Happy birthday to Marjorie Lee Browne who was born on this day in 1914. Her work on linear algebra, topology, and the properties of classical groups and being the first Black women to earn a PhD in mathematics from a US university makes her a champion Blerd (↬ Bluesky)
Ernie Smith on dead hardware
Imagine thinking a hand crank for a laptop would be a good idea!
Jess Peck on the dangers of AI optimism
‘It’s not the atom bomb: it’s leaded fuel. It won’t end the world in a bang, or in a climactic fight of good humans and foul machines, but in a gasp.’
Joshua Stein got WiFi into his Macintosh Portable. A remarkable feat!
Knowable Magazine on Black American zoologist Charles Henry Turner
It bees like that sometimes.
Shout out to Samantha Mugeni Niyoyita
‘As an engineer, normally we tend to be very technical. Expressing ourselves and sharing our skills and expertise are the kinds of things you can only learn through a social science master’s degree.’
Valencia reaches 46°C, a record temperature for the Spanish city. This broke the previous record by 3.4°C. Yikes. (ᔥ Twitter)
The ever-disappearing Antarctic sea ice
Not quite polar opposites.
Zoom has updated its ToS to allow training AI on user content without the ability to opt-out. The line that pisses me off is that Zoom has a “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license” to redistribute, publish, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content.
(ᔥ Stackdiary; ↬ Abeba Birhane)
Keidra Chaney on why nonprofits need a values-based social media strategy: If your organization’s internal social media content policies and procedures haven’t been documented, document them now.
Mongabay on breadfruit’s “biodiversatility”: According to recent research, the increased temperatures of climate change will widen breadfruit’s range, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa […] making this a reliable crop for places struggling with poverty and food security.
The Long Boom that got kinda real
They knew too much too soon.
Dr James Wootton on the 80s video game that helped scientists win a Nobel Prize
They’re more than just games.
Janelle Shane from AI Weirdness reviewed a study that showed GPT detectors were misclassifying writing by non-native English speakers as AI-generated 48-76% of the time, compared to 0%-12% for native speakers.
TIL: there’s an online encyclopedia for integer sequences. You can’t just put any sequence of numbers in but there are plenty of pages for the Fibonacci sequence, the Catalan numbers, and prime numbers.
The house is winning even more as Las Vegas casinos shift the odds and raise the stakes
Sam Rothstein would have never let this happen in his casino!
John D. Cook’s three advantages of non-AI models: It’s hard to imagine doing anything like Midjourney’s image generation without neural networks. The same is true of ChatGPT’s text generation. But a lot of business tasks do not require AI, and in fact would be better off not using AI.