Curated Commons // Edition 121
Welcome to the 121st edition of Curated Commons! Thank you for subscribing (if you haven't yet, what are you waiting for?).
Happy reading ($ indicates potential paywall).
Asking questions pays
The Internet is amazing. The guy who grew viral on TikTok asking owners of rich cars what they did for a living now earns enough to buy those cars. - Read here ($)
Brands are loving virtual influencers
Less tantrums and scandal-free, and pretty cheap - Just ~$14K per year for a ‘digital person’. - Read here
Biometrics are great. Till they are trained at you.
The owner of Madison Square Garden in NYC is using facial recognition to to put lawyers from firms suing his company on an exclusion list to keep them out of events. 1984 is no patch on 2023. - Read here ($)
On a related note, this is an interesting (in this case amusing too!) challenge in multiple scenarios. As a friendly reminder, biometrics, many a times, are a solution of convenience, not security.
Will e-CNY help China break into global markets?
China’s going big on CBDCs. Both as a way of extending its influence, and more importantly, to stay resilient for any future sanctions. Will it succeed? - Read here ($)
Doomsters on YouTube love China
Viewers globally apparently like to hear about China’s downfall. So savvy YouTubers are milking the opportunity by creating videos claiming just that! - Read here
AI is taking over… audio-book narrators
Not yet, but Apple just launched a whole new range of AI-voiced audiobooks. And while initial pushback will focus on the human edge, not hard to see how cost benefits become the overriding factor soon in preferring AI narration - Read here
Are we moving from range anxiety to recharge time anxiety
Good read on what it might take to make EVs more widespread - Read here ($)
On a related note, Hertz discovered that electric vehicles are between 50-60% cheaper to maintain than gasoline-powered cars. - Read here
Battery packs that could charge in the same amount of time it takes to fill up at a gas station could be key to making electric vehicles more affordable than gas cars
Hey, it’s perfectly OK to hit the share button!
AI is getting better at medicine
Not enough to replace doctors definitely, but enough to act as a great way to support them in decision-making. An in-progress use case of slow, and suddenly!
Platforms, great for participants, including scammers
Good read on how scammers are flooding Amazon Pakistan with a variety of scams, making it messy for legit sellers as well - Read here
We asked for flying cars, and finally have them
For a $140,000, you will get a car that’s designed to be on the road for 90% of the time, and flown when there are traffic jams - Read here ($)
Fighting aging
Are we moving from measuring lifespan to healthspan - the years of healthy living? Lots of billionaires are now funding research aimed at fighting aging. And the questions around what it means for existing societal inequalities only grow louder. Good piece - Read here ($)
While there’s a lot of approaches from research teams on fighting aging, Disney might have the most immediate solution through an AI tool that de-ages actors in seconds. - Read here
The age of the AI companion is nigh, and with it the benefits & the issues
An artist wanted to speak with her younger self. So she trained an AI chatbot on entries from her childhood journals and now keeps chatting with it - Read here
On the topic, reminded of this older piece on chatbot abuse - Read here
The society for prevention of cruelty to algorithms and robots couldn’t come sooner!
More Interesting Reads:
Twitter’s manual verification put to the test (spoiler alert - it failed) - Read here ($)
Remember COVID-19? Apparently, there’s now an exploding black market in China for COVID-19 drugs. - Read here
The age of super tall super slim skyscrapers - Read here($)
Does it still make sense to aim to send people to Mars? - Read here
India’s economy is becoming more formal, writes The Economist with the (usual) weird headline - Read here ($)
People have always been talking of privacy/surveillance. We just haven’t paid enough attention
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