Trump, on Tariffs, Says ‘Maybe the Children Will Have 2 Dolls Instead of 30’

NY Times - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 18:13
At the end of a cabinet meeting, the president allowed for the possibility that trade war could disrupt supply chains.

11 High School Lacrosse Players Face Charges in Hazing of Teammates

NY Times - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 17:53
The teenagers in Syracuse, N.Y., turned themselves in after the district attorney gave them 48 hours to surrender. He called the episode “hazing on steroids.”

Google Funding Electrician Training As AI Power Crunch Intensifies

SlashDot - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 17:40
Google is investing in training over 100,000 new U.S. electricians through a $10 million grant, aiming to address a critical labor shortage driven by AI-fueled data center growth and rising electricity demands. Reuters reports: A lack of access to power supplies has become the biggest problem for giant technology companies racing to develop artificial intelligence in energy-intensive data centers, which are driving up U.S. electricity demand after nearly 20 years of stagnation. The situation has led President Donald Trump to declare a national energy emergency aimed at speeding up permitting for generation and transmission projects. Google's funding, which includes a $10 million grant for electrical worker nonprofits, is the latest in a series of recent moves by giant technology companies to alleviate power project backlogs and electricity shortfalls across the United States. [...] The Google grant will be used for electrician apprenticeship programs and the training of existing workforce through organizations, including the Electrical Training Alliance, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association. It could increase the pipeline of electrical workers by 70% by the end of the decade, the company said. "This initiative with Google and our partners at NECA and the Electrical Training Alliance will bring more than 100,000 sorely needed electricians into the trade to meet the demands of an AI-driven surge in data centers and power generation," said Kenneth Cooper, international president of the IBEW labor union.

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Behind Trump’s Deal to Deport Venezuelans to El Salvador’s Most Feared Prison

NY Times - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 17:05
New details deepen questions about the deportations, showing that El Salvador’s president pressed for assurances that the migrants were really members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

Raspberry Pi Cuts Product Returns By 50% By Changing Up Its Pin Soldering

SlashDot - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 17:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Raspberry Pi boards have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits. SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads poked through a connective hole and solder applied to connect and join them securely. The Raspberry Pi board has a 40-pin GPIO header on it that needs through-hole soldering, along with bits like the Ethernet and USB ports. These require robust solder joints, which can't be done the same way as with SMT (surface-mount technology) tools. "In the early days of Raspberry Pi, these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement," writes Roger Thornton, director of applications for Raspberry Pi, in a blog post. The boards then had to go through a follow-up wave soldering step. Now Pi boards have their tiny bits and bigger pieces soldered at the same time through an intrusive reflow soldering process undertaken with Raspberry Pi's UK manufacturing partner, Sony. After adjusting component placement, the solder stencil, and the connectors, the board makers could then place and secure all their components in the same stage. Intrusive reflow soldering this way involves putting solder paste on both the pads for SMD bits and into the through-hole pins. The through-hole parts are pushed onto the paste, and the whole board then goes into a reflow oven, where the solder paste melts, the connectors fall in more fully, and joints are formed for all the SMD and through-hole parts at once. You can watch the process up close in this mesmerizing video from Surface Mount Process. Intrusive reflow soldering is not a brand-new process, but what it did for the Raspberry Pi is notable, according to Thornton. The company saw "a massive 50% reduction in product returns," and it sped up production by 15 percent by eliminating the break between the two soldering stages. By removing the distinct soldering bath from its production line, the company also reduced its carbon dioxide output by 43 tonnes per year (or 47.4 US tons).

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Wildfires in Israel Force Towns Near Jerusalem to Evacuate

NY Times - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 16:39
The fires interrupted memorial day ceremonies, and Israel’s top firefighter called the blazes “one of the toughest events” he has faced.

The Happiest Country in the World Isn’t What You Think

NY Times - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 16:13
Material prosperity isn’t everything.

New Atomic Fountain Clock Joins Elite Group That Keeps the World on Time

SlashDot - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 16:01
NIST: Clocks on Earth are ticking a bit more regularly thanks to NIST-F4, a new atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) campus in Boulder, Colorado. This month, NIST researchers published a journal article establishing NIST-F4 as one of the world's most accurate timekeepers. NIST has also submitted the clock for acceptance as a primary frequency standard by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), the body that oversees the world's time. NIST-F4 measures an unchanging frequency in the heart of cesium atoms, the internationally agreed-upon basis for defining the second since 1967. The clock is based on a "fountain" design that represents the gold standard of accuracy in timekeeping. NIST-F4 ticks at such a steady rate that if it had started running 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed, it would be off by less than a second today. By joining a small group of similarly elite time pieces run by just 10 countries around the world, NIST-F4 makes the foundation of global time more stable and secure. At the same time, it is helping to steer the clocks NIST uses to keep official U.S. time. Distributed via radio and the internet, official U.S. time is critical for telecommunications and transportation systems, financial trading platforms, data center operations and more.

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El Salvador Is Said to Have Spurned U.S. Request to Return Abrego Garcia

NY Times - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 15:45
It remained unclear whether the diplomatic effort was a genuine bid by the White House to address the plight of the immigrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia.

A Diver Visited a Fallen Whale. When He Returned, It Was Gone.

NY Times - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 14:52
A sunken calf’s disappearance created a mystery in murky waters near San Diego.

Investigating Shrimp Fraud Is an Urgent Matter on the Gulf Coast

NY Times - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 14:33
With a flood of imported seafood driving the U.S. shrimp industry to the edge of ruin, a consulting company out of Houston is testing truth in menu labeling.

Microsoft CEO Says Up To 30% of the Company's Code Was Written by AI

SlashDot - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 13:34
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20%-30% of code inside the company's repositories was "written by software" -- meaning AI -- during a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta's LlamaCon conference on Tuesday. From a report: Nadella gave the figure after Zuckerberg asked roughly how much of Microsoft's code is AI-generated today. The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI-generated code across different languages, with more progress in Python and less in C++.

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Here’s What 7 Americans Think of Trump’s First 100 Days

NY Times - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 13:05
Here’s what a variety of voters who made their choices in November’s election with some hesitation had to say about President Trump’s first 100 days.

Finland Restricts Use of Mobile Phones During School Day

SlashDot - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 12:51
Finland has passed legislation to restrict the use of phones and other mobile devices during the school day amid fears over their impact on student wellbeing and learning. From a report: Under the changes, which were approved by the Finnish parliament on Tuesday and will come into effect on 1 August, mobile devices will be heavily restricted during lesson times. Pupils will be allowed to use them only with the teacher's permission for healthcare or learning purposes. Finland is the latest European country to impose legal restrictions on the use of phones and other mobile devices in schools amid growing evidence of their impact on children and young people, including attention and self-esteem. Earlier this year, Denmark said it would ban mobile phones from all schools. The chair of the country's wellbeing commission, Rasmus Meyer, told the Guardian the measure was necessary to stop schools from being "colonised by digital platforms" and urged the rest of Europe to follow suit.

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Google's Sundar Pichai Calls US Remedies 'De Facto' Spinoff of Search

SlashDot - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 12:02
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told a judge who found that Google illegally monopolizes online search that a Justice Department proposal to share search data with rivals would be a "de facto" divestiture of the company's search engine. From a report: If Google were required to share both its search data and the information on how it ranks results, rivals could reverse engineer "every aspect of our technology," Pichai testified on Wednesday. "The proposal on data sharing is so far reaching, so extraordinary," Pichai said. It "feels like de facto divestiture of search" and its entire intellectual property and technology over 25 years of research, he said. During testimony in federal court in Washington, Pichai asserted that a package of antitrust remedies proposed by the government is too extreme and will undermine Google's ability to compete in the market.

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Wikipedia To Use AI

SlashDot - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 11:20
Wikipedia will employ AI to enhance the work of its editors and volunteers, it said Wednesday, also asserting that it has no plans to replace those human roles. The Wikimedia Foundation plans to implement AI specifically for automating tedious tasks, improving information discovery, facilitating translations, and supporting new volunteer onboarding, it said.

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Electronic Arts Lays Off Hundreds, Cancels 'Titanfall' Game

SlashDot - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 10:41
Electronic Arts is laying off hundreds of workers and canceling a Titanfall game that was in development at its Respawn Entertainment subsidiary. From a report: Between 300 and 400 positions were eliminated, including around 100 at Respawn, according to a person familiar with the cuts. The company had about 13,700 employees at the end of March 2024. "As part of our continued focus on our long-term strategic priorities, we've made select changes within our organization that more effectively aligns teams and allocates resources in service of driving future growth," Justin Higgs, a spokesman for the Redwood City, California-based company, said in a statement. The canceled project, code-named R7, was an extraction shooter set in the Titanfall universe, according to people familiar with its development. It was not close to being released.

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Microsoft Vows Legal Fight Against US To Protect European Cloud Customers

SlashDot - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 10:00
Microsoft has pledged to take the US government to court if necessary [alternative source] to protect European customers' access to its cloud services, as concerns mount over potential technology disruptions under President Donald Trump. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and vice-chair, announced five "digital commitments" to Europe on Wednesday, responding to regional anxieties following Trump's temporary suspension of military support to Ukraine. "We as a company need to be a source of digital stability during a period of geopolitical volatility," Smith said. The commitments include contesting any government order to cease European cloud services through legal channels and establishing European oversight of its continental operations. Microsoft will increase its European data center capacity by 40% over the next two years, expanding in 16 countries with investments of "tens of billions of dollars" annually. The Seattle-based company, which derives more than a quarter of its business from Europe, becomes the first major American tech firm to proactively address European concerns amid escalating trade tensions.

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In 2nd Term, Trump Pushes Bounds of Presidential Power, Testing Rule of Law

NY Times - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 05:02
The United States has never seen an effort to expand presidential authority at the scale of Donald J. Trump’s second term.

India’s Muslims Fear a Growing Backlash After Kashmir Attack

NY Times - Wed, 04/30/2025 - 00:21
State officials have detained thousands of Muslims and demolished homes, and activists say that right-wing Hindus are intensifying a demonization campaign.

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