A magical extension to a great podcast. While «Song Exploder» has musicians deconstruct their songs and explain how they came about, «Inside Music» lets you virtually step into songs and explore their fabric – the individual sounds and instruments that make it come to life.
Hadn’t thought about it that way yet: Cities built before the advent of cars might be best equipped for a future with far fewer cars.
It’s not that I’ve wondered before, but suddenly, it seems like a pressing matter: What does it feel like to be a cow? So here goes: Three cows, equipped with multiple sensors each. An algorithm to translate signals from those sensors into sentences. And a chatbot to deliver those messages to you (apparently, you can also write back and «chat» with the cows, because…sure). The project starts on September 4th.
At any time, there are 25000 self-driving cars making their way through Austin, Mountain View, and Phoenix. Except not in the real world, but in a simulation, designed to test fully autonomous cars in thousands of scenarios. Fascinating insights into the race to make human drivers absolete.
I’m years late to this, but totally flabbergasted. What a great piece of engineering.
Sort of mind-bening: First, humans invent artificial intelligence, now they try to understand how it works.
An important piece that sheds light on how Facebook decides on what is allowed on the platform and what gets removed. It has been shared widely and also been used as proof that Facebook is actively discriminating and opressing voices (the title of the piece certainly sets the tone). I think that’s wrong. Facebook deals with billions and billions of pieces of content every day and needs a set of rules that work across hundreds of national laws and cultural norms. That is a highly complex problem to solve. And while Facebook as arguably the worlds largest arbiter of human expression certainly needs to take more responsibilty, I don’t think lazy, one-dimensional criticism is helpful.
A short explainer on facial recognition that works with your own face. There’s also a notable piece on the widespread use of facial recognition in China (the text is behind a paywall, the video isn’t).
Some of the worst, most sophisticated cyber attacks have hit Ukraine over the past three years. It seems to be Russia’s laboratory for perfecting new forms of global online combat.
Somehow, computers outsmarting humans in games tend to get way more attention than in areas in which the consequences will be a lot more far-reaching. Take medicine. Algorithms are already beating humans’ accuracy in analysing brain scans or detecting skin cancer. This New Yorker piece offers a deep dive on how it works and what it means. (Plus, and that alone is worth the click: the definitive illustration of the mind-body-problem)