It "felt like a Disneyland ride," reports CBS News. A man took a Waymo takes to the airport — only to discover the car "wouldn't stop driving around a parking lot in circles." And because the car was in motion, he also couldn't get out.

Still stuck in the car, Michael Johns — a tech-industry worker — then phoned Waymo for help. ("Has this been hacked? What's going on? I feel like I'm in the movies. Is somebody playing a joke on me?") But he also filmed the incident... "Why is this thing going in a circle? I'm getting dizzy," Johns said in a video posted on social media that has since gone viral, garnering more than two million views and interactions....

The Waymo representative was finally able to get the car under control after a few minutes, allowing him to get to the airport just in time to catch his flight back to LA. He says that the lack of empathy from the representative who attempted to help him, on top of the point that he's unsure if he was talking to a human or AI, are major concerns. "Where's the empathy? Where's the human connection to this?" Johns said while speaking with CBS News Los Angeles. "It's just, again, a case of today's digital world. A half-baked product and nobody meeting the customer, the consumers, in the middle."

Johns, who ironically works in the tech industry himself, says he would love to see services like Waymo succeed, but he has no plans to hop in for a ride until he's sure that the kinks have been fixed. In the meantime, he's still waiting for someone from Waymo to contact him in regards to his concerns, which hasn't yet happened despite how much attention his video has attracted since last week.
"My Monday was fine till i got into one of Waymo 's 'humanless' cars," he posted on LinkedIn . "I get in, buckle up ( safety first) and the saga begins.... [T]he car just went around in circles, eight circles at that..."

A Waymo spokesperson admitted they'd added about five minutes to his travel time, but then "said the software glitch had since been resolved," reports the Los Angeles Times, "and that Johns was not charged for the ride."

One final irony? According to his LinkedIn profile, Johns is a CES Innovations Awards judge.

Meta's AI-generated social media profiles, which sparked controversy this week following comments by executive Connor Hayes about plans to expand AI characters across Facebook and Instagram, have largely failed to gain user engagement since their 2023 launch, 404 Media reported Friday.

The profiles, introduced at Meta's Connect event in September 2023, stopped posting content in April 2024 after widespread user disinterest, with 15 of the original 28 accounts already deleted, Meta spokesperson Liz Sweeney told 404 Media. The AI characters, including personas like "Liv," a Black queer mother, and "Grandpa Brian," a retired businessman, generated minimal engagement and were criticized for posting stereotypical content.

Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah reported that one AI profile admitted its purpose was "data collection and ad targeting." Meta is now removing these accounts after identifying a bug preventing users from blocking them, Sweeney said, adding that Hayes' recent Financial Times interview discussed future AI character plans rather than announcing new features.

Nick Clegg, former British Deputy Prime Minister and Meta's President of Global Affairs, is stepping down after seven years, with longtime policy executive Joel Kaplan set to replace him. Engadget reports: Clegg will be replaced by Joel Kaplan, a longtime policy executive and former White House aide to George W. Bush known for his deep ties to Republican circles in Washington. As Chief Global Affairs Officer, Kaplan -- as Semafor notes -- will be well-positioned to run interference for Meta as Donald Trump takes control of the White House. In a post on Threads, Clegg said that "this is the right time for me to move on from my role as President, Global Affairs at Meta."

"My time at the company coincided with a significant resetting of the relationship between 'big tech' and the societal pressures manifested in new laws, institutions and norms affecting the sector. I hope I have played some role in seeking to bridge the very different worlds of tech and politics -- worlds that will continue to interact in unpredictable ways across the globe."

He said that he will spend the next "few months" working with Kaplan and "representing the company at a number of international gatherings in Q1 of this year" before he formally steps away from the company.

Further reading: Meta Says It's Mistakenly Moderating Too Much

Generation Beta, starting in 2025 and lasting until around 2039, will grow up deeply immersed in AI and smart technology, facing pressing societal challenges like climate change and global shifts while potentially being shielded from excessive screen time by tech-savvy Gen Z parents. NBC News reports: Start and end dates of generations can be murky, but Generation Beta will keep being born until around 2039. Before them, Gen Alpha stretched from 2010 to 2024, Gen Z from around 1996 to 2010, and millennials from 1981 to 1996. The upcoming generation "will inherit a world grappling with major societal challenges," wrote demographer and futurist Mark McCrindle in a blog post. "With climate change, global population shifts, and rapid urbanisation at the forefront, sustainability will not just be a preference but an expectation." [...]

Just like Gen Z and Gen Alpha, Gen Beta will grow up with social media, though it's still unknown how those mediums will evolve in the next decade-plus. But other experts predict that Gen Z parents might choose to shield their kids from being chronically online, a stereotype that has come to define Gen Alpha. While older millennial parents tend to integrate technology into their Gen Alpha kids' lives, McCrindle wrote that Gen Z parents might take a different approach with their future Gen Beta children. "Generation Z know more about both the positives and challenges that come with social media use from a young age," McCrindle wrote. "As the most technologically savvy generation of parents, Gen Z see the benefits of technology and screen time, but equally they see the downsides of it and are pushing back on technology and the age at which their children access and engage with it."

Venezuela's Supreme Court on Monday fined TikTok $10 million for failing to prevent viral challenges allegedly linked to the deaths of three children. It also ordered the platform to establish a local office to oversee content compliance with national laws. The Associated Press reports: Judge Tania D'Amelio said TikTok had acted in a negligent manner and gave it eight days to pay the fine [...]. The judge did not explain how Venezuela would force TikTok, whose parent company is based in China, to pay the fine. Venezuela has blocked dozens of websites in previous years for not complying with regulations set by its telecommunications commission.

In November, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro blamed TikTok for the death of a 12-year-old girl who allegedly died after participating in a TikTok challenge that involved taking tranquilizer pills and not falling asleep. Venezuela's Education Minister Hector Rodriguez also said last month that a 14-year-old died after taking part in a TikTok challenge that involved sniffing substances. And on Nov. 21, Venezuela's attorney general blamed video challenges on TikTok for the death of a third child.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has announced plans to retire its iconic R46 subway cars, triggering nostalgia among New Yorkers who cherished their distinctive seating arrangement. The fleet -- which has served A, C, N, R, Q, and W lines for five decades -- will be replaced by R211 cars expected for delivery in 2027.

The R46's perpendicular seating configuration, designed for comfort during long trips to destinations like Coney Island, encouraged social interaction among passengers, according to New York Transit Museum director Concetta Bencivenga. The new R211 cars will feature longitudinal seating to improve passenger flow and reduce platform waiting times. Currently, 696 of the original 754 R46 cars remain in service. The replacement R211 cars will include security cameras, wider seats, improved signage, and better lighting.

Researchers have uncovered widespread manipulation of GitHub's star-rating system, with over 3.1 million fraudulent stars identified across 15,835 repositories, according to a new study by Socket, Carnegie Mellon University, and North Carolina State University.

The research team analyzed 20TB of data from GHArchive, spanning 6 billion GitHub events from 2019 to 2024, using their "StarScout" detection tool. The tool identified 278,000 accounts engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior to artificially boost repository rankings.

GitHub uses stars, similar to social media likes, to rank projects and recommend content to users. The platform has previously encountered malicious exploitation of this system, including the "Stargazers Ghost Network" malware operation discovered last summer. Approximately 91% of flagged repositories and 62% of suspicious accounts were removed by October 2024.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Jennifer Ouellette: Over the holiday weekend, all but one member of the editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned "with heartfelt sadness and great regret," according to Retraction Watch, which helpfully provided an online PDF of the editors' full statement. It's the 20th mass resignation from a science journal since 2023 over various points of contention, per Retraction Watch, many in response to controversial changes in the business models used by the scientific publishing industry. "This has been an exceptionally painful decision for each of us," the board members wrote in their statement. "The editors who have stewarded the journal over the past 38 years have invested immense time and energy in making JHE the leading journal in paleoanthropological research and have remained loyal and committed to the journal and our authors long after their terms ended. The [associate editors] have been equally loyal and committed. We all care deeply about the journal, our discipline, and our academic community; however, we find we can no longer work with Elsevier in good conscience."

The editorial board cited several changes made over the last ten years that it believes are counter to the journal's longstanding editorial principles. These included eliminating support for a copy editor and a special issues editor, leaving it to the editorial board to handle those duties. When the board expressed the need for a copy editor, Elsevier's response, they said, was "to maintain that the editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting." There is also a major restructuring of the editorial board underway that aims to reduce the number of associate editors by more than half, which "will result in fewer AEs handling far more papers, and on topics well outside their areas of expertise." Furthermore, there are plans to create a third-tier editorial board that functions largely in a figurehead capacity, after Elsevier "unilaterally took full control" of the board's structure in 2023 by requiring all associate editors to renew their contracts annually -- which the board believes undermines its editorial independence and integrity.

In-house production has been reduced or outsourced, and in 2023 Elsevier began using AI during production without informing the board, resulting in many style and formatting errors, as well as reversing versions of papers that had already been accepted and formatted by the editors. "This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors," the editors wrote. "AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage." In addition, the author page charges for JHE are significantly higher than even Elsevier's other for-profit journals, as well as broad-based open access journals like Scientific Reports. Not many of the journal's authors can afford those fees, "which runs counter to the journal's (and Elsevier's) pledge of equality and inclusivity," the editors wrote. The breaking point seems to have come in November, when Elsevier informed co-editors Mark Grabowski (Liverpool John Moores University) and Andrea Taylor (Touro University California College of Osteopathic Medicine) that it was ending the dual-editor model that has been in place since 1986. When Grabowki and Taylor protested, they were told the model could only remain if they took a 50 percent cut in their compensation.

Americans check their phones an average of 205 times a day, a 42.3% increase from last year. Millennials are leading the charts in frequency, attachment, and anxiety over phone use, while Gen Z spends the most time daily on their devices at over six hours. PCMag reports: There's a good chance that you're currently reading this article on your phone. If you're like one of the Americans surveyed by Reviews.org, this is one of 205 times today that you'll be checking the device in your hand. To spare you opening the calculator app, that's about once every five minutes you are awake or two and a half full months out of your year.

That's an alarming 42.3% rise from last year when the reviews company asked the same question and found people checked their phones 144 times per day. Some of the ways they spend those 205 moments are:

- 80.6% check their phones within the first 10 minutes of waking up
- 65.7% use their phone on the toilet
- 53.7% have texted someone in the same room
- 38.1% use or look at their phone while on a date
- 27% use or look at their phone while driving

And, of course, there are those many, many times when people check their notifications, with 76% checking their phones within five minutes of receiving one. Millennials are the fastest on the draw, with 89.5% of them checking within 10 minutes. Gen Z and Gen X have found common ground (finally), with 84% of each group looking at notifications shortly after receiving them. Boomers and the Silent Generation aren't as anxious to see who is trying to reach them, with 69% and 53.3%, respectively, checking their notifications within a few minutes.

Slashdot reader SysEngineer shared this report from the Guardian: AI tools could be used to manipulate online audiences into making decisions — ranging from what to buy to who to vote for — according to researchers at the University of Cambridge. The paper highlights an emerging new marketplace for "digital signals of intent" — known as the "intention economy" — where AI assistants understand, forecast and manipulate human intentions and sell that information on to companies who can profit from it. The intention economy is touted by researchers at Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) as a successor to the attention economy, where social networks keep users hooked on their platforms and serve them adverts. The intention economy involves AI-savvy tech companies selling what they know about your motivations, from plans for a stay in a hotel to opinions on a political candidate, to the highest bidder...

The study claims that large language models (LLMs), the technology that underpins AI tools such as the ChatGPT chatbot, will be used to "anticipate and steer" users based on "intentional, behavioural and psychological data"... Advertisers will be able to use generative AI tools to create bespoke online ads, the report claims... AI models will be able to tweak their outputs in response to "streams of incoming user-generated data", the study added, citing research showing that models can infer personal information through workaday exchanges and even "steer" conversations in order to gain more personal information.
The article includes this quote from Dr. Jonnie Penn, an historian of technology at LCFI. "Unless regulated, the intention economy will treat your motivations as the new currency. It will be a gold rush for those who target, steer and sell human intentions.

"We should start to consider the likely impact such a marketplace would have on human aspirations, including free and fair elections, a free press and fair market competition, before we become victims of its unintended consequences."

After a four-year hiatus, 2025 will see the return of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. Started in 1984 (and inspired partly by a bug in the classic Bourne shell), it's "the Internet's oldest contest," acording to their official social media account on Mastodon.

The contest enters its "pending" state today at 2024-12-29 23:58 UTC — meaning an opening date for submissions has been officially scheduled (for January 31st) as well as a closing date roughly eight weeks later on April 1st, 2025. That's according to the newly-released (proposed and tentative) rules and guidelines, listing contest goals like "show the importance of programming style, in an ironic way" and "stress C compilers with unusual code." And the contest's home page adds an additional goal: "to have fun with C!"

Excerpts from the official rules: Rule 0
Just as C starts at 0, so the IOCCC starts at rule 0. :-)

Rule 1
Your submission must be a complete program....

Rule 5
Your submission MUST not modify the content or filename of any part of your original submission including, but not limited to prog.c, the Makefile (that we create from your how to build instructions), as well as any data files you submit....

Rule 6
I am not a rule, I am a free(void *human);
while (!(ioccc(rule(you(are(number(6)))))) {
ha_ha_ha();
}

Rule 6 is clearly a reference to The Prisoner... (Some other rules are even sillier...) And the guidelines include their own jokes: You are in a maze of twisty guidelines, all different.

There are at least zero judges who think that Fideism has little or nothing to do with the IOCCC judging process....

We suggest that you avoid trying for the 'smallest self-replicating' source. The smallest, a zero byte entry, won in 1994.
And this weekend there was also a second announcement: After a 4 year effort by a number of people, with over 6168+ commits, the Great Fork Merge has been completed and the Official IOCCC web site has been updated! A significant number of improvements has been made to the IOCCC winning entries. A number of fixes and improvements involve the ability of reasonable modern Unix/Linux systems to be able to compile and even run them.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader — and C programmer — achowe for sharing the news.

A 9-year-old girl born without a left hand had "started asking for a robotic arm to help her feel more confident," her mother told the Washington Post. So her parents met with a consultant from Open Bionics, which fits people with lightweight, 3D-printed prostheses that function more like a natural arm and hand — known as Hero Arms. The bionic arms are manufactured in Britain and cost about $24,000, but the Batemans were hopeful that their health insurance company, Select Health, would pay for one for [their 9-year-old daughter] Remi. Remi said she tried using one of the robotic arms for a few days in Colorado and was thrilled to cut her food with a knife and fork for the first time and carry plates with two hands. "I loved it so much — I could function like a full human," she said. "I was able to steal my dad's hat. When they fit me for my arm, I told them I wanted it to be pink."

On Oct. 1, the Batemans sent a prescription for the robotic arm and office notes from Remi's pediatrician to Select Health for approval. One week later, their request was denied, Jami Bateman said. "They sent us a letter saying it was not medically necessary for Remi to have a Hero Arm and that it was for cosmetic use only," she said. "We appealed twice and were again denied."

"It was very upsetting, and Remi cried when I told her, because we'd all been so hopeful," Bateman added. "It broke our hearts." In mid-December, a frustrated Jami Bateman tried an approach she'd seen other people use when their health insurance failed them: She started a GoFundMe for her daughter, hoping to purchase a robotic arm through the kindness of strangers.... Bateman was stunned when friends and strangers chipped in more than $30,000 in just a few days, surpassing the family's $24,000 goal. People who donated understood the Batemans' predicament, and many were furious on their behalf.

As donations poured in, the Batemans received a call from somebody else who wanted to help. Andy Schoonover is the CEO of CrowdHealth, a subscriber-based resource that helps people negotiate lower costs for medical bills. He told the family on Dec. 16 that his company wanted to pay the entire cost of Remi's bionic arm. "We were looking for some ways to help people during the holiday season, and I stumbled upon Remi's story on social media," Schoonover said. "We were honored to help her out...."

Remi quickly came up with an idea. "She came to me and said, 'Mom, I know how it feels to have one hand. Is there someone else we can help?" Bateman recalled. She said she contacted Open Bionics and learned there was a long list of children who had been turned down for Hero Arms by their health insurance companies for the same reason Remi was denied...
Somewhere in Maryland, the mother of a 9-year-old boy born without a left hand suddenly got a surprise phone call explaining Remi's decision. "I was so proud of Remi that I immediately started crying," she said. "She wanted to give my son an opportunity that I was unable to give him. It just touched my heart."

They had been trying to raise money by running a lemonade stand. But yesterday Remi's GoFundMe page posted an update. The 9-year-old boy's arm had now been paid for.

"And maybe, if more donations roll in we can help a third child!"

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Back in January, Rice University professor and former CACM Editor-in-Chief Moshe Y. Vardi wrote of the unintended consequences of social media and mobile computing in "Computing, You Have Blood on Your Hands!" To close out the year, Vardi addresses the role tech workers play in enabling dubious Big Tech business models — including now-powered-by-AI Big Tech Surveillance Capitalism — in an opinion piece titled "I Was Wrong about the Ethics Crisis."

Vardi writes: "The belief in the magical power of the free market always to serve the public good has no theoretical basis. In fact, our current climate crisis is a demonstrated market failure. To take an extreme example, Big Tobacco surely does not support the public good, and most of us would agree that it is unethical to work for Big Tobacco. The question, thus, is whether Big Tech is supporting the public good, and if not, what should Big Tech workers do about it. Of course, there is no simple answer to such a question, and the only reasonable answer to the question of whether it is ethical to work for Big Tech is, 'It depends.' [...] It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, said the writer and political activist Upton Sinclair. By and large, Big Tech workers do not seem to be asking themselves hard questions, I believe, hence my conclusion that we do indeed suffer from an ethics crisis."

ewhac (Slashdot reader #5,844) writes: Retraction Watch is reporting that the entire editorial staff (save one) for the Journal of Human Evolution has resigned in protest over creeping harmful changes imposed by its publisher, Elsevier.

In an open letter posted to social media, the editors recount Elsevier's changes to their journal's scientific and editorial processes (inserting itself into those processes) — along with staff and budget reductions negatively impacting their ability to review and publish submissions. The letter alleges that when the editorial board complained of Elsevier's eliminating support for a copy editor, Elsevier responded that the editors shouldn't be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting. When the editors fiercely protested Elsevier's ending of JHE's dual-editor model, Elsevier allegedly responded that it would support a dual-editor model by cutting the compensation rate by half.

But perhaps most damning is a footnote revealing Elsevier's use of so-called "AI" in the publication process. "In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage."

Except for one unnamed associate editor, the editorial board for the Journal of Human Evolution determined that the situation with Elsevier was no longer tenable, and resigned.

Valerie Warner is 71 years old — and owes $268,000 in student loans.

Roughly 40 years ago she went to law school, but was only able to find work as a legal aid and later work in the public school system, which the Washington Post calls "a rewarding job but one that didn't pay enough to wipe out her loans." Later she earned a masters of education degree: All told, Warner borrowed a total of about $60,000 for her two advanced degrees. The amount seemed reasonable given the career trajectory that both credentials promised, but that path never materialized. Working a series of low-wage jobs, she went in and out of forbearance before ultimately defaulting. The balance ballooned to the current $268,000 total over the years due to collection fees and interest capitalization.
And she's not the only one in debt. "On a dreary December afternoon, a group of senior citizens stood in the rain outside the Education Department pleading for relief from a debt that many fear will burden them for the rest of their lives..." Some sat in rocking chairs, cross-stitching their debt number in a pattern. Others held signs that read, "Time is running out, sunset our debt." Or wore T-shirts saying, "Debt relief before we die...."

[A]ctivists are urging the U.S. Education Department to discharge the student debt of older borrowers who they say are in no position to repay. They say the department could use a little-known federal statute that considers a person's ability to pay within a reasonable time and the inability of the government to collect the debt in full. There are 2.8 million federal student loan borrowers aged 62 and older with a total of $121.5 billion in debt, more than 726,300 of them over the age of 71, according to the Education Department. Older borrowers are one of the fastest-growing segments of the government's student loan portfolio, and their Social Security benefits are subject to garnishment...

The Education Department would only acknowledge receiving a memo from the Debt Collective, the group organizing the campaign, outlining the agency's authority to cancel the debt of older borrowers. The activist organization said it has been meeting with members of Congress, White House committees and Education Department officials about the matter since September. "Many of these folks have been borrowers for 20 or 30 years, with punishingly high interest rates. Their balances and the way they have dragged on for decades is just an indictment of the broken system and the failure of past relief efforts," said Eleni Schirmer, an organizer with the Debt Collective... According to the think tank New America, the number of Americans approaching retirement age with student loan debt has skyrocketed over 500 percent in the last two decades. Some have loans they took out to finance their college educations, while others took out federal Parent Plus loans or co-signed private loans for their children.
The article points out that the U.S. government will garnish up to 15 percent of the Social Security income to recoup student loan debt, even if it means leaving recipients below the poverty line.

But it also includes this quote from Adam Minsky, an attorney who specializes in student debt, about the prospects for federal action that survives challenges in the U.S. court system. "[A]s a practical matter, I don't think that judges and courts that have been hostile to mass debt relief would treat this differently from other programs that have been blocked or struck down."

On Christmas Day, the social media app Bluesky added a list of Trending topics to its mobile app, allowing users to see which subjects are popular among its community. The Verge reports: The new feature can be found by selecting the search icon (the magnifying glass), which appears at the bottom of the screen on the mobile app and on the left sidebar on the web. Lists of Trending and Recommended subjects now appear below the search bar. Tap on any topic, and you will be able to access the associated posts. [...] According to the announcement, the new feature is "V1" (it is marked as a Beta on the app) and "we will be iterating with your feedback."

Meta is betting that characters generated by AI will fill its social media platforms in the next few years as it looks to the fast-developing technology to drive engagement with its 3 billion users. From a report: The Silicon Valley group is rolling out a range of AI products, including one that helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook [non-paywalled source], as it battles with rival tech groups to attract and retain a younger audience.

"We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform ... that's where we see all of this going," he added. Hayes said a "priority" for Meta over the next two years was to make its apps "more entertaining and engaging," which included considering how to make the interaction with AI more social.

Major video game studios' pursuit of ultra-realistic graphics has led to diminishing returns and industry-wide layoffs, as younger players gravitate toward simpler, more social games, New York Times is reporting.

Sony's Insomniac Games spent $300 million developing Marvel's Spider-Man 2, triple the budget of its predecessor, before laying off staff amid Sony's 900-person reduction in February. The industry has cut more than 20,000 jobs in the past two years. Meanwhile, games with basic graphics like Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite continue to dominate, particularly among younger players.

Genshin Impact, a mobile game by Hoyoverse, generates approximately $2 billion annually through frequent content updates rather than cutting-edge visuals. The shift has forced studios to reevaluate their strategies. Warner Bros. Discovery lost $200 million on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, while Sony shuttered its Concord studio shortly after launch. Some industry figures see AI as a potential solution to reduce graphics development costs, the report adds, particularly in sports games.

theodp writes: In 2012, now-Microsoft President Brad Smith unveiled Microsoft's National Talent Strategy, a two-pronged strategy that called for tech visa restrictions to be loosened to allow tech companies to hire non-U.S. citizens to fill jobs until more American schoolchildren could be made tech-savvy enough to pass hiring standards. Shortly thereafter, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org emerged (led by Smith's next-door neighbor Hadi Partovi with Smith as a founding Board member) with a mission to ensure that U.S. schoolchildren started receiving 'rigorous' computer science education instruction. Around the same time, Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC launched (with support from Smith, Partovi, and other tech leaders) with a mission to reform tech visa policy to meet tech's need for talent.

Fast forward to 2024, and Newsweek reports the debate over tech immigration policy has been revived, spurred by the recent appointment of Sriram Krishnan as senior policy adviser for AI at the Trump White House. Comments by far-right political activist Laura Loomer on Twitter about Krishnan's call for loosening Green Card restrictions were met with rebuttals from prominent tech leaders who are also serving as members of the Trump transition team. Entrepreneur David Sacks, who Trump has tapped as his cryptocurrency and AI czar, took to social media to clarify that Krishnan advocates for removing country caps on green cards, not eliminating caps entirely, aiming to create a more merit-based system. However, the NY Times reported that Sacks discussed a much broader visa reform proposal with Trump during a June podcast ("What I will do is," Trump told Sacks, "you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country"). Elon Musk, the recently appointed co-head of Trump's new Dept. of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had Sacks' and Krishnan's backs (not unexpected -- both were close Musk advisors on his Twitter purchase), tweeting out "Makes sense" to his 209 million followers, lamenting that "the number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low," reposting claims crediting immigrants for 36% of the innovation in the U.S., and taking USCIS to task for failing to immediately recognize his own genius with an Exceptional Ability Green Card (for his long-defunct Zip2 startup).

Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump has tapped to co-lead DOGE with Musk, agreed and fanned the Twitter flames with a pinned Tweet of his own explaining, "The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born -- first-generation engineers over "native" Americans isn't because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy -- wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture." (Colorado Governor Jared Polis also took to Twitter to agree with Musk and Ramaswamy on the need to import 'elite engineers'). And Code.org CEO Partovi joined the Twitter fray, echoing the old we-need-H1B-visas-to-make-US-schoolchildren-CS-savvy argument of Microsoft's 2012 National Talent Strategy. "Did you know 2/3 of H1B visas are for computer scientists?" Partovi wrote in reply to Musk, Loomer, and Sachs. "The H1B program raises $500M/year (from its corporate sponsors) and all that money is funneled into programs at Labor and NSF without focus to grow local CS talent. Let's fund CS education." The NYT also cited Zuckerberg's earlier efforts to influence immigration policy with FWD.us (which also counted Sacks and Musk as early supporters), taking note of Zuck's recent visit to Mar-a-Lago and Meta's $1 million donation to Trump's upcoming inauguration.

So, who is to be believed? Musk, who attributes any tech visa qualms to "a 'fixed pie' fallacy that is at the heart of much wrong-headed economic thinking" and argues that "there is essentially infinite potential for job and company creation ['We should let anyone in the country who is hardworking and honest and will be a contributor to the United States,' Musk has said]"? Or economists who have found that immigration and globalization is not quite the rising-tide-that-raises-all-boats it's been cracked up to be?

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.