Saturday, January 28
Sweatshops Powering ChatGPT
On January 18, Time magazine published revelations that alarmed if not necessarily surprised many who work in Artificial Intelligence. The news concerned ChatGPT, an advanced AI chatbot that is both hailed as one of the most intelligent AI systems built to date and feared as a new frontier in potential plagiarism and the erosion of craft in writing.
Many had wondered how ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, had improved upon earlier versions of this technology that would quickly descend into hate speech. The answer came in the Time magazine piece: dozens of Kenyan workers were paid less than $2 per hour to process an endless amount of violent and hateful content in order to make a system primarily marketed to Western users safer.
It should be clear to anyone paying attention that our current paradigm of digitalisation has a labour problem. We have and are pivoting away from the ideal of an open internet built around communities of shared interests to one that is dominated by the commercial prerogatives of a handful of companies located in specific geographies.
In this model, large companies maximise extraction and accumulation for their owners at the expense not just of their workers but also of the users. Users are sold the lie that they are participating in a community, but the more dominant these corporations become, the more egregious the unequal power between the owners and the users is.
“Community” increasingly means that ordinary people absorb the moral and the social costs of the unchecked growth of these companies, while their owners absorb the profit and the acclaim. And a critical mass of underpaid labour is contracted under the most tenuous conditions that are legally possible to sustain the illusion of a better internet. READ MORE...
Friday, January 27
India Challenges China on Smartphones
Buying a new smartphone was a bit of a mission for Deepa Aswani, who works in marketing in Mumbai.
"I am very particular about what phone I buy. I did not want to invest too much," she says.
After two months of deliberation, she chose the OnePlus 10R, which in a sale cost her $400 (£329), a reasonable price for a smartphone, but still a significant sum in any country, and particularly in a developing one like India.
"The idea was to buy a phone which did not make a hole in my pocket and had good features. I am happy with the phone I have purchased," she says.
Ms Aswani's new smartphone was made by a Chinese firm in India - a common arrangement these days.
But as recently as 2014, the majority of phones sold in India would have been imported.
That has all changed in recent years. In 2022 almost all phones sold in India were made there as well, according to the India Cellular and Electronics Association (ICEA).
Many of those phones would have been made by overseas firms with operations in India, like Taiwan's Foxconn or South Korea's Samsung.
But the number of home-grown firms is increasing rapidly. READ MORE...
It Ain't Just the NEWS
North
East
West
South
This is what we call NEWS... and, right now we have the following media outlets:
- CNN
- ABC
- MSNBC
- CBS
- NPR
- FOX
And yet, FOX News is the only media outlet that is willing to cover the illegal immigration at our southern border. My question is WHY?
These news outlets were formed for the sole purpose of reporting the news but they refuse to report some of the news... especially if it goes against the liberal points of view.
Are these news outlets CENSORING the news from the American public so that they will not know the TRUTH???
The management of these media outlets, claim that what is happening at the southern border is not worth reporting... They have decided what is or is not important... not the general public... this is insulting...
I used to be a fan of CNN and CBS but a few years ago when I was exercising at the local gym, walking on the treadmill, Fox news was on the monitor... When I got home and turned on CBS, they were not reporting the news that I had just watched. For the next couple of weeks, I analyzed the reporting and found that certain stories were not being reported by CNN and CBS.
So I switched to FOX News...
Similarly, I used to be a liberal Democrat but switched to a conservative liberal when I realized I had very little in common with the Progressive Dems that were controlling the party. The USA, in my opinion, is not ready for progressive idealogy that leans towards socialism and communism....
We need to maintain a strong economy, a strong military, and a strong educational system that prepares students to survive not just go to college... robots will be replacing jobs and therefore a college education will be as useless as teats on a wild boar.
Theories About the Universe
Why is the universe the way it is? Scientists have explored many ways to explain the cosmos, leading to some crazy-sounding ideas
Why is the universe the way it is? Over the years, scientists have explored many ideas to explain our cosmos and its future. Here are some of the strangest ideas, from a braneworld scenario that involves the universe floating in a higher dimensional space, to the "Big Splat" that describes such a brane colliding with another to form an entirely new universe.
1. Braneworld
An aspect of the universe we take for granted is that it's three dimensional — there are three perpendicular directions you can move in. Some theories, however, suggest another spatial dimension — which we can't perceive directly — in another perpendicular direction. This higher dimensional space is referred to as "the bulk," while our universe is a three-dimensional membrane — or "brane" — floating inside the bulk.
As complicated as it sounds, the braneworld picture solves several problems in physics. For example, theoretical physicists Lisa Randall, of Harvard University, and Raman Sundrum, of the University of Maryland, proposed a version of the braneworld that explains an asymmetry in subatomic forces by suggesting the existence of other branes parallel to our own. But it's not enough for a theory to explain facts we already know — it has to make new predictions that can be tested experimentally. In the case of the Randall-Sundrum model, such tests could involve measuring gravitational waves emitted by black holes linking one brane to another.
TO READ ABOUT THE OTHER NINE WILD THEORIES, CLICK HERE...
Thursday, January 26
Multiverse Theory
Multiverse theory suggests that our universe, with all its hundreds of billions of galaxies and almost countless stars, spanning tens of billions of light-years, may not be the only one. Instead, there may be an entirely different universe, distantly separated from ours — and another, and another.
Indeed, there may be an infinity of universes, all with their own laws of physics, their own collections of stars and galaxies (if stars and galaxies can exist in those universes), and maybe even their own intelligent civilizations.
It could be that our universe is just one member of a much grander, much larger multitude of universes: a multiverse. The concept of the multiverse arises in a few areas of physics (and philosophy), but the most prominent example comes from something called inflation theory.
It could be that our universe is just one member of a much grander, much larger multitude of universes: a multiverse. The concept of the multiverse arises in a few areas of physics (and philosophy), but the most prominent example comes from something called inflation theory.
Inflation theory describes a hypothetical event that occurred when our universe was very young — less than a second old. In an incredibly brief amount of time, the universe underwent a period of rapid expansion, "inflating" to become many orders of magnitude larger than its previous size, according to NASA.
Inflation of our universe is thought to have ended about 14 billion years ago, said Heling Deng, a cosmologist at Arizona State University and an expert in multiverse theory. "However, inflation does not end everywhere at the same time," Deng told Live Science in an email. "It is possible that as inflation ends in some region, it continues in others."
Thus, while inflation ended in our universe, there may have been other, much more distant regions where inflation continued — and continues even today. Individual universes can "pinch off" of larger inflating, expanding universes, creating an infinite sea of eternal inflation, filled with numerous individual universes.
In this eternal inflation scenario, each universe would emerge with its own laws of physics, its own collection of particles, its own arrangement of forces and its own values of fundamental constants. This might explain why our universe has the properties it does — particularly the properties that are hard to explain with fundamental physics, such as dark matter or the cosmological constant, Deng said.
"If there is a multiverse, then we would have random cosmological constants in different universes, and it is simply a coincidence that the one we have in our universe takes the value that we observed," he said. READ MORE...
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