Nepenthe

Pequeno guia para acertar na mudança de hora:   SMARTPHONE – A hora muda sozinha, é mágico. RÁDIO-DESPERTADOR – Carrega em todos os botões ao mesmo tempo e faz figas. RELÓGIO DE SOL – Desloca a casa para uma latitude de 43,4° Leste. FORNO – Chama um engenheiro (da NASA!) ou espera pela próxima mudança de hora.   Petit guide pour ne pas rater le changement d'heure: SMARTPHONE – L’heure change toute seule, c'est magique. RADIO RÉVEIL – Appuyez sur tous les boutons simultanément, puis croisez les doigts. CADRAN SOLAIRE – Déplacez votre maison d'une latitude de 43,4° Est. FOUR - Appelez un ingénieur de la NASA ou attendez le prochain changement d'heure.   A Quick Guide for Nailing Spring Ahead: SMARTPHONE – The time changes on its own – it’s magic. CLOCK RADIO – Press all the buttons at once, then cross your fingers. SUNDIAL – Move your house 43.4° east. OVEN – Call a NASA engineer or wait for the next time change.    

«Putain mais les ebooks quelle énorme arnaque. Les éditeurs te vendent juste un fichier avec le texte et c'est à toi de tout imprimer. Une ruine pour nous les sapios. Et je parle pas des livres audio où tu dois taper tout le texte sous Word avant de l'imprimer...»   «Caraças, que aldrabice me saíram os ebooks. As editoras vendem-te um simples ficheiro com o texto, e tens de imprimir tudo. Dá cabo da carteira aos bibliófilos. E nem me faças falar dos audiolivros, em que é preciso meter todo o texto no Word antes de imprimir...»   "Damn, ebooks are such a huge rip-off. Publishers just sell you a file with the text, and it's up to you to print everything out. It's ruinous for us bookworms. And don't even get me started on audiobooks, where you have to type out the entire text in Word before printing it..."

Apple's new live translation feature is a boon for travellers, but over-reliance on AI translation could make us rethink how, and why, we learn languages. From BBC Travel .   For nearly five decades, a comedy sci-fi novel has made readers wish they had a fish in their ear. In Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, characters could understand any language thanks to the petite (and sadly fictional) Babel fish. "If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language," Adams wrote. Now that sci-fi dream is edging closer to reality with Apple's new AirPods Pro 3, which promise live translation . According to the company, users can listen to conversations in a variety of foreign languages and hear translated words in their ears, while transcripts appear on their phone screen – all without the need for an alien fish transplant. At face value, this has the potential to power a new era...

 By Varsha Bansal to The Guardian : I n the spring of 2024, when Rachael Sawyer, a technical writer from Texas, received a LinkedIn message from a recruiter hiring for a vague title of writing analyst, she assumed it would be similar to her previous gigs of content creation. On her first day of work a week later, however, her expectations went bust. Instead of writing words herself, Sawyer’s job was to rate and moderate the content created by artificial intelligence. The job initially involved a mix of parsing through meeting notes and chats summarized by Google’s Gemini, and, in some cases, reviewing short films made by the AI. On occasion, she was asked to deal with extreme content, flagging violent and sexually explicit material generated by Gemini for removal, mostly text. Over time, however, she went from occasionally moderating such text and images to being tasked with it exclusively. “I was shocked that my job involved working with such distressing content,” ...

Click to read fully at David Byrne's website . I have a theory that much recent tech development and innovation over the last decade or so has had an unspoken overarching agenda—it has been about facilitating the need for LESS human interaction. It’s not a bug—it’s a feature. We might think Amazon was about selling us books we couldn’t find locally—and it was and what a brilliant idea—but maybe it was also just as much about eliminating human interaction. I see a pattern emerging in the innovative technology that has gotten the most attention, gets the bucks and often, no surprise, ends up getting developed and implemented. What much of this technology seems to have in common is that it removes the need to deal with humans directly. The tech doesn’t claim or acknowledge this as its primary goal, but it seems to often be the consequence. I’m sort of thinking maybe it is the primary goal. There are so many ways imagination can be manifested in the technical sphere...

and introducing the new UnBabel translation platform:

Created by: HackCollege

From The Guardian : A  spiky-haired, bespectacled animation of the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem marches across Google's doodle this morning , as the search engine marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of his first book,  The Astronauts . Lem remains best known for his cult novel  Solaris , the story of an incomprehensible intelligence encountered on an alien planet. It has been adapted for cinema twice,  by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972  and  by Steven Soderbergh, starring George Clooney, 30 years later , and was first published in 1961, during the author's most fertile period, when he also produced his most famous works including Hospital of the Transfiguration, The Invincible and Tales of Pirx the Pilot. But the doodle, which sees the Lem figure encounter a giant robot, is commemorating publication of his lesser-known first book Astronauci (The Astronauts), which was released in 1951, 60 years ago. The story of ...

1955 - 2011

Traductores. Nuestra desidia por aprender la lengua de Shakespeare nos ha obligado a utilizarlos para entender mejor  esta aldea digital. Pero ¿qué hay de esos lenguajes que, pese a estar en nuestro propio idioma, no solemos entender? Es por eso que Google, en alianza con el Cinismo Ilustrado , está próximo a sacar Googe Transall , una herramienta que permite  traducir absolutamente todo . Aquí unos buenos ejemplos: También funciona de maravilla a la inversa: Dios bendiga el siglo XXI.

Click and enjoy ;D

Author Tom McCarthy for The Guardian : There's a scene in Don Quixote where the deluded would-be knight is listening to fulling mills. This is not the famous windmill scene: in that one, the machines are clearly visible; this one, by contrast, takes place in pitch-black night. Quixote, struck by the mills' rhythmic metallic clankings, persuades himself that they are the half-articulated groans and snarls of monsters. He's wrong, of course: they're mills. But then again, perhaps, in the way madmen sometimes are, he's right. Just maybe, in the looping chains of broken syllables, the clashing metre of compounded phonemes, he's picking up a message, a weak signal slowly forming in time's static: an announcement, for those astute enough to hear, of a monstrous age of mechanised industry lurking in the night of the future. For centuries, literature has been haunted by technology. When Blake shudders in fearful awe before the tiger, don't be fool...