All posts tagged: Embracing

Young Tech Bros Are Embracing Celibacy in Favor of the All-Consuming Drive for Wealth

Young Tech Bros Are Embracing Celibacy in Favor of the All-Consuming Drive for Wealth

Published by José Betancourt

Getty Images / Oscar Wong The future moguls of corporate America aren’t living like the new money princes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Instead, today’s aspiring tycoons are pursuing a different kind of luxury: a monastic purity through abstinence. For Mahir Laul, founder of HR software startup Velric, the typically youthful whirlwind of sex and romance takes a backseat to Slack notifs and fundraising rounds. “There’s two things that I care about the most: the gym and my work,” Laul told Business Insider in an interview. “I am obsessed with work. My love life is in the gutters.” With so much pressure on building the next tech unicorn, Laul says most of his fellow entrepreneurs are in the same boat — a lifestyle that doesn’t leave much room for romance, casual or otherwise. “The opportunity cost is really high,” Annie Liao, founder of AI education company Build Club told BI. “Every night you spent out is time you could have spent building your startup.” She told the publication her San Francisco roommates are …

Embracing quantum spookiness: Best ideas of the century

Embracing quantum spookiness: Best ideas of the century

Published by skeptic

In the 1920s, Albert Einstein thought he had found a fundamental flaw in quantum physics. This set off a chain of investigations that, over several decades, showed he had instead discovered a crucial feature of quantum theory – and one of its oddest. This property, now called Bell non-locality, which involves quantum objects maintaining coordinated behaviours even across cosmically large distances, has been unkind to our intuition. Yet embracing it in the 21st century has turned out to be a fantastic idea. The issue can be set out with the help of two hypothetical experimenters, Alice and Bob, who each have one of a pair of “entangled” particles. Entanglement allows the particles to exhibit correlations even if they are so far apart that no signal could ever pass between them quickly enough to make a difference. Yet, for those correlations to become obvious, each experimenter must interact with their particle. Do the particles “know” they are correlated before Alice or Bob interacts with them, or is there something spooky going on between them? Einstein, working with Nathan Rosen …

Pentagon Is Embracing Musk’s Grok AI Chatbot as It Draws Global Outcry

Pentagon Is Embracing Musk’s Grok AI Chatbot as It Draws Global Outcry

Published by Sam Flores

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok will join Google’s generative AI engine in operating inside the Pentagon network, as part of a broader push to feed as much of the military’s data as possible into the developing technology. “Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said in a speech at Musk’s space flight company, SpaceX, in South Texas. The announcement comes just days after Grok — which is embedded into X, the social media network owned by Musk — drew global outcry and scrutiny for generating highly sexualized deepfake images of people without their consent. Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked Grok, while the U.K.’s independent online safety watchdog announced an investigation Monday. Grok has limited image generation and editing to paying users. Hegseth said Grok will go live inside the Defense Department later this month and announced that he would “make all appropriate data” from the military’s IT systems available for “AI …

‘Brilliant for work-life balance’: how Britain is embracing the ‘workation’ | Work-life balance

‘Brilliant for work-life balance’: how Britain is embracing the ‘workation’ | Work-life balance

Published by Sam Flores

Katherine first caught the bug when she visited Australia a couple of years ago. The flights were expensive, and it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, so she asked her manager if she could extend the trip by two weeks, and work remotely from her friend’s house. That was her first taste of a “workation” – combining working with a holiday – and she loved it. She now regularly arranges petsitting in different places so she can visit family, friends and new cities for long weekends without spending extra. “I just think it’s brilliant for work-life balance. It’s a great way to have a change of scene – your evenings and weekends, you feel like you’re on a mini-holiday,” she said. “It’s just getting out in nature, a different perspective, different environment.” At 48, Katherine doesn’t fit the stereotype of a young digital nomad living a freewheeling life. But she’s one of a growing number of people of all ages who are taking advantage of digital technologies and increasing flexibility from employers to explore …

How Hollywood’s Top Private Schools Are Embracing AI

How Hollywood’s Top Private Schools Are Embracing AI

Published by Daniella Wilson

Almost immediately after ChatGPT was first released in late 2022, alarm bells sounded in the education world about how it would negatively impact learning. That year, The Atlantic ran stories with headlines like “The College Essay Is Dead” and “The End of High School English.” The predictions were that unleashing AI to the world at large would lead to an exponential rise in cheating at school and that student essays would cease to be original. “I mean since day one the narrative in education has been really focused on cheating. And AI is still mostly seen as that thing that kids are using to cheat. So, you know, let’s not be naive. There are lots of kids using AI to cheat,” says Leon Furze, an educational consultant and the author of Practical AI Strategies: Engaging with Generative AI in Education. But he adds, “We’ve got to kind of go beyond that, I think and meet the students where they’re at with the technology.” Cut to 2025 and that is what’s happening at many of Los Angeles’ top private …

The Best Winter Albums For Beating (Or Embracing) the Cold

The Best Winter Albums For Beating (Or Embracing) the Cold

Published by Jenni Sidey

This is a chilly album. Though it contains a lot of Blake’s voice, it has less of the singer-songwriterly warmth of his later records, and instead leans more towards the electronic experimentation of his early EPs. It’s all the better for it: the vocal manipulation, looping and layering on “The Wilhelm Scream,” “I Never Learnt to Share” and many other tracks is quietly compelling; the titanic sub-bass under the vocals and piano of “Limit to Your Love” is a revelation. It’s still Blake’s finest piece of work. Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak (2008) Every year that goes by emphasises how 808s & Heartbreak, a divisive album upon release, was a landmark in 21st-century rap and popular music in general. Traumatized by the death of his mother and a split with his then-fiancé, Kanye West didn’t want to rap, so he booted up Autotune and made some melodic electro-pop. Modern Autotuned sad-boy rap wouldn’t exist without 808s & Heartbreak, but even putting that impact aside it’s compelling, in a distinctly anguished, heart-stricken way. One of the …

A Journey of Resilience: Breaking Chains, Embracing Truth

A Journey of Resilience: Breaking Chains, Embracing Truth

Published by Sam Flores

[ Adobe Stock | ergey Nivens ] Mariam Oyiza Aliyu The following piece was written by Mariam Oyiza Aliyu, an ex-Muslim rights activist and survivor of gender-based violence from Kogi State in central Nigeria. Aliyu has focused her humanitarian energies on the most vulnerable in Nigeria: women and children.  I grew up in the quaint town of Okene, nestled between the boundaries of a bustling city and a serene village in Kogi State, Nigeria. Our family was deeply immersed in the Islamic faith, and my father, a renowned sheik, held a prominent position within the community. However, he was an absentee father, leaving my sibling and me to be raised primarily by our extraordinary mother—a woman of unyielding strength and intellect. Despite the constraints imposed by our religious beliefs, my mother remained open-minded and free-spirited. Her activist tendencies, fueled by a burning desire for justice, often led her to question the norms of our community. This audacity, however, came at a price. As our faith was placed under scrutiny, we became targets of harassment and …