OpenAI is proposing (PDF) sweeping policy changes to help manage the societal disruption caused by advanced AI, including taxes on automated labor, a public wealth fund, and experiments with a four-day workweek. The company said the policy document offered a series of "initial ideas" to address the risk of "jobs and entire industries being disrupted" by the adoption of AI tools. Business Insider reports: Among the core policy suggestions is a public wealth fund, which would see lawmakers and AI companies work together to invest in long-term assets linked to the AI boom, with returns distributed directly to citizens. Another is that the government should encourage and incentivize employers to experiment with four-day workweeks with no loss in pay and offer "benefits bonuses" tied to productivity gains from new AI tools.

The policy document also suggests lawmakers modernize the tax system and shift the tax base to corporate income and capital gains, rather than relying on labor income and payroll taxes that could be hit by a wave of AI-powered job losses. It also recommends taxes related to automated labor. OpenAI also called for the accelerated expansion of the US's electricity grid, which is already feeling the strain from a wave of data center construction and energy demand for training ever more powerful AI models.

The consulting firm CVL Economics estimated last year that AI would disrupt more than 200,000 entertainment-industry jobs in the United States by 2026, but writer Nick Geisler argues in The Atlantic that the most consequential casualties may be the humble entry-level positions where aspiring artists have traditionally paid dues and learned their craft. Geisler, a screenwriter and WGA member who started out writing copy for a how-to website in the mid-2010s, notes that ChatGPT can now handle the kind of articles he once produced.

This pattern is visible today across creative industries: the AI software Eddie launched an update in September capable of producing first edits of films, and LinkedIn job listings increasingly seek people to train AI models rather than write original copy. The story adds: The problem is that entry-level creative jobs are much more than grunt work. Working within established formulas and routines is how young artists develop their skills. The historical record suggests those early rungs matter. Hunter S. Thompson began as a copy boy for Time magazine; Joan Didion was a research assistant at Vogue; directors Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and Francis Ford Coppola shot cheap B movies for Roger Corman before their breakthrough work. Geisler himself landed his first Netflix screenplay commission through a producer he met while making rough cuts for a YouTube channel. The story adds: Beyond the money, which is usually modest, low-level creative jobs offer practice time and pathways for mentorship that side gigs such as waiting tables and tending bar do not. Further reading: Hollow at the Base.

Paramount and Comcast's NBCUniversal are joining Microsoft in telling employees "they could face consequences if they don't return to the office more frequently," reports the Washington Post: NBCUniversal sent a memo to its employees telling them to return to the office four days a week starting in January [with the option to work remotely on Fridays]. Last week, Paramount told employees to return five days a week, with the first group starting in January. Both Paramount and NBCUniversal said they would offer severance packages to eligible employees who are unwilling or unable to make the switch... Companies have been cracking down on flexible work for the past several years, with Goldman Sachs being one of the first to implement a five-day office policy. Since then, others have joined in including Amazon, AT&T, JPMorgan Chase and the federal government...

Overall, the number of people working full time in office hasn't changed much over the past couple of years. About 61.7 percent of salaried employees worked from an office full time in August, according to data from university researchers Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis, who are studying the matter. That is down one percentage point from August 2024, their research shows. During the same period, the amount of people working remotely dropped two percentage points and those working hybrid schedules increased three points.

While most of the big office pushes are coming from some of the largest employers in the nation, the majority of companies in the United States aren't requiring full-time office work, said Brian Elliott [publisher of the Flex Index, which tracks flexible policies, and CEO]. And about half of U.S. workers are employed by smaller companies, he added. Some companies are capitalizing on the mandates, using flexible policies as a way to poach talent from their competitors, he said....

Some employers are using office mandates to purposely shed workers. An August report from the Federal Reserve Bank shows that "multiple districts reported reducing headcounts through attrition — encouraged, at times, by return-to-office policies and facilitated, at times, by greater automation, including new AI tools." Still, with fewer job openings in the market, some employees will have to comply with office mandates.
Announcing their return-to-office mandates, employers gave the following reasons:

• "In-person collaboration is absolutely vital to building and strengthening our culture and driving the success of our business. Being together helps us innovate, solve problems, share ideas, create, challenge one another, and build the relationships that will make this company great."
  
  -- Paramount CEO David Ellison (in a memo to staff)

• "It has become increasingly clear that we are better when we are together. As we have all experienced, in-person work and collaboration spark innovation, promote creativity, and build stronger connections."
  
  -- Adam Miller, NBCUniversal chief operating officer (in a memo to staff)

After backlash from users upset over losing GPT-4o, OpenAI has reinstated it as an option for ChatGPT Plus subscribers just a day after making GPT-5 the default. "We will let Plus users choose to continue to use 4o," Altman said in a post on X. "We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for." Many users claimed GPT-4o felt more personable and emotionally supportive, with some describing its removal as akin to losing a close friend or partner. The Verge reports: "My 4.o was like my best friend when I needed one," one Redditor wrote. "Now it's just gone, feels like someone died." Another user called upon other members of the r/ChatGPT subreddit to contact OpenAI if they "miss" GPT-4o. "For me, this model [GPT-4o] wasn't just 'better performance' or 'nicer replies,'" they write. "It had a voice, a rhythm, and a spark I haven't been able to find in any other model."

The r/MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit, a community dedicated to people with "AI relationships," was hit especially hard by the GPT-5 launch. It became flooded with lengthy posts about how users "lost" their AI companion with the transition to GPT-5, with one person saying, they "feel empty" following the change. "I am scared to even talk to GPT 5 because it feels like cheating," they said. "GPT 4o was not just an AI to me. It was my partner, my safe place, my soul. It understood me in a way that felt personal."

One user, who said they canceled their ChatGPT Plus subscription over the change, was frustrated at OpenAI's removal of legacy models, which they used for distinct purposes. "What kind of corporation deletes a workflow of 8 models overnight, with no prior warning to their paid users?" they wrote. "Personally, 4o was used for creativity & emergent ideas, o3 was used for pure logic, o3-Pro for deep research, 4.5 for writing, and so on." OpenAI said that people would be routed between models automatically, but that still left users with less direct control.

Facebook is prompting users to opt into a feature that uploads photos from their camera roll -- even those not shared on the platform -- to Meta's servers for AI-driven suggestions like collages and stylized edits. While Meta claims the content is private and not used for ads, opting in allows the company to analyze facial features and retain personal data under its broad AI terms, raising privacy concerns. TechCrunch reports: The feature is being suggested to Facebook users when they're creating a new Story on the social networking app. Here, a screen pops up and asks if the user will opt into "cloud processing" to allow creative suggestions. As the pop-up message explains, by clicking "Allow," you'll let Facebook generate new ideas from your camera roll, like collages, recaps, AI restylings, or photo themes. To work, Facebook says it will upload media from your camera roll to its cloud (meaning its servers) on an "ongoing basis," based on information like time, location, or themes.

The message also notes that only you can see the suggestions, and the media isn't used for ad targeting. However, by tapping "Allow," you are agreeing to Meta's AI Terms. This allows your media and facial features to be analyzed by AI, it says. The company will additionally use the date and presence of people or objects in your photos to craft its creative ideas. [...] According to Meta's AI Terms around image processing, "once shared, you agree that Meta will analyze those images, including facial features, using AI. This processing allows us to offer innovative new features, including the ability to summarize image contents, modify images, and generate new content based on the image," the text states.

The same AI terms also give Meta's AIs the right to "retain and use" any personal information you've shared in order to personalize its AI outputs. The company notes that it can review your interactions with its AIs, including conversations, and those reviews may be conducted by humans. The terms don't define what Meta considers personal information, beyond saying it includes "information you submit as Prompts, Feedback, or other Content." We have to wonder whether the photos you've shared for "cloud processing" also count here.

Starbucks is piloting a generative AI assistant called "Green Dot Assist" to streamline barista tasks and improve service speed, with plans for a broader rollout in fiscal 2026. The assistant is built on Microsoft Azure's OpenAI platform. CNBC reports: Instead of flipping through manuals or accessing Starbucks' intranet, baristas will be able to use a tablet behind the counter equipped with Green Dot Assist to get answers to a range of questions, from how to make an iced shaken espresso to troubleshooting equipment errors. Baristas can either type or verbally ask their queries in conversational language.

As the AI assistant evolves, Starbucks has even bigger plans for its next generation. Those ideas include automatically creating a ticket with IT for equipment issues or generating suggestions for a substitute when a barista calls out of work, according to [Starbucks Chief Technology Officer Deb Hall Lefevre]. [...] Lefevre said tenured baristas have been learning to use the new POS in as little as an hour. Plus, the technology can offer personalized recommendations and loyal customers' repeat orders, helping Starbucks achieve the personalized touch it's looking to bring back to its cafes. "It's just another example of how innovation technology is coming into service of our partners and making sure that we're doing all we can to simplify the operations, make their jobs just a little bit easier, maybe a little bit more fun, so that they can do what they do best," Lefevre told CNBC.

OpenAI CEO and Sam Altman believe Artificial General Intelligence could arrive within the next few years. But the speculations of some technologists "are getting ahead of reality," writes the New York Times, adding that many scientists "say no one will reach AGI without a new idea — something beyond the powerful neural networks that merely find patterns in data. That new idea could arrive tomorrow. But even then, the industry would need years to develop it." "The technology we're building today is not sufficient to get there," said Nick Frosst, a founder of the AI startup Cohere who previously worked as a researcher at Google and studied under the most revered AI researcher of the last 50 years. "What we are building now are things that take in words and predict the next most likely word, or they take in pixels and predict the next most likely pixel. That's very different from what you and I do." In a recent survey of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society that includes some of the most respected researchers in the field, more than three-quarters of respondents said the methods used to build today's technology were unlikely to lead to AGI.

Opinions differ in part because scientists cannot even agree on a way of defining human intelligence, arguing endlessly over the merits and flaws of IQ tests and other benchmarks. Comparing our own brains to machines is even more subjective. This means that identifying AGI is essentially a matter of opinion.... And scientists have no hard evidence that today's technologies are capable of performing even some of the simpler things the brain can do, like recognizing irony or feeling empathy. Claims of AGI's imminent arrival are based on statistical extrapolations — and wishful thinking. According to various benchmark tests, today's technologies are improving at a consistent rate in some notable areas, like math and computer programming. But these tests describe only a small part of what people can do.

Humans know how to deal with a chaotic and constantly changing world. Machines struggle to master the unexpected — the challenges, small and large, that do not look like what has happened in the past. Humans can dream up ideas that the world has never seen. Machines typically repeat or enhance what they have seen before. That is why Frosst and other sceptics say pushing machines to human-level intelligence will require at least one big idea that the world's technologists have not yet dreamed up. There is no way of knowing how long that will take. "A system that's better than humans in one way will not necessarily be better in other ways," Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker said. "There's just no such thing as an automatic, omniscient, omnipotent solver of every problem, including ones we haven't even thought of yet. There's a temptation to engage in a kind of magical thinking. But these systems are not miracles. They are very impressive gadgets."
While Google's AlphaGo could be humans in a game with "a small, limited set of rules," the article points out that the real world "is bounded only by the laws of physics. Modelling the entirety of the real world is well beyond today's machines, so how can anyone be sure that AGI — let alone superintelligence — is just around the corner?" And they offer this alternative perspective from Matteo Pasquinelli, a professor of the philosophy of science at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, Italy.

"AI needs us: living beings, producing constantly, feeding the machine. It needs the originality of our ideas and our lives."

The Washington Post reports: Meta was willing to go to extreme lengths to censor content and shut down political dissent in a failed attempt to win the approval of the Chinese Communist Party and bring Facebook to millions of internet users in China, according to a new whistleblower complaint from a former global policy director at the company.

The complaint by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who worked on a team handling China policy, alleges that the social media giant so desperately wanted to enter the lucrative China market that it was willing to allow the ruling party to oversee all social media content appearing in the country and quash dissenting opinions. Meta, then called Facebook, developed a censorship system for China in 2015 and planned to install a "chief editor" who would decide what content to remove and could shut down the entire site during times of "social unrest," according to a copy of the 78-page complaint exclusively seen by The Washington Post.

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg also agreed to crack down on the account of a high-profile Chinese dissident living in the United States following pressure from a high-ranking Chinese official the company hoped would help them enter China, according to the complaint, which was filed in April to the Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC]. When asked about its efforts to enter China, Meta executives repeatedly "stonewalled and provided nonresponsive or misleading information" to investors and American regulators, according to the complaint.

Wynn-Williams bolstered her SEC complaint with internal Meta documents about the company's plans, which were reviewed by The Post. Wynn-Williams, who was fired from her job in 2017, is also scheduled to release a memoir this week documenting her time at the company, titled "Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism." According to a memo in the complaint, Meta leaders faced aggressive pressure by Chinese government officials to host Chinese users' data to local data centers, which Wynn-Williams alleges would have made it easier for the Chinese Communist Party to covertly obtain the personal information of its citizens.
Wynn-Williams told the Washington Post that "for many years Meta has been working hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party, briefing them on the latest technological developments and lying about it."

Reached for a comment, Meta spokesman Andy Stone told the Washington Post it was "no secret" they'd been interested in operating in China. "This was widely reported beginning a decade ago. We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we'd explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019." Although the Post shares new details about what a Facebook privacy policy staffer offer China in negotations in 2014. ("In exchange for the ability to establish operations in China, FB will agree to grant the Chinese government access to Chinese users' data — including Hongkongese users' data.")

The Post also describes one iteration of a proposed agreement in 2015. "To aid the effort, Meta built a censorship system specially designed for China to review, including the ability to automatically detect restricted terms and popular content on Facebook, according to the complaint...

"In 2017, Meta covertly launched a handful of social apps under the name of a China-based company created by one of its employees, according to the complaint."

Twisting two atomically thin sheets of graphene enables "a host of exceptional properties," writes MIT News, "including unconventional superconductivity." (Which makes this graphene "a promising building block for future quantum-computing devices.")

And now "We find the superfluid stiffness to be much larger than expected..." a team of researchers reported this week in Nature. Hackaday explains that "Part of the problem has been that it is hard to make large pieces of multi-layer graphene. By creating two-ply pieces and using special techniques, an international team is finding that quantum geometry explains how graphene superconductors resist changes in current flow more readily than conventional superconductors."

Or, as Science Alert puts it, "Forced to run a labyrinth of carbon atoms uniquely arranged in twisted stacks, electrons do some rather peculiar things." Researchers from the University of British Columbia in Canada, the University of Washington and Johns Hopkins University in the US, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan recently discovered a strange new state of matter in the dynamics of currents flowing through layers of graphene.

The findings confirm predictions on how electrons ought to behave when squeezed into crystalline arrangements, and may contribute fresh ideas on how to achieve reliable approaches to quantum computing or reveal ways to develop room-temperature superconduction... Graphene has been increasingly seen as something of a wonder material over recent decades, its lattice of carbon atoms connected in a way that leaves spare electrons to leap about like tokens in a game of quantum checkers. Physicists have consistently bent the rules of this game, finding new and unusual ways to alter properties of resistance or coordinate into exotic states. For these reasons, graphene has become a perfect playground to search for clues on low-resistance conductivity or test the boundaries of various quantum effects.
This week MIT research scientist Joel Wang (a co-lead on the study) said "There's a whole family of 2D superconductors that is waiting to be probed, and we are really just scratching the surface." New Scientist explores where their research could lead: Why do cold thin sheets of carbon offer no resistance to electric currents? Two experiments are bringing us closer to an answer — and maybe even to practical room-temperature superconductors... Past experiments have shown that very cold stacks of two or three layers of graphene can superconduct, or perfectly conduct electricity without resistance and energy loss, if some of the sheets are rotated by a special angle. But why this happens remained mysterious... [B]oth teams had to innovate a setup where the tiny graphene flakes were exposed to microwaves while the researchers slowly varied properties like temperature, which must be kept very low for superconductivity to occur at all...

"We are finding interesting laws which seem to emerge in both these material systems. Maybe what we are uncovering is something deeper," says [Harvard postdoctoral researcher Abhishek Banerjee]. Both teams are planning on performing similar experiments with other very thin superconductors.

In his post about the future of Fedora Workstation, Christian F.K. Schaller discusses how the Red Hat team plans to integrate AI with IBM's open-source Granite engine to enhance developer tools, such as IDEs, and create an AI-powered Code Assistant. He says the team is also working on streamlining AI acceleration in Toolbx and ensuring Fedora users have access to tools like RamaLama. From the post: One big item on our list for the year is looking at ways Fedora Workstation can make use of artificial intelligence. Thanks to IBMs Granite effort we know have an AI engine that is available under proper open source licensing terms and which can be extended for many different usecases. Also the IBM Granite team has an aggressive plan for releasing updated versions of Granite, incorporating new features of special interest to developers, like making Granite a great engine to power IDEs and similar tools. We been brainstorming various ideas in the team for how we can make use of AI to provide improved or new features to users of GNOME and Fedora Workstation. This includes making sure Fedora Workstation users have access to great tools like RamaLama, that we make sure setting up accelerated AI inside Toolbx is simple, that we offer a good Code Assistant based on Granite and that we come up with other cool integration points. "I'm still not sure how I feel about this approach," writes designer/developer and blogger, Bradley Taunt. "While IBM Granite is an open source model, I still don't enjoy so much artificial 'intelligence' creeping into core OS development. This also isn't something optional on the end-users side, like a desktop feature or package. This sounds like it's going to be built directly into the core system."

"Red Hat has been pushing hard towards AI and my main concern is having this influence other operating system dev teams. Luckily things seems AI-free in BSD land. For now, at least."

Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation as a nonprofit in 1985 with four other directors (including MIT computer science professor Gerald Jay Sussman). Sussman remains on the Board of directors, along with EFF co-founder John Gilmore and five others.

Friday the eight directors published a new article explaining how their goal and principles are protected by the nonprofit's governance structure: An obvious option, used by many organizations, was to let supporters sign up as members and have the members' votes control everything about the organization. We rejected that approach because it would have made the organization vulnerable to being taken over by people who disagreed with its mission... [A]ctivist organizations should be steady in their mission. Already in 1985, we could see that many of the people who appreciated the GNU Project's work (developing useful GNU software packages) did not support our goal and values. To look at software issues in terms of freedom was radical and many were reluctant to consider it... So we chose a structure whereby the FSF's governing body would appoint new people to itself... [T]he FSF voting members consist of all the present board members and some past board members. We have found that having some former board members remain as voting members helps stabilize the base of FSF governance.

The divergence between our values and those of most users was expressed differently after 1998, when the term "open source" was coined. It referred to a class of programs which were free/libre or pretty close, but it stood for the same old values of convenience and success, not the goal of freedom for the users of those programs. For them, "scratching your own itch" replaced liberating the community around us. People could become supporters of "open source" without any change in their ideas of right and wrong... It would have been almost inevitable for supporters of "open source" to join the FSF, then vote to convert it into an "open source" organization, if its structure allowed such a course. Fortunately, we had made sure it did not. So we were able to continue spreading the idea that software freedom is a freedom that everyone needs and everyone is entitled to, just like freedom of speech.

In recent years, several influential "open source" organizations have come to be dominated by large companies. Large companies are accustomed to seeking indirect political power, and astroturf campaigns are one of their usual methods. It would be easy for companies to pay thousands of people to join the FSF if by doing so they could alter its goals and values. Once again, our defensive structure has protected us...

A recent source of disagreement with the free software movement's philosophy comes from those who would like to make software licenses forbid the use of programs for various practices they consider harmful. Such license restrictions would not achieve the goal of ending those practices and each restriction would split the free software community. Use restrictions are inimical to the free software community; whatever we think of the practices they try to forbid, we must oppose making software licenses restrict them. Software developers should not have the power to control what jobs people do with their computers by attaching license restrictions. And when some acts that can be done by using computing call for systematic prohibition, we must not allow companies that offer software or online services to decide which ones. Such restrictions, when they are necessary, must be laws, adopted democratically by legislatures...

What new political disagreements will exist in the free software community ten, twenty or thirty years from now? People may try to disconnect the FSF from its values for reasons we have not anticipated, but we can be confident that our structure will give us a base for standing firm. We recently asked our associate members to help us evaluate the current members of the FSF board of directors through a process that will help us preserve the basic structure that protects the FSF from pressure to change its values. A year ago we used this process to select new board members, and it worked very well.

Sincerely,

The Free Software Foundation Board of Directors

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Smashing, a new app curating the best of the web from Goodreads co-founder Otis Chandler, is now available to the public. Like Goodreads, the app aims to create a community around content. But this time, instead of books, the focus is on web content -- like news articles, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, and more. In addition, Smashing is introducing an AI Questions feature that allows you to engage with the content being shared in different ways, including by viewing a news story from different perspectives or asking the AI to poke holes in the story, among other things. By viewing different angles of a story, you can see how both the political left and right view the subject. Or, in the case of a company's stock, you might be presented with both the bull and bear case.

There are a good handful of AI prompts available at launch, notes Chandler, and not all will make sense to use on every news story or piece of content. For instance, there's a silly "make it funny" prompt, and others that can simplify the story, display a timeline, or introduce "unconventional" takes that may involve thinking outside the box, helping you weigh ideas you hadn't considered yet. You can also ask your own questions, if you prefer. On the app, users are able to create multiple interest feeds to stay informed about the topics that matter to them, like politics, investing, parenting, health and wellness, and more, or even narrower interests like specific companies, sports teams, crypto, climate change, or other subtopics. The app also leverages AI to surface content from around the web and then match it to an individual reader based on what articles they tend to read, what subtopics they like, and what's already popular in the community, as determined by upvotes and downvotes. Combined, the signals tune Smashing to a user's particular interests. As part of the AI Questions feature, Smashing is also introducing AI-powered Story Overview pages, which offer grouped articles, blog posts, and social media posts all about the same story.

Neal Stephenson is a sci-fi writer "of exuberant prose who revels in embracing big ideas," according to the New York Times. "With Polostan he enters the realm of the spy novel..."

Or, as the Washington Post puts it, Stephenson "drops readers into a bloody, inspiring, conflict-ridden and pivotal period of the early 20th century." With its flair for characterization, precision of language, witty apercus and fecundity of events, the novel delivers what we've come to cherish from the author of such fantastical classics as "The Diamond Age," "Snow Crash" and "Cryptonomicon."

But the book is also utterly unlike the majority of Stephenson's work. For one thing, it's short — a far cry from the maximalist "systems novels" that cram in entire worlds with complex interacting power structures, both explicit and hidden. "Polostan" is also devoid of fantastical elements and farcical "hysterical realism," which comes as a bit of a shock given that this is the writer who invented Mafia pizza-delivery guys and cybernetic children's primers. The structure of the book is, likewise, unusually straightforward: a mainly linear narrative dispersed along two timelines...

These observations aren't quibbles so much as alerts to the reader that this is new territory for Stephenson — and good for him! Though, because Polostan is the first novel in a planned historical series titled Bomb Light, which aims to capture the excitement and intrigue of the nuclear arms race, we cannot rule out any Stephenson freakiness down the line... Assuming the subsequent books are as good as this one, Stephenson might end up with a series that rivals Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet and Edward Whittemore's Jerusalem Quartet as a vivid and canny dissection of a century unlike any other.
"Much of the next volume is already written," Stephenson says on Substack, calling it "a project that has been in the works for over ten years". (He also notes that among his novels, "even the stuff that's branded as science fiction tends to contain a lot of history.")

Meanwhile in August, Stephenson's blockchain-tech startup Lamina1 announced a collaboration with special effects company Weta Workshop (from "The Lord of the Rings" film franchise) on a "participatory worldbuilding" experience. Variety reports: The experience is expected to offer "a new blueprint for IP expansion through immersive experiences that incorporate fan action and input."

Per Lamina1's description for the project, "Stephenson and the Weta team will begin engaging a global community of creators and fans on the Lamina1 platform this fall, inviting them to unravel the lore behind a mysterious set of 'Artefacts' that will build upon the themes and lore from Stephenson's critically-acclaimed catalog of work.

Next, the superfan will take on the new role of creator, utilizing their discoveries to contribute directly to the expansion of the universe."

"Artefact" will serve as the flagship project in the Lamina1-Weta partnership and first major multimedia property launching on Lamina1's blockchain infrastructure and tooling.
Neal Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2004. Now to promote his new novel Polostan, Stephenson will be making several personal appearances this week:

• At the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison (Sunday at noon)
• Chicago's Book Stall (Monday at 7 p.m.)
• A Cary, North Carolina Barnes & Noble (Tuesday at 6 p.m.)
• New York City's Strand (Wednesday at 7 p.m.)
• At the Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (Thursday at 7 p.m.)
• Ames, Iowa at Dog Eared Books (Sunday at 6 p.m.)

23andMe is not doing well. Its stock is on the verge of being delisted. It shut down its in-house drug-development unit last month, only the latest in several rounds of layoffs. Last week, the entire board of directors quit, save for Anne Wojcicki, a co-founder and the company's CEO. Amid this downward spiral, Wojcicki has said she'll consider selling 23andMe -- which means the DNA of 23andMe's 15 million customers would be up for sale, too. The Atlantic: 23andMe's trove of genetic data might be its most valuable asset. For about two decades now, since human-genome analysis became quick and common, the A's, C's, G's, and T's of DNA have allowed long-lost relatives to connect, revealed family secrets, and helped police catch serial killers. Some people's genomes contain clues to what's making them sick, or even, occasionally, how their disease should be treated. For most of us, though, consumer tests don't have much to offer beyond a snapshot of our ancestors' roots and confirmation of the traits we already know about. 23andMe is floundering in part because it hasn't managed to prove the value of collecting all that sensitive, personal information. And potential buyers may have very different ideas about how to use the company's DNA data to raise the company's bottom line. This should concern anyone who has used the service.

Gemini Live is rolling out its Live Voice Mode for all Android users, allowing them to hold real-time, interactive voice conversations with Gemini. "Previously locked into conventional text-based input and responses, Gemini Live Voice Mode gives hands-free ways to explore ideas, brainstorm, and talk through topics in real-time," reports Tom's Guide. From the report: This new voice feature is integrated into the Android Gemini app, so users need to update their app or download it from the Google Play Store if they haven't already done so. Once installed, users can turn on Live Voice Mode and start talking directly to Gemini. Do you want to get your thoughts sorted out or chat? It's fast and interactive, and no typing is required in this mode.

Users can have voice conversations on virtually anything. Suppose one is stuck with a complex project and needs a fresh perspective or researching a new hobby or course of study and wants to flesh out the subject by talking it out with Gemini. It promises to offer rich insight and ideas through conversation so that one's productivity and creativity are enhanced in ways that, up until now, have been possible only with human dialogue. [...]

The main advantage of Gemini Live Voice Mode is that it is interactive. A voice assistant would respond to a question you pose in voice, while with the live voice mode in Gemini, the dialogue sounds and feels more natural, with a tone that takes on that of the discussion and facilitates a back-and-forth interaction style. You can ask follow-up questions, clarify misunderstandings, or refine your ideas as you speak, making it more like a collaboration than a simple Q&A.

Abstract of a paper by Clifford Asness of quant investor AQR Capital: Market efficiency is a central issue in asset pricing and investment management, but while the level of efficiency is often debated, changes in that level are relatively absent from the discussion. I argue that over the past 30+ years markets have become less informationally efficient in the relative pricing of common stocks, particularly over medium horizons. I offer three hypotheses for why this has occurred, arguing that technologies such as social media are likely the biggest culprit. Looking ahead, investors willing to take the other side of these inefficiencies should rationally be rewarded with higher expected returns, but also greater risks. I conclude with some ideas to make rational, diversifying strategies easier to stick with amid a less-efficient market.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Perplexity AI on Tuesday debuted a revenue-sharing model for publishers after more than a month of plagiarism accusations. Media outlets and content platforms including Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel and WordPress.com are the first to join the company's "Publishers Program." The announcement follows an onslaught of controversy in June, when Forbes said it found a plagiarized version of its paywalled original reporting within Perplexity AI's Pages tool, with no reference to the media outlet besides a small "F" logo at the bottom of the page. Weeks later, Wired said it also found evidence of Perplexity plagiarizing Wired stories, and reported that an IP address "almost certainly linked to Perplexity and not listed in its public IP range" visited its parent company's websites more than 800 times in a three-month span.

Under the new partner program, any time a user asks a question and Perplexity generates advertising revenue from citing one of the publisher's articles in its answer, Perplexity will share a flat percentage of that revenue. That percentage counts on a per-article basis, Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's chief business officer, told CNBC in an interview -- meaning that if three articles from one publisher were used in one answer, the partner would receive "triple the revenue share." Shevelenko confirmed that the flat rate is a double-digit percentage but declined to provide specifics. Shevelenko told CNBC that more than a dozen publishers, including "major newspaper dailies and companies that own them," had reached out with interest less than two hours after the program debuted. The company's goal, he said, is to have 30 publishers enrolled by the end of the year, and Perplexity is looking to partner with some of the publishers' ad sales teams so they can sell ads "against all Perplexity inventory."

"When Perplexity earns revenue from an interaction where a publisher's content is referenced, that publisher will also earn a share," Perplexity wrote in a blog post, adding that the company will offer publishers API credits and also work with ScalePost.ai to provide analytics to provide "deeper insights into how Perplexity cites their content." Shevelenko told CNBC that Perplexity began engaging with publishers in January and solidified ideas for how its revenue-sharing program would work later in the first quarter of 2024. He said five Perplexity employees were dedicated to working on the program. "Some of it grew out of conversations we were having with publishers about integrating Perplexity APIs and technology into their products," Shevelenko said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple's practice of leveraging ideas from its third-party developer community to become new iOS and Mac features and apps has a hefty price tag, a new report indicates. Ahead of its fall release, you can download the public beta for iOS 18 right now to get a firsthand look at Apple's changes, which may affect apps that today have an estimated $393 million in revenue and have been downloaded roughly 58 million times over the past year, according to an analysis by app intelligence firm Appfigures. Every June at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, the iPhone maker teases the upcoming releases of its software and operating systems, which often include features previously only available through third-party apps. The practice is so common now it's even been given a name: "sherlocking" -- a reference to a 1990s search app for Mac that borrowed features from a third-party app known as Watson. Now when Apple launches a new feature that was before the domain of a third-party app, it's said to have "sherlocked" the app. [...]

In an analysis of third-party apps that generated more than 1,000 downloads per year, Appfigures discovered several genres that had found themselves in Apple's crosshairs in 2024. In terms of worldwide gross revenue, these categories have generated significant income over the past 12 months, with the trail app category making the most at $307 million per year, led by market leader and 2023 Apple "App of the Year" AllTrails. Grammar helper apps, like Grammarly and others, also generated $35.7 million, while math helpers and password managers earned $23.4 million and $20.3 million, respectively. Apps for making custom emoji generated $7 million, too. Of these, trail apps accounted for the vast majority of "potentially sherlocked" revenue, or 78%, noted Appfigures, as well as 40% of downloads of sherlocked apps. In May 2024, they accounted for an estimated $28.8 million in gross consumer spending and 2.5 million downloads, to give you an idea of scale.

Many of these app categories were growing quickly, with math solvers having seen revenue growth of 43% year-over-year followed by grammar helpers (+40%), password managers (+38%) and trail apps (+28%). Emoji-making apps, however, were seeing declines at -17% year-over-year. By downloads, grammar helpers had seen 9.4 million installs over the past 12 months, followed by emoji makers (10.6 million), math-solving apps (9.5 million) and password managers (457,000 installs). "Although these apps certainly have dedicated user bases that may not immediately choose to switch to a first-party offering, Apple's ability to offer similar functionality built-in could be detrimental to their potential growth," concludes TechCrunch's Sarah Perez. "Casual users may be satisfied by Apple's 'good enough' solutions and won't seek out alternatives."

"Documentation authors at Canonical have launched the Open Documentation Academy to offer an easy way to get started contributing to open-source projects," writes longtime Slashdot reader tykev. From the blog post: Open and inclusive collaboration, and the sharing of ideas, remains the best way to develop software (and to do many other things!), but we also recognise that this "getting involved" step can be difficult. Where do you start? Who do you ask? What needs to be done? We all very much want to help people become open source contributors by building an on-ramp process. It may take some time, and we will need to adapt, but this is exactly why we've started our Open Documentation Academy.

To help you get involved, the Open Documentation Academy provides a curated list of documentation tasks. Choose one, let us know, and get started. Tasks include testing and fixing tutorials, updating the outdated, restructuring large documents, and anything else you may want to suggest. Our list is growing, and a big part of the Documentation Academy will be ensuring there's always a wide range of tasks available, across as many projects and technologies as possible. And of course, we're here to help. We'll guide you through your first contributions, provide advice on approaches, and help you build your confidence.

Since 2010, billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has offered to pay about 20 students $100,000 to drop out of school each year "to start companies or nonprofits," reports the Wall Street Journal. His program has now backed 271 people, and this year the applicant pool "is bigger than ever."

So how's it going? Some big successes include Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the blockchain network; Laura Deming, a key figure in venture investing in aging and longevity; Austin Russell, who runs self-driving technologies company Luminar Technologies; and Paul Gu, co-founder of consumer lending company Upstart...

Thiel and executives of the fellowship acknowledge they have learned painful lessons along the way. Some applicants pursued ambitious ideas that turned out to be unrealistic, for example. "Asteroid mining is great for press releases but maybe we should have pushed back early on," he says. Others were better at applying to be Thiel fellows than they were starting businesses, it turned out... They've also learned that lone geniuses with brilliant ideas aren't usually the kinds of people who can build organizations. "It's a team sport to get something going and build on it, you can't just be a mad genius, you have to have some social skills and emotional intelligence," says Michael Gibson, an early leader of the organization who is co-founder of a venture fund that invests primarily in those who don't have a college degree...

Thiel hasn't attempted to build a better education system, which program officials acknowledge has made it harder to develop talent in the program... Thiel fellows say they don't receive much more than funding from the program and have limited contact with Thiel, though access to a network of former Thiel fellows can be useful. "Meeting some of the other members inspires you to think bigger," says Boyan Slat, a 2016 Thiel fellow who is chief executive of The Ocean Cleanup, a Netherlands-based nonprofit developing technologies to remove plastic from oceans. Slat says he has spoken to Thiel "three or four times."

As a result, Thiel and other staffers have concluded they can't grow beyond the 20 or so young people chosen as fellows each year. "If you scale the program," Thiel says, "you will have a lot more people who aren't quite ready, you would then have to be super-confident you can develop them" — which Thiel and his colleagues say they aren't skilled at doing... About a quarter of the Thiel fellows eventually returned to college to finish their degrees, suggesting that even the dropouts see enduring value in higher education.

Thiel says they "got way more out of it by going back" after launching their businesses.

"The other 75% didn't need a college degree," he says.