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#59 December 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

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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 alien hunter: has Harvard’s Avi Loeb found proof of extraterrestrial life? | Space | The Guardian

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.

The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement – The Verge

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”.

Police to be able to run face recognition searches on 50m driving licence holders | Facial recognition | The Guardian

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.

Cop28 landmark deal agreed to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels | Cop28 | The Guardian

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.

Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone

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.

Genetic testing firm 23andMe admits hackers accessed DNA data of 7m users | Hacking | The Guardian

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.

No Robots(.txt): How to Ask ChatGPT and Google Bard to Not Use Your Website for Training | Electronic Frontier Foundation

And finally, 66 Good News Stories You Didn’t Hear About in 2023, which we all need!

WATCH

EXPLORE

If you need to create a maze for free then check mazegenerator.net out.

This paper exploring and showing how to Animate Anyone from AI visual training sets.

Pick best time to schedule conference calls, webinars, online meetings and phone calls with worldtimebuddy.com.

A colossal amount of tutorials for those looking to create small bit artistic expressions via Pixel Art Tutorials – Saint11.

On useminimal.com there’s a collection of beautiful, minimalist printable calendars, habit trackers and planners (available in 31 languages).

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#47 November 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

fail whale rises from the depths

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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Serious concerns about the environmental impact of major productions including Amazon’s Rings of Power where “the first season of the show, …had generated roughly 14,387 tonnes of carbon dioxide.”

Facebook owner Meta to sack 11,000 workers after revenue collapse by so thinking / hoping this is just a start as finally the data extraction business models are starting to fail.

It looks like the same platform has been hoovering up users financial information who use online tax-filling platforms.

Read with nodding head this article on The Hollow Core of Kevin Kelly’s “Thousand True Fans” Theory.

A new study shows on-screen meetings hinder creative collaboration whilst other research shows that real-time collaboration tends to stifle creativity and diverse perspectives.

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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.

Also, use this python code to convert all your tweets into Markdown whilst converting the shortened urls to the originals plus downloads all associated images (worked for me).

Plink, where you can create beats and jam out with strangers all over the world.

twitterisgoinggreat.com (self explanatory and just like web3isgoinggreat.com).

Listen to this episode of Team Human as it’s worth your time.

floor796.com, you’re welcome…

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Image credit: The Oatmeal.
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#38 February 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Trawl through this cyber-assortments.

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How there’s a new stackable artificial leaf uses less power than lightbulb to capture 100x more carbon than other systems.

That Facebook & partners stole over $9 million from users across the Global South they preyed on specifically because they are low income (but don’t worry as you only use to stay in touch with friends and family, oh and how it’s parent company Meta might be broken up very soon).

You probably been reading about this metaverse thingy – read this: “I can’t help but wonder if these giant companies are so intent on selling us & the markets on the idea of a virtual future in order to distract us all from what they are doing to the real one.

There’s also a salient deconstruction on how bad NFT’s are (why Mozilla has recently stopped using crypto plus some graphs on how bad the energy consumption bitcoins are).

How to claim your settlement from Zoom from it’s previous illegal data privacy operations (why I don’t use it and why others don’t plus why you shouldn’t).

There’s scientists who have made a new COVID19 vaccine and it’s patent free (which it should’ve been in the first place).

About HopePunk, an antidote we all need right now.

WATCH

EXPLORE

Iconoir, one of the biggest open source libraries (no premium icons, no email sign-up, no newsletters).

Template Maker: download custom sized papercraft and packaging templates for free

Did you celebrate ‘Dydd Santes Dwynwen‘ (the Welsh version of Valentines Day).

FakeYou: Deep Fake platform to say stuff by your favorite characters.

Nitter: a great way to grab an RSS feed from a tweetmailer.

10 design principles which could save the world.

Looptap is fun although a tad addictive.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

CatalystCreativ Wysdem Talk | Can Wisdom Be Designed?

Exploring a model for systemising wisdom.

In March I got to both attend and speak at Catalyst Creativ Week, Las Vegas, which was founded in 2012 in partnership with Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project.

As you’ll watch, the subject was nothing to do with social media, instead, my long overdue and yet-to-be-launched moonshot project exploring can wisdom be designed, wysdem.com and which I blogged about here.

The official line (although please judge for yourself above and leave any thoughts / guidance / ideas you have in the comments):

“DK was an engaging speaker at CatalystCreativ’s March Catalyst Week Showcase. He drew the audience into his talk with his research on how wisdom plays into systems and held their attention by posing important and thoughtful questions on this discussion. In his talk, he explored how wisdom plays into individual responsibility so that we can better understand how it plays into the systems around us.”
Evelyn Sabino, Communications & Events Manager at CatalystCreativ

Check out the other magnificent talks from the event as well, some gems in here:

Related post:What Does It Mean? | The Role Of The Interpreter & DIKUW Content Model | Big Wisdom
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Scared Is Scared | Inspirational Video Model

Creative storytelling.

What a format to replicate / embellish / take inspiration from.

It also has this pearl:

The scared is scared of the things you like.

Oh the wisdom of youth.

Hat-tip Nat
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DIKUW Content Model | Big Wisdom

Pivoting away from big data and into big wisdom.

I literally only watched 90 seconds of the above video and had to grab a pen and piece of paper (always good to kick it old school) to jot down the opening point: Data > Information > Knowledge > Understanding > Wisdom.

Often cited as the DIKW Pyramid (although this model lacks the ‘understanding’ level), the pause was needed to reflect, as something ‘connected’ in my brain / soul and the ideas needed time to percolate:

DIKUW Content Model

There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing.
Peter Drucker

So many organisations / companies / social issues are about maintaining and sharpening the core operations (efficiencies) without re-examining the fundamentals of their origins (effectiveness).

Over the past few weeks I’ve shared the following with so many peers and friends as a way to get my head around it. When sharing, the example that’s become handy to ascribe it to is the oil industry:

The big oil companies have a wonderful understanding of how to protect and create the market for their product and to drive the consistent need. They have deep knowledge of how to both get the oil from where it is and then to refine and package it. They have precise information on where it is and how much it will make them based on the patterns. They have masses of data on all aspects of the process so they can refine and become more and more efficient.

What they don’t have is the wisdom to drive them into the future of becoming effective on a higher plane. They are doing the wrong thing righter.

Wisdom would allow them to pivot their whole business model. Taking their profits and for the next 5-10 years investing everything they have into more sustainable energies / renewables. This alone would revolutionise the whole sector via investment, ensure they continue to profit in the energy space whilst also pivoting the whole industry into serving the world and its global health.

Thoughts?

Thank you Russell Ackoff.

Big thanks to Jennifer Sertl for the tweet / link and appreciation for inspiration behind flow diagram image for Broomy83
Related post / presentation video: WYSDEM | Big Wisdom Thinking For Businesses & Organisations, Humanising Wisdom | An Exploratory Presentation
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Humanising Wisdom | An Exploratory Presentation

Introducing a new idea.

This is raw. Thoughts in flux. A developing concept and a growing passion:

Humanising Wisdom is an attempt to explore / activate / apply the latent wisdom in organisations, brands and individuals.

Presented at The 16th International Conference on Thinking yesterday.

NOTES

Would love to hear your thoughts on this. What does ‘humanising wisdom’ mean to you? Do I make sense? What didn’t work? What did? Hit me up in the comments…

YouTube video version
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