The Insider News

Ars Technica[^]:

Google will pay $11 million to settle the claims of 227 people who say they were unfairly denied jobs because of their age, according to Friday court filings. The settlement must still be approved by the judge in the case.

Bartek Filipek[^]:

For many years __has_include was available as an extension in Clang. Now it’s in the Standard!

wired article said:

It will be a long time before anyone starts sending fully formed thoughts to a computer, he says—and even longer before anyone finds it really useful. Think about speech-recognition software, which has been around for decades, Schalk says. “It was probably 80 percent accurate in 1980 or something, and 80 percent is a pretty remarkable achievement in terms of engineering. But it’s useless in the real world,” he says. “I still don’t use Siri, because it’s not good enough.”

In the meantime, there are far simpler and more functional ways to help people who have trouble speaking. If a patient can move a finger, he can type out messages in Morse code. If a patient can move her eyes, she can use eye-tracking software on a smartphone. “These devices are dirt cheap,” Schalk says. “Now you want to replace one of these with a $100,000 brain implant and get something that’s a little better than chance?”

I try to square this idea with all the stunning cyborg demonstrations that have made their way into the media over the years—people drinking coffee with robotic arms, people getting brain implants in Belize. The future always seems so near at hand, just as it did a half century ago when José Delgado stepped into that bullring. One day soon we’ll all be brains inside computers; one day soon our thoughts and feelings will be uploaded to the Internet; one day soon our mental states will be shared and data-mined. We can already see the outlines of this scary and amazing place just on the horizon—but the closer we get, the more it seems to fall back into the distance.

ZDNet[^]:

OpenAI, a company working on AI for the public good, is committing to build with Microsoft new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, and getting a $1 billion infusion from Microsoft as part of the arrangement.

ZDNet[^]:

Equifax has agreed to a settlement over its 2017 data breach that saw as many as 147 million people’s personal information, including names, birth dates, addresses, and social security numbers, exposed by the company.

Tech Xplore[^]:

From their first years of life, human beings have the innate ability to learn continuously and build mental models of the world, simply by observing and interacting with things or people in their surroundings.

IT Pro Portal[^]:

Many are also not paying attention to internal communications unless they absolutely must.