Half a million views equates to 19mins x 500,000 = 9,500,000mins / 158,333hours / 6597days / 942weeks / 18years of watching time.
That’s quite a juicy number in a little over a year and by way of thanks to the community I thought I’d create a fun offer to further aid the promotion of the talk…
…so if you:
share the YouTube video of my talk on LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / Threads (or any social media platform), and / or
feature it on your blog, and / or
shout it out in your email newsletter, and / or
leave a comment on the YouTube video
…you will go into the draw for the following package:
1x 75mins of 1-2-1 speaker coaching (for you or whomever you gift the time to); or
1x 75mins Presenting Engagingly Online masterclass for a group (whether it be a bunch of souls you bring together, your own leadership group in the organisation you work for or again gifted on to another deserving project);
Deadline for participation is Valentines Day 2024, February 14th and winner chosen by random.
And if you’re new here or haven’t seen the talk here it is:
Small print: Winner will be drawn at random. My ball, my rules, my final say. (#1) 1-2-1 and / or the (#2) online masterclass to be completed 6-11.30pm GMT weekdays or on a Monday or over weekend, before 31st March 2024. You either must tag me into your LinkedIn post or send me a link to it / other social media platform shares / features in blog posts / email newsletters etc. via my contact form. Many thanks and good luck.
ADDENDUM 14.2.24: thanks to all who participated. Winner has been chosen.
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.
Scientists believe we have great thoughts in bed because our brain is in a state conducive to neuroplasticity. Occupying ourselves with smartphones has replaced staring off into the distance and daydreaming. People equate boredom with low productivity, but making time for boredom may help you be more creative.
…if an AI company was aware that its training data included unlicensed works, or that its algorithms generated unauthorised derivative works not covered by “fair use”, then it could be liable for damages of up to $150,000 for each instance of knowing use. And in case anyone thinks that infringement suits by angry artists are like midge bites to corporations, it’s worth noting that Getty, a very large picture library, is suing Stability AI for alleged unlicensed copying of millions of its photos and using them to train its AI, Stable Diffusion, to generate more accurate depictions based on user prompts. The inescapable implication is that there may be serious liabilities for generative AIs coming down the line.
“Despite the increasing adoption of the technology, campaigners point out there is no legal basis for police to use it, with a courtroom challenge finding that South Wales police’s use of biometric surveillance was unlawful and breached privacy rights and equality laws.“
“I’ve been using the voice function since yesterday and noticed that it makes breathing sounds when it speaks,” said one Reddit user. “It takes a deep breath before starting a sentence. And today, actually a minute ago, it coughed between words while answering my questions.”
“Company documents cited in the complaint described several Meta officials acknowledging the company designed its products to exploit shortcomings in youthful psychology, including a May 2020 internal presentation called “teen fundamentals” which highlighted certain vulnerabilities of the young brain that could be exploited by product development. The presentation discussed teen brains’ relative immaturity, and teenagers’ tendency to be driven by “emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward” and asked how these asked how these characteristics could “manifest . . . in product usage”.”
“Now Earth’s oceans are no longer unique. They’re just strange. They exist on our planet’s sunlit surface, while the seas of the outer solar system are tucked beneath ice and bathed in darkness. And these subterranean liquid oceans seem to be the rule for our solar system, not the exception. In addition to Europa and Enceladus, other moons with ice-covered oceans almost certainly exist as well. A fleet of spacecraft will explore them in detail over the next decade.”
It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply… There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.
The ‘Welsh Not’, which usually consisted of a small piece of wood or slate inscribed with the letters ‘W.N’, was hung around the neck of a child who was caught speaking Welsh. At the end of the school day, the child wearing the ‘Welsh Not’ would be punished by the schoolteacher via People’s Collection Wales.
A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.
The original Wicker Man origin: an image from a set of 8 extra-illustrated volumes of A tour in Wales by Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) that chronicle the three journeys he made through Wales between 1773 and 1776 (via Wikipedia).
A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.
Why fidgeting is good for you, first paragraph bloody shocking as never thought this to be true, do people actually think that (asking for me as a fidgeter)?
Turning Empty Offices Into Vertical Farms (good for cities who are emptying due to working from homers and want to utilise their empty buildings but of course the great and good won’t contemplate that as that’s about doing something different and ah well sighs etc).
The Text FX project (from Google Labs) for some wicked fun ways to “expand the writing process by generating creative possibilities with text and language.”
I don’t pay much attention to web3 stuff as I used to although this newsletter (from Molly White) keeps me in touch in what’s happening in the silly crypto space.
Lunar Codex is an attempt to put an archive of 30,000+ creative artists from 157 countries on the Moon in 2026 as part of NASA Artemis program.
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.
Much like ‘The Scared Is Scared’ featured in last FTWWTTBS post, creating a visual from a recorded audio is a simple model. This time the above is crafted with the help of AI to generate the images which is often bizarre but never boring.
What a delight: the personality behind the art only on top of crafting plus the topic itself. The intricate details of the making is only matched by the exquisite tonal approach to the narration and story, right through to the song-and-dance outro. A half-an-hour which will delight, make you laugh out loud, chuckle and frown.
LOVING this 365 days creative project from Twitter account @smllwrlds, minimilistic science-fiction offerings to spark the imagination. Showing us how much can said in with little space and few words. The above are just a selection from this intriguing project.
All offered up to inspire, teach and make you smile / think.
