While the Omicron mutation might “impact” the effectiveness of our current vaccines, they’re “super unlikely” to render them useless, according to Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health.
And USA Today reports that vaccine makers are already getting ready to fight the variant:
Health experts have said it will likely be weeks before the world has good data about how omicron may reduce the effectiveness of current vaccines, but Moderna has already announced a three-point strategy to combat the new variant…
Moderna’s strategy involves three options for boosting COVID-19 vaccination, should omicron prove problematic for current vaccines. The three options, according to a Friday release from the company: A higher dose booster, shots currently being studied that are designed to “anticipate mutations such as those that have emerged in the Omicron variant” and an omicron-specific booster — which is already in the works.
Andy Slavitt, who previously served as President Joe Biden’s White House senior adviser for COVID response, said in a tweet that both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have estimated a vaccine to combat a new variant could be developed in about 3 months, with some regulatory and logistical hurtles to follow. “If we start in early December, new vaccines could be available by summer in much of the world,” Slavitt tweeted.
Multiple media organizations on Friday reported Pfizer-BioNTech is studying the new variant and expects data within weeks. If warranted, a targeted vaccine could be developed within 6 weeks and ship within 100 days, the reports say.
Johnson & Johnson is also testing its current vaccine against omicron, according to CNBC.
We’re now a month away from The Book of Boba Fett, the first spinoff to The Mandalorian that sees the return of Temuera Morrison’s helmeted bounty hunter. With Jabba dead and a power vacuum in the galaxy’s crime underworld, the green-armored Mandalorian’s decided to make a name for himself now that he’s back from the…
Maybe you’re the type of person who, at the end of each holiday season, washes all the stockings and other festive fabric decorations before putting them in a carefully sealed container, so everything’s ready-to-go the following year.
HBO Max has uploaded another alternative DC Comics movie cut, but it won’t brag about this one. As CBR and The Verge note, WarnerMedia comms executive Johanna Fuentes has confirmed HBO Max accidentally uploaded the censored TV version of the 2020 movie Birds of Prey. While it’s listed as the R-rated version from theaters, play it and you’ll get the same ‘family-friendly’ edit you’d see on TNT.
Fuentes promised that HBO Max would upload the R-rated movie, although she didn’t provide a timeline. That uncensored take will be the only version on the service, the exec added, and it has been available for about a year.
It’s not clear how the slip-up occurred. We’ve asked WarnerMedia for comment. With that said, HBO Max certainly isn’t averse to foul language or violence. This is an embarrassing moment for a streaming provider still in its early stages, but it doesn’t represent a sudden change of heart.
Or… counterpoint. We have a version of the film that airs on broadcast cable and the unedited version of the film for streaming which has been up for a year (which the original post on CBR noted). Will be updated on Max.
On Friday, the World Health Organization officially named a new version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus a variant of concern, and attached the Greek letter omicron to the designation. The Omicron variant is notable for the sheer number of mutations in the spike protein of the virus. While Omicron appears to have started spreading in Africa, it has already appeared in European countries like Belgium and the UK, which are working to limit its spread through surveillance and contact tracing.
As of now, the data on the variant is very limited; we don’t currently know how readily it spreads compared to other variants, nor do we understand the degree of protection against Omicron offered by vaccines or past infections. The new designation, however, will likely help focus resources on studying Omicron’s behavior and tracing its spread.
Many changes
While the Delta variant’s version of spike has nine changes compared to the virus that started the pandemic, Omicron has 30 differences. While many of these haven’t been identified previously, a number of these have been seen in other strains, where they have a variety of effects. These include increasing infectiveness of the virus, as a number of the changes increase the affinity between the spike protein and the protein on human cells that it targets when starting a new infection.
“The thought of combining a printer (the bane of office workers) with the bacterium E. coli (the scourge of romaine lettuce) may seem an odd, if not unpleasant, collaboration,” writes the New York Times.
“But scientists have recently melded the virtues of the infuriating tool and of the toxic microbe to produce an ink that is alive, made entirely from microbes.”
The microbial ink flows like toothpaste under pressure and can be 3D-printed into various tiny shapes — a circle, a square and a cone — all of which hold their form and glisten like Jell-O. The researchers describe their recipe for their programmable, microbial ink in a study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
The material is still being developed, but the authors suggest that the ink could be a crucial renewable building material, able to grow and heal itself and ideal for constructing sustainable homes on Earth and in space… [T]he new substance contains no additional polymers; it is produced entirely from genetically engineered E. coli bacteria. The researchers induce bacterial cultures to grow the ink, which is also made of living bacteria cells. When the ink is harvested from the liquid culture, it becomes firm like gelatin and can be plugged into 3D-printers and printed into living structures, which do not grow further and remain in their printed forms…
Bacteria may seem an unconventional building block. But microbes are a crucial component of products such as perfumes and vitamins, and scientists have already engineered microbes to produce biodegradable plastics. A material like a microbial ink has more grandiose ambitions, according to Neel Joshi, a synthetic biologist at Northeastern University and an author on the new paper. Such inks are an expanding focus of the field of engineered living materials. Unlike structures cast from concrete or plastic, living systems would be autonomous, adaptive to environmental cues and able to regenerate — at least, that is the aspirational goal, Dr. Joshi said. “Imagine creating buildings that heal themselves,” said Sujit Datta, a chemical and biological engineer at Princeton University who was not involved with the research….
Dr. Manjula-Basavanna is shooting for the moon, Earth’s satellite, where there are no forests to harvest for wood and no easy way to send bulk building materials. There, he said, the ink might be used as a self-regenerating substance to help build habitats on other planets, as well as places on Earth. “There is a lot of work to be done to make it scalable and economic,” Dr. Datta conceded. But, he noted, just five years ago creating robust structures out of microbes was unimaginable; conceivably, self-healing buildings could be a reality in our lifetime.
Perhaps you decided to spend the holiday weekend watching some good old fashioned superhero violence in the form of last year’s pretty good (and perhaps poorly named) Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) on HBO Max. If you’re one such person, you were greeted with a card saying that the…
It may sound far-fetched but you can actually get similar performance out a MacBook Air as an M1-powered MacBook Pro, with some fairly straight-forward modifications. You simply need a P5 (pentalobe) screwdriver and some inexpensive thermal pads.
Some may be curious as to why the MacBook Air doesn’t already have the same performance as
SpaceX doesn’t always get a warm reception when it expands Starlink. Reutersreports the Indian government has told Starlink to immediately stop “booking/rendering” satellite internet service in the country until it has a license to operate. The SpaceX division registered as a business in India on November 1st and has started pre-orders, but doesn’t yet have permission to run the service. Authorities have also discouraged would-be customers from signing up at this stage.
We’ve asked SpaceX for comment, although it initially declined Reuters‘ inquiries. The company hasn’t set a firm date for Starlink’s India debut, although it’s aiming for 200,000 connections in the country by the end of 2022. There were over 5,000 pre-orders as of November 1st.
Starlink is currently available in 21 countries in mostly public beta tests. However, SpaceX has a particularly strong incentive to serve India as soon as possible. India has a very large rural population (over 898 million, according to World Bank data). It’s a prime market for satellite broadband, and the Starlink team hopes 80 percent of devices sold in India by late 2022 will serve rural areas. However, it’s now clear India’s government doesn’t share that same enthusiasm.
Revealed yesterday via an investor presentation, Daybreak Game’s Austin-based Dimensional Ink game studio is developing a new Marvel MMO. However, according to the same presentation, it will likely be a few years before we see a trailer or screenshot of the upcoming online superhero game.
Linux cross-platform packaging format Flatpak has come under the spotlight this week, with the “fundamental problems inherent in [its] design” criticised in a withering post by Canadian software dev Nicholas Fraser.
By and large, the public cloud runs on Linux. Most users, even Microsoft Azure customers, run Linux on the cloud. In the case of market giant Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud provider will let you run many Linux distros or their own homebrew Linux, Amazon Linux. Now, AWS has released an early version of its next distro, Amazon Linux 3, which is based on Red Hat’s community Linux, Fedora.
AWS has long tried to incorporate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) compatibility into Amazon Linux, but this latest release takes that to new heights. By using Fedora as its upstream, the new Amazon distro, also called AL2022, is a stable distribution. It’s gone through extensive testing to offer package stability, and it also includes all available security updates….
TechRadar adds some more details:
The distro has had two major releases till now; the first in 2010, and the second in 2017. However, with the third AL2022 release the service is committing to a two year release cycle, with each release supported for a period of five years… AWS argues that the two year major release cycle, with updates shipped quarterly via minor releases, will help keep the software current, while the five year support commitment for each major release will give customers the stability they need to manage long project lifecycles.
We’ve heard the fable of “the self-made billionaire” a thousand times: some unrecognized genius toiling away in a suburban garage stumbles upon The Next Big Thing, thereby single-handedly revolutionizing their industry and becoming insanely rich in the process — all while comfortably ignoring the fact that they’d received $300,000 in seed funding from their already rich, politically-connected parents to do so.
In The Warehouse: Workers and Robots at Amazon, Alessandro Delfanti, associate professor at the University of Toronto and author of Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science, deftly examines the dichotomy between Amazon’s public personas and its union-busting, worker-surveilling behavior in fulfillment centers around the world — and how it leverages cutting edge technologies to keep its employees’ collective noses to the grindstone, pissing in water bottles. In the excerpt below, Delfanti examines the way in which our current batch of digital robber barons lean on the classic redemption myth to launder their images into that of wonderkids deserving of unabashed praise.
Pluto Press
This is an excerpt from The Warehouse: Workers and Robots at Amazon by Alessandro Delfanti, available now from Pluto Press.
Besides the jobs, trucks and concrete, what Amazon brought to Piacenza and to the dozens of other suburban areas which host its warehouses is a myth: a promise of modernization, economic development, and even individual emancipation that stems from the “disruptive” nature of a company heavily based on the application of new technology to both consumption and work. It is a promise that assumes that the society in question is willing to entrust such ambitions to the gigantic multinational corporations that design, implement, and possess technology. This myth of digital capitalism is based on a number of elements, including magical origins, heroes, and stories of redemption. Some are by now familiar to everyone: A couple of teenagers tinkering away in a garage can revolutionize or create from scratch an entire industry, generating billions in the process. The garage is an important component of this myth. Here we are not talking about the garages where MXP5 workers park their cars after a ten-hour shift in the warehouse, nor about the garages where Amazon Flex couriers store piles of boxes to be delivered. The innovation garage is the site where individuals unbounded by old habits and funded by venture capital turn simple ideas into marketable digital commodities. Nowhere does this myth run deeper than in California: William Hewlett and David Packard’s Palo Alto backyard shack is listed on the US National Register of Historic Places as “the birthplace of Silicon Valley,” while the garage of Steve Jobs’ parents’ house (where he and Steve Wozniak built the first batch of Apple computers) has been recently designated as a “historical site” by the city of Los Altos. These garages have even been turned into informal museums and receive thousands of visitors a year, some even arriving with organized tour buses. For Californian historian Mario Biagioli, the garage has become an important rhetorical device in contemporary discourses, helping mythify the origins of contemporary innovation. Masculine innovation in particular, since the garage is a strictly male space. Bezos himself started Amazon in a garage, albeit not in California—or so Amazon’s origin myth goes: in 1994 he left his lucrative but dull Wall Street hedge fund job and wrote a business plan while driving cross-country from New York to Seattle, where he used his and his family’s money to start the company.
The myth of the redemption and success of the hero entrepreneur trickles down to the warehouse, insofar as Amazon presents work to its employees through the frame of emancipation. The idea of redemption through work is nothing new. On the contrary, it is a damnation common to modern society. In the early 1960s, militant sociologist Romano Alquati pointed out that the culture of mid-20th century Italian factories included the construction of a “myth” or “cult” of emancipation. In this instance, it was directed at the masses of migrant workers who, following World War II, moved from the rural south to the north of the country to find manufacturing work with the flagship companies of the Italian postwar economic boom, such as FIAT or Olivetti. Redemption from the backwardness of rural life was ensured not only by steady paychecks and the prospect of a pension at the end of the line, but also by participation in technologically advanced production processes—the assembly line of industrial capitalism. Amazon simply repeats and updates such promises. In Italy, for example, Amazon positions itself as an employee-focused company that brings stable employment back to a precarized labor market—a boon to a labor market hit by financial crises, lackluster growth, and lack of opportunities for retraining and upskilling. So Amazon continues a historical trajectory of Italian capitalism, but imports onto the local context novel characteristics borrowed from the American digital corporation model.
Indeed, digital capitalism updates industrial capitalism’s promise of economic and social emancipation with some novel elements of its own. Rather than simply swapping out the assembly line with the robot or the algorithm, the culture of digital capitalism mixes libertarian ideology with entrepreneurial elements. At the core of this myth lies a form of individualism. The combination of new information technologies with free-market dynamics enables emancipatory potential for the entrepreneur. Furthermore, digital capitalist companies state that they exist to change the world, to make people happy, to create value for everyone and not just for investors—technological optimism at its apex. After all, how could you deliver a bad outcome when your first principle is don’t be evil, as Google’s old slogan famously put it.
Amazon extends this old myth to all its workers. Indeed, in corporate documents, the company goes so far as to state that everyone is an “owner” at Amazon. While this is quite literal in the case of engineers and executives who receive shares of the company, it can only be understood at the level of mythology for warehouse workers. A figurative or spiritual commitment to the company’s destiny. Managerial techniques used in the warehouse contribute to building this myth, as associates are asked to have fun at work and help Amazon make history, as one of its corporate slogans goes. The myth brings with it the idea that there is no alternative to digital capitalism. Only co-option, or failure for those who can’t keep up or won’t adapt or submit.
Myths are not just old stories or false beliefs. They are ideas that help us make sense of the world. The myth of digital capitalism itself is not simply fictitious, but instead has very concrete effects. For Big Tech corporations, this myth projects a positive contribution to the world, helping to attract workers and investment, and boost corporate value on financial markets. But it has other concrete effects as well. In different areas of the world, and in different communities, the myth of redemption stemming from participation in high-tech production has impacted economies and cultures. Feminist media studies scholar Lisa Nakamura recounted how, in the 1970s, electronics manufacturers operating on Navajo land in New Mexico justified the employment of Indigenous women. Labor in microchip production was presented as empowering for the crafty and docile Navajo women—assumptions derived from racist stereotyping. Italy is completely different from the Navajo Nation, and yet the idea that an imported version of American digital capitalism can be a force for collective modernization and individual emancipation is alive and well there too. Belief in this myth is evidenced in many different and even contrasting ways. Some bring resources, like the $1.5 billion state-owned venture capital fund launched in 2020 by the Italian government to support start-up companies in the hope they will foster economic growth. Others sell resources off, like when mayors of small towns with high unemployment compete to attract the next Amazon FC, offering the company both farmland newly opened up for development and a local workforce ready to staff the warehouse. Over the years, the mayors of Castel San Giovanni have described the presence of MXP5 as a force of “development” and a source of “pride” for the town. This is not unique to Italy. American mayors are routinely quoted praising the arrival of a new Amazon facility as a “wonderful” or “monumental” thing for their town.
Amazon’s corporate slogans also hedge up its myth. Central is the valorization of disruption—the idea of a hero entrepreneur defeating the gods of the past. Some of the slogans (the so-called Leadership Principles) are repeated time and again and painted everywhere in the warehouse. While Aboutamazon.com, the company’s corporate website, describes them as “more than inspirational wall hangings,” that is exactly what they sound like. Customer obsession is perhaps the most famous one, a slogan that captures the strategic goal of focusing on customers’ needs: the rest (profits, power) will follow. It also signals that workers are by design an afterthought. Other slogans are even more predictable, like Leaders are right a lot or Think big. Amazon’s myth trickles down to fulfillment centers like MXP5 in many ways. Amazon routinely conducts marketing operations aimed at finding new workers, not new customers. Billboards sporting smiling warehouse workers, recruitment events, and glowing articles commissioned by staffing agencies in the local newspaper are common sights in Piacenza, as in the areas surrounding other FCs. Social media multiplies the message. Amazon encourages employees to join its army of “ambassadors”—workers who plaster social media with positive stories about their job or videos in which they happily dance inside the warehouse. Like the FC’s walls, all these practices are soaked with the Leadership Principles: at a recruitment event near Toronto, slogans, such as Fulfilling the customer promise, were projected as part of a slideshow filled with smiling arrow logos, accompanying a presentation of more mundane details like job descriptions or benefits. “Every Amazonian who wants to be a leader,” we were told, should focus on “customer obsession” and “never settle,” and let’s not forget that Amazonians “are right a lot.” The event wrapped up with free pizza.
In the buildup to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, it seemed like Zendaya sure was gonna be in more of it than she actually was. The trailers implied that her character Chani would be more than a girl who haunts—or graces, depending on your POV—the dreams of Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, while the actual film itself…
Having a tough time scoring a PlayStation 5 console? You’re not alone—like the Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch OLED, the PS5 is a highly elusive console that is incredibly difficult to buy. Well, unless you’re willing to pay through the nose on eBay or from a marketplace seller. Good news, though. Another PS5 restock is right around the
After more than a year of development, an updated distribution kit for mobile phones NemoMobile 0.7 version was released, using the developments of the Mer project, but based on the ManjaroArm project. The systemimage size for Pine Phone is 740 MB. All applications and services are open under GPL and BSD licenses and are available on GitHub.
While there have long been diehard fans of vintage and antique furniture, the furniture shortage and resulting delivery delay throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has made higher-end secondhand shopping even more competitive. And with the increased demand has come a flood of fakes, Sydney Gore writes in an article for…
On Monday morning the moderation team for the Rust programming language “resigned effective immediately,” reports The New Stack:
The resignation was tendered via a pull request on GitHub, wherein team member Andrew Gallant wrote that the team resigned “in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves.”
According to the page describing Rust governance, the moderation team’s purpose is to do just that — to help “uphold the code of conduct and community standards” — and according to the resignation letter, they are unable to do so, with the Core Team seemingly being outside of those bounds. “As a result of such structural unaccountability, we have been unable to enforce the Rust Code of Conduct to the standards the community expects of us and to the standards we hold ourselves to,” Gallant continues, before making four specific recommendations to the Rust community as to how to move forward.
First, Gallant writes that the Rust community should “come to a consensus on a process for oversight over the Core Team,” which he says is currently “answerable only to themselves.” Next, the outgoing team recommends that the “replacement for the Mod Team be made by Rust Team Members not on the Core Team,” and that this future team “with advice from Rust Team Members, proactively decide how best to handle and discover unhealthy conflict among Rust Team Members,” with “professional mediation” also suggested. The final point, which they say is unrelated, is that the next team should “take special care to keep the team of a healthy size and diversity, to the extent possible,” something they failed to do themselves. To that point, the outgoing team is just three members, Andre Bogus, Andrew Gallant, and Matthieu M…
The former team concludes their resignation letter, writing that “we have avoided airing specific grievances beyond unaccountability” because they are choosing “to maintain discretion and confidentiality” and that the Rust community and their replacements “exercise extreme skepticism of any statements by the Core Team (or members thereof) claiming to illuminate the situation.”
“Our relationship with Core has been deteriorating for months,” they add in a thread on Reddit (where the subReddit’s moderators have since locked out comments “in light of the volatile nature of this thread.”)
There’s just one more official update. Thursday former Rust moderation team member Andrew Gallant tweeted the URL to a new post which has now appeared on the “Inside Rust blog” — titled “In response to the moderation team resignation.” The post reads:
As top-level team leads, project directors to the Foundation, and core team members, we are actively collaborating to establish next steps after the statement from the Rust moderation team. While we are having ongoing conversations to share perspectives on the situation, we’d like to collectively state that we are all committed to the continuity and long term health of the project.
Updates on next steps will be shared with the project and wider community over the next few weeks. In the meantime, we are grateful to the interim moderators who have stepped up to provide moderation continuity to the project.
Although buying a new GPU is still incredibly difficult, now might be a good time take a look at what else can be upgraded in your system. We have some deals on CPUs, motherboards, monitors, power supplies, and memory. We have already covered SSD storage deals yesterday, so let’s dive into these other PC hardware bargains.
Xiaomi only announced its electric car plans in March, but it already has grand ambitions. According to Reuters, the economic development agency Beijing E-Town has confirmed that Xiaomi will build an EV factory in the city capable of producing up to 300,000 vehicles per year. The plant will be built in two phases and should start mass production in 2024.
The company will also set up its EV headquarters, research and sales divisions in Beijing, the agency said. Xiaomi already plans to use its retail stores to help sell cars.
There are still many unknowns for Xiaomi’s car strategy, including the initial models and international expansion. The successful tech brand expects to invest the equivalent of $10 billion in the EV division over 10 years, but hasn’t shared much detail beyond that. The Beijing factory says more — it suggests Xiaomi intends to become a mainstream (if initially small) EV manufacturer that competes not just with Chinese rivals like Nio and Xpeng, but significant foreign automakers like Tesla.
