Stephan Faris

The vice president's "Making Dinner" playlist does ring of too good to be true

PANAMA PLAYLISTS

"I found the real Spotify accounts of celebrities, politicians, and journalists. Many use their real names.

The Panama Papers revealed hidden bank accounts. This reveals hidden tastes"

panamaplaylists.com

Time to take you to that great glue factory in the sky

So I got obsessed with this mystery text at the centre of a 1920 painting by El Lissitzky that was smuggled out of Kyiv under Russian bombing in 2022.
And we worked it out! How we did it and what it means-
The hidden Jewish history at the heart of a Kyiv painting
www.irishtimes.com/world/europe...

There should a Pulitzer for headlines.

One of the best things I've read on AI and art

This is a very very very good piece. Well reported, well sourced, well written. And covers nuances of Hollywood meets AI like no publication not based in LA could.

I think I'll skip the Solzhenitsyn session

Saw Anora the other night. Forgot what it was like to see a movie that's actually good.

Monthly reminder: Many people have a book in them, but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness, cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain, find the Blade of No One Made You Do This, and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.

The UK's foreign born population is about 15 percent (migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/br...), so between 1 in 6 and 1 in 7.

So if the Times is right, the foreign born are less likely to be in prison than those who took their first breath in the UK.

My latest for @ecfr looks at efforts to find 100s of 1000s of Iraqis who are missing.Many are believed to be in mass graves. #Iraq has so many mass graves it has a specialized directorate. It even has a Mass Graves Day.Every number is a person who was part of a family that is integral to a community

Many people are Saying, this is One of the BEST books which was ever written By Someone for people to Read. Also, I think you should Buy it and Read it.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

www.bol.com/nl/nl/f/the-...

this must be the large language model everyone's talking about

Who can tell with the way kids dress these days

I mean...

Sid, Johnny, it's after 9 o'clock

My hobby in my old age is watching pop videos and wondering who let these guys stay up past their bedtime.

The Prime Minister of France does not appear to know the name of the European Commission President, which seems, well,,

That dratted webcrawler!!!

Hello, I am an editor in a film. I dress badly, indulge in the darkest humor and have strong feelings about words like "impact" and "evacuate." This is also an accurate portrayal of real life.

18 months. 12,000 questions. A whole lot of anxiety. What I learned from reading students’ ChatGPT logs Students increasingly use AI chatbots for anything from academic queries to emotional quandaries. But are they missing out on the chance to make their own mistakes? Three undergrads reveal all …

Fascinating - even if one of the students "suspects university authorities are unaware of how widespread the practice is." They're really not. They (we) just don't know what on earth to do about it.

She's going to throw out her back trying to get through that door

This advert is terrible, but I submit that no car advert, ever, will be quite as bad as this one, which I still can't believe is not an advert for Eurostar:

WE HAVE LONG SINCE LEFT THE INFORMATION AGE. WELCOME TO THE AGE OF NOISE

Another day, another conversation with the press team where I explain that I did not give the quote in that story and the whole thing is AI slop. This happens once every few weeks now.

An AI slop factory apparently tried to rewrite our article about AI not replacing workers en masse, but hit the paywall... so just summarised the paywall. If this is the robot that takes my job I'll be v embarrassed

Five Types of Scoops Journalists tend to be obsessed with scoops, meaning: the first to break the news, and being seen as the first, which means getting credit for it among peers. But not all scoops are created equal. …

SCOOP! Recommended reading for everyone in Bxl, especially #2: “Journalists who are defending an ego scoop are engaged in an intramural competition that has nothing to do with public service, and everything to do with bragging rights” Hat tip Jay Rosen. publicnotebook.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/f...

The jackpot would be to learn to do that when I write

AI Comes Up with Bizarre Physics Experiments. But They Work. | Quanta Magazine Artificial intelligence software is designing novel experimental protocols that improve upon the work of human physicists, although the humans are still “doing a lot of baby-sitting.”

This matches with my understanding of where LLMs are likely to impact science quickest – bringing techniques that are well-understood to one set of experts, and applying them to questions raised by a different set of experts www.quantamagazine.org/ai-comes-up-...

Plan voor aanslag op Songfestival in Rotterdam, justitie wist van niets Tegen de verdachte, de Zweed Alexander H., werd deze maand in Luxemburg twaalf jaar celstraf geëist. De uitspraak volgt in november.

A neo Nazi planned to attack Eurovision in Rotterdam in 2020 with ricin or another poison gas, potentially killing many. The security services of Luxembourg caught him and he’s now on trial.

nos.nl/l/2575948