Curated Commons // Edition 98
Thank you for subscribing and welcome to the 98th edition of Curated Commons. Happy reading, and do pass on the newsletter and share it on your social networks if you find it interesting! It’s free!
Let’s dive right in ($ indicates potential paywall).
AI can create art. Who owns it?
Dall-E is now available in public beta and users get the right to commercialize images they create with Dall-E. For how long? - Read here
Streaming celebs, crazy followers
Streaming celebs on Twitch and elsewhere apparently make serious money, and attract serious stalkers. - Read here ($)
On a related note, the algorithms are all not that favorable for aspiring influencers and content creators. - Read here
And again, not all Twitch creators are raking in $$$. Many are tightening their belts - Read here ($)
Immature tech, over-confident law enforcement
Nope, not facial recognition. This time, apparently a citizen was charged with a murder where prosecutors used audio picked up by a network of sensors installed by a ‘gunshot detection company’. Case dismissed later. - Read here
Climate change drives…climate change?
91% of US homes have air conditioning. 3% of UK homes do. - Read here
We hate ads. Not ads we can sell.
New ad options on the Apple App Store - Read here
Virtual Kmarts are a big deal
Love this story! - Read here
Are the metaverse jobs going, going,…gone?
Not the most scientific of ways to measure metaverse job popularity, but here goes… - Read here ($)
Tech, for helping hearing-impaired
Smart tech for giving the hearing-impaired a display of real-time subtitles
We are content machines
What is content? - “Content is digital material that may circulate solely for the purpose of circulating” - Read here ($)
Sigh! These NFT scams
They just don’t stop coming… - Read here
A Brazilian firm selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) it says are linked to physical land in the country's Amazon rainforest has been asked by Brazilian prosecutors to prove its ownership of the land, which is in territory claimed by indigenous people.
The prosecutor's office has given Nemus 15 days to show the land belongs to it and has accused the company of pushing indigenous people in the region to endorse documents they could not understand.
"People from the company delivered a sign to the villages, written in English, and asked the indigenous people, who can barely read, to sign documents without clarifying the content or providing a copy," the prosecutor's office said in a public statement issued on July 25, without specifying further.
Be famous? or anonymous?
Instagram made it cool to be popular. Is it now cool to be anonymous for the younger generation? Either way, good for more youngsters to get privacy-aware. - Read here ($)
What does the rise of large language models like GPT-3 mean for conversation and writing
Writing makes us think. And if AI systems take the thinking out and produce an output, where does that leave us? Interesting piece that raises good points - Read here
Necrobotics is a thing!
Using dead spiders as robots. Fascinating research! - Read here
Can you sell shares in…yourself?
Are there limits to financialization? Probably not. Two Russian brothers who haven’t been apart for more than a month and share digital identities now want to sell shares in themselves. And they have the attention of the ears that have influence and $$$ - Read here ($)
Do you suffer from algorithmic anxiety?
When every algorithm tries real-hard to guess what you will select, sometimes, many times, even before you have made a selection! Or when you try to game the algorithm so you can get the desired outcome? The times we live in! - Read here ($)
More Interesting Reads
34 days, 2,400 miles and one cramped boat: How 4 women set a record rowing across the Pacific - Read here ($)
Data brokers have a new customers - federal agencies in the US - Read here
Cyberpunk, cancer, gaming, and lot more. - Read here ($)
Unearthing the secret powers of fungus - Read here ($)
DeepMind has predicted the structure of almost every protein known to science - Read here
How Russia spread a web of secret agents inside Ukraine? Good investigative story - Read here
On time, clocks and evolution of time-keeping - Read here
The rise of Protestware - where developers are sabotaging their own code - Read here
Life for the driver of an autonomous taxi - Read here
Interesting take - how emojis are accelerating our shift from a respond to a react culture - Read here
Racial bias and pulse oximeters - Read here ($)
How data labeling is creating jobs for women in interior India - Read here
Stay safe, and happy reading! And if you liked the newsletter, thank you, and maybe consider sharing it? My DMs on Twitter are always open for any feedback.