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Microsoft Bringing Teams Meeting Reminders To Windows 11 Start Menu

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 19:01
Microsoft is getting ready to place Teams meeting reminders on the Start menu in Windows 11. From a report: The software giant has started testing a new build of Windows 11 with Dev Channel testers that includes a Teams meeting reminder in the recommended section of the Start menu. Microsoft is also testing an improved way to instantly access new photos and screenshots from Android devices. [...] The Teams meeting reminders will be displayed alongside the regular recently used and recommended file list on the Start menu, and they won't be displayed for non-business users of Windows 11.

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Game Developer Survey: 50% Work at a Studio Already Using Generative AI Tools

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 18:20
A new survey of thousands of game development professionals finds a near-majority saying generative AI tools are already in use at their workplace. But a significant minority of developers say their company has no interest in generative AI tools or has outright banned their use. From a report: The Game Developers Conference's 2024 State of the Industry report, released Thursday, aggregates the thoughts of over 3,000 industry professionals as of last October. While the annual survey (conducted in conjunction with research partner Omdia) has been running for 12 years, this is the first time respondents were asked directly about their use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, GitHub Copilot, and Adobe Generative Fill. Forty-nine percent of the survey's developer respondents said that generative AI tools are currently being used in their workplace. That near-majority includes 31 percent (of all respondents) that say they use those tools themselves and 18 percent that say their colleagues do. The survey also found that different studio departments showed different levels of willingness to embrace AI tools. Forty-four percent of employees in business and finance said they were using AI tools, for instance, compared to just 16 percent in visual arts and 13 percent in "narrative/writing."

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Cop28 Deal Will Fail Unless Rich Countries Quit Fossil Fuels, Says Climate Negotiator

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 17:40
The credibility of the Cop28 agreement to "transition away" from fossil fuels rides on the world's biggest historical polluters like the US, UK and Canada rethinking current plans to expand oil and gas production, according to the climate negotiator representing 135 developing countries. The Guardian: In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Pedro Pedroso, the outgoing president of the G77 plus China bloc of developing countries, warned that the landmark deal made at last year's climate talks in Dubai risked failing. "We achieved some important outcomes at Cop28 but the challenge now is how we translate the deal into meaningful action for the people," Pedroso said. "As we speak, unless we lie to ourselves, none of the major developed countries, who are the most important historical emitters, have policies that are moving away from fossil fuels, on the contrary, they are expanding," said Pedroso. These countries must also deliver adequate finance for poorer nations to transition -and adapt to the climate crisis. In Dubai, Sultan Al Jaber, Cop28 president and chief of the Emirates national oil company, was subject to widespread scrutiny -- understandable given that the UAE is the world's seventh biggest oil producer with the fifth largest gas reserves. Yet the US was by far the biggest oil and gas producer in the world last year -- setting a new record, during a year that was the hottest ever recorded. The US, UK, Canada, Australia and Norway account for 51% of the total planned oil and gas expansion by 2050, according to research by Oil Change International. "It's very easy to label some emerging economies, especially the Gulf states, as climate villains, but this is very unfair by countries with historic responsibilities -- who keep trying to scapegoat and deviate the attention away from themselves. Just look at US fossil fuel plans and the UK's new drilling licenses for the North Sea, and Canada which has never met any of its emission reduction goals, not once," said Pedroso, a Cuban diplomat.

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How Much of the World Is It Possible to Model?

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 17:00
Dan Rockmore, the director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Sciences at Dartmouth College, writing for The New Yorker: Recently, statistical modelling has taken on a new kind of importance as the engine of artificial intelligence -- specifically in the form of the deep neural networks that power, among other things, large language models, such as OpenAI's G.P.T.s. These systems sift vast corpora of text to create a statistical model of written expression, realized as the likelihood of given words occurring in particular contexts. Rather than trying to encode a principled theory of how we produce writing, they are a vertiginous form of curve fitting; the largest models find the best ways to connect hundreds of thousands of simple mathematical neurons, using trillions of parameters.They create a vast data structure akin to a tangle of Christmas lights whose on-off patterns attempt to capture a chunk of historical word usage. The neurons derive from mathematical models of biological neurons originally formulated by Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, in a landmark 1943 paper, titled "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity." McCulloch and Pitts argued that brain activity could be reduced to a model of simple, interconnected processing units, receiving and sending zeros and ones among themselves based on relatively simple rules of activation and deactivation. The McCulloch-Pitts model was intended as a foundational step in a larger project, spearheaded by McCulloch, to uncover a biological foundation of psychiatry. McCulloch and Pitts never imagined that their cartoon neurons could be trained, using data, so that their on-off states linked to certain properties in that data. But others saw this possibility, and early machine-learning researchers experimented with small networks of mathematical neurons, effectively creating mathematical models of the neural architecture of simple brains, not to do psychiatry but to categorize data. The results were a good deal less than astonishing. It wasn't until vast amounts of good data -- like text -- became readily available that computer scientists discovered how powerful their models could be when implemented on vast scales. The predictive and generative abilities of these models in many contexts is beyond remarkable. Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of understanding just how they do what they do. A new field, called interpretability (or X-A.I., for "explainable" A.I.), is effectively the neuroscience of artificial neural networks. This is an instructive origin story for a field of research. The field begins with a focus on a basic and well-defined underlying mechanism -- the activity of a single neuron. Then, as the technology scales, it grows in opacity; as the scope of the field's success widens, so does the ambition of its claims. The contrast with climate modelling is telling. Climate models have expanded in scale and reach, but at each step the models must hew to a ground truth of historical, measurable fact. Even models of covid or elections need to be measured against external data. The success of deep learning is different. Trillions of parameters are fine-tuned on larger and larger corpora that uncover more and more correlations across a range of phenomena. The success of this data-driven approach isn't without danger. We run the risk of conflating success on well-defined tasks with an understanding of the underlying phenomenon -- thought -- that motivated the models in the first place. Part of the problem is that, in many cases, we actually want to use models as replacements for thinking. That's the raison detre of modelling -- substitution. It's useful to recall the story of Icarus. If only he had just done his flying well below the sun. The fact that his wings worked near sea level didn't mean they were a good design for the upper atmosphere. If we don't understand how a model works, then we aren't in a good position to know its limitations until something goes wrong. By then it might be too late. Eugene Wigner, the physicist who noted the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics," restricted his awe and wonder to its ability to describe the inanimate world. Mathematics proceeds according to its own internal logic, and so it's striking that its conclusions apply to the physical universe; at the same time, how they play out varies more the further that we stray from physics. Math can help us shine a light on dark worlds, but we should look critically, always asking why the math is so effective, recognizing where it isn't, and pushing on the places in between.

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Airbus Is Pulling Ahead as Boeing's Troubles Mount

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 16:20
Airbus cemented its position last week as the world's biggest plane maker for the fifth straight year, announcing that it had delivered more aircraft and secured more orders than Boeing in 2023. At the same time, Boeing was trying to put out a huge public-relations and safety crisis caused by a harrowing near disaster involving its 737 Max line of airliners. In the long-running duel between the two aviation rivals, Airbus has pulled far ahead. The New York Times: "What used to be a duopoly has become two-thirds Airbus, one-third Boeing," said Richard Aboulafia, the managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory in Washington, D.C. "A lot of people, whether investors, financiers or customers, are looking at Airbus and seeing a company run by competent people," he said. "The contrast with Boeing is fairly profound." The incident involving the 737 Max 9, in which a hole blew open in the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines flight in midair, was the latest in a string of safety lapses in Boeing's workhorse aircraft -- including two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 -- that are indirectly helping propel the fortunes of the European aerospace giant. As the Federal Aviation Administration widens its scrutiny of Max 9 production, Airbus's edge is likely to sharpen. Airlines are embarking on massive expansions of their fleets to meet a postpandemic surge in the demand for global air travel, and are considering which company to turn to.

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Apple Offers To Open Mobile Payments To Third Parties Amid EU Antitrust Case

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 15:40
Apple committed to address antitrust concerns posed by the European Commission surrounding its popular Apple Pay app, including allowing access to third-party mobile wallet and payment services. WSJ: The U.S. tech giant has agreed to allow companies' apps to make contactless payments on devices that use the iOS system, such as iPhones, for free without the need to use Apple Pay or Apple Wallet, the EU's executive arm said Friday.

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'Where Have All the Websites Gone?'

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 15:00
An anonymous reader shares an essay: No one clicks a webpage hoping to learn which cat can haz cheeseburger. Weirdos, maybe. Sickos. No, we get our content from a For You Page now -- algorithmically selected videos and images made by our favorite creators, produced explicitly for our preferred platform. Which platform doesn't matter much. So long as it's one of the big five. Creators churn out content for all of them. It's a technical marvel, that internet. Something so mindblowingly impressive that if you showed it to someone even thirty years ago, their face would melt the fuck off. So why does it feel like something's missing? Why are we all so collectively unhappy with the state of the web? A tweet went viral this Thanksgiving when a Twitter user posed a question to their followers. (The tweet said: "It feels like there are no websites anymore. There used to be so many websites you could go on. Where did all the websites go?") A peek at the comments, and I could only assume the tweet struck a nerve. Everyone had their own answer. Some comments blamed the app-ification of the web. "Everything is an app now!," one user replied. Others point to the death of Adobe Flash and how so many sites and games died along with it. Everyone agrees that websites have indeed vanished, and we all miss the days we were free to visit them.

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Sam Altman Says AI Depends On Energy Breakthrough

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 14:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday said an energy breakthrough is necessary for future artificial intelligence, which will consume vastly more power than people have expected. Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Altman said the silver lining is that more climate-friendly sources of energy, particularly nuclear fusion or cheaper solar power and storage, are the way forward for AI. "There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," he said. "It motivates us to go invest more in fusion." In 2021, Altman personally provided $375 million to private U.S. nuclear fusion company Helion Energy, which since has signed a deal to provide energy to Microsoft in future years. Microsoft is OpenAI's biggest financial backer and provides it computing resources for AI. Altman said he wished the world would embrace nuclear fission as an energy source as well. Further reading: Microsoft Needs So Much Power to Train AI That It's Considering Small Nuclear Reactors

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Boeing Cargo Plane Makes Emergency Landing in Miami After 'Engine Malfunction'

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 13:48
A Boeing cargo plane headed for Puerto Rico was diverted Thursday night after taking off from Miami International Airport because of engine trouble, according to an official and flight data. From a report: Atlas Air Flight 5Y095 landed safely after experiencing an "engine malfunction" shortly after departure, the airline said early Friday. It was unclear what kind of cargo the plane was carrying. Data collected by FlightAware, a flight tracking company, showed the aircraft was a Boeing 747-8 that left its gate at Miami International at 10:11 p.m. on Thursday and returned to the airport about 50 minutes later. The website also showed that the plane traveled 60 miles in total. Reuters adds: The Atlas Air Flight 5Y095 was on its way to San Juan, Puerto Rico from Miami International Airport on late Thursday evening. The pilot made a Mayday call around 0333 GMT to report an engine fire and requested to return back to the airport, according to multi-channel recordings of conversations between the air traffic control and the plane available on liveatc.net. "We have a engine fire," one of the plane crew said, disclosing that there were five people on board.

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David Mills, an Internet Pioneer, Has Died

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 12:03
David Mills, the man who invented NTP and wrote the implementation, has passed away. He also created the Fuzzballs and EGP, and helped make global-scale internetworking possible. Vint Cerf, sharing the news on the Internet Society mail group: His daughter, Leigh, just sent me the news that Dave passed away peacefully on January 17, 2024. He was such an iconic element of the early Internet. Network Time Protocol, the Fuzzball routers of the early NSFNET, INARG taskforce lead, COMSAT Labs and University of Delaware and so much more. R.I.P.

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Physicists Design a Way to Detect Quantum Behavior in Large Objects, Like Us

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 11:00
Researchers have developed a way to apply quantum measurement to something no matter its mass or energy. "Our proposed experiment can test if an object is classical or quantum by seeing if an act of observation can lead to a change in its motion," says physicist Debarshi Das from UCL. ScienceAlert reports: Quantum physics describes a Universe where objects aren't defined by a single measurement, but as a range of possibilities. An electron can be spinning up and down, or have a high chance of existing in some areas more than others, for example. In theory, this isn't limited to tiny things. Your own body can in effect be described as having a very high probability of sitting in that chair and a very (very!) low probability of being on the Moon. There is just one fundamental truth to remember -- you touch it, you've bought it. Observing an object's quantum state, whether an electron, or a person sitting in a chair, requires interactions with a measuring system, forcing it to have a single measurement. There are ways to catch objects with their quantum pants still down, but they require keeping the object in a ground state -- super-cold, super-still, completely cut off from its environment. That's tricky to do with individual particles, and it gets a lot more challenging as the size of the scale goes up. The new proposal uses an entirely novel approach, one that uses a combination of assertions known as Leggett-Garg Inequalities and No-Signaling in Time conditions. In effect, these two concepts describe a familiar Universe, where a person on a chair is sitting there even if the room is dark and you can't see them. Switching on the light won't suddenly reveal they're actually under the bed. Should an experiment find evidence that somehow conflicts with these assertions, we just might be catching a glimpse of quantum fuzziness on a larger scale. The team proposes that objects can be observed as they oscillate on a pendulum, like a ball at the end of a piece of string. Light would then be flashed at the two halves of the experimental setup at different times -- counting as the observation -- and the results of the second flash would indicate if quantum behavior was happening, because the first flash would affect whatever was moving. We're still talking about a complex setup that would require some sophisticated equipment, and conditions akin to a ground state -- but through the use of motion and two measurements (light flashes), some of the restrictions on mass are removed. [...] "The next step is to try this proposed setup in an actual experiment," concludes the reports. "The mirrors at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US have already been proposed as suitable candidates for examination." "Those mirrors act as a single 10-kilogram (22-pound) object, quite a step up from the typical size of objects analyzed for quantum effects -- anything up to about a quintillionth of a gram." The findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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Greenland's Ice Sheet Melting Faster Than Scientists Previously Estimated, Study Finds

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 08:00
Scientists have underestimated recent mass loss from Greenland by as much as 20%, finds a new study published in the journal Nature. CBS News reports: Since 1985, Greenland's ice sheet has lost approximately 5,091 square kilometers of ice researchers found using satellite imagery. Scientists said earlier estimates did not track melting at the edges of the ice sheets, known as calving, which measures ice breaking off at the terminus of a glacier. Greenland's ice sheet loses about 193 square kilometers of ice per year, researchers found. Study co-author Chad Greene and his colleagues said they qualified the extent of calving, which increased the scope of ice mass lost. They combined "236,328 observations of glacier terminus positions" compiled from various public data sets to capture monthly ice melt. Their measurements found that between 1985 and 2022, almost every glacier in Greenland experienced some level of loss. [...] Researchers in the study noted that "this retreat does not appear to substantially contribute to sea level rise" because most of the glacier margins the scientists measured were already underwater. The loss, however, may play a part in ocean circulation patterns, and how heat energy is distributed across the planet.

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Error'd: Grasshopper

The Daily WTF - Fri, 2024-01-19 07:30

One of my multitude of peeves is the phrase "special characters." Somehow, our lexicon has been corrupted by semiliterate middle-schoolers, who have never learned that the name for ,.;: and so on is punctuation and/or symbol. Dustin Hoffman's Raymond was a special character. Period ain't.

This week, Robert F. had the misfortunate to step into it, and observed "What boggles my mind is that someone had to actively choose to create a validation rule specifically for this."

 

Saver Stewart was frustrated by Fido's failure to refresh a field in their messages app. "It isn't reassuring when a major financial corporation can not count to zero correctly," he fretted. I figure they just reached zero and didn't update every element on-screen immediately.

 

In an echo of earlier error'ds, an anonymous member of our Helvetian contigent reminds us that Swiss Railway's apps (not to be confused with SwissRail's Zoppas) sind immer noch schlecht. Sagt mann "Ah, perfect! The Swiss Railways' app is telling me that I'll be there in NULL time 👌" Super!

 

"Even in the best families..." laments Lucio Crusca , shaking his head sadly. "This is WhatsApp Web since yesterday on my PC."

 

Finally, "I didn't think my age would be a problem..." stammered junior Jake. The cutoff age must be 34.5. Patience, grasshopper.

 

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Categories: Computer

80 Years Later, GCHQ Releases New Images of Nazi Code-Breaking Computer

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 04:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) announced the release of previously unseen images and documents related to Colossus, one of the first digital computers. The release marks the 80th anniversary of the code-breaking machines that significantly aided the Allied forces during World War II. While some in the public knew of the computers earlier (PDF), the UK did not formally acknowledge the project's existence until the 2000s. Colossus was not one computer but a series of computers developed by British scientists between 1943 and 1945. These 2-meter-tall electronic beasts played an instrumental role in breaking the Lorenz cipher, a code used for communications between high-ranking German officials in occupied Europe. The computers were said to have allowed allies to "read Hitler's mind," according to The Sydney Morning Herald. The technology behind Colossus was highly innovative for its time. Tommy Flowers, the engineer behind its construction, used over 2,500 vacuum tubes to create logic gates, a precursor to the semiconductor-based electronic circuits found in modern computers. While 1945's ENIAC was long considered the clear front-runner in digital computing, the revelation of Colossus' earlier existence repositioned it in computing history. (However, it's important to note that ENIAC was a general-purpose computer, and Colossus was not.) GCHQ's public sharing of archival documents includes several photos of the computer at different periods and a letter discussing Tommy Flowers' groundbreaking work that references the interception of "rather alarming German instructions." Following the war, the UK government issued orders for the destruction of most Colossus machines, and Flowers was required to turn over all related documentation. The GCHQ claims that the Colossus tech "was so effective, its functionality was still in use by us until the early 1960s." In the GCHQ press release, Director Anne Keast-Butler paid tribute to Colossus' place in the UK's lineage of technological innovation: "The creativity, ingenuity and dedication shown by Tommy Flowers and his team to keep the country safe were as crucial to GCHQ then as today."

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BMW Will Employ Figure's Humanoid Robot At South Carolina Plant

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 03:02
Figure's first humanoid robot will be coming to a BMW manufacturing facility in South Carolina. TechCrunch reports: BMW has not disclosed how many Figure 01 models it will deploy initially. Nor do we know precisely what jobs the robot will be tasked with when it starts work. Figure did, however, confirm with TechCrunch that it is beginning with an initial five tasks, which will be rolled out one at a time. While folks in the space have been cavalierly tossing out the term "general purpose" to describe these sorts of systems, it's important to temper expectations and point out that they will all arrive as single- or multi-purpose systems, growing their skillset over time. Figure CEO Brett Adcock likens the approach to an app store -- something that Boston Dynamics currently offers with its Spot robot via SDK. Likely initial applications include standard manufacturing tasks such as box moving, pick and place and pallet unloading and loading -- basically the sort of repetitive tasks for which factory owners claim to have difficulty retaining human workers. Adcock says that Figure expects to ship its first commercial robot within a year, an ambitious timeline even for a company that prides itself on quick turnaround times. The initial batch of applications will be largely determined by Figure's early partners like BMW. The system will, for instance, likely be working with sheet metal to start. Adcock adds that the company has signed up additional clients, but declined to disclose their names. It seems likely Figure will instead opt to announce each individually to keep the news cycle spinning in the intervening 12 months.

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Bing Gained Less Than 1% Market Share Since Adding Bing Chat, Report Finds

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 02:25
According to StatCounter, Bing's market share grew less than 1% since launching Bing Chat (now known as Copilot) roughly a year ago. From a report: Bloomberg reported (paywalled) on the StatCounter data, saying, "But Microsoft's search engine ended 2023 with just 3.4% of the global search market, according to data analytics firm StatCounter, up less than 1 percentage point since the ChatGPT announcement." Google still dominates the global search market with a 91.6% market share, followed by Bing's 3.4%, Yandex's 1.6% and Yahoo's 1.1%. "Other" search engines accounted for a total of just 2.2% of the global search market. You can view the raw chart and data from StatCounter here.

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Google To Invest $1 Billion In UK Data Center

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 01:45
Google announced today that it will invest $1 billion building a data center near London. Reuters reports: The data centre, located on a 33-acre (13-hectare) site bought by Google in 2020, will be located in the town of Waltham Cross, about 15 miles north of central London, the Alphabet-owned company said in a statement. The British government, which is pushing for investment by businesses to help fund new infrastructure, particularly in growth industries like technology and artificial intelligence, described Google's investment as a "huge vote of confidence" in the UK. "Google's $1 billion investment is testament to the fact that the UK is a centre of excellence in technology and has huge potential for growth," Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in the Google statement. The investment follows Google's $1 billion purchase of a central London office building in 2022, close to Covent Garden, and another site in nearby King's Cross, where it is building a new office and where its AI company DeepMind is also based. In November, Microsoft announced plans to pump $3.2 billion into Britain over the next three years.

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Remote Work Doesn't Seem To Affect Productivity, Fed Study Finds

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 01:02
An anonymous reader quotes a report released Tuesday (Jan. 16th) by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: The U.S. labor market experienced a massive increase in remote and hybrid work during the COVID-19 pandemic. At its peak, more than 60% of paid workdays were done remotely -- compared with only 5% before the pandemic. As of December 2023, about 30% of paid workdays are still done remotely (Barrero, Bloom, and Davis 2021). Some reports have suggested that teleworking might either boost or harm overall productivity in the economy. And certainly, overall productivity statistics have been volatile. In 2020, U.S. productivity growth surged. This led to optimistic views in the media about the gains from forced digital innovation and the productivity benefits of remote work. However, the surge ended, and productivity growth has retreated to roughly its pre-pandemic trend. Fernald and Li (2022) find from aggregate data that this pattern was largely explained by a predictable cyclical effect from the economy's downturn and recovery. In aggregate data, it thus appears difficult to see a large cumulative effect -- either positive or negative -- from the pandemic so far. But it is possible that aggregate data obscure the effects of teleworking. For example, factors beyond telework could have affected the overall pace of productivity growth. Surveys of businesses have found mixed effects from the pandemic, with many businesses reporting substantial productivity disruptions. In this Economic Letter, we ask whether we can detect the effects of remote work in the productivity performance of different industries. There are large differences across sectors in how easy it is to work off-site. Thus, if remote work boosts productivity in a substantial way, then it should improve productivity performance, especially in those industries where teleworking is easy to arrange and widely adopted, such as professional services, compared with those where tasks need to be performed in person, such as restaurants. After controlling for pre-pandemic trends in industry productivity growth rates, we find little statistical relationship between telework and pandemic productivity performance. We conclude that the shift to remote work, on its own, is unlikely to be a major factor explaining differences across sectors in productivity performance. By extension, despite the important social and cultural effects of increased telework, the shift is unlikely to be a major factor explaining changes in aggregate productivity. [...] The shift to remote and hybrid work has reshaped society in important ways, and these effects are likely to continue to evolve. For example, with less time spent commuting, some people have moved out of cities, and the lines between work and home life have blurred. Despite these noteworthy effects, in this Letter we find little evidence in industry data that the shift to remote and hybrid work has either substantially held back or boosted the rate of productivity growth. Our findings do not rule out possible future changes in productivity growth from the spread of remote work. The economic environment has changed in many ways during and since the pandemic, which could have masked the longer-run effects of teleworking. Continuous innovation is the key to sustained productivity growth. Working remotely could foster innovation through a reduction in communication costs and improved talent allocation across geographic areas. However, working off-site could also hamper innovation by reducing in-person office interactions that foster idea generation and diffusion. The future of work is likely to be a hybrid format that balances the benefits and limitations of remote work.

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IBM Scraps Rewards Program For Staff Inventions, Wipes Away Cash Points

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 00:20
Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: IBM has canceled a program that rewarded inventors at Big Blue for patents or publications, leaving some angry that they are missing out on potential bonuses. By cancelling the scheme, a source told The Register, IBM has eliminated a financial liability by voiding the accrued, unredeemed credits issued to program participants which could have been converted into potential cash awards. For years, IBM has sponsored an "Invention Achievement Award Plan" to incentivize employee innovation. In exchange for filing patents, or for publishing articles that served as defense against rival patents, IBM staff were awarded points that led to recognition and potentially cash bonuses. According to documentation seen by The Register, "Invention points are awarded to all inventors listed on a successful disclosure submission." One point was awarded for publishing. Three points were awarded for filing a patent or four if the filing was deemed high value. For accruing 12 points, program participants would get a payout. "Inventors reach an invention plateau for every 12 points they achieve -- which must include at least one file decision," the rules state. And for each plateau achieved, IBM would pay its inventors $1,200 in recognition of their efforts. No longer, it seems. IBM canceled the program at the end of 2023 and replaced it with a new one that uses a different, incompatible point system called BluePoints. "The previous Invention Achievement Award Plan will be sunset at midnight (eastern time) on December 31st, 2023," company FAQs explain. "Since Plateau awards are one of the items being sunset, plateau levels must be obtained on or before December 31, 2023 to be eligible for the award. Any existing plateau points that have not been applied will not be converted to BluePoints." We're told that IBM's invention review process could take months, meaning that employees just didn't have time between the announcement and the program sunset to pursue the next plateau and cash out. Those involved in the program evidently were none too pleased by the points grab. "My opinion...the invention award program was buggered a long time [ago]," said a former IBM employee. "It rewarded words on a page instead of true innovation. [Former CEO] Ginni [Rometty] made it worse by advocating the program to fluff up young egos."

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Google Is Rolling Out WebGPU For Next-Gen Gaming On Android

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-01-19 00:00
In a blog post today, Google announced that WebGPU is "now enabled by default in Chrome 121 on devices running Android 12 and greater powered by Qualcomm and ARM GPUs," with support for more Android devices rolling out gradually. Previously, the API was only available on Windows PCs that support Direct3D 12, macOS, and ChromeOS devices that support Vulkan. Google says WebGPU "offers significant benefits such as greatly reduced JavaScript workload for the same graphics and more than three times improvements in machine learning model inferences." With lower-level access to a device's GPU, developers are able to enable richer and more complex visual content in web applications. This will be especially apparent with games, as you can see in this demo. Next up: WebGPU for Chrome on Linux.

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