I normally post these on Twitter, but it just occurred to me I could try doing so here: MIT Technology Review has an open call for pitches, for our upcoming issue on ⚖️ethics⚖️. We're looking for *big* swings: features, investigations, profiles, and sharp essays at the intersection of #ethics and #technology. Rates: $1-2/word.

Pitch deadline is tomorrow: April 20. Short notice, I know! If you have an idea, but need a day or two to write up a pitch, send me an e-mail (see https://www.technologyreview.com/how-to-pitch-mit-technology-review/)

@norcalgrandma I find the whole “you need to be educated to carry on an argument” stance a little ridiculous, to be honest 🙂

Educated according to whom? Wouldn’t the life experience of a person who’s lived 50 - 70 years be more useful in some cases than the book learning of a 20 year old in a field that is not even related to the subject under discussion?

It’s all subjective and everybody has something to contribute and everybody has different viewpoints.

Personally, I wouldn’t give the “you need to be more educated” argument much credence at all — unless of course, the subject is a specialized one and the other person actually has education in that field. Then, I’d hope that they’d actually explain things clearly rather than simply throwing up “education” as a defense 🙂

Take a moment to enjoy this unusually twisted and very big London Plane in #camberwell #southlondon #treesofmastdon

@eloquence Exactly 🙂

If we are worried about “existential” threats, then there are more urgent things that he (and others) can concentrate on … but since they are ready to colonize Mars, I guess threats to Earth don’t matter that much but the tech they can take to Mars with them matters? 😛 (OK, just for the sake of clarity, I’m kidding about Mars but I think that’s the level of thinking we are seeing … )

Apparently Melon Husk wants to start “TruthGPT” to rival OpenAI and Google. If this is going to be anything like his “free speech” efforts on Twitter, you know that “truth” is the furthest thing you’ll get from “TruthGPT” 😛

Also didn’t Melon-boy sign a letter asking for a pause on development of systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least 6 months? So why is *he* going ahead with development of new systems? Doesn’t the pause apply to him?

Or was the pause only so that he (and others) can catch up? 😛

The way these people do u-turns is likely to give whiplash to people if anybody actually paid attention 😀

#MachineLearning #DeepLearning #GPT

@BenjaminHan You know that the ending (and most of the KGB stuff) is made up, right? 🙂 It was still an interesting story but not as highly dramatised as the Apple TV show made it seem …

I often warn people of the dangers of using LLMs as search engines and how you need to verify any fact provided by these engines yourself.

But on the flipside, what I’ve found Bing Chat (https://www.bing.com/) useful for recently has been to find out who plays a particular role in a TV show/movie 🙂

This is a game that my wife and I play — when we recognize somebody in a show, we either say “Oh, it’s so and so from this other show” or we just say “Oh, we know this person” and then try to figure out who it is.

Our old workflow used to be that we wait for the person’s name to be mentioned, go to IMDB, find the show, find the episode, and then search the cast for the person’s name. Or, go through the actor images till we (possibly) find the right person.

But with Bing Chat, all you have to do is simply say “Who plays <name> in <show>” and it generally find the info 🙂

In fact, recently I asked for a person by their shortened character name (since I couldn’t find them in the roles listing because they had been listed with the full character name) and Bing still found them.

So colour me (slightly) impressed 😛

#MachineLearning #SearchEngines #ChatGPT #BingChat

I’m home from my Channel Islands trip. Here’s a Santa Cruz Island fox.

I guess it’s time to start giving this more of a try. Twitter feels lonely now. I’m not great at #introductions, but I read this is proper etiquette here. I’m a librarian. I like #books #boardgames #swimming #starwars #janeausten

@BobWilliams I actually wrote a short story about this a long time ago — about how people don’t die but simply transfer over to a new universe when they die. So from the dead person’s perspective, they go on living but the people in the old universe think that the person died …

I often refer to this when things don’t seem quite right, or something I was sure was correct suddenly turns out to be wrong — it must be because I slipped into another universe, right? 🙂

Now I’m no #twitcher but when there are reports of a #Hoopoe just down the road I’ve got to try my luck.
What a bird..! 😲😎👍✅
These guys usually hang out in southern #Europe and occasionally appear in the south of #England causing a good deal of excitement.
But this one is in #Combee, #CountyDown, #NorthernIreland 😳

#nature #NaturePhotography #wildlife #bird #birdphotography #birds #rare #rarity #lifer #twitching #birding #exotic

#AmazingWorld
#ArtOfEasterEggs

Hennig Brand, who discovered phosphorus in 1669, found it while boiling down gallons of urine to try and make gold.

When movies get really stupid …

I’m watching this Tamil movie at the moment where this guy moves into a new house, doesn’t lock his room, has his housemate enter his room in the middle of the night, take car keys from his bedside to go to another house which has all its doors open in the middle of the night, enters the house and kills a woman and so on …

Do people really exist who have no suspicions at all of strangers and will leave their room door open if they share a house with somebody and they’ve just met the guy? I find it really hard to believe …

The movie goes on to have even more unbelievable stuff happen in quick succession and I’ll probably just watch it anyway to see where all the insanity leads but I find this one really hard to believe already 😛

#Movies #Plot #SuspensionOfDisbelief

I am James Davis Nicoll, reviewer, essayist, and part time cautionary tale. In addition to my own site and tor dot com, my work has appeared at Publishers Weekly, Romantic Times, and Interzone. Between 2001 and 2014, I was a first reader for the Science Fiction Book Club.

Links and more details in comments. This sort of issue is why my blog is called More Words, Deeper Hole.

#introduction #sciencefiction #reviews #bookstodon

@Rycaut Enjoy! When you watch them, would be interested to hear what you think 🙂

Some of them will require a lot of suspension of belief and I’m not sure that anybody has that much of patience — I just end up yelling at the TV but I still watch them 😛

@Rycaut I think you’re hitting the Achilles heel of Indian movies with those genres 😛 There are a few heist movies I can think of, but all of them fall short on plot because at some point or other you have to suspend belief if you want to keep on watching … Or, they are a copy/re-imagining of a Hollywood movie — sometimes I watch those just to compare/contrast. The “Dhoom” series is probably one of the best examples here for all of the above in one way or another …

Not quite a heist movie, but “Thaanaa Serndha Koottam” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6237966/) is a good one in the con-man genre that you might like.

But if you want a brilliantly crafted crime/cat-and-mouse kind of story, then you can’t go wrong with “Drishyam” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3417422) and the sequel. I linked to the original Malayalam version, but it’s so good that it’s been re-made in Tamil, Hindi, and Telugu and I’ve watched all of those versions 🙂

There have been a few good time travel movies but the rest of the SF genre is generally not very well represented on the Indian side. The most famous SF movie that I can think of (off the top of my head) is “Koi… Mil Gaya” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0254481) but if I recall correctly, it was a mishmash copy of “ET” with the standard dose of romance thrown in and the characters being adults, or something like that …

You can argue that most Indian cinema is fantasy in some way, but they do do brilliant historical/fantasy movies. For example, if you haven’t watched “Bahubali” you might want to …

I have “RRR” in my to-watch pile but I keep putting it off for fear that all the expectations will be for nothing. Great cast though. So I guess I should watch it at some point, but I keep adding to my to-watch Indian pile and at like 2.5 hours generally, it does take longer to get through all of them 😛

@Rycaut I think some people just want to forget and move on … but if we don’t remember, will we learn anything from it? 🙂

Plus, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some of the actors are against any sort of masking (on screen) since they might think that they won’t be noticed. But this is just speculation and not backed by any facts …

For some of the Indian movies, they do show photos during the filming process at the end and I see that at least some of the people are masked, (or chin-masked 😛) but since I haven’t seen much similar photos on the Hollywood side, not sure how that went …

Incidentally, I’m not Indian but I do love Indian movies since there is so much to choose from — each region has their own feel/flavour and it adds a ton of variety (and different viewpoints). If you are looking for anything particular, let me know. I love talking movies all day, everyday 😛

@Rycaut I did see that and had forgotten about it — thanks for the reminder 🙂

The only quibble I have is that that episode was about the pandemic but the rest of the show had nothing about it. Whereas “All Rise” had a similar Zoom-based episode (if I recall correctly) but they also incorporated masking and ongoing pandemic related stuff into the rest of the season …

But it’s been a few years and so my memory is hazy on the details now about both shows 🙂