“A virtual power plant (VPP) is a system that uses a network of decentralized energy resources, such as solar panels, wind turbines, and energy storage systems, to generate electricity.
These resources are connected and controlled through a central management system, which allows them to operate as a single, coordinated entity.
The goal of a VPP is to provide a reliable and cost-effective source of electricity by leveraging the collective output of the connected energy resources.
VPPs can be used to provide electricity to a specific location, such as a neighborhood or a campus, or they can be connected to the grid and used to generate electricity for a larger area.
They can also be used to support the integration of renewable energy sources into the grid, by providing a flexible and responsive source of electricity that can be dispatched as needed to meet changing demand.
VPPs can be beneficial in a number of ways. They can help to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, which can help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impacts of climate change.
They can also help to lower energy costs by using locally-generated renewable energy, and they can help to improve the reliability of the electricity supply by providing a distributed source of electricity that is not reliant on a single power plant or transmission line.”
As a random test this is not bad
The language is better than many low quality human writers, and, while the information has a “generic” feel to it, the amount of effort saved compared to a human composing a similar essay is impressive.
The attention the AI bot has generated since launch is understandable- given the speed and quality of the results.
Digital rights advocates on Tuesday welcomed Facebook’s announcement that it plans to jettison its facial recognition system, which critics contend is dangerous and often inaccurate technology abused by governments and corporations to violate people’s privacy and other rights.
“Corporate use of face surveillance is very dangerous to people’s privacy.”
Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who last month called facial recognition technology “a special menace to privacy, racial justice, free expression, and information security,” commended the new Facebook policy.
“Facebook getting out of the face recognition business is a pivotal moment in the growing national discomfort with this technology,” he said. “Corporate use of face surveillance is very dangerous to people’s privacy.”
The social networking giant first introduced facial recognition software in late 2010 as a feature to help users identify and “tag” friends without the need to comb through photos. The company subsequently amassed one of the world’s largest digital photo archives, which was largely compiled through the system. Facebook says over one billion of those photos will be deleted, although the company will keep DeepFace, the advanced algorithm that powers the facial recognition system.
Facebook has announced they will be deleting over a billion face recognition templates as they shut down their entire face recognition system. This is great news for Facebook users, and for the global movement pushing back on this technology. https://t.co/0ErdCBhkCT
In a blog post, Jerome Presenti, the vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta—the new name of Facebook’s parent company following a rebranding last week that was widely condemned as a ploy to distract from recent damning whistleblower revelations—described the policy change as “one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history.”
“The many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole,” he wrote.
Facial recognition technology, which has advanced in accuracy and power in recent years, has increasingly been the focus of debate because of how it can be misused by governments, law enforcement, and companies. In China, authorities use the capabilities to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. In the United States, law enforcement has turned to the software to aid policing, leading to fears of overreach and mistaken arrests.
Concerns over actual and potential misuse of facial recognition systems have prompted bans on the technology in over a dozen U.S. locales, beginning with San Francisco in 2019 and subsequently proliferating from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon.
Caitlin Seeley George, campaign director at Fight for the Future, was among the online privacy campaigners who welcomed Facebook’s move. In a statement, she said that “facial recognition is one of the most dangerous and politically toxic technologies ever created. Even Facebook knows that.”
"Facial recognition is one of the most dangerous and politically toxic technologies ever created. Even Facebook knows that," @caitlinseeley of @fightfortheftr told ABC News, "and even as algorithms improve, facial recognition will only be more dangerous." https://t.co/XBZGfyE6mp
— Evan Greer is on Mastodon and Bluesky (@evan_greer) November 2, 2021
Seeley George continued:
From misidentifying Black and Brown people (which has already led to wrongful arrests) to making it impossible to move through our lives without being constantly surveilled, we cannot trust governments, law enforcement, or private companies with this kind of invasive surveillance.
“Even as algorithms improve, facial recognition will only be more dangerous,” she argued. “This technology will enable authoritarian governments to target and crack down on religious minorities and political dissent; it will automate the funneling of people into prisons without making us safer; it will create new tools for stalking, abuse, and identity theft.”
Seeley George says the “only logical action” for lawmakers and companies to take is banning facial recognition.
So Facebook is deleting one billion facial recognition scans, but it's keeping DeepFace, the model that is trained on all those faces. Note that "the company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition into future products." Very meta. 👀 https://t.co/8ntPg5Hyf9
Amid applause for the company’s announcement, some critics took exception to Facebook’s retention of DeepFace, as well as its consideration of “potential future applications” for facial recognition technology.
Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
The Verge interview with Adobe’s CPO, has mega details
In a new, extensive, Verge interview podcast with Adobe’s CPO, Scott Belsky, a a ‘Prepare as NFT’ system launch for Photoshop was confirmed for the end of the month.
The idea is to maintain a kind of proof of originality system to help prevent fake NFTs (minting non-fungible tokens) from being minted and sold by imposters. The final choice is in the buyers hands at this stage, but having a way for creators to prove authenticity would be a big step.
Since this week Adobe is also holding its annual conference, called Adobe Max, there are also a bunch of new features arriving for Creative Cloud and a slew of app including Photoshop.
Big news! We've partnered up with @Adobe and @ContentAuth to enhance attribution of NFTs on Rarible. 🔎 Now collectors can see if the wallet used to design an NFT was the same one used to mint it as part of the Content Authenticity Initiative (#CAI) – https://t.co/EnWOAilv5g
Intersecting worlds collide with Adobe in them all…
Adobe has been around, amazingly, since 1982, and millions of digital creatives and content creators use their products.
Photoshop is so entrenched that it has long achieved verb status: if you want to enhance a photo, for example to enlarge your backside or smooth out your skin, just “photoshop it”. And over use is derided as a “photoshopped” persona or image.
Premiere Pro and After Effects, especially the latter, get a lot of pro and semi-pro use for video production. Many, many Pro photographers use Lightroom. The upgrade system for Adobe products and the creative cloud, such as the recent AI and neural engine assisted effects drive change and upgrades at a furious pace.
With the entire content, image and video creation industry becoming more and more vital to networked human communications, tracing and verifying authorship and authenticity are becoming more and more crucial.
Adobe is moving, with caution due to the issues that could arise, into the area on multiple fronts. As per the Verge article;
“With what Adobe is calling Content Credentials, creators will be able to link their Adobe ID with their crypto wallet and mint their work with participating NFT marketplaces. The software company says the feature should be compatible with popular NFT marketplaces including OpenSea, KnownOrigin, SuperRare, and Rarible. A ‘verified certificate’ that comes with minting an NFT with Photoshop’s Content Credentials will prove that the source of the art is authentic.”
“The Social Dilemma” a documentary now available to watch on Netflix, exposes some hard truths and dangers of social networking. Former employees from juggernaut tech companies including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and many others are interviewed, many of whom co-invented and developed the very structures and business models that are creating major problems as broken-down and discussed in the docu-drama.
Not much of a spoiler alert, but social media companies not only sell our user data, but in conjunction use all that data to create an ultra-sophisticated psychological profile, ultimately to have the powerful ability to manipulate us. Your privacy, surveillance capitalism, positive intermittent reinforcement, artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, dopamine hits, are just some of the terms used within the film and very much prevalent in social media.
There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software”
Edward Tufte
We’ve curated a list of books written by the former tech employees that appeared in the documentary, as well as provided some additional information from the publisher. Click to see more book information, we’ve provided links for purchase that if interested that helps out independent books stores.
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives–where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance–are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.
But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination–propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER – A former Wall Street quant sounds the alarm on Big Data and the mathematical models that threaten to rip apart our social fabric–with a new afterword. “A manual for the twenty-first-century citizen . . . relevant and urgent.”–Financial Times. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST – NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review – Boston Globe – Wired – Fortune – Kirkus Reviews – The Guardian – Nature – On Point
Automating Humanity is an insider’s perspective on everything Big Tech doesn’t want the public to know–or think about–from the addictions installed on a global scale to the profits being driven by fake news and disinformation, to the way they’re manipulating the world for profit and using our data to train systems that will automate jobs at an explosive, unprecedented scale.
Toscano provides a critique of modern regulation, including parts of the new European Union’s General Data Proctection Regulation (GDPR) suggesting how we can create proactive, adaptable regulation that satisfies both the needs of consumer safety and commercial success in the international economy. The content touches on everything from technology, economics, and public policy to psychology, history, and ethics, and is written in a way that is accessible to everyone from the average reader to the technical expert. Click Here to See “Automating Humanity” and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. Click Here to See “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier
You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we’re better off without them. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier, who participates in no social media, offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave these dangerous online platforms.
Lanier’s reasons for freeing ourselves from social media’s poisonous grip include its tendency to bring out the worst in us, to make politics terrifying, to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to twist our relationship with the truth, to disconnect us from other people even as we are more “connected” than ever, to rob us of our free will with relentless targeted ads. How can we remain autonomous in a world where we are under continual surveillance and are constantly being prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history that have no way of making money other than being paid to manipulate our behavior? How could the benefits of social media possibly outweigh the catastrophic losses to our personal dignity, happiness, and freedom? Lanier remains a tech optimist, so while demonstrating the evil that rules social media business models today, he also envisions a humanistic setting for social networking that can direct us toward a richer and fuller way of living and connecting with our world. Click Here to See “Ten Argument for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts” and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
Click Here to See “The Righteous Mind“ and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
Drawing on his twenty five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns. In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.
In this “landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself” (The New York Times Book Review) social psychologist Jonathan Haidt challenges conventional thinking about morality, politics, and religion in a way that speaks to conservatives and liberals alike. Click Here to See “The Righteous Mind” and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
Unlock new Convenience and Powers using the iOS 13 Share Menu
In the video above we showcase the somewhat hidden tricks needed to unlock the full potential of the new share menu for iOS 13 and iPadOS. The video uses iPadOS in order to give a better view within the video aspect ratio vs. the narrow iPhone screen dimensions. The streamlining of work across iPhone, iPad and Mac is much improved and expanded with the updates to iOS 13, iPadOS and macOS Catalina.
The share menu can vary from app to app, many use most often from within Safari or the Mail app, however, for this video we chose the Apple News app as the operations are essentially the same. Third party apps may have different choices of compatible apps to use for sharing and, naturally, different types of content (photos, news story links, PDFs, etc.) would be share with and can be saved into other apps in various ways compatible with those formats.
All-in-all this is a very powerful addition to the iOS / iPadOS toolbox and is but a tiny piece of the puzzle of new features and options built into this upgrade. Stay tuned for more tips and tricks and, if you prefer, you can also view the video on YouTube (below). Please, as always, subscribe and follow!
ABOVE: Logic Pro X 10.4.5 shown onstage at WWDC 2019 running 2,000 audio and software instrument tracks on the new Mac Pro.
Logic Pro X, Apple’s high end music production software, now has more under the hood, particularly when used with the new Mac Pro, which will be available in the Fall. Announced at WWDC 2019, this update is all that was promised and shown in the demo (see video above).
Particularly interesting for future Mac Pro users, the new Logic Pro X supports up to fifty-six processing threads. Up to five times the number of real-time plug-ins will be supported when using the new mac pro with this new Logic Pro version, as compared with the previous Mac Pro (trash can) version. This will enable smooth operation even within the most challenging production situations.
With support for up to one thousand audio tracks and one thousand software instrument tracks, which adds up to more than four times the number of tracks available, as needed.
Additionally, the new version supports one thousand Aux channel strips, one thousand external midi tracks and up to twelve sends per strip.
“As someone who uses Logic for everything I create musically, I got a huge kick seeing all the performance tweaks coming in Logic Pro X 10.4.5. And the expandability of the new Mac Pro will give it longevity and a home in my studio for a long time to come.”
— Oak Felder, producer for Demi Lovato, Drake, Alicia Keys and Rihanna
While many music and sound producers until now have opted to use the Apple’s free GarageBand app, essentially a stripped down version of Logic Pro X, with these new features ( a free upgrade for current Logic Pro X users) the relatively low price tag may begin to entice a larger percentage to go for the upper tier software.
Naturally, for the top pro clientele for whom cost is less relevant, the combination of the new Mac Pro and this upgraded version of Logic Pro X may be more competitive in a market where other similar products such as Avid Pro Tools and Abelton Live remain very popular.
A t WWDC, alongside updates to Logic Pro X, Apple announced macOS Catalina, iOS13 and iPadOS all expected to be released in time for the availability of the Mac Pro in the Fall.
Other Apple software, such as Final Cut Pro should see big updates by that time as well.
Also announced at WWDC, large creative software companies such as Adobe, BlackMagic and others pledged their support for the Mac Pro and detailed plans for major updates intended to take full advantage of the additional power and possibilities.
“Logic is my primary creative tool for composing music, playing a key role in creating the scores for ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ and ‘The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance’… I’m really excited to see the increased performance of Logic Pro X 10.4.5 along with the power, expandability and configurability of the new Mac Pro — together they will help me work even faster and let me focus more on being creative.”
— Daniel Pemberton, composer for “Black Mirror,” “Yesterday” and “Ocean’s 8”
Logic Pro X 10.4.5 is available now in the Mac App Store as a free update for all current users. For new users, the price remains a modest $199.99, which should be an enticement for many.
Additional new features in Logic Pro X 10.4.5, include:
The loop browser can filter by loop type and allows drag and drop of multiple loops into your project simultaneously.
The redesigned DeEsser 2 plug-in provides more options to reduce sibilance on audio tracks.
MIDI beat clocks can be sent to individual ports, each with unique settings like timing offset and plug-in delay compensation.
At the end of the day, regardless of whether it’s on a MacBook Pro, a Mac Pro or even an iMac, the improvements to Logix Pro X represent a welcome sight, showing that Apple is truly committed to pushing forward the tools, both hardware and software, that will enable creators across all classes and styles to do more than ever with less effort and cost.
