 |
|
|
|||||
Commuters in the New York City and New Jersey area are in for what is likely to be a weekend of increased congestion and more limited transit options after the engineers who run the New Jersey Transit rail system voted to go on strike. That strike is now in effect and could continue throughout the weekendand potentially even longer. Heres what you need to know about the NJ Transit strike. Whats happened? On Thursday, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) announced that its members who run the trains in the New Jersey Transit Corporation, better known as NJ Transit, were officially on strike. The strike came after the BLET and NJ Transit failed to reach a deal on a new contract for the approximately 450 engineers and trainees who run the railway and are represented by the union. The main issue centers around a disagreement on wage increases for the workers. News of the strike is no doubt a disappointment to the 100,000 NYC and NJ commuters who use the line daily, especially after both sides were reportedly close to a deal. Talks between both sides went on for 15 hours on Thursday and ended shortly before 10 p.m., reports CNN. The strike then officially began at 12:01 a.m., today, Friday, May 16. It is the first time union members working for New Jersey Transit have gone on strike in 42 years. The last time NJ Transit workers took to the picket lines was in 1983. What do the striking rail workers want? The BLETs union members are striking because no acceptable deal was reached on wage increases for its members. In a notice announcing the strike, BLET says that its NJ Transit members have not received a raise for five years. The union also notes that NJ Transit engineers make at least $10 less per hour than the engineers for other passenger railroads that share the same train platforms as the ones used by NJ Transit. NJ Transit has a half-billion dollars for a swanky new headquarters and $53 million for decorating the interior of that unnecessary building, BLET National President Mark Wallace said in a prepared statement. They gave away $20 million in revenue during a fare holiday last year. They have money for penthouse views and pet projects, just not for their front-line workers. Enough is enough. We will stay out until our members receive the fair pay that they deserve. In addition to the strike now in effect, from 4 a.m. this morning BLET members began picketing at multiple locations, including NJ Transits Newark headquarters, New York’s Penn Station, and the Atlantic City Rail Terminal in Atlantic City. The union says that despite the transit agency having the funds for a raise, NJ Transit managers walked out of talks before 10 p.m. on Thursday. What does NJ Transit say? NJ Transit, for its part, has posted a fact sheet about the strike, which lays out six claims and what the transit agency says are the facts about the claims. NJ Transit says that it offered BLET members a competitive wage and benefits package that all 14 other rail labor unions accepted in 2021. It also says that under its offer, NJ Transit locomotive engineers would have seen their average total earnings rise from $135,000 per year now to $172,856 as of July 1, 2027. The transit agency says these wages are competitive within the region and higher than the wages Philadelphias SEPTA workers receive. It concedes that the wages are lower than those received by MTA (Metro-North Railroad and Long Island Rail Road) workers in New York, but it adds, It isn’t reasonable to live and work in New Jersey, but demand to be paid like you live and work in New York. How long could the strike last? That is impossible to tell at this point. In theory, NJ Transit and BLET could agree to return to the negotiating table at any timealthough thats unlikely to happen today. However, on Thursday, NJ Transit CEO Kris Kolluri said that both sides are currently scheduled to start negotiating again on Sunday. But just because negotiations are scheduledor even begindoesnt mean the strike will be called off anytime soon. Indeed, if BLET would call off the strike, it may lessen the pressure on NJ Transit to meet their demands. CNN notes that when Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) workers went on strike in the 1980s, the strike lasted for 108 days. A strike of Metro-North workers lasted 42 days, and a strike of Long Island Railroad workers lasted 11 days. What should I do if I plan to use NJ Transit today? You should rethink your travel plans. NJ Transit has posted a notice warning of the complete suspension of services on its rail lines. The agency says it strongly encourages all those who can work from home to do so and limit traveling on the NJ TRANSIT system to essential purposes only. However, if you do need to commute, the agency says that it is adding very limited capacity to existing New York commuter routes on its bus services. The agency also says that from May 19, its regional Park & Ride service will operate on a first come, first served basis. Commuters who need to use NJ transit during the strike are strongely encouraged to check out the agencys rail strike information page here. What if Im seeing the Shakira or Beyoncé concerts? From this weekend, there are also two large music events planned in the area that NJ Transit normally serves. The first is the Shakira concert at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, which begins at 7:30 p.m. tonight, May 16. Then, Beyoncé is scheduled to perform at the same stadium for five nights between May 22 and May 29. MetLife Stadium has posted some travel options for concertgoers who are seeing the Shakira show tonight. The stadium points out that there will be no NJ Transit bus or rail service to the stadium tonight. It says that those coming to the concert from New York City may be able to use the Coach USA bus service, which it says will be limited. The venue also asks people who plan to arrive by car to please carpool and arrive early to help ease congestion. Will Congress step in? When it comes to transportation strikes, Congress does have the authority to act and compel workers to accept a deal and return to their jobs, notes CNN. The last time Congress did this was in December 2022 when it voted to force workers from the countrys four major freight railroads to accept a deal. However, CNN points out that Congress likely felt more compelled to step in at that time because the strike affected mst of the country. The NJ Transit strike is a local affair, which means Congress may be more reluctant to interfere.
Category:
E-Commerce
Cory Joseph has been blind since birth. So hes among the people Apple aims to serve with an addition to its App Store called Accessibility Nutrition Labels, one of a raft of features the company announced earlier this week to mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Once the labels go live later this year, each apps listing will detail the accessibility features it supports, such as the VoiceOver screen reader, voice input, options to adjust text size and screen contrast, and captioned audio. These enabling technologies can be the difference between an app being essential and unusable: Having this level of transparency from the App Store is huge, says Joseph. He isnt just one of the users who will benefit from that information, though. As a principal accessibility solutions architect at CVS Health, Joseph is in the business of making sure software works for everybody. Given his employers scaleits the worlds second-largest healthcare company by revenue and reaches 100 million people a dayits a job with the potential for deep real-world impact. When using CVSs apps, everyone’s trying to find the best care, and we want to make sure that’s barrier-free for everyone, explains Joseph. The 6-year-old team hes on has been responsible for achievements that go well beyond taking advantage of the core accessibility features offered by Apple and other platform providers. Spoken Rx uses RFID technology to identify prescription meds and read the vital details about them out loud. [Photo: Courtesy of CVS] In 2020, for instance, the company introduced a CVS Pharmacy app feature called Spoken Rxa baby of mine, Joseph says. Special radio-frequency identification (RFID) labels on prescription containers enable it to read aloud vital information such as dosage instructions. CVS Health has also made some of its investments in accessibility freely available to other developers by open-sourcing them, including iOS and Android code, an automated system for testing website usability, and tools for annotating web designs in Figma. As a field, accessibility has come a long way since Apple first dedicated a team to it, initially known as the Office of Special Education. Over 40 years, the company has built a wealth of functionality into its products to facilitate their use by people with disabilities, including the technologies that make the iPhone useful even if you cant see its touchscreen interface. Some of its recent advances, such as on-device generation of custom synthetic voices, would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. This weeks announcements even include support for brain-computer interfaces. By contrast, theres nothing gee-whizzy about the Accessibility Nutrition Labels themselves. They just summarize the features that a given app has enabled. But by doing that in such a straightforward, prominent way, theyll not only aid millions of users but also give some glory to the software makers who take accessible design seriously. Rather than be embarrassed by listings that make their lack of effort obvious, developers who dont yet have much to brag about might finally get with the program. Accessibility Nutrition Labels will clearly indicate which features for inclusive design an app supports. [Photo: Apple] Joseph hopes that the labels associations are only positive. It’s easy to think about this sort of thing as a badge of shame, and I think that’s not the right way to think about this, he told me. This is an opportunity for independent developers, large organizations, and everyone in between to highlight the good work they do. Even though Joseph works for a company that has dedicated significant mindshare and money to that good work, hes up front about the obstacles to rapid progress that large companies face, even when they have all the right intentions. I would be lying if I said that there aren’t challenges, he told me. We’re a gigantic organization. There are challenges in every gigantic organization. Of course, we balance all of our work and plan everything out as best as we can, and we deliver the most successful experience that we can across our applications. The good news, he adds, is that CVS Health-size resources arent necessary to make software accessible. Realistically, it’s easier for smaller developers, he says. They can move more quickly, they can update their code faster, and they can adapt to and take in their user feedback in real time and make those changes by engaging directly. For independent and smaller developers, this shouldn’t be a burden. I find that take heartening. And if Joseph is right that app creators dont have to be humongous to get inclusive design right, Accessibility Nutrition Labels will soon prove it. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can heck out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company Donald Trump says he’s our ‘crypto president,’ but he’s tanking its best shot at adoptionThe president’s deep involvement in the crypto industry is raising red flags in Washington, leading to the collapse of a key stablecoin bill. Read More AI is printing the rocket engine that could beat SpaceX at its own gameLeap 71 is developing AI to build rocket engines faster and cheaper than ever before. Read More Couples are saying ‘I do’ in ‘Minecraft’ as virtual weddings become more popularMore couples are tying the knot in digital worlds, saving money and celebrating love in the places they met online. Read More Apple teams up with a brain-computer startup to turn thoughts into device controlThe tech giant is working with Synchron to develop neural interfaces that let users control Apple devices with their brains. Read More Meta is building a new data center in Louisianaand this Senate committee wants to know why it’s being powered by gas (exclusive)The local utility says Meta’s AI data center requires three new natural gas plants. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is asking how this fits with Meta’s climate goals. Read More These 5 free AI-powered Chrome extensions make Gmail so much betterSignificantly improve your Gmail experience without breaking the bank.Read More
Category:
E-Commerce
It has been an odd few weeks for generative AI systems, with ChatGPT suddenly turning sycophantic, and Grok, xAIs chatbot, becoming obsessed with South Africa. Fast Company spoke to Steven Adler, a former research scientist for OpenAI who until November 2024 led safety-related research and programs for first-time product launches and more-speculative long-term AI systems about bothand what he thinks might have gone wrong. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. What do you make of these two incidents in recent weeksChatGPTs sudden sycophancy and Groks South Africa obsessionof AI models going haywire? The high-level thing I make of it is that AI companies are still really struggling with getting AI systems to behave how they want, and that there is a wide gap between the ways that people try to go about this todaywhether it’s to give a really precise instruction in the system prompt or feed a model training data or fine-tuning data that you think surely demonstrate the behavior you want thereand reliably getting models to do the things you want and to not do the things you want to avoid. Can they ever get to that point of certainty? I’m not sure. There are some methods that I feel optimistic aboutif companies took their time and were not under pressure to really speed through testing. One idea is this paradigm called control, as opposed to alignment. So the idea being, even if your AI wants different things than you want, or has different goals than you want, maybe you can recognize that somehow and just stop it from taking certain actions or saying or doing certain things. But that paradigm is not widely adopted at the moment, and so at the moment, I’m pretty pessimistic. Whats stopping it being adopted? Companies are competing on a bunch of dimensions, including user experience, and people want responses faster. There’s the gratifying thing of seeing the AI start to compose its response right away. Theres some real user cost of safety mitigations that go against that. Another aspect is, Ive written a piece about why it’s so important for AI companies to be really careful about the ways that their leading AI systems are used within the company. If you have engineers using the latest GPT model to write code to improve the company’s security, if a model turns out to be misaligned and wants to break out of the company or do some other thing that undermines security, it now has pretty direct access. So part of the issue today is AI companies, even though they’re using AI in all these sensitive ways, haven’t invested in actually monitoring and understanding how their own employees are using these AI systems, because it adds more friction to their researchers being able to use them for other productive uses. I guess weve seen a lower-stakes version of that with Anthropic [where a data scientist working for the company used AI to support their evidence in a court case, which included a hallucinatory reference to an academic article]. I obviously don’t know the specifics. Its surprising to me that an AI expert would submit testimony or evidence that included hallucinated court cases without having checked it. It isnt surprising to me that an AI system would hallucinate things like that. These problems are definitely far from solved, which I think points to a reason that its important to check them very carefully. You wrote a multi-thousand-word piece on ChatGPTs sycophancy and what happened. What did happen? I would separate what went wrong initially versus what I found in terms of what still is going wrong. Initially, it seems that OpenAI started using new signals for what direction to push its AI intoor broadly, when users had given the chatbot a thumbs-up, they used this data to make the chatbot behave more in that direction, and it was penalized for thumb-down. And it happens to be that some people really like flattery. In small doses, thats fine enough. But in aggregate this produced an initial chatbot that was really inclined to blow smoke. The issue with how it became deployed is that OpenAIs governance around what passes, what evaluations it runs, is not good enough. And in this case, even though they had a goal for their models to not be sycophanticthis is written in the company’s foremost documentation about how their models should behavethey did not actually have any tests for this. What I then found is that even this version that is fixed still behaves in all sorts of weird, unexpected ways. Sometimes it still has these behavioral issues. This is what’s been called sycophancy. Other times it’s now extremely contrarian. It’s gone the other way. What I make of this is its really hard to predict what an AI system is going to do. And so for me, the lesson is how important it is to do careful, thorough empirical testing. And what about the Grok incident? The type of thing I would want to understand to assess that is what sources of user feedback Grok collects, and how, if at all, those are used as part of the training process. And in particular, in the case of the South African white-genocide-type statements, are these being put forth by users and the model is agreeing with them? Or to what extent is the model blurting them out on its own, without having been touched? It seems these small changes can escalate and amplify. I think the problems today are real and important. I do think they are going to get even harder as AI starts to get used in more and more important domains. So, you know, it’s troubling. If you read the accounts of people having their delusions reinforced by this version of ChatGPT, those are real people. This can be actually quite harmful for them. And ChatGPT is widely used by a lot of people.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||