Stack Overflow has the announced the results of its annual survey of developers. ZDNet reports: Almost three-quarters (74%) of developers are actively looking for new roles or are open to fresh opportunities, according to research.... The highest percentage of active job seekers is in the 20-24 year-old cohort (27%), with 21% for 25-34 year-olds, 17% for 35-44 year-olds, and only 12% for 45-54 year-olds.

Additionally, the percentage of younger developers actively searching for their next role increased nine points year over year, according to the survey of 2,600 developers by StackOverflow....

Some 54% of respondents to the StackOverflow survey said a better salary is the largest motivator when considering a new opportunity. The biggest factors that stop developers from looking for new jobs are flexibility (58%), salary (54%), and learning opportunities (54%). Developers also want flexibility and the option to work from home, with 46% citing starting/ending the day at a precise time or being expected to work from an office (44%) as the top drawbacks in their current roles.

"Regardless of the economy, it's clear salary is important but it's not everything," says StackOverflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar.

Last.fm turned 20 years old over the weekend and users are still tracking their music playback hundreds of thousands of times a day. The Verge's Jacob Kastrenakes writes: Last.fm felt just a little bit revolutionary when it was first introduced in the early 2000s. The site's plug-ins -- which were originally created for a different service called Audioscrobbler -- tapped into your music player, took note of everything you listened to, and then displayed all kinds of statistics about your listening habits. Plus, it could recommend tracks and artists to you based on what other people with similar listening habits were interested in. "If this catches on, a system like this would be a really effective way to discover new artists and find people with similar tastes," the blogger Andy Baio wrote in February 2003 after first trying it out.

This was very much a precursor to the algorithmic recommendation systems that are built into every music streaming service today. Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal -- whatever it is you're listening to, they're all tracking your habits and using that to recommend new tracks to you. But on those services, your data is kept hidden behind the scenes. Using Last.fm was like having access to your year-end Spotify Wrapped but available every single day and always updating.

Streaming services' automated recommendations have largely obviated the need for a platform like Last.fm (I certainly haven't scrobbled anything in more than a decade). But I poked around, and it turns out there are still corners of the internet building vibrant communities around its features. One of the big uses is on Discord, where third-party developers have built a service called .fmbot that integrates scrobbling data into the popular chat room app. Thom, a backend developer based in the Netherlands, says the bot has more than 400,000 total users, with 40,000 people engaging with the service each day. It's particularly popular in Discords based around specific musical artists or genres -- where people "want to compare their statistics to each other" -- and among servers for small friend groups, so they can "dive deeper into what everyone is listening to," he says. The bot pulls in fun stats that people can brag about: the date of when they first listened to a given song, just how many days' worth of music they consumed each year, or a list of their top albums. In 2008, we ran a story from Slashdot reader Rob Spengler about Last.fm's "mountain of data." Not only did he note how Last.fm was the "largest online radio outlet" at the time, surpassing Pandora and others, but he (hilariously, in hindsight) posed the question: "Does sitting on a mountain of data make Last.FM powerful enough to start making a stand against the record industry?"

Time magazine teamed up with a London based non-profit newsroom called the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in an investigation that reveals that "horrific" videos "are part and parcel of everyday work for TikTok moderators in Colombia." They told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism about widespread occupational trauma and inadequate psychological support, demanding or impossible performance targets, punitive salary deductions and extensive surveillance. Their attempts to unionize to secure better conditions have been opposed repeatedly. TikTok's rapid growth in Latin America — it has an estimated 100 million users in the region — has led to the hiring of hundreds of moderators in Colombia to fight a never-ending battle against disturbing content. They work six days a week on day and night shifts, with some paid as little as 1.2 million pesos ($254) a month, compared to around $2,900 for content moderators based in the U.S....

The nine moderators could only speak anonymously for fear they might lose their jobs, or undermine their future employment prospects.... The TikTok moderation system described by these moderators is built on exacting performance targets. If workers do not get through a huge number of videos, or return late from a break, they can lose out on a monthly bonus worth up to a quarter of their salary. It is easy to lose out on the much-needed extra cash. Ãlvaro, a current TikTok moderator, has a target of 900 videos per day, with about 15 seconds to view each video. He works from 6am to 3pm, with two hours of break time, and his base salary is 1.2m pesos ($254) a month, only slightly higher than Colombia's minimum salary.... He once received a disciplinary notice known internally as an "action form" for only managing to watch 700 videos in a shift, which was considered "work avoidance". Once a worker has an action form, he says, they cannot receive a bonus that month....

Outsourcing moderation to countries in the global south like Colombia works for businesses because it is cheap, and workers are poorly protected.... For now... TikTok's low-paid moderators will keep working to their grueling targets, sifting through some of the internet's most nightmarish content.
The moderators interviewed all had "contractor" status with Paris-based Teleperformance, which last year reported €557 million ($620m) in profit on €7.1 billion ($8.1 billion) in revenue. In fact, Teleperformance has more than 7,000 content moderators globally, according to stats from Market Research Future, and the moderators interviewed said that besides TikTok, Teleperformance also provided content moderators to Meta, Discord, and Microsoft.

What's going on in the metaverse these days, you might ask. Looking at two of the biggest companies with over $1 billion valuations, the answer is surprising: Not much, or at least not enough to bring users back every day. From a report: According to data from DappRadar, the Ethereum-based virtual world Decentraland had 38 active users in the past 24 hours, while competitor The Sandbox boasted 522 active users in that same time. An active user, according to DappRadar, is defined as a unique wallet address' interaction with the platform's smart contract. For example, logging onto The Sandbox or Decentraland to make a purchase with SAND or MANA, each platform's respective native utility token, is counted as an "active use."

This means that DappRadar's compilation of daily active users doesn't account for people who log in and mosey around a metaverse platform or drop in briefly for an event, such as a virtual fashion week. It also likely means that these spaces are not where people are making transactions such as buying non-fungible tokens (NFT). A developer might defend the low daily stats with the familiar phrase, "don't hate the player, hate the game" but it seems it's not just one quiet day for the two metaverse platforms. The largest number of daily users ever on Decentraland was 675, according to DappRadar. For The Sandbox, that number was larger at about 4,503.

Backup and cloud storage company Backblaze has published data comparing the long-term reliability of solid-state storage drives and traditional spinning hard drives in its data center. Based on data collected since the company began using SSDs as boot drives in late 2018, Backblaze cloud storage evangelist Andy Klein published a report yesterday showing that the company's SSDs are failing at a much lower rate than its HDDs as the drives age. ArsTechnica: Backblaze has published drive failure statistics (and related commentary) for years now; the hard drive-focused reports observe the behavior of tens of thousands of data storage and boot drives across most major manufacturers. The reports are comprehensive enough that we can draw at least some conclusions about which companies make the most (and least) reliable drives. The sample size for this SSD data is much smaller, both in the number and variety of drives tested -- they're mostly 2.5-inch drives from Crucial, Seagate, and Dell, with little representation of Western Digital/SanDisk and no data from Samsung drives at all. This makes the data less useful for comparing relative reliability between companies, but it can still be useful for comparing the overall reliability of hard drives to the reliability of SSDs doing the same work.

Backblaze uses SSDs as boot drives for its servers rather than data storage, and its data compares these drives to HDDs that were also being used as boot drives. The company says these drives handle the storage of logs, temporary files, SMART stats, and other data in addition to booting -- they're not writing terabytes of data every day, but they're not just sitting there doing nothing once the server has booted, either. Over their first four years of service, SSDs fail at a lower rate than HDDs overall, but the curve looks basically the same -- few failures in year one, a jump in year two, a small decline in year three, and another increase in year four. But once you hit year five, HDD failure rates begin going upward quickly -- jumping from a 1.83 percent failure rate in year four to 3.55 percent in year five. Backblaze's SSDs, on the other hand, continued to fail at roughly the same 1 percent rate as they did the year before.

Seven years ago, Slashdot reader #66,542 announced "Panopticlick 2.0," a site showing how your web browser handles trackers.

But it was just one of the many privacy-protecting projects Peter Eckersley worked on, as a staff technologist at the EFF for more than a decade. Eckersley also co-created Let's Encrypt, which today is used by hundreds of millions of people.

Friday the EFF's director of cybersecurity announced the sudden death of Eckersley at age 43. "If you have ever used Let's Encrypt or Certbot or you enjoy the fact that transport layer encryption on the web is so ubiquitous it's nearly invisible, you have him to thank for it," the announcement says. "Raise a glass."

Peter Eckersley's web site is still online, touting "impactful privacy and cybersecurity projects" that he co-created, including not just Let's Encrypt, Certbot, and Panopticlick, but also Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere. And in addition, "During the COVID-19 pandemic he convened the the stop-covid.tech group, advising many groups working on privacy-preserving digital contact tracing and exposure notification, assisting with several strategy plans for COVID mitigation." You can also still find Peter Eckersley's GitHub repositories online.

But Peter "had apparently revealed recently that he had been diagnosed with cancer," according to a tribute posted online by security company Sophos, noting his impact is all around us: If you click on the padlock in your browser [2022-09-0T22:37:00Z], you'll see that this site, like our sister blog site Sophos News, uses a web certificate that's vouched for by Let's Encrypt, now a well-established Certificate Authority (CA). Let's Encrypt, as a CA, signs TLS cryptographic certificates for free on behalf of bloggers, website owners, mail providers, cloud servers, messaging services...anyone, in fact, who needs or wants a vouched-for encryption certificate, subject to some easy-to-follow terms and conditions....

Let's Encrypt wasn't the first effort to try to build a free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer infrastructure for online encryption certificates, but the Let's Encrypt team was the first to build a free certificate signing system that was simple, scalable and solid. As a result, the Let's Encrypt project was soon able to to gain the trust of the browser making community, to the point of quickly getting accepted as a approved certificate signer (a trusted-by-default root CA, in the jargon) by most mainstream browsers....

In recent years, Peter founded the AI Objectives Institute, with the aim of ensuring that we pick the right social and economic problems to solve with AI:

"We often pay more attention to how those goals are to be achieved than to what those goals should be in the first place. At the AI Objectives Institute, our goal is better goals."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: South Korea has once again shattered its own record for the world's lowest fertility rate as it faces the prospect of its population of 51 million people more than halving by the end of this century. Korean women were estimated, based on 2021 data, to have an average of just 0.81 children over their lifetimes, down from 0.84 a year earlier, the statistics office said Wednesday. The number of newborns declined last year to 260,600, which equates to about 0.5% of the population.

The number of women of child-bearing age fell 2% to 11,620,000 last year, signaling the fertility rate is only likely to deteriorate further. A typical Korean woman gave birth to her first child at age 32.6, up from 30.2 a decade earlier, according to the stats office. Her partner on average would be 35.1, compared with 33 a decade earlier. By region, the capital Seoul showed the lowest fertility rate at 0.63, while Sejong, home to government headquarters, had the highest at 1.28, according to the stats office. The most populous province, Gyeonggi, recorded 0.85, closer to the average. In the decades following the 1950-53 Korean War, the population at least doubled and in an effort to curb the baby boom in the early years of economic development, the government encouraged couples to have only one child. That policy was scrapped around the turn of the century as births started to sharply fall, prompting the government to spend tens of billion of dollars each year to encourage more children, but with little success so far. "Korea is the world's fastest-aging nation among economies with per capita GDP of at least $30,000," notes Bloomberg, citing United Nations global population projections and World Bank data. "By 2100, its population will fall by 53% to 24 million, up from a 43% decline forecast in 2019."

"The forecast is a sobering reminder of the demographic threat and associated economic challenges confronting Bank of Korea Governor Rhee Chang-yong and President Yoon Suk Yeol, who both took office earlier this year."

1.34 billion people consumed harmful amounts of alcohol in 2020, according to estimates from a new study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

It also found that 59.1% of those people consuming unsafe amounts were between the ages of 15 and 39, and that for that group "there are no health benefits to drinking alcohol, only health risks.... 60% of alcohol-related injuries occurring among people in this age group, including motor vehicle accidents, suicides, and homicides."

Of the 15 to 39-year-olds consuming unsafe amounts of alcohol, 76.7% were male. For adults over age 40, health risks from alcohol consumption vary by age and region. Consuming a small amount of alcohol (for example, drinking between one and two 3.4-ounce glasses of red wine) for people in this age group can provide some health benefits, such as reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and diabetes...

Authors call for alcohol consumption guidelines to be revised to emphasise consumption levels by age, stressing that the level of alcohol consumption recommended by many existing guidelines is too high for young people in all regions. They also call for policies targeting males under age 40, who are most likely to use alcohol harmfully.

The British army is "investigating an apparent hack," reports Engadget, after its official Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised Sunday: News of the breach was first reported by Web3 is Going Great . According to the blog, both accounts were simultaneously compromised to promote two different cryptocurrency scams.

Although it has since been scrubbed, the army's verified Twitter account was briefly changed to look like a page for The Possessed, a project involving a collection of 10,000 animated NFTs with a price floor of 0.58 Ethereum (approximately $1,063). During that time, the account tweeted out multiple links to a fake minting website....

Over on YouTube, the army's channel [had] been made to look like a page for Ark Invest...livestreaming videos that repurpose old footage of Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and Ark CEO Katie Wood discussing cryptocurrency. The clips feature an overlay promoting "double your money" Bitcoin and Ethereum scams. According to Web3 is Going Great, a similar scheme netted scammers $1.3 million this past May. It's unclear who is behind the attacks.

It was June 29th of 2021 that Microsoft-owned GitHub first announced its AI-powered autocompletion tool for programmers — trained on GitHub repositories and other publicly-available source code.

But after a year in "technical preview," GitHub Copilot has reached a new milestone, reports Info-Q: you'll now have to pay to use it after a 60-day trial: The transition to general availability mostly means that Copilot ceases to be available for free. Interested developers will have to pay 10 USD/month or $100 USD/year to use the service, with a 60-day free trial.... According to GitHub, while not frequent, there is definitely a possibility that Copilot outputs code snippets that match those in the training set.
Info-Q also cites GitHub stats showing over 1.2 million developers used Copilot in the last 12 months "with a shocking 40% figure of code written by Copilot in files where it is enabled." That's up from 35% earlier in the year, reports TechCrunch — which has more info on the rollout: It'll be free for students as well as "verified" open source contributors — starting with roughly 60,000 developers selected from the community and students in the GitHub Education program... One new feature coinciding with the general release of Copilot is Copilot Explain, which translates code into natural language descriptions. Described as a research project, the goal is to help novice developers or those working with an unfamiliar codebase.

Ryan J. Salva, VP of product at GitHub, told TechCrunch via email... "As an example of the impact we've observed, it's worth sharing early results from a study we are conducting. In the experiment, we are asking developers to write an HTTP server — half using Copilot and half without. Preliminary data suggests that developers are not only more likely to complete their task when using Copilot, but they also do it in roughly half the time."

Owing to the complicated nature of AI models, Copilot remains an imperfect system. GitHub said that it's implemented filters to block emails when shown in standard formats, and offensive words, and that it's in the process of building a filter to help detect and suppress code that's repeated from public repositories. But the company acknowledges that Copilot can produce insecure coding patterns, bugs and references to outdated APIs, or idioms reflecting the less-than-perfect code in its training data.
The Verge ponders where this is going — and how we got here: "Just like the rise of compilers and open source, we believe AI-assisted coding will fundamentally change the nature of software development, giving developers a new tool to write code easier and faster so they can be happier in their lives," says GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.

Microsoft's $1 billion investment into OpenAI, the research firm now led by former Y Combinator president Sam Altman, led to the creation of GitHub Copilot. It's built on OpenAI Codex, a descendant of OpenAI's flagship GPT-3 language-generating algorithm.

GitHub Copilot has been controversial, though. Just days after its preview launch, there were questions over the legality of Copilot being trained on publicly available code posted to GitHub. Copyright issues aside, one study also found that around 40 percent of Copilot's output contained security vulnerabilities.

Wimbledon is turning to big data to help improve fans' tennis knowledge, after discovering even ticket holders at the Championships were not aware of most of the players in the game. From a report: Crowds at this year's tournament -- expected to return to sold-out levels with easing of coronavirus restrictions -- are to be exposed to more facts and figures organisers hope will help get them "closer to the sport." AI-powered stats will seek to better explain the strengths and weaknesses in players' games but also predict upsets and rising stars, with data built in part from trawling newspaper headlines.

Alexandra Willis, the All England Club's director of communications and marketing, said the idea had come about before Covid. "We found that most fans didn't watch tennis the rest of the year," she said. "They also hadn't heard of most of the players [and] this was a specific barrier to engagement." Spectators at Wimbledon fortnight, as well as television viewers and app users, will have access to Win Factor, a tool that will aggregate data from a number of sources to better predict a player's chances of victory in a given match. Fans will be able to input their own match predictions while being encouraged to scour more information on some of the game's lesser-known players.

schwit1 shares a report from Task & Purpose: A fan of the popular mechanized combat simulator 'War Thunder' shared the specs of China's Type 99 Main Battle Tank online in order to win an argument over the game. [...] The latest incident, first reported by the OSINTtechnical Twitter account, involves information in Mandarin on the penetrator section of a Chinese tank round along with a technical diagram. While many of the original images have been taken down, they were essentially the schematics for a Chinese tank munition, presumably revealed to the world so a video game could more accurately depict what would happen if a Chinese tank and an American tank -- or British, French, Russian, German or Israeli tank -- met in combat. And this isn't the first time these forums have become an outlet for technical leaks. [...]

The most recent leak, the latest leak, from someone with access to the latest technical manuals from China's People's Liberation Army, occurred because a user wanted the game's Chinese battle tanks to have better in-game stats. While most of the information about the Chinese tank round was already known, it was still apparently more important for one gamer to prove another gamer wrong on a message board than it was to consider the implications of publishing the technical details of military munitions online.

The video game developer, Gaijin Entertainment, banned the user, telling Kotaku that, "Our community managers immediately banned the user and deleted his post, as the information on this particular shell is still classified in China. Publishing classified information on any vehicle of any nation at War Thunder forums is clearly prohibited, and the game developers never use it in their work."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple's Safari web browser has more than 1 billion users, according to an estimate by Atlas VPN. Only one other browser has more than a billion users, and that's Google's Chrome. But at nearly 3.4 billion, Chrome still leaves Safari in the dust. It's important to note that these numbers include mobile users, not just desktop users. Likely, Safari's status as the default browser for both the iPhone and iPad plays a much bigger role than its usage on the Mac. Still, it's impressive given that Safari is the only major web browser not available on Android, which is the world's most popular mobile operating system, or Windows, the most popular desktop OS. "The statistics are based on the GlobalStats browser market share percentage, which was then converted into numbers using the Internet World Stats internet user metric to retrieve the exact numbers," explains Atlas VPN in a blog post.

An anonymous reader shares a report: While not every user is actively monitoring hardware resource usage when gaming, enthusiasts and reviewers often turn the stats on to see how certain games and other applications are being handled by the hardware. During such a test run, CapFrameX, which developed a useful frametime analysis tool, noticed a weird anomaly when gauging the performance of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D on Lara Croft Shadow of the Tomb Raider (SotTR). The processor usage reported on Windows 11 is seemingly unusually low in one of the scenes in the game which is typically known to be quite intense on the CPU. Only one out the 16 threads seem to be reporting the correct usage whereas all the other threads are under 10% utilization. CapFrameX notes the issue though it isn't sure what could be causing it: " The core usage reporting on Window 11 is completely broken. Should be >80% for SotTR + this particular scene and settings. What happened? Did the recent update change the timer behavior?"

SlashData's "State of the Developer Nation" surveyed more than 20,000 developers in 166 countries, taken from December 2021 to February 2022, reports InfoWorld.

It found the most popular programming language is JavaScript — followed by Python (which apparently added 3.3 million new net developers in just the last six months). And Rust adoption nearly quadrupled over the last two years to 2.2 million developers.

InfoWorld summarizes other findings from the survey: Java continues to experience strong and steady growth. Nearly 5 million developers have joined the Java community since the beginning of 2021.

PHP has grown the least in the past six month, with an increase of 600,000 net new developers between Q3 2021 and Q1 2022. But PHP is the second-most-commonly used language in web applications after JavaScript.

Go and Ruby are important languages in back-end development, but Go has grown more than twice as fast in the past year. The Go community now numbers 3.3 million developers.

The Kotlin community has grown from 2.4 million developers in Q1 2021 to 5 million in Q1 2022. This is largely attributed to Google making Kotlin its preferred language for Android development.

America's most populous state is shrinking — at least a little. The Associated Press reports: With an estimated 39,185,605 residents, California is still the U.S.'s most populous state, putting it far ahead of second-place Texas and its 29.5 million residents. But after years of strong growth brought California tantalizingly close to the 40 million milestone, the state's population is now roughly back to where it was in 2016 after declining by 117,552 people this year.
That's a drop of 0.29% — at least some of which seems attributable to the pandemic. California's population growth had been slowing even before the pandemic as baby boomers' aged, younger generations were having fewer children and more people were moving to other states. But the state's natural growth — more births than deaths — and its robust international immigration had been more than enough to offset those losses. That changed in 2020, when the pandemic killed tens of thousands of people above what would be expected from natural causes, a category demographers refer to as "excess deaths." And it prompted a sharp decline in international immigration because of travel restrictions and limited visas from the federal government.

California's population fell for the first time that year. At the time, state officials thought it was a outlier, the result of a pandemic that turned the world upside down. But the new estimate released Monday by the California Department of Finance showed the trend continued in 2021, although the decline was less than it had been in 2020. State officials pointed specifically to losses in international immigration. California gained 43,300 residents from other countries in 2021. But that was well below the annual average of 140,000 that was common before the pandemic.
The state's official demographer predicts California's population will go back to increasing in 2022.

And even with the decline, the article points out that California "had a record budget surplus last year, and is in line for an even larger one this year of as much as $68 billion — mostly the result of a progressive tax structure and a disproportionate population of billionaires."

UK households could save an average of $183 per year by switching off so-called vampire devices, British Gas research suggests. From a report: These are electronics that drain power even when they are on standby. The figures are based on research conducted on appliances in 2019 but have been updated by British Gas to reflect recent price increases. The Energy Saving Trust (EST) said consumers need to consider which devices they leave switched on. It estimates households would save around $68.5 per year by switching off all their devices when not in use. The organisation, which promotes sustainability and energy efficiency, did not give exact details of how it came to this figure. "Stats or prices related to individual appliances depend on several factors, including model, functionality and individual usage," it said.

This week at the 2022 NAB Show Streaming Summit, Google launched in general availability Media CDN, a platform for delivering content using the same infrastructure that powers YouTube. From a report: With a presence in over 1,300 cities across 200 countries, Google says that Media CDN is designed to -- in the company's words -- "automate all facets" of "serving content [close to users]." The pandemic led to an explosion in demand for streaming content as business closures and shelter-in-place orders forced folks to stay home.

Media CDN, which joins Google's CDN portfolio for web and API acceleration, is by no stretch of the imagination the first of its kind. There's plenty of CDNs optimized to serve media. But Google touts ostensibly unique benefits like delivery protocols tailored to individual users and network conditions and "industry-leading" offload rates. "With multiple tiers of caching, we minimize calls to origin -- even for infrequently accessed content," Google VP Shailesh Shukla wrote in a blog post yesterday. "This alleviates performance or capacity stress in the content origin and saves costs." Media CDN also features tools for ad insertion, allowing customers to dynamically inject video content with ads. Moreover, the service is "built with AI/ML" to power interactive experiences, Google says, like real-time stats during sporting events and purchase links embedded in virtual billboards.

"At first glance, U.S. Covid cases appear to have plateaued over the last two weeks," reports NBC News, "with a consistent average of around 30,000 per day..."

"But disease experts say incomplete data likely masks an upward trend." "I do think we are in the middle of a surge, the magnitude of which I can't tell you," Zeke Emanuel, vice provost of global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, said. The BA.2 omicron subvariant, which now accounts for about 72 percent of U.S. cases and is more contagious than the original omicron variant, is fueling that spread, Emanuel added. "It's much more transmissible. It's around. We just don't have a lot of case counts," he said.

Emanuel and other experts cite a lack of testing as the primary reason cases are underreported. At the height of the omicron wave in January, the U.S. was administering more than 2 million tests per day. That had dropped to an average of about 530,000 as of Monday, the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The milder symptoms become, the less likely people are to test or show up in official case counts," said David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. More people also now have access to at-home rapid tests that are free or covered by insurance, and most of those test results don't get reported to state health departments or the CDC.

"Case counts and testing are progressively becoming shaky indicators because we're not catching everyone in the system," said Dr. Jonathan Quick, an adjunct professor at the Duke Global Health Institute.

Some local data, however, does reveal recent spikes. Average Covid cases have risen nearly 80 percent in Nebraska, 75 percent in Arizona, 58 percent in New York and 55 percent in Massachusetts over the last two weeks. Wastewater surveillance similarly suggests that infections are rising in Colorado, Ohio and Washington, among other states.
The Johns Hopkins epidemiologist emphasized that hospitalization figures are more important than case counts.

"If we're seeing an increase in cases, but not an increase in severe cases, I think it's a very valid question of does that matter?"

Decentralized finance (DeFi) firm Truflation is building a new gauge to track inflation independent from the government and in real-time. CoinDesk reports: Think of it as a competitor to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and one where officials can't move the goalposts. "The framework that [the government] is using is a hundred years old ... and they have continuously tried to evolve that versus taking a fresh approach in an age where we've got everything computerized," Truflation founder Stefan Rust told CoinDesk in an interview. The team started building Truflation after former Coinbase (COIN) Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan challenged Web 3 developers to build a censorship-resistant inflation feed, claiming that "the centralized state isn't going to provide reliable inflation stats," and promising an investment of $100,000. On Friday it was announced that Truflation won the challenge.

The key difference between the CPI and the Truflation index is that while the government uses survey data to measure inflation, Truflation looks at price data. The CPI is measured in the form of a survey that collects about 94,000 prices per month for commodities and services and 8,000 rental housing units for the housing component. While the Truflation index is based on the same calculation model as the widely used CPI, it is different because it measures and reports inflation changes daily by using current real-market price data from sources like Zillow, Penn State and Nielsen, among others. About 40% of the data that is being looked at is the same goods basket that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses. The remaining 60% is being substituted with data from other sources. Truflation, which runs on Chainlink and is therefore accessible and visible for everyone, currently measures a 13.2% inflation rate, as opposed to 7.9% measured by the CPI in March.