James Farrell
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Co-founders of Andreessen Horowitz give full support to Trump campaign
Billionaires Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firm, have announced their support for Donald Trump’s reelection bid, stating they will make hefty donations to his campaign. “The future of our business, the future of new technology, and the future of America is literally at stake,” Horowitz (pictured) said during ...
Elon Musk is moving X and Space X to Texas, claiming it’s over a new California gender law
Elon Musk today announced that he’s taking the X Corp. and Space X Corp. headquarters out of California following the state governor’s signing of a bill that prohibits school districts from disclosing students’ gender identity. Governor Gavin Newsom (pictured) enacted the SAFETY ACT on Monday, legislation designed to protect LGBTQ+ students in the state. The ...
Uber and Lyft drivers in Massachusetts to get minimum pay, other benefits in $175M settlement
Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. today settled a lawsuit with the attorney general in Massachusetts, which will include the companies agreeing to pay their drivers a minimum wage. The $175 million settlement comes with a slew of benefits for drivers other than the $32.50 per hour minimum during driving time. The drivers will also ...
AI beats students in UK university exams, fooling human educators
Researchers at the University of Reading in the U.K. have aired concerns about the integrity of tests after they surreptitiously submitted unedited artificial intelligence-generated exam answers, fooling exam markers and beating most of the human students. In the study, the researchers created 33 fake student identities and used ChatGPT-4 to answer 63 questions in legitimate ...
Waymo scraps the waitlist and makes robotaxis available to everyone in San Francisco
After some mishaps, it’s now full steam ahead for Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo LLC, which today said its driverless taxi service is available to anyone in San Francisco who has downloaded the app. The company has been operating in the city since 2009. It introduced fully autonomous cars in 2022, but people wanting to experience a ...
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is returning to Australia a free man
After spending years in a British prison, the former Australian hacker and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has left the U.K., reportedly having agreed to a plea deal with authorities in the U.S. Assange (pictured) had been wanted by U.S. authorities after famously publishing hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, ...
New York signs bill to counteract social media addiction in the young
New York Governor Kathy Hochul today signed a bill that would give parents the ability to block their children from seeing posts suggested by a social media platform’s algorithm, a move that addresses a years-long concern around the negative effects of social media on the nation’s youth. A second bill will address the problem of ...
Amazon’s first labor union partners with the Teamsters
Members of the Amazon Labor Union, the one and only unionized Amazon warehouse, have voted to join forces with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Workers at Amazon.com Inc.’s JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island voted to unionize in 2022, becoming the first and still the only Amazon warehouse to make such a decision. At the ...
US Surgeon General thinks social media should come with tobacco-style warning labels
One of the United States’ most senior health officials, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, today said in an op-ed for the New York Times social media platforms should have warning labels regarding the potential mental health harms they could create in the young. “The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency – and ...
Former NSA Director Paul Nakasone joins OpenAI board
Paul M. Nakasone, a retired general of the U.S. Army and a former director of the National Security Agency, NSA, has just been added to OpenAI’s board of directors, it was reported today. Nakasone stepped down as NSA director earlier this year after becoming head under the Trump administration. He also served as leader of ...