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Wall Street Has Stopped Rewarding 'Strategic' Layoffs
Goldman Sachs analysts have identified a notable shift in how investors respond to corporate layoff announcements, finding that even job cuts attributed to automation and AI-driven restructuring are now causing stock prices to fall rather than rise. The investment bank linked recent layoff announcements to public companies' earnings reports and stock market data, concluding that stocks dropped by an average of 2% following such announcements, and companies citing restructurings faced even harsher punishment.
The traditional Wall Street playbook held that layoffs tied to strategic restructuring would boost stock prices, while cuts driven by declining sales would hurt them. That distinction appears to have collapsed.
Goldman's analysts suggest investors simply don't believe what companies are saying -- firms announcing layoffs have experienced higher capex, debt and interest expense growth alongside lower profit growth compared to industry peers this year. The real driver, analysts suspect, may be cost reduction to offset rising interest expenses and declining profitability rather than any forward-looking efficiency play.
Goldman expects layoffs to keep rising, motivated in part by companies' stated desire to use AI to reduce labor costs.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Linux has had a great year, but there are two reasons I can't tear myself away from Windows - PC Gamer
Linux has had a great year, but there are two reasons I can't tear myself away from Windows PC Gamer
Categories: Linux
Linux has had a great year, but there are two reasons I can't tear myself away from Windows - PC Gamer
Linux has had a great year, but there are two reasons I can't tear myself away from Windows PC Gamer
Categories: Linux
Linux has had a great year, but there are two reasons I can't tear myself away from Windows - PC Gamer
Linux has had a great year, but there are two reasons I can't tear myself away from Windows PC Gamer
Categories: Linux
Chinese Social Media Users Criticize Authorities in Rare Sign of Dissent
An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese social media users criticized two key government policies, rare signs of public dissent in the country where the internet is heavily censored. The death of the former head of China's one-child policy agency -- which for decades forced women to carry out abortions and sterilizations -- sparked criticism of the demographic effort, with one netizen lamenting the "children who were lost."
Others, meanwhile, criticized Beijing's leadership over its ongoing row with Tokyo, sparked by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi saying her country could intervene to defend Taiwan in a potential Chinese attack on the self-ruled island, which Beijing claims as its own.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
23-Year-Old Radeon GPUs get a fix from the open-source Linux driver - VideoCardz.com
Categories: Linux
Framework Raises Memory Prices Again, Suggests Customers Bring Their Own RAM
Framework has announced yet another price increase for memory modules, the second in roughly a month, and the company is now actively encouraging customers to source their own RAM elsewhere if they can find better deals. The laptop maker cited "extreme memory shortages and price volatility" as the reason for the hike, noting that 32GB modules and smaller currently cost around $10 per gigabyte while 48GB modules run approximately $13 per gigabyte.
Framework said it expects to raise prices again by January as its suppliers continue increasing costs, a trend analysts predict will persist through 2026. Framework plans to add a direct link to PCPartPicker in its configurators so DIY Edition buyers can compare prices and find cheaper alternatives. The company said its pricing still compares favorably to Apple's roughly $25 per gigabyte and pledged to stay as close as possible to acquisition costs. Storage price increases are also on the horizon, Framework warned.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Waymo Pays Workers $22 To Close Doors on Stranded Robotaxis
Waymo's fleet of autonomous robotaxis can navigate city streets and compete with human taxi drivers, but they become stranded when a passenger leaves a door ajar -- prompting the company to pay tow truck operators around $20 to $24 through an app called Honk just to push a door shut. The owner of a towing company in Inglewood, California, completes up to three such jobs a week for Waymo, sometimes freeing vehicles by removing seat belts caught in doors. Another Los Angeles tow operator said locating stuck robotaxis can take 10 minutes to an hour because the precise location isn't always provided, forcing workers to search on foot through narrow streets too narrow for flatbed rigs.
Tow operators also retrieve Waymos that run out of battery before reaching charging stations, earning $60 to $80 per tow -- rates that aren't always profitable after factoring in fuel and labor. During a San Francisco power outage last weekend, multiple operators received a flurry of retrieval requests as robotaxis blocked intersections across the city. One San Francisco tow company manager declined because Waymo's offered rate fell below his standard $250 flatbed fee.
Waymo said in a blog post that the outage caused a "backlog" in requests to remote human workers who help vehicles navigate defunct traffic signals. San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood called for a hearing into Waymo's operations, saying the traffic disruptions were "dangerous and unacceptable." A retired Carnegie Mellon engineering professor who studied autonomous vehicles for nearly 30 years said paying humans to close doors and retrieve stalled cars is expensive and will need to be minimized as Waymo scales up. The company is testing next-generation Zeekr vehicles in San Francisco that feature automatic sliding doors.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nvidia Buying Groq's Assets For $20 Billion in Its Largest Deal on Record
Nvidia has agreed to buy assets from Groq, a designer of high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator chips, for $20 billion in cash, according to Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led the startup's latest financing round in September. From a report: Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq since the company was founded in 2016, said the deal came together quickly.
Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. Groq said in a blog post on Wednesday that it's "entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq's inference technology," without disclosing a price. With the deal, Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross along with Sunny Madra, the company's president, and other senior leaders "will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology," the post said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ho to run Linux GUI apps natively on Windows 10/11 with WSL, No VM Required - Yahoo! Tech
Categories: Linux
Arch Linux kills off Nvidia Pascal GPU support — users still running GTX 10-series graphics cards will have to manually install older drivers - Tom's Hardware
Categories: Linux
Arch Linux kills off Nvidia Pascal GPU support — users still running GTX 10-series graphics cards will have to manually install older drivers - Tom's Hardware
Categories: Linux
Arch Linux kills off Nvidia Pascal GPU support — users still running GTX 10-series graphics cards will have to manually install older drivers - Tom's Hardware
Categories: Linux
My favorite way to run Linux apps on Windows without a virtual machine - How-To Geek
Categories: Linux
Arch Linux kills off Nvidia Pascal GPU support - users still running GTX 10-series graphics cards will have to manually install older drivers - Tom's Hardware
Categories: Linux
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite's latest Linux benchmarks show significant regressions, performs similarly to five-year-old Intel Tiger Lake chips — promising chip continues to be plagued by software support issues - Tom's Hardware
Categories: Linux