James Frey's Blog, page 21

DeathGPT

from Metro UK

Urgent warning for anyone using scarily accurate ‘AI death calculator’

by Hiyah Zaidi

Be warned if you’re testing out an ‘AI death calculator’ (Picture: Getty)

The team behind an ‘AI death calculator’ that can predict, well, when you’ll die, issued a stark warning for those keen to find out their life expectancy.

Danish researchers unveiled the Life2vec AI chatbot in December. They said the program can accurately predict not only how long you’ll live, but also how rich you will be.

Now, a number of copycat apps are appearing online that appear to be scams – while the original chatbot has not been released to the public.

The team have put out a warning that scammers have created fraudulent websites imitating the chatbot which ‘have nothing to do with us and our work’.

[ click to continue reading at Metro ]

Waytoo Aggressive

from Futurism

Self-Driving Waymo Spotted Plowing Down Wrong Side of Street

“I think we can all agree that the decision making of the Waymo was not good.”

Image by blazelord69 via Reddit / Futurism

A  on social media shows a self-driving Waymo car bombing down the wrong side of the road in downtown San Francisco — yet another glaring incident involving the company’s vehicles acting unexpectedly.

The footage shows the vehicle passing a group of electric-powered unicyclists and scooters in the city’s Mission and Market district last week.

Another  the same event from a different perspective, with the Waymo car seemingly trying to overtake the unicyclists — by taking over the entirety of the oncoming lane.

Fortunately, one of the unicyclists managed to get the vehicle to stop by getting in front of it.

[ click to continue reading at Futurism ]

Colonizing The Dark Side

from Yahoo! News

China set to launch high-stakes mission to moon’s ‘hidden’ side

by Albee Zhang and Ryan Woo

BEIJING, April 29 (Reuters) – China will send a robotic spacecraft in coming days on a round trip to the moon’s far side in the first of three technically demanding missions that will pave the way for an inaugural Chinese crewed landing and a base on the lunar south pole.

Since the first Chang’e mission in 2007, named after the mythical Chinese moon goddess, China has made leaps forward in its lunar exploration, narrowing the technological chasm with the United States and Russia.

In 2020, China brought back samples from the moon’s near side in the first sample retrieval in more than four decades, confirming for the first time it could safely return an uncrewed spacecraft to Earth from the lunar surface.

This week, China is expected to launch Chang’e-6 using the backup spacecraft from the 2020 mission, and collect soil and rocks from the side of the moon that permanently faces away from Earth.

[ click to continue reading at Yahoo! News ]

Humans Can Be Awesome

Apocalypse Megalopolis

from The Hollywood Reporter

For Francis Ford Coppola’s Go-for-Broke Movies, All Roads Lead to Cannes

The director readies his self-funded epic ‘Megalopolis’ for the Croisette, with echoes of his ‘Apocalypse Now’ journey 45 years ago accompanying him.

BY THOMAS DOHERTY

Francis Ford Coppola, on location filming ‘Apocalypse Now.’ EVERETTs

For his forthcoming one from the heart, Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola has once again violated the cardinal rule of the entertainment business: Never invest your own money in the show. Reports are that to bankroll the $120 million epic he has literally mortgaged the farm, or vineyard. The investment is slated to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 14.

We — and he — have all been here before. Coppola last went into hock for another long-aborning and cost-overrunning project, which 45 years ago, almost to the day, also premiered at Cannes: the now legendary Apocalypse Now (1979).

At the time, Coppola was bathing in the afterglow of one of the most astonishing back-to-back double, or triple, plays in the industry’s history: The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974), the operatic two-part saga of mob family business in which organized crime serves less as a metaphor for American capitalism than its purest expression (“Michael, we’re bigger than U.S. Steel!”); and The Conversation (1974), a prophetic vision of the intrusion of high tech surveillance into private lives. Before Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) set the templates for the next half century of Hollywood cinema, Coppola was the singular visionary of what was already recognized as the Second Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.

Little wonder that Coppola’s next project was awaited with eager anticipation by most and, because this is after all Hollywood, knives out by a few.

[ click to continue reading at THR ]

Flame-throwing Robot Dog, Cool

A T-J to ’28 Years Later’

from Deadline

Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson & Ralph Fiennes To Star In ‘28 Years Later’ For Danny Boyle And Sony Pictures

By Justin Kroll

Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes Edd Horde/Getty Images

EXCLUSIVE: The new 28 Years Later trilogy from director Danny Boyle and Sony Pictures is gaining momentum, and some serious star power. Sources tell Deadline that Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes have boarded the first pic, a sequel to the original 28 Days Later.

Boyle is directing the first movie from a script by Alex Garland. Sony will release the film in theaters globally.

While plot details are vague, the original 28 Days Later in 2002 centered on a bicycle courier (played by Cillian Murphy) who wakes from a coma to discover the world had been overrun with zombies following the outbreak of a virus. The pic grossed more than $82 million worldwide and led to a 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later, on which Boyle and Garland served solely as EPs.

[ click to continue reading at Deadline ]

Endosymbiosis

from The Independent

Two lifeforms merge into one organism for first time in a billion years

‘The first time it happened, it gave rise to all complex life,’ scientists say

by Anthony Cuthbertson

An image showing how the algae looked at different stages using X-ray tomography (Valentina Loconte/Berkeley Lab)

For the first time in at least a billion years, two lifeforms have merged into a single organism.

The process, called primary endosymbiosis, has only happened twice in the history of the Earth, with the first time giving rise to all complex life as we know it through mitochondria. The second time that it happened saw the emergence of plants.

Now, an international team of scientists have observed the evolutionary event happening between a species of algae commonly found in the ocean and a bacterium.

“The first time we think it happened, it gave rise to all complex life,” said Tyler Coale, a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the research on one of two recent studies that uncovered the phenomenon.

“Everything more complicated than a bacterial cell owes its existence to that event. A billion years ago or so, it happened again with the chloroplast, and that gave us plants.”

[ click to continue reading at The Independent ]

He’ll be back.

S T-J

from BBC

Sam Taylor-Johnson: Nine things we learned from her This Cultural Life interview

by John Wilson

John Wilson with Sam Taylor-Johnson

Sam Taylor-Johnson has been equally successful as an artist and as a filmmaker. As a photographer, she was part of the Young British Artists movement that revolutionised the British art scene in the nineties. As a director, her work has ranged from blockbuster book adaptation Fifty Shades of Grey to biopics of musical legends. Her latest, Back to Black, is about the life of Amy Winehouse. Here are nine things we learned when she sat down with John Wilson for This Cultural Life.

[ click to continue reading at BBC ]