Snip!t channels - Alan Dix

Human control risks becoming an afterthought or a mere formality.

“When we talk about AI that’s ‘good’ for the planet, it’s often predictive models, extractive models, or old-school AI models.”

This week, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, called for economies to “move beyond GDP” as a measure of progress, warning that the world’s “existing accounting systems” were driving the planet towards disaster.
His remar...

there is no specific government app to direct motorists to the cheapest forecourt or garage.

Instead, this open source data will be used by established apps and websites that already map out and compare pump prices across the UK.

The diff...

It took an FOI request to bring this national security assessment to light. For ‘doomsayers’ like us, it is the ultimate vindication

The result was a world in which 75% of people lived in countries classified as water-insecure or critically water-insecure and 2 billion people lived on ground that is sinking as groundwater aquifers collapse.
Conflicts over water had risen...

The climate crisis is on track to destroy capitalism, a top insurer has warned, with the vast cost of extreme weather impacts leaving the financial sector unable to operate.

A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “Nature underpins our security, prosperity, and resilience and understanding the threats we face from biodiversity loss is crucial to meeting them head on.

their institution had removed the phrase “social justice” from a wall text as a way of softening the way a particular artist (a socialist, anti-racist figure) was presented

International law varies depending on whether we like the country being invaded. What’s not to understand?

The "Ten Titans," which includes Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Broadcom, Tesla, Oracle, and Netflix, now makes up over 39% of the S&P 500. And the technology sector alone makes up 34% of the index.

Since the prize in that race is global supremacy, there are few incentives for either side to fret about risks, or sign up to international protocols restricting the uses of AI and mandating transparency in its development. Neither the US n...

OpenAI for Countries, does what it says on the tin. It’s designed to embed OpenAI’s models and infrastructure inside the machinery of states, becoming an invaluable, indefatigable part of the running of our lives. OpenAI is in talks wi...

Digital billboards that can film viewers’ responses to adverts have been installed in hundreds of apartment blocks, in a move that civil liberty campaigners called “creepy as hell”.

It is not likely to be a hefty volume because the vast majority of the material has been lost in the mists of time. But the remnants of a language spoken in parts of the UK and Ireland 2,000 years ago are being collected for what is being b...

“With most standard product development jobs, you know exactly what you just built,” said ChatGPT’s Turley “You know how it’s going to behave. With this job, it’s the first time I’ve worked in a technology where you have to go...

Iceland’s former prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, has said that the Icelandic language could be wiped out in as little as a generation due to the sweeping rise of AI and encroaching English language dominance.

This fact points to a strategy that entertainment executives fear far more than AI, one that would empower artists to challenge the status quo across big content and big tech: organised labour.

Our goal is to create a mapping tool that captures and highlights what truly matters to communities, empowering them to use it to influence how their places are planned and developed.

MoD staff warned not to share hidden data before Afghan leak

Hidden tabs are a common feature in spreadsheet software and make information invisible to the user, but still easily accessible if the settings on a document are changed.

There are valid concerns about the abuse and overuse of large language models (LLMs) in education. But if you want to understand why so many students are turning to AI, you need to understand what brought us to this point – and the educat...

The Danish government is to clamp down on the creation and dissemination of AI-generated deepfakes by changing copyright law to ensure that everybody has the right to their own body, facial features and voice.

The List of Historic Place Names of Wales is an index of names for identifiable geographical locations gathered from a variety of historical sources by a number of different projects.

Drawing upon existing place name research, the List inc...

Another popular idea is Slow Zones, which are areas where car traffic is limited and streets reclaimed by pedestrians. Although some are skeptical of their usefulness, Salazar-Miranda’s study revealed some data-driven benefits: “We used...

Robot chefs are replacing humans at some South Korean highway restaurants.
Tech companies say robots can help solve labor shortage in an aging nation.
Workers say their roles have been downgraded from chefs to cleaning staff.

The open web search infrastructure will not only contribute to Europe’s sovereignty for navigating and searching the web. It will benefit us all as citizens. Based on our own preferences, we will finally have a real choice again when choo...

The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson aired on May 20th, 1977.
Carl Sagan says something very important, a strong message that didn't lose any validity since then.

“people with greater lifetime GPS experience have worse spatial memory during self-guided navigation”. Thirteen of their participants were retested three years after the initial research, when they found that “greater GPS use since in...

Social networks have two stable equilibria: either everyone uses them, or no-one uses them. In contrast, nonsocial apps (e.g. weather apps, exercise apps) can exist [somewhere] along a continuum of adoption. The binary nature of social netw...

Calculate with numbers you’re not sure about
Hi, I'm Filip, and I'd like to introduce to you an early version of an uncertainty calculator.
Statistics are scary, but they don't need to be. If you allow me to simplify, the field of statist...