Google fires protestors, NPR chaos, Humane's AI Pin, Startup tax crisis, sports betting scandal

One host describes the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in Los Angeles as moving enough to make him cry twice. A mother whose children were born with cystic fibrosis, and whose second child died, presented an award to funders working against the disease, and the night also honored the discoverers of a Parkinson's gene. He calls the prize a Nobel for the modern era, run by the Milners, Zuck and Priscilla Chan, and others, and says it works because it brings Hollywood and Silicon Valley together.

a modern version of the Nobel

The rest of the opening is banter: grilled octopus, a claim that octopuses have the IQ of four- to eight-year-olds, jokes that high-IQ food makes you smarter, and Jason's story of a bison rib in Austin that broke a tooth, now replaced by an implant. It carries no analysis.

Within 72 hours, applications passed the number of seats, though applications stay open and are processed in the order received. Past attendees are admitted automatically. Scholarship details are due in a couple of weeks. This year's price is higher because last year's per-person cost exceeded what attendees paid, so organizers are pricing to break even and funding scholarship tickets from the balance.

Asked to rank Robo, Koon and Hellmuth for a home game, one host says Robo has the widest range from his very-high-stakes cash experience, Koon is the most precise and impossible to exploit, and Hellmuth is unusually willing to fold strong hands, correctly. As stakes rise, Robo should grow more comfortable and Koon should fall back on a trusted playbook. These are one player's impressions, not measured results.

On Tuesday about a dozen employees held sit-ins at Google offices in Sunnyvale and New York to protest the Israel-Palestine conflict, occupying the Google Cloud CEO's office. Nine were arrested after refusing to leave. The group No Tech for Apartheid organized the action, and 28 employees were fired on Wednesday after a quick investigation. Google's VP of Global Security said they took over offices, defaced property and impeded other Googlers.

Behavior like this has no place in our workplace

The target was Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with Israel's government, announced in 2021 and shared with Amazon. Google has denied doing military work and says it serves departments such as finance, health care and transportation.