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"The app, which scraped billions of photos from the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and other online platforms, drew the world's attention last weekend following a detailed report in the New York Times. The app's supposed capability to identify practically anyone from even low-quality photos frightened privacy advocates and officials. And today, one of the latter - New Jersey's attorney general Gurbir Grewal - actually did something about it."

"This video is about stuff: light bulbs, printers, phones and why they aren't better"

"Finally, I can play Minecraft with a 24 chunk render distance"

"Crucial to his success, he says, was YouTube's recommendation system, the feature that promotes videos for you to watch on the homepage or in the "Up Next" column to the right of whatever you're watching. "We were recommended constantly," he tells me. YouTube's algorithms, he says, figured out that "people getting into flat earth apparently go down this rabbit hole, and so we're just gonna keep recommending.""

"The architecture of the social internet itself tells us not to be patient - to load more tweets, to hit refresh for new posts, and to click the top search results."

""The whole network of undersea cables is the lifeblood of the economy," said Alan Mauldin, an analyst with TeleGeography. "It's how we're sending emails and phone calls and YouTube videos and financial transactions.""

"New research by scientists at Michigan State University suggests that laptops do not enhance classroom learning, and in fact students would be better off leaving their laptops in the dorm during class. Although computer use during class may create the illusion of enhanced engagement with course content, it more often reflects engagement with social media, YouTube videos, instant messaging, and other nonacademic content. This self-inflicted distraction comes at a cost, as students are spending up to one-third of valuable (and costly) class time zoned out, and the longer they are online the more their grades tend to suffer."

"In the context of ongoing corruption crises, rising anti-migrant rhetoric and anti-human-rights movements, and threats to press freedom, the role of social media companies may seem like a lesser priority, but in fact, it is a crucial part of the picture. People's rights and freedoms offline are being jeopardised by online platforms' current business model, where profit is made from stoking up anger and fear. At the South African human rights organisation where I work, the Legal Resources Centre, we are seeing an escalation of xenophobic violence that is often incited on social media. A recent joint investigation we conducted with international NGO Global Witness showed that Facebook, TikTok and YouTube all failed to enforce their own policies on hate speech and incitement to violence by approving adverts that included calls on the police in South Africa to kill foreigners, referred to non-South African nationals as a "disease", as well as incited violence through "force" against migrants."

"After lunch at a friend's house, his host motioned to him to observe his 11-year-old son, who "walked to the couch and lay on his side. With his arm extended in front of him cradling his phone, he… went vacant. For the next hour, he was comatose. No signs of life other than his open eyes and an occasional finger swipe. 'We have to make him stop, pull him out, every time,' his dad said. My head filled with images of opium dens in China. Something about the stillness, the lying on his side." There are two insights to be derived from this domestic scene. The first is that the addictive properties of social media have been ratcheted up a further notch. In metaphorical terms, if Instagram and YouTube dispense marijuana, then TikTok provides "digital crack cocaine", as Forbes magazine once colourfully expressed it."

"The use for humans in the world of robotics, even as teachers, is shrinking thanks to AI. NVIDIA Research has announced the creation of Eureka, an AI agent powered by GPT-4 that has trained robots to perform tasks using reward algorithms. Notably, Eureka taught a robotic hand to do pen spinning tricks as well as a human can (honestly, as you can see in the YouTube video below, better than many of us)."

"But the reporters in those videos aren't real. Their names are Daren and Noah, and they're computer-generated avatars crafted by Synthesia, a London-based artificial intelligence company. The clips are from a YouTube channel called House of News, which presents itself as an English-language media outlet. Researchers say the videos are part of the Venezuelan government's attempts to spin the narrative on social media, considered one of the last bastions of free speech in a nation where outlets are censored and journalists are often persecuted. The incorporation of AI, experts told The Washington Post, seems to be a new addition to the government's disinformation campaigns, which range from incentivizing Twitter users to post specific talking points to using bots that spit out the regime's messaging."

"A 24-hour news channel startup based in southern California comes with a twist: all of the reporters and production are AI-generated. CBC's Jean-François Bélanger explores what Channel 1 is promising and why some are concerned about what it could mean for the news industry."