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AI is getting scary. Some YouTuber used AI to create a Motown versions of the Beatle's Rubber Soul and Revolver, and it's much, much better than you might expect. You could listen to it over and over. They use the same words, but they really revamp the music. I would say some of it sounds more like Sam Cooke, or other soul music, than specifically Motown, but it stands on it's own. How is this possible?

Oh, Deere The largest farming-equipment manufacturer in the world, John Deere, unveiled a new crop of autonomous tractors and trucks at CES 2025 earlier this week, as the heavy-machinery giant looks to capitalize on the buzz around all things self-driving. If your immediate thought is that this sounds like a job killer... it is. John Deere has talked up its machines’ capabilities for precisely that purpose: to help alleviate some of the labor-shortage issues that farming faces, with the company’s chief technology officer, Jahmy Hindman, saying that “there is not enough available and skilled labor” to do the kind of...

There is a line of at least a hundred people braving the DC cold this morning, waiting to get into the Supreme Court for today's oral arguments in the TikTok hearing. Some are avid users, and say they have been hearing about this hearing on the platform. Student Danielle Ballesteros has been waiting here since 6:30am. "I feel like TikTok doesn't deserve to be banned." She admits she uses it "probably too much" but thinks it's an important news source for people from her generation.

TikTok, the video-sharing platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is on the verge of being shut down in the United States unless it can find a new owner. American lawmakers argue its current proprietorship poses a national security threat. It comes after outgoing president Joe Biden signed legislation into law last April that would require the company to sell TikTok by January 19, 2025. On Friday, representatives for ByteDance will plead to the US Supreme Court to try and halt the decision. They are expected to frame the ban as un-American and an attack on the First Amendment, which defends...

Companies and top executives appear eager to curry favor with President-elect Donald Trump as he readies to take office The $170 million mark, which could reportedly reach $200 million, outpaces Trump’s reported 2017 inauguration committee raise of $107 million. The inaugural committee is also reportedly no longer selling tickets to donors to attend Trump’s swearing-in and accompanying private events. The record number comes just four years after many of the same companies and executives turned their backs on Trump following the 2020 election. The Times reported the remarkable shift in corporate attitude towards Trump: Mr. Trump often talks privately about...

“We’ve now exhausted basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge …. in AI training,” Musk said during a livestreamed conversation with Stagwell chairman Mark Penn streamed on X late Wednesday. “That happened basically last year.” Musk, who owns AI company xAI, echoed themes former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever touched on at NeurIPS, the machine learning conference, during an address in December. Sutskever, who said the AI industry had reached what he called “peak data,” predicted a lack of training data will force a shift away from the way models are developed today. Indeed, Musk suggested that synthetic data —...

Halliday has turned up at CES 2025 in Las Vegas with a pair of eponymous smart glasses filled to the brim with technology. There’s a waveguide display in the right eyecup that will project the equivalent of a 3.5-inch screen into the wearer’s view. This display is also easy to read in strong light and the company promises the hardware is “invisible to onlookers.” The company adds the glasses weigh just 35 grams and promise eight hours of battery life on a single charge. There’s no outward-facing camera, but Halliday says its product comes with a “proactive” AI assistant, anticipating...

Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, stayed at a rental home in New Orleans at the end of October and again in November, just weeks prior to his attack on Bourbon Street that killed 14 people. He wore the smart glasses to record video as he rode a bicycle through the French Quarter during that trip, FBI Special Agent in Charge Lyonel Myrthil said on Sunday. “Meta glasses appear to look like regular glasses, but they allow a user to record videos and photos hand-free,” Myrthil said. “They also allow the user to potentially livestream through their video.” Jabbar wore the glasses during...

Artificial intelligence: authentic scams. AI tools are being maliciously used to send “hyper-personalized emails” that are so sophisticated victims can’t identify that they’re fraudulent. According to the Financial Times, AI bots are compiling information about unsuspecting email users by analyzing their “social media activity to determine what topics they may be most likely to respond to.” Scam emails are subsequently sent to the users that appear as if they’re composed by family and friends. Because of the personal nature of the email, the recipient is unable to identify that it is actually nefarious. **SNIP** While many savvy internet users now...

A two-hour conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) model is all it takes to make an accurate replica of someone's personality, researchers have discovered. In a new study published Nov. 15 to the preprint database arXiv, researchers from Google and Stanford University created "simulation agents" — essentially, AI replicas — of 1,052 individuals based on two-hour interviews with each participant. These interviews were used to train a generative AI model designed to mimic human behavior. ... To create the simulation agents, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews that covered participants' life stories, values and opinions on societal issues. This enabled the...

Washington state Democrats appeared to have accidentally emailed their sweeping revenue plans and internal talking points on tax hikes to the entirety of the upper chamber’s members in Olympia, Fox News has learned. Property tax hikes and a new double-digit tax on firearms are among proposals Washington state Democrats are considering, according to materials originally disseminated to all members by Washington Senate Deputy Floor Leader Noel Frame, D-Seattle, in late December and later obtained by Fox News Digital. A document titled “2025 Revenue Options” and a PowerPoint presentation describing how to talk to constituents in defense of the plan were...

by Edward Madziwa, Program Assistant for the Security and Technology Program at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research The loss of life is an undeniable and tragic reality affecting all parties to armed conflicts raging across the world. Thousands of unidentified victims are left in a state of decomposition. In some instances, corpses are mutilated, desecrated, abandoned without any funeral rites, or not afforded decent burials. International humanitarian law (IHL) seeks to limit the means and methods of warfare and to protect war victims. Parties to armed conflicts are bound to collect and search for the dead, to prevent...

Consciousness defines what it means to be human, yet its mechanisms remain elusive. Scientists know that anesthetics can “turn off” consciousness, but how they achieve this is still unclear. Two dominant theories attempt to explain consciousness: the Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which posits that consciousness arises from the integration of information, and the Global Workspace Theory (GWT), which suggests it emerges from the exchange of information across different parts of the brain. In 1989, British mathematician and Nobel laureate Roger Penrose proposed an unconventional hypothesis linking consciousness to quantum entanglement. He argued that the human mind could solve problems that...

Disclaimer: The title of this thread is the title of the video at youtube. I don't necessarily think it will change your life. I don't like Google and have never used Gemini. That said, there were some things in the video about this new rendition of Gemini that were quite impressive. The summary below was provided by ChatGPT in html (so I could just insert it into the thread).Summary of the Gemini 2.0 Video TranscriptThe video introduces Gemini 2.0, a cutting-edge AI assistant developed by Google, highlighting its features, applications, and real-world use cases.Key Features of Gemini 2.0:Multimodal Capabilities: Combines...

“We’ve come such a long way,” she says in a welcome speech. “Looking at the guest list for today, 10% of you in the room are LTK millionaires.” Everyone swivels their heads in search of these mystery super earners. A man next to me, clad entirely in black, whispers, “Damn, let me take off my sunglasses and take a look around.” LTK has revolutionized the online shopping experience with what Box describes as a win-win-win model. The company allows influencers to post links to products they’re wearing, carrying, and decorating with on the LTK platform, which their followers can access...

The first successful demonstration of quantum teleportation over a fiber optic cable has been achieved, according to groundbreaking new research. The breakthrough, made by engineers at Northwestern University and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), presents new potentials in the realm of quantum communication by allowing it to be combined with existing cables used for providing Internet. This innovative approach reduces the requirement for additional infrastructure needed for quantum computing or quantum sensing technologies. Previously thought to be impossible, the Northwestern team responsible for the breakthrough says their work showcases the next stage in leveraging a single fiber...

Photo of the experimental setup to couple MWs to N- 𝑉⁢s using grape dimers. A stripped optical fiber with N- 𝑉 spins, cantilevered from a rod, lies between two grapes. The grapes were positioned on a platform with a vertical straight copper wire, equidistant from each grape. Credit: Fawaz, Nair, Volz Scientists at Macquarie University have discovered a novel way to enhance quantum sensor performance using ordinary grapes. By utilizing the water content and specific size of grapes, they created strong magnetic field hotspots that improve the efficiency of microwave-based quantum sensing. Supermarket Grapes and Quantum Sensors Researchers at Macquarie...

My friend @JoshuaSteinman is dropping bombshells about H-1B visas, and I’ve got a story to add. tl;dr – It’s a cultural problem. I spent years in India, working directly for one of the country’s wealthiest individuals. He recruited me for my computer skills to lead some of the most ambitious, technically challenging projects ever attempted. We broke world records and unlocked trillions in wealth. My boss? He now lives in a skyscraper in Mumbai. Toward the end of the project, he told me his best engineers were leaving for Silicon Valley, lured by unbelievable salaries. So, on his recommendation, I...

A now-banned FReeper used to do this every year, these were always fun.

For the last week the only thing anyone on Twitter – and, by extension, the rest of the Internet – has been talking about is the H1B visa. The fun started when Sriram Krishnan, brought on by the incoming Trump administration as an Artificial Intelligence policy advisor, mused about lifting country caps on the widely reviled H1B visa. This elicited enthusiastic support from a chorus of tech CEOs, who insisted that there is a severe shortage of skilled engineers in the United States and, presumably, the West more generally, which can only be met by poaching the ‘best and brightest’...