OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is negotiating major changes to the company's $14 billion partnership with Microsoft. The companies have defined artificial general intelligence (AGI) as systems generating $100 billion in profits [non-paywalled source] -- the point at which OpenAI could end certain Microsoft agreements, The Information reports. According to their contract, AGI means AI that surpasses humans at "most economically valuable work." The talks focus on Microsoft's equity stake, cloud exclusivity, and 20% revenue share as OpenAI aims to convert from nonprofit to for-profit status. The AI developer projects $4 billion in 2024 revenue.

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Data center construction is driving an unprecedented influx of electricians to central Washington state, where abundant hydropower and tax incentives have attracted major tech companies building AI infrastructure, New York Times is reporting. Microsoft alone projects needing 2,300 electricians in coming years for facilities across three counties along the Columbia River. Union electricians earning up to $2,800 weekly after taxes are transforming agricultural communities like Quincy, where data centers now account for 75% of local tax revenue. While the construction boom has funded community improvements including a new high school, rising housing costs and limited long-term employment opportunities raise concerns about sustainable economic benefits for longtime residents.

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Microsoft has integrated its AI assistant Copilot into Microsoft 365 subscriptions in Australia and Southeast Asia, simultaneously raising prices for all users. The move forces customers to pay for AI features regardless of interest, prompting complaints about intrusive pop-ups and price hikes, WSJ reports. From the report: Some users said on social media that Copilot pop-ups reminded them of Clippy, Microsoft's widely derided Office helper from the late 1990s, that would frequently offer unsolicited help. [...] The change demonstrates the lengths to which Microsoft is going to try to profit from its huge investments in AI. Copilot, which is built with technology from OpenAI, is a key part of Chief Executive Satya Nadella's plan to keep expanding Microsoft's software business for consumer and corporate customers.

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An anonymous reader writes: James Bond has dodged more than 4,000 bullets. He has jumped from an airplane, skied off a cliff and escaped castration by laser beam. Now, 007 is in a new kind of peril. Nearly three years after Amazon acquired the right to release Bond movies through its $6.5 billion purchase of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio, the relationship between the family that oversees the franchise and the ecommerce giant has all but collapsed, WSJ reports.

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Airports are facing a growing nuisance as travelers increasingly watch videos and take calls on speakerphone without headphones, creating tension among passengers at gates and lounges. Flight attendants at American Airlines, Alaska Air, and Delta have begun addressing the issue through announcements and website notices, though enforcement remains challenging, WSJ reports. Passengers report confrontations rarely end well, with offenders often dismissive or hostile when asked to use headphones. The story adds: The headphones-optional attitude isn't limited to air travel. Podcasts and sports games blare in open-plan offices. You can catch snippets of conversations on the sidewalk, some phones held aloft for video calls. Transit authorities in big cities have struggled to get passengers to keep their music to themselves on subways and commuter trains. Witnesses say offenders span the generational and socioeconomic spectrum, from grandparents on speakerphone to toddlers on iPads and from first class to coach. Air travel already overloads the senses with a cacophony of boarding announcements, beeping vehicles and crying babies. U.S. airlines generally don't allow voice and video calls in the air. But by takeoff, the damage has been done.

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The bald eagle is now officially the national bird of the US, after President Joe Biden signed a law on Christmas Eve bestowing the honour upon the white-headed and yellow-beaked bird of prey. BBC News: The bird has been a national emblem in the US for years, appearing on the Great Seal of the US -- used on US documents -- since 1782. But it had not been officially designated to be the national bird until Congress passed the bill last week, sending it to Biden's desk to be signed. "For nearly 250 years, we called the bald eagle the national bird when it wasn't," said Jack Davis, co-chair of the National Bird Initiative for the National Eagle Center, in a statement. "But now the title is official, and no bird is more deserving." Not everyone has always agreed about the national status of the bald eagle. Founding Father Benjamin Franklin objected to the creature being chosen to represent the country, calling it a "bird of bad moral character."

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As we enter that little gap between Christmas and New Year's, we explore some of the highlights of 2024. We start with this historical computing story. And unlike the subject, this shipped ready to read (and reprint). --Remy

Today's anonymously submitted story is a case where the WTF isn't the code itself, per se. This arguably could be a CodeSOD, and we'll get to the code, but there's so much more to the story.

Our submitter, let's call them Janice, used to work for a financial institution with a slew of legacy systems. One such system was an HP3000 minicomputer. "Mini", of course, meant "refrigerator sized".

The HP3000 itself is an interesting, if peripheral story, because it's one of the tales of a product launch going incredibly wrong. Let's talk a little history.

We start with the HP2100 in 1966, which Hewlett Packard did nothing to design, and instead purchased the company that designed it. The core innovation of the HP2100 was that it was architecturally similar to a PDP-8, but supported full 16-bit memory, instead of PDP's 12-bit.

HP didn't really know what they had bought- they marketed it as a "test and instrumentation" system, and were surprised when businesses purchased it for back office operations. They ended up with one of the most popular minicomputers for office use, despite it not being designed for that purpose.

Thus began the projects "Alpha" and "Omega". Alpha was a hardware refresh of the 2100, with a better memory model. Omega was a ground-up redesign for 32-bit memory, which would allow it to support a whopping 4MB of RAM. There was just one problem with the Omega design: they didn't have funding to actually finish it. The project was killed in 1970, which threw some of the staff into "wear black armbands to work" levels of mourning.

Unfortunately, while work was done on Omega, the scope of Alpha crept, which resulted in another project management wasn't sure could be delivered. But the market was there for a time-sharing minicomputer, so they pressed on despite the concerns.

The HP2000-line had time sharing system that used multiple processors. There was a front-end processor which handled user interactions. Then there was the actual CPU, which ran programs. This meant that time-sharing was simplified- the CPU just ran programs in a round-robin fashion, and didn't have to worry about pesky things like user inputs. Essentially, it was really just a batch processing system with a multi-user front-end.

The designers of Alpha wanted to support full multiprogramming, instead of this hybrid-ish model. But they also needed to support traditional batch processing, as well as real-time execution. So the team split up to build the components of the "Multi-Programming Executive" module, which would allow all of these features.

The Alpha, which was still 16-bit, didn't have the luxurious 4MB of RAM- it had 128kB. The MPE used much more memory than 128kB. This led to a massive crunch as the programmers worked to shrink MPE into something usable, while marketing looked at the deadlines and said, "We were supposed to be selling this thing months ago!"

The result was a massive war between engineering and marketing, where marketing gave customers promises about what the performance would be, engineering told marketing what the actual performance would be (significantly worse than what marketing was promising), and then management would demand engineering "prove" that marketing's over-promises could be met.

The initial ship-date was November, 1972, and by god, they shipped on time. Nothing actually worked, but they shipped. The first computer out the door was returned almost immediately. It could only handle two simultaneous users before slowing to a crawl, and crashed every ten minutes. By December, HP had gotten that to "crashes every two hours". They kept shipping machines even as they had to cut features and reliability promises.

Those frequent crashes also concealed another bug: after running for 24 days, the HP3000's clock would overflow (2^31 milliseconds) and the clock would magically reverse by 25 days. As one sysop of a purchased HP3000 put it: "The original designers of MPE never thought the OS would stay up for 25+ days in a row".

After a bunch of management shuffling, the titular Packard of Hewlett Packard sent a memo: production was stopping and all sold computers were being recalled. Customers were offered HP2000s in its place, or they could wait until fall 1973 for a revised version- that would only support 4-6 users, far fewer than marketing's initial promises of 64. This pleased no one, and it's reported that some customers cried over the disappointment.

With sales paused, the entire computer underwent a design overhaul. The resulting machine was faster and cheaper and could actually handle 8 simultaneous users. One year after the botched launch, the HP3000 went back on the market, and ended up being a full success.

It was so successful, HP continued supporting the HP3000 until 2010, which is where Janice enters our story. Circa 2006, she needed to update some Pascal code. That code used a lot of bit-masks to handle flags, which is normally a pretty easy function in Pascal- the language has a standard set of bitwise operations. So Janice was surprised to see:

FUNCTION BITON(A , B : INTEGER): BOOLEAN; VAR C : INTEGER; BEGIN CASE A OF 15 : C:=1; 14 : C:=2; 13 : C:=4; 12 : C:=8; 11 : C:=16; 10 : C:=32; 9 : C:=64; 8 : C:=128; 7 : C:=256; 6 : C:=512; 5 : C:=1024; 4 : C:=2048; 3 : C:=4096; 2 : C:=8192; 1 : C:=16384; 0 : C:=32768; OTHERWISE BITON:=FALSE; END; IF ((B DIV C) MOD 2) = 1 THEN BITON:=TRUE ELSE BITON:=FALSE; END; FUNCTION SETBITON(A, B : INTEGER) : INTEGER; VAR C : INTEGER; BEGIN CASE A OF 15 : C:=1; 14 : C:=2; 13 : C:=4; 12 : C:=8; 11 : C:=16; 10 : C:=32; 9 : C:=64; 8 : C:=128; 7 : C:=256; 6 : C:=512; 5 : C:=1024; 4 : C:=2048; 3 : C:=4096; 2 : C:=8192; 1 : C:=16384; 0 : C:=32768; OTHERWISE C:=0; END; IF NOT BITON(A,B) THEN SETBITON:=B + C ELSE SETBITON:=B; END; FUNCTION SETBITOFF(A, B : INTEGER) : INTEGER; VAR C : INTEGER; BEGIN CASE A OF 15 : C:=1; 14 : C:=2; 13 : C:=4; 12 : C:=8; 11 : C:=16; 10 : C:=32; 9 : C:=64; 8 : C:=128; 7 : C:=256; 6 : C:=512; 5 : C:=1024; 4 : C:=2048; 3 : C:=4096; 2 : C:=8192; 1 : C:=16384; 0 : C:=32768; OTHERWISE C:=0; END; IF BITON(A,B) THEN SETBITOFF:=B - C ELSE SETBITOFF:=B; END; FUNCTION LAND(A,B : INTEGER) : INTEGER; VAR I : INTEGER; BEGIN I:=0; REPEAT IF BITON(I,A) THEN IF BITON(I,B) THEN A:=SETBITON(I,A) ELSE A:=SETBITOFF(I,A) ELSE A:=SETBITOFF(I,A); I:=I + 1; UNTIL I > 15; LAND:=A; END;

This is a set of hand-reinvented bitwise operations, culminating in an LAND, which does a bitwise and (not a logical and, which makes it annoyingly misnamed). I wouldn't call the code a horrible approach to doing this, even if it's definitely an inefficient approach (and when you're running a 33 year old computer, efficiency matters), but absent built-in bitwise operations, I can't see a lot of other options. The biggest problem is that LAND will set bits on that are already on, which is unnecessary- an AND should really only ever turn bits off.

Which, as it turns out, is the root WTF. The developer responsible wasn't ignorant about bitwise operations. The version of Pascal that shipped on the HP3000 simply didn't have any. No and, or, not, or xor. Not even a shift-left or shift-right operation.

In any case, this is what happens when I start doing research on a story and end up getting sucked down a rabbit hole. As always, while Wikipedia's true value is as a bibliography. A lot of those links have much more detail, but I hope this quick overview was an interesting story.

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Japan Airlines said it was hit by a cyberattack Thursday, causing delays to more than 20 domestic flights but the carrier said there was no impact on flight safety. From a report: JAL said the problem started Thursday morning when the company's network connecting internal and external systems began malfunctioning. The airline said the cyberattack had delayed 24 domestic flights for more than 30 minutes, and the impact could expand later in the day.

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Three more EU member states -- including the most populous, Germany -- have joined the list of countries with "ultra-low" fertility rates [non-paywalled source], highlighting the extent of the region's demographic challenges. Financial Times: Official statistics show Germany's birth rate fell to 1.35 children per woman in 2023, below the UN's "ultra-low" threshold of 1.4 -- characterising a scenario where falling birth rates become tough to reverse. Estonia and Austria also passed under the 1.4 threshold, joining the nine EU countries -- including Spain, Greece and Italy -- that in 2022 had fertility rates below 1.4 children per woman. The fall in birth rates partially reflects the "postponement of parenthood until the 30s," which involves a "higher likelihood that you will not have as many children as you would like because of the biological clock," said Willem Adema, senior economist at the OECD.

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Apple has no plans to develop its own search engine despite potential restrictions on its lucrative revenue-sharing deal with Google, citing billions in required investment and rapidly evolving AI technology as key deterrents, according to a court filing [PDF]. In a declaration filed with the U.S. District Court in Washington, Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue said creating a search engine would require diverting significant capital and employees, while recent AI developments make such an investment "economically risky." Apple received approximately $20 billion from Google in 2022 under a deal that makes Google the default search engine on Safari browsers. This arrangement is now under scrutiny in the U.S. government's antitrust case against Google. Cue said Apple lacks the specialized professionals and infrastructure needed for search advertising, which would be essential for a viable search engine. While Apple operates niche advertising like the App Store, search advertising is "outside of Apple's core expertise," he said. Building a search advertising business would also need to be balanced against Apple's privacy commitments, according to his declaration.

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The Russian government has banned crypto mining in ten regions for a period of six years, according to reporting by the state-owned news agency Tass. Engadget adds: Russia has cited the industry's high power consumption rates as the primary reason behind the ban. Crypto is particularly power-hungry, as mining operations already account for nearly 2.5 percent of US energy use. This ban takes effect on January 1 and lasts until March 15, 2031. The country's Council of Ministers has also stated that additional bans may be required in other regions during periods of peak energy demand. It could also go the other way. The ban could be temporarily lifted or altered in certain regions if a government commission examines changes in energy demand and deems it necessary.

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Lost deliveries, shipping delays and theft on the front porch have become such growing problems that companies are making consumers pay for package protection. From a report: Tens of thousands of online retailers now offer the service for a few dollars per order. The fees go to young companies -- Route and Corso, to name two -- that promise to make customers whole without charging the merchant if a delivery doesn't arrive. Consumers are finding that retailers either ask them to pay for package protection or draw a harder line when it comes to replacing a missing item. Some retailers are making the fees mandatory, spreading the burden of package theft among all customers. To know whether you are paying the fee, review your order before you press purchase. Sometimes it is named after the company offering protection, and sometimes it is called shipping insurance or package protection. Skincare brand Topicals began using Corso two years ago after seeing 30% of its packages were regularly marked delivered but not received, according to customer insights manager Deja Jefferson. By requiring protection, which Topicals discloses on its shipping page, the company doesn't have to worry about convincing customers to opt in. "We actually don't get any complaints on it whatsoever," she said. Further reading: Porch Pirates Steal So Many Packages That Now You Can Get Insurance.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has published a year in review for its Edge browser and talked up AI-powered chats while lightly skipping over the software's stagnating market share. The company had some big numbers to share. There had been over 10 billion AI-powered chats with Copilot from inside the Edge browser window (although it did not disclose how many chats were customers asking how to install Chrome). Some 38 trillion characters had been auto-translated. Seven trillion megabytes of PC memory had been saved through the use of sleeping tabs. However, are those numbers actually as big as they seem? What Microsoft did not say is how little Edge has moved the needle on market share in 2024. Strangely, the company did not share raw usage information. Yet, a look at Statcounter's figures for browser desktop market share showed Edge with 11.9 percent of the market in December 2023 and reaching 12.87 percent by November 2024 -- an increase of less than 1 percent. The market leader, Google's Chrome browser, went from 65.23 percent to 66.33 percent in the same period. That's only slightly more than 1 percent, but it still maintains its dominance.

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Apple may be worth one and a half Googles now, but the world's most valuable company needs its relationship with the world's largest search engine to keep clicking. From a report: Such was evident Monday when Apple filed papers seeking to participate in the penalty phase of the Justice Department's antitrust case against Google. The search giant lost that case in August and is now battling the government over what remedies are appropriate. The DOJ has a long wish list that includes breaking the company up, forcing Google to make key search and user data available to potential rivals, and stopping the payments Google makes to partners such as Apple. The payments to Apple alone now reportedly equate to about $20 billion annually, and make Google the default search engine on devices like the iPhone. Apple didn't confirm any specific amounts in its filing, but did say the company feels compelled to "protect its commercial interests." Analysts widely estimate that the payments from Google are nearly pure profit for Apple, given relatively little incremental cost to generate that revenue. For Apple, $20 billion is about 16% of the operating income reported for the company's fiscal year that ended in September.

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Modern LED headlights are significantly brighter and more glaring than traditional halogen bulbs, creating dangerous driving conditions, lighting experts report. The newer lights produce an intense, concentrated beam that is bluer and more disorienting, particularly affecting older drivers. "Headlights are getting brighter, smaller and bluer. All three of those things increase a particular kind of glare. It's called discomfort glare," said Daniel Stern, chief editor of Driving Vision News.

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Software development is entering an "autopilot era" with AI coding assistants, but the industry needs to prepare for full autonomy, argues former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor. Drawing parallels with self-driving cars, he suggests the role of software engineers will evolve from code authors to operators of code-generating machines. Taylor, a board member of OpenAI and who once rewrote Google Maps over a weekend, calls for new programming systems, languages, and verification methods to ensure AI-generated code remains robust and secure. From his post: In the Autonomous Era of software engineering, the role of a software engineer will likely transform from being the author of computer code to being the operator of a code generating machine. What is a computer programming system built natively for that workflow? If generating code is no longer a limiting factor, what types of programming languages should we build? If a computer is generating most code, how do we make it easy for a software engineer to verify it does what they intend? What is the role of programming language design (e.g., what Rust did for memory safety)? What is the role of formal verification? What is the role of tests, CI/CD, and development workflows? Today, a software engineer's primary desktop is their editor. What is the Mission Control for a software engineer in the era of autonomous development?

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The annual defense policy bill signed by President Joe Biden Monday evening allocates $3 billion to help telecom firms remove and replace insecure equipment in response to recent incursions by Chinese-linked hackers. From a report: The fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act outlines Pentagon policy and military budget priorities for the year and also includes non-defense measures added as Congress wrapped up its work in December. The $895 billion spending blueprint passed the Senate and House with broad bipartisan support. The $3 billion would go to a Federal Communications Commission program, commonly called "rip and replace," to get rid of Chinese networking equipment due to national security concerns. The effort was created in 2020 to junk equipment made by telecom giant Huawei. It had an initial investment of $1.9 billion, roughly $3 billion shy of what experts said was needed to cauterize the potential vulnerability. Calls to replenish the fund have increased recently in the wake of two hacking campaigns by China, dubbed Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, that saw hackers insert malicious code in U.S. infrastructure and break into at least eight telecom firms. The bill also includes a watered down requirement for the Defense Department to tap an independent third-party to study the feasibility of creating a U.S. Cyber Force, along with an "evaluation of alternative organizational models for the cyber forces" of the military branches.

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They gave it the old college try, but America's elite universities are facing money problems partly of their own creation.ÂFrom a report: It might not seem that way compared with the broader world of U.S. higher education. Ivy League institutions and a handful in a similar orbit like Stanford, Duke and the University of Chicago aren't just blessed to have international cachet and their pick of excellent students and professors -- they also have the most money and the richest alumni. By contrast, public and especially smaller private colleges and universities are cutting staff and programs. Many are closing outright. A school like Harvard, now well into its fourth century, will almost certainly survive for a fifth one. But there are financial problems below the surface that could emerge if the bull market stumbles and especially if some proposed Trump administration policies are enacted. Harvard's $53.2 billion endowment is so huge that the difference between a good and a so-so investment performance translates to sums that would dwarf most colleges' entire nest eggs. Former Harvard President and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers estimated this year that if Harvard had been able to just keep up with other Ivies and "large endowment schools" in the past several years, it would have $20 billion more. For perspective, he says that just $1 billion could fund 100 professorships or permanently cover tuition for 100 students. But even Harvard's peer group isn't doing as well as it could. Veteran investment consultant Richard EnnisÂwrote this month that high costs and "outdated perceptions of superiority" have stymied Ivy League endowment returns, which could have been worth 20% more since the 2008 financial crisis if invested in a classic stock and bond mix.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Boston Globe: Every weekday morning at 8:30, Preston Thorpe makes himself a cup of instant coffee and opens his laptop to find the coding tasks awaiting his seven-person team at Unlocked Labs. Like many remote workers, Thorpe, the nonprofit's principal engineer, works out in the middle of the day and often stays at his computer late into the night. But outside Thorpe's window, there's a soaring chain-link fence topped with coiled barbed wire. And at noon and 4 p.m. every day, a prison guard peers into his room to make sure he's where he's supposed to be at the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, Maine, where he's serving his 12th year for two drug-related convictions in New Hampshire, including intent to distribute synthetic opioids. Remote work has spread far and wide since the pandemic spurred a work-from-home revolution of sorts, but perhaps no place more unexpectedly than behind prison walls. Thorpe is one of more than 40 people incarcerated in Maine's state prison system who have landed internships and jobs with outside companies over the past two years -- some of whom work full time from their cells and earn more than the correctional officers who guard them. A handful of other states have also started allowing remote work in recent years, but none have gone as far as Maine, according to the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, the nonprofit leading the effort. Unlike incarcerated residents with jobs in the kitchen or woodshop who earn just a few hundred dollars a month, remote workers make fair-market wages, allowing them to pay victim restitution fees and legal costs, provide child support, and contribute to Social Security and other retirement funds. Like inmates in work-release programs who have jobs out in the community, 10 percent of remote workers' wages go to the state to offset the cost of room and board. All Maine DOC residents get re-entry support for housing and job searches before they're released, and remote workers leave with even more: up-to-date resumes, a nest egg -- and the hope that they're less likely to need food or housing assistance, or resort to crime to get by.

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A new study reveals that the widely accepted "sophomore slump" phenomenon -- where a band's second album is perceived as significantly worse than the first -- exists primarily in professional critics' reviews, not fan ratings. Researchers suggest this bias stems from social conformity among critics, while fans provide more consistent and reliable evaluations across albums. "If every music critic has heard of a sophomore slump and everyone knows it happens, they might be convinced to over-apply it in their reviews," said Gregory Webster, Ph.D., the R. David Thomas Endowed Professor of Psychology at the University of Florida and co-author of the new study. "We suspect it's a kind of social conformity, which we see in a lot of social groups." Phys.Org reports: Webster and his co-author, University of Hannover Professor of Educational Science Lysann Zander, Ph.D., analyzed thousands of albums rated by professional critics and amateur fans. Both critics and fans said that bands' albums generally got worse over time. But critics were exceptionally harsh with the second album, which was an outlier in this downward trajectory. "It's only critics that show substantial evidence of a sophomore slump bias, whereby they are giving artists' second albums unusually low reviews compared to their first and third albums," Webster said. "Fans show no evidence of a sophomore slump bias." Webster and Zander expected that fan ratings would reflect a broader consensus about a band's true performance. Fans aren't pressured by the same social norms as professional critics. And with ratings from thousands of fans, the researchers could average across a large group to find more reliable ratings.

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