Dubai unveiled the world’s largest indoor vertical farm that will produce 2 million pounds of leafy greens each year. This is huge for the desert city which currently imports 90% of its produce.
Two Japanese companies came up with a solution for Japan’s overwork problem, Nap Boxes. They look like upright pods (coffins actually), but I’m afraid a box to stow exhausted workers doesn’t really address the root of the problem.
One of the highlights, comic relief actually, from last night’s House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack hearing was when they showed a sequence of images showing a defiant Missouri senator Josh Hawley before the insurrection and a video clip of him running after as the senator fled from the mob he helped incite.
The footage of “Hawley hawling ass” will forever be his legacy. It’s even mentioned on his Wikipedia page. Of course the Missouri Democrats are already making hay of it with a 5K “Hawlin’ Hawley” fundraiser.
Chevrolet got into the NFT game and put a limited edition token up for auction to drum up excitement for their latest model Corvette. Only problem? Zero bids.
Rowdy, a family’s beloved pet cat that’s been dodging airport personnel, airline employees, construction workers and animal experts since escaping from a pet carrier at Boston’s Logan Airport about three weeks ago, was reunited with her family.
A volunteer in New Zealand has become the first person to undergo DNA editing in to lower their blood cholesterol.
I don’t know why Google makes it so difficult to find the tracking script in the new G4 analytics. I guess it’s to keep consultants busy but if you’re scratching your head and trying to figure out where to find this analytics script in GA’s new setup, you’ve come to the right place.
Click on the Admin gear in the lower left hand corner of the screen.
Select the Account, in the second column, click on Data Streams
then select Web and click the right arrow.
scroll down to Tagging Instructions and click Global site tag to open up the drop down with your G4 tracking script. You can then copy the script you need to use on things like the SmartNews SmartFormat plugin or anywhere else you need to track pageviews.
In April, Steven Johnson wrote that he latest generation of an algorithm that uses deep learning to produce human-like text called Generative Pre-trained Transformer, version 3 (GPT-3) could “write original prose with mind-boggling fluency.” I was intrigued.
After reading Simon Willison’s excellent tutorial, encouraging me to play with GPT-3 because it’s “absurdly good fun,” I decided to dive in last weekend and play around. It was ridiculously easy to get started.
I asked GPT-3 to come up with a new tagline for SmartNews based on the following prompt:
Write a tagline for SmartNews, a news application that creates empathy for its users by showing them news from many different points of view. The algorithm does most of the curation but the entire process is monitored and enhanced by a small team of experienced journalists.
Get the news you need, without the noise
Not bad.
I veered epistemological and asked GPT-3 to prove it’s intelligence. The following are screenshots from our conversation in the console which they call a Playground, reminding you that this is not the voice of God or anything like that and responses here are nothing to take too seriously.
I like how my browser’s spell check stumbled over some punctuation.
Cheeky eh? OK, right back at ya.
I later read that this phrase, “There is no one correct answer to this question.” is a common dodge in order to duck a question that it does not feel confident in answering.
Later on, on a call with my parents, I and explained how GPT-3 worked and asked them if they wanted to ask the algorithm some questions. My father fired off the question below.
While the answer was the quality of a Google search result, the follow up response was quite interesting and shows not only the ability to summarize what it’s learned but also the ability to package and apply those learnings in response.
The next question was also from my father.
The algo’s response to the “complicated language” question was interesting. I did not think about the number of speakers of a language as an input but that was certainly thought provoking. I would whole-heartedly agree that Finnish is devilishly complex.
I was surprised with how far off the answer was to this relatively easy to figure out question. (I’ve heard GPT-3 is not so great at math).
I moved on to politics. Out of curiosity, I put this one out there just to see if had a sense of news & politics. It was not clear if this is ordered by priority but if it is, it’s interesting to see the #1 response which certainly seems timely.
Incidentally, I asked the same question last night and got a different set of responses then from my questions which were asked last weekend.
Inflation is certainly in the news and Yosemite is on fire. I’m not aware of any big cyber-attack but there are quite a few stories out there about potential Amazon Prime Day hacks. Nuclear War is interesting – could it be in response to PSA just released by NYC? Is GPT-3 reading the news?
I have an on-going debate with my father about which city is more congenial, Tokyo or New York (we also have an on-going debate about print v. online but that’s for another blog post).
The dialog is below. My father choose the word “comfortable.” I’m not sure about an algorithm’s definition of “comfortable” and you’ll see how it wriggles out of answering directly.
Which city do most people think is more comfortable, Tokyo or New York?
There is no definitive answer to this question as everyone has different opinions. Some people may find Tokyo more comfortable because it is a clean and safe city, while others may find New York more comfortable because it is more exciting and diverse. Ultimately, it is up to the individual to decide which city is more comfortable for them.
Why is Tokyo clean and safe?
Tokyo is clean and safe because it has strict laws and regulations regarding littering and public safety. There are also many public services that help to keep the city clean and safe, such as regular trash collection and a robust police force.
Why is New York exciting and diverse?
There are many reasons why New York is an exciting and diverse city. It is a melting pot of cultures, with people from all over the world coming to live and work there. There is always something to do, whether it is exploring the city’s many museums and galleries, or taking in a Broadway show. New York is also home to some of the best restaurants in the world, so foodies will never be bored.
My mom asked a question which kicked off the most interesting exchange of the night when I tried to pin GPT-3 down on specifics.
I’ll definitely be playing around with this some more.
Firing off questions and pondering responses from the great algorithm in the sky is a big upgrade from the usual family activities such as playing charades or hearts. I’m bringing along GPT-3 to my upcoming reunion for sure.
Where to you go when you want to get a super-short haircut after wearing it long for many years? You go to the person that has been perfecting the “pixie” haircut since the New Wave era, the guy with photos of Audrey Hepburn on the wall, the guy who owns the domain for cropsforgirls.com. Google “short haircut for women in NYC” and Crops for Girls Salon comes up as the first result. 30+ years in business, he’s even been written up in the NY Times.
Michael’s salon is in the East Village, he only takes cash, and is seriously thinking of packing it in to join his sister out West but we’re happy we found him while he’s still here. What do you think?
Over 75 people in Nigeria were rescued from a church basement where their pastor instructed them to wait in preparation for the rapture. He said it would take place in April but when it didn’t, he said the rapture had been postponed to September. Some had been down in the basement since last year.
Finnish researchers have figured out how to store energy for months at a time in gigantic sand batteries.
Kanye West announced that he is working on a car made of foam. He hired a sneaker designer to head Donda Industrial Design, his company that will lead the project.
Amazon announced that it has evolved Alexa’s speech synthesis to the point where it can mimic anyone, including your dead grandmother.
The New York Yankees blew out the Pittsburgh Pirates, 16-0. This was the Yankee’s largest shutout win since 1960. Even the Pirates announcer threw in the towel after his team, trying to staunch the bleeding, put their second baseman on the mound. “This is ridiculous,” he said as the 15th run was hit in via yet another homer.
The Sierra Leone Football Association is investigating two second-tier matches that ended at 95-0 and 91-1 respectively. The general manager of Lumbebu United, the team that lost by 95 points, said he was “not aware of any match manipulation.”
The Las Vegas Raiders football team made history as the first professional American football team to have an African American woman as president.
Due to inflation, the Hakone Aquarium in Japan has been forced to switch the penguins from Aji to cheaper Saba and they are not having it.
For the past two years I’ve had the good fortune to live right next to the largest fireworks event in North America, the Macy’s July Fourth fireworks “Spectacular” on the East River between Manhattan and Queens.
Last year I walked out on to the FDR highway which was blocked off to traffic both North and South from 42nd street. It wasn’t too crowded (probably because of the pandemic) so I was able to find a spot over-looking the river a few blocks north of the UN. I only had my iPhone with me but was still able to get some good shots as well as video.
This year they only blocked the freeway South from 42nd so it was too crowded to stroll on to the highway so I decided to try my luck with an DSLR and take some photos instead. I have never been able to get decent photos of fireworks so I read up on it beforehand and found this helpful guide that was written specifically for Canon cameras (mine is a Rebel 5Ti) which was quite helpful.
I used an 18-55 mm lens at around a 10-second shutter speed with a 2-second delay after pressing the shutter button. A tripod is key and you’ll need to practice timing when to press the shutter in order to get the full “starburst” effect. I also set the lens aperture to between f/10 to f/16 so the brightness of multiple bursts didn’t wash out the exposure.
Tripod
18 – 55 mm lens
Long shutter speed, at least 5 seconds
Set aperture to f/10 or above
Photos best early in the show, less smoke
Also, your best shots will be early in the show when the sky is still clear. Later on in the show it’ll be too smoky to get decent clarity on the burst trails.
It should go without saying to take as many photos as you can. These are just a subset of the 100+ that I took. As with all my photography experiments, it’s a numbers game. Out of many, you get a few that turn out decent enough to share.
Costco recalled 400,000 solar beach umbrellas right before the July 4th weekend because of their tendency to go up in flames.
Two employees at an Atlanta Circle K were shot, one fatally, by a dissatisfied customer. Police officers said that this was a case of someone with a gun who didn’t know how to resolve conflict without resorting to violence. This was a dispute about the amount of mayo on his sandwich.
