There’s been predictions that a transition to electric vehicles would hurt autoworkers. But this week U.S. autoworkers ended their strike after winning “significant gains in pay and benefits,” reports the Associated Press:

The United Auto Workers union overwhelmingly ratified new contracts with Ford and Stellantis, that along with a similar deal with General Motors will raise pay across the industry, force automakers to absorb higher costs and help reshape the auto business as it shifts away from gasoline-fueled vehicles…
The companies agreed to dramatically raise pay for top-scale assembly plant workers, with increases and cost-of-living adjustments that would translate into 33% wage gains. Top assembly plant workers are to receive immediate 11% raises and will earn roughly $42 an hour when the contracts expire in April of 2028. Under the agreements, the automakers also ended many of the multiple tiers of wages they had used to pay different workers.

They also agreed in principle to bring new electric-vehicle battery plants into the national union contract. This provision will give the UAW an opportunity to unionize the EV battery plants plants, which will represent a rising share of industry jobs in the years ahead.

In October the union’s president criticized what had been the original trajectory of the auto industry. “The plan was to draw down engine and transmission plants, and permanently replace them with low-wage battery jobs. We had a different plan. And our plan is winning.”

And this week the union’s president said they had not only “raised wages dramatically for over a hundred thousand workers” — and improved their retirement security. “We took a major step towards ensuring a just transition to electric vehicles.”

In Belvidere, Illinois, the union “won a commitment from Stellantis to reopen a shuttered factory and even add an EV battery plant,” the Associated Press notes.

“The new contract agreements were widely seen as a victory for the UAW,” their article adds — and perhaps even for other autoworkers. After the UAW’s president announced plans to try unionizing other plants, three foreign automakers in the U.S. — Honda, Toyota and Hyundai — “quickly responded to the UAW contract by raising wages for their factory workers.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – US Autoworkers End Strike with Pay Raises and a Chance to Unionize EV Battery Plants

Sam Altman will not be returning as CEO of OpenAI, after a furious weekend of negotiations.
The Information reports:
Sam Altman won’t return as CEO of OpenAI, despite efforts by the company’s executives to bring him back, according to co-founder and board director Ilya Sutskever. After a weekend of negotiations with the board of directors that fired him Friday, as well as with its remaining leaders and top investors, Altman will not return to the startup he co-founded in 2015, Sutskever told staff. Emmett Shear, co-founder of Amazon-owned video streaming site Twitch, will take over as interim CEO, Sutskever said.
The decision “which flew in the face of comments OpenAI executives shared with staff on Saturday and early Sunday “could deepen a crisis precipitated by the board’s sudden ouster of Altman and its removal of President Greg Brockman from the board Friday. Brockman, a key engineer behind the company’s successes, resigned later that day, followed by three senior researchers, threatening to set off a broader wave of departures to OpenAI’s rivals, including Google, and to a new AI venture Altman has been plotting in the wake of his firing.
Venture capitalist Jason Calacanis predicts on X:
The employees at OpenAI just lost billions of dollars in secondary share sales that were about to happen at a $90b valuation – that’s over. Done.

I think OpenAI will lose half their employees, the 12-18 month lead, and 90% of their valuation in 2024.

Just insane value destruction

What’s your prediction for the future of OpenAI?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – OpenAI Fiasco: Emmett Shear Becomes Interim OpenAI CEO as Altman Talks Break Down

An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:

Kyle Vogt, the serial entrepreneur who co-founded and led Cruise from a startup in a garage through its acquisition and ownership by General Motors, has resigned, according to an email sent to employees Sunday evening…

The executive shakeup comes a less than a month after the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s permits to operate self-driving vehicles on public roads after an October 2 incident that saw a pedestrian — who had been initially hit by a human-driven car and landed in the path of a Cruise robotaxi — run over and dragged 20 feet by the AV. A video, which TechCrunch also viewed, showed the robotaxi braking aggressively and coming to a stop over the woman. The DMV’s order of suspension stated that Cruise withheld about seven seconds of video footage, which showed the robotaxi then attempting to pull over and subsequently dragging the woman 20 feet…
[M]ore layoffs are expected at the company that employs about 4,000 full-time employees.
TechCrunch notes that Vogt previously co-founded Justin.tv Socialcam, Twitch, and shares this quote from an email that Vogt sent to all employees Sunday evening. “The startup I launched in my garage has given over 250,000 driverless rides across several cities, with each ride inspiring people with a small taste of the future…

“The status quo on our roads sucks, but together we’ve proven there is something far better around the corner.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Cruise’s CEO Resigns

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:

Central bank digital currencies have the potential to replace cash, but adoption could take time, said Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund on Wednesday.

“CBDCs can replace cash which is costly to distribute in island economies,” she said Wednesday at the Singapore FinTech Festival. “They can offer resilience in more advanced economies. And they can improve financial inclusion where few hold bank accounts.” […] “CBDCs would offer a safe and low-cost alternative [to cash]. They would also offer a bridge to go between private monies and a yardstick to measure their value, just like cash today which we can withdraw from our banks,” the IMF chief said.

The IMF has said that more than 100 countries are exploring CBDCs — or approximately 60% of countries in the world. “The level of global interest in CBDCs is unprecedented. Several central banks have already launched pilots or even issued a CBDC,” the IMF said in a September report. According to a 2022 survey conducted by the Bank for International Settlements, of the 86 central banks surveyed, 93% said they were exploring CBDCs, while 58% said they were likely to or may possibly issue a retail CBDC in either the short or medium term. But as of June, only 11 countries have adopted CBDCs, with an additional 53 in advanced planning stages and 46 researching the topic, according to data from the Atlantic Council…

On Wednesday, the fund launched a CBDC handbook as a reference guide for policymakers around the world…

Georgieva also said that artificial intelligence “could amplify some of the benefits of CBDCs” by providing accurate credit scoring and personalized support.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – The IMF Launches ‘Central Bank Digital Currency’ Handbook, Says CBDCs Could Someday Replace Cash

Today saw the end of IFComp.org’s 29th annual text adventure competition (now administered by the charitable non-profit IF Technology Foundation). 74 new and original text adventures
competed for a share of the $7,523 prize pool, with the winners announced in a special online ceremony on Twitch this afternoon.

After all the votes were tabulated, the winning game was Dr Ludwig and the Devil, a 90-minute epic in which an esteemed mad scientist tries to double-cross Beelzebub himself — along with “the world’s least effective torch and pitchfork-wielding mob!” Coming in second was LAKE Adventure. (Its premise? That it’s a 13-year-old’s 1993 game being revisited by its author 28 years later — complete with some gloriously retro artwork.) And finishing third was The Little Match Girl 4 (described as “a touching epic time travel fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.)

But also this week, the owner of the web site 80sNostalgia.com has created a text adventure using nothing but inter-linked posts on Threads.
“Think you can get under The Bridge?” its first post challenges. “Test your gaming skills with this Threads exclusive text-based game!
“And then try to get your head around got much work it took to make it…”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Text Adventures are Still Thriving in Interactive Fiction Competition – and On Threads

“To celebrate my life, I’ve arranged to buy up others’ medical debt and then destroy the debt,” reads a posthumous tweet posted Tuesday after the death of 38-year-old Casey McIntyre.

The Washington Post explains…

McIntyre, who served as publisher at Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House, was diagnosed in 2019 and proceeded through treatment without taking on debt, [husband Andrew Rose] Gregory told The Washington Post. But many fellow cancer patients she met were in more precarious financial positions, Gregory added. “We were both so keenly aware that Casey had great health insurance through Penguin Random House,” said Gregory, 41. “Casey had no medical debt….”

About nine months before McIntyre died, her husband came across a video online about members of a North Carolina church who purchased nearly $3.3 million of local residents’ medical debt for $15,048 in a “debt jubilee,” a historical reference to ancient stories about personal debts being canceled at regular intervals. The couple chose to make monthly donations to RIP Medical Debt, the same organization that partnered with the North Carolina churchgoers. The nonprofit organization aims to abolish medical debt “at pennies on the dollar,” according to its website. For every $100 donated, the company relieves $10,000 of medical debt. As of Saturday, nearly $200,000 had been donated to RIP Medical Debt in McIntyre’s memory, which would wipe out approximately $20 million of unpaid medical bills. [By Sunday afternoon it had risen to over $334,000…]

Allison Sesso, president and chief executive of RIP Medical Debt, said her organization found out about McIntyre’s case after McIntyre’s posthumous social media post went viral. Sesso said the pace of donations was record-setting for her charity. “What an incredible gesture to the world as you’re exiting,” Sesso told The Post. “This final act of generosity is blowing up. The amount that they’re raising and the rate at which this has gone is not something that we’re used to.”

McIntyre’s post on X has now received 65,400 likes — and 3,086 reposts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – A Viral Post on Social Media Will Clear the Medical Debt of Strangers

This week the Microsoft Security Response Center celebrated the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday updates.

In a blog post they call the updates “an initiative that has become a cornerstone of the IT world’s approach to cybersecurity.”
Originating from the Trustworthy Computing memo by Bill Gates in 2002, our unwavering commitment to protecting customers continues to this day and is reflected in Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative announced this month. Each month, we deliver security updates on the second Tuesday, underscoring our pledge to cyber defense. As we commemorate this milestone, it’s worth exploring the inception of Patch Tuesday and its evolution through the years, demonstrating our adaptability to new technology and emerging cyber threats…

Before this unified approach, our security updates were sporadic, posing significant challenges for IT professionals and organizations in deploying critical patches in a timely manner. Senior leaders of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) at the time spearheaded the idea of a predictable schedule for patch releases, shifting from a “ship when ready” model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence…

This led to a shift from a “ship when ready” model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence. In addition to consolidating patch releases into a monthly schedule, we also organized the security update release notes into a consolidated location. Prior to this change, customers had to navigate through various Knowledge Base articles, making it difficult to find the information they needed to secure themselves. Recognizing the need for clarity and convenience, we provided a comprehensive overview of monthly releases. This change was pivotal at a time when not all updates were delivered through Windows Update, and customers needed a reliable source to find essential updates for various products.

Patch Tuesday has also influenced other vendors in the software and hardware spaces, leading to a broader industry-wide practice of synchronized security updates. This collaborative approach, especially with hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel, aims to provide a united front against vulnerabilities, enhancing the overall security posture of our ecosystems. While the volume and complexity of updates have increased, so has the collaboration with the security community. Patch Tuesday has fostered better relationships with security researchers, leading to more responsible vulnerability disclosures and quicker responses to emerging threats…

As the landscape of security threats evolves, so does our strategy, but our core mission of safeguarding our customers remains unchanged.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Celebrates 20th Anniversary of ‘Patch Tuesday’