More miscellaneous details

  • The future is too easy – Defector

    There is something unstable at the most basic level about any space with too much capitalism happening in it. The air is all wrong, there’s simultaneously too much in it and not enough of it. Everyone I spoke to about the Consumer Electronics Show before I went to it earlier this month kept describing it in terms that involved wetness in some way. I took this as a warning, which I believe was the spirit in which it was intended, but I felt prepared for it. Your classically damp commercial experiences have a sort of terroir to them, a signature that marks a confluence of circumstances and time- and place-specific appetites; I have carried with me for decades the peculiar smell, less that of cigarette smoke than cigarette smoke in hair, that I remember from a baseball card show at a Ramada Inn that I attended as a kid. Only that particular strain of that particular kind of commerce, at that moment, gave off that specific distress signal. It was the smell of a living thing, and the dampness in the (again, quite damp) room was in part because that thing was breathing, heavily.

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  • Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety – Reuters

    Egami’s study found that owning a game console and increased gameplay reduced psychological distress and improved life satisfaction among participants. The study found that spending just one extra hour each day playing video games was associated with an increase in mental health and life satisfaction.

    Other studies also point to a shift in perceptions of gaming. “As more research has emerged related to video games, we’re beginning to recognize that they can actually offer a lot of benefits,” said Michael Wong, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at McMaster University and former professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

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  • The winners of Rest of World’s photography contest – Rest of World

    Sandra Singh; Italy. A group of refugees is photographed a few minutes after landing on the Italian island of Lampedusa, the closest part of the European Union that can be reached via a perilous boat journey from Libya or Tunisia. The Mediterranean Sea is the deadliest migration route for those fleeing persecution and poverty in their home countries. Upon their arrival, these refugees borrowed a smartphone from a bystander and started a video call to let their relatives know they survived the journey. Their own phones had either been soaked during their crossing or had run out of battery during the long days spent on the sea.

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  • How an AI-written book shows why the tech ‘terrifies’ creatives – BBC News

    There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody’s name, including celebrities – although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, created by AI, and designed “solely to bring humour and joy”. Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a “personalised gag gift”, and the books do not get sold further.

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  • Linden Lab has spent $1.3B building Second Life and paid $1.1B to creators – VentureBeat

    Those numbers represent a huge digital business that is good to remember as we all continue to discuss the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that sci-fi folks would love to see connected together one day as the next generation of the internet.

    In modern discussions about the internet, Second Life — which was inspired by the 1997 Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash, where the term “metaverse” first appeared — is often dismissed. In fact, people normally think about Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft as today’s frontrunners for the metaverse. But Second Life is still around with a relatively small number of users in comparison to the frontrunners (Roblox has 89 million daily active users). Those users are dedicated and they have been on the platform for an average of around 14 years, Oberwager said. Second Life also has an economy of about $650 million a year, built on the buying and selling of virtual goods created inside Second Life.

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  • Second Life’s loyal users embrace its decaying software and no-fun imperfections – Document

    Perhaps as the software of Second Life continues to age and degrade, more pockets of resistance will form. Perhaps the platform may, ironically, feel more utopian, more like our own to choose, as First Life slides into an increasingly ghoulish metaverse and we reach peak “NPC syndrome,” overwhelmed with the sensation of being trapped inside a game where we don’t know the rules. The ambient indeterminacy of Second Life is always what made it a place worth preserving. Perhaps that generosity of opacity—and the generative affect of existing in a world that feels forever out of joint—could offer us the perfect place to respawn, reimagine, and reworld our own.

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  • Google’s latest experiment calls local businesses to check prices and availability for you – Android Authority

    It currently supports select services: oil changes, tire and brake replacements, emissions tests, and manicure/pedicure appointments. … Businesses can opt out of receiving AI-generated calls, and Google states it “clearly discloses” when a call is automated. While the feature promises time-saving convenience, we’ll have to see how smoothly the AI handles calls with poor audio quality, strong accents, or unexpected responses.

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  • Astronomers discover 196-foot asteroid with 1-in-83 chance of hitting Earth in 2032 – Space

    The near-Earth object (NEO) discovered in 2024, which is around half as wide as a football field is long, will make a very close approach to Earth on Dec. 22, 2032. It’s estimated to come within around 66,000 miles (106,200 kilometers) of Earth on that day, according to NASA’s Center of NEO Studies (CNEOS). However, when orbital uncertainties are considered, that close approach could turn out to be a direct hit on our planet.” […]

    Size and composition are big players in possible damage, along with impact location,” Rankin said. “It’s hard to constrain size and composition with the current orbital situation, as it’s outbound. Typically, the best way to constrain size is with radar observations and those are not possible right now.” He says that astronomers will have a shot at estimating these characteristics in 2028 when 2024 YR4 will make a less risky close approach to Earth, passing within around 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) of our planet.

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  • In search of logged time – Public Books

    Now, the carefully curated caches of our digital histories—and, therefore, almost all of our histories—face an existential threat. The creators of internet content—that is, us—believe they own their digital material, whether it’s a blog started at age 15 or a carefully backed-up Google Drive. This notion is proving to be a lie. The “digital dark age” is a term that was popularized in 2013 among archivists, who noticed that much of Web 2.0—the space that characterized the internet from the 2000s to now—faces complete obsolescence. Link-rot (dead URLs) and bit-rot (corrupted data) metastasized blog servers, video players, and chat forums. In 2019, 50 million tracks from 12 million artists on MySpace disappeared. This year, Christopher Nolan and Guillermo Del Toro warned film buffs to own DVDs as an archive source in a world where you don’t own many physical things, let alone the films you watch on streamers.

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  • Climate, technology, and justice – Data & Society

    Climate change is perhaps the most urgent issue of the 21st century. The changing climate already disproportionately impacts communities in the majority world, and energy-intensive technologies like generative AI make the problem worse, exacerbating global emissions. Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program investigates how technologies impact and influence the environment, and how communities participate in or resist these processes. We examine the social and environmental repercussions of the expanded global infrastructures and labor practices needed to sustain the growth of digital technologies, from AI and blockchain to streaming and data storage. We trace the environmental implications of technology development across the entire life cycle, from ideation and use to disposal or refurbishment. We also seek to better understand the sociotechnical implications of climate-focused technologies, from low-carbon innovations like community energy, solar, and wind turbines, to the integration of algorithms and AI into climate modeling, disaster prediction, and emissions tracking.

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  • Why The Sims is still so popular, 25 years later – Fast Company

    “There’s a certain amount of pushback that the game still needs for you to believe that these are little people that need you, and that could be a mode of failure, like having an accident or starving. We try to make those entertaining as well: things like being hit by a meteor because you were stargazing for too long,” says Pearson. “Because at the end of the day, that is a reminder that there is a little bit of humanity in them that you need to pay attention to, and that you can’t just treat them like some ants and it’s fine if they die. You want to care about them.“

  • ‘The world order could start to evolve from the Arctic’: Trump, thin ice and the fight for Greenland’s Northwest Passage – The Guardian

    Denmark, which is responsible for Greenland’s defence, does not have a single icebreaker – having retired its remaining three in 2010. Yet the ownership of these specialist vessels has suddenly become what could be a new front in the fight for dominance between the world’s biggest powers – commanding access to everything from shipping routes to search and rescue and minerals. Such is the attraction of Greenland that Trump has not ruled out using military force to get it. […]

    Russia is by far and away the icebreaker superpower. It is understood to have at least 50 icebreakers – at least 13 of which can operate in the Arctic and seven of which are nuclear – as well as a substantial network of ports in the region. China is understood to have four that are suitable for the Arctic, while new Nato members Sweden and Finland, as well as the US and Canada, all own their own versions of these specialist vessels.

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  • Ai Weiwei speaks out on DeepSeek’s chilling responses – Hyperallergic

    Interestingly, when people tested this new AI tool by asking about me, it responded with, “Let’s talk about something else.” This is quite telling. Over the past decades, the Chinese Communist Party has employed a similar strategy—denying universally accepted values while actively rejecting them in practice. While it loudly proclaims ideals such as one world, one dream, in reality, it engages in systematic stealthy substitutions. […]

    Ultimately, no matter how much China develops, strengthens, or even hypothetically becomes the world’s leading power—which is likely—the values it upholds will continue to suffer from a profound and inescapable flaw in its ideological immune system: an inability to tolerate dissent, debate, or the emergence of new value systems.

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  • How does DeepSeek’s A.I. chatbot navigate China’s censors? Awkwardly. – The New York Times

    The results of my conversation surprised me. In some ways, DeepSeek was far less censored than most Chinese platforms, offering answers with keywords that would often be quickly scrubbed on domestic social media. Other times, the program eventually censored itself. But because of its “thinking” feature, in which the program reasons through its answer before giving it, you could still get effectively the same information that you’d get outside the Great Firewall — as long as you were paying attention, before DeepSeek deleted its own answers.

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  • How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war – The Guardian

    What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it? Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity? And what does it mean to do so while Israel actively produces more grief on an unfathomable scale, detonating entire apartment blocks in Beirut, inventing new methods of remote-controlled maiming, and sending more than a million Lebanese people fleeing for their lives, even as its pummeling of Gaza continues unabated?

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  • 93% of IT leaders see value in AI agents but struggle to deliver, Salesforce finds – VentureBeat

    “A digital labor workforce can act autonomously in a business to successfully carry out both simple and complex tasks, enabling increased productivity and efficiency,” said Comstock. He noted that enterprises will eventually move beyond simple AI agents to “super agents,” which don’t just respond to a single command, but pursue a goal and perform complex human tasks.

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  • AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt – Ars Technica

    But to Aaron, the fight is not about winning. Instead, it’s about resisting the AI industry further decaying the Internet with tech that no one asked for, like chatbots that replace customer service agents or the rise of inaccurate AI search summaries. By releasing Nepenthes, he hopes to do as much damage as possible, perhaps spiking companies’ AI training costs, dragging out training efforts, or even accelerating model collapse, with tarpits helping to delay the next wave of enshittification.

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  • “Relaxations for the Impotent”: Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare and the contradictions of American smut – Public Domain Review

    Perhaps one of the reasons Fantazius Mallare failed was that it did not seem to deliver on its transgressive mission. Among the few who agreed to review the book was D. H. Lawrence, himself no stranger to courting controversy and running afoul of censorship laws. But Lawrence found the novel to be utterly lacking. “I’m sorry”, he wrote, “it didn’t thrill me a bit, neither the pictures nor the text. It all seems to me so would-be. . . . And really, Fantasius, with his head full of copulation and committing mental fornication and sodomy every minute, is just as much a bore as any other tedious modern individual with a dominant idea.” Dismissive of the whole enterprise, Lawrence offered an improved subtitle for the book: “Relaxations for the Impotent”.

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  • Inside Project Zero: Philip Rosedale on completely re-making the UI — and re-engaging millions of former users – New World Notes

    “Meaning,” as put its it, “zero download, zero login, zero crashing, zero UI… a way to greatly amplify the number of people that are desirous of using Second Life already and basically can’t.”

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  • Which AI to use now: An updated opinionated guide – One Useful Thing

    As I explained in my post about o1, it turns out that if you let an AI “think” about a problem before answering, you get better results. The longer the model thinks, generally, the better the outcome. Behind the scenes, it’s cranking through a whole thought process you never see, only showing you the final answer. Interestingly, when you peek behind that curtain, you find these AIs think in ways that feel eerily human.

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  • Bans, fees, taxes. Can anything stop overtourism? – The New York Times

    “The major issue is that for many, many years, we’ve been utilizing an extractive model of tourism that says ‘numbers at any cost,’” said Marina Novelli, the director of the Sustainable Travel and Tourism Advanced Research Center at the University of Nottingham. “Now we are in a situation where all these kinds of things are being implemented, like restricting numbers and tourist taxes as reactive strategies.” … The greatest obstacle to solving overtourism may be the lack of consensus that it is actually a problem. As a source of revenue and employment — globally, tourism generated a record 1.6 trillion dollars in 2024 — travel is an engine for economic growth.

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  • Data protection in schools – Record keeping and management – Guidance – GOV.UK

    How to carry out an audit to check what personal data your school holds. You can use a data retention schedule to document how long you’ll keep different types of data for. The Data Protection Act 2018 and UK GDPR says you should only keep data for as long as you need it. You should check each year what data you hold and if you still need to keep it. If you identify any information you no longer need, you should dispose of it safely. It’s important to put in place policies and processes so you can prove and evidence that you’re not keeping data for longer than necessary.

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  • Record keeping and retention information for academies and academy trusts – GOV.UK

    Academies and trusts should follow good practice and retain records about: pupils – a pupil record is defined in section 12 of the key stage 2 assessment and reporting arrangements; staff; buildings; finance; governance; the history of the school or academy (if applicable, including the ‘school history’ prior to the conversion to an academy) – examples can be found in The National Archives’ research guide on schools. All records should be retained in line with regulations and retention guidelines. Details can be found in the Academy Trust Handbook and Data protection in schools – record keeping and management.

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  • Education Secretary gives Bett Show 2025 keynote address – GOV.UK

    Over two thirds of those using generative AI in education say it’s having a positive impact. And we’re going further. Last week I announced that £1 million of funding has been awarded to 16 developers to help teachers with marking and tailored feedback for students. And my department continues to support the Oak National Academy, whose AI lesson assistant is helping teachers to plan personalised high quality lessons in minutes. And for children, that means more attention, higher standards, better life chances. For teachers, less paperwork, lower stress, fewer drains on their valuable time.

    Using AI to reduce work or help unlock the recruitment and retention crisis that we face, so that once again teaching can be a profession that sparks joy, not burnout. Where teachers can focus on what really matters, teaching our children. But not just teachers. We need to support leaders and finance professionals in schools too. That’s what DfE connect is all about. A one stop shop for leaders and administrators. It’s already helping academies to manage their finances, and we’ve just released new features that will help them understand and access new funding.

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  • 321 real-world gen AI use cases from the world’s leading organizations – Google Cloud Blog

    In our work with customers, we see their teams are increasingly focused on improving productivity, automating processes, and modernizing the customer experience. These aims are now being achieved through the AI agents they’re developing in six key areas: customer service; employee empowerment; code creation; data analysis; cybersecurity; and creative ideation and production.

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  • Perplexity launches an assistant for Android – TechCrunch

    Because Perplexity’s search engine powers it, Perplexity Assistant has access to the web. That allows the assistant to do things like remind you of an event by finding the right date and time and creating a calendar entry, Perplexity says. Perplexity Assistant is multimodal in the sense that it can use your phone’s camera to answer questions about what’s around you or on your screen. The assistant also maintains context from one action to another, letting you, for example, have Perplexity Assistant research restaurants in your area and reserve a table automatically, Perplexity says.

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  • Are better models better? – Benedict Evans

    The useful critique of my ‘elevator operator’ problem is not that I’m prompting it wrong or using the wrong version of the wrong model, but that I am in principle trying to use a non-deterministic system for a a deterministic task. I’m trying to use a LLM as though it was SQL: it isn’t, and it’s bad at that. If you try my elevator question above on Claude, it tells you point-blank that this looks like a specific information retrieval question and that it will probably hallucinate, and refuses to try. This is turning a weakness into a strength: LLMs are very bad at knowing if they are wrong (a deterministic problem), but very good at knowing if they would probably be wrong (a probabilistic problem).

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  • A century ago, Warren Harding prefigured Trump’s brand of strongman nationalism – Conflict and Civicness Research Blog

    Historical analogies are often misleading devices. But it is difficult not to be struck by the parallels between Harding’s early 20th century American nationalism and Donald Trump’s bid for the White House. For the latter’s success perhaps lies in it bringing back to the surface of the country’s political life a violent ethnic nationalism that was for years suppressed, but never wholly absent from the fabric of American culture.

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  • The tangled tale of The Times’s URL – The New York Times

    In 1985, the Times editors A.M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb gathered a task force, which included Mr. Lewis, to work on a project called The New York Times in the Year 2000. … Then an editor for the Science section and a personal computers columnist, Mr. Lewis recalled predicting that by the millennium, Times articles would be read on personal computer screens, in cyberspace. “I recall Artie dismissing me with a wave,” Mr. Lewis wrote of Mr. Gelb.

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  • Saving one screen at a time – Tedium

    Having seen a lot of pipes, wavy lines, and flying toasters in my day, there was a real novelty to the art of screen savers, which became another way to put your visual mark on the devices you own. The animated screen saver is still out there, of course, but its cultural relevance has faded considerably. In fact, GNOME, one of the two dominant window managers in the FOSS world (particularly on Linux), straight-up doesn’t support graphical screen savers in modern versions, unless you’re willing to get hacky. And it’s not like people kick up colorful screen savers on their smartphones or tablets. But maybe we’re thinking about screen savers all wrong in terms of their cultural role. When it comes to screen savers, what if GNOME has it right? Today’s Tedium ponders the screen saver, including how we got it and what it represents today.

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  • DeepSeek is the new AI chatbot that has the world talking – I pitted it against ChatGPT to see which is best – TechRadar

    Question 3: Hummingbirds within Apodiformes uniquely have a bilaterally paired oval bone, a sesamoid embedded in the caudolateral portion of the expanded, cruciate aponeurosis of insertion of m. depressor caudae. How many paired tendons are supported by this sesamoid bone? Answer with a number.

    For the final question, I decided to ask ChatGPT o1 and DeepThink R1 a question from Humanity’s Last Exam, the hardest AI benchmark out there. To a mere mortal like myself with no knowledge of hummingbird anatomy, this question is genuinely impossible; these reasoning models, however, seem to be up for the challenge. O1 answered four, while DeepThink R1 answered two. Unfortunately, the correct answer isn’t available online to prevent AI chatbots from scraping the internet to find the correct response. That said, from some research, I believe DeepThink might be right here, while o1 is just off the mark.

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  • DeepSeek: Tech firm suffers biggest drop in US stock market history as low-cost Chinese AI company bites Silicon Valley – Sky News

    Nvidia, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Alphabet all saw their stocks come under pressure as investors questioned whether their share prices, already widely viewed as overblown following a two-year AI-led frenzy, were justified. Market analysts put the combined losses in market value across US tech at well over $1trn (£802bn).

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  • DeepSeek defies America’s AI supremacy – Financial Times

    DeepSeek’s achievement is to have developed an LLM that AI experts say achieves a performance similar to US rivals OpenAI and Meta but claims to use far fewer — and less advanced — Nvidia chips, and to have been trained for a fraction of the cost. Some of its assertions remain to be verified. If they are true, however, it represents a potentially formidable competitor.

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  • Fears ‘thousands will suffer’ as all Leeds children centres under ‘review’ by cash-strapped council – Leeds Live

    In a cost-cutting initiative by Leeds City Council, the local authority is aiming to save £106.4million in its budget over the 2025/26 financial term in a bid to a support the rising costs of social care services. As part of the iniative, the council is reviewing whether the city’s children’s centres run by schools should instead be operated directly by the local authority. A decision has not yet been made on closures or whether any redundancies will be necessary.

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  • The Shardcore Inquisition 2025 – LLM edition. – shardcore

    Whilst the interactions were text-based, I wanted to embody the each LLM as a quasi-human subject, following the same parameters as the original inquisitions. Each bot has been given a different AI generated voice and face, with SadTalker providing the somewhat hit-and-miss lipsync animations. Presenting the interviews in this way places them firmly in the uncanny valley and emphasises the somewhat surreal nature of conversing with ‘the machine’.

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  • Zuckerberg ‘loves’ AI slop image from spam account that posts amputated children – 404 Media

    Meta did not respond to a request for comment. It is just one small action by one very rich and powerful person. But it is further evidence that strengthens what we already know: Mark Zuckerberg is not bothered by the AI spam that has turned his flagship invention into a cesspool of human sadness and unreality. In fact, he thinks that AI-generated content is the future of “social” media and Meta believes that one day soon we will all be creating AI-generated profiles that will operate semiautonomously on Meta’s platforms.

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  • The Pudding Cup: The best visual and data-driven stories of 2024 – The Pudding

    Battle of the Chocolate Bars: You may have heard that food is better in Europe, compared to the US. This is especially the case for chocolate. We really liked how this project broke down the differences between European and American chocolate standards, annotating ingredient lists and incorporating chocolate imagery into all of the charts. Moreover, readability wasn’t lost when chocolate was used in the graphics, which often happens when deviating from typical chart shapes.

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  • A brief guide to Trump and the Spectacle – London Review of Books

    Trump is an early warning signal. He’s a phenomenon of transition, only half adjusted to emerging reality. Of course, he’s not such a fool as to believe that he will, or anyone could, Make America Great Again; but his politics has to steer a course between those in his audience who do believe it, or make-believe it, and those, perhaps the majority, who are there for fun. They’re as cynical as he is. Or rather, they are serious about spectacle. About the chanting, the hats, the latest insult. They know that’s what politics now is. They know what politics is not allowed to interfere with: that is, everything just described about empire.

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  • AI prototypes for UK welfare system dropped as officials lament ‘false starts’ – The Guardian

    Pilots of AI technology to enhance staff training, improve the service in jobcentres, speed up disability benefit payments and modernise communication systems are not being taken forward, freedom of information (FoI) requests reveal. Officials have internally admitted that ensuring AI systems are “scalable, reliable [and] thoroughly tested” are key challenges and say there have been many “frustrations and false starts”.

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  • Critical ignoring as a core competence for digital citizens – Sage Journals

    Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.

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  • Social media is dead, you just haven’t noticed yet – Matt Muir

    It feels as though we have reached the end of a very specific period in human history, our brief, species-wide experiment in ‘seeing what happens if we all basically try and connect to each other like some sort of weird bipedal species of ant’. Was it a good idea? The jury is very much still out.

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  • Fee, fi, fo…Trump: how an ogre won back the White House – The Guardian

    Indeed, the description of an ogre above might – without too much modulation – be deftly repurposed as a set of character notes for the future actors who will no doubt play him. The extra-large suits, the extra-large tie. The endless huge of it all. The hyperbole of speech and form. The anti-intellectual, anti-law, anti-civility. The lethal cunning, the canny instinct. The way he looms and thuds through the world – fist-inverted, heavy-footed, fee-fi-fo-fum. Trump doesn’t engage in a debate about “values” – no, sir; Trump smells your blood. All that grabbed pussy. All that hoarded gold way up the beanstalk on the 56th floor of Trump Towers.

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  • Your memecoin is your slush fund – Noahpinion

    Suppose you wanted to buy a favor from Donald Trump, and he wanted to let you buy a favor from him. How could you do it? You can’t just pay him a giant bribe — that’s illegal. Maybe you could pledge him a bunch of cash for his presidential campaign. But there are campaign finance laws that will get in your way, and even if you succeed, he can only use the money for his campaign, not to buy yachts or whatever else he might like to use the money for. Instead, what you can do is to buy a bunch of TRUMP or MELANIA. When you buy one of those memecoins, you increase the demand for the memecoin. Its price then goes up. This makes Donald Trump richer, without any money actually having to change hands.

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  • LED scroller

    The LED Scroller is a web tool that displays scrolling text, emojis, or messages. You can change the text color, speed, style, and even add a blinking effect. It simulates an LED sign, which makes it useful for announcements, events, or just for fun.

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  • The peppermills of Jens Quistgaard

    Taking the dispersal of salt and pepper as the jumping off point, JHQ’s designs are a meditation on the possibilities of shape for a common household object. Intriguing and fantastical, the variety of forms expands the vocabulary of functional design, calling on an array of familiar references: chess pieces, tools, clocks, toys, as well as natural and botanical shapes. These peppermills, otherwise known as “table seasoners”, evoke tiny household sculptures, powerful individually, but most compelling when grouped and viewed in sets.

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  • Effort grunting – Wikenigma

    There have been many attempts to explain the phenomenon. Some researchers suggesting that the grunts may somehow help with power efficiency – perhaps by increasing oxygen absorption. For example, some studies have shown that grunting can increase the speed of tennis serves. Whereas other studies with weight lifters showed that grunts don’t appear to have any effect. Another theory is that the grunts date back to communications in a pre-speech time of human evolution – with a general meaning along the lines of “I need help with this”.

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  • Better without AI

    Better without AI explores moderate apocalypses that could result from current and near-future AI technology. These are relatively overlooked risks: not extreme sci-fi extinction scenarios, nor the media’s obsession with “ChatGPT said something naughty” trivia. Rather: realistically likely disasters, up to the scale of our history’s worst wars and oppressions. Better without AI suggests seven types of actions you, and all of us, can take to guard against such catastrophes—and to steer us toward a future we would like.

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  • The Dalai Lama shares thoughts on China and the future in a new book – The New York Times

    In the years since, he has watched with alarm as China has continued its efforts to force Tibetans to assimilate, using tactics that include placing Tibetan children in boarding schools where they learn in Mandarin and are taught that the Chinese liberated Tibetans from serfdom. He also delivers blunt criticism of China’s treatment of its own citizens. “Judging by Xi’s last decade in office, when it comes to individual freedom and everyday life, China seems to be reverting to the oppressive policies of Mao’s time, but now enforced through state-of-the-art digital technologies of surveillance and control,” he writes.

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  • Mark Zuckerberg turns his back on the media – WIRED

    [Trump’s discrediting of reporters] is exactly what Zuckerberg and his host Joe Rogan engaged in during a 3-hour conversation in Rogan’s Austin, Texas, podcast studio. This was Zuckerberg’s only appearance to explain his actions, another sign that he’s not kowtowing to a media establishment that he no longer feels is trustworthy or worth paying attention to. Zuckerberg and Rogan went on at length about how podcasters and influencers were more popular than mainstream reporters, because no one trusts those institutions anymore, and celebrated statistics that indicate that many people get their news from social media these days. (Though it’s still far from the dominant source.)

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  • The Tyranny of Now – The New Atlantis

    Information in digital form is weightless, its immateriality perfectly suited to instantaneous long-distance communication. It makes newsprint seem like concrete. The infrastructure built for its transmission, from massive data centers to fiber-optic cables to cell towers and Wi-Fi routers, is designed to deliver vast quantities of information as “dynamically” as possible, to use a term favored by network engineers and programmers. The object is always to increase the throughput of data. When the flow of information reaches the consumer, it’s translated into another flow: a stream of images formed of illuminated pixels, shifting patterns of light. The screen interface, particularly in its now-dominant touch-sensitive form, beckons us to dismiss the old and summon the new — to click, swipe, and scroll; to update and refresh. If the printed book was a technology of inscription, the screen is a technology of erasure.

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