@cpltalk (cpltalk.bsky.social [email protected])

"In the U.S., robots are viewed as soulless, unlike in Asia, where they are viewed as soul-possible or soul-different." A tender, surprising essay about why the robot-filled future feels less dystopian in Korea & Japan than it does in the U.S.: thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-america-c…

🇩🇪 New: Germany officially withdraws support for Israel in legal proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against accusations of genocide brought by South Africa in December 2023. Germany announced in early 2024 that it would intervene as a third party in the case, formally rejecting South Africa’s claims as "baseless" and "political instrumentalization" of the Genocide Convention. Berlin argued that Israel has been exercising its right to self-defense following the October 7 attacks.

@OANDA The "offline" notification is clearly faulty

@Weyoun999 @belle_aec @Acyn I'd love to see those dead people taking stuff back to the shop.

@belle_aec @Acyn there's undocumented immigrants or dead people taking your stuff back right now and claiming the refund

Sanders: You have to have an ID to return something to a department store. It shouldn’t be harder than that to vote in our elections.

A crypto exchange is only as decentralised as its bank account. 🏦 Join @OpenCorporates & @ICIJorg and learn how digital wallets hide behind physical front companies. 🕵️‍♂️ 🗓️ March 26th at 3pm 🔗eu1.hubs.ly/H0sJ1Nq0

I reviewed the Heritage Foundation's database of voter fraud cases since the 1980s. They had just 10 examples of undocumented immigrants voting. I know of 2 more. Over decades. Importantly, several would NOT have been impacted by voter ID, as they involved stolen identities.

@inMikeRotch @atrupar Also this guy "Charles “Pete” Conrad, commander of the second mission to the moon, Apollo 12, was one of the first people to set foot on the moon." dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/success-story/…

@atrupar Many famous scientists had dyslexia. If anything it is a sign of intelligence :)

Trump: "The president of the United States, Gavin Newsum, admitted he has learning disabilities"

By emphasizing the number of people killed per mile rather than deaths per capita, traffic safety groups risk normalizing the factors that make American roads so deadly, writes David Zipper. Read his perspective here: bloom.bg/4uwNs5O 📷️: Getty Images

Music helps to understand the mind and the brain. Throughout the history of science, metaphors have shaped how we understand complex phenomena. The brain-as-computer metaphor has guided decades of theories and research. We propose music as a scientific metaphor for understanding the mind and brain via triplicate interfaces (listener, performer, composer) and a compound set of predictions. Multiple domains of music can be mapped onto different neural, cognitive and intersubjective processes such as network coordination, prediction, emotion and meaning. Neurocognition is not static but a dynamic, embodied, and time-sensitive system, much like a self-organized orchestra in which multiple processes interact simultaneously. Drawing on synergetics, predictive processing, and embodied cognition, we outline musical principles illuminating cognitive and action integration across time, offering new conceptual frameworks and testable predictions for future research. I enjoyed writing this piece with these stellar authors: @Kaiameye, @acolverson1, Christopher Bailey, @brucemillerucsf, @dafneduron90, Nicholas Johnson, Olga Castaner, @PierLuigiSacco, Eoin Cotter and Lucia Melloni. Science, like music, advances through new ways of listening to complex systems: doi.org/10.1016/j.neub…

Celebrate St. Patrick's Day the SAFE way and plan for a sober ride. 🍀🚗 Buzzed Driving Is Drunk Driving.

@harryr33 @punt_rd It's all extra effort, delays, and the actual reward is unclear. Plus potential issues with shipping and unhappy buyers when selling on ebay/facebook. But you're spot on re the real issue: It's a TV show. It's not real.

@cpltalk @punt_rd Maybe. Or in the case of this channel a chance to be on SM video? Or it's all staged & they're paid by the channel. How difficult is it to call an auction house or post on eBay or Facebook?

With all the fake AI ‘Pawn Shop’ videos doing the rounds here’s a clip of someone selling a Def Leppard guitar and then some special guest stars just happen to show up. It’s all 100% real and not staged at all. Also I’m really Elvis.

Every second time or so I encounter stupid programming faults when using the @AbeBooks⁩ site which part of @Amazon #UI #fail

.@ebay can't be bothered by #counterfeit wares being sold on their platform. Submitted an @omegawatches branded bracelet that the seller says is "compatible" but "unbranded" and their response "We didn’t find the listing to be in violation of our policy." #fail

This is wild. 143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history. Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots. Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget. Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard. The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.

Sorry to be the downer because this is an impressive story in some senses. But it is ~trivially easy to make a single mRNA vaccine. It's not hard. I cure mice of various cancers with various therapeutics all the time. I've made mice lose more weight in a month than tirzepatide does in a year. What is hard and expensive is proving its BOTH safe AND effective **in a randomized and controlled study in humans** while ALSO manufacturing it at clinical scale and grade. I am happy for this man and his dog. It is impressive. But y'all are overhyping it.

sorry to be insistent & repetitive, but there are many more than 15 "top" universities & a number of excellent small liberal arts colleges. feeling sorry for young persons who have been virtually brainwashed to think that their lives depend upon being accepted by a "top" university. there is so much in American culture to discourage & depress young people. at least, when some (of us) were college-age, the world seemed open & welcoming; scholarships for both science & the humanities abounded; there was no Internet, thus no obsessive focus on "top universities"; there was no hydra-headed AI looming ahead...

Phil Collins on how he came up with the drum solo for 'In The Air Tonight' 🥁

@danieljohnclark @SVG__Collection You sound like a lot of fun at parties

All music is physical music. Or are you suggesting a CD is physical music (etched into dye) whereas 'digital' (written in magnetic code onto platinum) is not physical? Flash memory is not physical? I don't get it. The data entering a computer is not physical? No? What do you think it is, then? If it enters by WiFi, that isn't? Do you mean 'transmit' / 'receive' - so, non physical - so there is no atomic / particle involvement whatsoever? There is no such process in the Universe.

When was the last time you bought physical music?

@SVG__Collection Yesterday, to be precise.

I worked at Epic Games for two years. This is real, and the strategy behind it is smarter than most people realize. Tim Sweeney has spent nearly two decades buying North Carolina forest land. 50,000+ acres across 15 counties. He’s now one of the largest private landowners in the state. The purchases started in 2008, right after the real estate collapse wiped out developers who had been planning golf resorts and luxury communities on biodiverse wilderness. Sweeney paid $15 million for Box Creek Wilderness, a 7,000-acre stretch in the Blue Ridge foothills containing 130+ rare and threatened species. Developers had owned 5,000 of those acres before the crash. He bought them for conservation prices when nobody else was bidding. He runs the acquisitions through an LLC called “130 of Chatham.” He buys the land, holds it for years, then either donates it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In 2021, he donated 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Largest private land donation in North Carolina history. The part people miss: he told the News & Observer that since 2021, land got too expensive to keep buying. So he shifted focus to converting his existing 50,000 acres into permanent conservation status. He’s locking the land into legal structures that make development impossible regardless of who owns it in the future. A billionaire worth roughly $6 billion is spending tens of millions acquiring wilderness specifically during economic downturns, then giving it away or placing it under permanent legal protection. The land will outlast him, Epic Games, and Fortnite. That’s the part that separates Sweeney from billionaires who write checks to get their name on a building. The building depreciates. The forest compounds.