[nonostantement #266] - missjourney / chomsky & chatgpt / tiktok ai filter

💾 Now with MORE floppy disks!

Welcome to nonostantement: a weekly newsletter with unnatural, austere, and amusing stuff found all over the Internet.

Hello there, Joele here. I am an Italian consultant living in Barcelona, Spain. I spend a lot of time online dealing with stuff for my clients (you know, advertising, branding, that kind of stuff). While online, I found a lot of interesting things. I collect the best in this newsletter.

Some music for you: Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock - It Takes Two, Emapea - Jazzy and A Big Life - Worldtraveller!

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Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

#PEOPLE

• Patrick Bateman Business Card Generator
  Generates business cards with your name and title in the style of Patrick Batemans in American Psycho

• MissJourney. The AI alternative that celebrates women+
  An initiative of TEDxAmsterdam Women & ACE

• En-ROADS
  En-ROADS is a freely-available online simulator that provides policymakers, educators, businesses, the media, and the public with the ability to test and explore cross-sector climate solutions.

• The Furniture Hustlers of Silicon Valley
  As tech companies cut costs and move to remote work, their left-behind office furniture has become part of a booming trade.

• What I think about when I say goodbye to my beloved dying pet
  Although it felt more like bereavement for a person than the loss of a thing, the death of a pet isn’t exactly like either

• [Video] - FIAT | WELCOME TO PANDELLERIA
  Welcome to Pantelleria! Or rather: Pandelleria! The island with the highest density of pandas in the world. A story all about eccentric and amusing stories.

• Opinion | Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT
  The most prominent strain of A.I. encodes a flawed conception of language and knowledge.

• Japanese company brings astronomically expensive space tourism within reach of the common masses
  We’ve still got some time to go before commercial space tourism goes mainstream, and the early birds taking up the initiative will reap the maximum benefit of client accusation.

• The Alarming Rise of India’s Pay-to-Breathe Industry
  As the state’s solutions to pollution fail, the need for expensive air purifiers is driving a new kind of inequality.

#TECH

• People Used Facebook's Leaked AI to Create a 'Based' Chatbot that Says the N-Word
  After 4chan published LLaMa online, others have taken the language model and created a functioning chat bot in Discord, which claimed that the n-word can refer to people who don't have good intentions.

#SOCIALMEDIA

• Why won’t TikTok confirm the Bold Glamour filter is AI?
  TikTok rolled out new AI tools for filters last month. But the company won’t say if its new Bold Glamour effect uses them — and the reaction to the filter isn’t entirely positive.

• Comedian sues AOC for Twitter block after U.S. Capitol catcall
  A suit against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for blocking a provocateur on Twitter cites a federal appeals court ruling against Donald Trump in a similar case.

• People on TikTok are paying elderly women to sit in stagnant mud for hours and cry
  The trend ran rampant in Indonesia until the government stepped in.

#THEDARKSIDE

• Russian propagandists get Twitter verification two years in Ukraine war
  The verification means their tweets, mostly opposing U.S. aid to Ukraine, are given added prominence.

• EUvsDisinfo
  EUvsDisinfo is the flagship project of the European External Action Service’s East StratCom Task Force. It was established in 2015 to better forecast, address, and respond to the Russian Federation’s ongoing disinformation campaigns affecting the European Union, its Member States, and countries in the shared neighbourhood.

• The privacy loophole in your doorbell
  Police were investigating his neighbour. A judge gave officers access to all his security-camera footage, including inside his home.

• The FBI Just Admitted It Bought US Location Data
  Rather than obtaining a warrant, the bureau purchased sensitive data—a controversial practice that privacy advocates say is deeply problematic.

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That's it for now.

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