Tired of digging all those blocks in Minecraft? Help could be at hand from an artificial intelligence assistant that can dig and build on command.

Video demonstrations show the AI assistant being told to build a circle out of wooden blocks and answering questions about what it is doing, asked by the controlling player.

Jalopnik asked ride-hailing drivers to share fare receipts, and it received data from more than 14,756 real-world trips in response. On average, Jalopnik, found, Uber kept about 35% of the revenue from each ride, and Lyft kept about 38%.

In regulatory filings, however, Uber has reported that its global take rate—the percentage of the rate it takes, as you might guess—is closer to 20%.

While the take rate for fares Jalopnik analyzed averaged between 35% and 40%, more than a quarter of the fares showed take rates in excess of 40%, with some coming in at over 50%.

Over the weekend, organizers of the conference, which had been scheduled for October 4-6 in Dresden, Germany, ended the event evermore after two scheduled speakers issued public statements that they would not be attending this year, citing concerns about the lack of diversity.

"According to them, they had only a single woman submit a session proposal this year despite having women present in previous years, and hers was a repeat from a local conference last year. They were also firm that the Call For Papers was done and over and they're not open to reaching out to new people now."

Conceptually, maximizing shareholder value makes some sense, but only if you don't think about it for more than a few minutes. Because the whole thing falls apart as soon as you ask "over what time frame?"

Taking a longer term view suggests that "maximizing" profits in the short run is likely to create significant problems in the long run, whether it be competition or customers annoyed at you and the like.

Perhaps much bigger news is that the Business Roundtable, a gathering of top CEOs, has now put out a letter saying that shareholder value cannot and should not be the only focus of a corporation.

WeWork's corporate parent We Company revealed in documents for its upcoming initial public offering that the office-share company lost more than $1.3 billion from its operations in the first half of this year.

"It is an interesting parallel with the dotcom companies," said Greg Kyle, director at the Bates Group who helped publicize the staggering losses being run-up by Internet start-ups during the late 1990s dotcom craze. "They're following the same pattern, in terms of spending to acquire customers. For some, like Amazon and Ebay, it worked out, but for many others much less so."

Amazon constantly scans rivals’ prices to see if they’re lower. When it discovers a product is cheaper on, say, Walmart.com, Amazon alerts the company selling the item and then makes the product harder to find and buy on its own marketplace -- effectively penalizing the merchant.

Antitrust experts say the Amazon policy is likely to attract scrutiny from Congress and the Federal Trade Commission, which recently took over jurisdiction of the Seattle-based company.

Merchants have long complained that Amazon wields outsize influence over their businesses. Besides paying higher fees, many now have to buy advertising to stand out on the increasingly cluttered site. Some report giving Amazon 40% or more of each transaction, up from 20% a few years ago.

The goal was to get critical mass of new subscribers to boost profits, with the hope that a majority of users wouldn’t see more than one movie a month.

Employees say Lowe demanded they change the passwords of “a small percentage of power users” ahead of those releases to prevent them from ordering tickets through the app, telling people that it was a “technical issue.”

The company also implemented a “trip wire,” which would cut off users once the company reached a certain monetary threshold each day. Users were told “there are no more screenings at this theater today,” when in reality MoviePass was disabling its services to prevent it from burning through too much cash.

Most of the questions revolve around a simple question that Facebook has squirmed over for more than a year: when did it become aware that Cambridge Analytica was abusing access to its systems?

But while pretty much no one believed Facebook was telling the truth at the time, in recent months evidence has come to light that would appear to prove its mendacity.

His notorious poor poker face is likely why he has repeatedly refused to attend in person at committee hearings, despite some aggressive requests for him to do so.

The encryption debate was back in the news this week as Attorney General William Barr railed against “warrant-proof” encryption that he argued protects criminals and terrorists, continuing the same arguments that have been made for almost 30 years.

In Facebook’s vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms.

The company even noted that when it detects violations it will need to quietly stream a copy of the formerly encrypted content back to its central servers to analyze further, even if the user objects, acting as true wiretapping service.

In AT&T executives heads, the 2015, $67 billion acquisition of DirecTV and the 2018 $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner were supposed to be the cornerstones of the company's efforts to dominate video and online video advertising. Instead, the megadeals made AT&T possibly one of the most heavily indebted companies in the world.

The company's latest earnings report indicates that AT&T not only lost another 778,000 "traditional" video subscribers last quarter (satellite TV, IPTV), but it lost another 168,000 subscribers at its DirecTV Now streaming service -- due to "higher prices and less promotional activity".