We’re not here to impress each other. We’re here to connect.
In Boston labs, old, blind mice have regained their eyesight, developed smarter, younger brains and built healthier muscle and kidney tissue. […] The experiments show aging is a reversible process, capable of being driven “forwards and backwards at will” […] “The astonishing finding is that there’s a backup copy of the software in the body that you can reset” […] It doesn’t matter if the body is 50 or 75, healthy or wracked with disease, Sinclair said. Once that process has been triggered, “the body will then remember how to regenerate and will be young again, even if you’re already old and have an illness. Now, what that software is, we don’t know yet. At this point, we just know that we can flip the switch.”
Small Penises and Fast Cars: Evidence for a Psychological Link — In this experiment, we manipulated what men believed about their own penis size, relative to others. We gave them false information, stating that the average penis size was larger than it in fact is.
Historically, women who were victims of rape had to show evidence of strenuous or ferocious resistance to the attack, as indicated by broken fingernails, blood, bruises… […] Consider the emotion of sexual disgust—the things that repulse you from a sexual perspective. Are men aware that women are more easily sexually disgusted than they are? (Crosby, Durkee, Meston, & Buss, 2020). Judging from the number of men who send unsolicited “dick-pics” (photographs of men’s genitalia) to women, the answer is a resounding “no.” Among millennial-aged women, slightly more than half have received dick pics, and 78% of these were unsolicited. […] Understanding sex differences in sexual psychology provides a path toward reducing violence toward women. When women have a say in designing laws and policies around sexual violence, they are more likely to bring a female mindset to those policies.
OpenAI signaled it’ll soon begin charging for ChatGPT […] ChatGPT had over a million users as of early December — an enviable user base by any measure. But it’s a pricey service to run. According to OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, ChatGPT’s operating expenses are “eye-watering,” amounting to a few cents per chat in total compute costs. (ChatGPT is hosted in Microsoft’s Azure cloud.)
Research Summaries Written by AI Fool Scientists
“In the unlikely situation where a crew is unable to control the aircraft, DragonFly can redirect the flight to the nearest appropriate airport and facilitate a safe landing” Airbus close to landing fully automated passenger jets
JPMorgan Chase is suing the 30-year-old founder of Frank, a buzzy fintech startup it acquired for $175 million, for allegedly lying about its scale and success by creating an enormous list of fake users to entice the financial giant to buy it.
Goldman Sachs lost $1.2 billion in 2022 mostly because of Apple Card
Apple launched its Self-Service Repair program, letting US customers fix broken screens, batteries, and cameras on the latest iPhones using Apple’s own parts and tools for the first time ever. I expected Apple would send me a small box of screwdrivers, spudgers, and pliers; I own a mini iPhone, after all. Instead, I found two giant Pelican cases — 79 pounds of tools — on my front porch. […] The single most frustrating part of this process, after using Apple’s genuine parts and Apple’s genuine tools, was that my iPhone didn’t recognize the genuine battery as genuine. “Unknown Part,” flashed a warning. […] $69 for a new battery — the same price the Apple Store charges for a battery replacement, except here I get to do all the work and assume all the risk. $49 to rent Apple’s tools for a week. A $1,200 credit card hold for the toolkit, which I would forfeit if the tools weren’t returned within seven days of delivery.
It’s illegal to burn a body in a floating boat anywhere in the U.S., and a single town in Colorado is the only place in the country where you can legally burn a corpse on a dry-land funeral pyres. The popular conception of what are commonly called “Viking” funerals – a flaming longship – aren’t historically accurate anyway […] “They (Vikings) were more likely to drag the boat ashore and burn it on dry land with the chieftain’s body and his possessions inside, or just bury the entire boat without setting it on fire,” Pray told Cowboy State Daily.
Date Like a Monk — Monks are famously celibate, but celibacy doesn’t just mean you’re not having sex. It means you’re not interacting with other people in a way that could be considered romantic. The Sanskrit word for monk, brahmacharyi, means “the right use of energy.” […] As monks, we were trained to direct our energy toward understanding our psyches, how we see the world and interact with it. If you haven’t developed a deep understanding of your motivations and obstacles, it’s harder to move through life with patience and compassion. […] Monks never try to impress anyone. […] We’re not here to impress each other. We’re here to connect.
some genetic changes
Identical college twins were accused of cheating in an exam by signaling. They won $1.5 million in damages after a jury decided they hadn’t cheated because their minds were connected.
When taxes go up, executives increase profits from insider trading, study “In states where there are increases in tax rates, there is an increase in the number of SEC insider trading investigations.”
There wasn’t a single bank robbery in Denmark last year
Hackers hit websites of Danish central bank and seven other Danish banks
ChatGPT isn’t all that bad at writing fairly decent malware — within a few weeks of ChatGPT going live, participants in cybercrime forums—some with little or no coding experience—were using it to write software and emails that could be used for espionage, ransomware, malicious spam, and other malicious tasks.
According to a new study, humans still have the genes for a full coat of fur. Those genes, it seems, have simply been switched off. […] “Some genetic changes might be responsible for loss of hair.”
Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage
Medical student types journals during ketamine infusions for suicidal ideation, treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder […] patient achieved remission from suicidality and PTSD within 1 month [Ketamine Journals | .docx]
A seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time. However, a 10-day—or longer—forecast is only right about half the time.
Even if there is a very strong neurological similarity between memories and experiences, we know that they can’t be exactly the same
A team of security researchers managed to gain “super administrative access” into Reviver, the company behind California’s new digital license plates which launched last year. That access allowed them to track the physical GPS location of all Reviver customersand change a section of text at the bottom of the license plate designed for personalized messages to whatever they wished
Ghost Writer: Microsoft Looks to Add OpenAI’s Chatbot Technology to Word, Email
Microsoft will have to buy OpenAI in 2023
Artists accuse Adobe of tracking their design process to power its AI
Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s, neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were thought to be active only during sensory perception are also active during the recall of memories. “It started to raise the question of whether a memory representation is actually different from a perceptual representation at all” […] Even if there is a very strong neurological similarity between memories and experiences, we know that they can’t be exactly the same. “People don’t get confused between them”
Intermittent fasting can boost your health, but how and when to restrict food consumption is crucial — When food intake starts in the morning, studies have observed weight loss and improvements in insulin sensitivity. Conversely, there are fewer or no benefits to starting meals at midday and ending them in the evening. Ram Babu Singh’s team (Halberg Hospital and Research Institute, India) also showed positive results in participants who ate only in the morning — and not in those who ate in the evening after 8 p.m. Research suggests our internal clock and circadian rhythms may have something to do with it.
It is very well known that intelligence (or, more in general, talent and personal qualities) exhibits a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth — often considered as a proxy of success — follows typically a power law (Pareto law), with a large majority of poor people and a very small number of billionaires. Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale (the average talent or intelligence), and the scale-invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes. In this paper, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness.
The happiest, least stressful, most meaningful jobs in America
Communities are already seeing items delivered by drones from Amazon Prime and Walmart
David Horvitz’s Public Access (2010) includes photographs of himself at various public beaches in California which were uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons and then inserted into the Wikipedia pages, and the subsequent reaction of the Commons and Wikipedia communities to his actions. Before all items were deleted, Horvitz printed them out, bound them and covertly placed the bound books in the history sections of local libraries along the California Coast. […] In 2016, David Horvitz hired a pickpocket to place sculptures in the pockets of attendees of the annual Frieze Art Fair.
‘One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy’ –E. B. White
Malibu Media LLC is an adult movie company that produces films featured on the pornagraphic website X-Art.com. The company has spent years suing people for copyright infringement, alleging the defendants downloaded its films via peer-to-peer file sharing software such as BitTorrent.
Malibu Media LLC is an adult movie company that produces films featured on the pornographic website X-Art.com. The company has spent years suing people for copyright infringement, alleging the defendants downloaded its films via peer-to-peer file sharing software such as BitTorrent.
The company targets individuals based on their IP address (like a phone number, but for one’s computer), which its proprietary technology has detected as being associated with illegal filesharing.
{ Rosenblum Law | Continue reading }
Over the past decade, Malibu Media has emerged as a prominent so-called “copyright troll,” suing thousands of “John Does” for allegedly torrenting adult content hosted on the porn studio’s website, “X-Art.” Whether defendants were guilty or not didn’t seem to matter to Malibu, critics claimed, as much as winning as many settlements as possible. As courts became more familiar with Malibu, however, some judges grew suspicious of the studio’s litigiousness. As early as 2012, a California judge described these lawsuits as “essentially an extortion scheme,” and by 2013, a Wisconsin judge ordered sanctions, agreeing with critics who said that Malibu’s tactics were designed to “harass and intimidate” defendants into paying Malibu thousands in settlements. […]
Now, TorrentFreak reports that Malibu’s litigation machine appears to finally be running out of steam—with its corporate status suspended in California sometime between mid-2020 and early 2021 after failing to pay taxes. Last month, a Texas court said that Malibu has until January 20 to pay what’s owed in back taxes and get its corporate status reinstated. If that doesn’t happen over the next few weeks, one of Malibu’s last lawsuits on the books will be dismissed, potentially marking the end of Malibu’s long run of alleged copyright trolling.
Doyle Lonnegan: I put it all on Lucky Dan; half a million dollars to win.
The simplest form of investment scam is that you promise people some attractive return on their investment […] There are two basic approaches, which are:
A reasonable return, or
An insane return.The first approach was made famous by Bernie Madoff […] The advantage of this approach is that it can attract sophisticated investors: Madoff was able to raise money from rich people and funds-of-funds because, in their obviously flawed due diligence, they concluded that the returns he promised were plausible. […]
The second approach […] you mostly don’t want sophisticated investors. It is plausibly harder to trick sophisticated investors than it is to trick unsophisticated ones. This is like why advance-fee scam emails have lots of typos: “By sending an initial email that’s obvious in its shortcomings, the scammers are isolating the most gullible targets.” Promising a 1,000,000% return ensures that you never end up talking to anyone but the most gullible possible marks. […] Here’s a good Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action against an alleged vaguely crypto-ish fraud: […]
According to the SEC’s complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Chandran, Davidson, Glaspie, Knott, and Mossel falsely claimed that investors could generate extravagant returns by investing in a blockchain technology called CoinDeal that would be sold for trillions of dollars to a group of prominent and wealthy buyers. […]
Chandran, a recidivist securities law violator and convicted felon, claimed to own a unique blockchain technology that was on the verge of being sold for trillions of dollars to a group of reputable billionaire buyers (“CoinDeal”). Chandran further claimed his business required interim financial support until the sale transaction closed. Together with and through other named Defendants, Chandran targeted mostly unsophisticated investors with false and misleading promises and representations that investments in CoinDeal would soon yield extremely high returns from the imminent sale of his business. Ultimately, there was no sale, and no distribution of proceeds, because CoinDeal was a sham. […]
Chandran typically provided status updates on the supposed deal, including but not limited to: the involvement of foreign central banks and the United States Department of Homeland Security; the latest board meetings of the consortium of wealthy buyers; the role of certain political figures; and the causes of “temporary” delays to the sale closing. These updates were designed to lull investors and induce them to continue investing in CoinDeal. […]
Then of course the “deal” would not close and there would be excuses, which included “the engineer … called in sick yesterday” and “the bank wants a new set of documents.” […] My favorite part, though, might be the section about Linda Knott. According to the SEC complaint, she didn’t know these people, and wasn’t in any real sense a part of their alleged scam. She just used their alleged scam as a substrate to run her own alleged scam:
In February 2021, Knott learned of CoinDeal through one of Glaspie’s teleconferences […] Knott started collecting funds for CoinDeal through an investor group called Together We Profit. Together We Profit was a loose arrangement of individuals interested in participating in CoinDeal. … Knott facilitated investment by lowering the barrier to entry for CoinDeal by allowing prospective investors to participate for as little as $27, which was lower than the amounts permitted by Glaspie. […] While Knott assured investors she would transmit all of their funds to CoinDeal, that was false. She enriched herself by misappropriating approximately $79,000 or more for personal use and purposes unrelated to CoinDeal.
Is my ‘red’ your ‘red’?
New York has become the latest US state to allow so-called human composting. A person can now have their body turned into soil after their death - which is seen as an environmentally friendly alternative to a burial or cremation. In 2019, Washington was the first US state to legalise it. Colorado, Oregon, Vermont and California followed suit.
OnlyFans mum embarrassed about wetting herself for years now sells wet pants
A fundamental question in the study of consciousness is “To what extent are sensory experiences equivalent between individuals?” Is my “red” your “red”?
In a world first, AI lawyer will help defend a real case in the US
Study Finds That Buttons in Cars Are Safer and Quicker to Use Than Touchscreens
Malone understood a few things about the cable industry that many outsiders didn’t. First, he understood that cable was like real estate: incredibly high fixed costs up front as you built or bought the systems, and then highly predictable, monopoly cash flows for a long time afterwards. He understood that if he used debt to finance acquisitions, he could keep growing the company, and use the depreciation on acquired systems (plus the write-offs from the loans itself) to delay paying taxes on that cash flow. […] The problem was that Wall Street in the 70s and 80s didn’t get any of this. […] To make his point, Malone created a new accounting metric, something he called ‘earnings before interest, depreciation, and taxes’, or EBITDA.
There are an estimated 25 million safe deposit boxes in America, and few protections for customers. No federal laws govern the boxes; no rules require banks to compensate customers if their property is stolen or destroyed.
PLAYBOY: Your salary is shooting up into the multimillions per movie–reportedly $4 million to $ 7 million. Do those numbers make you chuckle? NICOLAS CAGE: I don’t chuckle. I have respect for the dollar.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development has expanded to three generations and more than 1,300 descendants of the original subjects; it is, according to the researchers, the longest-running in-depth study on human happiness in the world. From all the data, one very clear finding has emerged: Strong relationships are what make for a happy life. More than wealth, I.Q. or social class, it’s the robustness of our bonds that most determines whether we feel fulfilled.
Optimal wings for flying fruits — Appendages of seeds, fruits, and other diaspores (dispersal units) are essential for their wind dispersal, as they act as wings and enable them to fly. […] The link of the fruit’s sepal shape to flight performance, however, is as yet unknown.
“You’re going to have black snakes from time to time. It’s just a fact of life,” he advised me. “You’re going to have field mice. You’re in the country.” And if one of those black snakes pursues one of those field mice into my bedroom? He suggests I put a wet towel on the floor, wait for the snake to wrap itself in the towel and then remove it.
‘In fact, one of the big banks came to me and said, “Donald, you don’t have enough borrowings. Could we loan you $4 billion”?’ –Donald Trump
“Hey Jared! POTUS wants to trademark/own rights to below, I don’t know who to see – or ask…I don’t know who to take to,” the email from Scavino reads, according to a transcript of Kushner’s testimony to the committee, which was released by the panel on Friday.
Two phrases were bolded in the email: “Save America PAC!” and “Rigged Election!”
Kushner forwarded the request and discussed it on an email chain that included Eric Trump, the president’s son; Alex Cannon, a Trump campaign lawyer; Sean Dollman, the chief financial officer of Trump’s 2020 campaign; and Justin Clark, a Trump campaign lawyer.
“Guys - can we do ASAP please?” Kushner wrote.
Eric Trump responded, saying: “Both web URLs are already registered. Save America PAC was registered October 23 of this year. Was that done by the campaign?”
Dollman responded: “‘Save America PAC’ is already taken/registered, just confirming that. But we can still file for ‘Save America.’”
Kushner’s response, according to the transcript, was: “Go.”
pure self-defense
Another source of discomfort was our neighbors’ cats. Now, we are eminently social in our disposition, and enjoy our neighbors’ company very much. We like to spend a social evening with them and have them do the same by us. But not so their cats. We never interchanged civilities with them, their visits were too ill timed and frequent. Our ducklings were carried off in large numbers, and in pure self-defense we shot the cats. Of course, this made trouble in our neighbors’ families, especially the female portion, by whom it was promptly resented. The principle of “touch my dog, touch me,” was illustrated here in all its force. No amount of provocation ever justified us in their eyes in killing their cats. With pater familias it was different. His affections were not engaged. He recognized the necessity of the thing, laughed it off, and said it was all right. [Natural and Artificial Duck Culture, 1906]
The former nun also claimed Rupnik had asked her and another nun to have a threesome with him, saying they would replicate the three-way relationship among God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
Why do some people seem to be drawn to situations that are not good for them? […] hypotheses: people make dysfunctional choices 1) to process or master previous trauma, 2) out of habit and because of preferences for what is familiar, 3) to maintain a coherent view of themselves and the world, and 4) to avoid difficult emotions.
Two groups including 26 women and 25 men […] We found that the brains of women and men reacted differently to infants’ faces, and these differential areas are in facial processing, attention, and empathetic networks.
In the mid-1800s a German physician, Carl Wunderlich, measured axillary (armpit) temperatures from about 25,000 people and found that the average was 98.6˚ F (37˚ C). And so, we’ve believed that ever since. […] An analysis of 20 studies between 1935 and 1999 found that the average oral temperature was 97.5˚ F. Time to redefine normal body temperature?
Bitcoin has a maximum supply of 21 million. Current data shows that 19.1 million bitcoins have been mined to date. However, of that amount, it is estimated that between 3-4 million bitcoins have been lost forever. […] Others such as Satoshi Nakomoto, the creator of bitcoin, are believed to hold as much as 1 million bitcoin. This anonymous person has not published any communication since 2010 and many presume the famed character has passed away. […] a mining firm in China mines 3% of all bitcoin. It mines 650 bitcoins monthly with an estimated electric bill of almost $1.2 million.
as of September 19, 2022, MicroStrategy and its subsidiaries held approximately 130,000 Bitcoins, acquired at an aggregate purchase price of $3.98 billion, at an average purchase price of $30,639 per bitcoin.
Pink Sauce went viral on TikTok. But then it exploded
Cheerful Chatbots Don’t Necessarily Improve Customer Service
The chief executive of one of Europe’s biggest insurance companies has warned that cyber attacks, rather than natural catastrophes, will become “uninsurable” as the disruption from hacks continues to grow. “What will become uninsurable is going to be cyber”
balls to the walls
A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate — Make Sunsets is already attempting to earn revenue for geoengineering, a move likely to provoke widespread criticism.
Cassidy and Dylan Scott, a married couple from Huntsville, Alabama, just happen to have the same birthday. This week, they welcomed their first baby – on their birthday. — Their baby girl arrived on Dec. 18 […] While this phenomenon is rare, in 2017, another couple who shared a birthday also welcomed a baby on the same day – and it happened to be Dec. 18, just like the Scotts. […] The family’s birthday, Dec. 18, is actually a common one – ranking No. 56 out of all days […] Out of all the calendar days, including leap day on Feb. 29, the two least common birthdays are Jan. 1, ranking at No. 365, and Dec. 25, ranking at No. 366, according to Stiles. Leap day, which only occurs every four years, is also uncommon, ranking at No. 347.
Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (Stanford University): Gender-based language includes a range of words and phrases that are not helpful, and, in many cases, are exclusionary. […] Instead of “balls to the wall” consider using “accelerate efforts.” balls to the walls (Wiktionary): First attested in the 1960s in the context of aviation, in reference to ball-shaped grips on an aircraft’s joystick and throttle. Pushing the “balls to the wall” would put the engine at maximum power. Not related to the vulgar sense of balls (“testicles”).
All four tests classified ChatGPT’s answers to their questions as left-leaning.
“Google has a business model issue. If Google gives you the perfect answer to each query, you won’t click on any ads.” […] Google has been reluctant to share its technology broadly because, like ChatGPT and similar systems, it can generate false, toxic and biased information. LaMDA is available to only a limited number of people through an experimental app, AI Test Kitchen.
Bitcoin hashrate drops nearly 40% as deadly U.S. storm unplugs miners
Loni Goddard works at Kerala Ayurveda, a wellness company, and rents an apartment in Reno. In 2020, her one-bedroom apartment cost $950 with internet and cable. When she re-signed her lease in April, the rent rose to $1,490 — not including internet and cable.
How a Vermont farmer proved no snowflakes are alike
Why do bees die when they sting you?
Aliens haven’t contacted Earth because there’s no sign of intelligence here, new answer to the Fermi paradox suggests […] If life has evolved on many planets in the galaxy, then aliens are probably more interested in the ones where there are signs not just of biology but technology […] experts have offered other explanations for the missing aliens: Perhaps they visited Earth in the past, before humans evolved or were capable of recording the visit. Or maybe long-distance space travel is more difficult than believed. Perhaps aliens evolved advanced civilization too recently to make it to Earth. Or they’ve deliberately decided not to explore the cosmos. It’s even possible that they’ve killed themselves off.
The Phantom of Heilbronn
Google can now read your doctor’s bad handwriting
The results of GPT-3 are often unexpected and surprising. But are they creative? GPT-3 was not trained to look at meaning. It does not understand its training data. When asked the simple multiplication question “1111*2=?”, GPT-3 responded “22”.
Study finds AI assistants help developers produce code that’s more likely to be buggy
People have A.I. bots running that use ChatGPT to automatically reply to people’s tweets and breaking up by letting ChatGPT write their break up letter
the images are fed into a “pre-trained machine learning (ML) model” to generate “a collection of 1,000 new, non-existing shapes” derived from the initial sex toy dataset
Previous studies have shown that comic book bodies are supernormal stimuli, exaggerated in dimensions that are attractive to primarily male comic book consumers. We predicted that comic book women would have longer legs than comic book men and would have longer than average legs [and] that comic book women would be depicted as wearing heels or walking on tiptoe more often, as this further elongates the legs. […] 86%–88% of female characters were drawn as either wearing high heels or walking or standing on tiptoe.
Adults are buying toys for themselves, and it’s the biggest source of growth for the industry […] one-fourth of all toy sales annually […] toy makers such as Mattel have created lines just for these consumers.
DEA seized enough fentanyl to kill every person in the U.S. in 2022
With a flat fee of $70 for trips into Manhattan and a guaranteed stream of passengers, a ride to and from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport is one of the more lucrative journeys for the city’s cab drivers. But federal prosecutors say two 48-year-old Queens men found another way to profit from the crowd of taxis waiting long hours for passengers at the airport, conspiring with Russians to hack the dispatch system and allow drivers to cut ahead in line for a $10 payment.
The Genesis of East Village Drag: An oral history of the Pyramid Club
This case started off as a missing person investigation, in which the victim disappeared in Taiwan on November 29, 2019. I was hired in mid-December 2019 and filed a petition for conservatorship of her estate, according to law.
The Phantom of Heilbronn, often alternatively referred to as the “Woman Without a Face”, was a hypothesized unknown female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at numerous crime scenes in Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009. The only connection between the crimes was the presence of DNA from a single female, which had been recovered from 40 crime scenes, ranging from murders to burglaries.[…] in March 2009, the case took a new turn when, while trying to identify a corpse, investigators found the Phantom’s female DNA in fingerprints on a male asylum seeker’s application. They subsequently came to the conclusion that there was no mysterious criminal and the laboratory results were due to contamination of the cotton swabs used for DNA probing. The cotton swabs used by many state police departments were found to have been contaminated before shipping. They all came from the same factory. The DNA belonged to a woman who worked at the factory where they were made. [more]
Snakes have clitorises
Elon Musk asks Twitter investors for more money
A SpaceX flight attendant said Elon Musk exposed himself and propositioned her for sex, documents show. The company paid $250,000 for her silence.
KoGuan Leo, an Indonesian billionaire and the third-largest individual shareholder of Tesla, is calling for the electric carmaker’s CEO, Elon Musk, to step down as much of his attention is focused on Twitter lately.
Elon Musk sells $3.6bn of shares in electric car maker Tesla. It brings the total of Tesla stocks sold by Musk over the past year to almost $40bn. Musk remains Tesla’s biggest shareholder with a 13.4% stake.
Musk’s $5.7 Billion Mystery Gift Went to His Own Charity
I Asked ChatGPT To Explain Some Jokes to Me
DoNotPay, the company that bills itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer,” is launching a new AI-powered chatbot that can help you negotiate bills and cancel subscriptions without having to deal with customer service.
In order to protest AI image generators stealing artists work to train AI models, artists are deliberately generating AI art based on the IP of corporations (Disney, Nintendo, DC, and Marvel)
Stability AI plans to let artists opt out of Stable Diffusion 3 image training
AI search engines: You.com [about You.com], Metaphor, Talk to Books
Reducing the particles generated by flushing institutional toilets A previous study reported that institutional flush-O-meter (FOM) toilets can generate 3–12 times as many droplets as other toilets by splashing (large droplets) and bubble bursting (fine droplets). In this study, an aerosol suppression lid was evaluated to measure the reduction of particles by size using three metrics
Memories are stored in all different areas across the brain as networks of neurons called engrams. In addition to collecting information about incoming stimuli, these engrams capture emotional information. In a new study, Steve Ramirez, a neuroscientist at Boston University, found evidence that good and bad memories are stored in different regions of the hippocampus, a cashew-shaped structure that holds sensory and emotional information necessary for forming and retrieving memories. […] His team also found that they could manipulate memories by activating these regions. When he and his team activated the top area of the hippocampus, bad memories were less traumatic. Conversely, when they activated the bottom part, mice exhibited signs of long-last lasting anxiety-related behavioral changes.
Facial expressions may be an unreliable way to read emotions
Schizophrenia has been an evolutionary paradox: it has high heritability, but it is associated with decreased reproductive success. […] The etiology of schizophrenia has not been understood and there have been no major breakthroughs in the treatment of schizophrenia for 60 years. […] The new etiological synthesis of schizophrenia indicates that an interaction between host genotype, microbe infection, and chronic stress causes schizophrenia, with neuroinflammation and gut dysbiosis mediating this etiological pathway.
The Sovereign Military Order of Malta, commonly known as the Order of Malta or Knights of Malta — Though it possesses no territory, the order is often considered a sovereign entity of international law, as it maintains diplomatic relations with many countries
Isukiri took his place on the cross
Saudi Arabia ‘linear city’ More: The 100-mile-long metropolis promises to accommodate nine million residents + Flying taxis, robotic avatars and holograms + satellite images show that Saudi Arabia’s sci-fi megacity is well underway
Dramatron is a so-called “co-writing” tool that can generate character descriptions, plot points, location descriptions and dialogue. The idea is that human writers will be able to compile, edit and rewrite what Dramatron comes up with into a proper script. Think of it like ChatGPT, but with output that you can edit into a blockbuster movie script.
This summer, scientists grew an embryo in a lab without the use of sperm, or eggs, or a womb. It happened to be that of a mouse. But the species is of secondary importance. What matters is that using only stem cells, a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel forged something in a lab that budded a tail on day six, grew a beating heart by day eight, and even evinced the beginnings of a brain. — Breakthroughs of the Year
The researchers found that longer genes are linked to longer lifespans, and shorter genes are linked to shorter lifespans. The researchers uncovered this pattern across several animals, including humans, and across many tissues (blood, muscle, bone and organs, including liver, heart, intestines, brain and lungs) analyzed in the study.
Tiny spurts of exercise throughout the day are associated with significant reductions in disease risk. Those who engaged in one or two-minute bursts of exercise roughly three times a day, like speed-walking while commuting to work or rapidly climbing stairs, showed a nearly 50 percent reduction in cardiovascular mortality risk and a roughly 40 percent reduction in the risk of dying from cancer as well as all causes of mortality, compared with those who did no vigorous spurts of fitness.
South Koreans are about to get a year or two younger, thanks to a new law — At present it’s common for South Koreans to have not just one age, but three – an “international age,” a “Korean age” and a “calendar age.” But to end confusion, the country’s parliament has decreed that from June 2023 all official documents must use the standard “international age.” […] when asked their age in informal settings, most South Koreans will answer with their “Korean age,” which could be one or even two years older than their “international age.” Under this system, babies are considered a year old on the day they’re born, with a year added every January 1.
Founded in 2014 with a goal to reintroduce oysters — a billion of them — into the New York Harbor by 2035, the Billion Oyster Project is about giving spent oyster shells a second life. — “Oysters are just so much more than for your consumption. They clean the water, they provide habitat for other marine species, they are lessening that wave energy so that hopefully the storm that’s coming isn’t going to flood your basement” […] Sixty restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn participate in the Billion Oyster Project’s shell collection program, including Lighthouse BK in Williamsburg. Saving the leftover shells from the oysters that diners slurp provides the literal foundation for the oysters.
Khloe Kardashian and Kendall Jenner sit in a luxe doctor’s office with white walls. Behind them, a window opens onto another room containing a futuristic blue brain scanner. The sisters are gazing at the doctor, an energetic middle-aged balding man wearing a white coat. This is Dr. Daniel Amen, 68, a psychiatrist to stars who has also treated Justin Bieber, Bella Hadid, and Meghan Trainor. Amen offers “bespoke” mental health treatment informed by scans of the physical brain. […] “Kendall’s got a beautiful brain on the outside,” Amen says, gesturing at a computer screen showing four brightly colored images. “But if we look at her emotional brain, which is right here, it’s way too busy. Which is why she can struggle with anxiety.”
Insiders made millions from Justin Bieber’s NFT project. His fans are down almost 90%.
ovies sorted by the color of the film posters from light to dark
Because people have a need to glue things to other things
Shingō village is the location of what is purported to be the resting place of Jesus, the “Tomb of Christ.” — Jesus Christ did not die on the cross at Golgotha. Instead, a man alleged to be his brother, Isukiri, took his place on the cross, while Jesus escaped across Siberia to Mutsu Province, in northern Japan. Once in Japan, Jesus changed his name to Torai Tora Daitenku and became a garlic farmer. In Japan, Jesus allegedly married a woman named Miyuko, with whom he fathered three children, all daughters. After his death at an age exceeding 100, Jesus was said to have been interred into one of two grave mounds in the village.
Chapman remained at the scene reading The Catcher in the Rye
Scammers Are Scamming Other Scammers Out of Millions of Dollars — Frequently, there are “rip-and-run” scams, Wixey says, where the buyer doesn’t pay for what they’ve received or the seller gets the money but doesn’t send across what they sold. Other types of scams involve faked data or security exploits that don’t work.
What our studies showed is that perceptions of fashion-forwardness—of being in the know—can outweigh aesthetics when choosing a luxury brand item. Ugly has somehow become a signal of taste
Indonesia passes criminal code banning sex outside marriage — Sex outside marriage will carry a jail term of up to a year under the new laws, which take effect in three years. […] the new laws apply equally to locals and to foreigners living in Indonesia, or visiting holiday destinations such as Bali. […] unmarried couples are also banned from living together - an act for which people could be jailed for up to six months. Adultery will also be an offence for which people can be jailed.
Pentagon splits $9 billion cloud contract among Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon
BuzzFeed has only three quarters to go at current burn rates […] In December 2021, BuzzFeed went public via merger with a SPAC, and got, well, only $16 million in equity funding, of the $277 million that the SPAC itself raised during its IPO, as 94% of the SPAC shareholders chose to redeem their shares and get their money back, rather than watch BuzzFeed burn through their money […] At the time of SPAC merger, BuzzFeed’s implied valuation was a ridiculous $1.5 billion. Today, the market capitalization is down to $146 million.
this year 50% of firms across the world had tried to use ai in some way, up from 20% in 2017
The code that ChatGPT can’t write
To commemorate the centenary of Marcel Proust’s death, Christopher Prendergast celebrates his use of pink, how its tone shifts from innocence to themes of sexual need, before finally fading out to grey at the novel’s close.
On the evening of 8 December 1980 … The killer was Mark David Chapman, an American Beatles fan who was incensed by Lennon’s lavish lifestyle and his 1966 comment that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”. Chapman said he was inspired by the fictional character Holden Caulfield from J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, a “phony-killer” who despises hypocrisy. […] Chapman fired five hollow-point bullets from a .38 special revolver, four of which hit Lennon in the back. Chapman remained at the scene reading The Catcher in the Rye until he was arrested by the police.
Knights of the Road
To prepare for the depths of winter when food is scarce, many animals slow down, sleep through the cold or migrate to warmer locales. Not the common shrew. To survive the colder months, the animal eats away at its own brain, reducing the organ by as much as a fourth, only to regrow much of brain matter in the spring
DNA showed a mother was also her daughter’s uncle — The answer to that medical mystery, sparked by a confusing paternity test result, is “When the genes of a vanished twin brother live on in the mother’s DNA.” — such human “chimeras” — people with DNA from more than one embryo — could be more common than we thought.
Walking backwards has a surprising number of health benefits
Mutual Funds That Consistently Beat the Market? Not One of 2,132.
Computer Repair Technicians Are Stealing Your Data
Australia says law making Facebook and Google pay for news has worked
To build a great salad, start with lettuce or leafy greens. It may surprise you to learn that the type of greens you choose doesn’t really matter that much. Compared to other greens, iceberg lettuce probably has the fewest nutrients, but pretty much all lettuces are low in vitamins and minerals. Dark leafy greens like spinach have more micronutrients, but the type of iron in spinach is poorly absorbed, and there’s plenty of oxalate, so be careful if you’re prone to kidney stones.
To cope with the uncertainties of life, hobos developed a system of symbols they’d write with chalk or coal to provide fellow “Knights of the Road” with directions, help, and warnings.
“I sent in my manuscript, and the map along with it, to Messrs. Cassell. The proofs came, they were corrected, but I heard nothing of the map. I wrote and asked; was told it had never been received, and sat aghast. It is one thing to draw a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write up a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to examine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained in it, and with a pair of compasses, painfully design a map to suit the data. I did it; and the map was drawn again in my father’s office, with embellishments of blowing whales and sailing ships, and my father himself brought into service a knack he had of various writing, and elaborately FORGED the signature of Captain Flint, and the sailing directions of Billy Bones. But somehow it was never Treasure Island to me.”(Robert Louis Stevenson, My First Book: “Treasure Island,” 1894.)
imitator of appearances
Just asked ChatGPT to write a short story about AI taking over the world
asking the gptchat thingy how to plot a communist revolution
Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT
Browse passages from books using experimental AI
TLDR This (paraphraser, summuraizer)
Lex is a new word processor that has all the features you expect from a Google docs-style editing experience. But—it also has an AI thought partner built-in to help unlock your best writing. […] If you ever get stuck, just hit command+enter or type +++ and GPT-3 will fill in what it thinks should come next. […] Also, if you want to generate title ideas based on your document, just click the button to the right of the title of the doc. It’ll ask the AI to come up with some options.
SEO-optimized and plagiarism-free content for blogs, Facebook ads, Google ads, emails…
Richard Hughes Gibson argues that large-language-model technology “is a sophist, at least on Plato’s understanding—an ‘imitator of appearances,’ creating a ‘shadow-play of words’ and presenting only the illusion of sensible argument.
downblousing
Our observations show that visual sexual stimulus can trigger masturbation in capuchin monkeys. We observed a multi-male multi-female captive colony of 17 bearded capuchins between January and October 2014. Over this period, we registered 11 copulation events, 68 attempt copulations, and five masturbation events. The same low-ranking male (named Fu) performed all masturbation events.
UK to criminalize deepfake porn — Other abusive behaviors that will become explicitly illegal include “downblousing” (where photographs are taken down a women’s top without consent); and the installation of equipment, such as hidden cameras, to take or record images of someone without their consent.
Why would a multi-million-dollar fashion company like Balenciaga run ads for their “Object Line” using children holding teddy bears in bondage costumes? Why would they place a copy of a court document on child pornography in the ad? More: Balenciaga files $25M suit against production company for the inclusion in one of the ads of legal documents from a US Supreme Court decision on child porn laws. The two-page court summons doesn’t mention the BDSM teddy bears.
Doctors believe Bruce Lee may have died from drinking too much water
OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source of training data. The Minecraft AI learned to perform complicated sequences of keyboard and mouse clicks to complete tasks in the game, such as chopping down trees and crafting tools. It’s the first bot that can craft so-called diamond tools, a task that typically takes good human players 20 minutes of high-speed clicking—or around 24,000 actions.
Slow Drinking of Beer Attenuates Sedative Feeling
Genetically modified tobacco plant produces cocaine in its leaves — Researchers have reproduced the entire biochemical pathway for how coca plants make cocaine in another plant, which could help people manufacture the drug for scientific study
Nearly half of all psychiatric patients get a different diagnose within 10 years. […] “Mental disorders are dynamic. They change over the course of a life.” […] The study shows which development is probable and which is improbable for the 20 most common mental diagnoses.
Within the European Union, airlines will be able to install the latest 5G technology on their aircraft, allowing passengers to use their smartphones and other connected devices just as they do on the ground.
Google: 60% Of The Internet Is Duplicate
the first house 3D-printed from bio-based materials (wood fibers and bio-resins) — The entire structure was printed in four modules and assembled on-site in a few hours. Electricity was installed just two hours after the assembly, and the house was essentially usable within a day after being brought on-site.
The Al Naslaa rock formation is Earth’s most bizarre geological feature
“Severed Spots,”, by the Brooklyn collective known as MSCHF, is based on a spot print by Damien Hirst, whose spots MSCHF excised and sold as their own works. It’s in their first art-world show, at Gallery Perrotin in New York. Related: Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)
When AI Stole
British Airways Flight 5390, June 10, 1990 [photos] While the aircraft was flying over Didcot, Oxfordshire, an improperly installed windscreen panel separated from its frame causing the captain to be sucked out of the aircraft. The captain was held in place through the window frame for twenty minutes until the first officer landed at Southampton Airport.
In late June, Microsoft released a new kind of artificial intelligence technology that could generate its own computer code. Called Copilot, the tool was designed to speed the work of professional programmers. As they typed away on their laptops, it would suggest ready-made blocks of computer code they could instantly add to their own. […] Matthew Butterick, a programmer, designer, writer and lawyer in Los Angeles […] and a team of other lawyers filed a lawsuit that is seeking class-action status against Microsoft and the other high-profile companies that designed and deployed Copilot. Like many cutting-edge A.I. technologies, Copilot developed its skills by analyzing vast amounts of data. In this case, it relied on billions of lines of computer code posted to the internet. Mr. Butterick, 52, equates this process to piracy, because the system does not acknowledge its debt to existing work. His lawsuit claims that Microsoft and its collaborators violated the legal rights of millions of programmers who spent years writing the original code.
When AI Stole and Finished Your Drawing Then Calls You a Thief
24.6 million addresses of the total 47.9 million, are below purchase price on their investments. About 45% are in the money, which means they are boasting unrealized gains, while the rest are roughly at break-even[…]Previous bear markets ended with the majority of addresses being out of-the money. […] Past data, however, is no guarantee of future results
Expert Proposes a Method For Telling if We All Live in a Computer Program
Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year
“All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players;” — This quotation expresses a metaphor because the world is not literally a stage.
{ Alice Mann }
