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Musk, Wozniak and Hawking urge ban on warfare AI and autonomous weaponsVia theguardian.comThe authors argue that AI can be used to make the battlefield a safer place for military personnel, but that offensive weapons that operate on their own would lower the threshold of going to battle and result in greater loss of human life.I get the impression that this is too exaggerated, and we’re far from a “rise of the machines” (neither military nor civilian), so this might be just a bit of summer noise, this is my bet.

50 years since iconic ‘A Model of Leptons’ publishedA model of leptons - PDFS Weinberg - Physical review letters, 1967 - APSJust two pages long, Weinberg’s elegant and simply written theory was revolutionary at the time, yet was virtually ignored for many years. But now, it is cited at least three times a week. Image caption: “This event shows the real tracks produced in the 1200 litre Gargamelle bubble chamber that provided the first confirmation of a neutral current interaction.“ One day, as the 34-year-old Weinberg was driving his red Camero to work, he had a flash of insight –...

111 years ago, Albert Einstein send on ’Annalen der Physik’ the 4th of his Annus Mirabilis papers, a three-page paper titled: “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?” [PDF, wikipedia], from which it’s can be derived the famous relation E = mc². Actually you can not find such equation in the article and rather you will find this other one, a bit ugliest (and approximate, magnitudes of fourth and higher orders are neglected):E = mc² is not the same equation but still serves at least to illustrate the equivalence relationship between mass and energy (through the...

Me, in no particular order… Baking. Cakes, cookies, bread, pizza dough. Mmm, pizza dough… Having a cup of tea and doing absolutely nothing other than existing for brief moments of respite in the afternoon while the baby takes her nap (this joyous occasion usually takes place between 1-3 p.m.). Dancing. That’s it… Just dancing and getting lost in the music. Taking obscenely long showers without feeling like I have to hurry, so I can do ALL THE THINGS, like a hair mask, a face mask and shave my toes (hey, keepin’ it real) A 90-minute deep-tissue massage S-l-e-e-e-e-p Tabs on...

I approach today’s 500th installment of Sundays with Tabs with a sense of pride coupled with bittersweet melancholy. Tabs and I have spent an average of 2-3 hours working together on these posts each week for more than 10 years. That’s literally more than 1,000 hours! As silly as these posts are, I’ll cherish the time I’ve spent creating them with Tabs for the rest of my life, because why not? Life is serious, and there’s always going to be something important going on. All of us face important decisions and challenges every single day — lost jobs, car repairs,...