We're already deep in a mental health crisis, particularly among the city folk, I don't think ignoring the aesthetic experience of where one lives is a wise idea. People aren't widgets even if they themselves don't realize that.
Man people talk... a lot. Complain about cars, postulate on 15 minutes cities, clamor for railways... Meanwhile I've owned three cars in my life, maybe driven 1-2 years total. I lived on the Oregon Coast and then moved to the Treasure Valley in Idaho and the last car I owned was in maybe 2010?
Be the change you want to see in the world. It's that simple. If I can do it where I've lived then I have a hard time believing others can't or that they need regulations or specific infrastructure or something else from the top down. These days with rideshares, smart phones, electric personal transport, etc it is MUCH easier now than it was 10 or 15 years ago.
So what exactly is stopping anyone? The situation is never gonna be conducive to your exact wants and needs but you can and should make at least a small carless change today or even if it's just skipping the car to the next trip to the grocery store.
I even subscribed for 5 bucks a couple months ago and it still pesters me. I can't seem to stay logged in.
Anyways in case anyone is wondering the physical wired magazine is just articles you've already read on their website days or weeks ago on the cheapest quality paper and ink that can survive a mailing. Maybe that's all self evident for most but this is first time I've subscribed to physical magazine in decades.
I think we're gonna have several asbestos/lead moments in our lifetimes. PFAS, micro plastics, endocrine disruption, I'd also wager marijuana is likely to have its own big tobacco moment eventually, I've heard fruits and vegetables have slowly been losing nutrient density over generations but I have not looked into that yet. There's more nebulous things like the impact of AI or the way we now communicate (or don't communicate in many cases)...
We have a lot of problems or potential problems that are going to be relatively subtle and or persistent over years and decades and I don't feel we are really taking them as seriously as we should. One thing that really worries me is how many of these various things may interact, we see this in pharmaceuticals where it's very hard if not impossible to rigorously test all the potential interactions. We have introduced a tremendous amount of changes to our lives in increasingly short time frames.
I use bard for what would of been random searches for facts or trivia type things. Sometimes I poke at it, I got it tell me to be ready to defend the country from communists once. It's pretty boring compared to ChatGPT but slightly more useful for the random lookup of something and on occasion I get interesting output from it when I prod it in terms of culture or politics.
The Sense of Beauty: Being the outline of Aesthetic Theory by George Santayana and Aesthetic Intelligence: How to Boost it and Use it in Business and Beyond by Pauline Brown and up next is The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee
I have grown quite fascinated by how people call cats. I was born and raised on the Oregon Coast, we always called cats by sucking back with our tounge tip on the front roof of our mouth (slightly behind the teeth) making a I guess clicking sound? I would type it by maybe nch, nch, nch sound. I've always been perplexed when people write the pspsps sound and now with articles description of the French kissy/pff pff sound.
I think this is good but I also fear it might let people feel more comfortable about tracking then they should. As I type this I can open up WIGLE or a multitude of other apps and see if my roommate is home just by looking for his devices BT signals. We leak a lot of data and now people are more generally aware of the possibility of tracking someone and not needing James bond esque tech. A motivated person could easily put two and two together and devise a way to keep tabs on someone with no tags required. Obviously HN will be more aware of this in general but I wish more people would take note of tracking in general and ask if they're okay with automatic plate readers, ubiquitous video surveillance or the multitude of ways a retailer can track your habits in (and out of) stores.
What a fascinating subject and it strikes me that I cannot recall the last time I saw a sundial. It might of been the 'human' one out at bruneau dunes, several years ago. Shame they are not more common.
I was shocked to find them using bitmojis at all. I find them terribly off putting visually. Not a big deal of course, but until I installed Snapchat I hadn't seen one in years.
Yeah, I remember reading about things like sports reports and weather being generated by computers ages ago in the likes of SciAm or New Scientist. I don't recall if they used the term AI, I think they did but this was a long time ago.
I feel like I'm experiencing a golden age of music. Not a week goes by that I don't find something new or something forgotten that quickly becomes part of my ever growing daily playlist. From Magdalena Bay to The Queers I haven't found this much good music since the days of WinMX and AudioGalaxy.
That said, I stay far away from "hot" or "trending" over the last 12 months since I paid for ytmusic I can count on one hand the tracks I found in those sections that I didn't immediately want to turn off. Yet that blemish aside I absolutely love ytmusic engine, it does an absolutely stellar job of ensuring the next autoplay or related track is something I want to hear or might want to hear. I used Tidal for 6 months prior and before that, for years, Spotify and it's really no comparison in that department.
They alter transcripts. The examples I have seen have been done to fix "flubs" of the Presidential Administration but a simple 'fix' done with care can subtly alter the message for future readers and I believe sets a dangerous precedent. However, for all I know this has been common practice for some time, but I have only seen evidence of this occuring recently.
I'm getting heavy flashbacks to Active Desktop and iirc "Active Channels".
Does anyone remember those? Web feeds on/in your desktop. I believe it coincided with the release of IE 4 and their big web integration push.
I had a branded mp3.com laptop bag, along with other schwag. Through mp3.com I shared some music I was making at the time and a very long time later I received a ASCAP cheque in the mail for about 20 dollars as a result.
I believe the paperwork indicated the music had been played publicly in like France or something. This some 20 years ago and all I have are memories, I was young and more eager to get my cash than anything else. What a wonderful time it was to be online back then.
I'm in the treasure valley, I came up in the early aughts and even worked as an interstate mover for a time. I moved lots of Californians into Idaho who sold their house and came up here and bought two or three, or simply vastly upgraded their square footage and amenities. Something is different this time, maybe a critical mass has been reached but the change in culture and politics is apparent. Even in the smaller cities of the valley you see it, you hear it, I see stop white supremacy fliers around my little city. Keep in mind we were marching for Bernie Sanders in Boise not too long ago, he even came and did a rally. Boise and parts of the valley were always leftish, for as long as I've been here but it's different this time. It's more jarring. Again it's probably critical mass of certain ideologies or simply population densities but it's still different and really starting to change the culture across the valley. And not for the better in my opinion, I mentioned the fliers for instance well Hispanic and even African refugee relations have been good here. There's not a problem with white supremacy here but it's now being made manifest by outsiders... Why people can't leave well enough alone I'll never understand.
Some of the adversarial research I've seen raises some big questions on the benefits insects are suppose to bring to the table, especially compared to existing protein sources like chicken.
I'm curious where they are going to take Bard. I was having it craft DALL-E prompts last night and it explained to me how it could, it told me it was particularly adept at it even, along with writing code and scripts but of course when asked about coding it said it's unable to.
But I suspect we'll see code generating functionality before long and yet I wonder if we'll see anything new or novel beyond chasing ChatGPT and the somewhat obvious assistant integration.
Kind of odd phrasing in the title but looking at the article it notes that this language had a big uptick in the early 2010s. I have seen images floating around showcasing the phenomenon in various charts and the observation offered is that in coincides pretty closely with the Occupy movement. The popular theory surrounding this is that it was a way for the powers that be to redirect efforts from wealth inequality to racial and gender issues via use of the corporate media. How true that is, I do not know, but it's been an idea floating around for years now.
I asked Bard Why did Google didn't create ChatGPT:
Google did not create ChatGPT because it is a text-generation chatbot developed by OpenAI. Google has its own text-generation chatbot called LaMDA, which is still in research mode.
Google is a company that is known for its innovation and its willingness to take risks. However, the company is also very careful about its reputation and its customer relationships. Google does not want to release a product that is not ready for prime time, and it does not want to damage its reputation by releasing a product that is not accurate or reliable.
ChatGPT is a very impressive piece of technology, but it is still in its early stages of development. There are some concerns about the accuracy of the chatbot, and there are some concerns about the potential for the chatbot to be used to spread misinformation or to generate harmful content. Google is not willing to take these risks, and so it has decided not to release a ChatGPT competitor.
Google is likely to continue to develop its own text-generation chatbot, and it is likely to release a more polished and more reliable product in the future. However, for now, Google is content to let OpenAI take the lead in the development of chatbot technology.
>It has also been well-documented that hostile surveillance technologies are disproportionately used to target marginalized groups, including migrants and black and brown people.
Isn't this where AI could really shine? By being colorblind? I would imagine the AI would be used to sort through the vast amounts of data generated and could be used to remove human bias.
I purchased yet another SFF PC off eBay recently, these things are great btw. Cheap, small, powerful and very reasonable on power usage... And I noticed this HP unit had a BIOS update in its initial Windows Update run. Granted it was under 'optional' updates but there are no warnings or even descriptions as to what it could or will do.
Seems like it should at least provide some info on potential consequences for a regular user. But things have been trending this way for a while, I remember when the SOP was to never attempt a flash under Windows yet I haven't seen that warning/advice in ages.