Apple and the unionized employees at its Towson, Maryland retail store have reached a tentative agreement that could secure them better pay, job protections, scheduling improvements to support a work-life balance and a more transparent disciplinary process. The Towson location in 2022 became the first Apple Store in the country to unionize, and back in May, it voted to authorize a strike against the company after “unsatisfactory” negotiation outcomes.
The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers’ Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (IAM CORE) said it’s been negotiating with Apple since January 2023. Under the tentative three-year agreement they’ve now reached, workers would be given average raises of 10 percent over the life of the contract, and starting pay rates for most positions would go up. The agreement would also establish a severance clause. The union represents about 85 employees, who will get to vote on the agreement on August 6.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-has-reached-a-union-contract-with-us-retail-employees-for-the-first-time-212422613.html?src=rss
Apple and the unionized employees at its Towson, Maryland retail store have reached a tentative agreement that could secure them better pay, job protections, scheduling improvements to support a work-life balance and a more transparent disciplinary process. The Towson location in 2022 became the first Apple Store in the country to unionize, and back in May, it voted to authorize a strike against the company after “unsatisfactory” negotiation outcomes.
The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers’ Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (IAM CORE) said it’s been negotiating with Apple since January 2023. Under the tentative three-year agreement they’ve now reached, workers would be given average raises of 10 percent over the life of the contract, and starting pay rates for most positions would go up. The agreement would also establish a severance clause. The union represents about 85 employees, who will get to vote on the agreement on August 6.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-has-reached-a-union-contract-with-us-retail-employees-for-the-first-time-212422613.html?src=rss
New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.
The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville
A few years ago, Keanu Reeves took a dive into the world of comics with a series called BRZRKR, which he wrote with longtime comic creator Matt Kindt. The limited series, which played out over 12 issues, follows a half-mortal, half-God warrior known as B who lives a violent existence but cannot die. And after 80,000 years of being alive, he really wants to. Eventually, he ends up working as a killing machine for the US government.
Netflix has plans for a film and anime spinoff of the series, and the BRZRKR universe is still growing even beyond that. This week, Reeves and author China Miéville — known for his works of “weird fiction” that blend sci-fi, fantasy and other genres — released The Book of Elsewhere, a novel that returns to the story of B in a pulpy, blood-soaked epic. It’s written with a unique style, starting off choppy in the prologue before shifting into something else entirely. If there’s one thing reviewers seem to agree on, it’s that this book is not afraid to get weird.
Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI by Anil Ananthaswamy
AI is all around us, and these days, conversations about the Big Tech race to build better and better systems sometimes feel almost escapable. But how often do we on the outside stop and take a look at how we got here in the technical sense, down to the math that made it all possible?
In Anil Ananthaswamy’s new book, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, the award-winning science journalist and author explains the history and mathematics underlying machine learning as we know it today. It’s not exactly light reading, but sometimes it’s nice to put your brain to work a little. You don’t need to be a math whiz to keep up with it — Ananthaswamy has said a basic understanding of calculus should be enough.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2024) #1 by Jason Aaron, Joëlle Jones
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are back in another new comic series from IDW, written by Jason Aaron (Batman: Off-World, Thor, Scalped), with art by Joëlle Jones (Lady Killer, Catwoman). The first issue was released this week — and it finds Raphael behind bars.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2024) celebrates the 40th anniversary of the franchise that we as a society just cannot seem to get enough of (no complaints here). In it, the turtles have all split off on their own and left New York, and it looks like the first few issues will each focus on one of the brothers. But, they’ll eventually be brought back together to do what they do best — fight bad guys and eat pizza. It’s meant to be something that even people who haven’t kept up with the many series over the years will be able to get into without feeling lost.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/what-to-read-this-weekend-keanu-reeves-book-of-elsewhere-ai-math-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-173909519.html?src=rss
New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.
The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville
A few years ago, Keanu Reeves took a dive into the world of comics with a series called BRZRKR, which he wrote with longtime comic creator Matt Kindt. The limited series, which played out over 12 issues, follows a half-mortal, half-God warrior known as B who lives a violent existence but cannot die. And after 80,000 years of being alive, he really wants to. Eventually, he ends up working as a killing machine for the US government.
Netflix has plans for a film and anime spinoff of the series, and the BRZRKR universe is still growing even beyond that. This week, Reeves and author China Miéville — known for his works of “weird fiction” that blend sci-fi, fantasy and other genres — released The Book of Elsewhere, a novel that returns to the story of B in a pulpy, blood-soaked epic. It’s written with a unique style, starting off choppy in the prologue before shifting into something else entirely. If there’s one thing reviewers seem to agree on, it’s that this book is not afraid to get weird.
Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI by Anil Ananthaswamy
AI is all around us, and these days, conversations about the Big Tech race to build better and better systems sometimes feel almost escapable. But how often do we on the outside stop and take a look at how we got here in the technical sense, down to the math that made it all possible?
In Anil Ananthaswamy’s new book, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, the award-winning science journalist and author explains the history and mathematics underlying machine learning as we know it today. It’s not exactly light reading, but sometimes it’s nice to put your brain to work a little. You don’t need to be a math whiz to keep up with it — Ananthaswamy has said a basic understanding of calculus should be enough.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2024) #1 by Jason Aaron, Joëlle Jones
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are back in another new comic series from IDW, written by Jason Aaron (Batman: Off-World, Thor, Scalped), with art by Joëlle Jones (Lady Killer, Catwoman). The first issue was released this week — and it finds Raphael behind bars.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2024) celebrates the 40th anniversary of the franchise that we as a society just cannot seem to get enough of (no complaints here). In it, the turtles have all split off on their own and left New York, and it looks like the first few issues will each focus on one of the brothers. But, they’ll eventually be brought back together to do what they do best — fight bad guys and eat pizza. It’s meant to be something that even people who haven’t kept up with the many series over the years will be able to get into without feeling lost.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/what-to-read-this-weekend-keanu-reeves-book-of-elsewhere-ai-math-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-173909519.html?src=rss
Amazon has released its first teaser video for Like A Dragon: Yakuza, its live action adaptation of SEGA’s Yakuza games, at San Diego Comic-Con. There’s a lot of focus on the inking process of Kazuma Kiryu’s iconic dragon tattoo, but you’ll also get glimpses of Kamurocho’s night scene, various characters in the series and the underground fight club that shows up as a mini-game across the franchise. In the last few seconds of the video, you’ll see a shirtless Kiryu heading to a circle of cheering viewers betting on his match.
When the company announced the show in June, it described the adaptation as a “crime-suspense-action series” that “follows the life, childhood friends, and repercussions of the decisions of Kazuma Kiryu, a fearsome and peerless Yakuza warrior with a strong sense of justice, duty, and humanity.” Seeing as the show is set between 1995 and 2005, it will most like be based on the first Yakuza game with glimpses of the years that took place after the events in Yakuza 0.
The first three of episodes of Like A Dragon: Yakuza will arrive on Prime Video on October 24, with the next three coming on October 31. It stars Ryoma Takeuchi (Kamen Rider Drive, Roppongi Class) as Kiryu. And as this teaser has revealed, his best friend Nishiki, who plays a pivotal role in the story, will be portrayed by Kento Kaku (Netflix’s House of Ninjas).
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-drops-the-first-teaser-for-its-upcoming-yakuza-adaptation-110442602.html?src=rss
Freelancer has accused Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude large language models, of ignoring its “do not crawl” robots.txt protocol to scrape its websites’ data. Meanwhile, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said Anthropic has ignored the website’s policy prohibiting the use of its content for AI model training. Matt Barrie, the chief executive of Freelancer, told The Information that Anthropic’s ClaudeBot is “the most aggressive scraper by far.” His website allegedly got 3.5 million visits from the company’s crawler within a span of four hours, which is “probably about five times the volume of the number two” AI crawler. Similarly, Wiens posted on X/Twitter that Anthropic’s bot hit iFixit’s servers a million times in 24 hours. “You’re not only taking our content without paying, you’re tying up our devops resources,” he wrote.
Back in June, Wired accused another AI company, Perplexity, of crawling its website despite the presence of the Robots Exclusion Protocol, or robots.txt. A robots.txt file typically contains instructions for web crawlers on which pages they can and can’t access. While compliance is voluntary, it’s mostly just been ignored by bad bots. After Wired’s piece came out, a startup called TollBit that connects AI firms with content publishers reported that it’s not just Perplexity that’s bypassing robots.txt signals. While it didn’t name names, Business Insider said it learned that OpenAI and Anthropic were ignoring the protocol, as well.
Barrie said Freelancer tried to refuse the bot’s access requests at first, but it ultimately had to block Anthropic’s crawler entirely. “This is egregious scraping [which] makes the site slower for everyone operating on it and ultimately affects our revenue,” he added. As for iFixit, Wiens said the website has set alarms for high traffic, and his people got woken up at 3AM due to Anthropic’s activities. The company’s crawler stopped scraping iFixit after it added a line in its robots.txt file that disallows Anthropic’s bot, in particular.
The AI startup told The Information that it respects robots.txt and that its crawler “respected that signal when iFixit implemented it.” It also said that it aims “for minimal disruption by being thoughtful about how quickly [it crawls] the same domains,” which is why it’s now investigating the case.
AI firms use crawlers to collect content from websites that they can use to train their generative AI technologies. They’ve been the target of multiple lawsuits as a result, with publishers accusing them of copyright infringement. To prevent more lawsuits from being filed, companies like OpenAI have been striking deals with publishers and websites. OpenAI’s content partners, so far, include News Corp, Vox Media, the Financial Times and Reddit. iFixit’s Wiens seems open to the idea of signing a deal for the how-to-repair’s website’s articles, as well, telling Anthropic in a tweet he’s willing to have a conversation about licensing content for commercial use.
If any of those requests accessed our terms of service, they would have told you that use of our content expressly forbidden. But don’t ask me, ask Claude!
If you want to have a conversation about licensing our content for commercial use, we’re right here. pic.twitter.com/CAkOQDnLjD
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/websites-accuse-ai-startup-anthropic-of-bypassing-their-anti-scraping-rules-and-protocol-133022756.html?src=rss
Freelancer has accused Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude large language models, of ignoring its “do not crawl” robots.txt protocol to scrape its websites’ data. Meanwhile, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said Anthropic has ignored the website’s policy prohibiting the use of its content for AI model training. Matt Barrie, the chief executive of Freelancer, told The Information that Anthropic’s ClaudeBot is “the most aggressive scraper by far.” His website allegedly got 3.5 million visits from the company’s crawler within a span of four hours, which is “probably about five times the volume of the number two” AI crawler. Similarly, Wiens posted on X/Twitter that Anthropic’s bot hit iFixit’s servers a million times in 24 hours. “You’re not only taking our content without paying, you’re tying up our devops resources,” he wrote.
Back in June, Wired accused another AI company, Perplexity, of crawling its website despite the presence of the Robots Exclusion Protocol, or robots.txt. A robots.txt file typically contains instructions for web crawlers on which pages they can and can’t access. While compliance is voluntary, it’s mostly just been ignored by bad bots. After Wired’s piece came out, a startup called TollBit that connects AI firms with content publishers reported that it’s not just Perplexity that’s bypassing robots.txt signals. While it didn’t name names, Business Insider said it learned that OpenAI and Anthropic were ignoring the protocol, as well.
Barrie said Freelancer tried to refuse the bot’s access requests at first, but it ultimately had to block Anthropic’s crawler entirely. “This is egregious scraping [which] makes the site slower for everyone operating on it and ultimately affects our revenue,” he added. As for iFixit, Wiens said the website has set alarms for high traffic, and his people got woken up at 3AM due to Anthropic’s activities. The company’s crawler stopped scraping iFixit after it added a line in its robots.txt file that disallows Anthropic’s bot, in particular.
The AI startup told The Information that it respects robots.txt and that its crawler “respected that signal when iFixit implemented it.” It also said that it aims “for minimal disruption by being thoughtful about how quickly [it crawls] the same domains,” which is why it’s now investigating the case.
AI firms use crawlers to collect content from websites that they can use to train their generative AI technologies. They’ve been the target of multiple lawsuits as a result, with publishers accusing them of copyright infringement. To prevent more lawsuits from being filed, companies like OpenAI have been striking deals with publishers and websites. OpenAI’s content partners, so far, include News Corp, Vox Media, the Financial Times and Reddit. iFixit’s Wiens seems open to the idea of signing a deal for the how-to-repair’s website’s articles, as well, telling Anthropic in a tweet he’s willing to have a conversation about licensing content for commercial use.
If any of those requests accessed our terms of service, they would have told you that use of our content expressly forbidden. But don’t ask me, ask Claude!
If you want to have a conversation about licensing our content for commercial use, we’re right here. pic.twitter.com/CAkOQDnLjD
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/websites-accuse-ai-startup-anthropic-of-bypassing-their-anti-scraping-rules-and-protocol-133022756.html?src=rss
Amazon has released its first teaser video for Like A Dragon: Yakuza, its live action adaptation of SEGA’s Yakuza games, at San Diego Comic-Con. There’s a lot of focus on the inking process of Kazuma Kiryu’s iconic dragon tattoo, but you’ll also get glimpses of Kamurocho’s night scene, various characters in the series and the underground fight club that shows up as a mini-game across the franchise. In the last few seconds of the video, you’ll see a shirtless Kiryu heading to a circle of cheering viewers betting on his match.
When the company announced the show in June, it described the adaptation as a “crime-suspense-action series” that “follows the life, childhood friends, and repercussions of the decisions of Kazuma Kiryu, a fearsome and peerless Yakuza warrior with a strong sense of justice, duty, and humanity.” Seeing as the show is set between 1995 and 2005, it will most like be based on the first Yakuza game with glimpses of the years that took place after the events in Yakuza 0.
The first three of episodes of Like A Dragon: Yakuza will arrive on Prime Video on October 24, with the next three coming on October 31. It stars Ryoma Takeuchi (Kamen Rider Drive, Roppongi Class) as Kiryu. And as this teaser has revealed, his best friend Nishiki, who plays a pivotal role in the story, will be portrayed by Kento Kaku (Netflix’s House of Ninjas).
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-drops-the-first-teaser-for-its-upcoming-yakuza-adaptation-110442602.html?src=rss
Amazon has released its first teaser video for Like A Dragon: Yakuza, its live action adaptation of SEGA’s Yakuza games, at San Diego Comic-Con. There’s a lot of focus on the inking process of Kazuma Kiryu’s iconic dragon tattoo, but you’ll also get glimpses of Kamurocho’s night scene, various characters in the series and the underground fight club that shows up as a mini-game across the franchise. In the last few seconds of the video, you’ll see a shirtless Kiryu heading to a circle of cheering viewers betting on his match.
When the company announced the show in June, it described the adaptation as a “crime-suspense-action series” that “follows the life, childhood friends, and repercussions of the decisions of Kazuma Kiryu, a fearsome and peerless Yakuza warrior with a strong sense of justice, duty, and humanity.” Seeing as the show is set between 1995 and 2005, it will most like be based on the first Yakuza game with glimpses of the years that took place after the events in Yakuza 0.
The first three of episodes of Like A Dragon: Yakuza will arrive on Prime Video on October 24, with the next three coming on October 31. It stars Ryoma Takeuchi (Kamen Rider Drive, Roppongi Class) as Kiryu. And as this teaser has revealed, his best friend Nishiki, who plays a pivotal role in the story, will be portrayed by Kento Kaku (Netflix’s House of Ninjas).
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-drops-the-first-teaser-for-its-upcoming-yakuza-adaptation-110442602.html?src=rss
Amazon has released its first teaser video for Like A Dragon: Yakuza, its live action adaptation of SEGA’s Yakuza games, at San Diego Comic-Con. There’s a lot of focus on the inking process of Kazuma Kiryu’s iconic dragon tattoo, but you’ll also get glimpses of Kamurocho’s night scene, various characters in the series and the underground fight club that shows up as a mini-game across the franchise. In the last few seconds of the video, you’ll see a shirtless Kiryu heading to a circle of cheering viewers betting on his match.
When the company announced the show in June, it described the adaptation as a “crime-suspense-action series” that “follows the life, childhood friends, and repercussions of the decisions of Kazuma Kiryu, a fearsome and peerless Yakuza warrior with a strong sense of justice, duty, and humanity.” Seeing as the show is set between 1995 and 2005, it will most like be based on the first Yakuza game with glimpses of the years that took place after the events in Yakuza 0.
The first three of episodes of Like A Dragon: Yakuza will arrive on Prime Video on October 24, with the next three coming on October 31. It stars Ryoma Takeuchi (Kamen Rider Drive, Roppongi Class) as Kiryu. And as this teaser has revealed, his best friend Nishiki, who plays a pivotal role in the story, will be portrayed by Kento Kaku (Netflix’s House of Ninjas).
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-drops-the-first-teaser-for-its-upcoming-yakuza-adaptation-110442602.html?src=rss
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