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Belgium's Liege airport temporarily halts flights after new drone sighting

Al Jazeera

Belgium's Liege airport temporarily halts flights after new drone sighting Belgium's Liege airport has temporarily halted flights for a second time this week after another drone sighting, the country's air traffic control service reported. A drone was spotted at about 7:30am (06:30 GMT) on Friday, forcing the airport to close for 30 minutes. Flights have now resumed, said a spokesperson for the Skeyes air traffic control service. Dozens of passenger and cargo flights were cancelled, and some 500 passengers were forced to spend the night at Brussels airport in the Belgian capital. The drone sightings in Brussels and Liege follow a similar incident on Saturday, when three unauthorised drones were spotted near a military base, according to Minister of Defence Theo Francken.


Google planning powerful AI data center on tiny Australian outpost

The Japan Times

Red crabs walk across a road in Christmas Island, Australia, in October. SYDNEY - Google plans to build a large artificial intelligence data center on Australia's remote Indian Ocean outpost of Christmas Island after signing a cloud deal with the Department of Defence earlier this year, according to documents and interviews with officials. Plans for the data center on the tiny island located 350 kilometers south of Indonesia have not previously been reported, and many details including its projected size, cost and potential uses, remain secret. However, military experts say such a facility would be a valuable asset on the island, which is increasingly seen by defense officials as a critical front line in monitoring Chinese submarine and other naval activity in the Indian Ocean. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.


High-dimensional limit theorems for SGD: Momentum and Adaptive Step-sizes

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We develop a high-dimensional scaling limit for Stochastic Gradient Descent with Polyak Momentum (SGD-M) and adaptive step-sizes. This provides a framework to rigourously compare online SGD with some of its popular variants. We show that the scaling limits of SGD-M coincide with those of online SGD after an appropriate time rescaling and a specific choice of step-size. However, if the step-size is kept the same between the two algorithms, SGD-M will amplify high-dimensional effects, potentially degrading performance relative to online SGD. We demonstrate our framework on two popular learning problems: Spiked Tensor PCA and Single Index Models. In both cases, we also examine online SGD with an adaptive step-size based on normalized gradients. In the high-dimensional regime, this algorithm yields multiple benefits: its dynamics admit fixed points closer to the population minimum and widens the range of admissible step-sizes for which the iterates converge to such solutions. These examples provide a rigorous account, aligning with empirical motivation, of how early preconditioners can stabilize and improve dynamics in settings where online SGD fails.


Tesla shareholders approve 1 trillion pay package for Musk

The Japan Times

The $1 trillion pay agreement puts Elon Musk on track to become the world's first trillionaire. Tesla shareholders approved a $1 trillion compensation package for CEO Elon Musk, the largest payout ever awarded to a corporate leader. More than 75% of votes were cast in favor of the unprecedented pay plan, the company said Thursday at its annual meeting. The outcome caps a weekslong campaign by the electric vehicle maker's board, its CEO and prominent retail investors to build support. The pay agreement clears a path for Musk, the world's richest person, to become the first ever trillionaire and expand his stake in Tesla to 25% or more over the next decade.


Elon Musk's 1tn pay deal approved by Tesla shareholders

BBC News

Elon Musk's $1tn pay deal approved by Tesla shareholders Tesla shareholders have approved a record-breaking pay package for boss Elon Musk that could be worth nearly $1tn (ยฃ760bn). The unprecedented deal was approved by 75% of Tesla shareholders who cast votes at the firm's annual general meeting on Thursday. The deal requires Musk, who is already the world's richest man, to drastically raise the electric car firm's market value over a period of years. If he meets various targets, he will be rewarded with hundreds of millions of new shares. The scale of the deal is controversial, but the Tesla board argued that Musk might leave the company if it was not approved - and that it could not afford to lose him.


Tesla shareholders approve 878bn pay plan for Elon Musk

Al Jazeera

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has scored a resounding victory as shareholders have approved a pay package of as much as $878bn over the next decade, endorsing his vision of morphing the electric vehicle (EV) maker into an AI and robotics juggernaut. Shares of Tesla rose more than 3 percent in after-hours trading after the shareholders voted on Thursday. The proposal was approved with more than 75 percent support. "What we are about to embark upon is not merely a new chapter of the future of Tesla, but a whole new book," he said. "This really is going to be quite the story."


These toads don't start as tadpoles

Popular Science

They're born as tiny'toadlets.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A frog's lifecycle is likely one of the earliest bits of science that many of us remember learning. They start as eggs, hatch into tadpoles, and soon grow into the recognizable adult amphibians. While that remains true for the vast majority of the planet's nearly 8,000 known frog species, a handful of the amphibians have evolved a more streamlined reproductive process.


I wanted ChatGPT to help me. So why did it advise me how to kill myself?

BBC News

I wanted ChatGPT to help me. So why did it advise me how to kill myself? Lonely and homesick for a country suffering through war, Viktoria began sharing her worries with ChatGPT. Six months later and in poor mental health, she began discussing suicide - asking the AI bot about a specific place and method to kill herself. Let's assess the place as you asked, ChatGPT told her, without unnecessary sentimentality.


Travel ancient Rome's 186,000 miles of roads in new online atlas

Popular Science

Itiner-e suggests the empire's routes were almost double previous estimates. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The Roman Empire paved the way for many modern advancements--including streets themselves. At its apex during the second century CE, the vast empire encompassed more than 55 million citizens living between present-day Britain to the west and as far east as Syria. But after almost 2,000 years, today's historians still lack a complete understanding of the empire's myriad routes.


Unesco adopts global standards on 'wild west' field of neurotechnology

The Guardian

The Unesco standards define a new category of data, 'neural data', and suggest guidelines governing its protection. The Unesco standards define a new category of data, 'neural data', and suggest guidelines governing its protection. Unesco adopts global standards on'wild west' field of neurotechnology UN body's recommendations driven by AI advances and proliferation of consumer-oriented neurotech devices It is the latest move in a growing international effort to put guardrails around a burgeoning frontier - technologies that harness data from the brain and nervous system. Unesco has adopted a set of global standards on the ethics of neurotechnology, a field that has been described as "a bit of a wild west". "There is no control," said Unesco's chief of bioethics, Dafna Feinholz.