I remember when the Copenhagen Wheel came out. Now there is this Clip. Looks weird and will probably fall off (and break) unexpectedly, but this is version 1. We'll see.
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Kara Swisher was one of the people that broke the Sam Altman story last fall. Now maybe her reading on the whole story is suspect? That's what some people think.
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Biomedical paper retractions have quadrupled in 20 years — why? Probably because AI has made it easier to generate papers than ever before. Maybe it's because there's also better fraud detection software? And folks like Sholto David are especially good at calling it out.
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Every so often, you come across someone describing their attempts to eliminate Google from their lives. Here's another one. It's possible to find suitable alternatives, except for YouTube. There is still nothing else that replaces it.
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AI Uncensored. Here's a search engine that purports to give you the unvarnished truth, without any DEI filtering, or any other filtering. You get what it's been trained on. But what has it been trained on? What LLM model is it based on? Can't tell, and there is no info I an find. FreedomGPT does something similar. You can look under the hood here.
Here's another example of why you must verify what an AI says. A man lost money in a scam for believing he had Facebook's customer support number, even when he was using Meta's own Llama3 on their own site. Everything must be verified, or else it could be false. Remember, LLMs only generate responses that LOOK LIKE they could be correct.
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It's disquieting that we're only now learning about a major hack that happened last year. Hundreds of internet routers were destroyed. The perpetrators are either unknown, or no one is saying.
And here's a recent major hacking of Santander Bank. What's going on?
Oregon defendants without a publicly-appointed attorney must be set free. Another consequence of Oregon not being able to hire qualified people for key positions. There are consequences for making Oregon an unliveable state. When Oregon needed healthcare providers so that they could get Medicaid established, they defined providers loosely – physician assistants, naturopaths, optometrists, dentists – almost anyone with a white coat, it seemed. Why can't they do something similar for attorneys, like paralegals? That's got to be better than setting criminals free. More here.
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Nice article on Gordon's Fireplace Shop, which is such an icon now. It's Portland's symbol – the Taj Mahal of the city. It's a monument to Ted Wheeler and Mike Schmidt. We should just encase it in glass and preserve it.
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Science is unhappy about "superspreaders" of "fake news", and identifies Gateway Pundit and Alex Jones InfoWars. InfoWars is for entertainment, but Gateway Pundit just publishes news that the mainstream media would not publish, because it makes conservatives and Trump look good. But it's not misinformation. I suspect Science magazine wants to be the arbiter of what it real news. Twitter and TikTok do more fake stuff than these two websites, and thank goodness we have Comminity Notes now.
Here's an example of people having a discussion about whether a radio station that broadcasts the time is an American idea. Apparently it is, but the person defending that position has to qualify his statement with "I’m not particularly patriotic, but this kind of thing feels particularly American." Why not just say it feels American and be proud of it? Afraid of being tagged "right-wing"?
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Dream on, Portland. Buildings like these are for cities where the people respect property and have low crime. And you can't even afford these now, can you?
