All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Did L.A.’s mayor cut the fire department budget? The answer gets tricky – Los Angeles Times

The City Council approved the firefighter raises in November, adding more than $53 million in additional salary costs. By then, the council had also signed off on $58 million for new firetrucks and other department purchases.

Once those two line items were added, the fire department’s operating budget actually grew by more than 7% compared to the prior fiscal year, according to the city’s financial analysts.

Source: Did L.A.’s mayor cut the fire department budget? The answer gets tricky – Los Angeles Times

Meta terminates its DEI programs days before Trump inauguration | US news | The Guardian

Following a week in which Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was getting rid of factchecking, as of Friday the company is also terminating its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, effective immediately.

An internal memo from Meta acknowledged that “the legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing”, while pointing to recent supreme court decisions and the “charged” view some have of DEI as a concept. Axios and Business Insider first reported the memo. While Meta confirmed to the Guardian the company is ending its DEI practices, the company did not respond to a request for a comment about how the decision aligns with its overarching goals.

Source: Meta terminates its DEI programs days before Trump inauguration | US news | The Guardian

Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of ‘pirated’ books to train AI models, authors claim | Mark Zuckerberg | The Guardian

Mark Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of “pirated” versions of copyright-protected books to train the company’s artificial intelligence models, a group of authors has alleged in a US court filing.

Citing internal Meta communications, the filing claims that the social network company’s chief executive backed the use of the LibGen dataset, a vast online archive of books, despite warnings within the company’s AI executive team that it is a dataset “we know to be pirated”.

The internal message says that using a database containing pirated material could weaken the Facebook and Instagram owner’s negotiations with regulators, according to the filing. “Media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, may undermine our negotiating position with regulators.”

The US author Ta-Nehisi Coates, the comedian Sarah Silverman and the other authors suing Meta for copyright infringement made the accusations in a filing made public on Wednesday, in a California federal court.

Source: Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of ‘pirated’ books to train AI models, authors claim | Mark Zuckerberg | The Guardian