Microsoft is retiring the existing Teams Free version for small business in favor of the similarly-titled Teams (free) on April 12th, and legacy data won't carry over. Engadget reports: Your office will have to pay for at least the Teams Essentials plan ($4 per user per month) to preserve chats, meetings, channels and other key info. As Windows Central explains, the new Teams (free) tier will require a new account. Data in the old app, now rebadged as Teams Free (classic), will be deleted. Anything you haven't saved by then will be gone, including shared files you haven't downloaded.

Unable to get the power it needs to feed its growing datacenter footprint, Amazon plans to transition some of its Oregon datacenters over to natural gas fuel cells. The Register reports: First reported by local media, Amazon's initial plan would involve installing just shy of 75 megawatts of fuel cell capacity across three datacenters with the option to expand that to four additional sites in the future. Fuel cells extract electricity from a fuel like natural gas or hydrogen without the need for combustion. With hydrogen, the only byproducts of this reaction are electricity and water vapor, but with natural gas, CO2 -- a potent greenhouse gas -- is still produced.

For Amazon, these natural gas fuel cells will be used as the primary energy supply, delivering 24.3 megawatts of power to each of the three datacenter sites. "We are investing in fuel cells as a way to power a small number of our operations in Oregon," an Amazon spokesperson told The Register in an email. "We continually innovate to minimize our impact on our neighbors, local resources, and the environment and this technology provides a pathway for less carbon intensive solutions in the region."

Continuing to use fossil fuels to power its datacenters is at odds with Amazon's stated sustainability goals -- which include transitioning facilities to 100 percent renewable energy by 2025. However, sources familiar with the matter tell The Register that Amazon's decision to use natural gas fuel cells was made in part due to challenges associated with power transmission infrastructure in the region. Oregon Live notes that the e-tail giant has had problems with landowners, who have objected to having high-voltage transmission lines cross their properties. Fuel cells provide Amazon a way to circumvent these headaches by generating the power onsite. However, regulators are concerned that the decision could actually increase Amazon's carbon footprint in the region as the power supplied by local utilities includes a mix of hydroelectric power. In documents filed with the state, it's estimated the fuel cells would generate 250,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.

A writer for the Atlantic complains that their HP printer is shaking them down like a loan shark. I discovered an error message on my computer indicating that my HP OfficeJet Pro had been remotely disabled by the company. When I logged on to HP's website, I learned why: The credit card I had used to sign up for HP's Instant Ink cartridge-refill program had expired, and the company had effectively bricked my device in response....

Instant Ink is a monthly subscription program that purports to monitor one's printer usage and ink levels and automatically send new cartridges when they run low. The name is misleading, because the monthly fee is not for the ink itself but for the number of pages printed. (The recommended household plan is $5.99 a month for 100 pages). Like others, I signed up in haste during the printer-setup process, only slightly aware of what I was purchasing. Getting ink delivered when I need it sounded convenient enough to me....

The monthly fee is incurred whether you print or not, and the ink cartridges occupy some liminal ownership space. You possess them, but you are, in essence, renting both them and your machine while you're enrolled in the program.... Here was a piece of technology that I had paid more than $200 for, stocked with full ink cartridges. My printer, gently used, was sitting on my desk in perfect working order but rendered useless by Hewlett-Packard, a tech corporation with a $28 billion market cap at the time of writing, because I had failed to make a monthly payment for a service intended to deliver new printer cartridges that I did not yet need....

There are tales of woe across HP's customer-support site, in Reddit threads, and on Twitter. A pending class-action lawsuit in California alleges that the Instant Ink program has "significant catches" and does not deliver new cartridges on time or allow those enrolled to use cartridges purchased outside the subscription service, rendering the consumer frequently unable to print. Parker Truax, a spokesperson for HP, told me, "Instant Ink cartridges will continue working until the end of the current billing cycle in which [a customer cancels]. To continue printing after they discontinue their Instant Ink subscription and their billing cycle ends, they can purchase and use HP original Standard or XL cartridges."
"Nobody told me that if I canceled, then all those cartridges would stop working," complains another owner of an HP printer cited in the article. "I guess this is our future, where your printer ink spies on you."

But the article ultimately concludes that the printer's shakedown is "just one example of how digital subscriptions have permeated physical tech so thoroughly that they are blurring the lines of ownership. Even if I paid for it, can I really say that I own my printer if HP can flip a switch and make it inert?"

Bill Gates is calling for "high-voltage transmission lines that can carry electricity long distances," calling them the key to a clean-energy future: [M]any of the best places to generate lots of electricity are far away from urban centers... so to maximize clean energy's potential, we're going to need much longer lines to move that power from where it's made to where it's needed.... Beyond being old and outdated, there's another big problem making everything worse: Our grid is fragmented. Most people (including me a lot of the time) talk about the "electric grid" as if it's one single grid covering the whole nation from coast to coast, but it's actually a complicated patchwork of systems with different levels of connection to one another.

Our convoluted network prevents communities from importing energy when challenges like extreme weather shut off their power. It also prevents power from new clean energy projects from making it to people's homes. Right now, over 1,000 gigawatts worth of potential clean energy projects are waiting for approval — about the current size of the entire U.S. grid — and the primary reason for the bottleneck is the lack of transmission. Complicating things further is the fact that new infrastructure projects are typically planned and executed by hundreds of individual utility companies that aren't required to coordinate.
Gates calls for new federal funding and policies , but also faults the permitting processes at the state level as "long, convoluted, and often outdated." As a result, we don't build lines fast enough, and we're slower than other countries. Some states — like New Mexico and Colorado — are doing innovative work to speed up the process. But there is a lot more room for policymakers to work together and make the permit process easier.

Although transmission is primarily a policy problem, innovation will help too. For example, grid-enhancing technologies like dynamic line ratings, power flow controls, and topology optimization could increase the capacity of the existing system. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is part of the climate initiative I helped start, has invested in new technologies like advanced conductors and superconductors — wires that use cutting-edge materials to get more energy out of smaller lines. But these technologies aren't a substitute for real systemic improvements and building lines in places where they don't already exist.
"By the 2030s, we need to build so many new lines that they would reach to the moon if they were strung together," Gates says in a video accompanying the article. "And by 2050, we'll need to more than double the size of the grid, while replacing most of the existing wires." But noting today's power grid problems, Gates writes optimistically that "It doesn't have to be this way."

And he ultimately believes that modernized power grids "will lead to lower emissions, cleaner air, more jobs, fewer blackouts, more energy and economic security, and healthier communities across the country."

The New York Post reports: Facebook can secretly drain its users' cellphone batteries, a former employee contends in a lawsuit.

The practice, known as "negative testing," allows tech companies to "surreptitiously" run down someone's mobile juice in the name of testing features or issues such as how fast their app runs or how an image might load, according to data scientist George Hayward. "I said to the manager, 'This can harm somebody,' and she said by harming a few we can help the greater masses," said Hayward, 33, who claims in a Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit that he was fired in November for refusing to participate in negative testing....

Killing someone's cellphone battery puts people at risk, especially "in circumstances where they need to communicate with others, including but not limited to police or other rescue workers," according to the litigation filed against Facebook's parent company, Meta Platforms. "I refused to do this test," he said, adding, "It turns out if you tell your boss, 'No, that's illegal,' it doesn't go over very well." Hayward was hired in October 2019 for a six-figure gig.

He said he doesn't know how many people have been impacted by Facebook's negative testing but believes the company has engaged in the practice because he was given an internal training document titled, "How to run thoughtful negative tests," which included examples of such experiments being carried out. "I have never seen a more horrible document in my career," he said....

The lawsuit, which sought unspecified damages, has since been withdrawn because Hayward is required to go to arbitration, said the lawyer, who said Hayward stands by the allegations.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader WankerWeasel for sharing the article.

During Samsung's Unpacked event on Wednesday where it unveiled its new Galaxy S23 smartphones, the company said it'll work with Google and Qualcomm on an upcoming mixed-reality platform. Samsung didn't mention any specific products or timeline. CNET reports: "It's more of a declarative announcement about how we are going to get it right in trying to build the XR ecosystem," TM Roh, president of Samsung's mobile division, said in an interview with CNET through a translator ahead of the event. "Google's been investing for a long time across both experiences and technology in AR and VR," Lockheimer said onstage. "Delivering this next generation of experiences requires cutting-edge advanced hardware and software. That's why our collaboration with Samsung and Qualcomm is so exciting."

Samsung has been relatively quiet about virtual reality aside from its Gear VR headset, which it launched several iterations of between 2015 and 2017. That device is a head-mounted holster for smartphone-powered VR experiences. Roh says there's been more demand from consumers for augmented and virtual reality, which is why the company chose this time to start discussing its plans. He says that the company has been researching the category for a while. "And now we believe that we have reached a certain threshold," he said.

The collaboration makes sense since Samsung, Google and Qualcomm already work together to develop smartphones. Samsung builds the hardware of its Galaxy phones, while Qualcomm supplies the processor and Google manages the software's underlying Android operating system. Roh said Google and Qualcomm will play similar roles in the development of this upcoming XR platform, although they will likely overlap in certain areas. Even though Qualcomm would supply the processor, for example, Samsung might make some optimizations, just as it's done for the chip inside the Galaxy S23 lineup. "Each player is taking leadership in each category, and then we will be working very closely together across the different categories," Roh said.

At Samsung's first Galaxy Unpacked event of the year, the company unveiled its new Galaxy S23 devices: the Galaxy S23, S23 Plus, and Galaxy S23 Ultra. Here's what The Verge's Allison Johnson says about the most premium phone of the bunch, the Galaxy S23 Ultra: Compared to the outgoing model, it comes with an updated processor, a new 200-megapixel main camera sensor, and a tweak to the form factor. The built-in S Pen is still here, naturally. And thankfully the price hasn't inflated. In fact, the starting MSRP of $1,199.99 now comes with 256GB of storage -- double last year's base model. It's a little extra shine on what was already Samsung's star smartphone. [...]

The S23 Ultra also features a very slight exterior redesign. The long edges of the phone are slightly less curved, so there's more of a flat surface to grip when you're holding the device. The back panel and the screen also curve around the sides a bit less, so you might be less likely to run your S Pen off the edge of the device, which tended to happen with the more rounded design. [...] That's the short list of what's new. What's not new is basically everything else: a 5,000mAh battery, IP68 dust and water resistance, and either 8GB or 12GB of RAM depending on the configuration. Your color options this year are phantom black, lavender, green, and cream [...]. [T]he S23 Ultra is up for preorder today and starts shipping on February 17th. "Samsung's trio of flagships for 2023 offer some refined designs -- which look a little iPhone-like, if I'm being candid -- with some camera, battery, and processor improvements over last year's S22 generation," adds The Verge's Antonio G. Di Benedetto. You can view a full list of specs here.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As the PC industry flounders, Intel suffered from such disastrous sales last quarter that it instituted pay cuts and other extreme measures going forward. AMD's client PC sales also dropped dramatically -- a whopping 51 percent year-over-year -- but the company managed to eke out a small profit despite the sky falling. So why aren't CPU and GPU prices falling too? In a call with investors Tuesday night, CEO Lisa Su confirmed that AMD has been "undershipping" chips for a while now to balance supply and demand (read: keep prices up). "We have been undershipping the sell-through or consumption for the last two quarters," Su said, as spotted by PC Gamer. "We undershipped in Q3, we undershipped in Q4. We will undership, to a lesser extent, in Q1."

With the pandemic winding down and inflation ramping up, far fewer people are buying CPUs, GPUs, and PCs. It's a hard, sudden reverse from just months ago, when companies like Nvidia and AMD were churning out graphic cards as quickly as possible to keep up with booming demand from cryptocurrency miners and PC gamers alike. Now that GPU mining is dead, shelves are brimming with unsold chips. Despite the painfully high price tags of new next-gen GPUs, last-gen GeForce RTX 30-series and Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards are still selling for very high prices considering their two-year-old status. Strategic under-shipping helps companies maintain higher prices for their wares.

Hot Hardware reports: When it comes to mechanical hard disk drive (HDDs), you'd be very hard pressed to find any data on failure rates reported by any of the major players, such as Western Digital, Seagate, and the rest. Fortunately for us stat nerds and anyone else who is curious, the folks at cloud backup firm Backblaze frequently issue reliability reports that give insight into the how often various models and capacities give up the ghost. At a glance, Backblaze's latest report highlights that bigger capacity drives -- 12TB, 14TB, and 16TB -- fail less often than smaller capacity models. A closer examination, however, reveals that it's not so cut and dry.

[...] In a nutshell, Backblaze noted an overall rise in the annual failure rates (AFRs) for 2022. The cumulative AFR of all drives deployed rose to 1.37 percent, up from 1.01 percent in 2021. By the end of 2022, Backblaze had 236,608 HDDs in service, including 231,309 data drives and 4,299 boot drives. Its latest report focuses on the data drives. [...] Bigger drives are more reliable than smaller drives, case close, right? Not so fast. There's an important caveat to this data -- while the smaller drives failed more often last year, they are also older, as can be seen in the graph above. "The aging of our fleet of hard drives does appear to be the most logical reason for the increased AFR in 2022. We could dig in further, but that is probably moot at this point. You see, we spent 2022 building out our presence in two new data centers, the Nautilus facility in Stockton, California and the CoreSite facility in Reston, Virginia. In 2023, our focus is expected to be on replacing our older drives with 16TB and larger hard drives," Backblaze says.

The Washington Post reports that "there are only seven working offshore wind turbines in the entire United States at the moment. In Europe, there are more than 5,000. China also has thousands."

And yet 17 wind-power projects in the eastern U.S. are facing "considerable" resistance, while shareholders "are pressuring companies not to invest in more projects beyond the wave that has already begun, said Paul Zimbardo, an analyst at Bank of America." Surging costs from inflation and labor shortages have developers saying their projects may not be profitable. A raft of lawsuits and pending federal restrictions to protect sensitive wildlife could further add to costs. The uncertainty has clouded bright expectations for massive growth in U.S. offshore wind, which the Biden administration and several state governments have bet big on in their climate plans. "We're trying to stand up an entire industry in the United States, and we're having natural growing pains," said Cindy Muller, a lawyer who runs the Houston office and co-chairs the offshore wind initiative at the law firm Jones Walker.

State leaders and the Biden administration have homed in on the industry because the power of offshore winds can produce a rare round-the-clock source of greenhouse-gas-free electricity — and one difficult for future administrations to undo once turbines are in the ground. The administration set a goal for 30 gigawatts of new power from offshore wind by 2030. That is about 3 percent of what the country needs to get to 80 percent clean electricity by that time, according to estimates from a team led by University of California at Berkeley researchers.... Delays make it unlikely that the Biden administration will meet its 2030 goal, lawyers and analysts said.
The article notes that last fall three wind developers"moved to renegotiate their contracts, saying they can no longer afford to deliver power for the prices promised because of soaring costs." And meanwhile a massive wind project south of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts "is years behind schedule amid regulatory delays and litigation from opponents."

Though the project has finally started laying cable, now an oil company-funded advocacy group "is providing the financial backing and legal expertise for litigation...taking up the cause of the whales in court." (This despite the fact that America's ocean-montoring agency, the NOAA, says whales aren't affected by wind power.) The Post notes that the project's construction finally began "a little more than a year ago...in the same area where a die-off of humpback whales began seven years ago." NOAA says about 40% of the whales showed evidence they'd been struck by a ship or entangled in nets, and both whales and fishermen "may be following their prey (small fish) which are reportedly close to shore this winter."

Ironically, the Sierra Club tells the Washington Post that "The biggest threat to the ocean ecosystem is climate change."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: New York City's largest fossil-fuel plant, which powers 20% of the city, will be replaced with offshore wind power. Ravenswood Generating Station is the New York City fossil fuel plant that will become an offshore wind hub. It's a 2,480-megawatt (MW) power plant in Long Island City, Queens, across from Roosevelt Island, and it's the Big Apple's largest power plant. Rise Light & Power, a New York based energy asset manager and developer that holds Ravenswood as its core asset, is submitting a proposal today, with support from community and state leaders, to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) in response to the state's offshore wind solicitation.

In a nutshell, the 27-acre waterfront oil and gas industrial site is going to be converted into a clean energy hub that will power one-fifth of New York City with offshore wind power. The Ravenswood offshore wind project will reuse existing physical and electrical infrastructure, and that's going to save New York ratepayers money. An HVDC conductor cable will be brought onshore at the existing power plant site. The cable will interconnect via underground HVAC cables to the NYISO bulk electric system at existing substations adjacent to the site. It will also become an offshore wind operations and maintenance hub that will support the just transition of the existing fossil fuel plant workforce, and drive economic investment into a historically underserved community. Rise Light & Power states that the project will, with training programs and job opportunities, justly transition and upskill Ravenswood's current Local 1-2 UWUA union workers.

schwit1 shares a report from NPR: A British man who planned to have a "robot lawyer" help a defendant fight a traffic ticket has dropped the effort after receiving threats of possible prosecution and jail time. [...] The first-ever AI-powered legal defense was set to take place in California on Feb. 22, but not anymore. As word got out, an uneasy buzz began to swirl among various state bar officials, according to Browder. He says angry letters began to pour in. "Multiple state bar associations have threatened us," Browder said. "One even said a referral to the district attorney's office and prosecution and prison time would be possible." In particular, Browder said one state bar official noted that the unauthorized practice of law is a misdemeanor in some states punishable up to six months in county jail.

"Even if it wouldn't happen, the threat of criminal charges was enough to give it up," [said Joshua Browden, the CEO of the New York-based startup DoNotPay]. "The letters have become so frequent that we thought it was just a distraction and that we should move on." State bar associations license and regulate attorneys, as a way to ensure people hire lawyers who understand the law. Browder refused to cite which state bar associations in particular sent letters, and what official made the threat of possible prosecution, saying his startup, DoNotPay, is under investigation by multiple state bar associations, including California's. "The truth is, most people can't afford lawyers," he said. "This could've shifted the balance and allowed people to use tools like ChatGPT in the courtroom that maybe could've helped them win cases."

"I think calling the tool a 'robot lawyer' really riled a lot of lawyers up," Browder said. "But I think they're missing the forest for the trees. Technology is advancing and courtroom rules are very outdated."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard, written by Katie Way: MILF Manor is a reality TV show made to be dissected on the internet. Everything, from its ripped-from-30-Rock title to the Oedipal set-up of mothers and their sons thrown into the same "dating pool," is so patently outrageous that it boomerangs back into normalcy -- of course these mothers need to participate in a blindfolded contest to identify their sons by their abs alone. But MILF Manor's most understated quirk is the one that sticks out to me: There's no tanned, vaguely handsome man with veneers and a dress shirt directing the festivities. Instead, contestants receive alerts and directions via text, on iPhones in magenta cases that seem to be provided by the producers. Like more and more reality TV competition shows, there's no actual host.

By my estimation, Netflix's The Circle kicked the trend off in 2020. Its contestants, who compete to create the most lovable social media presence in physical isolation, receive prompts and challenges from a big-screen TV in their living quarters. Pressure Cooker, a more recent offering from the streaming giant, is a cooking competition show where the host is replaced by a kitchen ticket printer: Competitions receive challenge instructions and the results of game-ending votes in the same way chefs take orders from their diners. The Button, a YouTube speed dating series by the production company Cut, goes a step further with the introduction of a large talking button that cracks jokes and prompts daters to ask each other cringe-worthy questions until one of them presses it, ending the date and sending in another option.

Why axe the role of host when it's been a staple of the formula for so long? It could be a sign of the recession. Reality TV competition shows are famously among the cheapest television to produce, but if I've learned anything about business, it's that executives have never met a corner they're not dying to cut. It could also be that the role of reality TV host is not attracting the same iconic cultural figures it once was, when the subgenre exploded in popularity in the early 2000s. [...] At the core, though, I believe there's something more insidious at play: Robots are once again stealing jobs from red-blooded human workers. Only this time, instead of factory linemen or fast food cashiers, these laborers are C-List comedians and guys who are incredibly symmetrical but not quite hot. (Again, Jeff Probst, I am not talking about you!) Sure, I know machine intelligence doesn't experience emotion -- yet! -- and I know that all of these robo-hosts are likely operated by producers -- for now! But isn't toying with people in a high-stress, high-stakes situation, the exact job description of a reality competition host, the absolute dream gig for a robot? Seems a little too perfect. "Experts already predict that AI and machine learning could replace people working as couriers, investment analysts, and customer service representatives," concludes Way. "Adding reality competition show hosts to that list means the creep into our cultural landscape has already started, which is a distinctly scary thought, in my book. Our flesh is weak, our MILFs are fragile, and we are so, so vulnerable to the clinical calculations of our machine overlords -- uh, I mean, hosts."

Senator Joe Manchin, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has introduced a new bill that squashes a small loophole around the Inflation Reduction Act's (IRA) $7,500 EV tax credit. Engadget reports: The new credits are restricted to cars with final assembly in the US, as well as those with a certain amount of North American battery content (an amount that increases every year). But, the U.S. Treasury has delayed its final rules on battery guidance until March, which means EVs with foreign batteries can still receive the full $7,500 in credits until then. Manchin's legislation, dubbed the American Vehicle Security Act (AVSA), would push the battery requirement back to January 1st.

"It is unacceptable that the U.S. Treasury has failed to issue updated guidance for the 30D electric vehicle tax credits and continues to make the full $7,500 credits available without meeting all of the clear requirements included in the Inflation Reduction Act," Manchin wrote a statement. "The Treasury Department failed to meet the statutory deadline of December 31, 2022, to release guidance for the 30D credit and have created an opportunity to circumvent stringent supply chain requirements included in the IRA. The IRA is first-and-foremost an energy security bill, and the EV tax credits were designed to grow domestic manufacturing and reduce our reliance on foreign supply chains for the critical minerals needed to produce EV batteries." Autoblog notes that the AVSA doesn't patch the other IRA loophole, which also allows for the full credit for leased cars built outside of the U.S.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Pakistan's national grid suffered a major breakdown, leaving millions of people without electricity for the second time in three months and highlighting the infrastructural weakness of the heavily indebted nation. The energy minister, Khurram Dastgir, said the outage on Monday was caused by a large voltage surge in the south of the grid, which affected the entire network. Supplies were being partially restored from north to the south, he added, nearly six hours after factories, hospitals and schools reported outages. The grid should be fully functioning by 10pm (1700 GMT), Dastgir said, adding: "We are trying our utmost to achieve restoration before that."

Like much of the national infrastructure, Pakistan's grid needs an upgrade that the government says it can ill afford. Pakistan has enough installed power capacity to meet demand, but it lacks resources to run its oil-and-gas powered plants -- and the sector is so heavily in debt that it cannot afford to invest in infrastructure and power lines. "We have been adding capacity, but we have been doing so without improving transmission infrastructure," Fahad Rauf, the head of research at Karachi-based brokerage Ismail Iqbal Industries, said.

Someone on Reddit used the Midjourney AI image generator to create "a selection of 28 fantastically alluring case designs" for the Mini ITX PC, reports Tom's Hardware: Our sample gallery of the AI-generated Mini ITX PCs embedded above features quite a few designs that are rather rotund. This isn't a bias of the AI; instead, Hybective admits he has a fondness for Wheatley (the AI robot from the Portal franchise) and has wanted a spherical PC ever since casting eyes on the Games Sphere (a GameCube parody) in teen sitcom Drake & Josh....

For his shared Mini ITX PC case images, the Redditor says he commonly used 'spherical' as one of the inputs into Midjourney. More specifically, at least some of the images were generated with the prompt "Sphere ITX PC build hyper realistic," or similar.

Long-time Slashdot reader wonkavader found a video on YouTube where, at the 2:50 mark, there's time-lapse footage of soldering paste magically melting into place. The secret? Many circuit boards include a grounded plane as a layer. This doesn't have to be a big unbroken expanse of copper — it can be a long snake to reduce the copper used. Well, if you run 9 volts through that long snake, it acts as a resistor and heats up the board enough to melt solder paste. Electronics engineer Carl Bugeja has made a board which controls the 9 volt input to keep the temperature on the desired curve for the solder.

This is an interesting home-brew project which seems like it might someday make a pleasant, expected feature in kits.
Hackaday is impressed by the possibilities too: Surface mount components have been a game changer for the electronics hobbyist, but doing reflow soldering right requires some way to evenly heat the board. You might need to buy a commercial reflow oven — you can cobble one together from an old toaster oven, after all — but you still need something, because it's not like a PCB is going to solder itself. Right?

Wrong. At least if you're Carl Bugeja, who came up with a clever way to make his PCBs self-soldering.... The quality of the soldering seems very similar to what you'd see from a reflow oven.... After soldering, the now-useless heating element is converted into a ground plane for the circuit by breaking off the terminals and soldering on a couple of zero ohm resistors to short the coil to ground.
It's an open source project, with all files available on GitHub. "This is really clever," tweeted Adrian Bowyer, inventor of the open source 3D printer the RepRap Project.

In the video Bugeja compares reflow soldering to pizza-making. (If the circuit board is the underlying dough, then the electronics on top are the toppings, with the solder paste representing the sauce that keeps them in place. "The oven's heat is what bonds these individual items together.")

But by that logic making a self-soldering circuit is "like putting the oven in the dough and making it edible."

A newly published study co-authored by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu "quantifies the extent to which automation has contributed to income inequality in the U.S.," reports SciTechDaily, "simply by replacing workers with technology — whether self-checkout machines, call-center systems, assembly-line technology, or other devices." Over the last four decades, the income gap between more- and less-educated workers has grown significantly; the study finds that automation accounts for more than half of that increase. "This single one variable ... explains 50 to 70 percent of the changes or variation between group inequality from 1980 to about 2016," Acemoglu says....

Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, an assistant professor of economics at Boston University, used U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis statistics on the extent to which human labor was used in 49 industries from 1987 to 2016, as well as data on machinery and software adopted in that time. The scholars also used data they had previously compiled about the adoption of robots in the U.S. from 1993 to 2014. In previous studies, Acemoglu and Restrepo have found that robots have by themselves replaced a substantial number of workers in the U.S., helped some firms dominate their industries, and contributed to inequality.
At the same time, the scholars used U.S. Census Bureau metrics, including its American Community Survey data, to track worker outcomes during this time for roughly 500 demographic subgroups... By examining the links between changes in business practices alongside changes in labor market outcomes, the study can estimate what impact automation has had on workers.

Ultimately, Acemoglu and Restrepo conclude that the effects have been profound. Since 1980, for instance, they estimate that automation has reduced the wages of men without a high school degree by 8.8 percent and women without a high school degree by 2.3 percent, adjusted for inflation.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

The Los Angeles Times explores an interesting exercise in prognisticating about the future. In 2018 robotics entrepreneur Rodney Brooks made a list of predictions about hot tech topics like robots, space travel, and AI, "and promised to review them every year until Jan. 1, 2050, when, if he's still alive, he will have just turned 95." His goal was to "inject some reality into what I saw as irrational exuberance." Each prediction carried a time frame — something would either have occurred by a given date, or no earlier than a given date, or "not in my lifetime." Brooks published his fifth annual scorecard on New Year's Day. The majority of his predictions have been spot-on, though this time around he confessed to thinking that he, too, had allowed hype to make him too optimistic about some developments....

People have been "trained by Moore's Law" to expect technologies to continue improving at ever-faster rates, Brooks told me.... That tempts people, even experts, to underestimate how difficult it may be to reach a chosen goal, whether self-aware robots or living on Mars. "They don't understand how hard it might have been to get there," he told me, "so they assume that it will keep getting better and better...."

This year, 14 of his original predictions are deemed accurate, whether because they happened within the time frame he projected or failed to happen before the deadline he set. Among them are driverless package delivery services in a major U.S. city, which he predicted wouldn't happen before 2023; it hasn't happened yet. On space travel and space tourism, he predicted a suborbital launch of humans by a private company would happen by 2018; Virgin Atlantic beat the deadline with such a flight on Dec. 13, 2018. He conjectured that space flights with a few handfuls of paying customers wouldn't happen before 2020; regular flights at a rate of more than once a week not before 2022 (though perhaps by 2026); and the transport of two paying customers around the moon no earlier than 2020.

All those deadlines have passed, making the predictions accurate. Only three flights with paying customers happened in 2022, showing there's "a long way to go to get to sub-weekly flights," Brooks observes.
"My current belief is that things will go, overall, even slower than I thought five years ago," Brooks writes. "That is not to say that there has not been great progress in all three fields, but it has not been as overwhelmingly inevitable as the tech zeitgeist thought on January 1st, 2018." (For example, Brooks writes that self-driving taxis are "decades away from profitability".)

And this year he's also graced us with new predictions responding to current hype:

• "The metaverse ain't going anywhere, despite the tens of billions of dollars poured in. If anything like the metaverse succeeds it will from a new small player, a small team, that is not yoked down by an existing behemoth."

• " Crypto, as in all the currencies out there now, are going to fade away and lose their remaining value. Crypto may rise again but it needs a new set of algorithms and capability for scaling. The most likely path is that existing national currencies will morph into crypto currency as contactless payment become common in more and more countries. It may lead to one of the existing national currencies becoming much more accessible world wide.

• "No car company is going to produce a humanoid robot that will change manufacturing at all. Dexterity is a long way off, and innovations in manufacturing will take very different functional and process forms, perhaps hardly seeming at all like a robot from popular imagination."

• " Large language models may find a niche, but they are not the foundation for generally intelligent systems. Their novelty will wear off as people try to build real scalable systems with them and find it very difficult to deliver on the hype."

• "There will be human drivers on our roads for decades to come."

And Brooks had this to say about ChatGPT. "People are making the same mistake that they have made again and again and again, completely misjudging some new AI demo as the sign that everything in the world has changed. It hasn't."

California state officials "claim that the 12.5 million electric vehicles expected on California's roads in 2035 will not strain the grid," writes the nonpartisan and nonprofit news organization Cal Matters.

"But their confidence that the state can avoid brownouts relies on a best-case — some say unrealistic — scenario: massive and rapid construction of offshore wind and solar farms, and drivers charging their cars in off-peak hours...." Powering the vehicles means the state must triple the amount of electricity produced and deploy new solar and wind energy at almost five times the pace of the past decade.... Adding even more pressure, the state's last nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, is slated to shut down in 2030.... To provide enough electricity, California must:

- Convince drivers to charge their cars during off-peak hours: With new discounted rates, utilities are urging residents to avoid charging their cars between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. But many people don't have unrestricted access to chargers at their jobs or homes.

- Build solar and wind at an unprecedented pace: Shifting to all renewables requires at least 6 gigawatts of new resources a year for the next 25 years — a pace that's never been met before.

- Develop a giant new industry: State officials predict that offshore wind farms will provide enough power for about 1.5 million homes by 2030 and 25 million homes by 2045. But no such projects are in the works yet. Planning them, obtaining an array of permits and construction could take at least seven to eight years.

- Build 15 times more public chargers: About 1.2 million chargers will be needed for the 8 million electric cars expected in California by 2030. Currently, about 80,000 public chargers operate statewide, with another estimated 17,000 on the way, according to state data.

- Expand vehicle-to-grid technology: State officials hope electric cars will send energy back to the grid when electricity is in high demand, but the technology is new and has not been tested in electric cars.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story.