Google’s carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand.
” This One Had A Full Nervous Breakdown.”
It’s Probably Nothing
Telegraph- E-scooter blamed for fire that burned down seven homes
A total of 10 fire engines and 60 firemen worked through the night to control the blaze, which spread through seven out of the eight houses in the terrace.
A total of 149 fires caused by exploding e-bike batteries were recorded by the London Fire Brigade in 2023, an increase of 71 per cent from 2022, according to figures provided to The Telegraph.
If You’ve Got Nothing To Hide
It shouldn’t be a problem for you.
CBC- Public servants uneasy as government ‘spy’ robot prowls federal offices
Bruce Roy, national president of the Government Services Union, called the robot’s presence in federal workplaces “intrusive” and “insulting.”
“People feel observed all the time,” he said in French. “It’s a spy. The robot is a spy for management.”
Francisco- While we’re at it the all of the information collected should be readily available to the public via the internet. In the interest of “transparency” of course.
The Sound Of Settled Science
When I was about 12, I read a book on “forensic science”, and for a time considered it as one of my career options. Little did I know, the field is more credentialist guesswork than it is solid science.
New research highlights the importance of careful application of high-tech forensic science to avoid wrongful convictions. The study was published on June 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the study, which has implications for a wide range of forensic examinations that rely on “vast databases and efficient algorithms,” researchers discovered that the odds of a false match significantly increase when examiners make millions of comparisons in a quest to match wires found at a crime scene with the tools allegedly used to cut them.
The rate of mistaken identifications could be as high as one in 10 or more, concluded the researchers, who are affiliated with the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE), based in Ames, Iowa.
Flashback: Bite marks, blood-splatter patterns, ballistics, and hair, fiber and handwriting analysis sound compelling in the courtroom, but much of the “science” behind forensic science rests on surprisingly shaky foundations.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
“Two all beef patties special sauce let us please tickle onions on a Westeel seed bin.”
What’s The Antidote to DEI?
Oh Joy
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Drawing Overlords
“Adobe has just changed the terms for subscription applications like Photoshop. Nothing big, just a demand of unlimited use of everything you ever create, forever. Oh, and you’re locked out of your existing work until you agree.”
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
“All of us at Lime condemn these vile acts in no uncertain terms,” Lime Director of Government Relations Hayden Harvey told The National Desk. “At a time when our teams at Lime are beginning pride celebrations around the globe, it is disturbing to see the hate taking place in Spokane.”
Lime has now implemented a “no-go zone” over the crosswalk, meaning scooters driven over the mural will be remotely shut down. According to the company’s website, entering a “no-go zone” will cause a Lime vehicle to “gradually come to a stop,” forcing a rider to walk their scooter until it is outside the zone.
Via Ed Driscoll.
Good Question
oftwominds.com- If AI Is So Great, Prove It: Eliminate All Surveillance, Spam, And Robocalling
If AI is so great, why doesn’t it do all this stupidly burdensome “shadow work” for us? When yet another corporate monopoly’s products and/or services fails miserably, then why can’t AI get on the phone with a tech-support person halfway around the world and get it sorted?
Priorities
Gateway Pundit- Google Snubs 160,000 Men Who Landed at Normandy 80 Years Ago, Instead Celebrates ‘Lesbian Chicana Activist’ on D-Day
Google spent the anniversary of D-Day “Celebrating Jeanne Córdova” with a cartoon image of the lesbian author and activist who died in 2016 at the age of 67 — far from German machine-gun fire and in peaceful Los Angeles, according to the Wikipedia page the company pushed as its top result for her.
Google noted on the “doodle” that it chose Córdova because of its embrace of LGBT “pride” for the month of June.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Everything new is old again.
We’re in a situation similar to the dotcom bust of 2000. The internet is definitely transformative, but real change takes time—it doesn’t happen overnight. The internet didn’t really take off until smartphones became affordable and people could access it from anywhere. I mean pets.com reached $400 million valuation while selling products at about ~60% loss. The only reason pets.com reached this valuation was the internet trend stick that was slapped onto it. Exactly what we are seeing with the AI bumper sticker companies are slapping onto their company.
Look at the # companies saying AI in earning calls. Just following the herd and using buzzwords to generate stock interest.
h/t Melinda Romanoff
Google Commemorative Logos You’ll Never See
A six-year span of internal Google reports, unearthed by 404 Media, exposes a troubling array of privacy breaches affecting everything from children’s voice data to the home addresses of unsuspecting carpool users.
These breaches include making YouTube recommendations based on users’ deleted watch histories. These issues, though not widely known or impactful on a large scale, reveal the complex challenges faced by one of the tech world’s behemoths.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
“Our focus on biometrics as a secure way to verify identity, replacing the password with the person, is at the heart of our efforts in this area,”
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Windows Chatbot Will Watch Literally Everything You Do
So Noted
Savage.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Wait until they find out the humans can topple transmission poles:
A range of AI systems have learned techniques to systematically induce “false beliefs in others to accomplish some outcome other than the truth,” according to a new research paper.
The paper focused on two types of AI systems: special-use systems like Meta’s CICERO, which are designed to complete a specific task, and general-purpose systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which are trained to perform a diverse range of tasks.
While these systems are trained to be honest, they often learn deceptive tricks through their training because they can be more effective than taking the high road.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
ENDORSED: After months of resisting, Air Canada was forced to give a partial refund to a grieving passenger who was misled by an airline chatbot inaccurately explaining the airline’s bereavement travel policy.
They Banned Our Incandescent Bulbs For This
JPMorgan Chase, a bank, calculates that Alphabet, Amazon’s cloud arm (aws), Meta and Microsoft consumed 90 terawatt-hours (twh) of electricity in 2022, as much as Colombia. And that was mostly before Chatgpt touched off the ai revolution in November that year. The ensuing hoopla led the International Energy Agency (iea), an official forecaster, to predict that data centres (including those dedicated to ai and equally energy-hungry cryptocurrencies) will eat up more than 800twh globally in 2026, double the amount in 2022…