2023
How actors are losing their voices to AI.. Actors who signed away their voice rights many years ago are now competing for work with AI versions of themselves, and hearing their own voices used in scams. (Madhumita Murgia / FT)
In a sign of what’s to come for many white-collar workers, artificial intelligence is eating the software industry, as companies turn to generative AI tools to save money on programmers.
Some 70% of coders are already using or plan to use AI in their work, with one-third saying the primary reason they do so is because it makes them more productive, according to survey by Stack Overflow.
What Will AI Do to Your Job? Take a Look at What It’s Already Doing to Coders. By Christopher Mims at the Wall Street Journal.
How Tom Brady’s Crypto Ambitions Collided With Reality. “The superstar quarterback is among the celebrities dealing with the fallout from the crypto crash. Others, like Taylor Swift, escaped.” (The New York Times / Erin Griffith and David Yaffe-Bellany).
Seems like Brady and other celebrities were both victimizers and victims, as is so often the case with people in pyramid schemes at any level. They’re not entirely guilty but they’re not innocent victims either.
And they’re all still rich. Maybe they lost a few millions or tens of millions, but they can afford it.
I was and am disappointed to see celebrities I liked and respected, like Matt Damon and Larry David, get caught up in this grift. I thought they had more integrity.
I remember when I did not have to spend quite so much of my life charging things and making sure that the things are charged
Josh Withers shares frustration with stagnation in the ebook market.
I agree, and blame the Amazon monopoly. That monopoly is created and maintained by laws, not markets.
Amazon needs to be required to allow competing products to read its ebook format. Problem solved.
Right now, that kind of compatiblity is outright illegal.
Threads: A mall inside the store inside the mall
I signed up for Threads. Unenthusiastically. I want to use fewer social media platforms, and concentrate my focus, rather than doing more.
Hopefully, Threads will follow through and become a full citizen of ActivityPub, and also connect to the blue Facebook platform. That will make my social media activity simpler.
Even better: Everybody needs to wake up and realize that we don’t need a platform to serve as the internet town square. The internet already is the town square.
About 7-10 years ago, JC Penny announced a bold new initiative to start opening independent shops within its stores. At first I thought that was brilliant, and then I said, “Wait a second—you want to open a mall inside the store inside the mall? How’s that going to work?”
I’m @mitchwagner on Threads. So far, my entire Threads activity consists of a single photo of the dog.
Every so often I am tempted by an Ember coffee mug and then I look at the price and I fall over unconscious.
Historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook “delve into the mysteries surrounding the Ark of the Covenant.”
The most important object in the universe, but also a somewhat invisible presence in the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant has fuelled stories for millennia… as a weapon of mass destruction, an elaborate filling cabinet for sacred laws, or as the very location where God and man meet.
The Rest is History: Raiders of the Lost Ark
Also:
“Who drinks the water I shall give him, will have a spring inside him welling up for eternal life.” A deeply mysterious object which doesn’t appear in the Bible, was the Holy Grail really the chalice used by Jesus during the Last Supper, and the very cup that caught his blood at the crucifixion? Or is it merely a symbol representing Christ’s bloodline? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the Holy Grail, the origin of the tradition, and the role it played within medieval Christendom.