The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with a photographer who claimed the late Andy Warhol should have honored her copyright on a photo of the rock star Prince when creating an iconic artistic image of the late singer. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the court majority in the 7-2 decision, which legal experts said could carry far-reaching implications for copyright protection and so-called transformative art. The issue is the legal doctrine called “fair use,” which encourages artistic expression by allowing for the use of protected works without the original creator’s permission.

Your DNA Can Now Be Pulled From Thin Air — Over the last decade, wildlife researchers have refined techniques for recovering environmental DNA, or eDNA — trace amounts of genetic material that all living things leave behind. A powerful and inexpensive tool for ecologists, eDNA is all over — floating in the air, or lingering in water, snow, honey and even your cup of tea. Researchers have used the method to detect invasive species before they take over, to track vulnerable or secretive wildlife populations and even to rediscover species thought to be extinct. The eDNA technology is also used in wastewater surveillance systems to monitor Covid and other pathogens. But all along, scientists using eDNA were quietly recovering gobs and gobs of human DNA. To them, it’s pollution, a sort of human genomic bycatch muddying their data. But what if someone set out to collect human eDNA on purpose? […] Dr. Duffy and his colleagues used a readily available and affordable technology to see how much information they could glean from human DNA gathered from the environment in a variety of circumstances, such as from outdoor waterways and the air inside a building.

Liver cells influence the body’s internal circadian clock, which was previously believed to be solely controlled by the brain

Seasonal Cycles as a Fundamental Source of Variation in Human Psychology — Humans too exhibit seasonal variation in sexual activity—although the nature of the seasonal cycle is more complex. For instance, in the United States, condom sales, the timing of first intercourse, and Google searches for pornography and prostitution all exhibit a biannual cyclewith peaksaround Christmas and during the early summer months. […] There are also seasonal cycles in birth rates. In an analysisof 78 years of United States monthly natality data, Martinez-Bakker et al. (2014)found that birth rates peaked in the summertime in northern states and peaked in the autumn in southern states. […] within the Northern Hemisphere,the summer season from June to August has been associated with higher rates of violent crime (Lauritsen & White, 2014), higher rates of rule infractions in prisons (Haertzen et al., 1993), and higher rates of domestic violence.

people primarily seek to improve the traits that they believe would particularly help them achieve their goals and increase their happiness. Moral improvements are not seen as particularly effective at doing either, and are therefore deprioritized.

Powerful magnetic pulses applied to the scalp to stimulate the brain can bring fast relief to many severely depressed patients for whom standard treatments have failed. Yet it’s been a mystery exactly how transcranial magnetic stimulation, as the treatment is known, changes the brain to dissipate depression. Now, research led by Stanford Medicine scientists has found that the treatment works by reversing the direction of abnormal brain signals.

iPhones will be able to speak in your voice with 15 minutes of training

A scientific journal suggests that the New York City’s 1.68 trillion pounds of buildings are causing the city to descending, with some neighborhoods faster than others

Studying Women’s Prison Newspapers

This appears to be a record made by Mr. Nathan exclusively for staff at King Records. He is blunt about how the label will handle new potential artists, and occasionally uses profanity. Clearly not meant for the ears of potential recording artists or the public. Fascinating inside baseball about the recording industry during the early to mid-sixties. [via Sasha Frere-Jones]

The man who started seeing the world backwards after being shot in the head

Doctored photographs create false memories of spectacular childhood events

Gang of four held in Chennai for selling fake glasses that showed people naked — Police were investigating the gang’s claims to have sold three pairs in Bengaluru by getting models to pose nude in a darkened room, where the customers would be allowed to wear the spectacles.

AI can predict pancreatic cancer three years ahead of human doctors

Scientists Regenerate Hair Cells that Enable Hearing — Hearing loss affects about 48 million Americans and 430 million people worldwide, with those numbers expected to grow as populations age. More than 90 percent of individuals affected have sensorineural hearing loss, caused by damage to the inner ear and the destruction of the hair cells responsible for relaying sounds to the brain.

The lawsuit alleges that the company’s products – particularly Instagram – connects vulnerable victims with human traffickers and sex buyers, and provides traffickers with the means to groom those victims. It says that human trafficking victims are regularly posted on Instagram and sold for sex against their will and claims that the company has failed to take adequate steps to stop this.

I’ve been trying to create a new habit of asking myself “what is my intention?” before I speak. Sometimes I communicate to empathize, or to think out loud, but a lot of the time my intention is to connect and to be understood. This article on Alan Alda’s 3 rules for expressing your thoughts is useful for all types of communication. They are: 1. Make no more than three points 2. Explain difficult ideas in three different ways and 3. Make important points three times

People in comas showed ‘conscious-like’ brain activity as they died, study says — The scientists retrospectively analysed the brain activity data in the moments after life support was withdrawn until the patients’ deaths. Upon removal of ventilator support, two of the patients showed an increase in heart rate along with a surge of gamma wave activity, considered the fastest brain activity and associated with consciousness. The activity was detected in the so-called hot zone, an area in the back of the brain linked to conscious brain activity. This area has been correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations in epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness in other brain studies.

A Brain Scanner Combined with an AI Language Model Can Provide a Glimpse into Your Thoughts

AI Chatbots Have Been Used to Create Dozens of News Content Farms — A new report documents 49 new websites populated by AI tools like ChatGPT and posing as news outlets

People are trying to claim real videos are deepfakes. The courts are not amused

These results more firmly establish first person singular pronoun use as a linguistic marker of depression

a Bloomberg report details the recent drastic increase in auto repossessions. Bloomberg cites data from Fitch Ratings saying that 5.3% of subprime auto borrowers are 60 days late or more on their payments. Compare that to May 2021, when that number reached a seven-year low of 2.58%.

Since the pandemic, the studios have become one of the trendiest destinations among South Korean Gen Z. The spaces — with no staff visibly present — typically house three to six photo booths and are open 24 hours a day.

“AND NOW?” is the prompt that follows every action on ECHO, a 34-year-old text-based social network that still hosts a community of former and current New Yorkers. When you log in: AND NOW? After checking who’s online: AND NOW? Upon joining one of ECHO’s chat rooms, called conferences: AND NOW?

The math is pretty simple. We could meet the world’s energy needs by harnessing just 0.01 per cent of the billions of megawatts of solar power that are hitting the Earth’s surface at any given moment. But scaling up quickly to capture that energy is a bit more complicated—even if the necessary technology is already at our disposal. Pavagada Ultra Mega Solar Park [in India], a clean-power plant the size of Manhattan, could be a model for the world—or a cautionary tale.

Logan Paul, an American YouTube personality, purchased a rare ‘Bumblebee’ 0N1 Force NFT for $623,000 back in 2021. Today, it’s worth $10.

For years, Ville Pulkki, a professor of acoustics at Aalto University, has been wondering why it feels so difficult to shout upwind. […] It isn’t harder to shout into the wind; it’s just harder to hear yourself.

A gene in the brain driving anxiety symptoms has been identified. Modification of the gene is shown to reduce anxiety levels, offering an exciting novel drug target for anxiety disorders.

Earlier this year, German stock photographer Robert Kneschke used Have I Been Trained?, a website that tells you if your photos were used to train AI image generators. He discovered many of his images in the dataset of LAION [the nonprofit that created the data set that trained Stable Diffusion]. Knescke asked ​​LAION to remove his work from the training data. But he got a response he didn’t expect: a letter from a law firm on behalf of LAION [in which] LAION’s attorney claims that the non-profit is “doing voluntary research with the aim of further developing self-learning algorithms in the sense of artificial intelligence and making them available to the general public,” and that they “do not violate copyright or data protection law. […] We also point out that our client can assert claims for damages in accordance with Section 97a (4) UrhG if they are unjustified in terms of copyright.” LAION lawyers are now reportedly demanding almost €900 (~$1000 USD) from Kneschke while LAION continues to use his pictures.

On Artifice and Intelligence — How to spot counterfeit cognition

The first babies conceived with a sperm-injecting robot have been born — Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they’d designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop. Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell.

Frozen finger, prepared using a water-filled ordinary rubber glove, was successfully used in one hundred patients with acute anal fissures

Juliane Koepcke became famous at the age of 17 as the sole survivor of the 1971 LANSA Flight 508 plane crash; after falling 3,000 m (10,000 ft) while strapped to her seat and suffering numerous injuries, she survived 11 days alone in the Amazon rainforest until local fishermen rescued her.

Fragments of wood believed to be from the cross Jesus was crucified on more than 2,000 years ago will be included in the cross that will lead the coronation service for King Charles III next month at Westminster Abbey. The two splinters, believed to be from the “true cross,” were gifted to the monarch by Pope Francis

New study indicates that cyberflashers tend to send unsolicited sexual images in an attempt to flirt or receive similar image in return. Women may engage in cyberflashing more often than men.

We evaluated sex differences in the perception of bitter compounds and an aromatic bitter herbal liqueur (Mirtamaro) obtained by the infusion of myrtle leaves/berries together with a mixture of Mediterranean herbs/plants as flavoring/bittering ingredients. […] Women showed higher ratings in Mirtamaro aroma (odor intensity) and bitterness (taste intensity) perception than men, with a superior capacity to perceive/describe its sensory attributes.

Learning science experts wanted to know why some students learn faster than others. They hoped to identify fast learners, study them and develop techniques that could help students understand new concepts quickly. What they found: In the right conditions, people learn at a remarkably similar rate.

Artificial intelligence, like machine learning before it, is making big money off what I call the “sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ scam.” Build a system that solves problems, but with an important user-facing control. For AI systems like GPT-X this is “prompt engineering.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai Received $226M Compensation While Firing Thousands

Major retail players are walking back their metaverse strategies

Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic — Xunzi suggests that adherence to the military counsel of Sun Tzu is so detrimental to one’s own self-interest, that it would be equivalent to “using one’s finger to stir a boiling pot.” […] the military theorist B.H. Liddell Hart met with China’s military attaché to Britain […] Hart asked, “What about Sun Tzu?” The attaché replied “that while Sun Tzu’s book was a venerated classic, it was considered out of date by most of the younger officers, and thus hardly worth study in the era of mechanized weapons.”

K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was a work of performance art executed on 23 August 1994 in which Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty burned £1 million (equivalent to £2.1 million in 2021) in the back of a disused boathouse. The money represented the bulk of the K Foundation’s funds that had been previously earned by Drummond and Cauty as the electronic band KLF.

India Passes China as World’s Most Populous Nation, UN Says — India’s population surpassed 1.4286 billion, slightly higher than China’s 1.4257 billion people, according to mid-2023 estimates by the UN’s World Population dashboard. China’s numbers do not include Hong Kong and Macau, Special Administrative Regions of China, and Taiwan, the data showed.

Capuchin monkeys were first trained to exchange stickers, habituated to being head-touched, and exposed to a horizontal mirror. Then, their mirror self-recognition was tested by surreptitiously placing a sticker on their forehead before requesting them to exchange stickers. None of the monkeys removed the sticker from their forehead in the presence of the mirror. In line with previous studies, this result suggests that capuchin monkeys lack the ability to recognize themselves in mirrors.

Companies like Uber and Amazon use AI to pay people different wages for the same work, a new study finds

How do artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning relate?

28 Artificial Intelligence Terms You Need to Know

Training GPT-3 requires water to stave off the heat produced during the computational process. Every 20 to 50 questions, ChatGPT servers need to “drink” the equivalent of a 16.9 oz water bottle.

An L.A. Startup Aims To Turn The Oceans Into A CO2 Sponge And ‘Green’ Hydrogen Machine “ocean water contains 150 times more carbon dioxide than the air, which means if you want to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere one of the most effective ways to do it is by removing it from the oceans,” […] His hope, and that of backers including the Grantham Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Singapore’s Temasek Foundation and U.S. Energy Department, which have contributed $30 million so far, is that Equatic will be removing millions of tons of CO2 in the years to come—and do so for less than $100 per ton. Sant also expects the company to generate hydrogen for $1 per kilogram that it can sell or use to help power Equatic’s operations.

Ageing seems to affect cellular processes in the same way across five very different kinds of life — humans, fruit flies, rats, mice and worms — according to a study published in Nature on 12 April. The findings could help to explain what drives ageing and offer suggestions for how to reverse it.

sex that occurs in “the spur of the moment” isn’t necessarily more satisfying than sex that has been scheduled in advance, study

A Number System Invented by Inuit Schoolchildren Will Make Its Silicon Valley Debut

A tabi is a “toed” fabric shoe/sock that has been worn in Japan (and parts of Asia) for thousands of years.

Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

Reading Urine in Medieval Medicine — a world in which uroscopy — the examination of urine for the purpose of diagnosis and prognosis — was one of a doctor’s most valued skills. The link was so strong that the urine flask became the identifying symbol of the late medieval physician, who was often shown examining a sample.

Only thrity-two full-length Greek tragedies have survived into the modern age. Written by just three men, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, these works represent a tiny fraction of those that would have been performed at the grand theater festivals of ancient Athens, beginning in the fifth century BCE. Of the more than 300 known tragedies from that era, the vast majority exist only as fragments. What does it take to stage Cresphontes, a lost Euripides tragedy, when all that remains of it are a few fragments of papyrus?

A drone has been converted into a flying flamethrower in central China in a fiery campaign to eradicate more than 100 wasp nests [video]

Denis Hopper was able to sustain his lifestyle and a measure of celebrity by acting in numerous low budget and European films throughout the 1970s as the archetypal “tormented maniac.” […] Hopper’s cocaine intake had reached three grams a day by this time, complemented by 30 beers, and some marijuana and Cuba libres. […] After staging a “suicide attempt” (really more of a daredevil act) in a coffin using 17 sticks of dynamite during an “art happening” at the Rice University Media Center (filmed by professor and documentary filmmaker Brian Huberman), and later disappearing into the Mexican desert during a particularly extravagant bender, Hopper entered a drug rehabilitation program in 1983.

Time it takes a hacker to brute force your password in 2023

Firefighters rescues man trapped inside art installation

They’re Selling Nudes of Imaginary Women on Reddit — and It’s Working

The scrotum: A comparison of men’s and women’s aesthetic assessments

The plaintiffs and several women on a Qatar Airways flight headed to Sydney — including citizens from Australia, New Zealand and Britain — were pulled off the aircraft and subjected to invasive gynecological exams in October 2020 after an abandoned newborn was discovered in an airport bathroom. Abandoned newborns are a problem in the country, which imprisons women who become pregnant out of wedlock.

This is a pre-computed replay of a simulation that accompanies the paper entitled “Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior.”

Teaching ChatGPT to Speak my Son’s Invented Language

Continuous Mode allows GPT-4 to run independently without user authorization, meaning it could potentially run forever and make decisions on its own. Based on the Auto-GPT code, a user created a project called ChaosGPT and asked how it would destroy humanity. ChaosGPT started by Googling ‘most destructive weapons’ to recruit a GPT-3.5-powered AI agent to do more research on deadly weapons. When GPT-3.5 says it’s only focused on world peace- ChaosGPT devises a plan to get GPT-3.5 to ignore its programming. Ultimately, the only real-world impact so far is a few tweets to a Twitter account. However, this demonstration left many in the community horrified. The user recorded the entire interaction

AI Can’t Take Over Everyone’s Jobs Soon (If Ever) — Models are still expensive to run, hard to use, and frequently wrong

…a phenomenon called “space weather.” Aurorae are among the most benign effects of this phenomenon. At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms that can knock out satellites. […] On Feb. 3 [2022], Starlink launched a group of 49 satellites to an altitude only 130 miles above Earth’s surface. They didn’t last long, and now solar physicists know why.

A Modest Proposal for the Non-existence of Exoplanets

Why Is Sea Level Rise Worse In Some Places? — It’s not only the ocean that is rising, but it’s also the land that is sinking.

Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors — The book is written as if by an actual experienced assassin, as a how-to manual on contract killing, however, in 1998 the Washington Post reported that the author was really a divorced mother-of-two who simply fabricated much of the material based on mystery novels and movies. […] On March 3, 1993, a triple murder was committed in Montgomery County, Maryland, by a man who used the book as his guide.

Faced with the high cost of egg-freezing in their home countries, some women are going abroad for a better deal, and a vacation. […] in the United States, the entire process — including the medications, the doctor visits and the average number of years of egg storage — costs about $18,000, and most women can’t count on health insurance to cover it. […] In the Czech Republic and Spain, for example, you can get one round of egg-freezing done for under $5,400. […] According to the market research firm Grand View Search, the global fertility tourism market, including people traveling to the United States, is expected to grow at the rate of 30 percent over the next seven years, becoming a $6.2 billion industry by 2030.

A leading pharmaceutical firm said it is confident that vaccins for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions will be ready by 2030. […] Moderna will be able to offer such treatments for “all sorts of disease areas” in as little as five years. The firm, which created a leading coronavirus vaccine, is developing cancer vaccines that target different tumour types. […] First, doctors take a biopsy of a patient’s tumour and send it to a lab, where its genetic material is sequenced to identify mutations that aren’t present in healthy cells. A machine learning algorithm then identifies which of these mutations are responsible for driving the cancer’s growth. Over time, it also learns which parts of the abnormal proteins these mutations encode are most likely to trigger an immune response. Then, mRNAs for the most promising antigens are manufactured and packaged into a personalised vaccine.

Driving on less than 5 hours of sleep is just as dangerous as drunk-driving, study finds

What is a mental disorder? […] participants made judgments about vignettes describing people with 37 DSM-5 disorders and 24 non-DSM phenomena including neurological conditions, character flaws, bad habits, and culture-specific syndromes. […] Findings indicated that concepts of mental disorder were primarily based on judgments that a condition is associated with emotional distress and impairment, and that it is rare and aberrant. Disorder judgments were only weakly associated with the DSM-5: many DSM-5 conditions were not judged to be disorders and many non-DSM conditions were so judged. [Chart: “Mental Disorder” Rating]

How Randomness Improves Algorithms — Unpredictability can help computer scientists solve otherwise intractable problems

The Gambler Who Beat Roulette — For decades, casinos scoffed as mathematicians and physicists devised elaborate systems to take down the house. Then an unassuming Croatian’s winning strategy forever changed the game.

How to recognize and tame your cognitive distortions

The Finnish Secret to Happiness? Knowing When You Have Enough. — On March 20, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network released its annual World Happiness Report, which rates well-being in countries around the world. For the sixth year in a row, Finland was ranked at the very top.

A Scammer Who Tricks Instagram Into Banning Influencers Has Never Been Identified. We May Have Found Him.

As a genre, research-based art, Bishop argues — “its techniques of display, its accumulation and spatialization of information, its model of research, its construction of a viewing subject, and its relationship to knowledge and truth” — reflect how internet technology has altered our relationship to information. Whatever else such works are about, they are also about how to cope with being confronted with too much information, modeling different dispositions one can assume toward the relentless production of data and connectivity.

Dream streaming platform: Offer a subscription-based service that allows users to watch and share their dreams with others like movies or TV shows […] Taste bud modification service: Alter clients’ taste buds to allow them to enjoy any food or drink, regardless of their personal preferences […] Time dilation retreats: Create vacation experiences where clients canenjoy extended stays in time-dilated environments, allowing them to relax for weeks while only hours […] Quantum uncertainty lottery: Develop a lottery system that leverages quantum mechanics to create a multitude of potential outcomes, with winners determined by the collapse of the probability wave function [ChatGPT / Barsee]

Some Guy Bought the Flatiron Building and Didn’t Pay for It

Meta wants EU users to apply for permission to opt out of data collection. Instead of a yes/no consent, Meta users will fill out a form and include justification.

Meta brings in a DJ to play dance music in one of its cafes as the company urges workers to return to the office

Authenticity refers to behaving in a manner that aligns with one’s true self. The true self, though, is positive. From a self-enhancement standpoint, people exaggerate their strengths and overlook their shortcomings,forming positively-distorted views of themselves.

Figuring out a lie has never been easier: forget body language or how convincing the message is, just listen to how detailed and rich the story is.

Adult individuals frequently face difficulties in attracting and keeping mates, which is an important driver of singlehood. In the current research, we investigated the mating performance (i.e., how well people do in attracting and retaining intimate partners) and singlehood status in 14 different countries. We found that poor mating performance was in high occurrence, with about one in four participants scoring low in this dimension, and more than 57% facing difficulties in starting and/or keeping a relationship. Men and women did not differ in their mating performance scores, but there was a small yet significant effect of age, with older participants indicating higher mating performance. nearly 13% of the participants indicated that they were involuntarily single, which accounted for about one-third of the singles in the sample. […] more than 15% of the participants indicated that they were voluntarily single

A core focus of the entire field of synthetic biology is to be able to design new genetic circuits in order to be able to program cells to accomplish new goals. […] A stunning example of this is the design of a cell-scale biosynthetic pathway in baker’s yeast to produce scopolamine—a medicinally valuable chemical that acts as a neurotransmitter inhibitor.

Harvard geneticists create an organism that is immune to all viruses

Association Between Daily Alcohol Intake and Risk of All-Cause Mortality […] meta-analysis of 107 cohort studies involving more than 4.8 million participants found no significant reductions in risk of all-cause mortality for drinkers who drank less than 25 g of ethanol per day (about 2 Canadian standard drinks) compared with lifetime nondrinkers […] significantly increased risk of all-cause mortality among female drinkers who drank 25 or more grams per day and among male drinkers who drank 45 or more grams per day.

Dumb phones are on the rise in the U.S. as Gen Z looks to limit screen time — Companies like HMD Global, the maker of Nokia phones, continue to sell millions of mobile devices similar to those used in the early 2000s.

There’s no doubt that we are polluting the planet. In order to find out how these pollutants might be affecting our own bodies, we need to work out how we are exposed to them. Which chemicals are we inhaling, eating, and digesting? And how much? Enter the field of exposomics. The term “exposome” was first coined a couple of decades ago. The idea is that it should capture all the things we are exposed to that might affect our health, whether we encounter them in our diets or in our environment. We already know that our genomes help determine our risk of various diseases, but that’s only part of the story. The exposome should help fill the gaps. As you might expect, this is a huge field that covers everything from the effect of a pregnant person’s diet on a fetus to the impact of structural racism on people’s health. But let’s focus on one of the trickier areas of study—understanding our exposure to pollutants. […] Once a chemical gets into your body, it doesn’t stay in its original form for very long. It might get broken down by enzymes in your liver or acids in your stomach, for example. Scientists have learned which breakdown products to look for to estimate a person’s exposure to lots of chemicals, but not all of them.

New York City Is Building a Wall of Oysters to Fend Off Floods

A new Panthera study published today in Landscape Ecology has found that pumas might utilize a sly hunting strategy known as ‘garden to hunt,’ by which puma kills fertilize or deposit nutrients in soil that increase plant quality and attract ungulates to feed in select habitat conducive to future stalk-and-ambush puma hunting.

ChatGPT is a parrot repeating what it saw on the internet with additional Bullshit-generation capabilities. There is no way a model trained simply on the objective of learning how the language __looks like__ is able to do much more than repeat information (in a way aligned to user query) that it already saw during training as it has little to none understanding of the contents. […] The fact that OpenAI allegedly tried to hire people to play with and explain in extensive detail how to solve various problems only proves that simply making a model bigger does not mean it becomes smarter. […] I just refused a job at #OpenAI. The job would consist in working 40 hours a week solving python puzzles, explaining my reasoning through extensive commentary, in such a way that the machine can, by imitation, learn how to reason. ChatGPT is way less independent than people think.

How to make Asteroids game with GPT-4

Can water solve a maze?

an ad that Andy Warhol placed in the Feb. 24, 1966, “Village Voice”

Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are citing one another in a misinformation shitshow

Study describes new ‘safe’ technique for producing babies of the desired sex […] According to the study, 59 couples in this group desired female offspring and the technique resulted in 79.1% (231/292) female embryos. This resulted in the birth of 16 girls without any abnormalities. […] Forty-six couples desiring male offspring ended up with 79.6% male embryos (223/280), resulting in the birth of 13 healthy baby boys.

high IQ associated with fewer psychopathology symptoms

For USA Today parent company Gannett, social media success has little to do with the news. Two of its editorial franchises, Humankind and Problem Solved, have seen growth in their social reach across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, where the brands have prioritized vertical video formats. There, the media company has used the viewership to generate advertising revenue and build awareness of the USA Today brand. [via EEAN]

Genomic analyses of Beethoven’s hair reveals “an extra-pair paternity event” in his ancestry [Extra-pair paternity is the result of copulation between a female and a male other than her social partner.]

A Norwegian man who had his own genitals, nipple and leg amputated appeared in a U.K. court this week accused of livestreaming the castration of other men on his “eunuch maker” website. He and eight other men were said to be part of a subculture of genital “nullification,” in which men willingly have their genitals removed to become “Nullos.”

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

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

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?

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

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