People bought 43 million vinyl records last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). From a report: That's 6 million more than the number of CDs sold in 2023, marking the second time since 1987 that's happened and reflecting the steady 17-year-running growth of vinyl sales. Vinyl, which tends to be pricier than the newer format, also far outstripped CDs in actual money made, raking in $1.4 billion compared to $537 million from CDs. The RIAA's report shows that CD revenue was up, too, but in terms of physical products sold, people actually bought about 700,000 fewer CDs in 2023 than the year before. (If you're curious, nearly half a million cassettes sold last year, too, according to Billboard.)

The Register: Cloudflare has revealed a little about how it maintains the millions of boxes it operates around the world -- including the concept of an "error budget" that enacts "empathy embedded in automation." In a Tuesday post titled "Autonomous hardware diagnostics and recovery at scale," the internet-taming biz explains that it built fault-tolerant infrastructure that can continue operating with "little to no impact" on its services. But as explained by infrastructure engineering tech lead Jet Marsical and systems engineers Aakash Shah and Yilin Xiong, when servers did break the Data Center Operations team relied on manual processes to identify dead boxes. And those processes could take "hours for a single server alone, and [could] easily consume an engineer's entire day."

Which does not work at hyperscale. Worse, dead servers would sometimes remain powered on, costing Cloudflare money without producing anything of value. Enter Phoenix -- a tool Cloudflare created to detect broken servers and automatically initiate workflows to get them fixed. Phoenix makes a "discovery run" every thirty minutes, during which it probes up to two datacenters known to house broken boxen. That pace of discovery means Phoenix can find dead machines across Cloudflare's network in no more than three days. If it spots machines already listed for repairs, it "takes care of ensuring that the Recovery phase is executed immediately."

A top executive from the crypto exchange Binance has escaped custody in Nigeria after being arrested for allegedly destabilizing the country's national currency. The Associated Press reports: Nadeem Anjarwalla, the regional manager for Binance in Africa, "fled Nigeria using a smuggled passport," the office of Nigeria's National Security Adviser said in a statement, calling for "whatever information that can assist law enforcement agencies to apprehend the suspect." Anjarwalla, who holds dual British and Kenyan citizenship, had been detained in Nigeria along with another colleague since Feb. 26 when they arrived in the country following a crackdown on the crypto platform. Tigran Gambaryan, the colleague who is an American citizen, remains in captivity.

Nigeria is Africa's largest crypto economy in terms of trade volume with many citizens using crypto to hedge their finances against surging inflation and the declining local currency. Binance stopped all trading with the Nigerian naira currency on its platform in early March after authorities accused it of being used for money laundering and terrorism financing -- without providing evidence publicly. It was not clear how Anjarwalla fled custody. The Abuja-based Premium Times newspaper, which broke the news of his escape, reported that he fled from a guest house in the capital city after guards led him to a nearby mosque for prayers. "The personnel responsible for the custody of the suspect have been arrested, and a thorough investigation is ongoing to unravel the circumstances that led to his escape from lawful detention," Zakari Mijinyawa, spokesman for the office of Nigeria's National Security Adviser said in a statement.

In a state where housing is expensive to build, to rent, or to buy — and not especially energy efficient — can a big blue robot make a difference?

The Boston Globe reports on Reframe Systems, one of the companies "trying robots to make construction more efficient" — in this case, "working alongside humans in an assembly line to build small houses in a factory." [Its cofounders] learned to get robots and humans to work together while at Amazon, which has built more than 750,000 bots in Massachusetts and deployed them to distribution centers around the world. Advising the company are Amy Villeneuve, former chief operating officer of that Amazon division, and Charly Mwangi, a veteran of the carmakers Nissan, Tesla, and Rivian...

Standing at one end of Reframe's factory, [cofounder Aaron] Small explained that the company's ambition is to build net-zero houses — houses that produce as much energy as they use — "twice as fast as traditional methods, twice as cheap, and with 10 times lower carbon" emissions. That means using large screws called helical piles to fix the house to the site, instead of a concrete foundation. (Concrete production generates large amounts of carbon dioxide.) The company buys recycled cellulose insulation to fill the walls. Solar panels go on the roof and triple-paned windows in the walls...

Reframe's "microfactory" can produce between 30 and 50 homes a year, [cofunder Vikas] Enti said. Eventually, the company aims to set up larger factories around the country, all within an hour's drive of big cities.
After a home is trucked to its final destination, "Electrical wires and plumbing are installed in both floors and walls as they're built," according to the article.

"Employees toting iPads can refer to digital construction drawings and get step-by-step instructions about tasks from cutting lumber to connecting pipes." One of the co-founders says, "We like to compare it to Lego instructions."

The Baffler says a new publishing house launched earlier this month "brings Silicon Valley-style startup disruption to the business of books."

Authors Equity has "a tiny core staff, offloading its labor to a network of freelancers," and like a handful of other publishers "is upending the way that authors get paid, eschewing advances and offering a higher percentage of profits instead." It is worth watching because its team includes several of the most important publishing people of the twenty-first century. And if it works, it will offer a model for tightening the connection between book culture and capitalism, a leap forward for the forces of efficiency and the fantasies of frictionless markets, ushering in a world where literature succeeds if and only if it sells....

Authors Equity's website presents its vision in strikingly neoliberal corporatespeak. The company has four Core Principles: Aligned Incentives; Bespoke Teams; Flexibility and Transparency; and Long-Term Collaboration. What do they mean by these MBA keywords? Aligned Incentives is explained in the language of human capital: "Our profit-share model rewards authors who want to bet on themselves." Authors, that is, take on more of the financial risk of publication. At a traditional publishing house, advances provide authors with guaranteed cash early in the process that they can use to live off while writing. With Authors Equity, nothing is guaranteed and nothing given ahead of time; an author's pay depends on their book's profits.

In an added twist, "Profit participation is also an option for key members of the book team, so we're in a position to win together." Typically, only an author's agent's income is directly tied to an author's financial success, but at Authors Equity, others could have a stake. This has huge consequences for the logic of literary production. If an editor, for example, receives a salary and not a cut of their books' profits, their incentives are less immediately about profit, offering more wiggle room for aesthetic value. The more the people working on books participate in their profits, the more, structurally, profit-seeking will shape what books look like.

"Bespoke Teams" is a euphemism for gigification. With a tiny initial staff of six, Authors Equity uses freelance workers to make books, unlike traditional publishers, which have many employees in many departments... Their fourth Core Principle — Long-Term Collaboration — addresses widespread frustration with a systemic problem in traditional publishing: the fetishization of debut authors who receive decent or better advances, fail to earn out, and then struggle to have a career. It's a real problem and one where authors' interests and capitalist rationalization are, as it were, aligned. Authors Equity sees that everyone might profit when an author can build a readership and develop their skill.
The article concludes with this prediction. "It's not impossible that we'll look back in twenty years and see its founding as auguring the beginning of the startup age in publishing."

Food for thought... Pulp-fiction mystery writer Mickey Spillane once said, "I'm a writer, not an author. The difference is, a writer makes money."

In an interview Saturday, CNN first asked Steve Wozniak about Apple's "walled garden" approach — and whether there's any disconnect between Apple's stated interest in user security and privacy, and its own self-interest?

Wozniak responded, "I think there are things you can say on all sides of it. "I'm kind of glad for the protection that I have for my privacy and for you know not getting hacked as much. Apple does a better job than the others.

And tracking you — tracking you is questionable, but my gosh, look at what we're accusing TikTok of, and then go look at Facebook and Google... That's how they make their business! I mean, Facebook was a great idea. But then they make all their money just by tracking you and advertising.

And Apple doesn't really do that as much. I consider Apple the good guy.
So then CNN directly asked Wozniak's opinion about the proposed ban on TikTok in the U.S. "Well, one, I don't understand it. I don't see why. I mean, I get a lot of entertainment out of TikTok — and I avoid the social web. But I love to watch TikTok, even if it's just for rescuing dog videos and stuff.

And so I'm thinking, well, what are we saying? We're saying 'Oh, you might be tracked by the Chinese'. Well, they learned it from us.

I mean, look, if you have a principle — a person should not be tracked without them knowing it? It's kind of a privacy principle — I was a founder of the EFF. And if you have that principle, you apply it the same to every company, or every country. You don't say, 'Here's one case where we're going to outlaw an app, but we're not going to do it in these other cases.'

So I don't like the hypocrisy. And that's always obviously common from a political realm.

"Hollywood is bracing for another actors strike, this time against the videogame industry," according to MarketWatch: "We're currently in bargaining with all the major game studios, and the major sticking point is AI," SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said Thursday. "Actors at all levels are at risk of digital replication. We have strike authorization on that contract and it is, at this point — we could end up going on strike...."

The union, which navigated its way to a new film and TV contract after a 118-day strike against the Hollywood studios last year, is again focusing on regulating artificial intelligence and its impact on wages and jobs. "It will be a recurring issue with each successive contract" every three years, Crabtree-Ireland said.
Some studios are already using AI-generated voices to save money, the article points out. "Actors and actresses should be very much afraid," Chris Mattmann, an adjunct research professor at the University of Southern California's Computer Science Department, says in the article. "Within three seconds, gen AI can effectively clone a voice."

The strike could affect Microsoft's Activision Publishing and Disney, as well as other major game publishers including Electronic Arts, Epic Games, and Warner Bros.

There's actually "a global trend toward increased air safety," notes a Wall Street Journal columnist.

And even in the case of the two fatal Boeing crashes five years ago, he stresses that they were "were two different crashes," with the second happening only "after Boeing and the FAA issued emergency directives instructing pilots how to compensate for Boeing's poorly designed flight control software.

"The story should have ended after the first crash except the second set of pilots behaved in unexpected, unpredictable ways, flying a flyable Ethiopian Airlines jet into the ground." Boeing is guilty of designing a fallible system and placing an undue burden on pilots. The evidence strongly suggests, however, that the Ethiopian crew was never required to master the simple remedy despite the global furor occasioned by the first crash. To boot, they committed an additional error by overspeeding the aircraft in defiance of aural, visual and stick-shaker warnings against doing so. It got almost no coverage, but on the same day the Ethiopian government issued its final findings on the accident in late 2022, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, in what it called an "unusual step," issued its own "comment" rebuking the Ethiopian report for "inaccurate" statements, for ignoring the crew's role, for ignoring how readily the accident should have been avoided.
So the Wall Street Journal columnist challenges whether profit incentives played any role in Boeing's troubles: In reality, the global industry was reorganized largely along competitive profit-and-loss lines after the 1970s, and yet this coincided with enormous increases in safety, notwithstanding the sausage factory elements occasionally on display (witness the little-reported parking of hundreds of Airbus planes over a faulty new engine).

The point here isn't blame but to note that 100,000 repetitions likely wouldn't reproduce the flukish second MAX crash and everything that followed from it. Rather than surfacing Boeing's deeply hidden problems, it seems the second crash gave birth to them. The subsequent 20-month grounding and production shutdown, combined with Covid, cost Boeing thousands of skilled workers. The pressure of its duopoly competition with Airbus plus customers clamoring for their backordered planes made management unwisely desperate to restart production. January's nonfatal door-plug blowout of an Alaska Airlines 737 appears to have been a one-off when Boeing workers failed to reinstall the plug properly after removing it to fix faulty fuselage rivets. Not a one-off, apparently, are faulty rivets as Boeing has strained to hire new staff and resume production of half-finished planes.

Boeing will sort out its troubles eventually by applying the oldest of manufacturing insights: Training, repetition, standardization and careful documentation are the way to error-free complex manufacturing.
As he sees it, "The second MAX crash caught Boeing up in a disorienting global media and political storm that it didn't know how to handle and, indeed, has handled fairly badly."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: UnitedHealth Group said Monday that it's paid out more than $2 billion to help health-care providers who have been affected by the cyberattack on subsidiary Change Healthcare. "We continue to make significant progress in restoring the services impacted by this cyberattack," UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty said in a press release. "We know this has been an enormous challenge for health care providers and we encourage any in need to contact us."

UnitedHealth disclosed nearly a month ago that a cyber threat actor breached part of Change Healthcare's information technology network. The fallout has wreaked havoc across the U.S. health-care system. Change Healthcare offers e-prescription software and tools for payment management, so the interruptions left many providers temporarily unable to fill medications or get reimbursed for their services by insurers. UnitedHealth, which provides care for 152 million people, said on Monday that it began releasing medical claims preparation software, which will be available to thousands of customers in the next several days. The company called it "an important step in the resumption of services."

On Friday, UnitedHealth said it restored Change Healthcare's electronic payments platform, after rebooting 99% of its pharmacy network services earlier this month. It also introduced a temporary funding assistance program to help health-care providers experiencing cash flow trouble because of the attack. UnitedHealth said the advances will not need to be repaid until claims flows return to normal. Federal agencies like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have introduced additional options to ensure that states and other stakeholders can make interim payments to providers, according to a release.

theodp writes: "Last year," Ian Bogost writes in Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem, "18 percent of Stanford University seniors graduated with a degree in computer science, more than double the proportion of just a decade earlier. Over the same period at MIT, that rate went up from 23 percent to 42 percent. These increases are common everywhere: The average number of undergraduate CS majors at universities in the U.S. and Canada tripled in the decade after 2005, and it keeps growing. Students' interest in CS is intellectual -- culture moves through computation these days -- but it is also professional. Young people hope to access the wealth, power, and influence of the technology sector. That ambition has created both enormous administrative strain and a competition for prestige."

"Another approach has gained in popularity," Bogost notes. "Universities are consolidating the formal study of CS into a new administrative structure: the college of computing. [...] When they elevate computing to the status of a college, with departments and a budget, they are declaring it a higher-order domain of knowledge and practice, akin to law or engineering. That decision will inform a fundamental question: whether computing ought to be seen as a superfield that lords over all others, or just a servant of other domains, subordinated to their interests and control. This is, by no happenstance, also the basic question about computing in our society writ large."

Bogost concludes: "I used to think computing education might be stuck in a nesting-doll version of the engineer's fallacy, in which CS departments have been asked to train more software engineers without considering whether more software engineers are really what the world needs. Now I worry that they have a bigger problem to address: how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers.

mrspoonsi shares a report from the BBC: A former takeaway worker found with Bitcoin worth more than $2.5 billion has been convicted at Southwark Crown Court of a crime linked to money laundering. Jian Wen, 42, from Hendon in north London, was involved in converting the currency into assets including multi-million-pound houses and jewelry. On Monday she was convicted of entering into or becoming concerned in a money laundering arrangement. The Met said the seizure is the largest of its kind in the UK.

Although Wen was living in a flat above a Chinese restaurant in Leeds when she became involved in the criminal activity, her new lifestyle saw her move into a six-bedroom house in north London in 2017 which was rented for more than $21,000 per month. She posed as an employee of an international jewelry business and moved her son to the UK to attend private school, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said. That same year, Wen tried to buy a string of expensive houses in London, but struggled to pass money-laundering checks and her claims she had earned millions legitimately mining Bitcoin were not believed. She later travelled abroad, buying jewelry worth tens of thousands of pounds in Zurich, and purchasing properties in Dubai in 2019.

Another suspect is thought to be behind the fraud but they remain at large. The Met said it carried out a large scale investigation as part of the case - searching several addresses, reviewing 48 electronic devices, and examining thousands of digital files including many which were translated from Mandarin. The CPS has obtained a freezing order from the High Court, while it carries out a civil recovery investigation that could lead to the forfeiture of the Bitcoin. The value of the Bitcoin was worth around $2.5 billion at the time of initial estimates -- but due to the fluctuation in the currency's value, it has since increased to around $4.3 billion.

The abstract of a new paper published on Journal of Financial Economics: We study aggregate lapsation risk in the life insurance sector. We construct two lapsation risk factors that explain a large fraction of the common variation in lapse rates of the 30 largest life insurance companies. The first is a cyclical factor that is positively correlated with credit spreads and unemployment, while the second factor is a trend factor that correlates with the level of interest rates. Using a novel policy-level database from a large life insurer, we examine the heterogeneity in risk factor exposures based on policy and policyholder characteristics.

Young policyholders with higher health risk in low-income areas are more likely to lapse their policies during economic downturns. We explore the implications for hedging and valuation of life insurance contracts. Ignoring aggregate lapsation risk results in mispricing of life insurance policies. The calibrated model points to overpricing on average. In the cross-section, young, low-income, and high-health risk households face higher effective mark-ups than the old, high-income, and healthy.

The White House said Wednesday Intel has been awarded up to $8.5 billion in CHIPS Act funding, as the Biden administration ramps up its effort to bring semiconductor manufacturing to U.S. soil. From a report: Intel could receive an additional $11 billion in loans from the CHIPS and Science Act, which was passed in 2022. The awards will be announced by President Joe Biden in Arizona on Wednesday. The money will help "leading-edge semiconductors made in the United States" keep "America in the driver's seat of innovation," U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said on a call with reporters. Intel and the White House said their agreement is nonbinding and preliminary and could change.

Intel has long been a stalwart of the U.S. semiconductor industry, developing chips that power many of the world's PCs and data center servers. However, the company has been eclipsed in revenue by Nvidia, which leads in artificial intelligence chips, and has been surpassed in market cap by rival AMD and mobile phone chipmaker Qualcomm.

Ethiopia's biggest commercial bank is scrambling to recoup large sums of money withdrawn by customers after a "systems glitch." From a report: The customers discovered early on Saturday that they could take out more cash than they had in their accounts at the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE). More than $40m was withdrawn or transferred to other banks, local media reported.

It took several hours for the institution to freeze transactions. Much of the money was withdrawn from state-owned CBE by students, bank president Abe Sano told journalists on Monday. News of the glitch spread across universities largely via messaging apps and phone calls. Long lines formed at campus ATMs, with a student in western Ethiopia telling BBC Amharic people were withdrawing money until police officers arrived on campus to stop them.

The Guardian reports that this week "Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, introduced a bill to establish a four-day US working week." "Moving to a 32-hour workweek with no loss of pay is not a radical idea," Sanders said on Thursday. "Today, American workers are over 400% more productive than they were in the 1940s. And yet millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages than they were decades ago. "That has got to change. The financial gains from the major advancements in artificial intelligence, automation and new technology must benefit the working class, not just corporate chief executives and wealthy stockholders on Wall Street.

"It is time to reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life. It is time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay."
The proposed bill "has received the endorsement of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, United Auto Workers, the Service Employees International Union, the Association of Flight Attendants" — as well as several other labor unions, reports USA Today: More than half of adults employed full time reported working more than 40 hours per week, according to a 2019 Gallup poll... More than 70 British companies started to test a four-day workweek last year, and most respondents reported there has been no loss in productivity.
A statement from Senator Sanders: Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, predicted last year that advancements in technology would lead to a three or three-and-a-half-day workweek in the coming years. Despite these predictions, Americans now work more hours than the people of most other wealthy nations, but are earning less per week than they did 50 years ago, after adjusting for inflation.
"Sanders also pointed to other countries that have reduced their workweeks, such as France, Norway and Denmark," adds NBC News.

USA Today notes that "While Sanders' role as chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee places a greater focus on shortening the workweek, it is unlikely the bill will garner enough support from Republicans to become federal law and pass in both chambers."

And political analysts who spoke to ABC News "cast doubt on the measure's chances of passage in a divided Congress where opposition from Republicans is all but certain," reports ABC News, "and even the extent of support among Democrats remains unclear."

Databricks CTO Matei Zaharia "said that Databricks had to keep track of scheduling a million things," remembers adjunct MIT professor Michael Stonebraker. " He said that this can't be done with traditional operating system scheduling, and so this was done out of a Postgres database. And then he started to whine that Postgres was too slow, and I told him we can do better than that...."

This resulted in DBOS — short for "database operating system" — which they teamed up to build with teams Stanford and MIT, according to The Next Platform: They founded a company to commercialize the idea in April 2023 and secured $8.5 million initial seed funding to start building the real DBOS. Engine Ventures and Construct Capital led the funding, along with Sinewave and GutBrain Ventures...

"The state that the operating system has to keep track of — memory, files, messages, and so on — is approximately linear to the resources you have got," says Stonebraker. "So without me saying another word, keeping track of operating system state is a database problem not addressed by current operating system schedulers. Moreover, OLTP [Online Transaction Processing] database performance has gone up dramatically, and that is why we thought instead of running the database system in user space on top of the operating system, why don't we invert our thinking 180 degrees and run the operating system on top of the database, with all of the operating services are coded in SQL...?"

For now, DBOS can give the same kind of performance as that full blown Linux operating system, and thanks to the distributed database underpinnings of its kernel, it can do things that a Linux kernel just cannot do... One is provide reliable execution, which means that if a program running atop DBOS is ever interrupted, it starts where it left off and does not have to redo its work from some arbitrary earlier point and does not crash and have to start from the beginning. And because every little bit of the state of the operating system — and therefore the applications that run atop it — is preserved, you can go backwards in time in the system and restart the operating system if it experiences some sort of anomaly, such as a bad piece of application software running or a hack attack. You can use this "time travel" feature, as Stonebraker calls it, to reproduce what are called heisenbugs — ones that are very hard to reproduce precisely because there is no shared state in the distributed Linux and Kubernetes environment and that are increasingly prevalent in a world of microservices.

The other benefit of the DBOS is that it presents a smaller attack surface for hackers, which boosts security, and that you analyze the metrics of the operating system in place since they are already in a NoSQL database that can be queried rather than aggregating a bunch of log files from up and down the software stack to try to figure out what is going on...

There is also a custom tier for DBOS, which we presume costs money, that can use other databases and datastores for user application data, stores more than three days of log data, can have multiple users per account, that adds email and Slack support with DBOS techies, and that is available on other clouds as well as AWS.
The operating system kernel/scheduler "is itself largely a database," with services written in TypeScript, according to the article. The first iteration used the FoundationDB distributed key-value store for its scheduling core (open sourced by Apple in 2018), according to the article — "a blazingly fast NoSQL database... Stonebraker says there is no reason to believe that DBOS can't scale across 1 million cores or more and support Java, Python, and other application languages as they are needed by customers..."

And the article speculates they could take things even further. "There is no reason why DBOS cannot complete the circle and not only have a database as an operating system kernel, but also have a relational database as the file system for applications."

Amazon announced a new AI-powered chatbot last month — still under development — "to help you figure out what to buy," writes the Washington Post. Their conclusion? "[T]he chatbot wasn't a disaster. But I also found it mostly useless..."

"The experience encapsulated my exasperation with new types of AI sprouting in seemingly every technology you use. If these chatbots are supposed to be magical, why are so many of them dumb as rocks?" I thought the shopping bot was at best a slight upgrade on searching Amazon, Google or news articles for product recommendations... Amazon's chatbot doesn't deliver on the promise of finding the best product for your needs or getting you started on a new hobby.

In one of my tests, I asked what I needed to start composting at home. Depending on how I phrased the question, the Amazon bot several times offered basic suggestions that I could find in a how-to article and didn't recommend specific products... When I clicked the suggestions the bot offered for a kitchen compost bin, I was dumped into a zillion options for countertop compost products. Not helpful... Still, when the Amazon bot responded to my questions, I usually couldn't tell why the suggested products were considered the right ones for me. Or, I didn't feel I could trust the chatbot's recommendations.

I asked a few similar questions about the best cycling gloves to keep my hands warm in winter. In one search, a pair that the bot recommended were short-fingered cycling gloves intended for warm weather. In another search, the bot recommended a pair that the manufacturer indicated was for cool temperatures, not frigid winter, or to wear as a layer under warmer gloves... I did find the Amazon chatbot helpful for specific questions about a product, such as whether a particular watch was waterproof or the battery life of a wireless keyboard.
But there's a larger question about whether technology can truly handle this human-interfacing task. "I have also found that other AI chatbots, including those from ChatGPT, Microsoft and Google, are at best hit-or-miss with shopping-related questions..." These AI technologies have potentially profound applications and are rapidly improving. Some people are making productive use of AI chatbots today. (I mostly found helpful Amazon's relatively new AI-generated summaries of customer product reviews.)

But many of these chatbots require you to know exactly how to speak to them, are useless for factual information, constantly make up stuff and in many cases aren't much of an improvement on existing technologies like an app, news articles, Google or Wikipedia. How many times do you need to scream at a wrong math answer from a chatbot, botch your taxes with a TurboTax AI, feel disappointed at a ChatGPT answer or grow bored with a pointless Tom Brady chatbot before we say: What is all this AI junk for...?
"When so many AI chatbots overpromise and underdeliver, it's a tax on your time, your attention and potentially your money," the article concludes.

"I just can't with all these AI junk bots that demand a lot of us and give so little in return."

"Workers at an Amazon air hub in Kentucky celebrated a victory Thursday," reports the Washington Post, "after federal labor regulators found that Amazon violated labor law by trying to prevent workers there from unionizing." The employees have been demanding higher pay, more flexible schedules and safer working conditions since 2022. After a months-long investigation, the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against Amazon last week, alleging the e-commerce behemoth illegally attempted to curtail those efforts by interrogating workers, threatening to call the police on them and demoting workers involved in union organizing.

The complaint is a victory for union organizers at a crucial air cargo hub in Kentucky who have been alleging that Amazon has been unfairly interfering with their unionization efforts there for months.... Amazon workers at various sites around the country have been trying to unionize for years, with little to show for it. Many have accused Amazon of using illegal tactics to discourage workers from supporting unions — more than 240 such charges have been filed with the labor board, workers said... Amazon employee Marcio Rodriguez said he was threatened with termination for his union-organizing activity along with 10 co-workers. For two weeks, Rodriguez said, Amazon management would "show up to where I was working out on the ramp in front of my co-workers in a truck and take me to the HR office," where they would interrogate him...

Amazon workers in Kentucky are seeking to form Amazon Labor Union, an independent but associated branch of the group that won a historic victory at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island in 2021. Lawyers for the union there are still battling Amazon, which has yet to come to the bargaining table and continues to argue that the NLRB unfairly sided with workers during that election. More recently, the company has argued in another New York case that the National Labor Relations Board itself is structured unconstitutionally, following legal arguments set forth by lawyers for SpaceX and Trader Joe's...

Amazon is scheduled to appear at a hearing before labor regulators regarding its alleged anti-union activities in Kentucky on April 22.

The Washington Post reports: Nearly a decade ago, Congress passed a law that allows private American space companies the rights to resources they mine on celestial bodies, including the moon.

Now, there's a private venture that says it intends to do just that.

Founded by a pair of former executives from Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, and an Apollo astronaut, the company, Interlune, announced itself publicly Wednesday by saying it has raised $18 million and is developing the technology to harvest and bring materials back from the moon... Specifically, Interlune is focused on Helium-3, a stable isotope that is scarce on Earth but plentiful on the moon and could be used as fuel in nuclear fusion reactors as well as helping power the quantum computing industry.

The company, based in Seattle, has been working for about four years on the technology, which comes as the commercial sector is working with NASA on its goal of building an enduring presence on and around the moon... Rob Meyerson, the former president of Blue Origin, co-founded Interlune with Gary Lai, another former executive at Blue, and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist who flew to the moon during Apollo 17... In an interview, Meyerson said that the company intends to be the first to collect, return and then sell lunar resources and test the 2015 law. There is a large demand for Helium-3 in the quantum computing industry, which requires some of its systems to operate in extremely cold temperatures, and Interlune has already lined up a "customer that wants to buy lunar resources in large quantities," he said.

"We intend to be the first to go commercialize and deliver and support those customers," he said. NASA might want to be a customer as well. In 2020, it said it was looking for companies to collect rocks and dirt from the lunar surface and sell them to NASA as part of a technology development program that would eventually help astronauts "live off the land...." The company's funding round was led by the venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, whose founder and general partner, Alexis Ohanian, said that the space sector has become far more appealing to investors. "The space economy is something we can actually talk about with a straight face now, and I think some of the smartest people on the planet are making those efforts," he said...

He said he was aware that it might take years, or longer for a moon mining business to make money. But he said that, "we're comfortable waiting for a decade plus to see those returns."
NASA is planning more missions like the Intuitive Machines landing earlier this year, according to the article, "which it says will not only help pave the way for humans to return to the moon but for private industry to begin commercial operations there as well." Interlune plans "a prospecting machine" as soon as 2026, followed by an "end-to-end demonstration" in 2028 that harvests and returns a small quanity of Helium-3, and then full-scale operations by 2030.

"China has also said that it is interested in extracting other resources, including Helium-3, which it said was present in a sample it returned from the moon in 2020."

When it comes to TikTok, "The Chinese government is signaling that it won't allow a forced sale..." reported the Wall Street Journal Friday, "limiting options for the app's owners as buyers begin lining up to bid for its U.S. operations..."

"They have also sent signals to TikTok's owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, that company executives have interpreted as meaning the government would rather the app be banned in the U.S. than be sold, according to people familiar with the matter."

But that's not always how it plays out. McClatchy notes that in 2019 the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. ordered Grindr's Chinese owners to relinquish control of Grindr. "A year later, the Chinese owners voluntarily complied and sold the company to San Vicente Acquisition, incorporated in Delaware, for around $608 million, according to Forbes."

And CNN reminds us that the world's most-populous country already banned TikTok more than three years ago: In June 2020, after a violent clash on the India-China border that left at least 20 Indian soldiers dead, the government in New Delhi suddenly banned TikTok and several other well-known Chinese apps. "It's important to remember that when India banned TikTok and multiple Chinese apps, the US was the first to praise the decision," said Nikhil Pahwa, the Delhi-based founder of tech website MediaNama. "[Former] US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had welcomed the ban, saying it 'will boost India's sovereignty.'"

While India's abrupt decision shocked the country's 200 million TikTok users, in the four years since, many have found other suitable alternatives. "The ban on Tiktok led to the creation of a multibillion dollar opportunity ... A 200 million user base needed somewhere to go," said Pahwa, adding that it was ultimately American tech companies that seized the moment with their new offerings... Within a week of the ban, Meta-owned Instagram cashed in by launching its TikTok copycat, Instagram Reels, in India. Google introduced its own short video offering, YouTube Shorts. Homegrown alternatives such as MX Taka Tak and Moj also began seeing a rise in popularity and an infux in funding. Those local startups soon fizzled out, however, unable to match the reach and financial firepower of the American firms, which are flourishing.
In fact, at the time India "announced a ban on more than 50 Chinese apps," remembers the Washington Post, adding that Nepal also announced a ban on TikTok late last year.

Their article points out that TikTok has also been banned by top EU policymaking bodies, while "Government staff in some of the bloc's 27 member states, including Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands, have also been told not to use TikTok on their work phones." Canada banned TikTok from all government-issued phones in February 2023, after similar steps in the United States and the European Union.... Britain announced a TikTok ban on government ministers' and civil servants' devices last year, with officials citing the security of state information. Australia banned TikTok from all federal government-owned devices last year after seeking advice from intelligence and security agencies.
A new EFF web page warns that America's new proposed ban on TikTok could also apply to apps like WeChat...