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“Enhance Your Mood with Near-Infrared Light Emitted by Desktop Lamps”

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Light therapy lamps have become increasingly popular as a result. These products rely on the visible light spectrum, in a bid to mimic the sun’s impact for those of us who spend more of our waking hours in front of a computer than we care to mention. More recently, use of the “near-infrared” (NIR) segment of the light spectrum has been growing in popularity as a potential alternative to visible light. As the name implies, the segment sits between infrared and visible light, at around 600 and 1000 nanometers. That said, it’s probably still safe to suggest that the jury is still out on a lot of this stuff.

“The Power of Politeness: How Treating a Chatbot with Kindness Can Improve Its Performance!”

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Phrasing requests in a certain way — meanly or nicely — can yield better results with chatbots like ChatGPT than prompting in a more neutral tone. So what’s the deal with emotive prompts? Nouha Dziri, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, theorizes that emotive prompts essentially “manipulate” a model’s underlying probability mechanisms. Why is it so trivial to defeat safeguards with emotive prompts? Another reason could be a mismatch between a model’s general training data and its “safety” training datasets, Dziri says — i.e.

“Reddit’s Public Offering: A Meme-Lover’s Dream for Traders and Trolls Alike”

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As Reddit finally files to go public, the company wrote in its S-1 filing that “meme stock” schemes on r/WallStreetBets could pose a risk to investors. The stock was so volatile, jumping more than 600% within days, that trading was halted multiple times. Retail traders tried to replicate the GameStop saga by investing in other heavily shorted stocks like AMC and Bed, Bath & Beyond, solidifying this phenomenon of trading “meme stocks,” to mixed results. This is a rare move that would let community members buy stock at the same price as institutional investors upon IPO. In 2023, Reddit incurred a net loss of $90.8 million, adding to the company’s cumulative deficit of $716.6 million.

Security Experts Warn: ConnectWise Vulnerabilities Being Exploited by Hackers to Deploy LockBit Ransomware

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Security experts are warning that a pair of high-risk flaws in a popular remote access tool are being exploited by hackers to deploy LockBit ransomware — days after authorities announced that they had disrupted the notorious Russia-linked cybercrime gang. In a post on Mastodon on Thursday, Sophos said that it had observed “several LockBit attacks” following exploitation of the ConnectWise vulnerabilities. “Two things of interest here: first, as noted by others, the ScreenConnect vulnerabilities are being actively exploited in the wild. Rogers said that Huntress has seen LockBit ransomware deployed on customer systems spanning a range of industries, but declined to name the customers affected. The company’s website claims that the organization provides its remote access technology to more than a million small to medium-sized businesses.

Threads begins trials on in-app camera shortcut and unpublished documents

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Meta said Thursday that it has started to test two “most requested” features: drafts and in-app camera. You can write the post you might want to post later in the composer, and just swipe down to save the draft. The Threads app also shows a different composer icon in the bottom bar when there is a saved draft that you haven’t posted yet. Along with the new drafts feature, Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo through the new camera shortcut that opens in the composer. This shortcut makes it easier if you want to quickly post a photo to Threads.

“Nation-State Breach: UnitedHealth Discovers Hack on Change Healthcare, Continues to See Pharmacy Outages”

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UnitedHealth says Change Healthcare hacked by nation state, as pharmacy outages drag onU.S. health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group said Thursday in a filing with government regulators that its subsidiary Change Healthcare was compromised likely by government-backed hackers. In a filing Thursday, UHG blamed the ongoing cybersecurity incident affecting Change Healthcare on suspected nation state hackers but said it had no timeframe for when its systems would be back online. UHG did not attribute the cyberattack to a specific nation or government, or cite what evidence it had to support its claim. Change Healthcare provides patient billing across the U.S. healthcare system. Change Healthcare has not yet disclosed the specific nature of its cyberattack.

“Groundbreaking Achievement: Intuitive Machines Successfully Lands First Commercial Spacecraft on the Moon”

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Intuitive Machines has landed a spacecraft on the lunar surface, in a historic first for a private company. “What we can confirm without a doubt is that our equipment is on the surface of the moon and we are transmitting,” mission director and Intuitive Machines CTO Tim Crain said. Instead, the lander leveraged one of the onboard payloads, NASA’s laser and doppler lidar sensors, to guide the spacecraft to the lunar surface. All in all, Intuitive Machines’ contract is worth a little less than $118 million. Intuitive Machines’ victory comes shortly after another CLPS awardee, Astrobotic, failed to put its lander on the moon.

2024: End of Gmail’s Simple HTML View – Google’s Plan to Revamp the Interface

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Most will have been defaulted to the “new” Gmail view long ago, so unless you have been specifically requesting the “basic HTML” view, nothing should change for you. The company is sunsetting Gmail’s basic HTML view, which allows users to look at their emails in a bare-bones state, starting January 2024. “We’re writing to let you know that the Gmail Basic HTML view for desktop web and mobile web will be disabled starting early January 2024. The Gmail Basic HTML views are previous versions of Gmail that were replaced by their modern successors 10+ years ago and do not include full Gmail feature functionality,” the email reads. The HTML version lacks a lot of features such as chat, spell checker, search filters, keyboard shortcuts, and rich formatting.

Reddit Finally Goes Public

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Social media giant Reddit filed to go public today. Today Reddit approaches the public markets with more than $800 million worth of revenue in 2023, up from $666.7 million in 2022. In 2022 Reddit generated a net loss of $158.6 million, and adjusted EBITDA of negative $108.4 million. That figure includes a massive $410 million Series F raised in 2021 and a smaller $368 million Series E raised earlier the same year. That makes it worth roughly 7.5% of its 2023 revenue, a very nice tailwind for its 2024 results.