notes

An international research team has found that recent heatwaves in the North Pacific may be linked to the massive reduction of aerosols from Chinese factories. The decrease in aerosols, which can reflect the sun’s heat back into space, has been associated with increased warming along Asia’s coastal regions, the development of high-pressure systems and subsequently more intense low-pressure systems in the central Pacific, leading to hotter conditions. Bob Yirka writes in »Computer models show heat waves in north Pacific may be due to China reducing aerosols« for phys.org ...

The Raspberry Pi developers will soon offer a free web-based remote desktop feature. Gordon Hollingworth writes in »Raspberry Pi Connect« for raspberrypi.com Our intention is that Raspberry Pi Connect will remain free (as in beer) for individual users with non-relayed connections, with no limit on the number of devices. We don’t yet know how many people will need to relay their traffic through our TURN servers; we’ll keep an eye on the use of bandwidth and decide how to treat these connections in future. ...

If you want to automatically publish content from an RSS feed to your Mastodon account, you should check out “MastoFeed”. In my experience, it works very reliably. The text was automatically translated from German into English. The German quotations were also translated in sense.

Antivirus software maker Avast passed personal data to Jumpshot without obtaining users’ consent. By doing so, it violated the General Data Protection Regulation and must now pay a fine of around €13.9 million. The European Data Protection Board states in »Czech SA imposed fine of 13.9 million EUR for infringement of Art. 6 and Art. 13 of GDPR«: ...

I learned something new! Although it’s almost obvious, it wasn’t clear to me. Right now we can’t simply fix faulty large language models when they make mistakes or spread false information. That’s because LLMs are created using neural networks. Neural networks learn on their own and build mathematical probabilities by repeatedly computing certain things with small variations. So if you want to change something in an LLM, you’d have to adjust countless such probabilities. This process is so labor-intensive that it’s easier to create a new LLM. That’s why GPTs are released as larger, major version updates. ...