An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the dynamics of the workplace have undergone a seismic shift. While some heralded the return to the office as a sign of normalcy, evidence suggests that for many, this transition has been far from smooth sailing. Nowhere is this struggle more evident than in the case of the U.S. federal government employees, particularly those within the Department of Justice. At the beginning of the year, the Justice Department initiated a return-to-office policy requiring much of its workforce to be present in person for up to six days per pay period or about three days per week. However, there were more stringent requirements for assistant U.S. attorneys. While approximately 70 percent of AUSAs currently enjoy the flexibility of two days per week of telework, recent changes in telework policies within certain offices have left many feeling stranded. A survey by the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys (NAAUSA) reveals a stark contrast in job satisfaction between those with telework options and those without. In offices where routine telework has been curtailed, a staggering 81 percent of respondents admitted they were actively seeking alternative employment opportunities. This dissatisfaction stands in contrast to offices where some level of telework is maintained, where only 42 percent of respondents expressed a desire to leave their current positions. NAAUSA Vice President Adam Hanna aptly summarizes the situation as a "workforce revolt." It's a sentiment echoed by employees across various offices, underscoring the critical importance of telework in retaining talent and maintaining morale. This is yet another testament to the value placed on flexibility and work-life balance -- crucial factors in the recruitment and retention of top talent. In response to the survey findings, NAAUSA has urged Justice Department leadership to implement consistent telework policies across all offices. The organization recommends a minimum baseline of two telework days per week, citing the importance of treating employees as responsible professionals capable of balancing in-person and remote work effectively. The issue extends beyond individual preferences, resonating with broader concerns surrounding recruitment, retention, and workplace culture. Employee organizations within the Justice Department have united in calling for a review of return-to-office mandates, citing potential negative impacts on productivity and workforce retention. These findings align with broader evidence of telework's positive effects, including the Office of Personnel Management's annual report (PDF) about telework in the federal government. That report showed that a staggering 68 percent of teleworking federal government employees intend to remain in their current positions, in contrast to a mere 53 percent of non-telecommuters. This underscores the pivotal role of telework in fostering employee loyalty and commitment.

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A portal linking New York City to Dublin via a livestream has been temporarily shut down after inappropriate behavior ensued, according to the Dublin City Council. From a report: Less than a week after the 24/7 visual art installation was put in place, officials have opted to close it down temporarily after people began to flash each other, grind on the portal, and one person even shared pictures of the twin tower attack to people in New York City. Alternatively, the portal had also been the site of reunions with old friends and even a proposal, with many documenting their experience with the installation online. The Dublin City Council said that although those engaged in the inappropriate behavior were few and far between, videos of said behavior went viral online. "While we cannot control all of these actions, we are implementing some technical solutions to address this and these will go live in the next 24 hours," the council said in a Monday statement. "We will continue to monitor the situation over the coming days with our partners in New York to ensure that portals continue to deliver a positive experience for both cities and the world."

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An anonymous reader shares an essay: Software designers refer to "the good enough principle." It means, simply put, that sometimes you should prioritise functionality over perfection. As a relentless imperfectionist, I'm inclined to embrace this idea. I gave this newsletter its name to encourage myself to post rough versions of my pieces rather than not to write them at all. When it comes to parenting, I'm a Winnicottian: I believe you shouldn't try to be the perfect mum or dad because there's no such thing. At work and in life, it's often true that the optimal strategy is not to strive for the optimal result, but to aim for what works and hope for the best. The good enough can be a staging post to the perfect. The iPhone's camera was a "good enough" substitute for a compact camera. It did the job, but it wasn't as good as a Kodak or a Fuji. Until it was. Technological innovation often works like this, but the improvement curve isn't always as steep as with the smartphone camera. Sometimes we allow ourselves to get stuck with a product which is good enough to displace the competition, without fulfilling the same range of needs. The psychological and social ramifications can be profound. Let's say you're a student and you use ChatGPT to write your essays for you. Give it the right prompts and it will produce pieces that are good enough to get the grade you need. That seems like a win: it saves you time and effort, presuming your tutors don't notice or don't care. Maybe you get through the whole of university this way. But be wary of this equilibrium. Over the longer term, you will be stunting the growth of your own mind. The struggle of turning inchoate thought into readable sentences and paragraphs is a powerful exercise for the brain. It's how you get better at thinking. It is thinking.

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An anonymous reader shares that IPv6rs has debuted a new one-click self hosting system: Everyone seemed like they were talking about self hosting, but we didn't understand why it wasn't more prolific. Thus, we conducted a survey to hear reasons. It turned out the two most common reasons were: 1. Lack of an external IP address 2. Too difficult to setup and maintain Our service already solves the first issue. We set out with a self-hostathon to figure out what the blockers were in setting up and running a self-hosted server. ... writes IPv6rs on their blog. We needed to make things easier, so we created Cloud Seeder, a one click installer that instantly launches a fully encapsulated server appliance that is externally reachable. At the time of launching, the current version of Cloud Seeder supports 20+ different appliances - from Mastodon which federates with Meta's Threads to Nextcloud which provides an enterprise-level, self-hosted alternative to the big-name collaboration suites. It also automatically handles updates/maintenance. We hope this will bring a new era to self hosting and, in turn, will bring the decentralized internet forest back. Is the self hosting era making its return?

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In a recent live broadcast in China, Xiaomi’s CEO Lei Jun announced that Xiaomi will no longer make cameras and will focus on making cars. Xiaomi used to produce the compact Xiaomi YI M1 MFT mirrorless camera and two lenses:

"YI Technology was originally backed by Xiaomi, but split off from Xiaomi in October 2016 and dropped the "Xiaomi Yi" branding. The YI M1 is a consumer-level camera designed and made in China. It has a 20MP Four Thirds sensor, 3'' 1.04M-dot touchscreen LCD, and an 81-point Contrast Detect AF system."

Deal of the day: YI M1 mirrorless MFT camera (4k, 20MP) with 12-40mm and 42.5mm lenses for $209

Here is a 4k 20MP mirrorless MFT interchangeable lens camera with 12-40mm lens for $150

YI M1 mirrorless Micro Four Thirds camera US pricing revealed

Photokina 2016: YI Technology announced a new M1 mirrorless Micro Four Thirds camera

Source: Weibo

The post Xiaomi will no longer make cameras and will focus on making cars appeared first on Photo Rumors.

Here are some quotes from a recent interview with Sigma's CEO Kazuto Yamaki on the latest Foveon sensor development:

• "Unfortunately, we have not made any significant progress since last year"
• "We made a prototype sensor but found some design errors. It worked but there are some issues, so we re-wrote the schematics and submitted them to the manufacturer and are waiting for the next generation of prototypes."
• "We are still in the design phase for the image sensor"
• "When it comes to the sensor, the manufacturing process is very important: we need to develop a new manufacturing process for the new sensor. But as far as that’s concerned, we’re still doing the research. So it may require additional time to complete the development of the new sensor."

The Sigma full-frame camera with Foveon sensor is not coming anytime soon, Sigma’s President: “not much progress has been made”

Via Dpreview

The post Sigma’s CEO Kazuto Yamaki on the latest Foveon sensor development appeared first on Photo Rumors.

Fairphone, the Dutch smartphone maker known for its user-repairable smartphones, is bringing its ultra-repairable design philosophy to their "Fairbuds" wireless earbuds. Liliputing reports: The Fairbuds have the sort of features we've come to expect from premium earbuds. They're noise-cancelling Bluetooth 5.3 earbuds with support for wind noise reduction and an environmental noise-cancelling feature that sets noise reduction depending on your environment. Fairphone's earbuds have six microphones, 11mm drivers, and an IP54 rating for water (and sweat) resistance. They also support multipoint connectivity, which means you can connect the earbuds to two different devices at the same time (like your phone and your laptop). The earbuds offer up to 6 hours of battery life and they come with a charging case that gives you another 20 hours of use between charges. And Fairphone offers iOS and Android apps that let you adjust EQ, install firmware updates, and make other changes. Other features include automatic play and pause when the Fairbuds are removed from your ears, capacitive touch controls, and three different ear tips sizes included in the box. But the key thing that makes these earbuds different from the competition is that they're designed to be repairable rather than replaceable. Lose just one earbud? Fairphone will let you buy a single earbud without paying again for a full set with a case. Is your battery life degrading a few years after purchase? Fairphone will sell battery replacements and let you swap out the batteries in your earbuds or charging case. All told, the company offers seven repairable/replaceable components for the Fairbuds. The company also offers a 3-year warranty for its new Fairbuds and notes that they're manufactured using: - 70% of all materials used in production are fair and recycled (fair = ethically sourced). - 100% of rare earth elements used are recycled. - Plastics used in the Fairbuds and their charging case are recycled. The Fairbuds are currently only available in Europe for 149 euros.

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The chief of Emirates, one of Boeing's largest clients, has said the crisis-stricken US aircraft maker should ensure its new chief executive has engineering experience to restore safety standards (non-paywalled link). From a report: A day after Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun announced he would step down, Sir Tim Clark also said he backed efforts by the US group's largest labour union to win a seat on the board. "To fix Boeing's issues the company needs a strong engineering lead as its head coupled to a governance model which prioritises safety and quality," Clark told the Financial Times on Tuesday. "Some serious lateral thinking" was needed, the airline boss added. Boeing on Monday unveiled a wide-ranging reshuffle of its leadership in a bid to get to grips with an escalating reputational crisis after a 737 Max door panel blew off mid-flight in January. Calhoun, 66, is to leave at the end of the year, while board chair Larry Kellner said he would depart in May. Stan Deal, head of the commercial planes division since 2019, was immediately replaced by chief operating officer Stephanie Pope.

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"Vernor Vinge, who three times won the Hugo for best novel, has died," writes Slashdot reader Felix Baum. Ars Technica reports: On Wednesday, author David Brin announced that Vernor Vinge, sci-fi author, former professor, and father of the technological singularity concept, died from Parkinson's disease at age 79 on March 20, 2024, in La Jolla, California. The announcement came in a Facebook tribute where Brin wrote about Vinge's deep love for science and writing. "A titan in the literary genre that explores a limitless range of potential destinies, Vernor enthralled millions with tales of plausible tomorrows, made all the more vivid by his polymath masteries of language, drama, characters, and the implications of science," wrote Brin in his post. As a sci-fi author, Vinge won Hugo Awards for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1993), A Deepness in the Sky (2000), and Rainbows End (2007). He also won Hugos for novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004). As Mike Glyer's File 770 blog notes, Vinge's novella True Names (1981) is frequency cited as the first presentation of an in-depth look at the concept of "cyberspace." Vinge first coined the term "singularity" as related to technology in 1983, borrowed from the concept of a singularity in spacetime in physics. When discussing the creation of intelligences far greater than our own in an 1983 op-ed in OMNI magazine, Vinge wrote, "When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding." In 1993, he expanded on the idea in an essay titled The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.

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samleecole writes: Last month, the surveillance company Flock Safety published a study and press release claiming that its automated license plate readers (ALPR) are "instrumental in solving 10 percent of reported crime in the U.S." The study was done by Flock employees, and given legitimacy with the "oversight" of two academic researchers whose names are also on the paper. Now, one of those researchers has told 404 Media that "I personally would have done things much differently" than the Flock researchers did. The researcher, Johnny Nhan of Texas Christian University, said that he has pivoted future research on Flock because he found "the information that is collected by the police departments are too varied and incomplete for us to do any type of meaningful statistical analysis on them." Flock is one of the largest vendors of ALPR cameras and other surveillance technologies, and is partially responsible for the widespread proliferation of this technology. It markets its cameras to law enforcement, homeowners associations, property managers, schools, and businesses. It regularly publishes in-house case studies and white papers that it says shows Flock is instrumental in solving and reducing crime, then uses those studies to market its products.

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CoinDesk: The Ethereum Foundation -- the Swiss non-profit organization at the heart of the Ethereum ecosystem -- is under investigation by an unnamed "state authority," according to the group's website's GitHub repository. The scope of the investigation and its focus was unknown at press time. According to the GitHub commit dated Feb. 26, 2024, "we have received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality." The investigation comes during a time of change for Ethereum's technology. Ethereum is the second-largest blockchain by market cap after Bitcoin, launching in 2015 following an initial coin offering for the chain's native ETH token. Earlier this month, the chain underwent a major technical upgrade, dubbed Dencun, designed to bring down transaction costs for users of Ethereum-based layer-2 platforms.

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Israeli outlet Calcalist: Nvidia is in advanced negotiations to acquire AI infrastructure orchestration and management platform Run:ai, Calcalist has learned. The value of the deal is estimated at many hundreds of millions of dollars and could even reach $1 billion. The companies did not respond to Calcalist's request for comment. Run:ai raised $75 million in a Series C round in March 2022 led by Tiger Global Management and Insight Partners, who also led the previous Series B round. The round included the participation of additional existing investors, TLV Partners, and S Capital VC, bringing the total funding raised to date to $118 million.

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