Curated Commons // Edition 108
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Let’s dive right in ($ indicates potential paywall).
Science, FTW
Microbots, tiny robots, have successfully cleared pneumonia from the lungs of mice - Read here
The bots, and scammers, have reached Linkedin
Some might argue, Linkedin converted perfectly normal humans to bots, but in this case, there’s a marked increase in the number of phony profiles on Linkedin, all with AI-generated photos and text from legit human accounts, being used to lure people into scams, and worse. - Read here
Bloomberg also had a related story on fake jobs on Linkedin - Read here ($)
Should you wipe or shred?
Too often we hear of stories of abandoned hard drives, or improperly wiped hard drives with personal data of millions of customers. To avoid this, many companies adopt a very environmentally unfriendly process of shredding used hard drives. Good long read from the FT - Read here ($)
Why haven’t machines taken over your job already?
Because you are likely amazing at what you do. And computers, not as much. Or something like that - Read here ($)
Some car makers are daring to think in different directions
Hummer went electric recently. In possibly the worst way possible. Now Citroen has come up with a concept with a very different approach. - Read here ($)
Say hi to “Amasia”
Not yet, but in a few billion years, once the Pacific Ocean fully vanishes - Read here
‘tis the season of cheating in sports
Move over Chess, Poker is here - Read here
Japan, being Japan
Gotta love Japanese. They’ve now embraced masks fully. - Read here ($)
We are messing up the world for the unborn
We simply don’t appreciate how badly we are messing up the planet :-( - Read here
Cause. And (Instagram) effect.
In an age of algorithmic recommendations, where your echo chamber determines what you see/hear/eat/…, you have to make real effort to go beyond what the algorithm drives you to… Good piece - Read here
Yet so often the opposite is true: that if you ignore a large portion of what the internet recommends, you’re significantly less likely to end up having the Positano problem. True luxury, as any rich person knows, is the ability to separate oneself from the masses, to avoid being next to or even seen by regular people. In the age of algorithms, the only way to replicate any semblance of luxury is to take the keystrokes less traveled.
How much of a strain are EVs on the grid?
Not much, says Bloomberg in this interesting analysis - Read here ($)
Listen to the analysts, not management, on a company’s prospects
Interesting analysis using NLP. - Read here ($)
From privacy to surveillance to entertainment?
Amazon’s MGM studios has produced a TV show based on clips of videos recorded by Ring cameras (an Amazon product). Make what you will. - Read here
It may make for entertaining TV, but it doesn’t make for a better society.
Then oil pipelines, now, sub-sea Internet cables?
Most Internet traffic today is carried over 400 fiberoptic pipes spanning 1.3 Mn kilometres. New concerns now arise whether these are vulnerable to sabotage by rogue Governments. - Read here
More interesting reads:
Robot makers are pledging to not weaponize their robots, or allow others to. Will this work? - Read here
One wild story - how scammers are luring job aspirants to pose as women and partake in crypto scams. Deep in the jungles of Myanmar - Read here
Can eDNA, “Environmental DNA”, help identifying people lost at sea? - Read here ($)
Are we becoming climate voyeurs? - Read here($)
Autonomous farming is coming, if John Deere has its way - Read here
Why does time go forwards, not backwards? - Read here
Dystopian TV shows based on everyday reality are already here - Read here
The big business of marriages in India - Read here ($)
McKinsey and its obsession with the business of addiction - Read here ($)
And finally, love how the mice look at the human here. They know the outcome
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