Last Sunday, June 9th 2024, Saudi Arabia ended the 50 year old petro-dollar agreement with the US
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A significant paradigm shift is unfolding: moving from databases that require manual data entry by humans to databases where AI agents automatically aggregate, sort, and summarize information based on objectives set by human curators. Entire product categories can be rethought.
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“What next, should I have a computer that eats my dinner and fucks my wife?” is one of those perfect sentences that just sticks in your head
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AI Training Data Poisoning Virus?
"I don't use Adobe's Creative Cloud because I like keeping my files locally. But seeing how they think they can use anything you upload there for AI training purposes, I'm filling up my entire 20 GB storage with random Nightshade-poisoned images. I encourage others do the same!" - Source
#Comment: It would be easy to automate the large scale poisoning of the datasets hosted on the large cloud providers, which are all shamelessly using user data for training proprietary AI models
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Does the IPhone matter at all anymore?
For Wall Street, WWDC24 is not all or even primarily about AI. The Street cares mostly about how many iPhones will be sold next: Is there enough AI stardust here to unleash a normal/super-cycle of hardware upgrades in 2024-27?
Meanwhile, the Chinese are shipping billions of phones that cost $100 across the global south, with the capabilities of the IPhone just 3 years ago, running on HarmonyOS. The innovation isn't AI Stardust, but apps you never heard of, highly attuned to non-western audience needs
The emerging multi-polar world isn't just about geopolitics and trade; it's fundamentally about the evolution of technology. For the first time in a century, independent tech platforms that diverge significantly from the dominant Western tech stack are thriving. These platforms offer unique user experiences in hardware, software, and intelligence, free from Western cultural influence. Although it's still early days, these new platforms are set to play a defining role in the digital lives of the majority of the global population.
The use-cases highlighted by big tech in the West often show how disconnected these organizations are from the needs of the majority of the world's population. While prompts like "Hey Siri, book a hike with Lisa", "Hey Google, order me pizza", or "Hey AI, generate fun birthday images" might resonate with a wealthy elite, they are irrelevant and contrived to billions of people globally.
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Hostile architecture is an urban-design strategy that uses elements of the built environment to purposefully guide behavior. What is it's opposite?
The Mosquito is a machine used to deter loitering by emitting sound at high frequency. This "hostile design" device is categorized by opposition as a sonic weapon targeted only at children and young people
