onfocus

Months after unbundling the apps in the European Union, Microsoft is taking the Office and Teams breakup worldwide. Reuters reports that Microsoft will begin selling Teams and the other Microsoft 365 apps to new commercial customers as separate products with separate price tags beginning today.

The damage has been done, but good to see steps to remedy the situation. Teams is awful and if they had to compete with a fair price they would lose. Maybe they're trying to stop more damages by doing this worldwide.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

I know it’s true, but it feels rare to see it in print because media organizations typically don’t acknowledge this truth. They usually smooth over reality so they don't offend potential customers and make their owners happy.

LAION-5B is an open-source foundation dataset used to train AI models such as Stable Diffusion. It contains 5.8 billion image and text pairs—a size too large to make sense of. In this visual investigation, we follow the construction of the dataset to better understand its contents, implications and entanglements.

An exercise in (and advocacy for) AI dataset transparency. Excellent information and presentation here.

Calculating the energy cost of generative AI can be complicated — but even the rough estimates that researchers have put together are sobering.

Generative AI tools can be fun and can help productivity but are those gains worth their higher resource cost?

“Some firms seem to have used rising costs as an opportunity to further hike prices to increase their profits, and profits remain elevated even as supply chain pressures have eased,” the report read.

Some firms deserve our scorn and ridicule, I say. It would be nice if the government could reign in the profiteering but I'm not holding my breath. Burn your large grocer loyalty cards I guess.

“When Americans see a case like this – so clearly concocted and motivated by special interests, and with evident connections between those interests and the judges on the case, it does tremendous damage to the reputation of the courts, and to the public trust in their ability to give all litigants an even shake,” said Alex Aronson, the executive director of the nonpartisan group Court Accountability and a former chief counsel to the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

"It’s not technically illegal" is the first refuge of scoundrels.

I feel personally attacked by this C64-inspired keyboard. The nostalgia is strong with this one.

Fun game where you adjust the RGB sliders to match the background color. I thought I was pretty good at eyeballing RGB and I get to 90% pretty quickly. But getting that last 10% is tricky.

In the wake of Louisiana's abortion ban, pregnant women have been given risky, unnecessary surgeries, denied swift treatment for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies, and forced to wait until their life is at risk before getting an abortion, according to a new report first made available to NPR.

We wouldn’t find this acceptable in another country but it’s happening in Louisiana and other states with abortion bans. Please register to vote and vote for people who don’t find medical malpractice acceptable.

Hippocratic promotes how it can undercut real human nurses, who can cost $90 an hour, with its cheap AI agents that offer medical advice to patients over video calls in real-time.

First, do no harm. Tech culture is going just great.

The numbers were nearly as bad worldwide, as daily active users on the mobile app fell to 174 million in February, down 15% from a year earlier, the firm said. The worldwide user base has been flat or down every month during Musk’s tenure began except one, when it grew slightly in October and then resumed falling, according to Sensor Tower.

Or: how to get minimal utility out of $44 billion.

Putting a 25% tax on 750 people to benefit the 330 million other members of the American public? Maybe you can see why it's not a radical idea when middle-class people are already paying higher rates themselves. To be clear, those affected by the rate increase would continue to be billionaires—it's just that their fortunes would grow past a billion at a slightly slower pace.

Escape velocity is a great way to think about when enough is enough for any one human to have. Society doesn't see much benefit from allocating so many resources to a small number of individuals. The standard argument is job creators! but that's a joke in a world where record profits lead to mass layoffs.