FT Alphaville: Last year, Norway's $1.5tn sovereign wealth fund revealed that it had lost NKr980mn, roughly $92mn, on an error relating to how it calculated its mandated benchmark. Here's what Norges Bank Investment Management said at the time: "In February this year, a calculation error was discovered in the composition of the index we're measured against. This error led to a marginal overweight in US fixed income relative to global fixed income. When this was discovered, we immediately set about correcting it, but because the fund is so large, the return was 0.7 basis points. Due to this our previously reported positive relative return of NOK 118 billion was adjusted down to NOK 117 billion."

It is a good example of how even tiny operational mistakes can have mammoth-sized consequences in nominal terms when you manage one of the world's biggest pools of capital. Sometimes a mistake can even lead to a windfall -- such as in 2021, when NBIM apparently made NKr582mn by accidentally accumulating an outsized position in a rising stock. But the 2023 index snafu is by far the biggest the fund has registered, almost twice as large as the cumulative operational-accidental losses it suffered from 2010-20. Alphaville was intrigued. What exactly went wrong? Well, in a recently-released anthropological report commissioned to investigate its own culture, NBIM seems to have inadvertently revealed just how minuscule the mistake was.

Here's an NBIM employee called "Simon" recounting the debacle to the report's author, Tone Danielsen. Alphaville's emphasis below: "Last year (spring 2022) we had an off-site. One of our workshops was on 'Mistakes and how to deal with them.' We wrote post-it notes, classifying them into different categories from harmless to no-goes. One of my post-it notes, I remember it vividly, read: Miscalculation of the Ministry of Finance benchmark. I placed it in the category unforgivable.

When I wrote that note, I honestly couldn't even dare to think about the consequences. And less than a year later, I did exactly that. My worst nightmare. It was a manual mistake. My mistake. I used the wrong date, December 1st instead of November 1st which is clearly stated in our mandate. The mistake was not revealed until months later, by the Ministry of Finance. They reported back that the numbers did not add up. I did all the numbers once more, and the cause of the mistake was identified. I immediately reported to Patrick [Global Head] and Dag [Chief]. I openly express that this was my mistake, and mine alone. I felt miserable and was ready to take the consequences -- whatever they might be."

Nvidia briefly surpassed Amazon in market capitalization on Monday, as the euphoria around AI catapulted the chipmaker to the fourth most valuable U.S. company. From a report: At a record high of $734.96, Nvidia was worth $1.82 trillion in market value, compared to $1.81 trillion for retail giant Amazon.com and a few billions away from Google-owner Alphabet's $1.87 trillion, according to LSEG data. The last time Nvidia was more valuable than Amazon was in 2002, when they were each worth under $6 billion.

In 2022 Apple filed a lawsuit against startup Rivos. The lawsuit said that in one year Rivos had hired more than 40 former Apple employees to work on competing system-on-a-chip technology, according to Reuters, "and that at least two former Apple engineers took gigabytes of confidential information with them to Rivos."

But Friday Bloomberg reported that the two companies told a judge that they'd "signed an agreement that potentially settles the case." "The agreement provides for remediation of Apple confidential information based on a forensic examination of Rivos systems and other activities," according to the filing in federal court in San Jose, California. "The parties currently are working through that process."
More details from Engadget: Apple also accused the defendant of instructing the employees it hired away to steal presentations and other proprietary information for unreleased iPhone chip designs that cost billions of dollars to develop. Rivos countersued Apple last year, accusing the larger company of restricting employees' ability to work elsewhere and of hindering emerging startups' growth by using anticompetitive measures.

The court dismissed Apple's trade secret claims against Rivos in April 2023, though the company was allowed to file a revised complaint. Apple already settled with its six former employees who filed a countersuit against the iPhonemaker along with Rivos after they dropped their claims against each other last month.

Both companies are now requesting the court to put their cases on hold until March 15, when they expect the settlement to be completed.

An anonymous reader shares a report: With progress in the battle against cancer progressing slowly on Earth, California researchers have teamed up with astronauts to take the battle to the stars. In space, the weak pull of gravity, also known as microgravity, places cells under incredible stress, causing them to age more rapidly. This phenomenon allows scientists to witness the progression of cancer growth -- and the effect of cancer treatments -- much more rapidly than they could on Earth.

When the Axiom 3 spaceflight launched from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Jan. 18, bound for the International Space Station, it took with it four crewmembers and some other unusual passengers -- miniature tumor organoids produced from the cells of cancer patients, grown in the lab by scientists at the University of California San Diego. Axiom 3 was slated for splashdown on Saturday but has been delayed until Tuesday, at the earliest, due to weather, according to SpaceX, which manufactured the Crew Dragon spacecraft used for the mission.

It wasn't the first time the team -- led by Dr. Catriona H.M. Jamieson, a hematologist and medical professor at the college -- sent such samples into space. It previously launched stem cells on multiple Space X flights and noticed that pre-leukemic changes occurred, unseen during the same timeframe in controls on the ground. "We said, 'Wait, what if you send cancer up?'" Jamieson tells Fortune. "'Will the cancer go from bad to worse?' And the answer is yes, under conditions of stress" caused by microgravity.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, reporting for The New York Times: Adam Neumann shot to fame by turning WeWork into a cultural and business phenomenon, before being ousted from the work space operator in dramatic fashion. But for the past several months, he has been trying to buy the now-bankrupt business -- with the help of the hedge fund mogul Dan Loeb, DealBook is the first to report. Neumann's new real estate company Flow Global is pushing WeWork to consider its takeover approach, according to a letter his lawyers sent to WeWork's advisers on Monday. Flow which has already raised $350 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, disclosed in the letter that Loeb's Third Point would help finance a transaction.

Flow has sought to buy WeWork or its assets, as well as provide bankruptcy financing to keep it afloat. But Flow's lawyers accused WeWork of stonewalling for months. "We write to express our dismay with WeWork's lack of engagement even to provide information to my clients in what is intended to be a value-maximizing transaction for all stakeholders," wrote the lawyers led by Alex Spiro of Quinn Emanuel, who also represents Elon Musk and Jay-Z.

Boeing found more mistakes with holes drilled in the fuselage of its 737 Max jet, a setback that could further slow deliveries on a critical program already restricted by regulators over quality lapses. ArchieBunker shares a report: The latest manufacturing slip originated with a supplier and will require rework on about 50 undelivered 737 jets to repair the faulty rivet holes, Boeing commercial chief Stan Deal said in a note to staff. While he didn't identify the contractor, a spokesman for fuselage supplier Spirit AeroSystems Holdings said it's aware of the issue and will conduct repairs. The extra time required for inspections and repair work could delay near-term plane deliveries, Deal said in his memo, which was seen by Bloomberg News. He didn't say whether any action would be required on the in-service 737 fleet.

The world's longest-serving central bank governor, Romania's Mugur Isarescu, was the target of a deepfake video depicting the policymaker as touting fraudulent investments. From a report: The episode highlights a raft of disinformation designed to undermine the credibility of key institutions. The video echoed similar deepfakes in recent days, including one aimed at Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, seeking to back false financial investments. The National Bank of Romania issued a warning, reminding citizens that neither Isarescu nor the central bank make investment recommendations. The video uses the image and voice of the central banker -- one of the most trusted officials in Romania -- to pitch stock investments and offers viewers a link to a fraudulent platform.

"We are extremely concerned about the significant rise of these types of fraud attempts and we urge people to be very careful with every transaction that they make," central bank spokesman Dan Suciu said. The videos coincide with a surge in interest for equity investments in Romania, fueled by the largest initial public offering in the country's history last year as well as above-average returns offered by the Bucharest Stock Exchange. Cyber-criminals have taken advantage of the trend in a country that ranks near the lowest in the European Union for financial mediation.

"In the last few years, the U.S. has seen a boom in cryptocurrency mining," writes Ars Technica. But they add that the U.S. government "is now trying to track exactly what that means for the consumption of electricity. Specifically, a crucial branch of the U.S. Department of Energy.

"While its analysis is preliminary, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates that large-scale cryptocurrency operations are now consuming over 2 percent of the U.S.'s electricity." That's roughly the equivalent of having added an additional state to the grid over just the last three years."

While there is some small-scale mining that goes on with personal computers and small rigs, most cryptocurrency mining has moved to large collections of specialized hardware. While this hardware can be pricy compared to personal computers, the main cost for these operations is electricity use, so the miners will tend to move to places with low electricity rates. The EIA report notes that, in the wake of a crackdown on cryptocurrency in China, a lot of that movement has involved relocation to the U.S., where keeping electricity prices low has generally been a policy priority.

One independent estimate made by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance had the US as the home of just over 3 percent of the global bitcoin mining at the start of 2020. By the start of 2022, that figure was nearly 38 percent... The EIA decided it needed a better grip on what was going on... To better understand the implications of this major new drain on the U.S. electric grid, the EIA will be performing monthly analyses of bitcoin operations during the first half of 2024.
The Energy Information Agency identified 137 bitcoin mining operators, of which 101 responded to inquiries about their full-capacity power supply. "If running all-out, those 101 facilities would consume 2.3 percent of the US's average power demand," the article points out. And they add that in at least five instances, the Agency found bitcoin operators had "moved in near underutilized power plants and sent generation soaring again...

"These are almost certainly fossil fuel plants that might be reasonable candidates for retirement if it weren't for their use to supply bitcoin miners."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Meta is poised to become Wall Street's top comeback kid. It was only a couple of years back the Facebook owner suffered the single biggest market value destruction in stock-market history. But the company has come a long way since then, on Thursday it dazzled shareholders with yet another impressive quarterly earnings report as the social media giant focuses on cutting back costs and shoring up billions in profits. The stock rose as much as 21% Friday, poised to add roughly $200 billion to its market capitalization. This would be the biggest single-session market value addition, eclipsing the $190 billion gains made by Apple and Amazon in 2022.

"Solid execution, faster growth, and increased capital structure efficiency improve the outlook from here," Brian Nowak, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note Friday. "Meta's AI pipeline for both users and advertisers is robust, with more tools set to launch and scale throughout '24," he added. Meta, which reduced headcount by 22% in 2023, unveiled plans for a $50 billion stock buyback, and announced its first quarterly dividend on Thursday, a sign to investors that it has money to spare and a reason for them to stick around. While the company is making big cost cuts, it continues to spend aggressively on artificial intelligence advancements, namely in generative AI but also on the background technologies to help feed its social media products and power its ad targeting.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this investigation by Time magazine's senior economics correspondent which argues that America's residential solar industry "is floundering." In late 2023 alone, more than 100 residential solar dealers and installers in the U.S. declared bankruptcy, according to Roth Capital Partners — six times the number in the previous three years combined. Roth expects at least 100 more to fail. The two largest companies in the industry, SunRun and Sunnova, both posted big losses in their most recent quarterly reports, and their shares are down 86% and 81% respectively from their peaks in January 2021... At the root of these struggles is the complicated financial engineering that helped companies raise money but that some investors and analysts say was built on a framework of lies — or at least exaggerations. Since at least 2016, big solar companies have used Wall Street money to fund their growth. This financialization raised the consumer cost of the panels and led companies to aggressively pursue sales to make the cost of borrowing Wall Street money worth it. National solar companies essentially became finance companies that happened to sell solar, engaging in calculations that may have been overly optimistic about how much money the solar leases and loans actually bring in.

"I've often heard solar finance and sales compared to the Wild West due to the creativity involved," says Jamie Johnson, the founder of Energy Sense Finance, who has been studying the residential solar industry for a decade. "It's the Silicon Valley mantra of 'break things and let the regulators figure it out.'"
Leasing the panels lets the companies claim green-energy tax credits (which they then sell to companies like Google). And meanwhile, bundles of solar-panel leases become asset-backed securities. By 2017, there were over $1 billion such securities... However, these financial innovations also increased the pressure on companies to grow quickly. Solar companies needed lots of new customers in order to package the loans into asset-backed securities and sell them to investors. Public companies especially faced intense scrutiny from investors who expected double-digit quarterly growth. And with upfront costs no longer a barrier for new customers, solar companies began to see almost every homeowner as a target, and they deployed expensive sales teams to go out and sell as aggressively as they could... Even today, about one-third of the upfront cost of a residential solar system goes to intermediaries like sales and financing people, says Pol Lezcano, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In Germany, where installation is done locally and there are fewer intermediaries, the typical residential system costs about 50% less than it costs in the U.S. "The upfront cost of these systems is stupidly high," says Lezcano, making residential solar not "scalable."

After growing 31% in 2021 and 40% in 2022, residential solar will only grow by 13% in 2023 and then contract 12% in 2024, according to predictions from the research firm Wood Mackenzie... Meanwhile, the pressure for fast sales may have led some companies to look the other way when salespeople obscured the terms of the solar panel leases and loans they were selling in order to close a deal.
One customer complains the solar panel company actually took out a lien on his house without his knowledge, according to the article. He's "one of a growing number of consumers now saying in courts and in arbitration that salesmen from solar-panel and solar-panel-finance companies — including some of the biggest in the U.S., like GoodLeap, Mosaic, Sunnova, and SunRun — tricked them into taking out onerous loans they didn't want — or that someone signed them up for a loan without their knowledge." Even some people who voluntarily signed up for financing products say they were misled about the actual cost of the solar panels. That's because loans from companies like GoodLeap and Mosaic often include an unexplained and significant "dealer fee." For example, a customer buying a $30,000 solar panel system with a low interest rate may not know that price includes a $10,000 loan-dealer fee. In other words, the cost of the panels, had they paid cash, would have been just $20,000; the extra 30% is the price they paid for the low-interest loan, though many consumers allege this was not explained to them...

In some ways, the current situation in the residential solar market is analogous to the subprime lending crisis that set off the Great Recession, though on a smaller scale. Like in the subprime lending crisis, some companies issued loans to people who could not — or would not — pay them. Like in the subprime lending crisis, thousands of these loans — and in solar's case, also leases — were packaged and sold to investors as asset-backed securities with promised rates of return. The Great Recession was driven largely by the fact that people stopped paying their loans, and the asset-backed securities didn't deliver the promised rate of return to investors. Similar cracks may be forming in the solar asset-backed securities market. For instance, the rate of delinquencies of loans in one of Sunnova's asset-backed securities was approaching 5% in the fall of last year, according to an October 2023 report issued by KBRA, a bond ratings agency. Historically, delinquencies in solar asset-backed securities had been around 1%.

The firms that grade these asset-backed securities have long said delinquencies would be low because rooftop-solar customers had high credit scores. The problem is that they appear not to have considered that even customers with good credit scores may not want to pay for solar panels that they were told would be free — or that salesmen could be signing people up without their knowledge.
Besides consumer cases in court, there's the possibility that regulators may act against solar companies that used inflated projections to juice their tax credits. "As early as 2016, a researcher at MIT's Energy Initiative estimated that such companies were overstating this value by as much as 50%." The broad problems facing residential solar and financing companies are already causing some pain in the forms of layoffs — California alone lost 17,000 solar jobs in 2023, according to the California Solar and Storage Association. There are ripple effects in the industry; Enphase Energy, which makes microinverters for solar panels, said in December it was laying off 10% of its workforce amidst softening demand.

It could get a lot worse before it gets better, with not just lost jobs, but near-total collapse of the current system. Some analysts, like Lezcano of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, think that the big, national players are going to have to fall apart for residential solar to become affordable in the U.S., and that in the future, the solar industry in the U.S. will look more like it does in Germany, where installations are done locally and there's fewer door-to-door sales.
"Over the past few years, a handful of people got rich off of Americans who were told they could simultaneously save money and save the planet. For example, Hayes Barnard, GoodLeap's founder and chairman, was named by Forbes as one of the 400 richest people in the world in 2023..."

"Parched conditions have crippled a waterway that handles $270 billion a year in global trade," reports Bloomberg. "And there are no easy solutions.

"The Panama Canal Authority is weighing potential fixes that include an artificial lake to pump water into the canal and cloud seeding to boost rainfall, but both options would take years to implement, if they're even feasible. " With water levels languishing at six feet (1.8 meters) below normal, the canal authority capped the number of vessels that can cross. The limits imposed late last year were the strictest since 1989... Some shippers are paying millions of dollars to jump the growing queue, while others are taking longer, costlier routes around Africa or South America. The constraints have since eased slightly due to a rainier-than-expected November, but at 24 ships a day, the maximum is still well below the pre-drought daily capacity of about 38. As the dry season takes hold, the bottleneck is poised to worsen again...

The canal's travails reflect how climate change is altering global trade flows. Drought created chokepoints last year on the Mississippi River in the US and the Rhine in Europe. In the UK, rising sea levels are elevating the risk of flooding along the Thames. Melting ice is creating new shipping routes in the Arctic. Under normal circumstances, the Panama Canal handles about 3% of global maritime trade volumes and 46% of containers moving from Northeast Asia to the US East Coast...

In the long term, the primary solution to chronic water shortages will be to dam up the Indio River and then drill a tunnel through a mountain to pipe fresh water 8 kilometers (5 miles) into Lake Gatún, the canal's main reservoir. The project, along with additional conservation measures, will cost about $2 billion, Erick Córdoba, the manager of the water division at the canal authority estimates. He says it will take at least six years to dam up and fill the site. The US Army Corps of Engineers is conducting a feasibility study. The Indio River reservoir would increase vessel traffic by 11 to 15 a day, enough to keep Panama's top moneymaker working at capacity while guaranteeing fresh water for Panama City...

The country will need to dam even more rivers to guarantee water through the end of the century.

In a regulatory filing today, Microsoft said that a Russian intelligence group hacked into some of the company's top executives' email accounts. CNBC reports: Nobelium, the same group that breached government supplier SolarWinds in 2020, carried out the attack, which Microsoft detected last week, according to the company. The announcement comes after new U.S. requirements for disclosing cybersecurity incidents went into effect. A Microsoft spokesperson said that while the company does not believe the attack had a material impact, it still wanted to honor the spirit of the rules.

In late November, the group accessed "a legacy non-production test tenant account," Microsoft's Security Response Center wrote in the blog post. After gaining access, the group "then used the account's permissions to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior leadership team and employees in our cybersecurity, legal, and other functions, and exfiltrated some emails and attached documents," the corporate unit wrote. The company's senior leadership team, including finance chief Amy Hood and president Brad Smith, regularly meets with CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft said it has not found signs that Nobelium had accessed customer data, production systems or proprietary source code.

The U.S. government and Microsoft consider Nobelium to be part of the Russian foreign intelligence service SVR. The hacking group was responsible for one of the most prolific breaches in U.S. history when it added malicious code to updates to SolarWinds' Orion software, which some U.S. government agencies were using. Microsoft itself was ensnared in the hack. Nobelium, also known as APT29 or Cozy Bear, is a sophisticated hacking group that has attempted to breach the systems of U.S. allies and the Department of Defense. Microsoft also uses the name Midnight Blizzard to identify Nobelium. It was also implicated alongside another Russian hacking group in the 2016 breach of the Democratic National Committee's systems.

A new survey of thousands of game development professionals finds a near-majority saying generative AI tools are already in use at their workplace. But a significant minority of developers say their company has no interest in generative AI tools or has outright banned their use. From a report: The Game Developers Conference's 2024 State of the Industry report, released Thursday, aggregates the thoughts of over 3,000 industry professionals as of last October. While the annual survey (conducted in conjunction with research partner Omdia) has been running for 12 years, this is the first time respondents were asked directly about their use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, GitHub Copilot, and Adobe Generative Fill.

Forty-nine percent of the survey's developer respondents said that generative AI tools are currently being used in their workplace. That near-majority includes 31 percent (of all respondents) that say they use those tools themselves and 18 percent that say their colleagues do. The survey also found that different studio departments showed different levels of willingness to embrace AI tools. Forty-four percent of employees in business and finance said they were using AI tools, for instance, compared to just 16 percent in visual arts and 13 percent in "narrative/writing."

The credibility of the Cop28 agreement to "transition away" from fossil fuels rides on the world's biggest historical polluters like the US, UK and Canada rethinking current plans to expand oil and gas production, according to the climate negotiator representing 135 developing countries. The Guardian: In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Pedro Pedroso, the outgoing president of the G77 plus China bloc of developing countries, warned that the landmark deal made at last year's climate talks in Dubai risked failing. "We achieved some important outcomes at Cop28 but the challenge now is how we translate the deal into meaningful action for the people," Pedroso said. "As we speak, unless we lie to ourselves, none of the major developed countries, who are the most important historical emitters, have policies that are moving away from fossil fuels, on the contrary, they are expanding," said Pedroso.

These countries must also deliver adequate finance for poorer nations to transition -and adapt to the climate crisis. In Dubai, Sultan Al Jaber, Cop28 president and chief of the Emirates national oil company, was subject to widespread scrutiny -- understandable given that the UAE is the world's seventh biggest oil producer with the fifth largest gas reserves. Yet the US was by far the biggest oil and gas producer in the world last year -- setting a new record, during a year that was the hottest ever recorded. The US, UK, Canada, Australia and Norway account for 51% of the total planned oil and gas expansion by 2050, according to research by Oil Change International. "It's very easy to label some emerging economies, especially the Gulf states, as climate villains, but this is very unfair by countries with historic responsibilities -- who keep trying to scapegoat and deviate the attention away from themselves. Just look at US fossil fuel plans and the UK's new drilling licenses for the North Sea, and Canada which has never met any of its emission reduction goals, not once," said Pedroso, a Cuban diplomat.

Apple has updated its long-standing App Store guidelines, giving developers the option to let users make in-app purchases for iOS apps outside of its App Store. But the changes still haven't won over one of the company's longtime critics. From a report: Under the new rules, app developers can provide customers with links to third-party purchase options for their apps, but they must still pay Apple fees of either 12% or 27%. Spotify, one of Apple's biggest critics, isn't a fan of the changes. In a statement, the music streaming service slammed the new rules. "Once again, Apple has demonstrated that they will stop at nothing to protect the profits they exact on the backs of developers and consumers under their app store monopoly," the company said in a statement. "Their latest move in the US -- imposing a 27% fee for transactions made outside of an app on a developer's website -- is outrageous and flies in the face of the court's efforts to enable greater competition and user choice." Tech columnist John Gruber, writing at DaringFireball: Maybe the cynics are right! Let's just concede that they are, and that Apple will only make decisions here that benefit its bottom line. My argument remains that Apple should not be pursuing this plan for complying with the anti-steering injunction by collecting commissions from web sales that initiate in-app. Whatever revenue Apple would lose to non-commissioned web sales (for non-games) is not worth the hit they are taking to the company's brand and reputationâ--âthis move reeks of greed and avariceâ--ânor the increased ire and scrutiny of regulators and legislators on the "anti-Big-Tech" hunt.

Apple should have been looking for ways to lessen regulatory and legislative pressure over the past few years, and in today's climate that's more true than ever. But instead, their stance has seemingly been "Bring it on." Confrontational, not conciliatory, conceding not an inch. Rather than take a sure win with most of what they could want, Apple is seemingly hell-bent on trying to keep everything. To win in chess all you need is to capture your opponent's king. Apple seemingly wants to capture every last piece on the boardâ--âeven while playing in a tournament where the referees (regulators) are known to look askance at blatant poor sportsmanship (greed).

Apple's calculus should be to balance its natural desire to book large amounts of revenue from the App Store with policies that to some degree placate, rather than antagonize, regulators and legislators. No matter what the sport, no matter what the letter of the rulebook says, it's never a good idea to piss off the refs.

Last year Marc Andreessen's firm "argued that AI companies would go broke if they had to pay copyright royalties or licensing fees," notes a Los Angeles Times technology columnist.

But are these powerful companies doing even more to ensure they're not billed for their training data? Just this week, British media outlets reported that OpenAI has made the same case, seeking an exemption from copyright rules in England, claiming that the company simply couldn't operate without ingesting copyrighted materials.... The AI companies also argue what they're doing falls under the legal doctrine of fair use — probably the strongest argument they've got — because it's transformative. This argument helped Google win in court against the big book publishers when it was copying books into its massive Google Books database, and defeat claims that YouTube was profiting by allowing users to host and promulgate unlicensed material. Next, the AI companies argue that copyright-violating outputs like those uncovered by AI expert Gary Marcus, film industry veteran Reid Southern and the New York Times are rare or are bugs that are going to be patched.
But finally, William Fitzgerald, a partner at the Worker Agency and former member of the public policy team at Google, predicts Google will try to line up supportive groups to tell lawmakers artists support AI: Fitzgerald also sees Google's fingerprints on Creative Commons' embrace of the argument that AI art is fair use, as Google is a major funder of the organization. "It's worrisome to see Google deploy the same lobbying tactics they've developed over the years to ensure workers don't get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald said. And OpenAI is close behind. It is not only taking a similar approach to heading off copyright complaints as Google, but it's also hiring the same people: It hired Fred Von Lohmann, Google's former director of copyright policy, as its top copyright lawyer....

[Marcus says] "There's an obvious alternative here — OpenAI's saying that we need all this or we can't build AI — but they could pay for it!" We want a world with artists and with writers, after all, he adds, one that rewards artistic work — not one where all the money goes to the top because a handful of tech companies won a digital land grab. "It's up to workers everywhere to see this for what it is, get organized, educate lawmakers and fight to get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald says.

"Because if they don't, Google and OpenAI will continue to profit from other people's labor and content for a long time to come."

A new analysis suggests that wind turbines have little impact on bird populations, according to the Economist — and that oil-and-gas extraction may be worse: Erik Katovich [an economist at the University of Geneva] combined bird population and species maps with the locations and construction dates of all wind turbines in the United States, with the exceptions of Alaska and Hawaii, between 2000 and 2020. He found that building turbines had no discernible effect on bird populations. That reassuring finding held even when he looked specifically at large birds like hawks, vultures and eagles that many people believe are particularly vulnerable to being struck.

But Dr. Katovich did not confine his analysis to wind power alone. He also examined oil-and-gas extraction. Like wind power, this has boomed in America over the past couple of decades, with the rise of shale gas produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of rocks. Production has risen from 37m cubic metres in 2007 to 740m cubic metres in 2020. Comparing bird populations to the locations of new gas wells revealed an average 15% drop in bird numbers when new wells were drilled, probably due to a combination of noise, air pollution and the disturbance of rivers and ponds that many birds rely upon. When drilling happens in places designated by the National Audubon Society as "important bird areas", bird numbers instead dropped by 25%. Such places are typically migration hubs, feeding grounds or breeding locations.

Wind power, in other words, not only produces far less planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane than do fossil fuels. It appears to be significantly less damaging to wildlife, too.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for sharing the article.

After removing the feature with Android 5.0 in 2015, Google appears to be bringing back lock screen widgets in the next version of Android. "There haven't been any indications since then that Google would ever bring this feature back," notes Android Authority. "But after Apple introduced widgets to the iPhone lock screen in iOS 16, many speculated that it was only a matter of time." From the report: As for how they might do that, there seem to be two different approaches that are being developed. The first one involves the creation of a new "communal" space -- an area on the lock screen that might be accessed by swiping inward from the right. Although the communal space is still unfinished, I was able to activate it in the new Android 14 QPR2 Beta 3 update. Once I activated the communal space, a large gray bar appeared on the right side of the lock screen on my Pixel device. After swiping inward, a pencil icon appeared on the top left of the screen. Tapping this icon opened a widget selector that allowed me to add widgets from Google Calendar, Google Clock, and the Google App, but I wasn't able to add widgets from most of my other apps. This is because the widget category needs to be set to KEYGUARD in order for it to appear in this selector. KEYGUARD is a category Google introduced in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean that very few apps utilize today since the lock screen hasn't supported showing widgets in nearly a decade. After adding the widgets for Google Clock and Google Finance, I returned to the communal space by swiping inward from the right on the lock screen. The widgets were indeed shown in this space without me needing to unlock the device. However, the lock screen UI was shown on top of the widgets, making things difficult to see. Clearly, this feature is still a work in progress in the current beta. [...]

While it's possible this communal space won't be coming to all devices, there's another way that Google could bring widgets back to the lock screen for Android phones: leveraging At a Glance. If you aren't familiar, Pixel phones have a widget on the home screen and lock screen called At a Glance. The interesting thing about At a Glance is that it isn't actually a widget but rather a "custom element behaving like a widget," according to developer Kieron Quinn. Under the hood, At a Glance is built on top of Smartspace, the API that is responsible for creating the various cards you can swipe through. Although Smartspace supports creating a variety of card types, it currently can't handle RemoteViews, the API on which Android app widgets are built. That could change soon, though, as Google is working on including RemoteViews into the Smartspace API.

It's unclear whether this will allow raw widgets from all apps to be included in At a Glance, since it's also possible that Google is only implementing this so it has more freedom in building new cards. Either way, this new addition to the Smartspace API would supercharge the At a Glance widget in Android 15, and we're excited to see what Google has in store for us.

Mark Gurman reports via Bloomberg: In one of Apple's biggest board shake-ups in years (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), longtime directors Al Gore and James Bell will be retiring from the company, with former Aerospace Corp. Chief Executive Officer Wanda Austin coming aboard. The company made the announcement Thursday, citing a policy of directors not standing for reelection after the age of 75. Bell, a former Boeing Co. executive, joined the Apple board in 2015, while former US Vice President Gore has been a director for more than two decades. Both men are 75.

The upheaval is unusual for Apple's board, which rarely has more than one retirement at a time. Gore was the longest-serving member -- having joined in 2003, when co-founder Steve Jobs was CEO and the iPhone didn't yet exist. "Al has contributed an incredible amount to our work -- from his unconditional support for protecting our users' privacy, to his incomparable knowledge of environment and climate issues," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. "James's dedication has been extraordinary, and we're thankful for the important perspectives and deep expertise he's offered on audit, finance, and so much more over the years."

Austin, the new nominee, has a significant track record of "advancing innovation and shaping corporate strategy," Apple said. She has long been a major proponent of US space exploration efforts, though that's not an area that Apple is directly involved in. She will be up for election at the company's annual shareholder meeting on Feb. 28. In spite of the age policy, another director, Ronald Sugar, is turning 76 this year and not slated to leave the board. Apple said that Sugar is remaining "in consideration of the significant recent transitions in board composition and the value of retaining directors who have developed deep insights into the company during their tenure." Given Apple's rationale for retaining Sugar, it's unclear if the policy will apply to Chairman Arthur Levinson, who turns 75 next year.

Restrictive US policies limiting advanced chip exports to China have done little to dampen Qualcomm's enthusiasm for the world's second-largest economy. From a report: In an interview at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, CEO Cristiano Amon expressed confidence about Qualcomm's business in the country, its largest market by revenue. "If you have a leading technology, you're going to have a big business in China," he said. The San Diego-based firm finds itself in a difficult situation, as the White House and Congress ramp up a pressure campaign to curb the sale of US chips and chipmaking tools to China, citing national security concerns. The Biden administration has argued that China's access to advanced semiconductors could aid military advancements.

Meanwhile, in China, government agencies and state-owned firms have widened their ban on Apple's iPhones for employees. Qualcomm is one of Apple's biggest suppliers. China remains the largest semiconductor market in the world, with sales in the country accounting for one-third of the global market, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.