A Taste of Ireland: The Irish Music & Dance Sensation will have you laughing, crying and jigging into the night with a show that has entertained thousands. An all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza, this energetic, feel-good Irish music and dance feast will feature a company of over 15 with some of the world's leading Irish Dancers and musicians, including world champions and stars of other well-known shows, such as Riverdance and Lord of the Dance.
The sell-out Irish dance sensation A Taste of Ireland explodes back onto Newcastle stages this month with a spectacular new production.
Hot off sold-out tours across the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand in 2023, this new production is touring NSW
A Taste of Ireland – The Irish Music & Dance Sensation
10 PRINT “The BASIC programming language turns 60.“
Blood test finds knee osteoarthritis up to eight years before it appears on X-rays
What is World Freedom Day? World Freedom Day is an annual event that honors the historic events of November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall, which separated East and West Berlin, was breached and ultimately led to its demolition.
This led to this:
The United Nations General Assemblydeclared May 3 to be World Press Freedom Day or just World Press Day, observed to raise awareness of the importance of freedom of the press and remind governments of their duty to respect and uphold the right to freedom of expression enshrined under Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and marking the anniversary of the Windhoek Declaration, a statement of free press principles put together by Africannewspaper journalists in Windhoek in 1991.
New York Times - Your Face Belongs To Us: A Tale of AI, a Secretive Startup, and The End of Privacy. – “Kashmir Hill is a technology reporter who has been covering the privacy implications of connected cars, including her own. Automakers have been selling data about the driving behavior of millions of people to the insurance industry. In the case of General Motors, affected drivers weren’t informed, and the tracking led insurance companies to charge some of them more for premiums.
I’m the reporter who broke the story. I recently discovered that I’m among the drivers who was spied on. My husband and I bought a G.M.-manufactured 2023 Chevrolet Bolt in December. This month, my husband received his “consumer disclosure files” from LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk, two data brokers that work with the insurance industry and that G.M. had been providing with data. (He requested the files after my article came out in March, heeding the advice I had given to readers.) My husband’s LexisNexis report had a breakdown of the 203 trips we had taken in the car since January, including the distance, the start and end times, and how often we hard-braked or accelerated rapidly. The Verisk report, which dated back to mid-December and recounted 297 trips, had a high-level summary at the top: 1,890.89 miles driven; 4,251 driving minutes; 170 hard-brake events; 24 rapid accelerations, and, on a positive note, zero speeding events.
I had requested my own LexisNexis file while reporting, but it didn’t have driving data on it. Though both of our names are on the car’s title, the data from our Bolt accrued to my husband alone because the G.M. dealership listed him as the primary owner. G.M.’s spokeswoman had told me that this data collection happened only to people who turned on OnStar, its connected services plan, and enrolled in Smart Driver, a gamified program that offers feedback and digital badges for good driving, either at the time of purchase or via their vehicle’s mobile app.
That wasn’t us — and I had checked to be sure. In mid-January, again while reporting, I had connected our car to the MyChevrolet app to see if we were enrolled in Smart Driver. The app said we weren’t, and thus we had no access to any information about how we drove.”
Atlantic [unpaywalled] – A great public resource is at risk of being destroyed. By Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier: “The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection. But all of this is coming to an end. The advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences.
To understand why, you must understand publishing. Its core task is to connect writers to an audience. Publishers work as gatekeepers, filtering candidates and then amplifying the chosen ones. Hoping to be selected, writers shape their work in various ways. This article might be written very differently in an academic publication, for example, and publishing it here entailed pitching an editor, revising multiple drafts for style and focus, and so on…The arrival of generative-AI tools has introduced a voracious new consumer of writing. Large language models, or LLMs, are trained on massive troves of material—nearly the entire internet in some cases.
They digest these data into an immeasurably complex network of probabilities, which enables them to synthesize seemingly new and intelligently created material; to write code, summarize documents, and answer direct questions in ways that can appear human. These LLMs have begun to disrupt the traditional relationship between writer and reader. Type how to fix broken headlight into a search engine, and it returns a list of links to websites and videos that explain the process. Ask an LLM the same thing and it will just tell you how to do it. Some consumers may see this as an improvement:
Why wade through the process of following multiple links to find the answer you seek, when an LLM will neatly summarize the various relevant answers to your query? Tech companies have proposed that these conversational, personalized answers are the future of information-seeking. But this supposed convenience will ultimately come at a huge cost for all of us web users…”
Back in 2020, my friend — let’s call him Liam — messaged the group chat. “It’s relentless,” he said, with a screenshot of a message from a woman reading “Still single?”
