Recipes

The Conversation – A new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) models can produce “creative” images on-demand based on a text prompt. The likes of Imagen, MidJourney, and DALL-E 2 are beginning to change the way creative content is made with implications for copyright and intellectual property. While the output of these models is often striking, it’s hard to know exactly how they produce their results. Last week, researchers in the US made the intriguing claim that the DALL-E 2 model might have invented its own secret language to talk about objects. DALLE-2 has a secret language. "Apoploe vesrreaitais" means birds. "Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons" means bugs or pests....

Personal head-up displays are a technology whose time ought by now to have come, but which notwithstanding attempts such as the Google Glass, have steadfastly refused to catch on. There’s an intriguing possibility in [Basel Saleh]’s CaptionIt project though, a head-up display that provides captions for everyday situations. The hardware is a tiny I²C OLED screen with a reflector and a 3D-printed mount attached to a pair of glasses, and it’s claimed that it will work with almost any ARM v7 SBC, including more recent Raspberry Pi boards. It uses the vosc speech recognition toolkit to read audio from a...

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Every Monday, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekHow do you perceive crime in your neighborhood? How about homelessness? Disorder? What’s your relationship to these things? How much do you think about them? How, if at all, do they affect where you live or the political candidates you support?Conversations of NoteTop of mind today are election returns in my home state, where Shane Goldmacher offers...

Well yes, this should do the job.  I would expect tnis to be part of our normal sand filtration systems that we use anyway.  It should also work for decades as well as the lodged particles will merely add to the filtration process.In time, the filtration layer can be cooked in order to degrade hte plastic content that has not been biologically degraded.The important take home is that our water systems are actually up to the job of nano particle removal.So also is our digestive system but then leave that alone for now. Slow sand filter cleans 99.9 percent of...

ShutterstockWe used to believe the world’s resources were almost limitless. But as we spread out across the planet, we consumed more and more of these resources. For decades, scientists have warned we are approaching the limits of what the environment can tolerate. In 2009, the influential Stockholm Resilience Centre first published its planetary boundaries framework. The idea is simple: outline the global environmental limits within which humanity could develop and thrive. This concept has become popular as a way to grasp our impact on nature. For the first time, we have taken these boundaries – which can be hard to...