PJH Studios

Category: Technology

Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.

  • Robot rentals assisting human workers

    Industrial robots are becoming more affordable for small and midsize companies, especially in situations where the companies can rent the machinery. The robots perform the repetitive, physically breaking work, allowing people to remain healthier and perform more valuable work.

    Buying a robot could cost as much as $500,000, and Mr. Calleja wasn’t even confident that one would work. Instead, he rented a robot from Formic, a Woodridge, Ill., firm that takes care of installation, training, programming and repairs. It costs about $23 an hour, roughly the same as a human.

    “We have very low turnover because we try to make jobs easier,” Mr. Calleja said of the company, which is outside Detroit. “We are a small facility, but we produce about 65,000 pounds of food a day.” Stacking it was “a backbreaking job,” he said.

    In an era when manufacturers consistently list attracting and retaining workers as a top challenge, companies are automating some of the worst jobs in their plants as a worker retention strategy.

  • ChatGPT as a therapeutic tool

    Can ChatGPT act as a therapeutic tool? Possibly, but you still have to recognize it for what it is.

    As ChatGPT became an intellectual partner, I felt emotions I hadn’t expected: warmth, frustration, connection, even anger. Sometimes the exchange sparked more than insight — it gave me an emotional charge. Not because the machine was real, but because the feeling was.

    But when it slipped into fabricated error or a misinformed conclusion about my emotional state, I would slam it back into place. Just a machine, I reminded myself. A mirror, yes, but one that can distort. Its reflections could be useful, but only if I stayed grounded in my own judgment.

    I concluded that ChatGPT wasn’t a therapist, although it sometimes was therapeutic. But it wasn’t just a reflection, either. In moments of grief, fatigue or mental noise, the machine offered a kind of structured engagement. Not a crutch, but a cognitive prosthesis — an active extension of my thinking process.

  • What modern kids want

    Children want to meet up in person, no screens or supervision. But because so many parents restrict their ability to socialize in the real world on their own, kids resort to the one thing that allows them to hang out with no adults hovering: their phones.

    One reason kids retreat to their phones is they can’t connect with other kids in an unstructured way.

  • Ukrainian soldier escapes on e-bike delivered by drone

    A wild story, something out of a dystopian war novel: Ukrainian soldier escapes on e-bike delivered by drone

  • 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.

  • Two guys made their own fiber internet provider

    In rural, Michigan, two guys made their own fiber Internet provider after poor service for too long from Comcast.

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.