The drawing for Brazil’s largest lottery prize ever — BRL 1 billion (USD 180 million) — was postponed due to the volume of bets, which reached 125,000 per second, 120,000 of them via digital channels. The draw, originally scheduled for 10 PM on Wednesday (31st), was moved to this morning. I hope they actually make it this time.
Via O Globo (pt_BR).
Mozilla said Firefox will have a “kill switch” that disables all AI features in the browser. Someone witty quipped it will be the “Uninstall” button.
It’s possible that Time magazine’s Person of the Year selection — which in this issue named “the AI architects” (i.e., big-tech AI CEOs) — was chosen by an AI. First clue: calling several people the otherwise singular “Person” of the Year. Second and stronger clue: only something as dumb as an AI would pick that bunch of clowns as Person(s) of the Year.
A few months ago, youtubers reported unsolicited interventions by Google to “improve” their videos with generative AI. It appeared to be a test; now it’s official.
Channel owners can disable this feature in Studio: go to Settings, Channel, Advanced settings and uncheck the two options under Video quality enhancements. For viewers, Google’s suggested workaround is to change the resolution in the player’s settings.
Many people were surprised to learn on the 20th that Signal uses Amazon/AWS infrastructure. Signal’s president, Meredith Whittaker, had to explain why:
Instant messaging demands near-zero latency. Voice and video in particular require complex global signaling & regional relays to manage jitter and packet loss. These are things that AWS, Azure, and GCP provide at global scale that, practically speaking, others (in the western context) don’t.
It’s important to note that Signal uses end‑to‑end encryption, which means nobody at AWS can access the content.
(By the way: the “reply guys” issue on Mastodon shows up in almost every technical post Meredith makes.)
I find it fascinating that so many people fall for the fallacy that artificial intelligence is reliable enough to guide decision‑making. And sometimes I find it funny, too.
Brazilian startup Jumpad is intriguing from the pitch itself: a “self‑hosted platform, deployed on the company’s cloud” that lets you enable APIs from external services like OpenAI and Google. Hm, okay. The service “involves engagement dashboards and gamified trainings, contributing to cultural transformation.” As an example of “cultural transformation,” we’re treated to this gem:
At one client, it was found that 25% of employees’ time was spent on calls and meetings, but about 80% of them were not actively participating. In other words, it was a huge waste of time.
Imagine having to burn the planet to “discover” that most meetings could have been an e‑mail.
(The information comes from Brazil Journal [pt_BR].)
The US ruled the “remedies” to be applied to Google in the case where the company was found guilty of monopolistic practices in the search market:
And that’s it.
It wasn’t much and everyone complained. Well, almost everyone: Apple and Mozilla — which receive huge payments from Google to keep its search engine as the default in iOS/Safari and Firefox, respectively — are relieved.
Old people on the internet probably remember phpBB, a discussion board software that was very popular in the early 2000s. I discovered, by chance, that it still exists and has active development, albeit slow: the phpBB3 series was released in December 2007 and the last major update (3.3), in January 2020. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…?
The Washington Post reports on the discomfort that white-collar professionals are experiencing with the increasing presence of AI note-taking bots in video calls. There are cases where there are more bots than human beings in meetings.
This might be a positive result of the chaotic adoption of artificial intelligence in companies. When everyone is sending bots to online meetings and reading text summaries of them, maybe these people will finally realize that all those meetings could have, in fact, been emails.