📺 FunFreq News Apr24
Meta is investing tens of billions into artificial general intelligence and giving it away for free. Here’s a great interview of Zuckerberg that covers a variety of topics from Llama 3, $10B Models, Caesar Augustus, and gigawatt data centers. (79 mins)
Sidenote: Meta was forced to emergency shutdown two artificial intelligence programs who invented their own language and were talking to each other. (3 mins)
The supergenius neural networks that Meta is giving away for free will eventually find their way into a wide variety of robot bodies. Here’s a new robot out of china that can already handle most of your household chores. Meet Astribot S1. (3 mins)
Also meet the all new Atlas from Boston Dynamics. This thing looks like it came from the droid army in Star Wars 3. (1 min)
There’s no droid army yet, but here’s a brief look inside the US Military’s new Drone Warfare School from the Wall Street Journal. (6 mins)
Getting back to nature: From 1800-1900, European colonists killed 60 million beavers for their fur, which is the reason we have so many wildfires across the Western United States today. Here’s a wild story about beavers getting parachuted into Canada and terraforming the landscape. (8 mins)
Here’s a few more reasons to care about the Earth. This astrophysicist shares some amazing statistics about just how rare our solar system really is. For example, our planet has 60 times less sulfur than the rest of the rocks in our solar system which allows us to grow food. We also have 60 times more aluminum, 90 times more titanium, and the exact right amount of 22 vital poisons from the periodic table. And maybe most amazing—the energy output from our Sun is five times more stable than the second most stable star in our Milky Way galaxy. (9 mins)
Something to make you laugh: raising teenagers, love languages, adult sports, and competition cheer. (15 mins)
Something to make you cry: Kodi is a blind, autistic singer that won America’s Got Talent. (5 mins)
If that video didn’t make you cry, this one will. Iam Tongi makes everyone cry with this audition he dedicated to his dad on American Idol. (7 mins)
Something to make you wonder: John Burke has a new book about his study of over 1,0000 near death experiences from all kinds of cultures, religions, and language groups. It’s called, “Imagine the God of Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God’s Revelation, and the Love You’ve Always Wanted”. Here’s a short interview describing his research. (19 mins)
Something to put you to sleep: This presentation is from creationist geologists doing really interesting science in the Grand Canyon. The reason I’m so interested in this work is because none of the evolutionary geologists can explain why:
The footprints of all the dinosaurs are “millions of years” below the actual dinosaur bodies they belong to.
None of the fossils in the fossil record show signs of decay, which indicates they were all buried alive. All the tiny, delicate wings on insects are perfectly intact just like the fins on all the fish.
None of the folds in rock layers show signs of cracking. (95 mins)
Finally, I don’t even like baseball, but Elly De La Cruz is incredible to watch. He hits home runs from either side of the plate, plays shortstop, and throws 100 mph. Here’s 8 minutes of highlights.
For People Who Read:
I finally finished my new book on artificial intelligence and intelligent design. It’s called “Uncertainty: The Computer Science of Everything”. Starting in May, I will send out a new excerpt each Wednesday that covers, well, all the uncertainty in the universe.
Microsoft pitched OpenAI’s DALL-E as a battlefield tool for US Military
Any battlefield use of the software would be a dramatic turnaround for OpenAI, which describes its mission as developing AI that can benefit all of humanity.
Tesla may start selling its Optimus humanoid robot next year, says Elon Musk
Here’s a few interesting stats from Piper Sandler’s Spring 2024 Survey of Teens:
Nike, Hoka, and Lululemon are among the most popular brands.
Beauty remains a heightened priority, with the core beauty wallet reaching the highest level seen since spring 2018 at $339 (about 15% of total spend), driven by growth in all categories. Cosmetics still holds the highest share of total beauty spend, but fragrance is experiencing the greatest growth at +23% Y/Y.
Instagram made a big improvement from fall ‘23 & is now the No. 2 favorite app with 30% of teens. TikTok remained No. 1 but declined to ~35%. SNAP fell to the No. 3 favorite at ~22%.
Weekly usage of VR devices improved to ~13% from ~10% in fall ’23. 33% of teens now own a VR device, up from 31% in fall '23.
Roblox active usage improved to ~34% in spring ’24 from ~31% in fall ’23. ~22% of teens have never played Roblox, down from ~24% in fall ’23.
66% of teens have used Spotify over the last six months (down from 68% last spring), with 45% of teens opting to subscribe/pay for Spotify (up from 44%).
Teens spend 29% of daily video consumption on Netflix and 27% on YouTube.
We close with a few surprising stories about kids and their computers.
24% of all 5-7 year-olds now own a smartphone, while 76% use a tablet
Overall use of social media sites or apps among all 5-7s has increased year-on-year (30% to 38%), with WhatsApp (29% to 37%), TikTok (25% to 30%), Instagram (14% to 22%) and Discord (2% to 4%) seeing particular growth among this age group.
Online gaming among 5-7 year-olds has also seen a significant annual increase – 41%, up from 34% – with more children of this age playing shooter games than ever before (15%, up from 10%).
Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media—and driving some to suicide
In January 2022 the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) received 100 reports of financially motivated sexual extortion. In February it was 173. By March, 259. The numbers were trending up so quickly and the script was so similar that the analysts reported it directly to Lauren Coffren, the executive director of the center’s exploited children division. “The bad actors were so fast and so ruthless,” Coffren says. Last year, after the center asked social media platforms to start tracking the crime, NCMEC received more than 20,000 such reports.
The scam, which the FBI calls sextortion, has become one of the fastest-growing crimes targeting children in the US, according to the agency. In an 18-month period ending in March 2023, the FBI says, at least 20 minors, primarily boys, killed themselves after falling victim to the scam. (Seven more sextortion-related suicides have been reported since then, the latest in January.) The crime is “just out of control,” says Mark Civiletto, a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s Lansing, Michigan, office. “This is something that’s touching every neighborhood across the country.”
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