Easter Sunday. Lake Murray was packed with picnickers.
It doesn’t look packed in this photo, but trust me, it was packed.
Is there any way I can subscribe to a Mastodon user’s RSS or Atom feed that includes boosts and media attachments? Is that supported on mastodon.social?
Texas governor Greg Abbott says he will pardon Daniel Perry, who was convicted of killing a protester at a Black Lives Matter march.. (Austin American-Statesman) Garrett Foster, who was killed by Perry, was carrying an AK-47. Perry claimed Foster pointed the gun at him. But prosecutors pointed to social media posts that they said pointed to Perry instigating events.
Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus at The Washington Post:
One night last week, the law professor Jonathan Turley got a troubling email. As part of a research study, a fellow lawyer in California had asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. Turley’s name was on the list.
The chatbot, created by OpenAI, said Turley had made sexually suggestive comments and attempted to touch a student while on a class trip to Alaska, citing a March 2018 article in The Washington Post as the source of the information. The problem: No such article existed. There had never been a class trip to Alaska. And Turley said he’d never been accused of harassing a student.
‘Bees are sentient’: inside the stunning brains of nature’s hardest workers. Research suggests bees have emotions, dreams, and even PTSD, raising ethical concerns. (The Guardian)
Gruesome cache of severed hands is evidence of trophy-taking in ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptian warriors took enemies’ hands as trophies, using them to account for battle casualties, and often presenting them to the Pharoah. (Ars Technica / Jennifer Ouellette)
Was this week’s “Picard” the first time “Star Trek” dropped an F-bomb? Did they boldly go where they’d never gone before?
The gambler who beat roulette. For decades, casinos scoffed as mathematicians and physicists devised elaborate systems to take down the house. Then an unassuming Croatian’s winning strategy forever changed the game. (Bloomberg / Kit Chellel, with Vladimir Otasevic, Daryna Krasnolutska, Peter Laca and Misha Savic)
Smart glasses developed by Cornell researchers can read silent speech, tracking lip and mouth movements, to control smartphones and other devices. (Cornell Chronicle / Louis DiPietro)
I remember technology like this featured in science fiction by John Varley in the 1970s, and have wondered why it doesn’t exist in real life.