Amazon expects to nearly triple its workforce in Vancouver, where software engineers are cheap, smart and plentiful. From a report: The online retail giant plans to occupy a bunker-like former Canada Post mailing center that’s being redeveloped into a new 1.1 million square-foot office to house 8,000 jobs by 2023, Jesse Dougherty, a vice president and Vancouver site lead at Amazon, said by phone. Currently, the company has 2,700 full-time employees at its city hub. It also plans to add 500 jobs in Toronto, according to a statement released Monday. A weak loonie, lower wages and a steady flow of graduates make Canada an attractive place to expand for tech companies whose largest expense is labor. The average wage of a software developer in Vancouver last year was $92,726, compared to $141,785 in San Francisco or $128,067 in Amazonâ(TM)s hometown of Seattle, according to a July report by real estate firm CBRE Group Inc. Once rental costs are folded in, the cost of running a 500-employee operation in the Canadian city is half that of a similar-sized operation in the Bay Area, it found.

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Source: Slashdot – Amazon Plans Vancouver Expansion Where Talent Is Cheap

Google today announced it will make it easier to install and use third-party app stores with the release of Android 12 next year. From a report: Google also reiterated its existing Payments Policy for in-app purchases of digital goods: Android developers who want to distribute apps and games on Google Play, must use Play’s billing system. Google is offering a 1-year grace period for developers who aren’t complying with this policy: The deadline is September 30, 2021. Today’s announcements today are a direct response to Epic’s war with Apple and Google over the 30% cut they take of every purchase on the iOS App Store and the Google Play store, respectively. On August 13, Epic updated Fornite for Android and iOS to use its own billing service, resulting in Apple and Google deleting Fortnite from their app stores. Epic then turned around and sued both tech giants. The lawsuits could define how all developers, from individuals to massive corporations, distribute apps on the world’s duopoly of mobile operating systems.

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Source: Slashdot – Google’s Epic Response: Android 12 Will Make It Easier To Install App Stores

Forget artificial sweeteners. Researchers are now developing new forms of real sugar, to deliver sweetness with fewer calories. But tricking our biology is no easy feat. From a report: Until the late eighteenth century, when sugar production started to become mechanized, most people consumed very little of what nutritionists call “free” or “added” sugars — sweeteners other than, say, the lactose naturally present in milk and the fructose naturally present in fruit. In 1800, an average American would have lived and died never having encountered a single manufactured candy, let alone the array of sugar-sweetened yogurts, snacks, sauces, dressings, cereals, and drinks that now line supermarket shelves. Today, that average American ingests more than nineteen teaspoons of added sugar every day. Not only does most of that never come into contact with our taste buds; our sweet receptors are also less effective than those for other tastes. Our tongues can detect bitterness at concentrations as low as a few parts per million, but, for a glass of water to taste sweet, we have to add nearly a teaspoon of sugar. DouxMatok’s method of restructuring sugar crystals was invented by Baniel’s father, Avraham, an industrial chemist. He patented the technique five years ago, when he was ninety-six; today, at the age of a hundred and one, he has finally retired. At one point during my visit, Eran sifted through a pile of his father’s memorabilia — black-and-white photographs, identification cards, university certificates — to find illustrations for a forthcoming presentation about the company.

Many of the photographs were new to Eran, and, as he tried to place them, the outline of his father’s life emerged: a six-year-old Polish boy sent to boarding school in what was then the British Palestine Mandate; a student at the University of Montpellier; a promising young scientist, strikingly handsome, exempted from serving in the British Army’s Palestine Regiment so that he could make bombs in the basement of a paint factory near Haifa. […] Estella Belfer, a pastry chef who is a judge on the TV show “Bake-Off Israel,” hopes to use Incredo exclusively one day, but, recently, she told me about some of the challenges of cooking with it. “To make chocolate, it’s easy. I just substitute the sugar with a smaller amount. In shortbread cookies, it is an improvement — it makes them crispier,” she said. “But in the cupcakes and the sponge cakes — this is where there is an art to using Incredo sugar.” Sugar is responsible for much of the tender, springy texture of a good cake; Incredo sugar behaves exactly the same way, but there’s a lot less of it, which creates a problem. Belfer told me that she has successfully blended other ingredients, including soluble fibre and plant proteins, to restore the missing bulk and fluffiness — “but it’s not easy.”

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Source: Slashdot – The Race To Redesign Sugar