Month: December 2024

From Curbed: “As the Coast Guard sped toward the cruise ship, Pam was still on the phone with the Norwegian employee in Miami, begging her to tell the ship to wait. As they approached the looming 14 white decks, she got an update: The captain was refusing their request. They would not be allowed to board. They were able to watch as the ship that held their clothes, their medication, their luggage, and their phone chargers started her mighty engines and sailed away. Cruisers of all stripes are familiar with the concept of force majeure, an arcane clause in maritime law. Force majeure, an “act of God” — it’s the acknowledgment that on the high seas, a ship is vulnerable to significant events beyond its control. Cruise ships are not responsible for acts of God. In fact, as the passengers were about to learn, they are not responsible for much of anything.”

Google Street View captured a man loading a body into the trunk of a car

From the New York Times: “It was a routine image picked up by Google Street View: a man loading a white bag into the trunk of a car. But that unexceptional picture, the authorities in Spain said on Wednesday, was among the clues that helped lead them to two people whom they recently arrested in the case of a man who disappeared last year. In a news release, the National Police said that officers had detained a woman described as the partner of the man who disappeared in the province of Soria, in the country’s north, along with a man who they said was also the woman’s partner. The two were detained last month at two locations in Soria, which is about 100 miles north of Madrid, police said. Investigators later located human remains that they believe could belong to the missing man. The police did not identify the people who had been detained or the victim.”

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Back in October, I wrote about artificial intelligence, and specifically about one of the crucial questions experts still can’t seem to agree on, which is whether it is going to destroy us or not. In that piece, I also mentioned the debate over whether the indexing or “ingesting” that AI large-language models do is — or at least should be — covered by the fair-use exception in copyright law. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it because it wasn’t directly relevant to the danger issue, but I wanted to expand on some of the points I made then, and also in a Columbia Journalism Review piece that I wrote last year. I am not a cheerleader for giant technology companies by any means, but I think there is an important principle at stake. And at the heart of it are some key questions: What (or who) is copyright law for? What was it originally designed to do? And does AI scraping or indexing of copyrighted content fit into that, and if so, how?

The case against AI indexing of content is relatively straightforward: by hoovering up content online and then using it to create a massive database for training large-language models, AI engines copy that content without asking and without paying for it (unless the publisher or owner has signed a deal with the AI company, as some news outlets have). This pretty clearly qualifies as de facto copyright infringement, as the Authors Guild and the New York Times and a number of others have argued and continue to argue. In a similar way, one could imagine that if a company were to copy millions of books and use them to create a massive index of content, that would pretty clearly qualify as infringement as well — copying without permission or payment.

The major difference between these two cases is that the second hypothetical one actually happened, when Google scanned millions of books as part of its Google Books project between 2002 and 2005, and created an index that allowed users to search for content from those books. After years of back-and-forth negotiations over payment for the infringement, this led to a lawsuit in which the Authors Guild and others argued that Google was guilty of copyright infringement on a massive scale. In the early days of that case, Judge Denny Chin of the Southern District of New York seemed to agree, but then at some point he changed his mind, and ruled that Google’s book-scanning activity was covered by the fair-use exception under US copyright law.

From the New York Times: “On Thursday, 38 prominent biologists issued a dire warning: Within a few decades, scientists will be able create a microbe that could cause an unstoppable pandemic, devastating crop losses or the collapse of entire ecosystems. The scientists called for a ban on research that could lead to synthesis of such an organism. The molecules that serve as the building blocks of DNA and proteins typically exist in one of two mirror-image forms. While sugar molecules can exist in left- and right-handed forms, DNA only uses the right-handed molecules. That’s the reason DNA’s double helix has a right-handed twist. Our proteins, by contrast, are made of left-handed amino acids. In theory, a mirror cell — with left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins — could carry out all the biochemical reactions required to stay alive.”

A British nurse found guilty of being an “angel of death” may be innocent

From The New Yorker: “Last August, Lucy Letby, a thirty-three-year-old British nurse, was convicted of killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill six others. Her murder trial, one of the longest in English history, lasted more than ten months and captivated the United Kingdom. The Guardian, which published more than a hundred stories about the case, called her “one of the most notorious female murderers of the last century.” The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

From Techspot: “The long-running saga of James Howells’ bid to retrieve a hard drive containing 7,500 Bitcoin that was accidentally thrown into a landfill in 2013 has taken a new turn. He now says he has a “finely tuned plan” to recover the component, and that its position has been narrowed down to a small area. In 2013, Howells had two 2.5-inch hard drives stored in a drawer, one of which he intended to get rid of and another that had a digital wallet with Bitcoin worth the equivalent of around $771 million today. Howells put the drive containing the Bitcoin in a black trash bag and his partner took the bag to the local landfill. Howells has been unsuccessfully trying to persuade the council of Newport, Wales, to allow him to dig for the drive for years now.”

Researchers say people like AI-generated poetry better than the human kind

From Nature: “As AI-generated text continues to evolve, distinguishing it from human-authored content has become increasingly difficult. This study examined whether non-expert readers could reliably differentiate between AI-generated poems and those written by well-known human poets. We conducted two experiments with non-expert poetry readers and found that most participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than the actual human-authored poems. We found that AI-generated poems were also rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. It seems the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

From New York: “It was the summer of 2023, and Matt Bergwall, a skinny 21-year-old University of Miami student, was lounging in an infinity pool in Dubai. Beside him was his girlfriend, a blonde Zeta Tau Alpha. The silver Cuban link chain on his wrist glistened as he held his phone high to snap a selfie, the city’s artificial palm-shaped islands splayed out along the horizon beneath them. Over the next few days, they swam in the pool and posed on their hotel balcony, posting a steady stream of pictures to Instagram. In one, he leans back on the edge of the pool, finger to the sky. None of Bergwall’s friends at school had a firm grasp of how the sophomore had money for the Tesla he drove or the Gucci he wore or, for that matter, the room in Dubai. But who could care when Bergwall was pitching in for yachts on Biscayne Bay?”

Why some Christmas nativity scenes in Spain have a tiny figure taking a poop

From Wikipedia: “A Caganer is a figurine depicted in the act of defecation appearing in nativity scenes in Catalonia and neighbouring areas such as Andorra, Valencia, Balearic Islands, and Northern Catalonia. It is most popular and widespread in these areas, but can also be found in other areas of Spain, Portugal, and Southern Italy. The name “El Caganer” literally means “the pooper”. Traditionally, the figurine is depicted as a peasant, wearing the traditional Catalan red cap and with his trousers down, showing a bare backside, and defecating. The exact origin of the Caganer is unknown, but the tradition has existed since at least the 18th century. According to the society Friends of the Caganer, it is believed to have entered the nativity scene during the Baroque period.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.