Brace yourself: Superintelligent AI is on its way
Let me tell you a little about Sam Altman, one of the leading figures pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence. He’s 39, from Chicago and worth about $1 billion, give or take. He dropped out of Stanford after two years to start Loopt, a location-based social media app that sold for $43.4 million in 2005.
Someone call nine-wine-wine: A 79-year-old woman hiking alone took a bad fall and broke her leg. She was at High Rock Lookout in Washington, where she scattered her mother’s ashes 23 years ago. A passing U.S. airman carried her on his back all the way to safety. What a guy! If you hike solo, please bring a phone that can text via satellite or carry a Spot satellite GPS messenger.
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Stop buying movies on Apple, Amazon and others: A new California law will force digital stores to admit you’re licensing content and you don’t actually own it. This is in response to companies like PlayStation and Ubisoft deleting games from players’ accounts after shutting down the servers.
🌍 Coming soon to Google Earth: See the world as it looked 80 years ago with satellite and aerial images from major cities like London, Berlin and Paris dating back to the 1930s. It’s neat to see San Francisco’s ports in 1938, once bustling with shipping.
✈️ U.S. air control systems are outdated: They won’t be modernized until 2030 at the earliest. Why the delay? Because some systems are over 40 years old, making parts hard to find. Add in FAA management issues (slow to start new projects, poor oversight and planning), and we’re running on seriously old tech. Reassuring, right?
Extremists are using AI to rebrand Adolf Hitler: The goal is to characterize him as a “misunderstood” figure for a new generation. Over the past month, AI-cloned audio and video clips of Hitler, spewing English versions of his fanatical speeches, have reached millions on social media. The comments? Disturbingly, things like, “Maybe he is NOT the villain.” If you see these posts, report them so platforms can take them down faster.
🚨 Seven years of slacking: Meta’s been slapped with a $101 million fine for storing up to 600 million Facebook and Instagram passwords in plain-text format. That’s a major security no-no. Even worse? The breach was discovered in 2019, but some passwords had been unprotected since 2012 and were searchable by over 20,000 Meta employees. The fine isn’t big enough.
🧬 A happy ending: Luis Armando Albino was just 6 years old when he was abducted from a California park in 1951. He was taken to the East Coast and raised by another couple as their own. Over 70 years later, a gal who turned out to be his biological niece took a DNA test for fun and found a 22% match — to her long-lost uncle. She went to the police, who reopened the missing person’s case, and Luis was reunited with his biological family.
Just like us … sort of: Believe it or not, billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg still take out mortgage loans. Why? It provides liquidity. By not tying up their wealth in homes, they can use that cash for bigger investments. Example: Pay 5% interest on a $2 million mortgage and invest the $2 million in something earning 10%. This isn’t financial advice, but it makes sense to me.