Month: January 2023

Self-Watering Planters Reuse Household Jars

Self-watering planters are low-maintenance, and common DIY projects. What we like most about [Tommy]’s design is that it reuses empty jars to create self-watering planters. After all, jars are fantastic at reliably holding water, so why not put them to work? Incorporating jars as part of the design means fewer worries about leakage, but it

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How the “enshittification” cycle, in which platforms first are good to users and business customers before abusing them, has infected TikTok, Amazon, and others (Cory Doctorow/Pluralistic)

Cory Doctorow / Pluralistic: How the “enshittification” cycle, in which platforms first are good to users and business customers before abusing them, has infected TikTok, Amazon, and others  —  Today’s links  — Tiktok’s enshittification: The company manually allocates surplus to creators, and they can take it away again, too.

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Researchers detail how ProGen, an LLM trained on 280M proteins, designed proteins with anti-microbial properties that were tested in real life and shown to work (Karmela Padavic-Callaghan/New Scientist)

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan / New Scientist: Researchers detail how ProGen, an LLM trained on 280M proteins, designed proteins with anti-microbial properties that were tested in real life and shown to work  —  An AI was tasked with creating proteins with anti-microbial properties.  Researchers then created a subset of the proteins and found some did the job

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Researchers detail how ProGen, an LLM trained on 280M proteins, designed proteins with anti-microbial properties that were tested in real life and shown to work (Karmela Padavic-Callaghan/New Scientist)

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan / New Scientist: Researchers detail how ProGen, an LLM trained on 280M proteins, designed proteins with anti-microbial properties that were tested in real life and shown to work  —  An AI was tasked with creating proteins with anti-microbial properties.  Researchers then created a subset of the proteins and found some did the job

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How the “enshittification” cycle, in which platforms first are good to users and business customers before abusing them, has infected TikTok, Amazon, and others (Cory Doctorow/Pluralistic)

Cory Doctorow / Pluralistic: How the “enshittification” cycle, in which platforms first are good to users and business customers before abusing them, has infected TikTok, Amazon, and others  —  Today’s links  — Tiktok’s enshittification: The company manually allocates surplus to creators, and they can take it away again, too.

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The Voice of ChatGPT Is Now On The Air

AIs can now apparently carry on a passable conversation, depending on what you classify as passable conversation. The quality of your local pub’s banter aside, an AI stuck in a text box doesn’t have much of a living quality. human. An AI that holds a conversation aloud, though, is another thing entirely. [William Franzin] has

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The White House publishes a roadmap for mitigating risks posed by cryptocurrencies and urges Congress to hasten efforts to create a crypto regulatory framework (Sander Lutz/Decrypt)

Sander Lutz / Decrypt: The White House publishes a roadmap for mitigating risks posed by cryptocurrencies and urges Congress to hasten efforts to create a crypto regulatory framework  —  Four senior Biden officials penned a note Friday urging lawmakers to hasten their efforts to create a regulatory framework for crypto.

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Q&A with Princeton CS professor Arvind Narayanan on why he calls ChatGPT a “bullshit generator”, his worries over its boom, developing his AI taxonomy, and more (Julia Angwin/The Markup)

Julia Angwin / The Markup: Q&A with Princeton CS professor Arvind Narayanan on why he calls ChatGPT a “bullshit generator”, his worries over its boom, developing his AI taxonomy, and more  —  Hello, friends,  —  If you have been reading all the hype about the latest artificial intelligence chatbot …

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Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI ask court to throw out AI copyright lawsuit

Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI claim the lawsuit doesn’t hold up. | Photo: Jens Büttner/dpa-Zentralbild/ZB (Photo by Jens Büttner/picture alliance via Getty Images Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI want the court to dismiss a proposed class action complaint that accuses the companies of scraping licensed code to build GitHub’s AI-powered Copilot tool, as reported earlier by Reuters.

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Meme-stock mania companies, including GameStop and AMC Entertainment, have raised $4.7B since the hype began in January 2021, but failed to boost performance (Financial Times)

Financial Times: Meme-stock mania companies, including GameStop and AMC Entertainment, have raised $4.7B since the hype began in January 2021, but failed to boost performance  —  Cash bonanza enabled by retail investors fails to boost beneficiaries’ performance  —  Companies at the centre of the meme-stock mania …

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Creative Vandalism The KITT Way

It’s probable that most of us have at some time dreamed up a witty and subversive way to deface our city, but that few of us will have followed through on the idea. [Matt Gray] then is something of a modern-day urban hero for doing just that. Who couldn’t walk past Knightrider Court, EC4, in

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San Francisco asked California regulators to halt or scale back the expansion of Cruise and Waymo, after repeated incidents with stopped and idle robotaxis (David Ingram/NBC News)

David Ingram / NBC News: San Francisco asked California regulators to halt or scale back the expansion of Cruise and Waymo, after repeated incidents with stopped and idle robotaxis  —  SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco is trying to slow the expansion of robotaxis after repeated incidents in which cars without drivers stopped …

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OpenWeb, which helps outlets target readers with ads and manage comments, acquires Jeeng, an audience management service used by over 650 publishers, for $100M (CTech)

CTech: OpenWeb, which helps outlets target readers with ads and manage comments, acquires Jeeng, an audience management service used by over 650 publishers, for $100M  —  The Israeli-founded unicorn, which raised $170 million at a $1.5 billion valuation three months ago, completed its third acquisition in a year …

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The US Federal Reserve rejected Custodia Bank’s application to become a Federal Reserve System member, citing safety risks with the bank’s crypto-focused model (Hannah Lang/Reuters)

Hannah Lang / Reuters: The US Federal Reserve rejected Custodia Bank’s application to become a Federal Reserve System member, citing safety risks with the bank’s crypto-focused model  —  The U.S. Federal Reserve on Friday rejected crypto-focused Custodia Bank’s application to become a member of the Federal Reserve System …

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