The Helpdesk - A Tech Podcast For The Rest Of Us
Amazon Needs To Clean Up After Itself
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Episode notes
Lots of Slack news Slack now lets you DM anyone - Slack is starting to roll out a new feature that lets anyone using the service DM each other. - Announced back in October, Slack Connect DMs will let Slack users privately message employees outside of their company. - This new DM feature builds on Slack's work with Connect, which started appearing last year. Slack quickly removes message invites in its new DM feature over harassment concerns - The company says in response to concerns the feature could be used to send abusive messages or harassment with relative ease, it's now disabling the option to send a message alongside an invite. Slack is getting new audio features Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield says the company will soon introduce new audio features; - Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said his company would soon add a range of audio features for all users of its work chat app. - Terfield said that a feature for leaving audio messages, similar to a function available in messaging apps like Telegram, was available in a beta test. - He also said that Slack would soon offer a feature akin to the audio-chat app Clubhouse, which allows users to drop into rooms for conversations without requiring scheduling a meeting or initiating a call. - Terfield also said Slack would soon get an ephemeral video message feature commonly known as "Stories," similar to a message format originated by Snapchat and imitated by many, from Instagram to LinkedIn. Amazon has a poop problem - The pandemic-induced boom in online shopping has come with an unhygienic side effect. - The Intercept reports, Amazon’s delivery drivers in the US often don’t have anywhere to go to the bathroom during their shifts. Leaving them to pee in bottles or defecate in bags. - Amazon, in a fight with Bernie Sanders on Twitter, said this an urban legend - But documents from The Intercept show management is aware of the problem. - This story has some amazing passive aggressive emails from management to their drivers… Intel to Spend $20 Billion on 2 New Chip Factories in Arizona. - Intel announced massive changes in its "Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future" webcast last week - New Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced plans for Intel to produce processors for other companies. - There are three components of this vision; Intel's in-house manufacturing, Intel using third-party foundries for manufacturing, and the company's new Intel Foundry Services that will produce chips for other companies. - Intel expects to build on its existing relationships with third-party foundries, which today manufacture a range of Intel technology - from communications and connectivity to graphics and chipsets. - To deliver this vision, Intel is establishing a new standalone business unit, Intel Foundry Services, led by semiconductor industry veteran Dr. Randhir Thakur, who will report directly to Gelsinger. - That's a major shift for Intel that could see the company making chips for some of its biggest rivals. Women in AI awards - The very first Australian Women in AI awards were held in Sydney on Friday. - I went along, so my weekend started in a room full of people who are smarter than me and have cooler job titles. - The gist of the WAI is the recognise the women kicking goals in AI and closing the gender gap that exists in AI and many other parts of tech - According to a 2018 study from Wired and Element AI, just 12% of AI researchers globally are female. - Australia’s chief scientist Dr Cathy Foley “We are limiting what we can achieve because we are limiting who is in the room working on solutions.” - The overall winner of the night was Jamila Gordon, CEO and founder of Lumachain which uses AI to reduce waste across the global food supply chains. The platform tracks and traces the origin, location and condition of individual items in a supply chain, in real time, f...