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Category: humor

PolyAI Ltd. is an ambitious startup that creates artificial voices to replace call center operators. Based in London, it has raised $28 million to bring AI-powered customer service to Metro Bank Plc, BP Plc and more. The idea is that instead of the nightmare of dialing random digits in a decision tree, you can instead ask to, say, book a table and a voice — with just the slightest inflection of its machine-learning origins — responds with great civility. That’s nice. But there was a brief moment two years ago when it wasn’t polite at all.

A software developer with PolyAI who was testing the system, asked about booking a table for himself and a Serbian friend. “Yes, we allow children at the restaurant,” the voice bot replied, according to PolyAI founder Nikola Mrksic. Seemingly out of nowhere, the bot was trying make an obnoxious joke about people from Serbia. When it was asked about bringing a Polish friend, it replied, “Yes, but you can’t bring your own booze.”

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Money is pouring into artificial intelligence. Not so much into ethics. That’ll be a problem down the line.

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Humor can be quite useful.

Let’s see how.

Suppose you are having a bad day (I realize this seems a bit dour and gloomy, but the venerated gallantry of well-placed humor will turn this around, wait and see).

While on the way home from work, you opt to use a ridesharing or ride-hailing service. After settling into the car and getting ready to have a quiet and solemnly introspective ride home, the driver suddenly speaks up and tells you an entertaining joke that causes you to laugh out loud. The merriment of the humorous anecdote sparks you to get out of your dismally sour mood. It was one of the best jokes you have ever heard, a knee-slapping and side-splitting piece of humor.

Things are looking up, and when you arrive home, your perspective and attitude about the world have shifted into one of peacefulness and content.

All due to letting some humor enter into your day.

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The concept and technology behind Neuralink are so far ahead of what we’ve grown accustomed to that it might as well be magic. Make no mistake Neuralink is happening and it’ll be here sooner than you think…

I remember the first time I heard about Neuralink. I thought it was a joke or something far off in the future. Then I heard Elon Musk was behind it and immediately knew that this bonkers technology would be with us a lot sooner than any of us imagined.

The concept of Neuralink is simple: you have a chip implanted in your brain and with this chip, you can control things – computer games, applications, your phone, beam thoughts to other Neuralink users. Elon has even demoed the tech working inside a monkey’s head.

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Huge thanks to:
Blue Origin: https://www.youtube.com/c/blueoriginchannel/featured.
Everyday Astronaut: https://www.youtube.com/c/EverydayAstronaut.
ULA: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnrGPRKAg1PgvuSHrRIl3jg.
Lab Padre: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFwMITSkc1Fms6PoJoh1OUQ
NASA: https://www.youtube.com/c/NASA/featured.
Evan Karen: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDN1X8Fz1oAXX-rBcOWjzmg.
Ocean Cam: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF8IYFF60clbbznjvJ7qoTQ
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Source of thumb:
Blue Origin: https://twitter.com/blueorigin.
Alexander Svan: https://twitter.com/AlexSvanArt.
Izan Ramos: https://twitter.com/IzanRamos2002
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Our video content is referenced by video sources at these sites:
https://en.wikipedia.org.
https://twitter.com.
https://arstechnica.com.
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Raptor and BE4SpaceX and Blue Origin have been competing with each other for many space crafts and commercial contracts. We have also talked about their rivalry many times but today is all about their engines that fire up the massive rockets both the companies are developing. SpaceX, the leading space company has made many rocket engines since its launch in 2002. A few months ago, SpaceX completed its 100th Raptor Engine. This extraordinary milestone was achieved in just 29 months. Blue Origin’s rocket engines game started work on the BE-4 in 2011. Importantly, they said the “BE-4 would be ‘ready for flight’ by 2017″, but at this moment Blue Origin’s powerful BE-4 engine is more than four years late. The first flight test of the new engine is now expected no earlier than 2022 on the Vulcan rocket. This is a big problem and we need to talk about that.
So, How did Blue Origin’s BE-4 turn into a joke whereas SpaceX’s Raptor is the leading example?
Let’s find out:
Firstly, how has BE-4 gone through almost a decade of failure?
This was their first engine to combust liquid oxygen and liquified natural gas propellants. It was initially planned for the engine to be used exclusively on a Blue Origin proprietary launch vehicle New Glenn, the company’s first orbital rocket. However, it was announced in 2014 that the engine would also be used on the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan Centaur launch vehicle, the successor to the Atlas V launch vehicle. This was labeled “a stunner” choice. The company planned to begin full-scale engine testing in late 2016 and expected to complete the development of the engine in 2017.However, the first engine was not fully assembled until March 2017. Also, in March, United Launch Alliance indicated that the economic risk of the Blue Origin engine selection option had been retired, but that the technical risk on the project would remain until a series of engine firing tests were completed later in 2017. A test anomaly occurred on 13 May 2017 and Blue Origin reported that they lost a set of powerpack hardware.
SpaceX’s Raptor Engines completely HUMILIATED Blue Origin BE-4 Engines!!
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Circa 2000

A 1940 paper by Gamow and Mario Schoenberg was the first in a subject we now call particle astrophysics. The two authors presciently speculated that neutrinos could play a role in the cooling of massive collapsing stars. They named the neutrino reaction the Urca process, after a well known Rio de Janeiro casino. This name might seem a strange choice, but not to Gamow, a legendary prankster who once submitted a paper to Nature in which he suggested that the Coriolis force might account for his observation that cows chewed clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

In the 1940s Gamow began to attack, with his colleague Ralph Alpher, the problem of the origin of the chemical elements. Their first paper on the subject appeared in a 1948 issue of the Physical Review. At the last minute Gamow, liking the sound of ‘alpha, beta, gamma’, added his old friend Hans Bethe as middle author in absentia (Bethe went along with the joke, but the editors did not). Gamow and Alpher, with Robert Herman, then pursued the idea of an extremely hot neutron-dominated environment. They envisioned the neutrons decaying into protons, electrons and anti-neutrinos and, when the universe had cooled sufficiently, the neutrons and protons assembling heavier nuclei. They even estimated the photon background that would be necessary to account for nuclear abundances, suggesting a residual five-degree background radiation.

We now realize that their scheme was incorrect. The Universe began with roughly equal numbers of protons and neutrons. Collisions with electrons, positrons, neutrinos and anti-neutrinos are more important than neutron decay, and the absence of stable nuclei with atomic numbers of five and eight creates a barrier to further fabrication in the early Universe. Nevertheless Alpher, Gamow and Herman’s work was the first serious attempt to discuss the observable consequences of a big bang and the basic framework was correct. Ironically, the term ‘Big Bang’ was coined by Fred Hoyle, an advocate of a steady-state model of the universe, to make fun of Gamow’s efforts.

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Between the rolled eyes, shrugged shoulders, jazzed hands and warbling vocal inflection, it’s not hard to tell when someone’s being sarcastic as they’re giving you the business face to face. Online, however, you’re going to need that SpongeBob meme and a liberal application of the shift key to get your contradictory point across. Lucky for us netizens, DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) has collaborated with researchers from the University of Central Florida to develop a deep learning AI capable of understanding written sarcasm with a startling degree of accuracy.

“With the high velocity and volume of social media data, companies rely on tools to analyze data and to provide customer service. These tools perform tasks such as content management, sentiment analysis, and extraction of relevant messages for the company’s customer service representatives to respond to,” UCF Adjunct Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, Ivan Garibay, told Engadget via email. “However, these tools lack the sophistication to decipher more nuanced forms of language such as sarcasm or humor, in which the meaning of a message is not always obvious and explicit. This imposes an extra burden on the social media team, which is already inundated with customer messages to identify these messages and respond appropriately.”

As they explain in a study published in the journal, Entropy, Garibay and UCF PhD student Ramya Akula have built “an interpretable deep learning model using multi-head self-attention and gated recurrent units. The multi-head self-attention module aids in identifying crucial sarcastic cue-words from the input, and the recurrent units learn long-range dependencies between these cue-words to better classify the input text.”

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Dogecoin may have started as a joke, but one of its holders is sitting on some serious dough.

A single cryptocurrency account contains about $2 billion worth of the meme-inspired coin whose price has been pumped up by celebrities such as Elon Musk, Snoop Dogg and Gene Simmons.

The account holds about 36.8 billion dogecoins — a massive stash that accounts for more than 28 percent of all the coins currently in circulation, according to cryptocurrency data website Bitinfocharts.

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