Recommended from Around the Web (Week Ending November 8, 2013)
Video: The NSA’s Evolution
The New York Times offers a brief history of the NSA and sheds light on how the agency acquired its wide-ranging powers of surveillance.
-Kyanna Sutton, senior web producer
That Goddamned Blue Bird and Me: How Twitter Hijacked My Mind
A timely reflection on Twitter’s addictive properties.
—Will Knight, news and analysis editor
When Privacy Is Theft
Margaret Atwood reviews Dave Eggers’s new book, which examines a troubled, technology-mediated vision of the future.
—Will Knight
Where Cats Glow Green: Weird Feline Science in New Orleans
A great video about scientists trying to save endangered cat species with cloning leaves us with an important question: What’s the point of helping these species reproduce if they have no habitat to call home?
—Susan Young, biomedicine editor
Call Me i$Hm@eL
The art of choosing a hacker nickname.
—Brian Bergstein, deputy editor
A Mind-Boggling Sculpture That Crawls with a Mind of Its Own
Project by Malta-based architect William Bondin will bring walking sculptures to a public park near you.
-J. Juniper Friedman, editorial assistant
Google Is Ordered to Block Images in Privacy Case
Quelle horreur for Google in Europe. A French judge delivers a lesson in how an alleged privacy invasion against one individual can become a legal or regulatory tipping point for huge Internet businesses.
—David Talbot, chief correspondent
Researchers Give Urine-Powered Robot New “Heart”
Good to see that “fully autonomous robots that collect human urine to power themselves” are no longer a dream.
—Will Knight
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Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.
And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.
OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora
The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.
Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.
Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.
This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language
A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.
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