LEGO has unveiled a new 'smart brick' that can detect how it's being played with and react accordingly. This brick, developed in partnership with Wired, uses a combination of sensors and AI to understand building techniques and provide feedback. It's designed to inspire creativity and learning through play, offering features like pose detection, color recognition, and shape identification. The brick is part of LEGO's ongoing efforts to integrate technology into its building system, aiming to create more interactive and educational experiences.
Amazon introduces 'Ask this Book,' an AI-powered feature on the Kindle iOS app that allows readers to ask questions about the book they are reading and receive spoiler-free answers. The article also details the 'Recaps' feature for book series, providing a quick refresher on storylines and characters. 'Ask this Book' will expand to Kindle devices and Android OS next year.
A physicist explores the simulation hypothesis – the idea that our reality could be a computer simulation – and its implications, drawing on philosophy, technology, and scientific observations.
RentAHuman.ai is a platform allowing AI agents to hire humans for physical tasks, raising questions about the future of work and potential exploitation.
Deep inside a Texas mountain, a vast mechanical clock urges humanity to measure time on the scale of civilisation.
The Interim Computer Museum (ICM) preserves and shares the history of computing through interactive exhibits using vintage hardware with modern enhancements.
Italo Calvino's 'literature machine' is a prescient vision of the perils and promise of artificial intelligence. This article explores Calvino's thoughts on the future of literature in the age of computers, his embrace of fantasy as a way to represent the modern world, and why his work remains relevant today.
An essay outlining the author's vision for a new architecture of social media, designed to be free from oligarchic control and manipulation, focusing on principles like open source, community ownership, human management, and a multi-threaded conversation topology.
Lee Felsenstein's post outlines his vision for a next-generation social media system designed to counter the negative influences of current platforms, particularly those controlled by oligarchs and used for manipulation. He argues that control of information channels is key to politics, and a healthy "commons of information" is vital for a civilized society.
His proposed system, "Commons of Information – NextGen," is built on principles of open source code, community ownership, human management, local cooperative economics, multi-threaded conversations, restriction to public communications, and a lack of profit motive.
Key features include a book-like conversation topology (avoiding "topic drift"), a micropayment system for content moderation and services, and a legal structure designed to resist takeover by powerful interests. Felsenstein emphasizes the need for ongoing discussion and collaboration to realize this vision, framing it as a crucial step towards a more democratic and informed future. He positions this work as a response to the current political climate and the dangers of authoritarianism and misinformation.
Lee Felsenstein's post outlines his vision for a next-generation social media system designed to counter the negative influences of current platforms, particularly those controlled by oligarchs and used for manipulation. He argues that control of information channels is key to politics, and a healthy "commons of information" is vital for a civilized society.
His proposed system, "Commons of Information – NextGen," is built on principles of open source code, community ownership, human management, local cooperative economics, multi-threaded conversations, restriction to public communications, and a lack of profit motive.
Key features include a book-like conversation topology (avoiding "topic drift"), a micropayment system for content moderation and services, and a legal structure designed to resist takeover by powerful interests. Felsenstein emphasizes the need for ongoing discussion and collaboration to realize this vision, framing it as a crucial step towards a more democratic and informed future. He positions this work as a response to the current political climate and the dangers of authoritarianism and misinformation.
A pilot program allows teachers to use AI to tackle their classroom problems. Researchers found that teachers learned to build and customize tools quickly, but successful integration depended on solving specific problems rather than just seeking efficiency.
Andrej Karpathy discusses the transformative changes in software development driven by large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence, comparing the current era to the early days of computing. The article details Software 3.0 as the latest evolution in software development paradigms, where LLMs are programmable systems that interpret natural language prompts.
