Back in September of last year I had the wonderful honour of virtually chatting with Josh Shipp and Jesse Rice for the above podcast.
I’ve slept since then so had forgotten what we chatted about but boy did I love experiencing this conversation again as a listener.
There’s lots of insights here from my lived experience as a speaker coach and speaker myself plus how to present online effectively. I also got to ask some questions also of Josh and got some advice / insights from his brain.
I featured Josh in a MediaSnackers podcast back in 2009, met up with him a couple of times during the following years and kept in touch ever since. He’s one of my favourite speakers and humans on the planet. A mentor. Author. MTV advice star. TV personality. Now business leader / youth speaker agency founder. An exemplar of the practice of oratory.
Before I leave, I ask Loeb what is to be gained from looking for aliens, and his reply is surprisingly humble. “We know from our private life that if we find a partner, it gives new meaning to our existence,” he says. “So finding a partner somewhere in the form of another civilisation that can teach us things that we can imitate, that we can aspire to, will give us a meaning to our cosmic existence. The universe will not be pointless any more.
The publication is suing both companies for copyright infringement and asks them to be held liable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” for allegedly copying its works. It’s also asking the court to prevent OpenAI and Microsoft from training their AI models using its content, as well as remove the Times’ work from the companies’ datasets.
Facial recognition searches match the biometric measurements of an identified photograph, such as that contained on driving licences, to those of an image picked up elsewhere. The intention to allow the police or the National Crime Agency (NCA) to exploit the UK’s driving licence records is not explicitly referenced in the bill or in its explanatory notes, raising criticism from leading academics that the government is “sneaking it under the radar”.
There was confusion in the plenary hall shortly after the agreement was passed as many parties had assumed there would be a debate over the text. The Alliance of Small Island States, representing 39 countries, said it had not been in the room when the deal was adopted as it was still coordinating its response. Its lead negotiator, Anne Rasmussen, from Samoa, did not formally object to the agreement and believed the deal had good elements, but said the “the process has failed us” and the text included a “litany of loopholes”. “We have made an incremental advancement over business as usual when what we really needed is an exponential step change in our actions and support,” she said. Her speech was met with a standing ovation.
Generating images was by far the most energy- and carbon-intensive AI-based task. Generating 1,000 images with a powerful AI model, such as Stable Diffusion XL, is responsible for roughly as much carbon dioxide as driving the equivalent of 4.1 miles in an average gasoline-powered car. In contrast, the least carbon-intensive text generation model they examined was responsible for as much CO2 as driving 0.0006 miles in a similar vehicle. Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion XL, did not respond to a request for comment.
On Friday, the California-based company said in a regulatory filing that the personal data of 0.1% of customers – or about 14,000 individuals – had been accessed by “threat actors”. But the filing warned that hackers were also able to access “a significant number of files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry”. The company confirmed to TechCrunch on Saturday that because of an opt-in feature that allows DNA-related relatives to contact each other, the true number of people exposed was 6.9 million – or just less than half of 23andMe’s 14 million reported customers. Another group of about 1.4 million people who opted in to 23andMe’s DNA relatives feature also “had their family tree profile information accessed”, the company also acknowledged. That information includes names, relationship labels, birth year, self-reported location and other data.
If you do not want your website’s content used for this training, you can ask the bots deployed by Google and Open AI to skip over your site. Keep in mind that this only applies to future scraping. If Google or OpenAI already have data from your site, they will not remove it.
A snippet from a recent Creative Welly episode which sums up my thinking on why our online feeds are so ineptly corrupt these days plus a simple strategy to solve the problem.
And I meant a psychology degree in addiction.
“Trust people to be human and adults about this. Let them follow who they want to follow and just serve them that stuff, nothing else. And you’ll be surprised then the uptake of activity because you’ve trusted them.”
About how the EU is moving closer to AI laws (including banning use of facial recognition tech by police & emotional recognition at work places & in schools.).
Meet the people still living on SecondLife: I still remember intro’ing folks to this in my presentations / workshops back in 2006-11, the concept of avatars, virtual currency / concerts / lectures etc.
emojikitchen.dev has over 30,000 unique emoji mashup combinations for you to play with and use.
shapecatcher.com to draw in the box and it will help you to find the most similar unicode characters (urrently, there are 11817 character glyphs in the database).
clipdrop.co/uncrop “uncrops” your images and broadens them out (just like Photoshop Generative Fill Firefly but without text prompt) for free. Here’s an example from my AI creations:
And finally, Midjourney just released their ‘zoom out’ feature (you can either 1.5x or 2x) which is like automatic generative fill / out-painting. Here are my first attempts:
A few chosen narrative examples, to uncover forms, inspire the soul and stir the creative spirits.
A friend introduced me to this track over twenty years ago. An example of prefacing a performance which amplifies and cascades it’s way into the tune. An embellishment of the highest order. Stick your headphones on and turn off the lights for this one.
Imagine the whole story of the first Star Wars film STAR WARS IV, A New Hope in a single scrolling computer graphic… well imagine no more, check out the immense infographic of SWANH which has it all there. It took over 1000 hours to complete and is 123 meters-long or 1024 x 465152 px or 27 x 12307 cm or 10.6 x 4845.3-inch. Created by graphic novelist Martin Panchaud.
Blast from the past with this one as remember seeing it doing the rounds a decade ago when it came out. Still one of the sweetest ways to creatively embellish a piece of audio from a young human telling the best story on the planet (with some great life advice at the end as well for us all).
All offered up to inspire, teach and make you smile / think.
Got an important presentation or pitch coming up and struggling to prepare? This will help (or your money back): exploring the three elements which make up a great talk plus a Jedi-mind trick which will reframe those debilitating nerves once and for all.
What a joy to be invited to give a TEDx talk last month in Whakatū Nelson, at their first ever in-person event.
After nearly a decade of developing and delivering the TEDx offerings for Te Whanganui-o-Tara Wellington, was an honour to be stepping on that red rug as just a speaker to share my ‘idea worth spreading.’
As discussed in the talk, scripts are rubbish, and just to prove here’s mine which I prepared my talk from after developing different options via the post-it note medium (if you’re speaking from lived experience this is all you need):
Thanks to all the good people behind the scenes at TEDxNelson for the opportunity to share my story/ies plus the attendees and other speakers for making it a great day.
BUY NOW Speaking With Purpose: A guide to delivering impressive presentations!
For only $10NZD this bundle deal featured an ebook with a juicy 37 chapters, nearly 14,000 words across 89 pages plus a 1hour34mins audiobook version (read by me).
The livestream of The Pitch Drop experiment, the longest running lab experiment (established in 1927 to demonstrate how tar is the most viscous liquid, there’s been 9 drops have fallen in 95 years).
Whilst it still breathes, check out social.perma.cc which allows you to capture a thread from Twitter and archive it in sealed PDFs to attest to legitimacy.
