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Manažer společnosti Lenovo vypustil zprávu, že Zen 5 dosahuje pouze o 10 % vyššího IPC než Zen 4. Protože se již k situaci vyjadřuje každý, kdo má… nos mezi očima, nebude na škodu anketa…

Proteins are biological workhorses.

They build our bodies and orchestrate the molecular processes in cells that keep them healthy. They also present a wealth of targets for new medications. From everyday pain relievers to sophisticated cancer immunotherapies, most current drugs interact with a protein. Deciphering protein architectures could lead to new treatments.

That was the promise of AlphaFold 2, an AI model from Google DeepMind that predicted how proteins gain their distinctive shapes based on the sequences of their constituent molecules alone. Released in 2020, the tool was a breakthrough half a decade in the making.

But proteins don’t work alone. They inhabit an entire cellular universe and often collaborate with other molecular inhabitants like, for example, DNA, the body’s genetic blueprint.

This week, DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs released a big new update that allows the algorithm to predict how proteins work inside cells. Instead of only modeling their structures, the new version—dubbed AlphaFold 3—can also map a protein’s interactions with other molecules.

For example, could a protein bind to a disease-causing gene and shut it down? Can adding new genes to crops make them resilient to viruses? Can the algorithm help us rapidly engineer new vaccines to tackle existing diseases—or whatever new ones nature throws at us?

“Biology is a dynamic system…you have to understand how properties of biology emerge due to the interactions between different molecules in the cell,” said Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, in a press conference.

AlphaFold 3 helps explain “not only how proteins talk to themselves, but also how they talk to other parts of the body,” said lead author Dr. John Jumper.

The team is releasing the new AI online for academic researchers by way of an interface called the AlphaFold Server. With a few clicks, a biologist can run a simulation of an idea in minutes, compared to the weeks or months usually needed for experiments in a lab.

Dr. Julien Bergeron at King’s College London, who builds nano-protein machines but was not involved in the work, said the AI is “transformative science” for speeding up research, which could ultimately lead to nanotech devices powered by the body’s mechanisms alone.

For Dr. Frank Uhlmann at the Francis Crick Laboratory, who gained early access to AlphaFold 3 and used it to study how DNA divides when cells divide, the AI is “democratizing discovery research.”

Molecular Universe

Proteins are finicky creatures. They’re made of strings of molecules called amino acids that fold into intricate three-dimensional shapes that determine what the protein can do.

Sometimes the folding processes goes wrong. In Alzheimer’s disease, misfolded proteins clump into dysfunctional blobs that clog up around and inside brain cells.

Scientists have long tried to engineer drugs to break up disease-causing proteins. One strategy is to map protein structure—know thy enemy (and friends). Before AlphaFold, this was done with electron microscopy, which captures a protein’s structure at the atomic level. But it’s expensive, labor intensive, and not all proteins can tolerate the scan.

Which is why AlphaFold 2 was revolutionary. Using amino acid sequences alone—the constituent molecules that make up proteins—the algorithm could predict a protein’s final structure with startling accuracy. DeepMind used AlphaFold to map the structure of nearly all proteins known to science and how they interact. According to the AI lab, in just three years, researchers have mapped roughly six million protein structures using AlphaFold 2.

But to Jumper, modeling proteins isn’t enough. To design new drugs, you have to think holistically about the cell’s whole ecosystem.

It’s an idea championed by Dr. David Baker at the University of Washington, another pioneer in the protein-prediction space. In 2021, Baker’s team released AI-based software called RoseTTAFold All-Atom to tackle interactions between proteins and other biomolecules.

Picturing these interactions can help solve tough medical challenges, allowing scientists to design better cancer treatments or more precise gene therapies, for example.

“Properties of biology emerge through the interactions between different molecules in the cell,” said Hassabis in the press conference. “You can think about AlphaFold 3 as our first big sort of step towards that.”

A Revamp

AlphaFold 3 builds on its predecessor, but with significant renovations.

One way to gauge how a protein interacts with other molecules is to examine evolution. Another is to map a protein’s 3D structure and—with a dose of physics—predict how it can grab onto other molecules. While AlphaFold 2 mostly used an evolutionary approach—training the AI on what we already know about protein evolution in nature—the new version heavily embraces physical and chemical modeling.

Some of this includes chemical changes. Proteins are often tagged with different chemicals. These tags sometimes change protein structure but are essential to their behavior—they can literally determine a cell’s fate, for example, life, senescence, or death.

The algorithm’s overall setup makes some use of its predecessor’s machinery to map proteins, DNA, and other molecules and their interactions. But the team also looked to diffusion models—the algorithms behind OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image generator—to capture structures at the atomic level. Diffusion models are trained to reverse noisy images in steps until they arrive at a prediction for what the image (or in this case a 3D model of a biomolecule) should look like without the noise. This addition made a “substantial change” to performance, said Jumper.

Like AlphaFold 2, the new version has a built-in “sanity check” that indicates how confident it is in a generated model so scientists can proofread its outputs. This has been a core component of all their work, said the DeepMind team. They trained the AI using the Protein Data Bank, an open-source compilation of 3D protein structures that’s constantly updated, including new experimentally validated structures of proteins binding to DNA and other biomolecules

Pitted against existing software, AlphaFold 3 broke records. One test for molecular interactions between proteins and small molecules—ones that could become medications—succeeded 76 percent of the time. Previous attempts were successful in roughly 42 percent of cases.

When it comes to deciphering protein functions, AlphaFold 3 “seeks to solve the exact same problem [as RoseTTAFold All-Atom]…but is clearly more accurate,” Baker told Singularity Hub.

But the tool’s accuracy depends on which interaction is being modeled. The algorithm isn’t yet great at protein-RNA interactions, for example, Columbia University’s Mohammed AlQuraishi told MIT Technology Review. Overall, accuracy ranged from 40 to more than 80 percent.

AI to Real Life

Unlike previous iterations, DeepMind isn’t open-sourcing AlphaFold 3’s code. Instead, they’re releasing the tool as a free online platform, called AlphaFold Server, that allows scientists to test their ideas for protein interactions with just a few clicks.

AlphaFold 2 required technical expertise to install and run the software. The server, in contrast, can help people unfamiliar with code to use the tool. It’s for non-commercial use only and can’t be reused to train other machine learning models for protein prediction. But it is freely available for scientists to try. The team envisions the software helping develop new antibodies and other treatments at a faster rate. Isomorphic Labs, a spin-off of DeepMind, is already using AlphaFold 3 to develop medications for a variety of diseases.

For Bergeron, the upgrade is “transformative.” Instead of spending years in the lab, it’s now possible to mimic protein interactions in silico—a computer simulation—before beginning the labor- and time-intensive work of investigating promising solutions using cells.

“I’m pretty certain that every structural biology and protein biochemistry research group in the world will immediately adopt this system,” he said.

Image Credit: Google DeepMind

Mandatory return-to-office policies appear to be pushing workers at major tech companies away from their employers, with measurable effects on how willing people are to stay at companies that require in-person attendance.

A study released this week by researchers at the University of Michigan and University of Chicago found that three large US tech companies — Microsoft, Apple and SpaceX — saw substantially increased attrition, particularly of their more senior personnel, when they implemented strict return-to-work policies in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While many efforts to study remote work and its effects on the economy have been based on survey data, the authors of this study used publicly available resume data, rather than self-reported preferences, to track the actual effects of back-to-work policies

The three companies were chosen, according to the researchers, because they were among the first to implement return-to-office mandates as the pandemic eased in 2022, and because of their critical importance to the technology sector.

“We estimate nearly identical effects for all three companies despite their markedly different corporate culture and product gamut, suggesting the effects are driven by common underlying dynamics,” the report said.

One of the most striking findings, according to David Van Dijcke, one of the study’s authors and a Ph.D candidate in economics at the University of Michigan, was that workers in more senior positions were more likely than their juniors to leave a job rather than go back to the office.

“You might expect something different, where younger or more junior employees have matured in or started their first jobs in a remote environment,” he said. “But we didn’t find anything like that.”

The study also found a tight correlation between the rigor of a specific return-to-office policy and its effects on workers, Van Dijcke said. Apple’s one day per week policy produced the smallest changes to its workforce, causing about a 4% decrease in senior employees as a share of the overall pool. SpaceX’s full-time in-house requirement, by contrast, led to a larger than 15% decrease.

Van Dijcke, who is also employed at the risk analytics division of Ipsos Public Affairs, said that there were several possible reasons more senior tech workers might leave. Another study, he noted, tracked two offices of the same company, located mere blocks apart, and found that employees there got different benefits from working remotely and working in-office.

“They found that senior software engineers were more productive when they were not close to their co-workers, which I guess makes sense, right?” he said. “They’re skilled at what they do and benefit from fewer distractions. Whereas if you’re more junior you might benefit from distractions that give you valuable feedback.”Recent surveys have tracked closely with Van Dijcke and his colleagues’ findings, including data published today by Gartner finding that one in three executives would quit over a return-to-office mandate, compared to less than 20% of non-executive workers.

Nevertheless, Gartner said that in-office requirements are getting more strict across the technology sector. Dell, for instance, has begun to issue employees color-coded “grades” based on their attendance.

Remote Work

Spoiler alert: We're gonna talk about AI

Interview  Mick Baccio, global security advisor at Splunk, has watched the evolution of election security threats in real time.…

Dellu byla odcizena databáze zákazníků (jméno, adresa, seznam zakoupených produktů) [Customer Care, Bleeping Computer].

V lednu byl otevřen editor kódů Zed od autorů editoru Atom a Tree-sitter. Tenkrát běžel pouze na macOS. Byl napevno svázán s Metalem. Situace se ale postupně mění. V aktuálním příspěvku Kdy Zed na Linuxu? na blogu Zedu vývojáři popisují aktuální stav. Blíží se alfa verze.

Sources claim ransomware is to blame

Healthcare organization Ascension is the latest of its kind in the US to say its network has been affected by what it believes to be a "cybersecurity event."…

Editor’s note: On Thursday, after this story was published, Apple apologized for its ad and said it would not use it.

For years now, Apple has been as much a marketing company as a technology company. But after Apple CEO Tim Cook introduced the iPad Pro ad this week, you have to ask whether Apple has lost its marketing mojo. 

The ad features — if that’s the right word — musical instruments, artist tools, toys, and games being crushed by a huge hydraulic press and turned into a new iPad. All this happens to the musical background of Sonny and Cher’s 1971 hit, All I Ever Need Is You. 

Ah, no, Apple, we need far more than just you.

I mean, seriously.  How was this ad ever made? Who greenlighted it? And how in the world did it ever make it to the public? Did no one even look at it?

It’s not just me. Many other people hate — really hate — the ad, based on the groundswell of criticism that erupted online this week. 

At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) fans are pushing out artists, writers, and musicians, it’s offensive for Apple to imply we can do without all those old analog creative types. (I’m reminded of how James McNerney, former Boeing CEO, would call his company’s senior engineers  “phenomenally talented a**holes.” If Apple ends up shoving out its creative people the way Boeing did its engineers, future Apple products might be as “good” as the Boeing 737 Max 9, and the 787 Dreamliner.)

No one will die from a bad Apple, but it’s a red flag whenever a company mistreats its top people. It’s a slap in the face to all of Apple’s in-house creatives, as well as the company’s many loyal creative users. 

The timing could not have been worse. People, especially creative pros, are understandably nervous about their work being stolen and losing their jobs to soulless AI algorithms and apps. This ad is that very fear crystallized into 60 seconds of video. 

This is not the kind of “Think Different,” people want to see from Apple. Indeed, this is the opposite of what people want. As Michael J. Miraflor, chief branding officer for venture capital company Hannah Grey VC, tweeted, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single commercial offend and turn off a core customer base as much as this iPad spot.“

James Cook, marketing director at venture capitalist firm Molten Ventures, summed it well on Xitter: 

Apple’s new “Crush” ad (let’s call it “2024”) is a visual & metaphorical bookend to the 1984 ad.

1984: Monochrome, conformist, industrial world exploded by colourful, vibrant human.

2024: Colourful, vibrant humanity is crushed by monochrome, conformist industrial press.

Exactly so. 

Now, Cult of Mac members might argue we just don’t get it. That just tells me that Apple’s marketing policies, started by Steve Jobs with his personal reality distortion field, have been remarkably persistent. But that was then; this is now.

Seeing objects like pianos and guitars that many love being smashed is a slap in the face and it’s painful to watch. This is how Apple can lose its marketing mojo.

And if you don’t think Apple could lose its popularity due to an ad, think again. Ask Coca-Cola how  its 1985 New Coke campaign worked out. Hint: Many of you have never had a New Coke in your life. More recently, Peleton saw its stock price drop by 15% after its ad campaign showing a woman being thankful to her husband for getting an the exercise bike so she could become prettier. Yeah, that went over well.

Remarkably, the same concept was done much better by eBay, of all companies, in 2015, eBay produced an animated GIF of the evolution of the desk where desktop items from photos to calculators to calendars transform into icons on an ever-changing computer screen. 

Unlike the Apple ad, this was fun, and it made the same point.

Even more annoying is that Apple could have used the same footage and music to make a brilliant ad. That’s what Reza Sixo Safai did on Xitter. Safai simply reversed the video, so from an iPad Pro, the crushed wreckage is restored to all its wonderful, delightful glory. 

The moral of this story is that no company can ever be so successful that it can’t blow it. If Apple is as smart as its fans think it is, it will dump this ad as soon as possible and try to find another way to get people excited about buying iPads. 

This was not the way. 

Apple, iPad, IT Strategy, Marketing and Advertising Industry, Vendors and Providers

IT giant tries to downplay leak as just names, addresses, info about kit

Dell has confirmed information about its customers and their orders has been stolen from one of its portals. Though the thief claimed to have swiped 49 million records, which are now up for sale on the dark web, the IT giant declined to say how many people may be affected.…

Researchers have detailed a Virtual Private Network (VPN) bypass technique dubbed TunnelVision that allows threat actors to snoop on victim's network traffic by just being on the same local network. The "decloaking" method has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-3661 (CVSS score: 7.6). It impacts all operating systems that implement a DHCP client and has

Researchers have detailed a Virtual Private Network (VPN) bypass technique dubbed TunnelVision that allows threat actors to snoop on victim's network traffic by just being on the same local network. The "decloaking" method has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-3661 (CVSS score: 7.6). It impacts all operating systems that implement a DHCP client and has Newsroomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Having China, Russia, and Iran routinely rummaging around is cause for concern, says ex-NSA man

RSAC  Digital intruders from China, Russia, and Iran breaking into US water systems this year should be a "wake-up call," according to former National Security Agency cyber boss Rob Joyce.…

Mise Čchang-e 6, v rámci níž chce Čína poprvé dopravit na Zemi vzorky z odvrácené strany Měsíce, je v plném proudu. A zdá se, že její součástí je i jedno zařízení, o němž dosud nebylo nic zveřejněno. Vesmírný reportér Andrew Jones na snímcích sdílených China Academy of Space Technology zaznamenal ...

It’s not often an Apple advertisement bombs, but when it does it generates international attention. That’s why everyone is now learning that Apple’s newly introduced iPads can be used to make music, create art, capture images, make movies and do much more, and the versatile tool isn’t just for creative pros, but for the rest of us, too. What makes this possible? Apple Silicon — and additional details have emerged since the introduction of the chip.

The big news concerns speed. Apple’s M4 is up to 45% faster than the M2 processor and 25% faster than the not-so-old amazing M3, according to the latest speed data leak. It makes the chip faster than Qualcomm’s much-hyped Snapdragon X Elite — as well as the competing M3 Pro.

Fresh data for the M4 on Geekbench 6 gives us these scores:

• Single core: 3,767.
• Multi core: 14,677.

These results are likely to have been captured from new iPads, which means the actual performance potential for the M4 on the Mac is likely to be even greater. 

While the test results come from one of the tablets with 16GB RAM, we understand the processor has clock speeds lowered to make the device more energy efficient. Once someone does give Apple Silicon a heat sync, it should be able to run faster, even though when it comes to single-core chips no other consumer processor or chip can compete with the M4. The only way, as they say, is up.

I’ve said before that Apple’s silicon design teams are moving so fast that they compete with themselves, and this continues to be true. Not only that, but it seems to be accelerating the introduction of these processors.

Here’s the evidence:

M1 processor (November 2020)

• Single core: 2,304.
• Multi core: 8,422.

M2 processor (June 2022)

• Single core: 2,623.
• Multi core: 9,803.

M3 processor (October 2023)

• Single core: 3,027.
• Multi core: 11,883.

M4 processor (May 2024)

• Single core: 3,767.
• Multi core: 14,677.

Sources: At time of writing Geekbench 6 appears to be offline. As a result, I’ve had to use Nanoreview to source the data. It is also true that these results vary; an earlier check on Geekbench showed single core results between 3,595-3,810. Take them as a guide.

It is worth noting the extent to which each iteration of M-series chip leapfrogs the previous generation. The current highest end iPad Pro with an M4 chip running 1TB+ RAM seems like it might even surpass the M3 Pro chip. That’s significant, I think.

The three towers

Apple’s teams seem to have the following goals: To make computationally powerful chips, make them extremely power efficient, and ensure they generate little heat so the processors can be used across a slew of different devices. 

Iteration by iteration of the Apple Silicon concept, realizing these goals lets Apple achieve significant environmental benefits, dramatically reducing the power required by its devices while also trimming the size of batteries inside them — which means those devices derive the same life between charges. It also means Apple’s designers can scale cheerily between versions of the core architecture, scaling all the way from A-series chips in iPhones to the powerful Ultra series of processors the company also has the ability to create. 

This wide scale remains a huge design opportunity for Apple, which can visualize and design systems that could not exist before. We’ve all seen talk about plans for folding devices; those are made far more possible as products get thinner and batteries become increasingly less likely to overheat. Within this, the influence of ARM, (which itself recently announced record results), is tangible. 

Where is this going?

What this means is that Apple Silicon is becoming a huge competitive advantage to the company. “The flexibility of Apple silicon architecture remains one of their biggest technical advantages over competitors,” said Ben Bajarin, Creative Strategies analyst, following Apple’s latest iPad launch.

Apple’s own CPU tests claim that the M4 chip with 28 billion transistors outpaces the M2 by 50%.  Apple also compared the processor to an Asus Zenbook 14 OLED with an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor, arguing that its new iPads could deliver the same performance at a quarter the power. That means you get more life between charges and as enterprise apps appear, the iPad can only become a more attractive tool for anyone in the mobile enterprise.

They’ll become even more tempting once they do become foldable and processor sizes shrink even more.

Please follow me on Mastodon, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.

Apple, CPUs and Processors, iOS, iPad, Tablets

Pro časté přenášení a plnohodnotnou práci i na cestách jsou nejlepší volbou notebooky s úhlopříčkou okolo 14". Zaměřili jsme se na cenově dostupné modely s klasickou konstrukcí a cenou do 20 000 Kč.

Polish government institutions have been targeted as part of a large-scale malware campaign orchestrated by a Russia-linked nation-state actor called APT28. "The campaign sent emails with content intended to arouse the recipient's interest and persuade him to click on the link," the computer emergency response team, CERT Polska, said in a Wednesday bulletin. Clicking on the link

Polish government institutions have been targeted as part of a large-scale malware campaign orchestrated by a Russia-linked nation-state actor called APT28. "The campaign sent emails with content intended to arouse the recipient's interest and persuade him to click on the link," the computer emergency response team, CERT Polska, said in a Wednesday bulletin. Clicking on the link Newsroomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Agentura Mercury Research zjistila, že podíl AMD na dodávkách x86 procesorů opět roste a obecně činí 20,6 %. Intel tak do notebooků, serverů a desktopů stále dodává čtyřikrát více čipů a má z nich pětkrát více peněz, protože podíl AMD na tržbách činí 16,3 %. Jsou to ale lepší čísla než před rokem, ...

There has been a promising shift in the tech industry, with major companies pledging to release products with built-in security features. This development aims to address the increasing cybersecurity threats individuals and organizations face.