New technology from World Labs, a startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, can generate interactive 3D scenes from a single photo. The tech “lets you step into any image and explore it in 3D.” Wild! I’d love to play with this with old family photos.
The Great Grocery Store Squeeze.
Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s.
Easing restrictions on “discriminatory pricing” allowed major supermarket chains to drive local groceries out of business, and forced residents of low-status city neighborhoods and rural towns to travel long distances to buy food.
“The Biden administration has begun to connect the dots.” But Trump’s re-election puts that work in doubt.
By Stacy Mitchell at The Atlantic.
h/t Garbage Day
Currently reading: Demon by John Varley 📚Book 3 in the Gaea trilogy.
Finished reading: The Closers by Michael Connelly 📚. Another good Harry Bosch yarn. Spoiler alert: Bosch catches the murderer, but only after near catastrophic failure.
… giving more rights to a creative worker who has no bargaining power is like giving your bullied schoolkid more lunch money. No matter how much lunch money you give that kid, the bullies will take it and your kid will remain hungry. To get your kid lunch, you have to clear the bullies away from the gate.
— Harpercollins wants authors to sign away AI training rights, by Cory Doctorow
Alex Williams at the New York Times:
Earl Holliman, an iron-jawed actor who earned a star on Hollywood Boulevard for a prolific career that included a corral full of Westerns, an appearance on the first episode of “The Twilight Zone” and a turn as Angie Dickinson’s boss on the 1970s television drama “Police Woman,” died on Monday at his home in Studio City, Calif. He was 96.
…
Despite a promising trajectory, Mr. Holliman was open about not burning for stardom the way many in Hollywood did.
“Money is getting important to me,” he said in a 1967 interview with The Los Angeles Times, for an article headlined “He’d Rather Be an Actor Than a Star.” “The trouble is, I can’t handle success.”
After starring in the Western series “Hotel de Paree,” which ran for a season starting in 1959, he told the newspaper he received four movie offers and a recording contract from Capitol Records.
“So what did I do?” he said. “I went to Europe instead, bummed around for a whole year.”
A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History.
Zeynep Tufekci at the New York Times:
The H5N1 avian flu, having mutated its way across species, is raging out of control among the nation’s cattle, infecting roughly a third of the dairy herds in California alone. Farmworkers have so far avoided tragedy, as the virus has not yet acquired the genetic tools to spread among humans. But seasonal flu will vastly increase the chances of that outcome. As the colder weather drives us all indoors to our poorly ventilated houses and workplaces, we will be undertaking an extraordinary gamble that the nation is in no way prepared for.
Biden has failed to take action to defend against H5N1, and Trump wants an anti-vaxxer and advocate of dubious herd immunity pandemic prevention in charge of public health. This is not OK.
NASA radar reveals an abandoned Cold War military base buried under the ice in Greenland. Camp Century was built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1959.
Vaccines Will Have to Prove Themselves Again. The Hard Way. By Donald G. McNeil Jr.: Vaccines will prove themselves tragically after disproportionate numbers of unvaccinated children die unnecessarily. “When children begin dying, moms will figure out who was lying.”
On the Mac Power Users forum, I’m following a discussion about the search for perfect headphones for different use cases.
I mainly use my headphones to listen to podcasts and make calls, both videoconferencing, for work, and the occasional phone call. Over the years, I’ve gone from AirPods to AirPods Pro and now I use AirPods Pro 2, which I like very much. The noise canceling is great.
I am blessed because, apparently, I have perfectly average earholes; AirPods have always fit great for me.1
I used SoundCore sleep earbuds for a while but they stopped working after a few months.
Now I use foam earplugs.
I tried using the AirPods Pro as sleep earpods but they jammed deep into my ears when I slept on my side and started beeping a warning, completely defeating the purpose. However, those were first-gen AirPods Pro; I now have the second-gen so maybe I’ll give those a try.
-
Once I figured out how to wear the blasted things. For a couple of years I jammed them in my ears with the stems facing outward because I did not trust that they would just rest effortlessly on the ear bottom-part. ↩︎
Tim Chambers: A Quick Snapshot of the Microblogging Landscape
I like Chambers' vision: Mastodon should evolve to be easier to use, like Linux evolved into Chromebooks. BlueSky and Mastodon should become more interoperable. Threads should fully adopt ActivityPub. Ultimately, microblogging — and blogging! — should become one big thing, like email, where the underlying platform and protocols are unimportant.
Tumblr can continue to be Tumblr, and that’s OK. Matt Mullenweg said the platform would embrace ActivityPub two years ago, but that’s the last we heard of it. I don’t think he meant it; he just blurted it out without considering it.
h/t @manton
Daring Fireball: ‘Building LLMs Is Probably Not Going Be a Brilliant Business’.
The business with a moat is making the cutting-edge computer hardware that trains LLMs, and that belongs to Nvidia.
David Pierce at The Verge: Craft 3 is shockingly close to my ideal productivity app — I expect I will give Craft 3 a try, but I’m really, really trying to stop switching apps.
Musk accuses Trump whistleblower Vindman of ‘treason,’ says ‘he will pay’ – An oligarch with the ear of the incoming President is publicly threatening a political opponent with criminal prosecution.