Bluesky Adds 2 Million New Users After Brazil’s X Ban

In the days following Brazil’s shutdown of X, the decentralized social networking startup Bluesky added over 2 million new users, up from just half a million as of Friday. “This rapid growth led some users to encounter the occasional error that would state there were ‘Not Enough Resources’ to handle requests, as Bluesky engineers scrambled to keep the servers stable under the influx of new sign-ups,” reports TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez. From the report: As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to becoming the app to No. 1 in Brazil over the weekend, ahead of Meta’s X competitor, Instagram Threads. According to app intelligence firm Appfigures, Bluesky’s total downloads soared by 10,584% this weekend compared to last, and its downloads in Brazil were up by a whopping 1,018,952%. The growth seems to be having a halo effect, as downloads outside Brazil also rose by 584%, the firm noted. In part, this is due to Bluesky receiving downloads in 22 countries where it had barely seen any traction before.

In terms of absolute downloads, countries that saw the most installs outside Brazil included the U.S., Portugal, the U.K., Canada and Spain. Those with the most download growth, however, were Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Romania. Most of the latter group jumped from single-digit growth to growth in the thousands. Bluesky’s newcomers have actively engaged on the platform, too, driving up other key metrics.

As one Bluesky engineer remarked, the number of likes on the social network grew to 104.6 million over the past four-day period, up from just 13 million when compared with a similar period just a week ago. Follows also grew from 1.4 million to 100.8 million while reposts grew from 1.3 million to 11 million. As of Monday, Bluesky said it had added 2.11 million users during the past four days, up from 26,000 users it had added in the week-ago period. In addition, the company noted it had seen “significantly more than a 100% [daily active users] increase.” On Tuesday, Bluesky told TechCrunch the number is now 2.4 million and continues to grow “by the minute.”

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Intel’s Dow Status Under Threat As Struggling Chipmaker’s Shares Plunge

Intel’s slumping share price could cost it a spot in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Reuters reports: Analysts and investors said Intel was likely to be removed from the Dow, pointing to a near 60% decline in the company’s shares this year that has made it the worst performer on the index and left it with the lowest stock price on the price-weighted Dow. The chipmaker’s shares slid about 7% on Tuesday amid a broader market selloff, with the Philadelphia SE Semiconductor index (.SOX) down nearly 6%, following reports of lower chip sales globally in July.

A removal from the index will hurt Intel’s already bruised reputation. The company has missed out on the artificial intelligence boom after passing on an OpenAI investment and losses are mounting at the contract manufacturing unit that the chipmaker has been building out in hopes of challenging TSMC. To fund a turnaround, Intel suspended dividend and announced layoffs affecting 15% of its workforce during its earnings report last month. But some analysts and a former board member believe the moves might be too little, too late for the chipmaker.

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NaNoWriMo Is In Disarray After Organizers Defend AI Writing Tools

The Verge’s Jess Weatherbed reports: The organization behind National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is being slammed online after it claimed that opposing the use of AI writing tools is “classist and ableist.” On Saturday, NaNoWriMo published its stance on the technology, announcing that it doesn’t explicitly support or condemn any approach to writing. “We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege,” NaNoWriMo said, arguing that “not all brains” have the “same abilities” and that AI tools can reduce the financial burden of hiring human writing assistants.

NaNoWriMo’s annual creative writing event is the organization’s flagship program that challenges participants to create a 50,000-word manuscript every November. Last year, the organization said that it accepts novels written with the help of AI apps like ChatGPT but noted that doing so for the entire submission “would defeat the purpose of the challenge.” This year’s post goes further. “We recognize that some members of our community stand staunchly against AI for themselves, and that’s perfectly fine,” said NaNoWriMo in its latest post advocating for AI tools. “As individuals, we have the freedom to make our own decisions.”

The post has since been lambasted by writers across platforms like X and Reddit, who, like many creatives, believe that generative AI tools are exploitive and devalue human art. Many disabled writers also criticized the statement for inferring that they need generative AI tools to write effectively. Meanwhile, Daniel Jose Older, a lead story architect for Star Wars: The High Republic, announced that he was resigning from the NaNoWriMo Writers Board due to the statement. “Generative AI empowers not the artist, not the writer, but the tech industry,” Star Wars: Aftermath author Chuck Wendig said in response to NaNoWriMo’s stance. “It steals content to remake content, graverobbing existing material to staple together its Frankensteinian idea of art and story.”

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Microsoft Says Its Recall Uninstall Option in Windows 11 is Just a Bug

Hewlett Packard To Pursue Mike Lynch’s Estate For Up To $4 Billion

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has confirmed it will push ahead with a high court lawsuit against the estate of the deceased tech tycoon Mike Lynch in which it is seeking damages of up to $4 billion. From a report: The US company said in a statement it would follow the legal proceedings “through to their conclusion” despite Lynch’s death last month when his yacht sank off the coast of Italy. HPE won a civil claim against Lynch in the English high court in 2022, after accusing him and his former finance director Sushovan Hussain of fraud over its $11 billion takeover of his software company Autonomy in 2011.

A ruling on damages is expected soon, although the judge presiding over the case, Mr Justice Hildyard, wrote in 2022 that he expected final damages to be “substantially less than is claimed.” Lynch, 59, who was cleared in a separate criminal fraud trial over the Autonomy deal in the US in June, and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, were among seven people who died after the Bayesian superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily last month.

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OSOM, the Company Formed From Essential’s Ashes, is Apparently in Shambles

Python, JavaScript, Java: ZDNet Calculates The Most Popular Programming Languages

Pundits aggregate results from multiple pollsters to minimize biases. So ZDNet tried the same approach, but aggregating rankings for the popularity of 19 top programming languages. Senior contributing editor David Gewirtz combined results from nine popularity rankings, including PYPL, the Tiobe index, GitHub’s Usage 2023 summary report, and several rankings from Stack Overflow and from IEEE Spectrum.
The results?
The top cluster contains Python, JavaScript, and Java. These are all very representative in the world of AI coding…
The next cluster contains the classic C-based languages [C++, C#, C], plus TypeScript (which is a more robust JavaScript variant) and SQL.
Below that are languages that were dominant a while ago, the web languages used to build and operate websites [HTML/CSS, PHP, Shell], followed by a range of other languages that are either growing in popularity (R, Dart) or dropping in popularity (Ruby). [Just above Ruby are Go, Rust, Kotlin, and Lua.]
Finally, at the bottom is Swift, Apple’s language of choice. Objective-C, the previous language of Apple programming, has all but dropped off the list since Apple launched Swift. But while Apple boasts many developers, Swift is clearly not a standout in programmer interest… [T]here aren’t a huge number of companies hiring Apple app developers, at least primarily. That’s why Swift is relatively far down the chart. Objective-C is being replaced by Swift, and we can see it dropping right before our eyes.

“With the exception of Java, the C-family of languages still dominates,” the article concludes, before adding that if you’re only going to learn one language, “I’d recommend Python, Java, and JavaScript instead.” But it also advises aspiring programmers to learn “multiple languages and multiple frameworks. Build things in the languages. Programming is not just an intellectual exercise. You have to actually make stuff….

“[L]earning how to learn languages is as important as learning a language — and the best way to do that is to learn more than one.”

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Green Energy from Storage Batteries are Replacing Fossil Fuels in California – and Texas

1.9 million solar panels began operating this year in California — at a Mortenson facility with 120,000 installed batteries that give it a storage capacity of 3,280 megawatts. An article in El Pais notes that this helped California pass 10,000 megawatts of photovoltaic storage in April — enough to meet 20% of demand — for the first time ever. (In 2019, the state had just 770 megawatts of storage capacity.)

Mark Rothleder, the vice president of the independent grid operator, California ISO (CAISO), said earlier this year that they will add another 1,134 megawatts in the first eight months of 2024. This is growth on top of the leap made last year. “In 2023 alone, the ISO successfully onboarded 5,660 megawatts of new power to the grid,” Rothleder said at a conference in San Diego…

Renewable production was enough to supply the grid on 40 out of 48 days this spring, compared to seven days in the whole of last year. Lithium batteries appear to be undercutting the use of fossil fuels. Gas accounts for 40% of California’s grid. However, its use in April registered its lowest proportion in seven years. “The data clearly shows that batteries are displacing natural gas when solar generation is ramping up and down each day in CAISO,” notes an analysis by Grid Status, a firm specializing in energy issues. Natural gas was king on the grid in April 2021, 2022 and 2023. CAISO was sending between 9,000 and 10,000 megawatts produced from gas to the grid once solar ran out. Last April, however, it amounted to only 5,000 megawatts… [California’s goal: run on 100% renewable energy by 2045.]
Arizona and Georgia have followed California’s lead. But it is Texas, the other major U.S. giant in this industry, that is snapping at its heels. At the end of April, batteries supplied 4% of the grid’s electricity, enough to power several million homes. Batteries are beginning to look like an alternative to a system heavily dependent on gas and coal.

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