Lifeboat Foundation

A sharp-eyed developer at Krita noticed recently that, in the settings for their Adobe Creative Cloud account, the company had opted them (and everyone else) into a “content analysis” program whereby they “may analyze your content using techniques such as machine learning (e.g. for pattern recognition) to develop and improve our products and services.” Some have taken this to mean that it is ingesting your images for its AI. And … they do. Kind of? But it’s not that simple.

First off, lots of software out there has some kind of “share information with the developer” option, where it sends telemetry like how often you use the app or certain features, why it crashed, etc. Usually it gives you an option to turn this off during installation, but not always — Microsoft incurred the ire of many when it basically said telemetry was on by default and impossible to turn off in Windows 10.

That’s gross, but what’s worse is slipping a new sharing method and opting existing users into it. Adobe told PetaPixel that this content analysis thing “is not new and has been in place for a decade.” If they were using machine learning for this purpose and said so a decade ago, that’s quite impressive, as is that apparently no one noticed that whole time. That seems unlikely. I suspect the policy has existed in some form but has quietly evolved.

The visually impaired are getting a helping hand (or a helping belt, as it were) from Korean startup AI Guided. At CES in Las Vegas, the company was showing off some pretty neat tech that incorporates optical and Lidar technology along with AI-powered on-device computing to identify obstacles and help with navigation.

The company claims to be able to do advanced object identification to help keep walkers safe, in addition to using gentle haptic feedback to help with wayfinding. The whole system is carried on a belt, leaving the users hands-free.

The bike can hit the 60 mph mark in three seconds and offers a top speed of 124 mph.

Making its foray into the US market, Davinci Motor has debuted its first electric motorcycle — DC100, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2023 in Las Vegas. The Chinese manufacturer focuses on producing high-performance electric offerings with a long-range to rival traditional liter-class motorcycles.

Continue reading “Davinci Motor debuts its electric motorcycle with a 400 kilometer range at CES 2023” »

The bank is suffering from the ongoing crypto winter triggered by the collapse of FTX.

U.S. bank Silvergate, which provides exclusively cryptocurrency services, saw its customers withdraw over $8 billion in the last three months of last year, according to a report by the BBC

The bank was then forced to sell nearly $5.2 billion in assets in order to survive.

Continue reading “Crypto carnage: $8 billion withdrawn from Silvergate” »

It has long been known that one day quantum computers will probably be able to crack the RSA encryption method we use to keep data safe, but a team of researchers is now claiming it is already possible, while others say the results require more scrutiny.

In this video, I explain why the anthropic principle is a good, scientific principle. First I explain the difference between the strong and the weak anthropic principle. Then I name some examples of the use of the weak anthropic principle and explain its relation to the multiverse. Finally I explain that the weak anthropic principle is merely a constraint on the laws of nature.

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An exploration of ten far future ways we might colonize the Milky Way.

My Patreon:

Continue reading “10 Ways We Might Colonize the Galaxy” »

An exploration of scenarios within scientific possibility of why aliens might choose to invade earth.

https://www.patreon.com/johnmichaelgodier.

Continue reading “10 Reasons Aliens Might Invade Earth” »

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