Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, February 17, 2024 -Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: February 2024
Meet Goody-2, the AI too ethical to discuss literally anything
TechCrunch: “Every company or organization putting out an AI model has to make a decision on what, if any, boundaries to set on what it will and won’t discuss. Goody-2 takes this quest for ethics to an extreme by declining to talk about anything whatsoever. The chatbot is clearly a satire of what some perceive… Continue Reading
How to discover weird and cool places near you
PopSci: “You might think there’s nothing interesting where you live. You’re probably wrong. Every place on Earth has an interesting story to tell—the hard part is finding them. There are all kinds of apps and websites that recommend activities to tourists, and there’s a good chance that your town hosts at least some tourists. Why… Continue Reading
Charted: The Approval Ratings of World Leaders in 2024
The Approval Ratings of World Leaders in 2024. “What are the approval ratings of world leaders in 2024? Morning Consult set out to answer the question, surveying people from 15 major countries around the world. Figures in the dataset are rounded for simplicity. Data was collected from December 13, 2023 to January 2, 2024. Approval… Continue Reading
Why Charging Your Gadgets Over 80% Is Such a Bad Idea
IFixIt: “Charging your phone’s battery to 100% is drastically shortening its useful life. But the fix is easy, and while auto companies have known about this and mitigated its consequences for some time, now most major smartphone brands—including Apple, Samsung, and Google—are finally jumping on board. When we think about battery longevity, we think about… Continue Reading
Mapping Soot and Smog Pollution in the United States
Earth Justice: “Under the Clean Air Act, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must set standards that protect public health from common air pollutants, such as fine particulate matter (also known as soot) and ground-level ozone (also known as smog). On Feb. 7, the EPA strengthened the annual particulate matter standard from 12 micrograms per cubic meter… Continue Reading
‘Humanity’s remaining timeline?
The Guardian – It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse: “It’s January. I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling… Continue Reading
OpenAI shows off life-like videos made with AI
OpenAI – “Creating video from text. Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions. Read the Technical Report – Video generation models as world simulators. We explore large-scale training of generative models on video data. Specifically, we train text-conditional diffusion models jointly on videos and images of variable… Continue Reading
Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies
The Atlantic [read free] “By now, December’s congressional hearing about anti-Semitism at universities, during which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT all claimed that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university’s policies only “depending on the context,” is already a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to… Continue Reading
How the Smithsonian Is Helping Black Americans Trace Their Roots
Smithsonian Magazine – Free sessions hosted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture offer visitors advice on researching their genealogy..Genealogy researchers use military records, birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, wills, legal and court documents, and census records to help piece together the past. The resources referenced by NMAAHC’s team don’t currently… Continue Reading
How to Make Calls and Texts From Your Smartphone Without Cell Service
How to Geek: “Key Takeaways Use Google Voice to make calls and send texts using only Wi-Fi, eliminating the need for a cellphone carrier. Android’s Wi-Fi Assistant feature and Wi-Fi hotspots can make it easier to always have access to Wi-Fi. Google Voice is not the only option; other apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp… Continue Reading
OMB stands up first online database of all federal programs
Federal News Network: “It took 13 years — with some stops, starts and stumbles in between — but as of today, the federal government now has a single website designed to deliver detailed, searchable information about all federal programs. The Office of Management and Budget flipped the switch Thursday on the new Federal Program Inventory,… Continue Reading
