

News
Many fired IT professionals face deportation from the US
According to CNBC, thousands of IT professionals who have fallen under massive layoffs at the world’s largest technology companies may soon be deported from the United States, as they were in the country on an H-1B work visa. Workers with a temporary visa often have 60 to 90 days to find a new job and avoid deportation.
Layoffs in the tech industry topped 50,000 in November, according to the website Layoffs.fyi, as more large companies acknowledged the need to cut costs.
Technology companies are among the employers with the highest number of H-1B visa approvals, which are issued to professionals with higher education and additional training. Silicon Valley has for years relied on government-issued temporary visas to hire thousands of foreign workers in technical fields such as engineering, biotechnology, and computer science. This is the main reason tech companies openly defend the rights of immigrants.
According to a former Amazon Web Services employee who lost his job, Amazon gave laid-off employees 60 days to find a new position within the company, after which they were offered severance pay.
According to the National Endowment for American Policy Survey of U.S. Immigration Data, Amazon had the most approved H-1B visa petitions in fiscal year 2021, with 6,182. The rest of the tech companies are not far behind one of their competitors on this metric.
The former Amazon Web Services employee has been in the country for two years on student and work visas. He said he was unexpectedly fired in early November, just a few months after joining the company as an engineer. Despite Amazon telling him he had 60 days to find another job within the company, his manager advised him to apply for a job elsewhere. Amazon said in November it was suspending hiring of its corporate employees.
A search for “H1B layoffs” on LinkedIn shows a flood of messages from people who have recently lost their jobs expressing concerns about the 60-day period.

News
Twitch launched an endless series in the style of sitcoms of the 80s. It is generated by neural networks

On the Twitch platform, they launched the series Nothing, Forever in the style of sitcoms of the 80s. It is notable for the fact that it is completely created using neural networks. Replicas for the series are “invented” by ChatGPT, and DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Azure Cognitive Services generate a picture, which is then played using the Unity game engine. For voice acting, a speech synthesizer is used.
The series is constantly being created and developed based on the feedback of the viewers. At the same time, even very good jokes sometimes come across, although often the characters speak out of place or even simply remain silent. There are also animation bugs.
Overall, the visuals are similar to the first 3D PC and console games, and the scenes are fairly repetitive.
The series is based on the 1980s sitcom Seinfeld. The series can be watched here. In the future, the authors intend to create other similar projects to compete with Netflix series. They will also be endless, or at least very long.
News
How so, Microsoft? A third party developer has already added ChatGPT to Word

Creative Data Studios has developed a plug-in for Microsoft Word called Ghostwriter ChatGPT that adds chatbot functionality to a text editor. The novelty was created without the participation of Microsoft.
There are currently two versions of the plugin available: $10 and $25. The first is limited to short responses of two paragraphs and uses only the ChatGPT language model. A more advanced one is devoid of such restrictions, it uses all OpenAI models. You can install the plugin through the Office Add-in Store.
In addition, the developers promise an early release of similar plug-ins for all applications from the Microsoft package: Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote. After the release of the add-on pack, users who have already purchased the plugin for Word will receive a discount.
According to Patrick Husting, who developed Ghostwriter, Microsoft will most likely disable Ghostwriter in the future when its own implementation of ChatGPT support is ready. However, this option can still be used.
Earlier it was reported that Microsoft has already added support for the GPT-3.5 model to Teams Premium, which will allow the neural network to listen to conversations, draw notes and plans based on the results. Microsoft also plans to add ChatGPT to the Bing search engine, but there, according to rumors, there will already be GPT-4.
Phones
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra vs iPhone 14 Pro Max in a camera battle. Published a large video comparison of the two flagships

Despite the fact that there are still two weeks before the start of sales of Samsung Galaxy S23 smartphones, full reviews of the camera of the older novelty have already been published on the Web. The author of the famous SuperSaf channel compared the Galaxy S23 Ultra camera with the iPhone 14 Pro Max camera.
Unfortunately, although the comparison is voluminous, it is far from being as informative as it happens on some other channels. However, there is still a lot of information.
As you can see, in low light, the brainchild of Samsung shows a wider dynamic range and detail. This is true for all cameras, including the ultra wide and tele cameras. But when shooting video at night, everything is not so clear. At least the Korean smartphone has a lot more noise and slower autofocus.
Of course, Samsung easily wins in the comparison of cameras, because it has two of them at once. Already at 10x zoom, the difference is very noticeable, and the iPhone cannot offer more than 15x at all.
Cinematic Mode on the iPhone clearly looks better, in addition, we can note a fairly significant difference in color reproduction, both in the photo and in the video.
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