Sep 29
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has secured a Pentagon contract for its military satellite network, Starshield. This news, first reported by Bloomberg, marks the Pentagon’s first confirmed Starshield contract with SpaceX.
Sep 29
Tesla has been tolerating racial harassment at its factory in Fremont, California since at least 2015 until today, according to the lawsuit filed by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The automaker has violated federal law by tolerating the “widespread and ongoing racial harassment of its Black employees,” the agency said. Further, affected workers who raised concerns about the abuse they were getting were apparently subjected to various forms of retaliation: They were transferred, their duties were changed, or they were terminated.
The EEOC’s lawsuit says Black employees were regularly called variations of the N-word, “monkey,” “boy” and “black b*tch” throughout the factory, even in hubs were workers gathered. These employees also encountered drawings of racial graffiti, including swastikas and nooses, on desks, as well as on the walls of bathroom stalls and elevators throughout the factory. If these allegations sound familiar, it’s because they’re identical to the complaints filed by plaintiffs who previously sued Tesla for racial harassment.
One of those plaintiffs was Melvin Berry, who accused Tesla supervisors of using racial slurs against him. And there was Owen Diaz, who said he was subjected to racial slurs and was made to feel unsafe at work with racist graffiti on his workspace, such as drawings of Inki the Caveman. Diaz was originally granted $137 million in damages, which was one of the highest amounts awarded to an individual suing on the basis of discrimination. However, it was significantly lowered following several appeals, until it was reduced to $3.2 million earlier this year.
The EEOC filed its lawsuit after doing an investigation on the automaker and trying to reach pre-litigation settlement through conciliation. Now, it’s seeking both compensatory and punitive damages, as well as backpay for all affected workers. It’s also asking the court for an injunction “designed to reform Tesla’s employment practices to prevent such discrimination in the future.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tesla-sued-by-federal-agency-for-racial-harassment-at-california-factory-053220563.html?src=rss
Sep 29
These States Aim To Keep Iconic National Parks Open Amid Possible Government Shutdown
Posted in: Today's ChiliThe National Parks Conservation Association says every day of a shutdown could mean national parks collectively losing nearly 1 million visitors.
Sep 29
The Chandra X-ray Observatory didn’t exist in 1838, when the Eta Carinae star system started to brighten as it ejected material in an event named the “Great Eruption.” But traces of the eruption remain, and a timelapse has now been created by compiling 20 years of the space telescope’s data to showcase the dynamic…
Sep 29
Google has announced a new control in its robots.txt indexing file that would let publishers decide whether their content will “help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs, including future generations of models that power those products.” The control is a crawler called Google-Extended, and publishers can add it to the file in their site’s documentation to tell Google not to use it for those two APIs. In its announcement, the company’s vice president of “Trust” Danielle Romain said it’s “heard from web publishers that they want greater choice and control over how their content is used for emerging generative AI use cases.”
Romain added that Google-Extended “is an important step in providing transparency and control that we believe all providers of AI models should make available.” As generative AI chatbots grow in prevalence and become more deeply integrated into search results, the way content is digested by things like Bard and Bing AI has been of concern to publishers.
While those systems may cite their sources, they do aggregate information that originates from different websites and present it to the users within the conversation. This might drastically reduce the amount of traffic going to individual outlets, which would then significantly impact things like ad revenue and entire business models.
Google said that when it comes to training AI models, the opt-outs will apply to the next generation of models for Bard and Vertex AI. Publishers looking to keep their content out of things like Search Generative Experience (SGE) should continue to use the Googlebot user agent and the NOINDEX meta tag in the robots.txt document to do so.
Romain points out that “as AI applications expand, web publishers will face the increasing complexity of managing different uses at scale.” This year has seen an explosion in the development of tools based on generative AI, and with search being such a huge way people discover content, the state of the internet looks set to undergo a huge shift. Google’s addition of this control is not only timely, but indicates it’s thinking about the way its products will impact the web.
Update, September 28 at 5:36pm ET: This article was updated to add more information about how publishers can keep their content out of Google’s search and AI results and training.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-will-let-publishers-hide-their-content-from-its-insatiable-ai-202015557.html?src=rss
Sep 29
The Fox News host had a baffling take on Thursday’s proceedings.
Sep 29
The Chandra X-ray Observatory didn’t exist in 1838, when the Eta Carinae star system started to brighten as it ejected material in an event named the “Great Eruption.” But traces of the eruption remain, and a timelapse has now been created by compiling 20 years of the space telescope’s data to showcase the dynamic…
Sep 29
After First Setback, Second Pig Heart Transplant Provokes Cautious Optimism
Posted in: Today's Chili
58-year-old Lawrence Faucette has become a medical milestone this month, being only the second living person in the world to have received a heart transplant from a genetically modified pig.
Sep 29
If you’re an extremely online Apple user, you’ve probably heard the collective disappointment over the company’s new FineWoven cases for the iPhone 15/15 Pro series. Everyone from Reddit to The Verge to Digital Trends has reasons why you shouldn’t spend $60 on Apple’s case made of recycled materials. It’s a scratch…
Sep 29
At dawn on Wednesday, French antitrust authorities conducted a surprise raid on a company in the country that specializes in graphics cards — and according to The Wall Street Journal and Challenges business magazine, that company was NVIDIA. We reached out to NVIDIA for clarification and a spokesperson declined to comment. Here’s what we know for sure:
The French Competition Authority conducted a surprise raid early Wednesday morning on “a company suspected of having implemented anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector,” according to a brief press release from the regulator. The raid was tied to a larger investigation into the health of the cloud computing market, with a focus on identifying whether new companies were being unfairly squeezed out by larger, existing ones. The results of that investigation were published in June and they centered on three “hyperscalers,” Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
The results read, in part, “The likelihood of a new operator being able to gain market share rapidly appears limited, excluding companies who are already powerful in other digital markets.” NVIDIA is not mentioned in the original cloud investigation.
NVIDIA has seen significant financial success this year amid the AI boom. NVIDIA’s AI chips and data centers are in high demand, and the company crushed its most recent earnings expectations, pulling in $13.51 billion in the second quarter of 2023, compared with $6.7 billion in 2022.
As the French Competition Authority noted, a raid does not mean the targeted company is guilty of anticompetitive practices — but it’s a confident step from the regulatory body.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/looks-like-nvidia-got-raided-by-french-antitrust-authorities-205809329.html?src=rss
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