The effort to impose age-verification on websites by Meta has a nefarious hidden agenda. The mysterious TBOTE Project is investigating this and suspects that the real goal is to gain control over the operating system. It's not clear what TBOTE stands for – one source says it's "The Beginning of the End". Okayyyy....
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Will datacenters of the future be powered by organic brain cells? Apparently, the argument in favor is that power consumption is much lower. One additional advantage is that "wetware" will be easier to destroy if the AI turns against us. Right?
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Businesses rush to rehire staff after regretted AI-driven cuts. I predicted this. For one, AI has not yet matured to where it can replace humans. At this stage, it's still an effective force multiplier for humans. In a few years, however, AI capabilities may subsume human ability, and a second wave of layoffs may occur. But clearly, HR jumped the gun.
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The Kelly Criterion. This is must reading for those who like to play around on Polymarket or Kalshi. (What happened to PredictIt?) And someone wrote a follow-up article: Never go full Kelly. Know what you are doing when you bet large sums of money in the prediction market.
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One of the limitations of raw LLM-based assistants is that they don't remember. Memory is lost when the session closes, or even after you enter a query. Many of the public LLM assistants get around this with long context windows, so that your last query may still be there when the new query is entered and appended. But you may want a longer memory, like that of a human. So someone created a memory library that works with LangChain (one of the standard Retrieval Augmented Generation systems). And it stores older memories in a vector database for retrieval later. I'll give this a try and see how robust it is.
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Coffezilla reviews Deepfake Scams. We can't believe anything we see on media anymore. This is going to be a BIG problem for the news media. How will they solve it?
And Hollywood is facing an existential crisis, as the future suggests that there won't be a need for a motion picture industry. This could be a good thing, though. Other people should be able to tell compelling stories, too.
Related to this is that ChatGPT relies on Wikepedia for facts about Islamists, but Islamist are the source for what Wikipedia writes.
See the problem there?
See the problem there?
Even writers groups are wondering how it will be possible to prove human authorship.
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Purity Spiral. There's actually a term for what we are seeing all the time.
A purity spiral is a hypothesized form of groupthink in which it becomes more beneficial to hold certain views than to not hold them, and more extreme views are rewarded while expressing doubt, nuance, or moderation is punished (a process sometimes called "moral outbidding"). It is argued that this feedback loop leads to members competing to demonstrate the zealotry or purity of their views.
Agents are a new threat to security. Now instead of just one hacker trying to break in, imagine a swarm of AI agents unleashing their combined ingenuity and persistence. That's how they broke into McKinsey.
Some colleges are cutting back to three years now. Is it because students can get the necessary education in three years instead of four? Is it to address the unrelenting increases in the cost of a college education? Is it an effort to tailor one's curriculum to one's needs? Some countries already offer 3 years programs, so there is competition as well.
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Not good. Some people are noticing that racial and cultural biases are affecting who gets hired or promoted at tech firms.
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Apparently the 14 inch MacBook can't handle the M5 chip. It gets too hot and the chip slows down. Not what you want. Gotta get the 16 inch which can handle heat better.
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Anthropic is also starting an educational effort. The Anthropic Institute. Better to help people learn how to code the Anthropic way. Google has been doing this. Microsoft, too.
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Oregon has lost thousands of taxpaying commuters from Clark County. It's not just remote work. Tax data indicate that less people are working at Oregon businesses.
Few other places in the U.S. have performed that poorly. Employment in Clark County, for example, topped pre-pandemic highs by 2021 and is now up about 10% from 2019.
They're working at Clark County businesses.
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Here's an opinion from an insider as to what is wrong with Oregon schools. As to universities, despite declining enrollment, they still keep adding staff. "In the face of meager public funding, that disconnect puts upward pressure on tuition." I'll bet.
Related: Is Oregon among the worst states for student loan debt? Not the worst, but near the top.
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