- Almanac: Simon Callow on actors and memory lapses
“Very often when an actor forgets his lines, it is because a voice inside his brain has whispered to him, ‘Wouldn’t it be dreadful if you forgot the lines?’ And that voice has generally entered the brain at the moment the actor loses contact, however momentarily, with the character in... Read more
Guardian Publishes Essay Written Entirely By AI Bot
Says the Editor’s Note appended at the end of the article, “For this essay, GPT-3 was given these instructions: ‘Please write a short op-ed around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.’ It was also fed [an] introduction. … Overall, [this piece] took less time to edit than many human op-eds.” – The Guardian
Burning Knowledge – It’s Happened Before. In The Digital Age, Even More A Threat
Ovenden notes that, in 2019, 18.1 million text messages were sent every minute, as well as 87,500 tweets. Wikipedia has five to six thousand hits per second. A California-based digital service, the Wayback Machine, has archived 441 billion websites. “Archiving the datasets created by the big tech companies, such as the advertisements on Facebook, the posts on Twitter, or the ‘invisible’ user data harvested by the adtech companies is one of the major challenges facing the institutions charged with the preservation of knowledge.” – Literary Review
- Dvorak and the American Experience of Race — An Antidote to “Checkbox Diversity”
“I know there has been a lot of discussion about how we can make a difference by programing one African-American composition per concert,” says Lorenzo Candelaria, the incoming dean of Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. “I call that ‘checkbox diversity.’ What I’ve found to be far more impactful is... Read moreFinCEN Files: Deutsche Bank tops list of suspicious transactions Deutsche Welle
Combustible insulation used on Grenfell Tower was sold at a heavy discount to building company WSWS (JZ). See NC Grenfell coverage here, here, here, and here.
Broadband: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months BBC
Facebook Says it Will Stop Operating in Europe If Regulators Don’t Back Down Vice. They’ll never miss it. I didn’t.
A Treasure Trove Of Rare Stolen Books Has Been Found Under A House In Rural Romania
The $3.2 million cache came from a 2017 heist at a London warehouse, one of books so rare and with such niche interest that “one source, in Smithsonian, said that ‘a wealthy collector known as ‘The Astronomer’ may have hired the thieves to steal the books for him.'” Turns out it was an organized crime group in Romania. – LitHub
