A group of content creators say they’re organizing to make YouTube become a fairer platform, reports Motherboard:

The YouTubers Union, a community-based movement fighting for the rights of content creators and users, has joined forces with IG Metall, Germany’s largest union and Europe’s largest trade union. Together, they have launched a joint venture called FairTube and sent a letter of demands to YouTube accompanied by a video explaining their concerns, demands, and plan of action. The move is one of the most significant organized labor actions taken by creators on the platform, and puts some actual union power behind what has thus far been a nascent and disorganized movement.

In recent years, YouTube creators have consistently spoken out about changes to the massive platform that they say they are rarely consulted on that affect their ability to make money. For example, YouTube has repeatedly changed how it handles copyright takedown requests (allowing copyright holders to assert copyright on and monetize videos that they didn’t upload, for example.) YouTube has also controversially “demonetized” or issued content warnings to some innocuous channels. One of the creators leading the unionization charge, Jörg Sprave, has had his popular slingshot videos removed by YouTube.

“We aren’t demanding things that cut into profits or are unrealistic. We want fairness. We want transparency. We want to be treated like partners. And we want personal communication instead of anonymous communication,” Sprave told Motherboard… . In a letter to YouTube signed by Sprave and Christiane Benner, the Vice President of IG Metall, FairTube asks that “all categories and decision criteria that affect Creators’ earning capability, especially monetization and search and discovery, shall be transparent.”

The union’s project secretary believes YouTube is now required to do this under Europe’s new GDPR regulations. (Adding that in the meantime, YouTube content creators “are having severe mental health problems as a result of living under algorithmic management.”)

The article notes one study that found that the top 3% of YouTubers generate about 90% of the traffic — yet even then, their average income is around $17,000. And Sprave now complains that YouTube creators “are making less money, have less stability, and are constantly being suppressed and demonetized now that YouTube is in favor of ad-safe brands.”

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Source: Slashdot – YouTubers Union Teams With Actual Labor Union To Pressure YouTube

Boeing’s 737 Max was built with “effectively neutered” oversight, writes the New York Times, citing interviews with over a dozen current and former employees at America’s Federal Aviation Agency.

Their damning conclusion? The agency “had never independently assessed the risks of the dangerous software known as MCAS when they approved the plane in 2017.”

The regulator had been passing off routine tasks to manufacturers for years, with the goal of freeing up specialists to focus on the most important safety concerns. But on the Max, the regulator handed nearly complete control to Boeing, leaving some key agency officials in the dark about important systems like MCAS, according to the current and former employees…The company performed its own assessments of the system, which were not stress-tested by the regulator.

Turnover at the agency left two relatively inexperienced engineers overseeing Boeing’s early work on the system. The F.A.A. eventually handed over responsibility for approval of MCAS to the manufacturer. After that, Boeing didn’t have to share the details of the system with the two agency engineers…

Late in the development of the Max, Boeing decided to expand the use of MCAS, to ensure the plane flew smoothly. The new, riskier version relied on a single sensor and could push down the nose of the plane by a much larger amount. Boeing did not submit a formal review of MCAS after the overhaul. It wasn’t required by F.A.A. rules… The agency ultimately certified the jet as safe, required little training for pilots and allowed the plane to keep flying until a second deadly Max crash, less than five months after the first…. By 2018, the F.A.A. was letting the company certify 96 percent of its own work, according to an agency official.

The article ends by describing the days after the first 737 Max crash, when Boeing executives visited the regulatory agency’s headquarters in Seattle.
“The officials sat incredulous as Boeing executives explained details about the system that they didn’t know.”

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Source: Slashdot – NYT: Boeing Was Certifying Its Own Safety For the 737 Max

AmiMoJo quotes Reuters:
Scorching temperatures across Europe coupled with prolonged dry weather has reduced French nuclear power generation by around 5.2 gigawatts (GW) or 8%, French power grid operator RTE’s data showed on Thursday. Electricity output was curtailed at six reactors by 0840 GMT on Thursday, while two other reactors were offline, data showed. High water temperatures and sluggish flows limit the ability to use river water to cool reactors.

In Germany, PreussenElektra, the nuclear unit of utility E.ON, said it would take its Grohnde reactor offline on Friday due to high temperatures in the Weser river.
France’s nuclear reactors supply more than 75% of its electricity, according to the article — though their grid operator says they still have enough capacity left to meet demand.

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Source: Slashdot – Hot Weather Cuts French, German Nuclear Power Output

Long-time Slashdot reader Faizdog writes: The “sensitivity” conjecture stumped many top computer scientists, yet the new proof is so simple that one researcher summed it up in a single tweet.

“This conjecture has stood as one of the most frustrating and embarrassing open problems in all of combinatorics and theoretical computer science,” wrote Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas, Austin, in a blog post. “The list of people who tried to solve it and failed is like a who’s who of discrete math and theoretical computer science,” he added in an email.

The conjecture concerns Boolean functions, rules for transforming a string of input bits (0s and 1s) into a single output bit. One such rule is to output a 1 provided any of the input bits is 1, and a 0 otherwise; another rule is to output a 0 if the string has an even number of 1s, and a 1 otherwise. Every computer circuit is some combination of Boolean functions, making them “the bricks and mortar of whatever you’re doing in computer science,” said Rocco Servedio of Columbia University.

“People wrote long, complicated papers trying to make the tiniest progress,” said Ryan O’Donnell of Carnegie Mellon University.

Now Hao Huang, a mathematician at Emory University, has proved the sensitivity conjecture with an ingenious but elementary two-page argument about the combinatorics of points on cubes. “It is just beautiful, like a precious pearl,” wrote Claire Mathieu, of the French National Center for Scientific Research, during a Skype interview. Aaronson and O’Donnell both called Huang’s paper the “book” proof of the sensitivity conjecture, referring to Paul Erds’ notion of a celestial book in which God writes the perfect proof of every theorem. “I find it hard to imagine that even God knows how to prove the Sensitivity Conjecture in any simpler way than this,” Aaronson wrote.

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Source: Slashdot – Decades-Old Computer Science ‘Boolean Sensitivity’ Conjecture Solved in Two Pages