Alexandria

Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot?

The world is racing to develop ever more sophisticated large language models while a small language model unfurls itself in my home.

As Actors Strike for AI Protections, Netflix Lists $900,000 AI Job

Hollywood executives said writers’ and actors’ strike demands like raising wages and protecting actors’ likenesses from AI was “unrealistic.”

The dirty little secret that could bring down Big Tech

New research reveals that Silicon Valley uses predatory pricing to crush competitors and scam investors — evidence the government can use to bust up tech monopolies.

De la merdification des choses

Hundreds attend AI church service in Germany

The ChatGPT chatbot led more than 300 people through 40 minutes of prayer, music, sermons and blessings.

Is precision fermentation the future of food?

Precision fermentation is touted as the next big thing that could solve food security and sustainability challenges

Even Amazon can't make sense of serverless or microservices

The Prime Video team at Amazon has published a rather remarkable case study on their decision to dump their serverless, microservices architecture and replace it with a monolith instead. This move saved them a staggering 90%(!!) on operating costs, and simplified the system too. What a win! But beyond celebrating their good sense, I th...

Quantum computing could break the internet. This is how

We don’t know when. We don’t know who will get there first. But Q-day will happen — and it will change the world as we know it

"Demain ce sont des ChatGPT qui vous expliqueront que vous n’avez plus droit aux aides sociales"

L’émergence de ChatGPT, agent conversationnel lancé par la société américaine OpenAI, contrôlée par Microsoft, suscite une profonde admiration concernant l’évolution de l’intelligence artificielle (IA). Est-elle une nouvelle étape franchie dans le dépassement de l’homme par la machine ? Pour QG, l’entrepreneur Tariq Krim, fondateur de Netvibes, et ancien vice-président du Conseil…

ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.

New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.

Opinion | The Imminent Danger of A.I. Is One We’re Not Talking About

We are so stuck on asking what the technology can do that we are missing the more important questions.

Opinion | The Crypto Collapse and the End of the Magical Thinking That Infected Capitalism

Dogecoin. WeWork. The Metaverse. It was an era of illusory and ridiculous promises.

You will always have more problems than engineers.

How to deal with a sad reality.

AI Homework

The first obvious casualty of large language models is homework: the real training for everyone, though, and the best way to leverage AI, will be in verifying and editing information.

La doctrine Musk : technopolitique d’un géant technologique - Le Grand Continent

Pour comprendre la rationalité du système Musk, il faut en déconstruire les grands principes. À travers la désactivation de Starlink en Ukraine ou sa tentative chaotique de racheter Twitter, le milliardaire est en train de construire une puissance géopolitique formelle, complémentaire des prérogatives actuelles des États-Unis — une puissance fondée sur un cocktail nouveau : trolling, technologie totale, techno-politique. Asma Mhalla fait le point dans cette étude.

Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model - Waxy.org

How does it feel to be turned into an AI image model? To find out, I opened a door to the multiverse and interviewed the creator and unwilling subject of a controversial DreamBooth model.

Bitcoin et les cryptomonnaies ont-elles une utilité sociale ?

Pour Nicolas Dufrêne, les cryptomonnaies ne permettent pas de répondre aux défis sociaux et écologiques de l’époque. Au contraire, elles les aggravent.

L’influenceur, symptôme d’un « homo numericus » en manque de liens humains

Exposition à outrance, culture du clash, hypersexualisation des corps, dépenses somptuaires, mise en scène du bonheur… Adulé par les uns et vilipendé par les autres, la figure de l’influenceur ou influenceuse offre une représentation de l’homo numericus qui divise autant qu’elle exhorte à une prise de conscience sur ce qu’elle reflète de notre société. Une tribune d'Isabelle Djian, économiste du numérique et essayiste, et de Michael Stora, psychologue et psychanalyste, fondateur de l’école des Héros.

The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse

Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences

The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars

Everyone trusted the two guys at Three Arrows Capital. They knew what they were doing — right?

The Petty Pleasures of Watching Crypto Profiteers Flounder

Behind all the Web3 bluster is just “hollow abstraction.”

The Renewable-Energy Revolution Will Need Renewable Storage

Can gravity, pressure, and other elemental forces save us from becoming a battery-powered civilization?

Why This Computer Scientist Says All Cryptocurrency Should “Die in a Fire” ❧ Current Affairs

<p>UC-Berkeley’s Nicholas Weaver has been studying cryptocurrency for years. He thinks it’s a terrible idea that will end in disaster. </p>

The Attention Economy is Making Us Stupid

Global war and reproductive rights should not be at the mercy of our ever-shortening attention spans

How Bitcoin Tracers Took Down the Web’s Biggest Child Abuse Site

Welcome to Video’s customers thought their payments were untraceable. They couldn’t have been more wrong. The untold story of the case that shredded the myth of Bitcoin’s anonymity.

Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported

These early adopters found out what happened when a cutting-edge marvel became an obsolete gadget... inside their bodies.

Bored Apes, BuzzFeed and the Battle for the Future of the Internet

The self-righteous anger over the identification of the founders of a popular NFT club says a lot about the web3 battles to come in the years ahead.

Infographie : des GAFA plus puissants que jamais

Avec 243 milliards de dollars de bénéfices en 2021, Google, Apple, Facebook et Amazon disposent de moyens inédits pour poursuivre leur expansion.

Emmanuel Macron, cinq années de surveillance et de censure

A l'approche de l'élection présidentielle, nous revenons sur le bilan en matière de surveillance et de censure d'Emmanuel Macron, de son gouvernement et de sa majorité à l'Assemblée nationale. Détailler le nombre impressionnant de textes législatifs ou réglementaires qui leurs sont dus et qui ont a

How Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

Hundreds of millions of users. No algorithm. No ads. Courage in the face of autocracy. Sound like a dream? Careful what you wish for.

Why it's too early to get excited about Web3

The World’s Biggest Startups: Top Unicorns of 2021

There are more than 800 unicorns—private startups with a valuation above $1 billion— globally. Here are the world’s biggest startups.

Station F a choisi ses startups les plus prometteuses pour 2022

GreenTech, FinTech, Moonshot Tech... Station F mise sur six domaines pour sélectionner ses 40 startups les plus prometteuses pour 2022.

Plan France 2030 : 30 milliards d'euros seront injectés dans l'industrie 4.0

Le plan du gouvernement pour réindustrialiser la France passera par l'innovation dans une poignée de secteurs clés comme l'énergie, l'automobile, l'agriculture et la santé. Cet investissement bénéficiera aux grands industriels comme aux start-up.

Open Source Is Finally Coming to Financial Services - Future

Imagine financial services could be built like Lego, and that those blocks could be assembled to fit hundreds of use cases. That's the power of open source.

They’re putting guns on robot dogs now

The future of four-legged warfare.

GitHub’s Engineering Team has moved to Codespaces | The GitHub Blog

Over the past months, we’ve left our macOS model behind and moved to Codespaces for the majority of GitHub.com development.

Artificial intelligence research may have hit a dead end

"Misfired" neurons might be a brain feature, not a bug — and that's something AI research can't take into account

Opinion | I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age

The internet rewired our brains. He predicted it would.

How Claude Shannon Invented the Future

Today's information age is only possible thanks to the groundbreaking work of a lone genius.

Why Covid Will Make AI Go Mainstream In 2021: Top 3 Trends For Enterprises

Artificial Intelligence will transform the future of Pharma Drug Discovery, Work from Home, and Edge Computing in 2021. Find out why this will be the year when AI sees widespread use across industries.

As E-Commerce Booms, Robots Pick Up Human Slack

The Covid-19 pandemic and the explosion in demand for home-delivered goods means FedEx and other shippers are pushing the limits of what robotic arms can do.

Opinion | I Am the C.E.O. of Uber. Gig Workers Deserve Better.

Gig workers want both flexibility and benefits — we support laws that could make that possible.

Who Wants A Google Checking Account?

A July 2020 survey asked consumers what they would do if Google offered a checking account. More than a quarter said they would open an account. Who are these consumers and what impact will this have on the banking industry?

There’s No Such Thing As a Tech Expert Anymore

Members of Congress clearly don’t understand the tech companies they’re supposed to regulate. But neither does anyone else.

Wireless Charging Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen

We crunched the numbers on just how inefficient wireless charging is — and the results are pretty shocking

Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing

Blockchain technology is going to change everything: the shipping industry, the financial system, government … in fact, what won’t it change? But enthusiasm for it mainly stems from a lack of knowledge and understanding. The blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.

Facebook is out of control. If it were a country it would be North Korea

If the combined might of brands like Unilever and Coca-Cola don’t scare Mark Zuckerberg, who can hold the social media platform to account?

Pourquoi la Silicon Valley mise-t-elle sur le télétravail ?

Derrière des arguments sanitaires, écologiques ou ayant trait à la qualité de vie se cachent aussi des motivations économiques.

Contre la censure en ligne, RSF bâtit une immense « Bibliothèque libre » dans « Minecraft »

Le bâtiment virtuel, constitué d’environ 12,5 millions de blocs, permet aux joueurs de pays pratiquant la censure sur le Net de lire des articles habituellement inaccessibles.

Debt is Coming

Ten years from now, what seismic change will we reflect back on and think, “well that was pretty obvious, in retrospect”?   Debt is going to finally come to the tech industry.  We can hat…

«Les groupes familiaux sur Whatsapp, cette joie ultime/ce fléau»

La technologie redessine les contours de notre quotidien, et les relations familiales n’y échappent pas. Dans quelle mesure est-ce que nos échanges en ligne modifient nos rapports dans la vraie vie?

Meet the Mad Scientist Who Wrote the Book on How to Hunt Hackers

Thirty years ago, Cliff Stoll published The Cuckoo's Egg, a book about his cat-and-mouse game with a KGB-sponsored hacker. Today, the internet is a far darker place—and Stoll has become a cybersecurity icon.

From TikTok’s rise to WeWork’s fall, we charted 14 of tech’s defining trends in 2019

A year-end look back at the tech trends that ended the decade.

AlphaStar: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

AlphaStar is the first AI to reach the top league of a widely popular esport without any game restrictions.

What Are Zero-Knowledge Proofs?

How do you make blockchain and other transactions truly private? With mathematical models known as zero-knowledge proofs.

La dette technique : une supercherie mythologique pour galériens de l’IT

Ou : “Ben-Hur au COMEX” © Yoann Grange

Photographer removes our phones, exposing a lonely world

In Eric Pickersgill's "Removed" photos, people stare at their hands, or the empty space between them, ignoring opportunities for human connection.

Révolutions de l’information : comment la technologie a tué le cyberflâneur

La technologie a suscité plusieurs révolutions de l’information. Le mot-clé consacre la logique utilitaire. Facebook et le smartphone enterrent l'aléatoire.

The world’s most advanced nanotube computer may keep Moore’s Law alive

A team of academics at MIT has unveiled the world’s most advanced chip yet that’s made from carbon nanotubes—cylinders with walls the width of a single carbon atom. The new microprocessor, which is capable of running a conventional software program, could be an important milestone on the road to finding silicon alternatives. The electronics industry…

Adblocking: How About Nah?

For more than a decade, consumer rights groups (including EFF) worked with technologists and companies to try to standardize Do Not Track, a flag that browsers could send to online companies signaling that their users did not want their browsing activity tracked. Despite long hours and backing from...

Alain Damasio : « Créer une pluralité d'îlots, d'archipels, est la seule manière de retourner le capitalisme »

Comment vivre dans des villes privatisées, où notre attention est contrôlée et sollicitée en permanence, et nos corps pistés à chaque instant ? Le dernier roman d'Alain Damasio, dont l'action se déroule en 2040, (...)