overblown

Twenty-five years ago, the ultimate bro film came out; it is now rereleased for the anniversary. David Fincher’s bone-splintering, soft-tissue-pulping Fight Club is the ultraviolent hipster-fantasy about a depressed white collar nerd befriended by a supercool alpha male and inducted into a secret bare-knuckle combat cult whose purpose is to restore real masculinity. It was adapted by screenwriter Jim Uhls from the uncompromisingly pessimistic novel by Chuck Palahniuk and, after a slow commercial start, became the movie…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Everyone has been there. You get invited to something that you absolutely do not want to attend—a holiday party, a family cookout, an expensive trip. But doubts and anxieties creep into your head as you weigh whether to decline. You might wonder if you'll upset the person who invited you. Maybe it'll harm the friendship, or…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain In and out of the workplace, people often keep adverse information about themselves secret because they worry that others will judge them harshly. But those fears are overblown, according to new research from the McCombs School of Business. The work is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain In the minds of many Californians, El Niño has long loomed as a rainmaker of epic proportions. In 1982-83, the Pacific climate pattern caused storms that pounded the state's shoreline, damaging 1,000 homes between Santa Barbara and the Mexican border and washing the tip of the Santa Monica Pier out to sea. When it…

AI pioneer Yann LeCun. Jérémy Barande/Wikimedia Commons AI pioneer Yann LeCun has described talk of artificial intelligence (AI) posing an existential threat to humanity as “preposterously ridiculous.” Speaking to the BBC this week at an AI-focused event held in Paris by Meta, where he now works as the company’s chief AI scientist, Professor LeCun said: “Will AI take over the world? No, this is a projection of human nature on machines.” LeCun’s comments are in stark contrast to those made by Geoffrey Hinton and…

Ever since the poem churning ChatGPT burst on the scene six months ago, expert Gary Marcus has voiced caution against artificial intelligence's ultra-fast development and adoption.But against AI's apocalyptic doomsayers, the New York University emeritus professor told AFP in a recent interview that the technology's existential threats may currently be "overblown." "I'm not personally that concerned about extinction risk, at least for now, because the scenarios are not that concrete," said Marcus in San Francisco. "A more…

Many of the leading voices in AI have co-signed yet another ominous open letter warning that we should be “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI.” However, the voices shouting for regulation the loudest have us wondering how much of the AI fear-mongering is warranted, and how much is self-serving theater. This week, I’m joined by Devin Coldewey to talk about why AI doomerism is overblown, and why the blowhards doing the blowing want it that way. Articles from the episode: The TechCrunch Podcast posts every…

Lotus Ruan, who has conducted technical analyses of Chinese apps like WeChat and is currently a senior research fellow at the Toronto-based research group Citizen Lab, echoes this view: “With the rise of TikTok and the Chinese apps going global, are looking at the Chinese apps with a magnifying glass.” As a result, the risks are often exaggerated. The actual differences between these apps and American apps are pretty small, Ruan says. In 2021, a technical review of TikTok, conducted by a colleague of Ruan’s, reported…

We’re seeing the truth about one of the most hyped sectors of the last decade After years of hype, the creator economy is slamming into reality. Influencer programs are shuttering. Investment is drying up. And worsening economic conditions are threatening to crush creators and the tech infrastructure behind them. While today’s economic downturn is causing broad pain, the creator economy is suffering in particular because its middle class hasn’t yet emerged. Online content creation is…

“Now that I’m dead… ” begins the murdered narrator of Steve Toltz’s new book, whose chapters alternate between the afterlife and a near-future Sydney beset by “drone terrorism, nanobot murders, hurricane firestorms and utter global chaos”. The Covid era, known as “the Fattening” (“all that gruelling isolation and silly panic buying and overeating… The only thing we learned was how to hide from deliverymen”), has given way to a new pandemic, K9, spread by dogs.When the news seems like a novel, you may as well play loud,…