I remember seeing the animated Aladdin in the theater, laughing so hard and so continuously my sides literally ached, and wondering later how on earth the animators’ pencils managed to keep up with Robin Williams’ mouth. “We had a script,” one of them says at the beginning of this video, a little despairingly. (h/t Laughing Squid)
“Restoration is never free.” Still amazing and heartening. More here.
Of course you wanted to know this. The one essential tool on earth or in space. Who hasn’t flown in a plane held together with duct tape?
Quote: “Buckler’s new problem is harder and more urgent. He wants to predict how roughly 2,000 critical plant species will cope with a climate that no longer resembles the one they evolved in. His team built AI models that can read a plant’s genome and forecast how it might adapt, ran them across more than 700 species of grass, and surfaced 17 genes that look like they hold the keys to survival. That’s not a lab curiosity. That’s a map for feeding people through a century of heat.”
Dana sez, the best piece I’ve yet read on the case for AI (as opposed to the many, many I have read against). Read it here.
Quote: “Community Waste Solutions [in Haines, Alaska] is on track to go completely off-grid and soon will be powered by a mixture of solar, batteries and diesel generators. The driving factor: soaring utility bills. “I’d love to say it’s all a green initiative, but it’s just cost,” Craig Franke, the company’s general manager, told KHNS.” Read about it here and with oil over $100 a barrel watch for it coming to a landfill near you soon.
Quote: “Why would an Anthropic employee make a donation to a candidate with a platform like this? The honest answer is that I’m terrified by the extremely rapid pace of AI development, and I wish it were slower. AI companies are stuck in a race to build powerful AI as fast as possible without the level of testing, safeguards and transparency that the public should demand of them. From what I’ve seen of the industry, I think it’s on track to take unacceptable risks of catastrophically bad outcomes without strict regulation to hold these companies to account.”
Click through the image above to read the column. (h/t PatiC)
Quote for the day
Even then, the most anyone might say in the future is that [Lindsay Graham] was an emblematic figure: emblematic of the men and women who defined the Republican Party in the first decades of the 21st century, who lacked both the political strength and the moral character to resist a malign force, a man who chose to join that force and its assault on American democracy rather than resist it. –Jamelle Bouie
Outro…
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