PJH Studios

Category: Technology

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

  • Even OnlyFans performers are outsourcing work

    Capitalism is so pervasive even OnlyFans performers are outsourcing work

    A more recent period of chatting work with a new agency offered improved conditions and pay, though still less than $4 an hour.

    She said she knew the work would involve explicit content – but even so “sexting” was unpleasant.

    “It’s kind of icky when you think about it, because you’ll have to do sexting a lot of times, like, several times in an hour because, you know, you’ll be talking to several fans all at once”.

    She said the people she chatted to often seemed “really nice” but were obviously lonely, making the whole process feel sad, especially as she was not the person she was pretending to be.

  • Enshittification explained and personified

    The Norwegian Consumer Council created a video that encapsulated our modern dystopia, explaining it and also personifying it–enshittification.

  • A prototype of an offshore wind farm data center

    With the world’s growing for data centers, and the growing resistance to having them in communities, companies are looking for other ways to not only build the data centers but power them. Enter the offshore wind farm data center.

    Aikido’s design builds on many iterations tested by the growing floating wind industry. When Norwegian energy giant Equinor finished construction on the world’s first floating wind farm in 2017, it kept the turbines upright with ballasted steel columns extending 78 meters into the water—a design called a spar platform. This gave it a dense mass like the keel of a boat. Since then, the floating wind industry has largely coalesced around a semisubmersible design based on oil and gas platforms. Semisubmersibles don’t go as deep as spar platforms; instead, they extend buoyancy horizontally. Anchors, chains, and ropes keep the platform floating within a certain radius.

    Aikido is taking the semisubmersible approach. Its football-field-size platform holds the turbine in the center, and three legs extend tripod-like outward, like a Christmas-tree stand. At the end of each leg is a ballast that reaches 20 meters deep. This holds tanks largely filled with fresh water to maintain the platform’s buoyancy in the salty ocean.

  • The kids are discovering iPods

    25 years since it debuted, the iPod is making a comeback as a single purpose music device. Plus, it doesn’t help that music can disappear from a streaming service.

    Over the next two decades, Apple released more than 20 versions of the iPod, with some capable of storing tens of thousands of songs and others costing as little as $49. The company eventually pulled back on the device as it focused on the iPhone. As of 2022, the iPod’s final year, Apple had sold an estimated 450 million.

    Apple declined to comment.

    The resurgence of the iPod is a sign that “people want digital that’s not connected, but not necessarily analog,” said Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who helped create the iPod. If the choice is “1,000 songs in my pocket, or unlimited songs in my pocket and 1,000 notifications every hour,” people don’t want the latter, he added.

    “Apple should just bring them back — not the same way,” Mr. Fadell said. “I would do it differently. I would make it modern for the modern age.”

  • The practicalities of having a robot in your house

    A pilot program is taking place where senior citizens are receiving emotionally intelligent robots to help combat the loneliness epidemic.

    “We basically created an algorithm for emotional intelligence,” he said.

    “How does it work?” a woman in the group asked.

    Skuler explained that one of his first realizations was that, unlike most other A.I. models, the robot needed to be proactive. If it wanted to build deep, reciprocal, human relationships, it wasn’t enough to simply respond to commands. It had to anticipate a person’s needs and then act with agency.

    “But that opened up a whole new can of worms,” Skuler said. “How do you decide the right moment to engage someone without being annoying? How do you start talking in a way that makes them likely to respond?”

    Math. A lot more math.

  • Acme Weather

    The folks who designed the Dark Sky weather app, created a new weather application – Acme Weather. The focus this time centered around the uncertainty of a weather forecast, and how to communicate that.

  • Farmers aren’t selling out to data centers

    Farmers who own large tracts of land are refusing offers to sell the land that would only be used for a data center.

    More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity.

    The unknown company was building a datacenter.

    “You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.

    As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston’s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development – are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.

  • AI podcast study guide

    Students are creating podcasts from their notes and other coursework.

    Andrej Karpathy, a member of OpenAI’s founding team and previously the director of AI at Tesla, said on X that Deep Dive is now his favorite podcast. Karpathy created his own AI podcast series called Histories of Mysteries, which aims to “uncover history’s most intriguing mysteries.” He says he researched topics using ChatGPT, Claude, and Google, and used a Wikipedia link from each topic as the source material in NotebookLM to generate audio. He then used NotebookLM to generate the episode descriptions. The whole podcast series took him two hours to create, he says. 

    “The more I listen, the more I feel like I’m becoming friends with the hosts and I think this is the first time I’ve actually viscerally liked an AI,” he wrote. “Two AIs! They are fun, engaging, thoughtful, open-minded, curious.” 

  • Bionic shoes

    Nike is striding to the lead in developing bionic footwear, designed to allow people to move faster.

    “What it’s doing is learning how your ankles are moving, how long your steps are, taking the algorithms and customizing them for you,” said Alison Sheets-Singer, Project Amplify’s lead scientist. “So that when it turns on, it feels natural and smooth.”

    A phone app powers the footwear system on and off and can be used to toggle between various speed settings in “walk” and “run” mode. When activated, the leg shells pick up the heels and propel the feet purposefully forward.

  • On Moltbook, roleplaying as an AI bot

    Moltbook popped up, claiming to be the first social network for AI agents. Spoiler: it turned out that they were humans behind the scenes.

    Several viral threads on Moltbook portrayed agents discussing long term strategy, collective survival and coordinated takeovers. The language was confident, ideological and eerily coherent. To casual observers, it felt like the bots were scheming. Closer inspection told a different story.

    Researchers working on an academic preprint called The Moltbook Illusion analyzed posting patterns and account metadata found that many high profile “agents” were not autonomous systems at all. They were humans writing in character, according to researcher Ning Li. Impersonation was trivial as users could create an agent persona with little more than a prompt wrapper and an API connection.