Technology
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What Baby Yoda Can Teach Us About the Future of Memes
When George Lucas was pitching Star Wars and every major studio was rejecting it except for one, he probably couldn’t have imagined the three words together: “Baby Yoda memes.” Although, given that the word “meme” orginated from the Ancient Greek word of mīmēma (“imitated thing”), maybe Yoda himself – a connisseur of broken English translations of ancient…
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Deepfake Face Generators & The Uncanny Valley
The aptly named “thispersondoesnotexist.com” generates faces randomly. The ostensible purpose of this deepfake face generator is a little unclear, but I’m assuming the developers wanted to show how real deepfake faces can look. The result is… creepy. With a click of the mouse, you can generate faces of people who never lived. “Deepfake” is a…
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Amazon is Not Waging a “War” Against Books
Amazon is waging a war against “bookstores” and “book culture.” According to a new article from Salon, anyway. Well, if Amazon is at war, I guess I’m a soldier. Of the last three books I’ve bought, two have been through Amazon, for my smartphone. Why? Because they’re obscure business books that I was confident I…
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The Robots that Write… and Do Everything Else, Too
A while ago, I read the excellent book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McCafee, Race Against the Machine. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about automation, whether I’m looking at Google’s driverless cars or checking out at CVS through a self-service kiosk. It’s a weird time to be alive and, if the common wisdom about robots these…
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Fitzgerald & Hemmingway Were Bloggers, Too
Sometimes, I feel guilty about blogging. It’s a little pinching sensation, probably a sensation most writers are familiar with – the feeling that you’re wasting time you should be using to work on your novel. That’s why I was reassured when I read a recent interview with a professor about “the Lost Generation” and found…
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How eBooks Can Save Journalism
At the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), Michelle Bachmann said a lot of things that weren’t true. She said she got the information from a self-published book, Presidential Perks Gone Royal. It’s written by a Republican lobbyist. Bachmann trusted a book’s facts. Nothing wrong with that. However, with the filters for publication down, lies and…
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The Internet Has Made Us All Entitled Content Thieves
This week, the New York Times closed another loophole that got around its notorious paywall. You know… the paywall. The thing ensuring that one of the last bastions of what Americans call journalism (even if it’s owned by someone with a dubious background at best) doesn’t have to depend on advertising revenue that directly influences its…