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Submission + - OpenAI, National Security Council Staffers Met Twice at White House in January

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: A newly-released batch of White House Visitor Log entries reveals that what the NY Times called "the White House's first gathering of A.I. companies" wasn't OpenAI's first White House rodeo. WH visitor logs indicate that OpenAI staffers met twice at the White House with National Security Council staffers in January 2023, the same month that saw Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella — who attended yesterday's White House meeting with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — announce Microsoft would invest an additional $10 billion in OpenAI. One of OpenAI's January WH meetings came prior to Nadella's announcement, while the second meeting — with Altman in attendance — was held the day after Microsoft announced its $10B OpenAI investment.

Thursday's meeting on Advancing Responsible Artificial Intelligence Innovation marked a return to the White House for Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who were summoned to the WH in 2021 for President Biden's s Presidential Summit on Cybersecurity in the wake of high-profile cyberattacks. Also in attendance at that meeting was Hadi Partovi, CEO of the Microsoft and Google-backed nonprofit Code.org, which committed to helping out by using its K-12 CS curriculum to teach Cybersecurity concepts to schoolkids. On Tuesday, Code.org coincidentally announced the formation of TeachAI, a partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft, and others that's committed to helping governments and educators teach with and about AI. Laying out its goals, TeachAI says it "will produce guidelines for policymakers, administrators, educators, and companies in best practices for safely using AI in [K-12] education," and argues that "revisions to the [tech-influenced] K-12 CS Framework [used by a number of schools] are necessary to reflect that [K-12] CS instruction must teach about AI and teach using AI." Back in 2020, Microsoft gave Code.org $7.5 million to create "a comprehensive and age-appropriate approach to teaching how AI works along with the social and ethical considerations, from elementary school through high school." Code.org's Board of Directors include Microsoft President Brad Smith and Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott.

Submission + - Journalist Writes About Discovering She'd Been Surveilled By TikTok (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: One evening in late December last year, I received a cryptic phone call from a PR director at TikTok, the popular social media app. I’d written extensively about the company for the Financial Times, so we’d spoken before. But it was puzzling to hear from her just before the holidays, especially since I wasn’t working on anything related to the company at the time. The call lasted less than a minute. She wanted me to know, “as a courtesy,” that The New York Times had just published a story I ought to read. Confused by this unusual bespoke news alert, I asked why. But all she said was that it concerned an inquiry at ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, and that I should call her back once I’d read it.

The story claimed ByteDance employees accessed two reporters’ data through their TikTok accounts. Personal information, including their physical locations, had been used as part of an attempt to find the writers’ sources, after a series of damaging stories about ByteDance. According to the report, two employees in China and two in the US left the company following an internal investigation. In a staff memo, ByteDance’s chief executive lamented the incident as the “misconduct of a few individuals.” When I phoned the PR director back, she confirmed I was one of the journalists who had been surveilled. I put down my phone and wondered what it meant that a company I reported on had gone to such lengths to restrict my ability to do so. Over the following months, the episode became just one in a long series of scandals and crises that call into question what TikTok really is and whether the company has the world-dominating future that once seemed inevitable.

Submission + - The Death of "Learn to Code"?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: According to Google Trends, peak "Lean to Code" occurred in early 2019 when laid-off Buzzfeed and Huffpost journalists were taunted with the phrase on Twitter ("learn to code" has also been used in a serious vein by others, including President Biden). Now, Vox's Rani Molla reports that the "learn to code" advice for unemployed workers is likely to be less welcome than ever as software engineers made up the biggest portion of tech layoffs in 2023.

Molla writes, "The latest round of layoffs at Facebook parent company Meta is impacting workers in core technical roles like data scientists and software engineers — positions once thought to be beyond reproach. This represents a stark about-face for a company that, until recently, had been offering outrageous salaries and basically hoarding people in these highly sought-after technical positions. And now, as part of the company’s 'year of efficiency,' it’s letting some of them go. As Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it, 'We’re in a different world.'" Indeed. Encouraging kids to pursue CS careers in Code.org's viral 2013 launch video, Zuckerberg explained, "Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find."

In Learning to Code Isn’t Enough, a new MIT Technology Review article, Joy Lisi Rankin reports on the long history of learn-to-code efforts, which date back to the 1960s. "Then as now," Lisi Rankin writes, "just learning to code is neither a pathway to a stable financial future for people from economically precarious backgrounds nor a panacea for the inadequacies of the educational system."

Submission + - EU Takes On United States, Asia With Chip Subsidy Plan (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The European Union on Tuesday agreed a 43 billion euro ($47 billion) plan for its semiconductor industry in an attempt to catch up with the United States and Asia and start a green industrial revolution. The EU Chips Act, proposed by the European Commission last year and confirmed by Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, aims to double the bloc's share of global chip output to 20% by 2030 and follows the U.S. CHIPS for America Act.

"We need chips to power digital and green transitions or healthcare systems," Commission Vice-President Margrethe Vestager said in a tweet. Since the announcement of its chips subsidies plan last year, the EU has already attracted more than 100 billion euros in public and private investments, an EU official said. "The critical piece of the equation which the EU will need to get right, as for the U.S., is how much of the supply chains supporting the industry can be moved to the EU and at what cost," said [Paul Triolo, a China and tech expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic & International Studies]. While the Commission had originally proposed funding only cutting-edge chip plants, EU governments and lawmakers have widened the scope to cover the whole value chain, including older chips and research and design facilities.

Submission + - The 4-Year Debate: Do Degree Requirements Still Matter for IT? (cio.com)

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Some companies have moved away from seeking only applicants with a college education, while others still want to see that bachelor's degree on IT worker's resumes. CIO.com's Mary Pratt reports on the debate among tech executives as to the value of a 4-year degree in today's tight talent market. 'Figures from the 2022 study The Emerging Degree Reset from The Burning Glass Institute quantify the trend, reporting that 46% of middle-skill and 31% of high-skill occupations experienced material degree resets between 2017 and 2019. Moreover, researchers calculated that 63% of those changes appear to be “‘structural resets’ representing a measured and potentially permanent shift in hiring practices” that could make an additional 1.4 million jobs open to workers without college degrees over the next five years.'

Comment Re:We had to share desks once ('98~'99) (Score 2) 109

You missed the point, he is saying desk sharing is superior to "hoteling". Hoteling is when there are desks that are basically first come first serve each day, you unpack your stuff at the desk and pack up at the end of the day, like you would in a hotel. The Google plan is more like a timeshare, two people sharing the same desk but on different days. If each employee gets their own set of locked drawers it could probably even work.

Comment Re: Also: Wrong question (Score 1) 428

It won't be a return to ICE, it would be worse - if the grid cannot handle demand and the typical alternate sources of energy (gasoline engines, natural gas) have been outlawed, the people will be so desperate for energy they will elect politicians who promise to stabilize the grid by building a fleet of coal power plants within a year (by suspending environmental regulations).

Comment Re:Not that I necessarily disagree, but (Score 1) 84

by PrimaryConsult (#63115576) Attached to: GOP-Led States Ban TikTok On Government Devices

I look at it the other way - interacting via social media is so standard and easy, it is *better* than alternative ways such as a contact form or email. The two most useful are Twitter and Youtube - I follow all the government agencies and politicians that pertain to me, and can easily interact with them/their staff when needed. Initially that was all I had a Twitter account for.

As for Youtube - the NY Senate puts all their hearings on Youtube for anyone to watch. State agencies put out instructional / public safety videos on there. They could put those videos directly on their websites but it is inferior both in reach (people have to go to government agency websites) and cost (why re-invent a video service when one exists and costs taxpayers nothing to use).

Comment Re:Not that I necessarily disagree, but (Score 2) 84

by PrimaryConsult (#63112080) Attached to: GOP-Led States Ban TikTok On Government Devices

There are many reasons for government on social media. Two categories for it:
-Government run accounts: get information out to people easily (transit agencies on delays, or there's new procedures for license renewal, parks/beaches closing due to weather, etc) and in a manner that allows for feedback; also users can report problems and it can get to someone in the agency easily - it's like a free no-frills ticketing system, with the added benefit of "customers" (taxpayers) self-grouping their issues under one thread, and when the official account replies other people having the issue know the agency is aware and won't bother calling/emailing about it, saving everyone time.
-Government employees as regular users: same reason an employee of any other company might, to solicit information from people more knowledgeable on a subject.

That said, TikTok is completely useless for all of that.

Comment Re:Just pretend it doesn't exist (Score 2) 249

by PrimaryConsult (#63074556) Attached to: Mercedes Locks Faster Acceleration Behind a $1,200 Annual Paywall

IBM charges annual subscription fees to enable "dark" CPUs and memory in machines that have been purchased. Though they are flexible and allow the transfer of entitlement from one machine to another dynamically (useful if you're doing hardware maintenance, you can dial down the hardware you're shutting down to 0 and redistribute its activations to the other machines in your environment). You can pre-purchase temporary extra CPU activation days for cases where you temporarily find yourself hitting limits (let's say you're TicketMaster and Taylor Swift has just announced her first tour in four years). Their hypervisor software keeps track of all that for you and tells IBM all about what you're doing with the hardware.

In a weird way this is better than if they just allowed unfettered access to all of the hardware, because it imposes a sort of forced emergency capacity buffer that bean counters would be tempted to trim down. They can trim down on paper what they pay IBM, but you as an admin have the ability to essentially instantly teleport extra CPUs or TBs of memory into your machines when you need it the most.

Submission + - Lancet COVID comission chairman thinks US Government preventing investigation (currentaffairs.org)

Submitted by RemindMeLater
RemindMeLater writes: The chair of the Lancet COVID commission thinks it "very possible that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, originated through dangerous virus research gone awry" and that "after two and a half years of this, it’s time to fess up that it might have come out of a lab and here’s the data that we need to know to find out whether it did." When asked why researchers aren't investigating the lab leak hypothesis, Professor Sachs said:

They’re not looking. They just keep telling us, “Look at the market, look at the market, look at the market!” But they don’t address this alternative. They don’t even look at the data. They don’t even ask questions. And the truth is from the beginning, they haven’t asked the real questions.

Submission + - Germans ready to lean back into nuclear power (spiegel.de)

Submitted by atcclears
atcclears writes: German voters can see the toll of Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine and the cost of Berlin’s failed 20-year green-energy transition, and they are opening to reality. The country’s economic prospects, and Europe’s, depend on whether their leaders will follow that example. Some 78% of respondents support running the three remaining nuclear power plants at least until summer 2023

Submission + - Oracle insiders describe the 'complete chaos' from layoffs and restructuring (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by SpzToid
SpzToid writes: Earlier this week, database giant Oracle began a sizable layoff, potentially impacting thousands of employees globally, sources told Insider.

The hardest-hit units, current and former employees said, were in the marketing and customer experience (CX) divisions, where insiders say the mood is bleak — and those who haven't yet been laid off are scrambling to figure out whether they'll be cut next.

"The people who have left are breathing a sigh of relief," a marketing employee who was laid off on Monday told Insider. "And the people who are still here are definitely running for the hills."

Some marketing teams have seen their headcount slashed by anywhere from 30% to 50%, sources said. In some cases, they said, managers were given the choice of who would get cut, while others had no say in how the layoffs would affect their teams.

"There's no marketing anymore," a senior marketing leader who was laid off on Monday told Insider. "We're not even supposed to say we're in marketing because there is no marketing division."

Oracle's advertising unit also laid off about 60 employees in July, Insider previously reported, and The Information reported that the company was seeking to cut as much as $1 billion in costs via layoffs and other means.

Now, there's a sense among many at Oracle of impending doom, with more cuts and reorganizations expected through the end of the year, including soon after its CloudWorld conference in October.

"It's just a horrible environment left," a former marketing employee who worked with Kelman said. "It's complete chaos."

Oracle's cuts affected some of its most seasoned employees

Some marketing employees have also been sharing their layoff notifications in external Slack channels and texts to warn others they may be next.

"We started the Slack messages before the notifications started," a former employee said. "So you could see when the calls were coming in and you could tell that you were going to get the next calls."

While the company is known for cutting workers every year, some employees said they were shocked by how many senior, experienced, and high-performing staffers were let go on Monday.

For example, Oracle's code base is so complicated that it can take years before engineers are fully up to speed with how everything works, and workers with over a decade of experience were cut, some employees said.

The decision to cut some of its over 130,000-strong workforce comes at a critical moment for the Austin-based tech giant. Oracle last month won regulatory approval for its $28 billion purchase of the medical-records company Cerner and is absorbing its roughly 20,000 employees. It also recently won a contract to store the US user data for the ByteDance-owned video app TikTok — a deal that may boost its cloud ambitions as it seeks to overtake cloud giants like Amazon Web Services.

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