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Startup Still Working On 'Immortal Avatars' That Will Live Forever
Startup Eternime, founded by MIT fellow Marius Ursache, is still working on "immortal avatars" that, after your death, will continue interacting with your loves ones from beyond the grave. An anonymous reader quotes CNET: Give Eternime access to your social media profiles and the startup's algorithms will scrape your posts and interactions to build a profile... The algorithms will study your memories and mannerisms. They'll learn how to be "you"... Eternime was announced in 2014 after Ursache developed the idea during the MIT Entrepreneurship Development Program. He wasn't entirely sure if he should develop the project further and wanted to get a sense of public reaction.
In the first four days, 3,000 people signed up at Eterni.me, the company's website, for a private beta. Then, Urasche received an email from a man dying of terminal cancer. "Eternime, he wrote, was the last chance to leave something behind for friends and family," Urasche told me. "That was the moment I decided that this was something worth dedicating my life to"... Since 2014, the Eternime website has largely been silent, although it continues to take names of people who want to test the service. Ursache says the Eternime team has been refining the product over the last two years, testing features, figuring out what will work and what won't.
"The private beta test is ongoing," according to the article, "and Ursache says the feedback has been positive." But unfortunately, the service still isn't operational yet. |
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There are no conversations. |
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JR |
Art is not meant to change the world, but when you see people interacting, when you see an impact on their lives, then I guess in a smaller way, this is changing the world. So, that's what I believe in. That's why I'm into creating more and more interactions. |
Anant Agarwal |
A large number of students around the world don't really have access to high quality education. So, launching EdX allows students all over the world to have much better access to a high quality education from a university such as Harvard, MIT, Berkeley and others as we add more universities. |
Anant Agarwal |
We are making sure that the courses we offer at MITx and HarvardX are quintessential MIT and Harvard courses. They are not watered down. They are not MIT Lite or Harvard Lite. These are hard courses. These are the exact same courses, so the certificate will mean something. |
Richard Le Gallienne |
Nature is forever arriving and forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her partings a promise of meetings farther along the road. |
Sholom Aleichem |
Playing nuts is a game like any other, neither better than tops, nor worse than cards. The game is played in various ways. There are 'holes' and 'bank' and 'caps.' But every game finishes up in the same way. One boy loses, another wins. And, as always, he who wins is a clever fellow, a smart fellow, a good fellow. |
Herman Cain |
My presence in the social media and on the Internet is much bigger than many of the other candidates, including Mitt Romney. So, when you take the social media and you take the Tea Party citizens movement, you have a combination there that, quite frankly, 10 years ago, I wouldn't have had a chance. |
Alexia Fast |
When I was in high school, I got bullied through social media - on the Internet, on my Facebook. That was hard for me, and I think social media has made it easy for people to bully other people on-line because they can just post anything they want anonymously. |
Socrates |
All men's souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine. |
Harold Hamm |
It's harder, but we're still finding oil in Oklahoma today. The bar has been raised on startup companies, but it can still be done. Every regulation and every rule limits you, but, yes, it can still be done. That's the beauty of living in a free country and having the freedom to have an idea and become an entrepreneur. |
Robert Dallek |
Whatever the long-term legal prospects for same-sex marriage, President Obama's willingness to put the matter front and center in an election year can at least make him a candidate for inclusion in Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. |
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New Study Finds It's Harder To Turn Off a Robot When It's Begging For Its Life
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: [A] recent experiment by German researchers demonstrates that people will refuse to turn a robot off if it begs for its life. In the study, published in the open access journal PLOS One, 89 volunteers were recruited to complete a pair of tasks with the help of Nao, a small humanoid robot. The participants were told that the tasks (which involved answering a series of either / or questions, like "Do you prefer pasta or pizza?"; and organizing a weekly schedule) were to improve Nao's learning algorithms. But this was just a cover story, and the real test came af...
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It seems like the way to go is just to have a huge variety of different possible captchas, but I would think that once you have more than a couple bots working together to build models not even that would hold up forever. Abstractly, though, doesn't it boil down to this - Is there a set of problems that a human can answer easily and a computer cannot, but the computer can still recognize a correct answer easily? My instinct is that as soon as you define that set you can build a machine to generate solutions. But I guess the answer to the real question of whether it's worth it depends on if you can build a machine that builds machines that generate solutions. And I think for just the images alone the answer is probably yes - audio/video I'm less sure about.
This post is a comment.
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Malware Developer Who Used Spam Botnet To Pay For College Gets No Prison Time (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The operator of a 77,000-strong spam botnet was sentenced to two years probation and no prison time after admitting his crime and completely reforming his life. The former botnet operator is now working for a cybersecurity company, and admitted his actions as soon as the FBI knocked on his door back in 2013. The botnet operator, a 29-year-old from Santa Clara, California, says he was tricked by fellow co-schemers who told him they were not doing anything wrong by infecting computers with malware because they were not accessing private information such as banking...
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im very aware of my mortality. but im also not fearful of death. i have done everything ive needed to do. if i die, my words will live on and continue to inspire. so im comfortable dying at any time. its the slow death im terrified of
This post is a comment.
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IMMORTAL TECHNIQUE!!!!!!
This post is a comment.
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"Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home."
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Senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms – this is what we start with, and it is quite a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these capabilities at birth, we would probably have trouble surviving.
But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers.
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Scientists Transfer Memory Between Snails
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: UCLA neuroscientists reported Monday that they have transferred a memory from one animal to another via injections of RNA, a startling result that challenges the widely held view of where and how memories are stored in the brain. The finding from the lab of David Glanzman hints at the potential for new RNA-based treatments to one day restore lost memories and, if correct, could shake up the field of memory and learning. The researchers extracted RNA from the nervous systems of snails that had been shocked and injected the material into unshocked snails. RNA's primary role is to serve as...
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I had a dream that I lived in Europe somewhere and I had this shed where I took chairs that my parents painted and tried to sell them. I had to take some of the chairs and scrape off the paint in places where they needed to be modified so that they would sell better. I was working one day when a girl with a broken arm walked up to me and asked me out. I told her I didn't live there and I was going back to the USA. She gave me her number anyway and then her mom showed up and made her leave. Then there was this whole other part of my dream where people were killing each other and there were some gangs and stuff but I don't know if that had anything to do with the chairs or if they were just in the same city or what.
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Facebook breach put data of 50 million users at risk
The vulnerability had to do with the social network's "view as" feature.
Facebook on Friday said a breach affected 50 million people on the social network.
The vulnerability stemmed from Facebook's "view as" feature, which lets people see what their profiles look like to other people. Attackers exploited code associated with the feature tha...
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