News report of WhatsApp mulling over putting ads into the app. And charging a subscription to hide ads. But WhatsApp says there’s no plans for it. There’s no actual news here. Of course they have considered it as an option. As every app and platform is currently doing. Of course they might do it. But when there’s nothing confirmed, it means the news article reporting it is as...
I went to see Extreme on Tuesday night at the Enmore Theatre. They were very good. Uncomfortably loud. But very good. Almost 2 hours on stage, an excellent set, and of course… Nuno. I’ve actually seen Extreme before. Back in 1993 I went to see them with my best friend Mal, and another friend. Mal and I occasionally reminisce about the concert, even after all these decades. We recall...
I’m assuming nobody is surprised by this: “New AI capabilities make it easier for sellers to write engaging, effective product listings, and help shoppers find what they are looking for.” BTW, just quietly, the whole blog post announcing it feels like it was written by AI. The telltale bloat of over-explaining a topic. So I asked ChatGPT to summarise it – here’s all...
I don’t use Unity and don’t really understand what it does, but boy do I know all about the outrage their new pricing model has generated.
A classic example of poor communication causing havoc. The reputation hit is significant.
Another case of perception being more important than reality.
Didn’t realise that FOBO (Fear Of Becoming Obsolete) , but thanks to this Gallop News poll I do now. The article confidently highlights the fears of U.S. workers of becoming obsolete due to AI are increasing (up from 15% to 22%). The ‘findings’ go on to break down the fears amongst age groups (younger people are more worried) and household income (lower salary earners are more...
Good article covering the water usage in data centres, with a focus on those used for training AI. [Aside: Interestingly, the Techmeme summary title is a little click-baity (which is unusual because techmeme usually takes the hype out of articles).] The summary seems to be that data centres can take up to 1 litre of water for every 100 ChatGPT prompts from users. The calculation comes from a...
This is a follow up post to my The Four Voices of the No Campaign article last week. As per that previous post, a few introductory notes: This is based on my personal sphere, I’m not pretending it is representative of the wider community This won’t discuss any of the issues, it is purely about the groups that are voting Yes With that said, here’s my current observation of the...
From The New York Times: The Internal Revenue Service has started using artificial intelligence to investigate tax evasion at multibillion-dollar partnerships as it looks for ways to better police hedge funds, private equity groups, real estate investors and large law firms. NYT Assuming this does focus on the bigger players (often the smallest tax payers) and has safeguards in place , I’d...
SimilarWeb reckons ChatGPT usage is dropping (according to this Reuters article). See also this report from back in July 2023 reporting on a 10% drop in web traffic to the ChatGPT site. Note: this is only looking at web traffic trends, ie it excludes apps and API traffic (which one would assume is growing). Difficult to say what this means for ChatGPT (versus AI interest in general), but given...
Amazon has updated it’s Content Guidelines for Kindle books to require indication of AI generated content – here’s the full section that’s relevant: Start quote: “Artificial intelligence (AI) content (text, images, or translations) We require you to inform us of AI-generated content (text, images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make edits to and...