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If you’re spending hundreds or thousands of dollars buying an OTC hearing aid, make sure you’re getting a product that offers a sustainable long-term solution to your hearing loss needs. Aside from the obvious things like sound quality, take a few minutes to look into these specs. What size and style works best for you? Most hearing aids on the market are classified as either behind-the-ear (BTE) or in-the-ear (ITE).
For millennia, some of the world’s largest filter-feeding whales, including humpbacks, fin whales, and blue whales, have undertaken some of the longest migrations on earth to travel between their warm breeding grounds in the tropics to nutrient-rich feeding destinations in the poles each year. “Nature has finely tuned these journeys, guided by memory and environmental cues that tell whales when to move and where to go,” said Trisha Atwood, an ecologist and associate professor at Utah State University’s Quinney College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. But, she said, climate change is “scrambling these signals,” forcing the marine mammals to veer off course.
Researchers and users of LLMs have long been aware that AI models have a troubling tendency to tell people what they want to hear, even if that means being less accurate. But many reports of this phenomenon amount to mere anecdotes that don’t provide much visibility into how common this sycophantic behavior is across frontier LLMs. Two recent research papers have come at this problem a bit more rigorously, though, taking different tacks in attempting to quantify exactly how likely an LLM is to listen when a user provides factually incorrect or socially inappropriate information in a prompt.
The outage that hit Amazon Web Services and took out vital services worldwide was the result of a single failure that cascaded from system to system within Amazon’s sprawling network, according to a post-mortem from company engineers. The series of failures lasted for 15 hours and 32 minutes, Amazon said. Network intelligence company Ookla said its DownDetector service received more than 17 million reports of disrupted services offered by 3,500 organizations.
A 61-year-old man in California is lucky to be alive after a combination of herbal supplements he was taking for joint pain ended up utterly wrecking his body, landing him in intensive care and in a delirious state for months. His case is reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine: Clinical Cases. The man turned up at a hospital in San Francisco in bad shape, but with nonspecific problems that had begun just two days earlier.
One of the things that emerging diseases, including the COVID and Zika pandemics, have taught us is that it’s tough to keep up with infectious diseases in the modern world. Things like air travel can allow a virus to spread faster than our ability to develop therapies. But that doesn’t mean biotech has stood still; companies have been developing technologies that could allow us to rapidly respond to future threats.
Digital reading devices like the Kindle have existed for almost 20 years, and the standard eReader form factor has hardly changed at all. Amazon, Boox, and a few other companies have offered larger E Ink screens, but how about something smaller? Boox has unveiled its second-generation Palma e-reader, which still fits in your pocket but adds a color screen and mobile data connectivity. The first-gen Palma launched last year, earning fans who saw it as a way to read and access some apps without the full spate of distracting smartphone experiences.
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