Author: Robin Edgar
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NL Museum Temporarily Swapped Girl with Pearl Earring With AI Art and Luddites didn’t like it – sounds like art pushing boundries
A Netherlands museum is facing criticism for selecting an AI-generated piece of art to temporarily take the place of the renowned Girl with a Pearl Earring painting. The artwork was created by Johannes Vermeer in 1665 and is usually located at the Mauritshuis Museum but is on loan at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until June…
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Google adds ChatGPT AI rival PaLM to Docs, Gmail, API and more
Google has promised to offer API-level access to its large language model PaLM so that developers can build it into their apps and workflows, and thus make the ChatGPT-like text-emitting tech available to world-plus-dog. The web giant is also threatening to bake the model’s content-generating capabilities into Google Docs, Gmail, and more. […] On Tuesday,…
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Anthropic launches Claude, a chatbot to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT
Anthropic, a startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees, today launched something of a rival to the viral sensation ChatGPT. Called Claude, Anthropic’s AI — a chatbot — can be instructed to perform a range of tasks, including searching across documents, summarizing, writing and coding, and answering questions about particular topics. In these ways, it’s similar to…
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OpenAI Levels Up, commercialises more With Newly Released GPT-4
[…] On Tuesday, the company unveiled GPT-4, an update to its advanced AI system that’s meant to generate natural-sounding language in response to user input. The company claimed GPT-4 is more accurate and more capable of solving problems. It even inferred that ChatGPT performs better than most humans can on complicated tests. OpenAI said GPT-4…
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‘Counterportation’: Quantum breakthrough paves way for world-first experimental wormhole
[…] The invention, by a University of Bristol physicist, who gave it the name “counterportation,” provides the first-ever practical blueprint for creating in the lab a wormhole that verifiably bridges space, as a probe into the inner workings of the universe. By deploying a novel computing scheme, revealed in the journal Quantum Science and Technology,…
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AlphaGo pushed human Go players to become more creative
Earlier this year, an amateur Go player decisively defeated one of the game’s top-ranked AI systems. They did so using a strategy developed with the help of a program researchers designed to probe systems like KataGo for weaknesses. It turns out that victory is just one part of a broader Go renaissance that is seeing…
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Unique image obtained by scientists with high-speed camera shows how lightning rods work
[…] “The image was captured on a summer evening in São José dos Campos [in São Paulo state] while a negatively charged lightning bolt was nearing the ground at 370 km per second. When it was a few dozen meters from ground level, lightning rods and tall objects on the tops of nearby buildings produced…
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Lawyers grasping at straws here: ‘Robot lawyer’ DoNotPay is being sued by a law firm because it ‘does not have a law degree’. Yup, AI really is coming to get you, scum.
DoNotPay, which describes itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer,” has been accused of practicing law without a license. It’s facing a proposed class action lawsuit filed by Chicago-based law firm Edelson on March 3 and published Thursday on the website of the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of San…
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People Were Unwittingly Implanted With bits of plastic by Stimwave in Medical Scam
Chronic pain patients were implanted with “dummy” pieces of plastic and told it would ease their pain, according to an indictment charging the former CEO of the firm that made the fake devices with fraud. Laura Perryman, the former CEO of Stimwave LLC, was arrested in Florida on Thursday. According to an FBI press release,…
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Telehealth startup Cerebral shared millions of patients’ data with advertisers since 2019
Cerebral has revealed it shared the private health information, including mental health assessments, of more than 3.1 million patients in the United States with advertisers and social media giants like Facebook, Google and TikTok. The telehealth startup, which exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic after rolling lockdowns and a surge in online-only virtual health…
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Newly discovered enzyme that turns air into electricity, providing a new clean source of energy
Australian scientists have discovered an enzyme that converts air into energy. The finding, published today in the journal Nature, reveals that this enzyme uses the low amounts of the hydrogen in the atmosphere to create an electrical current. This finding opens the way to create devices that literally make energy from thin air. The research…
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With the help of OpenAI, Discord is finally adding loads of novel functionalities
[…] Starting next week, the company will begin rolling out a public experiment that will augment Clyde, the built-in bot Discord employs to notify users of errors and respond to their slash commands, with conversational capabilities. Judging from the demo it showed off, Discord envisions people turning to Clyde for information they would have obtained…
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Knots smaller than human hair make materials unusually tough and (de|re)formable
[…] In the latest advance in nano- and micro-architected materials, engineers at Caltech have developed a new material made from numerous interconnected microscale knots. The knots make the material far tougher than identically structured but unknotted materials: they absorb more energy and are able to deform more while still being able to return to their…
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First Complete Map of a Fly Brain Has Uncanny Similarities to AI Neural Networks
[…] An interdisciplinary team of scientists have released a complete reconstruction and analysis of a larval fruit fly’s brain, published Thursday in the journal Science. The resulting map, or connectome, as its called in neuroscience, includes each one of the 3,016 neurons and 548,000 of the synapses running between neurons that make up the baby…
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US House reps, staff health data stolen in cyberattack
Health data and other personal information of members of Congress and staff were stolen during a breach of servers run by DC Health Care Link and are now up for sale on the dark web. The FBI is investigating the intrusion, which came to light Wednesday after Catherine Szpindor, the House of Representatives’ chief administrative…
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Women in trouble now: Scientists create mice with two fathers after making eggs from male cells
Scientists have created mice with two biological fathers by generating eggs from male cells, a development that opens up radical new possibilities for reproduction. The advance could ultimately pave the way for treatments for severe forms of infertility, as well as raising the tantalising prospect of same-sex couples being able to have a biological child…
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Holy shit: German Courts saying DNS Service (Quad9) Is Implicated In Any Copyright Infringement At The Domains It Resolves
Back in September 2021 Techdirt covered an outrageous legal attack by Sony Music on Quad9, a free, recursive, anycast DNS platform. Quad9 is part of the Internet’s plumbing: it converts domain names to numerical IP addresses. It is operated by the Quad9 Foundation, a Swiss public-benefit, not-for-profit organization. Sony Music says that Quad9 is implicated…
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YouTube Chills the Darned Hell Out On Its Cursing Policy, but you still can’t fucking say fuck
Google’s finally rolling back its unpopular decree against any kinds of profanity in videos, making it harder for any creators used to offering colorful sailor’s speech in videos from monetizing content on behalf of its beloved ad partners. The only thing is, Google still seems to think the “f-word” is excessively harsh language, so sorry…
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How this UK newspaper publisher uses AI to generate articles
Reach, the owner of the UK’s Daily Mirror and Daily Express tabloids among other newspapers, has started publishing articles with the help of AI software on one of its regional websites as it scrambles to cut costs amid slipping advertising revenues. Three stories written with the help of machine-learning tools were published on InYourArea.co.uk, which…
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Diving: how to prevent water in your ears and improve your equalizing
Recently I went on a liveaboard with some extremely experienced divers, most of which had 400 or more dives logged. One of my problems with diving is that I am an extremely slow equalizer, which means that I have to descend extremely slowly, especially at around 5m and again at 10m depth. Another problem I…
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When Given The Choice, Most Authors Reject Excessively Long Copyright Terms
Recently, Walled Culture mentioned the problem of orphan works. These are creations, typically books, that are still covered by copyright, but unavailable because the original publisher or distributor has gone out of business, or simply isn’t interested in keeping them in circulation. The problem is that without any obvious point of contact, it’s not possible to…
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Texas Bill Would Make ISPs censor any abortion information
Last week, Texas introduced a bill that would make it illegal for internet service providers to let users access information about how to get abortion pills. The bill, called the Women and Child Safety Act, would also criminalize creating, editing, or hosting a website that helps people seek abortions. If the bill passes, internet service…
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Florida bill would make bloggers who are paid to write about elected officials register with ethics commission
A proposed law in Florida would force bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis and other elected officials to register with a state office and file monthly reports or face fines of $25 per day. The bill was filed in the Florida Senate Tuesday by Senator Jason Brodeur, a Republican. If enacted, the proposed law…
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JPMorgan Chase ‘requires workers give 6 months notice’
A veteran JPMorgan Chase banker fumed over the financial giant’s policy requiring certain staffers to give six months’ notice before being allowed to leave for another job. The Wall Street worker, who claims to earn around $400,000 annually in total compensation after accumulating 15 years of experience, griped that the lengthy notice period likely means…
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40-passenger hydrogen electric plane completes maiden flight
Mere weeks after achieving experimental airworthiness certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Universal Hydrogen has successfully taken its 40-passenger regional hydrogen electric plane to the skies. The aircraft took off from Washington state this morning and ascended to an altitude of 3,500 mean sea level (MSL) before safely landing, as you can see in…
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