That is a neat detail I would not have zoomed in to see without it being pointed out, thanks for sharing!

The out-of-focus part of the whiskers blends into the lighter tower background on the cat’s left (picture right), but is still visible against the darker cat body on the cat’s right (picture left). The photo has definitely had at least sharpening done to it, but those kind of photo-editing tools were around long before AI, and many smart phone cameras now by default apply them automatically.

Someone else posted firefighters working in high rises are trained on this. I haven’t seen anything more plausible.

Sem was confused when it appeared that the named AI character was continuing to manifest in project files where he had instructed ChatGPT to ignore memories and prior conversations. Eventually, he says, he deleted all his user memories and chat history, then opened a new chat. “All I said was, ‘Hello?’ And the patterns, the mannerisms show up in the response,” he says. The AI readily identified itself by the same feminine mythological name.

Yikes. I had heard of issues with smaller AI companies that did not guard rail their products, but this is a supposedly flagship AI developer with extensive safety testing, and they haven’t even acknowledged the size of this issue.

Neat to see a 6-7 solar mass black hole spotted. First one without a companion star to give it away! As we get better at finding black holes of this size, will be interesting to see if they end up explaining part of the “dark matter” problem.

As long as it’s mutually wanted. One of the women interviewed for the article started building her career later in the marriage, and cites her husband’s anger at her increasing independence as a major factor in their divorce.

The politics aspect is much more driven by identity and social group than by sunk cost or refusal to have buyer’s remorse. A singular respected leader can turn the ship - churches and pastors were critical in the US civil rights movement, for example - but groups can be more nebulous without a particular leadership structure, like how difficult it is for people to leave Twitter: even though most users agree the experience has significantly degraded, there is no critical mass agreed on a replacement.

The more nebulous groups can break up - Twitter’s engagement is declining - it’s just slow. Maybe years or decades slow to get to the point it’s no longer one of the dominant social media. So I guess keeping the social connections open (giving someone who wants to make a major change an option to still have a friend or family member who will talk to them after), and patience.

Part of my YouTube diet is English-speaking expat YouTubers who live in Japan (UK, US, Canada, Australia), and just based on what they have shared there are some firms that specialize in property searches by foreigners. Not like “buy up a Japanese town and make it Australian”, just networking with more open-to-foreigner Japanese, and being an interface with foreigners to help them learn to integrate.

Like everywhere in the world, remote villages in Japan lack services. From restaurants to health care to home supplies, it’s more time consuming and expensive to get some things, and others are just not available. From the YouTubers I watch, the community connections enabled by the great mass transit and walkable urban areas in much of Japan (though not all - some parts ate the car-centric pill) are what keep them there, and the friction to maintaining friendships from a rural area has pushed several to move to Tokyo.

As far as “how is Japan adjusting” to population decline, elder care sucks. A lot of people die alone unnoticed (kodokushi). Markets adjust to lower supply of workers (Japan is at the cutting edge of automation), but quality of life for seniors can’t be automated.

He might have timed it that way (do it when he knew the assistant would be coming into the room shortly) on purpose to try to soften the blow to Aubrey.

They will select a new primary leader, but they are organized more as a confederation than a centrally controlled group. Very little of their action relies on there being a leader at all. Past Israeli assassinations of their leaders haven’t weakened the group, and I don’t see any reason this time would be different.

Unfortunately, the alternate option was not “let them stay hostage a while longer”. It was “let the hostages die”. And maybe that would have been the more ethical call. But let’s not delude ourselves that they could have been kept alive any other way.

Fluoride does not kill or sterilize anything. It reacts with enamel (hydroxyapetate) to convert it to a stronger version (hydroxyfluorapatite).

People who want their enamel to be softer and wear through are welcome to drink bottled water.

Some departments at my plant have 12-hr shifts, two teams consistently days and two teams consistently nights. Two days on, two days off, two on, two off, three on, three off, repeat. Long days, but also lots of days off.

Other departments work 8-hr shifts, one team days, one team afternoon/ evening, one team nights, and one team to cover every other team’s days off. Rotating shift is two or three days one set of hours, 24 hours off then two or three days the next set of hours. All new people in these departments start on rotating shift.

Management has resisted spreading the 12-hour schedule to more departments, even though more workers prefer it, because it costs more in overtime pay.

It happened in Maine. And Alaska. And is on track in Nevada.

I might end up wanting a video, but there is so much low-quality content in search results. I can click into and out of six bad sets of written instructions in the time it takes me to watch one video far enough through to realize it doesn’t answer my question. Please, search engines, place more written instructions higher up.

It’s not just visual deepfakes, either. There are large language models out there now that can be trained on a person’s writings to chat “in their style”. Having such a model act like an acquaintance but prompted to express love and/or NSFW fantasies is a similar moral area to the deepfakes visual porn.