Google’s Sundar Pichai cancels internal meeting on gender issues in light of online harassment concerns

Google CEO Sundar Pichai was expected to hold an all-hands meeting this afternoon in light of now-former Google engineer James Damore’s post about differences between men and women. Shortly before it was scheduled to start, Pichai sent out a note to employees letting them know it’s cancelled, Recode reports.

Some employees reportedly expressed fear that they’d be targets of online harassment if they were to speak up and ask questions in the town hall.

“We had hoped to have a frank, open discussion today as we always do to bring us together and move forward. But our Dory questions appeared externally this afternoon, and on some websites Googlers are now being named personally,” Pichai wrote in an email to employees. “Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be ‘outed’ publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall.”

Pichai cut his vacation short a couple of days ago to deal with hellfire that has ensued as a result of the memo. In the days since his return, Pichai has spoken with many Googlers about the memo and Google’s decision to fire Damore, Pichai wrote in his note to employees today.

“The vast majority of you are very supportive of our decision,” he wrote. “A smaller percentage of you wish we would do more. And some are worried that you cannot speak out at work freely. All of your voices and opinions matter … and I want to hear them.”

Although there will be no meeting today, it sounds like Google employees will soon be able to meet up and freely discuss the events of the past week. You can head over to Recode to read the full memo.

More@ https://www.technapping.com
Source: Techcrunch

Comments

WTF is bitcoin cash and is it worth anything?

Early yesterday morning bitcoin’s blockchain forked — meaning a separate cryptocurrency was created called bitcoin cash . The way a fork works is instead of creating a totally new cryptocurrency (and blockchain) starting at block 0, a fork just creates a duplicate version that shares the same history. So all past transactions on bitcoin cash’s new blockchain are identical to bitcoin core’s blockchain, with future transactions and balances being totally independent from each other. For practical matters, all this really means is that everyone who owned bitcoin before the fork now has an identical amount of bitcoin cash that is recorded in bitcoin cash’s forked blockchain. But it’s not exactly this easy. If you control your own private keys, or hold your bitcoin in an exchange that said it would credit users’ balances with bitcoin cash, you’re fine and can access your newfound cryptocurrency right now. If you held your bitcoin with a provider like Coinbase, which said before the fork t...

Walmart expands its grocery delivery business, powered by Uber

Walmart is expanding a test of its grocery delivery service, powered by Uber, the company announced this week. The retailer is now offering grocery delivery in two new markets — Dallas and Orlando — which join Tampa and Phoenix as locations where consumers can shop online for grocery items, then opt to have them come to their home for an additional $9.95 fee. Grocery delivery has been something Walmart has experimented with for years, starting with tests in Denver and San Jose of grocery delivery using its own service and trucks. The tests involving Uber are newer, however. In June, 2016, Walmart began a trial in Phoenix, which expanded to Tampa this March. In those locations, Walmart offers grocery delivery at five local stores per market. This week’s Dallas test is larger, with 8 stores participating. In Orlando, there are four stores involved. The grocery delivery service is available via the same online grocery shopping website where customers can place their pick-up orders — a s...

OpenAI bot remains undefeated against world’s greatest Dota 2 players

Last night, OpenAI’s Dota 2 bot beat the world’s most celebrated professional players in one-on-one battles, showing just how advanced these machine learning systems are getting. The bot beat Danil “Dendi” Ishutin rather easily at The International, one of the biggest eSports events in the world, and remains undefeated against the world’s top Dota 2 players. Elon Musk’s OpenAI trained the bot by simply copying the AI and letting the two play each other for weeks on end. “We’ve coached it to learn just from playing against itself,” said OpenAI researcher Jakub Pachoki . “So we didn’t hard-code in any strategy, we didn’t have it learn from human experts, just from the very beginning, it just keeps playing against a copy of itself. It starts from complete randomness and then it makes very small improvements, and eventually it’s just pro level.” To be clear, a 1v1 battle in Dota 2 is far less complex than an actual professional battle, which includes two teams of five players completing...

Technapping

Search This Blog