Tag Archives: streamlining

Trump Administration Unveils Overhaul of EPA, Streamlining Approval for New Chemicals

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On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to reassign scientists from independent labs to various departments.

Administrator Lee Zeldin disclosed these adjustments in a video statement, indicating that the agency is “reshaping scientific expertise” to concentrate on what are deemed “mission essentials.”

The most immediate impact will be on the Research and Development Bureau, the EPA’s primary research faction, which investigates aspects like the health and environmental repercussions of “eternal chemicals” in drinking water, as well as strategies to lessen airborne particulate pollution.

An internal document reviewed by the New York Times highlighted the Trump administration’s proposal to dissolve this office as part of a plan to eliminate 1,155 scientists, including chemists, biologists, and toxicologists engaged in health and environmental research.

While the changes weren’t enacted on Friday, the agency’s new focus areas were unveiled. According to Zeldin, 130 positions will transition to the office responsible for new chemical approvals, addressing the long-standing backlog cited by the Chemical Industry Group.

During the All Hands Staff Meeting later that day, Nancy Beck, a previous lobbyist for the American Council of Chemicals and now at the helm of the EPA’s chemicals office, reassured Scientists, remarking that it was a “very exciting time.”

She encouraged everyone in the agency to consider applying for these roles.

Officials from the Trump administration have indicated that further laboratory changes are on the horizon. A scientist on a call expressed concern that failing to transition to one of the new areas might result in job termination.

Additionally, on Friday, the EPA postponed the deadline for accepting withdrawal offers, which is now extended to May 9.

“This feels like a hunger game,” remarked a lab employee who opted for anonymity to avoid potential retaliation.

Other scientists will transition to managerial positions as part of the new office focused on applied scientific environmental solutions. Zeldin emphasized the need to “put science at the center of agency regulations.”

Democrats and environmental advocates have raised concerns that these changes could politicize scientific inquiry.

“This so-called ‘reorganization’ is merely a thinly veiled effort to diminish the agency’s globally respected scientific capacity by redistributing scientists and managing chemical assessments for the industry,” stated Deputy Director Cherry Pingley, a Democrat from Maine.

Chitra Kumar, managing director of the climate program at the federal advocacy group Concern Scientists Federal, warned that relocating scientists to policy offices “will expose these experts to political pressures, particularly in this administration.”

This shift occurs amidst the agency’s extensive deregulation initiative. Under Zeldin’s direction, the EPA has revised or rescinded over 30 regulations intended to safeguard air, water, and climate quality. Managers are also focused on dismantling the legal foundations of many climate regulations known as danger detection.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Lisbon startup raises $19 million by streamlining customized goods production

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The advent of the Internet, combined with the ability to customize items such as clothing, revolutionized marketing, especially for products, back in the day. We think we’re all familiar with the “March” phenomenon by now, no? Benefiting from this long-term trend are customized product startups focused on small and medium-sized businesses.
visawas able to raise a large funding round even in this relatively flat market in 2023.

Following the $38.6 million (€32 million) Series C that I reported on in 2020, the Lisbon, Portugal-based startup is currently in the process of completing its $18 million ($19.78 million) Series “C2” (not yet fully completed). (not Series D). ) to enter the US market. This round was led by the previous lead investor Indico Capital Partners. This was again joined by fellow Portuguese investors, Iberis Capital and Rinse Capital.

This brings Bizay’s total funding to €72 million (approximately $79 million), but a spokesperson demurred when asked what the company’s current valuation was. However, outside observers are likely to estimate the current valuation to be between $180 million and $220 million.

It’s no surprise at all that customer products continue to perform well. Companies love to push out branded products, and advances in technology have made it easier and easier for markets to serve them. As of 2022, the global custom apparel market size (clothing only) is valued at over $48 billion. Be expected It is expected to grow to reach $70 billion by 2028. Even just a customized T-shirt. projected It is expected to be worth more than $3 billion by 2025.

According to Bizay, the company’s “special sauce” is its supply chain system for product customization, which combines merchandising, packaging, apparel, and a wide range of product customizations, allowing it to significantly reduce costs and deliver products They say they have succeeded in increasing the number of categories. Right down to a customized company bird watch if you wish.

Bizay co-founder Jose Salgado said by phone: It’s a way for them to express themselves.

And Salgado said if, for example, the Texas Broncos want 50,000 customized T-shirts, the company is “investing a lot of effort.”

“We can be competitive not only for small quantities, but also for medium and large quantities. We have done extensive work in research and development and have understood how to scale up. It’s about these huge setup costs. It’s about allowing suppliers to produce multiple orders at the same time within the same operation. This results in significant cost savings.”

He noted that the company has “no factories, no machinery, no inventory,” but instead enables a fairly complex value chain to deliver its products. We choose the best suppliers. So the supply chain has been optimized to a very large extent,” he told me.

It’s clear that there are opportunities for e-commerce not just for small and medium-sized businesses.

Also, part of what’s happening in the world is the explosion of the creative economy. For example, influencers are connecting their various social platforms to customized product platforms to make insane amounts of money.

Early this year, #Make and buy TikTok With over 71 billion hashtag views, it’s clear that influencer marketing is alive and well.

In fact, fans of Sheffield band ‘Bring Me The Horizon’ can buy one. Personalized BMTH T-shirt Simply connect your Spotify account or email to the band’s product website.

Of course, Bizay often competes with a number of print-on-demand shops, from Printful to Printify to Gelato to Gooten to Art of Where. The question is how to differentiate between these countless players.

Salgado disputes that these companies focus on a single technology, saying that many of them are vertically integrated and therefore rely on in-house production. . and independent of quantity and requirements,” he said.

Stephane Morais, Managing General Partner at Indico Capital Partners, added in a statement accompanying the financing: . We believe this can be replicated in the US market and will once again support the team in executing that expansion.”

So much for company customized goods, we all know that getting goods from a bankrupt company is schadenfreude, and that’s often the more glamorous part of this world.

With the collapse of brands like Silicon Valley Bank, phrases like “SVB goods” have reached the peak in search trends and eBay sellers List up a $1,000 SVB-branded blanket and a $249 wine and cheese board with the SVB logo.

Perhaps Bisray’s Series D will result in it scooping up all of the failing intellectual property of failed companies and launching its own store of “memorabilia of failure.”

Source: techcrunch.com

Factory plans to leverage AI for streamlining the software development lifecycle

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Developer velocity (the speed at which an organization ships code) is often influenced by necessary but time-consuming processes such as code reviews, documentation, and testing. Inefficiencies can make these processes even longer. according to According to one source, developers waste 17.3 hours a week on technical debt and bad code, or code that doesn’t work.

Machine learning Ph.D. Matan Greenberg and Eno Reyes, previously a data scientist at Hugging Face and Microsoft, thought there had to be a better way.

During a hackathon in San Francisco, Greenberg and Reyes built a platform that could autonomously solve simple coding problems. This is a platform they later came to believe had commercial potential. After the hackathon, the two expanded the platform to handle more software development tasks and founded a company. factoryto monetize what they built.

“Factory’s mission is to bring autonomy to software engineering,” Grinberg told TechCrunch in an email interview. “More specifically, Factory helps large engineering organizations automate parts of their software development lifecycle through AI-powered autonomous systems.”

Factory systems – Greenberg calls them “droids” in Lucasfilm terminology there may be a problem — Built to juggle a variety of repetitive, mundane, but typically time-consuming software engineering tasks. For example, Factory has “Droids” for reviewing code, refactoring or rebuilding code, and even generating new code from a prompt like GitHub Copilot.

Grinberg explains: “Reviews Droid leaves insightful code reviews, providing human reviewers with context for every change to the codebase. Documentation Droid generates documentation as needed and continuously updates it. Test Droid creates tests and maintains test coverage percentages as new code is merged. Droid knowledge resides in communication platforms (such as Slack) to answer deeper questions about engineering systems. Project Droid also helps you plan and design requirements based on customer support tickets and feature requests.”

Factory’s droids all have what Greenberg calls a “droid core,” an engine that ingests and processes a company’s engineering system data to build a knowledge base, and an engine that extracts insights from the knowledge base to perform various engineering tasks. It is built on algorithms that solve problems. . His third Droid core component, his Reflection Engine, acts as a filter for third-party AI models that Factory utilizes, allowing Factory to implement its own safety measures, security best practices, etc. based on these models. I will make it possible.

“The enterprise perspective here is that this will enable engineering organizations to output better products faster, while also boosting engineering morale by offloading tedious tasks such as code reviews, documentation, and testing. It’s a suite of software that makes it better,” Greenberg said. “Additionally, the autonomous nature of the droid requires little user education or onboarding.”

Now, if Factory can consistently and reliably automate all these development tasks, the platform will certainly pay for itself. According to 2019 investigation According to Tidelift and The New Stack, developers spend 35% of their time managing code, including testing and addressing security issues, and less than a third of their time actually coding.

But the question is, can it be done?

Even today’s best AI models can make fatal mistakes. Generative coding tools can also introduce insecure code, and a Stanford study found that software engineers who use code generation AI are more likely to introduce security vulnerabilities in the apps they develop. It is suggested.

Greenberg was candid about the fact that Factory doesn’t have the capital to train all its models in-house, so it’s at the mercy of third-party limitations. But while relying on third-party vendors for some of its AI capabilities, he argues that the Factory platform still provides value.

“Our approach is to build these AI systems and inference architectures, leverage cutting-edge models, establish relationships with customers, and deliver value now,” Greenberg said. Masu. “For early startups, training is a losing battle. [large] model. There is no financial advantage, no chip access advantage, no data advantage, and (almost certainly) no technological advantage compared to incumbents. ”

Factory long play teeth Greenberg said the company will further train its AI models to build an “end-to-end” engineering AI system and differentiate those models by collecting engineering training data from early customers.

“Over time, you have more capital. Chip shortage The problem is solved and we have direct access (with permission) to a treasure trove of data (i.e., the historical timeline of the entire engineering organization). ” he continued. “We build robust and fully autonomous droids with minimal human intervention, customizing them to our customers’ needs from day one.”

Is that too optimistic? perhaps. Competition in the AI ​​startup market is increasing day by day.

But to Greenberg’s credit, Factory already works with a core group of about 15 companies. Mr. Greenberg declined to name names, but the size of his clients, which have used Factor’s platform to date to perform thousands of code reviews and create hundreds of thousands of lines of code, is from “seed stage.” It covers a wide range of topics, including “public”.

And Factory recently closed a $5 million seed round co-led by Sequoia and Lux ​​with participation from SV Angel, BoxGroup, DataBricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, and Hugging Face co-founder Clem Delangue. Greenberg said the new funding will be used to expand Factory’s six-person team and platform capabilities.

“The main challenges in this AI code generation industry are trust and differentiation,” he said. “Every VP of Engineering wants to use AI to improve their organization’s outcomes. This is hindered by the unreliability of many AI tools and the lack of confidence that this new futuristic sound A large labyrinthine organization that refuses to trust its technology…Factory is building a world where software engineering itself is an accessible, scalable commodity.”

Source: techcrunch.com