Adam Conover, whose videos I generally like, made an embarrassing mistake and accepted an offer to make a video about Sam Altman’s cryptocurrency company, World, and its Orb biometric scanning device. After folks complained and pointed out how working with World went against his values, he turned down the money and made this video about the situation and the event.
Why I Became a Crypto Shill (Adam Conover – YouTube)
In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.
Dan Sinker
The Who Cares Era (Dan Sinker /blog)
A whole lot of people – including computer scientists who should know better and academics who are usually thoughtful – are caught up in fanciful, magical beliefs about chatbots. Any sufficiently advanced technology and all that. But why chatbots specifically?
Jeffrey Lockhart
it’s the interface (scatterplot)
Using any means to put words into the mouth of a dead person feels grotesque, especially for the purposes of a legal case. Generative AI unfortunately makes it easy to accomplish in a rather compelling way.
An AI avatar made to look and sound like the likeness of a man who was killed in a road rage incident addressed the court and the man who killed him: “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the AI avatar of Christopher Pelkey said. “In another life we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness and a God who forgives. I still do.”
It was the first time the AI avatar of a victim—in this case, a dead man—has ever addressed a court, and it raises many questions about the use of this type of technology in future court proceedings.
Matthew Gault, Jason Koebler
‘I Loved That AI:’ Judge Moved by AI-Generated Avatar of Man Killed in Road Rage Incident (404 Media)
The very idea of having an “employee” that is just a large language model and a generated portrait seems bizarre to me. A boss immediately hitting on the large language model when he sees the generated portrait is even weirder. Let’s just not do this.
On Monday, the co-founder of Business Insider Henry Blodget published a blog on his new Substack about a “native-AI newsroom.” Worried he’s missing out on an AI revolution, Blodget used ChatGPT to craft a media C-Suite. Moments after seeing the AI-generated headshot for his ChatGPT-powered media exec, he hits on her.
Matthew Gault
Business Insider Founder Creates AI Exec For His New Newsroom, Immediately Hits On Her (404 Media)
The rise of LLM-powered code generation tools is reshaping how developers write software – and introducing new risks to the software supply chain in the process.
These AI coding assistants, like large language models in general, have a habit of hallucinating. They suggest code that incorporates software packages that don’t exist.
…
Running that code should result in an error when importing a non-existent package. But miscreants have realized that they can hijack the hallucination for their own benefit.
Thomas Claburn
LLMs can’t stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything (The Register)
Twenty years ago today, Linus Torvalds made the very first commit to Git, the information manager from hell.
Over these last 20 years, Git went from a small, simple, personal project to the most massively dominant version control system ever built.
Scott Chacon
20 years of Git. Still weird, still wonderful. (GitButler Blog)
Views are the most visible metric on the internet. You can see, in more or less real time, how many views something got on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and most other video platforms. X tracks views for every single thing you post, as does Threads. A view is the universal currency of success — more views, more fun.
But it’s all nonsense. Views are nothing. Views are lies.
David Pierce
‘Views’ are lies (The Verge)
This first article is from just shy of a decade ago in 2016:
In perhaps the most eagerly anticipated aerospace announcement of the year, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has revealed his grand plan for establishing a human settlement on Mars.
In short, Musk thinks it’s possible to begin shuttling thousands of people between Earth and our smaller, redder neighbor sometime within the next decade or so. And not too long after that—perhaps 40 or a hundred years later, Mars could be home to a self-sustaining colony of a million people.
…
Though he admitted his exact timeline is fuzzy, Musk thinks it’s possible humans could begin flying to Mars by the mid-2020s.
Nadia Drake
Elon Musk: A Million Humans Could Live on Mars By the 2060s (National Geographic)
Was there ever any chance for Elon Musk to achieve that goal? Here are two more recent articles that claim he never had a chance. The first addresses engineering problems with SpaceX’s Starship. The second looks at the feasibility of anyone actually living on Mars.
This is why Starship, in my opinion, is just one massive con.
That is the real reason why Starship was doomed to fail from the beginning. It’s not trying to revolutionise the space industry; if it were, its concept, design, and testing plan would be totally different. Instead, the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do.
Will Lockett
Starship Was Doomed From The Beginning (Planet Earth & Beyond)
Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.
Albert Burneko
Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars (Defector)
Scott Boehmer 