Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content

Teslas account for fully 91 percent of all self-driving-related crashes in the NHTSA data.

Pizza startup Zume shuts down after raising $445 million Founded in 2015, the firm planned to cook pizzas in the back of a massive truck, with robots, while en route to customers’ homes. […] the company quickly gave up on the cooking-while-driving model — cheese kept sliding around when the truck hit bumps in the road […] Zume CEO Alex Garden was projecting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and talking about becoming the “Tesla of fresh food, and the Amazon of fresh food”

The idea behind private equity or PE is simple: a private equity firm gathers up a bunch of cash, raises some investor cash, and takes on a lot of debt to buy various companies, often taking them off the public stock market. Then, they usually install new management and embark on aggressive cost cutting and turnaround programs mostly because they have to pay down all that debt pretty fast. The company can then be sold or taken public again for a hefty profit. But don’t worry — if it doesn’t work out, the PE firms are extracting fees at every step of the process, so they get paid no matter what happens. […] Those funds buy companies, whether it’s nursing homes, single-family rentals, veterinary clinics, OB-GYN practices. The really interesting thing about that, and I think what drew me to this as a lawyer but also concerns me as a citizen, is that because of the layered ownership structure of private equity firms, oftentimes private equity firms have control of the companies they buy but very little responsibility when those companies do arguably illegal things.

Mouse studies suggest that drugs from LSD to ecstasy renew the brain’s flexibility — but some scientists are sceptical

The role of eyebrows in face recognition (2003) we find that the absence of eyebrows in familiar faces leads to a very large and significant disruption in recognition performance. In fact, a significantly greater decrement in face recognition is observed in the absence of eyebrows than in the absence of eyes.

After years spent researching and protecting sea turtles, Nichols started studying the impact that water has on the human body and brain. “When you see water, when you hear water, it triggers a response in your brain that you’re in the right place”

The ancient city of Elengubu, known today as Derinkuyu, burrows more than 85 meters [280 feet] below the Earth’s surface, encompassing 18 levels of tunnels. The largest excavated underground city in the world, it was in near-constant use for thousands of years […] abandoned in the 1920s […] “rediscovered” in 1963 by an anonymous local who kept losing his chickens. While he was renovating his home, the poultry would disappear into a small crevasse created during the remodel, never to be seen again. Upon closer investigation and some digging, the Turk unearthed a dark passageway. It was the first of more than 600 entrances found within private homes leading to the subterrestrial city of Derinkuyu.

The source wildly speculated, “There is someone who is either s–tting in the aisle, or surreptitiously dumping defecation that they smuggled into the theater.” — Fan poops in aisle near Hillary and Chelsea Clinton at Broadway show

Don’t be dazzled by generative AI’s creative charm! Predictive AI, though less flashy, remains crucial for solving real-world challenges and unleashing AI’s true potential.

An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models — Our findings indicate that approximately 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of GPTs, while around 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted.

New research shows we can only accurately identify AI writers about 50% of the time

Simple Wi-Fi routers can be used to detect and perceive the poses and positions of humans and map their bodies clearly in 3D, a new report has found.

researchers found 11 areas of DNA that were linked to depression in females, and only one area in males.

this research explores the phenomenon of pseudo-events (such as press conferences, political rallies…) coverage in the New York Times (N = 70,370 articles) from 1980 to 2019 […] We found a significant increase in pseudo-event coverage […] Our findings show how media logic has been internalized in different ways by the social subsystems of politics, culture, and economics.

In a matter of weeks, viral teenage pranks at conveyor-belt sushi chain restaurants across Japan have ballooned into a moral panic over hygiene. Social media users and the Japanese press have branded the incidents acts of “sushi terrorism”

Here’s why you can’t see all twelve black dots in this optical illusion

Positive and negative memories are stored in different parts of the brain. Additionally, positive and negative memory-formation is associated with vastly different gene expression profiles. This raises the distinct possibility of therapeutic memory manipulation.

Here we distinguished between 27 different types of love

Consumption of ultraprocessed foods containing little or no whole foods in their ingredients contributed to 57,000 premature deaths in Brazil in 2019

Lab-grown blood given to people in world-first clinical trial

An informal, unofficial guide for non-technical people who want to use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse.

Interiew with the founder of Stability AI [audio]

How to run a small social network site for your friends [2019]

Stories are now available on Signal

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR, created a VR headset that kills you if you die in the game: Oculus co-founder makes a VR headset that can literally kill you — the new VR headset uses three embedded explosive charges, planted above the forehead, that can “instantly destroy the brain of the user.” The lethal explosion is triggered via “a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency.”

Operation Popeye was a military cloud-seeding project carried out by the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War in 1967–1972. The highly classified program attempted to extend the monsoon season over specific areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in order to disrupt North Vietnamese military supplies by softening road surfaces and causing landslides.

Submarines are valued primarily for their ability to hide. The assurance that submarines would likely survive the first missile strike in a nuclear war and thus be able to respond by launching missiles in a second strike is key to the strategy of deterrence known as mutually assured destruction. Any new technology that might render the oceans effectively transparent, making it trivial to spot lurking submarines, could thus undermine the peace of the world. For nearly a century, naval engineers have striven to develop ever-faster, ever-quieter submarines. But they have worked just as hard at advancing a wide array of radar, sonar, and other technologies designed to detect, target, and eliminate enemy submarines. […] Nuclear-powered submarines each cost roughly US $2.8 billion […] the game of submarine hide-and-seek may be approaching the point at which submarines can no longer elude detection and simply disappear. It may come as early as 2050

50 years ago, an artist convincingly exhibited a fake Iron Age civilization – with invented maps, music and artifacts

Glenn Gould - “How Mozart Became a Bad Composer”