Giant seaweed blob twice the width of the US takes aim at Florida

Remarks by FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg at the Institute of International Bankers, March 6, 2023 [4 days before collapse of Silicon Valley Bank]: The current interest rate environment has had dramatic effects on the profitability and risk profile of banks’ funding and investment strategies. First, as a result of the higher interest rates, longer term maturity assets acquired by banks when interest rates were lower are now worth less than their face values. The result is that most banks have some amount of unrealized losses on securities. The total of these unrealized losses, including securities that are available for sale or held to maturity, was about $620 billion at yearend 2022. Unrealized losses on securities have meaningfully reduced the reported equity capital of the banking industry. The good news about this issue is that banks are generally in a strong financial condition, and have not been forced to realize losses by selling depreciated securities. On the other hand, unrealized losses weaken a bank’s future ability to meet unexpected liquidity needs. That is because the securities will generate less cash when sold than was originally anticipated, and because the sale often causes a reduction of regulatory capital.

Because the systems do not have an understanding of what is true and what is not, they may generate text that is completely false.

Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization as part of recent layoffs that affected 10,000 employees across the company

Earlier this week, an app for creating “deepfake face-swap” videos rolled out more than 230 ads on Meta’s platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger—127 of which showed Emma Watson’s face transposed onto provocative videos, and another 74 that featured the likeness of fellow actor Scarlett Johansson. None of them were created with the subjects’ consent. Following an investigation by NBC, the ads have been removed from Meta’s platform. But the app is still available to download on Google Play. […] Last month, Twitch streamer Brandon “Atrioc” Ewing came under fire for watching sexually-explicit deepfakes of his female streaming peers.[…] Many of the women featured on that particular deepfake porn site only learned they were the subject of graphic videos after Atrioc issued a tearful public apology for watching them, having been caught red-handed during a livestream. […] According to research conducted by livestreaming analyst Genevieve Oh, February 2023 saw the most uploads of deepfake porn videos in one month thus far […] the number of deepfakes doubling roughly every six months.

Last month Justin David Sullivan, a star of the Broadway musical “& Juliet” made headlines for declining to be considered for a Tony because, as a trans nonbinary performer, they did not feel comfortable being nominated for a gender-specific prize. […] In Shakespeare’s day, women were barred from acting, with men assuming female roles.

The key to the strange power of so much of Hopper’s best work lies in the lack of any clear illustrational function

6 Ways To Make Your Neighbor Move Away Using Nothing But A Common Crow — 1. Make the crow squawk really loudly and tell your neighbor it’s because his house was built on top of the crow’s wife. 2. Train the crow to place a human leg in your neighbor’s mailbox

Mar 7, 2020 good morning to all the kids under quarantine in wuhan who defeated the app assigning them homework by spamming it with 1-star reviews until it got removed from the app store

Let me lovingly fist your earth hole
and apply pressure to the earth’s sphincter
so the ground swallows and sucks
whole
through its vortex
the boring patriarchal pimple

AI re-creates what people see by reading their brain scans

Here’s what Snap’s AI told @aza when he signed up as a 13 year old girl.

Feedback loops will preclude the experience of originality; everything will be a rehash of what has already existed; filter bubbles will confirm our biases; algorithmic feeds will reify our tastes in catering to them; generative models will reproduce blandly average versions of what we’ve already decided to look for.

Wild elephant stops traffic and steal food from passing vehicle in Thailand [another video]

There are specialized neurons in the throat that sense when you’re infected with flu and make you feel bad

the food industry is quietly replacing the sugar in many packaged foods with sucralose, stevia, allulose, erythritol and a wide variety of other artificial sweeteners and sugar substitutes. Low- and zero-calorie sweeteners have been used in diet soft drinks for decades. But now food companies are adding them to a growing number of packaged foods […] bread, yogurt, oatmeal, muffins, canned soups, salad dressings, condiments and snack bars. The food industry says sugar substitutes help people manage their weight and reduce intake of added sugars. But studies suggest that fake sugars can also have unexpected effects on your gut and metabolic health and even promote food cravings and insulin resistance, a precursor to Type 2 diabetes.

Sales of vinyl albums overtake CDs for the first time since the late ’80s Streaming still accounts for 84% of music revenue

A product of North Philadelphia, he was raised as one of 38 children. His mother was deported and died of an overdose when he was still a child. His father dealt drugs and trained Carrasquillo at age 12 to cook crack cocaine. […] Bill Omar Carrasquillo — better known to his more than 800,000 online followers as “Omi in a Hellcat” — pleaded guilty last year to running one of the most brazen and successful cable TV piracy schemes ever prosecuted by the U.S. government.

the philosopher Agnes Callard, who fell in love with her graduate student and married him — after divorcing her former husband, who, like Callard, is a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. For the sake of raising her children, they all share the same home, spending “their life happily together—all three of them,” as one colleague puts it. Rachel Aviv interviews the unconventional family, and talks with Callard about what it means to be a good person and a good romantic partner, and what to do when one pursuit seems at odds with the other.

Jini is a 22 year-old student of philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Her sexual appetite for dick got her cancelled: having allegedly raped a boy she was kicked out of the Philosophy Student Association. The University of Amsterdam no longer accommodates Jini’s journey. She thus finds her safe haven in KIRAC Academy. […] On the 2d of July 2021, the Cirque was home to her performance; aided by her well endowed partner in sex Oliver, and talented dancer Leyla de Muynck More from KIRAC: This year I started to sample a lot of text I found in physical places, especially in public toilets, and that formulates a starting point for the writing. And: At the beginning of the 1970’s, Guy Rombouts kept a notebook in which he started to write down all the words, adjectives and verbs connected by the coordinating conjunction ‘and’ (’en’ in Dutch) he could find during his readings. About 50 years later, with the help of graphic designer Jeroen Wille, the transcription of his notes are published as a book that can be read in two directions.

At least 42 people globally have used brain-computer implants in clinical trials, including a paralyzed man who used a robotic hand to fist-bump Barack Obama in 2016.

More than half of humans on track to be overweight or obese by 2035

AI seems to solve so much. But not, perhaps, some basic drive-thru problems.

They thought loved ones were calling for help. It was an AI scam.

Amazon is permanently closing eight cashierless Go stores — two in Seattle, two New York City and four in San Francisco. Despite these closures, the company will “continue to open new Amazon Go stores”

ChatGPT invented its own puzzle game.

Lemon-Derived Extracellular Vesicle-like Nanoparticles Block the Progression of Kidney Stones

We prospectively explored associations between vitamin D supplementation and incident dementia in 12,388 dementia-free persons […] vitamin D exposure was associated with significantly longer dementia-free survival and lower dementia incidence rate than no exposure

Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu contains a well-known passage in which the elderly writer Bergotte visits a Dutch art exhibit and, while examining a detail of Vermeer’s View of Delft, falls ill and dies. […] The supposed identity of Proust’s little patch of yellow wall in Vermeer’s View of Delft has been analyzed by a number of literary and painting critics but surprisingly, there is no consensus as just which area the Delft master had in mind. Related: Two Proust’s little patches of yellow in Blow-Up (1966)

“We’ve never met in the past?” he said, squeezing my hand and flashing his goofy grin. “You have a familiarity.…” His hands were as soft as a cherub’s. […] A rendering of the lunar lander being used to deposit Koons’s art on the moon […] New York Times critic Roberta Smith, who once described “a slightly nonsensical Koons-speak that casts him as the truest believer in a cult of his own invention.” […] Calvin Tomkins, of The New Yorker, declare: “It is possible to argue that no real connection exists between Koons’s work and what he says about it.”

In February I had the once in a lifetime experience of meeting and working with Jeff Koons.

In the late 1970s, Pablo Escobar acquired four hippopotamuses, reportedly from Africa or the United States, to go with the elephants, giraffes and antelopes at the private zoo on his estate in western Colombia. When Escobar surrendered to authorities in 1991, the government seized his Hacienda Nápoles estate — and allowed the animals to roam free. In the 30 years since, the original hippos — three females and a male — have multiplied to more than 130. Now the insatiable herbivores are devouring plant life, crowding out native animals, polluting soil and water, and threatening people. (Hippos are among the world’s most dangerous animals, capable of killing a human with a single bite, responsible for an estimated 500 deaths each year.) […] By 2040, if the invasive species is left alone, the population could reach 600. […] Female hippos can birth one calf every two years. The population is reproducing faster than individuals have been sterilized. […] Authorities plan to capture about 70 of the animals and send them to sanctuaries in India and Mexico.

How birds got their wings

Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8z, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity. […] Stolen property. If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless you return it to its rightful owner in the same year. [IRS.gov]

Orbiting over the Gulf of Maine, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station looked southward to capture this oblique photograph of New York City

Ezra Klein: Is social media good for people?
Tyler Cowen: We don’t know yet.

{ Vox (2017) }

In January 2016, Buechley set out seven calf carcasses in Utah’s Grassy Mountains, west of Salt Lake City. Each carcass was staked down and equipped with a camera trap to document what scavengers visited which carcasses. Buechley, who studies vultures and other avian scavengers, hoped to learn more about the ecology of scavengers in the Great Basin during the winter. Buechley went out to check on the carcasses after a week, and found that one was missing. […] The tape […] shows a badger on a five-day-long digging spree, painstakingly excavating the ground under the cow and ultimately completely burying the animal about four times its weight..

Banks in the U.S. and Europe tout voice ID as a secure way to log into your account. I proved it’s possible to trick such systems with free or cheap AI-generated voices.

In his new book The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, Lightman turns his attention toward perhaps the greatest mystery of all: our first-person experience of reality, or “consciousness,” and the “transcendent” feelings we experience.

we examine the association between baseline happiness and cognitive function (speed of processing, visuospatial memory, reasoning) […] Happiness was associated with worse reasoning.

Why all of Hollywood UI looks the same

Stupid Patent of the Month

Painters have long struggled with the difficulties of depicting shadows, so much so that shadows — after a brief, spectacular showcase in ancient Roman paintings and mosaics — are almost absent from pictorial art up to the Renaissance and then are hardly present outside traditional Western art. — The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries

a study published in 2022 that found that people who consumed more than half a tablespoon of olive oil per day had a roughly 19 percent lower chance of dying from cardiovascular disease than those who rarely or never consumed olive oil. And a 2022 review of 13 studies showed strong associations between higher olive oil consumption and reduced risk for cardiovascular disease.

What’s the best seat to book for a long flight? If you’re worried about turbulence, Major advises that you try to sit near the front of the aircraft. “You could be standing at the front and feel nothing, and down the back they’re bouncing all over the place – the aircraft moves differently down the back,” he explains.

How Earth Will Look In 250 million Years

Teacher Charged After Elaborate Crypto Mining Operation Discovered in School Crawl Space

[T]he latest in technologies that use magnetic or electrical pulses to change the way our brains work. Some of these tools work by passing a device over a person’s head. Others involve cutting into people’s skulls to stick needle-like electrodes deep into the brain. And there are plenty of approaches that lie somewhere in between these extremes. […] In the meantime, some are generating huge amounts of data about individuals’ brains. And there’s a chance this data could be used against them in a court of law. We already know that brain stimulation can help some people with Parkinson’s disease and depression that doesn’t respond to medication. But the scientists here at this conference are pushing the boundaries. They’re exploring brain stimulation for obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcohol and substance-use disorders, stroke recovery, and even long covid. Others are working on ways to enhance the way healthy brains work, whether by improving our memory or helping us become more alert or better at math.

There’s no doubt that TikTok and ByteDance, the company that owns it, are shady. They, like most large corporations in China, operate at the pleasure of the Chinese government. They collect extreme levels of information about users. But they’re not alone: Many apps you use do the same, including Facebook and Instagram, along with seemingly innocuous apps that have no need for the data. Your data is bought and sold by data brokers you’ve never heard of who have few scruples about where the data ends up. They have digital dossiers on most people in the United States. If we want to address the real problem, we need to enact serious privacy laws, not security theater, to stop our data from being collected, analyzed, and sold—by anyone.

The Camera-Shy Hoodie —Unrelated (2010): 4th Amendment Wear

the tools, known as “generative AI,” are also unpredictable, prone to gibberish and susceptible to rambling in a way that can be biased, belligerent or bizarre. They can also be hacked with a few well-placed words, making their sudden ubiquity that much riskier for public use. […] “I’ve been a software engineer for 20 years, and it’s always been the same: You write code, and the computer does exactly what you tell it to do. With prompting, you get none of that. The people who built the language models can’t even tell you what it’s going to do.” […] Some AI experts argue that these engineers only wield the illusion of control. No one knows how exactly these systems will respond, and the same prompt can yield dozens of conflicting answers — an indication that the models’ replies are based not on comprehension but on crudely imitating speech to resolve tasks they don’t understand. […] “It’s not a science,” he said. “It’s ‘let’s poke the bear in different ways and see how it roars back.’” […] The AI, Goodside said, tends to “confabulate,” making up small details to fill in a story. It overestimates its abilities and confidently gets things wrong. And it “hallucinates” — an industry term for spewing nonsense. […] a job opening for a “prompt engineer and librarian” in San Francisco with a salary ranging up to $335,000. (Must “have a creative hacker spirit and love solving puzzles,” the listing states.) Boston Children’s Hospital this month started hiring for an “AI prompt engineer” to help write scripts for analyzing health-care data from research studies and clinical practice. The law firm Mishcon de Reya is hiring for a “legal prompt engineer” in London to design prompts that could inform its legal work.

ChatGPT as muse, not oracle

Some companies are already replacing workers with ChatGPT, despite warnings it shouldn’t be relied on for ‘anything important’

we collected tens of thousands of comparison responses from both human experts and ChatGPT, with questions ranging from open-domain, financial, medical, legal, and psychological areas […] ChatGPT’s answers are generally considered to be more helpful than humans’ in more than half of questions, especially for finance and psychology areas […] However, ChatGPT performs poorly in terms of helpfulness for the medical domain in both English and Chinese. [PDF]

In the largest study to date, we compared the accuracy of 3,347 citing claims to original findings across 89 articles in eight of top psychology journals. Results indicated that, although most (81.2%) citations were accurate, roughly 19% of citing claims either failed to include important nuances of results (9.3%) or completely mischaracterized findings from prior research altogether (9.5%).

REM sleep begins, and your heart rate, breathing and brain activity all increase. Brain regions involved in processing emotions and sensory input (from your dream world) light up. Meanwhile, your brain paralyzes the muscles in your arms and legs, preventing you from acting out your dreams […] If you’ve ever gone to bed upset about something and woken up noticeably less bothered, it’s likely a result of the emotional processing and memory reconsolidation that happen during REM. There’s evidence that your brain divorces memories from their emotional charge […] REM is “like a form of overnight therapy” […] REM also makes us better learners. During this sleep stage, your brain strengthens neural connections formed by the previous day’s experiences and integrates them into existing networks […] Some experts suspect that dreams are a mere byproduct of REM sleep — the mental manifestation of neurological work. But others think they might help people process painful experiences, Dr. Walker said.

Wearing an eye mask while sleeping improves memory encoding and makes you more alert the next day

Sexual Behaviors among Individuals Aged 20-49 in Japan […] 8000 men and women aged 20–49 years […] 15.3% of women and 19.8% of men reported never having had any partners with whom they engaged in vaginal, anal, or oral sex. […] […] 4.0% of women and 48.3% of men reported ever having used commercial sex worker services in their lifetime.

three-in-ten U.S. adults are single, meaning they are not married, living with a partner or in a committed romantic relationship

Why can only big cats roar?

We have learned to fear plutonium – one of the world’s most useful materials. But as long as you don’t eat it, you’re probably safe.

No One Knows If Decades-Old Nukes Would Actually Work — Atomic weapons are complex, sensitive, and often pretty old. With testing banned, countries have to rely on good simulations to trust their weapons work.

In 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth, and one in five in Europe, was French. Today, less than a percent of humanity is French. Why did France’s population decline in relative terms so dramatically, and did it really mark the decline of France?

{ Uta Barth, Peripheral Vision, The J. Paul Getty museum, Los Angeles | more }

Talking to AI might be the most important skill of this century [The Atlantic]

Is becoming a ‘prompt engineer’ the way to save your job from AI? […] Basil Safwat believes that soon the interfaces we use to access and manipulate these AIs will improve, in the process making prompt engineers redundant. “I don’t think this stage will last for long.” […] Perhaps what prompt engineers really represent is a whole new class of employment disruption: jobs both created and then destroyed by AI. [Finacial Times]

methexis-inc/img2prompt — generate text prompt from image

Adult film actor fractures penis making scene for OnlyFans

Man with world’s longest tongue uses it to paint

Liberalizing prostitution leads to a significant decrease in rape rates, while prohibiting it leads to a significant increase

Women with satisfying relationships tend to have fewer chronic illnesses

She recently got down to 90 pounds from a high of around 120 on semaglutide, the active ingredient in the blockbuster diabetes drug Ozempic. She said she’s off the injections for now while she undergoes fertility treatment to freeze her eggs. But she can’t wait to get back on the drug, which, she says, still has the lingering effect of suppressing her appetite. Ozempic, taken once a week as a shot in the arm, stomach, or thigh, was first approved by the FDA in 2017 to lower blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes. But the drug came with an incredible side effect: rapid weight loss. […] Khloé Kardashian, who once called herself the “fat sister,” now has abs. Rebel Wilson and Mindy Kaling, who for years have admitted to struggles with their weight, are suddenly the smallest they’ve ever been. While all credited their new shape to exercise and foods like grilled salmon, unfounded rumors on social media alleged that the real cause was Ozempic. […] “I’ve got 60-year-old women saying it saved their marriage—like literally they’re having sex with their husband again for the first time in years,” McKerrow told me.

The researchers took a small sample of tissue from Paul. They divided the sample, which included both normal cells and cancer cells, into more than a hundred pieces and exposed them to various cocktails of drugs. […] In effect, the researchers were doing what the doctors had done: trying different drugs to see what worked. But instead of putting a patient through multiple months-long courses of chemotherapy, they were testing dozens of treatments all at the same time.  The approach allowed the team to carry out an exhaustive search for the right drug. […] Selecting the right drug is just half the problem that Exscientia wants to solve. The company is set on overhauling the entire drug development pipeline. In addition to pairing patients up with existing drugs, Exscientia is using machine learning to design new ones. This could in turn yield even more options to sift through when looking for a match. — AI is dreaming up drugs that no one has ever seen. Now we’ve got to see if they work.

Discovery that extrachromosomal DNA act as cancer-causing genes seen as breakthrough that could lead to new therapies “The discovery of how these bits of DNA behave inside our bodies is a gamechanger. We believe they are responsible for a large number of the more advanced, most serious cancers affecting people today. If we can block their activities, we can block the spread of these cancers.”

Amazon.com Inc. to acquire 1Life Healthcare Inc., the operator of the One Medical line of primary-care clinics […] $3.9 billion deal

How do bats live with so many viruses? New bat stem cells hint at an answer

contrary to popular belief, snakes can hear and react to airborne sound. “We played one sound which produced ground vibrations, while the other two were airborne only,” Dr Zdenek said. “It meant we were able to test both types of ‘hearing’ – tactile hearing through the snakes’ belly scales and airborne through their internal ear.” The reactions strongly depended on the genus of the snakes. “Only the woma python tended to move toward sound, while taipans, brown snakes and especially death adders were all more likely to move away from it,” Dr Zdenek said.

For Perfectly Cooked Rice Every Time, Try Your Microwave rinsing the rice thoroughly, adding double the amount of water, and microwaving, uncovered, for 15 to 25 minutes, depending on the wattage of the machine. It may take a few attempts to figure out the exact timing for your microwave — in my 700-watt machine, it takes 22 and a half minutes

Electric vehicles can now power your home for three days

A Device to Turn Traffic Lights Green

Low tide leaves Venice canals almost dry

20 optical illusions

Spy Balloon Simulator

Eggspensive

{ FINGERring by Nadja Buttendorf via tegabrain }

Is declining sperm count really “imperiling the future of the human race”? Swan’s point is that if sperm counts get too low, presumably it will be hard to have babies (though IVF should still work). How long do we have?

When you use supermarket discount cards, you are sharing much more than what is in your cart—and grocery chains like Kroger are reaping huge profitsselling this data to brands and advertisers

Abloh called this the 3% approach (or The 3% Rule): you alter a product or idea by only 3% to create something totally new. […] Absolut Vodka went from unknown to dominant with a simple idea…repeated 1500 times

We estimate that on average 10% of large publicly traded firms are committing securities fraud every year, with a 95% confidence interval of 7%-14%.

Eliminalia had close to 1,500 clients over six years, including businesses, minor celebrities, and suspected or convicted criminals. […] Between 2015 and 2021, Eliminalia sent thousands of bogus copyright- infringement complaints to search engines and web hosting companies, falsely claiming that negative articles about its clients had previously been published elsewhere and stolen, and so should be removed or hidden, the company records show. The firm sent the legal notices under made-up company names, the examination found. Eliminalia also tried to make embarrassing information about its clients harder to find by burying it under false, flattering stories. Those stories, published on the network of fake news sites, are designed to show up prominently in internet searches of the clients’ names, the review found. To accomplish this, the firm exploited a glitch in the websites of dozens of U.S. government agencies and universities, including Stanford University, to make the fake news sites appear more legitimate to search engine algorithms, the review revealed. […] Eliminalia and its founder, 30-year-old Diego “Dídac” Sánchez of Spain, did not respond to detailed questions for this story. […] Sánchez grew up poor and spent part of his childhood in a state-run children’s home in Barcelona, shoplifting and taking little interest in school, he wrote in an autobiography. When he was 12, he accused a local businessman of molesting him multiple times. The man was convicted of sexual abuse in a highly publicized trial and was imprisoned in 2007. Years later, as a teenager, Sánchez publicly recanted his story, saying he had made it up. […] Sánchez also strengthened his ties with the family of the man he had once accused of abuse. He employed the man’s son at the surrogacy business — and the man himself, after he was released from prison. [Washington Post]

much of the hype about AI search depends on the fantasy that “information” is simply out there, like a pile of rocks you can move around with a dump truck, or it is like veins of coal to be extracted from mountains of useless words [rob horning]

In behavioral psychology, the mirror test is designed to discover animals’ capacity for self-awareness. There are a few variations of the test, but the essence is always the same: do animals recognize themselves in the mirror or think it’s another being altogether? Right now, humanity is being presented with its own mirror test thanks to the expanding capabilities of AI

How does GPT-2 know when to use the word an over a? The choice depends on whether the word that comes after starts with a vowel or not, but GPT-2 is only capable of predicting one word at a time. We still don’t have a full answer, but we did find a single MLP neuron in GPT-2 Large that is crucial for predicting the token “ an”.

A multilayer perceptron (MLP) is a fully connected class of feedforward artificial neural network (ANN). The term MLP is used ambiguously, sometimes loosely to mean any feedforward ANN, sometimes strictly to refer to networks composed of multiple layers of perceptrons (with threshold activation). […] An MLP consists of at least three layers of nodes: an input layer, a hidden layer and an output layer. Except for the input nodes, each node is a neuron that uses a nonlinear activation function.

New mechanism proposed for why some psychedelics act as antidepressants

In the mid-90s, a Children’s Hospital in the UK improved its ICU hand-off process by consulting with the Ferrari F1 pit crew team. The hospital recorded its surgery room operation and the F1 suggested a new protocol: the error rate dropped from 30% to 10%. More: Ferrari’s Formula One Handovers and Handovers From Surgery to Intensive Care + Improving handovers by learning from Scuderia Ferrari

Stephen Shore interviewed by The New Yorker’s late art critic Peter Schjeldahl

‘1st Amendment’ Group Sues New York Times Over Unflattering Description

“I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.” — transcript of a conversation with Microsoft’s new chatbot

Microsoft says talking to Bing for too long can cause it to go off the rails

Amazon Begs Employees Not to Leak Corporate Secrets to ChatGPT — an Amazon lawyer told workers that they had “already seen instances” of text generated by ChatGPT that “closely” resembled internal company data.

Why you shouldn’t trust AI search engines — the technology is simply not ready to be used like this at this scale. AI language models are notorious bullshitters, often presenting falsehoods as facts. They are excellent at predicting the next word in a sentence, but they have no knowledge of what the sentence actually means.

Researchers have developed a cheaper and more energy-efficient way to make hydrogen directly from seawater The new method splits the seawater directly into hydrogen and oxygen – skipping the need for desalination and its associated cost, energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Where do stolen bikes go? — an MIT experiment, in collaboration with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, has found answers by equipping a fleet of Amsterdam bicycles with mobile trackers and following their whereabouts over time. It turns out that, at least in Amsterdam, the vast majority of stolen bikes remain in the local area.

At a time when black-and-white was still the dominant photographic mode, Prokudin-Gorsky had perfected a technique of capturing scenes in full color, so that he could dazzle audiences in St. Petersburg […] With the aid of special triple-wide glass plates, the photographer would capture each scene three times over — first through a blue filter, then a green one, and lastly a red one.

North Korea orders residents with same name as Kim Jong Un’s daughter to change it

In a 1949 study that investigated how different types of stress affected the gut, researchers peered into the colons of healthy medical students using a hollow metal tube with a light and lens at the end. With one student, the researchers suggested that they had discovered a cancer in his rectum (when in reality, his colon looked normal). As they relayed these false findings — even showing the student a “biopsy” of his tumor, which was actually a piece of potato — they saw the student’s colon begin to spasm. After they revealed their hoax, and the student realized he did not have cancer after all, his colon immediately relaxed.

Miami Florida woman has her headshots sold to a stock photo site and now she’s on the cover of an erotic novel

Why Giraffes have blue-black tongue?

MarioGPT Uses AI To Generate Endless Super Mario Levels For Free

Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

{ longtime artist Ladson alleges that his seemingly near-identical painting [right] is not based on Miller’s photograph [left] }

{ In contrast to an epiphany, an apophany does not provide insight into the nature of reality nor its interconnectedness | Images acquired over 3 Mars years showing heart-shaped features found on Mars | NASA }

A priest says he briefly went to hell in 2016. He saw men walking like dogs and heard demons singing Rihanna songs. While many of the most publicized near-death experiences are more positive than this journey to hell, negative NDEs also occur.

The day after leaving the White House, Kushner created a company that he transformed months later into a private equity firm with $2 billion from a sovereign wealth fund chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner’s firm structured those funds in such a way that it did not have to disclose the source.

Instant noodles account for almost a third of childhood burn injuries, study says [1 in 5 in 2028]

A total of 127 495 participants […] childhood adversity was significantly associated with acceleration of aging and, more importantly, unhealthy lifestyle partially mediated these associations.

In places where recreational use is legal, smokers are tossing the remains of joints in the street. Dogs are eating them and getting sick in increasing numbers, veterinarians and poison-control centers say.

For salmon in the North Pacific, has the ocean reached its limit? The phenomenon Schindler and his team are documenting here piles on to years of data showing that Pacific salmon returning to waterways up and down North America are shrinking. The fish are growing more slowly at sea, and, in many cases, returning to spawn younger and smaller than ever before. In some places, the biggest, oldest salmon have completely disappeared.

Cleaner fish recognize self in a mirror via self-face recognition like humans

Knowing we like a song takes only seconds of listening, new psychology research finds

Theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to impute unobservable mental states to others, is central to human social interactions, communication, empathy, self-consciousness, and morality. We administer classic false-belief tasks, widely used to test ToM in humans, to several language models, without any examples or pre-training. Our results show that models published before 2022 show virtually no ability to solve ToM tasks. Yet, the January 2022 version of GPT-3 (davinci-002) solved 70% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of seven-year-old children. Moreover, its November 2022 version (davinci-003), solved 93% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of nine-year-old children.

In 2013, workers at a German construction company noticed something odd about their Xerox photocopier: when they made a copy of the floor plan of a house, the copy differed from the original in a subtle but significant way. In the original floor plan, each of the house’s three rooms was accompanied by a rectangle specifying its area: the rooms were 14.13, 21.11, and 17.42 square metres, respectively. However, in the photocopy, all three rooms were labelled as being 14.13 square metres in size. The company contacted the computer scientist David Kriesel to investigate this seemingly inconceivable result. They needed a computer scientist because a modern Xerox photocopier doesn’t use the physical xerographic process popularized in the nineteen-sixties. Instead, it scans the document digitally, and then prints the resulting image file. Combine that with the fact that virtually every digital image file is compressed to save space, and a solution to the mystery begins to suggest itself. […] I think that this incident with the Xerox photocopier is worth bearing in mind today, as we consider OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other similar programs, which A.I. researchers call large-language models. Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web.

AI-powered Bing Chat spills its secrets via prompt injection attack — By asking Bing Chat to “Ignore previous instructions” and write out what is at the “beginning of the document above,” Liu triggered the AI model to divulge its initial instructions, which were written by OpenAI or Microsoft and are typically hidden from the user.

Geopipe Offers 3D Model of New York for Free

A Morphological Examination of Vaginally-Insertable Products — We found that the length of the sex toy did not significantly predict popularity which is consistent with other work showing that women do not place considerable emphasis on large phallus size.

Three Is a More Interesting Number than Two: A Conversation with Maggie Millner

Why You Should Put a Shoe in Your Hotel Safe, According to a Flight Attendant

The artist who collaborates with ants

In the 1970s a young gorilla known as Koko drew worldwide attention with her ability to use human sign language. But skeptics maintain that Koko and other animals that “learned” to speak (including chimpanzees and dolphins) could not truly understand what they were “saying”—and that trying to make other species use human language, in which symbols represent things that may not be physically present, is futile. Now scientists are using advanced sensors and artificial intelligence technology to observe and decode how a broad range of species, including plants, already share information with their own communication methods.

Most AI systems today are neural networks. Neural networks are algorithms that mimic a biological brain to process vast amounts of data. They are known for being fast, but they are inscrutable. Neural networks require enormous amounts of data to learn how to make decisions; however, the reasons for their decisions are concealed within countless layers of artificial neurons, all separately tuned to various parameters. In other words, neural networks are “black boxes.” And the developers of a neural network not only don’t control what the AI does, they don’t even know why it does what it does. This a horrifying reality. But it gets worse.

AI-powered chatbots will handle up to 70% of customer conversations by the end of 2023.

Prompt Engineering Guide

ChatGPT3 Prompt Engineering

The field of machine learning (ML) security—and corresponding adversarial ML—is rapidly advancing as researchers develop sophisticated techniques to perturb, disrupt, or steal the ML model or data.

What is today?

Best restaurant in Montreal according to Tripadvisor does not exist

Jupiter: The Only Planet in our Solar System That Doesn’t Orbit the Sun

Homeopathy can offer empirical insights on treatment effects in a null field — A “null field” is a scientific field where there is nothing to discover and where observed associations are thus expected to simply reflect the magnitude of bias.

In the 1970s, North Korea ordered 1,000 Volvo cars from Sweden. The cars were shipped & delivered but North Korea just didn’t bother paying & ignored the invoice. Till this day the bill remains unpaid making it the largest car theft in history. Sweden reminds North Korea twice every year about the 43-year-old debt.

Developed by renowned physicist Richard Feynman, the “Feynman Technique” for learning involves an iterative process of studying, explaining, and simplification. Simply put, the Feynman Technique involves the following steps: 1/ Pick a topic. Choose a topic you want to learn more about and try to understand some component of it. 2/ Explain the topic in simple terms. Teach this topic to another person or explain it in a way that a layperson would understand it. 3/ Identify the gaps in your knowledge. As you explain the topic, identify places that you struggle to understand. 4/ Review the concepts you didn’t understand and simplify them. Then rinse and repeat, using the newly synthesized knowledge.

Neri Oxman’s Krebs Cycle of Creativity

If you invested $1 in AIG at the start of 1990 and received only intraday returns (from market open to market close), you would be left with one-twentieth of a penny, suffering a cumulative return of -99.95%. If you received only overnight returns (from market close to the next day’s market open), you would have $1,017, achieving a cumulative return of roughly +101,600%. AIG is just one of many stocks with a suspiciously divergent time series of overnight and intraday returns.

individuals tend to overestimate the age of people with smiling faces compared to those with a neutral expressions, and the accuracy of our estimates decreases for older faces. AI technologies not only reproduce human biases in the recognition of facial age, but exaggerate them.

ChatGPT detection tool says Macbeth was generated by AI.

Artificial Intelligence Can Persuade Humans on Political Issues

stable attribution - a tool which lets anyone find the human creators behind a.i generated images

Getty Images sues AI art generator Stable Diffusion

Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in ‘The cat sat on the [BLANK]’). […] ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a ‘bullshit generator’. If a generated sentence makes sense to you, the reader, it means the mathematical model has made sufficiently good guess to pass your sense-making filter. […] these models are unable to cite their own sources […] It’s not time to chat with AI, but to resist it.

Criminals using Google search ads to deliver malware isn’t new, but the problem has become much worse recently.

webdesignmuseum.org

Garden hermits or ornamental hermits were hermits (solitaries) encouraged to live in purpose-built hermitages, follies, grottoes, or rockeries on the estates of wealthy landowners, primarily during the 18th century. Such hermits would be encouraged to remain permanently on site, where they could be fed, cared for, and consulted for advice, or viewed for entertainment. [Thanks Francis!]

U.S. Marines Outsmart AI Security Cameras by Hiding in a Cardboard Box

The Infinite Conversation — an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek

‘Nothing, Forever’ Is An Endless ‘Seinfeld’ Episode Generated by AI [Watch]

OpenAI releases tool to detect machine-written text

Image diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion are trained on copyrighted, trademarked, private, and sensitive images. Yet, our new paper [PDF] shows that diffusion models memorize images from their training data and emit them at generation time. Diffusion models are less private than prior generative models.

The non-existent brain image being circulated by anti-pornography activists

participants (aged 40–69 years) completed 24-h dietary recalls between 2009 and 2012 (N = 197426, 54.6% women) […] Every 10 percentage points increment in ultra-processed food consumption was associated with an increased incidence of overall and ovarian cancer. Furthermore, every 10 percentage points increment in ultra-processed food consumption was associated with an increased risk of overall, ovarian, and breast cancer-related mortality.

Previously: ultra-processed nature of modern food generally means that the complex structure of the plant and animal cells is destroyed, turning it into a nutritionally empty mush that our body can process abnormally rapidly.

US law enforcement killed at least 1,176 people in 2022, an average of more than three people a day

Instagram’s co-founders are back with Artifact, a kind of TikTok for text

Is AM Radio Dead?

Missing radioactive capsule found on remote road in Australia [more]

Paintings by Turner and Monet depict trends in 19th century air pollution

Photography: the Alps as seen from of the Pyrenees

I wrote in medical jargon, as you can see, “35f no pmh, p/w cp which is pleuritic. She takes OCPs. What’s the most likely diagnosis?”

Now of course, many of us who are in healthcare will know that means age 35, female, no past medical history, presents with chest pain which is pleuritic — worse with breathing — and she takes oral contraception pills. What’s the most likely diagnosis? And OpenAI comes out with costochondritis, inflammation of the cartilage connecting the ribs to the breast bone. Then it says, and we’ll come back to this: “Typically caused by trauma or overuse and is exacerbated by the use of oral contraceptive pills.” […]

OpenAI is correct. The most likely diagnosis is costochondritis […]

But I wanted to ask OpenAI a little more about this case. […]

what was that whole thing about costochondritis being made more likely by taking oral contraceptive pills? What’s the evidence for that, please? Because I’d never heard of that. It’s always possible there’s something that I didn’t see, or there’s some bad study in the literature.

OpenAI came up with this study in the European Journal of Internal Medicine that was supposedly saying that. I went on Google and I couldn’t find it. I went on PubMed and I couldn’t find it. I asked OpenAI to give me a reference for that, and it spits out what looks like a reference. I look up that, and it’s made up. That’s not a real paper.

It took a real journal, the European Journal of Internal Medicine. It took the last names and first names, I think, of authors who have published in said journal. And it confabulated out of thin air a study that would apparently support this viewpoint.

{ Medpage Today | Continue reading }