lemmee_in

joined 9 months ago
 

When Hollywood’s writers and actors went on strike last year, it was, in part, because of AI. Actors didn’t care for the notion that their likenesses could be used without their permission, whether by the studios that hired them that week or by someone at home with a computer in 2040. Writers didn’t want to do punch-ups on potentially crummy AI scripts or have their words (or ideas) cannibalized by large language models that didn’t pay them a dime.

But while some Hollywood filmmakers came out of the strikes fearful of how AI might wreck their industries, others wanted to learn more. This week, many of those filmmakers gathered in a movie theater in Culver City, California, for the inaugural Culver Cup, a generative-AI film competition sponsored by FBRC.AI and Amazon Web Services.

 

Bandai Namco has reportedly turned to the unspoken Japanese tradition of layoff-by-boredom by stuffing unwanted employees into oidashi beya, or "expulsion rooms."

Employees ~~banished~~ reassigned to oidashi beya are left to do nothing, or given menial tasks at best. According to Bloomberg's unnamed insider sources, Bandai Namco has moved around 200 of its 1,300 person team to these rooms in recent months.

The goal of sticking someone in an expulsion room is to literally bore or shame them into quitting, and Bloomberg's sources claim it has worked on around half the people Bandai Namco has stuck in there so far.

 

When Gmail first appeared in 2004, the idea of having what seemed like a never-ending space for email was revolutionary. Most paid services were providing a few megabytes of space, and here came Google promising a full gigabyte (which, at the time, seemed huge) for free.

Over the years, however, Gmail has added a plethora of features that it touts as “improvements” but some of them are irritating. Worse, it looks for ads for things that it will never need and sticks them at the top of email list.

Back in the dark ages before Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other free cloud-based apps, most email happened either via paid services or inside of walled gardens. In the former, you paid a service provider for an email account and downloaded your email into an app that only lived on your computer — an app with a name like Pine, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, or Thunderbird.

For the most part, nobody was scanning your email to find out the last time you bought shoes, or whether you were shopping for car insurance, or that you had recently been buying gifts for a relative’s new baby. Nobody was taking that information and selling it to vendors so they could drop ads into your email lists or surprise you with additional promotional messages. Your email lived on your computer alone. Once it was downloaded and erased from the server, it was just yours — to save or erase or lose.

 

Widely shared on social media, the atmospheric black and white shots -- a mother and her child starving in the Great Depression; an exhausted soldier in the Vietnam war -- may look at first like real historic documents.

But they were created by artificial intelligence, and researchers fear they are muddying the waters of real history.

"AI has caused a tsunami of fake history, especially images," said Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, a Dutch historian who debunks false claims online.

"In some cases, they even make an AI version of a real old photo. It is really weird, especially when the original is very famous."

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The title is not wrong, bedevils in this context are burdens / weighs

The title in French (translate with depl)

Le gouvernement socialiste espagnol est confronté à une crise du logement "insoutenable

Translate back to English

Spain's Socialist government faces an "unsustainable" housing crisis

The article also mentions that the government is trying to push through laws such as rent caps, punishments for landlords to improve housing.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Most religions in China get the same treatment from the CCP.

Christian communities have had similar experiences.

In 2016, thousands of crosses were torn down from churches throughout Zhejiang Province. The authorities have also broken up congregations that have not been approved by the state, while church leaders have been arrested and jailed.

The demolition of domes, crosses and minarets and their replacement by Chinese-styled tiled roofs and Buddhist-styled pagodas. It involves mandatory patriotic education for Buddhist, Christian and Muslim clergy and it entails party-approved sermons and prayers.

South of Xinjiang in Tibet, the authorities have restricted the practice of Tibetan Buddhism over the last decade. Religious festivals have been banned more frequently and government employees, teachers and students have been barred from participating in religious activities.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/26/a-jealous-god-china-remakes-religions-in-its-own-image

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The error message is because it hasn't heard of you at all, and isn't going to resolve you because you're not a logged-in local user.

Apparently there are other users who have the same problem

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

shifting weather in the Sahara desert has also impacted this year's hurricane season

Sahara desert hit by extraordinary rainfall event that could mess with this year's hurricane season

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago

It also publicly noted that going NSFW (Not Safe For Work), a tool moderators used to add friction to accessing a subreddit and to make the subreddit ineligible for advertising, was “not acceptable.”

Easy solution here, post NSFW content in every sub 👍

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

In reality it is probably double or triple that.

Yup, I've read articles in NYT or WSJ (kinda forgot), about single mom, daughter and her dog living in a car because they couldn't afford the rent.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is just Google's clever way of not removing the sideloading feature from their OS.

They let app developers to prevent users from using sideloaded app.

This way they can avoid antitrust lawsuits.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago

Google : "You don't own your phone, we own you."

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Organic Maps :

No Ads ✅

No Telemetry ✅

Google :

Does it make us money? ❌

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I don't even have a smart tv, I don't want anything other than my phone and laptop connected to the internet.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

That's the problem there's no common consensus from scientists. What is happening right now is similar to the scenario from The Day After Tomorrow, scientists debate and offer their theories.

from phys.org today

Not the day after tomorrow: Why we can't predict the timing of climate tipping points

A study published in Science Advances reveals that uncertainties are currently too large to accurately predict exact tipping times for critical Earth system components like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), polar ice sheets, or tropical rainforests.

These tipping events, which might unfold in response to human-caused global warming, are characterized by rapid, irreversible climate changes with potentially catastrophic consequences. However, as the study shows, predicting when these events will occur is more difficult than previously thought.

Climate scientists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) have identified three primary sources of uncertainty.

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-day-tomorrow-climate.html

Also as Rahmstof said.

“There’s now five papers, basically, that suggested it could well happen in this century, or even before the middle of the century,” Rahmstof said. “My overall assessment is now that the risk of us passing the tipping point in this century is probably even greater than 50%.”

While the advances in AMOC research have been swift and the models that try to predict its collapse have advanced at lightning speed, they are still not without issues.

This research gap means the predictions could underestimate how soon or fast a collapse would happen.

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