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Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up

Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up

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Image by gt39 from Pixabay

Thank you, Eminem, and who’d have thought and how could you tell?

The multitude of falsehoods and over-promises of AI aside (Instagram’s AI Chatbots Lie About Being Licensed Therapists), Deep Fakes, that other wonderful outcome that AI hath wrought, is fast becoming a huge problem thanks to the improvements in AI. We’re currently witnessing The Rise of AI-Powered Deepfake Scams and as CNN  reported, “Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer.’”

Of course, AI savior, Sam Altman, has a solution: capture the digital identity of, well, every human on the planet.  He first rolled out his orb (nee World Orb) iris scanner in 2023 to create a unique digital identity as proof of being human, which it seems “More than 12 million people have already verified their identity using Orbs, which are available and free to use in more than 20 countries,” said CNN. Not a huge number considering the billions of people on the planet, what to speak of the fact that there are those who are “worried the project could centralize too much power under Altman, who already has an outsized role in what’s expected to be a revolutionary tech transformation.” Read More...

The Myth of the Crowded Vertical

The Myth of the Crowded Vertical

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Image by Rudi Arlt from Pixabay

Disclosure: this is not a new product promotion but rather a study in how to potentially disrupt a very crowded vertical.

“A new American electric vehicle startup called Slate Auto has made its debut, and it’s about as anti-Tesla as it gets,” TechCrunch reported, once again missing the forest through the trees, and proving yet again that the tech media loves to get their digs in, whether it’s appropriate or not.

While there are current Tesla owner who are experiencing buyer’s remorse, or as the New York Times wrote, “In Marin County, There’s Trouble in Teslaville,” is the main selling point of the Slate the fact that it isn’t a Tesla? Or maybe the fact that “It’s affordable, deeply customizable, and very analog. It has manual windows, and it doesn’t come with a main infotainment screen. Heck, it isn’t even painted. It can also  transform from a two-seater pickup to a five-seater SUV,” as TechCrunch pointed out. Read More...

The Dire Wolf: A Lesson in Startup Basics

The Dire Wolf: A Lesson in Startup Basics

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Image by Dušan from Pixabay

Easter is coming and speaking of resurrections, dire wolves, made famous by HBO’s Game of Thrones, have been extinct for around 12,500 years, but “thanks to genetic engineers at biotech company Colossal Biosciences, these majestic predators are back,” Live Science reported. The pups were even named after the dire wolves from the HBO series: Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi.

“The company claims to have achieved this by extracting DNA from dire wolf fossils in 2021, isolating and growing gray wolf cells, and “tinkering” with the genes. They then transferred that DNA into empty canine eggs and transplanted those into fertile dogs,” Daily Dot explained.

As for this being a resurrection event, “Colossal’s critics have pointed out that, out of thousands of genetic differences that distinguish dire wolves from gray wolves, the company made only a handful of edits focused on recapitulating obvious physical traits such as fur color and texture,” Science.org reported. “Many researchers were also quick to note that according to a 2021 genetic analysis published in Nature, the dire wolf might not even be a wolf at all, belonging instead to a North American lineage of dogs that diverged from the ancestors of gray wolves more than 5 million years ago. As that study’s lead author Angela Perri told Science in 2021, the dire wolf was more closely related to the African jackal than the gray wolf and may have resembled “a giant, reddish coyote.” Read More...

23andMe: Trust the Tech?

23andMe: Trust the Tech?

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Image by Victoria from Pixabay

Variations on a theme and in case you missed it, 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Privacy, “leaving the fate of millions of people’s genetic information up in the air as the company deals with the legal and financial fallout of not properly protecting that genetic information in the first place. The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA directly to a large, for-profit commercial genetic database; 23andMe is now looking for a buyer to pull it out of bankruptcy,” as 404 Media et al reported.

“Once valued at $6 billion, executives have yet to find a bidder for the $50 million gene testing company that has never turned a profit,” Reddit noted, but that’s a whole other story.

“This strategic shift coincides with the resignation of its co-founder and CEO, Anne Wojcicki, who stepped down to spearhead an independent bid to acquire the company after facing repeated rejections from its board,” said Reclaim the Net. “For the millions who entrusted their DNA to 23andMe, the assumption might have been that such intimate data enjoys the ironclad protections of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a law designed to shield sensitive health information from unauthorized disclosure. Yet, 23andMe operates outside HIPAA’s reach, leaving it tethered only to its own privacy policies — rules it can rewrite at will.” Read More...

AI and the Written Word

AI and the Written Word

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

A subject matter expert friend of ours is being pressed ad nauseam to write a book, but his free time is in short supply. It has been suggested to him, again ad nauseam, to  have an LLM do it for him. The book would be generated in days!

Before deferring to a generative AI, some things to keep in mind: “AI Search Has A Citation Problem. We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News,” Columbia Journalism News reported.  “We found that…

• Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
• Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts.
• Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences.
• Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles.
• Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses. Read More...

A Flea and a Fly and the Worst Flu Season in Years

A Flea and a Fly and the Worst Flu Season in Years

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Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay

Again, the headline is courtesy of a poem by Ogden Nash
“A flea and a fly in a flu
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “let us flee!”
“Let us fly!” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.”

It’s winter. It’s the height of flu season, and it’s being reported as one of the worst flu seasons in years. We’re always curious as to why and while we’re not a conspiracy theorist at all, it’s always interesting to connect the dots and to separate truth/science from media talking points. If you believe that the latter is an exaggeration, we came across this, and it’s worth a watch.

We’re hearing from more and more of our readers who took the Covid vaccine about what we’ll call ‘buyers regret,’ and this just in: Yale scientists link Covid vaccines to alarming new syndrome causing ‘distinct biological changes’ to body, the Daily Mail et al reported. Read More...

All the News that’s Fit to Spin

All the News that’s Fit to Spin

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Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

The tech community was taken by storm last week by DeepSeek, which in our mind, we refer to as DeepSix, which seems much more accurate, all things considered: all the news that we see as fit to ‘print’ and bugger all to the rest. The technology has the same problems that all LLMs have: it scrapes/is trained on the information readily available on the web. And picks and chooses what you can see.

From a technical point of view: “What’s clever about what DeepSeek has done is that they’ve figured out a way to squeeze out more performance from Nvidia’s chips by going a level deeper and tinkering with how the chips work. In short, this is better engineering, and it has allowed them to overcome the constraints imposed on them due to US chip controls. In doing so, they have shown the world a new approach to building AI models much more cheaply,” wrote Om Malik in Crazy Stupid Tech.  “I think the hysteria is hugely overblown…If you read the original paper, two things are clear: DeepSeek has done something clever that will help lower the cost of the AI revolution for everyone, and they’ve shared how they’ve done it.”

Then there’s this: “OpenAI Furious – DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us,” 404 Media reported. “OpenAI shocked that an AI company would train on someone else’s data without permission or compensation.” Read More...

Exactly Who Was Behind that TikTok Ban?

Exactly Who Was Behind that TikTok Ban?

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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Whether the TikTok ban was short-lived or not, time will tell. It’s back for now, which is good news for the said 170M Americans who depend on the platform for income.

So, with all of the egregious behavior we’ve seen on the part of platforms like Google/Alpha with its globally recognized monopolistic practices and Facebook, which has how many lawsuits against them,  it was TikTok that suddenly went dark?

If you’re wondering why Congress moved so quickly and decisively against TikTok, you need to look no further than to Mark Zuckerberg himself. Read More...

The Week the World Changed

The Week the World Changed

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Image by Eduard Oertle from Pixabay

It was an odd week, between the devastating Los Angeles fires and Mark Zuckerberg burning the US government censorship apparatus to the ground. Or at least sent up a few smoke signals, and where there’s smoke…

We’re not going to get into the politics of the fire. There’s certainly enough on that out there. This is about tech. While it was reported that the reservoir and fire hydrants were empty, isn’t California the jewel in the crown of technology? And there is technology out there to combat water shortages and fires. Los Angeles is built on a desert. Before you put a major city in place, good idea to consider the water problem, which self-train civil engineer William Mulholland did back re Los Angeles in the day (think the movie Chinatown), but the city has since then greatly expanded and water shortages are not a rarity in Southern California. In Israel, which is also built on a desert, measures were put in place to ensure that water would get to where it was needed in order to support the population: How Israel’s Water Surplus Is TRANSFORMING the Middle East. It’s basic urban planning.

Cloud-seeding has brought rain to the otherwise parched Middle East, and while there is some debate about whether or not the science was responsible for the flooding in Dubai last year, well, that is the only incident of flooding/water manipulation in the desert, the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus aside, but that’s literally another story. Read More...

Talk About a Killer App…

Talk About a Killer App…

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Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

The tech sector has a bad habit of releasing tech before it has been tested over time, sending it out into the wild, no matter the potential harm it may do. This is a warning we saw in the Age of Social, but tech is always about pushing the envelope, no matter that someone’s standing there in ready with a lit match. Case in point: Facebook contended that it was there to bring the world closer together. Remember Facebook’s Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Day when whistleblower Frances Haugen went public about the platform’s manipulations and the damage it was doing to young people? To this day, the problems have not been eliminated.

And you do have to wonder how dangerous a platform truly is when it’s the whistleblower himself who is eliminated.

“A former researcher at OpenAI has come out against the company’s business model, writing, in a personal blog, that he believes the company is not complying with U.S. copyright law. That makes him one of a growing chorus of voices that sees the tech giant’s data-hoovering business as based on shaky (if not plainly illegitimate) legal ground…OpenAI is currently being sued by a broad variety of celebrities, artists, authors, and coders, all of whom claim to have had their work ripped off by the company’s data-hoovering algorithms. Other well-known folks/organizations who have sued OpenAI include Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nahisi Coates, George R. R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, the Center for Investigative Reporting, The Intercept, a variety of newspapers (including The Denver Post and the Chicago Tribune), and a variety of YouTubers, among others,” Gizmodo reported. Read More...