Apple could be on track to release a foldable iPad as early as next year, according to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. From a report: "I'm positive about the foldable iPad in 2024 and expect this new model will boost shipments and improve the product mix," he tweeted early Monday. Kuo expects it to be joined by a revamped iPad Mini, due to enter mass production in early 2024. Kuo didn't offer many new details on the rumored iPad foldable, but said that it will feature a "carbon fiber" kickstand produced by Chinese component manufacturer Anjie Technology.

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The New York Times looks at the AbbVie's anti-inflammatory drug Humira and their "savvy but legal exploitation of the U.S. patent system." Though AbbVie's patent was supposed to expire in 2016, since then it's maintained a monopoly that generated $114 billion in revenue by using "a formidable wall of intellectual property protection and suing would-be competitors before settling with them to delay their product launches until this year." AbbVie did not invent these patent-prolonging strategies; companies like Bristol Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca have deployed similar tactics to maximize profits on drugs for the treatment of cancer, anxiety and heartburn. But AbbVie's success with Humira stands out even in an industry adept at manipulating the U.S. intellectual-property regime.... AbbVie and its affiliates have applied for 311 patents, of which 165 have been granted, related to Humira, according to the Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge, which tracks drug patents. A vast majority were filed after Humira was on the market. Some of Humira's patents covered innovations that benefited patients, like a formulation of the drug that reduced the pain from injections. But many of them simply elaborated on previous patents. For example, an early Humira patent, which expired in 2016, claimed that the drug could treat a condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, a type of arthritis that causes inflammation in the joints, among other diseases. In 2014, AbbVie applied for another patent for a method of treating ankylosing spondylitis with a specific dosing of 40 milligrams of Humira. The application was approved, adding 11 years of patent protection beyond 2016. AbbVie has been aggressive about suing rivals that have tried to introduce biosimilar versions of Humira. In 2016, with Amgen's copycat product on the verge of winning regulatory approval, AbbVie sued Amgen, alleging that it was violating 10 of its patents. Amgen argued that most of AbbVie's patents were invalid, but the two sides reached a settlement in which Amgen agreed not to begin selling its drug until 2023. Over the next five years, AbbVie reached similar settlements with nine other manufacturers seeking to launch their own versions of Humira. All of them agreed to delay their market entry until 2023. A drug pricing expert at Washington University in St. Louis tells the New York Times that AbbVie and its strategy with Humira "showed other companies what it was possible to do." But the article concludes that last year such tactics "became a rallying cry" for U.S. lawmakers "as they successfully pushed for Medicare to have greater control over the price of widely used drugs that, like Humira, have been on the market for many years but still lack competition."

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What happens when Stack Overflow's senior research analyst delves more deeply into results from their annual Developer Survey? Rust, Elixir, Clojure, Typescript, and Julia are at the top of the list of Most Loved Programming Languages. However, in looking at the last three years, we see a bit of movement. [While Rust has remained #1 since 2020, Elixir has risen to #2, while Clojure and TypeScript have dropped.] In 2022, we added a drill-down to specifically show popularity amongst those learning to code. Because Stack Overflow is a learning resource, I would expect that popularity amongst those specifically learning would be a good indicator of current and future programming language popularity. There is an interesting pattern in comparing Most Loved and Learning to Code Popularity: people learning to code aren't using the most loved languages.... Less than 1% of those learning responded they were using either Clojure or Elixir. 1.2% are using Julia 7.1% are using Rust and 15.1% are using Typescript. The article still tries to tease out ways to predict future popular programming languages (by, for example, the number of questions being asked about languages, especially by new programmers learning to code). But along the way, they uncover other surprising statistical truths about the limits of their data: "Stack Overflow questions are more susceptible to the preferences of those using the site as a learning tool rather than those of more advanced developers." "[B]eing loved (via the Developer Survey) is not related to generating more questions on Stack Overflow. And this makes sense: posting questions most likely speaks to friction with coding, a friction that may lead to loving a programming language less." "Our latest Developer Survey showed us that ~32% of programmers have been professionally coding for four years or less, a significant amount of people who are most likely involved in learning programming languages. That is, beginner-friendly languages get the most questions and popularity, but the Most Loved languages make veteran developers happy."

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Amazon is "selling a vacant Bay Area office complex purchased about 16 months ago," reports Bloomberg, "the company's latest effort to unwind a pandemic-era expansion that left it with a surfeit of warehouses and employees." Amazon in October 2021 paid $123 million for the 29-acre property in Milpitas, California, part of a strategy to lock up real estate near big cities that could be used for new warehouses and facilitate future growth.... Amazon is expected to take a loss on the sale of the Metro Corporate Center, according to one person familiar with the terms of the deal, who spoke on condition of anonymity.... Amazon last year began its biggest-ever round of job cuts that will ultimately affect 18,000 workers around the globe. The world's largest e-commerce company, which is scheduled to report earnings on Feb. 2, warned investors that fourth-quarter sales growth would be the slowest in its history. SFGate writes that the possible sale "is indicative of broader trends in Bay Area corporate real estate, which has struggled with remote work, tech layoffs and broader economic shifts." "According to a report by commercial real estate firm Kidder Mathews, direct office vacancies in San Francisco rose to more than 18.4% in the fourth quarter of 2022, while a Kastle Systems report found that office occupancy rates rose to 41.8%, just 1% higher than the rates in September 2022."

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segaboy81 shares a report from Neowin: What do you get when the world's largest CRM breaks into the research industry and leverages AI to build their products? You get ProGen, a new AI system that can make artificial enzymes from scratch that can work just as well as real ones found in nature. ProGen was made by Salesforce Research (yes, that Salesforce) and uses language processing to learn about biology. In short, ProGen takes amino acid sequences and turns them into proteins.... "The artificial designs are better than ones made by the normal process," said James Fraser, a scientist involved in the project. "We can now make specific types of enzymes, like ones that work well in hot temperatures or acid." To make ProGen, the scientists at Salesforce fed the system amino acid sequences from 280 million different proteins. The AI system quickly made a staggering one million protein sequences, of which 100 were picked to test. Out of these, five were made into actual proteins and tested in cells. That's just 0.0005% of the generated results.... The code for ProGen is available on Github for anyone who wants to try it (or add to it) The project shows "how generative AI can lead to potential solutions for addressing challenges in human disease and the environment," argues a statement form Salesforce. More details from New Scientist: The AI, called ProGen, works in a similar way to AIs that can generate text. ProGen learned how to generate new proteins by learning the grammar of how amino acids combine to form 280 million existing proteins. Instead of the researchers choosing a topic for the AI to write about, they could specify a group of similar proteins for it to focus on. In this case, they chose a group of proteins with antimicrobial activity. The researchers programmed checks into the AI's process so it wouldn't produce amino acid "gibberish", but they also tested a sample of the AI-proposed molecules in real cells. Of the 100 molecules they physically created, 66 participated in chemical reactions similar to those of natural proteins that destroy bacteria in egg whites and saliva. This suggested that these new proteins could also kill bacteria. The researchers selected the five proteins with the most intense reactions and added them to a sample of Escherichia coli bacteria. Two of the proteins destroyed the bacteria. The researchers then imaged them with X-rays. Even though their amino acid sequences were up to 30% different from any existing proteins, their shapes almost matched naturally occurring proteins. James Fraser at the University of California, San Francisco, who was part of the team, says it was not clear from the outset that the AI could work out how to change the amino acid sequence so much and still produce the correct shape.... He was surprised to have found a well-functioning protein in the first relatively small fraction of all the ProGen-generated proteins that they tested.

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When Google laid off 6% of its workforce — some of whom had worked for the company for decades — employees "got the news in their inbox," writes Gawker's founding editor in a scathing opinion piece in the New York Times: That sting is becoming an all-too-common sensation. In the last few years, tens of thousands of people have been laid off by email at tech and digital media companies including Twitter, Amazon, Meta and Vox. The backlash from affected employees has been swift.... It's not just tech and media. Companies in a range of industries claim this is the only efficient way to do a lot of layoffs. Informing workers personally is too complicated, they say — and too risky, as people might use their access to internal systems to perform acts of sabotage. (These layoff emails are often sent to employees' personal email; by the time they check it, they've been locked out of all their employer's own platforms.) As someone who's managed people in newsrooms and digital start-ups and has hired and fired people in various capacities for the last 21 years, I think this approach is not just cruel but unnecessary. It's reasonable to terminate access to company systems, but delivering the news with no personal human contact serves only one purpose: letting managers off the hook. It ensures they will not have to face the shock and devastation that people feel when they lose their livelihoods. It also ensures the managers won't have to weather any direct criticism about the poor leadership that brought everyone to that point.... Future hiring prospects will be reading all about it on Twitter or Glassdoor. In a tight labor market, a company's cruelty can leave a lasting stain on its reputation.... The expectation that an employee give at least two weeks notice and help with transition is rooted in a sense that workers owe their employers something more than just their labor: stability, continuity, maybe even gratitude for the compensation they've earned. But when it's the company that chooses to end the relationship, there is often no such requirement. The same people whose labor helped build the company get suddenly recoded as potential criminals who might steal anything that's not nailed down.... Approval of unions is already at 71 percent. Dehumanizing workers like this is accelerating the trend. Once unthinkable, unionization at large tech companies now seems all but inevitable. Treating employees as if they're disposable units who can simply be unsubscribed to ultimately endangers a company's own interests. It seems mistreated workers know their value, even if employers — as they are increasingly prone to demonstrate — do not.

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segaboy81 shares a report from Neowin: What do you get when the world's largest CRM breaks into the research industry and leverages AI to build their products? You get ProGen, a new AI system that can make artificial enzymes from scratch that can work just as well as real ones found in nature. ProGen was made by Salesforce Research (yes, that Salesforce) and uses language processing to learn about biology. In short, ProGen takes amino acid sequences and turns them into proteins.... "The artificial designs are better than ones made by the normal process," said James Fraser, a scientist involved in the project. "We can now make specific types of enzymes, like ones that work well in hot temperatures or acid." To make ProGen, the scientists at Salesforce fed the system amino acid sequences from 280 million different proteins. The AI system quickly made a staggering one million protein sequences, of which 100 were picked to test. Out of these, five were made into actual proteins and tested in cells. That's just 0.0005% of the generated results.... The code for ProGen is available on Github for anyone who wants to try it (or add to it) The project shows "how generative AI can lead to potential solutions for addressing challenges in human disease and the environment," argues a statement form Salesforce. More details from New Scientist: The AI, called ProGen, works in a similar way to AIs that can generate text. ProGen learned how to generate new proteins by learning the grammar of how amino acids combine to form 280 million existing proteins. Instead of the researchers choosing a topic for the AI to write about, they could specify a group of similar proteins for it to focus on. In this case, they chose a group of proteins with antimicrobial activity. The researchers programmed checks into the AI's process so it wouldn't produce amino acid "gibberish", but they also tested a sample of the AI-proposed molecules in real cells. Of the 100 molecules they physically created, 66 participated in chemical reactions similar to those of natural proteins that destroy bacteria in egg whites and saliva. This suggested that these new proteins could also kill bacteria. The researchers selected the five proteins with the most intense reactions and added them to a sample of Escherichia coli bacteria. Two of the proteins destroyed the bacteria. The researchers then imaged them with X-rays. Even though their amino acid sequences were up to 30% different from any existing proteins, their shapes almost matched naturally occurring proteins. James Fraser at the University of California, San Francisco, who was part of the team, says it was not clear from the outset that the AI could work out how to change the amino acid sequence so much and still produce the correct shape.... He was surprised to have found a well-functioning protein in the first relatively small fraction of all the ProGen-generated proteins that they tested.

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When you share your email, "you're sharing a lot more," warns the New York Times' lead consumer technology writer: [I]t can be linked to other data, including where you went to school, the make and model of the car you drive, and your ethnicity.... For many years, the digital ad industry has compiled a profile on you based on the sites you visit on the web.... An email could contain your first and last name, and assuming you've used it for some time, data brokers have already compiled a comprehensive profile on your interests based on your browsing activity. A website or an app can upload your email address into an ad broker's database to match your identity with a profile containing enough insights to serve you targeted ads. The article recommends creating several email addresses to "make it hard for ad tech companies to compile a profile based on your email handle... Apple and Mozilla offer tools that automatically create email aliases for logging in to an app or a site; emails sent to the aliases are forwarded to your real email address." Apple's Hide My Email tool, which is part of its iCloud+ subscription service that costs 99 cents a month, will create aliases, but using it will make it more difficult to log in to the accounts from a non-Apple device. Mozilla's Firefox Relay will generate five email aliases at no cost; beyond that, the program charges 99 cents a month for additional aliases. For sites using the UID 2.0 framework for ad targeting, you can opt out by entering your email address [or phone number] at https://transparentadvertising.org.

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To detect AI-generated text, Stanford researchers are proposing a new methodology "that leverages the unique characteristics of text generated by large language models (LLMs)," reports the tech-news site Neowin: "DetectGPT" is based around the idea that text generated by LLMs typically hover around specific regions of the negative curvature regions of the model's log probability function.... This method, called "zero-shot", allows DetectGPT to detect machine written text without any knowledge of the AI that was used to generate it.... As the use of LLMs continues to grow, the importance of corresponding systems for detecting machine-generated text will become increasingly critical. DetectGPT is a promising approach that could have a significant impact in many areas, and its further development could be beneficial for many fields. The article also includes its obligatory amazing story about the current powers of ChatGPT. "I asked it how to build an obscure piece of Linux software against a modern kernel, and it told me how. It even generated code blocks with the bash commands needed to complete the task." Then to test something crazier, Neowin asked ChatGPT to generate "a fictional resume for Hulk Hogan where he has no previous IT experience but wants to transition into a role as an Azure Cloud Engineer. "It did that, too." Thanks to Slashdot reader segaboy81 for sharing the story.

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Fortune reports on what happened next: As questions piled up over the weekend, Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the entire company in a meeting on Monday to answer questions, and announced then that top executives would take a pay cut this year as part of the company's cost reduction measures, Business Insider reported. Pichai said that all roles above the senior vice president level will witness "very significant reduction in their annual bonus," adding that for senior roles the compensation was linked to company performance. It was not immediately clear how big Pichai's own pay cut would be. Reuters also points out that Pichai "received a massive hike in salary a few weeks before Google announced layoffs." But Fortune makes an interesting comparison: Pichai's move to cut the pay for senior executives comes only weeks after Apple's Tim Cook announced his compensation would be 40% lower amid shareholder pressure. The iPhone maker had a strong 2022 and remains one of the few tech behemoths that hasn't announced layoffs yet. Last year Apple's share price still dropped 27%, reports Forbes, and "According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is expected next month to report its first quarterly sales decline in over three years." Yet Apple seems to have avoided layoffs — which Forbes argues is because Apple didn't hire aggressively during the pandemic. Compared to the other Big Tech companies, Apple scaled its workforce at a relatively slow pace and has generally followed the same hiring rate since 2016. While there was a hiring surge in Silicon Valley during the pandemic, Apple added less than 7,000 jobs in 2020.... The tech companies undergoing layoffs right now hired fervently during their pandemic — and even before. Alphabet has consecutively expanded its workforce at least 10% annually since 2013, according to CNBC.... Since 2012, Meta has expanded its workforce by thousands each year. In 2020, Zuckerberg increased headcount by 30% — 13,000 workers. The following year, the social media platform added another 13,000 employees to its payroll. Those two years marked the biggest growth in the company's history. Amazon has initiated its plan to separate more than 18,000 white-collar professionals from its payroll. In 2021, the online retailer hired an estimated 500,000 employees, according to GeekWire, becoming the second-largest employer in the United States after Walmart. A year later, the company expanded its workforce by 310,000. Entrepeneur supplies some context about those layoffs at Google: Reports indicate qualifying staff who were let go will receive their full notification period salary plus a severance package beginning at 16 weeks' pay and two additional weeks for every year of employment. Also part of the package: bonuses, vacation time, and health care coverage for up to six months will be paid for, along with job placement and immigration support. Entrepreneur also notes reports that Google's latest round of layoffs "affected 27 massage therapists across Los Angeles and Irvine."

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"San Francisco is trying to slow the expansion of robotaxis," reports NBC News, "after repeated incidents in which cars without drivers stopped and idled in the middle of the street for no obvious reason, delaying bus riders and disrupting the work of firefighters." The city's transportation officials sent letters this week to California regulators asking them to halt or scale back the expansion plans of two companies, Cruise and Waymo, which are competing head-to-head to be the first to offer 24-hour robotaxi service in the country's best-known tech hub. The outcome will determine how quickly San Francisco and possibly other cities forge ahead with driverless technology that could remake the world's cities and potentially save some of the 40,000 people killed each year in American traffic crashes.... Neither vehicles from Cruise or Waymo have killed anyone on the streets of San Francisco, but the companies need to overcome their sometimes comical errors, including one episode last year in which a Cruise car with nobody in it slowly tried to flee from a police officer. In one recent instance documented on social media and noted by city officials, five disabled Cruise vehicles in San Francisco's Mission District blocked a street so completely that a city bus with 45 riders couldn't get through and was delayed for at least 13 minutes. Cruise's autonomous cars have also interfered with active firefighting, and firefighters once shattered a car's window to prevent it from driving over their firehoses, the city said.... "A series of limited deployments with incremental expansions — rather than unlimited authorizations — offer the best path toward public confidence in driving automation and industry success in San Francisco and beyond," three city officials wrote Thursday in a letter to the utilities commission, the state agency that decides if a company gets a robotaxi license. A second letter expressed concerns about Waymo.... Cruise has argued that its service is safer than the status quo. A Cruise spokesperson also provided letters of support "written by local San Francisco merchants associations, disability advocates and community groups." And U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told Quartz last year that "it would be hard to do worse than human drivers when it comes to what we could get to theoretically with the right kind of safe autonomous driving." But in 2021 CBS reported that dozens and dozens of Waymo's robo-taxis kept mistakenly driving down the same dead-end street. And in 2018 a self-driving Uber test vehicle struck and killed a woman in Arizona. More stories from the Verge: In July, a group of driverless Cruise vehicles blocked traffic for hours after the cars inexplicably stopped working, and a similar incident occurred in September. Meanwhile, a driverless Waymo vehicle created a traffic jam in San Francisco after it stopped in the middle of an intersection earlier this month. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into Cruise last December over concerns about the vehicles blocking traffic and causing rear-end collisions with hard braking... [San Francisco] city officials also express concern over the way driverless vehicles deal with emergency vehicles. Last April, officials say an autonomous Cruise vehicle stopped in a travel lane and "created an obstruction for a San Francisco Fire Department vehicle on its way to a 3 alarm fire...." Other incidents involve Cruise calling 911 about "unresponsive" passengers on three separate occasions, only for emergency services to arrive and find that the rider just fell asleep.... Officials say companies should be required to collect more data about the performance of the vehicles, including how often and how long their driverless vehicles block traffic.

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Last week Microsoft announced 10,000 layoffs — and a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT. But OpenAI also released a tool called Codex in August of 2021 "designed to translate natural language into code," reports Semafor. And now OpenAI "has ramped up its hiring around the world, bringing on roughly 1,000 remote contractors over the past six months in regions like Latin America and Eastern Europe, according to people familiar with the matter." The article points out that roughly 40% of those contractors "are computer programmers who are creating data for OpenAI's models to learn software engineering tasks." "A well-established company, which is determined to provide world-class AI technology to make the world a better and more efficient place, is looking for a Python Developer," reads one OpenAI job listing in Spanish, which was posted by an outsourcing agency.... OpenAI appears to be building a dataset that includes not just lines of code, but also the human explanations behind them written in natural language. A software developer in South America who completed a five-hour unpaid coding test for OpenAI told Semafor he was asked to tackle a series of two-part assignments. First, he was given a coding problem and asked to explain in written English how he would approach it. Then, the developer was asked to provide a solution. If he found a bug, OpenAI told him to detail what the problem was and how it should be corrected, instead of simply fixing it. "They most likely want to feed this model with a very specific kind of training data, where the human provides a step-by-step layout of their thought-process," said the developer, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid jeopardizing future work opportunities.

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"The manufacture of 'green steel' moved one step closer to reality Friday," reports the Associated Press, "as Massachusetts-based Boston Metal announced a $120 million investment from the world's second-largest steelmaker, ArcelorMittal." Boston Metal will use the injection of funds to expand production at a pilot plant in Woburn, near Boston, and help launch commercial production in Brazil. The company uses renewable electricity to convert iron ore into steel. Steel is one of the world's dirtiest heavy industries. Three-quarters of world production uses a traditional method that burns through train loads of coal to heat the furnaces and drive the reaction that releases pure iron from ore. Making steel releases more climate-warming carbon dioxide than any other industry, according to the International Energy Agency — about 8% of worldwide emissions. Many companies are working on alternatives. The financial package by global steel giant ArcelorMittal is the biggest single investment made to date by the firm's carbon innovation fund. Microsoft is another investor. Tadeu Carneiro, CEO of Boston Metal, said its technology is "designed to decarbonize steel production at scale" and would "disrupt the industry." The company's technology was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professors Donald Sadoway and Antoine Allanore, experts in energy storage and metallurgy respectively, are the founders.... Boston Metal said it can eliminate all carbon dioxide from its steel production and hopes to ramp up production to millions of tons by 2026. As a bonus, it said, it is able to extract metals from slag normally considered waste.

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Long-time Slashdot reader Beave writes: Security researchers and practitioners at Quadrant Information Security recently found themselves in a battle with the Russian ransomware gang known as "Black Basta"... Quadrant discovered the Russian gang attempting to exfiltrate data from a network. Once a victim's data is fully exfiltrated the gang then encrypts workstations and servers, and demands ransom payments from the victim in order to decrypt their data and to prevent Black Basta from releasing exfiltrated data to the public. Fortunately, in this case, Black Basta didn't make it that far. Instead, the security researchers used the opportunity to better understand Black Basta's "backend servers", tools, and methods. Black Basta will sometimes use a victim's network to log into their own servers, which leads to interesting opportunities to observe the gang's operations... The first write up goes into technical details about the malware and tactics Black Basta used. The second second write up focuses on Black Basta's "backend" servers and how they manage them. TLDR? You can also listen to two of the security researchers discuss their findings on the latest episode of the "Breaking Badness" podcast. The articles go into great detail - even asking whether deleting their own exfiltrated data from the gang's server "would technically constitute a federal offense per the 'The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act' of 1986."

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"From the maintainer of Ubuntu Unity and the Unity desktop environment, here comes blendOS," writes 9to5Linux, "a GNU/Linux distribution that aims to be the last distribution you'll ever use, especially if you distro hop." blendOS is here to offer you "a seamless blend of all Linux distributions," as its creator wants to call it. blendOS is based on Arch Linux and GNOME on Wayland, but it lets you use apps from other popular distributions, such as Fedora Linux or Ubuntu. This is possible because you can use the native package managers from Arch Linux (pacman — included by default), Fedora Linux (dnf), and Ubuntu (apt), which are included as containers using Distrobox/Podman. However, the DNF and APT package managers aren't included in the live ISO image, nor blendOS's own blend package manager.... It also follows a rolling release model, since it's derived from Arch Linux. Even if it comes with the GNOME desktop by default on the live ISO image, blendOS will let you deploy a new installation with another popular desktop environment, such as KDE Plasma, MATE, or Xfce, or even window managers like Sway or i3. Apart from the fact that you can install any app from any of the supported Linux distributions, blendOS also comes with out-of-the-box support for sandboxed Flatpak apps, which you can easily install directly from the Flathub Store app, which is a Web App that puts the Flathub website on your desktop.

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