Sartre, it will be recalled, had asserted a kind of absolute freedom for the conscious human being. It was this claim that Merleau-Ponty disputed. […] If freedom were everywhere, as seemed to be the case in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness , then freedom in effect would be nowhere […] “Free action, in order to be discernible, has to stand out from a background of life from which it is entirely, or almost entirely, absent.” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945) […]

While Sartre properly emphasized the subject’s freedom, he distorted the scope of this freedom by rendering it absolute. The subject, argued Merleau-Ponty, always faced a previously established situation, an environment and world not of its own making. Its life, as intersubjectively open, acquired a social atmosphere which it did not itself constitute. Social roles pressed upon the individual as plausible courses for his life to take. Certain modes of behavior became habitual. Probably , this world, these habits, a familiar comportment: probably these would not change overnight. It was unlikely that an individual would suddenly choose to be something radically other than what he had already become. The Sartre of Being and Nothingness underestimated the weight of this realm of relative constraint and habitual inertia.

{ Merleau-Ponty: The Ambiguity of History | Continue reading

Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent’s motivations, as such, can play a role in the generation of its behavior. […] a new kind of non-reductive theory is proposed: Irruption Theory. […] irruptions are associated with increased unpredictability of (neuro)physiological activity, and they should hence be quantifiable in terms of information-theoretic entropy. Accordingly, evidence that action, cognition, and consciousness are linked to higher levels of neural entropy can be interpreted as indicating higher levels of motivated agential involvement.

{ PsyArXiv | Continue reading }

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.

The present studies investigated the relationships between men’s perceived risk of experiencing sperm competition (i.e., when the ejaculates of two or more men simultaneously occupy the reproductive tract of a single woman), and their use of strategies to detect, prevent, and correct their partner’s sexual infidelity.

We investigated these associations using self-reports provided by men (Study 1, n = 113), partner-reports provided by women (Study 2, n = 136), and dyadic reports (Study 3, n = 103 couples).

The results of these studies indicated that the attractiveness of women was consistently associated with men’s use of benefit-provisioning mate retention behaviors (e.g., buying expensive gifts for one’s partner, showing signs of physical affection) and semen-displacing behaviors (e.g., deeper copulatory thrusting, more thrusts during copulation), whereas the infidelity risk of women was often associated with men’s use of cost-inflicting mate retention behaviors (e.g., threatening to end the relationship, monopolization of partner’s free time).

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading }

Previous work provides evidence of adaptations to sperm competition in men. For example, men’s testes size relative to body weight is larger than for the monandrous gorilla, which experiences very low sperm competition risk. However, men’s relative testes size is smaller than that of chimpanzees, whose polygynandrous mating system generates substantial sperm competition. […]

Several studies provide evidence that men unconsciously increase sperm number in an ejaculate when they are at greater sperm competition risk. Specifically, men who spent a greater proportion of time apart from their partners since the couple’s last copulation (time during which a man cannot account for his partner’s sexual behavior) produce more sperm in their next in-pair copulatory ejaculate. […]

Researchers have also theorized that the morphology of the human penis suggests an evolved function as a semen displacement device. […]

Both sexes reported that men thrust more deeply and more quickly at the couple’s next copulation when they experienced contexts in which sperm competition is more likely to occur. […] Goetz and colleagues also found that as sperm competition risk increased, men performed more copulatory behaviors that might act to displace the sperm of a potential rival that may be present (such as more thrusts and deeper thrusts during copulation). […]

Symons (1979) argued that women’s orgasm and associated physiological structures such as the clitoris are byproducts of selection on male genitalia and orgasm. […] Research also indicates that orgasm increases the retention of sperm. […] ancestral men who were particularly interested in the occurrence of their partner’s copulatory orgasm may have been more successful in the context of sperm competition.

{ Personality and Individual Differences (2010) | Continue reading }

The infidelity-detection hypothesis for oral sex proposes that men perform oral sex to gather information about their partner’s recent sexual history. […] men at a greater recurrent risk of sperm competition expressed greater interest in, and spent more time performing, oral sex on their partner

{ Personality and Individual Differences (2012) | Continue reading | More: Is Cunnilingus-Assisted Orgasm a Male Sperm-Retention Strategy? }

{ Anna Uddenberg | k-t z | Art Basel }

we analyzed Google’s C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA. (OpenAI does not disclose what datasets it uses to train the models backing its popular chatbot, ChatGPT) […]

The three biggest sites were patents.google.com No. 1, which contains text from patents issued around the world; wikipedia.org No. 2, the free online encyclopedia; and scribd.com No. 3, a subscription-only digital library. Also high on the list: b-ok.org No. 190, a notorious market for pirated e-books that has since been seized by the U.S. Justice Department. At least 27 other sites identified by the U.S. government as markets for piracy and counterfeits were present in the data set. […]
Others raised significant privacy concerns. Two sites in the top 100, coloradovoters.info No. 40 and flvoters.com No. 73, had privately hosted copies of state voter registration databases. Though voter data is public, the models could use this personal information in unknown ways.

Business and industrial websites made up the biggest category (16 percent of categorized tokens), led by fool.com No. 13, which provides investment advice. Not far behind were kickstarter.com No. 25, which lets users crowdfund for creative projects, and further down the list, patreon.com No. 2,398, which helps creators collect monthly fees from subscribers for exclusive content.

Kickstarter and Patreon may give the AI access to artists’ ideas and marketing copy, raising concerns the technology may copy this work in suggestions to users. […] The copyright symbol — which denotes a work registered as intellectual property — appears more than 200 million times in the C4 data set.

The News and Media category ranks third across categories. But half of the top 10 sites overall were news outlets: nytimes.com No. 4, latimes.com No. 6, theguardian.com No. 7, forbes.com No. 8, and huffpost.com No. 9. (Washingtonpost.com No. 11 was close behind.) […] RT.com No. 65, the Russian state-backed propaganda site; breitbart.com No. 159, a well-known source for far-right news and opinion; and vdare.com No. 993, an anti-immigration site that has been associated with white supremacy. […] Among the top 20 religious sites, 14 were Christian, two were Jewish and one was Muslim, one was Mormon, one was Jehovah’s Witness, and one celebrated all religions. […]

The data set contained more than half a million personal blogs, representing 3.8 percent of categorized tokens. Publishing platform medium.com No. 46 was the fifth largest technology site and hosts tens of thousands of blogs under its domain. Our tally includes blogs written on platforms like WordPress, Tumblr, Blogspot and Live Journal.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

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

Ezra Klein: Is social media good for people?
Tyler Cowen: We don’t know yet.

{ Vox (2017) }

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?

{ Uta Barth, Peripheral Vision, The J. Paul Getty museum, Los Angeles | more }