Technology

As America begins a six-day state funeral for former president Jimmy Carter, Microsoft co-founder/philanthropist Bill Gates shared "my fondest memory" this week. "He and Rosalynn were among my first and most inspiring role models in global health." They played a pretty profound role in the early days of the Gates Foundation. I'm especially grateful that they introduced us to Dr. Bill Foege, who once helped eradicate smallpox and was a key advisor for our global health work. Jimmy and Rosalynn were also good friends to my dad. One of my favorite photographs of all time shows Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela, and my dad in South Africa holding babies at a medical clinic. I remember my dad coming back from that trip with a whole new appreciation for Jimmy's passion for helping people with HIV. At the time, then-President Thabo Mbeki was refusing to let people with HIV get treatment, and my dad watched Jimmy almost get into a fist fight with Mbeki over the issue. As Jimmy said in a 2012 conversation at the Gates Foundation hosted by my dad, "He was claiming there was no relationship between HIV and AIDS and that the medicines that we were sending in, the antiretroviral medicines, were a white person's plot to help kill black babies." At a time when a quarter of all people in South Africa were HIV positive, Jimmy just couldn't accept Mbeki's obstructionism. Ars Technica reported it was also Jimmy Carter who saved America's space shuttle program. And Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House (which "were later removed by his successor, Ronald Reagan," according to Boiling Point, an environmental newsletter from the Los Angeles Times: He tried and largely failed to block construction of more than a dozen expensive, environmentally destructive water infrastructure projects such as dams, canals and reservoirs. He also tried to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, implementing the first vehicle fuel-efficiency standards and tasking researchers with bringing down the cost of solar panels — an effort he predicted could be "a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people...." And although he was largely thinking about how to free Americans from geopolitical crises that could wreak havoc on oil supplies and gasoline prices, he also had heat-trapping greenhouse gases in mind... The final report from the White House Council on Environmental Quality warned that fossil fuel combustion could cause "widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social, and agricultural patterns." It advised that to avoid such risks, we should limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — the goal eventually agreed to by nearly 200 nations, 35 years later. Even if Carter's actions were targeted more at reducing oil imports than at cutting planet-warming pollution — he was willing to increase domestic coal production if it meant less dependence on foreign crude — the political battles he fought, particularly those he lost, have lessons for those of us who care about the climate today. The historian Kai Bird, for instance, notes that after struggling to pass a tax on gas-guzzling cars, Carter wrote in his diary, "The influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable, and it's impossible to arouse the public to protect themselves." Indeed, oil and gas companies still wield huge influence. SUVs are more popular than ever. The newsletter argues the story of Carter's life can be an inspiration, since Carter saw a lot of changes in his 100 years. "We need to see more changes to survive. May we all be as lucky as Carter was."

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This week New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose published his annual "Good Tech" awards to "shine the spotlight on a few tech projects that I think contributed positively to humanity." And high on the list is "Andres Freund, and every open-source software maintainer saving us from doom." The most fun column I wrote this past year was about a Microsoft database engineer, Andres Freund, who got some odd errors while doing routine maintenance on an obscure open-source software package called xz Utils. While investigating, Freund inadvertently discovered a huge security vulnerability in the Linux operating system, which could have allowed a hacker to take control of hundreds of millions of computers and bring the world to its knees. It turns out that much of our digital infrastructure rests on similar acts of nerdy heroism. After writing about Freund's discovery, I received tips about other near disasters involving open-source software projects, many of which were averted by sharp-eyed volunteers catching bugs and fixing critical code just in time to foil the bad guys. I could not write about them all, but this award is to say: I see you, open-source maintainers, and I thank you for your service. Roose also acknowledges the NASA engineers who kept Voyager 1 transmitting back to earth from interstellar space — and Bluesky, "for making my social media feeds interesting again." Roose also notes it was a big year for AI. There's a shout-out to Epoch AI, a small nonprofit research group in Spain, "for giving us reliable data on the AI boom." ("The firm maintains public databases of AI models and AI hardware, and publishes research on AI trends, including an influential report last year about whether AI models can continue to grow at their current pace. Epoch AI concluded they most likely could until 2030.") And there's also a shout-out to groups "pushing AI forward" and positive uses "to improve health care, identify new drugs and treatments for debilitating diseases and accelerate important scientific research." The nonprofit Arc Institute released Evo, an AI model that "can predict and generate genomic sequences, using technology similar to the kind that allows systems like ChatGPT to predict the next words in a sequence." A Harvard University lab led by Dr. Jeffrey Lichtman teamed with researchers from Google for "the most detailed map of a human brain sample ever created. The team used AI to map more than 150 million synapses in a tiny sample of brain tissue at nanometer-level resolution..." Researchers at Stanford and McMaster universities developed SyntheMol, "a generative AI model that can design new antibiotics from scratch."

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A U.S. Appeals Court ruled this week that net neutrality couldn't be reinstated by America's Federal Communications Commission. But "Despite the dismantling of the FCC's efforts to regulate broadband internet service, state laws in California, New York and elsewhere remain intact," notes the Los Angeles Times: This week's decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, striking down the FCC's open internet rules, has little bearing on state laws enacted during the years-long tug-of-war over the government's power to regulate internet service providers, telecommunications experts said. In fact, some suggested that the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit's decision — along with other rulings and the U.S. Supreme Court's posture on a separate New York case — has effectively fortified state regulators' efforts to fill the gap. "Absent an act of Congress, the FCC has virtually no role in broadband any more," Ernesto Falcon, a program manager for the California Public Utilities Commission, said in an interview. "The result of this decision is that states like California, New York and others will have to govern and regulate broadband carriers on our own." California has one of the nation's strongest laws on net neutrality, the principle that internet traffic must be treated equally to ensure a free and open network. Former Gov. Jerry Brown signed the measure into law in 2018, months after federal regulators in President elect-Donald Trump's first administration repealed the net neutrality rules put in place under President Obama. Colorado, Oregon and other states also adopted their own standards. The Golden State's law has already survived legal challenges. It also prompted changes in the way internet service providers offered plans and services. "California's net neutrality law, which is seen as the gold standard by consumer advocates, carries national impact," Falcon said.... "The state's authority and role in broadband access has grown dramatically now," Falcon said. California's net neutrality rules prohibit "throttling" data speeds, according to the article.

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It "felt like a Disneyland ride," reports CBS News. A man took a Waymo takes to the airport — only to discover the car "wouldn't stop driving around a parking lot in circles." And because the car was in motion, he also couldn't get out. Still stuck in the car, Michael Johns — a tech-industry worker — then phoned Waymo for help. ("Has this been hacked? What's going on? I feel like I'm in the movies. Is somebody playing a joke on me?") But he also filmed the incident... "Why is this thing going in a circle? I'm getting dizzy," Johns said in a video posted on social media that has since gone viral, garnering more than two million views and interactions.... The Waymo representative was finally able to get the car under control after a few minutes, allowing him to get to the airport just in time to catch his flight back to LA. He says that the lack of empathy from the representative who attempted to help him, on top of the point that he's unsure if he was talking to a human or AI, are major concerns. "Where's the empathy? Where's the human connection to this?" Johns said while speaking with CBS News Los Angeles. "It's just, again, a case of today's digital world. A half-baked product and nobody meeting the customer, the consumers, in the middle." Johns, who ironically works in the tech industry himself, says he would love to see services like Waymo succeed, but he has no plans to hop in for a ride until he's sure that the kinks have been fixed. In the meantime, he's still waiting for someone from Waymo to contact him in regards to his concerns, which hasn't yet happened despite how much attention his video has attracted since last week. "My Monday was fine till i got into one of Waymo 's 'humanless' cars," he posted on LinkedIn . "I get in, buckle up ( safety first) and the saga begins.... [T]he car just went around in circles, eight circles at that..." A Waymo spokesperson admitted they'd added about five minutes to his travel time, but then "said the software glitch had since been resolved," reports the Los Angeles Times, "and that Johns was not charged for the ride." One final irony? According to his LinkedIn profile, Johns is a CES Innovations Awards judge.

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"It's fair to say that by 1995, OS/2 was dead software walking," remembers a new article from the Register (which begins with a 1995 Usenet post from Gordon Letwin, Microsoft's lead architect on the OS/2 project). But the real question is why this Microsoft-IBM collaboration on a DOS-replacing operating system ultimately lost out to Windows...? If OS/2 1.0 had been an 80386 OS, and had been able to multitask DOS apps, we think it would have been a big hit.... OS/2's initial 1980s versions were 16-bit products, at IBM's insistence. That is when the war was lost. That is when OS/2 flopped. Because its initial versions were even more crippled than the Deskpro 386... Because OS/2 1.x flopped, Microsoft launched a product that fixed the key weakness of OS/2 1.x. That product was Windows 3, which worked perfectly acceptably on 286 machines, but if you ran the same installed copy on a 32-bit 386 PC, it worked better. Windows 3.0 could use the more sophisticated hardware of a 386 to give better multitasking of the market-dominating DOS apps... IBM's poor planning shaped the PC industry of the 1990s more than Microsoft's successes. Windows 3.0 wasn't great, but it was good enough. It reversed people's perception of Windows after the failures of Windows 1 and Windows 2. Windows 3 achieved what OS/2 had intended to do. It transformed IBM PC compatibles from single-tasking text-only computers into graphical computers, with poor but just about usable multitasking... Soon after Windows 3.0 turned out to be a hit, OS/2 NT was rebranded as Windows NT. Even the most ardent Linux enthusiast must c\oncede that Windows NT did quite well over three decades. Back in 1995, the Register's author says they'd moved from OS/2 to Windows 95 "while it was still in beta. "The UI was far superior, more hardware worked, and Doom ran much better."

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"In many instances, there's a catch: flexible work but at lower pay..." writes Fortune. "Remote workers are accepting lower salaries in order to achieve remote status. Some are taking as much as 5% to 15% less pay to do so, while other employers are reversing the strategy to entice workers to come to the office at higher salaries..." Today, nearly half of managers anticipate challenges in meeting candidates' compensation expectations. And when the gap between salary expectation and an offer is too great, many employers are negotiating remote and hybrid work to get candidates to sign on the dotted line, according to Robert Half's recently published 2025 U.S. Hiring Outlook. Some candidates accept 5% to 15% less pay in exchange for getting to work from home, Theresa L. Fesinstine, founder of human resources advisory peoplepower.ai, told Fortune. "There's this unspoken exchange rate between flexibility and comp, and for some candidates, it's worth a significant trade-off," said Fesinstine, who has more than two decades of leadership experience in HR. This is especially true "for those who value work-life balance or are saving on commute costs." There are inherent risks in offering job candidates lower salaries, even if it means getting the chance to work from home. Amy Spurling, founder and CEO of employee benefits reimbursement platform Compt, told Fortune she expects to see a second Great Resignation this year after hiring freezes, benefits cuts, and forced RTO policies in 2023 and 2024. "If you're trying to lowball remote workers, you're about to face a harsh reality," Spurling said. "2025 is going to be a 'find out' year for companies that thought they could use remote work or other 'perks' to replace competitive compensation and genuine employee support." To wit, a 2024 report by PwC forecasts another resignation period with a 28% increase in the number of people who plan to change jobs, compared to 19% during the Great Resignation of 2022... What's more, Fesinstine argues, remote work "isn't a perk anymore, but rather a standard operating model." So attempting to describe remote work as a benefit doesn't sit well with job candidates... On the other hand, Michael Steinitz, senior executive director of professional talent solutions at Robert Half, told Fortune their research shows 76% of job candidates are willing to work fully in-office — in exchange for a higher salary. "Among those employees, the average raise they would request is about 23%, he said."

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