Curated Commons // Edition 123
Welcome to the 123rd edition of Curated Commons! Thank you for subscribing (if you haven't yet, what are you waiting for?).
Happy reading ($ indicates potential paywall).
All things Science
Shooting superbugs with…light
Antibiotic resistance, often a result of their indiscriminate use/abuse, has been a growing challenge globally, and new research suggests promising results for killing superbugs with light. - Read here
Can microbes help solve the world’s fertilizer problems?
Manufacturing of synthetic fertilizers is expensive, and a pain to the environment. Now startups, and big agri companies too, are hoping microbes may provide an alternative, while saving money for the farmer. - Read here($)
Our Algorithmic Future
Will Generative AI lead to job loss in white-collar jobs?
The great AI takeover of jobs has yet to make the jump from PPT panels to real-world, for most job categories. Will Generative AI finally change this? - Read here ($)
Your uploaded pics were used to train a GAN. Which is now being monetized. Who owes whom?
We are going to face many similar questions. For now, the cases have already started and it’s field time for lawyers and tough time for judges. Getty Images is suing creators of Stable Diffusion - Read here
What happens when private equity meets algorithms that do their bidding?
We are beginning to have live examples from the future of what happens when PE firms discover that they can have algorithms to do work. They will deploy them to churn out SEO-friendly content stuffed with affiliate links that rank high on Google results. - Read here
What might slow down AI?
The lack of written prose. Apparently, there’s not enough good quality prose written to feed AI. But not to worry, there’s a lot more human-generated content for AI to munch on - Read here($)
Behind every AI system is…a low cost human worker half-way around the world
The horrors of social media content moderation are coming to AI chatbots. OpenAI used workers in Kenya to make ChatGPT less toxic. With very predictable results - Read here
Does ChatGPT have an inner being?
This is one very good takedown of ChatGPT by Nick Cave, an Australian singer. Creativity needs a human touch - is that replicable by a feeling-less piece of code? - Read here
We have just one planet
The world is drowning in packaging waste
Voluntary reduction targets from big companies aren’t working. - Read here
Carbon offsets - sigh!
New investigation suggests that ~90% of rainforest carbon offsets by the biggest provider, Verra, are worthless. This is a scam wrapped in a fraud inside a lie. - Read here
The Future of Everything
Get ready for quantum computing
Everything that we’ve known about computing will (hopefully) soon become redundant. Very good long read on quantum computing - Read here ($)
Why do we love selfie apps?
This is a very well-written piece on why we love AI-driven camera apps. - Read here ($)
Autonomous vehicles - yes. Their carbon emissions - no.
Why our future needs constant innovation…
“In the future, the energy needed to run the powerful computers on board a global fleet of autonomous vehicles could generate as many greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centers in the world today.” - Read here
Just Business Things
Apple and China - more intertwined than we think
There’s a lot of talk of Apple moving out of China and setting up base in India/Vietnam and a few other countries. But it appears it might be far more harder than anyone imagined. Very good story - Read here($)
“All the tech competence China has now is not the product of Chinese tech leadership drawing in Apple. It’s the product of Apple going in there and building the tech competence.”
Who disrupts whom is a question of time
Uber disrupted the relation between taxi drivers and consumers. They are now seen as the middle-man to be disrupted.
All things life
What is the key to a good life?
Deep relationships, says a Harvard study that has been studying this topic since…1938. Get off this email and nurture those relationships! - Read here ($)
Can you slow aging?
There’s a fair bit of scientific research on the topic. But in case you haven’t seen, some folks are also pursuing their own research, on themselves. Braintree founder publishes his ‘blueprint’ for reversing the biological age of his organs - Read here
When shouldn’t you use Google?
Maybe if you are planning a crime? - Read here
More Interesting Reads:
A school deployed a software-controlled lighting system. It broke down. The pandemic broke down supply chains. And the lights continue to shine bright, night or day - Read here
China is stepping up industrial espionage - Read here
It’s a pandemic of cyberattacks out there - Read here
The transformative potential of AI in medicine - Read here
A DIY coder created a virtual AI ‘wife’ using ChatGPT - Read here
And finally
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