There is no dark side of the moon Facebook, really—matter of fact it’s all dark.

The most notorious is probably thalidomide, but there are plenty others on this list of withdrawn drugs that cause long-term side effects.

And that’s different from the commercial pharmaceutical industry how?

Not advocating for restoring the mammoth, but this is a dangerous line of argument.

With climate change and ongoing mass extinctions, many current species are or will soon be in the same situation that re-introduced mammoths would be—and you could use the same argument to say that trying to preserve them is cruel so we should kill off any current species facing environmental stress.

He’s a bit vague on the details, but I believe he’s using a laser:

To create a more realistic model of quantum dynamics, I employ a physical generator of random numbers based on coherent quantum-optical processes (the emission of coherent light can be associated with the effect of QT). Unlike a pseudo-random generator, a quantum generator produces truly random numbers.

As far as I can tell from quickly skimming the source paper… it sounds like he just replaced his pseudo-random number generator with a light sensor and thinks that makes the outcome “quantum” because photons are quantum.

I haven’t yet read Li’s editorial, but I’m generally more inclined to trust her take on these issues than Hinton and Bengio’s.

Is this science reporting, or did the Mirror’s political editor just run out of material?

It’s the AI analogue of confirmation bias.

Yes, but they generally had twice as many back then.

Dinosaur teleportation technology proved!

Can you trust a AI press release?

At the time, it was assumed that genes and traits had a mostly one-to-one correspondence. Thanks to the human genome project we now know that it’s more often a many-to-many correspondence, which makes figuring out the relationships enormously more complex. But mapping the genome was still a critical step.

Edit: The analogous situation in neurology would be the correspondence between brain regions and cognitive functions—in the last decade or two we’ve found out that most functions involve many separate brain regions networked together in different patterns for different functions. Mapping this “connectome” is the equivalent of mapping the genome—but this Harvard/Google neuron-mapping project is at a much lower level, more akin to studying the physical structure of chromosomes.

Good point.

This cubic millimeter of tissue has allowed Harvard and Google researchers to produce the most detailed wiring diagram of the human brain that the world has ever seen. […] This helped researchers to identify the brain’s six cortical layers and white matter.

I thought the human cerebral cortex was two to four millimeters thick—how does a single cubic millimeter contain all six layers plus the underlying white matter?

It does suggest that tech users should reconsider their assumptions about the scope of the arbitration clauses in the user agreements they sign.

Humans instinctively do something analogous with natural language, using poetic forms like rhyme, meter, and alliteration. (For example, the speeches from Shakespeare’s plays are immediately detectable because they’re in iambic pentameter.)

Imagine you lacked the natural human ability to detect verse, making poetry indistinguishable from prose. As far as you could tell, it would be like an invisible watermark that only specialists could detect. LLMs can use a similar approach, making up their own patterns that are opaque to humans but detectable to themselves.

See the Julian day.

The obvious missing element is another AI on Sydney’s end to summarize all the fan mail into a one-number sentiment score. At that point we can eliminate both the AIs and the mental effort, and just send each other single numbers via an ad-sponsored Google service.

AFib patients using wearable devices are more likely to engage in high rates of symptom monitoring and experience anxiety than non-users

Well no shit—how can non-users engage in high rates of symptom monitoring if they don’t have symptom monitors?