Gpscruise

(University of Pittsburgh) A multi-disciplinary group of researchers is awarded $1.89 million from DOE to create a new model for traffic intersections that reduces energy consumption utilizing artificial intelligence that links vehicles and infrastructure.

A group of New York beachgoers who were branded 'racist MAGA supporters' on online after they were filmed in an altercation with Cardi B's sister, are suing the rapper for defamation.

Though it was necessity that caused most people to move to a remote workplace due to the restrictions put in place by the pandemic, many experts predict that remote work will continue long after a vaccine is created and we, as a whole, can go back to what was normal before quarantine. With that, staying organized at home can be more difficult than in an office, but technology is aplenty when it comes to helping you do so.

Here are 10 extensions that Chrome offers to help you keep your home office organized and secure.

Win the Day

Though admittedly not the most powerful tool on this list, starting said list with “Win the Day” seemed appropriate. This extension allows users to set goals and deadlines and keeps them organized on your desktop. You can sectionalize your goals with sub-goals, as well.

Google Keep

Google Keep is an extension for the organization of data. Data used to be utilized, primarily, by a data analyst at a given company, but now everyone should have a firm grasp of how to collect and manage data feedback.

Papier

This extension is to help organize your brainstorm sessions, even the ones with just you as the participant. It’s very easy to use, and with machine learning it can organize all of your brainstorming thoughts just how you like them, after a few weeks of you doing it manually.

LastPass

LastPass is a password manager extension that securely saves your login credentials across all of your devices. Rather than having a folder on your desktop that can be easily hacked, LastPass advertises itself as a “password vault” that only you can access when you need to quickly reference you means of accessing a website.

Productivity Tracker

Another encompassing extension, this helps users track their work, their financial plans, and even their personal goals outside of work, like walking every day, or keeping tabs on caloric intakes. It also tracks all of your clicks and scrolls in Chrome, so you can evaluate what you’ve been wasting your time on.

Save to Pocket

This nifty extension helps you organize your time and information by allowing you to quickly save something that you want to read right from your desktop to your phone. With this, you can make sure your time spent at the desktop involves actual work, and then when you’re in transit you can “check your pocket” for the story you want to get wise to.

Clockify

Clockify leans a little more towards time-management than physical organization, but organizing your time is as important as organizing your “stuff.” Clockify can be programmed to make sure you don’t get lost in a wormhole of a website like social media, that can not only waste time, but also cause security issues if logged in for too long.

TodoBook

With some similarities to Clockify, TodoBook is a way to self-inflict focus on your wondering mind. When you use this extension, it automatically shows you your to-do list every time you login to facebook or another social media site in order to keep you on task and mentally organized.

Diigo

This one is more geared towards those who need to organize and recall large amounts of research. Called a “web collector,” Diigo makes it extremely easy to collect, site, and even make notes directly on web pages that you can reference later.

Just Read

Last but not least, is more for in-the-moment organization, and that is the Just Read extension that allows users to block out everything on a page that isn’t the meat and potatoes. Ads, links, etc. are “muted,” allowing users to focus on what they came to the page to see.

Happy Chroming!

The post 10 Best Chrome Extensions for Keeping Organized appeared first on Dumb Little Man.

Former Vice President Joe Biden said it would be an exercise in 'raw political power' to push through a Supreme Court nomination before the election, and said any nominee should be withdrawn if he wins.

Editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth said Donald Trump had been far worse for the US scientific community than the magazine feared in 2016, when it did not endorse Hillary Clinton.

Five of California’s 10 largest fires in modern history are all burning at once. Together, this year’s wildfires have already destroyed 4,200 buildings, forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes, and scorched more than 3.2 million acres across the state.

That’s larger than Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks combined, and nearly half the area of Massachusetts. The latest blazes follow a string of particularly deadly and devastating fire seasons in California, and scientists say climate change will ensure even worse ones to come.

To anyone who lives here, or anyone who’s watching, the situation is maddening and seems utterly unsustainable. So what’s the solution?

There’s an overwhelming to-do list. But one of the clearest conclusions, as experts have been saying for years, is that California must begin to work with fires, not just fight them. That means reversing a century of US fire suppression policies and relying far more on deliberate, prescribed burns to clear out the vegetation that builds up into giant piles of fuel.

Such practices “don’t prevent wildfires,” says Crystal Kolden, an assistant professor at the University of California, Merced focused on fire and land management. “But it breaks up the landscape, so that when wildfires do occur, they’re much less severe, they’re much smaller, and when they occur around communities, they’re much easier to control.”

Awaiting a spark

The Great Fire of 1910 burned 3 million acres across Idaho, Montana, and surrounding areas, killed nearly 90 people, destroyed several towns, and famously ushered in an era of zero tolerance for fires in the US. It and severe fires that followed prompted the US Forest Service to officially implement the “10 a.m. policy” in 1935, with a goal of containing any fire by that time the morning after it was spotted.

Decades of rushing to stamp out flames that naturally clear out small trees and undergrowth have had disastrous unintended consequences. This approach means that when fires do occur, there’s often far more fuel to burn, and it acts as a ladder, allowing the flames to climb into the crowns and take down otherwise resistant mature trees.

Climate change, which exacerbates these risks, seems to have finally tipped the balance of what was an increasingly untenable situation, says Anthony LeRoy Westerling, who is also at UC Merced. In California, it almost certainly intensified the prolonged drought earlier this decade, which killed some 150 million trees in the Sierra Nevada range.

Meanwhile, temperatures are rising and rainfall patterns are becoming more extreme. Unusually wet winters promote the growth of trees and other plants, followed by dry, hot summers that draw the moisture out of them.

This creates a tinderbox when the gusty winds arrive in the fall: a vast buildup of dry fuel just awaiting a spark, whether from a lawnmower, downed power line, or lightning strike.

A century-long backlog of work

The problem now is the staggering scale of the work to clean this up.

As much as 20 million acres of federal, state, or private land across California needs “fuel reduction treatment to reduce the risk of wildfire,” according to earlier assessments by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and other state agencies. That’s nearly two-thirds of the state’s 33 million acres of forests and trees, and six times the area that has burned so far this year.

This “treatment” can include prescribed burns set under controlled conditions—ideally, spaced out geographically and across the year to prevent overwhelming communities with smoke. It can also mean using saws and machines to cut and thin the forests. Another option is “managed wildfire,” which means monitoring fires but allowing them to burn when they don’t directly endanger people or property.

More than a century of deferred work, however, means it’s hard to get into places that need thinning. It’s also risky to do prescribed burns or allow natural fires to rage, since the fuels are so built up in many places, Westerling says.

PHILIP PACHECO/GETTY IMAGES

A 2018 report by the Little Hoover Commission, an independent state oversight agency, recommended cleaning out 1.1 million acres a year. That would still take two decades, and require a lot of workers and money. Prescribed burns on forest and park lands can cost more than $200 per acre, while thinning can easily top $1,000, depending on the terrain. So the total costs could range from hundreds of millions of dollars to well above a billion per year.

Still, that’s a fraction of the costs incurred by out-of-control wildfires. To take just one example, the devastating Wine Country Fires in October 2017 did more than $9 billion worth of damage in a single month. Battling wildfires on US Forest Service land runs more $800 an acre.

And without thinning and burning, the wildfires are only going to get worse.

If the goal is to burn up excess fuel, why not just let the wildfires rage? The problem is that runaway fires in overgrown forests don’t achieve the same results as controlled burns. These intense blazes can level vast stretches of the forest rather than simply clearing out the undergrowth and leaving the big trees standing, says Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at UC Berkeley. Instead of restoring the health of the forests, large, uncontrolled fires often transform them into shrub land, where vegetation grows quickly and severe fires can rapidly return.

Funding and accountability

The state isn’t doing anything close to the necessary amount of work today. Thinning and prescribed burns both generally cover around tens of thousands of acres per year, a tiny fraction of what the Little Hoover Commission recommended. In 2018, the state passed a law dedicating $1 billion over five years to wildfire prevention. Late last year, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of fire bills that included another $1 billion for preparedness and emergency response. That’s still not at the levels needed.

The good news is that California reached an agreement in August with the US Forest Service to boost these efforts, with a goal of treating a million acres per year for the next two decades. The work would be evenly split between the parties, even though the federal government owns 57% of California’s forests while state and local agencies only own 3%. (The remaining 40% is held by “families, Native American tribes, or companies.”)

The bad news is it’s a “memorandum of understanding,” not a binding law—and there’s no firm additional funding commitment.

The problem is that “these agencies have been saying things like this for the better part of five decades,” says Michael Wara, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and member of California’s Wildfire Commission. “The funding is key. As is a clear line of accountability if they don’t actually follow through.”

DAVID MCNEW/GETTY IMAGES

Prescribed burning faces other hurdles, including public concerns over smoke, safety, and wildlife; drawn-out environmental review processes; and conflicts with timber interests. The logging industry owns 14% of California’s forest land and makes money by removing the mature trees, not the kindling.

Setting far more fires will require sweeping regulatory reforms to streamline the approvals process. It will also likely necessitate the creation or appointment of a state agency singularly dedicated to fuel treatment, Wara says. Right now, burning and thinning efforts are managed by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which, he believes, will always prioritize the job that the public and politicians judge it on: containing the death and destruction from active fires.

“Fire season is always coming, and they’re always responsible for it,” Wara says. “I think we need a new agency whose sole mission is fire risk reduction.”

The fire next time

Kolden, of UC Merced, stresses that California will also need to prepare for the fires that will inevitably break out no matter what the state does.

“We need to look at the places that are most at risk for not just fires, but disastrous fires that destroy whole communities, and do the mitigation work that will save lives and reduce property destruction,” she says.

Among other things, that will require adopting stricter building codes for the materials used to build structures; trimming back trees; widening the space around structures; and retrofitting existing homes and buildings with fire-resistant features. Communities will also need better fire detection and notification systems, redundant evacuation routes, and more effective emergency response practices.

And California’s leaders need to decide whether to even let communities rebuild after particularly devastating blazes, such as the Camp Fire that all but wiped out the town of Paradise.

In the longer term, of course, we need to slow down climate change. That won’t lessen the current level of risk, but it could at least limit how much worse things get.

The number of days with extreme fire risk conditions across California could increase by more than 50% toward the end of the century under a scenario in which global emissions peak around 2050 and decline thereafter, according to one recent study. In the worst-case emissions scenario, that number could almost double in some regions, exceeding 15 days each fall.

DIEGO SAEZ-GIL

As devastating as the fires have become, we’re still just at the early edge of climate change, says Diego Saez-Gil, chief executive of Pachama, a startup using AI and satellite data to help restore and protect forests.

“I do hope that the orange skies in San Francisco, and the fires and the floods and the hurricanes, are really wake-up calls,” he says. “Instead of denying or neglecting it, or whatever attitude we had in the past, it’s time we all get together and start working on this very seriously.”

He now knows the dangers firsthand. Five days after those lightning storms set California on fire, the flames reached his home in the Santa Cruz Mountains and burned it to ashes.

It’s almost October. The leaves are showing their vibrant fall colors. Pumpkin spice everything can be found everywhere, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month will soon be underway.

Learning that a friend, family member, or coworker has breast (or any other) cancer is hard. Figuring out what to say next is harder. As a two-time cancer survivor, I know that there are plenty of things not to say to a cancer patient because I’ve heard most of them.

I’ve written my experiences and learnings down in my book Again: Surviving Cancer Twice With Love And Lists and I will share with you here important questions, phrases, or topics to avoid.

At least you have a good cancer.

No cancer is a “good” cancer. This is a backhanded way of asking about the patient’s prognosis. Rather than asking for such information, let the individual know that you’re there to listen and let her share what she’s comfortable sharing.

Cancer isn’t as hard as it used to be.

When I was fourteen years old in 1981 with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, cancer was really hard, especially when I threw up day after day from radiation treatment and couldn’t go to high school. Thirty-five years later when I was forty-nine—a wife, mom of three, and professional—with breast cancer, cancer still was really hard, especially after I lost my hair, had agonizing bone pain, and diarrhea during months of chemotherapy. While advances in cancer treatment have improved over the years, any treatment stinks. It’s okay to say, “This really sucks.” Because it does and thanks for noticing.

Are you getting the boob job with the tummy tuck?

A lumpectomy or a single or bilateral mastectomy is not a “boob job.” It’s the amputation of some or all of the breast tissue, possibly including nipples, and often resulting in the complete loss of sensation in the chest. Reconstruction, if chosen, may be done with implants or with some form of flap reconstruction where the surgeon may use tissue from other body parts to reconstruct the breasts. These are painful surgeries with fairly long recoveries and leave individuals profoundly changed in their self-identities and in their sex lives. So, not a tummy tuck.

Does it run in your family? Maybe you should have worked out more.

No one asks for a cancer diagnosis. It’s not anyone’s fault if they get one. Please leave the “should have” lectures at home and avoid attributing an individual’s cancer diagnosis to something they may or may not have done, such as the food they ate, their exercise habits, or family history.

My mother, sister, friend, grandma . . . had cancer. She died.

Individuals’ cancer experiences and outcomes are different, and these stories may not always be helpful or comforting, particularly if death is involved. Put yourself in the patient’s shoes, would you want someone to say that to you?

Have you heard about [this new treatment, supplement, anti-cancer diet]?

When I was in treatment, I received much unsolicited advice. I had a great team of medical professionals whom I trusted, and I didn’t want to hear about the latest Internet “cures,” ginger chews for nausea, or turmeric tea’s anti-inflammatory properties. Respect the patient – and her choices.

I Know How You Feel.

No, you don’t. But, you can ask her how she’s feeling.

You’re so brave, strong, an inspiration . . .

While not unkind, these expressions discount how individuals with cancer may feel, which, more often than not, may be sad, angry, terrified, and anxious.

You look great.

Cancer may come with hair loss, weight loss or gain, changes in skin tone, etc. Trust me, the patient knows she doesn’t look great and is probably upset about it. Instead, simply tell the individual how great it is to see her.

Nothing.

If you’re not sure what to say, then say so. Don’t ghost your friend, family member, or coworker due to your fear or unease. It’s about her, not you.

So what can you do?

Remember that the person with whom you’re speaking is the same person she always has been. Listen or offer words of encouragement and support. Ask what you can do to help them in practical, concrete ways, such as making meals, taking them to appointments, or picking up children from school. Finally, talk to them about something, anything, other than cancer.

If you would like to learn more, read about my journey in my new book

The post 10 Things Not to Say to Someone with Breast (Or Any Other) Cancer appeared first on Dumb Little Man.

The New York rapper says her relationship with the Migos star is "irretrievably broken".

WASHINGTON, D.C.—President Trump celebrated his historic Middle East peace deal today by cooking up his world-famous bacon-wrapped pork ribs on the White House lawn, inviting the participants from the Muslim and Jewish nations to partake in his "good old-fashioned home cooking."

The post Trump Celebrates Middle East Peace Deal By Cooking Up His World-Famous Bacon-Wrapped Pork Ribs appeared first on The Babylon Bee.

Computer software company Oracle has won the bidding for Chinese app TikTok's US operations and will become a 'trusted partner,' a source told the Wall Street Journal Sunday.

Numbers demonstrating on the streets have been smaller but the actions much more targeted

A few minutes before Boris Johnson’s convoy swept past on his way to prime minister’s questions this week, around a dozen people stepped off the pavement and into the middle of the busy junction outside parliament.

As they hurriedly sat down and tried to glue their hands to the road, they were surrounded by scores of police officers. Within seconds they were lifted – or dragged – back to the pavement. The protest was over almost before it had begun and minutes later the prime minister’s motorcade sped past unhindered.

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George Floyd swallowed drugs during a prior arrest on May 6, 2019 according to a new court filing that has been completely ignored by the media for two weeks. ...

The chances that wormholes exist are slim, but that doesn't mean that they can't provide a useful escape, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

President Donald Trump tweeted that suburbs would be 'OVERRUN' by anarchists and looters if he loses the election - hours after justifying his coronavirus comments as an effort to avoid 'panic.'

Roughly 950 people move to Florida every day and the state has seen 'unprecedented demand' and an uptick in luxury home sales as people in Northern cities flee the pandemic.

White House aides mounted furious pushback following the release of an Atlantic article that reported Trump called deceased veterans 'losers' - and even quoting John Bolton to do so.

The news: Apple and Google have announced they’re expanding their coronavirus exposure warning system so health agencies can take part without needing to create a customized app. It’s a significant upgrade to the system, which uses Bluetooth to work out if people have spent extended periods of time near each other and then notifies the close contacts of someone who tests positive for coronavirus. The original system launched in May and has since been adopted by six states in the US and at least 15 countries. Maryland, Nevada, Virginia, and Washington, DC, will be the first to sign up to use the revamped system, Apple and Google said in a conference call.

How it works: In states or regions that have enabled the “Exposure Notifications Express” tool, a prompt will flash up on phones with the latest version of Apple or Android’s operating system, informing the user that it’s available. Apple users just need to tap the screen to enable it. Android users will still have to download an app—however, the app is automatically generated for public health authorities by Google. All the agency has to do is provide Apple and Google with some basic information and set up servers to host Bluetooth keys and exposure verification.

Why it matters: It’s a promising development at a time when excitement around contact tracing apps has distinctly cooled. Anything that makes it easier for agencies to set up these apps should help boost adoption in the population at large, which is crucial if they are going to help break the chain of infections. However, it’s still not a panacea. These apps will only ever be part of the overall fight against covid-19, which still heavily relies on manual contact tracing, social distancing, and mass testing.

Read next: Is a successful contact tracing app possible? These countries think so.

A New Scientist investigation has found that some of the world's richest people are funding geoengineering plans that would transform the world's oceans to combat climate change

Kyle Rittenhouse has been charged as an adult with two counts of first-degree homicide and one count of attempted homicide following the shootings on the third night of protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

A short but remarkable study by the chief librarian of the Bodleian in Oxford charts 3,000 years of literary vandalism

A third of the way into his rich and meticulous 3,000 year history of knowledge and all the ways it may be preserved (or not), Richard Ovenden casually mentions that he and his wife once had to clear the house of a family member – a job that involved deciding which letters and diaries should be saved, and which, ultimately, destroyed. As he notes, such decisions are taken everywhere, every day, with few consequences. But occasionally, the fate of such documents can have profound consequences for culture, particularly if the deceased person had a public life. Think of Byron’s publisher, John Murray, tearing up and then burning the manuscript of his memoirs at his house in Albemarle Street; of Philip Larkin’s secretary, Betty Mackereth, feeding his diaries, sheet by sheet, into a Hull University shredder.

At this point, I had to stop reading Ovenden’s book for a moment, to picture the author going through the dressing-table drawers of, say, his elderly aunt. I imagine this would be an oddly impressive sight, for by day he is Bodley’s librarian (the most senior position at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford). If there’s anyone you might want to read your love letters after your death, it’s probably him; as Burning the Books reveals on every page, not only is he careful, diligent and wise, he also knows what to leave out, and what to keep in – and it’s this quality, above all, that makes his book so remarkable. Its sweep is quite astonishing and yet, amazingly, his narrative runs to just 320 pages.

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• A team of scientists have been developing a proposal that would send a semi-autonomous submarine to explore the seas of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
• Titan is the only body in our solar system that has large bodies of liquid on its surface.
• It's also a top candidate in the search for alien life.

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What lies in the alien seas of Titan, Saturn's largest moon?

To find out, a team of researchers has spent years developing a plan that would send a submarine to explore the moon's extremely inhospitable lakes and seas, potentially as soon as the 2030s. NASA hasn't approved the mission, but the agency has granted the researchers two rounds of funding through the Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.

If approved, the mission would be a massive undertaking, requiring the transport of a semi-autonomous, nuclear-powered submarine that's 20 feet long and 3,300 pounds on a seven-year journey to Saturn.

In a NASA blog post, Steven Oleson of NASA's Glenn Research Center wrote:

"The mission concept we propose to study will investigate a full spectrum of oceanographic phenomena: chemical composition of the liquid, surface and subsurface currents, mixing and layering in the 'water' column, tides, wind and waves, bathymetry, and bottom features and composition."

Later in the post, Oleson added that the mission could help scientists better understand how life evolved on Earth, and potentially on Titan. In a presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations working group earlier this month, Oelson said:

"We feel that the Titan submarine is kind of a first step before you go do a [sub mission on] Europa or Enceladus."

​Why study Titan?

Titan has long been a top candidate for space research and the search for alien life within our solar system. But scientists didn't know much about the Mercury-sized moon until 2004, when NASA's Cassini spacecraft began conducting flybys of Titan, and later landed the Huygens probe on the moon's surface.

That mission revealed that Titan is actually more like Earth than our Moon: Titan has an atmosphere with organic molecules and complex chemistry. It has rain and storms, which help to shape the dunes on its surface. And it has maria (seas) and lacus (lakes), some larger than the Great Lakes of North America. Besides Earth, no other body in our solar system has liquid on its surface like Titan does.

Still, it might be more accurate to think of Titan as a "deranged Earth," as Caitlin Griffith, a professor in the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, put it to Forbes. After all, Titan's orangeish atmosphere is incredibly smoggy, made mostly of nitrogen and a bit of methane. Its surface is incredibly cold, at about -290 degrees Fahrenheit. And its frigid seas are made of ethane or methane, not water.

But the strange composition of Titan's seas might not be a bad thing: It should be relatively easy for a submarine to travel through Titan's seas, and the salty liquid wouldn't interfere with radio signals. (Depending on the mission design, those signals would be beamed directly to Earth, or to a relay orbiter outside of Titan.)

The submarine would likely explore two of Titan's largest northern seas, Kraken Mare and Ligeia Mare, which cover thousands of square miles and reach depths of 115 feet and 560 feet, respectively.

It's unclear what the submarine might find. Organisms as we know them on Earth would have a tough time surviving in Titan's seas, but scientists do generally agree that it's possible the moon may harbor microbial life.

If the mission is approved, the submarine would likely need to reach Titan during the moon's spring or summer, when there's visible light. Given that each of Titan's seasons last about seven years, that means the submarine would need to launch in the 2030s, if it's going to happen in the mid-term future.

In 2026, NASA plans to launch a rotorcraft to Titan as part of a separate mission.

"With the Dragonfly mission, NASA will once again do what no one else can do," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "Visiting this mysterious ocean world could revolutionize what we know about life in the universe. This cutting-edge mission would have been unthinkable even just a few years ago, but we're now ready for Dragonfly's amazing flight."

Every time Athens pushes a refugee boat away, it’s the result of an entire continent acting in its perceived self-interest

A vital part of international refugee law is the principle of non-refoulement: the idea that states should not push people seeking asylum back to unsafe countries. In a country like the UK, which does not sit next to a war zone, advocates of “tougher” policies to deter asylum seekers will claim that the principle does not apply, since people who reach Britain’s shores will have passed through several peaceful countries before they get there.

But if every country looks only to its own interests, and behaves as if asylum seekers are someone else’s problem, then you very quickly end up with a system that traps people in situations where their lives are at risk. That is the system bequeathed by Europe’s panicked response to the 2015 refugee crisis, and in recent months, partly under cover of the emergency conditions imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, it has got worse.

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Lin Wood, the famed attorney who successfully represented Covington Catholic's Nick Sandmann in multiple lawsuits against the media, graciously and heroically offered to help Kyle Rittenhouse for free on Thursday morning after GoFundMe suspended his ...

The actor, 58, who donned a protective face mask during the footage amid the Covid-19 crisis, also sneaked into the busy BFI IMAX cinema to watch new film Tenet.

Four years after predicting an expensive, ineffective and racist policy, The Last Week Tonight host checks in on Trump’s signature promise of the border wall

In the run-up to the 2016 election, John Oliver explained the destructive risks of then-candidate Trump’s “build the wall” sloganeering in a Last Week Tonight segment: it was “transparently racist” as a mantra and both expensive and pointless as a policy. Four years later, Oliver returned to the subject on Sunday, because “while we predicted the whole thing would be a shamble, the extent to which that’s been true even we didn’t see coming.”

As a candidate, Trump intended for the wall to define his presidency, “and that has very much happened,” said Oliver, “but in none of the ways that he intended.” And with a referendum on the Trump presidency less than three months away, Oliver explained, it’s worth checking up on “the wall” — what has been built in the three and a half years since Trump took office, what damage has been done, and who’s doing the building.

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For the fourth year in a row, California is experiencing major wildfires – probably because climate change has left the region unusually hot and dry, say researchers

US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Food and Drug Administration head Stephen Hahn will join Trump at the Sunday 6pm press conference about the 'breakthrough.'

Satellite images have captured a Chinese submarine entering a cave complex beneath the mountain at Yulin Naval Base on Hainan Island. It's believed to be the first sighting of the entrance.

At the start of the week, Liam Porr had only heard of GPT-3. By the end, the college student had used the AI model to produce an entirely fake blog under a fake name.

It was meant as a fun experiment. But then one of his posts reached the number-one spot on Hacker News. Few people noticed that his blog was completely AI-generated. Some even hit “Subscribe.”

While many have speculated about how GPT-3, the most powerful language-generating AI tool to date, could affect content production, this is one of the only known cases to illustrate the potential. What stood out most about the experience, says Porr, who studies computer science at the University of California, Berkeley: “It was super easy, actually, which was the scary part.”

GPT-3 is OpenAI’s latest and largest language AI model, which the San Francisco–based research lab  began drip-feeding out in mid-July. In February of last year, OpenAI made headlines with GPT-2, an earlier version of the algorithm, which it announced it would withhold for fear it would be abused. The decision immediately sparked a backlash, as researchers accused the lab of pulling a stunt. By November, the lab had reversed position and released the model, saying it had detected “no strong evidence of misuse so far.”

The lab took a different approach with GPT-3; it neither withheld it nor granted public access. Instead, it gave the algorithm to select researchers who applied for a private beta, with the goal of gathering their feedback and commercializing the technology by the end of the year.

Porr submitted an application. He filled out a form with a simple questionnaire about his intended use. But he also didn’t wait around. After reaching out to several members of the Berkeley AI community, he quickly found a PhD student who already had access. Once the graduate student agreed to collaborate, Porr wrote a small script for him to run. It gave GPT-3 the headline and introduction for a blog post and had it spit out several completed versions. Porr’s first post (the one that charted on Hacker News), and every post after, was copy-and-pasted from one of the outputs with little to no editing.

“From the time that I thought of the idea and got in contact with the PhD student to me actually creating the blog and the first blog going viral—it took maybe a couple of hours,” he says.

SCREENSHOT / LIAM PORR

The trick to generating content without the need for much editing was understanding GPT-3’s strengths and weaknesses. “It’s quite good at making pretty language, and it’s not very good at being logical and rational,” says Porr. So he picked a popular blog category that doesn’t require rigorous logic: productivity and self-help.

From there, he wrote his headlines following a simple formula: he’d scroll around on Medium and Hacker News to see what was performing in those categories and put together something relatively similar. “Feeling unproductive? Maybe you should stop overthinking,” he wrote for one. “Boldness and creativity trumps intelligence,” he wrote for another. On a few occasions, the headlines didn’t work out. But as long as he stayed on the right topics, the process was easy.

After two weeks of nearly daily posts, he retired the project with one final, cryptic, self-written message. Titled “What I would do with GPT-3 if I had no ethics,” it described his process as a hypothetical. The same day, he also posted a more straightforward confession on his real blog.

Porr says he wanted to prove that GPT-3 could be passed off as a human writer. Indeed, despite the algorithm’s somewhat weird writing pattern and occasional errors, only three or four of the dozens of people who commented on his top post on Hacker News raised suspicions that it might have been generated by an algorithm. All those comments were immediately downvoted by other community members.

For experts, this has long been the worry raised by such language-generating algorithms. Ever since OpenAI first announced GPT-2, people have speculated that it was vulnerable to abuse. In its own blog post, the lab focused on the AI tool’s potential to be weaponized as a mass producer of misinformation. Others have wondered whether it could be used to churn out spam posts full of relevant keywords to game Google.

Porr says his experiment also shows a more mundane but still troubling alternative: people could use the tool to generate a lot of clickbait content. “It’s possible that there’s gonna just be a flood of mediocre blog content because now the barrier to entry is so easy,” he says. “I think the value of online content is going to be reduced a lot.”

Porr plans to do more experiments with GPT-3. But he’s still waiting to get access from OpenAI. “It’s possible that they’re upset that I did this,” he says. “I mean, it’s a little silly.”

Update: Additional details have been added to the text and photo captions to explain how Liam Porr created his blog and got it to the top of Hacker News.