Two U.S. authors have filed a proposed class action lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the company infringed their copyrights by using their works without permission to train its generative AI system, ChatGPT. The plaintiffs, Massachusetts-based writers Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, claim the data used to train ChatGPT included thousands of books, including those from illegal "shadow libraries." Reuters reports: The complaint estimated that OpenAI's training data incorporated over 300,000 books, including from illegal "shadow libraries" that offer copyrighted books without permission. Awad is known for novels including "13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl" and "Bunny." Tremblay's novels include "The Cabin at the End of the World," which was adapted in the M. Night Shyamalan film "Knock at the Cabin" released in February.

Tremblay and Awad said ChatGPT could generate "very accurate" summaries of their books, indicating that they appeared in its database. The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of money damages on behalf of a nationwide class of copyright owners whose works OpenAI allegedly misused.

"Alaska Weather," a daily 30-minute TV show that has broadcast across Alaska for the past 47 years, is going off the air due to a lack of funds. Gizmodo reports: In lieu of the news, residents seeking information on their state's weather will be forced to lean on spotty, sub-par internet. Friday evening will be the final television installment of "Alaska Weather," as first reported by Alaska Public Media. The show, which is the only weather program produced directly by the National Weather Service, has filled an information and communications void for decades. Without it, "if you don't have good internet connectivity, you're in a world of hurt in western and northern Alaska as far as getting weather information," said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center, to the Associated Press. And many in Alaska don't have reliable or fast internet access.

General, aviation, and maritime forecast segments will remain available online only, via YouTube. Emergency alerts, like storm warnings, will be relegated to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration radio broadcasts, which don't cover the whole state, per Alaska Public Media. Officials from the state-owned, non-profit media organization say that money problems are to blame. Putting together and distributing "Alaska Weather" has cost Alaska Public Media $200,000 annually, and the network can't afford to do it anymore, according to Linda Wei, APM's chief content officer.

"It's no longer sustainable for us to continue in this manner," Wei told AP. "It's not a decision that we came to lightly." Big state funding cuts in 2019 left APM in a tough spot. The media org kept "Alaska Weather" going on its own for years, following the loss of state backing, but now Wei says the network can't anymore. "We've been doing this, without support, for about four or five years, and we've made that known to NOAA," said Wei to WaPo. "It just got to the point where we couldn't continue." Wei says she's hoping there's a possibility of getting "Alaska Weather" back on the air. But for now, there will be a gap.

The U.S. Federal Reserve announced on Thursday that 57 firms have been certified to utilize its "FedNow" instant payments system after it launches in late July. From a report: The Fed did not provide a specific date for the launch, but 41 banks and 15 service providers, including large firms like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of New York Mellon, US Bancorp and Wells Fargo, have completed formal testing and will be ready to provide instant payments after the new service is live.

Investigations triggered by the cracking of encrypted phones three years ago have so far led to more than 6,500 arrests worldwide and the seizure of hundreds of tons of drugs, French, Dutch and European Union prosecutors said Tuesday. From a report: The announcement underscored the staggering scale of criminality -- mainly drugs and arms smuggling and money laundering -- that was uncovered as a result of police and prosecutors effectively listening in to criminals using encrypted EncroChat phones. "It helped to prevent violent attacks, attempted murders, corruption and large-scale drug transports, as well as obtain large-scale information on organised crime," European Union police and judicial cooperation agencies Europol and Eurojust said in a statement.

The French and Dutch investigation gained access to more than 115 million encrypted communications between some 60,000 criminals via servers in the northern French town of Roubaix, prosecutors said at a news conference in the nearby city of Lille. As a result, 6,558 suspects have been arrested worldwide, including 197 "high-value targets." Seized drugs included 30.5 million pills, 103.5 metric tons (114 tons) of cocaine, 163.4 metric tons (180 tons) of cannabis and 3.3 metric tons (3.6 tons) of heroin. The investigations also led to nearly 740 million euros ($809 million) in cash being recovered and assets or bank accounts worth another 154 million euros ($168 million) frozen.

In the span of half a year, ChatGPT has become one of the world's best-known internet brands. Now its creator, OpenAI, has bigger plans for the chatbot: CEO Sam Altman privately told some developers OpenAI wants to turn it into a "supersmart personal assistant for work." From a report: With built-in knowledge about an individual and their workplace, such an assistant could carry out tasks such as drafting emails or documents in that person's style and with up-to-date information about their business. The assistant features could put OpenAI on a collision course with Microsoft, its primary business partner, investor and cloud provider, as well as with other OpenAI software customers such as Salesforce.

Those firms also want to use OpenAI's software to build AI "copilots" for people to use at work. But for OpenAI, building new ChatGPT capabilities will be the focus of its commercial efforts, according to Altman's comments and two other people with knowledge of the company's plans. Companies are still in the first innings of making money from the latest crop of AI services, and the race is on to figure out what products and business models will create the most value. Large-language models that allow ChatGPT and other software to understand conversational commands are relatively new, although Microsoft is already charging a 40% premium to Office 365 customers that want to use OpenAI's LLMs to automate tasks such as creating PowerPoint presentations based on text documents, summarizing meetings or drafting email responses.

Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios chief, Matt Booty, was encouraging Xbox CFO Tim Stuart to spend big money on acquiring game content in 2019 to set the company up to battle Sony in subscriptions. From a report: The revelation comes in an email thread that's part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing. "We (Microsoft) are in a very unique position to be able to go spend Sony out of business," said Booty in a December 2019 email, referencing spending $2 billion or $3 billion in 2020 to avoid competitors getting ahead in content at a later date.

"It is practically impossible for anyone to start a new video streaming service at scale at this point," said Booty, referencing competitors like Google, Amazon, and Sony. Booty described content as a moat and that only Sony could really compete with Xbox Game Pass: "In games, Google is 3 to 4 years away from being able to have a studio up and running. Amazon has shown no ability to execute on game content. Content is the one moat that we have, in terms of a catalog that runs on current devices and capability to create new. Sony is really the only other player who could compete with Game Pass and we have a 2 year and 10 million subs lead."

Microsoft argues the email is old and that it never pursued such a strategy anyway.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: Americans hate their internet service providers (ISPs) more than any other segment of the consumer economy -- except gas stations. A fresh set of rankings from the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) reveals that few consumers are happy with the way their ISPs conduct business, preferring them only over trips to the pump in a list of 43 major industries. The rankings come courtesy of the ACSI's most recent telecommunications study, which the organization publishes annually. The study covers subscription TV services, video streaming services, and ISPs of both the fiber and non-fiber variety. Using interviews with 22,061 American consumers conducted between April 2022 and March 2023, this year's telecommunications study investigates just how happy people are with their ISPs, then pits that data against that of several other industries. This year, ISPs ranked lower than the endlessly frustrating automobile, banking, and health insurance industries, as well as 39 others that people tend to have an easier time with, such as breweries and athletic shoes.

On a satisfaction scale of 1 to 100, ISPs earned a lackluster 68, which consists of fiber's 75-point and non-fiber's 66-point satisfaction scores combined. The ACSI used customers' input on a number of experiential data points, from choosing a plan to actually using their home Wi-Fi networks, to calculate both scores and combine them based on usage. Although fiber customers found their internet to be relatively reliable and their bills easy to understand, earning an 80 in both categories, non-fiber customers weren't as impressed at 72 and 75, respectively. Unsurprisingly, both fiber and non-fiber customers enjoyed reaching out to their providers' customer service teams the least out of 14 total data points.

There was only one industry that ranked lower than ISPs. As much as Americans generally dislike the way ISPs manage hardware, pricing, customer service, outages, and more, they dislike gas stations even more, giving the category a measly score of 65. While the ACSI doesn't share respondents' reasoning (it's a telecommunications study, after all), it's easy to see why consumers might not enjoy spending obscene money to fill their tanks at dusty roadside stops.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Working from home appears to be here to stay, especially for women and college-educated workers, according to economic data released Thursday that revealed how Americans spent their time in 2022. The data, from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), suggests that the pandemic changes that upended the workplace, family life and social interactions continue to have a lasting effect on life in the United States.

Many white-collar workers who hunkered down at home during pandemic shutdowns have returned to the office, but extraordinarily high numbers have not. For many, remote work appears to be a new normal... Working from home "is a permanent shift," said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. "We're now seeing many companies start as remote-first companies." The new data is a "continuation of what we've been seeing" in the American workforce, she said...

The annual survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau asks thousands of Americans how they spent the past 24 hours of their lives across different categories of activities. Results from 2019 through 2021 showed that the pandemic dramatically shifted how much time people spend working at home. The new data suggests those changes persisted through 2022, even as much of life returned to normal as more people got vaccinated and boosted against the coronavirus, and case counts fell...

There is a clear benefit to remote work for employees, Pollak said. Working from home saves time and money on commuting, and many employees want the flexibility to work from anywhere, to better support their parents or children. She said remote work also is "part of the reason for this huge spike in new business formation. It has lowered the barriers to starting a business."
The 2022 figures show 34% of workers over the age of 15 still said they were working at home — and 54% of workers with a workers with a bachelor's degree or higher. (Meanwhile, workers without a high school diploma "were even less likely to work from home in 2022 than they were before the pandemic.")

The Post also reports another interesting finding in the data. "Americans ages 20 to 24 are the only group that spent more time socializing than before the pandemic. Teenagers, and adults ages 55 to 64, reported an overall decline in time spent socializing since before the pandemic."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: By pretending to be legitimate music rightsholders, two men managed to extract over $23 million in revenue from YouTube's content-ID system. Both were arrested, pleaded guilty (PDF), and now face multi-year prison terms. This week, the U.S. requested a 70-month sentence against the 'number two' of the operation, in part to deter future fraud. [...] Last year, one of the defendants confessed to his part in the copyright swindle by pleading guilty. Webster Batista admitted it was a simple scheme: find Latin American music that wasn't yet monetized on YouTube and claim the content as their own. In February of this year, the second defendant pleaded guilty. Jose Teran signed a plea agreement admitting that he was part of the conspiracy, engaging in wire fraud and money laundering.

The Content ID scam was straightforward, Teran's plea agreement revealed. The defendants simply identified unmonetized music and uploaded those songs to YouTube. [W]e discovered there were recorded songs of musicians and bands on the internet that were not being monetized. We began searching and downloading these songs. Once songs were downloaded, Batista would then upload them to Y.T. as mp3 files." "We falsely claimed legal ownership over these songs to receive royalty payments," Teran adds, noting that the scheme brought in millions. To collect these payments Batista launched the company MediaMuv, which became a trusted YouTube Content ID member through a third-party company referred to by the initials A.R. As the scheme grew, more employees were hired and tasked with finding more unmonetized tracks.

Despite pleading guilty, both defendants face a multi-year stint in prison. Teran will be the first to be sentenced and this week, the defendant and the prosecution announced their respective positions. According to the defense, Teran wasn't the lead of the operation. As an aspiring musician he looked up to his co-defendant, who is portrayed as the brains behind the operation. [...] Teran and Batista at one point had between five and eight people working for them. These employees used special software to find unmonetized music which they would then add to their catalog, to exploit YouTube's Content ID system. "Defendant, Jose Teran, engaged in a concerted effort -- over nearly five years -- to steal royalty proceeds from approximately 50,000 song titles, causing a loss of more than $23,000,000.00," the prosecution writes (PDF). "A 70-month sentence is undoubtedly substantial but given Mr. Teran's conduct and the need to deter future fraud, it is entirely warranted," the Government's sentencing memorandum concludes.

American retailers see opportunities in the primary-care business. From a report: With his long white coat, stethoscope, genially soothing manner and wonky eagerness to discuss "population health management" and "patient-centred" medicine, Ronald Searcy seems the Platonic ideal of a primary-care doctor. The most unusual thing about him is where he works: a compact facility complete with examination rooms, dentist's office, phlebotomy lab and X-ray room tucked into a Walmart in north-west Arkansas. Since 2019, Walmart has opened 32 of these "health centres" in five states; by the end of next year it plans to more than double that number, and expand into two more states. Walmart is not the only big company expanding its medical offerings.

[...] What do these companies see in the medical business? The answer, befitting America's Byzantine and rent-filled health-care system, is both simple and complex. The simple answer is money. Americans spend a stunning amount of it on health: roughly 18% of GDP in 2021, far exceeding the rich-country average of about 10% and more than double the ratio of some, such as South Korea, with healthier and longer-lived populations. Americans' spending is forecast to rise by 5.4% per year over the next eight years, outpacing economic growth and accounting for almost 20% of GDP by 2031. The bulk of that spending will come from Medicaid and Medicare, federal programmes that cover health-care costs for, respectively, poor people and over-65s. The complex part reflects changes in how insurers, including Medicaid and Medicare, pay for coverage; as well as changes in how consumers are willing to get it.

A stark business reality faced Reddit before a user uprising engulfed its site this month: slowing sales growth. From a report: Reddit's revenue rose 38% in 2022 to about $670 million last year, two people familiar with the matter said, faster than many other internet ad firms but a steep slowdown from the more than doubling of revenue the company experienced in 2021 over 2020. The slowdown adds to uncertainty about Reddit's hopes of going public. It comes in the wake of a highly public battle between Reddit and third-party apps that connect to Reddit and are popular with users and moderators. The battle has highlighted the challenges for many internet firms that rely on content from users but are trying to build profit-making businesses.

And the 2022 sales figure, which hasn't been previously reported, suggests Reddit would face a significant valuation haircut from its last private round if public investors valued it similarly to peer companies. The 2022 revenue multiple at which Snap and Meta Platforms are trading suggests Reddit is worth just over $3.3 billion. That's about one-third the value private investors put on the company less than two years ago, when Reddit last raised money.

The US government is providing a conditional $9.2 billion loan to Ford for the construction of three battery factories, the largest government backing for a US automaker since the 2009 financial crisis. "The enormous loan [...] marks a watershed moment for President Joe Biden's aggressive industrial policy meant to help American manufacturers catch up to China in green technologies," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The new factories that will eventually supply Ford's expansion into electric vehicles are already under construction in Kentucky and Tennessee through a joint venture called BlueOval SK, owned by the Michigan automaker and South Korean battery giant SK On Co. Ford plans to make as many as 2 million EVs by 2026, a huge increase from the roughly 132,000 it produced last year. The three-factory buildout by BlueOval plus an adjacent Ford EV assembly unit have an estimated price tag of $11.4 billion. BlueOval was previously awarded subsidies by both state governments. That means taxpayers would be providing low-interest financing for almost all of the cost.

Ford's cars and SUVs made with domestic batteries will also be eligible for billions of dollars in incentives embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act's $370 billion in clean-energy funding, part of the historic climate measure narrowly passed into law about a year ago. The US government will subsidize manufacturing of batteries, and buyers could qualify for additional tax rebates of up to $7,500 per vehicle.

The rush of incentives, government lending and private-sector investment has led to a manufacturing boom in the wake of the IRA. More than 100 battery and electric-vehicle production projects are announced or already under construction in the US, representing about $200 billion in total investments. "Not since the advent of the auto industry 100 years ago have we seen an investment like that," says Gary Silberg, KPMG's global automotive sector leader.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed new rules to crack down on hidden fees charged by cable and satellite video providers. "My administration's top priority is lowering the cost of living for the middle class, and that includes cracking down on companies' use of junk fees to hide true costs from families, who end up paying more as a result," Biden said in a statement on Tuesday. Ars Technica reports: As Biden noted, the FCC "proposed a new rule that would require cable and satellite TV providers to give consumers the all-in price for the service they're offering up front." The proposed rule would force companies like Comcast, Charter Spectrum, and DirecTV to publish more accurate prices. Biden continued: "Too often, these companies hide additional junk fees on customer bills disguised as "broadcast TV" or "regional sports" fees that in reality pay for no additional services. These fees really add up: according to one report, they increase customer bills by nearly 25 percent of the price of base service."

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel first floated pricing transparency rules for the TV services offered by cable and satellite companies in March. That effort took a step forward on Tuesday when the commission approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that seeks public comment on rules that would force video providers to offer accurate prices in advertising. "Consumers who choose a video service based on an advertised monthly price may be surprised by unexpected fees related to the cost of video programming that raise the amount of the bill significantly," the NPRM said. The cable and satellite TV companies' practice of listing "Broadcast TV" and "Regional Sports Network" fees separately from the advertised price "can be potentially misleading and interpreted as a government-imposed tax or fee, instead of a company-imposed service fee increase," and make it hard for customers to compare prices across providers, the FCC said.

The docket is available here, and comments will be accepted for 60 days after the NPRM is published in the Federal Register. The FCC said its proposal "would require cable operators and DBS [direct broadcast satellite] providers to clearly and prominently display the total cost of video programming service." The FCC is also seeking comment on whether it has the authority to impose similar requirements on other types of video providers. But Rosenworcel reportedly said in a congressional hearing that the FCC's authority under US law doesn't extend to streaming services.

Discord is introducing new ways to generate revenue, including server subscriptions, tiered subscriptions, and the ability for server owners to sell digital products. This move has raised concerns among some users who feel that Discord is becoming less welcoming and more like the paywalled internet it was once an escape from. PC Gamer reports: "To date, we've paid out millions of dollars to thousands of creators and communities, and we're seeing more creators and communities earning on their Discord servers every day," wrote product manager Derek Yang in a blog post published today. "...Today, we're excited to share new tools that help you get started earning money faster."

The nickel-and-dime-ification of Discord servers begins this week with "media channels," a new type of channel (currently in beta) designed to host subscriber-only content, including, for instance, "exclusive memes and wallpapers." You could see an art creator using this Discord feature to post subscriber-only illustrations, as many comic creators and other illustrators already use Patreon to do.

Not a bad deal for creators, but that's only the start of the new revenue streams Discord, who currently takes a 10% cut of server subscriptions, plans to implement. Here's a full list of what the free (now with three asterisks) chat app has in the works:

- Tier Templates: Formalized subscription tiers with prices set by Discord ($3.99, $4.99, $7.99, and $9.99)
- Downloadables: One-time purchasable digital products or subscriptions sold by server owners, which will be accessed via ...
- Server Shops: "A single home for server owners to sell Server Subscriptions, Downloadables and Premium Roles"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After threatening to do so last week, Reddit has now removed the moderators of some of the subreddits that were protesting Reddit's new API pricing scheme. Some of these subreddits have new mods in the protesters' place, while other affected subreddits have been left unmoderated. Still others, oddly, saw their moderators reinstated. Reddit claims the moves are a response to mods breaking its Moderator Code of Conduct by allowing "not safe for work" (NSFW) content in previously "safe for work" subreddits. However, moderators who spoke to Ars Technica believe Reddit's actions are designed to silence their protests over the new fees.

Various Reddit moderators reached out to Ars Technica this week, informing us that mods for r/Celebrities, r/InterestInGasFuck_, r/mildlyinteresting, r/self, r/ShittyLifeProTips, and r/TIHI have been removed. Other subreddits are reportedly affected, too, including r/toyota, r/garmin, and r/IllegalLifeProTips. All of the communities recently started allowing NSFW content as a form of API pricing protest. Reddit can't sell ads on NSFW content, and Redditors have accused the company of covertly switching some subreddits back to SFW.

As of this writing, some of the subreddits whose mods were removed remain unmoderated. Other subreddits have new mods. One example, r/Celebrities, has already seen resistance from community members, claiming the new mods "don't represent" them and that these mods weren't active in the community before the protests. Meanwhile, the feeling around the general mod community is one of disgust, while some are seriously considering abandoning their volunteer posts or have already done so. "We put up with a lot as Reddit mods—death threats, doxing, sorting through lewd and even illegal material (that Reddit continually ignores)—and deserve to be treated with basic respect," a Reddit moderator, who asked to be referred to only as Jess for privacy reasons, said regarding the removal of some mods. The mod has started erasing their account and has resigned as a moderator. "I have no desire to be associated with a company that conducts itself in such a manner," Jess said. Confusingly, the moderators of some of the subreddits, including r/mildlyinteresting, were restored. Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said in a statement: "It's not OK to show people NSFW content when they don't want to see it. In line with our Moderator Code of Conduct, we'll remove moderators and restrict communities where moderators are engaging in malicious conduct, like allowing rule-violating behavior or encouraging the submission of sexually explicit content in previously safe-for-work spaces."

He added that mods "incorrectly marking a community as NSFW is a violation of both our Content Policy and Moderator Code of Conduct."

Ars notes that replacing Reddit moderators isn't so simple. "The free work Reddit moderators do has been valued at $3.4 million annually, and as detailed on the r/hentai subreddit, the work mods do is both complex and extensive," reports Ars. "Reddit itself calculated that manual mod removals represented 30.9 percent of content removed in 2022. Reddit would be a different website, one perhaps incapable of functioning, without the tens of thousands of volunteers it uses to keep content safe, enjoyable, relevant, and valuable. Relying on volunteers saves the unprofitable company plenty of money."

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday sued Amazon for illegally inducing consumers to sign up for its Prime service and then hindering them from canceling the subscription, the most aggressive action against the company to date by the agency's chair, Lina Khan. From a report: The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, argues that Amazon had used design tactics on its website known as "dark patterns" to nudge people into subscribing to Prime, the F.T.C. said in a release. And when consumers wanted to cancel, they had to go through a byzantine process to do so.

"Amazon tricked and trapped people into recurring subscriptions without their consent, not only frustrating users but also costing them significant money," Ms. Khan said in a statement. The lawsuit was the first time that the F.T.C. has taken Amazon to court under Ms. Khan, who rose to fame with a viral critique of the company and who is ramping up scrutiny of the e-commerce giant. Ms. Khan has said the power that big tech companies have over online commerce requires regulators to be far more aggressive and has begun taking actions against them./i.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Adults ages 19 to 64 in the United States should be screened for anxiety disorders, according to a new recommendation from the US Preventive Services Task Force released Tuesday. The final recommendation, published in the medical journal JAMA, marks the first time the USPSTF has made a final recommendation on screening for anxiety disorders in adults, including those who are pregnant and postpartum. The task force found "insufficient evidence" to screen for anxiety in older adults. The USPSTF, a group of independent medical experts whose recommendations help guide doctors' decisions and influence insurance plans, also continues to recommend that all adults be screened for major depressive disorder, including those who are pregnant or postpartum and older adults. The recommendation is consistent with the task force's 2016 recommendation on depression screenings.

While rates of clinical depression had been rising steadily in the United States, they jumped significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic. In general, about 1 in 6 adults will have depression at some time in their life, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And although depression and anxiety are different conditions, they commonly can happen together -- and such screening recommendations can help clinicians identify which patients may need treatment for both conditions or one versus the other. "Anxiety disorders are common, and they can really impact people's quality of life, and what the task force found is that screening for anxiety disorders in the general adult population can lead to identifying these conditions early and then, if those people who are identified get linked up with appropriate care, they will benefit," said Dr. Michael Silverstein, vice chair of the USPSTF and director of the Hassenfeld Child Health Innovation Institute at Brown University. "So it really is extremely good news for the delivery of preventive services for the American public," he said. "We also found that in the older adult population, which is defined as age 65 and older, that the task force really needs more evidence to weigh the risks and benefits of screening for anxiety disorders. And for that older adult population, we're calling for urgent new research."

USPSTF researchers noted in their anxiety screening recommendation statement that most people with anxiety disorders don't receive treatment within the first year of symptoms, if ever -- showing a need for more robust screening. "Only 11% of US adults with an anxiety disorder started treatment within the first year of onset; the median time to treatment initiation was 23 years," the researchers wrote. "A US study of 965 primary care patients found that only 41% of patients with an anxiety disorder were receiving treatment for their disorder." Once the new screening recommendations are practiced in the real world, the results may reveal that anxiety disorders are much more prevalent than previously thought, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, who was not involved in the recommendation statements. "Anxiety has been way under the radar for a long time, and so I think it's good that they are recommending for the broad population to be screened. When we start screening for anxiety, we're going to find a lot more of it than we thought we had," he said.

"I think it's an opportunity for us to get our hands around this crisis before we have a mental health emergency," Benjamin added. "So we definitely have to do more. We know as a nation, we have under-invested in mental health. We have not put as much money into mental health. We have not been treating mental health at the same level as physical health. And we know that people who need mental health services are really struggling to find providers to care for them."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Although Twitch's new Partner Plus program, which gives streamers an increased share of their subscription revenues, was seen as an olive branch by many in the streaming community, creators should probably take a second look at the company's sparkling initiative before starting to cheer, industry experts say. Last Thursday, Twitch announced that streamers who qualified for its new Partner Plus initiative would get a 70 / 30 split of revenue from subscriptions, which are donated by their viewers. Most streamers earn a 50/50 split. As explained by Twitch, those inducted into the program would receive 70% of their subscriptions for one year until they reach their first $100,000. Once streamers hit that amount, their subscription share reduces to 50%, which is the standard split for most streamers.

While it was clear from the get-go that not all streamers would qualify for the program -- requirements include being a Twitch partner and having at least 350 monthly recurring subscriptions -- many were outraged to hear that it could be as little as 2.5%, or about 1,066. That's the number that Twitch analytics service Streams Charts came up with after analyzing how many Twitch partners were active, or who have streamed at least once, in the past three months and how many of those had more than 350 monthly subscriptions. Out of the more than 71,000 Twitch partners, Streams Charts told Gizmodo, only about 42,000 were active in the past three months. Of those, only 1,066 had at least 350 monthly subscriptions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. chipmaker Intel will spend $25 billion on a new factory in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday, calling it the largest-ever international investment in the country. The factory in Kiryat Gat is due to open in 2027, to operate through 2035 at least and to employ thousands of people, Israel's Finance Ministry said. Under the deal Intel will pay a 7.5% tax rate, up from the current 5%, the ministry added.

During its almost five decades of operations in Israel, Intel has grown to become the country's largest privately held employer and exporter and a leader of the local electronics and information industry, according to the company's website. In 2017, Intel bought Israel-based Mobileye, which develops and deploys advanced driver-assistance systems, for $15 billion. Intel took Mobileye public last year.

According to an industry insider, LCD TVs won't see any further development because all new R&D money is being spent on self-emissive displays like MicroLED and OLED, as well as on backlight technology like Mini-LED. Tom's Guide reports: According to Bob Raikes from Display Daily, it's all about OLED development. "I asked EMD (which is the US name of Merck KGaA and is by far the dominant supplier of LC materials), what they were doing to push LC materials for displays onto the next stage ... They are developing LCs for privacy windows and antennas, but they told us that 'there is no pull from clients' for significant development in LC materials," Raikes wrote in a recent article. "That shouldn't have been a surprise to me -- I have been talking about the switch to OLED and other emissive displays for the premium end (and later the mainstream) of the display market for a lot of years. Still, after decades of reporting on LC developments, it took a moment to sink in!"

As for what, specifically, manufacturers are working on, it's the production of QD-OLED panels for use in the high-end Samsung and Sony TVs like the Samsung S95C OLED and Sony A95K OLED as well as the development of PHOLED panels that use a blue phosphorescent material that has a longer shelf life and can go brighter than the traditional organic material in OLED panels. [...] Sadly, LCD TVs' days are coming to a close, but OLED TVs are still going strong.