Are Microsoft and their ilk doing *any* due diligence with their AI investments?
“Builder.ai lacked true AI, instead utilising a group of Indian developers who were merely pretending to be bots writing code.”
On the plus side, less environmental degradation and actual people were getting paid 💁🏼♀️
ibtimes.co.uk/builderai-collap…
Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5bn 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Actually Indians' Pretending to Be Bots
Builder.ai, once a $1.5 billion 'AI' startup backed by Microsoft and QIA, is filing for bankruptcy. A lender seized $37M, crippling operations.Vinay Patel (International Business Times UK)
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A long post about excellence, learning, standards, rules, and being exceptional but also good.
Get Weird And Disappear ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/get-we…
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Small anecdote about this from my own family. In the 1940s, my paternal grandmother was ordered to host a young man who had been a warden in one of the German Concentration Camps. That man had nightmares every night and when my grandmother mentioned this to a neighbor along the lines of "If Hitler weren't such a stuck up about the Jews, we wouldn't be in this pickle" she got rounded up by the Gestapo and questioned for a day, and only let go because my grandfather was at the Eastern Front and known to be a good citizen (i.e., fervent Nazi).
This is _the only story_ about the Nazi time I know about my grandparents. Everything else was stoic silence.
Everyone knew.
infosec.exchange/users/masek/s…
I didn't knowWhen I learned about the holocaust as teenager in Germany, many people from the Nazi era were still alive and lived all around me. Being the curious person I always was, I asked them about what happened and their role in it.
"I didn't know" was the boilerplate answer. And as they were relatives and friends, I believed them at first.
Then in 1981 we got a new teacher for history and he exposed the lie. Or more precise: he got us exposing those lies.
1/5
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What does it mean to live in a quantum universe?
Most of us don't think of quantum physics as playing a role in our macroscopic, everyday world.
But look closer, and you'll see that so much absolutely relies on it.
bigthink.com/starts-with-a-ban…
Ask Ethan: What does it mean to live in a quantum universe?
Over a century after we first unlocked the secrets of the quantum universe, people find it more puzzling than ever. Can we make sense of it?Ethan Siegel (Big Think)
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OK, this thing is amazing and props to @siracusa for another really neat tool. I look forward to giving it a run on my mom's machine -- it's got multiple users on it (and the tool doesn't do cross-user file linking alas, though I understand why) and they're regularly short of disk space.
mastodon.social/@siracusa/1140…
Announcing the third entry in my collection of weird little Mac apps: Hyperspacehypercritical.co/2025/02/25/hy…
Hyperspace can reclaim disk space *without removing any files.* Read the linked post to learn how it works.
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AI has a lot of problems, but maybe counter intuitive, energy consumption is not a big issue!
Very interesting read by Andy Masley on the energy consumption of ChatGPT compared to services like streaming and other cloud services.
andymasley.substack.com/p/indi…
He does not mention the Jevons paradox though which could have negative outcomes for some services I guess.
#ai #energy #chatgpt #water #climatechange
Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
And a plea to think seriously about climate change without getting distractedAndy Masley (The Weird Turn Pro)
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David Fi&er
in reply to Ashe Dryden • • •Gabriel N
in reply to Ashe Dryden • • •strong colonialist’s undertones in that title.
“The Biggest Mechanical Turk” is a great idea for a movie.
Courtney Stanton
in reply to Ashe Dryden • • •Ashe Dryden
in reply to Courtney Stanton • • •