2023s
How actors are losing their voices to AI.. Actors who signed away their voice rights many years ago are now competing for work with AI versions of themselves, and hearing their own voices used in scams. (Madhumita Murgia / FT)
In a sign of what’s to come for many white-collar workers, artificial intelligence is eating the software industry, as companies turn to generative AI tools to save money on programmers.
Some 70% of coders are already using or plan to use AI in their work, with one-third saying the primary reason they do so is because it makes them more productive, according to survey by Stack Overflow.
What Will AI Do to Your Job? Take a Look at What It’s Already Doing to Coders. By Christopher Mims at the Wall Street Journal.
How Tom Brady’s Crypto Ambitions Collided With Reality. “The superstar quarterback is among the celebrities dealing with the fallout from the crypto crash. Others, like Taylor Swift, escaped.” (The New York Times / Erin Griffith and David Yaffe-Bellany).
Seems like Brady and other celebrities were both victimizers and victims, as is so often the case with people in pyramid schemes at any level. They’re not entirely guilty but they’re not innocent victims either.
And they’re all still rich. Maybe they lost a few millions or tens of millions, but they can afford it.
I was and am disappointed to see celebrities I liked and respected, like Matt Damon and Larry David, get caught up in this grift. I thought they had more integrity.
I remember when I did not have to spend quite so much of my life charging things and making sure that the things are charged
Josh Withers shares frustration with stagnation in the ebook market.
I agree, and blame the Amazon monopoly. That monopoly is created and maintained by laws, not markets.
Amazon needs to be required to allow competing products to read its ebook format. Problem solved.
Right now, that kind of compatiblity is outright illegal.
Threads: A mall inside the store inside the mall
I signed up for Threads. Unenthusiastically. I want to use fewer social media platforms, and concentrate my focus, rather than doing more.
Hopefully, Threads will follow through and become a full citizen of ActivityPub, and also connect to the blue Facebook platform. That will make my social media activity simpler.
Even better: Everybody needs to wake up and realize that we don’t need a platform to serve as the internet town square. The internet already is the town square.
About 7-10 years ago, JC Penny announced a bold new initiative to start opening independent shops within its stores. At first I thought that was brilliant, and then I said, “Wait a second—you want to open a mall inside the store inside the mall? How’s that going to work?”
I’m @mitchwagner on Threads. So far, my entire Threads activity consists of a single photo of the dog.
Every so often I am tempted by an Ember coffee mug and then I look at the price and I fall over unconscious.
Historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook “delve into the mysteries surrounding the Ark of the Covenant.”
The most important object in the universe, but also a somewhat invisible presence in the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant has fuelled stories for millennia… as a weapon of mass destruction, an elaborate filling cabinet for sacred laws, or as the very location where God and man meet.
The Rest is History: Raiders of the Lost Ark
Also:
“Who drinks the water I shall give him, will have a spring inside him welling up for eternal life.” A deeply mysterious object which doesn’t appear in the Bible, was the Holy Grail really the chalice used by Jesus during the Last Supper, and the very cup that caught his blood at the crucifixion? Or is it merely a symbol representing Christ’s bloodline? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the Holy Grail, the origin of the tradition, and the role it played within medieval Christendom.
“Why do we have so little access to what’s happening under the hood?" Neuroscientist David Eagleman discusses how almost everything we do is controlled unconsciously. Our consciousness and free will are just illusions, thinking we’re in control but really just along for the ride.
I’ve seen the metaphor elsewhere comparing consciousness and free will to a toddler riding in a car with one of those child-safety seats that has a toy dashboard and steering wheel built in. The kid thinks they’re driving, but they’re not.
I made heavy use of Google Reader, checking it several times daily every day. But I never used the social features—I barely knew about them.
Learning about them now, I think I would have loved them. Most of what I do on social media is share things I find elsewhere on the Internet, sometimes commenting on them. I’ve never found a platform where that kind of behavior was a perfect fit. Reddit comes close, but there’s a lot of overhead on Reddit finding the right community to comment in, and figuring out those communities’ sometimes esoteric rules.
Raymond Scott was one of the most famous musical composers of the 20th Century, though his name is nearly forgotten today. He was also a brilliant electronics engineer, and his life’s work was the Electronium, an automated music-composing machine. Scott came up in in the Big Band era, and later worked with Berry Gordy, who founded the Motown record later. Scott’s music appears in Looney Tunes, Ren & Stimpy, and the SImpsons cartoons.
Player Piano, an episode of the Last Archive podcast featured on 99% Invisible.
The Last Archive: The Word for Man is Ishi: The amazing story of Ishi, only member of his Native American community to survive genocide, who was discovered in a small town in northern California in 1911.
Celebrated during his life as “the last wild Indian,” Ishi moved in to the new Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a living exhibit. But he also took control of his own life, moving around the community, attending vaudeville shows, and giving newspaper interviews.
Ishi’s life is a microcosm of American imperialism, and how white America celebrated, romanticized, and mourned Native American culture, after first subjugating that culture, committing genocide against it, and sidelining actual, living Native Americans who were—and are—still here.
Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber worked with Ishi and became Ishi’s friend, though Kroeber eventually betrayed Ishi. Ishi died in 1916.
Thirteen years later, Kroeber had a child, who grew up to become one of the most famous and well-respected science fiction writers of the century, writing again and again about imperialism and its victims.
Marc Maron interviews Hugh Grant on the WTF podcast. Grant is self-deprecating and surprisingly funny. From 2021.
Google bungled by killing Google Reader to build Google+, and then bungled again killing Google+ The company is like the proverbial donkey placed between a pile of hay and a bucket of water that ends up dying of hunger and thirst because it can’t decide between them.
How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever. By David Pierce at The Verge
Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been.
Google Reader was more than just an RSS reader. It was a general-purpose information hub and sharing platform. It achieved 30 million loyal users—a great success by real-world measures, but not Google scale.
Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products started with Reader and has only gotten worse over time. But the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it. Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web. To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.
Instead of building on Google Reader, Google wanted to build Google+, and look how that turned out.
I used Reader daily, but never got into the social features. I was barely aware they existed. I thought Google+ was great.
Doctors are starting to use generative AI to help with paperwork, which takes them literally hours every day—often evenings and weekends—and is a leading driver of burnout.
A.I. May Someday Work Medical Miracles. For Now, It Helps Do Paperwork.. By Steve Lohr at The New York Times.
Today’s funny found photos, a meme, skeet and tweet and a vintage photo of Harrison Ford
Harrison Ford takes a leap of faith in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
OceanGate is a microcosm of the Covid response. We’ll just let Covid rip through the population and try to hospitalize anybody who gets REALLY sick without fixing the healthcare system. Nothing bad will happen. See also: Climate change, gun control, housing prices.
Question for my vegetarian/vegan friends: Would you eat lab-grown meat?
I’m seeing in the news that lab-grown meat is coming to the market. This is not fake meat like the Impossible Burger, made from plant materials. This is meat cloned from animal cells. Supposedly, it tastes exactly like ground meat—ground beef or chicken—because that’s exactly what it is.
Would you eat it?
I also talked with ChatGPT. I asked it whether AI is a threat to people’s jobs, and how people can maximize their success in their careers as AI becomes more prevalent. I didn’t include ChatGPT’s responses in the article. Read them here.