-
1 month ago | 
archive.is | Rishi Iyengar |David Gerard |Keith Johnson |Alexandra Sharp
President Donald Trump is making a big bet on bitcoin, with all the might of the U.S. government. Trump signed an executive order late Thursday establishing a strategic bitcoin reserve for the United States, putting the cryptocurrency on par with petroleum and gold as strategic assets that Washington stockpiles. David Sacks, Trump’s crypto and AI czar, belabored the metaphor further.
-
Nov 28, 2024 | 
pivot-to-ai.com | David Gerard
The Dead Boys were a legendary Cleveland, Ohio punk band who formed in 1976. Vocalist Stiv Bators died in 1990, but the rest of the band has reunited several times since. The current version formed in 2017, with original members Cheetah Chrome and Johnny Blitz and still play the nostalgia circuit.
-
Nov 25, 2024 | 
pivot-to-ai.com | David Gerard
Spines Publishing plans to “disrupt” the book industry by releasing 8,000 titles in 2025 — with AI!Spines was founded as BooxAI in 2021, changing its name earlier this year. Spines claims 273 published titles in 2024 — 33 on the same day. [Bookseller, archive]Spines is a venture capital play — $6.5 million of venture funding in April and another $16 million last week. [Spines; Calcalist]Nobody wants AI-generated books — they only ever get bought by accident.
-
Oct 28, 2024 | 
pivot-to-ai.com | David Gerard
Olivia Squizzle is here to save us from AI. She can do it instead. Don’t load up ChatGPT! Just call Olivia’s hotline. [YouTube]Do you like the novelty of things being not that great but coming from a place that makes it feel exciting? Why can’t that place be me? VIDEO Here’s Olivia dealing with her eight million commissions a day. [YouTube] VIDEO Like this:Like Loading... Related
-
Oct 28, 2024 | 
pivot-to-ai.com | David Gerard
If you like music even a bit, you might boggle at the idea that people would be happy with a stream of anonymous machine-generated slop. But to the music streaming business, caring which song you’re hearing makes you a weird outlier. The vast majority of streaming listeners want a radio playing background noise.
-
Oct 27, 2024 | 
pivot-to-ai.com | David Gerard
Machine learning for audio transcription is not perfect — you always have to check the output — but it’s often good enough in practice for real work. But OpenAI sells LLMs. When you sell hammers, every problem looks like a nail. So OpenAI thought they could fix their Whisper system’s machine transcription errors by running the output through ChatGPT.
-
Oct 26, 2024 | 
pivot-to-ai.com | David Gerard
Social media these days features a whole lot of weird race and IQ graphs to support racist conspiracy theories. This stuff has long been funded and promoted by rich racists. Angela Saini’s excellent book Superior (US, UK) traces the history of organizations like old-school-Nazi eugenicists the Pioneer Fund and the pseudojournal Mankind Quarterly.
-
Oct 25, 2024 | 
pivot-to-ai.com | David Gerard
Cybercheck, from Global Intelligence, claims it can find the key evidence to nail down a case. Cybercheck reports have been involved in at least two murder convictions. Cybercheck hands the police pages of claimed evidence distilled from “open source intelligence” by a completely automated “machine learning” process with no human intervention — for just $309 a case.
-
Oct 18, 2024 | 
pivot-to-ai.com | David Gerard
Thanks to the estimable Stephen Farrugia (pictured above), Pivot to AI now has dark mode that works properly and is readable in both light and dark modes!The WP Dark Mode plugin tries to paywall additional CSS – a basic function of core WordPress – and Blocksy has a paywalled dark mode function. Fortunately, the WordPress built-in additional CSS can get around both of these. Click the little sun-moon icon at bottom-right to try the dark mode if you haven’t before.
-
Oct 5, 2024 | 
pivot-to-ai.com | David Gerard
David went on Australian tech journalist Stilgherrian’s podcast series, The 9pm Edict, and it’s just gone up! [Show notes; download, MP3]We talk about Pivot to AI, the AI bubble industry, what the “AI uprising” really means, things that work, things that don’t work, AI artist nonsense, and that bloody awful Google podcast generator. The show is just over an hour, with a bonus NotebookLM podcast of glib wrongness tacked on the end.
