Lifeboat Foundation

The ancient Celts were fierce warriors who lived in mainland Europe. But during the Renaissance, an idea took hold that they lived in the British Isles.

Copilot is more than just a chatbot. Microsoft is gradually building an AI assistant that it has dreamed about for years.

Microsoft’s new AI-powered Copilot summarized my meeting instantly yesterday (the meeting was with Microsoft to discuss Copilot, of course) before listing out the questions I’d asked just seconds before. I’ve watched Microsoft demo the future of work for years with concepts about virtual assistants, but Copilot is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to them coming true.

Continue reading “Microsoft’s new Copilot will change Office documents forever” »

Large language models know a lot but can’t remember much at all.

Posted on Big Think.

Here’s a demo of The Infinite Arcade.

If people like it, I’ll publish the site later today or tomorrow!

I guess bee farmers won’t jut be collecting honey.

Honey bees are more than just pollen collectors! With a sense of smell on par with dogs, honey bees can be trained to detect any smell, like explosives. But how these bees are trained to detect explosives, what their advantage is over sniffer dogs, and how other animals have been trained to perform unbelievable tasks for the armed forces, is #NotWhatYouThink #NWYT #long.

Continue reading “How Honey Bees Are Trained To Detect Explosives” »

Germany, India, Mexico, and Spain. As multiparty democracies, these countries present a more complex picture of what brings people together—or divides them. Using social media data, a group of researchers proposes a novel approach to measuring polarization in nations with multiple political parties.

Complexity Science Hub scientist Samuel Martín-Gutiérrez and his colleagues developed a model that infers opinions from social networks, and measures the left-right political division, as well as other more nuanced sources of tension. They analyzed Twitter data from the Spanish elections of 2015 and 2019.

“It’s important to understand polarization in our society, and our findings shed new light on how political beliefs are shaped,” says Martín-Gutiérrez. “Our approach can lead to useful insights when applied to real-world debates happening on social media.”

“Our instincts of time and causation are our deepest, strongest instincts that physicists and philosophers—and humans—are loath to give up,” said one scientist.

A two-week meeting starting in Kingston, Jamaica, today could lead to the beginning of deep-sea mining of the ocean floor this year.

A meeting of 167 nations of the International Seabed Authority in Jamaica this week plans to finalize regulating ocean seafloor mining.