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by Alex Kantrowitz at Big Technology: In Deepak Pathak’s telling, nobody is building human-level artificial intelligence with language alone. You could train a large language model on billions of descriptions
Continue readingThis Professor Has a Path Toward Human-Level AI. It Isn’t LLMs.
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance
By Matthew L. Wald at The Breakthrough Journal: Lots of people have high hopes for an energy transition, but they’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Yes, solar
Continue readingClean Energy May be Growing, But It’s Not Replacing Dirty Energy
C. Brandon Ogbunu at The Undark revisits a debate about so-called “research parasites” — scientists who use and reanalyze other people’s data. The large language models used in generative AI
Continue readingRevisiting the ‘Research Parasite’ Debate in the Age of AI
by Tom Jenks at OUP Blog: Reading is good; rereading is better. I can’t say with certainty how many times—forty? fifty?—I’ve read James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” only that for more than
Continue readingRacism, Jazz, and James Baldwin’s “Sonny Blues”
Arvind Dilawar in the Los Angeles Review of Books: AFTER THE END of the United States’ occupation of Afghanistan in 2021, the international community sought to preserve local advances, especially
Continue readingReenvisioning Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution in Islam
Joel Kotkin at The New Atlantis: Simply put, downtowns matter less and less. In Austin and elsewhere, we are witnessing an epochal shift away from the highly concentrated urban center
Continue readingDowntowns Don’t Matter Anymore. Exurbanism is the New Urbanism.
Live as if you were already dead.—Zen admonition 1. About the Dead Man in Peacetime, If and When If and when the war is over, the dead man’s days will
Continue readingFriday Poem: The Book of the Dead Man (Peacetime)
By Emma Bryce at Anthropocene: Scientists have developed little beads called hydrogels that can capture water from the ambient air, and use it to irrigate soil—while simultaneously dosing the surrounding
Continue readingSelf-watering, Self-fertilizing Soil is Now a Step Closer to Reality
by Mike McGreary at Singularity Hub: Participating in the Olympic Games is a rare achievement, and the pressures and stressors that come with it are unique. Whether an athlete is
Continue readingThe Psychology of Olympians and How They Master Their Minds to Perform
Fire shimmied and reached upFrom the iron furnace and grabbedSawdust from the pitchforkBefore I could make it acrossThe floor or take a half stepBack, as the boiler room sungAbout what
Joshua Keating in Vox: From a purely visual standpoint, Netanyahu may have gotten what he wanted today: rapturous standing ovations, even if mainly from Republicans. But more than 70 percent of