Lifeboat Foundation

South Korea’s parliament has approved a bill that will make it the first country to impose curbs on Google and Apple’s payment policies that force developers to only use the tech giants’ proprietary billing systems.

The legislation will become law once signed by President Moon Jae-in, whose party has been a vocal supporter of the bill.

Apple and Google’s policies usually require developers to pay the tech giants a commission as high as 30% of every transaction.

“I think it’s changed everything, and I think it’s changed everything fundamentally,” James Livingston, a history professor at Rutgers University and the author of No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea, told Vox.

We’ll (probably) always have work, but could the job as the centerpiece of American life be on the way out?

To understand the question, you have to know how the country got to where it is today. The story starts, to some degree, with a failure. Much of American labor law — as well as the social safety net, such as it is — stems from union organizing and progressive action at the federal level in the 1930s, culminating in the New Deal. At that time, many unions were pushing for a national system of pensions not dependent on jobs, as well as national health care, Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, told Vox. They did win Social Security, but with many people left out, such as agricultural and domestic workers, it wasn’t a full nationwide retirement system. And when it came to universal health care, they lost entirely.

El Salvador began installing Bitcoin ATMs, allowing its citizens to convert the cryptocurrency into U.S. dollars and withdraw it in cash, as part of the government’s plan to make the token legal tender.

The government will install 200 of the teller machines to initially accompany its digital wallet called Chivo, a local slang term for ‘cool,’ President Nayib Bukele said on Twitter. Transactions will be commission free, he said, adding that there will also be 50 financial branches across the country for withdrawing or depositing money.

A pesticide that’s been linked to neurological damage in children, including reduced IQ, loss of working memory, and attention deficit disorders, has been banned by the Biden administration following a years-long legal battle.

Agency officials issued a final ruling on Wednesday saying chlorpyrifos can no longer be used on the food that makes its way onto American dinner plates. The move overturns a Trump-era decision.

SpaceX wants to put an advertising billboard in space. The company will have to follow legal frameworks for doing so, experts explain.

# On the Opportunities and.
Risks of Foundation Models.

AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character.

This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles (e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations).

Continue reading “## Center for Research on Foundation Models • Aug 16 2021” »

Since 1,988 and formation of the Posthuman Movement, and articles by early adopters like Max Moore were a sign our message was being received — although I always argued on various Extropian & Transhuman bulletin boards & Yahoo groups &c that “Trans” was a redundant middle and we should move straight to Posthuman, now armed with the new MVT knowledge (also figures on the CDR). There will be a new edition of World Philosophy, the first this millennium, to coincided with various Posthuman University events later this year. Here is the text:

THE EXTROPIAN PRINCIPLES V. 2.01 August 7 1992.

Max More Executive Director, Extropy Institute.

Continue reading “This 1,992 paper was included on best-selling CDR World Philosophy compilation (before internet) and I claim some credit for circulated it and popularising the ‘Transhuman sidetrack’” »

Public health information (CDC)

Research information (NIH)

SARS-CoV-2 data (NCBI)

Continue reading “Prolonged disorders of consciousness: a critical evaluation of the new UK guidelines” »

The applications claimed Dabus, which is made up of artificial neural networks, invented an emergency warning light and a type of food container, among other inventions.

Several countries, including Australia, had rejected the applications, stating a human must be named the inventor. The decision by the Australian deputy commissioner of patents in February this year found that although “inventor” was not defined in the Patents Act when it was written in 1991 it would have been understood to mean natural persons – with machines being tools that could be used by inventors.

But in a federal court judgment on Friday, justice Jonathan Beach overturned the decision, and sent the matter back to the commission for reconsideration.