more reliable packages updates will be. We hope to see some of you there, also join us on IRC on Libera in #archlinux-testing!

05 Mar 2024 12:00am GMT

04 Mar 2024

feedPlanet Arch Linux

mkinitcpio hook migration and early microcode

With the release of mkinitcpio v38, several hooks previously provided by Arch packages have been moved to the mkinitcpio upstream project. The hooks are: systemd, udev, encrypt, sd-encrypt, lvm2 and mdadm_udev. To ensure no breakage of users' setup occurs, temporary conflicts have been introduced into the respective packages to prevent installing packages that are no longer compatible. The following packages needs to be upgraded together:

Please note that the mkinitcpio flag --microcode, and the microcode option in the preset files, has been deprecated in favour of a new microcode hook. This also allows you to drop the microcode initrd lines from your boot configuration as they are now packed together with the main initramfs image.

04 Mar 2024 12:00am GMT

05 Feb 2024

feedPlanet Arch Linux

My FOSDEM 2024 Experience

Sharing my experience after giving a talk at FOSDEM 2024!

05 Feb 2024 12:00am GMT