This is perfect. We humans tend to center ourselves in everything. This is true with animals, land, and even other people.
Source: @anna_lillith (posted fresh to include full alt text).
humans
🦝🧠 Researchers have found that #raccoons pack a primate-like number of neurons into their small brains, including specialized cells once thought to be exclusive to #humans and great #apes.
This "neural density" helps explain their ability to solve complex puzzles and remember solutions for years, often outperforming #dogs and #cats.
👉 https://www.good.is/raccoon-science
#biology #wildlife #neuroscience #nature #evolution #science #behavior #stem
This is my childhood friend Kevin's "Big Stick" emblem. He had* severe hemophilia and the Big Stick is a rite of passage that he's taken part in for over 20 years at an activity camp for kids with hemophilia.
Hemophilia is a bleeding disorder where your body doesn't make enough clotting factor to stop bleeds. This means that there is no such thing as a minor injury. It's not just cuts and scrapes. You pull a muscle? There's bleeding that has to be controlled.
Hemophiliacs have to administer clotting factor from an IV to stop bleeds. At this camp, the kids will reach an important rite of passage. They learn a crucial skill they'll need to become independent. The kids will self infuse their own IV for the first time.
Kevin's at the camp for work reasons, but he's also volunteering to give back. He hand carves every child their own custom stick trophy to award to them after they've taken a needle and made their "big stick".
*-He still has hemophilia, but cutting edge therapies improved it.
Edited 295d ago
Shot the annual Shiny Side Up bike and car show in San Jose yesterday... no, it's not that kind of bike show.
This is a very Northern California kind of show. It's a low rider "cruiser bike" and low rider car show with other kinds of bike and bike related celebrations included.
One of those bike celebrations are BMX stunt performances. I'll have additional photos from the show coming soon, but some of the BMX shots are just too fun not to share.
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Edited 56d ago
People with genetic variants for red hair may have special cells that can convert an excess amino acid into pigment, researchers in Spain have found. Read more from @ScienceAlert:
Robots are cool and all, but have you tried shooting squishy humans into space so that they can use their eyeballs to appreciate the features on the surface of the Moon with more nuance??
META’S REAL AI WAS HIDING
IN PLAIN SIGHT. 💎
I watched a video this morning called 'The (Overdue) Collapse of Meta,' expecting another story about a giant technology company finally coming unstuck.
BUT THAT REALLY WASN'T THE STORY.
Meta is still making extraordinary amounts of money.
The metaverse was a spectacular failure. Zuckerberg renamed the company around it, talked about a billion people eventually inhabiting virtual worlds, and poured tens of billions of dollars into trying to make it happen.
PEOPLE MOSTLY DIDN'T COME.
But while everyone was laughing at cartoon legs and expensive headsets, something else inside Meta was working extraordinarily well.
THE ADVERTISING MACHINE
For more than a decade, Meta has been using AI to learn from the tiny signals produced by billions of human brains. What we stop to look at. What we click. What we ignore. What keeps us scrolling?
WHAT WE ARE ABOUT TO BUY
And increasingly, what we might be about to do. That system became astonishingly good at turning human behaviour into advertising revenue. Which changes the story rather dramatically.
META DIDN'T FAIL TO BUILD POWERFUL AI.
It was built years ago. It just wasn't sitting there chatting pleasantly to us. It was behind Facebook and Instagram, watching behaviour and learning how to predict it.
And the enormous advertising business generated by that machinery is now helping to finance Meta's next gigantic gamble: superintelligence, data centres, researchers, and infrastructure costing tens of billions of dollars.
There is something almost perfect about that. The metaverse failed because people didn't particularly want what Meta was selling. The advertising machine succeeded because we WERE what Meta was selling. And perhaps that is the part worth paying attention to.
Because sometimes the most important question about technology isn't:
DID IT WORK?
It is:
WHAT DID IT LEARN TO DO TO US?
@3goodthings @DigitalCoup @meditation @economics_that_works
#Meta #Facebook #Instagram #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #SurveillanceCapitalism #SocialMedia #BigTech #Privacy #Technology #DigitalRights #people #humans #brain
Edited 17d ago