Tech jobs have long been in the top ranks among the highest-paying industries, but some companies really shell out the dough for their engineers.
In 2022, the median total compensation for Google employees was $279,802, according to leaked internal data from the company reviewed by Business Insider. Among the highest-paying positions at Google, software engineers led the pack with a maximum base salary of $718,000 last year.
It seemed like exactly the type of juicy hypocrisy that the internet lives for.
On Monday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that in order to tackle the spam problem on its new Twitter competitor, Threads, the company was going to introduce tighter rate limits on the platform.
Sounds familiar? That’s because rate limits were one of the controversial decisions implemented by Elon Musk on Twitter in early July that resulted in massive backlash against the platform. Users were finding themselves blocked from seeing content on Twitter due to daily rate limiting, after viewing a certain number of tweets.
But, as it turns out, no, Threads did not deploy the same controversial rate limits on its platform that Twitter did. Threads instead strengthened the same type of rate limits present on most all social media platforms, limits that even Twitter used long before Musk even acquired the company.
Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing appears to be paying off.
The streaming giant on Wednesday said it added nearly six million paid subscribers during the three months ending in June, bringing its total to more than 238 million globally.
The company said it has now launched paid sharing — its effort to get users to stop sharing accounts with others for free — in more than 100 countries, after beginning its broad rollout earlier this year. Netflix said revenue in those regions is now higher than before the service launched, and that “sign-ups are already exceeding cancellations.”
Tesla reported a much bigger-than-expected increase in profits, despite a series of price cuts that trimmed the amount of revenue per vehicle sold.
Tesla (TSLA) reported adjusted earnings of $3.1 billion, or 91 cents a share, up 20% from the second quarter last year. Analysts surveyed by Refinitiv had forecast earnings of 82 cents a share.
Its profit margin of 18.2% was also better than expected, although profit margins were still smaller than they were last year due to the series of price cuts the company announced since earlier this year. A year ago, Tesla’s margin was 25%, and even reported a 19.3% profit margin in the first quarter, when it first started to put the price cuts in place. But the forecast was that the continued price cuts would drop the profit margin under 17% in the most recent quarter.
With the exception of a uniquely slimy arms dealer played by the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, the villains in the Mission: Impossible movies have always been rather serviceable, even forgettable. That is, if you’d even consider them the villains. Time, altitude, gravity, probability: These are the real threats facing Ethan Hunt, the Tom Cruise-shaped pinball launched through every exhilarating espionage machine in the series.
In Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, a sequel whose convoluted absurdity begins with the punctuation in its title, Hunt finally faces an enemy as intangible as the laws of nature he regularly defies. The Entity, as it’s called, is a sentient computer virus—a mass of malevolent code capable of hacking every database on the planet, and reshaping the world by redefining its notions of truth. It’s a timely foe for an age of invisible danger, disinformation, and AI anxiety. In its ability to predict and effectively control the future, it’s also a rather fitting adversary for Hunt. Has the living manifestation of destiny met his match in, well, the unliving master of it?
Easyjet has confirmed it has cancelled 1,700 flights as people prepare to travel on their summer holidays.
The airline has axed flights during July, August and September, travelling to and from Gatwick airport.
Easyjet blamed constrained airspace over Europe and ongoing air traffic control difficulties, which are causing regular cancellations.
The company said 95% of affected passengers had been rebooked onto alternative flights.
Easyjet announced the decision as many schools in England and Wales prepare to break-up for the summer holidays.
Threads is looking into adding an alternative home feed, of only posts, in chronological order, from the people each individual user follows, according to Instagram boss Adam Mosseri.
It currently shows a mix of recommended content and posts from those followed.
Threads was billed as an “initial version” at launch and the company has signalled more features are to come.
But a planned system to make Threads compatible with some other apps, such as Mastodon, has met with resistance.
Instagram, which is owned by Meta, built the Threads app.
Google can now use public data to help train and create AI products, according to new privacy policy changes.
As of July 1, the tech giant’s newly adjusted policy reads: “Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public. For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.”
Previously, the policy only stated that publicly available information could be used to help train Google “language models” and gave a single mention of Google Translate.
Facebook has tried to compete with Twitter in numerous ways over the years, including copying signature Twitter features such as hashtags and trending topics. But now Facebook’s parent company is taking perhaps its biggest swipe at Twitter yet.
Meta on Wednesday officially launched a new app called Threads, which is intended to offer a space for real-time conversations online, a function that has long been Twitter’s core selling point.
The app appears to have many similarities to Twitter, from the layout to the product description. The listing, which first appeared earlier this week as a teaser, emphasizes its potential to build a following and connect with like-minded people.
Despite decades of Alzheimer’s research, scientists have not found a treatment that halts or dramatically slows the disease. Now, scientists are investigating if a completely new approach — so-called Alzheimer’s vaccines — could alter the disease’s course.
The logic behind this effort? Much of the previous research has placed beta-amyloid plaques, clumps of protein that accumulate in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, front-and-center. But drugs that remove beta-amyloid plaques alone don’t seem to have much impact on the disease course. So some researchers have proposed that the plaques are a consequence, rather than a cause of Alzheimer’s.
Dispatches From The Front 