A new YouTube tool will let advertisers use Google's Gemini AI model to target ads to viewers when they're most engaged, reports CNBC: Peak Points has the potential to enable more impressions and a higher click-through rate on YouTube, a primary metric that determines how creators earn money on the video platform... Peak Points is currently in a pilot program and will be rolling out over the rest of the year.
The product "aims to benefit advertisers by using a tactic that aims to grab users' attention right when they're most invested in the content," reports TechCrunch: This approach appears to be similar to a strategy called emotion-based targeting, where advertisers place ads that align with the emotions evoked by the video. It's believed that when viewers experience heightened emotional states, it leads to better recall of the ads. However, viewers may find these interruptions frustrating, especially when they're deeply engaged in the emotional arc of a video and want the ad to be over quickly to resume watching.

In related news, YouTube announced another ad format that may be more appealing to users. The platform debuted a shoppable product feed where users can browse and purchase items during an ad.

Thursday was Rust's 10-year anniversary for its first stable release. "To say I'm surprised by its trajectory would be a vast understatement," writes Rust's original creator Graydon Hoare. "I can only thank, congratulate, and celebrate everyone involved... In my view, Rust is a story about a large community of stakeholders coming together to design, build, maintain, and expand shared technical infrastructure." It's a story with many actors:

- The population of developers the language serves who express their needs and constraints through discussion, debate, testing, and bug reports arising from their experience writing libraries and applications.

- The language designers and implementers who work to satisfy those needs and constraints while wrestling with the unexpected consequences of each decision.

- The authors, educators, speakers, translators, illustrators, and others who work to expand the set of people able to use the infrastructure and work on the infrastructure.

- The institutions investing in the project who provide the long-term funding and support necessary to sustain all this work over decades.

All these actors have a common interest in infrastructure.
Rather than just "systems programming", Hoare sees Rust as a tool for building infrastructure itself, "the robust and reliable necessities that enable us to get our work done" — a wide range that includes everything from embedded and IoT systems to multi-core systems. So the story of "Rust's initial implementation, its sustained investment, and its remarkable resonance and uptake all happened because the world needs robust and reliable infrastructure, and the infrastructure we had was not up to the task." Put simply: it failed too often, in spectacular and expensive ways. Crashes and downtime in the best cases, and security vulnerabilities in the worst. Efficient "infrastructure-building" languages existed but they were very hard to use, and nearly impossible to use safely, especially when writing concurrent code. This produced an infrastructure deficit many people felt, if not everyone could name, and it was growing worse by the year as we placed ever-greater demands on computers to work in ever more challenging environments...

We were stuck with the tools we had because building better tools like Rust was going to require an extraordinary investment of time, effort, and money. The bootstrap Rust compiler I initially wrote was just a few tens of thousands of lines of code; that was nearing the limits of what an unfunded solo hobby project can typically accomplish. Mozilla's decision to invest in Rust in 2009 immediately quadrupled the size of the team — it created a team in the first place — and then doubled it again, and again in subsequent years. Mozilla sustained this very unusual, very improbable investment in Rust from 2009-2020, as well as funding an entire browser engine written in Rust — Servo — from 2012 onwards, which served as a crucial testbed for Rust language features.
Rust and Servo had multiple contributors at Samsung, Hoare acknowledges, and Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, and others "hired key developers and contributed hardware and management resources to its ongoing development." Rust itself "sits atop LLVM" (developed by researchers at UIUC and later funded by Apple, Qualcomm, Google, ARM, Huawei, and many other organizations), while Rust's safe memory model "derives directly from decades of research in academia, as well as academic-industrial projects like Cyclone, built by AT&T Bell Labs and Cornell."

And there were contributions from "interns, researchers, and professors at top academic research programming-language departments, including CMU, NEU, IU, MPI-SWS, and many others." JetBrains and the Rust-Analyzer OpenCollective essentially paid for two additional interactive-incremental reimplementations of the Rust frontend to provide language services to IDEs — critical tools for productive, day-to-day programming. Hundreds of companies and other institutions contributed time and money to evaluate Rust for production, write Rust programs, test them, file bugs related to them, and pay their staff to fix or improve any shortcomings they found. Last but very much not least: Rust has had thousands and thousands of volunteers donating years of their labor to the project. While it might seem tempting to think this is all "free", it's being paid for! Just less visibly than if it were part of a corporate budget.

All this investment, despite the long time horizon, paid off. We're all better for it.
He looks ahead with hope for a future with new contributors, "steady and diversified streams of support," and continued reliability and compatability (including "investment in ever-greater reliability technology, including the many emerging formal methods projects built on Rust.")

And he closes by saying Rust's "sustained, controlled, and frankly astonishing throughput of work" has "set a new standard for what good tools, good processes, and reliable infrastructure software should be like.

"Everyone involved should be proud of what they've built."

MIT said Friday it can no longer stand behind a widely circulated paper on AI written by a doctoral student in its economics program. The paper said that the introduction of an AI tool in a materials-science lab led to gains in new discoveries, but had more ambiguous effects on the scientists who used it. WSJ: MIT didn't name the student in its statement Friday, but it did name the paper. That paper, by Aidan Toner-Rodgers, was covered by The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets. In a press release, MIT said it "has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper."

The university said the author of the paper is no longer at MIT. The paper said that after an AI tool was implemented at a large materials-science lab, researchers discovered significantly more materials -- a result that suggested that, in certain settings, AI could substantially improve worker productivity. But it also showed that most of the productivity gains went to scientists who were already highly effective, and that overall the AI tool made scientists less happy about their work.

A Northeastern University student demanded her tuition money back after discovering her business professor was secretly using AI to create course materials. Ella Stapleton, who graduated this year, grew suspicious when she noticed telltale signs of AI generation in her professor's lecture notes, including a stray ChatGPT citation in the bibliography, recurring typos matching machine outputs, and images showing figures with extra limbs.

"He's telling us not to use it, and then he's using it himself," Stapleton told the New York Times. After filing a formal complaint with Northeastern's business school, Stapleton requested a tuition refund of about $8,000 for the course. The university ultimately rejected her claim. Professor Rick Arrowood acknowledged using ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and presentation generator Gamma. "In hindsight, I wish I would have looked at it more closely," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, Telegram announced it had removed two huge black markets estimated to have generated more than $35 billion since 2021 by serving cybercriminals and scammers. Blockchain research firm Elliptic told Reuters that the Chinese-language markets Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee together were far more lucrative than Silk Road, an illegal drug marketplace that the FBI notoriously seized in 2013, which was valued at about $3.4 billion. Both markets were forced offline on Tuesday, Elliptic reported, and already, Huione Guarantee has confirmed that its market will cease to operate entirely due to the Telegram removal.

The disruption of both markets will be "a big blow for online fraudsters," Elliptic confirmed, cutting them off from a dependable source for "stolen data, money laundering services, and telecoms infrastructure." [...] Elliptic reported that Telegram connected black markets with an audience of a billion users, noting that Telegram tried to remove several Huione Guarantee channels earlier this year, but "the marketplace was ready" with backups and remained online until this week. Wired suggested that Huione Guarantee "operated in plain sight" on Telegram for years. But Telegram suggested it just discovered it. Huione Guarantee is a subsidiary of Huione Group, which was recently sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for supporting "criminal syndicates who have stolen billions of dollars from Americans." According to Reuters, that included allegedly laundering "at least $37 million in crypto from cyber heists by North Korea and $36 million of crypto from so-called 'pig butchering' scams."

Workers who secured substantial salary increases during the pandemic hiring frenzy are now confronting a stark reality: they're likely overpaid in today's cooling job market. According to new Korn Ferry data, two-thirds of U.S. workers believe they're compensated at or above their market value.

The tech sector has experienced significant wage deflation, with expanding pay transparency laws making market corrections impossible to ignore. Only 60% of recent job switchers received raises in Q1 2025, down from 73% just one quarter earlier.

OpenAI is currently in "a tough negotiation" with Microsoft, the Financial Times reports, citing "one person close to OpenAI."

On the road to building artificial general intelligence, OpenAI hopes to unlock new funding (and launch a future IPO), according to the article, which says both sides are at work "rewriting the terms of their multibillion-dollar partnership in a high-stakes negotiation...."

Microsoft, meanwhile, wants to protect its access to OpenAI's cutting-edge AI models... [Microsoft] is a key holdout to the $260bn start-up's plans to undergo a corporate restructuring that moves the group further away from its roots as a non-profit with a mission to develop AI to "benefit humanity". A critical issue in the deliberations is how much equity in the restructured group Microsoft will receive in exchange for the more than $13bn it has invested in OpenAI to date.

According to multiple people with knowledge of the negotiations, the pair are also revising the terms of a wider contract, first drafted when Microsoft first invested $1bn into OpenAI in 2019. The contract currently runs to 2030 and covers what access Microsoft has to OpenAI's intellectual property such as models and products, as well as a revenue share from product sales. Three people with direct knowledge of the talks said Microsoft is offering to give up some of its equity stake in OpenAI's new for-profit business in exchange for accessing new technology developed beyond the 2030 cut off...

Industry insiders said a failure of OpenAI's new plan to make its business arm a public benefits corporation could prove a critical blow. That would hit OpenAI's ability to raise more cash, achieve a future float, and obtain the financial resources to take on Big Tech rivals such as Google. That has left OpenAI's future at the mercy of investors, such as Microsoft, who want to ensure they gain the benefit of its enormous growth, said Dorothy Lund, professor of law at Columbia Law School.
Lund says OpenAI's need for investors' money means they "need to keep them happy." But there also appears to be tension from how OpenAI competes with Microsoft (like targeting its potential enterprise customers with AI products). And the article notes that OpenAI also turned to Oracle (and SoftBank) for its massive AI infrastructure project Stargate. One senior Microsoft employee complained that OpenAI "says to Microsoft, 'give us money and compute and stay out of the way: be happy to be on the ride with us'. So naturally this leads to tensions. To be honest, that is a bad partner attitude, it shows arrogance."

The article's conclusion? Negotiating new deal is "critical to OpenAI's restructuring efforts and could dictate the future of a company..."

Back in 2000, Slashdot founder CmdrTaco marked the 4th anniversary of Jennifer Ringley's pioneering "JenniCam" livestream (saying "It sure beats the Netscape FishCam. It's nuts how Jenni's little cam became such a fixture on The Internet...")

But a new article in the Washington Post remembers how "Once, Ringley looked directly into the camera and held a note in front of her eye. It read: 'I FEEL SO LONELY.'" By 2003, Ringley had shut down the site and disappeared. She began declining interview requests, saying she was enjoying her privacy; her absence on social media continues to this day.
"But by then, the human zoo was everywhere," they write including "social media, where everyone could become a character in their own show." In 2007 Justin Kan launched Justin.TV, which eventually became Twitch, "a thrumming online city for anyone wanting to, as its slogan said, 'waste time watching other people waste time.'"

But the article also notes 2023 stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey that found Americans"were spending far less time socializing than they had 20 years ago — especially 18-to-29-year-olds, who were spending two more hours a day alone." So how did this play out for the next generation of livestreaming influencers? Here's the origin story of "a lonely young woman in Texas" who's "streamed every second of her life for three years and counting." One afternoon, her boyfriend told her to try Twitch, saying, as she recalled: "Your life sucks, you work at CVS, you have no friends. ... This could be helpful." In her first stream, on a Friday night, she played 3½ hours of "World of Warcraft" for her zero followers.
Eight years later... Six hundred and forty-two people are watching when Emily tugs off her sleep mask to begin day No. 1,137 of broadcasting every hour of her life... On the live-streaming service Twitch, one of the world's most popular platforms, Emily is a legendary figure. For three years, she has ceaselessly broadcast her life — every birthday and holiday, every sickness and sleepless night, almost all of it alone. Her commitment has made her a model for success in the new internet economy, where authenticity and endurance are highly prized. It's also made her a good amount of money: $5.99 a month from thousands of subscribers each, plus donations and tips — minus Twitch's 30-to-40 percent cut.

But to get there, Emily, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her last name be withheld due to concerns of harassment, has devoted herself to a solitary life of almost constant stimulation. For three years, she has taken no sick days, gone on no vacations, declined every wedding invitation, had no sex. She has broadcast and self-narrated a thousand days of sleeping, driving and crying, lugging her camera backpack through the grocery store, talking through a screen to strangers she'll never meet. Her goal is to buy a house and get married by the age of 30, but she's 28 and says she's too busy to have a boyfriend. Her last date was seven years ago... But no one tells streamers when to record or when to stop. There are no labor codes, performance limits or regulations to keep the platforms from setting incentives impossibly high. Many streamers figure out the optimal strategy themselves: The more you share, the more successful you can be....

Though some Twitch stars are millionaires, most scramble to get by, buffeted by the vagaries of audience attention. Emily's paid-subscription count, which peaked last year at 22,000, has since slumped to around 6,000, dropping her base income to about $5,000 a month, according to estimates from the analytics firm Streams Charts... Sometimes Emily dreads waking up and clocking into the reality show that is her life. She knows staring at screens all night is unhealthy, and when she feels too depressed to stream, she'll stay in bed for hours while her viewers watch. But she worries that taking a break would be "career suicide," as she called it. Some viewers already complain that she showers too long, sleeps in too late, doesn't have enough fun...

She said she "used to show true sadness on stream" but doesn't anymore because it makes viewers uncomfortable. When she hits a breaking point now, she said, she closes herself in the bathroom.

Google will pay $1.4 billion to the state of Texas, reports the Associated Press, "to settle claims the company collected users' data without permission, the state's attorney general announced Friday." Attorney General Ken Paxton described the settlement as sending a message to tech companies that he will not allow them to make money off of "selling away our rights and freedoms."

"In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law." Paxton said in a statement. "For years, Google secretly tracked people's movements, private searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry through their products and services. I fought back and won...."

The state argued Google was "unlawfully tracking and collecting users' private data." Paxton claimed, for example, that Google collected millions of biometric identifiers, including voiceprints and records of face geometry, through such products and services as Google Photos and Google Assistant. Google spokesperson José Castañeda said the agreement settles an array of "old claims," some of which relate to product policies the company has already changed. "We are pleased to put them behind us, and we will continue to build robust privacy controls into our services," he said in a statement. The company also clarified that the settlement does not require any new product changes.
Google's settlement with Texas "far surpasses any other state's claims for similar violations," according to a statement from their attorney general's office. "To date, no state has attained a settlement against Google for similar data-privacy violations greater than $93 million. Even a multistate coalition that included forty states secured just $391 million — almost a billion dollars less than Texas's recovery."

The statement calls the $1.375 billion settlement "a major win for Texans' privacy" that "tells companies that they will pay for abusing our trust."

In a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned that AI is breaking the economic model of the web by decoupling content creation from value, with platforms like Google and OpenAI increasingly providing answers without driving traffic to original sources. He argued that unless AI companies start compensating creators, the web's content ecosystem will collapse -- calling most current AI investment a "money fire" with only a small fraction holding long-term value. Search Engine Land reports: Google's value exchange with content creators has collapsed, Prince said: "Ten years ago... for every two pages of a website that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. ... That was the trade. ... Now, it takes six pages scraped to get one visitor." That drop reflects the rise of zero-click searches, which happen when searchers get answers directly on Google's search page. "Today, 75 percent of the queries... get answered without you leaving Google." This trend, long criticized by publishers and SEOs, is part of a broader concern: AI companies are using original content to generate answers that rarely/never drive traffic back to creators.

AI makes the problem worse. Large language models (LLMs) are accelerating the crisis, Prince said. AI companies scrape far more content per user interaction than Google ever has -- with even less return to creators. "What do you think it is for OpenAI? 250 to one. What do you think it is for Anthropic? Six thousand to one." "More and more the answers... won't lead you to the original source, it will be some derivative of that source." This situation threatens the sustainability of the web as we know it, Prince said: "If content creators can't derive value... then they're not going to create original content."

The modern web is breaking. AI companies are aware of the problem, and the business model of the web can't survive unless there's some change, Prince said: "Sam Altman at OpenAI and others get that. But... he can't be the only one paying for content when everyone else gets it for free." Cloudflare's right in the middle of this problem -- it powers 80% of AI companies and a 20-30% of the web. Cloudfaire is now trying to figure out how to help fix what's broken, Prince said. AI = money fire. Prince is not against AI. However, he said he is skeptical of the investment frenzy. "I would guess that 99% of the money that people are spending on these projects today is just getting lit on fire. But 1% is going to be incredibly valuable." "And so maybe we've all got a light, you know, $100 on fire to find that $1 that matters." You can watch a recording of the interview and read the full transcript here.

Chief executives are exiting their posts at an unprecedented rate as economic volatility and emerging challenges reshape corporate leadership decisions, according to data from executive tracking firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Public-company CEO departures reached 373 last year, jumping 24% from 2023 levels. Among U.S. businesses with at least 25 employees, 2,221 chief executives left their positions in 2024, the highest number since Challenger began monitoring departures in 2002.

Corporate leaders are citing AI, tariffs, recession fears and scrutiny of diversity initiatives as key stressors driving the exodus. "It's a very difficult time to lead," said Blake Irving, former GoDaddy CEO. "Given all the weird gyrations going on in the economy and with our new administration, it's really hard for even great leaders to find a true north." The trend extends beyond the C-suite, with managers 1.7 times more likely to report high workplace stress than rank-and-file employees, according to a recent McLean & Co. survey of over 200,000 workers.

An industrial plan China rolled out a decade ago that was criticized by the U.S. as protectionist has been highly successful in narrowing China's technological gap with the West, a new study finds. From a report: The study, commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is set to intensify the debate in Washington and elsewhere over how to counter China's use of state subsidies and other strategies to bolster its competitiveness. To placate President Trump during his first-term trade war with China, Beijing dropped mentions of the "Made in China 2025" plan, leader Xi Jinping's signature industrial strategy, from public discourse. But the policy stayed in place.

The study, released Monday, shows that enormous state support unleashed under the strategy has enabled China to eliminate or reduce its dependence on imports such as rail and power equipment, medical devices and renewable-energy products. In addition, Chinese companies have become more competitive globally, gaining market share from foreign companies in sectors including shipbuilding and robotics. The findings in the study, conducted by economic consulting firm Rhodium Group, highlight the stakes for the U.S. and other advanced economies as Beijing continues to advance Xi's blueprint to make China a leader in high-tech industries.

An anonymous reader shared this report from The Verge: Firefox could be put out of business should a court implement all the [U.S.] Justice Department's proposals to restrict Google's search monopoly, an executive for the browser owner Mozilla testified Friday. "It's very frightening," Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim said.

The Department of Justice wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a forced sale of Google's own Chrome browser and requiring it to syndicate search results to rivals. The court has already ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in search, partly thanks to exclusionary deals that make it the default engine on browsers and phones, depriving rivals of places to distribute their search engines and scale up. But while Firefox — whose CFO is testifying as Google presents its defense — competes directly with Chrome, it warns that losing the lucrative default payments from Google could threaten its existence.

Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla's revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization's for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added. Losing that revenue all at once would mean Mozilla would have to make "significant cuts across the company," Muhlheim testified, and warned of a "downward spiral" that could happen if the company had to scale back product engineering investments in Firefox, making it less attractive to users. That kind of spiral, he said, could "put Firefox out of business." That could also mean less money for nonprofit efforts like open source web tools and an assessment of how AI can help fight climate change.

Ironically, Muhlheim seemed to suggest that could cement the very market dominance the court seeks to remedy. Firefox's underlying Gecko browser engine is "the only browser engine that is held not by Big Tech but by a nonprofit," he said.

Apple said a majority of its devices shipped into the U.S. in the June quarter will originate in India and Vietnam, a move to allay investor concerns about the impact of tariffs on its operations. From a report: The company was among the hardest-hit of the tech giants last month because of its exposure to China, a primary target of the Trump administration's global tariff pressure. Most of Apple's devices are assembled in the country, and investors are closely watching its efforts to shift final assembly of devices bound for the U.S. to India and other countries.

Chief Executive Tim Cook said the impact in the June quarter from tariffs, assuming existing policies remain in place, would add $900 million to Apple's costs, a figure he suggested could be worse in future quarters. He also said that there was limited impact from tariffs in March. [...] He added that Apple would continue to diversify its supply chain away from China. "What we learned some time ago was that having everything in one location had too much risk with it," he said. Further reading: JPMorgan Says India-Assembled iPhone Within Spitting Distance of China Price.

Donald Trump's crypto company created a digital dollar called USD1, which is now being used by a big investor in Abu Dhabi to help fund a $2 billion deal with Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange. Reuters reports: Stablecoins are an increasingly lucrative cog in global crypto trading. Their issuers typically profit by earning interest from the Treasuries and other assets that underpin them. The value of USD1 in circulation reached about $2.1 billion on Wednesday, according to CoinMarketCap data, making it one of the fastest-growing stablecoins. The identity of its major holders, however, remains unclear. An anonymous cryptocurrency wallet that holds $2 billion worth of USD1 received the funds between April 16 and 29, according to data from crypto research firm Arkham. Reuters could not ascertain the owner of this wallet.

Binance founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao, who was incarcerated in the United States last year after pleading guilty to violating U.S. laws against money laundering, met Zach Witkoff and two other World Liberty co-founders in Abu Dhabi, according to a photo posted on social media site X on Sunday. "It was great to see our friends," in Abu Dhabi, posted Zhao in response to the photo, tagging Witkoff. Zhao, who in 2023 stepped down from his role at Binance as part of a $4.3 billion settlement with the U.S. over the illicit finance charges, remains a major shareholder of Binance.

Separately, Zach Witkoff announced that USD1 would be integrated into Tron, the blockchain of Hong Kong-based crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun. Sun is the biggest known investor in World Liberty and an adviser to the venture, according to his social media posts, having poured at least $75 million into the project. Sun was fighting a U.S. securities fraud lawsuit at the time of his first investment in World Liberty. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in February paused its case against him, citing public interest.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Instead of depressing wages or taking jobs, generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have had almost no wage or labor impact so far -- a finding that calls into question the huge capital expenditures required to create and run AI models. In a working paper released earlier this month, economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard looked at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark in 2023 and 2024.

Many of these occupations have been described as being vulnerable to AI: accountants, customer support specialists, financial advisors, HR professionals, IT support specialists, journalists, legal professionals, marketing professionals, office clerks, software developers, and teachers. Yet after Humlum, assistant professor of economics at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, and Vestergaard, a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen, analyzed the data, they found the labor and wage impact of chatbots to be minimal. "AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation," the authors state in their paper.

The report should concern the tech industry, which has hyped AI's economic potential while plowing billions into infrastructure meant to support it. Early this year, OpenAI admitted that it loses money per query even on its most expensive enterprise SKU, while companies like Microsoft and Amazon are starting to pull back on their AI infrastructure spending in light of low business adoption past a few pilots. The problem isn't that workers are avoiding generative AI chatbots -- quite the contrary. But they simply aren't yet equating to actual economic benefits. "The adoption of these chatbots has been remarkably fast," Humlum told The Register. "Most workers in the exposed occupations have now adopted these chatbots. Employers are also shifting gears and actively encouraging it. But then when we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle."

Humlum said while there are gains and time savings to be had, "there's definitely a question of who they really accrue to. And some of it could be the firms -- we cannot directly look at firm profitability. Some of it could also just be that you save some time on existing tasks, but you're not really able to expand your output and therefore earn more. So it's like it saves you time writing emails. But if you cannot really take on more work or do something else that is really valuable, then that will put a damper on how much we should actually expect those time savings to affect your earning ability, your total hours, your wages."

"In terms of economic outcomes, when we're looking at hard metrics -- in the administrative labor market data on earnings, wages -- these tools have really not made a difference so far," said Humlum. "So I think that that puts in some sense an upper bound on what return we should expect from these tools, at least in the short run. My general conclusion is that any story that you want to tell about these tools being very transformative, needs to contend with the fact that at least two years after [the introduction of AI chatbots], they've not made a difference for economic outcomes."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: The secretive Russian satellite in space that U.S. officials believe is connected to a nuclear anti-satellite weapon program has appeared to be spinning uncontrollably, suggesting it may no longer be functioning in what could be a setback for Moscow's space weapon efforts, according to U.S. analysts... [The Cosmos 2553 satellite launched in 2022] has had various bouts of what appears to be errant spinning over the past year, according to Doppler radar data from space-tracking firm LeoLabs and optical data from Slingshot Aerospace shared with Reuters.

Believed to be a radar satellite for Russian intelligence as well as a radiation testing platform, the satellite last year became the center of U.S. allegations that Russia for years has been developing a nuclear weapon capable of destroying entire satellite networks, such as SpaceX's vast Starlink internet system that Ukrainian troops have been using. U.S. officials assess Cosmos 2553's purpose, though not itself a weapon, is to aid Russia's development of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon. Russia has denied it is developing such a weapon and says Cosmos 2553 is for research purposes....

"This observation strongly suggests the satellite is no longer operational," the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, said of LeoLabs' analysis in its annual Space Threat Assessment published on Friday.

"Not so long ago, working in tech meant job security, extravagant perks and a bring-your-whole-self-to-the-office ethos rare in other industries," writes the Wall Street Journal.

But now tech work "looks like a regular job," with workers "contending with the constant fear of layoffs, longer hours and an ever-growing list of responsibilities for the same pay." Now employees find themselves doing the work of multiple laid-off colleagues. Some have lost jobs only to be rehired into positions that aren't eligible for raises or stock grants. Changing jobs used to be a surefire way to secure a raise; these days, asking for more money can lead to a job offer being withdrawn.

The shift in tech has been building slowly. For years, demand for workers outstripped supply, a dynamic that peaked during the Covid-19 pandemic. Big tech companies like Meta and Salesforce admitted they brought on too many employees. The ensuing downturn included mass layoffs that started in 2022...

[S]ome longtime tech employees say they no longer recognize the companies they work for. Management has become more focused on delivering the results Wall Street expects. Revenue remains strong for tech giants, but they're pouring resources into costly AI infrastructure, putting pressure on cash flow. With the industry all grown up, a heads-down, keep-quiet mentality has taken root, workers say... Tech workers are still well-paid compared with other sectors, but currently there's a split in the industry. Those working in AI — and especially those with Ph.D.s — are seeing their compensation packages soar. But those without AI experience are finding they're better off staying where they are, because companies aren't paying what they were a few years ago.
Other excepts from the Wall Street Journal's article:

• "I'm hearing of people having 30 direct reports," says David Markley, who spent seven years at Amazon and is now an executive coach for workers at large tech companies. "It's not because the companies don't have the money. In a lot of ways, it's because of AI and the narratives out there about how collapsing the organization is better...."

• In some cases, companies post record revenue while still trimming head count.

• Google co-founder Sergey Brin told a group of employees in February that 60 hours a week was the sweet spot of productivity, in comments reported earlier by the New York Times.

• One recruiter at Meta who had been laid off by the company was rehired into her old role last year, but with a catch: She's now classified as a "short-term employee." Her contract is eligible for renewal, but she doesn't get merit pay increases, promotions or stock. The recruiter says she's responsible for a volume of work that used to be spread among several people. The company refers to being loaded with such additional responsibilities as "agility."

• More than 50,000 tech workers from over 100 companies have been laid off in 2025, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts and crowdsources lists of laid off workers...

Even before those 50,000 layoffs in 2025, Silicon Valley's Mercury News was citing some interesting statistics from economic research/consulting firm Beacon Economics. In 2020, 2021 and 2022, the San Francisco Bay Area added 74,700 tech jobs But then in 2023 and 2024 the industry had slashed even more tech jobs -- 80,200 -- for a net loss (over five years) of 5,500.

So is there really a cutback in perks and a fear of layoffs that's casting a pall over the industry? share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Do you agree with the picture that's being painted by the Wall Street Journal?

They told their readers that tech workers are now "just like the rest of us: miserable at work."

80-year-old George Lucas appeared this week at a 45th anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back, reports CNN — and finally gave a good explanation for why Yoda speaks the way he does. "He explained that it came about in order to ensure that the little alien's usually profound messages really landed with audiences." "Because if you speak regular English, people won't listen that much," Lucas said at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival, per Variety . "But if he had an accent, or it's really hard to understand what he's saying, they focus on what he's saying." Yoda was "basically the philosopher of the movie," the filmmaker added. "I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen — especially 12-year-olds."

Also this week, the verified Instagram accounts for Disney+, Star Wars and LucasFilm — Lucas' film and television production company — posted clips of Yoda doing bloopers on the set of "Star Wars" films, with [Frank] Oz continuing to do the voice and manipulate the heavy Yoda puppet even on takes that were unusable. Suffice it to say: One for the ages, Yoda is.
Lucas also remembered how he'd "mounted a guerilla campaign to generate excitement" for the first Star Wars movie, reports Variety. ("I got the kids walking around Disneyland and the Comic Cons and all that kind of stuff... that's why Fox was so shocked when the first day the lines were all around the block.") And Variety says Lucas described a condition in his contract for Star Wars "that would again be life-changing, both for him and the entertainment industry as a whole." "I said, 'besides that, I'd like licensing.' They went, 'What's licensing?'" Unimpressed by the film, and colored by the history of movie merchandising to that point, the studio capitulated to his demands. "They talked to themselves, and they went, 'He's never going to be able to do that. It takes them a billion dollars and a year to make a toy or make anything. There's no money in that at all.'"

"4chan, down for more than a week after hackers got in through an insecure script that handled PDFs, is back online," notes BoingBoing. (They add that Thursday saw 4chan's first blog postin years — just the words "Testing testing 123 123...") But 4chan posted a much longer explanation on Friday," confirming their servers were compromised by a malicious PDF upload from "a hacker using a UK IP address," granting access to their databases and administrative dashboard.

The attacker "spent several hours exfiltrating database tables and much of 4chan's source code. When they had finished downloading what they wanted, they began to vandalize 4chan at which point moderators became aware and 4chan's servers were halted, preventing further access." While not all of our servers were breached, the most important one was, and it was due to simply not updating old operating systems and code in a timely fashion. Ultimately this problem was caused by having insufficient skilled man-hours available to update our code and infrastructure, and being starved of money for years by advertisers, payment providers, and service providers who had succumbed to external pressure campaigns. We had begun a process of speccing new servers in late 2023. As many have suspected, until that time 4chan had been running on a set of servers purchased second-hand by moot a few weeks before his final Q&A [in 2015], as prior to then we simply were not in a financial position to consider such a large purchase. Advertisers and payment providers willing to work with 4chan are rare, and are quickly pressured by activists into cancelling their services. Putting together the money for new equipment took nearly a decade...

The free time that 4chan's development team had available to dedicate to 4chan was insufficient to update our software and infrastructure fast enough, and our luck ran out. However, we have not been idle during our nearly two weeks of downtime. The server that was breached has been replaced, with the operating system and code updated to the latest versions. PDF uploads have been temporarily disabled on those boards that supported them, but they will be back in the near future. One slow but much beloved board, /f/ — Flash, will not be returning however, as there is no realistic way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files.

We are bringing on additional volunteer developers to help keep up with the workload, and our team of volunteer janitors & moderators remains united despite the grievous violations some have suffered to their personal privacy.

4chan is back. No other website can replace it, or this community. No matter how hard it is, we are not giving up.