a fate worse than jeff

out of an abundance of caffeine

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

Stumbled upon a Codex skill that creates cool illustrations to explain topics or tell stories.

You feed it text (blog, article, narrative, even code) and it makes explainer graphics with this cute blob character.

I gave it the repo for the X recommendation algo and got this 👇

[Deedy @deedydas]

Every single one of the 11 Meta superintelligence hires is an immigrant who did their undergrad abroad.

7 China, 1 India, 1 Australia, 1 UK, 1 South Africa.
8 are PhD or PhD dropouts in the US.

Immigration is key to US AI innovation.

[Peggy Gabour @peggy_gabour]

@theliamnissan Why should any of us be forced to "see" bot farm tweets?
Hey Elon, this isn't "freedom".

[Orin Kerr @OrinKerr]

That's quite a paragraph. https://t.co/uc0qgeVP3g

[Jason Scott @textfiles]

I'm sure it is rolling out at various rates, but for most people using Google going forward, it will produce an AI generated summary of the links you were going to go to to read, killing basically all traffic to that site.

[Jason Scott @textfiles]

Did you feel it? Google just declared war on the web.

Exciting times.

[Rachel Metz @rachelmetz]

In November, I wrote about how artists are fighting generative AI companies scraping their work for datasets, and mentioned a new tool, Nightshade, that acts as an AI poison pill. Nightshade v 1.0 came out today. Curious to see how it’s used, and if it impacts data scraping.

[Jay Rosen @jayrosen_nyu]

Twitter is Now a Fog-of-War Machine

"What Elon Musk did to his social network to make it almost useless for news about Israel and Gaza." https://t.co/0fARVlWrSI By @ScottNover

[nxthompson @nxthompson]

"People who have turned to X for breaking news about the Israel-Hamas conflict are being hit with old videos, fake photos, and video game footage at a level researchers have never seen." https://t.co/I1UgnW2sSg

[farhad manjoo (former bluecheck) @fmanjoo]

dude chose perfect moment to get rid of headlines

[Justin Taylor @TheSmarmyBum]

Trying to follow along on Twitter with what’s happening in Israel when every single account on the trending page is verified makes me miss when verification actually meant something.

It’s really hard to disseminate what’s real and what’s not these days

[Andrew Lawrence @ndrew_lawrence]

just a reminder that it is pretty close to impossible to distinguish fact from fiction on this app

[Mark Nelson @energybants]

Word is out: Microsoft is plunging ahead on nuclear energy.

They want a fleet of reactors powering new data centers. And now they're hiring people from the traditional nuclear industry to get it done.

Why?

Lack of stable long-term power, whether clean or dirty, is constraining Microsoft's growth. They need to build big data centers that consume electricity all the time and the old assumption that somebody else's reliable plants will always be around to firm up your wind and solar is falling apart.

It certainly helps that founder Bill Gates was one of the earliest big business converts to nuclear energy, investing his own money to develop new reactors.

But Microsoft, like many companies, was held back by what we might consider "Enron-ism" infecting its energy thinking: renewable energy credits plus markets plus cute little lies to the public about how electricity works. Greenwashed fossil/hydro/nuclear with the ESG stamp of approval.

The problem? Eventually you run out of other people's cheap firm power.

So Microsoft has recently become a leader in openly asserting that nuclear energy counts as clean energy, as opposed to the ongoing cowardice we see from the other big tech companies who lie to the public about being "100% renewable powered."

Sure, the lawyers said it was okay to lie, but the lie doesn't give you a permanent supply of cheap reliable energy. That comes from nuclear.

A world is coming where only the tech companies willing to become nuclear power developers may get to keep expanding their cloud businesses, and only countries open to new reactors get to host this expansion.

A world where tech companies with 50% margins become the only survival hope for traditional industrial concerns with 5% margins who need someone else to bootstrap a proper electricity supply.

Where diesel backup generators are replaced with microreactors reliable enough to be trusted to keep a cluster of facilities secure in the case of public grid failure.

The race is on.

[Joseph Cox @josephfcox]

This was all possible because of OMNY's "Check trip history" feature. On the main site, you have to enter the details shown here. But there is no auth beyond that. No PIN, anything. As EFF told me, "Credit card info is not a goddamn unique identifier." https://t.co/334xmojGQ3

[Joseph Cox @josephfcox]

New: I tracked the precise movements of an NYC subway rider. Saw what specific time they got on and at what station. It became obvious which station was nearest to their home.

This was all because of a 'feature' on the MTA website

Wide open to abuse https://t.co/334xmokeFB

[a fate worse than jeff @jeffemera]

@cjdcat Please someone set this to Careless Whisper

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

Want to know the difference between the Ancient Greeks and the Ancient Romans? Just look at their statues.

Art always tells you what a society wants to believe about itself.

So, from the Soviet Union to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, here's what art says about who we are...

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

BREAKING: Hollywood studios proposed contracts that would allow them to scan actors and create AI that would give them the actors' likeness rights forever, per the Verge.

[Fouad | فؤاد @Bp__Dev]

This is one of the coolest thing I made in UE5. A level made of functions and nodes, explaining in real time what you do as you play.

[a fate worse than jeff @jeffemera]

@Scobleizer If any co was to defy the Betamax-vs-VHS, premium-vs-cheap battle in the race for mass adoption…

…that co would be Apple, several times over.

[a fate worse than jeff @jeffemera]

@Scobleizer Then again, given the litany of successes of Apple’s premium, integrated hardware / software / content / privacy offerings, and how they have transformed markets over the years…