An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Oracle is trying -- and sometimes struggling -- to attract workers to Nashville, where it is developing a massive riverfront headquarters. The company is hiring for more roles in Nashville than any other US city, with a special focus on jobs in its crucial cloud infrastructure unit. Oracle cloud workers based elsewhere say they've been offered tens of thousands of dollars in incentives to move. Chairman Larry Ellison made a splash in April 2024 when he said Oracle would make Nashville its "world headquarters" just a few years after moving the software company from Redwood City, California, to Austin. His proclamation followed a 2021 tax incentive deal in which Oracle pledged to create 8,500 jobs in Nashville by 2031, paying an average salary above six figures.

"We're creating a world leading cloud and AI hub in Nashville that is attracting top talent locally, regionally, and from across the country," Oracle Senior Vice President Scott Twaddle said in a statement. "We've seen great success recruiting engineering and technical positions locally and will continue to hire aggressively for the next several years." Still, Oracle has a long way to go in its hiring goals. Today, it has about 800 workers assigned to offices in Nashville, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. That trails far behind the number of company employees in locations including Redwood City, Austin and Kansas City, the center of health records company Cerner, which Oracle acquired in 2022.

A lack of state income tax and the city's thriving music scene are touted by Oracle's promotional materials to attract talent to Nashville. Some new hires note they moved because in a tough tech job market, the Tennessee city was the only place with an Oracle position offered. To fit all of these workers, Oracle is planning a massive campus along the Cumberland River. It will feature over 2 million square feet of office space, a new cross-river bridge and a branch of the ultra high-end sushi chain Nobu, which has locations on many properties connected to Ellison, including the Hawaiian island of Lanai. [...] Oracle has been running recruitment events for the new hub. But a common concern for employees weighing a move is that Nashville is classified by Oracle in a lower geographic pay band than California or Seattle, meaning that future salary growth is likely limited, according to multiple workers who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

A weaker local tech job market also gives pause to some considering relocation. In addition, many of the roles in Nashville require five days a week in the office, which is a shift for Oracle, where a significant number of roles are remote. For a global company like Oracle, the exact meaning of "headquarters" can be a bit unclear. Austin remains the address included on company SEC filings and its executives are scattered across the country. The city where Oracle is hiring for the most positions globally is Bengaluru, the southern Indian tech hub. Still, Oracle is positioning Nashville to be at the center of its future. "We're developing our Nashville location to stand alongside Austin, Redwood Shores, and Seattle as a major innovation hub," Oracle writes on its recruitment site. "This is your chance to be part of it."

Michael and Susan Dell pledged $6.25 billion to boost participation in the new "Trump Accounts" child investment program. "The historic gift has little precedent, with few single charitable commitments in the past 25 years exceeding $1 billion, much less multiple billions," notes the Associated Press. "Announced on GivingTuesday, the Dells believe it's the largest single private commitment made to U.S. children." From the report: Its structure is also unusual. Essentially, it builds on the "Trump Accounts" program (PDF), where the U.S. Department of the Treasury will deposit $1,000 into investment accounts set up by Treasury for American children born between Jan. 1, 2025 and Dec. 31, 2028. The Dells' gift will use the "Trump Accounts" infrastructure to give $250 to each qualified child under 10. Though the "Trump Accounts" became law as part of the president's signature legislation in July, the Dells say the accounts will not launch until July 4, 2026. Michael Dell said they wanted to mark the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.

[...] Under the new law, "Trump Accounts" are available to any American child under 18 with a Social Security number and their families can fund the accounts, which must be invested in an index fund that tracks the overall stock market. When the children turn 18, they can withdraw the funds to put toward their education, to buy a home or to start a business. The Dells will put money into the accounts of children 10 and younger who live in ZIP codes with a median family income of $150,000 or less and who won't get the $1,000 seed money from the Treasury. The Dells hope their gift will encourage families to claim the accounts and deposit more money into it, even small amounts, so it will grow over time along with the stock market. The report notes that the timed rollout of the $1,000 deposits gives Republicans a strategic political advantage by delivering money to voters during the 2026 midterms and halting the benefit right after the 2028 presidential election.

After the Python Software Foundation rejected a $1.5 million grant because it restricted DEI activity, "a flood of new donations followed," according to a new report. By Friday they'd raised over $157,000, including 295 new Supporting Members paying an annual $99 membership fee, says PSF executive director Deb Nicholson.

"It doesn't quite bridge the gap of $1.5 million, but it's incredibly impactful for us, both financially and in terms of feeling this strong groundswell of support from the community." Could that same security project still happen if new funding materializes? The PSF hasn't entirely given up. "The PSF is always looking for new opportunities to fund work benefiting the Python community," Nicholson told me in an email last week, adding pointedly that "we have received some helpful suggestions in response to our announcement that we will be pursuing." And even as things stand, the PSF sees itself as "always developing or implementing the latest technologies for protecting PyPI project maintainers and users from current threats," and it plans to continue with that commitment.
The Python Software Foundation was "astounded and deeply appreciative at the outpouring of solidarity in both words and actions," their executive director wrote in a new blog post this week, saying the show of support "reminds us of the community's strength."

But that post also acknowledges the reality that the Python Software Foundation's yearly revenue and assets (including contributions from major donors) "have declined, and costs have increased,..." Historically, PyCon US has been a source of revenue for the PSF, enabling us to fund programs like our currently paused Grants Program... Unfortunately, PyCon US has run at a loss for three years — and not from a lack of effort from our staff and volunteers! Everyone has been working very hard to find areas where we can trim costs, but even with those efforts, inflation continues to surge, and changing U.S. and economic conditions have reduced our attendance... Because we have so few expense categories (the vast majority of our spending goes to running PyCon US, the Grants Program, and our small 13-member staff), we have limited "levers to pull" when it comes to budgeting and long-term sustainability...
While Python usage continues to surge, "corporate investment back into the language and the community has declined overall. The PSF has longstanding sponsors and partners that we are ever grateful for, but signing on new corporate sponsors has slowed." (They're asking employees at Python-using companies to encourage sponsorships.) We have been seeking out alternate revenue channels to diversify our income, with some success and some challenges. PyPI Organizations offers paid features to companies (PyPI features are always free to community groups) and has begun bringing in monthly income. We've also been seeking out grant opportunities where we find good fits with our mission.... We currently have more than six months of runway (as opposed to our preferred 12 months+ of runway), so the PSF is not at immediate risk of having to make more dramatic changes, but we are on track to face difficult decisions if the situation doesn't shift in the next year.

Based on all of this, the PSF has been making changes and working on multiple fronts to combat losses and work to ensure financial sustainability, in order to continue protecting and serving the community in the long term. Some of these changes and efforts include:

— Pursuing new sponsors, specifically in the AI industry and the security sector
— Increasing sponsorship package pricing to match inflation
— Making adjustments to reduce PyCon US expenses
— Pursuing funding opportunities in the US and Europe
— Working with other organizations to raise awareness
— Strategic planning, to ensure we are maximizing our impact for the community while cultivating mission-aligned revenue channels

The PSF's end-of-year fundraiser effort is usually run by staff based on their capacity, but this year we have assembled a fundraising team that includes Board members to put some more "oomph" behind the campaign. We'll be doing our regular fundraising activities; we'll also be creating a unique webpage, piloting temporary and VERY visible pop-ups to python.org and PyPI.org, and telling more stories from our Grants Program recipients...

Keep your eyes on the PSF Blog, the PSF category on Discuss, and our social media accounts for updates and information as we kick off the fundraiser this month. Your boosts of our posts and your personal shares of "why I support the PSF" stories will make all the difference in our end-of-year fundraiser. If this post has you all fired up to personally support the future of Python and the PSF right now, we always welcome new PSF Supporting Members and donations.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: When's the last time you settled down with a good book, just because you enjoyed it? A new survey shows reading as a pastime is becoming dramatically less popular in the U.S., which correlates with an increased consumption of other digital media, like social media and streaming services. The survey was carried out by researchers from the University of Florida and the University of London, and charts a 40 percent decrease in daily reading for pleasure across the years 2003-2023, based on responses from 236,270 US adults.

"This is not just a small dip -- it's a sustained, steady decline of about 3 percent per year," says Jill Sonke, director for the Center for the Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida. "It's significant, and it's deeply concerning." The number of US people reading for pleasure every day peaked in 2004 at 28 percent, the researchers found, but by 2023 this was down to 16 percent. There was a silver lining though: those people who are still reading are reading for slightly longer on average.

Reading habits aren't changing across the board. The drops in reading for pleasure were higher in Black Americans, especially those with lower income, education levels, and who lived outside of cities. That speaks to problems beyond the rise of smartphones, tablets, and other screens, according to the researchers. Different life situations are leading to disparities in accessibility that don't help promote reading as a pastime. "Our digital culture is certainly part of the story," says Sonke. "But there are also structural issues -- limited access to reading materials, economic insecurity and a national decline in leisure time. If you're working multiple jobs or dealing with transportation barriers in a rural area, a trip to the library may just not be feasible." The findings have been published in the journal iScience.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, experts have debated how widely AI language models would impact the world. A few years later, the picture is getting clear. According to new Stanford University-led research examining over 300 million text samples across multiple sectors, AI language models now assist in writing up to a quarter of professional communications across sectors. It's having a large impact, especially in less-educated parts of the United States. "Our study shows the emergence of a new reality in which firms, consumers and even international organizations substantially rely on generative AI for communications," wrote the researchers.

The researchers tracked large language model (LLM) adoption across industries from January 2022 to September 2024 using a dataset that included 687,241 consumer complaints submitted to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), 537,413 corporate press releases, 304.3 million job postings, and 15,919 United Nations press releases. By using a statistical detection system that tracked word usage patterns, the researchers found that roughly 18 percent of financial consumer complaints (including 30 percent of all complaints from Arkansas), 24 percent of corporate press releases, up to 15 percent of job postings, and 14 percent of UN press releases showed signs of AI assistance during that period of time.

The study also found that while urban areas showed higher adoption overall (18.2 percent versus 10.9 percent in rural areas), regions with lower educational attainment used AI writing tools more frequently (19.9 percent compared to 17.4 percent in higher-education areas). The researchers note that this contradicts typical technology adoption patterns where more educated populations adopt new tools fastest. "In the consumer complaint domain, the geographic and demographic patterns in LLM adoption present an intriguing departure from historical technology diffusion trends where technology adoption has generally been concentrated in urban areas, among higher-income groups, and populations with higher levels of educational attainment." "Arkansas showed the highest adoption rate at 29.2 percent (based on 7,376 complaints), followed by Missouri at 26.9 percent (16,807 complaints) and North Dakota at 24.8 percent (1,025 complaints)," notes Ars. "In contrast, states like West Virginia (2.6 percent), Idaho (3.8 percent), and Vermont (4.8 percent) showed minimal AI writing adoption. Major population centers demonstrated moderate adoption, with California at 17.4 percent (157,056 complaints) and New York at 16.6 percent (104,862 complaints)."

The study was listed on the arXiv preprint server in mid-February.

A New York law mandating low-cost broadband is inspiring similar legislation across multiple states, despite industry opposition. The law requires ISPs with over 20,000 customers to offer $15 plans with 25Mbps speeds or $20 plans with 200Mbps to income-eligible residents.

Vermont, Massachusetts, and California legislators have introduced comparable bills following New York's success. Vermont's proposal mirrors New York's pricing structure, while Massachusetts goes further by requiring 100Mbps speeds for the $15 tier. AT&T responded by withdrawing its 5G home internet service from New York rather than complying with the mandate.

Industry lobby groups continue fighting these regulations, with USTelecom warning that state-level price controls will "undermine connectivity progress" and "discourage investment."

America's Federal Trade Commission has been "raising antitrust concerns" about them for years, reports NBC News.

The latest? America's three largest drug middlemen "inflated the costs of numerous life-saving medications by billions of dollars over the past few years, the FTC said in a report Tuesday." The top pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — CVS Health's Caremark Rx, Cigna's Express Scripts and UnitedHealth Group's OptumRx — generated roughly $7.3 billion through price hikes over about five years starting in 2017, the FTC said. The "excess" price hikes affected generic drugs used to treat heart disease, HIV and cancer, among other conditions, with some increases more than 1,000% of the national average costs of acquiring the medications, the commission said. The FTC also said these so-called Big Three health care companies — which it estimates administer 80% of all prescriptions in the U.S. — are inflating drug prices "at an alarming rate, which means there is an urgent need for policymakers to address it...."

Some of the steepest drug markups were "hundreds and thousands of percent," according to Tuesday's report, which highlights just how profitable specialty drugs have become for the three leading PBMs. Cancer drugs alone made up nearly half of the $7.3 billion, the commission wrote, with multiple sclerosis medications accounting for another 25%. Dispensing highly marked-up specialty drugs was a massive income stream for the companies in 2021, the FTC found. Out of tens of thousands of drugs dispensed, the top 10 specialty generics alone made up nearly 11% of the companies' pharmacy-related operating income that year, the agency estimated. Across the 51 drugs the agency analyzed, the Big Three's price-markup revenue surged from $522 million in 2017 to $2.1 billion in 2021, the report said.
"The FTC found that 22 percent of specialty drugs dispensed by PBM-affiliated pharmacies were marked up by more than 1,000 percent," reports The Hill, "while 41 percent were marked up between 100 and 1,000 percent. Among those drugs marked up by more than 1,000 percent, half of them were marked up by more than 2,000 percent."

And the nonprofit site progressive news site Common Dreams shares some examples from the FTC's 60-page report: "For the pulmonary hypertension drug tadalafil (generic Adcirca), for example, pharmacies purchased the drug at an average of $27 in 2022, yet the Big Three PBMs marked up the drug by $2,079 and paid their affiliated pharmacies $2,106, on average, for a 30-day supply of the medication on commercial claims," the publication notes. That's a staggering average markup of 7,736%... The new analysis follows a July 2024 report that revealed Big Three PBM-affiliated pharmacies received 68% of the dispensing revenue generated by specialty drugs in 2023, a 14% increase from 2016...

Responding to the FTC report, Emma Freer, senior policy analyst for healthcare at the American Economic Liberties Project — a corporate accountability and antitrust advocacy group — said in a statement Tuesday that "the FTC's second interim report lays bare the blatant profiteering by PBM giants, which are marking up lifesaving drugs like cancer, HIV, and multiple sclerosis treatments by thousands of percent and forcing patients to pay the price."

Bruce Perens, original co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has responded to questions from Slashdot readers about a new alternative he's developing that hopefully helps "Post Open" developers get paid.

But first, "One of the things that's clear from the Slashdot patter is that people are not aware of what I've been doing, in general," Perens says. "So, let's start by filling that in..."

Read on for the rest of his wide-ranging answers....

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave an hour-long interview to the "All-In" podcast (hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg).

And when asked about this summer's launch of the next version of ChatGPT, Altman said they hoped to "be thoughtful about how we do it, like we may release it in a different way than we've released previous models...

Altman: One of the things that we really want to do is figure out how to make more advanced technology available to free users too. I think that's a super-important part of our mission, and this idea that we build AI tools and make them super-widely available — free or, you know, not-that-expensive, whatever that is — so that people can use them to go kind of invent the future, rather than the magic AGI in the sky inventing the future, and showering it down upon us. That seems like a much better path. It seems like a more inspiring path.

I also think it's where things are actually heading. So it makes me sad that we have not figured out how to make GPT4-level technology available to free users. It's something we really want to do...

Q: It's just very expensive, I take it?

Altman: It's very expensive.
But Altman said later he's confident they'll be able to reduce cost. Altman: I don't know, like, when we get to intelligence too cheap to meter, and so fast that it feels instantaneous to us, and everything else, but I do believe we can get there for, you know, a pretty high level of intelligence. It's important to us, it's clearly important to users, and it'll unlock a lot of stuff.
Altman also thinks there's "great roles for both" open-source and closed-source models, saying "We've open-sourced some stuff, we'll open-source more stuff in the future.

"But really, our mission is to build toward AGI, and to figure out how to broadly distribute its benefits... " Altman even said later that "A huge part of what we try to do is put the technology in the hands of people..." Altman: The fact that we have so many people using a free version of ChatGPT that we don't — you know, we don't run ads on, we don't try to make money on it, we just put it out there because we want people to have these tools — I think has done a lot to provide a lot of value... But also to get the world really thoughtful about what's happening here. It feels to me like we just stumbled on a new fact of nature or science or whatever you want to call it... I am sure, like any other industry, I would expect there to be multiple approaches and different peoiple like different ones.
Later Altman said he was "super-excited" about the possibility of an AI tutor that could reinvent how people learn, and "doing faster and better scientific discovery... that will be a triumph."

But at some point the discussion led him to where the power of AI intersects with the concept of a universal basic income: Altman: Giving people money is not going to go solve all the problems. It is certainly not going to make people happy. But it might solve some problems, and it might give people a better horizon with which to help themselves.

Now that we see some of the ways that AI is developing, I wonder if there's better things to do than the traditional conceptualization of UBI. Like, I wonder — I wonder if the future looks something more like Universal Basic Compute than Universal Basic Income, and everybody gets like a slice of GPT-7's compute, and they can use it, they can re-sell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research. But what you get is not dollars but this like slice — you own part of the the productivity.
Altman was also asked about the "ouster" period where he was briefly fired from OpenAI — to which he gave a careful response: Altman: I think there's always been culture clashes at — look, obviously not all of those board members are my favorite people in the world. But I have serious respect for the gravity with which they treat AGI and the importance of getting AI safety right. And even if I stringently disagree with their decision-making and actions, which I do, I have never once doubted their integrity or commitment to the sort of shared mission of safe and beneficial AGI...

I think a lot of the world is, understandably, very afraid of AGI, or very afraid of even current AI, and very excited about it — and even more afraid, and even more excited about where it's going. And we wrestle with that, but I think it is unavoidable that this is going to happen. I also think it's going to be tremendously beneficial. But we do have to navigate how to get there in a reasonable way. And, like a lot of stuff is going to change. And change is pretty uncomfortable for people. So there's a lot of pieces that we've got to get right...

I really care about AGI and think this is like the most interesting work in the world.

Netflix on Thursday reported a 16% rise in memberships in the first quarter, reaching 269.6 million, beating Wall Street expectations. Starting next year, the company will no longer provide quarterly membership numbers or average revenue per user starting next year. CNBC reports: "As we've noted in previous letters, we're focused on revenue and operating margin as our primary financial metrics -- and engagement (i.e. time spent) as our best proxy for customer satisfaction," the company said in its quarterly letter to shareholders. "In our early days, when we had little revenue or profit, membership growth was a strong indicator of our future potential." Netflix said now that it is generating substantial profit and free cash flow -- as well as developing new revenue streams like advertising and a password-sharing crackdown -- its membership numbers are not the only factor in the company's growth. It said the metric lost significance after it started to offer multiple price points for memberships. The company said it would still announce "major subscriber milestones as we cross them."

Netflix also noted that it expects paid net additions to be lower in the second quarter compared to the first quarter "due to typical seasonality." Its second-quarter revenue forecast of $9.49 billion was just shy of Wall Street's estimate of $9.54 billion Shares of the company fell around 4% in extended trading. Netflix reported first-quarter net income of $2.33 billion, or $5.28 per share, versus $1.30 billion, or $2.88 per share, in the prior-year period. The company posted revenue of $9.37 billion for the quarter, up from $8.16 billion in the year-ago quarter.

In its fourth quarter earnings report today, Nvidia beat Wall Street's forecast for earnings and sales, causing shares to rise about 10% in extended trading. CNBC reports: Here's what the company reported compared with what Wall Street was expecting for the quarter ending in January, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv:

Earnings per share: $5.16 adjusted vs. $4.64 expected
Revenue: $22.10 billion vs. $20.62 billion expected

Nvidia said it expected $24.0 billion in sales in the current quarter. Analysts polled by LSEG were looking for $5.00 per share on $22.17 billion in sales. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addressed investor fears that the company may not be able to keep up this growth or level of sales for the whole year on a call with analysts. "Fundamentally, the conditions are excellent for continued growth" in 2025 and beyond, Huang told analysts. He says demand for the company's GPUs will remain high due to generative AI and an industry-wide shift away from central processors to the accelerators that Nvidia makes.

Nvidia reported $12.29 billion in net income during the quarter, or $4.93 per share, up 769% versus last year's $1.41 billion or 57 cents per share. Nvidia's total revenue rose 265% from a year ago, based on strong sales for AI chips for servers, particularly the company's "Hopper" chips such as the H100, it said. "Strong demand was driven by enterprise software and consumer internet applications, and multiple industry verticals including automotive, financial services and health care," the company said in commentary provided to investors. Those sales are reported in the company's Data Center business, which now comprises the majority of Nvidia's revenue. Data center sales were up 409% to $18.40 billion. Over half the company's data center sales went to large cloud providers. [...]

The company's gaming business, which includes graphics cards for laptops and PCs, was merely up 56% year over year to $2.87 billion. Graphics cards for gaming used to be Nvidia's primary business before its AI chips started taking off, and some of Nvidia's graphics cards can be used for AI. Nvidia's smaller businesses did not show the same meteoric growth. Its automotive business declined 4% to $281 million in sales, and its OEM and other business, which includes crypto chips, rose 7% to $90 million. Nvidia's business making graphics hardware for professional applications rose 105% to $463 million.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: YouTube recently started slowing down its entire site whenever ad blockers are used. A new wave of slowdowns is hitting users, with the only resolutions being disabling the ad blocker or upgrading to premium. To combat the increasing frequency of ads on YouTube, people have employed the use of ad blockers for years. According to YouTube, that method of avoiding ads is deemed a violation of the terms of service. Of course, pre-video ads are a huge source of income for the service, and the only way to avoid them without the use of a third-party application is to pay YouTube directly for premium.

YouTube has since started discouraging the use of ad blockers in a couple of ways. The first is with a pop-up message that reads, "Ad blockers violate YouTube's Term of Service." The message then suggests you turn off your ad blocker. The user is not allowed to continue watching without doing so. The second method is one that's now starting to roll out to more users. YouTube has recently started slowing the entire site when an ad blocker is being used, referring to it as "suboptimal viewing." According to a post on Reddit, multiple users have noted that YouTube has become laggy and unresponsive, seemingly all of a sudden. It was quickly discovered that disabling whichever ad blocker is being used immediately revitalizes the site.

The United States and China are pursuing parallel scientific tracks. To solve crises on multiple fronts, the two roads need to become one, Nature's editorial board wrote Wednesday. From the post: It's no secret that research collaborations between China and the United States -- among other Western countries -- are on a downward trajectory. Early indicators of a possible downturn have been confirmed by more sources. A report from Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, published in August, for instance, stated that the number of research articles co-authored by scientists in the two countries had fallen in 2021, the first annual drop since 1993. Meanwhile, data from Nature Index show that China-based scientists' propensity to collaborate internationally has been waning, when looking at the authorship of papers in the Index's natural-science journals.

Nature reported last month that China's decoupling from the countries loosely described as the West mirrors its strengthening of science links with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. There are many good reasons for China to be boosting science in LMICs, which could sorely do with greater research funding and capacity building. But this is also creating parallel scientific systems -- one centred on North America and Europe, and the other on China. The biggest challenges faced by humanity, from combating climate change to ending poverty, are embodied in a globally agreed set of targets, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Approaching them without shared knowledge can only slow down progress by creating competing systems for advancing and implementing solutions. It's a scenario that the research community must be more aware of and work to avoid. Nature Index offers some reasons as to why collaboration between China and the West is declining. Travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic took their toll, limiting collaborations and barring new ones from being forged. Geopolitical tensions have led many Western governments to restrict their research partnerships with China, on national-security grounds, and vice versa.

Nvidia has swung from fourth to first place in an assessment of chip industry revenue published today. From a report: Taipei-based financial analyst Dan Nystedt noted that the green team took the revenue crown from contract chip-making titan TSMC as Q3 financials came into view. Those keeping an eye on the world of investing and finance will have seen our report about Nvidia's earnings explosion, evidenced by the firm's publishing of its Q3 FY23 results.

Nvidia charted an amazing performance, with a headlining $18.12 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 206% year-over-year (YoY). The firm's profits were also through the roof, and Nystedt posted a graph showing Nvidia elbowed past its chip industry rivals by this metric in Q3 2023, too. Nvidia's advance is supported by multiple highly successful operating segments, which have provided a multiplicative effect on its revenue and income. Again, we saw clear evidence of a seismic shift in revenue, with the latest set of financials shared with investors earlier this week.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the nonprofit journalism site, the San Francisco Standard: The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved legislation that aims to shore up the city's beleaguered Downtown by filling empty storefronts and expediting the conversion of underused office buildings into housing. The bill is a major component of Mayor London Breed's recovery agenda. Co-sponsored by Board President Aaron Peskin, it amends the city's planning code to expand residential uses and Downtown office conversions. It also streamlines the review of certain projects, among other changes...

Even with speedier project approvals, converting San Francisco office buildings to housing remains a costly endeavor; few developers have explored the option to date. At an April 3 hearing of the board's Land Use Committee, lawmakers outlined the need for multiple reforms to make conversions economically feasible; Supervisor Dean Preston voiced concerns that even those reforms would not accommodate low-income housing. Many say San Francisco's Downtown is currently caught in a "doom loop" driven by economic knock-on effects of the pandemic, including an office vacancy rate approaching 30% and trophy office towers changing hands at deep discounts...

The bill passed Tuesday is one of several legislative efforts to aid Downtown and the city's overall economy. Initiatives have included legislation to delay tax increases for retail, food service and other businesses hit hard by the pandemic, an "Office Attraction Tax Credit" for new companies opening in the city and a program called "Vacant to Vibrant," which provides grants to businesses which open "pop-up" shops and art spaces in Downtown's empty storefronts.

Across the software development field, founders are experiencing an income tax season that has become an existential threat to their company's survival. Software startups say they were blindsided by shocking tax bills as a result of a change in law related to research and development costs, and if Congress does not provide a retroactive fix, business failures will spread throughout the industry. From a report: The root of the issue is the inability of lawmakers to extend a key tax provision that had bipartisan support at the end of last year that allows for full expensing of research and development costs under Section 174 of the tax code. That did not come out of nowhere, and was a big disappointment to major corporations that had lobbied for the measure. But for many small business owners who often wear multiple hats, don't have lobbying arms or relationships with big four CPA firms, the change to require R&D amortization over a period of five years first became known this spring when accountants showed them the massive tax bills they owed the government. As word has spread throughout the software community, some owners remain too afraid to look at the full tax cost as they file for tax extensions and accountants revise their returns.

The pain is being felt from the smallest software developers of a dozen or less employees to large venture-backed companies sitting on pre-2022 frothy valuations, with tax bills rising to a level where cash flow is being drained, forcing painful financial decisions. Startups need to take out loans or extend lines of credit at a time of tighter bank lending and higher rates, ask VCs for more money during the worst fundraising environment in over a decade, freeze hiring and contemplate layoffs -- if they have not started making them already within a sector leading the economy in job losses and running at a rate higher than the worst layoffs of the dotcom bubble. Many software firms will make it through this year, but if R&D full expensing treatment is not brought back, they say survival will become an issue. The software development field is the starkest example of the fallout from the R&D tax change because its biggest expense is software development talent. Developers don't come cheap, and until tax year 2022, these companies could fully expense those costs as R&D rather than having to amortize them over multiple years. Industry success relies on the contribution of software talent, but when that cost overwhelms cash flow and profits, it potentially makes the business model untenable.

ProPublica looks at "a booming underground community of Instagram scammers and hackers who shut down profiles on the social network and then demand payment to reactivate them." While they also target TikTok and other platforms, takedown-for-hire scammers like OBN are proliferating on Instagram, exploiting the app's slow and often ineffective customer support services and its easily manipulated account reporting systems. These Instascammers often target people whose accounts are vulnerable because their content verges on nudity and pornography, which Instagram and its parent company, Meta, prohibit.... In an article he wrote for factz.com last year, OBN dubbed himself the "log-out king" because "I have deleted multiple celebrities + influencers on Meta & Instagram... I made about $300k just off banning and unbanning pages," he wrote.

OBN exploits weaknesses in Meta's customer service. By allowing anyone to report an account for violating the company's standards, Meta gives enormous leverage to people who are able to trick it into banning someone who relies on Instagram for income. Meta uses a mix of automated systems and human review to evaluate reports. Banners like OBN test and trade tips on how to trigger the system to falsely suspend accounts. In some cases OBN hacks into accounts to post offensive content. In others, he creates duplicate accounts in his targets' names, then reports the original accounts as imposters so they'll be barred for violating Meta's ban on account impersonation. In addition, OBN has posed as a Meta employee to persuade at least one target to pay him to restore her account.

Models, businesspeople, marketers and adult performers across the United States told ProPublica that OBN had ruined their businesses and lives with spurious complaints, even causing one woman to consider suicide. More than half a dozen people with over 45 million total followers on Instagram told ProPublica they lost their accounts temporarily or permanently shortly after OBN threatened to report them. They say Meta failed to help them and to take OBN and other account manipulators seriously. One person who said she was victimized by OBN has an ongoing civil suit against Meta for lost income, while others sent the company legal letters demanding payment....

A Meta spokesperson acknowledged that OBN has had short-term success in getting accounts removed by abusing systems intended to help enforce community standards. But the company has addressed those situations and taken down dozens of accounts linked to OBN, the spokesperson said. Most often, the spokesperson said, OBN scammed people by falsely claiming to be able to ban and restore accounts.... After banning an account, OBN frequently offers to reactivate it for a fee as high as $5,000, kicking off a cycle of bans and reactivations that continues until the victim runs out of money or stops paying.
A Meta spokesperson told the site they're currently "updating our support systems," including a tool to help affected users and letting more speak to a live support agent rather than an automated one. But the Meta spokesperson added that "This remains a highly adversarial space, with scammers constantly trying to evade detection by social media platforms."

ProPublica ultimately traced the money to a 20-year-old who lives with his mother (who claimed he was only "funnelling" the money for someone else). After that conversation OBN "announced he would no longer offer account banning as a service" — but would still sell his services in getting your account verified.

Around 2009 Slashdot was abuzz about how over-the-air broadcasting in North America was switching to a new standard called DTV. (Fun fact: North America and South America have two entirely different broadcast TV standards — both of which are different from the DVB-T standard used in Europe/Africa/Australia.) But 2022 ends with us already talking about DTV's successor in North America: the new broadcast standard NextGen TV.

This time the new standard isn't mandatory for TV stations, CNET points out — and it won't affect cable, satellite or streaming TV. But now even if you're not paying for a streaming TV service, another article points out, in most major American cities "an inexpensive antenna is all you'll need to get get ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and PBS stations" — and often with a better picture quality: NextGen TV, formerly known as ATSC 3.0, is continuing to roll out across the U.S. It's already widely available, with stations throughout the country broadcasting in the new standard. There are many new TVs with compatible tuners plus several stand-alone tuners to add NextGen to just about any TV. As the name suggests, NextGen TV is the next generation of over-the-air broadcasts, replacing or supplementing the free HD broadcasts we've had for over two decades. NextGen not only improves on HDTV, but adds the potential for new features like free over-the-air 4K and HDR, though those aren't yet widely available.

Even so, the image quality with NextGen is likely better than what you're used to from streaming or even cable/satellite. If you already have an antenna and watch HD broadcasts, the reception you get with NextGen might be better, too.... Because of how it works, you'll likely get better reception if you're far from the TV tower.

The short version is: NextGen is free over-the-air television with potentially more channels and better image quality than older over-the-air broadcasts.
U.S. broadcast companies have also created a site at WatchNextGenTV.com showing options for purchasing a compatible new TV. That site also features a video touting NextGen TV's "brilliant colors and a sharper picture with a wider range of contrast" and its Dolby audio system (with "immersive, movie theatre-quality sound" with enhancements for voice and dialogue "so you get all of the story.") And in the video there's also examples of upcoming interactive features like on-screen quizzes, voting, and shopping, as well as the ability to select multiple camera angles or different audio tracks.

"One potential downside? ATSC 3.0 will also let broadcasters track your viewing habits," CNet reported earlier this year, calling the data "information that can be used for targeted advertising, just like companies such as Facebook and Google use today...

"Ads specific to your viewing habits, income level and even ethnicity (presumed by your neighborhood, for example) could get slotted in by your local station.... but here's the thing: If your TV is connected to the internet, it's already tracking you. Pretty much every app, streaming service, smart TV and cable or satellite box all track your usage to a greater or lesser extent."

But on the plus side... NextGen TV is IP-based, so in practice it can be moved around your home just like any internet content can right now. For example, you connect an antenna to a tuner box inside your home, but that box is not connected to your TV at all. Instead, it's connected to your router. This means anything with access to your network can have access to over-the-air TV, be it your TV, your phone, your tablet or even a streaming device like Apple TV....

This also means it's possible we'll see mobile devices with built-in tuners, so you can watch live TV while you're out and about, like you can with Netflix and YouTube now. How willing phone companies will be to put tuners in their phones remains to be seen, however. You don't see a lot of phones that can get radio broadcasts now, even though such a thing is easy to implement.
But whatever you think — it's already here. By August NextGen TV was already reaching half of America's population, according to a press release from a U.S. broadcaster's coalition. That press release also bragged that 40% of consumers had actually heard of NextGen TV — "up 25% from last year among those in markets where it is available."

Remittances to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) withstood global headwinds in 2022, growing an estimated 5% to $626 billion. This is sharply lower than the 10.2% increase in 2021, according to the latest World Bank Migration and Development Brief. World Bank: Remittances are a vital source of household income for LMICs. They alleviate poverty, improve nutritional outcomes, and are associated with increased birth weight and higher school enrollment rates for children in disadvantaged households. Studies show that remittances help recipient households to build resilience, for example through financing better housing and to cope with the losses in the aftermath of disasters.

Remittance flows to developing regions were shaped by several factors in 2022. A reopening of host economies as the COVID-19 pandemic receded supported migrants' employment and their ability to continue helping their families back home. Rising prices, on the other hand, adversely affected migrants' real incomes. Also influencing the value of remittances is the appreciation of the ruble, which translated into higher value, in U.S. dollar terms, of outward remittances from Russia to Central Asia. In the case of Europe, a weaker euro had the opposite effect of reducing the U.S. dollar valuation of remittance flows to North Africa and elsewhere. In countries that experienced scarcity of foreign exchange and multiple exchange rates, officially recorded remittance flows declined as flows shifted to alternative channels offering better rates.

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday cracked down on Chegg, an education technology firm based in Santa Clara, Calif., saying the company's "careless" approach to cybersecurity had exposed the personal details of tens of millions of users. From a report: In a legal complaint, filed on Monday morning, regulators accused Chegg of numerous data security lapses dating to 2017. Among other problems, the agency said, Chegg had issued root login credentials, essentially an all-access pass to certain databases, to multiple employees and outside contractors. Those credentials enabled many people to look at user account data, which the company kept on Amazon Web Services' online storage system.

As a result, the agency said, a former Chegg contractor was able to use company-issued credentials to steal the names, email addresses and passwords of about 40 million users in 2018. In certain cases, sensitive details on students' religion, sexual orientation, disabilities and parents' income were also taken. Some of the data was later found for sale online. Chegg's popular homework help app is used regularly by millions of high school and college students. To settle the F.T.C.'s charges, the agency said Chegg had agreed to adopt a comprehensive data security program.