Tiny country with a sad succession of quick profit schemes, corruption, excess, and environmental ruin; a microcosm of earth's plight.
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Is technology stealing or creating jobs?
Rather than AI replacing jobs,
6:19 what this author is pushing: harness the progress of technology [AI] in the interests of shared prosperity.
Saturday, December 30, 2023
Paragraphica - Bjørn Karmann
Intriguing, and yet oddly dehumanizing, idea for a camera that generates a paragraph of information about your geolocation; then generates an image of what the AI thinks you might be looking at.
NYTimes: A.I. Can Make Art That Feels Human. Whose Fault Is That?
A.I. Can Make Art That Feels Human. Whose Fault Is That?
"A.I. cannot innovate. All it can produce are prompt-driven approximations and reconstitutions of preexisting materials... A.I. might be the best thing to happen to culture in years — that is, if these perpetual mediocrity machines, these supercharged engines of cliché, end up pressing us to revalue the things humans alone can do."
-Jason Farago
Wednesday, December 27, 2023
Flywheel effect
"flywheel effect. [Uranium investment] is a very small sector and when money starts flowing into the ETFs, that automatically leads to buying of the included equities and the included Sprott physical uranium fund. Sprott will then have to buy uranium on spot, which leads to higher uranium prices, which in turn leads to more money pouring into the ETFs"
Tuesday, December 26, 2023
Speaker Diarization in Speech Processing
My voice recorder app on my Android phone recently upgraded to labeling speakers in real time in the recording (see image.) As I watched it work, it would assume that one person was continuing to speak, then suddenly change its mind and go back and label a sentence as a different speaker.
This process, called "speaker diarization" seems endlessly complex to me (and is so easy for human brains that we take it for granted.) The program would have to detect when a new speaker is speaking, look for patterns in their speech that are unique, then analyze subsequent recorded speech to match that pattern and label the speaker.
Just recognizing when one person stops and another starts seems very complex to me. And it seems from this description that it's constantly recalculating if the current recording is continued speech from one speaker, or another speaker has started.
As I watched my voice recorder transcribe, it was surprisingly good at this - even when two people had overlapping banter and fast back-and-forth conversation. Amazing for handheld technology.
Monday, December 25, 2023
How Temu makes money
14:43 Temu is gearing up to launch social shopping here in the US - a wildly successful shopping model used by (parent company) Penduoduo in China, [which takes shopping] to another level [through] group buying where you can band together with friends and family in order to earn quantity discounts - referred to as 'team up, price down' " - or "social commerce"
Friday, December 22, 2023
Remote village in Madagascar
Intriguing video-journal essay - a journey trying to get any information about a geologic oddity in Madagascar. It took going there in person to solve the mystery.
22:19 only a small portion of people live within 2km of an all-season road in Madagascar. This staggering difference from first-world countries tells you a lot.
Fighting obesity
3:38 Chile instituted a ban on child-focused advertising of processed foods, resulting in a 24% consumption reduction.
Thursday, December 21, 2023
How to avoid pickpockets
Good advice whenever taking public transit
1. Avoid crowded areas
2. 3:21 avoid groups of 2 or 3 that are not looking at their phones but are looking at the crowd around them (and don't let them get behind you)
3. 4:32 don't stand near the door, where a picture can escape easily after striking
4. 6:23 pay attention when someone is blocking the exit, making the crowd tighter
5. 8:00 beware at ticket booths where people have their wallets out; have a friend stand guard watching behind you.
Wednesday, December 20, 2023
Innovative packing material
Simple, practical design for packing paper that unfolds when you pull on it, and interlocks with itself.
Tuesday, December 19, 2023
Lifetime greenhouse gas emissions of an EV compared to an internal combustion
Even if the electricity is generated from coal, the carbon footprint of an electric vehicle is lower over its lifetime despite the high environmental cost of manufacturing the EV.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-27/comparing-electric-cars-and-petrol-cars/103746132
Monday, December 18, 2023
Releasing millions of fruit flies
Reducing fruit fly infestation by 90% requires dropping 24 million (350 pounds of) sterilized flies every day throughout the growing season. The plane is traveling at 160mph, but the fruit flies must obviously survive this, since the program is successful.
4:01 this achieves one sterile male every 40 m²
And here's a similar program to eradicate only the dangerous mosquitoes. See 5:54 in
Sunday, December 17, 2023
Smartphones-eavesdropping conspiracy debunked
This interesting article debunks the conspiracy theory that our smartphones are listening to us in the background. It explains lots of ways the servers could find out what we're talking about. https://usa.kaspersky.com/blog/smartphones-eavesdropping/18320/
And, from that article, a link to the long list of activities that Google has tracked on your device today:
Auto dealer profits
Car dealerships have had lawmakers on their side for decades, shifting the risk from dealers to manufacturers, and becoming profitable behemoths, with profits outranking some car makers like Mazda and Subaru. A shift is under way, prompted by Tesla, for automakers to sell directly to consumers.
Thursday, December 14, 2023
NYTimes: Who Gets the Water in California? Whoever Gets There First.
Who Gets the Water in California? Whoever Gets There First.
"in no state does rainfall vary more each year, swinging between deluge and drought in a cycle that global warming is intensifying at both ends."
"Californians are being forced to confront the limitations of nature's endowment in new and urgent ways."
"researchers estimate that more than half a million acres of farmland may need to be taken out of cultivation by 2040 to stabilize the region's aquifers."
"In their section of the valley, the two carrot growers have used more water in recent decades than everyone else combined."
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
Visualized: Global CO2 Emissions Through Time (1950–2022)
Very interesting to see these carbon outputs over time.
Friday, December 8, 2023
Engine rebuild time-lapse
I really like watching these engine build time-lapse videos, and this one is particularly well done with a moving camera. It's an incredible but if machinery and a whole lot of parts to keep track of!
Brain damage and art
An artist becomes obsessed with painting strawberries, and Bolero wrote the very repetitive piece "Ravel" Both people soon developed dementia.
Likewise, in this podcast, they explore how artists changed their art, sometimes for the better after specific brain injuries.
Thursday, December 7, 2023
Brain adapts to a new thumb
6:00 The brain quickly adapts to the presence of a new extra thumb on your hand, and actually changes how it maps the hand and foot.
Monday, December 4, 2023
Sunday, December 3, 2023
Friday, December 1, 2023
Charring food for more flavor - chicken cutlets.
Nice recipe for chicken cutlets. Start at 4:11 if you don't have time for the background on blackening and charring food.
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