Our current economic system does not serve humans well. As a community (fighting cruel wars in XXI centuries) or as the individual (born to compete against others, running through kindergarten to nursing home on SSRIs, painkillers and Ritalin) +
Have I missed something? Is it now normal for white, post-doc women to elbow-kick their love interest and colleague in the solar plexus? And a black male one at that? In a jaw-dropping scene of a Netflix series viewed worldwide? And the man passively folds in half, choking, +
Hats off to the colleagues at Haut et Court for pooling in an impressive amount of resources and talent to shoot the “Constellation” series for Apple+. However, the end result turned out as a pseudo sci-fi light-horror semi-drama that toys with quantum mechanics in low Earth orbit +
Wear the same outfit for a month to notice that no one notices. If it’s clean — no one cares. Even if your jeans got holes. Even if you’re a woman, certain that you need a new dress and a matching handbag every day. People +
Yann Le Cunn, a Chief AI Scientist at Meta, writes that only a few book authors make significant money from book sales, so most books should be freely available for download. The lost revenue for authors would be small, and the benefits to society large by comparison. +
We’ve had opposite extremes — capitalists & communists, Adam Smithians & Karl Marxists — completely miss the obvious. Humans are not rational, deterministic “utility functions” optimizing for individual or collective “good”. Free markets’ invisible hand will correct? +
Woha! Very unexpected reversal. Figma and Adobe have abandoned their proposed merger, after facing regulatory hurdles in Europe and the UK in particular, where the Competition and Markets Authority rightly determined the deal “would harm the design software market” +
Have you received “the call” from COP28′s final plenary assembly to “transition away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner”? No? Why not? By the way, the UNFCC gives us a 67% chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2°C, if global +
The Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival will be reducing the number of programs in its competitions. The National selection will go from 12 to 10 programs, and the International from 14 to 12. The second-largest French film festival, in terms of number of spectators +
Even online, the French struggle with “customer service”. A retailer of running shoes, i-Run, has been sending me monthly e-mails warning that the €8.29 credit I had after buying from them will expire today, if I do not re-order immediately. They’ve just sent me a +
“I’m a consumer, what’s wrong with that?” The way you consume? The quantity? The fact that luck gave you an opportunity to NOT be an animal, to use that neocortex to create a better world, maybe? +
As of 13 September 2023, UNESCO has verified damage to 289 cultural sites in Ukraine: 120 religious buildings, 27 museums, 109 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, 19 monuments, 13 libraries… In Odessa alone, a city near and dear to me from childhood +
Today, “Generative AI by Getty Images” launched on an NVIDIA Edify / Picasso framework, trained on Getty’s own stock of photographs. Same as previously done by Adobe. And Shutterstock. And… Send me an e-mail when you need a one-of-a-kind, human-made +
Fascinating how the film “Limitless” by Neil Burger starring Bradley Cooper paints a dreamy picture of a struggling artist with an external solution to everything — a pill, stolen by the artist — to be used by the artist to pursue: 1) money 2) sex 3) power… and his art? +
What would a trilingual like myself do with a ChatGPT? Torture it with correspondence tests, of course. Here’s the result: 🤪 ChatGPT: If we were to use English proficiency as a base and attribute a numerical score of 100 to it, I would rank my +
Oh, now Twitter asks me to pay 100 USD per month to read and backup my own tweets on my server. Since early July 2023, I can no longer GET my own posts, sort them into 3 distinct languages and store them in my own +
When I saw a “person missing” announcement in my Facebook feed, I somehow didn’t quite understand… “What’s going on? How so?” The usual, the so commonly trivial was going on — the death of an interesting person who did so much for Russian culture. +
ChatGPT. It’s a chat. Not AI. It’s not Intelligent. It’s not even a knowledge base of Humanity, like Wikipedia or PubMed. It’s a collection of statistical models of knowledge. Some licensed, some stolen*. Oh, and no one understands how the inside works. The chat predicts +
You know what? Russians still living in Russia, the remaining 140 million of them, don’t care about the war. Nor do they care about their rulers or the Western sanctions. Or the Western companies having left or banned. Russia is stuck in yet another historical +
Everybody thought: first AI would do physical labor, then some cognitive labor, then the really hard cognitive labor, like programming… And then, last of all, but maybe never, because it’s magical and human… was creativity +
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