IBM Pledges $150 Billion US Investment

SlashDot - lun, 04/28/2025 - 11:23
IBM announced plans to invest $150 billion in the United States over the next five years, with more than $30 billion earmarked specifically for research and development of mainframes and quantum computing technology. The investment follows similar commitments from tech giants including Apple and Nvidia -- each pledging approximately $500 billion -- in the wake of President Trump's election and tariff threats. "We have been focused on American jobs and manufacturing since our founding 114 years ago," said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in a statement. The company currently manufactures its mainframe systems in upstate New York and plans to continue designing and assembling quantum computers domestically. The announcement comes amid challenging circumstances for IBM, which recently saw 15 government contracts shelved under the Trump administration's cost-cutting initiatives. Further reading: IBM US Cuts May Run Deeper Than Feared - and the Jobs Are Heading To India; IBM Now Has More Employees In India Than In the US (2017).

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The Jewish Students Caught Up in Trump’s Antisemitism Crackdown

NY Times - lun, 04/28/2025 - 01:00
Going after antisemitism on campus has swept up Jewish students protesting the war in Gaza.

Trump Says He Wants to Save the U.S. Auto Industry. His Policies Could Destroy It.

NY Times - lun, 04/28/2025 - 01:00
Trump’s approach risks leaving U.S. automakers isolated and incapable of competing on their own merits as foreign companies bolt ahead.

Dick Barnett, Champion Knick With a Singular Jump Shot, Dies at 88

NY Times - lun, 04/28/2025 - 00:48
A high-scoring guard, he played on New York’s two title-winning teams in the 1970s. He was remembered for his “fall back, baby” shooting style.

One Person Killed as Boat Collides With Ferry in Florida

NY Times - lun, 04/28/2025 - 00:16
The ferry was carrying 45 people when it was struck near a bridge in Clearwater, Fla. Other people were injured, the police said.

One Key to a Successful Campaign for Pope? Act Like You’re Not Campaigning.

NY Times - lun, 04/28/2025 - 00:01
Crucial meetings will be held this week in which contenders begin jockeying in earnest for the job of leading the Roman Catholic Church.

U.S. Dollar’s Weakness Creates an Opportunity for the Euro. Can It Last?

NY Times - lun, 04/28/2025 - 00:01
European officials see the concern over the “safe haven” reputation of U.S. financial assets as a chance to attract investors.

​North Korea Confirms It Sent Troops to Fight for Russia

NY Times - dim, 04/27/2025 - 23:48
Its leader, Kim Jong-un, ordered a monument for soldiers killed in the war against Ukraine and praised their “heroism and bravery​.”

Rough Night for Republican at Town Hall in N.Y. Swing District

NY Times - dim, 04/27/2025 - 23:48
Representative Mike Lawler faced shouts, groans and mockery at a high school auditorium in Rockland County.

Could a 'Math Genius' AI Co-author Proofs Within Three Years?

SlashDot - dim, 04/27/2025 - 22:59
A new DARPA project called expMath "aims to jumpstart math innovation with the help of AI," writes The Register. America's "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency" believes mathematics isn't advancing fast enough, according to their article... So to accelerate — or "exponentiate" — the rate of mathematical research, DARPA this week held a Proposers Day event to engage with the technical community in the hope that attendees will prepare proposals to submit once the actual Broad Agency Announcement solicitation goes out... [T]he problem is that AI just isn't very smart. It can do high school-level math but not high-level math. [One slide from DARPA program manager Patrick Shafto noted that OpenAI o1 "continues to abjectly fail at basic math despite claims of reasoning capabilities."] Nonetheless, expMath's goal is to make AI models capable of: - auto decomposition — automatically decompose natural language statements into reusable natural language lemmas (a proven statement used to prove other statements); and auto(in)formalization — translate the natural language lemma into a formal proof and then translate the proof back to natural language. "How must faster with technology advance with AI agents solving new mathematical proofs?" asks former DARPA research scientist Robin Rowe (also long-time Slashdot reader robinsrowe): DARPA says that "The goal of Exponentiating Mathematics is to radically accelerate the rate of progress in pure mathematics by developing an AI co-author capable of proposing and proving useful abstractions." Rowe is cited in the article as the founder/CEO of an AI research institute named "Fountain Adobe". (He tells The Register that "It's an indication of DARPA's concern about how tough this may be that it's a three-year program. That's not normal for DARPA.") Rowe is optimistic. "I think we're going to kill it, honestly. I think it's not going to take three years. But I think it might take three years to do it with LLMs. So then the question becomes, how radical is everybody willing to be?" "We will robustly engage with the math and AI communities toward fundamentally reshaping the practice of mathematics by mathematicians," explains the project's home page. They've already uploaded an hour-long video of their Proposers Day event. "It's very unclear that current AI systems can succeed at this task..." program manager Shafto says in a short video introducing the project. But... "There's a lot of enthusiasm in the math community for the possibility of changes in the way mathematics is practiced. It opens up fundamentally new things for mathematicians. But of course, they're not AI researchers. One of the motivations for this program is to bring together two different communities — the people who are working on AI for mathematics, and the people who are doing mathematics — so that we're solving the same problem. At its core, it's a very hard and rather technical problem. And this is DARPA's bread-and-butter, is to sort of try to change the world. And I think this has the potential to do that.

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‘60 Minutes’ Rebukes Paramount On-Air Over Executive Producer’s Exit

NY Times - dim, 04/27/2025 - 22:51
The show’s top producer abruptly said last week he was quitting. “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” the correspondent Scott Pelley told viewers.

Netanyahu Accuses Israel’s Domestic Security Chief of Lying to Court

NY Times - dim, 04/27/2025 - 22:43
Intent on firing the Shin Bet chief, Ronen Bar, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced him in a sharp affidavit, deepening national political divisions.

Protests Against Israeli Official Heat Up Outside Synagogue in Brooklyn

NY Times - dim, 04/27/2025 - 22:24
Mayor Eric Adams said the police were investigating reports of “despicable” actions by pro-Israel counterprotesters outside a Brooklyn synagogue where a far-right Israeli official had spoken.

At Least 11 People Killed After Car Plows Into Vancouver Filipino Festival

NY Times - dim, 04/27/2025 - 22:21
Dozens of people were also reported injured after a car drove into a Filipino community festival in British Columbia, the police said.

U.S. Military Says Its Air Campaign Has Hit More Than 800 Targets in Yemen

NY Times - dim, 04/27/2025 - 22:07
President Trump ordered a start to the strikes against the Houthis on March 15. Congressional officials say the campaign has cost well over $1 billion.

Nuclear Fusion Pioneer Abandons Plan for Prototype Reactor, Will License Reaction-Boosting Nuclear Fuel Capsule

SlashDot - dim, 04/27/2025 - 21:05
Remember First Light Fusion? Founded in 2011, it was a pioneering British startup that in 2022 "successfully combined atomic nuclei, which U.K. regulators called a milestone in the decades-long push for fusion energy. It's now "pulled the plug on plans to build its first reactor," reports the Telegraph, abandoning its push for a prototype power plant based on its "projectile fusion" technology due to a lack of funding. The technology involves a 5p-sized projectile being fired at a fuel cell at extreme speeds using electromagnets to generate a powerful reaction and simulate collisions at extremely high speeds, such as those in space. Instead of building its own plant, First Light plans to supply other nuclear power companies with one of its inventions, called an "amplifier", which houses a nuclear fuel capsule and boosts the power of fusion reactions. The group has burned through tens of millions of pounds trying to bring its technology to fruition... The decision to ditch its original plan will allow First Light Fusion to be more "capital light", the nuclear group said in March, while licensing its inventions would generate more revenues. The company said it had recently secured the first tranche of a new funding round. Mark Thomas, First Light Fusion's chief executive, said: "We have been very pleased with the response to our strategy pivot, moving to an enabler of inertial fusion while rapidly accelerating revenues... First Light Fusion's other investors include Chinese technology giant Tencent.

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Chubby Checker, Outkast and the White Stripes Will Join the Rock & Hall of Fame

NY Times - dim, 04/27/2025 - 20:40
Joe Cocker, Cyndi Lauper, Bad Company and Soundgarden — but not Oasis or Phish — are also part of the 40th anniversary class.

To 'Reclaim Future-Making', Amazon Workers Published a Collection of Science Fiction Stories

SlashDot - dim, 04/27/2025 - 19:38
Its goal was to "support workers to reclaim the power of future-making". A 2022 pilot project saw over 25 Amazon workers meeting online "to discuss how science fiction shed light on their working conditions and futures." 13 of them then continued meeting regularly in 2023 with the "Worker as Futurist" project (funded by Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, according to an article by the project's leaders in the socialist magazine Jacobin). "Our team of scholars, teachers, writers, and activists has been able to pay Amazon workers (warehouse workers, drivers, copy editors, MTurk workers, and more) to participate in a series of skill-building writing workshops and information sessions...." And when it was over, "the participants were supported to draft the stories they wanted to tell about The World After Amazon...." Six months ago they held the big launch event for the book's print edition, while also promising that "you can read the workers' stories online, or download the book as a PDF or an ebook, all for free." The Amazon-worker stories have tempting titles like "The Museum of Prime", "The Dark Side of Convenience", and even "The Iron Uprising." ("In a dystopian future of corporate power, humans and robots come together in resistance and in love.") And the project also created a 13-episode podcast offering "interviews with experts on Amazon, activists and organizers, science fiction writers and others dedicated to reclaiming the future from corporate control." As they wrote in Jacbon: This isn't finding individual commercial or literary success, but dignity, imagination, and common struggle... Our "Worker as Futurist" project returns the power of the speculative to workers, in the name of discovering something new about capitalism and the struggle for something different... We must envision the futures we want in order to mobilize and fight for them together, rather than cede that future to those who would turn the stars into their own private sandbox... The rank-and-file worker — the target of daily exploitation, forced to build their boss's utopia — may have encrypted within them the key to destroying his world and building a new one.

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2 U.S. Citizen Children Were Deported to Honduras With Their Mother, Lawyer Says

NY Times - dim, 04/27/2025 - 19:32
The children, 4 and 7, were put on a plane with their mother, who was deported. The family’s lawyer said the mother was given no choice but to take her children, which the Trump administration denied.

New Details Emerge on Trump Officials’ Sprint to Gut Consumer Bureau Staff

NY Times - dim, 04/27/2025 - 18:24
Emails and testimonials from workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau document the administration’s efforts to lay off 90 percent of the employees.

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