A wild story, something out of a dystopian war novel: Ukrainian soldier escapes on e-bike delivered by drone
Category: Technology
Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.
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Subliminal AI messages
Different AI models can send subliminal messages to other models.
Alarming new research suggests that AI models can pick up “subliminal” patterns in training data generated by another AI that can make their behavior unimaginably more dangerous, The Verge reports.
Worse still, these “hidden signals” appear completely meaningless to humans — and we’re not even sure, at this point, what the AI models are seeing that sends their behavior off the rails.
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Two guys made their own fiber internet provider
Herman said he was the chief operating officer of his father’s construction company and that he shifted the business “from doing just directional drilling to be a turnkey contractor for ISPs.” Baciu, Herman’s brother-in-law (having married Herman’s oldest sister), was the chief construction officer. Fueled by their knowledge of the business and their dislike of Comcast, they founded a fiber ISP called Prime-One.
Now, Herman is paying $80 a month to his own company for symmetrical gigabit service. Prime-One also offers 500Mbps for $75, 2Gbps for $95, and 5Gbps for $110. The first 30 days are free, and all plans have unlimited data and no contracts.
And that’s been the key to their success – they had most of the know how to do it. They only needed to organize and acquire a few additional skills to build out the business.
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Have AI attend that meeting for you
AI bots are attending meetings in people’s stead.
Some of the AI helpers were assisting a person who was also present on the call — others represented humans who had declined to show up but sent a bot that listens but can’t talk in their place. The human-machine imbalance made Sellers concerned that the modern thirst for AI-powered optimization was startingto impede human interaction.
“I want to talk to people,” said Sellers, who runs a content agency for entrepreneurs out of Birmingham, Alabama. “I don’t want to talk to a bunch of note takers,” he said — before adding that he hasoccasionally himself sent an AI note taker to meetings in his place.
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Cassette players roll back into popularity
While I don’t think they ever truly went away, cassette players are making a comeback of sorts with a thriving underground and indie tape scene. Maxell is making a new one with bluetooth and USB-C.
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The Way of Code by Rick Rubin
I’m not sure if this is sincere or satire: The Way of Code by Rick Rubin, inspired by Lao Tzu. It contains 81 koans about programming, each accompanied by a AI generated gif.
The artwork above was created by vibe coding, generated based on the themes of each chapter. You can add prompts to change the images to your liking. You ultimately get to shape each of the art pieces.
This is how art creation always happens.
It starts with a prompt, a seed. It can be several sentences or something you notice on a walk. Anything can work as a first prompt. Only you can decide that.
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This band doesn’t exist
Velvet Sundown, a band with 350,000 monthly listeners, most likely doesn’t exist–a growing phenomenon enabled by AI.
Though they’re not yet dominating the charts, disturbingly realistic AI songs are slowly but surely creeping into our headphones – and you may even be listening to them without realizing what you’re hearing. Smuggled into popular playlists and hidden in plain sight among authentic, well-known tracks, AI-generated artists with fake photos, ChatGPT-generated biographies and no genuine fans to speak of are picking up hundreds of thousands of streams.
One such artist is The Velvet Sundown, a band with almost 350,000 monthly Spotify listeners but no discernible online presence or social media accounts. (“There’s not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed,” as one Redditor put it.) While we can’t confirm that the band’s music is AI-generated, a glance at their artist image and bio should be enough to persuade even the least skeptical observer.
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AI can’t have my em dash
A supposed tell that something was written with AI is the use of the em dash—signifying a pause for a related thought. But really, it’s proof of what AI was trained on.
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Mary Meeker covers AI trends
For the better part of the 2010s, Mary Meeker’s trends report was a must read for anyone working in technology. 2019 was the last edition, but she’s returned, delving into AI.
Venture capitalist Mary Meeker just dropped a 340-page slideshow report — which used the word “unprecedented” on 51 of those pages — to describe the speed at which AI is being developed, adopted, spent on, and used, backed up with chart after chart.
“The pace and scope of change related to the artificial intelligence technology evolution is indeed unprecedented, as supported by the data,” she writes in the report, called “Trends — Artificial Intelligence.”
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Flooded with AI slop
The ability of AI to near instantaneously churn out paragraphs of text is being weaponized to overwhelm well meaning officials.
One morning in October of 2024, Fredericton city councillor Margo Sheppard received an email with the subject line: “The Real Policy Crisis: Prioritizing ‘Nature’ Over People.” It was polished — almost algorithmically smooth — and it calmly urged her to reconsider Fredericton’s net-zero policies.
Over the next month, a flood of similar emails followed, all aimed at getting Fredericton to abandon global climate targets. Sheppard is used to emails from organizations on all kinds of issues, but not this many, not on this issue — and not so well crafted. She grew suspicious.
“If we’re getting them in Fredericton,” Sheppard thought, “councillors all across the country must be getting them too.”