A substantial proportion of people confused virtual reality with reality. 20% sat on a virtual chair without checking for its real presence. 45% used memory from an earlier event in VR to find an object in reality.

even a few meals high in saturated fats can cause inflammation in the body, despite physical symptoms – in the form of chronic inflammation – potentially taking years to appear

Who took ‘Napalm Girl’? World Press Photo ‘suspends’ attribution of historic Vietnam War image […] the “visual and technical” evidence “leans toward” an emerging theory that a Vietnamese freelance photographer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, took the photo. Previously: Napalm B is chemically distinct from its predecessor Napalm. And: Nick Ut: From ‘Napalm Girl’ to a crying Paris Hilton

“The technology we’re building today is not sufficient to get there,” said Nick Frosst, a founder of the AI startup Cohere who previously worked as a researcher at Google and studied under the most revered AI researcher of the last 50 years. “What we are building now are things that take in words and predict the next most likely word, or they take in pixels and predict the next most likely pixel. That’s very different from what you and I do.” […] Humans know how to deal with a chaotic and constantly changing world. Machines struggle to master the unexpected — the challenges, small and large, that do not look like what has happened in the past. Humans can dream up ideas that the world has never seen. Machines typically repeat or enhance what they have seen before. That is why Frosst and other sceptics say pushing machines to human-level intelligence will require at least one big idea that the world’s technologists have not yet dreamed up. There is no way of knowing how long that will take.

Black propaganda is a form of propaganda intended to create the impression that it was created by those it is supposed to discredit. It is typically used to vilify or embarrass the enemy through misrepresentation.

every day the same again | May 19th, 2025