Daily Tech News 18 November 2023

• What the fuck is going on at OpenAI? (Tech Crunch)
  
  Snake ail salesman Sam Altman has been dismissed as CEO and removed from the board, and co-founder Greg Brockman, who yesterday was chairman and president, is now neither of those. CTO Mira Murati is interim CEO until a replacement can be found.
  
  Altman is also deeply involved in the thoroughly sleazy Worldcoin project, and the moderately dubious Humane AI pin. It might be something as simple as a conflict of interests, or it could be something... More.
  
  Sam Altman strikes me as a high-functioning version of Sam Bankman-Fried, so these events surprise me not at all.

• An online atrocity database got hacked and leaked the personal details of the victims of said atrocities. (The Intercept)
  
  Who thought this was a good idea?
  
  
  
• A Canadian court has overturned a government ruling that single-use plastic items are toxic, on the basis that they aren't. (Reuters)
  
  The government wants to ban single-use plastic, so rather than pass legislation, it just defined them as toxic so they'd be banned automatically.
  
  The only problem with that is, well, they're not toxic at all.
  
  A little surprising that a Canadian court would take issue with this, but welcome nonetheless.
  
  
  
• What could be toxic, though - as mentioned previously - is eye drops. (Ars Technica)
  
  An inspection of one factory in Mumbai found workers wandering around barefoot - inside an allegedly sterile production area where not only shoes but shoe coverings, gowns, and gloves are required.
  
  They did detect the inevitable contamination. They just... Kept right on going.
  
  
  
• You can save oil by taking your kids to school on an electric moped, and even more when you all get killed in a traffic accident on the first day. (The Conversation)
  
  Take a look at the photos in the article. Sad to say, those people are statistics waiting to be calculated.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile:
  
  `

  Getting back to productive matters, Starship flight 2 launches in ~6 hours!!

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2023

  
  

https://t.co/NQahDe7Hmf pic.twitter.com/L2dRD5RJlU

— Merryweather Media (@Merryweatherey) October 20, 2023

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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