“In the afterlife, we’ll sit around talking about the good old days, when we wished that we were dead.”
- Samuel Beckett
Four percent of humanity subscribes to OnlyFans? Who says Britain is in decline?
Has Communism Happened Yet? Ian Welsh
A Personal Meditation on Growing Old Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
Google’s AI Will Help Decide Whether Unemployed Workers Get Benefits Gizmodo
British twins grow ‘monster’ pumpkin expected to weigh more than a rhino Telegraph
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 7, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness.
Four highlights from this week: In a Big Blow to Internet Archive, Appeals Court Says Online Lending Library Is Not Fair Use; Clearview AI was keeping an illegal database of faces; gets fined; How to scan for unknown trackers that might be following you; and Chase money glitch: How a viral TikTok trend turned out to just be plain check fraud.
It pays to be brief - Cornell Chronicle: ” “It pays to be brief when asking artificial intelligence tools to mine massive datasets for insights, according to Cornell researcher Immanuel Trummer.
That’s why Trummer, associate professor of computer science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, has developed a new computational system, called Schemonic, that cuts the costs of using large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Google Bard by combing large datasets and generating what amounts to “CliffsNotes” versions of data that the models can understand.
Using Schemonic cuts costs of using LLMs as much as tenfold, Trummer said. “The monetary fees associated with using large language models are non-negligible,” said Trummer, the author of “Generating Succinct Descriptions of Database Schemata for Cost-Efficient Prompting of Large Language Models,” which was presented at the 50th Conference of Very Large Databases (VLDB) held Aug. 26-30 in Guangzhou, China. “I think it’s a problem everyone who is using these models has.
WayBack Machine – Access Archived Webpages Directly Through Google Search
Internet Archive Blogs: “In a significant step forward for digital preservation, Google Search is now making it easier than ever to access the past. Starting today, users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. How It Works To access this new feature, conduct a search on Google as usual.
Next to each search result, you’ll find three dots—clicking on these will bring up the “About this Result” panel. Within this panel, select “More About This Page” to reveal a link to the Wayback Machine page for that website. Through this direct link, you’ll be able to view previous versions of a webpage via the Wayback Machine, offering a snapshot of how it appeared at different points in time.
A Commitment to Preservation At the Internet Archive, our mission is to provide, “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” The Wayback Machine, one of our best-known services, provides access to billions of archived webpages, ensuring that the digital record remains accessible for future generations.”