Researchers used electric stimulation to switch on exact genes involved in regulating insulin. Blood glucose concentrations of model mice returned to normal.

"When we let corporations decide who is allowed to speak, they act with a mixture of carelessness and self-interest, becoming off-the-books deputies of authoritarian regimes and corrupt, powerful elites.

Alas, we made the wrong tradeoff with Trusted Computing. For the past twenty years, Trusted Computing has been creeping into our devices, albeit in somewhat denatured form. "

"As I wrote last week, giving manufacturers the power to decide how your computer is configured, overriding your own choices, is a bad tradeoff - the worst tradeoff, a greased slide into terminal enshittification"

Click Here to be Taken to the Megathread!

from [email protected]

Vicuna v1.5 Has Been Released!

Shoutout to [email protected] for catching this in an earlier post.

Given Vicuna was a widely appreciated member of the original Llama series, it'll be exciting to see this model evolve and adapt with fresh datasets and new training and fine-tuning approaches.

Feel free using this megathread to chat about Vicuna and any of your experiences with Vicuna v1.5!

Starting off with Vicuna v1.5

TheBloke is already sharing models!

Vicuna v1.5 GPTQ

7B

• Vicuna-7B-v1.5-GPTQ
• Vicuna-7B-v1.5-16K-GPTQ

13B

• Vicuna-13B-v1.5-GPTQ

Vicuna Model Card

Model Details

Vicuna is a chat assistant fine-tuned from Llama 2 on user-shared conversations collected from ShareGPT.

Developed by: LMSYS

• Model type: An auto-regressive language model based on the transformer architecture
• License: Llama 2 Community License Agreement
• Finetuned from model: Llama 2

Model Sources

• Repository: https://github.com/lm-sys/FastChat
• Blog: https://lmsys.org/blog/2023-03-30-vicuna/
• Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05685
• Demo: https://chat.lmsys.org/

Uses

The primary use of Vicuna is for research on large language models and chatbots. The target userbase includes researchers and hobbyists interested in natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

How to Get Started with the Model

• Command line interface: https://github.com/lm-sys/FastChat#vicuna-weights
• APIs (OpenAI API, Huggingface API): https://github.com/lm-sys/FastChat/tree/main#api

Training Details

Vicuna v1.5 is fine-tuned from Llama 2 using supervised instruction. The model was trained on approximately 125K conversations from ShareGPT.com.

For additional details, please refer to the "Training Details of Vicuna Models" section in the appendix of the linked paper.

Evaluation Results

Vicuna is evaluated using standard benchmarks, human preferences, and LLM-as-a-judge. For more detailed results, please refer to the paper and leaderboard.

A group of Internet service providers that won government grants are asking the Federal Communication Commission for more money or an "amnesty window" in which they could give up grants without penalty.

The ISPs were awarded grants to build broadband networks from the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), which selected funding recipients in December 2020. A group calling itself the "Coalition of RDOF Winners" has been meeting with FCC officials about their requests for more money or an amnesty window, according to several filings submitted to the commission.

The group says broadband construction costs have soared since the grants were announced. They asked for extra money, quicker payments, relief from letter of credit requirements, or an amnesty window "that allows RDOF winners to relinquish all or part of their RDOF winning areas without forfeitures or other penalties if the Commission chooses not to make supplemental funds available or if the amount of supplemental funds the Commission does make available does not cover an RDOF Winner's costs that exceed reasonable inflation," a July 31 filing said.

A different group of ISPs urged the FCC to reject the request, saying that telcos that win grants by pledging to build networks at a low cost are "gaming" the system by seeking more money afterward.

So far, the FCC leadership seems reluctant to provide extra funding. The commission could issue fines to ISPs that default on grants—the FCC recently proposed $8.8 million in fines against 22 RDOF applicants for defaults. Group’s members are a mystery

The Coalition of RDOF Winners doesn't include every ISP that was granted money from the program. But exactly which and how many ISPs are in the coalition is a mystery. The group's attorney, Philip Macres of Klein Law Group, told Ars today that he is "not at liberty to provide the list of all the members in the Coalition of RDOF Winners."

Macres confirmed that the group doesn't include every RDOF winner but said he cannot reveal how many ISPs are members. There appear to be at least two members: Arkansas-based wireless broadband provider Aristotle Unified Communications and a Texas ISP called TekWav both joined the meetings at which the coalition asked the FCC for more money or an amnesty window.

In late 2020, the FCC tentatively awarded $9.2 billion over 10 years to 180 Internet providers that agreed to deploy broadband to over 5.2 million unserved homes and businesses. But after seeing evidence that the program was mismanaged under former Chairman Ajit Pai, the current FCC re-evaluated the grants and authorized payments of $6 billion to a smaller group of ISPs.

The size of individual grants didn't change, but the FCC refused to give final authorization to certain grants, including $886 million that was originally awarded to SpaceX's Starlink satellite service and $1.3 billion that was slated for wireless provider LTD Broadband.

Separately, the US government is distributing over $42 billion in the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program that was authorized by Congress in November 2021. Geographic areas that have RDOF funding are generally ineligible for BEAD grants.

In cases where an ISP defaults on an RDOF grant, the geographic location associated with the grant would become eligible for funding from the larger BEAD program. But if a default happens after BEAD funding is allotted, an unserved area could end up with no subsidized networks. Other ISPs urge FCC to enforce rules

The Coalition of RDOF Winners' request for more funding or an amnesty window drew opposition from WTA—Advocates for Rural Broadband, formerly called the Western Telecommunications Alliance, which says it represents over 360 rural telecommunications companies across the US and over 85 industry vendors.

The WTA said it's not a proponent of the "reverse auction" format the FCC used for the RDOF, in which ISPs bid on grants organized by census blocks. But "if the Commission employs reverse auctions as a device to determine and distribute Universal Service Fund support in certain areas, it must strictly enforce all of its auction rules, terms and conditions in order to prevent such reverse auctions from being abused, distorted and undermined by various gaming tactics," the WTA said.

The WTA pointed out that winning RDOF bidders got their grants because they made lower bids than other ISPs. In other words, the ISPs that agreed to serve specific census blocks at a lower cost to the government are the ones that got the grants.

"An obvious gaming danger is the use of a 'strategy' of making support bids as unreasonably low as necessary in order to 'win' specific service areas, and then coming back to the Commission later for the additional support that is actually needed to construct and operate the promised broadband networks in such areas," the WTA told the FCC in a July 28 filing.

It looks like Google's long-running project to split up ChromeOS and its Chrome browser will be shipping out to the masses soon. Kevin Tofel's About Chromebooks has spotted flags that turn on the feature by default for ChromeOS 116 and up. 116 is currently in beta and should be live in the stable channel sometime this month.

The project is called "Lacros" which Google says stands for "Linux And ChRome OS." This will split ChromeOS's Linux OS from the Chrome browser, allowing Google to update each one independently. Google documentation on the project says, "On Chrome OS, the system UI (ash window manager, login screen, etc.) and the web browser are the same binary. Lacros separates this functionality into two binaries, henceforth known as ash-chrome (system UI) and lacros-chrome (web browser)." Part of the project involves sprucing up the ChromeOS OS, and Google's docs say, "Lacros can be imagined as 'Linux chrome with more Wayland support.'"

Previously ChromeOS was using a homemade graphics stack called "Freon," but now with Wayland, it'll be on the new and normal desktop Linux graphic stack. Google's 2016 move to Freon was at a time when it could have moved from X11 (the old, normal desktop Linux graphics stock) directly to Wayland, but it decided to take this custom detour instead. Google says this represents "more Wayland support" because Wayland was previously used for Android and Linux apps, but now it'll be used for the native Chrome OS graphics, too.

On the browser side, ChromeOS would stop using the bespoke Chrome browser for ChromeOS and switch to the Chrome browser for Linux. The same browser you get on Ubuntu would now ship on ChromeOS. In the past, turning on Lacros in ChromeOS would show both Chrome browsers, the outgoing ChromeOS one and the new Linux one.

Lacros has been in development for around two years and can be enabled via a Chrome flag. Tofel says his 116 build no longer has that flag since it's the default now. Google hasn't officially confirmed this is happening, but so far, the code is headed that way.

Users probably won't notice anything, but the feature should make it easier to update Chrome OS and might even extend the lifetime of old ChromeOS devices. This should also let Google more directly roll out changes on ChromeOS. Currently, there can be a delay while Google does the extra build work for ChromeOS, so the standalone browsers get security fixes first.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/EG7nc

Ongoing clinical trial testing therapeutic in humans.

Move comes in response to Canadian legislation requiring internet giants to pay news publishers

Guardian staff and agencies Tue 1 Aug 2023 22.14 BST

Meta has begun the process to end access to news on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada, the company said on Tuesday.

The move comes in response to legislation in the country requiring internet giants to pay news publishers.

The findings suggest that Facebook users seek out content that aligns with their views.

Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, said the changes will roll out in the coming weeks.

Canada’s heritage minister, Pascale St-Onge, who is in charge of the government’s dealings with Meta, called the move irresponsible.

“[Meta] would rather block their users from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations,” St-Onge said in a statement on Tuesday. “We’re going to keep standing our ground. After all, if the government can’t stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?”

Canada’s public broadcast CBC also called Meta’s move irresponsible and said that it was “an abuse of their market power”.

The Online News Act, passed by the Canadian parliament, would force platforms like Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and Meta to negotiate commercial deals with Canadian news publishers for their content.

The legislation is part of a broader global trend of governments trying to make tech firms pay for news. Canada’s legislation is similar to a ground-breaking law that Australia passed in 2021 and had triggered threats from Google and Facebook to curtail their services. Both the companies eventually struck deals with Australian media firms after amendments to the legislation were offered.

In the US, the state of California has also considered a similar law. In that case, too, Meta has threatened to withdraw services from the state if the legislation goes through.

On the Canadian law, Google has argued that it is broader than those enacted in Australia and Europe as it puts a price on news story links displayed in search results and can apply to outlets that do not produce news.

Meta had said links to news articles make up less than 3% of the content on its users’ feed and argued that news lacked economic value.

Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, had said in May that such an argument was flawed and “dangerous to our democracy, to our economy”.

cross-posted from: https://derp.foo/post/95970

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

• According to our sources, Lenovo is gearing up to enter the handheld PC gaming arena.
• Similar to devices like the Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally, Lenovo's "Legion Go" device will sport AMD Phoenix processors, with an 8-inch display.
• It could look similar to Lenovo's previously leaked Lenovo Legion Play Android device, which never reached general availability.
• As of right now, there's no indication on timing for official announcements or launch windows.