⚡The final frontier is prime real estate -- SpaceX makes move towards commercial space station 🧑🚀
PLUS: Can Twitter be as big as TV for Tucker Carlson? | Writers on strike make demands about AI
Clayton Hester
May 11, 2023
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The Precap
The fate of higher education — can we get by without it?
Studio Bot — game changer for coders?
Disney looks to combine Hulu and Disney+
Starlink satisfaction
Commercial space station in the works
Can Twitter be as big as TV for Tucker Carlson?
Writers on strike make demands about AI
The quest for universal language
Judy Chicago’s art “herstory”
Adobe Firefly and Google Bard get together
and more!
In Short
Google is changing things up on its devices thanks to AI, such as custom wallpapers.
The downfall of the Metaverse is not the end of the coming VR world. Fast Company explores what it means that the Metaverse never got the chance to live up to Mark Zuckerberg’s vision.
Spotify removed thousands of songs to combat streaming fraud rather than due to AI-related issues, reflecting the ongoing challenges streaming services face in preventing fraud on their platforms.
What is going on in the publication landscape? The Guardian’s Chanté Joseph explores.
Trends & Changes
The fate of higher education — can we get by without it?
📰 Is the degree dead? We’re consulting the coroners. In this case, that means turning to Rachel Romer and Allison Dulin Salisbury writing at Forbes. They’ve ruled that the degree is still kicking. But there is a shift towards valuing skills over degrees as a signal for employability, with a growing number of companies dropping degree requirements for jobs where they are not strictly necessary, opening up more opportunities for the 70 million Americans who lack a bachelor's degree, but have the skills for higher-paid work; however, employers must still support formal learning for their employees once hired, and investing in certificates, short-term education, and degree programs can create more containers of skills.
Studio Bot — game changer for coders?
🤖 Google has announced Studio Bot, an AI assistant that can help Android developers write and debug code, using a conversational experience to interact with developers as an advisor, but is still in the early stages and only available to US developers for now. Additionally, Google also plans to launch a Codey-based code generation tool that is more like Copilot and has launched ML Hub, a repository of guidance for developers seeking to use machine learning models in their work.
Disney looks to combine Hulu and Disney+
📰 Disney CEO Bob Iger has announced that the company will launch a new app that combines content from its streaming services, Disney+ and Hulu, in order to provide a more unified streaming experience for subscribers of both services, which will start rolling out by the end of 2023, indicating that Disney may be keeping Hulu despite a looming deadline to buy out Comcast's third of the shared ownership. Meanwhile, Iger has escalated the company's feud with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, by asking him if he wants Disney to "pay more taxes or not" during the company's Q2 earnings call, as the power struggle between the two continues over a year-long period.
Starlink satisfaction
📰 Despite a slowdown over the past year, Starlink users in both metro and nonmetro areas are relatively satisfied with the service, as shown by Ookla's data on internet performance metrics, with Starlink's net promoter score beating out fixed broadband providers in both areas, despite slower median download speeds; and Starlink's upload and download speeds have started to increase again in the past two quarters, with Starlink still outperforming other satellite internet providers in North America and some fixed providers in other regions.
Commercial space station in the works
🚀 SpaceX and startup Vast plan to launch the first commercial space station in low-Earth orbit, with the Haven-1 module set to be launched by a Falcon 9 rocket in August 2025 and joined by the larger Vast-1 module, followed by a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft with four astronauts aboard, before selling all four seats on the maiden mission, with customers including domestic and international space agencies and private individuals involved in science and philanthropic projects, and SpaceX's long-term goal being to deploy a "100-meter-long, multi-module, spinning, artificial gravity space station" launched by its Starship rocket.
Can Twitter be as big as TV for Tucker Carlson?
📰 Traditional TV and the content creator space — the differences between them have long been a point of interest when watching the transformation of the modern media landscape. One test case today: Fox News' viewer numbers dropped nearly in half after Tucker Carlson left, but his Twitter announcement about starting a new show has garnered over 21.3 million views, sparking discussions about the differences between Twitter views and TV ratings and the potential success of Carlson's new endeavor. While Carlson and Twitter are a combo sure to spark strong feelings, it will be worth watching as Twitter continues in its present flux state. It might just show what the future holds for Twitter creators of every stripe, political or otherwise.
Writers on strike make demands about AI
🎬 The Writers Guild of America is striking and demanding a clause in their contract that prohibits AI from writing or rewriting literary material, as well as training on writing covered by the contract, reflecting the entertainment industry's anxiety about automation.
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Thought Experiments
Gottfried Liebniz, that famed mathematician, philosopher, and polymath, flushed with ideas, wanted to create a language that superseded the limits of our current languages.
This was his “characteristica universalis.”
I’ve begun trying my hand at developing this notion.
I propose the following: a language that is both ideographic and pictographic. And is fundamentally relational. No character or symbol is isolated. In each corner will be an adjacent idea. Each idea reflects outward and inward. This is how each character in the new language is defined -- relationally. This draws on his "Ars Combinatoria."
To create the images I’ve rendered from Midjourney, I drew on mandalas, ideographs, pictographs, calligraphy, the works of Xu Bing, and sacred geometry.
To communicate, you’d have to form idea-chains.
Forming a language of this scale and scope would be an inhuman task.
It’ll require the help of our AI friends.
The aim would be to start with concrete concepts, referring to basic idea-units.
The complexity scales upward from there.
From there, we get into fun questions of linguistic relativity.
But those are questions for another time.
Till then,
—Clayton
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Discoveries Daily
A new exhibition by Judy Chicago in New York’s New Museum explores the “Herstory” of art, which is set to feature 80 female artists.
New Tools
🤖 Google has announced the launch of its PaLM 2 large language model, which will be integrated into its cloud through an AI-powered interface called Duet AI. This interface includes code assistance capabilities, a generative AI chat assistance function, and AppSheet, a no-code solution that allows any user to write cloud applications with natural language prompts. The goal of Duet AI is to provide a conversational experience for cloud management, making it easier for users to deploy code and manage applications in the cloud.
🤖✍️ Adobe Firefly's generative AI, which has produced over 70 million images since its beta launch, is now integrated with Google's Bard, allowing users to create and modify images directly in Bard and design via Adobe Express. Adobe addresses AI use, ownership, and royalties concerns with 'Do Not Train' tags and utilizes the Content Authenticity Initiative's technology for content transparency.
Lifelong Learning
Honing your craft? Learn more about building up your creative skills at CreativeLive.
