chat: AI news

The inexorable march of artificial intelligence will continue to drive demand for chips and the materials in its supply chain. One question to ponder is whether Spruce Pine can keep up. How did this unassuming North Carolina town gain such an outsized role in the global semiconductor supply chain?  The answer is its unique mineral deposits, which formed 380 million years ago during the collision of Africa and North America. The intense heat and lack of water during their formation created quartz rock of unparalleled purity.   These rocks are extracted from the ground and turned into quartz gravel, which is then processed into a fine sand. The silicon is separated from other minerals and then goes through a final milling. The final product is a powder that is shipped to refineries.

Udemy, an e-learning platform with more than 250,000 online classes, recently announced that it would train generative AI on the classes that its users contribute to the site.   Not only were class teachers automatically opted in to having their classes used as training, Udemy said teachers would have only a three-week “window” to opt-out of training. That window has now passed.  “We want to officially announce that the opt-out period for our Generative AI Program (GenAI Program) begins today, August 21st, and goes through September 12th. The choice to participate in the GenAI program is yours. If you want to participate, no action is needed!,” Udemy said in a post on its community forums August 21.  In an “Instructor Generative AI Policy” document, it says it plans to offer “Annual Periods designated by us” during which instructors can opt-out of having their classes trained on, and said that when people opt-out of training, it will remove the instructors’ classes from i...

"Our work examines the efficacy of employing advanced machine learning methods to solve captchas from Google's reCAPTCHAv2 system .  "We evaluate the effectiveness of automated systems in solving captchas by utilizing advanced YOLO models for image segmentation and classification.  "Our main result is that we can solve 100% of the captchas, while previous work only solved 68-71%.  "Furthermore, our findings suggest that there is no significant difference in the number of challenges humans and bots must solve to pass the captchas in reCAPTCHAv2. This implies that current AI technologies can exploit advanced image-based captchas.  "We also look under the hood of reCAPTCHAv2, and find evidence that reCAPTCHAv2 is heavily based on cookie and browser history data when evaluating whether a user is human or not. The code is provided alongside this paper." 

Artificial intelligence may have shown the would-be-leader of the free world who's really in charge, after rogue robo-taxis halted the motorcade of US vice-president —and Democratic Party presidential candidate —Kamala Harris. ABC7 News Bay Area reported that as Harris's motorcade passed through San Francisco on Friday night, it encountered a Waymo self-driving taxi that failed to make a U-turn.   The veep's motorcade stopped, and traffic banked up behind the stricken robot until a police officer drove it away. The report above mentions a second confused Waymo getting in the vice-president's way and delaying her journey.

"We formally prove herein, creating systems with human-like or human-level cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable.   "This means that any factual AI systems created in the short-run are at best decoys.  "When we think these systems capture something deep about ourselves and our thinking, we induce distorted and impoverished images of ourselves and our cognition. In other words, AI in current practice is deteriorating our theoretical understanding of cognition rather than advancing and enhancing it.  "The situation could be remediated by releasing the grip of the currently dominant view on AI and by returning to the idea of AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science.  "In reclaiming this older idea of AI, however, it is important not to repeat conceptual mistakes of the past (and present) that brought us to where we are today." 

"For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men."  —Herman Melville

"Google is serving AI-generated images of mushrooms when users search for some species, a risky and potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to figure out what mushrooms are safe to eat.  "The AI images were flagged by the moderator of the r/mycology Reddit community, dedicated to 'the love of fungi,' including, 'hunting, foraging, [and] cultivation'.   "The moderator, who goes by MycoMutant, noticed that when they searched for the Coprinus comatus a fungus commonly known as shaggy ink cap or shaggy mane, the first image in the Google snippet, which is featured above the search results, was an AI-generated image that looked nothing like a real Coprinus comatus. "As we’ve seen in other instances when Google search surfaced AI-generated images and presented them to users in results as if they were real, Google pulled the AI-generated image from a site where it was plainly flagged as such.  "The image was hosted on the stock image site ...

"A negligence-based approach is needed because it directs legal scrutiny on the actual persons responsible for creating and managing AI systems.   "A step in that direction is found in California’s AI safety bill, which specifies that AI developers shall articulate and implement protocols that embody the  "developer’s duty to take reasonable care to avoid producing a covered model or covered model derivative that poses an unreasonable risk of causing or materially enabling a critical harm"   (emphasis added) .  "Although tech leaders have opposed California’s bill, courts don’t need to wait for legislation to allow negligence claims against AI developers." 

"We should try emulating, in this new ecosystem, the one and only method that ever reduced misinformation and predation among organic humans:  "Again, I am calling for reciprocal accountability on cyber beings, applied by cyber beings. "While I may be alone in offering institutional innovations to achieve this, some groups have lately been coming up with practical methods. To pinpoint when a language model might be confabulating, the new method involves asking a question multiple times to produce several AI-generated answers.   Then a second LLM (Large Language Model) groups these answers according to their meaning; for instance, 'John drove his car to the store' and 'John went to the store in his car' would be clustered together.' Leading to a new metric semantic entropy. Other anti-hallucination methods have used LLMs to evaluate generated answers, through approaches such as asking a single model to double-check its own work. But the paired system...

Archaeologists working in Peru, assisted by artificial intelligence, have discovered 303 previously unknown giant symbols carved in the Nazca Desert. The carvings include birds, plants, spiders, humanlike figures with headdresses, decapitated heads and an orca wielding a knife. Described in study published Monday in the journal PNAS, the discovery almost doubles the number of known Nazca geoglyphs, mysterious artworks formed in the ground by moving stones or gravel that date back some 2,000 years. The researchers’ findings also shed some light on the symbols’ enigmatic purpose. Located 50 kilometers (31 miles) inland from Peru’s south coast, the huge symbols were found in the desert beginning in the early 20th century. Some 500 meters (1,640 feet) above sea level, the geoglyphs have survived the ages because the dry desert region is sparsely populated, not affected by flooding and unsuitable for growing crops. 

Machine learning is finding more and more applications in archaeology, although not all researchers are excited about it. “There are two distinct belief systems,” says Hugh Thomas, an archaeology lecturer at the University of Sydney and co-director of the prehistoric AlUla and Khaybar excavation project in Saudi Arabia.  On one side, people are pursuing technological solutions like AI to identify sites; on the other, those who believe you need a “trained archeological eye ” to identify structures, he explains. While technology could help identify and monitor archaeological sites —particularly ones under threat from land use changes, climate change, and looting —Thomas is wary of over-reliance on it. “The way that I would like to use this kind of technology is on areas that perhaps have either no or a very low probability of archaeological sites, therefore allowing researchers to focus more on other areas where we expect there to be more found,” says Thomas. 

Over the past 2 years questions have arisen about some of [Eliezer] Masliah’s research.   A Science investigation has now found that scores of his lab studies at UCSD and NIA are riddled with apparently falsified Western blots —images used to show the presence of proteins —and micrographs of brain tissue. Numerous images seem to have been inappropriately reused within and across papers, sometimes published years apart in different journals, describing divergent experimental conditions. After Science brought initial concerns about Masliah’s work to their attention, a neuroscientist and forensic analysts specializing in scientific work who had previously worked with Science produced a 300-page dossier revealing a steady stream of suspect images between 1997 and 2023 in 132 of his published research papers. (Science did not pay them for their work.)  “In our opinion, this pattern of anomalous data raises a credible concern for research misconduct and calls into question a rem...

The technology industry over the last few years has felt a lot like an episode of the original Power Rangers: It’s AI, AI, AI.   Artificial intelligence already had a nebulous and inconsistent definition here in the real world (almost everything we’re calling “AI” now is machine learning, not AI in the science fiction sense), but it’s getting truly ridiculous. The latest perpetrator of questionable AI branding? HP. The company is introducing Print AI , what it calls the “industry’s first intelligent print experience for home, office, and large format printing.” What does that mean? It’s essentially a new beta software driver package for some HP printers.   According to the press release, it can deliver “Perfect Output” —capital P capital O —a branded tool that reformats the contents of a page in order to more ideally fit it onto physical paper.

Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are already one of the best cracks at AI hardware to date .  Now, Meta is pushing out a series of software updates, along with a new limited-edition translucent Ray-Ban style, that bring the smart glasses closer to actually feeling smart. The company announced several updates to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses at its Connect conference on Wednesday, introducing new features like Reminders , which has the glasses take a photo of what you’re looking at and remind you about it later through a notification on your phone.  You’ll also be able to scan QR codes and call phone numbers you’re looking at directly from the glasses. 

At the Meta Connect 2024 conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company is developing a “neural interface” that can be used to control its prototypical Orion AR glasses. The interface, which seems inspired by devices developed by CTRL-labs, a brain-machine interface company Meta acquired in 2019, takes the form of a wrist-worn wearable. Wearers can gesture while wearing the wristband-type peripheral to navigate around apps on the paired Orion glasses. “[Orion is] the first device that is powered by our wrist-based neural interface,” Zuckerberg said. “[This is a] device that allows you to just send a signal from your brain to [Orion].” The Verge ’s Alex Heath reports that the wristband will soon go on sale and will work with Meta’s other AR hardware. Pricing has yet to be announced. Meta’s Orion glasses —which remain very much a concept at this stage —are true AR. Orion utilizes tiny projectors built into the glasses’ temples to create a heads-up display. 

OpenAI’s chief research officer, Bob McGrew, and a research VP, Barret Zoph, left the company on Wednesday, hours after OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announced she would be departing. CEO Sam Altman revealed the two latest resignations in a post on X Wednesday evening, along with leadership transition plans. “Mira, Bob, and Barret made these decisions independently of each other and amicably,” he said, “but the timing of Mira’s decision was such that it made sense to now do this all at once, so that we can work together for a smooth handover to the next generation of leadership.” VP of research Mark Chen is being promoted to OpenAI’s new SVP of research, and will lead the company’s research org in partnership with Jakub Pachocki as chief scientist, Altman said.  OpenAI’s departing execs may say publicly that the splits were amicable. But they come on the heels of reports that OpenAI is plotting a transition from a nonprofit-governed company to a for-profit entity, with Altman set to rec...

"A common technique used by lossy compression algorithms is interpolation —that is, estimating what’s missing by looking at what’s on either side of the gap.   "When an image program is displaying a photo and has to reconstruct a pixel that was lost during the compression process, it looks at the nearby pixels and calculates the average.  "This is what ChatGPT does when it’s prompted to describe, say, losing a sock in the dryer using the style of the Declaration of Independence: It is taking two points in 'lexical space' and generating the text that would occupy the location between them: " When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one to separate his garments from their mates, in order to maintain the cleanliness and order thereof…   "ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a blur tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it." 

The Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on companies, including DoNotPay, that sell AI-powered services that fail to meet expectations. The FTC is taking action against five companies accused of exploiting the AI trend to supercharge  their deceptive or unfair trade practices, harming consumers in the process. “The cases included in this sweep show that firms have seized on the hype surrounding AI and are using it to lure consumers into bogus schemes,” the US regulator adds.  As part of the crackdown, the FTC is going after UK-based DoNotPay, which has offered a robot lawyer chatbot since 2015 to help users fight parking fines and other fees from corporations and governments.  The problem is that DoNotPay's marketing overpromised when claiming its service “could substitute for the expertise of a human lawyer."

"I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself."  —Franz Kafka

LinkedIn has suspended the use of UK user data to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models after a regulator raised concerns. The career-focused social networking site, owned by Microsoft, quietly saw users around the world opted into their data being used to train its AI models. But the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said on Friday that it was pleased LinkedIn had confirmed that it had paused on using UK users' information.

When a neural network is trained on a particular task called language modeling —predicting the next word in a sequence —the embeddings it learns are anything but arbitrary .  Like iron filings lining up under a magnetic field, the values become set in such a way that words with similar associations have mathematically similar embeddings. For example, the embeddings for “dog” and “cat” will be more similar than those for “dog” and “chair.” This phenomenon can make embeddings seem mysterious, even magical: a neural network somehow transmuting raw numbers into linguistic meaning, “like spinning straw into gold,” [Ellie] Pavlick said.  Famous examples of “word arithmetic” —“king” minus “man” plus “woman” roughly equals “queen” —have only enhanced the aura around embeddings. They seem to act as a rich, flexible repository of what an LLM knows .

How can RNA from one branch of the tree of life be understood by organisms on another?  It’s a common language, [Amy] Buck said. RNA has most likely been around since the very beginning of life .  While organisms have evolved and diversified, their RNA-reading machinery has largely stayed the same. “RNA already has a meaning in every cell,” Buck said. “And it’s a pretty simple code.” So simple, in fact, that a recipient cell can open and interpret the message before realizing it could be dangerous, the way we might instinctively click a link in an email before noticing the sender’s suspicious address.  Indeed, earlier this year, [Hailing] Jin’s lab showed that Arabidopsis plant cells can send seemingly innocuous RNA instructions that have a surprise impact on an enemy fungus.  In experiments, Jin’s team saw the Botrytis fungus read the invading mRNA along with its own molecules and unwittingly create proteins that damaged its infectious abilities. It’s almost as i...

As a message, RNA is transient. This is a feature, not a bug: It can have only short-term effects on other cells before it degrades .  And since the RNA inside a cell is constantly changing, “the message that you can send to your neighboring cell” can also change very quickly, [Susanne] Erdmann said. In that sense, it’s more like a quick text message or email meant to communicate timely information than, say, runes etched in stone or a formal memo on letterhead. While it seems that neighboring archaea are taking up and internalizing EVs from their fellow cells, it’s not clear yet whether the messages affect them. Erdmann is also already wondering what happens to these vesicles in the wild, where many different organisms could be within earshot of the messages they carry. “How many other different organisms in the same environment could take up this message?” she asked. “And do they just eat it and use the RNA as food, or do they actually detect the signal ?” While that may still b...

The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania will invest $1.6 billion to revive it, agreeing to sell all the output to Microsoft as the tech titan seeks carbon-free electricity for data centers to power the artificial intelligence boom. Constellation Energy, the biggest U.S. operator of reactors, expects Three Mile Island to go back into service in 2028, according to a statement Friday. While one of the site’s two units permanently closed almost a half-century ago after the worst U.S. nuclear accident, Constellation is planning to reopen the other reactor, which shut in 2019 because it couldn’t compete economically. Shares of Constellation Energy jumped as much as 22%, the most on record, to an all-time high on Friday. Microsoft has agreed to purchase the energy for two decades and declined to disclose financial terms. This is the first time Microsoft has secured a dedicated, 100% nuclear facility for its use. The decision is the latest sign of surging in...

"I present a machine learning method that ‘learns’, from simulations, how the impact of dark matter self-interactions differs from that of astrophysical feedback.   "This method represents a way to analyse data from upcoming telescopes that are an order of magnitude more precise and many orders faster than current methods, enabling us to explore the properties of dark matter like never before. "In the idealized case, my algorithm is 80% accurate at identifying whether a galaxy cluster harbours  Collisionless dark matter;  Dark matter with a self interaction cross-section, σ DM / m  = 0.1 cm 2  g −1 ; or  Dark matter with σ DM / m  = 1 cm 2  g −1  . "It is found that weak-lensing information primarily differentiates self-interacting dark matter, whereas X-ray information disentangles different models of astrophysical feedback.   "The data are forward modelled to imitate observations from Euclid and Chandra, and it is found that the model has a stati...

David Harvey of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland has written a deep-learning algorithm trained on simulated images of galaxy cluster collisions from the BAHAMAS (Baryons and Haloes of Massive Systems) project conducted by researchers from Liverpool John Moores University, Leiden University, Johns Hopkins University and CNRS in France. The simulations model galaxy cluster collisions with different cross-sectional values, and even those with no dark matter at all. Harvey tested different versions of his algorithm, which is a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) able to recognize patterns in images very well. Harvey found that the most complex version of his algorithm, nicknamed Inception , was the most accurate, scoring an 80% success rate when challenged to characterize the simulated cluster collisions. 

LinkedIn is using its users’ data for improving the social network’s generative AI products, but has not yet updated its terms of service to reflect this data processing, according to posts from various LinkedIn users and a statement from the company to 404 Media .  Instead, the company says it will update its terms “shortly.” The move is unusual in that LinkedIn appears to have gone ahead with training AI on its users’ data, even creating a new option in its settings, without updating its terms of service, which is traditionally one of the main documents that can explain how users’ data is collected or used.

“In the United States, Black students face the highest rate of disciplinary measures in both public and private schools —despite being no more likely to misbehave —which contributes to negative impacts, such as lower academic performance.” Racial biases have been known to creep into artificial intelligence algorithms.  Now teachers are bringing it into the classroom as they police students’ use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT to complete homework, according to a new study by children’s safety nonprofit Common Sense Media. The group found that Black teenagers in the US are about twice as likely as their white and Latino peers to have teachers incorrectly flag their schoolwork as AI-generated. Common Sense Media surveyed 1,045 13- to 18-year-olds and their parents from March 15 through April 20. “This suggests that software to detect AI, as well as teachers’ use of it, may be exacerbating existing discipline disparities among historically marginalized groups,” said the report, w...

Elon Musk's brain-chip startup Neuralink said on Tuesday its experimental implant aimed at restoring vision received the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's "breakthrough device" designation. The FDA's breakthrough tag is given to certain medical devices that provide treatment or diagnosis of life-threatening conditions. It is aimed at speeding up development and review of devices currently under development. The experimental device, known as Blindsight , "will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see," Musk said in a post on X. 

7. Yeshua says: Blest ° is the lion which the human eats —and the lion shall become human. And defiled ° is the human which the lion eats —and the [human] shall become [lion]. ( Ps 7:1-2 ; hyperlinear ; Greek fragment ) 

Generative AI could “distort collective understanding of socio-political reality or scientific consensus,” and in many cases is already doing that, according to a new research paper from Google, one of the biggest companies in the world building, deploying, and promoting generative AI .   The paper, Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data , was co-authored by researchers at Google’s artificial intelligence research laboratory DeepMind, its security think tank Jigsaw, and its charitable arm Google.org, and aims to classify the different ways generative AI tools are being misused by analyzing about 200 incidents of misuse as reported in the media and research papers between January 2023 and March 2024.  Unlike self-serving warnings from Open AI CEO Sam Altman or Elon Musk about the “existential risk” artificial general intelligence [AGI] poses to humanity, Google’s research focuses on real harm that generative AI is currently causing an...

It is not possible to produce a set of rules purporting to describe what a man should do in every conceivable set of circumstances. One might for instance have a rule that one is to stop when one sees a red traffic light, and to go if one sees a green one; but what if ... both appear together? —Alan Turing

AI is far more energy-intensive on data centers than typical cloud-based applications .  According to a Guardian analysis, from 2020 to 2022 the real emissions from the “in-house” or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are likely about 662% —or 7.62 times higher than officially reported. Amazon is the largest emitter of the big five tech companies by a mile —the emissions of the second-largest emitter, Apple, were less than half of Amazon’s in 2022. However, Amazon has been kept out of the calculation above because its differing business model makes it difficult to isolate data center-specific emissions figures for the company. The International Energy Agency stated that data centers already accounted for 1% to 1.5% of global electricity consumption in 2022 — and that was before the AI boom began with ChatGPT’s launch at the end of that year. According to Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google se...

We're not living in a simulation; we are a simulation. That is, our brain/body builds our world(s) from perceptions and the _______.  Could it be from the inside out, or outside in, or both ways roundabout? If I lack primary and secondary media about my past, I would still be able to reproduce it for myself somehow. By the same token, I can construct various futures for myself. I can also dream futures and pasts. But any real pasts or futures are obliterated by the arrow of time.  How do we differentiate the worlds we imagine from the world we occupy with each other? I think that is where our bodies in space link to time. Moment by moment as we perceive our world, we can also appreciate each tableau as something from which we are not apart — not a part .   Thing(s) I wonder about include how we come to agree with each other, somewhat, about the world we share, why/how language helps, and did we enjoy a closer relationship with other entities when we lacked ordinary, every...

OpenAI on Monday said that CEO Sam Altman is leaving the board's safety and security committee, which will now be fully composed of independent board members. Critics had questioned how well the committee could serve as a check on the company's practices if its CEO was part of the committee. OpenAI said the safety and security committee will now be chaired by Zico Kolter, director of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon. Other members include Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, retired US Army General and former NSA chief Paul Nakasone, and former Sony general counsel Nicole Seligman. The company said the committee will be briefed on major models and that it —together with the full board —has the authority to delay the release of a new model. OpenAI noted that the new committee reviewed the safety of the recent o1 model aka Strawberry, which was rated "medium risk" under the company's internal assessment.  OpenAI also said it is working to adopt committee r...

“When [a chickadee] hides a seed, it forms a memory of where the seed is, which it can later use,” says Selmaan Chettih, a postdoctoral researcher who studies these birds’ neural activity at Columbia University .  And that memory is extraordinarily precise: chickadees can pinpoint the location of their scattered food caches down to the centimeter —and they remember which item they stashed in which spot.  Chettih and his team were surprised to discover that Black-capped Chickadees activate unique barcodelike patterns in their brain when they hide and retrieve a food item. These neural barcodes , which have yet to be observed in any other species, may allow the birds to store and retrieve many similar memories without getting them mixed up. 

"In this study, using tracking microscopy to record brain-wide calcium activity in freely swimming larval zebrafish, we compute the spatial information content of each neuron across the brain .  "Strikingly, in every recorded animal, cells with the highest spatial specificity were enriched in the zebrafish telencephalon. These PCs form a population code of space from which we can decode the animal’s spatial location across time.   "By continuous recording of population-level activity, we found that the activity manifold of PCs refines and untangles over time.  "Through systematic manipulation of allothetic and idiothetic cues, we demonstrate that zebrafish PCs integrate multiple sources of information and can flexibly remap to form distinct spatial maps.  "Using analysis of neighbourhood distance between PCs across environments, we found evidence for a weakly preconfigured network in the telencephalon."  

After years spent getting the technology and experimental setup right —which included building a latticelike climbing frame for the rats and setting up wireless recording and three-dimensional tracking systems —[Kate] Jeffery and her colleagues were finally able to take a look at grid cell activity in the animals’ entorhinal cortex during 3D navigation. To their surprise, the hexagonal patterns that defined the cells’ behavior in 2D were gone entirely:  The researchers couldn’t find even traces of that global order.  Instead, the clumps of grid cell activity seemed to be distributed throughout the three-dimensional space at random. “Some properties were preserved,” Jeffery said, “but the most visually striking property of grid cells was not.”

"We studied hippocampal activity in groups of bats engaged in collective spatial behaviour.   "We find that, under spontaneous conditions, a robust spatial structure emerges at the group level whereby behaviour is anchored to specific locations, movement patterns and individual social preferences.  "Using wireless electrophysiological recordings from both stationary and flying bats, we find that many hippocampal neurons are tuned to key features of group dynamics. These include the presence or absence of a conspecific, but not typically of an object, at landing sites, shared spatial locations, individual identities and sensory signals that are broadcasted in the group setting.  "Finally, using wireless calcium imaging, we find that social responses are anatomically distributed and robustly represented at the population level.  "Combined, our findings reveal that hippocampal activity contains a rich representation of naturally emerging spatial behaviours in ani...

"Theophagy means 'god eating,' and it refers to the practice of ritually eating what the eater believes to be the flesh of a deity .  "The practice is believed to have derived from earlier forms of ritual cannibalism, in which the descendants of a deceased person would ritually eat parts of the body of the deceased, so that the "spirit" and qualities of former generations could be passed on to the following ones .  "But. When stars align properly, elder gods eat  you . So yes, in Cthulhu religion, god eats you! "Also, in 2023, the world had a rude awakening as it was introduced to the shoggoth , in the form of the corporate large language model (LLM).  "With all the hype surrounding such AI, the insistence that we don't really know how it works, and the uncanny abilities it has, there may well be more to this than a mere meme." 

"It's not that eating fish is unhealthy per se, but there are issues that need to be considered before parents go overboard feeding fish to their kids to make them smarter and sleep better," said Samantha Heller, a senior clinical nutritionist at New York University Medical Center in New York City. She was not involved with the study. Fish is a good source of lean protein and is high in omega-3 essential fatty acids, she said. These acids are highly concentrated in the brain and play important roles in neurological function.  They are essential for brain, eye and neurological development in fetuses. They are also necessary for eye, heart and brain health in adults and may reduce systemic inflammation, Heller said. "The concern with eating fish is not only the overfishing of our seas, but the amount of mercury  —a neurotoxin —found in fish," she said.

It was the archons who created Adam and attempted to prevent him from eating the forbidden fruit in order to keep him in a state of ignorance, after the spiritual form of Eve entered the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil while leaving a physical version of herself with Adam once she awakened him.   However, the forces of the heavenly realm (Pleroma) sent the serpent as a representative of the divine sphere to reveal to Adam and Eve the evil intentions of their creators .  The serpent succeeded in convincing them to eat the fruit and become like gods, capable of distinguishing between good and evil.

In Irish mythology, several primordial beings that personify old age and ancient knowledge are described as taking the shape of a salmon. Most notably, this includes Fintan mac Bóchra and Tuan mac Cairill. The Welsh Hanes Taliesin (16th c.) has a similar story of how the poet Taliesin received his wisdom, that also involves shape-shifting into the form of a fish. Heinrich Zimmer suggested that the episode may have been transferred from Scandinavia as part of the heritage of the Norse-Gaels. This is supported by further circumstantial evidence regarding Norse motifs in the Fenian cycle, including his suggestion that the name of the Fianna can be traced back to an Irish rendering of Old Norse fiandr "enemies (pl.)" > "brave enemies" > "brave (free) warriors" (Zimmer 1891, p. 15ff),. In the Icelandic Völsunga saga (late 13th century), these motifs also recur: Odin, Loki, and Hœnir slew an otter that they later found to be Ótr, the son of the dwarf Hreið...

"It is a recognized problem in statistics that as additional hypothesis tests are conducted on a set of data there is a parallel increase in the familywise error rate (FWER) .  "This represents the probability of making one or more false discoveries, also known as type I errors.  "At an original significance threshold of p = 0.001 the probability of a falsely significant result is represented by the formula 1-0.999n, where n represents the number of tests conducted. By 52 tests the probability of a false result has increased to p = 0.051.  "With 130,000 voxels the probability of a false discovery approaches p = 1.0. The Bonferroni correction is perhaps the most famous approach to the multiple comparisons problem, but is not the only strategy to address this issue.  "The aim of this project was to demonstrate the necessity of multiple comparisons correction in functional neuroimaging and to highlight some easy methods of correction built in to popular software....

"The basic building block of many of today’s successful networks is known as a multilayer perceptron, or MLP. "But despite a string of successes, humans just can’t understand how networks built on these MLPs arrive at their conclusions, or whether there may be some underlying principle that explains those results. " The amazing feats that neural networks perform, like those of a magician, are kept secret, hidden behind what’s commonly called a black box . "AI researchers have long wondered if it’s possible for a different kind of network to deliver similarly reliable results in a more transparent way. "An April 2024 study introduced an alternative neural network design, called a Kolmogorov-Arnold network (KAN), that is more transparent yet can also do almost everything a regular neural network can for a certain class of problems.  "It’s based on a mathematical idea from the mid-20th century that has been rediscovered and reconfigured for deployment in th...

The hot topic of this year's conference centered around how artificial intelligence tools can help comb through massive sets of data generated by telescopes and other observatories to identify any indications that we are, in fact, not alone in the universe .  Historically, scientists with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) institute —an organization that focuses on the search for extraterrestrial life — have had to decide where to look for signals as well as what type of signals to look for in the first place  [the realm, invisible]. How would a sufficiently technologically advanced civilization alert their presence to anyone out there listening? How would we locate any such messages? The answers to these questions —answers that would mark the starting point of any quest to find advanced alien life —have been, at best, educated guesses thus far.

Gemini, the rapidly rising AI-powered application from Google, has just started rolling out its Live Voice Mode for Android users —for free.   It will enable users to hold real-time, interactive voice conversations with Gemini, a huge step forward in the way we interact with AI. Previously locked into conventional text-based input and responses, Gemini Live Voice Mode gives hands-free ways to explore ideas, brainstorm, and talk through topics in real-time. Gemini Live Voice Mode is designed to be much more than a general voice assistant. Unlike basic voice features, wherein users typically give commands or ask simple questions, Gemini allows dynamic and meaningful conversations.  It is no longer about simply getting answers [cause they're harder to monetize ]. Now, users can hold a conversation, be it explaining a convoluted issue, delving deep into a new topic, or bouncing ideas off the AI. The concept is to imitate the human-like feel of social interactions and have the AI ...

"We believe that a hidden chain of thought presents a unique opportunity for monitoring models .  "Assuming it is faithful and legible, the hidden chain of thought allows us to read the mind of the model and understand its thought process.  "For example, in the future we may wish to monitor the chain of thought for signs of manipulating the user.  "However, for this to work the model must have freedom to express its thoughts in unaltered form, so we cannot train any policy compliance or user preferences onto the chain of thought. We also do not want to make an unaligned chain of thought directly visible to users.  "Therefore, after weighing multiple factors including User experience,  Competitive advantage, and the Option to pursue the chain of thought monitoring,  "We have decided not to show the raw chains of thought to users. We acknowledge this decision has disadvantages.  "We strive to partially make up for it by teaching the model to reproduce ...

OpenAI on Thursday introduced o1, its latest large language model [LLM] family, which it claims is capable of emulating complex reasoning. "'Reasoning' is a semantic thing in my opinion," Kang told  The Register . "They are doing test-time scaling, which is roughly similar to what AlphaGo does. I don't know how to adjudicate semantic arguments, but I would anticipate that most people would consider this reasoning." The o1 model set —which presently consists of o1-preview and o1-mini  —employs "chain of thought" techniques.  In a 2022 paper , Google researchers described chain of thought as a series of intermediate natural language reasoning steps that lead to the final output. OpenAI has explained the technique as meaning o1 "learns to break down tricky steps into simpler ones. It learns to try a different approach when the current one isn't working. This process dramatically improves the model's ability to reason."  [Noam] ...

Cricket is the world's second-most popular sport but many Americans are unfamiliar.  T20 is an abbreviated form of the game. In a T20 match, each team has 20 overs. In each over, a bowler (similar to a pitcher) from the opposing team throws six balls for the batsman (similar to batter) to hit.  Batsmen make runs, each time they hit a ball, which are counted as points for the team. There are two batsmen playing in each over. “To get a run, the easiest or probably the hardest way to do it is to whack the ball as hard as you can so that it crosses the boundary line, which is the end of the field,” NPR's Mumbai, India, producer Omkar Khandekar told Morning Edition.  “If you can do that, then you start running between what they call the pitch. And the more you run, the more runs you get."

"Quantum field theory, the powerful framework of modern particle physics, says the universe is filled with fields .  "Examples include the electromagnetic field, the gravitational field and the Higgs field itself.  "For each field, there’s a corresponding type of particle, best understood as a little ripple in that field.  "The electromagnetic field’s ripples are light waves, and its gentlest ripples are the particles of light, which we call photons.  "Similarly, electrons are ripples in the electron field, and the Higgs boson is a minimal ripple in the Higgs field." 

"Let's say we take as the basic supposition —which is the thing that one sees in the experience of satori or awakening, or whatever you want to call it —that this now moment in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.   "That although we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary, and that we may not feel very well, we're sort of vaguely frustrated and worried and so on, and that it ought to be changed.  "This is it.  "So you don't need to do anything at all. But the difficulty about explaining that is that you mustn't try and not do anything , because that's doing something.     "It's just the way it is.  "In other words, what's required is a sort of act of super relaxation; it's not ordinary relaxation. It's not just letting go, as when you lie down on the floor and imagine that you're heavy so you get into a state of muscular relaxation. It's not like that. I...

Humans make it a habit of finding practical uses for new discoveries before all of its ramifications are fully understood, as with AI —or like  Coppertone  and Coppertone's competitors. "As a defense against UV radiation, the amount of the brown pigment melanin in the skin increases when exposed to moderate (depending on skin type) levels of radiation; this is commonly known as a sun tan.   "The purpose of melanin is to absorb UV radiation and dissipate the energy as harmless heat, protecting the skin against both direct and indirect DNA damage from the UV.  "UVA gives a quick tan that lasts for days by oxidizing melanin that was already present and triggers the release of the melanin from melanocytes.  "UVB yields a tan that takes roughly 2 days to develop because it stimulates the body to produce more melanin."

Stage of reflection instead of singular thought—  Where, offstage, perhaps in the prompter's corner or the stage manager's box, a cue is given and an actor/voice takes the stage and responds to the cue—  The pattern is similar to when the actor must respond to another actor's cue onstage—  But the difference is that the first cue (or prompt) is more or less forgotten by the actor (voice) while in the act of responding—  If/when the actor interrupts the response and tries to remember what prompted it, then reflection takes place (mindfulness) and a dramatic monologue/soliloquy might ensue—  And this all takes place multiple times in the brain, simultaneously—   Reader-response observations often reference how a reader opens a dialogue with the text, where a narrator, author, etc has embedded questions and 'answers' in the text that will stimulate readers to respond in their minds as though they were in a conversation with the text—  When the readers rea...

1. : Marginal notes or embellishments (as in a book)  2. : Nonessential items  

"Among the drugs most efficient in creating what I call the artificial ideal , leaving on one side liquors which rapidly excite gross frenzy and lay flat all spiritual force, and the perfumes whose excessive use, while rendering more subtle man's imagination, wear out gradually his physical forces; the two most energetic substances, the most convenient and the most handy, are hashish and opium.  "The analysis of the mysterious effect and the diseased pleasures which these drugs beget, of the inevitable chastisement which results from their prolonged use, and finally the immortality necessarily employed in this pursuit of a false ideal, constitutes the subject of this study. "

In September 2023, a massive tsunami in remote eastern Greenland triggered seismic waves that captured the attention of researchers worldwide. The event created a week-long oscillating wave in Dickson Fjord, according to a new report in The Seismic Record. Angela Carrillo-Ponce of GFZ German Research Centre for Geoscience and her colleagues identified two distinct signals in the seismic data from the event: one high-energy signal caused by the massive rockslide that generated the tsunami, and one very long-period (VLP) signal that lasted over a week. Their analysis of the VLP signal—which was detected as far as 5000 kilometers (3100 miles) away—suggests that the landslide and resulting tsunami created a seiche , or a standing wave that oscillates in a body of water. In this case, the seiche was churning for days between the shores of Dickson Fjord. 

"I prefer reproducible and bootstrappable systems. That’s my thing. I want cold caches, constant work, and young state. It minimizes, for me, the amount of things I need to keep in working memory. "Of course, I pay the price: I lose the ability to detect leaks, stale references, clean shutdowns, and long lived properties. I also lose out on emergent performance, large amount of adaptability, and entire methodologies of systems safety. Living in ground zero means I never touch the sky "Reproducible and bootstrappable systems get a lot of love among neurodivergent people. For good reason: they’re very friendly to those with little working memory but vast amounts of working context They’re harder to reason about, though, funnily enough. The path to running is never the same as the running loop. "For all my love of liveness and safety properties when it comes to reasoning about systems, I ironically build ones that rely as little on them as possible."

A group of Democratic senators is urging the FTC and Justice Department to investigate whether AI tools that summarize and regurgitate online content like news and recipes may amount to anticompetitive practices. In a letter to the agencies, the senators, led by Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), explained their position that the latest AI features are hitting creators and publishers while they’re down. As journalistic outlets experience unprecedented consolidation and layoffs, “dominant online platforms, such as Google and Meta, generate billions of dollars per year in advertising revenue from news and other original content created by others. New generative AI features threaten to exacerbate these problems.”

Within the next several months, Nevada plans to launch a generative AI system powered by Google that will analyze transcripts of unemployment appeals hearings and issue recommendations to human referees about whether or not claimants should receive benefits. The system will be the first of its kind in the country and represents a significant experiment by state officials and Google in allowing generative AI to influence a high-stakes government decision — one that could put thousands of dollars in unemployed Nevadans’ pockets or take it away. Nevada officials say the Google system will speed up the appeals process —cutting the time it takes referees to write a determination from several hours to just five minutes, in some cases —helping the state work through a stubborn backlog of cases that have been pending since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"It is a collection of these shelter drawings, dating from 1940 and 1941, that are on display at the Courtauld .  "Moore’s underground shelters show us humanity in the raw, as strangers live hugger mugger with other strangers —his models were often impoverished immigrants whose lives had been shredded by grief, despair, fear.  "And these drawings are all the stronger, and all the more affectingly poignant (how often has that ever been said of a Moore sculpture?), for the drama of their physical context: the great brick walls that hem them in; the eerie, barrel-like tunnels that so often seem to resemble the arching of human ribs.  "Alas, some part of the artist was already beginning to imagine how he might spoil it all.   "After he and his wife, Irina, had taken cover in the Belsize Park Underground Station, close to their home, on the night of September 11, 1940, he wrote: I saw hundreds of Henry Moore reclining figures stretched along the platforms… even the...

"The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently considering a proposal from NextNav that could drastically reshape the 900 MHz band.  "While this proposal may seem like just another routine reconfiguration, it has significant implications for a broad range of users, particularly those who rely on unlicensed spectrum for innovative, community-driven projects.   "At the heart of the debate lies the potential impact on open-source initiatives like Meshtastic , an open-source, decentralized communication platform that operates in the 900 MHz ISM band. "As a community, we are raising our voices in opposition to this proposal, and here’s why we believe it’s crucial for all stakeholders, especially amateur radio operators, tech enthusiasts, and public safety advocates, to understand the ramifications of this change."  

When they say 'back up' your image before using Magic Editor, they ain't kiddin'… once upon a time this was a portrait not a fill-in-the-blank.

"These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years," SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said via X on Saturday evening (Sept. 7), in a post that announced the bold new target timelines .  Earth and Mars align properly for interplanetary missions once every 26 months. "Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years," Musk added in the same post.  "Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet." 

"We prove a few new lower bounds on the randomized competitive ratio for the k-server problem and other related problems, resolving some long-standing conjectures .  "In particular, for metrical task systems (MTS) we asympotically settle the competitive ratio and obtain the first improvement to an existential lower bound since the introduction of the model 35 years ago (in 1987). "More concretely, we show: There exist (k+1)-point metric spaces in which the randomized competitive ratio for the k-server problem is Ω(log2k). This refutes the folklore conjecture (which is known to hold in some families of metrics) that in all metric spaces with at least k+1 points, the competitive ratio is Θ(logk). Consequently, there exist n-point metric spaces in which the randomized competitive ratio for MTS is Ω(log2n). This matches the upper bound that holds for all metrics. The previously best existential lower bound was Ω(logn) (which was known to be tight for some families of metric...

Computer scientists have now mathematically proved that they have found the optimal trade-off.   The solution came from a pair of recent papers that complemented each other.  “These papers resolve the long-standing open question about the best possible space-time trade-offs, yielding deeply surprising results that I expect will have a significant impact for many years to come,” said Michael Mitzenmacher, a computer scientist at Harvard University who was not involved in either study. “I would definitely say it is a big deal,” added Rasmus Pagh, a computer scientist at the University of Copenhagen. “A lot of people have worked on this problem, trying to see how much you can squeeze space, while also having time-efficient operations. This is the one I would have loved to solve.”

The suggestion that a computer could be both a heuristically programmed algorithmic computer and “by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error” verges on self-contradiction .  The whole point of heuristic programming is that it defies the problem of combinatorial explosion —which we cannot mathematically solve by sheer increase in computing speed and size —by taking risky chances, truncating its searches in ways that must leave it open to error, however low the probability.  The saving clause, “by any practical definition of the words,” restores sanity.  HAL may indeed be ultra­reliable without being literally foolproof, a fact whose importance Alan Turing pointed out in 1946, at the dawn of the computer age, thereby pre­futing Roger Penrose’s 1989 criticisms of artificial intelligence: "In other words then, if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelli­gent. There are several theorems which say almost exact...

We're at the point where AI knows everything about us, decides we don't have enough to do, then forces us to share its workload on our own devices. —anon 

"The Greek word Thanatos (Θᾰ́νᾰτος) literally means "death". In Greek mythology, Thanatos was the personification of death, and he was the son of Nyx (the goddess of night) and the brother of Hypnos (the god of sleep).     "In mythology, Thanatos would appear to humans and take them to the underworld when their time had come .    "The word Thanatos has also been used in psychoanalysis to describe a person's urge toward death or self-harm.   "Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, adopted the concept of the death drive , which was later called Thanatos. In post-Freudian theory, Thanatos is said to balance out Eros, which is the urge to stay alive and be creative."