Week 07-24 - Curiosities
Greetings from the Mesa
It's been a week - or a little over a week now. Dealing with sick kitty, continued bureaucracy, some really fraked up news. It's agitated anxiety and grief non-stop. It'll all work itself out. But it's been a rough one. The one bright spot is that the mountain bluebirds are back, and look to be tending to the boxes. The weather has warmed significantly and spring is just around the corner. Yay!
Curiosities of the Week
The atmospheric rivers that keep slamming California (Wired) are leading to an explosion of Valley Fever. Remember kids mother nature always bats last.
Gym Owner Transforms Fitness For Individuals With Disabilities (Forbes) "For Javeno, it's about creating a fantasy world where individuals can momentarily forget their pain and rediscover the simple pleasure of smiling." This is the way a gym should be...
How Walmart, Delta, Chevron and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages (CNBC) "“A lot of this becomes thought crime,” Jutta Williams, co-founder of Humane Intelligence, said of AI employee surveillance technology in general. She added, “This is treating people like inventory in a way I’ve not seen.” Gross.
AI learns language through the experience of a single child in groundbreaking study (PsyPost) "The success of CVCL in mimicking a child’s language learning process challenges traditional theories that suggest more complex cognitive capacities are necessary for language acquisition. It demonstrates that simple associative learning mechanisms, coupled with multimodal representation learning, can be a solid foundation for understanding and replicating the early stages of word learning."
Consuming
Now Reading: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Not too far along yet, but i'm ready to dive deeper.
Now Watching: Finished True Detective: Night Country (loved it) and moved onto The Night Agent on Netflix. Some of the acting is absolutely terrible, but it's "thrilling" enough to keep watching. It is a shame that they have killed off all of my favorite characters so far.
Thinking about:
Eden Phillpotts: ”The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”)
Thanks for reading, see you next week!