“If you want to take the island, you need to burn the boats.”
— Tony Robbins.
Sometimes scams are hidden in plain sight. That goes for the self-help world,
Freedom from Dissent The Baffler
NFL to roll out facial authentication software league-wide The Record
What do different countries pay for Olympic gold medals?
Via Cremieux, and here is the related Wikipedia page.
X is training Grok AI on your data—here’s how to stop it
Ars Technica: “Elon Musk-led social media platform X is training Grok, its AI chatbot, on users’ data, and that’s opt-out, not opt-in. If you’re an X user, that means Grok is already being trained on your posts if you haven’t explicitly told it not to. Over the past day or so, users of the platform noticed the checkbox to opt out of this data usage in X’s privacy settings. The discovery was accompanied by outrage that user data was being used this way to begin with.
The social media posts about this sometimes seem to suggest that Grok has only just begun training on X users’ data, but users actually don’t know for sure when it started happening. Earlier today, X’s Safety account tweeted, “All X users have the ability to control whether their public posts can be used to train Grok, the AI search assistant.” But it didn’t clarify either when the option became available or when the data collection began.
You cannot currently disable it in the mobile apps, but you can on mobile web, and X says the option is coming to the apps soon…How to opt out…Alternatively, you can follow this linkdirectly to the settings page and uncheck the box with just one more click. If you’d like, you can also delete your conversation history with Grok here, provided you’ve actually used the chatbot before.”
Dark oxygen: jubiliant for others, cry for yourself and your kin
To summarize the new results:
An international team of researchers recently discovered that oxygen is being made by potato-shaped metallic nodules deep under the surface of the Pacific Ocean. In July, their findings, which throw into dispute the concepts of oxygen production, were published in the Nature Geoscience jonal. The discovery could lead to a reconsideration of the origins of complex life on Earth.
The findings from a team of researchers led by Professor Andrew Sweetman at the U.K.’s Scottish Association for Marine Science, show that oxygen is being produced at around 4,000 metres below the surface of the ocean in complete darkness. This contradicts previous scientific assumptions that only living organisms, including plants and algae, can use energy to create oxygen through photosynthesis, using sunlight for the reaction.
As Julian Gough suggests, most life probably is on icy moons. This means a lot more life! Over a time slice, it could mean billions of additional lives out there. Did you pop up the champagne?
The bad news is that the chance that Robin Hanson’s “Great Filter” lies behind us is somewhat smaller. Which boosts the chance that it may life in our near future. Did you pull out the tissues?
On net, did this news change your mood at all? Why or why not?
Delta Seeks Damages From CrowdStrike, Microsoft After Outage CNBC. I love these Godzilla v. Mothra fights.
The Bezzle
Sen. Cynthia Lummis announces bill for US Treasury to buy 1 million bitcoin worth $68 billionThe Block (UserFriendly)
Trump Media Stock (DJT) – The 2nd Quarter Earnings Report Needs Explanation Forbes
Tesla’s dismal results draw the shorts, and the tipsters, back out of the shadows Francine McKenna. The preview is informative.