‘The real apocalypse is technology, our descendants will no longer look like us.’ –Pier Paolo Pasolini
Ezra Klein: Is social media good for people?
Tyler Cowen: We don’t know yet.{ Vox (2017) }
technology
Si je réagis je m’enfonce encore plus, c’est bien connu, faut pas se débattre dans les sables mouvants.
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
more than three people a day
U.S. Marines Outsmart AI Security Cameras by Hiding in a Cardboard Box
‘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.
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
Missing radioactive capsule found on remote road in Australia [more]
Paintings by Turner and Monet depict trends in 19th century air pollution
‘It will become cheaper to show fakes than to show reality.’– Jaron Lanier
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.
‘The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.’ –Rainer Maria Rilke
[T]he reason someone may live beyond 100 years starts with their DNA […] “You can’t make it out that far without having already won the genetic lottery at birth” […] The longer your parents live, the more likely you’ll live a healthier, longer life, experts say. […]
“It’s probably not one single gene but a profile, a combination of genes”
Nir Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, has studied the lives of hundreds of centenarians, the people they’ve married and their kids. The children of centenarians are “about 10 years healthier” than their peers, Barzilai said. […]
The plan is to use artificial intelligence to help find the genes and develop drugs from them
Unalaska, Alaska
Just as mobile unleashed new types of applications through new capabilities like GPS, cameras and on-the-go connectivity, we expect these large models to motivate a new wave of generative AI applications.
imitator of appearances
Just asked ChatGPT to write a short story about AI taking over the world
asking the gptchat thingy how to plot a communist revolution
Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT
Browse passages from books using experimental AI
TLDR This (paraphraser, summuraizer)
Lex is a new word processor that has all the features you expect from a Google docs-style editing experience. But—it also has an AI thought partner built-in to help unlock your best writing. […] If you ever get stuck, just hit command+enter or type +++ and GPT-3 will fill in what it thinks should come next. […] Also, if you want to generate title ideas based on your document, just click the button to the right of the title of the doc. It’ll ask the AI to come up with some options.
SEO-optimized and plagiarism-free content for blogs, Facebook ads, Google ads, emails…
Richard Hughes Gibson argues that large-language-model technology “is a sophist, at least on Plato’s understanding—an ‘imitator of appearances,’ creating a ‘shadow-play of words’ and presenting only the illusion of sensible argument.
‘Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard. Just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS. People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They “trust me.” Dumb fucks.’ –Mark Zuckerberg
Today, the Federal Trade Commission filed an amended complaint against Facebook in the agency’s ongoing federal antitrust case. The complaint alleges that after repeated failed attempts to develop innovative mobile features for its network, Facebook instead resorted to an illegal buy-or-bury scheme to maintain its dominance. It unlawfully acquired innovative competitors with popular mobile features that succeeded where Facebook’s own offerings fell flat or fell apart. And to further moat its monopoly, Facebook lured app developers to the platform, surveilled them for signs of success, and then buried them when they became competitive threats. Lacking serious competition, Facebook has been able to hone a surveillance-based advertising model and impose ever-increasing burdens on its users.
“Facebook lacked the business acumen and technical talent to survive the transition to mobile. After failing to compete with new innovators, Facebook illegally bought or buried them when their popularity became an existential threat,” said Holly Vedova, FTC Bureau of Competition Acting Director. “This conduct is no less anticompetitive than if Facebook had bribed emerging app competitors not to compete. The antitrust laws were enacted to prevent precisely this type of illegal activity by monopolists. Facebook’s actions have suppressed innovation and product quality improvements. And they have degraded the social network experience, subjecting users to lower levels of privacy and data protections and more intrusive ads. The FTC’s action today seeks to put an end to this illegal activity and restore competition for the benefit of Americans and honest businesses alike.”
Each night when I return the cab to the garage, I have to clean the cum off the back seat
It’s hard to remember a time when scrolling through Instagram was anything but a thoroughly exhausting experience.
Where once the social network was basically lunch and sunsets, it’s now a parade of strategically-crafted life updates, career achievements, and public vows to spend less time online (usually made by people who earn money from social media)—all framed with the carefully selected language of a press release. Everyone is striving, so very hard. […]
Back in the 1990s […] nobody cool was trying to monetize their lifestyle […] But somewhere in the early 2000s, the slacker of popular culture lost ground to the striver. […]
The internet influencer is the apotheosis of all this striving, this modern set of values taken to its grotesque extreme: Nothing is sacred, art has been replaced by “content,” and everything is for sale.
image { De Niro’s wig from Taxi Driver }
‘This world is arranged as it had to be if it were to be capable of continuing with great difficulty to exist; if it were a little worse, it would be no longer capable of continuing to exist. Consequently, since a worse world could not continue to exist, it is absolutely impossible; and so this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds.’ –Schopenhauer
{ The Clubhouse isn’t owned and operated by the influencers themselves but is overseen by outside investors. | Harper’s | full story }
‘There are many people today who see that modern society is heading toward disaster in one form or another, and who moreover recognize technology as the common thread linking the principal dangers that hang over us.’ –Theodore Kaczynski
if you want to build a global taxi service that people can hail from a smartphone app, one way to do it is to coordinate with the taxi commissions of hundreds of cities to get regulatory approvals and make sure that you comply with local requirements, and another way to do it is to completely ignore those regulations and just launch your app everywhere. The second approach might expose you to ruinous fines or shutdown orders or bad publicity or prison, but it also might work; you might end up so popular in so many places that the local regulators can’t ban you and will have to accept your proposed terms. […]
If you want to build self-driving cars, you will need to test them. […] [a] way to test them is to just send out a bunch of cars to drive themselves everywhere, without asking for permission, and see what happens. […]
Federal agencies say he’s breaking the rules and endangering people. Mr. Musk says they’re holding back progress. […] When asked to comment on the specifics of this article, Mr. Musk replied with a “poop” emoji.
{ Matt Levine/Bloomberg | Continue reading }
previously:
Driverify [cryptocurrency]: Developed by Tesla’s self-driving-car division. Cars mine Driverify with spare computing power while idling, and spend it bidding against each other for right-of-way if they arrive at a four-way stop sign at the same time (users can preprogram how aggressively their cars bid in these auctions). […]
Banned [by the SEC] because: in the Phoenix suburb where the system was being tested, a pedestrian and Driverify-equipped car reached an intersection at the same time. The car dutifully wired a bid, but the pedestrian failed to respond. The car interpreted this as a bid of zero and ran into her.
related { NASA suspends SpaceX’s $2.9 billion moon lander contract after rivals protest }
This sentence is false
Why AI is Harder Than We Think
The year 2020 was supposed to herald the arrival of self-driving cars. Five years earlier, a headline in The Guardian predicted that “From 2020 you will become a permanent backseat driver.” In 2016 Business Insider assured us that “10 million self-driving cars will be on the road by 2020.” Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk promised in 2019 that “A year from now, we’ll have over a million cars with full self-driving, software…everything” […]
none of these predictions has come true. […]
like all AI systems of the past, deep-learning systems can exhibit brittleness— unpredictable errors when facing situations that differ from the training data. This is because such systems are susceptible to shortcut learning: learning statistical associations in the training data that allow the machine to produce correct answers but sometimes for the wrong reasons. In other words, these machines don’t learn the concepts we are trying to teach them, but rather they learn shortcuts to correct answers on the training set—and such shortcuts will not lead to good generalizations. Indeed, deep learning systems often cannot learn the abstract concepts that would enable them to transfer what they have learned to new situations or tasks. Moreover, such systems are vulnerable to attack from “adversarial perturbations”—specially engineered changes to the input that are either imperceptible or irrelevant to humans, but that induce the system to make errors.
‘Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard. Just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS. People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They “trust me.” Dumb fucks.’ –Mark Zuckerberg
Mr. Zuckerberg told his lieutenants that Facebook “needed to inflict pain” upon Apple and Mr. Cook, said a person with knowledge of the discussions. […]
In 2017, Facebook had expanded its work with Definers Public Affairs, a Washington firm that specialized in opposition research against its clients’ political foes. Definers employees distributed research about Apple’s compromises in China to reporters, and a website affiliated with Definers published articles criticizing Mr. Cook, according to documents and former Definers employees.
Definers also began an “astroturfing” campaign to draft Mr. Cook as a 2020 presidential candidate, presumably to put him in President Trump’s cross hairs, The New York Times reported in 2018. […]
(Definers’ work against Apple was also funded by Qualcomm, another Apple rival, according to a Definers employee. Facebook fired Definers after The Times reported on its activity.)
how should we make use of this life that we still have?
The most widespread use of augmented reality isn’t in gaming: it’s the face filters on social media. The result? A mass experiment on girls and young women.
congratulations to drugs for winning the war on drugs
{ if you or someone nearby are being brutalized by a police Spot robot and can get a hand or something underneath, grab this handle and yank it forward. This releases the battery, instantly disabling the robot. | sleep paralysis demon | Continue reading }
