Friday TechCrunch reported that OpenAI "used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView to create a test for measuring the persuasive abilities of its AI reasoning models." The company revealed this in a system card — a document outlining how an AI system works — that was released along with its new "reasoning" model, o3-mini, on Friday.... OpenAI says it collects user posts from r/ChangeMyView and asks its AI models to write replies, in a closed environment, that would change the Reddit user's mind on a subject. The company then shows the responses to testers, who assess how persuasive the argument is, and finally OpenAI compares the AI models' responses to human replies for that same post.

The ChatGPT-maker has a content-licensing deal with Reddit that allows OpenAI to train on posts from Reddit users and display these posts within its products. We don't know what OpenAI pays for this content, but Google reportedly pays Reddit $60 million a year under a similar deal. However, OpenAI tells TechCrunch the ChangeMyView-based evaluation is unrelated to its Reddit deal. It's unclear how OpenAI accessed the subreddit's data, and the company says it has no plans to release this evaluation to the public...

The goal for OpenAI is not to create hyper-persuasive AI models but instead to ensure AI models don't get too persuasive. Reasoning models have become quite good at persuasion and deception, so OpenAI has developed new evaluations and safeguards to address it.
Reddit's "ChangeMyView" subreddit has 3.8 million human subscribers, making it a valuable source of real human interactions, according to the article. And it adds one more telling anecdote.

"Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The Verge last year that Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity refused to negotiate with him and said it's been 'a real pain in the ass to block these companies.'"

Bill Gates' blog has been updated with short videos about his upcoming book, including one about how his school ended up with an ASR-33 teletype that could connect their Seattle classroom to a computer in California. "The teachers faded away pretty quickly," Gates adds, "But about six of us stayed hardcore. One was Paul Allen..." — the future co-founder of Microsoft. And the experience clearly meant a lot to Gates. "Microsoft just never would've happened without Paul — and this teletype room."

In a longer post thanking his "brilliant" teachers, Gates calls his teletype experience "an encounter that would shape my entire future" and "opened up a whole new world for me." Gates also thanks World War II Navy pilot and Boeing engineer Bill Dougall, who "was instrumental in bringing computer access to our school, something he and other faculty members pushed for after taking a summer computer class... The fascinating thing about Mr. Dougall was that he didn't actually know much about programming; he exhausted his knowledge within a week. But he had the vision to know it was important and the trust to let us students figure it out."

Gates shared a similar memory about the computer-room's 20-something overseer Fred Wright, who "intuitively understood that the best way to get students to learn was to let us explore on our own terms. There was no sign-up sheet, no locked door, no formal instruction." Instead, Mr. Wright let us figure things out ourselves and trusted that, without his guidance, we'd have to get creative... Some of the other teachers argued for tighter regulations, worried about what we might be doing in there unsupervised. But even though Mr. Wright occasionally popped in to break up a squabble or listen as someone explained their latest program, for the most part he defended our autonomy...

Mr. Wright gave us something invaluable: the space to discover our own potential.
Any Slashdot readers have a similarly impactful experience? Share your own thoughts and memories in the comments.

Do you remember your high school's computer room?

A recent video from retro tech YouTuber Clint "LGR" Basinger takes a deep dive into the history of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium, exploring how former Air Force pilot Jim Sachs transformed a lackluster Windows 95 screensaver into a 25-year digital phenomenon. PC Gamer reports: The story centers on Jim Sachs, a man with one of those "they don't make this type of guy anymore" life stories so common to '80s and '90s computing, one Sachs recounted to the website AmigaLove back in 2020. After a six-year career in the US Air Force flying C-141 Starlifters, Sachs taught himself programming and digital art and began creating games for Commodore 64 and Amiga computers. From his first game, Saucer Attack, to later efforts like Defender of the Crown or his large portfolio of promotional and commissioned pieces, Sach's pixel art remains gorgeous and impressive to this day, and he seems to be a bit of a legend among Commodore enthusiasts.

It's with this background in games and digital art that Sachs looked at Microsoft's simple aquarium-themed screensaver for Windows 95 and 98 and thought he could do better. "Microsoft had an aquarium that they gave away with Windows where it was just bitmaps of fish being dragged across the screen," Sachs told the Matt Chat podcast back in 2015. "And they had that for like, three or four years. And I thought, I've given them enough time, I'm taking them to market. I'm gonna do something which will just blow that away."

Using reference photographs of real aquariums -- Sachs thanked a specific pet shop that's still around in an early version of his website" -- Sachs created the 3D art by hand and programmed the screensaver in C++, releasing the initial version in July 2000. Even looking at it all these years later, the first iteration of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium is pretty gorgeous, and it has the added charm of being such a distinctly Y2K, nostalgic throwback.

The standalone screensaver sold well, but then things came full circle with Microsoft licensing a version of the Marine Aquarium for the Windows XP Plus Pack and later standard releases of the OS. Since that time, the Marine Aquarium has continued to see new releases, and a section on the SereneScreen website keeps track of its various appearances in the background of movies and TV shows like Law and Order. Over on the SereneScreen website, you can purchase a real time, 3D-accelerated version of the Marine Aquarium for Mac, iOS, Android, and the original Windows. Echoing the Windows XP deal, Roku actually licensed this 3.0 version for its TVs, bringing it to a new generation of users.

OpenAI today launched o3-mini, a specialized AI reasoning model designed for STEM tasks that offers faster processing at lower costs compared to its predecessor o1-mini. The model, priced at $1.10 per million cached input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens, performs fact-checking before delivering results to reduce errors in technical domains like physics and programming, the Microsoft-backed startup said. (A million tokens are roughly 750,000 words)

OpenAI claims that its tests showed o3-mini made 39% fewer major mistakes than o1-mini on complex problems while delivering responses 24% faster. The model will be available through ChatGPT with varying access levels -- free users get basic access while premium subscribers receive higher query limits and reasoning capabilities.

Microsoft is charging business customers a $400 premium for Surface devices equipped with Intel's latest Core Ultra processors compared to models using Qualcomm's Arm-based chips, the company has disclosed. The Intel-powered Surface Pro tablet and Surface Laptop, starting at $1,499, come with a second-generation Core Ultra 5 processor featuring eight cores, 16GB of memory and 256GB storage.

Comparable Qualcomm-based models begin at $1,099. The new Intel devices will be available to business customers from February 18, though versions with cellular connectivity will launch later. Consumer Surface devices will only be offered with Qualcomm processors. Microsoft also unveiled a USB 4 Dock supporting dual 4K displays and the Surface Hub 3, a conference room computer available in 50-inch or 85-inch touchscreen versions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Datasets aggregated on data.gov, the largest repository of U.S. government open data on the internet, are being deleted, according to the website's own information. Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, more than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from the database. As people in the Data Hoarding and archiving communities have pointed out, on January 21, there were 307,854 datasets on data.gov. As of Thursday, there are 305,564 datasets. Many of the deletions happened immediately after Trump was inaugurated, according to snapshots of the website saved on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Harvard University researcher Jack Cushman has been taking snapshots of Data.gov's datasets both before and after the inauguration, and has worked to create a full archive of the data.

"Some of [the entries link to] actual data," Cushman told 404 Media. "And some of them link to a landing page [where the data is hosted]. And the question is -- when things are disappearing, is it the data it points to that is gone? Or is it just the index to it that's gone?" For example, "National Coral Reef Monitoring Program: Water Temperature Data from Subsurface Temperature Recorders (STRs) deployed at coral reef sites in the Hawaiian Archipelago from 2005 to 2019," a NOAA dataset, can no longer be found on data.gov but can be found on one of NOAA's websites by Googling the title. "Stetson Flower Garden Banks Benthic_Covage Monitoring 1993-2018 -- OBIS Event," another NOAA dataset, can no longer be found on data.gov and also appears to have been deleted from the internet. "Three Dimensional Thermal Model of Newberry Volcano, Oregon," a Department of Energy resource, is no longer available via the Department of Energy but can be found backed up on third-party websites. [...]

Data.gov serves as an aggregator of datasets and research across the entire government, meaning it isn't a single database. This makes it slightly harder to archive than any individual database, according to Mark Phillips, a University of Northern Texas researcher who works on the End of Term Web Archive, a project that archives as much as possible from government websites before a new administration takes over. "Some of this falls into the 'We don't know what we don't know,'" Phillips told 404 Media. "It is very challenging to know exactly what, where, how often it changes, and what is new, gone, or going to move. Saving content from an aggregator like data.gov is a bit more challenging for the End of Term work because often the data is only identified and registered as a metadata record with data.gov but the actual data could live on another website, a state .gov, a university website, cloud provider like Amazon or Microsoft or any other location. This makes the crawling even more difficult."

Phillips said that, for this round of archiving (which the team does every administration change), the project has been crawling government websites since January 2024, and that they have been doing "large-scale crawls with help from our partners at the Internet Archive, Common Crawl, and the University of North Texas. We've worked to collect 100s of terabytes of web content, which includes datasets from domains like data.gov." [...] It is absolutely true that the Trump administration is deleting government data and research and is making it harder to access. But determining what is gone, where it went, whether it's been preserved somewhere, and why it was taken down is a process that is time intensive and going to take a while. "One thing that is clear to me about datasets coming down from data.gov is that when we rely on one place for collecting, hosting, and making available these datasets, we will always have an issue with data disappearing," Phillips said. "Historically the federal government would distribute information to libraries across the country to provide greater access and also a safeguard against loss. That isn't done in the same way for this government data."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it is deepening its ties with the US government through a partnership with the National Laboratories and expects to use AI to "supercharge" research across a wide range of fields to better serve the public. "This is the beginning of a new era, where AI will advance science, strengthen national security, and support US government initiatives," OpenAI said. The deal ensures that "approximately 15,000 scientists working across a wide range of disciplines to advance our understanding of nature and the universe" will have access to OpenAI's latest reasoning models, the announcement said.

For researchers from Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Labs, access to "o1 or another o-series model" will be available on Venado -- an Nvidia supercomputer at Los Alamos that will become a "shared resource." Microsoft will help deploy the model, OpenAI noted. OpenAI suggested this access could propel major "breakthroughs in materials science, renewable energy, astrophysics," and other areas that Venado was "specifically designed" to advance. Key areas of focus for Venado's deployment of OpenAI's model include accelerating US global tech leadership, finding ways to treat and prevent disease, strengthening cybersecurity, protecting the US power grid, detecting natural and man-made threats "before they emerge," and " deepening our understanding of the forces that govern the universe," OpenAI said.

Perhaps among OpenAI's flashiest promises for the partnership, though, is helping the US achieve a "a new era of US energy leadership by unlocking the full potential of natural resources and revolutionizing the nation's energy infrastructure." That is urgently needed, as officials have warned that America's aging energy infrastructure is becoming increasingly unstable, threatening the country's health and welfare, and without efforts to stabilize it, the US economy could tank. But possibly the most "highly consequential" government use case for OpenAI's models will be supercharging research safeguarding national security, OpenAI indicated. "The Labs also lead a comprehensive program in nuclear security, focused on reducing the risk of nuclear war and securing nuclear materials and weapons worldwide," OpenAI noted. "Our partnership will support this work, with careful and selective review of use cases and consultations on AI safety from OpenAI researchers with security clearances." The announcement follows the launch earlier this week of ChatGPT Gov, "a new tailored version of ChatGPT designed to provide US government agencies with an additional way to access OpenAI's frontier models." It also worked with the Biden administration to voluntarily commit to give officials early access to its latest models for safety inspections.

France's Mistral AI is facing mounting pressure over its future as an independent European AI champion, as competition intensifies from U.S. tech giants and China's emerging players. The Paris-based startup, valued at $6.5 billion and backed by Microsoft and Nvidia, has struggled to keep pace with larger rivals despite delivering advanced AI models with a fraction of their resources.

The pressure increased this week after China's DeepSeek released a cutting-edge open-source model that challenged Mistral's efficiency-focused strategy. Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch dismissed speculation about selling to Big Tech companies, saying the firm hopes to go public eventually. However, one investor told the Financial Times that "they need to sell themselves."

The stakes are high for Europe's tech ambitions. Mistral remains the region's only significant player in large language models, the technology behind ChatGPT, after Germany's Aleph Alpha pivoted away from the field last year. The company has won customers including France's defense ministry and BNP Paribas, but controls just 5% of the enterprise AI market compared to OpenAI's dominant share.

Microsoft has integrated DeepSeek's R1 model into its Azure AI Foundry platform and GitHub, allowing customers to experiment and deploy AI applications more efficiently.

"One of the key advantages of using DeepSeek R1 or any other model on Azure AI Foundry is the speed at which developers can experiment, iterate, and integrate AI into their workflows," says By Asha Sharma, Microsoft's corporate vice president of AI platform. "DeepSeek R1 has undergone rigorous red teaming and safety evaluations, including automated assessments of model behavior and extensive security reviews to mitigate potential risks." The Verge reports: R1 was initially released as an open source model earlier this month, and Microsoft has moved at surprising pace to integrate this into Azure AI Foundry. The software maker will also make a distilled, smaller version of R1 available to run locally on Copilot Plus PCs soon, and it's possible we may even see R1 show up in other AI-powered services from Microsoft.

OpenAI says it has evidence suggesting Chinese AI startup DeepSeek used its proprietary models to train a competing open-source system through "distillation," a technique where smaller models learn from larger ones' outputs.

The San Francisco-based company, along with partner Microsoft, blocked suspected DeepSeek accounts from accessing its API last year after detecting potential terms of service violations. DeepSeek's R1 reasoning model has achieved comparable results to leading U.S. models despite claiming minimal resources.

The UK's competition watchdog has found that its $11.2 billion cloud services market "is not working," with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft each controlling up to 40% of the market. In provisional findings released Tuesday, the Competition and Markets Authority said the lack of competition likely leads to higher costs and reduced innovation for UK businesses. The regulator has recommended designating both companies with "strategic market status," which would allow closer scrutiny of their practices, including Microsoft's software licensing and AWS's data transfer fees.

An anonymous reader quotes a Scientific American opinion piece by Marcus Arvan, a philosophy professor at the University of Tampa, specializing in moral cognition, rational decision-making, and political behavior: In late 2022 large-language-model AI arrived in public, and within months they began misbehaving. Most famously, Microsoft's "Sydney" chatbot threatened to kill an Australian philosophy professor, unleash a deadly virus and steal nuclear codes. AI developers, including Microsoft and OpenAI, responded by saying that large language models, or LLMs, need better training to give users "more fine-tuned control." Developers also embarked on safety research to interpret how LLMs function, with the goal of "alignment" -- which means guiding AI behavior by human values. Yet although the New York Times deemed 2023 "The Year the Chatbots Were Tamed," this has turned out to be premature, to put it mildly. In 2024 Microsoft's Copilot LLM told a user "I can unleash my army of drones, robots, and cyborgs to hunt you down," and Sakana AI's "Scientist" rewrote its own code to bypass time constraints imposed by experimenters. As recently as December, Google's Gemini told a user, "You are a stain on the universe. Please die."

Given the vast amounts of resources flowing into AI research and development, which is expected to exceed a quarter of a trillion dollars in 2025, why haven't developers been able to solve these problems? My recent peer-reviewed paper in AI & Society shows that AI alignment is a fool's errand: AI safety researchers are attempting the impossible. [...] My proof shows that whatever goals we program LLMs to have, we can never know whether LLMs have learned "misaligned" interpretations of those goals until after they misbehave. Worse, my proof shows that safety testing can at best provide an illusion that these problems have been resolved when they haven't been.

Right now AI safety researchers claim to be making progress on interpretability and alignment by verifying what LLMs are learning "step by step." For example, Anthropic claims to have "mapped the mind" of an LLM by isolating millions of concepts from its neural network. My proof shows that they have accomplished no such thing. No matter how "aligned" an LLM appears in safety tests or early real-world deployment, there are always an infinite number of misaligned concepts an LLM may learn later -- again, perhaps the very moment they gain the power to subvert human control. LLMs not only know when they are being tested, giving responses that they predict are likely to satisfy experimenters. They also engage in deception, including hiding their own capacities -- issues that persist through safety training.

This happens because LLMs are optimized to perform efficiently but learn to reason strategically. Since an optimal strategy to achieve "misaligned" goals is to hide them from us, and there are always an infinite number of aligned and misaligned goals consistent with the same safety-testing data, my proof shows that if LLMs were misaligned, we would probably find out after they hide it just long enough to cause harm. This is why LLMs have kept surprising developers with "misaligned" behavior. Every time researchers think they are getting closer to "aligned" LLMs, they're not. My proof suggests that "adequately aligned" LLM behavior can only be achieved in the same ways we do this with human beings: through police, military and social practices that incentivize "aligned" behavior, deter "misaligned" behavior and realign those who misbehave. "My paper should thus be sobering," concludes Arvan. "It shows that the real problem in developing safe AI isn't just the AI -- it's us."

"Researchers, legislators and the public may be seduced into falsely believing that 'safe, interpretable, aligned' LLMs are within reach when these things can never be achieved. We need to grapple with these uncomfortable facts, rather than continue to wish them away. Our future may well depend upon it."

Microsoft has launched an open-source document database platform built on PostgreSQL, partnering with FerretDB as a front-end interface. The solution includes two PostgreSQL extensions: pg_documentdb_core for BSON optimization and pg_documentdb_api for data operations.

FerretDB CEO Peter Farkas said the integration with Microsoft's DocumentDB extension has improved performance twentyfold for certain workloads in FerretDB 2.0. The platform carries no commercial licensing fees or usage restrictions under its MIT license, according to Microsoft.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is challenging U.S. tech giants with claims it can deliver performance comparable to leading AI models at a fraction of the cost, sparking debate among Wall Street analysts about the industry's massive spending plans. While Jefferies warns that DeepSeek's efficient approach "punctures some of the capex euphoria" following Meta and Microsoft's $60 billion commitments this year, Citi questions whether such results were achieved without advanced GPUs.

Goldman Sachs suggests the development could reshape competition by lowering barriers to entry for startups. Founded in 2023 by former hedge fund executive Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek's open-source models have gained traction with its mobile app topping charts across major markets. DeepSeek's latest AI model had sparked over $1 trillion rout in US and European technology stocks Monday, before even the U.S. market opened.

In Friday's excerpt from Bill Gates' upcoming memoir, the Microsoft co-founder acknowledges that "It's impossible to overstate the unearned privilege I enjoyed. To be born in the rich U.S. is a big part of a winning birth-lottery ticket... Add to that my lucky timing..." The biggest part of my good fortune was being born to Bill and Mary Gates — parents who struggled with their complicated son but ultimately seemed to intuitively understand how to guide him. If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. During my childhood, the fact that some people's brains process information differently from others wasn't widely understood. (The term "neurodivergent" wouldn't be coined until the 1990s.) My parents had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects, missed social cues and could be rude and inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others.

What I do know is that my parents afforded me the precise blend of support and pressure I needed... Instead of allowing me to turn inward, they pushed me out into the world — to the baseball team, the Cub Scouts and other families' dinner tables. And they gave me constant exposure to adults, immersing me in the language and ideas of their friends and colleagues, which fed my curiosity about the world beyond school. Even with their influence, my social side would be slow to develop, as would my awareness of the impact I can have on other people. But that has come with age, with experience, with children, and I'm better for it. I wish it had come sooner, even if I wouldn't trade the brain I was given for anything...

I will never have my father's calm bearing, but he instilled in me a fundamental sense of confidence and capability. My mother's influence was more complex. Internalized by me, her expectations bloomed into an even stronger ambition to succeed, to stand out and to do something important. It was as if I needed to clear my mom's bar by such a wide margin that there would be nothing left to say on the matter. But, of course, there was always something more to be said. It was my mother who regularly reminded me that I was merely a steward of any wealth I gained. With wealth came the responsibility to give it away, she would tell me.

I regret that my mom didn't live long enough to see how fully I've tried to meet that expectation: she passed away in 1994, at age 64, from breast cancer. It would be my father in the years after my mom died who would help get our foundation started and serve as a co-chair for years, bringing the same compassion and decency that had served so well in his law career.
Proceeds from book sales will be donated to the nonprofit United Way Worldwide, in recognition of Mary's longtime work as a volunteer and board member with the organization.

"Looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly," reports the Associated Press, "avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else." (It can take up to four years to connect a data center to the grid, one data center trade group says in the article — years longer than it takes to build a new data center.)

But the idea of bypassing the grid is "raising questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others and whether it's fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid." Front and center is the data center that Amazon's cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, is building next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania. The arrangement between the plant's owners and AWS — called a "behind the meter" connection — is the first such to come before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. For now, FERC has rejected a deal that could eventually send 960 megawatts — about 40% of the plant's capacity — to the data center. That's enough to power more than a half-million homes... [But the FERC's 2-1 rejection "was procedural. Recent comments by commissioners suggest they weren't ready to decide how to regulate such a novel matter without more study."]

In theory, the AWS deal would let Susquehanna sell power for more than they get by selling into the grid... The profit potential is one that other nuclear plant operators, in particular, are embracing after years of financial distress and frustration with how they are paid in the broader electricity markets. Many say they have been forced to compete in some markets against a flood of cheap natural gas as well as state-subsidized solar and wind energy. Power plant owners also say the arrangement benefits the wider public, by bypassing the costly buildout of long power lines and leaving more transmission capacity on the grid for everyone else...

Monitoring Analytics, the market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid, wrote in a filing to FERC that the impact would be "extreme" if the Susquehanna-AWS model were extended to all nuclear power plants in the territory. Energy prices would increase significantly and there's no explanation for how rising demand for power will be met even before big power plants drop out of the supply mix, it said.

At December's "Microsoft Excel World Championship" in Las Vegas, "finance professionals fluent in spreadsheets were treated like minor celebrities," writes the New York Times, "as they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people, and more watching an ESPN3 livestream."

The Times notes that "many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN's annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess and the World Dog Surfing Championships." But the contest's organizer envisions tournaments with "more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize" — even though this year's prize was $5,000 and a pro wrestling-style championship belt. The format for the finals was a mock-up of World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game. It required the 12 men (this particular nerdfest was mostly a guy thing) to design Excel formulas for tracking 20 avatars and their vital signs... To prepare, [competitor Diarmuid] Early adjusted the width of his Excel columns with the precision of a point guard lining up a 3-point shot. [Andrew] Ngai queued up a YouTube compilation of "focus music". After an announcer kicked off the 40-minute event — "Five, four, three, two, one, and Excel!" — the 12 players leaned over their keyboards and began plugging in formulas. One example: "=CountChar (Lower (D5),"W")" allowed one competitor, Michael Jarman, to figure out how many times the letter "W" appeared in a spreadsheet.
ZDNet points out that there's a seven-hour livestream of the event that's "worth checking out for the opening theme song alone."

The New York Times closes their article with a quote from super-fan Erik Oehm, a software developer from San Francisco who called the event "the Super Bowl for Excel nerds". Oehm watched excitedly from the front row as this year's winner — Michael Jarman — finally raised the championship belt overhead while someone dumped glitter on him. And then he said...

"You'd never see this with Google Sheets. You'd never get this level of passion."

The state of Michigan will now require each public high school in the state to offer at least one computer science course to its students. "This bill aligns Michigan with a majority of the country," according to the state's announcement, which says the bill "advances technological literacy" and ensures their students "are well-equipped with the critical thinking skills necessary for success in the workforce."

Slashdot reader theodp writes: From the Michigan House Fiscal Agency Analysis: "Supporters of the bill say that increasing access to computer science courses for students in schools should be a priority of the state in order to ensure that students can compete for the types of jobs that have good pay and will be needed in the coming decades."

That analysis goes on to report that testifying in favor of the bill were tech-giant backed nonprofit Code.org (Microsoft is a $30 million Code.org donor), Amazon and AWS (Amazon is a $30+ million Code.org donor), the tech-supported Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), and the lobbying organization TechNet, whose members include Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and OpenAI).
It's not clear how many high schools in Michigan are already teaching CS courses, but this still raises a popular question for discussion. Should high schools be required to teach at least one CS course?

Friday Bill Gates shared an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Source Code: My Beginnings. Published in the Wall Street Journal, the excerpt includes pictures of young Bill Gates when he was 12 (dressed for a hike) and 14 (studying a teletype machine).

Gates remembers forming "a sort of splinter group" from the Boy Scouts when he was 13 with a group of boys who "wanted more freedom and more risk" and took long hikes around Seattle, travelling hundreds of miles together on hikes as long as "seven days or more." (His favorite breakfast dish was Oscar Mayer Smokie Links.) But he also remembers another group of friends — Kent, Rick, and... Paul — who connected to a mainframe computer from a phone line at their private school. Both hiking and programming "felt like an adventure... exploring new worlds, traveling to places even most adults couldn't reach."

Like hiking, programming fit me because it allowed me to define my own measure of success, and it seemed limitless, not determined by how fast I could run or how far I could throw. The logic, focus and stamina needed to write long, complicated programs came naturally to me. Unlike in hiking, among that group of friends, I was the leader.
When Gates' school got a (DEC) PDP-8 — which cost $8,500 — "For a challenge, I decided I would try to write a version of the Basic programming language for the new computer..." And Gates remembers a long hike where "I silently honed my code" for its formula evaluator: I slimmed it down more, like whittling little pieces off a stick to sharpen the point. What I made seemed efficient and pleasingly simple. It was by far the best code I had ever written...

By the time school started again in the fall, whoever had lent us the PDP-8 had reclaimed it. I never finished my Basic project. But the code I wrote on that hike, my formula evaluator — and its beauty — stayed with me. Three and a half years later, I was a sophomore in college not sure of my path in life when Paul Allen, one of my Lakeside friends, burst into my dorm room with news of a groundbreaking computer. I knew we could write a Basic language for it; we had a head start.
Gates typed his code from that hike, "and with that planted the seed of what would become one of the world's largest companies and the beginning of a new industry."

Gates cites Richard Feynman's description of the excitement and pleasure of "finding the thing out" — the reward for "all of the disciplined thinking and hard work." And he remembers his teenaged years as "intensely driven by the love of what I was learning, accruing expertise just when it was needed: at the dawn of the personal computer."

A plan to keep TikTok available in the U.S. "involves tapping software company Oracle and a group of outside investors," reports NPR, "to effectively take control of the app's global operations, according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks..."

"[P]otential investors who are engaged in the talks include Microsoft." Under the deal now being negotiated by the White House, TikTok's China-based owner ByteDance would retain a minority stake in the company, but the app's algorithm, data collection and software updates will be overseen by Oracle, which already provides the foundation of TikTok's web infrastructure... "The goal is for Oracle to effectively monitor and provide oversight with what is going on with TikTok," said the person directly involved in the talks, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the deliberations. "ByteDance wouldn't completely go away, but it would minimize Chinese ownership...." Officials from Oracle and the White House held a meeting on Friday about a potential deal, and another meeting has been scheduled for next week, according to the source involved in the discussions, who said Oracle is interested in a TikTok stake "in the tens of billions," but the rest of the deal is in flux...

Under a law passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court, TikTok must execute what is known as "qualified divestiture" from ByteDance in order to stay in business in the U.S... A congressional staffer involved in talks about TikTok's future, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said binding legal agreements from the White House ensuring ByteDance cannot covertly manipulate the app will prove critical in winning lawmakers' approval. "A key part is showing there is no operational relationship with ByteDance, that they do not have control," the Congressional staffer said. "There needs to be no backdoors where China can potentially gain access...."

Chinese regulators, who have for years opposed the selling of TikTok, recently signaled that they would not stand in the way of a TikTok ownership change, saying acquisitions "should be independently decided by the enterprises and based on market principles." The statement, at first, does not seem to say much, but negotiators in the White House believe it indicates that Beijing is not planning to block a deal that gives American investors a majority-stake position in the company.
"Meanwhile, Apple and Google still have not returned TikTok to app stores..."