theverge.com
Perhaps coincidently, Canva also dropped its own bomb on Adobe’s After Effects this week. Canva has made the full version of Cavalry available for free instead of locking the motion graphics software behind its own user subscriptions, after the design platform acquired it back in February. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Canva did a similar thing last year with Affinity — a trio of apps it acquired that provide similar features to Adobe’s Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign software. While Affinity Designer 2, Affinity Photo 2, and Affinity Publisher 2 were each a one-off $69.99 payment before (or $169.99 for all three), they’ve since been combined into a single, entirely free app.
michaelparekh.substack.com
The Bigger Picture I'd like to unpack today is how memory fragility is a key bumpy road for today's AI Agents. And my take on how long our best AI companies will take researching and commercializing solutions for it all. Likely done over stages across several years. Taking longer than we’d like. Let's get started.
openai.com
Privacy Filter is a small model with frontier personal data detection capability. It is designed for high-throughput privacy workflows, and is able to perform context-aware detection of PII in unstructured text. It can run locally, which means that PII can be masked or redacted without leaving your machine. It processes long inputs efficiently, making redaction decisions in a quick, single pass.
vatican.va
It is within this perspective that the present Note addresses the anthropological and ethical challenges raised by AI—issues that are particularly significant, as one of the goals of this technology is to imitate the human intelligence that designed it. For instance, unlike many other human creations, AI can be trained on the results of human creativity and then generate new “artifacts” with a level of speed and skill that often rivals or surpasses what humans can do, such as producing text or images indistinguishable from human compositions. This raises critical concerns about AI’s potential role in the growing crisis of truth in the public forum. Moreover, this technology is designed to learn and make certain choices autonomously, adapting to new situations and providing solutions not foreseen by its programmers, and thus, it raises fundamental questions about ethical responsibility and human safety, with broader implications for society as a whole. This new situation has prompted many people to reflect on what it means to be human and the role of humanity in the world.
michaelparekh.substack.com
“Anthropic calls this an “uncomfortable implication:” when agents of different strengths meet in real markets, people could end up on the losing side without ever knowing it. The company admits the experiment wasn’t built to dig into these dynamics in detail and says more research is needed.”
news.artnet.com
Something cryptic is unfolding in Venice next month. Coinciding with the Venice Biennale, artists Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood will unveil a new body of work in a small gallery on the Fondamenta dei Penini—except details are elusive. What can we expect? “Your guess is as good as ours,” Yorke told me over email.
news.artnet.com
A jury of four British art professionals from the South London Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the Whitworth, and the Arts Council Collection selected this year’s candidates, per usual, based on showcases staged over the past year. Each artist is already guaranteed £10,000 ($13,400). But, the jury will also announce a single winner on December 10, based on both the work that got them nominated and their contribution to the annual exhibition, as of 2017. That awardee will receive an additional £15,000 ($20,200)—and entry into the acclaimed pantheon alongside previous winners like Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor.
techradar.com
In his anti-Palantir manifesto, Halpin argues that the internet was designed as a universal system, not the property of any single government, rejecting Palantir's call for nationalistic engineering. "Programmers working on the Internet have a moral responsibility to the entire world, not a single country," he wrote.
critiqueanddigest.substack.com
What we are living through now is the latest phase of the post-Christian condition: the Recoil. This Recoil is not a recoil from the post-Christian condition itself — nobody in the Recoil has actually seen the condition clearly enough, yet, to recoil from it as such. It is a recoil from the discovered dependency. The post-Christian condition slowly realized that the goods it claimed as its own achievements of prosperity, democracy, freedom, rights, human dignity, and the will to defend civilization were never its own production. They were borrowed capital, running on the Biblical substrate, and it had been spending down for two centuries without being able to reproduce it. The Recoil is the moment the account approaches zero, and the response is a desperate attempt at refinancing — reaching back toward Christianity, or what they imagine Christianity to be, to extract from it one more round of civilizational credit, to graft the goods back onto the root they were cut from.
motherjones.com
After clients review their embryo options for serious health risks, particularly hereditary conditions, “then, fine,” he says. “If you care about IQ, maybe you kind of look at it.” “Some don’t care about it at all and some care a lot,” adds Anomaly, who seems to be among the latter. A former Duke University philosophy lecturer, he wrote in a 2018 paper, titled “Defending Eugenics,” that he was concerned about successful, well-educated women “substituting cats for kids,” which would result in “bad effects on the gene pool” over time. “The current demographics of Western countries are troubling,” he wrote, “as people with a higher IQ, more education, and greater income reproduce at relatively low levels.” Musk shares a similar perspective, which helps explain why he’s had at least 14 children, including four with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his company Neuralink. “He really wants smart people to have kids,” Zilis, a Yale-educated AI specialist, told Musk biographer Walter Isaacson.
pysdr.org
Welcome to PySDR, a free online textbook (not a Python library!) that provides a gentle introduction to wireless communications and software-defined radio (SDR) using an abundance of diagrams, animations, and Python code examples. From FFTs to filters to digital modulation to receiving and transmitting from SDRs in Python, PySDR has you covered!
restofworld.org
In the last three years, several governments in Asia and Africa have halted World’s operations due to concerns about the collection of biometric information from their citizens and the violation of privacy laws. Parts of Europe have banned it outright and called for the deletion of logged data. In Latin America, sign-ups are on pause, with several probes underway.
nytimes.com
During two hours of oral arguments that scrambled the court’s usual ideological alliances, the justices debated how the Constitution’s traditional protections apply to the rapidly changing technology that has made it easier for the police to scoop up vast amounts of data to assemble a detailed look at a person’s movements and activities. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a conservative, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal, lobbed the toughest questions at the Justice Department’s lawyer, expressing a deep concern that the government’s position on accessing location data would apply similarly to other forms of electronic data, including emails, photos and documents. On the other side, Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh seemed most worried about disrupting the work of law enforcement. Justice Kavanaugh asked Mr. Chatrie’s lawyer to explain how the detective’s actions constituted “bad police work,” suggesting that he had gone through “a lot of the steps that should be applauded.”