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When Hollywood’s writers and actors went on strike last year, it was, in part, because of AI. Actors didn’t care for the notion that their likenesses could be used without their permission, whether by the studios that hired them that week or by someone at home with a computer in 2040. Writers didn’t want to do punch-ups on potentially crummy AI scripts or have their words (or ideas) cannibalized by large language models that didn’t pay them a dime.

But while some Hollywood filmmakers came out of the strikes fearful of how AI might wreck their industries, others wanted to learn more. This week, many of those filmmakers gathered in a movie theater in Culver City, California, for the inaugural Culver Cup, a generative-AI film competition sponsored by FBRC.AI and Amazon Web Services.

The ambitious identity-verification project Worldcoin, now called World, wants a future where humans are “orb-verified.”

Sam Altman, the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, one of the most dramatic tech companies of the modern era. An inkling of Worldcoin began in 2019 when Altman began exploring identity verification that could be used in universal basic income schemes.

He teamed up with technologist Alex Blania to turn the idea into a reality. In a world of rapidly advancing AI, they theorized, it would be important for a human to prove they were not a bot. The answer they came up with relied on individuals using iris-scanning tech to generate private tokens that would verify their identities around the world.

Worldcoin, then, is the ultimate attempt at tech solutionism: A human-grade AI world that Altman is building might also be technologically regulated by a tool that Altman has his hands in.

More than 3,600 people died alone in their homes in Korea last year, data showed Thursday, with middle-aged and elderly men accounting for more than half of such deaths.

The number of "lonely deaths" came to 3,661 in 2023, up from 3,559 the previous year, according to data compiled by the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

The figure indicates that 1.04 out of every 100 deaths in Korea were attributed to solitary deaths last year.

Bandai Namco has reportedly turned to the unspoken Japanese tradition of layoff-by-boredom by stuffing unwanted employees into oidashi beya, or "expulsion rooms."

Employees ~~banished~~ reassigned to oidashi beya are left to do nothing, or given menial tasks at best. According to Bloomberg's unnamed insider sources, Bandai Namco has moved around 200 of its 1,300 person team to these rooms in recent months.

The goal of sticking someone in an expulsion room is to literally bore or shame them into quitting, and Bloomberg's sources claim it has worked on around half the people Bandai Namco has stuck in there so far.

When Gmail first appeared in 2004, the idea of having what seemed like a never-ending space for email was revolutionary. Most paid services were providing a few megabytes of space, and here came Google promising a full gigabyte (which, at the time, seemed huge) for free.

Over the years, however, Gmail has added a plethora of features that it touts as “improvements” but some of them are irritating. Worse, it looks for ads for things that it will never need and sticks them at the top of email list.

Back in the dark ages before Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other free cloud-based apps, most email happened either via paid services or inside of walled gardens. In the former, you paid a service provider for an email account and downloaded your email into an app that only lived on your computer — an app with a name like Pine, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, or Thunderbird.

For the most part, nobody was scanning your email to find out the last time you bought shoes, or whether you were shopping for car insurance, or that you had recently been buying gifts for a relative’s new baby. Nobody was taking that information and selling it to vendors so they could drop ads into your email lists or surprise you with additional promotional messages. Your email lived on your computer alone. Once it was downloaded and erased from the server, it was just yours — to save or erase or lose.

Subsidized minivans, no income taxes: Countries have rolled out a range of benefits to encourage bigger families, with no luck