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Dell Technologies is the latest technology company to announce job cuts, saying Monday that it will be cutting about 5 percent of its workforce, or about 6,600 jobs. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, Dell will cut 5 percent of its global workforce to respond to a “challenging global economic environment.” Co-Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke said in an email to employees that the company is facing market conditions that “continue to erode with an uncertain future,” which will require restructuring the organization and letting some employees go. “In the coming days and weeks, you’ll begin to...

James Pethokoukis asks, “Does ChatGPT mean the Technological Singularity is near? How would we know?” To answer the second question first, we probably wouldn’t. One of the characteristics of a singularity is that you can’t tell when you’re entering it. (And by the time you figure things out, it’s too late.) But looking at Chat GPT and the various AI Art programs that are appearing, I can’t help but see an irony: The jobs that are coming under attack first are the jobs that up to now have resisted technological replacement. For decades, traditional manufacturing jobs were gobbled up by...

Businesses are likely to sweat device assets for longer this year as they spend conservatively in a weakening economy, and this along with shrinking demand from consumers is leaving manufacturers in a tight spot. Gartner forecasts a perfect storm with fortunes declining for shipments of PCs, tablets and mobile phones 4.4 percent year-on-year in 2023 to 1.74 billion units. If accurate, that's just slightly more than 287 million computers, down 6.8 percent, some 2.9 percent fewer tablets to almost 133 million and 1.339 billion phones, down 4 percent. This is against a backdrop of a 36 percent revenue decline for...

Music streaming service Spotify announced Monday that it is slashing hundreds of jobs in the latest round of layoffs in the tech sector. Spotify said it would cut 6 percent of its staff, or about 600 workers, based on its last earnings report. “Like many other leaders, I hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us. In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth,” CEO Daniel Ek wrote in a statement. Ek announced...

SAN FRANCISCO — When Lyft laid off 13% of its workers in November, Kelly Chang was shocked to find herself among the 700 people who lost their jobs at the San Francisco company. “It seemed like tech companies had so much opportunity,” said Chang, 26. “If you got a job, you made it. It was a sustainable path.” Brian Pulliam, on the other hand, brushed off the news that crypto exchange Coinbase was eliminating his job. Ever since the 48-year-old engineer was laid off from his first job at the video game company Atari in 2003, he said that he...

Jan 20 (Reuters) - Google's parent Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) is eliminating about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, it said Friday, as Silicon Valley reels from recent layoffs and faces a troubled outlook. Alphabet, whose shares rose 3% in pre-market trading, is making the cuts just as the U.S. company confronts a threat to its long-held perch atop the technology sector. For years Alphabet has attracted top talent to build Google, YouTube and other products that reach billions of users, but it is now locked in competition with Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) in a burgeoning area known as generative artificial...

I formed a Neighborhood Watch group and now need a messaging app. The police rep. mentioned WhatsApp but supposedly some people are moving away from it to Signal. Not knowing anything about social media I need some advice, our group already has Facebook which I don't have, don't do, and can't even seem to get, and someone else handles that Facebook account and it isn't used much by them I'm told. My first instinct is to use Signal, but I'm really in the dark about these things and once I sign-up someone else will be doing the mass communications on...

Suddenly in the last few minutes, Whenever I look at replies to a post I see the poster, time and subject title, but not the reply. Anybody else have that problem?...................

The Wi-Peep stands out due to its accessibility and portability. In addition, it was created by Abedi’s team using only a store-bought drone and a small amount of readily available hardware, costing only $20. The drone-powered device exposes vulnerabilities in WiFi security. A team of researchers from the University of Waterloo has created a drone-powered device that can see through walls using WiFi networks. The device, named Wi-Peep, can fly close to a building and then utilize the WiFi network of the inhabitants to quickly identify and locate any WiFi-enabled devices within. The Wi-Peep exploits a loophole the researchers call...

Key Points 8GB and 16GB make a big difference in performance. The key difference is the volume of RAM and how much stress you need to put on your PC. 16GB is the clear winner for any PC. 8GB and 16GB of RAM isn’t the usual comparison. Obviously, more RAM would be better, so we’re going to look at the comparison from a few different angles. We’re going to look at what 16GB can do that 8GB can’t. When does 8GB stop being enough? What are the differences in performance and available features? We’ll look at what we can and...

Ultrafast computer processing speeds are possible with optical chirality logic gates that operate about a million times faster than existing technologies. Processing devices based on polarized light run one million times faster than current technology. Logic gates are the basic building blocks of computer processors. Conventional logic gates are electronic, working by shuffling around electrons. However, researchers have been developing light-based optical logic gates to meet the data processing and transfer demands of next-generation computing. Aalto University scientists developed new optical chirality logic gates that operate about a million times faster than existing technologies, offering ultrafast processing speeds. Optical Chirality...

Blackrock has a grim presentation on investing in 2023. Particularly with regards to The Federal Reserve and their ability to stave-off a recession (comin’ at you!). Central bankers won’t ride to the rescue when growth slows in this new regime, contrary to what investors have come to expect. They are deliberately causing recessions by overtightening policy to try to rein in inflation. That makes recession foretold. We see central banks eventually backing off from rate hikes as the economic damage becomes reality. We expect inflation to cool but stay persistently higher than central bank targets of 2%. Those companies —...

Billionaire has spent almost six months in Japan after largely disappearing from public viewJack Ma, the Alibaba founder and once the richest business leader in China, has been living in central Tokyo for almost six months, amid Beijing’s continuing crackdown on the country’s technology sector and its most powerful businessmen. Ma’s months-long stay in Japan with his family has included stints in hot spring and ski resorts in the countryside outside Tokyo and regular trips to the US and Israel, according to people with direct knowledge of his whereabouts. Ma has largely disappeared from public view since he criticised Chinese...

Monday’s order follows a ruling from U.S. Magistrate Judge Ivan Davis, who on Friday transferred the case back to Louisiana after Psaki attempted to fight the deposition in a Virginia court where she lives and would be deposed. Biden’s Justice Department supported her effort. "Ms. Psaki’s effort to eliminate or delay her deposition in this action had failed because of the swift action of two judges in widely dispersed courts, one in Virginia and one in Louisiana, and by the implausibility of her reasons for not testifying as to Federal efforts to censure social media that made quick resolution possible,"...

Consumers spent a record amount of money on online purchases on Black Friday, surpassing $9 billion, according to Adobe Analytics data. Adobe found that $9.12 billion was spent on Friday, marking a 2.3 percent rise year over year. Electronics sales were a large driver of the increase, with such online sales up 221 percent from the average day in October. Items such as audio equipment, toys and exercise equipment also sold well, with sales of each up more than 200 percent from an average day last month.

It seems like an eternity ago, but it’s just been a year. At this time in 2021, the Nasdaq Composite had just peaked, doubling since the early days of the pandemic. Rivian’s blockbuster IPO was the latest in a record year for new issues. Hiring was booming and tech employees were frolicking in the high value of their stock options. Twelve months later, the landscape is markedly different. Not one of the 15 most valuable U.S. tech companies has generated positive returns in 2021. Microsoft has shed roughly $700 billion in market cap. Meta’s market cap has contracted by over...

On my last night in Montana, I gave a talk on transhumanism to a right-wing organization. This was the third meeting I’d attended, held in the basement of an old Eagles Lodge. It really was a great honor. There were about forty people in the audience, I’d say, and about twenty holstered pistols. You don’t say the wrong thing to a crowd like that. Any more, I open my talks on transhumanism by noting that what we’re talking about is mostly fantasy. Genetic engineering on demand, sentient artificial superintelligence, commercial brain-computer interfaces—these are all disturbing ideas that exist, by and...

So, after dodging it for nearly three years (and precisely 14 days post-omicron booster), the little SOB finally got me. Pretty crappy timing if you ask me. Rather than bitch and moan about how lousy I feel (plenty), I found something else to bitch and moan about: Digital thermometers. I hate them on the molecular level because, in my limited experience, they work properly about 0% of the time. And what could be a better opportunity for generating a superior dataset than neurotically checking my temperature every 17 seconds? But it did not go well. I experienced thermomageddon at the...

A little noticed federal lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, is uncovering astonishing evidence of an entrenched censorship scheme cooked up between the federal government and Big Tech that would make Communist China proud. So far, 67 officials or agencies - including the FBI - have been accused in the lawsuit of violating the First Amendment by pressuring Facebook, Twitter and Google to censor users for alleged misinformation or disinformation. Victims of the Biden-Big Tech’s “censorship enterprise” include The Post, whose Hunter Biden laptop exposé was suppressed by Facebook and then Twitter in October 2020 after the FBI went to Facebook warning...

Government agencies and private security companies in the U.S. have found a cost-effective way to engage in warrantless surveillance of individuals, groups and places: a pay-for-access web tool called Fog Reveal. The tool enables law enforcement officers to see “patterns of life” – where and when people work and live, with whom they associate and what places they visit. The tool’s maker, Fog Data Science, claims to have billions of data points from over 250 million U.S. mobile devices. Fog Reveal came to light when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that advocates for online civil liberties, was investigating...