online casino jilihot OAKLAND — A lawyer who has accused former District Attorney Pamela Price of political extortion will likely soon have access to written communications exposing how Price handled day-to-day business as Alameda County’s top prosecutor. In a court hearing Friday, the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office revealed plans to file a subpoena for Price’s personal phone records, as it attempts to prove that Price imposed sentencing enhancements against a client whose attorney refused to work against Price’s recall. Judge Thomas Reardon indicated he would grant the subpoena and expects it be complied with by the year’s end. The controversy centers on the murder conviction of a man named Jamal Thomas , who was found guilty of fatally shooting his former neighbor following a lengthy campaign of harassment, vandalism and threats. After the conviction, Thomas’ trial lawyer filed a sworn declaration accusing Price of using her position as a political cudgel. Voters later booted Price from office in an unprecedented recall election on Nov. 5. Her last day on the job was Dec. 5. The following day, Kathleen Guneratne, an assistant public defender, aired her intention to file the subpoena during a court hearing. The subpoena is only expected to target communications that Price had related to her job as district attorney, as well as the murder case against Thomas. Price will be expected to comply with the subpoena by Dec. 30, Reardon said in court Friday. The DA’s office declined to comment, and Price did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Written communications by Price during her tenure as DA are public record under state law. She assumed office in January 2023 for what was supposed to be a six-year term, until voters recalled her by a nearly two-to-one margin. It’s unclear whether Price discussed Thomas’ case in text messages, but the defense hopes to at least verify a sworn declaration by Thomas’ trial lawyer, Jennie Otis, who says Price imposed a sentencing enhancement one day after the two spoke on the phone on June 23 about Price’s efforts to oppose the recall. Otis said she voiced her concerns about Price’s handling of the office and declined to donate to or support her campaign, only to be informed the following morning that the office would be pursuing a gun enhancement. Sentencing enhancements, which are added to charges and can lengthen prison sentences, were a rarity during Price’s tenure. One of her first acts as DA was to change the office’s policy to require prosecutors to approve enhancements with higher-ups before filing them. It was part of her pledge during the 2022 campaign to reduce over-incarceration. Also on Friday, Reardon ordered the district attorney’s office to hand over any emails or phone records from Price’s county-issued cell phone related to the alleged retaliation. The order encompassed two time periods — June 20-24, as well as Nov. 20 to Dec. 5. Reardon’s order also included emails and texts written by Price’s former second-in-command, Otis Bruce Jr. Bruce announced his plans to leave the office in late June , just days after the alleged retaliation; his last official day was July 13. Ironically, Price’s former office released some of her text messages in court filings on Monday about a different case , where she refers to a defendant as a “MF” — shorthand for “motherf—er” — and asks for “more info” about the case in question. The defendant Price referred to is Mario Juarez, a political operative and local Democratic Party insider who was charged with grand theft for allegedly bouncing checks for political campaign mailers opposing Sheng Thao’s leading opponent in the 2022 Oakland mayoral race. The text messages were filed by an Alameda County prosecutor to oppose a motion by Juarez’s attorney, which alleges something similar to the claims made by Thomas’ defense team. Juarez has claimed Price attempted to seek a $25,000 political donation from him just days before filing the case against him in January 2024. The prosecution motion, while arguing that Price’s handling of the case was proper, strangely includes a sworn declaration by Deputy District Attorney Kate DeFerrari that implies it wasn’t. DeFerrari wrote that another prosecutor, Angelina Clay, recommended dismissing the case against Juarez to Deputy District Attorney Briggitte Lowe, but that Bruce stepped in and prevented that action. Clay had based her recommendation on a belief that the case against Juarez couldn’t be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, DeFerrari wrote. “Mr. Bruce told Ms. Lowe not to do anything — like dismiss the case — because District Attorney Pamela Price would not be happy with that,” DeFerrari wrote in her declaration. She later added, “The bottom line is that this case was handled different from other cases.”

For my last issue of the year, I’m focusing on the AI talent war, which is a theme I’ve been covering since this newsletter launched almost two years ago. And keep reading for the latest from inside Google and Meta this week. But first, I need your questions for a mailbag issue I’m planning for my first issue of 2025. You can or leave them in the comments. This week, Databricks the largest known funding round for any private tech company in history. The AI enterprise firm is in the final stretch of raising $10 billion, almost all of which is going to go to buying back vested employee stock. How companies approach compensation is often undercovered in the tech industry, even though the strategies play a crucial role in determining which company gets ahead faster. Nowhere is this dynamic as intense as the war for AI talent, as I’ve covered before. To better understand what’s driving the state of play going into 2025, this week I spoke with , VP of AI at Databricks. Rao is one of my favorite people to talk to about the AI industry. He’s deeply technical but also business-minded, having successfully sold multiple startups. His last company, MosaicML, sold to Databricks for $1.3 billion in 2023. Now, he oversees the AI products for Databricks and is closely involved with its recruiting efforts for top talent. Our conversation below touches on the logic behind Databricks’s massive funding round, what specific AI talent remains scarce, why he thinks AGI is not imminent, and more. The company is a little over 11 years old. There have been employees that have been here for a long time. This is a way to get them liquidity. Most people don’t understand that this is not going into the balance sheet of Databricks. This is largely going to provide liquidity for past employees, [and] liquidity going forward for current and new employees. It ends up being neutral on dilution because they’re shares that already exist. They’ve been allocated to employees and this allows them to sell those to cover the tax associated with those shares. It’s real. The key thing here is that it’s not just pure AI talent — people who come up with the next big thing, the next big paper. We are definitely trying to hire those people. There is an entire infrastructure of software and cloud that needs to be built to support those things. When you build a model and you want to scale it, that actually is not AI talent, per se. It’s infrastructure talent. The perceived bubble that we’re in around AI has created an environment where all of those talents are getting recruited heavily. We need to stay competitive. OpenAI is certainly there. Anthropic. Amazon. Google. Meta. xAI. Microsoft. We’re in constant competition with all of these companies. Yeah. That’s why the talent war is so hot. The leverage that a researcher has in an organization is unprecedented. One researcher’s ideas can completely change the product. That’s kind of new. In semiconductors, people who came up with a new transistor architecture had that kind of leverage. That’s why these researchers are so sought after. Somebody who comes up with the next big idea and the next big unlock can have a massive influence on the ability of a company to win. I see some aspects of the pool expanding. Being able to build the appropriate infrastructure and manage it, those roles are expanding. The top-tier researcher side is the hard part. It’s like looking for . There are just not very many humans who are capable of that. I would say the were largely driven by this kind of mentality. You have these concentrations of top-tier talent in these startups and it sounds ridiculous how much people pay. But it’s not ridiculous. I think that’s why you see . It’s very hard to find another . A guy we had at my previous company that I started, Nervana, is arguably the best GPU programmer in the world. He’s at OpenAI now. Every inference that happens on an OpenAI model is running through his code. You start computing the downstream cost and it’s like, “Holy shit, this one guy saved us $4 billion.” “You start computing the downstream cost and it’s like, ‘Holy shit, this one guy saved us $4 billion.’” You start to see some selection bias of different candidates. Some are AGI or bust, and that’s okay. It’s a great motivation for some of the smartest people out there. We think we’re going to get to AGI through building products. When people use technology, it gets better. That’s part of our pitch. AI is in a massive growth base but it’s also hit peak hype and is on the way down the . I think we’re on that downward slope right now, whereas Databricks has established a very strong business. That’s very attractive to some because I don’t think we’re so susceptible to the hype. Honestly, there’s not a great consensus. I’ve been in this field for a very long time and I’ve been pretty vocal in saying that it’s not right around the corner. The large language model is a great piece of technology. It has massive amounts of economic uplift and efficiencies that can be gained by building great products around it. But it’s not the spirit of what we used to call AGI, which was human or even animal-like intelligence. These things are not creating magical intelligence. They’re able to slice up the space that we’re calling facts and patterns more easily. It’s not the same as building a causal learner. They don’t really understand how the world works. You may have . We’re all kind of groping in the dark. Scaling was a big unlock. It was natural for a lot of people to feel enthusiastic about that. It turns out that we weren’t solving the right problem. No. I think it’s going to be an important thing for performance. We can improve the quality of answers, probably reduce the probability of hallucinations, and increase the probability of having responses that are grounded in fact. It’s definitely a positive for the field. But is it going to solve the fundamental problem of the spirit of AGI? I don’t believe so. I’m happy to be wrong, too. Yeah. Meta started years later than OpenAI and Anthropic and they basically caught up, and xAI caught up extremely fast. I think it’s because the rate of improvement has essentially stopped. You see this with every product cycle. The first few versions of the iPhone were drastically better than the previous versions. Now, I can’t tell the difference between a three-year-old phone and a new phone. I think that’s what we see here. How we utilize these LLMs and the distribution that has been built into them to solve business problems is the next frontier. If you aren’t already getting new issues of , , which includes unlimited access to all of our stories and an improved ad experience on the web. You’ll also get of past issues. As always, I want to hear from you, especially if you have a tip or feedback. Respond here, and I’ll get back to you, or . Thanks for subscribing. /

DALLAS (AP) — Juan Soto gets free use of a luxury suite and up to four premium tickets behind home plate for regular-season and postseason New York Mets home games as part of his record $765 million, 15-year contract that was finalized Wednesday. The Mets also agreed to provide personal team security for the All-Star outfielder and his family at the team’s expense for all spring training and regular-season home and road games, according to details of the agreement obtained by The Associated Press. Major League Baseball teams usually provide security for player families in seating areas at ballparks. New York also agreed to assist Soto's family for in-season travel arrangements, guaranteed Soto will have uniform No. 22 and included eight types of award bonuses. Soto's suite will be valued at the Mets' prevailing prices, presumably for tax purposes, and after 2025 he can by each Jan. 15 modify or give up his suite selection for the upcoming season. He can request the premium tickets, to be used by family members, no later than 72 hours before the scheduled game time. The Yankees had refused to offer Soto a free suite. “Some high-end players that make a lot of money for us, if they want suites they buy them ... whether it's CC (Sabathia), whether it’s (Aaron) Judge, whether it’s (Gerrit) Cole, whether it’s any of these guys," general manager Brian Cashman said. "We've gone through a process on previous negotiations where asks might have happened and this is what we did and we’re going to honor those, so no regrets there." Cashman said the Yankees have a shared suite for player families and a family room with babysitting. Soto gets a $75 million signing bonus, payable within 60 days of the agreement’s approval by the commissioner’s office. The deal for the 26-year-old, which tops Shohei Ohtani's $700 million, 10-year contract with the Dodgers, was reached Sunday pending a physical that took place Tuesday. Soto receives salaries of $46,875,000 each in 2025 and 2026, $42.5 million in 2027, $46,875,000 apiece in 2028 and 2029 and $46 million in each of the final 10 seasons. Soto has a contingent right to opt out of the agreement within three days of the end of the 2029 World Series to become a free agent again, but the Mets have the an option to negate the opt-out provision by increasing the yearly salaries for 2030-39 by $4 million annually to $50 million and raising the total value to $805 million. If the club exercises its option to negate the opt-out provision, Soto can make his opt-out decision by the fifth day after the World Series. He has a full no-trade provision and gets a hotel suite on road trips. Soto would receive a $500,000 bonus for winning his first Most Valuable Player award and $1 million for each MVP award. He would get $350,000 for finishing second in the voting and $150,000 for finishing third through fifth. Soto was third in the AL voting this year. He would earn $100,000 for each All-Star selection and Gold Glove, $350,000 for World Series MVP and $150,000 for League Championship Series MVP. Soto would get $100,000 for selection to the All-MLB first or second team, $150,000 for Silver Slugger and $100,000 for the Hank Aaron Award. Award bonuses are to be paid by the Jan. 31 after the season in which the bonus is earned. AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlbReal estate will continue to thrive in Coimbatore