The global outage that last month prevented McDonald's from accepting payments prompted the company to release a lengthy statement that should serve as a master  class in how not to report an IT problem. It was vague, misleading and yet the company used language that still allowed many of the technical details to be figured out.  (You know you've moved far from home base when Burger King UK makes fun of you— in response to news of the McDonald's outage, Burger King played off its own slogan by posting on LinkedIn: “Not Loving I.T.”) The McDonald's statement was vague about what ..read more

Meetings have been problematic for decades. They’re often used as a catch-all solution to unresolved problems. And a chronic lack of meeting discipline means that, for all the time spent getting people together, little is accomplished. Now, in a post-pandemic remote work world, where hybrid work and flex work are common, meetings are turning into something like an ongoing crisis at many organizations. They’re harming productivity and causing havoc with employee morale. And yet with many remote workers saying they feel disconnected, the misguided consensus is that even more meetings are the ans ..read more

Scale AI, the data processing company that advertises itself as a way to train generative AI on higher-quality information, has apparently shut down access to its platform in several countries, leaving gig workers in the lurch. The company, which does much of its data processing through a subsidiary called Remotasks, cut access to its portal for workers in Nigeria, Kenya and Pakistan in  March, according to a report by Rest of World. The gig workers used by Remotask, and by extension Scale, improve data quality by adding labels, annotations, and general human input to information set to b ..read more

With WWDC 2024 now set, Apple continues to work on bringing itself more in line with US government demands. What we don’t know yet is the extent to which these changes will be restricted to the EU, or whether Apple intends to make them available worldwide in an attempt to quell regulatory zeal. To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

Though most companies have settled on return-to-office (RTO) policies now that COVID-19 is no longer considered a global health emergency, many continue to adjust their practices, often to the detriment of their workforce. Several workforce surveys over the past three months have revealed that employees do not view mandated RTO policies favorably, even when hybrid, because the guidelines are often too rigid. During the pandemic, employees became comfortable with flexible work arrangements. When people have the chance to work flexibly, 87% of them take it, according to a 2022 study by global ma ..read more

The marketing hype surrounding AI broadly — and generative AI (genAI) more specifically — is becoming tiresome. You can't open an article or watch a news video without running into at least a reference to it. We may be approaching the point at which we stop breathlessly extolling its virtues (and dreading some of its outcomes). The hype is so extreme that a fall-out, which Gartner describes in its technology hype cycle reports as the "trough of disillusionment," seems inevitable and might be coming this year. That's a testament to both genAI’s burgeoning potential and a sign of the technology ..read more

Microsoft’s Copilot AI could soon run locally on PCs rather than relying on the cloud. Intel told Tom’s Hardware that the chatbot could run on future AI-enabled PCs that would need to incorporate neural processing units (NPUs) capable of exceeding 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) — a performance level not yet matched by any consumer processor currently available. Intel mentioned that these AI PCs would be equipped to handle “more elements of Copilot” directly on the machine. Copilot currently relies predominantly on cloud processing for most tasks, leading to noticeable delays, especia ..read more

Have you ever had an unexpected direct phone call from Apple support? I have not, and if you do ever receive one, you probably aren’t talking to Apple. The company says you should immediately hang up. “If you get an unsolicited or suspicious phone call from someone claiming to be from Apple or Apple Support, just hang up,” the company support website states. Don’t fall for it Other things it warns against are suspicious calendar invitations in Mail or Calendar, annoying pop-ups in the browser, unexpected software download prompts, and fraudulent emails. To read this article in full, please cli ..read more

Amazon has announced it is investing $2.75 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the AI startup to $4 billion, as initially announced. In September last year, Amazon had invested an initial tranche of $1.25 billion. As part of this partnership, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its main cloud provider for key operations, including safety research and the development of foundational models. Anthropic will also use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for building, training, and deploying future models. To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

Essentially, all software is built using open source. By Synopsys' count, 96% of all codebases contain open-source software. Lately, though, there's been a very disturbing trend. A company will make its program using open source, make millions from it, and then — and only then — switch licenses, leaving their contributors, customers, and partners in the lurch as they try to grab billions. I'm sick of it. The latest IT melodrama baddie is Redis. Its program, which goes by the same name, is an extremely popular in-memory database. (Unless you're a developer, chances are you've never heard of it ..read more