Comment on Comparisons of November sales at department stores

Ikea is assembling a team of Roblox players to work at its virtual store—and you can even get paid for the job. The Swedish retailer announced in a press release Monday that it will be launching “The Co-Worker Game,” a virtual recreation of the store that will be available on Roblox on June 24.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Tuesday, a group of former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employees published an open letter calling for AI companies to commit to principles allowing employees to raise concerns about AI risks without fear of retaliation. The letter, titled "A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence," has so far been signed by 13 individuals, including some who chose to remain anonymous due to concerns about potential repercussions. The signatories argue that while AI has the potential to deliver benefits to humanity, it also poses serious risks that include "further entrenchment of existing inequalities, to manipulation and misinformation, to the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction." They also assert that AI companies possess substantial non-public information about their systems' capabilities, limitations, and risk levels, but currently have only weak obligations to share this information with governments and none with civil society.

Enlarge A ransomware attack that crippled a London-based medical testing and diagnostics provider has led several major hospitals in the city to declare a critical incident emergency and cancel non-emergency surgeries and pathology appointments, it was widely reported Tuesday. The attack was detected Monday against Synnovis, a supplier of blood tests, swabs, bowel tests, and other hospital services in six London boroughs.

Enlarge / All these pieces more or less pop apart after a brief chemical treatment. (credit: Israel Sebastian.) For years, the arguments against renewable power focused on its high costs. But as the price of wind and solar plunged, the arguments shifted. Suddenly, concerns about the waste left behind when solar panels hit end-of-life became so common that researchers at the US's National Renewable Energy Lab felt compelled to publish a commentary in Nature Physics debunking them. Part of the misinformation is pure nonsense.

Enlarge / Some subscribers say they'll just cancel after watching Season 2 of House of the Dragon. (credit: Warner Bros. Discovery) Max's monthly ad-free streaming subscription costs $1 more than it did yesterday. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) today raised the prices for ad-free Max subscription plans, effective immediately for new subscribers. In addition to the cheaper ad-free plan now costing $17 per month, the Ultimate ad-free monthly plan, which supports four instead of two concurrent streams and 4K instead of 1080p resolution, is up a dollar to $21 per month. Annual subscriptions to the streaming service are also getting more expensive.

Enlarge / Pixel devices. (credit: Google) Google has changed its repair policy in response to criticism from repair advocate Louis Rossmann. Rossmann dug through the Google Store's "Service & Repair Program Terms & Conditions" for its first-party mail-in repair service and found the same style of onerous bans on third-party parts that Samsung was recently caught using.