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Daily Archives: January 9, 2023

How to keep your phone charged and working in extreme storms

Washington Post: “More storms are expected to drench the West Coast this week as parts of California are still dealing with flooding, destruction and power outages caused by recent atmospheric rivers. It’s the latest extreme weather to hit the country this winter. A powerful winter “bomb cyclone” pummeled the central U.S. and Great Lakes region in December. A smartphone can be a lifeline in these types of natural disasters, connecting you to assistance and real-time resources. Unfortunately, events like winter storms, hurricanes, wildfires and heat waves can take out the power grids and cell networks phones rely on to do that work. It’s an increasingly common situation. More than 40 percent of Americans live in a county that was struck by climate-related extreme weather last year, a Post analysis of federal data showed. If you’re preparing for, in the midst of, or recovering from dangerous weather or climate disasters, here are some of the best ways to get your phone in the best shape to help you.”

Chris Olah on what the hell is going on inside neural networks

80,000 Hours: “Big machine learning models can identify plant species better than any human, write passable essays, beat you at a game of Starcraft 2, figure out how a photo of Tobey Maguire and the word ‘spider’ are related, solve the 60-year-old ‘protein folding problem’, diagnose some diseases, play romantic matchmaker, write solid computer code,… Continue Reading

A.I. Is Becoming More Conversational. But Will It Get More Honest?

The New York Times: “In late November, OpenAI, a San Francisco artificial intelligence lab, unveiled a bot called ChatGPT that left more than a million people feeling as if they were chatting with another human being. Similar technologies are under development at Google, Meta and other tech giants. Some companies have been reluctant to share… Continue Reading

Microsoft’s new AI can simulate anyone’s voice with 3 seconds of audi

Ars Technica: “On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person’s voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything—and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker’s emotional tone.… Continue Reading

Courts Find That Twitter Can Restrict More Than Just Your Character Count

ABA:  “The 21st century court system has seen a surge of internet-related cases as websites and social media platforms continue to connect more individuals around the globe. While only 5 percent of adults in the United States reported using social media in 2005, the number has now skyrocketed to more than 70 percent. Today, people… Continue Reading