Since the news business has changed from reporting to profits, keeping eyeballs is what it is all about.
Fox found this out after they accurately reported that Trump was projected to lose Arizona. Tucker Carlson then ranted about how their viewership was going down, along with the stock price with which he was richly compensated. He understood that their viewers were there to hear what they need to believe. And if they didn’t get it, they would move to Newsmax, Onan and other alternative news sources that would feed the beast.
Rush Limbaugh always understood that and bragged that he was an Entertainer. Are you entertained?
For any democracy to it operate efficiently, it needs an informed electorate. So how do you sort out the news from the fire hose of information flow these days?
1)Realize that your. 00001 experience of the world contributes to 80% of your worldview. Approach your understanding with a scientist skepticism that he’s always willing to accept that he could be wrong.
2)Intentionally expose yourself to opposing views. We don’t like to do this because it makes us uncomfortable. Over the years I have developed a diversity of writers that I follow on the hellscape that is Twitter. Most of us don’t have a luxury of time to do that. It’s not easy being free, when you don’t have an emperor to make all the decisions for you.
3) Turn off the Crisis News networks . If there isn’t good video footage, or if the victim isn’t attractive, you won’t hear about it . Just like the print media, television is all about eyeballs. Now there are live news events that television coverage excels at. Television Studios nowadays don’t need to wait for their cameras to warm up to go live. Walter Cronkite had to wait to give the world the shocking news about Kennedy being shot in Dallas.
CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reports that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Credit CBS via Landov
4) Read some news sources from outside the United States bubble. Here are some free websites that also have free apps for your handhelds.
A good one to see the southeast Asian perspective on the world is the Asia Times https://asiatimes.com/
5) Last, but not least, Social Media is just that and not a source of verifiable information. Outrage and anger build engagement. Realize that you are being baited with these emotions to click on their stories.
Will the Server Farms of today turn into Server Cities to supply the Fifth Industrial Age’s insatiable drive for more computing power?
Or will it be like the Main Frame Computer being overtaken by the PC?
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Glen Beck (background) and Betty Snyder (foreground) program the ENIAC in building 328 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL).
But nowadays the PC in your hand, i.e. your cellphone, offloads it’s computing load to more powerful computers at a server farm. A server farm is actually a large number of PCs hooked up parallelly. All that data has been harnessed in Large Language Models (LLM) to train Artificial Intelligence (AI).
By winning the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Britain was able to produce the ships and tanks that powered their Empire. Whoever wins the AI race (the Fifth Industrial Revolution) will dominate this century and maybe beyond. This thoughtful interview will brief you on the implications of our ongoing competition with China and why we should win, except for one caveat –
this idea of “temporal claustrophobia,” where the Kaiser, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany all convinced themselves they were at a high watermark.
In this show, we discuss the historical underpinnings of that argument and apply it to AI today — drawing out policymaking lessons spanning centuries of technologically driven great power transitions. We also get into:
Why long-term productivity growth is driven by the diffusion of general-purpose technology, and what makes this so crucial for great power competition;
Historical lessons from the UK, Soviet Union, US, and Germany illustrating the cultural and policy roadblocks to tech diffusion;
The importance of decentralized systems, and how this helped America win the Cold War
Why China’s diffusion capacity lags behind its innovation capacity, and how America should avoid getting locked into any one technological trajectory.
Co-hosting is Teddy Collins, formerly of DeepMind and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Midjourney: “Technological Diffusion in the Style of Traditional Chinese Art, City, Society, Schools, Different forms of Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Scrolls, the Printing Press, Computers, Smart Phones”
Click on the 2 page to read the whole interview. It is worth your time to learn about what will undeniably will be the defining driver of our age.
You want to see why the writers and actors are on strike?
Because they have seen the future and they are not in it.
This Barbie/Oppenheimer trailer was all made with AI tools that are available to the Public. Yes some of them require subscriptions, but the fees are nominal. That’s how I made this hot date night for them.
At least when Buzzfeed asked AI to come up with what Europeans imagined what people from each State in America to look like. The images were created in Midjourney the best text to image AI out there so far. The result wasn’t pretty.
If you need help with Math or any of the Sciences, you can quickly find the formula, how to use it and then plugin your data for the answers. This free website, which has been integrated in ChatGPT Pro and soon will be in Google’s Bard AI, can also be accessed through your web browser. Wolfram Alpha handles other categories (Like the opening line from famous books), but it excels at Math and Formulas. Click on the “Submit” button for access and free registration.